Chapter 14
The telephone rang. Mavis answered.
"Can you handle a special hundred dollar assignment around eight?" Carmen's toneless voice asked. "Name of Troop. Used to ask for Elsie. Somebody recommended you so take it from there. This one's a regular, so if you play it right...."
"All right," Mavis said irritably, "No need to draw me a picture-I know the score. I'm free. Send him up about eight, not before."
She hung up. She was bored. It was six months since she first walked into Frenchie Blaine's establishment, just a green kid with hot pants and a yen for excitement and money. Already she looked five years older. There were harsh lines on her face, around her mouth. Her eyes had a hard, calculating look, and there was a sort of hopelessness in their expression, mingling with a mercenary gleam.
Big Elsie was dead, run down by a drunken driver only six weeks after Mavis met her. Now Mavis was queen in her chosen profession, raking in up to five hundred dollars a night, selecting her clients. She had her own apartment-a luxury layout in a brown-stone building on 77th Street. Technically she still worked for Frenchie. The big woman owned the apartment, but the big, new Lincoln Mavis drove around in was her own and paid for, and her closets held more expensive clothing than Frenchie Blaine's. Mavis also owned, body and soul, a handsome pimp named Harry Savourne whom she kept around strictly for personal reason, but had no more genuine affection for him than for the general run of her extensive clientele.
Mavis had changed. She was hard, shrewder, dollar wise, utterly unscrupulous. She had proved an apt pupil. She still spent an occasional night with Frenchie. So long as Frenchie had the contacts it was in Mavis's best interests to reciprocate, and there were times after that first night with Frenchie, when she actually enjoyed intimacy.
She poured herself a drink, glanced at her watch, shrugged. "Time to get lost, Harry," she said. "I've got company in fifteen minutes."
The long-haired young man detached himself from the sofa and stood up, yawning. Apart from his physical equipment he had little to recommend him to any woman.
"I think I'll go shoot a little pool," he said. "Might take in a movie."
"Got any money?"
"Coupla dollars."
She opened her bag, threw him a couple of crumpled tens. He caught the bills adroitly, flicked them with a long forefinger, went out without a word.
"Bastard!" Mavis muttered. She got ready, watching the time. When the doorbell rang she was finishing her fourth drink of the evening.
It was too good to last. But another three months elapsed before Mavis saw the writing on the wall. It began with a slight discharge, facial blemishes that developed into unsightly sores, flaking skin, listlessness and vomiting. Mavis consulted a doctor. Since leaving the apartment on 42nd Street she had neglected the periodical check-up Frenchie had always been so insistent about.
The doctor confirmed what she herself suspected. That meant treatment, time lost from business. But the alternative wasn't pleasant. So Mavis followed her doctor's advice. She was away six weeks, at the end of which time she had lost an estimated seven thousand dollars worth of business, a score of her best customers, and twenty pounds of body weight ... And the second night after her return to the 77th Street apartment Harry Savoume came back into her life, but with a difference and in a manner that terrified her.
She was resting when he arrived. She had spoken with Frenchie over the phone, and Frenchie had given her a verbal beating that still washed over her weary mind like a restless, surging tide.
Harry Savoume had a key and he came straight in, quietly. The first she knew of his presence was when she opened her eyes to find him leaning over her gripping a long-bladed flick-knife. His face was no longer handsome, covered as it was with festering sores and convulsed in a fiendish expression of hate and fury. That, and the murder gleaming stark and terrible in his bloodshot eyes, wrested a shocked cry from Mavis before his free hand gripped her throat and choked the sounds to a hoarse whisper.
"You rotten, filthy whore!" Savourne raved. "You lousy, stinking bitch. I hoped you'd be back. I've waited, thinking every day that you'd come. Now I'm gonna give it to you. I'm gonna pay you back for what you done to me, you hear? I'm gonna cut you, real bad."
She struggled desperately, managed to speak.
"For God's sake, Harry," she pleaded, "Have you gone completely mad? What did I ever do to you?"
He indicated his face with a trembling finger.
"This!" he shouted, "This is what you done, this and the rest. You rotten cow! You must have known and yet you let me go.
His control snapped. Savagely he whipped the knife blade across her face, slashed again almost before her restricted throat could produce a scream. When she did start she kept right on, and all the time the demented pimp was cutting her, laying open her face, slicing her arms when she crossed them to shield her bleeding features, hacking at her breasts ... She rolled, fell shrieking to the floor. And Harry Savourne kicked her, viciously, methodically, in the stomach, in the groin, the kidney region, her ribs, until she lay silent and still against the wall and he was too exhausted to swing his punishing foot any more.
