David Duffy - In for a Ruble

“You don’t get it. You can’t. He made me feel like I was special, you know. I realize it sounds sick now, but that’s how it works. It was our special thing. I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t want it to stop, because then I wouldn’t be special anymore. I didn’t know about Daria. I didn’t.”

“It wasn’t your fault Andras. He manipulated you. The same way he manipulated your sister. And lots of others. It was his disease. Not yours.”

“NO! That’s not it. That’s not what I mean. You don’t know. YOU DON’T!”

I had a bad feeling. “Okay. I’m listening.”

His voice dropped to a whisper, as if he feared he’d be overheard.

“ Everybody knew. Mom and Dad. Aunt Julia. Everybody. Nobody did anything about it. ”

“That’s still not your fault.”

“ Yes it is—I didn’t make them. ”

We sat in the rented SUV, heater running, while Andras finished his story. He’d got most of it out upstairs before I announced it was time to move. Two reasons. We had a destination now—back to Massachusetts—and we’d have visitors shortly. I’d made it easy for Karp to trace us. I didn’t have a plan, just the gamble that if he was focused on me, I could stay a step ahead and protect Andras while we kept moving, and he’d have a harder time hurting anyone else, like the girl.

As with many people who have held a secret for as long as he had—especially as painful as this one—it all came tumbling out once he started. The abuse, which had gone on for several years. The Christmas party when Julia had barged in, Walter’s hands in Andras’s underwear. The whispered arguments that followed, among his parents, his father and Julia, everyone but Walter. Andras was twelve years old. He understood they were talking about him, about him and Walter. What he didn’t understand was why nothing happened. Everything went back to the way it was before. Except he was no longer special to Walter. He hadn’t understood why, although he put it down to getting caught—and that was somehow his fault in his mind. He figured out some years later that Walter had been effectively exiled. He didn’t show up at holidays or family functions anymore, some excuse was made about how busy he was. That was how the Leitzes dealt with it. What Andras didn’t know, what no one apparently knew, according to him, was that Uncle Walter had already started on Daria and somehow managed to keep it up even after being banned. Andras suspected as much when Daria committed suicide, but there was no proof, and he kept his fears and accusations to himself.

The suicide led to his mother’s breakdown and his parents’ divorce. She never said so, but it was clear to Andras that she blamed Leitz for everything that had happened. Andras was confused and frightened—his own experience and his family’s response, or nonresponse—still weighed on his young mind, as did his guilt over Daria. He was glad to seek refuge in boarding school, far away from the whole scene.

It was a boy named Kevin, three years ahead of him at Gibbet, who introduced Andras to the world of online porn for a fee. Somehow he knew to seek him out. He’d been there too. In Kevin’s case, it was his next-door neighbor, a doctor, who initiated secret touches and more—and then a whole, huge world of men who were only too happy to buy computer gear, pay apartment rentals, and shower gifts and cash on kids like Kevin and Andras if they were willing to strip, jerk off, and do things with their friends in front of a Web cam. Turned out there were several kids at Gibbet with similar experiences. That didn’t make the school unusual, maybe just par for the course. One came up with the idea of the Oscar Wilde theme. Andras was the computer expert. He wired and equipped an earlier, two-room apartment in Crestview, before doing the same in the expanded playhouse above the liquor store. The clients paid for it all, then the kids started charging on a fee-for-service basis. No client complained. None of the kids took it that seriously. It was kind of a lark, a joke. They felt more pity than anything for these sad perverts who shelled out thousands to watch them prance and preen in costume before jerking off or jumping into the sack. Hooking up with monetary benefits. Andras hadn’t even focused that seriously on the money. He didn’t need it, but he kept opening new bank accounts to hold the growing stash of cash.

“So you were all abused kids?” I asked, just to be sure. “That was the common bond?”

“Yeah.”

“Usually family members?”

He thought for a moment. “Usually, not always… like Kevin.”

“What about Irina?” I asked as gently as I could.

“What about her?” he snapped, immediately on the defensive.

He shook his head violently from side to side. I got ready to grab him, in case he tried to run. But he only swiveled in his seat and looked out the window. Not the time to push it.

“Okay,” I said. “What happened next?”

What happened next was that he started to have feelings for Irina. She held him at bay, but relented with time, and they began going out as well as hooking up for the benefit of their growing Internet audience. He found nothing odd about this progression of events—I understand it’s the way it often works with kids today (minus the online show-and-tell)—but it still seemed odd to me. On the other hand, everything about his story was bizarre. He began to feel protective and wanted her to stop performing. She told him to mind his own business. I could hear her, and I guessed her language was more colorful. He couldn’t let it go. He began to monitor her online activities, especially her “private auditions.” He grew increasingly jealous of “frankyfun” as franky took up more of her time. He hacked into franky’s account at ConnectPay and was horrified—but not necessarily shocked—to find it belonged to a guy with the same address as Uncle Walter. It didn’t take him any longer than it had me to make the connection.

Andras started toying with franky electronically—inserting minor malware programs into ConnectPay’s servers, causing modest data corruption and periodic operating glitches. He confronted Irina again. She told him to back off, she could manage her own affairs. So he sent a message to franky, from Oscar, telling him bad things would happen if he continued to pursue Salomé. Franky didn’t believe him. Salomé kept performing. Andras hacked into ConnectPay’s servers, accessed the company’s bank information and moved three million dollars through several accounts into his own and Irina’s. He figured that was enough to get franky’s attention. Oscar sent franky another e-mail informing him of the “fine” for not obeying the rules and warning him the next one would be double. When franky continued to pursue Salomé, Andras hit ConnectPay for five million in November.

He told the tale calmly and precisely, without emotion. Except when I asked about Irina. Somewhere along the story line, we moved from fact to fiction. I let him keep talking. We’d go through it again, maybe more than once, and the inconsistencies would begin to show themselves.

Things stayed quiet through December, but franky was all over Salomé as soon as they got back to school. So Andras, using her e-mail address, made the date at the Black Horse. Only franky didn’t show. Irina did, and she was royally pissed off.

I felt no sympathy for the late Walter Coryell. I did wonder if there were any members of the Leitz family who weren’t putting the squeeze on another.

Andras figured the only way out of Irina’s doghouse was to resolve things with franky once and for all. As soon as his uncle got sprung from the Tolland County jail, Andras arranged to meet him on Wednesday in New York. But when he arrived at Coryell’s office, nobody answered the buzzer. Uncle Walter didn’t answer his cell phone either. He went looking for Coryell at home. He wasn’t there, neither was Julia, of course, but the kids let him in. He hung with them until they got reabsorbed in their videogames, then he tossed his uncle’s bedroom, taking every key he could find.