Against Nature

by Casey Barrett

  I turned on some Pogues and settled down with my laptop to do some homework. “If I Should Fall From Grace With God” came out of the wireless speaker as Shane MacGowan growled about going “where no murdered ghost can haunt me.” Hearing the drunken bard made me long for whiskey, but there was not a drop in the apartment. I resisted a run to the liquor store. I typed in some searches for Susie Wingate. Nothing much, a Google nonentity, a Facebook page with few friends and infrequent updates. I typed in Carl Kruger and got a bit more. Cass’s report on our walk was all verified: the forced doping of Hilde Kruger, from the town of Merseburg on the wrong side of the Wall. Plucked from his family at the age of eight, sent to the sporting institute and probed like a high-performance lab rat. His Olympic title, followed by the defection and gender reassignment, reduced to a succinct Wikipedia entry; all facts, no story.

  East Germany had been a doomed state from the beginning. Under the yoke of the Soviet regime, they were denied the basic freedoms and pleasures of the West. Merseburg was just an hour drive from the border, yet it existed in a different gray universe. It was a land of deep insecurity and deprivation. Sport, they realized, was a way to gain recognition and respect on the international stage. Long before the drugs produced superhuman Olympians, these were a hearty, hardworking stock. The genetics and the work ethic were there first. Add in heavy doses of Oral Turinabol to still-forming female bodies, and you’ve got an unnatural army of world-beating athletic machines. Historians noted the echoes of the Third Reich. The Germans were still obsessed with perfecting humanity in the most inhumane ways. Now they’d lowered their ambitions from the battlefields to the fields of play. It was the world Kruger was born into. Country-strong parents who were proud members of the Party produced strapping offspring: Hilde, the youngest. Now they had three sons.

  World champion, and then an Olympic champion, in the javelin before twenty, the pictures of Kruger throwing that spear in full doped-to-the gills glory were disconcerting. Soon after, the drugs began to exhibit their side effects: joints could not support the artificial muscle and started to snap. Knees and back and shoulder problems halted any future success. It was rumored that excessive injections kept Kruger out of the next world championships. There were worries about a failed test. Kruger was sent instead to a detox clinic outside of Leipzig, and by twenty-two, was a broken-down, used-up piece of athletic meat. He’d served his country’s purpose, brought them glory at the Games, and now was expected to live out his days on a paltry stipend, with ironic work as a physical-education teacher at a Merseburg grammar school. The story should have ended there, as it ended for so many others, except Kruger possessed the courage of self-awareness. He escaped, along with his lover, the swimmer Uli Max. Their defection to New York, Kruger’s transition, and his subsequent marriage to Uli were matters of record. There had been some press on it at the time, but there had been nothing reported since. I longed to know more. I understood how Victor Wingate had become hooked on the tale.

  Emerging from the K-hole of searches and clicks, I realized I still hadn’t heard from Cass. I tried her cell—straight to voice mail. Texted her and stared at the screen, but those ellipses promising a reply never appeared. I told myself she must have forgotten, staying somewhere out of service in the sticks.

  She mentioned that Victor had discovered a link in Kruger’s story to present crimes and some very famous athletes. It wasn’t just a history lesson, another twisted chapter of warped goals and expendable bodies. He uncovered something current, implicating icons that would not appreciate the attention. My mind began tripping through the connections, from the echoes of the Third Reich to the East German doping experiment to the present-day sports landscape of performance enhancement and big money. I thought of fit, aggressive Oliver and his waiting master outside the bar. Wondered what else Kruger had told Wingate.

  I opened a new tab on my browser and typed in Kruger’s bar NYC. Google spit back the result in 0.57 seconds. It was located at 168 East Broadway, a few blocks from the Manhattan Bridge. A century and a half ago much of the Lower East Side of Manhattan was known as Little Germany, boasting the third-largest German-speaking population in the world, behind only Berlin and Vienna. Waves of new mass immigrations diluted the Deutsche presence over the decades, but German inscriptions could still be spotted on the facades of plenty of landmarked buildings. And now here was Carl and Uli, part of the old lineage, just another proud couple dreaming the American Dream, shedding past identities and slipping into new ones in the city that let you be whatever you damn well pleased.

