Philip Carlo: The Ice Man

As Richard made his way back down the hill to his car, he was curious, even a bit amused, to see what would happen; would the rats in fact eat a man while he was still alive? Curious, also, to see his own reaction to such a thing. Richard often wondered why he could be so cold-blooded. Was he born that way or made that way—was it nature or nurture that made him the remorseless monster he’d become? It was a question he’d been asking himself for many years now, since he was a young boy.

Today, Richard had promised to take his daughters Merrick and Chris to Lobels, a specialty shop that sold parochial-school uniforms. Barbara was feeling a bit under the weather and didn’t go. Both the girls enjoyed shopping with their dad because he bought them whatever they wanted. All either of them had to do was look at something and it was suddenly theirs. Richard had been brought up in extreme poverty, had to steal food to eat as a boy in Jersey City, and his own children would never want for anything.

Excited, the girls sat next to their dad in the front seat. They both knew that their father often got into arguments with people about how they drove, and the girls silently hoped that nothing like that happened today. It was a kind of ritual they had—hoping their dad would not explode as he drove.

Barbara explained: Richard was like the cop of the road. He couldn’t see someone do something wrong, take a turn without signaling, without saying something. I mean something, you know, nasty.

Each of the girls needed four blouses and two skirts for the school year. At the shop in Emerson, Richard bought them five gray pleated skirts, fifteen blouses, two dozen pairs of knee-high socks, two blue blazers, five vests, and a half dozen pairs of gym outfits. Going shopping with dad was like Christmas morning.

Pleased his girls were happy, Richard paid with cash, and off they went. They were now going to stop in Grand Union to pick up some groceries and return home. Two blocks from the shop, a woman in a station wagon cut Richard off. Incensed, he stopped next to her at a light, rolled down his window, and berated her for cutting him off. There were several children in the backseat of the wagon.

“Daddy—Daddy, don’t get mad,” Merrick begged. “Please, Daddy.” But the woman gave Richard a dirty, condescending look and ignored him as if he were crazy, a fool. In the next instant, Richard was out of the car. He quickly walked to the station wagon, opened the door, and actually ripped the door right off its hinges in two powerful pulls.

Terrified, the woman stared at Richard.

Satisfied, he got back in his car and pulled away.

“Please, Daddy, please calm down,” Chris now begged.

“Quiet!” he demanded, the word seeming more like a growl than any word in the English language.

Four days later, Richard returned to the cave. The rats had eaten the man alive. All his flesh was gone. In the pale yellow glow of Richard’s flashlight, the mark was now only disjointed, haphazard bones—an unspeakable sight.

Curious, Richard stared at his work, this monster he had created. He made sure the camera had captured what had happened… how the huge rats first approached the hapless man with trepidation as he furiously squirmed to free himself; how the rats, more and more of them, bolder and bolder still, began taking bites out of him, first his ears, then his eyes. Vicious little bastards, Richard thought.

Richard retrieved his equipment and left. A gentle snowfall had covered the forest with a pearly white blanket. Everything was white and clean and storybook lovely. A solemn white silence had descended upon the forest. He knew the fresh snow would cover any tracks he left.

Richard took the videotape of the mark being eaten alive to the man who had ordered the hit.

“Did he suffer?” the man asked, his voice gruff, his manner callous, his eyes dead, like two bullet holes.

“Oh yeah, he really suffered,” Richard said.

“Really?” the man asked.

“Really,” Richard said, and gave him the tape. They both watched it. Overjoyed, yet slightly appalled that Richard would even think of, let alone do, such a thing, the man gave him ten thousand dollars for the contract, and a second ten thousand dollars for the incredible suffering the mark had experienced.

“You did a good job,” he said. Richard liked to please his customers; that was how his business had grown over the years. Richard did not know what the mark had done to deserve such a fate. He didn’t care. None of that was his business. The less he knew, the better.

After a job well done, Richard made his way home, again wondering why such things didn’t bother him, how he had become so cold, so devoid of human feelings. He thought about his childhood, and his jaw muscles clenched into tight knots and he made that slight clicking sound out of the left side of his heart-shaped mouth. He took a long, deep breath, turned on the radio and tuned in a country music station. Richard liked country music. The simple lyrics and meandering repetition soothed him.

Still thinking about his childhood, the barbaric cruelty he had suffered, Richard made his way home, where he would again wrap himself in the cloak of a loving husband, a doting father, a devoted family man.

He parked his car in front of his home and sat there for a while wondering how he had become so unlike other people. With these thoughts filling his enormous head, Richard slowly stepped from his car and made his way inside, walking with his quiet catlike gait, like a heavyweight prizefighter in his prime.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Jersey City, New Jersey, the place where Richard Kuklinski was born and raised, was a bustling Polish enclave. Because of its many Polish Catholic churches and an abundance of blue-collar work, Polish immigrants flocked to Jersey City in large numbers.

The Lackawanna, Erie, Pennsylvania, and Central railroad companies all had bases in Jersey City. Trains from across the United States brought all kinds of produce to the East Coast of America, and this was the final stop. Sprawling rail yards filled the area. Rail tracks ran on just about every other street. Jersey City’s main thoroughfare, Railroad Avenue, had a trestle running right down the center of the wide two-way street. Powerful black locomotives pulling long rust-colored trains to the waterfront were the norm; the heavy chug-chug sound and high-pitched screams of steam locomotives came from all directions, both day and night, seven days a week.

Located at the northeast end of the state of New Jersey, Jersey City was ideally located near the bustling metropolis of Manhattan, and from here all types of goods and produce were shipped up and down the eastern seaboard. At its closest point just across the southernmost end of the Hudson River, Jersey City was only three-quarters of a mile away from lower Manhattan—the center of the world—and ferries were constantly bringing goods to the piers that crowded the busy Manhattan waterfront. On a clear day, it seemed, you could easily throw a stone to Manhattan from Jersey City, it appeared so close—the proverbial stone’s throw away.

In truth, Jersey City was as different from New York City as another planet. In Jersey City lived the working poor, those struggling to make ends meet, to put food on the table. Yes, there was a lot of work in Jersey City, but it was backbreaking menial employment, and the wages were pitifully low. In the summertime it was unbearably hot and humid. Because of underdeveloped swampland nearby, undulating dark clouds of mosquitoes filled the night air. In the winter Jersey City was brutally cold, constantly battered by powerful winds that came tearing down the Hudson River and off the nearby Atlantic Ocean. It seemed during those months like a place in the far northern reaches of Siberia.