"I know a place," I said.
HE said, "You know this is perfect, and I never would have thought of a place like this. This is what you"d call your basic Irish neighborhood tavern, isn"t it?"
"You could."
"Just a few blocks from where I live and I never knew it existed, but then I could walk past it every day and never notice it, never pay any attention, you know? Different worlds. Here you got your decent working-cla.s.s people, honest as the day is long, real salt-of-the-earth types. And look, you got your tin ceiling, tile floor, dart board on the wall. This is perfect."
We were in Grogan"s, of course, and I wondered if anyone had ever described its owner as the salt of the earth, or honest as the day was long. Still, it seemed to suit our purpose. It was quiet and nearly empty, and no one who knew Thurman was likely to put in an appearance.
I asked him what he wanted to drink. He said he guessed a beer would be good, and I went to the bar for a bottle of Harp and a gla.s.s of c.o.ke. "You missed the big fellow," Burke told me. "He was in an hour ago, said you kept him up all night."
I went back to the table and Thurman noticed my c.o.ke. "That"s not what you were drinking last night," he said.
"You were drinking stingers."
"Don"t remind me. The thing is, I"m not that much of a drinker ordinarily. A martini before dinner, and maybe a couple of beers. Last night I was. .h.i.tting it. Matter of fact, I"m not sure how much I said to you. Or how much you know."
"I know more than I did last night."
"And you knew more then than you let on."
"Maybe you"d better just tell me what"s bothering you."
He thought about it, then nodded shortly. He patted his pockets and found the sketch I"d given him the night before. He unfolded it and looked from it to me. He asked if I knew who it was.
"Why don"t you tell me?"
"His name is Bergen Stettner."
Good, I thought.
"I"m afraid he"s going to kill me."
"Why? Has he ever killed anyone before?"
"G.o.d," he said. "I don"t know where to start."
HE said, "I never met anyone like Bergen before. He started to come around after the buy-in and we hit it off right away. I thought he was fantastic. Very strong, very sure of himself, and when you"re with him it"s very easy to believe that the ordinary rules don"t apply. The first time I met him he took me back to his apartment. We drank champagne on the terrace with all of Central Park spread out below us like our private backyard.
"The next time I was over there I met his wife. Olga. Beautiful woman, and there was so much s.e.xual energy around her it was dizzying. He went to the bathroom and she sat down next to me and put her hand in my lap and started stroking me through my pants. "I want to suck your c.o.c.k," she said. "I want you to f.u.c.k me in the a.s.s. I want to sit on your face." I couldn"t believe what was happening. I was sure he"d walk in and catch us like that, but by the time he came back she was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, talking about one of the paintings.
"The next day he kept telling me how much Olga liked me, how she said they should see more of me. A few days later we went out to dinner with them, my wife and I. It was awkward, because there was this whole thing going on between me and Olga. At the end of the evening Bergen kissed Amanda"s hand, very Continental, but with a self-mocking quality to it at the same time. And Olga gave me her hand to kiss, and it smelled of, well, it smelled of p.u.s.s.y. She must have touched herself. And I looked up at her, you know, and there was this expression on her face, it got to me as much as the smell did.
"Of course he knew everything that was going on, they planned it together, I know all that now. The next time I was over at their apartment he said he had something to show me, it wasn"t something I"d be likely to see on cable but he thought it would interest me. He put on a videoca.s.sette, and it was p.o.r.no, an amateur video. Two men sharing a woman. Halfway through Olga came in and sat down next to me. I hadn"t even known she was in the apartment, I"d thought Bergen and I were there alone.
"When the ca.s.sette ended Bergen took it off and put on another one. This one featured two women, one black and one white. The black woman was a slave. It took me a minute to realize that the white woman was Olga. I couldn"t take my eyes off the screen.
"After it ended I looked around and Bergen had left the room. Olga and I tore our clothes off and got on the couch. At some point I realized Bergen was in the room, watching us. Then we all got up and went into the bedroom together."
ALONG with the s.e.x Stettner fed him a steady diet of philosophy. Rules were for those who lacked the imagination to break them. Superior men and women made their own rules, or lived with none at all. He quoted Nietzsche often, and Olga put a New Age gloss on the old German. There were truly no victims when you claimed your power, because their fate was just a manifestation of their own desire for subjugation. They created their destiny even as you created yours.
One day Stettner called him at the office. "Stop what you"re doing," he said. "Go downstairs, wait on the corner, I"ll pick you up in fifteen minutes." Stettner took him for a long drive, telling him only that he had a gift for him. He parked in an unfamiliar neighborhood and led Thurman down a flight of stairs into a bas.e.m.e.nt chamber. There he beheld a naked woman manacled to a metal frame, her mouth stopped with a gag. "She"s yours," Stettner told him. "Do whatever you want with her."