  I grabbed an umbrella and headed back out into the rain.

  Chapter 7

  The bar was full and relaxed, with the air of regulars disinterested in a scene. The Stones’ “Torn and Frayed” was playing, but not loud enough to disrupt conversation. The demographic was all over the map. A Chinese couple, a table of Rasta black guys, some fading beauties on the wrong side of forty, and the usual collection of bloated dudes with hunched shoulders curled over their pints at the bar. I joined them on a stool in the corner. Felt more comfortable than my own living room.

  The décor was dive basic: neon beer signs as the only art, worn bar, low ceiling, and a few Formica tables with mismatched chairs behind the stools. There was a drum set and two guitars standing unused on a tattered green rug in the corner. Above the cash register behind the bar, I noticed the only personal touches: a cheaply framed black-and-white photo of a large woman heaving a javelin. Above that, mounted on hooks over the mirror, the spear itself.

  The bartender took her time making her way over. I didn’t wave or force eye contact. I wanted to establish myself as a patient sort, in for the long haul. When she reached my corner, she jutted her chin, waited for my order. A Hofbräu and a Maker’s, little ice. She turned without reply and began to pour. She was a wide, tall woman dressed in a loose black frock. Hands like a man’s, her left swallowed up the pint glass as she pressed the tap with her right. “Handsome” was the proper word for her type of female face: strong jaw, strong Germanic nose, hard blue eyes. Her hair was auburn and pulled back in a careless ponytail.

  “Sixteen,” she said.

  “Start a tab?” I asked, offering a card.

  She shrugged, took it, left me with my drinks.

  I forced myself to sip them slow. I had no plan beyond remaining until the bar started to empty. Then I’d venture some chat with the bartender, whose identity was confirmed soon after my first Maker’s, when a regular two stools down called over for “Uli.”

  Uli Kruger, née Max, Carl’s beloved. Once upon a time behind the Wall, they were doomed and doped lesbians, world-class athletes cut adrift after their playing days. Now, all grown-up, they were husband and wife, proprietors of a low-key, Downtown bar, where all felt welcome. The romance of it, the long odds of triumph to normalcy, was touching. I remembered one of my mother’s old boyfriends, in her dissipated drinking days after the fall. He was a cokehead Turk with wild moods and a warm heart. He owned a bar, off the Bowery. I couldn’t remember his name or the bar’s, but I always remembered a piece of wisdom he once shared, while serving me underage after he packed mom off in a cab to pass out.

  “Duck,” he preached, “owning a bar is one of man’s most noble endeavors. Because no matter how bad things get in the world, if you have one, you’ll have a place where people can come to raise a glass and forget their lives, and at least laugh for a little while.”

  I raised mine at the memory. Then raised my hand and ordered another. Uli returned with wordless refills. Her manner behind the bar was unsmiling, but not unhappy. On her side of the taps, this was work, not playtime, and she did it with unhurried efficiency. She sipped water from a pint glass, and granted an occasional crack of a smile for a witty regular or two. She began to grow more attractive as I watched her work. Part of it was the inevitable softening of standards from the booze, but more than that, there was something about her, a dignity in her movements. Though anything but lithe, sh
e moved through her space in a smooth, almost sensual way. I remembered her past as an elite swimmer, one of her country’s high-performance guinea pigs. For some athletes, no matter the ravages of time, the body never lost its grace of movement. The back stayed straight; the shoulders rolled back; the body was forever aware of energy expended.

  We were part of the same tribe. In my own damaged youth, I was once a swimmer of promise too. It would be my “in” when the time was right. If she read the tabloids, she’d probably heard of me, or at least remembered the case of Charlie McKay, the devil in a Speedo, so said the Post.

