CHAPTER

FOUR

THE PHONE RANG SATURDAY MORNING AND I ignored it.

I cinched my leather harness and assumed the role of master. Danny responded, his erection growing underneath the sheet. I instructed him not to move—to keep his eyes on the ceiling - and selected a feather whip and alligator teeth tit clamps for play.

Danny moaned lightly under the whip. His nipples rose into purple buds when I attached the clamps. I placed my left hand over his mouth and commanded him to lick it clean, finger by finger. He took my thumb into his mouth and sucked. I lashed his groin and the inside of his thighs as he washed my fingers. As the master, I maintained the precise measure of the whip: enough force to sting the skin with pleasure, but not enough to cause harm. Under the lash, Danny bent like a sapling. After he had completed the service on my hand, I took one of his socks and stuffed it into his mouth. Then, I lit a candle and dripped hot wax from his sternum to groin. His body shivered with each white drop.

The phone rang for a second time—ten annoying rings.

I freed Danny’s hand and allowed him to masturbate to orgasm. I released his bindings and we showered together. I permitted Danny to wash and kiss me, and then I washed and kissed him.

When the phone rang the third time, Danny shot me an exasperated look, chiding me for being such a Luddite.

“I am not getting an answering machine,” I said.

We sat naked on the bed and talked for an hour. Then, while he kissed me, Danny eased into his clothes. I was ready for round two, but my less-than-subservient slave had plans for the afternoon. We promised to get together for a movie in a couple of days. He kissed me and then left. I pulled the weights from under my bed and worked out for 45 minutes. Then, I put on a light cotton robe and stretched out across the bed. The room was dim under a low, gray July sky.

A couple of years ago, I visited a fortune teller who had a little business on the edge of Bay Village. A garish storefront window, with a blinking red neon sign and curtains of brightly colored beads strung across it, called to any suckers who passed by. There was a green door with an outstretched yellow hand, palm forward, painted on the glass. I was always on the fence about such hocus-pocus, not really believing in palmistry, séances, or other such nonsense, but, on a whim, I decided to give this woman a try. Perhaps I had puffed too much grass that day. I opened the door and the tangy smell of paprika entered my nose. She lived upstairs and had a pot of goulash on the stove. The munchies kicked in as she descended the stairs. She was a short European woman with curly black hair and legs as thick as tree trunks.

“You half the geeft of proph-ee-see,” she said in her best fake gypsy accent. That’s about all I remember from an hour long session which emptied my wallet of $100. But I never forgot her pronouncement.

Too bad I had lacked the gift to foretell Stephen’s attack, when the knife missed his stomach and liver by centimeters. The assailant was a kid—at least that was the word on the street - a hatemonger, a dangerous boy playing with a sharp toy. The fool should have known better than to stab a gay newspaper columnist and ex-police reporter. All the rags raged, including the straight press, but no knife was ever found, no arrests ever made.

My supposed gift was even worse when it came to Ms. Deranged. I was shot in the left arm when I made a stupid attempt to skim money from a triple threat—drag queen, crack cocaine dealer, and pimp. Needless to say, she was pissed. I reported to the unforgiving and unimpressed police that I was shot in an attempted robbery. Stephen, being my best buddy after saving his life, made pilgrimages to my cheerfully drab hospital room for a couple of days. After my recovery, I gave him the bullet and went cold turkey on all sauces: herbal, capsule, powder, and liquid. Stephen’s boyfriend John stepped back, allowing our time together, realizing we had formed our own strange bond.

Since Stephen’s visit to inform me about the Combat Zone killing, I had been incessantly plagued by my dreams of death and cold. A particularly disturbing one involved a naked man strapped to a wooden slab in a Nazi laboratory. He was being tortured by a sadistic young soldier. So, in my dreams and even awake, I started to see—picture—this soldier, the man who killed. The resolution was fuzzy, the face indistinct, but I knew he was real even though he was a product of my dreams. That much I surmised. But there was much more I couldn’t put my finger on. In my waking hours, the soldier was never in the Zone, but far away in a cluttered room with little light and close air—a horror of a space—but full of the possibility of answers, like a Ouija Board gone bad.