He had s.e.x with the woman. It would have been discourteous to refuse, like turning down a drink or a meal or any other offer of hospitality. Besides, the woman"s utter helplessness was fiercely exciting to him. When he had finished having intercourse with her Stettner asked him if there was anything else he wanted to do to the woman. He said there wasn"t.
They left the building and got back into Stettner"s car. The older man told him to wait a minute, that there was something he had forgotten to do. He was back shortly and began driving. He asked Thurman if he"d ever been a woman"s first lover. Thurman said that he had.
"But not your wife."
No, Thurman acknowledged. Amanda had not been a virgin when they met.
"Well, I have given you a gift," Stettner said. "You have already been a woman"s first lover, and now you have been this one"s last. That girl you were just with, no one will ever have her again, no one but the worms. Do you know what I did when I went back? I killed her for you. I took the gag out of her mouth, and I said, "Goodbye, darling," and I cut her throat."
Thurman didn"t know what to say.
"You don"t know if you should believe me. Maybe I just went back to take a p.i.s.s, or to cut her loose. Do you want to go back and see for yourself?"
"No."
"Good. Because you know I always tell the truth. You"re confused, you don"t know how to feel about this. Relax. You didn"t do anything. I did it. And she would have died anyway. No one lives forever." He reached over and took Thurman"s hand in his. "We are closer than close, you and I. We are brothers in blood and s.e.m.e.n."
IT had taken him a long time to pour the beer and now it was taking him longer to drink it. He would pick up the gla.s.s and have it halfway to his lips and set it down and resume talking. He didn"t really care about the beer. He wanted to talk.
He said, "I don"t know if he killed that woman. She could have been some wh.o.r.e hired for the occasion and he went back to pay her and let her free. Or he could have cut her throat the way he said. There"s no way to know."
From that point on he was leading two lives. On the surface he was a young executive on the way up. He had a great apartment and a rich wife and a rosy future. At the same time he was living a secret life with Bergen and Olga Stettner.
"I learned to turn it on and off," he said. "Like you leave your job at the office, I left that whole side of myself for when I was with them. I saw them once, twice a week. We didn"t always do anything. Sometimes we would just sit around and talk. But there was always that edge, that current flowing among us. And then I"d shut it off and go home and be a husband."
After he"d known the two of them for several months, Stettner needed his help.
"He was being blackmailed. There was a tape they had made. I don"t know what was on it but it must have been bad because the cameraman kept a copy and he wanted fifty thousand dollars for it."
"Arnold Leveque," I said.
His eyes widened. "How did you know that? How much do you know?"
"I know what happened to Leveque. Did you help kill him?"
This time he got the gla.s.s to his lips. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, "I swear I didn"t know that was how it was going to go. He said he would pay the fifty thousand but he couldn"t meet with Leveque, the man was afraid of him. It"s not hard to guess why. He said it would be one payment and that would be the end of it, because the man would not be fool enough to try the same stunt twice.
"There"s a Thai restaurant on the corner of Tenth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street. I met Leveque there. He was this comical fat man who waddled like a windup toy. He kept telling me that he was sorry to be doing this but he really needed the money. The more he said it the more despicable he seemed.
"I gave him the briefcase full of money and let him open it. He seemed more frightened when he saw the money. I was supposed to be a lawyer, that was the story, and I was wearing a Brooks pinstripe and trying to slip legal terms into my conversation. As if it mattered.
"We made the exchange, and I told him he could retain the briefcase but I couldn"t allow him to go off with it until I was a.s.sured that the ca.s.sette was the one my client wanted. "My car"s parked nearby," I said, "and we"re just minutes from my office, and as soon as I"ve seen five minutes of the tape you can be on your way with the money."
He shook his head. "He could have just stood up and walked out of there," he said. "What was I going to do? But I guess he trusted me. We walked halfway to Eleventh Avenue and Bergen was waiting at the mouth of an alleyway. He was going to hit Leveque over the head and then we were going to get out of there with the money and the tape."
"But that"s not what happened."
"No," he said. "Before Leveque could even react Bergen was punching him. At least that"s what it looked like, but then I saw that he had a knife in his hand. He stabbed him right there on the street, then grabbed him and dragged him into the alley and told me to get the briefcase. I got it and went into the alley and he had Leveque against the brick wall and he was stabbing him. Leveque was just staring. Maybe he was already dead, I don"t know. He never made a sound."
AFTERWARD they took Leveque"s keys and searched his apartment, carrying off two bags full of homemade tapes. Stettner had thought Leveque would have kept a backup tape of the one he was using for blackmail, but it turned out he hadn"t.
