Trap (9781476793177) (14 page)

The woman gave him a suspicious glance. “I'll see if I can get ahold of someone on ICU. It might take a few minutes, so go have a seat in the waiting room, and I'll come get you.”

Gallo did as he was told, sitting in the only seat available, next to a man holding a bloody rag against his stomach as he moaned and spoke what sounded like Russian. Across from them a woman shivered and sweated, crying out in delirium as her anxious boyfriend or husband patted her shoulder and looked around desperately. He stood up and walked around the corner and peeked out at the woman behind the information desk. She was arguing with a police officer who was holding on to a handcuffed man as he vomited on the floor.

Gallo turned and made his way across the room to the double swinging doors that he'd seen patients and doctors going in and out of and walked through. He found himself walking rapidly along a crowded, bustling hallway filled with doctors, gurneys, nurses, paramedics, and patients. He approached a man in green surgeon's scrubs who stood looking down at a clipboard.

“Which way to Intensive Care?” he asked.

Without looking up from the clipboard, the doctor pointed to a sign on a wall that read “ICU” in big bold letters and had an arrow pointing down another hallway. By following arrows, he found an elevator that carried him to a floor that had another ICU sign pointing to the left. He turned a corner and realized he had reached his destination, not because of the sign hanging above more swinging doors but the people who stood and sat outside them.

Standing in the center of them was Alejandro Garcia, dressed in a hospital gown with his hands bandaged. The stocky young man saw him coming and moved to get in his way. “Second time tonight . . . what the fuck you doing here,
pendejo,
” he swore.

It had been a long, trying night. Gallo's anger finally boiled to the surface as he came chest to chest with his former rival. “Call me that one more time and . . .”

“. . . and what?” Garcia spat. “You got no business here. These people are Rose's friends, people who love her. They stick by her, thick and thin. That doesn't include you.”

The situation was about to get out of hand when Simon Lubinsky pushed through the doors from the Intensive Care unit. He looked sad and worn out, then confused when he saw Gallo. But then he nodded. “Let him by, Alejandro . . .”

Garcia frowned. “But . . .”

Lubinsky held up his hand. “Please, now is not the time for this, Rose wants to see him.”

“But how does she know he's here?” Garcia asked.

“I don't know,” Lubinsky replied, “but somehow she knew he would come. So let him pass.”

Garcia glared at Gallo one more time but then stepped aside. As he approached the old man, Gallo said, “Simon, I'm so . . .”

“I know, Micah, I know, but there's no time to waste. You must hurry.”

Simon escorted him back past the nurses' station to a room and told him to go in. “I'll wait out here,” he said.

Gallo entered the dark room and waited for a moment for his eyes to adjust to the gloom. As they did, he saw Rose lying in the bed, covered nearly head to foot in bandages. Only one arm and hand that had somehow escaped the flames lay on top of the sheet.

“Rose?” he said as he approached her bedside.

Rose Lubinsky responded by raising her unbandaged hand for him to hold. He grabbed it tenderly and bent over to kiss her fingers, but she pulled him closer and whispered. “You know.”

“I don't understand, Rose. Know what?” he replied.

“Who did this?” She turned her head slightly so that she could look at him with the one eye not covered by gauze.

“The Nazis.”

The eye glittered. “You know better than that.”

“I don't . . . not for sure.”

“Micah, my son, for your sake,” she said, her breath laboring from the pain, “don't try to live with the guilt. It will eat you.”

“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.”

B
Y THE TIME
L
ARS
F
ORSLING
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.