“Oh no.” She wagged her finger at him and undid the top three buttons of his checked shirt. “That’s not how to get me off.”
“Then how?” Anatoly took a deep breath.
She pulled him by his tie toward the wooden beams.
“This hand here, this one here… your head like this… Fine…”
He was on his knees with his hands poking through the rough openings in the timber walls and his head held by the neck a lit-tie higher. His wrists were firmly gripped by thick leather straps.
“Begin!” Anatoly commanded.
She bit her lip and slowly freed her taut white breasts from her shirt. Her small pink nipples stared at Anatoly, making him moan in anticipation.
“See?” she said with a quick intake of breath, moving nearer.
“Yes…”
“Look closer,” she whispered in his ear. “This is the last time you’re ever going to see these tits. Or any others.”
Her knee crunched into the man’s jaw and his drunk vanished. A completely sober Anatoly understood. The torture chamber’s walls started closing in like a frightened sphincter, and the bloody tattooed mannequin opened its eyes, raised its head, and laughed a plastic chuckle. Anatoly spat out a tooth and shouted, and she immediately slapped tape across his smeared mouth.
Zlata glanced at the platinum face on his left wrist.
“It’s midnight, the witching hour! It’s time!” she proclaimed. She tore off his shirt and deftly lowered his trousers and boxers, turning his hairy butt toward the dim museum lamp. She examined her victim critically.
“Honored ladies and gentlemen!” she announced to the mannequins frozen in eternal convulsions at the back of the hall. “Witches and warlocks! Brothers and sisters! Before you is a fellow seeker of justice in the lynching court of Anatoly Nikolaevich Kvadrat. A leader in making campaign faces for his deputy portfolio, a model family man, yesterday’s athlete, today’s bard, blah blah blah. My God, how tedious! Much more interesting is his unofficial dossier and the way it stinks…” She gave a loud laugh. “We will accompany this with color illustrations. Especially since our ward, as his last wish, expressed an interest in a brief excursion into the history of executions and torture.”
The witch walked up to the display glass, which was crowded with exhibits that from a distance resembled a surgeon’s time-darkened instruments.
“Am I right, Tolya, that you left the Young Communist Workers to join the Democrats? An old dog doesn’t give up its bone easily, huh? You wouldn’t surrender your power just like that… Did the budget cut you out? Honestly, did it? I know it did…” She was concentrating on smearing a black marker across a small steel object that was quite frightening to Anatoly at the present moment.
“And so, the time has come to become acquainted with the first item in our exhibit.” She walked slowly toward the naked man. He made a muffled sound and shook his head.
“The brand! The prototype of the prison tattoo!” she exclaimed, and energetically pressed into Anatoly’s sweat-shiny forehead something resembling a large razor with a studded plate on one end. He screamed under the tape and his legs started squirming again.
“Exactly the same principle. Studs with alcohol-based paint are driven under the convict’s skin. The most widespread brand in Russia was a word.” She took a compact mirror from her bag and brought it up to her victim’s pale face.
He read the inscription in the drops of blood emerging on his forehead: THIEF.
He bellowed and jerked but soon tired and coughed muffledly. His bugged-out eyes followed her every movement.
“Scared, Tolenka? Desperate? Don’t be. You don’t know what that is. Despair is when you’re young and healthy and you don’t want to live. Because you work ten jobs and can’t buy a friggin’ corner to lay your head down. And do you know what it is to be the lowest trash? The lowest educated trash with honest, educated parents who are also the lowest trash? You don’t know, bitch. Guys like you don’t know, but now you’re caught and you’re going to answer and pay for everyone’s sins, and more than likely this will be the sole beautiful act in your whole fat, pointless life…
“The knout!” She took a leather lash off the wall. She raised her eyes to the ceiling and quoted in a sing-song, “For his first pilfering the guilty man was sentenced to punishment by the knout and loss of his left ear… Pilfering is stealing, and this is how it was punished under canon law in the seventeenth century. Now this is going to hurt a little…”
She flicked the knout and a frisson of terror passed through Anatoly’s body. He squealed and jerked. The straps held him tight.
After the tenth lash she threw the knout in the corner and did a few exercises, trying not to breathe hard. She was flushed and under her tousled hair her eyes shone with dilated pupils.
“Ivan the Terrible came up with a curious method of punishment for those who had absconded with the state treasury,” Zlata said. “As a man of power with a Swiss bank account, Tolya, this should interest you. The czar hung the embezzler of state funds upside down, brought in his relatives, and made them watch the paterfamilias be sawed in half with an ordinary rope. It took a long time, a very long time.”
She burst out laughing again, sweeping a few fiery locks off her damp forehead.
“One other item in our exhibit has a simple, boring name, the ‘pear’”—Zlata moved on to the next display case—”but sometimes an executioner could make silent heroes quiver at the mere mention of it. Pay attention. There were pears to be introduced into the mouth and the rectum, and there were vaginal pears. As we know, what makes man different from an animal is his abstract thinking and his ability to create.”
She came up close to Anatoly, playing with a device that resembled a metal beetle whose belly was decorated with a large screw.
“Upon being introduced into a person’s natural orifice, the pear opens up with the help of the screw mechanism. Just like an iron flower opening its daisy petals. The internal organs pop like balloons. And you know who the first people who used the anal pear were? Lovers of small boys…”
She raised her voice, again addressing the silent mannequins: “And who would have thought, honored gentlemen, that this model family man, the father of two children, by the way, and this close to becoming a legislator… It’s shameful, Tolik, how painstakingly you’ve hidden from the electorate your love for little-boy ass…”
He closed his eyes. Somehow this witch knows everything about me. Everything… She’s insane, truly off her rocker, and that means she’s capable… of anything. But what exactly? What did I ever do to her? What?…
A deadly anguish turned his arms and legs to cotton. Anatoly shuddered a few times on the floor and fell quiet. The pear lay there beside him.
“Adultery is a mortal sin,” the witch sang out, “but death by pear sometimes comes too quickly. Therefore, we’ll leave the fruit for dessert.”
She busied herself with something at another display, then walked up to Anatoly and disdainfully touched his small, shriveled member with the tip of her shoe. A blade resembling a table knife gleamed dully in her hand.
“Spousal betrayal, Tolya, was punished mercilessly, regardless of the defendant’s regalia. I also heard that before you were in state service you used to traffic in young girls, right? So you see, the same fate awaited procurers. Do you understand what I’m talking about? Plain old castration. Point of fact: as autopsies of eunuchs’ corpses have shown, the castrate’s cock was small and underdeveloped. The hair on his body was sparse and absent altogether from his limbs and anus. There was almost no hair in the armpits or on the genitalia.” Suddenly, she winked. “But if they got to you younger, castration might help preserve your luxurious head of hair. The hair on eunuchs’ heads grows beautifully. But now, alas, it’s too late.”