Depraved Indifference

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  “But why Israelis? Why have Israelis rescued me and why are they kidnapping me? You needed a minyan? You’re pissed off because I’m dating a shiksa? No, it’s got to be Karavitch.”

  Leventhal performed an eloquent gesture of wonderment, holding his palms up and looking from side to side as if summoning support from an invisible crowd. “Mr. Karp, I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.”

  Karp fell back on the pillows, exhausted. He had less strength than he had thought. “OK,” he said weakly. “Fine. You’re not interested in Karavitch. Nobody’s interested in Karavitch.”

  Leventhal’s face became grave. In a quiet voice he said, “Ah, I think you have got it right, Mr. Karp. In fact, nobody is interested in Karavitch. Djordje Karavitch has been dead for thirty years. He died in Trieste in 1946, murdered by the man you are prosecuting under his name.” With that, Leventhal stalked out of the room. Devra Blok resumed her seat and took up her knitting again.

  At her vanity mirror, wrapped in a silk kimono, Rhoda Klepp was considering how she was going to control the situation she had created for herself with that uncharacteristic burst of impetuosity. Sex was, she well knew, merely a question of control, once you cut through all the bullshit: a question of who screwed whom and who got screwed. Usually it was a pretty straight deal—you gave, you got, and Rhoda usually arranged it so that she got a little more than she gave, which was how she had reached her present status. In her world, sex was a tool, useful, if mildly distasteful, like giving dinner parties for a lot of boring, powerful people.

  But Marlene had confused her with her tale of a different world, where people conducted themselves with abandon. Abandon! That was the problem. Rhoda still hadn’t figured out how you could get the benefits of abandon (in terms of having something to boast and condescend about) and still maintain total control.

  A difficult problem, but not, she thought, beyond her powers. The trick would be to destroy his confidence. Booze and a show of boredom usually worked for her. After that, when he had been reduced to the pliable schmuckhood that she knew occupied the center of all male-kind, she would let him do his stuff. It would be something to talk about, at least, like drinking warm mescal from a bottle with a dead worm in it: the act disgusting, the retelling—the chance to be the center of attention—delicious.

  She finished her face, stood up, and let the kimono slip down, examining her naked body like a carpenter testing the edge of a chisel. Let him drool over that, she thought. Afterward, she would bring out the costumes. And the equipment.

  Guma sat on the white Haitian cotton couch in the large living room of her Murray Hill apartment and finished his third scotch. He’d been there only twenty minutes. A Burt Bacharach record was playing on the stereo. There had been some desultory conversation about what to “do” on their “date,” but both of them knew why he was here. He looked around the room. Where would she keep those keys? Lots of white, three large abstract paintings, chrome, glass, with bright plastic accents: science-fiction modern. All it needed was a robed and hypercephalic envoy from the Council of Scientists.

  Rhoda was clinking things at the bar. Then she came toward him holding two drinks. She was wearing a kind of black pajama outfit, silky with little shiny threads woven into it, the sort of thing the Viet Cong would wear if they shopped at Bloomies. The top was half unbuttoned, and as she bent over to set the drinks down, Guma could see an entire large, white breast even without craning his neck. She seemed to take a long time arranging the drinks, ashtray, nut bowl, and chip-and-dip tray on the low glass coffee table. Guma casually reached out and slid his hand under the breast, hefting it slightly.

  “Pound and a half,” he said. “My old man ran a meat market. I used to work there Saturdays.” He withdrew the hand, wondering why he felt so absolutely non-horny. Maybe it was the range of expressions that flickered across her face: outrage, horror, contempt, and simulated arousal.

  “How interesting,” she said. She arranged herself at the opposite end of the couch and drank from her vodka gibson. “I’d rather hear about Thailand. Marlene Ciampi’s been telling me all about your exotic tastes.”

  “She has, huh? What would she know about my exotic tastes?”

  “A lot, according to her. She described your performance last weekend in great detail.”

  This is definitely not going to happen, Guma thought, and what the fuck is she talking about? He took a deep swallow of his drink, and observed her watching him closely. She’s feeding me scotch like they were going to bring back Prohibition tomorrow. She’s trying to get me drunk? Me? He smiled inwardly and an idea began to take shape.

