"Are you Communists, then?" she asked.
"Good God no!" Lisa said angrily. "Their society's as rotten as yours! The West is stifling through over-indulgence and corruption; the East is stifling through narrow-mindedness and bureaucracy. Both of them have got to go before there's any real freedom!"
"And you're helping them on their way?"
"The East will destroy itself ultimately," the blonde explained loftily. "Because of the money your country's pouring into Europe, the revolution will take longer here. People are too well-fed and too complacent to bother. So it's left to groups like ours to take the initiative."
"But what are you trying to do?" Susan asked bewilderedly.
"I told you. This society's too complex – and the capitalists have the reins too firmly in their hands – for it to be altered. It's got to be destroyed, totally destroyed, before anything worthwhile can be built."
"But supposing you did destroy it – what would you put in its place?"
"Others who come after us can decide that," Lisa said. "It's enough for us to hasten in whatever way we can its destruction. And one of the ways is to get you and people like you thrown out of Europe. If we can get the Americans discredited by showing them up for what they are, the disintegration will be that much quicker!"
"And you think it's right to kill people… to have innocent folks suffer… just because it suits your plans?"
"In all revolutionary movements the few have to suffer in the cause of the many," Lisa said virtuously.
The captive brunette sighed and shook her dark head.
"I still don't see what good it does you, having kidnapped me!"
"You're not supposed to see. But it will help certain plans we have."
"How?"
"You ask too many questions. Take off that robe and lie down."
"Oh no!" Susan gasped. "Please… Not again!"
"Yes again," the German blonde girl said inexorably. "And again and again and again, just as often as we want."
Her red-nailed fingers dropped to the captive girl's exposed thigh and moved lasciviously towards the vee of dark, silky pubic hair showing between the open edges of the loose robe. The American girl was crying now.
"Please!" she sobbed, clamping her legs together and drawing the garment tighter around her. "Please…"
She didn't want to do this because, God help her, she was beginning to like it… beginning to like being Lisa's lover… beginning to love being brought to orgasm by the gang males.
"No," Susan said in a sudden defiance, "I'm not going to… anymore!"
Lisa drew back her hand and slashed viciously across the face.
"Do what you're told you little bitch!" she snapped. "Take that off and lie on your back holding your cunt open, or I'll get Heinz in to beat you into obedience!"
As Susan cried out with pain and alarm, the urgent shrilling of a telephone sounded in an adjoining room. For an instant both girls, prisoner and the jailer, froze. They heard the scrape of a chair, a man's voice speaking, the sound of footsteps. The door opened and Heinz put his head into the room.
"That was Elsa," he said briefly. "In one hour's time."
A slow smile spread over Lisa's face.
"Saved by the bell," she said to Susan. "Quite literally! Well – you were asking how it helped us, having you here. Now you're going to find out!"
"W-w-w-what do you mean?" the frightened teenager quavered.
"Usually," the blonde explained, "when someone's kidnapped the ransom's paid by somebody else. Then, if they're lucky, they're set free."
"B-b-b-but you… you said you weren't asking a ransom for m-m-m-me."
"We're not – in the usual sense. If you want to be set free, the price has to be paid by you yourself."
"I don't understand," Susan said tearfully. "I don't understand any of it."
"You don't have to. But if you ever want to get out of here alive," Lisa said with a harsh, menacing note in her voice, "you've got to do something for us… and you've got to do it exactly as you're told… or else! Now listen carefully while I tell you what you do…"
CHAPTER FIVE
The St. Pauli district lies to the West of Hamburg, on the right bank of the river. The rich bankers and industrialists of the city, being driven home in their Mercedes and Opels to the shady mansions of the expensive suburb of Blankenese, switch on the interior lights of their limousines and bury their noses in their papers as they drive through. Respectable inhabitants of the center eye tourists and newcomers warily, fearful that they may ask the way the notorious Reeperbahn, that street of sin that bisects St. Pauli. Hamburg citizens, in fact, seem slightly ashamed of their entertainment area. But the Reeperbahn is no unsavoury back-street alley. To begin with it's almost two miles long and about as wide as the Champs Elysees in Paris.
Behind the jammed car parks and service roads bordering its curving, tree fringed length, glittering lines of theaters, cinemas, clubs and restaurants tempt the reveler with money to spend. For in St. Pauli entertainment is big business – and business is as usual twenty-four hours a day, with every conceivable taste catered for. At the far end of the avenue the more sinful establishments prosper. The cinemas are blue; the clubs offer entertainments more bizarre than beautiful; the whores choke the doorways. There's a cabaret where the floor-show presents naked women wrestling in liquid mud; another that challenges its clients to ride a donkey drunk on buckets of beer; a third specializing in transvestitism and flagellation.
They used to tell a story in Hamburg about a rich American visiting a St. Pauli club, empty except for a handsome dark girl sitting at the piano.
After waiting some minutes, the American asks: "Don't I get any service around here? Where's the waiter?"
"So sorry," the girl said. "The waiter's in love with the hat-check boy, and tonight's the hat-check boy's night off."
"Well, couldn't the chef come and take my order?"
"Alas," the girl sighs, "Tuesday is the night the chef is beaten by the doorman of the club across the street."
"Well, what about the doorman here?"
"His friend is a sailor – and he's on furlough right now."
"Hell," the American says disgustedly, "doesn't anyone around here like girls?"
The lady at the piano strikes a chord.
"What do you think I come here for?" she says.
There are two streets in the strip-club area called the Grosse Freiheit and the Kleine Freiheit – the Greater and the Lesser Freedom – where once the whores sat in shop windows waiting to be hired. But the shutters are permanently closed now and the bust-and-belly business has taken over. Instead, a block away, rises the multi-story steel and concrete Eros Center – the only apartment block in the world inhabited exclusively by prostitutes, who promenade in its central courtyard hoping to attract clients to their king-sized beds above. Beside the police station is the Zillertal – a huge, gaudy restaurant noisily featuring those three B's – beer, brass-bands and belching – that represent Bavaria's contribution to the humor of the world. And across the road from the Zillertal is the sole remaining example of the "little streets" of St. Pauli – the Herbertstrasse.
Barred off at each end with urinal-like steel partitions carrying huge warnings forbidding entry to minors, the Herbertstrasse is only just over a hundred yards long. The bulbs in the street lamps are pink. An old man plays a sentimental tune on an accordion in one corner. And along the broad cobbled precinct, in the shadows of the one cul-de-sac that leads off it, a constant flow of men – a surprising number with a wife or girl on one arm – promenade the thirty-odd brothels whose madams rent the three-story houses on the street. In the wide ground-floor picture-windows sit the girls… fat girls, thin girls, black girls, white girls, big-breasted jolly girls in decollete nightgowns, severe girls in corsets with whips tucked into their boots, girls in leather, girls in rubber, girls in fishnet tights and girls in skin-hugging wool catsuits.