Trap (9781476793177)

by Tanenbaum, Robert K.

  “Oh, Rose,” he cried out quietly. “I’m not brave like you. I’m as bad as they are.”

  “No,” she said. “You are lost, but you are good. They must be stopped . . . for the children. Promise me . . .”

  Gallo wanted to stand up and turn away from her. “Who butters your bread, Micah?” But instead he nodded. “I’ll try.”

  Rose Lubinsky seemed to relax and squeezed his fingers. “Goodbye, Micah. I have always loved you. Now, please, send Simon . . . then wait for him.”

  Tears streaming from his eyes, Gallo left the room and saw Simon standing across the hallway. “She wants you,” he said.

  Simon nodded and then walked slowly back to the room where his wife waited as though by his pace he could delay the inevitable. Gallo watched him enter the room and close the door, then left the ICU. He didn’t join the others and avoided looking at them.

  A few minutes later, whether five or twenty-five Gallo in his grief didn’t know, Simon Lubinsky returned carrying a manila envelope. “She . . . she . . . ,” he tried to say, but choked on the words. “My love is gone.” He seemed to stumble a bit then and Garcia rushed up to support him.

  After a moment, Simon patted the young man on his broad shoulders and straightened up and looked at Gallo. He held out the manila envelope. “She asked me to give this to you,” he said. “She said you would know what to do with it.”

  Gallo took the envelope, opened it, and pulled out a document. He read it briefly, his brow furrowing. “I don’t understand. When did she give this to you?”

  “There are many things in God’s world that we aren’t meant to understand,” Lubinsky said. “But she gave it to me earlier tonight, after the book signing. She said she saw you come in and leave, and had hoped to speak to you.” He shook his head. “Rose was always intuitive, but even I had no idea what she meant when she said that if anything happened to her, I should give you this.”

  Gallo bowed his head as a sob escaped his lips. The old man reached out and stroked his hair. Then with a sigh, the young man raised his head and turned toward Garcia.

  “You have no reason to trust me,” he said. “But I could use your help.”

  “What are you planning to do?” Garcia asked, his eyes wet but his face grim.

  “Get even.”

  “Then let’s ride, hombre.”

  11

  BY THE TIME LARS FORSLING saw a judge and walked out of The Tombs it was noon. He was tired, angrier than ever, and panicked about his mother. After he told Karp he wanted a lawyer, the conversation had ended and he was turned over to a sleepy Legal Aid attorney, who basically told him not to talk to the prosecutors anymore and that he’d have to wait until morning to get out on bail.

  He was allowed to make a phone call but his mother didn’t pick up. That in itself wasn’t alarming; often as not she’d been drinking heavily and was asleep—or passed out—by eight. However, he couldn’t reach her after he was released either because the jail had not returned his cell phone. “Take it up with the DA,” he was told, “they’re onto it right now.”

  So he’d hurried to the Canal Street subway station, jumped the turnstile, and took the green line north to 116th. Along the way he kept to himself and avoided the hard glares of a group of young blacks. His night in The Tombs had been sleepless, as he was locked up in a cell next to an immense dark Jamaican who kept telling him what he was going to do “to your cracker ass if’n I get a chance.” But then and on the trip north, he was in no position to say or do anything, except quietly hate.

  As the train rattled and rolled, sliding to each stop to let passengers on and off, Forsling grew more impatient and agitated. He imagined his mother’s panic. He’d spent the night out before, of course, but never without telling her, and he’d always had his phone to check up on her. Sometimes that meant having to go home sooner than he’d wanted as she complained bitterly about having to spend a night alone with her real and imagined dangers. “What if some negro breaks in and rapes me,” she’d cry. “You know they’re just looking for a chance. Then you’ll be sorry.”

  IT WAS HARD for him to imagine anyone wanting to have sex with his mother. As she told him at least several times a week, she’d once been a great beauty—a long-legged dancer who’d arrived in New York from Wisconsin to try out for the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall. That hadn’t worked out the way she’d hoped “because those other girls were jealous of my looks and talent. They were sleeping with the bosses so they made sure I didn’t get the job and upstage them.”