***

I was sleeping, curled into a tight ball, clammy from the dream. In some odd way, whatever the mind dreams, the mind knows. Dreaming is wonderful if there are no nightmares. But who has such a luxury? I pulled the blanket over me and prayed to be saved by an absent God. Nothing is as damning as the silence in your head after a prayer.

The phone rang. This time I answered.

Wonder of wonders, Stephen Cross was on the line. His voice had that edgy, anxious tone of a father who’s lost his child in a department store.

“I was with Danny—as if it’s any of your business,” I said, making my excuse for not answering the phone earlier.

“Get a goddamn machine,” Stephen replied tartly.

“Out of the question. One, I don’t like them. Two, I don’t have the money for such extravagances.”

“A machine is not an extravagance, it’s a necessity. We’re ready to enter the 21^st Century, yet no one can reach you. Hermits are very passé.”

“That’s the way I like it,” I said, growing annoyed at Stephen’s jabs.

“No wonder you don’t make enough money for extravagances. If you don’t answer the phone, no one can hire you for your services.”

My irritation faded. “Okay, point taken,” I said. “You need a bodyguard?”

“Yeah, just in case.” He relaxed a little and the tension began to melt.

“You want to talk?”

“I’d rather you come by for conversation—let’s say a verbal three-way in about an hour.”

“I didn’t think you and John were into that.”

“We’re not. John’s at work. I’ve got a call into District Four. Chris Spinetti will be by.” Stephen’s voice sparkled a little.

The hair on the back of my neck bristled. I had no use for Spinetti, a Boston police detective. I could barely hide my disgust for the dick. After I was shot, Chris had driven me to hell and back and since then had almost singlehandedly ruined my career. I was annoyed by Stephen’s tempered glee.

“I couldn’t care less about seeing Chris, and I’m sure he feels the same way.”

“Get over it,” Stephen said. “I want you to know everything. You’re my pipeline, Des, and my bodyguard.”

Was that all Stephen saw in me—security? What about John, the boy wonder? How was he at protection? I had never offered my heart to Stephen; after all, I really wasn’t the marrying kind, but I sent out signals he couldn’t ignore. Little looks I shot his way during our monthly get-togethers. For the first time in my life, I had sampled what it might be like to be in love, and I liked it. But, as any grade school student knows, there has to be a sender and a receiver for two-way communication, and no messages had been received, no hints taken.

There was an uncomfortable silence before I responded with a simple, “Thanks.”

“There’s been another murder,” Stephen said, his voice edgy again.

I was silent.

“In New Hampshire,” he continued, “but it matches the pattern of the Combat Zone killing. A married man, for Christ’s sake. He took his last cruise at the rest stop on I-93 in Salem. His cock ended up in his left hand.” He stifled a half-hearted chuckle. “Not attached. When they turned the body over they found a swastika carved into his thigh.” Stephen sighed. “Remember Edward the Second?”

I wanted to say something flip like, “Not, personally, but if you’re speaking of Marlowe’s play…,” but I couldn’t. All I could imagine was that bloody body on the ground. Instead I said, “King of England, 1307 to 1327, the son of Edward the First and Eleanor of Castille. The first Prince of Wales—”

“—Sorry, should have known better. This man died like Edward, but instead of Isabella and Mortimer ordering the death of the King by the insertion of a red-hot poker in the rectum, this killer updated his modus operandi for the ’90s. A .357 up the ass.”

The soldier from my dream popped back into my head.

“I was in a bookstore looking for Shakespeare’s plays. Macbeth or Julius Caesar. The ceiling was vaulted and through the window I saw a flying buttress. Then the dream shifted in an instant, the way dreams do, and I was standing in the snow outside a small wooden hut.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Stephen asked.

“This afternoon…when I was sleeping. I opened the door to the hut, wanting to get out of the cold, and I saw a naked man on a tilted wooden slab. He was barely alive, his face drawn and ashen, and colored with streaks of sea-foam green. His right arm was stripped free of skin from shoulder to elbow, muscle and tendon exposed. The soldier who was torturing him drew his pistol and fired. He shouted something when he pulled the trigger.”

