Peter Spiegelman - Red Cat

“You like that, don’t you…” “You want it there…” “Tell me you want it there…” “Say it like you mean it…” “Say it again, bitch.”

The soundtrack was dominated by his synthesized commands and exhortations, and by his unadulterated panting, grunts, and huffing. The unprocessed sounds were startling in their intimacy, and more unsettling than his words.

Beneath Skinny’s dictates and the other noises he made, Cassandra’s voice was a leitmotif of gasping obedience. She did what Skinny told her to do and said what he told her to say, and when he told her to say it again, she did. She moaned and cried out and pleaded, sometimes in pleasure and sometimes not, and her white, limber body bent and twisted beneath Skinny’s cubist face. Her own icon’s face, when it was visible, was pale and empty-eyed.

What Monroe had called the investigation segment began with what seemed a pause in the sex montage, and with a gradual change in the sound and look of the video. The commands and moaning faded away, and the noise of a running shower grew louder. Colors bled from the screen and were replaced by a smoky black and white. The tang of seedy sex dissipated and a sweaty paranoia took its place.

The bathroom door was opened wide and Cassandra was alone on the wrecked bed. Her naked body was luminous but her movements were stiff and achy as she rose and moved to a chair, to a jacket hanging there, to a pocket and a wallet inside. She looked over her shoulder as she rifled through the wallet and withdrew some cards. She held them to the camera lens, and though their surfaces were masked it was plain that they were credit cards and business cards. I’d thought of David when I saw it. My wallet was in my suit jacket…

I’d thought of him again as the scene shifted to another blurry interior and a shot of Cassandra, dressed now and hunched above a telephone. Skinny’s wind-up voice was distant on the other end, but the fear and anger in his words were close at hand and unmistakable.

“Don’t call here, for chrissakes…” “How did you get this number, you crazy bitch…” “Why are you calling me…” “What do you want from me…” “Fucking bitch- I’ll kill you, you call again…” “Just leave me alone…” “Please…just leave me alone.”

But she wouldn’t. I’d heard Cassandra’s side of the conversation before, on David’s voicemail. Her words were different in the video but she covered the same scary ground, and she was relentless.

“Why don’t you write me anymore? Why don’t you call? You think you can just ignore me? If you won’t take my calls, maybe your wife will.”

Their back-and-forth was a tortured accompaniment to more images of Cassandra on the telephone, and to shots of a blur-faced Skinny walking the streets, hailing taxis, entering and leaving unidentifiable buildings, and completely unaware of the camera trailing him. In the course of maybe ten minutes of video, his initial surprise gave way to anger, his anger mutated to fear, and his fear dissolved in desperation. By the end of it, Skinny’s synthesized words were lost in human sounds- quavers, sniffles, maybe tears- and I was surprised by the bud of sympathy that had grown for the bastard.

“Just leave my wife out of it, for chrissakes. Please, she’s got nothing to do with this- nothing at all. Just tell me what the hell you want from me. Please…”

Finally Cassandra did:

“I want to see you again, one last time.”

Like the investigation sequence, the final scene- the interrogation, Monroe called it- was shot in black and white, though the blacks were somehow deeper and the grays more silvery. It brought Cassandra and Skinny back to what looked like the same hotel room, where the drapes were still drawn but the bed was made up. Skinny was awkward, and stiff with anger, but he sat as directed in a straight-backed chair. Cassandra was perched on the edge of the bed, with her white hands on her knees. She wore a white blouse, a dark suit jacket, and tailored pants, and her auburn hair looked black and lacquered. Her bearing was military and her tone was clinical. Her questions were simple and direct.

“Why did you do it…” “Did you think about your wife or your children- what would happen if they found out…” “Did you think of the risk…” “Was it just the sex…” “Is that all it takes?”

Skinny reached for defiance at first, but he was beaten before he ever walked through the door. His resistance degraded quickly, from combative, to petulant, to whiny, and the last fight went out of him in a shuddering breath that left him folded and shrunken before the camera. But when his first answers came, they didn’t please Cassandra.

“ ‘I don’t know’ is no answer…” “How can you say it has nothing to do with her…” “I didn’t just happen-you came looking for me, and you came back for more.” She shredded Skinny’s evasions like a terrier and flung the scraps aside until he was spent and she had the bone in her teeth.

“I did it because I wanted to, because I wanted you. Once we got started, the things we did- I couldn’t think of anything else. It made me feel handsome- powerful. I didn’t think about her or the kids…I didn’t give a damn about them.”

Skinny’s voice wound down like a tired spring and his narrow frame slumped in the shadows. Cassandra was perfectly still and her face was a white mask.

“And you’d do it again, wouldn’t you?” she asked. “You’d do it now if you could?”

Skinny looked at her, dazed and uncertain. When he spoke, there was pleading in his voice. “If I could,” he said softly. The screen went dark.

A shadow fell across the table and Chaz Monroe returned with his drink and a bowl of salted nuts. The noise of the bar crowd came back with him. He raised his glass to me again and drank.

“Hard to get out of your head, aren’t they?” he said. I nodded. “They have that squirmy-sexy thing going on: the utter submission of a beautiful woman to a nameless, faceless man, and all before the cameras- except that she’s the only one who knows the cameras are there, and she’s the one who set the whole thing up. Abuse, self-abasement, voyeurism: it’s quite the trifecta. And then she turns the tables.” He tossed some cashews into his mouth and washed them down with scotch.

“Todd didn’t steer you wrong on the reliquaries,” he said. “They only make sense after you’ve seen the videos, and then they pack a punch.”

They did indeed. An empty condom wrapper, Cassandra’s torn hosiery, her underpants, a soiled washcloth- all last seen on screen, in Cassandra’s hands or in Skinny’s. Their presence behind the glass of the curio cabinet gave the events in the video a reality, an immediacy, that was undeniable and invasive. But those mementos, from Interview Two, were positively quaint next to the souvenirs in the other cabinet: the spent matches, the dollops of melted candle wax, the green silk tie from the hotel drapes, the white plastic grocery bag, the neatly cut square of bed linen, stained with what looked like blood. A chill went down my spine.

Monroe saw me shiver and caught the drift of my thoughts. “Have you ever heard the word ‘bitch’ so overused?” he said. “I don’t sleep with women myself, but I certainly like them more than Cassandra’s fellows seem to. And it’s fascinating how similar their notions of the erotic all seem to be. The pervasiveness of popular culture, I suppose.” Monroe played with his little beard. “There’re two or three doctoral dissertations in there, at least.”

“At least,” I said. “Are the other videos as rough as Interview Four?”

Monroe gave it some thought. “It’s one of the grittier ones, I’d say, and mostly on account of Bluto. He required no prompting.”