by Dean Unkefer
I thought for a moment, then I answered truthfully, “No.”
Flowers was both surprised and pleased. He pulled off my wires and patted me on the back like I had just won some type of award. “Thank you. I believe you. You are a good agent. You’ve never taken any drug money, unlike the rest of your friends. I know what’s going on. You must help me find the truth.”
We shook hands and I left.
GRAMERCY PARK
For the next week or so things quieted down and, oddly, Michael began to take more of a personal interest in me. Perhaps it was because I passed the polygraphs and everyone knew Flowers had nothing on me.
Of all the things that I had seen – killings, mutilations, strung-out junkies – nothing horrified me more than something Michael showed me one night just for fun. We had been talking to an informant in a hotel room on the West Side. He had not been contacted by Flowers, so, at least for now, things seemed to be at a standstill. It was about midnight and, incredibly, neither one of us had had a drink all day. Michael suggested we go downtown to a special club in Gramercy Park. It was a big three-story mansion with leaded-glass windows and a heavy oak front door. Michael knocked on the door and a man in a butler suit answered. Before we could say anything, he said, “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but this is a private club. Members only.”
Michael came out of the shadows so the butler could have a better look at him.
The butler closed the door quietly and we just stood there. After a few minutes the door opened and a woman motioned us to come in. Tiffany lamps, fringes, wood stairways, crown molding, and crystal chandeliers gave the place an old Victorian look. The woman who greeted us was in her fifties and dressed very stylishly. Her reading glasses hung around her neck on a gold chain. She led us off to the side of the foyer into a small office, and then through another door to a larger office decorated with books and vases of orchids. She sat behind a desk and stared at Michael. Then, in a trembling voice, she asked, “What do you want?”
Michael grinned. “We thought you might be a little short-handed tonight, so we came to help you with your clients.”
The color drained from her face. Wherever Michael went, people reacted as though they were meeting the devil himself. She was too frightened to even answer.
Michael saved her from further embarrassment. “My friend drinks vodka straight, no garnish, on the rocks. I drink scotch the same way.”
Her hand was shaking as she picked up the phone and ordered bottles of vodka and scotch with a bucket of ice and two glasses. Almost instantly a young man arrived carrying a tray, set it down on the desk, and walked out without saying a word. Michael and I fixed our drinks and sat down facing the woman across the desk. Michael pulled on his drink and watched the poor frightened woman like a snake would watch a mouse. Then he said, “Things should be getting started soon. We don’t want to participate, we just want to watch.” This bothered the woman even more. She kept quietly repeating, “Please, please, please.” Michael tried to put her at ease a little bit, raising his glass with approval. “Not bad. Thank you. Single malt. Very good.” And then he said, “I don’t care who your clients are, we just want to watch. This is my partner and I’m training him. Who knows, someday you may need him, or worse, far worse, someday he may need you.”
She picked up the phone again, asking whoever was on the other end to “find Robin and send her to the office right away.”
Within a few minutes a black girl came in, wearing a white nurse’s uniform with a folded white cap. The older woman looked at the nurse and said, “Robin, these are special guests of mine. They don’t want to meet anyone. They’re not here for therapy. Take them with you. They’re just here to observe. Let them see some of the stations. Please be careful; I will be waiting here in the office.”
Michael and I followed Nurse Robin out of the office into a smaller one where she stopped, walked up to a blank wall and pushed on it. It opened up to a dark hallway and she led us in, closing the secret panel behind us. With the exception of little lights along the floor, it was completely dark. We went through a narrow walkway and down a small flight of steps to a landing. She stepped back and waved to Michael.
Michael chuckled. “I’ve seen it all before. Let him look.”
I walked over to the black wall and put my eye up to a small hole. I could see a room of rough stonewalls. There were steel rings anchored every four or five feet, waist high. A fat, naked, bald, white man was tied to one of the rings by his wrists. He knelt on the floor screaming and crying. Then I saw why. A woman came into view; she was dressed in high-heeled black leather boots, a wide belt with studs around her waist, and a black leather bra that exposed her nipples through large holes in the center. She wore a black mask that covered her face, but allowed her long black hair to flow down over her shoulders. The man was already covered in blood, but she stepped back and hit him again with a short whip. He screamed and whimpered like a dog. She hit him again and again, and he screamed and cried. Then she walked over and grabbed his head and pushed it between her naked thighs. She threw her head back and stared at the ceiling.
