'You'd be surprised what that little bugger can get up to in any circumstances,' said Flint, 'and married to that maternal mastodon of his, is it any wonder? I'd just as soon go to bed with a giant clam as climb in with Eva Wilt.'
'I suppose there's something in that,' said the Major fingering his black eye cautiously. 'She certainly packs one hell of a punch. Can't stay around. Got to go and get those floodlights going again.'
He wandered out and Flint sat on wondering what to do. Now that the Superintendent was out of action he supposed he must be in charge of the case. It was not a promotion he wanted. About the only consolation he could find was the thought that Henry Wilt was about to get his final comeuppance.
In fact Wilt was concentrating his mind on just the opposite. The state of his manhood, so recently repaired, demanded it. Besides, adultery was not his forte and he had never found the process of making love when he didn't feel up to it at all appealing. And since when he felt like it Eva usually didn't, reserving her moments of passion until the quads were safely asleep and Wilt would have been given half a chance, he had become accustomed to a sort of split sexuality in which he did one thing while thinking about another. Not that Eva was satisfied with one thing. Her interest, while more single-minded than his, was infinitely eclectic in matters of procedure and Wilt had learnt to accept being bent, crushed, twisted and generally contorted along lines suggested by the manuals Eva consulted. They had titles like How to Keep your Marriage Young or Making Love the Natural Way. Wilt had objected that their marriage wasn't young and that there was nothing natural about risking strangulated hernia by using the coitus position advocated by Dr Eugene van Yonk. Not that his arguments ever did any good. Eva replied by making unpleasant references to his adolescence and unwarranted accusations about what he did in the bathroom when she wasn't there and in the end he had been driven to prove his normality by doing what he considered thoroughly abnormal. But if Eva had been vigorously experimental in bed Gudrun Schautz was a demented carnivore.
From the moment in the kitchen when she had first latched on to him in a frenzy of blatant lust, Wilt had been bitten, scratched, licked, chewed and sucked with a violence and lack of discrimination that was frankly insulting, not to say dangerous, and which had led him to wonder why the bitch bothered to shoot people when she could just as easily have done them to death in more lawful and decidedly nastier ways. Anyway, nobody in his right mind could sensibly accuse him of being an unfaithful husband. If anything, quite the opposite; only the most dutiful and conscientious family man would have put himself so much at risk as to get voluntarily into bed with a wanted murderess. Wilt found the adjective singularly inappropriate and it was only by concentrating his imagination on Eva when he had first met her that he could evoke a modicum of desire. It was this flaccid response that provoked Gudrun Schautz. The bitch was not only a murderess; she managed to combine political terror with the expectation that Wilt was a male chauvinist pig who would launch himself into her without a second thought.
Wilt's views on the matter were different. It was one of the tenets of his confused philosophy that you didn't mess about with other women once you were married. And bouncing up and down on an extremely nubile young woman undoubtedly came into the category of messing about. On the other hand there was the interesting paradox that he was spiritually closer to Eva now than when he was actually making love to her and thinking about something else. More practically there wasn't a hope in hell of having an orgasm. The catheter had put paid to that for the time being he could bounce away until the cows came home, but he was no more going to put his penis to the test of a genuine erection than fly to prevent this dreadful possibility he alternated his vision of a youthful Eva with images of himself and the execrable Schautz lying on the autopsy table in a terminal coitus interruptus. Considering the din they were making it seemed all too likely and it was certainly a most effective anti-aphrodisiac. Besides, it had the additional advantage of confusing the Schautz woman. She was evidently accustomed to more committed lovers and Wilt's erratic fervour threw her.
'You like it some other way, Liebling?' she asked as Wilt receded for the umpteenth time.
'In the bath,' said Wilt who had suddenly become conscious that the terrorists below might decide to take a hand and that baths were more bulletproof than beds. Gudrun Schautz laughed. 'So funny, ja. In the bath!'
At that moment the floodlights went out and the roar of the helicopter could be heard. The noise seemed to spur her to a new frenzy of lust.
'Quick, quick,' she moaned, 'they're coming.'
'Buggered if I am,' muttered Wilt but the murderess was too busy trying to exorcise oblivion to hear him and as Mrs de Frackas' conservatory disintegrated and rapid gunfire sounded below he was hurtled once more into a maelstrom of lust that had nothing to do with real sex at all. Death was going through the motions of life and Wilt, unaware that his part in this grisly performance was being monitored for posterity, did his best to play his role. He tried thinking about Eva again.
Chapter 17
Downstairs in the kitchen Chinanda and Baggish were having a hard time thinking at all. All the complexities of life from which they had tried to escape into the idiotic and murderous fanaticism of terror seemed suddenly to have combined against them. They fired frantically into the darkness, and for one proud moment imagined they had hit the helicopter. Instead, the thing had apparently bombed the house next door. When they finally stopped shooting they were assailed by the yells of quads in the cellar. To make matters worse, the kitchen had become a health hazard. Eva's highly polished tiles were a slick of vomit and after Baggish had twice landed on his backside they had retreated to the hall to consider their next move. It was then that they heard the extraordinary noises emanating from the attic.
'They're raping Gudrun,' said Baggish and would have gone to her rescue if Chinanda hadn't stopped him.
'It's a trap the police pigs are setting. They want to get us upstairs and then they rush the house and rescue the hostages. We stay down here.'
'With that noise? How long do you think we can go on with all that yelling? We each need to sleep by turns and with them crying is impossible.'
'So we stop them,' said Chinanda and led the way down to the cellar where Mrs de Frackas was sitting on a wooden chair while the quads demanded mummy.
'Shut up, you hear me! You want to see your mummy you stop that noise,' Baggish shouted. But the quads only yelled the louder.
'I should have thought coping with small children would have been an essential part of your training,' said Mrs de Frackas unsympathetically Baggish rounded on her. He still hadn't got over her suggestion that his proper métier was selling dirty Postcards in Port Said.
'You make them quiet yourself,' he told her, waving his automatic in her face, 'or else we '
'My dear boy, there are some things you have yet to learn,' said the old lady 'By the time you reach my age dying is so imminent that I can't be bothered to worry about it. In any case I have always been an advocate of euthanasia. So much more sensible, don't you think, than putting one on a drip or one of those life-support machines or whatever they call them. I mean, who wants to keep a senile old person alive when she's no use to anyone?'
'I don't,' said Baggish fervently. Mrs de Frackas looked at him with interest.