“Let’s try something different. Tell me who he was. Your husband, I mean. The one they found under the stage, after the show, in Waterloo. Dead and bloody, stuffed into the Halved Man apparatus, right where you left him.”
She stops midchew.
“Your dead husband,” he continues. It’s time to put on more pressure. “Blood everywhere. Bruises, cuts, broken bones. Someone hit him and hit him hard. You, I suspect. It’s amazing what damage a woman can do when she wants to.”
She turns her face away, looks down. He offers her the apple again, its hollow white side, but she makes no move toward it.
Quietly she says, “He was beaten?”
“Badly.”
“Did you see the body?”
“Yes.”
She asks, “Did you see his face?”
Something in him makes him reach out for her chin and pull it forward again. He wants to look her full in the face. With his other hand, he puts the white, bitten side of the apple in front of her mouth. He says, “Eat.”
She takes a smaller bite this time. Her eyes don’t leave his as she chews and swallows it, her nimble face a storm of emotion. She looks angry and pleading and hungry and confused. A faint sheen of sweat is starting to form on her brow, under the tendrils of reddish hair. She takes a second small bite and chews it, his fingers on her jaw feeling every movement of muscle and bone, and he sees again the knot in her throat as she swallows.
Then she says, “Please. Did you?”
“No,” he lies.
She drops her chin toward her shoulder, and he lets her. He thinks she looks queasy, but he might be flattering himself, thinking he has some effect on her.
In silence, he feeds her the rest of the apple. She eats it all, down to the core and the seeds. At last, he is holding only half an inch of stem between his thumb and forefinger. He reaches out with his handkerchief and wipes a spot of apple from the corner of her mouth, and she says softly, “Thank you.”
The air in the room is already stale and hot. He wishes the one barred window, eight feet up the wall, would give him fresh air to breathe.
He makes a decision and rises from his chair, moving it away to give himself room. Then he drops to his knees at her feet, putting one hand on each ankle.
“What are you doing?” She edges back, rocks herself against the chair. The legs move a little. She inches back but he holds on. Then she wrenches hard and pulls one leg free, trying to kick him.
“Easy!” he shouts.
Her dirty boot catches him in the shoulder, causing a sharp hot pain, which he hides. He shoves the kicking foot down hard and shifts his body sideways so he’s sitting on it, pinning the wild leg between his body and the chair. He prays the exertion won’t damage him, but if it does, so be it. He’s gambling anyway. He’s betting that she’s a prize rich enough to win him security, the security that began slipping away three months ago when he interrupted a man robbing a bank and slipped away even further this afternoon in a doctor’s office in Waterloo.
She tries to kick again, wrenching her body around, straining against all five pairs of handcuffs. When none of that works, she lets out a howling, piercing scream.
“Easy, I said! I’m not going to hurt you! Be quiet!”
“Get away!” she shouts.
He uses one hand to hold her foot in place while the other unlaces the boot. She keeps moving and shifting and twitching. He could explain to her why he needs to remove her boots, but it wouldn’t soothe her, so he isn’t going to waste the words.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says one more time instead.
“You don’t understand,” she says. She says it over and over again, quieter and quieter, “You don’t understand, you don’t understand, you don’t understand.”
At first, he’s afraid it’s a spell. Some kind of incantation. But it goes on and on, as if she’s compelled. It doesn’t seem like she’s trying to bewitch him; she doesn’t even seem to know he’s there.
When she finally pauses, breathless, he says, “That’s right. I don’t understand. Why don’t you explain it to me?”
In a low clear voice, she says, “Okay.”