Turk changed the apartment locks and closed the door to her father’s study. Her mother had died the previous Christmas (pneumonia contracted doing charity work), and once Lazlo had been declared legally incompetent, her brothers, Seamus and Teddy, sold the language school and the three siblings divided their parents’ remaining holdings. Turk got the apartment, sizable deposits to her accounts, and closets full of evening gowns, tuxedos, shelves of high heels, drawers of undergarments, socks, garters, watches, jewelry, banker’s boxes of files, photo albums, yellowing notepads, a hundred pounds of letters, some bound in twine, some by rubber band, some with ribbons. Artifacts of an earthly existence. Her father had not touched his dead wife’s things. Thus she inherited the tangible absence of both parents all at once and, being a good Brunn, immediately set to categorizing and organizing. Her father’s office at the language school arrived in fifty boxes, mostly books. She’d gone through the lot of it within a week, working daily from dawn until midnight. The personal effects took a month. Turk held on to the books, the pots and pans, the furniture, papers. A solitary sentimental gesture, she kept her father’s wristwatch, a Technos Atomium, and wore it every day. The jewelry she unloaded in the Diamond District. Everything else went to the incinerator or to the Catholic church on 82nd. And then she was alone.
Turk, who at the time knew nothing of her father’s origins except that he refused to talk about the shattering loss of his family during World War I or his and Magda’s nearly instant immigration to the United States, had no more reason to suspect that her father was a Krupp than the king of England. Lazlo had been meticulous in his destruction of all physical evidence connecting him to his family, who were, when he and Magda decided to bug out in 1919, very much alive and well and hard at work on the fatherland’s illegal rearmament and military reindustrialization. He engaged a forger in Bonn to produce new birth certificates, transforming him and Magda into Brunns; his property was sold off through an intermediary to raise funds for their new life. If not exactly a cakewalk, an unexceptional series of events in the postwar haze, when regulations weren’t much more than smoke rising off the once-reliably thorny bureaucracy that had gone kaput with the rest of the empire. Lazlo burned photos, letters, diplomas. In Berlin, death certificates for L and M Krupp were drawn up and archived (he was KIA; she starved to death during the British blockade), a final act of erasure before the freshly minted Brunns hopped a train to Antwerp and from there a steamer to New York.
It was after committing her father to Pickering that Turk, just a liberated gal looking for a way to tame her wild despair, underwent a reinvention of her own. No torched documents, no new name, no transoceanic voyage, her ride on the IND Eighth Ave line down to that MacDougal Street basement was no less transformative. She hadn’t been searching for a new self or a new line of work. She was looking only for a little relief, and there was nothing like the loving embrace of the creaking leather straps to help you let go of the feeling you’re responsible for every living thing on the planet. Turk tried it once, got intrigued, became a regular, her tastes expanded, and before long she was on the other side of the dungeon, rigging her own subs. When the bondage market exploded in the early ’70s (Vietnam plus Nixon times Vatican II equals), she put out her shingle.
Twenty years later, Turk was running a well-regarded dungeon, but trend lines were down. The internet was wrecking everything, and she was forced to pivot to a new experiential tableau. She was no dummy. She subscribed to Red Herring and Inc. She was hip to the innovate-or-die ethos.
What she came up with was something like an emotional amusement park, a menu of scenes that would appeal to the varied tastes of her client base. She began testing different complications: hostage situation, verbally abusive parent, bank holdup, little scenarios she could set up and run within the confines of the dungeon. Clients were enthusiastic, but there wasn’t much repeat business. The complications were novelties. They lacked soul.
She kept working on it. Each new complication was a step further down the path. After a year of R&D, she chartered a 727 and sold tickets for a hijacking complication. Fifty-seven participants paid $8,500 each. Seven paid a $1,500 booster that got them a pistol-whipping from the Libyan hijackers. A female client fought back and they took her in the galley and raped her ($2,000). On subsequent hops, Turk added a bareback fee of another $2,500 (pre-complication testing included), but the whole thing got out of hand. Too many clients were signing up for slashings, whippings, and rapes, men and women in equal numbers, and everyone was enjoying it all a little too much—the rapists, the victims, the other passengers. It didn’t sit right with Turk. She was a capitalist, but she’d begun to think of her business as a gallery of sorts. She wanted her product to mean something. She didn’t want clients who were paying to be entertained. She wanted clients who were paying to be moved. She could see the entertainment parabola arcing back to the dungeon, and her business was no longer in the dungeon.
She spiked the plane complication and came up with a clever gas station complication in which a participant, working behind the counter, might or might not experience a brutal robbery customized to his or her psychological profile. She jacked the price up into the five figures. The uncertainty was the selling point—it was luxury in the extreme, tying on that blue bib and waiting all weekend on a stool for the holdup man to come through the door. You waited and you waited, and he didn’t come. He never came. So wait a minute—you’re telling me you spent all weekend in a shithole south of Albuquerque, sweeping scorpions out of the john, watching dust devils hop the highway, and nothing happened? And it cost how much? That’s exquisite, sign me up!
She had run the complication for five different clients before she sent in a crew with guns. How, you might ask, did she keep getting people to pay for the experience of doing nothing?
Look, it’s a fact: There’s a subset of the wealthy who love to get ripped off. I suppose it’s not far removed from the SM binary of powerful businessman by day, gimp by night. Because the U.S. dollar no longer activates their jolly glands, they have to come up with new forms of currency. And the gold standard, the crown jewel, the one thing that will get everyone to shut up, gather ’round, and pay attention, is a good story. They’re all chasing stories. And good stories are always about failure. The more humiliating the failure, the better. You met Mick Jagger on Mustique? Yeah, well, he went down on my wife in a bathroom at the White House, and I was outside holding his coat. Let me tell you how it happened.
Turk understood that if the complication was a guaranteed rip-off, they’d line up to take two. They couldn’t not tell their friends. There was a waiting list. But it troubled her because there it was again, a complication turned into entertainment.
So she mixed things up to invert the inversion. She sent in the gunmen. On the day of that fateful complication, the man behind the counter, who had graced the covers of alumni magazines of Yale (undergrad), Stanford (business), a son of the Mississippi Delta who had slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, was at the time the lone Black man in the lily-white field of dot-com billionaires. The gunmen wrenched him over the counter by the collar of his Ascot Chang and sent him through the plate-glass window headfirst (sugar glass, of course, safety being priority one). They dragged him across the parking lot by his heels, secured a noose around his neck, bound his arms and legs, and tossed him into the scarred bed of a Ford F-150. Drove long enough for him to get an eyeball full of the inked 88s and iron crosses. Impressed upon him their violent intentions, in case he had not understood, by invoking the terminologies of slavery and invisibility. Pressed the blades of their knives to his crotch. Waved around a flare gun and made clear their willingness to use it to clear his sinus passages. Pulled into a field, pitched him over the side of the truck, threw the length of rope over a high branch, and began to hoist him up.