"Most of them were movies he taped off the TV," Thurman said. "Old black-and-white cla.s.sics, mostly. A few were p.o.r.n, and some were old TV shows." Stettner screened them himself and wound up throwing just about everything out. Thurman had never seen the tape he helped recover, the one that had cost Arnold Leveque his life.
"I saw it," I said. "It shows the two of them committing murder. Killing a boy."
"I figured that"s what it was, or why would they pay that kind of money for it? But how could you have seen it?"
"Leveque had a copy that you missed. It was dubbed onto a commercial ca.s.sette."
"He had a whole lot of those," he remembered. "We didn"t bother with them, we left them there. That was clever of him." He picked up his gla.s.s, put it down untouched. "Not that it did him much good."
Boys were a part of Stettner"s life, and one Thurman was never interested in sharing. "I don"t like h.o.m.os.e.xuals," he said flatly. "Don"t care for them, never did. Amanda"s brother is a h.o.m.os.e.xual. He never liked me and I never liked him, it was right out there from the jump. Stettner said he was the same way, he thought f.a.ggots were weaklings and that AIDS was the planet"s way of grinding them under its heel. "It"s not a h.o.m.os.e.xual act to use these boys," he would say. "You take them as you take a woman, that"s all. And they"re so easy to get, they"re all over the place begging to be taken. And no one cares. You can do as you please with them and no one cares." "
"How did he get them?"
"I don"t know. I told you, that was an area of his life I made it my business to stay out of. Sometimes I would see him with a boy. He would take up with one sometimes, the way he did with the one you saw at the fights last week. He would treat him like a son, and then one day you wouldn"t see the boy anymore. And I would never ask what happened to the boy."
"But you would know."
"I wouldn"t even think about it. It was none of my business, so why should I think about it?"
"But you had to know, Richard."
I hadn"t called him by his first name before. Maybe that helped the words get through his armor. Something did, because he winced as if he"d taken a hard right to the heart.
"I guess he killed them," he said.
I didn"t say anything.
"I guess he killed a lot of people."
"What about you?"
"I never killed anyone," he said quickly.
"You were an accessory to Leveque"s murder. According to the law, you were as guilty as if you"d used the knife yourself."
"I didn"t even know he was going to kill him!"
He knew, just as he had known what happened to the boys. I let it pa.s.s. "You knew he was going to commit a.s.sault and robbery," I said. "That made you a partic.i.p.ant in felony, and that"s enough to make you fully culpable if the felony results in a death. You"d be guilty of murder if Leveque had died of a heart attack. As far as the law is concerned, you"re guilty."
He took a couple of deep breaths. Dully he said, "All right, I know that. You could say the same thing about the girl he went back and killed, if he killed her. I suppose I was guilty of rape. She didn"t resist, but I didn"t exactly have her consent." He looked at me. "I can"t defend what I did. I can"t justify it. I"m not going to try to say that he hypnotized me, although it was like that, it really was, the way the two of them set me up and... and just got me to do what they wanted."
"How did they do that, Richard?"
"They just-"
"How did they get you to kill your wife?"
"Oh, G.o.d," he said, and put his face in his hands.
MAYBE they had planned it from the beginning. Maybe it had been part of a secret agenda all along.
"You"d better take a shower," Olga would say. "It"s time for you to go home to your little wife." Your little wife, your darling wife, your charming wife- always said with a hint of irony, a touch of mockery. You have spent an hour in the world of the brave, the bold, the reckless, the daring, she was telling him, and now you may return to the black-and-white humdrum world and the Barbie doll who shares it with you.
"A shame she has all the money," Stettner said early on. "You give all your power away when your woman has more money than you do."
At first he"d been afraid that Stettner would want Amanda s.e.xually. He had allowed Thurman to share Olga, and would want a quid pro quo. Thurman hadn"t liked the idea. He wanted to keep the two lives separate, and was relieved when the Stettners did not seem to want Amanda included in their relationship. The first meeting of all four had not been a success, and, on the two subsequent occasions when both couples had drinks and dinner together, the conversation was stilted.
It was Stettner who first suggested he increase his insurance coverage. "You have a child coming, you want to protect that child. And you should have the mother covered as well. If anything happened to her you"d have a nurse, you"d have a governess, you"d have expenses for years." And then, when the policies were in force: "You know, Richard, you"re a man with a rich wife. If she died you"d be a rich man. There"s an interesting distinction, don"t you think?"
The idea grew gradually, little by little.
"I don"t know how to explain this," he said. "It wasn"t real. We would joke about it, we would think up impossibly farfetched ways to do it. "It"s a shame microwave ovens are so small," he said. "We could stuff Amanda in with an apple in her mouth and cook her from the inside out." It"s sickening to think of now, but then it was funny because there was no reality to it, it was a harmless joke. And, because we went on joking about it, it began to have a kind of reality.
