"Damn!" Tiffany exclaimed petulantly, clenching her pouting lower lip with small even white teeth. "And she has the juicy role… Sacrificing herself for me!"
"Yeah, but you got the technique, kid. You're an actress!" Dippy breezily pointed out. "You could turn the tables on her just like that!" He snapped his stubby tobacco-stained fingers. "All you got to do is say, 'No, no, dear sister, I can't let you do such a horrible thing for me…' You're both prisoners, in this little skit, see, and the idea is one of you seduces the guard — that's Cliff — while the other escapes, get it? You can ad-lib it good, and she won't know what to do. So you steal the show, kid. She has to sneak off-stage and there you are!"
Tiffany's eyes were sparkling with enthusiasm now and the color had returned to her youthful heart-shaped face. "Oh, Mr. Gallagher!" she bubbled happily. "That's a wonderful idea! How can I ever thank you enough?"
"Oh, just send me a postcard from time to time, kid," Dippy said blandly, slipping down from his chair on his runty legs and starting toward the door. From Nowheresville, you dumb cunt, he added to himself. "Be upstairs backstage in ten minutes. Mike'll show you what to do."
When the horrid bald little man with the beady eyes and cruel thin-lipped mouth finally came in, June had no idea how long she had been cooped up in the tiny room Pimple Face had brought her to. When they left the Bormans' apartment shortly after eleven o'clock, he had made her put on what looked like a pair of ordinary dark glasses but, in fact, the lenses were completely opaque. She couldn't see a thing except out the sides, and when they had driven off a ways he had stopped the car and stuffed cotton between the frames and her cheeks, so that she was completely blinded… It was awful, being deprived of your sight. She didn't see how blind people stood it.
When she protested, Pimple Face just told her to shut up. "Anybody gets curious, babe, you just had an eye operation," he told her curtly.
So she hadn't the slightest idea of where she was either. They had driven around for what seemed like a long time before they had left the car and come to this place, with him steering her by the arm. It was up four flights of stairs and smelled musty, that's all she knew for sure. Boards had resounded under their feet, and she had had a feeling of space around her, as if she might be on the stage of a theater, just before she was put into this windowless little cubicle. She took it to be an actor's dressing room, although it certainly wasn't what you would call glamorous… just a table with a mirror and a few pots of makeup on it, a rickety chair, a wash basin and a cot with a plastic chamber pot under it.
There was no lock on the door, but before he left her alone Pimple Face warned her there was a guard on the only exit, so not to get any bright ideas about running away. She hadn't intended to anyhow, or she wouldn't have accompanied him in the first place. She was certain she had figured out a way to get both Tiffany and herself out of the jam they were in.
About an hour later Pimple Face had returned with a Coke and hamburger for her and had gone over with her the few pitiful lines she was supposed to speak in her grand debut as an actress. It was just a one-act curtain raiser, he said, a very simple situation based on the real-life one she was actually in, so all she had to do was be herself. The main part obviously was making love to the guard. June had protested when she heard that Tiffany was to play with her, but Pimple Face had sworn it would be her last performance. It certainly would be, June mused to herself, if her plan worked. And it would be the last time for quite a while that Pimple Face would be pushing people around. Of course, she hadn't bothered to memorize her lines. She had no intention whatsoever of speaking them.
When Pimple Face left the second time, she had dozed off on the cot, completely exhausted by all the incredible things that had happened to her since her arrival in the city. When she woke up, her watch had stopped, and she had no way of knowing how long she had slept. Her stomach told her it must be late though. She was hungry again and had to urinate terribly. She was just trying to get up the courage to use the chamber pot when the offensive little man barged in without even knocking and started barking orders at her.
"Stand up and strip!"
As she began to slowly undress, he sat down on the chair, making unpleasant sucking noises with his tongue against his teeth and continuously raking her body over with those piercing little gimlet eyes. She had expected this, of course… to be treated like an animal at the market place… but the vicious satisfaction the evil little creature obviously derived from her embarrassment made her blood boil.
"Whaddaya standing like that for?" he rasped at her when finally she stood voluptuously naked in front of him.
"I have to go to the bathroom," she answered primly.
"Piss in that pot," he sneered, indicating the chamber pot under the cot. "It's not really all that big a deal, kid," he added when she hesitated, "compared to what you're gonna be doing in a little while. Did the guy tell ya what ya have to do?"
"He said… seduce the guard," June answered. Finally the urgency of her need to urinate overcame her modesty and she squatted down on the pot sidewise to him. Somehow his hearing the loud frothing sound of her water gushing into the plastic container was even more humiliating than his watching her. He would pay for this, she vowed grimly to herself. The sadistic little wretch!
"The script calls for you to suck his cock!" Dippy snapped. "You ever suck a cock?"
"N-no-o…" June faltered, but then in fear that he would make her practice on him she quickly added, "But I know how. I saw it done once."
"You saw it!" Dippy exclaimed, simulating shock with a sly grin. "Whadda ya, a voyeur or somepin?" His eyes sparkled maliciously when he saw her blush bright red from head to toe. Borman was right! She was too much, this broad was, with a cock-stiffening body like that and all these hang-ups. Something hadda break. "C'mere!" he ordered peremptorily. "Spread those pussy lips. Come on, Goddamnit!" he yelled furiously when she hesitated again. "I gotta make sure you're healthy, kid. I got my other actors to think about to, for chrissake!"
She approached him and, with hands trembling from both shame and rage, parted the sparsely haired outer flanges of her cunt, exposing to his lewd gaze the slick pink flesh of the moist furrow and the shrinking little bud of her clitoris.
He whipped the cigar from his mouth and leaned forward, sniffing loudly. "Pretty funky," he commented dryly. "Wha'd ya take on last night? A Goddamn bull…? Wash it up, for Godsake. Curtain call in five minutes." With that he clamped the cigar back into his cruel little mouth and strutted out, leaving the dark-haired girl's face flaming and her body trembling in outrage.
"Just you wait," she muttered. "Just wait!"
When Gallagher pushed her out onto the stage, instead of falling to the floor sobbing and then running to Tiffany as she had been instructed to do, June strode firmly across the rough planks toward the footlights and stood there commandingly in her proud naked beauty with arms upraised. There was a prolonged burst of applause mixed with whistles and wolf calls, but she stood there unflinchingly until the noise subsided. Half-blinded by the spot projectors above and the row of lights below, she could only see the faces in the audience as vague blurs, but she was sure that out there somewhere there must be at least one person who had a spark of humanity left in him, sick as he must be to come to a show like this. When the theater was completely silent, she began the brief speech that she had rehearsed to herself that afternoon.
"Please help us!" she cried out in a vibrant compelling voice. "My sister and I are prisoners here. We're not doing this of our own free will. We're treated like slaves. You must help us! Get up and leave. Then call the police. That's all you have to do!"