My pursuer tripped on the T–shirts and bellowed for backup. CO Hartigan came through the door on the run. Jackets and shirts tumbled from belts and got tangled in the machinery. Sirens howled and the clanking machines ground to a halt.
I ducked under Hartigan’s outstretched arm and pushed open the door, with some foolish hope of pretending I’d gotten turned around and ended up in the room by mistake. Wenzel was on the other side of the door. He seized my arms. I slid my legs around his ankles and with the fury that had been boiling in me for a month, took his feet out from under him. He fell backward, still holding me, but his grip loosened as he fell, and I pulled away, rolling on my side and coming up in a crouch.
Hartigan was facing me, pulling a gun. I twisted away, then suddenly lost control of my limbs. I was shot through the air as from a cannon and careened headfirst onto the pile of jackets. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. The skin on my chest stung. My legs were wet, and I smelled urine and burning cloth. My arms and legs jerked spastically.
Hartigan stood over me, a smile of exultant sadism on his face, and lifted one large booted foot. I managed to wrench myself sideways just before he kicked me. His boot sank savagely into my ribs, and then into my skull.
When I woke I was in a dark room. My head pounded violently. I tried to lift a hand to feel my head but I couldn’t move my arms. My ribs ached and my stomach heaved. I shut my eyes and passed out again.
I felt a hand on my arm and someone saying, Is she alive? I wanted to pull my arm away but I still couldn’t move it. I was alive, someone else confirmed, but I wasn’t going anywhere, they could take off the manacles.
“Someone like her will fool you, Hartigan,” the first voice said. It belonged to CO Polsen. “Wenzel has a concussion from the blow she gave him. Leave her chained up, that way you’ll be sure.”
It was the fall, I wanted to say. I took his legs out from under him and he fell. But my jaw hurt and I couldn’t speak. Later someone brought me water. I was so grateful tears spurted out the sides of my eyes.
My cousin Boom–Boom had dared me to climb the crane, I tried to tell my mother. And why had I done it, she demanded in Italian. Do you need to do everything that crazy boy does? What are you trying to prove, that you’re a cat who has nine lives? My father told her to let me be, I had a concussion and two broken ribs and that was punishment enough. And my punishment, my mother shouted in English, if she’s taken from me in one of these crazy exploits you and your brother laugh at, I will never survive it.
I thought it would be safe now to open my eyes, because my father would be smiling down at me, but when I opened them I was in a cell—not the one I shared with Solina—one with a single bed in it. I heard a sharp snap. The pounding pain had subsided to a muted throb and I could move my head. I saw the door, with a window in the top and an eye bulging as it peered at me. There was a second snap as a shutter slid across the window, leaving me once more in darkness.
I kept dozing off into phantasmagoric dreams, where I was eight or nine or ten, with my mother as she made me practice scales until my arms hurt so much I begged her not to make me do music anymore, or with Boom–Boom at a Fourth of July picnic where the fireworks made my head ache and tears run down my cheeks. The fireworks smelled, too, like some kind of horrible uncleaned toilet.
The snapping shutter roused me periodically. I could move my arms now, but the pain in my ribs and gut was so great I didn’t move them much. I was alternating between drenching sweats and chills so violent they caused a rattling at my feet. I thought my bones were clanking, but when I tried to sit up to look at my feet, the pain in my stomach stabbed me brutally. I cried out and lay back down. Once when the shutter opened I had a flash of awareness: my legs were manacled together. It didn’t matter—I was in too much pain to walk anywhere. I shut my eyes again.
Someone asked again if I was still alive. I knew the voice, but my mind floated off. She’s not in good shape, a second man answered. She stinks, the first voice said. She’ll be in back, Polsen, you won’t smell her once you get her inside. Wenzel can’t drive; you’ll have to come along. Put on some gloves and a mask. Change her shirt; we don’t want to get into the mess we had with the other one, having to come up with a clean shirt because this one’s got burn marks on it.
CO Polsen. He was tearing off my shirt; he was going to treat me the way he had that other woman, and I was powerless to stop him. I would not cry I would not give him the satisfaction I would not cry when he touched the raw skin on my breasts. I was jerked upright, and the pain across my abdomen was so ferocious I blacked out. Then I was sick and my father was carrying me, but he was too rough, he was hurting me, my head and my stomach.