A surprise in no way good

ON Jan. 21, 1998, Assistant U.S. Atty. Stanley Alpert is about to celebrate his 38th birthday. Coming home by subway to his Greenwich Village apartment after a disappointing blind date, he sees a promising-looking woman on the train and strikes up a conversation with her. Realizing that the two of them are disembarking at the same stop and live only a few blocks apart, he offers to walk her home. Along the way, they go looking for some middle-of-the-night cookies. And, because of the cookie search (eventually successful even though he never gets to eat them), Alpert is in the wrong place at the wrong time -- alone on a dark, deserted street where he becomes the target of a hapless gang of stupidly vicious punks who kidnap him hoping to use his ATM card to gain access to his bank account.

“The Birthday Party: A Memoir of Survival” is not a funny book, although some of what happens in the course of the harrowing next 26 hours is funny. It may be hard to remember that in 1998 cellphones were far from ubiquitous and the horrors of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks hadn’t happened.

Despite the passage of time, however, I have no doubt that Alpert’s recollection of those events and conversations, including the lame jokes, are entirely accurate. Life-changing experiences are often seared into memory, complete with details of sound, smell and taste that defy ordinary recall. And even though he eventually escapes from his captors and sees his assailants brought to justice, it is clear that Alpert continues to grapple with the disturbing effects of that violation to this very day.

Contrast is everything: We see Alpert’s $70 Florsheims as opposed to the thugs’ $130 Air Jordans. The punks drive a black Lexus. The lawyer doesn’t own a car. Alpert and his captors are products of New York’s mean streets. Alpert grew up as a nice Jewish kid in Brooklyn just as the safe, working-class neighborhood was changing to a gang- and drug-infested one. His parents divorced. His family was poor, and he grew up dealing with routine muggings. Ultimately, this impoverished childhood served as the catalyst to a desire to succeed and sent him in search of an education. His attackers see their backgrounds, ironically not all that different from Alpert’s, as excuses for turning to lives of crime, drugs and prostitution and as a justification for their stealing what Alpert has legitimately earned. “Hey, you have an education. You can always earn it back,” one of them says.

In the face of his captors’ terrifying threats, Alpert forces himself to remain calm. When the thugs threaten to harm his elderly father, the blindfolded hostage engages in a life-and-death game of mental chess to protect his family without inflaming his captors. Throughout the ordeal, he is faced with the very real understanding that his assailants have nothing to lose and that these may be his last few precious hours on this earth.

Anyone who has ever watched “Cops” knows that most crooks aren’t geniuses. The bad guys here are no exception. Their schemes are violent, overblown and essentially stupid, but what’s truly chilling is how young these perpetrators are, how devoid of any moral compass and how ignorant they are of how the world works. Their behavior is ultimately so bizarre (including offering their captive sex with one of their group’s female members) and so puzzling (they let him go for no clear reason) that investigators don’t believe Alpert’s story.

At first they think that he made up the whole thing. But the clues Alpert manages to provide -- part of a cellphone number, the pattern of tiles in a brownstone lobby and the name of a local deli -- eventually provide enough information so that the kidnappers are found and brought to justice. Their videotaped interrogations and unwittingly damning confessions, rendered verbatim, are simultaneously incredibly arrogant and incredibly sad. These are young people who know not they know not.

Reading “The Birthday Party” is like watching a slow-motion train wreck -- difficult to look at but impossible to turn away from. Alpert depicts good guys and bad guys in vivid detail, bringing into focus the motivations and the backgrounds of the perpetrators (as well as the friends who come to his aid) and the cops, FBI agents and district attorneys who investigated and prosecuted the case. These are the men and women who constitute the thin blue line that holds the chaos of mindless violence at bay -- violence that can reach out and touch any of us at any time.

Those telling details -- alternately funny, appalling, fascinating and scary -- are the product of some hard-won wisdom on Alpert’s part. That’s the real gift he received on the occasion of his remarkably memorable 38th birthday. “The Birthday Party” is a good read, but it is also an object lesson. We all need to pay attention to it.

J.A. Jance is the author of many thrillers, including “Dead Wrong,” “Long Time Gone” and, most recently, “Web of Evil.”