“Arschficker?” Stephen asked.

“It could have been. I don’t know German. But there was something even more disturbing—in the corner was a metal vat filled with freezing water, it smelled of salt and frost. There was a man surrounded by chunks of ice, his skin was shimmering, blue with cold. I couldn’t understand what he was shouting, but he kept calling to me, arms outstretched. He wanted me to save him and I couldn’t…. And then the soldier killed him, too.”

I could feel the goose bumps run over Stephen’s body. It took him a few seconds to compose himself before he said, “Some times you scare me, Des. Don’t tell me any more dreams. Please come over.”

“Dangerous stuff is going down,” I said. “I know it from the dream.”

I hung up after promising to be over in an hour. I took off my robe, dropped it on the bed and walked to the shower. Little beads of sweat ran down my neck and chest, and I was strangely cold for a warm July afternoon, but the hot water soon warmed my body and soul. As I relaxed in the steam, I made up my mind to keep select details of my personal life from Stephen Cross. After all, in my dream he was the man in the vat.

The trip to Stephen’s was an excuse to get out of my apartment, shake off my lethargy, and rejuvenate my dislike for Chris Spinetti. The murders, my sense of mortality, hammered a cat-like arch of anxiety into my back. No matter how tenuous the thread, there was a connection between Stephen and me (as John had recognized). Usually, the shared violence of our histories guided our conversations, but when we were together we sometimes talked about his writings, the theories he advanced, the groups he discussed in his weekly column. We talked about Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Conservatives, Protestants, Catholics, the Christian Right, the militia movement, neo-Nazis, and gay bashers. We rarely talked about sex. Of all these topics, Stephen was most interested in Nazis and gay bashers, whom he saw as an increasing threat inspired by the politics of the country. I wasn’t quite sure of the reasons for his fascination with things National Socialist, but I suspected it had to do with his struggle to understand such movements, combined with the lingering effects of the violence he had experienced.

While pondering my relationship with Stephen, I also wondered what I might do to annoy my old friend Chris Spinetti. If he was the closet case I suspected, nothing would set him off like a good dose of drag. I pulled a white cotton slip with lace trim from my dresser, slipped it on, and tucked it into a pair of black jeans. I had mastered that maneuver long ago with some artful diapering of the crotch. I chose a leather jacket and a pair of boots to complete my outfit. The afternoon air was misty and cool enough for heavier clothing.

Stephen and John lived at 308 Channing, west of my apartment on the same street. The fifteen-minute walk took me past the Victorian brownstones of the South End—the graceful, curving bow fronts constructed 120 years ago that lined the street like the crests of waves. My end of Channing was dirtier and dingier: the red bricks had turned a sad brown. Stephen and John were strictly upper class compared to my neighborhood. The classy end of Channing had no burned-out buildings, no drug dealers smoking crack on the stoop, no homeless living under the steps. Three-zero-eight was in a “better part” of the South End with clean-swept gutters, gas lamps that worked, and pruned maple and ash trees protected by ornamental wrought-iron guards.

At 2:30 p.m., I walked up the high concrete steps to Stephen’s apartment and rang the buzzer, about a half-hour before Chris was scheduled to arrive. Stephen, wearing only a blue towel wrapped around his waist, peered through the double-glass doors. Unlike his lover, John, Stephen was displaying the slight paunch common to most over-forty American males. And, horror of horrors, I spotted patches of white scalp through the strands of his wet black hair. I lowered my gaze to steal a peak at his towel-covered crotch. Nothing extraordinary there. I mentally slapped myself for being such a bitch and then chalked it up to jealousy. I admired the man and his life more than I cared to admit. If only our lives had not been so different, I could have taken my “crush” to a whole different level. I envied Stephen and John, in their home, safe and comfortable in their monogamous relationship. They were real. They meant something.

“You’re early,” he said, sounding eerily similar to Michael in The Boys in the Band, except the line to Harold was “You’re late.”

“I just got out of the shower,” he said, drily.

“No kidding.”

