Rook had first seen her from the balcony of his house while he waited for his mother to finish preparing dinner. She would be taking a stroll in the narrow lane with her children, and sometimes with her husband.

She looked between thirty and thirty- five and she had eyes that seemed always to be smiling and lips that were thick enough to be kissable. Her body was well built and curvy: the breasts stuck out boldly, the heavy buttocks radiated a kind of animal sensuality inside the slacks that she usually wore.

The more he saw her the more he liked her and he began to have intercourse with her. He had not once touched a woman physically but he was used to having intercourse with them. His favourite picture of the stacked Mrs. Piko, the one he evoked the most, was one in which her voluptuous body was lying naked on its side and he pumping himself into her from behind, his legs pressing against her fleshy thighs, his hands grabbing her strong breasts. He had an idea to take a picture of her while she passed the balcony so that he could look at her when he was having her, but the evening light wasn't strong enough for the kind of camera he had and also he wasn't sure if he could do it without her noticing it.

He talked about her several times to Kaiz, his only friend, and Kaiz one day asked: 'If you like her so much, why don't you do something about it?'

'What do you mean do something about it?' Rook protested. 'Damn it, she is married!'

'So what? A woman is a woman -- husband or no husband. She probably needs it from somebody else.'

It happened one day that Rook walked into Unchi, a restaurant he almost never went to because of its high prices. As he stepped out of the lift on the top floor of the high building, his eyes fell immediately on her. She was at the cashier's desk. He nearly stopped in his tracks.

Because she wore the skirt and blouse (resembling in colour the uniform of the waiters) and her head hung over her work, he wasn't absolutely sure it was she, not until he passed her and she looked up at him; and then he had an impulse to give her a smile, but his face couldn't register it.

He slumped at a table from which he had a view of her and, his appetite having suddenly left him, he ordered a bottle of beer. He wondered why he had never known she worked.

There was of course no reason why he should have known such a thing, for he had always kept aloof from his neighbours. His two sisters, indulging as they did in a good deal of tittle-tattle with other girls in the lane, had told him the little he knew about her, that she was Mrs. Hava Piko and Mr. Piko was the manager of an electric bulb factory and that they had only those two children they saw in the lane.

He lingered over his beer; and when he had finished and paid for it, he did not wait for the waiter to come back with the change but followed him to the cashier so that he could collect it there.

She gave him a glance past the waiter as she took the bill and the note; and when she raised her hand to work the cash register her breasts protruded out of her blouse so powerfully that he wondered if the waiter too was looking at it. He felt jealous.

There was unfortunately nothing wrong with the change and all there remained for him to do was to tip the waiter. Tipping to him was a foul practice; he would never have given a tip in his life if he could have been sure no nasty trick would be played with his food next time. But now he gave it ungrudgingly and a generous amount too, and then he turned away diffidently, walked a few paces and pressed the lift button.

'You live in Tooki Lane, don't you?'

For a moment Rook couldn't believe it. He turned and saw that the waiter had disappeared and there was no one else she could possibly have addressed.

'Yes, I do,' he answered hurriedly, smiling. He took a step towards her, wondering how she could have known that. As far as he was aware she had never looked up at the balcony. 'Have you seen me there?'

'How else would I know?' she smiled.

That didn't sound quite polite, but he laughed.

'You are practically our neighbour,' she added.

'Yes,' he returned. Then, after a nervous pause, 'I didn't know you worked here.'

'I've just started.'

'Oh...eh, have you been working some place before?'

She shook her head. 'My first job.'

He didn't think it proper to ask why she had started working, so: 'Do you like it here?'

'Not bad.' She did not stop smiling.

He could not think of anything else to say and found it awkward to continue looking at her when she wasn't saying anything else either. With nervous excessiveness, he nodded, 'Well, see you sometime.'

'Yes.'

Going down the lift he was in a fever. He made up his mind then and there that he would come back the next day. But then, a minute later, he checked himself: No, he would come back a week or so after, for she must not be allowed to get the impression that he was in any way interested in her.