Some measure of sanity returned to him. He ran long fingers through his lank hair, spat deliberately at the huddled figure, wiped the knife blade clean on the bed cover, and went out.
The surgeon who saved Mavis Preed's life would have been kinder had he let her die. When, after seven weeks of pain, she was able to see herself without bandages, she took one look in the mirror and promptly went into raving hysterics. Harry Savoume had done a thorough job. Her broken ribs had mended, and the scars on her arms were trivial, of small consequence. But her breasts were puckered horrors, her face a nightmarish pattern of criss-crossing scar ridges, one eye corner drawn down to reveal horribly bloodshot flesh.
At the hospital they quieted her with an injection. The doctor in charge of the case consulted an eminent plastic surgeon who spent exactly ten minutes of his valuable time inspecting Mavis's injuries and then shook his head decisively.
"I can try," he said. "Perhaps I can do something-I don't know. Some of those ridges, and that eye! What inhuman swine was responsible for a thing like this? Was he mad?"
"At the time, yes. The Police pulled him in over a month ago, but he wouldn't talk, and he's remained silent ever since. He was rotten with syphilis. They've got him in an insolation ward in C-Block, right here. Maybe that had something to do with it, if he caught it from her. She won't talk. We haven't been able to extract any information from her, no reason or explanation. You think there's some hope?"
"Some, perhaps. I wouldn't like to commit myself at this stage. And, of course, there'll be the question of fees."
"Yes. Well, I'll call you when I've had a chance to talk to her. We know who she is, of course. And she has money, there's no question about that, otherwise I wouldn't have called you in."
The doctor's talk with Mavis was not particularly successful. For some she refused to believe that plastic surgery might help her at all. She lay like a corpse, silent, unseeing, rating everyone and everything. But when finally the doctor was able to make her comprehend and partially accept his explanations, she cut short his spiel with two short, abrupt words:-
"How much?"
"In your case," he told her, "I'd say about ten thousand dollars."
"Tell him to go ahead."
"I should warn you that there's no guarantee it will prove successful. You must be prepared...."
"All right. I'd rather be dead than like this. If there's a chance, any chance at all, I want it and I don't care what it costs."
It meant another eight weeks in hospital, at fourteen dollars a day. And a series of complicated operations. Most of the time Mavis didn't know whether it was night or day, or even what day of the week it was. She didn't greatly care. Sam Davis, reading a brief account of some West Side whore being carved up by a former pimp, turned the page without connecting the incident in any way with the young tramp who almost a year ago had almost caused the break-up of his sister's marriage. He'd seen, and read about, scores of similar incidents since Mavis Preed slammed out of the Branch house that fateful afternoon.
It was just one week before Christmas when Doctor Julian Ebercore snipped the bandages from Mavis's breasts and discovered that the skin grafts had taken well. Apart from faint scars her bosom was restored, as firmly moulded and as beautiful as before. He decided to allow her face a few more days in which to heal, days that seemed like an eternity to Mavis.
When next he came she was sitting up in bed listening to the radio. She was able to get up and move around, but each afternoon they insisted that she rest for a couple of hours. Over the radio a choir was rendering carols. In a few hours it would be Christmas Eve. Outside, snow lay thick over everything and drifted in huge, fluffy flakes against the window panes.
The scissors were cold against Mavis's cheek, cutting, snipping, while her heart trumped and her fingers clutched the bed covers tightly. Bandages fell away. Doctor Ebercore smiled, and snipped some more.
"This is the moment we've been waiting for, my dear," he said confidently. "I pray to God we've been as successful as before. Nurse.
Gently he removed the gauze. He looked, and for an instant his face twisted in an expression of horror and disgust. Swiftly he banished the look, but Mavis had seen. Before he could prevent her she snatched the mirror held by the nurse standing close by. The thing Mavis saw in that mirror was blood-red, formless, hideous. It bore no resemblance to a human face. Her mouth, opening as she screamed, was a drooling, twisted monstrosity.
Sounds came, awful, mournings that began as a throaty chuckle and mounted swiftly to a shrieking crescendo that reverberated through the quiet building.
Doctor Julian Ebercore gaping, white faced, and shuddered. "My God!" he muttered.