Читать книгу LIFE AFTER RUSSIAN ROULETTE: REDEMPTION - Michael Kaminski - Страница 3

I stared emotionless at the police revolver pointed straight at my eyes. Suppressed thoughts and memories surfaced again from the darkness of my mind. Thoughts about the complexities, contradictions and conflicts that live within every human heart and soul, especially within me, came alive. The moral and ethical decisions tugged in different directions like a mental, spiritual and psychological tug of war.

As I focused my attention on the Smith & Wesson .38 Special hovering within inches of my head, the contrast of darkness and light, the blackness of the inner tube compared to the bright stainless steel barrel fascinated me. The old powder burns and encrusted residue encircled and surrounded the cylinder. The depth of the indentions within the police issue hollow point bullets appeared like cold eyes looking back at me.

I knew the man holding the gun held it with a very steady grip. I thought I knew him as I reflected on my situation. Memories of past encounters and experiences took control of my mind. Although this was not the first time a gun had been pointed directly at me or at my head, it was the first time I was the one holding the grip.

I sat upright in bed and looked at my surroundings. I had been at Lancaster Theological Seminary for two and a half years. During that time, I never desired to make my two-room residence feel like home.

The bedroom was bare except for the bed, a small refrigerator and a mirror on the door. No pictures hung on the walls. No other furniture. No rug on the cold tile floor, just a bed and a refrigerator to keep the brandy and beer cold.

The other room, my living room, was no different in creative interior design. However, it did have two chairs, a desk and even a small rug on the floor. In a way, my small suite reminded me of the apartment I had when I was living undercover and working in organized crime and Narcotics on The Block in Baltimore.

Maybe, psychologically, I did not want to become too comfortable in this environment. I was working through my third and final year and still did not feel really religious or even deeply spiritual.

“Why was I even in seminary?” I thought.

Holding a glass of brandy in my left hand and my gun in my right, I reflected on the years and experiences that led me to this place in life. I looked at the old biker hat that draped over one of the Bibles sitting on the desk. The contrast was almost amusing.

The sun had set very early on that cold evening in January of 1989. It seemed like the brief brightness of the day and the short winter sun was quickly overcome by the darkness of the long winter night. The shadows of the nights always haunted me.

I just returned to seminary that day after the holiday break and prepared for next semester’s classes.

“Holidays,” I smiled as I swallowed the glass of brandy quickly. “I hate the holidays. I hate Christmas music. Hell, I even hate Christmas. What kind of minister would I be, anyway?”

I had been in seminary since September of 1986 and my understanding of why I was on this journey still remained a mystery to everyone, including me.

As the thoughts in my mind drifted back to that long dark night and warm summer morning in August of 1979, the darkness of the early morning hours created a surreal scene as I relived the events of the deadly shooting.

We all knew how the situation would end. Although none of us openly talked about what was going to happen in the morning, everyone involved in the setup understood the eventuality of Max dying.

When you make a conscious decision to take a life, you lose part of your soul. When you decide to play judge and jury to the extent that a man dies, no matter what he has done in the past, you have crossed over the imaginary line that separates right from wrong, moral from immoral and ethical from unethical. As police officers, we decided to cross the line, to go over the edge.

What we decided to do on this investigation was more than an ethical or moral choice. We had become experts on walking the fine line of legality. We were very proficient in justifying our actions and the outcomes of our projects. But this time we were going beyond the boundaries of our badge and power.

“Perceptions,” I put the gun on the bed and poured more brandy into that familiar old glass I carried with me for many years.

As I held it, I thought about its significance to me. For anyone else, a glass was meaningless – just another old and scratched bar tumbler. But in my mind, it was a reflection of the lives we lived and the identities we created to survive undercover.

The glass was really symbolic of the masks or personas we created, the person we wanted other people to believe we were, to exist and get to where we wanted to be. It was PJ’s glass but I kept it after he died.

The effect of the brandy actually intensified my thoughts like a truth drug. There were three names written on the glass – Coz, Jason, and PJ. All three names belonged to the same person but no one really knew the real Paul Joseph Werner except me. When PJ died shortly after the killing of Max, I took the glass as a reminder of the cops we had become.

PJ changed my life. He was more than just my partner in Narcotics. He also became my blood brother after we cut our wrists and blended our blood as one. That night, as we sat in bed together in the apartment we used as a cover location for drug deals and organized crime contacts, we made a personal bond and commitment to each other. Trust no one, not even the other cops, especially the other members of our unit. I never forgot that promise or broke the trust.

The mirror on the door appeared to be like a doorway into my past, an entrance into the very dark hollow of my mind. I stood up and gazed intently into the image of who was looking back at me.

