From "Gomorrah" by Susan Knight

[rufusluciusivan]

This one, I have been looking for it for years, ever since I saw a short out of context excerpt.

A bunch of revolutionists are attempting to infiltrate a party being held for the wedding of a businessman.

I only skimmed through the book to get some context, but the story appears to be very bleak, talking about a brutal dictatorship and corrupt high society, the characters who infiltrate the party are morally grey AT BEST (save for the fake valet), and the story ends with the main protagonists of the infiltration scheme dead. (The woman who disguises herself as the maid blows herself up to avoid capture.) The only ray of hope is that it ends mostly well for the innocent bystanders.

Still it's quite a detailed scene for something found in a mainstream story. Sadly there doesn't seem to be a detailed description of the girl herself, but the story doesn't forget about her existence because we actually learn what becomes of the maid at the end. The story even features details unusual for a mainstream one - such as when they discuss how to make sure the maid can't raise the alarm and settle with sedatives. Or the fact the uniform is too tight for the female mugger because she has bigger breasts and buttocks. In fact, they actually decide to settle with a spare uniform from the storage. So long for having gone through the trouble of abducting and stripping the real maid...^^ At least this earns them a spot on this Board.

The scenes are scattered across the novel, so I'll be copy-pasting the highlights:




First glimpse at the maid.

What wasn’t normal, however, was that Winkowicz wasn’t off on a date. He wasn’t getting laid for free by a beautiful whore in return for overlooking some possession charge. He wasn’t screwing some poor bitch of a frightened housewife who had been caught shop-lifting trying to feed her five children after her husband had as usual blued all the money on booze. He wasn’t even visiting his own wife in hospital nor going to his father’s funeral. Winkowicz had none of the official and unofficial’excuses to account for his absence. In fact, strictly speaking Winkowicz wasn’t absent at all. When the Commissioner’s personal and private valet went to the Commissioner’s dressing-room to hang up the Commissioner’s ordinary everyday uniform alongside all the other more elaborate ones — the military outfits of three decades hanging stiffly on their hangers like a parade of the rulers of a minor military dictatorship — he would find, if he cared to look, Winkowicz lying stiffly behind the uniforms, a stiletto in his chest from which a small trickle of blood had spread in a rather artistic pattern, what had been Winkowicz now resembling nothing so much as the plate of trout in raspberry coulis at that very moment being prepared down in the kitchen. Winkowicz even shared with the trout the same glazed and slightly affronted expression on his face.
The valet didn’t care to look. He rather disliked corpses, even while admitting that they were at times an unavoidable necessity. In any case, where could Winkowicz have gone? Only the valet and the Commissioner possessed keys to the dressing-room and the Commissioner had long gone to the concert. The valet skipped off to attend to other duties, taking care to lock both the dressing-room and the bedroom doors behind him, and taking special care to hang the keys on a chain around his neck. He smiled a sparkling smile at the languid maid with gold dust on her dark hair, who was lounging in the corridor doing nothing in particular. The valet felt the key to the locked dressing-room burn cold against his breast. He was looking forward to the evening ahead, even though he realised that it might, after all, be his last.
The languid maid, who was keeping an eye on the valet, while dusting in a perfunctory manner the not exactly Ming vases in the corridor, was on the other hand not at all looking forward to the evening ahead (not realising it might be her last). No, indeed. It would be work, work, work. It would be watching those gluttons permit themselves every sensuous luxury, degrading themselves once more in front of their servants and not caring because they didn’t regard their servants as being of any importance. It would be seeing the avid yellow eye of the Commissioner’s wife, in the middle of an animated conversation with some old duffer, follow every move the servants made in order to find an excuse to ridicule them in front of the guests, and later to cut a few shillings off their pay.
The languorous maid smelt the flower she had abstracted from the Commissioner’s wife’s bouquet, the flower she had hidden in her bosom. Its sweetness still evoked distant fields, morning dew, sunshine. One of her duties was to spray the Commissioner’s wife’s flower arrangement with perfume. She would do it now, get it over with. If she used enough, the scent would linger until the arrival of the guests. She chose a carafe of the Commissioner’s wife’s most expensive, least floral perfume, and descended the stairs to the dining room, banqueting hall, as it pleased the Commissioner’s wife to call it (the trough, as the languid maid thought of it). The arrangement stood in the middle of the long French polished mahogany table. In the heat, the exceptional heat for the time of year, the flower heads were already wilting. The maid sprayed them with water. There was nothing more she could do for them. Their gorgeous petals were already writhing in the agony of their death throes. The languid maid’s eye was caught by a splash of black, the congealed blood from the Commissioner’s wife’s finger spotting the petals like the clue to a recent assassination. She emptied half the carafe of expensive perfume all over the spiked flower heads and fled. The handpicked valet caught her in the hall.
“Go home,” he said. “This is no place for you. Go home to your parents’ house in the country.”
The bastard knew everything, even without being told. Even about that house she had left forever in order to see the world.
“Go home,” he said, his bright brown eyes glittering. “Go home now.”
The languid maid tossed her black hair, showering the valet with golden pollen. So that was it: he wanted her gone. Laughing harshly, she went into the kitchen and shut the door on his anxious face.