He ushered me through a tasteful hall decorated with expensive table lamps and landscape prints and into the apartment. The living room with its wood-burning fireplace, large bay window, and chintz settee seemed as composed and cheerful as a Mozart piano concerto. Stephen told me to make myself at home and then left the room.

I thought I might help myself to the scotch on the drinks tray, but sobriety got the better of me. I snooped around. The apartment looked “cozy and nice”. That’s how anyone’s maiden aunt would have described it. There were two side chairs at each end of the settee. Dark walnut stereo speakers nestled in the curve of the window. There was no shortage of objet d’art on the fireplace mantle: a clock, silver candlesticks, bronze reproductions of Chinese horses, wooden curio boxes—all very South End cachet.

The dining room, connected to the living room by a pair of French doors, was less ornate. A round oak table skirted by four chairs filled the room. A laptop computer sat on a rolling cart in the corner. Birch logs filled the room’s fireplace, this one seemingly dormant all year. To the left, a small white kitchen adjoined the dining room. Stephen had disappeared down a spiral wooden staircase to a lower floor, which, I surmised, contained at least a bathroom and bedroom.

A thud echoed up the stairwell. Stephen, dressed in a white T-shirt and khaki pants, reappeared ass first in the kitchen. He grunted and tugged at a hefty wooden trunk which scraped along the tiles. He lifted the trunk and carried it to the dining room table. Flecks of red paint fell from the leather straps. Stephen withdrew a metal key from his pocket and inserted it into the lock. The lid opened smoothly. I smelled mothballs.

“I wanted to show you this,” Stephen said. “It’s my dad’s collection from World War II. He gave it to me. I played with this stuff when I was a kid.”

He lifted a steel helmet from the trunk. I recognized it as the formidable German headgear from war movies. “Waffen, SS,” he explained. “The military branch of the Shutzstaffel, the protection squad formed by Himmler. The helmet has the S-rune decals of the SS - symbolizing the sun’s life-giving powers.” He handed it to me. The steel was cool to the touch.

Stephen reached into the trunk and pulled out a long, gray coat with black epaulets.

“My father took this from a dead SS Captain in December 1944.”

“Charming,” I said, wondering if this display had reached its peak of morbidity.

“He smuggled this stuff out,” Stephen continued. “He would tell me stories about the war and I would dream of fighting in France, trudging from village to village, hunkering down in a snowy foxhole with my rifle, and then, after the fighting was over, drinking wine in front of a fireplace in the home of a grateful French partisan.” He laughed. “War was romantic when I was a kid. I have hobnail boots and a visor field cap as well.” He lifted a small gray hat from the trunk. The empty eyes of a grinning skull, woven in silver thread, stared out from the cap. The skull rested below a spread-winged eagle perched on a swastika. “The skull and crossbones worn by all the SS. The Nazis gave the SS rings, as well. The death head was on the outside, and Himmler’s signature inside the band. Take a look in the trunk.”

Photos and letters were piled on top of books and clothing. The photos interested me. On a summer day more than fifty years ago, a German woman with short dark hair had helped her young son walk across a thick lawn. She clutched his chubby hands above his head as he teetered on his feet. Another picture was more severe: It showed the stern face of a German soldier, in dress uniform, his dark hair slicked back from his temples. His nose was long and narrow and ended in a graceful curve above his thin lips. His dark eyes stunned me with their messianic gaze. In another photo, the family dined at an outdoor picnic table near a rose trellis. A rough pencil inscription on the back read, “Mein Herz.”

“Most of this stuff was from this unidentified family,” Stephen explained. He stared into the trunk with a kind of reverence, as if it held some mystical powers. “As a child, there was one piece I could never touch.” He lifted a long bundle wrapped in a torn white sheet, placed it on the table, and unrolled it in slow turns. Eventually, the form was revealed: a gleaming steel dagger, its handle a black hourglass crowned and divided from the hilt by burnished metal. S-runes and an eagle decorated the weapon, which seemed to draw forth the powers of the Norse gods in its design. It looked expertly proportioned for killing. The six-inch blade carried the inscription, “Meine Ehre Heisst Treue.” I asked Stephen for a translation, although I had a good idea.