  Midnight slid to two a.m. over the course of silently sipped whiskeys and beers. I was feeling rather fine. A nice buzz, Cass was back in my life, and I was back on a trail, albeit on a pro bono basis. As the bar began to clear, Uli’s musical tastes became more eccentric. I recognized Klaus Nomi’s cover of “You Don’t Own Me.” An otherworldly scenester who arrived in the East Village from Bavaria in the seventies, Klaus sang backup for Bowie and slept with every boy in town, before falling to AIDS in the eighties. Now he was a cult figure for cool kids who missed the edgy arty days of a Downtown they never knew. I used to deal to an aging drag queen that claimed he knew him.

  I was smiling at the memory, nodding along to Nomi, when Uli approached, granting her first acknowledgment. “You know Klaus Nomi, yeah?” she asked.

  “Brings me back,” I said.

  “To what?”

  “Life.”

  She reached behind her and grabbed the neck of the Maker’s and refilled my glass. “On house,” she said. “For Klaus.”

  I raised it in thanks, took a sip. She lingered. I was about to play my fellow swimmer card, blurt out an intro, when the bar door opened and in stumbled a drunken beast. He staggered through the entry with a leering recklessness that shattered the room’s kind vibe. I felt Uli tense at his presence. She stepped away from me and braced herself.

  The beast scanned the room with bleary eyes. All that was left was the table of Rastas and myself. The black guys gazed back under heavy lids, then tipped back the remains of their beers in unison and moved to leave. They seemed to recognize him and didn’t need the drama.

  “Who needs a drink?” shouted the beast.

  But they were already moving toward the door. Uli had her arms crossed behind the bar. He didn’t seem to notice me raise my empty glass an inch to accept the offer. I sized him at about six-three, 250 pounds or so, but he identified bigger, like a retired linebacker now lost in a fog of pills and concussed memories. He was dressed in wide jeans, work boots, and a worn black sweater that would have fit across the chest of a bull. His head was shaped like a Halloween pumpkin, lumpy and carved into something both frightening and ridiculous. The features were all oversized and misshapen. Face and scalp were covered with the same length of patchy stubble. His movements made you think of falling china.

  “Carl,” said Uli. “Go home.”

  Carl Kruger snorted and weaved down and around the bar and helped himself to a pint glass and a bottle of Jameson. He poured it half full, gulped at the amber, and wiped his mouth with a meaty forearm. Uli pushed past him. She started gathering her things by the register. The electricity between husband and wife crackled, on the verge of igniting. Neither looked in the other’s direction. Uli tossed a purse over a wide shoulder, circled the bar to leave.

  “You close up,” she said. “Betrunken schwein.”

  “Fotze,” said Carl.

  Then the door opened and shut, and it was just the two of us. Carl seemed to deflate in her absence. His shoulders sagged with a heavy exhale. He shook his big pumpkin head and tried to rub some clarity into his watery eyes. He grabbed another pint glass from the shelf and poured himself a Bud from the tap. He was slurping it down when he seemed to notice me for the first time.

  “What can I get you?” he asked.

  “Another Hof and a Maker’s would be great,” I said.

  “Geil,” he grunted.

  I watched him pour. He sagged and swayed against the taps as Klaus Nomi continued to serenade us like a soprano alien. He pushed the drinks before me, held up his glass, and said “Prost.” Drained it down and poured himself a refill.

  “Sorry about all that,” he said, waving toward the door. “The wife, you know . . .”

  “Rough night?” I asked.

  “Genau,” he said. “Rough night, rough week, rough life.”

  “I can relate.”

  He turned and sized me up, took the measure of just how much I could. My look back seemed to satisfy him.

  “Scheisse happens, eh?”

  Raised my whiskey. “This helps,” I said.

  “Ja, ja, so it does.”

  He came over and poured me another, helping himself to the same. Carl saw me looking over his shoulder at the javelin mounted above the bar, the framed picture beneath it.

  “Another life,” he said.

  “Who is that?” I asked.

  Something passed across that ruined face. It was covered by a glass as more beer slushed down his throat. When he set it down, he sighed and said, “She is no longer with us.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Carl pushed away my condolences like a bad meal. “No ‘sorry.’ It was a long time ago.” He went back for the Jameson, stopped midpour, and tilted his head at the music. “What is this shit she’s playing?”