I couldn’t watch any more. I stepped back like I had been poked in the eye. Michael had been watching me, smoking a cigarette. He told Nurse Robin to go back to the office and get the vodka and scotch, and meet us at station two.
As Michael and I groped through the darkened corridors I saw tripods and camera equipment. Michael said, “You haven’t seen anything yet. Just remember sex is at its best when it’s forced perversion.”
Michael looked through the second peek-hole first, and then said, “You’ll like this. This one is special. Even I haven’t seen it before.”
I peeked through the hole at station number two. There were two men on the floor, on their hands and knees. They were wearing leather masks and had a steel bit, like a horse bridle, jammed in their mouth between their teeth, and a wide dog collar around their necks. One man’s harness was red; the other blue, matching the outfits of the girls who tortured them. They were wielding riding crops. There was some type of weird competition going on. The girls made the men roll over on their backs and raise their legs in the air, and then they struck them on the groin with the riding crop. Whoever screamed and cried the loudest seemed to win. Then they lifted the horse bits from their mouths and made them lick each other’s crotch to ease the pain. When one of them was not licking hard enough, a girl would whack him on the buttocks with her riding crop. The men licked each other’s cocks and sucked each other’s testicles until finally the women separated them. Then the two girls began beating the two men all over again.
I pulled away from the peephole and looked at Michael. He was smiling at me over the rim of a fresh glass of scotch. I think he wondered if I was aroused. Then he said, “I brought Dewey here, too. He loved it.”
I knew if I didn’t leave soon I would throw up. I turned to Michael. “I can’t stand this. I gotta get out of here.”
Nurse Robin pointed us to go back the way we came, but Michael said, “We’re going out through the locker room. My friend doesn’t like the golden shower.”
Nurse Robin shook her head no.
Michael smiled at her and repeated, “We’re going out through the locker room. I want my friend to see who these people are.”
“No. I’m sorry but that’s not authorized, and I can’t permit this.”
Michael just stared at her.
In this situation, I could imagine Ed or Dewey decking anyone who stood in their way, but I had never seen Michael hit anybody, ever. There was just something about Michael, something unnatural and terrifying. It was as if he could read your mind, but only the bad things, the weaknesses, the perversions, and of course, the lies. He just gave her a moment to think … and without another word, she led us forward to a wall at the end of the corridor where she stopped and peeked through, then unlatched a door and let us into another small office containing medical equipment. After closing the secret passage behind us she led
us through another smaller room into the kind of locker room used by professional athletes – carpeted benches, shelves, hangers, shiny wood, chandeliers. Each locker space had clothes, shoes, coats, shirts, and ties, neatly folded or hung on the padded hangers.
Michael nudged me and said, “Remember what I taught you,” and he pointed to the hanging clothes.
I couldn’t remember a thing Michael had told me that related to what I had just seen. The first locker held a silk suit, expensive shoes, and a diamond-studded watch. The next locker stunned me. Above the black suit, black shoes and socks sat a priest’s collar.
Michael said, “In six months he’ll be the next Archbishop of New York.” He gave a little chuckle and we moved on to the next locker, to more expensive suits, expensive jewelry, and then there were women’s clothes, elegant silk underwear and designer shoes. Then Robin said, “Each of our guests is attended to by at least two escorts to ensure their privacy and take care of any special needs they may have after their procedures.”
“That’s always good to know,” Michael said.
Robin then led us to a small foyer, not as elegant as the one we had come in by. She opened the outside door for us and Michael and I walked back out into the cool night air. Michael laughed. “Dewey set the nurse up. He tried to tip her ten dollars and she threw it on the floor. She was so insulted and busy throwing the ten dollars on the floor she didn’t see Dewey steal a riding crop as a souvenir. I think he wanted it to use on the snotty advertising bitch he keeps on the side, or maybe she was going to use it on his pasty white ass. Dewey’s a funny guy, but really tricky.”
