Taigue didn't come until the last day—the last hour, in fact. I was sweating. The Coliseum seamstress had already sewn the big scarlet letter on the breast of my gray prison blouse and the Coliseum barber had just been in to cut my hair. I could hear the distant shuffling of feet on the stoning platform and the faraway murmur of many voices.
Taigue was still fasting. Ordinary MEP officers were usually content to fast their required day per week and to let it go at that. But Taigue was not an ordinary MEP officer. He stood before me like a Bunyanesque caricature. Caverns had appeared above the ridges of his cheek bones and his eyes had retreated into their depths where they burned like banked fires.
"Short hair becomes you, Mr. Bartlett," he said, but his irony lacked its usual edge. Moreover, the ghastly paleness of his face could not be wholly attributed to his physical condition.
"Did you come to receive my confession, Captain?"
"Whenever you're ready, Mr. Bartlett."
"I'm ready now."
He nodded solemnly. "I thought you might be. I discounted Julia's insistence that she acted of her own free will."
That shook me. "Julia? Is—is she here?"
He nodded again. "She gave herself up a week ago. She confessed to altering the data cards—insisted over and over that she alone was to blame. I tried to tell them, I tried to explain to the Marriage Administrator that she couldn't possibly be to blame, that she was an innocent tool in the hands of a hardened adulterer. But he wouldn't listen. No one would listen. They sewed the letter on her this morning. They—they cut her hair."
I tried to tell myself that she had it coming, but it wasn't any good. I felt sick. I kept seeing her crumpled body lying in the arena and the cruel stones scattered in the dirt and the blood on them. Julia's blood—