When he told Kaiz she was working in Unchi, Kaiz wanted immediately to have a look at her, to see if 'she is all that you say she is.'

His verdict when he had seen her was expressed with a distortion of his facial muscles and a single word: 'Fat.'

'Go to hell !' Rook told him.

'Just imagine lying there on all that meat. Like a fly on a cake.'

'Well, she is certainly better than one of your scraggy ones. Who the hell wants to lie on bones! Hell, one can even get hurt!'

Rook started going regularly to the Unchi, always making sure that there was a decent interval between each of his visits. And since he had to pass the cashier's desk to go in, he nearly always got an opportunity of a few words with her. He found her good-humoured and friendly and he tried to be as nice to her as he could, never failing to keep himself on the look-out for any sign that she had had enough of their conversation so that he should not stand there for even a second longer. He was so suspicious that sometimes he walked away even though she appeared to want to continue talking.

She was a good conversationalist, with a talent for small talk, and she was completely at her ease. She was fond of making facetious remarks and she was pleased when he laughed at them. Rook had never liked indulging in small-talk; he found it awfully difficult to make trivial remarks he did not mean; but in order to keep talking to her he was willing to be insincere. He was afraid his insincerity would show and to cover it up he delivered his remarks with an unnatural stress. This later made him feel ridiculous and awful.

His talking to her had excited his imagination even more. The fantasy he created most often now was the one in which he comes out of the lift and she, upon seeing him, takes him to some bedroom behind the restaurant. There he immediately lifts her skirt and with a tug at her flimsy panties tears them off. He falls with her on the bed, she on her back, he between her thick thighs. And then when they have finished he drinks a beer in the restaurant while she does a bit of work at her desk. The beer having been drunk, he calls her again -- this time to the restaurant's balcony. There they do it standing, as they watch the city down below.

Rook never failed to report to Kaiz his chats with her. Once, after listening to him, Kaiz said:

'Well then, what are you waiting for, you fool?'

'What do you mean?'

'She wants you.'

I first saw her in a movie theatre, seated a couple of rows away. She was fantastic. I quickly made up my mind to make an ‘approach’ once the show was over.

When the lights came on, I sprang to my feet but only to get a shock. She was gone. Her seat was empty. Apparently she hadn’t liked the picture or something. I cursed my luck and walked out dejected.

Weeks later I was elated when I saw her again, in a restaurant. There she was, with the same dazzling face and smashing figure, seated alone at the table in the corner, with a glass of beer before her. Automatically I made my way towards her.

‘May I sit here?’ I smiled, pointing to one of the chairs at her table.

She looked up and, without speaking, nodded.

With an expressionless face she watched me sit down. Then, out of the blue, she coolly asked: ‘Would you like a beer?’

For a moment I thought I was going to fall off the chair. ‘Why.....yes....thank you,’ I said, recovering. Later that evening she accepted my invitation to come up to my room and our affair began.

Not long after, however, a sneaking feeling told me that there was something wrong somewhere.

It was a large foggy space with no end to it. The man, wearing only a flowing white robe, walked about in a daze, looking for he knew not what.

Suddenly he saw a black robed creature who looked neither human nor anything else he had previously come across. But that could be because he could remember nothing. He approached this 'person' cautiously, stood some distance away and simply stared at him. Finally he opened his mouth: "Who are you?"

"That's not important," was the answer.

"It's important to me."

There was no further response.

Suddenly the man heard what seemed like a frightened voice of a woman from somewhere beyond. He ran towards it.

"God, oh God, where am I?" the woman was screaming, as she lay sprawled on the floor. "Doctor! Nurse! For God's sake, what has happened?"

"Stop shouting, woman!" said the man, coming up to her.

"Who...who are you? Where are we?” she said.

"In hell, where do you think?"