" "We"ll do it next Thursday," Bergen would say, and we"d plan some ridiculous black-comedy scenario, and that would be the end of it. And then when Thursday came Olga would say, "Oh, we forgot, today was the day we were supposed to kill little Amanda." It was a joke, a running gag.
"When I was with Amanda, when they weren"t around, I was a normal happily married man. That sounds impossible, doesn"t it? But it was true. I guess I must have had this idea that someday Bergen and Olga would just disappear. I don"t know how I expected this to happen, whether they would get caught for some of the things they had done or whether they would just drop me or move out of the country or, I don"t know. Maybe I expected them to die. And then the whole dark side of life that I was leading with them would vanish and Amanda and I would live happily ever after.
"One time, though, I was lying in bed and she was asleep next to me and I started having images of different ways of killing her. I didn"t want to have those thoughts but I couldn"t get them out of my head. Smothering her with a pillow, stabbing her, all sorts of murderous images. I had to go into the other room and have a couple of drinks. I wasn"t afraid I would do anything, I was just upset by the thoughts.
"Right around the first of November I mentioned that our downstairs neighbors would be spending the next six months in Florida. "Good," Bergen said. "That"s where we"ll kill Amanda. It"s a natural site for a burglary, with the owners in Florida. And it"s convenient, she won"t have to travel far, and it"s better than doing it in your apartment because you wouldn"t want police parading in and out of your place. They make a mess, sometimes they even steal things."
"I thought it was a joke. "Oh, you"re going to a party? When you come home we"ll be waiting in the Jews" apartment downstairs. You"ll walk right in on a burglary in progress. I hope I can still remember how to break in. I"m sure it"s like swimming, once you learn it you never forget it."
"The night of the party I didn"t know if it was a joke or not. This is hard to explain. I knew but I didn"t know. The two sides of my life were so far apart it"s as if I didn"t really believe something on one side could touch something on the other. It"s like I knew they would be waiting there for us but I couldn"t really believe it.
"When we left the party I wanted to walk home because I wanted to delay getting there for fear that they"d be there, that it would be real this time. And on the way home she started talking about her brother, how she was worried about his health, and I made a nasty crack. So we had an argument, and I thought, all right, b.i.t.c.h, in an hour you"ll be history. And the thought was exciting.
"Walking up the stairs I saw the door to the Gottschalks" apartment was closed and I felt relieved, and then I saw that the doorframe was splintered and there were jimmy marks around the lock so I knew they were there. But I thought if we were quiet we could get past the closed door and upstairs to our own apartment and we"d be safe. Of course we could have turned around and gone back down the stairs, but I didn"t even think of that at the time.
"Then we got to the top of the flight of stairs and the door opened and they were waiting for us. Olga had on a leather outfit she wears sometimes and Bergen was wearing a long leather coat. They looked as though they"d stepped out of a comic book. Amanda didn"t recognize them at first. She was just staring at them, not knowing what to make of it, and before she could say anything Bergen said, "You"re dead, b.i.t.c.h," and punched her in the face. He was wearing thin leather driving gloves. He made a fist and hit her full force in the jaw.
" Bergen grabbed her and dragged her inside with his hand clamped over her mouth. Olga got Amanda"s hands behind her back and handcuffed her. They taped her mouth and Olga tripped her and kicked her in the face when she fell.
"They stripped her and dragged her into the bedroom and threw her on the bed. Bergen raped her and turned her over and raped her again. Olga hit her in the face with a crowbar and I think that may have knocked her out. I don"t think she was conscious for most of it.
"I hope not.
"They told me I had to have s.e.x with her. And this is the worst part. I thought I was going to be sick to my stomach, I thought I was going to puke, but get this, I was excited. I was hard. I didn"t want to have s.e.x, I didn"t want to, but my c.o.c.k wanted to. G.o.d, it makes me sick to think about it. I couldn"t finish. I was on top of her and I couldn"t finish and I just wanted to come so I could stop but I couldn"t.
"Then I was standing over her and Bergen had her panty hose wrapped around her neck and he made me take an end in each hand. He told me I had to do it and I just stood there. Olga was on her knees blowing me and Bergen "s gloved hands were holding my hands, and I was holding the ends of the panty hose, I couldn"t let go because of his grip. And he pulled his hands apart, and that pulled my hands apart, and her eyes were staring up at me, staring, you know. And Olga was doing what she was doing, you know, and Bergen was holding me very tight, and there was the smell of the blood and the leather and the s.e.x.
"And I had an o.r.g.a.s.m.