Lucky Bastard (14 page)

And then she broke contact.

Jack did not see Greta again or have another woman (for she really had spoiled him for his old pleasures) for seven weeks. Then, on a rare sunny morning in May, Jack, who had gotten plump again, was out for his morning run along the Neckar embankment when the antique Daimler pulled up beside him.

The windows of the Daimler were down. A Strauss waltz blared from the speakers; cars behind it sounded their horns. Greta smiled at him through the open window. She wore a blond wig with two long braids. She pulled over to the curb, then slid across the front seat, reached into the back, and flung open the door.

“Get in,” she said. She was dressed in a puffy dirndl, petticoats billowing above her bare, dimpled knees.

Gasping with laughter, Jack got into the backseat. Greta slammed the door, rolled up the front window, and put the car in motion to a fanfare of klaxons. She looked at Jack in the rearview mirror.

“Take off those clothes,” she said.

He wore a sweat-soaked T-shirt and running shorts.

“I'm going to get perspiration all over the leather,” he said.

“Never mind. No one will ever know you've been here.”

No one could see him through the smoked windows. He did as she ordered. Greta drove on, shooting glances at him in the rearview mirror. In moments he was naked except for his running shoes and socks.

“The shoes and socks, too.”

Greta's rucksack lay beside Jack on the backseat. He took hold of its strap, intending to move it to the floor.

“Don't touch that!” Greta cried. “Don't touch anything!”

She handed something to him, folded into a wad: surgical gloves.

“Put them on.”

Jack said, “On what?”

“No boasting. Your hands.”

“Why?”

They stopped at a red light. Greta reached over the back of the seat and scooped up Jack's T-shirt and shorts and jockstrap. She rolled her window down a hand's breadth.

“Put on the gloves or I'll throw these out the window.”

She was in a state of high excitement, sexual and otherwise. Jack did as she ordered; rules of the game. Greta slid across the seat.

“Climb over and drive,” she said.

With some difficulty because of the state he was in, Jack clambered into the front seat and got behind the wheel.

“Put the seat all the way back.” Jack did as he was told. His toes barely touched the pedals. “Where to?”

“Straight on,” Greta said.

In addition to the dirndl, Greta wore white kneesocks and laced brown oxfords—the entire Rhine maiden costume. She took off her wig and tossed it into the backseat, along with Jack's clothes. The wig was stiff, like a helmet; it rolled back and forth on the seat. While Jack drove through heavy traffic, Greta worked on him with hands and tongue, bringing him repeatedly to the point of ejaculation, then preventing it with a fingertip applied with clinical precision to exactly the correct pressure point.

“Greta, for God's sake! That's
agonizing.
”

“
Nicht war?
” She lifted her head and gazed through the windshield. “Turn right at the next street. Park on the right, in the middle of the block, in front of the shop with the red dress in the window.”

Groaning, Jack did precisely as ordered. They were in a no-parking zone, across from a bank. Cars flowed by in a steady unending stream; the smell of exhaust leaked into the Daimler through its open vents.

Greta, still fully dressed, reached into her bodice and brought something out.

“Look, Jack, for you! All the way from America!”

Greta waved a brand-new tube of Vaseline in front of Jack's eyes. She unscrewed the cap and passed the open tube under his nose.

She said, “Have you guessed?”

Jack shook his head. All this was happening on a public street at eight-thirty in the morning in the midst of rush-hour traffic, in a car that stuck out like a sore thumb even when it was not illegally parked. He was stark naked.

“Now you get the one thing I would never give you,” Greta said. “I'm all ready. Do you want some, too?”

For once, Jack knew exactly what she meant. He couldn't believe his luck. He nodded, paralyzed by a mixture of fear and desire. Greta squeezed half the tube into the palm of her hand and showed it to him.

Whispering, Greta said, “This is the last way I am a virgin. Sit back from the wheel.”

Jack obeyed. She lifted her skirt, then tulips within snowy tulips of scalloped petticoats. With her back to his chest, she straddled his body. Gripping him like the hilt of a sword, she lowered herself with brutal force, free arm out-thrown, screaming at the top of her voice.

“
Aaaaaaaaaah!
”

She sobbed, apparently in real pain, as she repeated the movement, producing in Jack an ecstasy so intense, a realization of fantasy so complete, that he feared, even as it was occurring, that he would never be able to duplicate it.

It lasted only seconds, but when it was over, Jack was helpless, nearly senseless. His heart pounded. He was, for the first time ever after such a moment, limp. Greta got off him, more gently than she had got on.

Jack lay with his eyes closed, in a state of trust and satiety. While his mind drifted, Greta placed his hands on the steering wheel, bent his fingers around it. He heard a tiny noise:
click.
And then another
click.

His eyes sprang open. His hands in their transparent gloves were handcuffed to the steering wheel.

Jack said, “Jesus, Greta—”

Greta knelt on the seat beside him. She said, “And now, our first kiss.”

Never before had they kissed; Swallow customs were not so different in this regard from those observed by other prostitutes. And Jack, who liked his sensations localized, did not really care for kissing. But now Greta grasped his head with both hands, and covered his open mouth with hers. He felt her tongue on his, then something else.

The key to the handcuffs.

“Don't swallow it, Liebchen.”

Greta put on her Jeanne Moreau glasses and smiled her mad smile. She leaned over the back of the seat, her sweet round dirndled behind sticking up, and wrestled her rucksack into the front seat.

She opened the rucksack, unbuckled and unlaced its puckered top, and removed an Uzi machine pistol and a magazine.

Jack leaped in his skin. Voice cracking, he cried, “What the fuck is that?”

Greta said, “Quiet. You'll swallow the key. And then what?”

