Trap (9781476793177) (8 page)

T
HE YOUNG MAN STOOD GAZING
down at the naked, sleeping woman he'd tied to the bed before sexually assaulting her. He imagined dousing her with gasoline and setting her on fire, then watching her writhe in pain and listening with pleasure to her screams. Just the thought made him want to take her again, but instead he took a photograph with his cell phone.

Then she groaned. Only it was not the sound of a victim but of a woman whose appetite for kinky sex was satiated for the moment. He found it amusing that she was driven by the excitement of knowing that he was dangerous—that the role of master and slave could change from erotic role-playing to fatal reality.

The woman looked up at him and saw the renewed lust in his eyes. But she shook her head. “No time. Untie me,” she commanded. “I have to get back to the office.”

His violent fantasy faded and he did as he was told. Quickly untying the knots, he handed her the lacy black lingerie and conservative gray business suit she'd worn to their assignation at the Seahorse Motel, a run-down, by-the-hour flophouse outside of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

He wasn't sure how he felt about the woman. Love wasn't part of the equation: not for her, and certainly not for him. It was just a word. He wasn't even sure he liked this woman, though they'd been having sex since soon after his fourteenth birthday and she'd been in her late twenties.

Love and like weren't really part of his vocabulary when it came to other people. As far as he was concerned there were three kinds of human beings. Those who could help him get, or do, what he wanted, such as his mother and the woman who was hurriedly getting dressed in the half-light of this dirtbag motel. Next were those people who meant nothing to him except, perhaps, as potential victims, and the social misfits he hung out with in the rare moments when he sought social contact. And last were those people who were dangerous to him, especially the police.

Hate he understood. He hated almost everybody, including those who fell into the first group, the people who helped him. He enjoyed fantasizing about hurting and killing all of them, particularly with fire. Even his mother fell into that category when she'd make him angry. He hated this woman, too, who pulled his strings like a puppeteer whether for her sexual pleasure or her “projects,” but didn't really care about what happened to him.
That's okay,
he thought as she walked into the bathroom to fix her hair and makeup.
I have a few strings to pull, too, and I could give a shit what happens to her.

Although he didn't think a lot about it, he supposed his predilections started at an early age, even before his dad abandoned him and his mother when he was five. He didn't remember or know much about the man, just that he used to burn him with cigarettes for “being bad” and beat his mother, called her a “whore,” and burned her, too. The old man was the first person he could remember hating, but rather than feeling any empathy for his mother, he mostly felt contempt. She was weak. She was incapable of protecting herself or him from the man. He discovered early on that he enjoyed hearing her scream and that was the only thing he missed when his dad left one day and didn't come back.

He knew he wasn't what other people considered “normal,” not that he really cared. Never had. In school, the other kids made fun of the way he looked—what his mother called his “affliction”—and the burn marks on his hands and arms, even if he was able to hide those on his chest and back beneath his shirt. He got pushed, hit, spit on, and teased mercilessly, but he just bided his time, held grudges, and looked for his moment to strike back. In the meantime, he was content to stay to himself on the playground and sit alone at lunch.

The odd little boy was mostly ignored by his teachers. He didn't cause problems, and they had their hands full with plenty of others who did in the overcrowded public school classrooms of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood where he grew up. Oh, there were signs early on: he liked to play with fire and once set his mother's apartment on fire and later tossed a lit match in a wastepaper basket at school. But no one put together the incidents of small animals being maimed and sometimes covered with lighter fluid and ignited with the quiet middle-school boy.

However, adolescence changed that; all of that biding his time, carrying grudges, the seething anger began to boil over. It started with a bullying episode in the sixth grade when he stabbed an older boy who'd been calling him names in the neck with a pencil. It escalated the next year when a pretty black girl in his homeroom class told on him after he'd grabbed one of her budding breasts and squeezed so hard she'd screamed in pain. That had earned him a trip to the principal's office and a series of meetings with the school psychologist, who talked to him about “inappropriate behavior” and “needing to find more responsible ways to interact with your peers.”

He promised to behave, but he didn't really mean it. The next day, he'd walked up behind the girl and sprayed the back of her curly black hair with lighter fluid. She didn't notice anything was wrong until he lit a match and tossed it at her head. Even then her reaction was delayed when the eyes of her friends grew suddenly wide a few moments before she felt the searing pain from the flames.

The look on her face and those of her friends brought a wide smile to his face, and their screams made him laugh. He didn't even think about running away before the male teacher grabbed him roughly and held him until the police arrived.

This time they took him to a hospital mental ward to be evaluated by a psychologist, who concluded that he was one of the youngest examples of an advanced antisocial personality disorder the doctor had come across in all of his years in practice. His mother had been upset and cried when he was committed to juvenile detention for eighteen months. But he'd beamed with pride sitting at the defense table in the courtroom and listening to the psychologist on the witness stand warn the judge that the defendant was “a budding sociopath who needs intensive treatment and even then will probably remain a danger to others upon his release.”

When he got out, he was worse. His earlier crimes had merely been preliminary flashes of anger and an indifference to the pain or suffering of others, except as a means of entertainment for himself. But by the time he was released back into the custody of his mother, who'd moved to a different neighborhood in Brooklyn, he was seething. Very little made him happy: burning things, especially living things, though sometimes torching a building was exciting, too; cherry red Chuck Taylor basketball shoes; red like fire, red like pain, red like the anger in his head; and his laptop computer.

