THE MIND OF A TORTURER

In his smart grey suit Martin looked too handsome to be a torturer, too polite to be a brutal sadist whose hands had committed countless atrocities. His eyes showed no remorse as he told Jane about the terrible things he had done during his time as a senior warden at San Lorenzo Women's Jail.

Jane watched his face keenly as he spoke, hoping to see a flicker of shame or guilt, but he seemed almost proud of his achievements. The government had even awarded him a special honor, in recognition of his twenty years in the prison service. He considered himself to be a patriot, a loyal servant of the state, despite what the foreign newspapers were saying about him.

Jane showed him a photocopy of an article she had written about San Lorenzo and asked him if he was one of the men in the fuzzy black-and-white photograph.

"Yes, that's me," he replied, grinning at the picture. "It must be about twenty years ago, when I was in my early twenties. Didn't I look fine in my uniform, with my white shirt neatly pressed and a gold pin in my tie?"

"Who is the other guy?" Jane inquired.

Martin chuckled, shaking his head as he ran his fingers through his elegantly-styled black hair. "That's poor Carlito, my fat buddy from the police academy. We worked together at San Lorenzo for ten years, until his assassination by the rebels. They came to his house one night and put a bullet through his head. Such a tragedy!"

"And who is the girl standing between you and Carlito?" asked Jane, pointing to the blurred image of a young woman in a short dark dress.

Martin shrugged, squinting as he peered closely at the picture. "The picture is not very clear. I'm not sure who she is, but she might be Cara Dominguez or Rosita Branco. They were a couple of university students whom we interrogated at the jail in 1983, during the anti-government riots."

"What happened to them?" asked Jane, reaching for her pen and notebook.

Martin sat back, his eyes darkening as he folded his arms. "Are you going to write another newspaper article about me?"

"Yes, of course," Jane answered. "That's why I asked you to come to this office." She cast him a sardonic smile and added: "That's why my editor is paying you five hundred dollars."

"Of course," Martin replied, winking across the desk. "Write whatever you want, for I don't have anything to hide, and here in Canada I'm a long way from those who would like to kill me."

"South America is only a plane-ride away," said Jane. "But that doesn't matter now, not to me. So please begin your story. Tell me about the university girls."

Martin hesitated, his gaze following the movements of her hand as she scribbled quickly in the notebook. Then, with a smile widening across his face, he lifted from the floor beside his chair a black rucsac and unzipped the top. To Jane's amazement he brought forth a dozen small bundles of cloth, all neatly folded and sealed in polythene wallets, each wallet labelled with a white sticker. Jane shook her head in horrified fascination, her blonde hair flicking her shoulders and her eyebrows lifting.

"Oh my God!" she exclaimed. "Are those things really what I think they are?"

Martin nodded, grinning with glee as he laid the twelve packets on the desk, arranging them in two lines of six. Jane made some hasty notes, speaking aloud as she listed the items by color.

"Four white and two black. No, three white and one patterned. Is that some kind of red lace? Primrose yellow, pale violet, pale green. Dark blue and light blue. My God, surely these aren't ...?"

"They are indeed," Martin interrupted. "A few souvenirs from my private collection."

"Panties," observed Jane. "Taken from your victims at the women's jail?"

"Merely a small selection," he replied. "At my house in Vancouver I've got sackfuls of underwear, of every type imaginable. I guess it was a kind of hobby when I worked at San Lorenzo, a way of preserving my memories of those twenty years. I kept the panties of every woman I interrogated."

"Why bother sealing them in polythene?" Jane asked naively.

Martin leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table and bringing his face to within eight inches of Jane's. She felt his hot breath on her lips and saw a strange eager gleam in his eyes.

"To preserve the scent," he answered slowly. "Every week, I have to spray the panties with a special substance which preserves their precious aroma. Then I seal them again in their little bags." He scanned her face to discern her reaction. To his delight she looked completely shocked by his admission, her cheeks blushing faintly as she chewed the end of her pencil. For a moment she seemed less like an ambitious journalist than an embarrassed schoolgirl.

