"Destroyer 012 - Slave Safari.pdb" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Remo)

"Cash in advance."

Lippincott paid, and after insolently recounting the money, the sergeant led him upstairs to a long broad hallway. They stopped in front of a polished steel door. From a tall chest next to the door, the sergeant took a cardboard box, and handed it to Lippincott.

"Your whips and chains are in here. Hooks are on the wall. If the girl gives you any trouble, just ring the buzzer in the room. If she refuses you anything, threaten to ring the buzzer. She shouldn't be any trouble though. Been here three months. Only the really new ones give trouble. Haven't been educated, so to speak."

The sergeant took a key from a ring on his belt and unlocked the door. Lippincott gripped the paper box tightly under his arm and went into the room like a schoolboy discovering an abandoned pastry shop.

He slammed the door behind him, and in his rush into the room, almost stumbled over a wide metal cot. On it lay a nude woman, her legs drawn up to her stomach, her arms shielding her head, her red hair a dirty tangle on the mattress, which was speckled with dried bloodstains.

The room smelled of camphor and Lippincott assumed it must be from the ointment that glistened on the girl's flanks over fresh and precisely drawn lash marks. Lippincott suddenly felt compassion for the creature and was tempted to leave the room, perhaps even buy her freedom, when she peered from beneath her folded arms and seeing a man with a box, rose slowly from the cot. When he saw her young breasts flecked with dried blood as she rose from the cot, a driving rage enveloped him, and when she dutifully walked to the dirty, blood-spattered wall and raised her hands above her head to an iron ring, Lippincott was trembling. He fumbled the chains around her wrists, then pounced on the whip as if someone might snatch it from him.

As he readied himself for the stroke, the girl asked, "Do you want screaming?" She was American.

"Yes, screaming. Lot of screaming. If you don't scream, I'll whip harder and harder."

Lippincott whipped and the girl screamed with each cutting crack. Back came the whip, then forward, crack, and the polished snakelike cord glistened with blood, back and forward, back and forward, faster until the screams and the whip and the cracking became a single sound of anguish and then it was over. James Forsythe Lippincott was spent and with the sudden quenching of his strange and sudden thirst, his powers of reasoning assumed command and he was suddenly afraid.

He realized now the girl had screamed almost as a duty despite the great pain. She was probably drugged. Her back looked like raw meat.

What if someone had taken pictures of him? He could deny them. It would be his word against some bush nigger's. What if the Minister of Public Safety found out he used his name improperly? Well, three, maybe four hundred dollars would take care of that.

What if the girl died? Twelve thousand dollars. He gave more than that each year to the Brotherhood Union for Human Dignity.

So why be afraid?

"Are you through, Lippy?" the redheaded girl asked dully, her voice heavy with drugs. "If you are, you're supposed to take the chains off."

"How do you know my name? That's only used in my social circle."

"Lippy, this is Busati. Are you through?"

"Uh, yes," he said, going to the wall to get a better look at her face in the dimly lit room. She was about twenty five, the fine, lean nose had been broken days before and was swollen and blue now. There was a gash in the lower lip that had crusted around the edges.

"Who are you?"

"Don't ask. Just let me die, Lippy. We're all going to be dead."

"I know you, don't I? You're... you're," and he saw the features, now mangled, that had once graced Chesapeake Bay society, one of the Forsythe girls, a second cousin.

"What are you doing here, Cynthia?" he said, and then, in horror, remembered and said, "We just buried you in Baltimore."

"Save yourself, Lippy," she groaned.

In his panic, that was just what Lippincott intended to do. He envisioned Cynthia Forsythe somehow getting back to Baltimore and disclosing his terrible secret. Lippincott grabbed the end of the whip and wrapped it around the girl's neck.

"You're a fool, Lippy, you always were," she said and James Forsythe Lippincott tightened the whip and kept pulling the ends until the red swollen face of the girl disclosed a tongue and the eyes bulged and he kept pulling.

The sergeant downstairs understood why James Forsythe Lippincott did not wish to write out a personal check, and yes, he would trust him to return to his hotel and make arrangements with the National Bank of Bu-sati to get cash. "We do not worry," the sergeant said. "Where would you go?"