Greta put the loaded Uzi back into the rucksack and put on her wig, smiling sweetly, tucking rufous curls up under the blond helmet.

Jack's heart was pounding. He rattled the chain of his handcuffs. He said, “Unlock these.” He stuck out his tongue, key balanced on the tip.

Greta shook her head no and, with a stiff forefinger, pushed Jack's tongue back into his mouth, tucking the key beneath it. He tasted Vaseline.

Wild-eyed, Jack said, “You belong in a fucking concentration camp.”

“And you're
in
one, piglet. Now listen to me.”

Jack's eyes still popped from his head. He could hardly breathe. He threw himself violently toward Greta. The cuffs cut into his wrists with all the force generated by this sudden movement of his two-hundred-pound body.

Greta said, “Jack, be calm. See the bank across the street? It opens in three minutes. I am going to go in. I will be followed by others you will recognize. We will make a great victory for the people.”

Realization, followed by overwhelming sensations of dread and fear, flooded into every cell of Jack's body. “
You're going to rob the bank!
”

“No,” Greta said. “We are going to collect the people's taxes.”

“Greta, don't do this.”

Greta said, “You will stay here and watch, lucky boy, until I come out and get into another car. Then you will drive away. You can shift with your foot, so.” She demonstrated. “When I come out of the bank,” she said. “But not sooner. If you try to go sooner, this car will explode. Someone is watching. He will press a button and Goodbye, Jack. Do you understand?”

“No!” Jack screamed. “I
don't
understand, you fucking maniac!”

“Good, then you will learn something,” Greta said. She looked intently at her Rolex, counting the minutes.

Then she turned the key in the ignition and started the Daimler. When she opened the door, Jack could hear its exhaust, regular and soft as the respiration of a sleeping human.

She said, “Goodbye, Jack. Find yourself a wonderful American girl and have lots of little Jacks and Jills. But never forget Greta!”

Jack was too terrified to reply. She gave him no last smile. Greta saved that for the old bank guard, who watched with unconcealed pleasure as she waited obediently for the light to change, then crossed the street, dirndl swinging with every stride of her shapely calves in their snow-white kneesocks, blond cap shining in the morning sunshine, the very picture of German girlhood. When she added a virginal smile to all this, the guard exclaimed, “
Wunderschön!
”

Greta disappeared into the shadowy interior of the bank. Moments later she was followed by three other young people. All carried rucksacks.

Suddenly the air was split by police hooters—many of them, approaching at high speed. Traffic scattered as cars got out of the way. Half a dozen police cars arrived, strobe lights flashing. Policemen wearing bulletproof vests and steel helmets with transparent visors leaped out, assault rifles at the ready.

At this moment, inside the bank, gunfire erupted. A squad of policemen rushed the front door. Two of them were knocked down by a burst of gunfire from within. The others flattened themselves against the wall on either side of the entrance. The old guard pulled his pistol and charged the door. He was killed before he could fire his weapon; bullets exiting his body stitched a line of bloody pockmarks across his back.

Greta's three friends came out the door abreast, crouching and firing Uzis. The remaining policemen, using their cars as breastworks, fired back, killing them all. One of them, a painfully skinny boy, jerked upright and did a crazy final dance, spewing bullets from his Uzi and splintering upstairs windows as he went down.

Greta had emerged while this was happening, and was now running down the sidewalk, concealing the Uzi against her dirndl. She had lost her wig. Her own wild red hair stood out around her head as if electrified. Guns at the ready, the police watched her, puzzled. Was she one of the terrorists, or was she what she was dressed to look like?

A BMW waiting at the end of the block threw open its door. Greta made for it, and as she turned, the police saw her gun. She raised it, but before she could shoot, they fired on her in unison with twenty automatic weapons. These sounded like the enraged snarl of so many animals. Greta's body spun as if gripped by the terrible fangs of an invisible wolf pack, blood whipping like long red tresses from dozens of puncture wounds.

Sobbing with fear, Jack put the Daimler into gear with his foot, let out the clutch, and drove slowly away. In the rearview mirror he saw the BMW being torn apart by police bullets as it sped in the opposite direction. He expected to be followed by the police cars, to be pulled over, to be told to put up his hands, to be unable to obey because his hands were chained to the wheel, to be killed in indescribable pain by a hundred rounds of ammunition. He prayed, shouting: “Save me, save me, let me live, I'll do anything you say!”

But nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Two blocks away from the battle, the world went on in the bright May sunshine as if death and madness had never been invented by a deaf supreme being, as if Jack could not smell Greta on his own fouled body with every breath he drew.

He drove into the old city and parked the Daimler near the castle. He spat the key to the handcuffs into his palm and freed himself. Then he put on his clothes. They were cold, wet with sweat.

Trembling violently, Jack got out of the Daimler, locked all the doors, and began to run again, the car keys in his hand. A few blocks from the car, as he passed a storm drain, he let the keys drop from his hand and kicked them down the sewer.

Following some instinct he had not known he possessed, he ran in a long circle, to protect the secret of his den. Home at last, he ran up the stairs and went directly to the toilet. He closed the door behind him and vomited. Minutes later, when he threw the key to the handcuffs into the bowl, he realized that he was still wearing the surgical gloves. He stripped them off and threw them in, too, but then fished them out again, afraid that they would stop the drain and regurgitate the only evidence against him.

And then he realized that the gloves were not the only evidence. There was more, if the police looked in the right place for it during the autopsy.

Greta! Obeying her last instruction, he remembered her as she was in their last game together, shrieking and twisting in pain or pleasure—who could know which?—in the final, unforgettable moment of what neither of them had ever called love. But was.

Three