He had said that without thinking but seconds later he began to wonder and fear suddenly seized him. He tried to shrug it off.

"What...?! cried the woman.

"We have died, madam. That's what. Any more questions?"

"Died?! Oh, God, my God..."

Detective Inspector Mason felt a little uneasy as he picked up the post-mortem report that had just been delivered to him. It seemed for a moment that the nausea he had felt when he had first seen the victim was about to return. Never before had he had to do with such a bestial case. The corpse had in places looked like butcher’s meat, and he could certainly do without being reminded of it. With a sigh he began to read the document from the Coroner’s office.

It told him, among other things, that a single attacker had been responsible for the woman’s death. The same shoe had smashed into her skull in several places; and specimen slides under the pathologist’s microscope had indicated a single sexual assault.

Putting the report aside at last, Mason opened his drawer and examined once again the pair of men’s gloves which had been found near the mutilated body. There was little doubt that they belonged to the lust-driven sadist he was looking for. He had tried to show them around town, and a lot of people had even come to have a look at them after reading so much about the case in the press, but alas nobody had the foggiest idea who they might belong to.

Feeling more frustrated than ever, the Inspector picked up the autopsy report again. He had just began to re-read it when his phone rang.

‘Is that Inspector Mason?’ a voice asked.

‘Yes’.

‘About that murder in Town Hall Square.....I think I can help you.’

‘May I have your name please?’

‘Never mind my name!’ exploded the caller. ‘Do you want to hear what I have to say or don’t you?!’

‘Yes, of course, but--’

‘It was a deaf man! A chap wearing one of those hearing aids. I saw him running away into Main street about the time of the crime.’

At around half past ten at night the rain stopped beating on the roof of my house. My friend Morten, whom I had invited for a chat and some grub, cried 'Oh' and sprang to his feet. It was the first time he had been forced to stay on at my place after dark. He slipped into his overcoat and gave me an embarrassed smile.

'Well, I'll see you,' he said quietly, his hands in his pockets.

'No need to hurry, Morten,' I said, making no move to get up from my chair. 'It's not all that late; the last bus is a long way off.'

'No thank you, I must go now.'

'But why? Tomorrow is Sunday, and you are not doing anything special, are you?'

'No...but it's such a bother to get home late,' he screwed up his face.

'Look, why don't you spend the night here? It won't be any trouble to me. You can go home tomorrow, nice and fresh.'

He shook his head. 'Thank you very much, but...I think I should go.'

I sighed and stood up.

Tom came out of the river and saw that there was still no one else about. He gave out a sigh of pleasure and lay down on the cloth he had spread out.

His eyes had been shut only a minute when he heard the shifting of the sand beside him. He looked up and was surprised.

'Oh, hello Harriet,' said he. He put as much warmth into his voice as he could.

It had been a week since he had seen her, in the park, and he had begun to think that after what she had witnessed there, she would not want to see him again. He had been seated on a bench with his arm wrapped around his new girl when suddenly he had noticed Harriet staring at them from the bench opposite. How long she had been seated there he did not know, but when he saw her --she had broken into a sardonic smile when he did -- he was shocked, in spite of the fact that he had told her that he was seeing another girl. He had told her that because, strangely enough, it was she who had proposed that he get another girl. He got the impression that she said that out of a feeling of guilt: because she was running around with other boys and wanted to feel better by letting him be unfaithful to her. When confronted with this theory she had denied it hotly saying that it was because she liked him very much (she had never used the word 'love') and wanted him to be happy.

'You are a full-blooded man and you need more sex than I can give you,' she had said.

It was only later that he understood the real reason. Nothing but plain jealousy it was. She feared very much that he was having another girl and thought the best way to find out was by encouraging him to admit it.

When he had met this other girl and told Harriet about it she put on a sweet face and pretended that it was fine. But gradually her displeasure had come out into the open. Surreptitiously she had started to inquire about his movements and begun to drop in on him at unexpected hours in the hope of finding him with the other girl and thus embarrassing him.

