I said: “Before long you’ll be out of a job, Baroness. We’ll tell you ahead of time where our ships are going to strike, and you won’t be able to do anything about it. Shall I tell you more?”
The small woman on the chaise longue did not smile. From where I lay I could not tell whether she was a young girl or an old woman. “Be careful not to injure his bones, Lorenz,” she said. “His other tissues are more or less beside the point.”
Anderson kicked me carefully below the ribs and below the pelvis. For a minute nothing was important to me but the fingers of pain which searched my body. Then I said, very carefully so as not to shout: “You will not be able to do anything about it because there will be no Japanese warships left. There will be no Japanese airforce left. Perhaps there will be no Japanese cities left. The Japanese islands will be a sad place.”
“Are you tired, Lorenz?” the little woman said. He kicked me carefully in the lower part of the abdomen.
I said: “How did you ever get into the big time, Jensen? I thought you were a small-time crook. You still have all the mannerisms of a pimp.”
He kicked me again, but without enthusiasm. I decided that I had contributed my share to the conversation, and fell silent. My stomach muscles were moving like injured worms.
Miss Green came into the room with a colorless glass bottle in her hand. There was a blue mark on her cheek under the red mark of the rouge, but she looked warm and excited. The hand which held the bottle trembled and the junk jewelry on her arm clinked merrily. Her step was quick and elastic.
“My God,” Anderson said. “She’s been at the ether again.”
“I just thought if you throw away this bottle like you did the last one,” said Miss Green. She executed several steps of an original pas seul. “Well, I just thought.”
“Give me that bottle,” Anderson said.
“Here it is, you fat stoat.” She tossed it to him. He caught it, took a single threatening step towards her, met the impassive gaze of the Baroness, and turned to me.
He poured some of the ether on a handkerchief and applied it to my face. It scalded my mouth like fire or ice. I moved my head quickly and bit his wrist. He tore it from my teeth but I tasted blood. Then he held my head by the ears while the Baroness held the cloth to my face. I retired again into a universe of turning wheels.
When I came to I was lying on the floor in the back of a car which was moving quickly over an uneven road. At least that was the hypothesis which fitted the facts that dirty fabric vibrated steadily under my face and bounced intermittently against my skull with explosive pain. I could hear the hum of the powerful motor. I could see no lights.
I tried to flex my arms and felt the strain on my legs. My wrists and ankles were still tied together behind me. I began to rotate my right wrist in a quarter-circle within the loop of rope which held it. The rope was tight and rough and wore away the skin. I continued to rotate my wrist, working the rope down past the base of my thumb. I could feel warm blood on my hand. Perhaps it helped to lubricate the rope, which slipped gradually down towards my knuckles, wearing away the skin as it went. My hand felt as if it had been thrust in boiling water. I continued to work it back and forth within the loop. The rope slid over the thickest part of my thumb, and I jerked my hand free.
With my right hand I went to work on the knots which held my other hand and my feet. The blood made the knots slippery and hard to open. I hoped that I was not losing a great deal of blood. I wanted to have enough blood left to kill Anderson.
The knots had not been tied by a man who knew anything about knots. Once I got them started they loosened easily. My left hand came free without losing the skin. That was encouraging, because I needed one good hand. Inch by inch, so as to make no noise, I turned over on my back. I reached to my bent legs and removed the rope from my ankles. My hand simmered, my head rattled, and my stomach screamed. But I had accomplished a great deal.
Supporting myself on my hands because my stomach would not bear the weight, I rose to a sitting position. From there I could see over the back of the front seat the upper half of a man’s head wearing a chauffeur’s cap. I knew that the head silhouetted against the reflection from the headlights must be Anderson’s because I hated it so much. I crouched forward and moved my arms, flexing and stretching them. When I was quite sure that they were able to do what I wanted them to, I flung my left arm over the back of the front seat and embraced Anderson’s neck.
My stranglehold went on so fast and hard that his exclamation of surprise died in a gasp. But he had enough presence of mind to jam on the brakes. The car slewed sideways on gravel which machine-gunned the chassis and fenders, and came to rest. Without deliberately looking I saw that the road passed among mountains along the edge of an arroyo, and that there was a moon.
I had Anderson’s throat in the angle of my left elbow and began to apply leverage with my right hand. But he had managed to get a gun in his hand, which he used to hammer my arms and my fingers. I let go with my left hand to grapple for the gun, but my injured right hand was not strong enough to hold him.
He twisted out of my grip and struck me with the muzzle of the gun on the side of the jaw. I fell over into the back seat and before I could reach him again he was out of the car.
He opened the back door and showed me the snout of his automatic. “You drive the rest of the way,” he said.
A .45 automatic at three feet was unanswerable. I climbed in behind the wheel and he got in beside me.
“If you go over fifteen I’ll shoot you in the base of the spine,” he said. “And stay in the center of the road. There won’t be any other traffic.”
The black sedan crawled up the moonlit road, purring like a stroked cat. Anderson’s gun was thrust hard into the base of my spine. We came to a single-track dirt road which looped off to the right and ascended out of sight among the hills. The entrance to it was barred by a wire gate on a wooden frame.
“We’ll get out and open the gate,” Anderson said. “If my gun loses contact with the small of your back, I’ll shoot. It will pay you to walk carefully.”
I walked carefully to the gate, opened it, and walked carefully back to the car. The high slopes of the mountains were very beautiful in the moonlight, as beautiful as the white mountain in the drawing of the pale birds. I drove the car through the gate, and then we closed it behind us. The black sedan crawled up the narrow road among the hills. In a high valley flanked by mountains we came over the brow of a hill to a long low ranchhouse. It had a dim yellow light in the window.
Anderson told me to stop the car and I stopped it. He told me to get out and I got out. He told me to walk towards the verandah and I walked towards the verandah. Hector Land was standing in the doorway waiting for us when we climbed the steps.
“This is the man that killed Bessie,” Anderson said. “I want you to choke him to death, but be careful not to break any bones in his neck.”
Hector Land’s right fist struck me in the face very quickly, twice before I fell.
“You’d kill Bessie,” Hector Land said as he stood over me. “You and the white people like you, you’d throw her out of a job and drive her to whoring and foul her bed and then kill her. You’d kill us off in Detroit, you’d drive us out of the factories, you’d drive us out of the streets. You’d call us the filth of the earth but you’d love our women. You’d love our women and you’d kill us. Why did you kill Bessie?”