"But surely the panties are stained and smelly?" she ventured, her blush deepening to a bright pink when he laughed at her question.

"Precisely!" he chortled, sitting back and toying with his tie. "The flavor is as strong as on the day I stripped those women in the Punishment Room."

"Why bring these twelve today," asked Jane, her blush fading as she regained control of her emotions. "Are they of special relevance to my newspaper article?"

Martin sighed, his left hand idly caressing one of the polythene wallets. "In my letter to you I mentioned that I had various artefacts in my possession, artefacts from the jail, that I felt would be useful for your research on San Lorenzo. All written records were destroyed when the prison burned down two years ago, but I salvaged a few bits and pieces when I fled the country. My entire collection of prisoners' underwear came with me to Canada, and from that collection I have chosen these twelve items, for these panties were worn by the women who feature in your investigation."

Jane clicked her tongue in dismay, staring sadly at the packets and recalling the tales of savage torment that each one represented. The gruesome array filled her with pity and disgust.

"Did any of these women die in your care?"

"None at all," Martin snapped, barely disguising the anger in his voice. "I was an interrogator, not an executioner. I guess most of these women are still alive and in good health."

"But you tortured them so brutally," Jane protested.

"They were traitors to the government," came the swift reply. "My job was to show them the error of their ways, or to find out why they had strayed from truth and loyalty."

"What do you do with their underwear?" Jane inquired, half-guessing what his answer would be.

"I sniff them," he admitted openly. "I carefully take them out of their little packets and hold them to my face. Then, with my eyes closed, I inhale deeply, and in my mind I see again the woman who once wore those panties. I see her suspended from a beam, or strapped to a table, or chained to a whipping-post. In my nostrils I sense again the woman's individual fragrance: her sweat, her pussy juice, maybe even her piss. Did you not know that a woman's fear oozes a very distinctive aroma into her underwear?"

Jane shook her head and grimaced. "Ugh! That's crazy stuff!" But she continued writing in her notebook, while her guest continued his report.

"You see, Miss Schultz," he resumed. "The women's jail operated under various restrictions, one of which decreed that no prisoner should be completely naked during her interrogation. The same rule applied to any punishments we were obliged to deal out. It meant that we could strip a prisoner to her underwear but no further. The law permitted removal of bras, but not panties. So the panties would be worn throughout the entire interrogation, even if the process dragged on for two or three days. You can probably imagine how ripe some of those gussets became after fifty hours of sweat and fear." He paused to unwrap one of the packets, producing from it a small bundle of white cotton which unravelled as he held it up. "These panties were worn by Rosita Branco, who might be the girl in that old photograph. Hell, she was a tough little creature! Nineteen years old and incredibly beautiful, with long dark hair and a lovely slim figure. We questioned her for three days in the Punishment Room, until we got the information we needed. I remember how snugly these panties fitted on her pert young ass, and how her body writhed at the post as we whipped her. There were four of us in the room with poor sweet Rosita: me and Carlito, with Pedro and Gus. We took turns to flog her, using horsewhips mostly, and three of us would stand around masturbating while the fourth gave her an exquisite lashing."

Jane watched in growing distaste as he pressed the underwear to his face. He held her gaze while he nuzzled and sniffed the white cotton.

"I can't put this extreme stuff in the newspaper," she moaned. "It's too freaky for our readers, and my editor will kill it before it gets published. Give me something else, something less voyeuristic."

"OK, Miss Schultz," said Martin. "But first you must perform a small favor."

"You're getting five hundred dollars," she replied icily. "What more could you want?"

"Five hundred dollars gets me to come here, to your newspaper's office. But if you want a real story, you have to show your commitment to the subject. Don't you want to get inside my mind?"

Jane smiled grimly. "Yes, I do. Why else would I title my article as The Mind of a Torturer?"

