Simone was still looking at the boxer. I saw her slide the end of her tongue slowly over her lips.
"This perfume," I said to Henri, "does it have any effect upon a woman?"
"None whatsoever," he said. "That is why I am sending Simone out now to prepare the spray." The girl went into the main laboratory, closing the door behind her.
"So you spray something on the girl and I walk toward her," the boxer said. "What happens then?"
"We shall have to wait and see," Henri said. "You are not worried, are you?"
"Me, worried?" the boxer said. "About a woman?"
"Good boy," Henri said. Henri was becoming very excited. He went hopping from one end of the room to the other, checking and rechecking the position of the chair on its chalk mark and moving all breakables such as glass beakers and bottles and test-tubes off the bench on to a high shelf. "This isn't the ideal place," he said, "but we must make the best of it." He tied a surgeon's mask over the lower part of his face, then handed one to me.
"Don't you trust the noseplugs?"
"It's just an extra precaution," he said. "Put it on."
The girl returned carrying a tiny stainless-steel spray-gun. She gave the gun to Henri. Henri took a stop watch from his pocket. "Get ready, please," he said. "You Pierre, stand over there on the six-metre mark." Pierre did so. The girl seated herself in the chair. It was a chair without arms. She sat very prim and upright in her spotless white overall with her hands folded on her lap, her knees together. Henri stationed himself behind the girl. I stood to one side. "Are we ready?" Henri cried.
"Wait," said the girl. It was the first word she had spoken. She stood up, removed her spectacles, placed them on a high shelf, then returned to her seat. She smoothed the white overall along her thighs, then clasped her hands together and laid them again on her lap.
"Are we ready now?" Henri said.
"Let her have it," I said. "Shoot."
Henri aimed the little spray-gun at an area of bare skin just below Simone's ear. He pulled the trigger. The gun made a soft hiss and a fine misty spray came out of its nozzle.
"Pull your noseplugs out!" Henri called to the boxer as he skipped quickly away from the girl and took up a position next to me. The boxer caught hold of the strings dangling from his nostrils and pulled. The vaselined plugs slid out smoothly.
"Come on, come on!" Henri shouted. "Start moving! Drop the plugs on the floor and come forward slowly!" The boxer took a pace forward. "Not so fast!" Henri cried. "Slowly does it! That's better! Keep going! Keep going! Don't stop!" He was crazy with excitement, and I must admit I was getting a bit worked up myself. I glanced at the girl. She was crouching in the chair, just a few yards away from the boxer, tense, motionless, watching his every move, and I found myself thinking about a white female rat I had once seen in a cage with a huge python. The python was going to swallow the rat and the rat knew it, and the rat was crouching very low and still, hypnotized, transfixed, utterly fascinated by the slow advancing movements of the snake.
The boxer edged forward.
As he passed the five-metre mark, the girl unclasped her hands. She laid them palms downwards on her thighs. Then she changed her mind and placed them more or less underneath her buttocks, gripping the seat of the chair on either side, bracing herself, as it were, against the coming onslaught.
The boxer had just passed the two-metre mark when the smell hit him. He stopped dead. His eyes glazed and he swayed on his legs as though he had been tapped on the head with a mallet. I thought he was going to keel over but he didn't. He stood there swaying gently from side to side like a drunk. Suddenly he started making noises through his nostrils, queer little snorts and grunts that reminded me of a pig sniffing around its trough. Then without any warning at all he sprang at the girl. He ripped off her white overall, her dress, and her underclothes. After that, all hell broke loose.
There is little point in describing exactly what went on during the next few minutes. You can guess most of it anyway. I do have to admit, though, that Henri had probably been right in choosing an exceptionally fit and healthy young man. I hate to say it, but I doubt my middle-aged body could have stood up to the incredibly violent gymnastics the boxer seemed driven to perform. I am not a voyeur. I hate that sort of thing. But in this case, I stood there absolutely transfixed. The sheer animal ferocity of the man was frightening. He was like a wild beast. And right in the middle of it all, Henri did an interesting thing. He produced a revolver and rushed up to the boxer and shouted, "Get away from that girl! Leave her alone or I'll shoot you!" The boxer ignored him, so Henri fired a shot just over the top of his head and yelled, "I mean it, Pierre! I shall kill you if you don't stop!" The boxer didn't even look up.
Henri was hopping and dancing about the room and shouting, "It's fantastic! It's magnificent! Unbelievable! It works! It works! We've done it, my dear Oswald! We've done it!"
The action stopped as quickly as it had begun. The boxer suddenly let go of the girl, stood up, blinked a few times, and then said, "Where the hell am I? "What happened?"
Simone, who seemed to have come through it all with no bones broken jumped up, grabbed her clothes, and ran into the next room. "Thank you, mademoiselle," said Henri as she flew past him.
The interesting thing was that the bemused boxer hadn't the faintest idea what he had been doing. He stood there naked and covered with sweat, gazing around the room and trying to figure out how in the world he came to be in that condition.
"What did I do?" he asked. "Where's the girl?"
"You were terrific!" Henri shouted, throwing him a towel. "Don't worry about a thing! The thousand francs is all yours!"
Just then the door flew open and Simone, still naked, ran back into the lab. "Spray me again!" she cried. "Oh, Monsieur Henri, spray me just one more time!" Her face was alight, her eyes shining brilliantly.
"The experiment is over," Henri said. "Go away and dress yourself" He took her firmly by the shoulders and pushed her back into the other room. Then he locked the door.
Half an hour later, Henri and I sat celebrating our success in a small cafŽ down the street. We were drinking coffee and brandy. "How long did it go on?" I asked.
"Six minutes and thirty-two seconds," Henri said.
I sipped my brandy and watched the people strolling by on the sidewalk. "What's the next move?"
"First, I must write up my notes," Henri said. "Then we shall talk about the future."
"Does anyone else know the formula?"
"Nobody."
"What about Simone?"
"She doesn't know it."
"Have you written it down?"
"Not so anyone else could understand it. I shall do that tomorrow."
"Do it first thing," I said. "I'll want a copy. What shall we call the stuff? We need a name."
"What do you suggest?"
"Bitch," I said. "Let's call it Bitch." Henri smiled and nodded his head slowly. I ordered more brandy. "It would be great stuff for stopping a riot," I said. "Much better than tear-gas. Imagine the scene if you sprayed it on an angry mob."
"Nice," Henri said. "Very nice."
"Another thing we could do, we could sell it to very fat, very rich women at fantastic prices."
"We could do that," Henri answered.
"Do you think it would cure loss of virility in men?" I asked him.
"Of course," Henri said. "Impotence would go out the window."
"What about octogenarians?"
"Them, too," he said, "though it would kill them at the same time."
"And marriages on the rocks?"
"My dear fellow," Henri said. "The possibilities are legion."
At that precise moment, the seed of an idea came sneaking slowly into my mind. As you know, I have a passion for politics. And my strongest passion, although I am English, is for the politics of the United States of America. I have always thought it is over there, in that mighty and mixed-up nation, that the destinies of mankind must surely lie. And right now, there was a President in office whom I could not stand. He was an evil man who pursued evil policies. Worse than that, he was a humourless and unattractive creature. So why didn't I, Oswald Cornelius, remove him from office?