"What a waste of time," Remo said. He pulled back from the woman.
"Remo," she said, "would you do me a favor?"
"A small one," Remo said.
"Take me outside and do it in the snow, under the trees. I love doing it amid nature. It feels so good, so natural. Please."
"I guess so," Remo said.
"I like trees," she said. "They're so ... so ... symbolic," she said.
"Terrific," he said. Thirty steps wasted and he hadn't found anything out, and this woman was still as stiff from hip to knee as she had been when he had first seen her.
He lifted her up and carried her out the back door of the trailer. He dumped her roughly on the ground. For the first time she squealed, and it was an honest squeal of passion.
"Just jump on me and bang away," she said. "Forget technique."
Remo followed her instructions, landing on her roughly, pushing her arms far apart, pinning them down with his strong hands, pressing hard enough to bruise her creamy skin, and inside ten seconds the woman melted, trembling and quaking, shuddering with the intense release of passion.
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She lay still under him, her shoulders trembling slightly against the snow.
"That was marvelous," she said.
"Why didn't you tell me'you liked rough stuff?" he said. "I could have saved a lot of time."
"I like rough stuff. Save time."
So they did it again. And again.
The third time, Remo asked her again: "Who's behind the killings?"
"I don't know," she said. • "What's the Association?"
"Ecology group. Pays our bills."
"Swell," Remo growled. He stood up and-looked down at her. "You better get inside before you catch, cold."
She nodded. "Will you come and keep me warm again?"
"Absolutely," he said. "On June 17th, I'm free from eight till nine in the morning."
"I'll wait," she said, as Remo crunched off through the snow, leaving her lying on the ground.
Cicely Winston-Alright went back into her trailer and closed the door behind her, then leaned up against it. God, she thought, at last a man . . . someone who wasn't put off by her money or her beauty and wasn't afraid just to take her like an animal in the woods. She could feel a shiver down her back. She was still throbbing down there, for the first time in years. Only one other man had ever ... it was just like in the movies ... like the books she sneaked out of her mother's closet . . .
She sighed and wondered if Remo had left yet. She
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ran to the front window of the trailer and looked out into the clearing, but he had gone.
She smiled and ran her ringers over her body. He would be back, she thought. She would make sure that he came back. If only men knew that she wanted them to be men, that she wanted them to take her, to force her, to bend her to their will, to hurt her. Why didn't men ever realize?
She walked to her bed and put on a flimsy black peignoir. Then she heard a sound in her kitchen, at the other end of the trailer behind a thin plywood door.
It was short, dark, and pretty Ararat Carpathian. God, how she hated Armenians, she thought. Not that she knew that many. In fact, Carpathian was the only one she knew, but she hated him enough to make up for all the rest. If they could only find some way of boiling down those people, she thought, America could solve its oil problems by breeding Armenians.
She smiled at him and let her gown slip open slightly, making sure he got a good view of her front, then slowly pulled it closed.
"Why, Ari," she said. "How nice to see you."
"I've been waiting quite a while," Carpathian said. "But you were busy."
"Oh, you noticed," she said. "Yes. Quite busy."
"Your friend seemed to want to talk," Carpathian said.
"Men always do," she said. She busied herself at the stove, making a cup of hot chocolate. She did not offer him any. When she turned to come and join him at the kitchen table, she noticed for the first time that he had a lumberjack's double-bladed axe leaning up against the wall behind his seat.
"Well, what is on your mind, Ari?" she asked.
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"Tonight's demonstration," he said.
"Ah, yes. The demonstration. We seem to live and die by our demonstrations, don't we, Ari?"
She noticed him smirking under the thin Une of his mustache.
"You could say that, Cicely," he said.
She wondered why he was carrying that axe around.
"Our people are beginning to feel uneasy," Ari said. "After last night's fiasco and with the press watching, they're losing their enthusiasm for tonight."
"Go make a speech. That'll whip them up."
"No. They need more than that," he said.
Mrs. Winston-Alright shook her head from side to side.