I shook my head.
"He was a guard, a very handsome guard, at a concentration camp. Some of the women in the camp developed extremely complicated attitudes toward him. He was that handsome, you see."
"His real name was Barry?" I said.
"No." Merryman gave me the full fifty-kilowatt smile. "His dog's name was Barry. A big German shepherd, passionately devoted to his master. Actually, an ordinary enough dog by all accounts. Except that he had a trick. Would you like to know what the trick was?"
"Not really."
"Well, darling, too bad for you. It was only one trick, but it was a good one. He was trained to chew off the genitals of male prisoners. He got very fat." He paused to see the effect of his story. I didn't speak. Merryman shrugged. "So," he said, "that was Barry."
"And you," I said, "haven't got any genitals. You piss sitting down. Out of choice. And when you're finished you dry that teensy little thing in the breeze and go bother some twelve-year-old because anything else would be too loose for you. You haven't got a cock. You've got a hypodermic."
Merryman looked very ugly all of a sudden. "You shouldn't have said that," he said. "And if you did say it, you shouldn't have said it in front of anyone else. Barry is going to take special care of you, aren't you, Barry?" Barry nodded fervently. "But first, in front of you, Barry is going to take special care of sweet little Eleanor."
"Zip your trousers," I said. "Your mole is showing."
Merryman's face filled with blood. "Put him on ice," he said to Barry.
Barry grabbed me under the arm and hoisted me up in a lopsided fashion. "Walking time," he said.
We went out the door and down the hall to the elevator. In the elevator, Barry produced a small silvery key and inserted it into the slot marked basement. We started down. I leaned against him adoringly.
"Lover," I said, "what a surprise. You're taking me where we met."
He pushed me away roughly. "Later," he said. "We'll have our laughs later."
"What do you eat for breakfast?" I asked. "Babies?"
"Tomorrow, I'll have liver. Yours."
"I'll bet you say that to all your dates," I said.
"Keep it up," he said. "You don't know what a long time is yet."
The elevator doors opened and he pushed me out into a dark hallway. It was still wet from the rain. It was probably always wet.
"Have you been to Venice?" I asked as he steered me along. "You'd feel right at home. Water, rats, the whole schmear. You could probably get work chewing barnacles off the bottoms of gondolas. Or else you could eviscerate chickens in the marketplace. Somebody has to do it. Italians love chicken." Three of my fingers felt like water balloons that had been filled with blood. "Listen," I said, "why don't we go out to dinner? I'll buy. Italian, Mexican, Thai, you name it. I love the way you handle a fork. I'd love to see you try it on food."
"You're going to see a lot more of it," he said. We were heading toward the kitchen. "You'll see it on your girlfriend."
"You're going to fork my girlfriend?" We passed the air-conditioning unit, humming busily away. "That's not very polite. Where I come from, a gentleman doesn't say that to another gentleman."
He grunted.
"So much for snappy patter," I said as he propelled me into the kitchen. "Oh, I see. Put me on ice. It's that sweet little refrigerator, isn't it? Good. I have a theory. All shivering is caused by the attempt to reduce the amount of body surface exposed to the cold. Open up, I always say. Open up and let the cold in. Then you won't shiver. What do you think?"
"I think," he said, opening the refrigerator door, "that you're going to want to be cold in a few hours."
"Jesus," I said. "You sound like a Friars' roast for one of Bob Hope's writers."
"Bundle up," he said, pushing me in and closing the door.
Somebody inside sighed.
"Well," Eleanor said, "what took you so long?"
Chapter 28
The darkness was absolute. The rods and cones of my retina worked overtime to impose squirmy little red and green paramecia on the air, but when I looked down I literally could not see my body.
"He hurt my fingers," she said.
"It's his hobby," I said. "Some men collect stamps or guns or varieties of begonia. He collects fingernails." I was babbling. I'd been talking compulsively ever since I'd unloaded on Merryman. It was as though that action, childish as it had been, had pulled the cork on all the emotions I'd been choking down since Merryman's call woke me up. I bit down on my tongue until it hurt and counted to twenty. Then I leaned over and tried to kiss her on the cheek. I felt her lips beneath mine, and then her arms went around me. She'd been looking at me in the total darkness, the way a lover will. Her hands on my neck were icy. I put my arm around her waist. The slenderness of her was familiar and sweet.
"How long have you been in here?"
"Forever. I can't tell. What time is it now?"
"A little after nine."
"Four or five hours, then. Simeon, there are rats in here. One of them touched my hand, and then it ran over my feet. I screamed. I felt so stupid, screaming in a refrigerator when obviously no one is going to come and help me. I mean, why do you scream? For help, right? But this was just screaming. The way I screamed when that man hurt me."
"We're going to kill him," I said, wishing I believed it.
"Oh, be real. We're locked in this thing and there's no way in the world to get out. That door is six inches thick and they've pulled off the handle on this side. There's nothing there but some greasy-feeling rollers. I threw myself against the door so hard that I've got a bone bruise on my shoulder, but it's closed tight. Even if we get out, we're in this awful basement and we're surrounded by zombies."
"Listen," I said, laughing at the cliche in spite of myself, "I have a plan."
"Well," she said, "I'd love to know what it is."
I felt around in my windbreaker and located the bottom of the zipper. I peeled back the lining and pulled out the pimp's knife, then took her hand and dropped the knife into it.
"What's this?"
"It's a pimp's knife," I said.
"What are we going to do, commit double suicide? Boy, wouldn't that burn them up?"
"The door closes through a system of rollers, the ones you got your hands all greasy touching. We're going to use the knife as a lever to manipulate the rollers. Then we're going to push the door open and walk out."
"Into the arms of the zombies."
"One thing at a time."
"Okay," she said, "I'm game. Anything's better than sitting here feeling like the Thanksgiving turkey. What do you think the temperature is, anyway?"
"Low forties. Cold enough for hypothermia."
She handed the knife back to me.
"What do you want me to do?"
"Wait for a while."
"What for?"
"The Revealing. It's on television from the studio next door. Everybody goes to watch. It will cause a sudden drop in the zombie population. Also, we're waiting for a man."
"Who?"
"I don't really know how to tell you. If he shows up, I'll introduce you."
"If he shows up?"
I gave it a moment's thought and then shrugged. "I didn't have time to put him under contract," I said. "You came as a bit of a surprise."
"They were waiting for me in the parking lot. I'd just said good-bye to Jeannie Seaver, she's in Features, and I opened the car door and got in, and this man got in next to me and pushed me into the passenger seat. It was the one called Barry, the one who did that thing to my fingers. Then he unlocked the back door and another man got in, and they drove me here."
"Where you met Dr. Merryman."
"Is he that ghastly handsome man? Oh, Simeon, he oozes poison like a toad. Barry's awful, he's sick and revolting and vile, but the other one's worse. He smiles at you and even flirts with you, and there's nothing in there but cold. When the other man, the old man, I mean, Brooks, arrived, Merryman peeled him alive in front of everybody. This was about midnight. He just poured abuse on him for an hour or so and then got up in the middle of a sentence and left the room. When he came back he'd changed his shirt, and he picked up exactly where he'd left off."