  Greta Forsling had survived, like so many other young women who came to Gotham seeking fame on the Great White Way, as a waitress. However, she’d managed to get some bit parts in the chorus or as a walk-on for off-Broadway shows. One of those was to be her ticket to stardom until she’d been seduced and impregnated with Lars by the show’s producer. “He said he was Italian, but I know he was a Jew,” she’d told her son since childhood. “He lied to me, and then after I got pregnant, he wanted me to have an abortion. But I wouldn’t, so he left me for some whore. I gave up being a star so that you could live.”

  When young Lars asked about his father all she’d add was that “he was like all the other Jews and the negroes and spics who see a beautiful blond woman. There’s just one thing on their filthy minds.”

  Greta told her son that she was related to Swedish nobility and that was the only thing that might save him from the taint of his “half-Jewish blood.” He would have to listen to her, and obey her without question, if he wanted to “burn” the accident of his birth out of his body. “We must be vigilant and make sure that the evil never gets a chance to take over,” she warned him. “But you’re lucky you have me as your mother. I love you, and I’ll save you from yourself.”

  After Lars’s birth, they’d moved to Brooklyn, where she’d found more work in diners, working for men who invariably fell into the category of “niggers, Jews, and spics,” and all of whom seemed to spend most of their time trying to get her into bed. Not that she resisted all of them. Ever since Lars could remember there’d been a steady stream of men of all types and colors going into her bedroom at night and not coming out until morning. They’d look down at the boy sleeping on the couch—some would smirk, others would pat him on the head and even give him the change from their pockets, but few ever came back for seconds.

  Whatever beauty Greta Forsling once had faded into a frowsy, overweight, bottle-blonde with veins in her cheeks from too much cheap vodka, and deep lines around her eyes and mouth from chain-smoking cigarettes. And she’d gone downhill from there.

  She never seemed to keep a job for long—blaming it on “sexual harassment” and other women’s jealousies—which meant they never lived anywhere for any length of time either. Lars got used to coming home from school to find an eviction notice on the door and his mother gone. Sometimes she scribbled a note on the notice to tell him where to look for her; other times she just left him to figure it out himself or wait for her to come looking for him.

  The constant moving, his embarrassment over the tattered clothes he wore, and his overbearing, usually drunk mother meant that he’d had few friends. Any time it looked like he might have found one, his mother would discourage it. The neighborhoods where they could afford to live were all poor and mixed race, and she didn’t want him “hanging out with mud people,” warning that close associations with other races and ethnicities might “bring out the Jew in you.”

  It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d found a friend. Sooner or later he’d go home and there’d be a new eviction notice and he’d be off to a new part of the city and a new school.

  The closest he ever came to having peers was in high school, where for a time he’d hung out with other “alternative” kids who didn’t fit into the social strata. They wore black clothing, dyed their hair and eyebrows the color of coal, and used dark eye shadow while working to maintain perfectly pasty complexions. They’d gather behind the gym, smoke cigarettes, and talk
about how “fucked up” the world was, but they weren’t really friends. Mostly just a collection of outcasts drawn together by their antisocial attitudes.

  Another eviction notice had arrived during his junior year in high school. It was something of a miracle that he’d made it that far, but he wasn’t stupid and something inside of him had made him cling to the hope of someday bettering his situation. However, this time he never went back.

  They’d moved over to Manhattan and a run-down, two-story walk-up on the Upper East Side. But not that Upper East Side, the one with all the rich, well-dressed people, who drove expensive cars and lived in nice, clean buildings with doormen and security guards. No, their neighborhood, though technically the Upper East Side, was only a few blocks south of East Harlem. A land of crime-ridden, crumbling tenements, and more closely resembling the economic conditions and cultural makeup of the latter than the former.

