“For Five Borough, it’s business as usual. They’re not making money but they’re not getting killed, and the new investors are willing to lose money for a few years. In fact they might be willing to lose money forever.”
“I see.”
“Do you? Interestingly enough, the new investors seem content to play a very passive role. You’d think they might make changes in the company’s management, but they kept all the old people on and didn’t bring in anybody new. Except that there’s someone now who’s around a lot. He doesn’t work for Five Borough, he doesn’t draw a salary, but if you look at the company you’ll always see him out of the corner of your eye.”
“Who is he?”
“Now that,” he said, “is an interesting question. His name is Bergen Stettner, which sounds German, or at least Teutonic, but I don’t think that’s the name he was born with. He lives with his wife in an apartment on a high floor in that hotel of Trump’s on Central Park South. Keeps an office in the Graybar Building on Lexington. He deals in foreign currencies, and he also buys and sells precious metals. What does this begin to suggest to you?”
“That he’s a laundryman.”
“And that Five Borough is functioning as some sort of laundry. How or why or for whom or to what extent are questions I wouldn’t presume to answer.” He poured himself some vodka. “So I don’t know if this does you any good at all, Matthew. I couldn’t find out anything at all about young Richard Thurman. If he hired some street scum to tie him up and savage his wife, either he picked a remarkably closemouthed pair or their fee included passage to New Zealand, because the word on the street is no word at all.”
“That figures.”
“Does it?” He knocked back the Stoly. “I hope the news about Five Borough isn’t completely useless to you. I didn’t want to say anything over the phone. That’s never something I like to do, and your calls go through the hotel switchboard, don’t they? Isn’t that a nuisance?”
“I can dial out direct,” I said. “And they take messages.”
“I’m sure they do, although I don’t like to leave them if I can help it. I’d offer to find out more about Stettner, but I might have a hard time doing that. He keeps a low profile. What have you got there?”
“I think it’s his picture,” I said, and unfolded the sketch. Danny Boy looked at it, then at me.
“You already knew about him,” he said.
“No.”
“You just happened to have his pencil portrait tucked in your jacket pocket. It’s signed, for God’s sake. Who, pray tell, is Raymond Galindez?”
“The next Norman Rockwell. Is that Stettner?”
“I don’t know, Matthew. I never set eyes on the man.”
“Well, I’m ahead of you there. I had a good look at him. I just didn’t happen to know who I was looking at.” I folded the sketch and put it away. “Keep this to yourself for now,” I said, “but if things break right, he’s going to go away for a long long time.”
“For running a laundry?”
“No,” I said. “That’s what he does for a living. What’s going to put him away is what he does for a hobby.”
MY walk home took me past St. Paul’s. It was nine-thirty when I got there, and I stopped in for the last half hour of the meeting. I got a cup of coffee and dropped into a chair in the back row. I noticed Will Haberman a few rows in front of me and imagined bringing him up to date. In that version of The Dirty Dozen you lent me, Will, we’ve so far learned that the part of Rubber Man was played by Bergen Stettner. A young fellow with no previous acting experience played the male ingenue. He was using the stage name of Happy. We’re not sure yet about Leather Woman, but there’s a possibility her name is Chelsea.
That was the name Thurman had dropped last night. “Who, Chelsea? Just a tramp, my friend. Take my word for it.” I was willing enough to take his word, but I was less and less persuaded that the girl who’d strutted around the ring with the numbered cards was the masked woman in leather.
I couldn’t pay any real attention to the meeting. The discussion went on around me while my mind spun off in circles of its own. I’d come down into the church basement not for what I might hear but just to be in a safe place for a few minutes.
I ducked out early and got back to my room with two minutes to spare. Ten o’clock came and went, and at five minutes after the hour the phone rang and I grabbed it. “Scudder,” I said.
“You know who this is?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t say my name. Just say where you know me from.”
“Paris Green,” I said. “Among other places.”
“Yeah, right. I didn’t know how much you were drinking last night, how much you’d remember.”
“I have a pretty good memory.”
“So do I, and I’ll tell you something, there’s times I wish I didn’t. You’re a detective.”
“That’s right.”
“Is that straight? I couldn’t find you in the book.”
“I’m not listed.”
“You work for some agency. You showed me a card but I didn’t get the name.”
“I just free-lance for them. Mostly I’m on my own.”
“So I could hire you directly.”
“Yes,” I said. “You could do that.”
There was a pause while he thought it over. “The thing is,” he said, “I think I’m in trouble.”
“I can see where you’d think that.”
“What do you know about me, Scudder?”
“What everybody knows.”
“Last night you didn’t recognize my name.”
“That was then.”
“And this is now, huh? Look, I think we ought to talk.”
“I think so, too.”
“Where, though? That’s the question. Not Paris Green.”
“How about your place?”
“No. No, I don’t think that’s a good idea. Someplace public, but not where somebody might recognize me. All the places that come to my mind are out, because they’re the places I go all the time.”
“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-class 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 glass of Coke. “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 Coke. “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 hitting 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?”
“God,” 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 sexual 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 cock,’ she said. ‘I want you to fuck me in the ass. 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 pussy. 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 videocassette, and it was porno, 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 cassette 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 sex 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 basement 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 sex 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 piss, 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 semen.”
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 glass 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 whore 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 glass 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 assured that the cassette 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 wi
th 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 classics, mostly. A few were porn, 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 cassette.”
“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 glass, 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 homosexuals,” he said flatly. “Don’t care for them, never did. Amanda’s brother is a homosexual. 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 faggots were weaklings and that AIDS was the planet’s way of grinding them under its heel. ‘It’s not a homosexual 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.’ ”