“My honor is loyalty,” he said. “It’s a ceremonial dagger, given to the SS men as a reward for exceptional service and merit.”

I stared at the gleaming blade and got the uneasy feeling that I had met, through the photographs, the dead soldier who carried this dagger.

“The spoils of Nazi Germany. Swastikas carved into gay men. What other pleasant surprises do you have for me?”

I withdrew a cigarette from the pack I had tucked into my jeans and put it into my mouth, savoring the earthy smell of tobacco. I wondered whether I would be permitted to smoke in the house of the clean. He motioned for me to have a seat in the living room; I sat in one of the uncomfortable side chairs. Stephen reclined on the settee. I enjoyed the moment, my romantic notions getting the better of me. He was slightly flushed from the shower, or maybe from dragging the trunk up the stairs, but he looked comfortable and relaxed as the gray afternoon light and the brilliant green of the trees mixed in the bay window behind him. What would it be like to sit with your lover on a Sunday afternoon, have a smoke or a drink, and talk about life? The little stuff, “How was your day, dear? What are we having for dinner tonight, sugar cakes?” Could I really be happy in such a domestic prison? For a moment, I thought I could, as I took in Stephen’s form. There was something sexy and masculine about him despite all my attempts to knock him down. I loved his studious, good looks. I wanted to run my hands over the crotch of his khakis. I removed the cigarette from my mouth and relegated it to my fingers where I could twirl it enough to annoy him.

Stephen broke my fantasy soon enough. His mouth turned down at the corners and the lines around his eyes set in deep furrows.

“John doesn’t even know what I’m about to tell you,” he said.

I was not flattered. “Why not? You two might as well be married,” I said, trying hard to tone down my jealousy. “He’s your partner—he needs to know.”

“I’ll tell him soon enough, but frankly Des, I didn’t want him to be alarmed. He doesn’t understand these things—the political machinations that drive the world. John’s more concerned with biceps and triceps and the latest health food. It works for him, and that’s fine. In a way, it’s fine for me too. His profession keeps me grounded.”

“Well then, everything’s perfect here at 308.”

“Hardly. When Chris gets here, he’ll understand. He’ll take this seriously.”

I cringed at Spinetti’s name. Stephen shot me a look as if I had thrown cold water in his face.

“I’ve had a few nasty phone calls in my career,” Stephen continued, “but nothing that’s bothered me this much. I’ve dealt with crackpots and weirdoes. I didn’t worry about this at first either, but that’s all changed.”

He stopped and watched as I rocked the cigarette between my fingers.

“Throw me a fag,” he said. “I need one.”

“Mind if I join you?”

“Not at all.”

“What will John say?” I threw the pack to him.

He chuckled and replied, “I’ll tell him you wanted a smoke. Pull that Chinese dish off the mantle. It’ll work as an ashtray. It’s a fake anyway.”

I did as instructed, put the dish on the coffee table, and settled back in my chair. I lit up and tossed my lighter to Stephen. He did the same and drew in a deep, smoky breath, which he exhaled with a grateful smile.

He ruffled his damp hair with his left hand and said, “About three months ago, on a Sunday morning, as John and I were watching television, flipping through all the crap on cable, John stopped for a moment on a religious program and I saw the face. This thin white face jabbering about religion—another man joined in—two men spouting talk-show generalities about Christianity. The first face knocked me right off the couch. I know this man, I thought. Praise the Lord, I know this man.

“We didn’t go searching for this program. I’m a Methodist and John’s a lapsed Catholic. I asked John to go back to the channel. I made up a story about watching it—that these two guys were talking about a topic I might be interested in writing about. I really wanted to make sure I wasn’t losing my mind. John was disgusted by the program and walked to the kitchen to have a bit more breakfast. I was happy he left me alone.

“The channel is called ‘God’s Network”. I turned up the volume and listened to the voice. The man was saying, ‘We need your support. Your tax-deductible contributions go to our work. The Council for Religious Advancement remains a beacon for America…we can stop the tide of destruction from swamping America’s families…we can stop the homosexuals and their agenda.’ The usual stuff.