  By this time his mother had given up even pretending to look for work. She’d become so obese, which had contributed to her diabetes, that she qualified for disability checks and spent most of her days and nights propped up beneath stained, threadbare silk sheets in a worn-out king-sized bed eating junk food, reading romance novels, smoking cigarette after cigarette until the ashtrays were overrun with butts, and drinking her vodka with 7Up.

  Sometimes she’d go for a month or more without leaving the apartment; Lars cashed her disability checks for her and bought whatever it would cover. It was all she could do to waddle to the toilet and back to her bed. She rarely bathed, preferring to cover up any bodily odors with a cheap perfume.

  And yet, despite all of that, Lars Forsling loved his mother. When she wasn’t warning him about the “Jewish poison” coursing through his veins, or berating him for forgetting her cigarettes or vodka, or reminding him that she’d “given up everything” so that he could live and that he was “cruel” to leave her alone, she was the only person who’d ever said she loved him. He was “the smartest boy in your school . . . the best-looking . . . the nicest.” Whatever the danger of his father’s diseased blood, he had pure Nordic DNA that would “burn it out of your body so long as you listen to your mother.”

  He knew that their relationship was dysfunctional and that his dependence on her was unhealthy. From time to time he’d dreamed of moving to Idaho, where he’d be welcomed into one of the white supremacist camps. But whenever he brought it up, his mother would scream at him for being ungrateful for all she’d sacrificed and then weep hysterically and threaten to kill herself. So he’d resign himself to the life he had, at least while his mother was still alive.

  Although indoctrinated in racism since childhood, Lars had not acted on his beliefs until his midtwenties, when on a whim he decided to attend an American Nazi Party meeting he’d seen advertised on a flyer taped to a street light pole. Held in the basement of The Storm Trooper, a dive bar in Hell’s Kitchen, the meeting had been attended by only a dozen or so brown-shirted young- to midforties-aged men sporting red-black-and-white Nazi armbands. A small, dumpy man in a black SS shirt with a Hitler-style mustache named Bob Mencke had led the meeting, starting with a loud, off-key and poorly pronounced singing of “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” followed by a lengthy diatribe essentially blaming all the woes of the poor, white males in America on blacks, “fags,” and Jews.

  Mencke had finished his speech with an admonition to prepare for the coming race war, and a plea to members to pay their association dues “so that our good works can continue,” as well as to purchase his monthly newsletter, The New York Der Stürmer. He concluded the meeting by asking “all new recruits”—Lars was the only one—to introduce themselves.

  Uncomfortable and embarrassed, Forsling had stood and stammered out his name and that he was of pure Nordic blood. “And all of my life, I’ve been told about the bad things that are being done to the white race.” Not knowing what else to say, he’d started to sit down but stopped when, led by Mencke, the other members began to applaud. It was the first time in his life he’d heard that sound applied to him, and so was the warm welcome he received when the meeting adjourned and the members went upstairs to drink beer.

  Forsling was hooked. He realized that most of the members were what larger society would label “losers.” Some of them were simply socially inept in more mainstream groups, others lacked intelligence and so were easily led, and some just plain violent, angry young white males looking for justification to vent. Smart if undereducated, Forsling soon stood out among the losers as a leader. He immersed himself in Nazi culture and education, reading Mein Kampf and tracts by European and American Nazis so thoroughly that Mencke began asking him to speak at meetings.

  It was from his studies that he’d learned about the “Aryan mecca,” in parts of Idaho, where he dreamed that the sort of acceptance he’d received from the New York members would be greatly magnified. He might even find a good Aryan wife and live his life among pure white people in the pristine mountains. But not while Mom’s alive.

  In preparation for the race war and to make himself appear more formidable, he bought himself an old set of weights and worked out incessantly in his bedroom. He’d followed that up by getting “Sieg Heil” tattooed across his forehead, and when that was met with words of respect and admiration from his peers, as well as seeing the intimidation it generated among the general population, he’d added the swastikas on his temples. No one minded when he began affecting a slight German accent, and when one of the other members noticed, he’d said he got it from his mother “who comes from Swedish nobility.”