In the park she had obviously expected him to come over to her bench or invite her over to his but he had done neither. Not wishing to risk letting the new one know of his relationship with her, he had simply ignored her; and when she left after a few agonizing moments he drew a long breath. He was glad she had enough pride not to come barging in.

He was no fool. He had no intention whatsoever of losing this new one. Very lucky indeed he was to meet her. She was the kind of girl he had really been looking for in the beginning. The kind of girl that was not only beautiful and sweet but was far from being vacant in the mind. She also happened to have that something extra which he rather oddly enough deemed desirable in a girl he would marry -- long hair. Harriet had hers clipped near the ears; he had asked her several times to let it grow but she had refused on the grounds that her hair was 'sick'.

'It's not your hair that's sick, it's you,' he had told her once angrily.

He remembered the first time he had met Harriet. She was seated alone at a table in a night club. He had just come in and she was the first good-looking girl he had observed (he never wasted his time on plain ones). She had apparently come with some friends and they were away dancing. He had walked up to her and she had immediately jumped up. Hardly a minute had passed by when she was kissing him wildly with her tongue. Soon he had her address in his pocket and made a date to meet her the following week. The dance with her had lasted barely ten minutes; it was the quickest pick up he had ever made.

He had paid scant attention that night to the bandage she had worn around her knees. He came to know the reason for it only later, when they had been going out a few weeks. It seemed that when she was little someone had forced her to take up dancing lessons and ever since then she had come to detest dancing. When therefore for social reasons she had to go to a place where there was dancing she always put this fictitious bandage on to give her a ready excuse to avoid taking to the floor. He felt flattered that she wanted him so much as to take a turn with him in spite of her phobia. She had never danced with him again after that first dance.

On their first date she did not hesitate to tumble into bed with him. He got the impression that she was of easy virtue. His fear was confirmed a couple of months later when he took her to one of his friend's parties. She came with the bandage on and told him that since she did not dance he should feel free to dance with other girls. And he did. Once, after one of the dances, when he came back to where she was seated, he found her in the arms of another boy. He got so mad that he told her to get out; he never wanted to see her again. But, to his great surprise, she went down on her knees and begged him to take her back, promising him that she would never do it again. At length he had given in and tried to put the incident out of his mind.

But he could not regain any faith in her; and one day, to test her, he had asked a friend of his to make advances to her. The friend reported back that she was quite willing to go out with him. He was convinced then that she did a lot of things behind his back.

But still no matter how 'sick' he thought she was, he had come to understand her and to sympathize with her. He knew what kind of childhood she had had -- abandoned soon after birth by divorced parents, brought up by a lonely old lady, and grew up only to discover that her mother whom she had never seen was a part-time prostitute -- and aware that she could not possibly have been anything else but what she was. The last few days that he hadn't seen her he had been truly afraid for her. Of the life that awaited her.

'I thought you would never come out of the water, Tom,' she smiled, sitting down on the sand. She wore a plain white dress.

'I am glad to see you, Harriet.'

'Why haven't you called me? she asked.

'Harriet, I couldn't talk to you that day in the park. I am sorry.'

'Never mind that. Are you still seeing her?'

For a moment he looked at her without replying, then he smiled. 'You told me to have another girl, so I am having her.'

She was a maid in her late thirties in a small hotel where he stayed and he didn't pay much attention to her at first despite the fact that she had a great body: big but sexy, buttocks bulging out, breasts not small. Since there were not that many people he could talk to in the hotel, except the receptionist, he fell into the habit of chatting with her as well. He found her amiable, eager to help him with whatever he wanted for his room. He learned from the receptionist that she had a husband but that her marriage was on the rocks. He even saw the husband once or twice when he came to see her for something, but she herself never disclosed to him that she was married.

One day in the supermarket he bought a cake for himself but on impulse gave it to her instead. He never expected anything in return from her but the next day, when she came to clean his room, he could see that she was very pleased with him; she did a much better job of cleaning the room and was in no hurry to leave after she had finished. He felt kind of embarrassed, not knowing what he should say or do.