  “Yeah, that. Well, I was a little off that night.” He drained his glass. “Hey, how about another drink? No, don’t bother, I’ll get one for both of us.”

  Rhoda considered herself an experienced drinker. She knew how much she could take and never took any more. On the other hand, she couldn’t very well expect this jerk to drink alone. She decided that matching him one for two would be safe.

  How serious a miscalculation this was she did not realize until around midnight. By then everything was moving in slow motion, and she felt like her skin was covered in masking tape. There was loud music playing on the radio. Guma kept moving in and out of her field of vision. He didn’t seem to be weaving much for a man who had drunk twice as much as she had, but then, how could she tell?

  “Time to get th’ show onna road!” she said out loud. “Hey, Guma, y’creep. Time f’ some o’ that kinky stuff. I got it all, all the stuff. Hey, where are ya?”

  She stumbled into the small kitchen. Guma was peering into a cabinet. “Hey, hey whatcha doin’?” she asked.

  Guma looked up from his work. Rhoda was swaying like seaweed in the tide. Her black jacket was hanging entirely open and her pointed breasts rocked rhythmically from side to side. The motion was entrancing and started doing things to his groin area. He made himself stare into her face.

  “Looking for more of those pearl onions,” he replied benignly. “You look like you could use another gibson.”

  “Nah, no more drinks. Wanna do kinky. Now.” She made a clumsy grab for him and managed to latch onto his belt. She tugged at it, as one might on the bridle of an unwilling burro.

  “OK, OK,” said Guma, detaching her hand. “Kinky coming right up. Hey, Rhoda, whyn’t you head for the bedroom and I’ll, uh, get some supplies from here.”

  “Wha’? Wha’ splies?”

  “Foodstuffs, Rhoda baby. You can’t go kinky without all kinds of foodstuffs. Now run along and make yourself, you know, ready.” He reached out and gave her left nipple a friendly honk.

  She giggled and arched her back, ran a thick tongue across her lips. “Oh, yeah. OK, a’right. I got all the stuff inna room.” She staggered out. It’s working, she thought dully. I got him nailed.

  Her bedroom was dominated by a huge brass bed dressed with black satin and set in the middle of a round white shag rug. It was lit dimly by wall sconces. On a side table were arranged a bottle of massage oil and a large white plastic vibrator with numerous rubber attachments. Sophisticated.

  Rhoda plunged into the lowest drawer of her bureau, dragged out a large brown paper bag, and dumped its contents on the bed. Thin chains, a pair of knee-length leather boots with five-inch heels, chrome-studded black leather garments, and various other accessories fell in a tangle. She crumpled up the bag and shoved it under the bed. It would be tacky if he knew she had bought all this stuff yesterday.

  Rhoda shucked off her pajama outfit and underpants. Clumsily she tried to sort out the tangle. She extracted a leather bra with shiny needle spikes around the cut-out nipple holes and heaved herself into it. It closed in the back with a miniature lock and key.

  Next, the boots. They were tight, and she had to struggle to pull them on. She felt sweat running down her sides and matting her hair to her forehead. Wobbling to her feet, she stood up and sagged toward her full-length mirror to take a look at the effect.
Immediately she crashed face forward to the ground. The tops of the boots were still wired together. She cursed viciously and tried to roll over, but found that her bra spikes were tangled inextricably in the shag rug. She lay there humping and thrashing like a tied hog.

  Entering the bedroom with the tray he had loaded from the refrigerator and pantry, Guma observed this spectacle for some time, fascinated by the bounce and quiver of her generous buttocks. Chivalrously he suppressed a guffaw. Instead he said, “That’s a new one. Rhoda, baby. You getting all hot there by yourself?”

  She heard this as from afar. Yes, it made sense. That was indeed what she was doing. She produced a quasi-sensual moan to suit. He put down the tray and quickly sorted things out. He unlocked the bra so she could get up and cut the boot wire with a nail scissors he found on her vanity table. She collapsed back on the bed and watched the ceiling rotate.

  “What have we got here?” she heard him say. “Chains? OK, let’s check it out.”