  “Klaus Nomi,” I offered.

  “I know who it is,” he said. “I’m German, ja? Our music is shit.”

  He knocked back the Jamey, found the iPod by the register, and scrolled for something more suitable. Motörhead’s “Ace of Spades” began to rip through the bar. Carl turned it up. Venturing conversation over Lemmy was pointless, so I just watched as he placed both hands over the taps and began to rock his head and sing along to the metal. “The Chase Is Better Than the Catch” came next and Carl cranked it even louder. I’d never been much for the harder stuff, but like many I harbored a fascination for Lemmy Kilmister, the ultimate speed-fueled, bottle-a-day rock star. Somehow, despite his best efforts, the hard-living bastard had made it just past his seventieth birthday. He was an example to the rest of us who insisted on challenging our vices to take us down.

  Carl emerged from his metal trance after the second track ended and lowered the volume back to a level that wouldn’t violate noise ordinances and send neighbors dialing 311 to complain. Despite his rapid refills of Jameson and Bud, he seemed more sober now than when he arrived. And his headbanging had mellowed him. He came back over.

  “So, what do you do?” he asked.

  “I find things,” I said. Then realized it had been a long time since I found anything I could be proud of.

  “What sort of things?”

  “People, mostly. Whatever folks pay me to look for.”

  “Like a private eye, ja?”

  “I guess,” I said. “I’m not though, not officially. I don’t have a gun or fancy spy toys or anything like that.”

  “So, who hires you then?”

  “Rich women,” I said.

  Carl liked that. He raised his glass, waited for me to do the same. We clinked. “To rich women,” he said. “Prost.”

  We drank. I thought of Juliette Cohen and that big, beautiful apartment. It was beginning to feel something like home. And her kid, Stevie . . . I missed those two. I’d miss that life. What was I thinking, turning my back on that peace? It had everything a man could want: sex, security, fulfillment as a father figure, even health. In my time with Juliette I hadn’t touched the amber, didn’t drink anything harder than good red wine; hadn’t done a drug harder than weed since I started teaching Stevie. The life had, well, maybe not everything. It lacked a certain dignity, perhaps. I’d spent years trying to renounce ambition as the deadliest of sins. I took pride in never seeking work. I let the cases—those rich women—find me. But that was just passive-aggressive ego and whiskey-soaked laziness. I longed to be pointed in a direction, like a hound on a hunt, and told to
sniff and howl until I found it.

  “So, what are you looking for now?” asked Carl.

  I waited until he made eye contact. Then I said, “I’m looking for you.”

  Too forward, perhaps; too cute a move to pull on a drunken beast behind a bar. I was out of practice and maybe the booze altered my judgment. We had been getting along so well. But Carl didn’t hesitate. He flung his pint glass at my head like a fastball aimed at brain damage. It grazed my ear as I dodged and it shattered against the door behind us. The stinging contact sparked instant sobriety. I was up off my stool and braced for Carl’s onslaught before he could reach for another glass. He let another fly and this one I stepped past easily. It exploded behind me next to the first one.

  “Wait!” I shouted. “Wait! I’m here about Victor Wingate.”

  Hearing the name, Carl flung one more glass, then turned and reached behind the register. He came out with an old German Luger and pointed it at me. The gun looked like an antique relic that hadn’t been fired in ages, but it did not shake in Carl’s hands.

  “Victor is dead,” he said. “And you will be too if you fuck with me.”

  I raised my hands, moved back toward my barstool. “Can I sit?” I asked. “I’m not here to fuck with you, Carl. I’m investigating his death. I’m sorry for setting you off. That was the wrong way to begin.”

  I pulled out the stool and sat down, put my hands back in the air. The nine-millimeter hole at the end of the pistol stared straight into my eyes. A short black tunnel, with death coiled at the bottom, waiting for a touch of the trigger. He held it like a man familiar with firearms. I looked back like a man familiar with guns being pointed at him. We had our standoff, and then Carl lowered the Luger and said, “Talk before I shoot you.”