Martin tossed the white panties across the desk and indicated with his finger that she should pick them up. With a shrug she lifted the underwear with both hands and stretched the elasticated waistband between her thumbs. For the first time she noticed a delicate lace trim around the edge of the cotton, and a faint yellow stain on the inner gusset.

"Hold them up to your nose," said Martin.

Reluctantly, but with a sense of curiosity that made her feel deeply ashamed, Jane raised the underwear to her face and pressed her nose against the crotch. She inhaled slowly, her nostrils flaring at the sour odor.

"Yukk!" she gasped, throwing the panties onto the desk. "The smell is much stronger than I expected. What the hell was oozing out of that poor girl?"

Martin gave a knowing smile and began folding the panties into a neat square bundle. "Not all of the ooze came from Rosita. Some of the fragrance is hers, of course: three days of sweat and fear, plus some dribbles of urine when terror seized control of her bladder. But the strongest smell is probably our semen, mine and Pedro's and Carlito's, after we had sex with her."

"Hey, you said her underwear stayed on during the interrogation," Jane observed.

Martin nodded. "That is true, yes, but at the end of the first day we took her out of the Punishment Room and put her in another cell. There, with no danger of a surprise visit from the prison governor, we forgot the regulations and had some fun with lovely Rosita. We stripped her naked and raped her all night, making her do all sorts of sexy tricks. I forced her to suck my cock while Pedro fucked her cute college ass. Then, just before dawn, we put the panties back on her quivering body and returned her to the Punishment Room. By the end of the second day her skin was marked all over with red stripes, except where her underwear had protected her from our whips. She was starting to look messed-up, but that night we took her out and had another ten hours of amazing sex. I remember running my tongue over all the whip-marks on her gorgeous breasts, hearing her plead for mercy as I rammed two fingers up her tight asshole. She was probably the most beautiful girl I've ever seen and it was a real pleasure to rape her."

Jane scribbled rapidly while he talked, never raising her eyes to meet his strange eager stare. As she listened to his account, she felt an urge to cover her ears, but at the same time her curiosity kept her mind dangling on his every word. To her distress she suddenly felt like a ghoulish voyeur straining to catch a glimpse of a road traffic accident.

"So, Miss Schultz," he said. "I guess you now know why these panties stink so bad. By the end of the third day, when Rosita got released by a special order from the President, her pussy and ass were oozing a ripe mixture of fluids. That's why hers are my favorite panties in the whole collection. No others exude such a wonderfully strong aroma."

"You're completely crazy," said Jane, putting down her pencil and looking at him. "How do you manage to sleep at night, knowing all the horrible deeds you've committed?"

"I sleep like a baby," Martin replied. "I drink a lot of beer and take a few drugs, so I always have a peaceful night. I'm not ashamed of anything I did in my home country. It was just a job that had to be done."

Jane gave a weary sigh and pointed to the packets laid out on the desk. "I'm not sure if I can listen to every one of these stories. I've researched many torture reports but yours are particularly disturbing, mainly because you've kept these awful souvenirs. Maybe we should take a break for twenty minutes and resume later?"

"As you wish, lady," Martin replied, rising from his chair and bowing courteously. He hurriedly stowed the polythene packets in his rucsac and headed for the door.

"There's a coffee machine next to the editor's office," she called after him as he went out into the corridor.

Then, closing her eyes and breathing slowly, Jane leaned back in her chair, trying to erase the savage images from her mind. She opened her eyes when Steve, her colleague from the editorial department, came into the room with a sandwich.

"Tuna with cheese?" he asked.

"That's precisely the flavor," she answered, smiling at Steve's bemused expression.

"I don't understand," he said quietly.

"I can't get the smell out of my nostrils," she explained. "It's like tuna and cheese."

"What smell?"

Jane reached forward for the sandwich but quickly withdrew her hand.

"It's OK, Steve," she said. "Thanks anyway, but I reckon I'll skip lunch today."

THE END

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