  She felt him fumbling at her wrists and sat bolt upright. Something was wrong here. “No, no, you’re spose to be tied up,” she complained. In fact, she had looked forward to having him helpless on her bed, but the idea of being chained up herself had never occurred to her. She began to panic through her stupor. “No, don’ wanna,” she cried, and tried to get on her feet.

  He gently pushed her back and massaged her neck. “Sure, I’ll do it, baby, but you know the routine. You been around, right? I mean, Rhoda, would I waste my time with somebody who didn’t know the score?” And more of this, in such a smooth, knowing, insistent tone, that she came to think that this is what she had planned all along. In short order she was tied by her wrists and ankles to the four corners of the brass bed.

  She felt his weight on the bed and soon after something cold was placed on her eyes, blotting out her vision. She felt him leave the bed. She rattled her chains and waited for the kinky stuff to start. From time to time he would return to the bed and touch her body. He was putting substances on her flesh, cool, viscous, dripping. Strange odors arose from her body. Maddening at first, these sensations soon become intensely sensual. Now he was doing something between her thighs. Waves of heat erupted from her loins. She gasped and writhed her hips. She began to murmur the obscenities she had learned from her extensive readings in softcore pornography.

  Guma looked up from his handiwork. Rhoda’s eyes were covered with two beef patties. In the center of each one was a raw egg garnished with a maraschino cherry. He had decorated her breasts with catsup and Cool-Whip in a barber-pole pattern, and elaborately covered her hips and belly with a melange of oyster sauce, chocolate syrup, and a mass of lo mein he had found in a take-out container. Her crotch was heavily slathered with Louis Sherry grape jam. “Be right back, baby,” he murmured and proceeded to toss the room in a professional manner, except that from time to time he had to pass by the bed and stir the grape jam a bit to keep Rhoda amused.

  Still, it took him barely five minutes to find them, about twenty keys in all shapes on a heavy ring with an “I love New York” brass tag on it. He turned to go.

  “Hey Rhoda, I just forgot something I had to do at the office. I’ll be right back.”

  This did not register in the slightest. “Uhnng, uhh, I want it. Give it to me. I’m burning up!” she sighed.

  “Rhoda,” he said severely, “real people don’t say shit like that.”

  “Ooh, I want that big passion pole,” she cried, flapping and spreading her thighs to the limits imposed by the thin chains. His gaze was drawn involuntarily to the center of this movement, to the little slivers of tender pink visible amid the dark purplish glop. He felt a familiar, if unexpected, stirring.

  “Ah, what the hell,” he said, undoing his belt, “as long as I’m here.”

  The second morning of his captivity Karp felt well enough to get out of bed. The previous day had passed in fitful bouts of sleep and dull awakenings. He knew he ought to have made a fuss, railed at Leventhal, tried to get away to a phone, but he simply didn’t have the energy.

  “Being shot,” observed Devra Blok as she helped him to his feet and into a blue terrycloth robe, “is not like anything else. It knocks the stuffings out, isn’t it so?”

  “Yo,” Karp answered shakily, concentrating on keeping his feet. He leaned heavily against her and was conscious of her strength and the heat of her body under the thin shirt. “You sound like you’ve been shot yourself.”

  She shook her head. “Not me. But I have taken care of casualties. So, let us go get you feed.”

  “Fed,” said Karp. “Bacon and eggs? Or is this a kosher kidnap? How about bagels and lox?”

  A faint smile. “What you like.”

  She brought him into a sunny breakfast nook that smelled of toast and coffee and frying onions. Karp felt the saliva flow; he hadn’t eaten any serious food since before he had been shot. He sat gingerly down at a round white table, and Devra sat next to him. Across the counter in the kitchen a lean man in a dark T-shirt stirred something at the range.

  Devra poured coffee, and in a few moments the man came in from the kitchen holding a frying pan full of scrambled eggs made with minced lox and onions and a plate of toasted rye. The man nodded to Karp and sat down. Devra said, “Natan likes to cook breakfast, don’t you, Natan?” Natan grinned shyly and dug into the meal. Karp did the same, wondering what Natan did when he wasn’t cooking breakfast. The man was well built in a wiry way. He had a thick head of dirty blond curls and a wide mouth loaded with big white teeth. He had the air of a college student, but Karp figured he was four or five years into his twenties.