Next time we cut on the maid, she's already been ambushed, stripped, and tied up. This is the proper "Uniform Stealing" part.




The cop they called Mirandolo wanted to kill her but the handpicked valet was against it. Another figure, fullbreasted, lolled against the door frame, watching them coolly.
“We can’t let anything, anyone, stop us now. We can’t afford to run any risks,” the cop known as Mirandolo was saying.
“We'll lock her up, knock her out, until afterwards,” the valet replied. “She’s not one of the guilty ones. She’s a victim.”
“Precisely. A victim. One of those that falls both ways.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that.”
The handpicked valet looked to where the languid maid was lying in a white slip, stripped of her black uniform, bound and gagged and terrified on his bed.
“I told you,” he said gently, “to go home.”
“Don’t you agree with me?” the cop they called Mirandolo asked the full-breasted woman by the door.
She hesitated. This was no moment for sentiment. On the other hand, the girl could not move, would not go anywhere.
“It might be kinder to kill her now,” she said. “Who knows what might happen to her later? On the other hand, she presents no danger to us as she is. She doesn’t look much like Houdini to me. I think he’s right.” She jerked her head at the valet. “She’s not one of those who deserves to die.”
“OK,” said the cop they called Mirandolo. “If you say so.”
“The Commissioner’s bitch has pots of sleeping pills,” the valet said. “We could make her take a good dose of those.”
"OK."
The cop they called Mirandolo was not pleased. Still, he was willing to go on with the decision for the time being. He could always, he considered privately, slip back later and tighten the gag a little too much.
“I'll fetch the pills,” the valet said. “You get ready.”
While he was gone, the full-breasted woman lifted off her own loose dress and dropped it to the floor. Then she picked the maid’s uniform off the bed and struggled her way into it.
“Will it do?” she gasped. “I can hardly breathe.”
“It’s not for long,” the cop they called Mirandolo replied doubtfully. “It'll have to.”
When he returned with the Commissioner’s wife’s sleeping pills, the valet, relieved at having saved the maid for a time at least, laughed out loud on seeing the way the full-breasted woman bulged out of the uniform. The buttons were stretched almost to popping across the bosom and the fabric pulled back to reveal white flesh beneath. The skirt, hitched up at the back over her wide buttocks, showed several inches of sturdy white thigh.
“No, no. You're far too eye-catching. The bitch will have a fit. She likes her servants to be part of the furniture, almost invisible. I’ll get a larger size from the store-room. I won't be long. You give her,” he jerked his head at the maid, “four of these.” He passed the woman a bottle of white tablets. “Four’s enough. Any more might be dangerous. And you,” he turned to the cop they called Mirandolo — but of course Mirandolo himself meanwhile lay cooking like a joint of pork in a blazing building downtown that the fire brigade hadn’t even bothered to try and save — “get back on duty or you'll be missed.”
He skipped out. The woman glanced at the man in the pungent uniform of Mirandolo.
“You hold her down while I give them to her.”
She poured four tablets into her palm and looked at them, gleaming white as pearls. She glanced at the man again and poured out four more. He nodded at her. The woman found a glass and ground the tablets into it. Then she took a flask of brandy from a carrier bag and poured a large slug into the glass. She swished it around so that the grains of the tablets were well distributed throughout the drink. She looked down at the cop. He pinched the maid’s nose, slipping down the gag at the same time. At last the maid was forced to open her mouth and the woman emptied the contents of the glass down her throat.
“You'll sleep like a baby now, darling,” the woman said gently, as the maid coughed and spluttered. “Now, now, don’t spit it out or I'll have to give you some more.”
The man dressed as Mirandolo replaced the gag. He looked at the full-breasted woman.
“I'll see you later,” he said. And left.
The woman pulled back her hair. The bruise on the side of her face, inflicted earlier by the masked and helmeted policeman, gleamed livid yellow and blue and purple. The full-breasted woman covered it with make-up from the maid’s dressing table. As it was still only incompletely disguised, she let a swathe of hair fall forwards over her cheek. It would have to do. When the valet came back at last with a large black uniform, the full-breasted woman tore off the maid’s too tight dress and put on the new large one that engulfed even her. Finally, she took a belt out of the carrier bag and, lifting her skirt, fixed the belt loosely around her waist. The belt held two pistols and a knife, that when in position, dangled under her belly.
The valet meanwhile sat on the bed stroking the hair of the still-whimpering maid, who gazed at him with her terrified brown eyes. Later, when he looked at his hand, it seemed to be covered in gold-dust.