We were about three houses down from the front entrance when Michael volunteered what I wanted to know. “They have to turn down requests for membership. They can’t handle all the business. Do you know how much it costs just to go through one hour of their therapy? Anywhere from two to five thousand dollars. They have to know what they’re doing to avoid serious injuries, and of course everything is confidential. I don’t know what the initiation fee is, but these are the kind of people that don’t worry about such things.”
He pointed up and down the street at four limos waiting with their engines purring.
“Why?” I asked. I felt like Ed with his dumb questions at our meetings at the Heidelberg. “Why do they do that?”
“Because they have to.” He looked at me and must have realized how truly naïve I was, because he continued in a more understanding tone. “These people have lost their souls. It’s a terrible thing to lose, because you almost never get it back.” Michael sounded like he was Lucifer, explaining how he made a living.
“Okay, Michael, how do you lose your soul?”
“Easy,” he said. “You just start by caring more about saving yourself than anyone else. You see, all of those people in there have one thing in common; they’re all high-powered, ambitious, and very selfish. They inflict pain and cruelty on people all day long, at their jobs, in their families. Why, these business people and priests are so ruthless they make what we do look like a church picnic. They have to do something like this to make themselves feel, just to feel anything. They get so wound up inside themselves that the only way to feel anything is with pain. Pain becomes pleasure. It’s the only window left to them to be alive. At least they feel something, and that reminds them that they’re not dead. They humiliate themselves – and like to be whipped – as a private payback for what they do every day to others. To them it seems to balance the scale. They beat up on people during the day and they get beat up in a fancy club at night. It’s the only way to live when you’ve lost your conscience, or if you prefer, your soul.”
To the underworld, to the Bureau, to most of the law-enforcement community, Michael was known as the cruelest, most ruthless, and most evil agent on the planet. But now I saw a different side of him, and for the first time, I looked at him as a human being. Before he hailed a cab, to go wherever he went late at night, he gave me a warning: “If you hurt people long enough and hard enough, I’ll get you a membership to that club, a membership all your own.”
For some odd desperate reason I began to think about Daisy and my son. Stranger still, I looked at all of the insanity pouring into my life and began to understand the pleasures at Gramercy Park.
DINNER WITH A FRIEND
I met a model named Cookie at the bar in Maxwell Plum’s, one of my nighttime haunts on Second Avenue. At first I thought she was a hooker, and she certainly looked underage. Cookie was intrigued with what she called my “air of mystery” and soon we were kissing. She felt the gun tucked under my armpit and I could tell that it excited her even more. She had a nice apartment in the 80’s on the East Side so I decided to stay there for a while. Daisy’s temporary move to Chicago to live with her parents had lasted months and I doubted that she and Mark would ever come back. Every day I expected to see divorce papers in the mail. I hated going home to the dirty, empty apartment. And now, at least I had a sex life.
Something else good happened after I met Cookie; Del Ridley invited me to dinner. We had trained together in Washington with Jerry Ramirez, but he didn’t like Michael and Dewey, so he transferred to Group One. At the Heidelberg meeting that week Michael had put Del Ridley on the top of the list of agents who would probably cooperate with Flowers. Del had even started to dress better – with shined shoes, starched shirts and dark suits – after the investigation began. I suspected that the invitation had something to do with the investigation, but I was lonely and glad to accept.
I brought Cookie because I knew Del’s wife Sarah was a model too, so they could talk about their vanities. Del and Sarah’s apartment was nicely furnished in a rent-controlled brownstone on the West Side. Although Cookie couldn’t string two coherent sentences together, she talked all the time. The evening started out as a lot of fun. It was the first normal thing that I had done since joining the Bureau, but then, like everything else in my life, there was a strange turn. Sarah asked Cookie to go for a walk. Walking was the last thing Cookie wanted to do, since she was wearing spiked high heels. Sarah insisted and they left, leaving Del and me alone to talk. I sensed a set up.