  Forsling liked to be thought of as tough and ready to fight. But beneath the tattoos and leather coats he was still a frightened boy growing up in tough neighborhoods without a father and with a slovenly, abusive drunk of a mother. He got in a few scrapes when he had other, rougher members of the gang with him to do most of the fighting, but he left the truly violent work to those who enjoyed it, like Jimmy Gerlach, who worked as a bouncer at The Storm Trooper. According to his admirers in the club, Gerlach had served time in Attica for manslaughter after he punched a black man who died after he fell and hit his head.

  There was one thing Forsling feared more than anything else: rats. Ever since he could remember he’d been terrified of them. His mother attributed it to a time when he was still an infant and she’d heard him crying. “I went to check on you in your crib and there was this enormous rat biting your face,” she said. “That was another time I saved you.” But whatever the cause, even the sight of one could be enough to cause him to panic.

  Forsling’s role as a leader in the group had changed dramatically when he suggested the group participate in Kristallnacht USA. He’d read that the Nazi party and other white supremacist groups were going to commemorate the German event by attacking Jewish businesses and homes on the anniversary.

  Mencke, who as it turned out was always more talk than action, had argued against it. “The time isn’t right,” he said. “We need to continue to grow and marshal our forces.”

  However, most of the rest of the group had been persuaded by Forsling’s enthusiasm and voted to participate. It marked the change in leadership of the group, though Mencke remained Oberkommando. Still, Forsling was in charge and led the planning for Kristallnacht.

  Although the group caused quite a bit of damage to Jewish businesses and defaced the doors and walls at the Holocaust Museum in Battery Park, Forsling was disappointed when only half the members reported for duty. He was even more disappointed when the national commemoration fizzled out. He’d been arrested outside the museum and charged with vandalism, which got him his first night in The Tombs, though he’d been able to get one of the girls who hung around the group to look in on his mom so the next day’s lecture would be mild. That arrest, and his subsequent dressing-down of the absent members, vaulted him to the top of the group’s hierarchy, with even Mencke addressing him as an equal.

  High on the praise of his social group, Forsling had looked for another venue in which
to make a name for himself and found it when he was looking through the Sunday New York Times book section and saw the announcement about Rose Lubinsky’s book signing at Il Buon Pane. He hadn’t intended on getting arrested that night and had actually snuck away from the protest to find a tree to pee behind when he got caught walking back on the street next to the bakery.

  He was actually proud of how he’d stood up to Karp and the black detective. But he knew that his mother was going to be an angry, weeping mess when he got back home.

  FORSLING WAS WORKING on his explanation to his mother when he rounded the corner and saw the fire truck and crowd of onlookers halfway down the block in front of the walk-up where he lived. He walked faster. Has to be that family of spics next door using the stove to heat their apartment again, he told himself and began to run.

  Only it wasn’t the family next door. He arrived in front of his home and stared up at the second floor, with its shattered windows and the smoke damage evident on the outside. The top of the building was virtually gone, the roof having caved in before the firefighters could put the blaze out. He ducked under the yellow tape that had been wrapped around the outside of the walk-up.

  “Hey, buddy, get outta there,” a man in a firefighter officer’s uniform yelled at him.

  “This is my house,” Forsling explained. “I live here with my mom.”

  The officer, who was standing near the truck, gave the other man a look and walked over. He held out his hand but Forsling ignored it as he looked back at the building. “Son, I’m Captain Bo Loselle of the New York Fire Department. I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  Forsling looked at him wildly “What bad news? What do you mean? Where’s my mom?”

  “There was a fire. It appears to have started in your mother’s bedroom.”

  “So what hospital is she in?”

  Loselle shook his head. “I’m sorry. She didn’t make it. She’s at the city medical examiner’s office. I can have one of my men give you a ride . . .”