  A door slammed somewhere in the back of the house. A few seconds later, Yaacov the weightlifter strode into the room, rubbing his hands. He had traded his track suit for a puffy red down parka, jeans, and hiking boots. He said “good morning” all around, unzipped his parka, and sat at the table.

  Karp remarked lightly, “Yaacov, hang onto that parka. If the commando business ever goes bad, you can get a job with Michelin.”

  “Pardon?” Yaacov asked politely.

  “You know, Michelin, the tire company. Their little man?” Karp mimicked the great girth of l’homme Michelin and got blank looks. It must be the language barrier, he thought.

  After breakfast they adjourned to the living room. This was furnished in an anonymous suburban style, vaguely early American. Floor-length drapes in a pale green silky material covered one wall. There were pictures on the walls and hook rugs on the floors, but no knickknacks or personal photographs to be seen. Karp wondered who lived here, or if anybody did. He presumed it was what the spy stories called a safe house. He spotted a phone sitting on a corner table and thought about what they would do if he just walked up to it and tried to call.

  Yaacov turned on a TV and sat on a couch to watch it. Soaps. He seemed interested. Devra sat in a ladder-back rocker and took out her knitting. Natan disappeared somewhere. There was a grandfather clock that ticked loudly. After half an hour of this, Karp felt his mind softening. He wanted to know what these people wanted from him. He wanted to know what Leventhal was up to. And most of all, he wanted to know what he had meant about Karavitch not being Karavitch, but somebody else instead, who had killed the real Karavitch.

  The hours dragged by. They had lunch—tuna fish sandwiches and Pepsi—and then returned to their original places. Karp studied his captors. The three of them seemed curiously flat in their personalities. No little jokes. No byplay. Very solemn. Of course, he reflected, maybe this is what kidnappers learn in kidnapping school: don’t flash anything at the victim, be cool. Maybe he could get a rise out of them.

  “This is fun,” he said, “I always wanted to sit around for days on end and watch daytime TV. The problem is, I didn’t bring my ironing.” He stood up, walked over to the phone, and picked up the receiver. It was dead. Then he noticed that someone had removed the wire connecting it to the wall jack.

  “Damn, I really could have gone for a pizza,” he remarke
d. Devra looked up from her knitting. “We can get. Do you like it?”

  “No, Devra. It was sort of a joke. Kind of an incongruity that in many people would produce the sensation of humor, perhaps leading to a laugh.” She looked at him blankly.

  Karp walked over to the floor-length drapes, pulled them back, and looked out through the huge picture window they concealed. A cleared gravel driveway and hedge-lined road, a snowy lawn, a row of black trees. A figure, a large man, was hurrying up the road. Leventhal? Before he could decide, Yaacov was by his side, closing the drapes.

  “Please. You shouldn’t do.”

  “Huh? Why shouldn’t I? You’re afraid I’ll make signals? Help, I’m a prisoner in a matzoh-ball factory?”

  Yaacov looked uncomfortable. He exchanged a quick look with Devra. “No,” he said, “these men who shot you. They are outside.”

  “What? Oh, for crying out loud! What is this shit, guys? Why the hell don’t you just call the goddamn cops?”

  “I’m afraid we can’t do that yet, Mr. Karp,” said Leventhal.

  Karp spun around. Leventhal was standing in the doorway of the living room, taking off his gloves. He was wearing a double-breasted tan car-coat, to which he gave a decidedly military air. His face was reddened, either with cold or exertion.

  “Why not? When are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  Leventhal smiled. “Now, if you like.” He spoke to the two others in clipped phrases in guttural Hebrew, orders. They vanished. Leventhal removed his coat and threw it on the couch, then sat and gestured Karp cordially into an armchair opposite him.

  “Now,” he said when Karp had seated himself, “we can have our talk. You are being well treated?”

  “Sure. First class. Best kidnapping I ever had. Look, Leventhal, when are you going to let me get out of here? And what was all that about those guys that shot me hanging around outside? And what was all the stuff about Karavitch being somebody else?”