I still could not honestly perceive who I was as I looked at myself in the mirror. The face looking back at me was almost unrecognizable from the idealistic young man who joined the Baltimore City Police Department in 1973.

As I continued to look in the mirror and stare at the face looking back at me, I remembered the identities I used undercover, Michael Brian Beccio and Michael Brian Mattia. Those people remained in the minds of the people I left behind in Baltimore. Before I left the city, I was informed that at least three contracts were out for Beccio and Mattia. I made a lot of enemies as a cop and some were even police officers.

PJ had taught me a valuable lesson. Allies and enemies were interchangeable. Do not trust anyone. In reality, there was a similarity between the Pagans, Hawkeye and some of the cops in Vice and Narcotics.

The mirror brought to light the distorted masks I used to hide my true identity while working undercover. Surrounded by the darkness of the room, I felt like a ghost living a life I had created to survive my past. Once you walk into the shadows, it is difficult to see the light and truth about life.

Once again, I was wearing a disguise. I created a new persona that I wanted people to see when they looked at me. In a way, I assumed a new identity by attempting to symbolically kill my old self through an alcohol induced spiritual transformation. I decided to enter seminary after I tried to kill myself in a car accident followed by weeks of living in morphine-induced hallucinations in the hospital. It was during those hallucinations that I found myself going to hell every day. After one of those morphine trips, I made a promise to God that when I could walk again I would enter seminary. No other logical reason.

In a sense, I was tired of playing the game as I examined my reflection in the mirror. I became conditioned to living on the edge, even in seminary.

For years, I craved the adrenalin rush of taking risks and playing the game of mental and psychological Russian roulette every day. It was an addictive drug. Now I missed that way of life. To me, for years, there was nothing more exciting and challenging than creating the crime.

I wanted to go back in time, and in a very psychologically destructive way, feel at home again. I wanted to experience the thrill and power of holding someone’s life in the palm of my hand. That was where I belonged, I thought, not in seminary.

Nevertheless, I also knew, realistically, that way of life would eventually kill me. See there is more than one way to die. Physical death is only one form.

I wanted to shatter the mirror with my fist and destroy the image that was looking back at me, haunting me, and pulling me like a magnet back into my past and back into the cave.

As I walked around the room, trying to numb the pain with more brandy in the darkness, I noticed the shiny stainless steel revolver resting on the bed.

“Perceptions,” again I thought. “How would society perceive my actions? But then how would society perceive what I did as a cop?”

For a brief moment, a smile crossed my lips as I wondered how many seminary students bring a gun with them when they embark on their spiritual journey of faith.

“Why was I here?” I asked myself again as I looked deep into the soul of my eyes that appeared to echo the journey of my life. “Was I really walking toward a deeper level of faith or was I just running from life and trying to escape from the masks I lived behind for so many years?”

In the blackness of that icy January night, I was frozen in my thoughts. I did not understand my reasons or actions. I did not want to die. Then, I did not want to live. Not this way. I was tired of living with the past weighing me down. I was also afraid of what life would be like in the future. I was afraid of dying and I was afraid of living. I was afraid of life.

I sat back down on the bed with another glass of brandy. Again, my thoughts flashed back to the day of the shooting. It was a beautiful, warm and sunny day. “Most people would be thankful to be alive on a day like that,” I remembered that morning as I sat across the highway from the fruit stand waiting for PJ and Max to come out. A nice day to die I thought. Not alone on a cold January night.

As the lonely darkness of the night transformed into the silent stillness of the early morning hours, the effect of the brandy finally numbed my senses. My eyelids drooped but I did not want to fall into a deep sleep.

I was afraid of not waking up again. It was not unlike many of the nights I was alone undercover, the fear of not being in control.

So many thoughts crowded my mind as I stepped inside the cave. And there they were: the shooting, the way I set myself up for professional suicide after PJ’s death, being suspended and investigated by the Internal Investigation Division, resigning from the department without charges after agreeing not to talk, and the situation at the Russian embassy.

I thought about how society perceives a person to be in life. Society expects a person to act, look and be a certain way. Society would not understand my actions as a cop.

“Society would not understand my suicide in seminary” I looked at my image in the mirror. “I do not fit the image of someone who should be granted ordination.”

“What am I doing?” I thought. I sat down on the edge of my bed in the dark dorm room. “Why do I want to do this?”

No one answered.

I fixed my pillow so that it would stand upright at the head of the bed and against the wall. I positioned myself, rested my back against the pillow, and sat in the silence.

As I sipped from the glass, I held my old friend that was with me since 1974. My gun warmed in the palm of my hand. It became a part of me again. I finally started that journey inside that chasm of my mind and drifted into the dimness of my soul.