A Bomb Built in Hell

by Vachss, Andrew

  At 1:20 a.m. the Ford turned down Houston heading for the East River. Wesley reached for the switch on the radio transmitter—before he touched it, he felt the old man’s gnarled hand on his. He looked back at the darkness in the back seat for second. Then they threw the switch, together.

  As the car slowed for a light on Houston, the sky above Chrystie fired to a brilliant orange-red. The car purred east.

  For the first time, the kid came inside the garage with them to stay. The old man was able to reach his bed by himself. The kid slept right beside him.

  Wesley and the dog went to their apartment and they were all asleep within minutes.

  59/

  The News said the fire had claimed the lives of “at least thirty-one people,” and had caused another eleven to be hospitalized. The authorities were strongly divided as to the cause of the homicidal arson. They sifted the ruins for nineteen days, and if they found anything besides miscellaneous flesh and bone, it never made the papers.

  Minor wars soon erupted among mob factions throughout the city, eastern Long Island, and northern New Jersey. They soon escalated, and bigger people were called in from outside to settle things. Paranoia was running wild, and everyone was so busy distrusting and plotting that even those who knew who had been at the meeting never thought to look for Petraglia. It was assumed he died in the blaze with the others.

  A voodoo church that had been meeting in a cellar under one of the movie houses in Times Square was dynamited, with four people killed. The police had more informers than they could pay. Crackdowns on drunks took place from one end of the Bowery to the other. The law said it was okay to be a drunk, but a flaming menace to society was something else.

  It was popularly assumed that a wino had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette until some bright boy leaked the identity of the bodies inside the building. The columnists had a field day and the florists felt like they were back in the heyday of Dion O’Banion in the Roaring ’20s.

  60/

  Wesley worked days on his project. The compounding was easy—a four-to-one mixture of ammonium nitrate and TNT produces a good facsimile of Amatol, the best military-industrial explosive for large-scale demolition work. He made the mercury-fulminate detonators himself, packing each one inside a sealed aluminum tube about the size of a mechanical pencil. The explosives were hermetically sealed inside zinc boxes, then packed into wooden crates. Pet had drilled each of the boxes so that the mercury-fulminate pencils snapped into position instantly.

  Nights, Wesley spent on the roof. Alone. There was a lot to think about. But first the area had to be clean. There were already too many cops around during the day—junkies were a magnetic force to them.

  Wesley finally admitted to himself that he had expected Pet to check himself out in the gas chamber they had built. But he hadn’t let the old man go....

  He waited patiently until the rehab of the building on Houston was nearly complete. Then he and the kid went to the site in broad daylight, each carrying two of the wooden crates. He had made the kid practice until he could handle thirty-five pounds on each shoulder like it wasn’t much of anything. The crates were clearly marked GENERATOR PARTS: THIS SIDE UP! and they had no trouble placing all four of them in corners of the top floor.

  They made the same trip several more times, until there were twenty boxes of the mixture in place.

  The last night, they returned again—this time with the Doberman. They left the dog near the door and went downstairs. The place was ready-made for junkies, alright—as easy to break into as a glass vault. They planted sixty sticks of fuseless dynamite in the basement. Harmless, unless there was a massive explosion in the immediate vicinity. On the top floor, Wesley rigged a magnesium fuse from each of the fulminate of mercury pencils. The trails crossed at several points and met in the center of the empty floor, forming a giant spider’s web.

  As they went down the back stairs with the dog, Wesley reflected that it wasn’t much use writing slogans on a wall if you planned to total the building. The tiny propane torch had been placed with its tip pointing right into the middle of the spider’s web, joined by seven others exactly the same. The hard part had been the trip mechanism, but the salesman at Willoughby-Peerless had been only too happy to demonstrate how the motor-driven Nikon F could be activated at distances up to a full mile with a radio transmitter, especially when he spotted Wesley for the kind of chump who would pay retail. The whole tab came to over three grand and the salesman went home happy. Wesley went home with exactly what he wanted, too.

  That night, he and the kid set up the Nikon so that its mirror mechanism flipped the series-wired little torches into action. Then they closed the door behind them, and Wesley smeared several tubes of Permabond back and forth across the seams which they had hand-sanded to the smoothness of glass. They knew that a single drop would hold a car door shut against a man trying desperately to get out—what they applied would hold against anything short of an explosion. They stuck the aluminum sign with its skull-and-crossbones in black on a white background on the door and left. In bright-red lettering, it said:

  KEEP OUT! DANGER! POISON GAS USED FOR EXTERMINATION!