Quick description of the disguised impostor:




The party was going with a swing. Of course it was. The Commissioner's wife had a gift for giving parties. Everyone told her so. You have a gift, they said. And she smiled a ghastly death’s head smile. Who was this bitch with the big tits, anyway? Where was her usual languid maid? (Lying in a coma in the handpicked valet’s bedroom). The valet had told her that the languid maid had suddenly gone home to her parents’ house in the country and that this fat-arsed bitch was the best he could get at the last minute. That wasn’t organisation: that was mismanagement.

Well, she’d tear the little cow’s sleepy eyes out if ever she came back. Didn’t she know when she was well off? As for this hippopotamus, after tonight she could wobble back to whatever zoo she had escaped from.

The full-breasted woman smiled at the men as she handed round the snacks. Eat them if you like, her eyes seemed to say, but I’m a tastier dish. And the men smiled back and their eyes seemed to say, apologetically of course, I'd rather eat you and maybe later I will, but just for the present the formalities have to be observed.





When things get out of hand and the female impostor and Mirandolo start shooting the guests, the story cuts back to the maid and the (recently-widowed) wife of the businessman.





Upstairs in the valet’s room, the room she had stumbled into by chance, the doll-faced young widow was trying to revive the comatose maid. She had released her bonds, slapped her face, breathed into her mouth as she had been taught.

The valet, fetching the machine gun, had paused to show her where the coffee was, how she could use the electric kettle to make some. He was enraged. The full-breasted woman, the man disguised as the cop, they had no right. The cause had not demanded this.

He had paused to look into the unconscious face of the maid, her hair still powdered with golden pollen. He bent his face down to hers, and heard her shallow breath. He inhaled her scent of summer. He pressed his lips to her cold damp forehead. They had no right.

He had told the doll-faced widow she could try to revive the maid. He had told her how she could escape. Forcing the coffee into the maid’s mouth until she choked and vomited. Forcing more coffee into her, dragging her round the room, round the room. The widow heard the explosion of machine-gun fire from the ballroom below, and knew that time was short. Desperately, she dragged the maid over to the window and opened it. Looking out, she saw the spindly fire escape extend down the outside wall of the mansion to the garden far below. She dragged the maid out on to the fire escape. The cold air made her gasp. She propped the maid against the wrought iron, and dashed back into the room for a blanket, which she placed round the maid’s trembling shoulders. But the cold air had caused the maid to gasp, too, and now she was swallowing air like wine and laughing as if she were drunk. Slowly, slowly the widow supported her down the fire escape, step by step, rung by rung, always aware of the plunge to the hard as iron garden below if her foot should slip. Down and down and down.




The epilogue shows the maid and widow are leaving the town




A small train of survivors clustered together in a procession walking away from what remained of the city. The singer, an old old woman sitting on the shoulders of the strong man and wearing a large-sized chocolate and banana coloured hounds tooth jacket, led the way playing a haunting tune on the tin whistle while exotic birds fluttered round her shoulders. Joachim followed, gently leading the golden boy, who now smiled up at him. The doll-like little widow and the languid maid with pollen-dusted hair clung together under a blanket, stumbling occasionally on sharp stones.