“When I left the LAPD ten years ago, I left behind a world where there was no respect for me. Not as a black man, not as a queer. Every day when I went to work, in the locker room, behind my back, somewhere, I heard the word
nigger
, or the word
faggot
. Even in front of me, I heard the word
nigger
, like I didn’t matter, or my skin was white, or I was invisible. So I created my own world here, where I make the rules. Where I hand out the humiliation, the pain. You understand now, Justice? You get how it works?”
Gitt ran his hand over Peter’s unmarked shoulders, down his back, over his ass.
“So clean and pure, such a perfect canvas. The first time I saw this kid, when that Callahan guy interviewed me, my jaw just about dropped. Then, when I saw him at your place that day I drove by, and I knew where to find him, oh my, I just knew I had to have him, all for myself.”
“Please, Gitt.”
He sauntered to the wall, reached up without hesitating, and brought down a rattan cane. It was in the range of two to three feet, not quite a half inch in width, showing some flexibility as Gitt came back, slapping it against his hand.
“They call this one White Lightning. Imported from Singapore. Now there’s a country that knows how to dish out punishment, how to keep the people in line.”
He caressed Peter’s buttocks.
“Take a good look, Justice. These’ll never be the same again.”
“Gitt, I’m begging you—”
“Cane strokes have to be done properly. It’s an art form, really, an elegant craft. The strokes have to be delivered at well-chosen intervals, with real passion. All those sexually repressed English schoolmasters understood that. Interesting, isn’t it, how the most civilized countries are so in love with simple instruments of torture, not to mention the bare male butt.”
“Gitt, please don’t.”
He stepped back, took two quick steps forward, and lashed Peter across the ass. Peter clenched his fists, the muscles in his shoulders knotted, and from under the mask a slow, guttural groan rose from his throat.
Gitt waited half a minute, then delivered another blow, slicing open the skin. I heard Peter whimper, saw his muscles tighten as he braced for the next flash of pain. Half a minute later, he screamed as Gitt flailed him again, peeling back more flesh.
“No more, Gitt. For God’s sake.”
“The sooner you finish your story, Justice, the sooner I stop using my toys.”
“Do I have your word on that?”
He swung his arm again, sending the cane whistling through the air, leaving a rising welt across Peter’s thighs and another cry dying on the air.
“You got my word, motherfucker. Now talk.”
He spun, and sliced Peter once more across the buttocks with tremendous force, much harder than before. Peter’s head fell to the side and stayed there. I started talking.
“I’m guessing that Tommy Callahan recognized you as one of the cops on the videotape when he came to interview you about your views on bareback sex. Or maybe he knew about you already, because of his fetish for leather and bondage.”
Gitt delivered another sharp blow across Peter’s backside. Peter remained unconscious, and Gitt seemed to lose interest. He laid the cane on the table, tapped more of the crystalline powder into the spoon, and snorted. Then he reached up and pulled the mask off Peter’s head. He grabbed a fistful of hair, and pulled Peter’s head back.
“They don’t come any finer than this, do they?”
Gitt’s eyes had glazed over, and his speech was thick and slow. He twisted Peter’s head and kissed him on the mouth. What I could see of Peter’s face was intact, unmarked. When Gitt glanced in my direction, his own face was flushed with lust.
“You understand what I’m talking about, Justice. I made him tell me if he’d been fucked or not. So I know you had him.”
“I didn’t hurt him, Gitt.”
“You used him for pleasure, though.”
“Maybe. But I didn’t hurt him. There’s a difference.”
“Now it’s my turn to use him, for my kind of pleasure.”
Gitt was stroking himself, getting hard. With his free hand, he held the vial of amyl under his nose, inhaling the vapors, groaning as his blood began to rush.
I spoke quickly.
