They didn’t talk much on the way. It really was quite oppressive and totally dark in some stretches. Here and there, a lonely stoplight glowed. Any houses still standing had boarded-up doors and windows and looked quite forlorn. Instinctively they pressed against each other and at some point in the gloom between two pale islands of light the good Samaritan gave in to his desire for more intimate human contact and tried to kiss the girl. As I’ve said, he was a sympathetic man in his mid-thirties, as well dressed as it was possible to be in those days, and he’d shown himself to be friendly and helpful. Under other circumstances the girl would have been quite willing to let it happen. But for some unfathomable reason, she instantly panicked, the suppressed tension of the preceding hours broke through and tore a scream from her throat, a scream so wild and terrible that her escort took fright himself and ran head over heels in one direction while the girl fled in the other, screaming all the while. She ran and screamed to the point of utter exhaustion when she spied the lighted sign of a police station in the distance. The officers on duty were already pouring out in response to her screaming. One took her firmly by the arm. “Where is he? Which way did he run?” She struggled for breath. “It was nothing—I’m so frightened—He just wanted to—” “Which way did he go?” the policeman yelled at her. “Somewhere in the other direction.”—She heard the sudden roar of the motorcycles, a swarm of police raced off in the direction she was pointing. “But he just wanted to . . .” “Come with me!” said the officer still holding her by the arm. He led her into the station and in front of a mirror. Around her neck was a wire loop with a toggle . . .

He told it with great dramatic effect and the reaction was usually what he’d hoped. But he had to be reminded that the story had been making the rounds for a decade or more. “That’s exactly why I keep telling it,” he said. “At least people from those days will recall it. Everything else has been erased, suppressed, never happened. And there’s hardly a more vivid way to bring that time back to life, the Ice Age that sucked the marrow from your bones: a mixture of anxiety, fear, and lust . . .” “Lust?” his listeners would ask. “Yes, lust. Freedom that might even become blood lust. There was nothing left to keep people in check. No commandments, no restraints, nothing. Sheer, naked survival was the only thing that mattered. People could do whatever they wanted. Everything was permitted. No wonder they never caught the rubble murderer. Even if all his victims were killed in the same way, it doesn’t necessarily follow that there had been only one. What if the girl’s escort had just decided to try out the role? Put a wire loop in his pocket to see what would happen IF. . . Can’t you imagine the delicious curiosity to see just once what would happen if you cast off all inhibitions . . .”