Del got right to the point. “I’m helping Andy Flowers. Surely you can see he’s right. You know what’s been going on. Dewey, Michael, Silkey, Greenway, they’ve all been stealing drug money, killing, and giving heroin to informants. They’re all going to the penitentiary for at least twenty years. You can’t believe what Andy’s investigators have found out. Andy says you’re an honest agent, but if you’re not careful, you’re going with them. You know they’ve got to be stopped. Michael is evil. He’s the mastermind, and Dewey Paris is a killer.”
I wasn’t surprised at what I was hearing. “Dewey Paris is not a killer. He may have killed a lot of people, but he’s not a killer. There’s a difference.”
“Yes, he is. What about Bobby Moon? He was shot twelve times. Do you call that self-defense?”
Now I was annoyed. “Bobby Moon was going to shoot me. I was making a buy of seventy-five thousand dollars from the Scarluci family. He tried to rob me. Dewey and Ed Silkey saved my life. Moon would kill anyone who just looked at him funny. There are police reports all over the place. The killing was justified. Now you and Flowers want to change that? Why? Look at what Dewey and Michael have accomplished. The list of Mafia leaders, drug dealers, murderers, the list is endless. Doesn’t that mean anything?”
Del shook his head. “Their names are not even on most of the reports.”
“That’s it, isn’t it? Numbers, paperwork. Answer me this: have Dewey, Michael, or any of the others ever lost a dollar of government money? They don’t even cheat on their expense reports. Michael hasn’t filed for reimbursement for his travel expenses in years. It’s all about the paperwork isn’t it? What about the war on drugs? What about this country?”
Del was still determined. “Flowers asked me to talk to you. He respects you very much and he needs your help. Flowers knows what a good agent you are. He knows y
ou’ve never taken any money and won’t lie on a government report. He knows about your first case. You proved to everyone that you’d rather lose your job than lie. They wanted Dewey first; he’s incompetent and weak. Flowers thought getting Dewey would be easy.”
“Incompetent, weak?” I almost laughed. “Jesus Christ, you have no idea. Flowers is an idiot, a bureaucratic idiot. Dewey and Michael are the toughest, meanest, smartest agents in the Bureau.”
Del said, “These people are evil. They’re wrong. I’m sorry you can’t see it. Michael doesn’t scare me. I’m not afraid of them.”
I looked back at him. “You should be.”
“I’ll tell Andy about your threat.”
“Threat? Jesus Christ! We’re in a war, can’t you see that?”
He just shook his head and looked away.
“Thank you for dinner,” I said, “but I’m out of here. You and I see things differently.” I walked out of the apartment without saying another word. It took me a few minutes to find Cookie hobbling along after Sarah. I thanked Sarah and hailed a cab.
The next day I met with Dewey and told him about my conversation with Del. Dewey was not surprised and said, “Del Ridley has never been on one single case that would be of interest to Andy Flowers. The sad thing about Ridley is he thinks he’s a street agent, but he isn’t even a decent paper pusher. We also know more about Flowers’ Task Force; they’re FBI, they’re IRS, they’re Justice Department, a mixture of elite agents – all of them with clean records and all of them are absolutely sure they know the difference between right and wrong. I think they’re very determined and Michael is worried. Now they want you; you’ll be their first target because you’re the weakest and you can bring the rest of us down.”
I had a bad feeling. “Never.”
Manchester, our international informant from the Moon/Scarluci case, was the first to go. Flowers’ investigators didn’t like the way the case was written up. They said it was “a little too staged” and “too convenient for the wiretap” so they interviewed Charlie Moon in prison. Everyone knew Charlie Moon was still running things from his cell, but that didn’t concern Flowers and his investigative agents. They told Charlie Moon that Manchester was an informant and that Michael and Dewey had killed his son Bobby. The police found Manchester in his apartment garage, slumped over the steering wheel of his Cadillac with a bullet in the back of his head. The office was filled with stories of the same type: informants running for their lives, being murdered. Flowers was building a reputation to scare people into cooperating, but he was still a bull in a china shop, except he was breaking real people.