Sleepers

Prologue

I sat across the table from the man who had battered and tortured and brutalized me nearly thirty years ago. I had imagined him to be in his sixties – he had seemed so old to me back then – but, in fact, he was in his late forties, less than a decade older than me. His thinning hair was combed straight back, and his right hand, trembling and ash white, held a filtered cigarette. His left clutched a glass of ice water. He looked at me from behind a pair of black-rimmed glasses, his brown eyes moist, his nose running, the skin at its base red and flaky.

'I don't know what you want me to say,' he said in a voice devoid of the power it once held. 'I don't know where to start.'

In my memory, he was tall and muscular, arrogant and quick-tempered, eager to lash out at those under his command at the juvenile home where I spent nine months when I was thirteen years old. In reality, sitting now before me, he was frail and timid, thin beads of cold sweat forming at the top of his forehead.

'I need to keep my job,' he said, his voice a whining plea. 'I can't lose this one. If any of my bosses find out, if anybody finds out, I'm finished.'

I wanted to stand up and grab him, reach past the coffee and the smoke and beat him until he bled. Instead, I sat there and remembered all that I had tried so hard, over so many years, to forget. Painful screams piercing silent nights. A leather belt against soft skin. Foul breath on the back of a neck. Loud laughter mixed with muffled tears.

I had waited so long for this meeting, spent so much time and money searching for the man who held the answers to so many of my questions. But now that he was here, I had nothing to say, nothing to ask. I half-listened as he talked about two failed marriages and a bankrupt business, about how the evil he committed haunts him to this very day. The words seemed cowardly and empty and I felt no urge to address them.

He and the group he was a part of had stained the future of four boys, damaged them beyond repair. Once, the sound of this man's very walk caused all our movement to stop. His laugh, low and eerie, had signaled an onslaught of torment. Now, sitting across from him, watching his mouth move and his hands flutter, I wished I had not been as afraid of him back then, that I'd somehow had the nerve and the courage to fight back. So many lives might have turned out so differently if I had.

'I didn't mean all those things,' he whispered, leaning closer toward me. 'None of us did.'

'I don't need you to be sorry,' I said. 'It doesn't do me any good.'

'I'm beggin' you,' he said, his voice breaking. 'Try to forgive me. Please. Try.'

'Learn to live with it,' I told him, getting up from the table.

'I can't,' he said. 'Not anymore.'

'Then die with it,' I said, looking at him hard. 'Just like the rest of us.'

The pained look of surrender in his eyes made my throat tighter, easing the darkness of decades.

If only my friends had been there to see it.

This is a true story about friendships that run deeper than blood. In its telling, I have changed many of the names and altered most of the dates, locations and identifying characteristics of people and institutions to protect the identities of those involved. For example, I have changed the location of the murder trial, which did not take place in Manhattan. I've also changed where people live and work – and made many of them a lot better looking than they really are. It is a story that has taken two years to write and parts of two decades to research, forcing awake in all the principals memories we would have preferred to forget. I have been helped in the re-creation of the events of this story by many friends and a few enemies, all of whom requested nothing more in return than anonymity. So while their deeds have been accurately documented, their names – heroes and villains – will remain unknown.

However hidden their identities, this is still my story and that of the only three friends in my life who have truly mattered.

Two of them were killers who never made it past the age of thirty-five. The other is a non-practicing attorney living within the pain of his past, too afraid to let it go, finding reassurance instead in confronting its horror.

I am the only one who can speak for them, and for the children we were.