“When he said the word ‘homosexuals’, I knew. The voice, the sound of the word, the slight lilt of the Southern accent. I walked to the television and crouched down to get a better look. He was handsome in a charismatic, elegant way—older, of course, but his hair was still blond. The most beautiful mouth, gently bowed arches for lips. But it was the way he said the word—lightly, almost sweetly—that made me remember. Then he started quoting Bible verses, all the old war horses against homosexuality.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Rodney Jessup.”

“So, who’s he? The only TV in my apartment is me.”

“You know the Combat Zone like the back of your hand, but you don’t know squat about politics. But I understand. Who knew Jim Bakker before the scandal? The Reverend Rodney Jessup recently resigned as the head of the Beacon of God Churches to run for President. When did I meet him? 1977? 1978? It was on Eighth Avenue. Your old haunt.”

“I worked that street on my back.”

Stephen laughed and stubbed out the cigarette he had barely smoked. “I was working for a small newspaper near New Haven, newly out, discovering my way in the world. I had this tiny apartment that overlooked the waterfront. It smelled like oil and dead fish mostly. New York City was indeed the Great White Way. It gave me hope that my life might be more than reporting about traffic light installations on Main Street. Of course, I was lonely too.”

“I can hardly imagine you being lonely,” I said, and hoped Stephen didn’t take my comment as sarcasm.

“Oh, yes, plenty lonely. A kid from Kansas on the East Coast. One night, I went into the city. I walked past the Hercules Theater on 49^th Street. It was December, cold and windy, and the thought of heading back to my bare Connecticut apartment depressed me. So, I dug into my pocket and found five dollars—a steep but necessary price to pay for company. According to the black plastic letters plastered on the blazing white marquee, I was about to enjoy Beach Boy Bums and Hot and Wild, a decidedly entertaining double feature. I remember thinking I was ashamed of what my life had become: quick sexual encounters in a dingy porn theater.”

“It’s a living,” I said.

“Maybe for some, but I hoped there was more to being gay than this. However, I was unsure what it was.” He took another cigarette from my pack and lit up. “I was scared shitless. Every time I went to a theater I was terrified somebody would rob me or cut me up.”

“Clearly an amateur, unsure of his environment.”

Stephen smirked. “Yes, but sex won out on most occasions. After I paid my admission, I walked into the tacky blue lobby with beefcake photos of nude men on the walls. The place smelled like a bad mix of raw sex and disinfectant. At the end of the lobby there was a double set of stairs to the left and to the right going up to the balcony. I opened the red double doors leading into the theater, and all I saw was a smoky pall drifting across a blazing white screen. I had walked in between movies. I decided to settle in upstairs, which for some reason always seemed more inviting to me. That’s when I saw him standing in the bend in the stairs. He was a tall attractive man in a tweed sports jacket. We cruised each other. He followed me into the bathroom. We barely spoke. I touched his shoulder and then he touched mine.”

Stephen sighed.

“Go on,” I said.

“I wanted to make sure it was all right with him. He acted as if it hurt to touch me. Then, he apologized to me and said it was his first time. I wasn’t sure whether to believe him, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered in the Hercules. We sat in a deserted corner of the theater. We got together over the next three months. It was the only place he said we could meet.

“He never wanted to tell me his name, he said it didn’t matter, but he said Stephen Cross was an easy name to remember. Of course, I didn’t know then he might be a minister. One of the last times I saw him, we were kissing in a corner, I was rubbing my hands all over his body. After he left—because we never walked out together—I saw a white business card on the floor. Apparently, it had fallen out of one of his pockets. It’s filed away somewhere—”

The phone interrupted us. I looked at the mantle clock: it was 3:15 p.m.

I heard Stephen making excuses, apologies. When he returned his face was strained, tighter.

“Spinetti can’t make it. He’s busy working the case in the Zone. Shit, I needed to talk to him.”

“You still can,” I said. “Can you get away from John for a few hours tonight? I know where we can find Chris.”

I knew exactly where to find the detective. The Déjà Vu.