“After Callahan recognized you, he made some kind of overture in private, letting you know he had the tape. By then, Fairchild was a front-runner for the chief’s job. It was obvious he had powerful backers; a lot was on the line. If that tape was ever made public, broadcast on television, it would have ruined him. Callahan suggested that you act as the messenger, let Fairchild know the tape was for sale. Maybe he offered to cut you in on the deal. Listen to me, Gitt!”
Gitt looked over, halfway out of this world and into another, traveling on the crystal and the amyl.
“You double-crossed Callahan and cut a deal with Fairchild. He paid you to get the tapes from Callahan. That’s why the autopsy reports on Callahan showed that he was tortured before he died. He had to be persuaded to give them up, didn’t he? Byron Mittelman, on the other hand, merely had to be eliminated, so he was taken care of with a single bullet to the head. Is that how it went down, Gitt?”
Gitt spit into his hand, lathered himself, and positioned himself behind Peter.
“You gave me your word, Gitt! I told you all of it, everything I know! You promised to stop, to leave him alone.”
I saw a different smile this time, the hideous grin Cecile Chang had described to me, the one she still saw in her nightmares.
“I told you I’d stop using my toys, Justice.” Gitt turned to show me his erect penis. “This is no toy.”
“He’s never done anything to you, Gitt. Why do you have to hurt him?”
“With pain comes pleasure. He’ll learn that soon enough. Don’t pretend you don’t understand.” He crossed to where I hung, and I felt his fingers close around me where I was stiff. “We’re not so very different, you and I. Now are we, Justice?”
I spit into his face, hoping he’d turn his rage on me. Instead, he grabbed my head and kissed me hard, his rough beard scratching my mouth. Then he sauntered back to Peter and stood inhaling the poppers until he swayed unsteadily and had to put a hand on Peter’s shoulder to steady himself. When he’d gotten his balance, he spit into his hand and lubricated himself again.
“Not bareback, Gitt. He’s just a kid, a naïve kid who wanted to get a taste of life, see what was out there in the world. He doesn’t deserve this.”
“It feels so fucking good without a condom.”
His voice sounded small, distant, as if he were receding from me.
“I never hurt him, Gitt. That’s the difference between you and me. I never exposed him to the virus, never raped him. I treated him like a human being. Like he was worth something.”
Gitt wasn’t listening. It was as if I wasn’t there, as if nothing mattered to Gitt any longer except Peter, and Peter’s rectum.
“Not bareback, Gitt! He’s worth something. You’re worth something!”
But Gitt was gone, reduced to nothing but sexual desire, with nothing beyond it that was human. Not intelligence. Not responsibility. Not empathy. Not a single feeling beyond the sensation in his body, in his cock and balls, beyond his narcissistic need. He was a man who felt no worth, so he was unable to see any worth in Peter. A man who had reduced himself to the piece of meat between his legs and felt compelled to reduce Peter similarly, to justify the coldness in his soul, the emptiness. It was all so clear to me now, what I had wanted to say in my script for Cecile Chang: Unless and until we could value ourselves in our entirety, we could never value others. It was an age-old problem, between men and women, parents and children, bosses and workers, rich and poor, whites and nonwhites. But among homosexual men, with AIDS in the equation, it was not just a matter of respect versus degradation, but of life and death. It was all so clear to me now, and all too late.
Gitt wrapped his right arm around Peter’s waist, and began guiding his cock where he wanted it to go, until it began to pry apart Peter’s bleeding cheeks.
Then a gunshot exploded, and I ducked as bullet fragments ricocheted off the floor and walls. Gitt went down, clutching his right leg, writhing, wailing through clenched teeth.
Sergeant Montego moved quickly across the cobbled stones, his revolver aimed at Gitt’s head. It was an old-fashioned thirty-eight Detective’s Special, the kind my father had carried twenty-three years ago before I’d used it to end his life. In his other hand, Montego clutched two videocassettes, which he placed on the table next to Gitt’s pharmaceutical supply. He ordered Gitt to lie face down, and when Gitt failed to comply immediately, Montego kicked him viciously in his wounded knee, which got him moving. Seconds later, Gitt was sitting up against a pillar, his hands cuffed behind him, his eyes clamped shut, his face twisted with pain. I could see the full damage now: The bullet had made a small entry wound at the back, in the fleshy joint of Gitt’s leg, but had exploded out the front, leaving an ugly, gaping hole, a mess of shredded tissue and splintered bone where Gitt’s kneecap had been.
