He smiled abruptly, and looked up from the roses, directly into Augusta’s face.
“Johanna, my love,” he said, “we are here to be married today, you and I, we are here to celebrate our wedding. We are here to sanctify our union that will be, we are here to witness and to obliterate. The other, I mean. Your union with another, we will obliterate that, Johanna, we will forget that shameless performance — why did you let him do it?” he shouted, and then immediately said, “Forgive me, Augusta,” and walked to where she was sitting on the sofa, and took the bouquet from her hands and placed it on the floor. Then, kneeling before her, he took both her hands between his own, and said, simply, “I take you for my wife, I take you for my own.”
He kissed her hands then, first one and then the other, and rose, and gently lifted her from the couch and led her into the bedroom.
The scalpel was in his hand.
He had tried to make love to her, and had failed, and now he rose from the bed angrily, and said, “Put on your underthings! Are you a whore? Is that what you are?” and watched as she lifted the long bridal gown and put on the white lace-edged panties, the only garment he had earlier asked her to remove.
“You do not have to answer,” he said. “I know what you are, I have known for a long time.”
She said nothing.
“I suppose you are disappointed in me,” he said. “Someone like you, who knows so many men. I suppose my performance was less than satisfying.”
Still, she said nothing.
“Have you known others like me?” he asked. “In your experience, have you known others who could not perform?”
“I want you to let me go,” she said.
“Answer me! Have you known others like me?”
“Please let me go. Give me the key to the front door, and—”
“I’m sure you have known a great many men who had medical problems such as mine. This is entirely a medical problem, I will see a doctor one day, he will prescribe a pill, it will vanish. I myself was a doctor, did you know that? I was Phi Beta Kappa at Ramsey University, did you know that? Yes. I was an undergraduate there, Phi Beta Kappa. And I was accepted at one of the finest medical schools in the country. Yes. I went for two years to medical school. Would you like to know what happened? Would you like to know why I am not a doctor today? I could have been a doctor, you know.”
“I want to leave here,” she said. “Please give me the key.”
“Augusta, you are being absurd,” he said. “You cannot leave. You will never leave. I am going to kill you, Augusta.”
“Why?”
“I told you why. Would you like to know what happened in medical school, Augusta? Would you like to know why I was expelled? I mutilated a cadaver,” he said. “I mutilated a female cadaver. With a scalpel.”
She backed away from him.
He was coming for her with the scalpel in his hand. He was between her and the doorway. The bed was in the center of the room, she backed toward it, and then climbed onto the mattress, and stood in the middle of the bed, ready to leap to the floor on the side opposite, whichever one he approached.
“I urge you not to do this,” he said.
She did not answer. She watched him, waiting for his move, poised to leap. She would use the bed as a wall between them. If he approached it from the side closest to the door, the right-hand side, she would jump off onto the floor on the left. If he crawled onto the bed in an attempt to cross it, she would run around the end of it to the other side. She would keep the bed between them forever if she had to, use it as a barrier and a—
He thrust the scalpel at her, and seemed about to reach across the bed, and she jumped to the floor away from him, and realized too late that his move had been a feint. He was coming around the side of the bed, it was too late for her to maneuver her way to the door, she backed into the corner as he came toward her.
She would remember always the sound of the door being kicked in, would remember, too, the swift shock of recognition that darted into his eyes and the way his head turned sharply away from her. She could see past him to the front door, could see the bolt shattering inward, and Steve Carella bursting into the room, a very fat man behind him, and then Bert — and the scalpel came up, the scalpel came toward her.
They were all holding guns, but the fat man was the only one who fired. Steve and Bert, they just stood there looking into the room, they saw the scalpel in his hand, they saw her in a wedding gown, crouched in the corner of the room, the scalpel coming toward her face — I mutilated a female cadaver — the fat man taking in the situation at once, his gun coming level, and two explosions erupting from the muzzle.
She would realize later that the fat man was the only one who did not love her. And she would vow never to ask either Steve or Bert why they had not fired instantly, why they had left it to Fat Ollie Weeks to pump the two slugs into the man who was about to slit her throat.
WEEKS: We just told you your rights, and you just told us you understood your rights and didn’t need no lawyer here to tell us what this whole thing is about. Now, I just want you to understand one more thing, you shithead, and that’s you’re in no danger of dying, the doctor says you’re gonna be fine. So I don’t want no trouble later, I want it clear on the record when we get to court that nobody said you were going to die or anything. We didn’t get you to make a statement by saying you were a dying man or nothing like that.
SCHEINER: That’s true.
WEEKS: So that’s why the stenographer’s taking all this down if you want to tell us about it.
SCHEINER: What do you want to know?
WEEKS: Why’d you kidnap the lady?
SCHEINER: Because I love her.
WEEKS: You love her, huh? You were ready to f’Christ’s sake kill her when we—
SCHEINER: And myself.
WEEKS: You were going to kill yourself, too?
SCHEINER: Yes.
WEEKS: Why?
SCHEINER: With her dead, what would be the sense of living?
WEEKS: You’re crazier’n a fuckin’ bedbug, you know that? You’re the one was gonna kill her. To punish her for what she did. What’d she do?
SCHEINER: She allowed him.
WEEKS: She allowed him, huh? You fuckin’ lunatic, you’re a fuckin’ lunatic, you know that? How’d you know what hotel they were at?
SCHEINER: I followed them from the church.
WEEKS: Were you at the reception?
SCHEINER: No. I waited downstairs for them.
WEEKS: All the while the reception was going on?