The Queen and I (12 page)

Chapter Twenty-One: Like Mother, Like Son

Louis Grecko arrived home to his Brighton Beach apartment that he shared with his mother, Cloris, and set his keys on the stand next to the door. He slowly and quietly walked down the hallway to the living room, careful not to wake his mother due to the late hour. He knew that he should have called when he was out to let her know that he would be late, but he had not anticipated seeing the young couple on the train who had so intrigued him.

He had spotted them while on his way home from seeing Heinrich and gotten off at their exit on the
D
train at Kings Highway and followed them up the busy avenue to their apartment building. He had waited outside until the sun went down when the odds of anyone noticing him entering the building’s courtyard was diminished thanks to nightfall. He waited there until it was time to enter the building through the front door.

It was one of the rare pleasures in his otherwise horrific life that he could enjoy and make his own. Nothing else exhilarated him the way the hunt and eventual capture did. Try as he might to find a hobby or some other kind of release, the hunt was the only thing that brought him real pleasure, that and his love of musicals and the ability to sing to his mother and Heinrich in that perfect soprano.

He watched carefully as the couple entered the building and saw the female stop at the mailboxes in the wall in the lobby. He made a mental note of where she was standing so that he could figure out what apartment number they lived in later. Louis bid his time until some irresponsible neighbor left the building and was stupid enough to hold the door open for him; people nowadays were still trusting to the point that they didn’t ask another’s business when entering a residential building. The way they saw it, there were too many people to know all of the other residents friends and acquaintances, so it was best to just mind your own business.

Examining the mailboxes, he was quite certain that he could narrow down the apartments to two or three possible candidates; he checked each one by knocking on the door to determine who his prey had been by gazing into their confused faces. This was admittedly a dangerous way of going about things, but Louis had learned from past experiences that most people had a way of not paying much attention to his face because he was so painful to look at.

He tried two doors and was met by an elderly woman who refused to open the door and threatened to call the cops, and a young Latino man who thought Louis was the pizza delivery guy. The young man reeked of marijuana and beer, and Louis briefly considered adding him to his shopping list of terror, but then thought otherwise. The thoughts of that young couple were intoxicating to him at this point, and he needed to quench his thirst.

The third door rewarded Louis for his patience; he had found his prey and they were as unassuming and innocent as he had hoped. They truly had no idea that they were part of his favorite game and that these upcoming hours were going to be the worst and the last of their young lives.

For a large man, Louis was deceptively fast, and overpowering the young man was no problem for him. Louis rendered him unconscious with a single blow to the temple and charged into the apartment before the girl could coax the scream from her lungs, the shock of what she had just seen slowing her senses. He grabbed hold of her, squeezed her throat tight enough to render her unconscious without killing her, and laid her body on the bed. He returned for the boy and used the pull strings from the venetian blinds to tie him to a kitchen chair.

Louis sat in the dimly lit bedroom and watched as the two soon-to-be-victims slept off the initial attack, and pondered his various options of what he could and would do to them. It was one thing to pick them out of a crowd, hunt them down, and then overpower them. That was the easy part, but his mother had taught him over the span of his lifetime so many clever ways to hurt people before killing them that he was having trouble deciding on a method. Torture was probably the most enjoyable option, since he loved the challenge of doing it while keeping his victims quiet enough to not alert any neighbors. He also enjoyed finding his implements of torture from everyday household items.

He found some duct tape and stripped the girl naked and bound her hands behind her back before waking her. As soon as she regained consciousness and realized the horrible position that she was in, she tried to scream, but Louis quickly placed a large hand over her mouth and smiled. He loved the vibrating feel against his palm as a victim tried to scream through his hand.

Louis shoved a rolled up sock in her mouth and covered it with another piece of duct tape. He stood back and admired her naked body in the half shadows of the room; he watched as the lines of her midsection heaved up and down as she struggled to catch her breath. Her eyes gave away the terror she was feeling.

He lit a cigarette and took a deep, long drag, releasing the smoke very slowly into her face, watching as she struggled to cough through her gagged mouth. Tears were building in her eyes as she wondered what this odd creature was going to do to her. Louis smiled and even laughed a bit at her discomfort and turned to the boy; it was time for the boy to wake up.

Louis took another sock, shoved it into his mouth, covered it with another piece of tape, and slowly extinguished the cigarette on the forehead of the young man. The girl screamed in horror through her gag, a muffled roar of shock and fear. The boy woke, and after a brief, stunned moment, let out a cry of his own at the realization of what was being done to him.

Their captor took a seat on the edge of the bed and gently rubbed the girl’s right breast, while taking exceptional notice of her nipple. Rage filled the boy’s eyes as he struggled to free himself from his binds, and he kicked violently against the floor. Louis could not have this, so he quickly punched the young man across the jaw and taped his legs to the chair.

“Mother doesn’t like it when you make noise,” Louis said to the young man. He leaned in close and whispered into his ear, “What kind of fun should we have?”

The young man’s eyes went wide with confusion and fear as his evening was about to take a terrible turn. For the next couple of hours, the young couple experienced the worst kind of horrors as Louis Grecko administered amputations, extractions, and severed several body parts. Blood was everywhere, and Louis admired the way that it flowed across the floor and how it pooled and soaked into the mattress. It was an amazing thing to watch, blood. It had a mind of its own, unlike water that just looked for the easiest way to move and flow from one point to another. Blood had its own way of doing things; it was like a stubborn serpent that refused to accept the fact that its way was blocked.