Montego shouldered his gun, found a pocketknife, began cutting my ankles free.
“Winston Tsao-Ping called downtown, told them they had to get a message to me ASAP.”
“Tsao-Ping called you?”
“That’s how the caller identified himself.”
“A voice from the past. He has good timing.”
Montego nodded as he cut.
“The message was short and simple: ‘Benjamin Justice has gone after Charlie Gitt. You’d better hurry.’ I was at home when communications reached me.”
“I hope they didn’t interrupt anything important.”
“My kids’ homework. They didn’t mind.” Montego freed my feet and stretched up to cut the rope binding my wrists. “I don’t know how you found Winston Tsao-Ping after all these years, or where he was calling from, but he saved your ass.”
“So did you, Sergeant. Have I thanked you yet?”
“You can thank me by getting out of here and forgetting you ever met me.”
“What about the videotapes?”
He grabbed me around the waist and eased me down. My pants and shoes were in a pile nearby, and I started pulling them on. Montego picked the tapes up from the table.
“These?
Pocahontas
and
The Lion King
. For my kids.”
“That’s not what the labels say, Montego. I see the words
On Patrol
and
transvestite beating
. That would be the master, I imagine. The other one’s a copy.”
“Let’s ask Mr. Gitt. I’ve been meaning to, anyway.” Montego turned and looked down at Gitt, whose face was sullen, contemptuous. “Charlie?”
“Fuck you, Montego.”
“I came across these when I was searching for you and Justice upstairs. Are these the only copies?”
When Gitt said nothing, Montego drew his revolver, kneeled down, and pointed the muzzle directly at Gitt’s genitalia.
“I could really mess you up, Charlie.”
“You’re going to kill me, anyway.”
“Yes. But it can be easy or it can be very unpleasant.”
Gitt looked away, swallowing hard. Several seconds passed that must have been very difficult for him. Then, in a subdued voice:
“Yeah, they’re the only copies. Just the two.”
Montego rose and handed me his pocketknife.
“Take care of your friend there.”
I bent to cut the rope around Peter’s ankles.
“You’re working for Taylor Fairchild, then.”
“Don’t assume you know everything, Justice.”
“Someone sent Gitt to take care of Callahan and Mittelman. If not Fairchild, who?”
“Gitt was supposed to pay for the tapes, that was it. He got the tapes, all right. But after he overheard Callahan on the phone, warning Mittelman, he decided to take out Mittelman as well, all on his own. Then, with things really messy and the stakes higher than ever, he decided to pull yet another double cross, sell the tapes to the highest bidder. He’s been negotiating, right up until today.”
When the ropes were off Peter’s ankles, I rose and turned the bar so he was facing me. His head was to the side, still without movement. I reached up to work at the leather wrist cuffs, and Montego kept talking.
“When we got into business with Gitt, we didn’t realize how far off the deep end he’d gone. No one was ever supposed to get hurt. You can believe that or not, Justice, but that’s how it is.”
“Fairchild’s the one who benefits from all this.”
“Taylor Fairchild is a decent man. He’s going to make a fine chief. He’ll be good for the city.”
“A good cop who helped beat Winston Tsao-Ping half to death, then participated in a cover-up so he could get on with his career.”
“He made a mistake, a long time ago.”
“I imagine your career rises with Fairchild’s, doesn’t it?”
Montego didn’t reply to that. Peter’s hand and arm fell limply, and Montego held him up while I worked on the other wrist.
“Somebody has to be calling the shots in all this, Montego.”
“That goes without saying.”