"How do you wish your steak, sir?" the bunny was asking. A stake through the heart, for a vampire.
"Medium well," Saul said, wondering why his mind was wandering in such odd directions. ("Odd erections," somebody said in the nearby dark- or was it a distorted echo of his own voice?)
"Medium well," the bunny repeated, seemingly speaking to the wall. A medium wall, Saul thought.
Immediately the wall opened and Saul was looking into a combination kitchen and butcher shop. A steer was standing not five feet from him, but before he could recover from this shock a male figure, stripped to the waist and wearing the hood of a medieval executioner, caught his attention. With one stroke of a huge hammer, this figure knocked the steer unconscious and it fell to the floor with a crash. Immediately the executioner produced an axe and chopped its head off; blood gushed in a crimson pool from its neck.
The wall closed, and Saul had the terrifying feeling that the whole scene had been a hallucination- that he was losing his mind.
"All our lunches are educational today," the bunny said in his ear. "We believe every customer should understand fully what's on the end of his fork and how it got there, before he takes a bite."
"Good God," Saul said, getting to his feet. This wasn't a Playboy Club, it was some den of lunatics and sadists. He stumbled toward the door.
"No way out," a man at another table said softly as he passed.
"Saul, Saul," the maitre d' murmured politely, "why dost thou persecute me?
"It's a drug," Saul said thickly, "you've given me a drug." Of course, that was it- something like mescaline or LSD-and they were guiding his hallucinations by providing proper stimuli. Perhaps they were even faking some of the hallucinations. But how had he fallen into their hands? The last thing he remembered, he was in Joe Malik's apartment with Barney Muldoon… No, there was a voice saying,
"No man should marry a woman more than thirty years younger than himself," the maitre d' said mournfully. How did they know about that? Had they investigated his whole life? How long had they held him?
"I'm getting out of here," he shouted, pushing the maitre d' aside and bolting for the door.
Hands grasped for him and missed (they weren't really trying, he realized: he was being allowed to reach the door). When he plunged through the doorway, he realized why: he was not on the street but in another room. This was the next ordeal.
A rectangle of light appeared on the wall; somewhere in the darkness there was a projector. A card, light an old silent-movie caption, appeared in the rectangle. It said:
ALL JEW GIRLS LIKE TO BALL WITH BUCK NIGGERS
"Sons of bitches," Saul shouted back at them. They were still working on his feelings about Rebecca. Well, that would get them nowhere: he had ample reason to trust her devotion to him, especially her sexual devotion.
The card moved out of the rectangle, and a picture appeared in its place. It was Rebecca's, in her nightgown, kneeling. Before her stood a naked and enormous black man, six feet six at least, with an equally impressive penis which she held sensuously in her mouth. Her eyes were closed in bliss, like a baby nursing.
"Motherfuckers," Saul screamed. "It's a fake. That's not Rebecca- it's an actress with makeup. You forgot the mole on her hip." They could drug his senses but not his mind.
There was a nasty laugh in the darkness. 'Try this one, Saul," a voice said coldly.
A new picture slid into view: Adolph Hitler, in full Nazi uniform, and a naked Rebecca backing up to him, taking his penis in her rectum. Her face showed both pain and pleasure- and the mole on her hip was visible. Another fake- Rebecca was born years after Hitler died. But they hadn't produced the slide in the thirty seconds after his shout, and that meant they knew her body, intimately… And they also knew how skeptical and quick his mind was, and were prepared to administer a series of jolts until something got past his ability to doubt.
"No comment?" the voice asked mockingly.
"I don't believe a man who died thirty years ago would be buggering
"Sometimes, with the vulgar, we must communicate vulgarly," the voice replied- and it was almost gentle and pitying this time.