He gathered up his souvenirs and made his quiet exit from the building, running into no witnesses on the way out. When he got back to the train station, he placed a 911 call and alerted the police to the two mangled corpses in their apartment. Their bodies would be discovered shortly, and they would be spared the indecency of rotting to the point of becoming malodorous. If there was one thing that Louis and his mother hated, it was when a body was left out to the point of stinking; that could not be tolerated.

He sat in his favorite chair in the living room and admired the Ziplock bag that he had stolen to hold his mementos in and wondered if the police had arrived yet. Surely they would be on to the fact that this had been done by the same person who had been leaving bodies like this around New York City for the last twenty years; they were still no closer now than ever before to finding him or naming any suspects. His mother had taught him well, and he was always careful to leave behind no trace evidence.

His mother had been a member of the infamous Mossad, that being before she married out of the Jewish faith, and had learned various ways of torture and how to not get caught. Cloris Weiner had taught her son what she had learned.

His attention now shifted to the mysterious new object for his hunt, the man who Heinrich wanted him to find, the one he was not allowed to kill, Jeffrey David Rothstein.

The last part was what troubled him the most; he had never done a hunt before that did not end in the eventual death of the victim. Sometimes death came quickly, other times it was a long, drawn-out enterprise that left him exhausted and exhilarated at the same time.

He knew very little about the man he was now pursuing, only that he was very important to Heinrich and the little sissy who was in his office. He knew that the man was a famous person and that he loved Broadway, so that troubled Louis a little. Louis loved Broadway; he loved everything about the theater, especially musicals, and the thought that he was being asked to hunt down and possibly cause harm to an artist who only made others happy with his plays was something that Louis would normally turn down and probably attack the man who asked such a thing of him. But this was Heinrich who was asking the favor, and he never said no to Heinrich Schultz.

Schultz had been a benefactor to Louis and his mother for as long as Louis could remember. He was the one who had protected them from his abusive father after the man had left to become a mime. He had been the one who had moved them to the apartment that they now lived in, and he was always the one who supplied them with any and every of the personal needs that they ever asked for. Their requests were very few, and often odd, to say the least, but Schultz always saw to it that their every need was taken care of.

There were nights when Schultz would arrive unexpectedly, and Louis’s mother and he would retire early. They had to have been joking a lot while they were in her room because they spent most of the night laughing, and she always seemed to be happy.

Suddenly, Louis heard her bedroom door open, and he knew that she would be angry at him for being out so late without calling, but that was why he had brought these gifts for her enjoyment. She took much pride in her son’s work and thought of it as a personal triumph that she had taught him so well that he was now capable of pulling off jobs on his own without her guidance or instruction.

She sat beside him and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Where were you for so long?” she asked.

“They needed to learn the Way.”

His mother looked at the bag of souvenirs and lifted it to examine the contents.

“Are these for me?” she asked.

“I do things for you, Mom,” he answered without ever making eye contact. “I had to follow them because they mocked life and needed to be taught the Way.”

“You did well, my son.” She opened the bag and pulled out a nipple. “Was she pretty?”

“Not as pretty as you.”

“Did you kill him before you cut this off?” She was holding a penis in her hand now.

“He tried to scream, but I covered his mouth.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Yes, Mother.”

She leaned over and gently kissed Louis on the cheek and rubbed his back. He liked it when his mother was happy, and she was always happy when he brought her home gifts. It was one of the true pleasures in her life when he came home and surprised her. But she could not deny the fact that he had acted without her and that he had not bothered to call to let her know that he would be out as late as he was. That kind of behavior was unacceptable and required swift and strong discipline.

Louis knew she was thinking about what to do with him for his transgression. It had to be something that would make him think twice before doing something like this again.

She lit a cigarette for herself and ordered Louis to pour her a glass of peppermint schnapps. He did as he was asked and stood before her, waiting for her to decide what her punishment for him would entail.

Cloris Weiner admired the delicate, perfectly formed nipple that Louis had taken from the young lady and moved on to the penis. She handled it gently, as she would something small and fragile.
There was nothing small about this one,
she thought.
The young lady must have been very happy with their relationship.

She smelled it and put it back into the bag. Cloris looked up at Louis and ordered him to pull his pants down around his ankles. He did as he was asked, and she rose to stand next to her son. She admired the man that she had created and felt sorry for what she was about to do, but knew that it had to be done. It was the only way that he would learn.

She took a long drag of her cigarette and put it out on his scrotum. He winced briefly, but did not scream out in pain or shed a tear; he truly was a remarkable man, her son.

He apologized and pulled his pants back up. Promising to never do that again, he turned his attention to the envelope that she had placed on the television stand next to the sofa and opened it. It was full of pictures and notes on Jeffrey David Rothstein, his family names, acquaintances, his relationships, even the color of his car.

His mother had prepared this package for him through her own research to make his job easier in finding the man who had eluded the powerful Heinrich Schultz. As a personal favor and treat for her son, she had also included a biography of Mendel Fujikawa. She thought that after the job of finding Rothstein was done, she would let her son have a little personal fun and take out his aggressions on the little man of Jewish-Japanese origin.

Together, Louis and his mother were a dangerous pair who were relentless in whatever the task was that they chose to execute. There was nothing that she was afraid to do, and she had trained her son to have no regard for life other than his own and hers. With his brute strength and talent for finding people who did not want to be found, there was little that they could not accomplish.

Tomorrow, she would set her son loose on the world, and he would stop at nothing until he found Jeffrey David Rothstein and brought him back to Heinrich, who would ship him to the island that the large German was so proud of. It was a waste as far as she was concerned; he would be better served if he allowed Louis to do away with the man. They could watch in enjoyment and amazement as the craftsman who was her son went to work.