The Heckler

That evening, the fourteenth of April, he had dazzled her with his brilliance at dinner. She sat in wide-eyed wonder, contributing little to the conversation, fascinated with his speech. They walked under a star-scattered sky later, guided imperceptibly by the deaf man to an apartment on Franklin Street. When the deaf man suggested that they go up for a drink, the girl demurred slightly, and he felt a quickening of passion; this would not be a pushover; there would be a struggle and a chase to whet his appetite.

They did not talk much in the apartment. They sat on the modern couch in the sunken living room and the girl took off her shoes and pulled her knees up under her, and the deaf man poured two large snifters of brandy, and they sat rolling the glasses in their hands, the girl peeking over the edge of her glass the way she had seen movie stars do, the deaf man drinking the brandy slowly, savoring the taste of the lip-tingling alcohol, anticipating what he would do to this girl, anticipating his pleasure with a slow cruelty that began mounting inside him, a carefully controlled cruelty—control, he reminded himself, control.

By midnight, the girl was totally witless.

Half naked, she did not know what was happenng to her, nor did she care; she had no mind; she possessed only a body which was alive in his arms as he carried her down a long white corridor to the first of three bedrooms. Her stockings were off, she realized; he had taken off her stockings; firmly cradled in his arms, her skirt pulled back, she realized she was naked beneath the skirt, her blouse hung open; he had somehow removed her bra without taking off her blouse, she could see the white beating expanse below her neck and suddenly he was standing over her and she was looking up at him expectantly and seeing him and feeling sudden fear, the fear of true and total invasion, and then she knew nothing.

Nothing. She knew nothing. She was drawn toward a blazing sun, pulled away from it, he knew nothing inviolate, every secret place of her succumbed totally to his vicious onslaught, every aching pore of her was his to claim, she was drugged, she was not herself, she was not anyone she knew, she had been carried mindlessly to the edge of totality, violated and adored, cherished and possessed, worshiped and ravaged, there was no cessation, no beginning and no end, she would remember this night with longing and excitement, remember it too with shame and guilt as the night she surrendered privacy to a total stranger, with an abandon she had not known she’d possessed.

At three in the morning, he gave her a gift. He crossed the room and she was too weary to follow him even with her eyes, and suddenly he was beside her again, opening a long carton, pulling the filmy silk from within its tissue paper folds.

“Put this on,” he said.

She obeyed him. She would have obeyed whatever command he’d given her. She rose and pulled the black gown over her head.

“And your shoes.”

She obeyed. She felt somewhat dizzy, and yet she longed to be in his arms again. The short nightgown ended abruptly above her thighs. She felt his eyes upon her, sweeping the curve of her leg, the long accentuated curve dropping to the high-heeled spike.

“Come here,” he said, and she went to him hungrily.

11.

WELL, THE FIFTEENTH was the middle of the month, and a hell of a month it was shaping up to be so far.

All things considered, and not even taking into account the petty little daily crimes which bugged every man working the squad, April so far—despite the lovely weather—was beginning to assume the characteristics of a persistent migraine. And no man on the squad had a bigger headache than Meyer Meyer.

Meyer, it seemed, had become the man officially assigned to the Heckler Case. That it was now a bona fide “case,” there seemed to be no doubt. What had started with David Raskin as a simple series of threatening phone calls and foolish pranks had somehow mushroomed into something with the proportions of an epidemic. Slowly, bit by bit, the complaints had come in until the list of shop or restaurant owners reporting threatening calls and acts of harassment had grown to a total of twenty-two. Some of the complainants were truly terrified by the threats; others were simply annoyed by the disruption of their business. Meyer, taking the calls, became more and more convinced that one man, or group of men, was responsible for the heckling. In any case, themodus operandi seemed identical.

But what he couldn’t understand was what the hell was so important about April thirtieth?

Or why these particular shops had been chosen? A haberdashery, a Chinese restaurant, a tie store, a leather goods shop, a candy shop—what was so important about these particular locations?

Meyer simply couldn’t figure it.