Later that day, as he lay in bed, he wondered if she was attracted to him and whether he should have put his arm around her or something. He was certainly not averse to having any casual sex that came his way. So the next day when she came, he took courage in both his hands and grabbed her elbow, saying "Do you want me?" He knew it was a stupid thing to say to a woman because the usual answer to that is a resounding "NO", if not a slap in the face.

Luckily for him all she said was: "I'll think about it." He felt exhilarated and he couldn't wait for her to come back in the next day.

When she did she had a slight smile on her face. He watched her do her work while exchanging small talk. And then, while she bent over the bed arranging the linen, he came behind her and put his crotch on her behind. She straightened up and turned towards him, saying nothing. He couldn't help himself then: he reached for her breasts and squeezed them. She didn't protest, so he lifted up her sweater. He saw that she had a very loose-fitting bra which he easily pushed up, exposing her. Still there was no sound from her, so he bent down and sucked on her nipples.

'It's these goddamned new movies!'

'And the magazines!'

'We are being screwed, that's what!'

I was at my first underworld party and was listening to a bunch of racketeers discussing the whore business. There was, it seemed, too much free loading going on everywhere; no longer was it only the Don Juans who were doing it; every penny-pinching masturbator had got on to it.

Listening to them was all right for a while, but then it got bloody boring. Those pimps had nothing else on their minds. Even my Uncle, the local thug, who had insisted that I attend the party if I wanted to pick up the trade, which I did, even he seemed to be falling asleep.

'Let's scram, Uncle,' I whispered.

'Easy, boy, easy,' said my Uncle drowsily. 'You are learning even if you aren't.'

'What do you mean? ' I almost shouted, making some heads turn at me.

'To put up with boredom,' said he from the corner of his mouth. 'Very important.'

Ordinarily I would have said 'To hell with the old bastard' and taken to my heels; but not this time. The aged relative had promised to put me up in a racket; he had to be oiled.

So I did the next best thing. I turned a little to the side and looked at the other gangsters in the room.

And right away I caught sight of this indescribable thing, sitting alone in a corner. Boy, what looks! What curves!

'Now that's the kind of flesh you need to get your limbs on, boy,' I said to myself, and I began to speculate, while I stared.

What the hell was she doing sitting there alone, looking miserable? The answer took shape immediately: she was a concubine of one of the sharks; she was tired of the shark and the lousy parties he kept taking her to; she wished she could make a get-away, free herself from it all.

I gave it no further thought. I took out my note book and a pencil. And I began to write, pretending that I was taking note of what the whoremongers were saying. I gave a glance at my Uncle to see if I had made him happy but he appeared to have dozed off.

I wrote :

ME, YOUNG BULL, WANTS TO MAKE LOVE TO YOU. LET'S GET OUT OF HERE. MEET ME AT HOTEL CUNTINENTAL IN HALF HOUR.

I didn't expect her to of course. But it was a diversion. It was going to be fun looking at her reaction. I hailed a waiter, exchanged my empty glass with a full one and stuck him the note. Off you go, I said, nodding towards the sex object. He turned, looked, and turned back again, shaking his head. I got the message. I dug out a currency note from my pocket and handed it to the bastard.

Off he went. First, stealthily, like he was afraid to scare her away or something; then, as he got closer to her, like a greyhound, dashing up to her, almost throwing the note at her and bouncing back fast like a rubber ball. What a screwball, I thought.

She read it. And when she looked up I began waving to her so that she would know it wasn't somebody ugly. She saw me, and before I could make out anything else on her face some bawd placed his filthy hand on my shoulder: 'What's the matter, young fellow? You dumb or something?'

The whole bunch broke out laughing then, staring at me. Encouraged by this, another wise-guy opened his mouth: 'Just piss off if you don't like our company.'