  The papers promised a “gala event” at the new methadone clinic. All the public supporters of methadone maintenance—actors, politicians, anyone wealthy enough or famous enough to rate a photo-op—would be hosted to a superb lunch prepared by the addicts themselves. It was widely hailed by the Times as:

  ... one of the few remaining issues around which New Yorkers remain united. In spite of dissident factions which oppose methadone clinics on NIMBY—Not In My Back Yard—grounds, those with a vision for this city recognize that methadone maintenance programs are a necessary element in the fight against narcotics addiction. The clinics are here to stay.

  The gala was scheduled for noon on Thursday, a slow news day. Extensive press coverage was expected.

  61/

  Thursday, 12:35 p.m. The newly christened Methadone Maintenance Center was open for business and the joint was packed. In an attempt to “involve the community,” as the Times duly reported, the doors had been thrown open to the public. The chance to mingle with all the celebrities was too good to pass up— mothers brought their children, housewives drove in from far-flung suburbs, and businessmen with no more interest in narcotics-control than in socialism flocked to the center. Wesley took the radio transmitter to the roof on the Slip so that there would be minimum signal interference, as the helpful salesman had suggested. He went up there alone—there was a tacit agreement between Wesley and the old man that he would be the only one to go up on the roof.

  The range was right—but if it didn’t fire, he’d just have to move it closer. Wesley pressed the switch. There was a dead silence in his head. He mentally counted backwards from one hundred, like the time they’d operated on his leg in the Army and they had pumped the Sodium Pentothal into him.

  He was all the way down to eighty-two when a dull, booming roar rose out of Houston Street and swept across town toward the river in thundering waves. A much larger explosion followed—the sound deeper, resonating at a different harmonic. All the sounds that followed were indistinguishable from the general madness that came close behind.

  Surviving spectators said that the roof of the building had literally jumped into the air—then the entire front of the building had simply vanished in smoke. TV programs were interrupted with horror-struck announcers saying there was nothing but rubble where the Center had been. Seven different precincts responded to the fire calls. Squad cars were clogging traffic on the street until well past dark. A roving reporter interviewed a long-haired young man just back from gunner duty on a helicopter in Vietnam—he asked if the young man had ever seen anything like that before. The young man just shrugged: “There’s more bodies, that’s all.”

  The papers were full of estimated body counts and the FBI was invited to participate in the case by an anguished mayor. In spite of the fire trucks, the ruins smoldered for
several days—water pressure was low in the area, due to all the open hydrants. The blast had blown several buildings completely apart and had thrown death-dealing chunks of concrete and steel as far as a hundred yards. Ninety-three persons were known dead by the third day of counting.

  The mayor dismissed persistent rumors that the bombing was the work of some group that was opposed to a methadone clinic in their neighborhood. “There have been minor incidents elsewhere, but the people of my city know they can always get a redress of their grievances at City Hall.”

  The News’ “Inquiring Photographer” did a street survey on reactions to the explosion. The results were never printed.

  At least six political groups anonymously claimed credit for the bombing, calling it everything from “bringing imperialistic war home to the pigs,” to “a manifesto written in dynamite.” None was taken too seriously by anyone but the FBI, which was already counting the increased budget appropriations.

  Every columnist had his favorite candidate, although “terrorists” remained the front-runner. Rumors of a cult surfaced occasionally, but never gained much strength.

  There was a mass funeral for the “methadone victims,” although many of the families of the dead declined the privilege.

  Wesley returned to the roof to think.

  62/

  Seeing the old man didn’t want to talk, Wesley walked through the garage and into his own area. The Mansfield job was the first they had done just for the money. Their employers were fundamentally unchanged—regrouped, cautious, but with the same limited ways of carving out their unique monopolies. Because they thought the old man died in the gas attack, it was now Wesley who negotiated with them directly.

  He had handled the Mansfield negotiations just like Carmine had taught him: No questions, just a price. Half up front with the rest on completion. Mansfield had been one of the prime suspects in the gas murders. The people who ordered his death used their paranoia as proof.

  Wesley stripped off all the clothing he had worn on the job and stuffed it into a large paper bag. The jewelry came off too, to be filed with hundreds of similar articles. The incinerator would later claim all the clothing—it was part of the cost of doing business.

  After a quick shower, Wesley dressed again and headed for the firing range on the fourth floor. He carefully sighted in and calibrated the new M16s Pet had bought from a warrant officer at Fort Dix. A few missing guns from the overall inventory were routinely charged against the manufacturer, who was, in turn, building the guns so far below the specifications agreed to in the government contract that protesting the slight extra charge was unthinkable. Wesley was able to obtain all the military ordnance he wanted and everyone’s illusions were preserved ... even down to the two boots who thought they were delivering the M16s to a government agent who was going to run a “spot check” to make sure they worked well enough to protect our boys in whatever jungle they would be fighting in that year.

