Tied to a chair. To Louis this seemed kind of corny. Certainly he was frightened and concerned about the situation, but there was something so Hitchcock about being tied to a chair. Somehow he knew that he would not be in one of the Cary Grant films, one of the good ones. No, it was all Torn Curtain for Louis.
He looked around the room. Someone had done a lot of shopping at Bowery Restaurant Supply. Everything was stainless steel tables and shelves. Easy to clean, never stains. It didn't bode well that those two traits were important. As if to drive that point home, the shelf nearest him was lined with jars of unmistakably human teeth. They were labeled with dates and what he guessed were the initials of the former owners. Those nearest the front had recent dates and the contents were gleaming white with silvery fillings. Behind that he could see yellower jars, with yellower contents.
He wanted to get up and have a look and see how far back the dates went, but getting up was something he had already tried and failed at. That was how he discovered he was tied to a chair.
Ok. If this is Torn Curtain, then what would Paul Newman do. Louis could see shelves directly ahead of him, maybe fifteen feet. There were crates stacked in front, but on the shelves there were medical supplies and tools, all gleaming with the stainless steal motif that dominated the room. There were also canisters with labels that said things like "industrial" and "solvent" and "acid" and "caution." Paul Newman would find someway over to that shelf and use something there to get loose of his ropes.
Louis rocked back and forth and so did the chair. He then hopped. Forcing all of his weight forward in a kind of all-over flinch, a stunted paroxysm. "Shrrrk!" and he was an inch closer.
"Shrrrk!"
"Shrrrk!"
"Shrrrk!"
"Shrrrk!"
He hoped his captors had forgotten about him, because this was going to take a while. He stopped to rest. He noticed that he was now close enough to see inside one of the crates at the base of the shelf. It was full of ornate beer steins. They were inscribed as if they were commemorative items from the 1936 Olympics. But the crate was labeled "made in China" and the steins were clearly too clean and new to be real. Around the Olympic rings and inscription there were various kinds of German Gothic ornamentation. Proud looking bucks and vicious wolves, together with scenes of the gloriously industrial "volk" and all of it dominated with nods to the Thousand Year Reich that was just on the horizon at the time.
All of this Nazi crap. Here in America. Louis had been to Germany, briefly. But to him, all of this death's head ghoulery seemed like a distant remnant when he had been there. The sort of medieval, dark iconography that the original Nazis had embraced and updated into their black hearted high fashion terror seemed, in the face of Germany's modern incarnation, to be a kind of last stand for that aesthetic. Sure some of the old gargoyled building were still around, but most of the country seemed to be like an echo of the Frankfurt airport where Louis had landed, one big sprawl of clean angles and square spaces, the whole place a kind of experiment in publicly accessible modernist abstraction without bias or passion enough for race-deep hate.
Seeing all of this stuff end up here in New York, it reinforced the notion that evil can't be killed. Maybe you can purge it from one place, but it will only pop up in another. Like chasing mercury with your finger. Another way to wind up mad.
Louis had rested enough. He scrunched and jerked, "Shrrrk!" Then again. But the second time, something different happened. "Shrrr – whup." Then he was tilting wildly forward and left. All he could see was the nearest crate rising quickly towards his left temple, a nice soft entry point for the rapidly approaching corner to force its way into his brain as he fell towards it. When he had landed painfully but safely unlobotomized, his head only a centimeter away from the crate, Louis suddenly felt as if he had made the leap from Torn Curtain to Get Smart. "Missed it by that much."
His being on his side, his cheek pressed into the rug which he had apparently not seen until it caught the front leg of his chair, this was not the only thing that had changed. His seat had lost some of its structural integrity. The chair was broken. He couldn't see where or which part, but he knew there was suddenly more give in the ropes. He knew, kind of instinctively, that he could wriggle free. He started to twist his body trying to writhe loose.
Then there was the sound of footsteps. He looked beyond the shelves. From his new vantage point he could see the bottom of a door. He heard voices beyond it and then saw shadows fall in front of the light streaming through the crack at the base of the door. One of the voices...
Was that Zelda?