Family pets began to go missing in the new neighborhood, then their charred bodies would show up in alleys and parks. A few vacant warehouses and old tenements went up in flames. But no one got terribly alarmed until a teenaged black couple out on a date in Coney Island narrowly escaped death when their car exploded in a ball of fire. They'd been fortunate that the crude timer set to ignite an incendiary device taped onto the gas tank had been the work of an overly ambitious amateur; they'd already exited the car and were walking away when the delayed charge went off. They'd escaped with minor cuts and burns, and a frightening story to tell the newspapers.

No suspect claimed responsibility or was found. But some of the neighbors began to whisper among themselves about the strange teenager who lived with his mother in a dilapidated townhome in the Brighton Beach area. Rumor said he'd been in juvie, something about setting another classmate's hair on fire.

The rumors proved true, of course, and were corroborated after he threw a Molotov cocktail into the basement of an elderly Jewish couple in the neighborhood. The couple were badly burned and nearly died from smoke inhalation, but were saved by a man who rushed into the burning home and carried them out. A tip was phoned in to the police from someone who claimed to have seen the young man near the home. Whether that was true or not, or just someone acting on a hunch, the detectives who responded surprised him and found two more bombs in the shed behind the townhome; both bottles matched the make of the bottle used in the bombing and, after obtaining a warrant, further investigation of his computer revealed numerous searches for bomb-making instructions, including for Molotov cocktails.

After his arrest, he was appointed a young, female attorney from the Legal Aid Society, the New York version of a public defender's office, and that's how he met the woman who was walking out of the bathroom adjusting a brunette wig and putting on sunglasses. “You have money for the bus?” she asked.

“Why can't you give me a ride?” he asked sullenly.

“You know why,” she replied. “We can't be seen together.”

“You could drop me off on some corner in Manhattan.”

The woman shook her head. “Can't risk it. Especially with our new project.”

A familiar hot anger threatened to flare up.
You can still overpower her. Tie her up. Set the room on fire,
a voice whispered in his head.
But then there'd go your meal ticket,
another voice warned.

As his Legal Aid attorney, given the heavy caseload, incompetence, and corruption at the Kings County DAO, the woman persuaded the lame prosecutor to plea bargain the attempted murder charge to assault. He'd spent his fifteenth birthday back in juvenile detention. She tried to convince the psychologists that their efforts to “reach” him were succeeding. But his relationship with the woman had gone far beyond attorney-client privileges. Something about him seemed to turn her on, and during one of their meetings at the juvie center's private attorney-client makeshift meeting room she'd reached under the table and touched him where previously he'd been touched in
that
way only by himself.

Even back then he realized that her erotic attraction had more to do with his “personality” than his looks. But he recognized that she was one of those people who could do something for him, both sexually and legally, so after he got out of detention he played along with her game and let her set the rules. No kissing; this wasn't about affection, just “the act.” No being seen together. No calling—she'd contact him via email, but no message other than time, date, and where, which most often was “the usual place,” aka the Seahorse Motel. He was to reply with a blank email if he couldn't make it, or nothing at all if he could; he always made it.

The sexual relationship had gone on for years, even after she left the Legal Aid Society. They also had a “business relationship,” what she called her “projects,” which meant paying him to terrorize, hurt, and, on two occasions, kill people she considered to be in the way of her goals. He'd at first been surprised to learn that they had so much in common; her conscience was no more troubled by what she asked him to do than his was in doing it. He thought that probably had a lot to do with her attraction to him—like two vicious, singular animals coming together only to mate.

It was all fine with him, but he was getting tired of the long bus ride to Atlantic City, which was several hours from Manhattan. “Then I want more money,” he said. “I'm through riding that fucking bus. I want to buy a car.”

The woman regarded him coolly for a moment with her green eyes before nodding. “Do this right, and I'll see about a bonus.”

“Better be a big bonus, and don't fuck with me.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Take it any way you want.”

The woman laughed. “I already took it the way I wanted. But finish our little project and you'll get your car.” She paused. “In the meantime, there's someone I want you to meet. Come to my office tomorrow night.”

“I thought we couldn't be seen together,” he replied.

She ignored the sarcasm in his voice. “Come to the side entrance. The security guard will let you in. He'll keep his mouth shut.”

“What time?”

“Seven. Do you have an idea on when you're going to do it?”

“Yeah, I read about some book signing. I'll do it then.”

M
OISHE
S
OBELMAN WOKE UP FROM
his nap in a cold sweat. In his dream, the German officer, Hans Schultz, the man who'd torn him from the arms of his father, knelt in the road, crying and begging for his life:
“I only did what I was told.”
But Moishe ordered him to laugh like he'd laughed listening to desperate people dying in the Sobibor gas chamber. Then with the coward giggling hysterically in terror, the sweat beading on his face, his eyes starting in fear, Moishe dropped the garrote over his head and yanked it tight . . .

He supposed the dreams were tied to Rose Lubinsky's talk at the synagogue a week earlier. Although he'd heard the story before, listening to her tell it in front of the congregation had been overwhelmingly powerful.
The Lost Children of the Holocaust
. He'd thought over and over about the title of her book and its significance. He wondered if those children who, unlike Rose, did not know, or remember, their past felt some absence, some truth that was hidden from them. Not knowing their true identities, unaware of their heritage, having forgotten those who brought them into the world and loved them.

Lubinsky's message had clearly touched many others, judging from the response. Moishe had stolen a quick glance at Zak Karp and noted the tears in his eyes. The boy felt him looking and turned his head and gave him a quick smile before wiping at his tears, embarrassed like any macho kid to have been caught crying. But there had not been time to talk to him alone again after Lubinsky's presentation before Butch, Zak, and his twin brother, Giancarlo, left for home. He hoped that before too long he might get a chance to discuss the effect of her talk on a youngster searching for his own identity.