  Wesley always disassembled each weapon and rebuilt it to the correct specs, using the manual as a guide. He remembered throwing away his own rifle in Korea when he finally got his hands on a solid, reliable Russian AK-47—nobody in his outfit with any brains was carrying Army-issue by then. They all had sidearms, which were supposed to be only for officers. They threw away the cumbersome grenade-launchers (“Lost in combat, sir!”) and even copped the Russian knives when they could.

  Something about all that puzzled Wesley, and he finally decided to ask the smartest guy in the outfit about it. Morty was a short, wiry-haired Brooklyn boy who always had his face in a book.

  “They want us to win this war, right?”

  “This isn’t a war, Wes. It’s a police action.”

  “When the police go into action in my neighborhood, it is war.”

  “What I mean is, Congress hasn’t declared war on the North Koreans,” Morty explained, patiently. “It’s the United Nations that’s doing this.”

  “It’s the North Koreans against the South Koreans, right?”

  “So...?”

  “So why don’t we let them settle their own beef?”

  “Because of Communism, Wes. The North Koreans are controlled by the Reds and they want to take over the whole fucking world— if we don’t stop them here, we’ll have to fight them in America eventually.”

  “And we own the South Koreans, right?”

  “No. Nobody ‘owns’ them. What the South Koreans want is to be free.”

  “So why don’t they fight?”

  “They do fight. It’s just that—”

  “Oh, bullshit, man. They don’t do shit but rip us off. They let their women be diseased whores and they wash the fucking dishes and do the laundry and all.... I mean why don’t they fight us?”

  “We’re on their side—we’re helping them get free.”

  “A zip’s a zip, right? That’s what everyone says—once we start blasting, everything yellow goes down.”

  “Yeah. Well, look ... why did you ask me if we want to win?”

  “If we want to win, why’d they give us such lousy guns?”

  “Well, you know the factories ... in wartime, they have to—”

  “I thought this was a fucking police action.”

  “Man, Wes, you get harder and harder to talk to.”

  “You know what I think, Morty?”

  “What?”

  “I think we’re the bullets, you know?”

  63/

  Wesley went back to reloading some new cartridge casings. He finished at about 3:00 a.m. and climbed up to the roof. He was dressed in doubleknit black jersey pants and shirt. Socks of the same material went almost to the knee. He wore mid-calf leather boots which closed with Velcro fasteners. The boots had been worked for hours with Connolly’s Hide Food until they were glove-soft, and the crosscut crepe soles gave superb traction without making a sound. He had on a soft, black-felt hat—with the jersey’s turtleneck, it gave an unbroken line of black from the back. Dark grey deerskin gloves hid his hands. The same black paste that football players use to protect their eyes from reflected glare was smeared across both cheekbones and the bridge of his nose. In the roof’s blackness he was just another shadow.

  Wesley put the night glasses to his face and dispassionately watched a gang of car-strippers at work under the only remaining streetlight in the area, about two blocks north of Pike Slip. Unlike the junkies, these kids were anxious to avoid contact with the rest of the human race while they were working. They were the same as the birds in the trees in Korea had been—everything was safe as long as you saw them (or heard them) going about their business.

  The old man worried him. Pet had tried to check out in the gas chamber. They both knew this, and it made things hard. Pet couldn’t hit the street at all anymore—Wesley had to rely on the kid.

  They were working only for money now. Before they put all of Carmine’s employers in the gas chamber Wesley hadn’t thought a minute about the future. He was on earth to do a job, a guided missile ... but now he was a missile that hadn’t exploded when it had connected with its target. He had to think about tomorrow for the first time, and it was a new experience.

  Wesley climbed down the stairs. Before he went back to his own apartment, he checked the garage. The old man had a blank look on his face, polishing the cars for the hundredth time—they gleamed like jewels, too bright.

  64/

  The next morning, the old man was polishing the Ford as Wesley slipped into the garage. For the first time in all their time together, the old man didn’t turn when someone entered. Wesley walked up to the Ford and just stared silently until the old man finally turned to face him.

  “What?”

  “I want to talk to you, Pet. You want to check out of here?”

  “Yeah. I wanted to check out when I had to do that Prince motherfucker ... and you knew it and you wouldn’t let me and that was good, Wes. But you should have left me in that room there on Chrystie.”