Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  “Is that where you flew in from?”

  “Is this where I’m supposed to tell you if your guess is right?”

  “I don’t guess,” Pryce said. “And I’m not dumb enough to buy what I already own. Those Canadian pilots are incredible, aren’t they?”

  “I thought the Count was Swedish,” I said, acting as if he was talking about the mad-with-courage Quixote who built the “Biafran Air Force” out of spare parts, instead of the no-nerves pilots who flew ancient Connies over the war zone through the black night, diving down to a dirt runway lit only by flares, as casually as if they were dropping off a truckload of Budweiser behind a 7-Eleven.

  “You were lucky,” he said, giving up.

  “I was stupid,” I told him. “A stupid kid who thought he was going to be a hero. But if you don’t know what I was doing there, I’d be real surprised. And if you think I’d ever so much as set foot on that continent again, you should change therapists.”

  He gave me a look that could mean anything.

  “You think Katanga isn’t still a butcher shop?” I said, deliberately referencing where he’d started this game. He was an opponent I couldn’t KO, maybe, but I could take whatever he threw. For as many rounds as he wanted to go.

  “I understand,” he said, calmly. “But the Prince could still have sources we don’t know about.”

  “What he doesn’t have is a photograph,” I said, confidently. “And even if he did, it wouldn’t resemble what you’re looking at now. There’s no risk.”

  “What would I tell him?” Pryce asked, throwing in the towel.

  “Why tell him anything? I’m a man you hired. I don’t need a name for that. He wouldn’t expect me to give him one.”

  “You don’t want to give him anything else, either,” Pryce warned.

  “You don’t seriously think I’m walking into some embassy, do you?” I half-laughed. “Here’s how it goes. I pick the spot. I don’t search him; he doesn’t search me. He can bring anyone he wants, but the only DNA left behind at the scene is going to be his.”

  “He’ll never—”

  “This one’s nonnegotiable,” I told the shape-shifter. “He doesn’t like it, fuck him. At least you’ll find out how bad he really wants that baby back.”

  “The Devil don’t need to breed to sow his seed.”

  “So having the baby—”

  “—wasn’t enough. You can’t be born with what that scumbag was teaching his child. He loses the kid, he loses all the work he put into him.”

  “So you think—?”

  “That the baby’s seen a whole lot more than Pryce’s people found out about? Sure! That wasn’t no single meal the freak was feeding him, Schoolboy; it was that little child’s diet, hear me?”

  “Yeah, Prof,” I said to the old man in the hospital bed. And I did. That’s why ethnic cleansers use rape as a weapon of war. Any baby born from those rapes will be doomed, rejected as impure by his own people, a living symbol of their enemy’s triumph . . . if it’s allowed to live at all. What better place to leave your mark than inside your enemy?

  Genocidal rapists always claim a holy reason for what they want to do.

  Only one thing is true about Truth: when everybody claims to be telling it, some of them have to be lying.

  Years ago, I’d watched Wolfe throw a brick through that plate-glass window. A man and a woman—citizen’s words, not mine—had been convicted of slow-killing a little baby. At the trial, the Medical Examiner testified that the exact cause of death couldn’t be determined. Too many possibilities: complications from the violent sodomy, food-deprivation, traumatic shock . . . All he could say for sure was that the death was a homicide.

  Wolfe stood up at the sentencing hearing, wearing her trademark black-and-white colors, gray gunfighter’s eyes locked on the slab-faced political appointee who got to make the final call. I can still hear every word:

  “Your Honor, as you know, the law provides for Victim Impact Statements, so the victim’s loved ones have an opportunity to tell the Court how the offender’s crime affected their own lives. All this Court needs to know about this case is that there isn’t a single human being on this planet who could make such a statement.”

  The judge listened to the mother’s lawyer claim she was a battered woman, totally under the control of her sadistic monster of a husband. He listened to the father’s lawyer say how the mother had taken her frustration at her husband’s repeated affairs—“for which he takes full responsibility, Your Honor”—out on the helpless child.

  Then he maxed them both. Whether it was the truth of the torture chamber that had been the child’s life, or the truth of Wolfe’s clear threat to answer the media’s questions the wrong way, nobody knows.

  The mother would be out by now, released while she was young enough to have a couple more babies and score a Welfare check to hand over to her new “man.”

  The father had been on Rikers, waiting for his transfer Upstate, when someone slid a concrete-honed sliver of steel deep into his kidney, then snapped off the taped handle. When the guards couldn’t wake him up the next morning, they rolled him onto a gurney.

  Nobody claimed the body.

  I didn’t like working so close to the Mole’s junkyard, but it was the only place where we could have built the set in privacy before the opening curtain.

  Identical black Mercedes sedans formed a circle around the aluminum Quonset hut like an army laying siege to a flimsy fort. A dozen men positioned themselves, weapons starkly outlined against the Hunts Point prairie twilight.

  Two men entered the hut, immediately stepping to opposite sides in a gears-meshing move they must have practiced a thousand times. Each held a shoulder-strapped machine pistol in one hand and a portable spotlight in the other. One swept up, the other down.

  All they saw was a dirt floor, a bare aluminum ceiling, and a man sitting on an old padded secretary’s chair with a hollow orange crate to his right, topped with a blue glass ashtray. The man’s face was covered with a black mesh mask, slit at the mouth. Pale-yellow glasses covered his eyes and distorted the shape of his face. A dull-gray sweatshirt hung loosely over his upper body.

  They could also see the back of a brand-new black leather armchair, with its own orange crate and ashtray.

  The man they saw was smoking. A red scar was visible on the back of his hand.

  One of them said something in Arabic into a hand-held. About a minute later, the door opened again, and another man made an entrance. He lacked the centered balance of the first two, but moved with the confidant grace of an Invulnerable.

  “The hardest thing to disguise is the voice,” the Mole had told me. “It is fortunate that your teeth . . .”

  It was a while before he said, “There! Now concentrate on moving your lips as little as possible. Let your voice come through the new upper bridge. Do not speak from your stomach or your chest; use only your throat. Shallow breaths. Are you ready to practice?”

  When I nodded, he flipped some switches, adjusted the microphones, and watched his meters until he was satisfied.

  The special man took the leather armchair, reached into a jacket that cost enough to buy a hundred human lives in his home country, removed a single dark-papered cigarette from a slim, dull-colored metal case, and fired it up with a lighter so small it looked as if flame had materialized in his hand. He took a connoisseur’s sip of his smoke, leaned back, and regarded me silently.

  “When I grant an audience, I expect to see the face of the man who sits across from me,” he said, after he realized I wasn’t going to speak until he did.

  If I’d been one of those Chandler-clone private eyes, it would have been time for a wisecrack about burqas. But I don’t walk the mean streets, I live below them. I’m not an ex-cop with friends on the force; I’m an ex-con who knows the cops for what they are. I’m not a war hero; I’m a man for hire. So I just said, “This is what you agreed to with my boss.”

  “When a man takes my mo
ney . . .”

  This glossy, silk-wrapped thing was cruder than the stuff they pumped from the ground he owned, about as subtle as a Tijuana sausage show. Whoever was paying me, he could pay more—gee, never heard that one before.

  “I’m on salary,” I told him, listening to the reedy voice of a man I wouldn’t have recognized myself. “I just do what I’m told.”

  That he recognized. An almost effeminate gesture with the fingers of his right hand dismissed the two professionals who had cleared the path for him. They barely disturbed the air as they left, but I knew I had been photographed somehow.

  “I need to get the facts straight,” I told him, no authority in my voice, just a man explaining his assignment.

  “I have already—”

  “This is my specialty,” I interrupted. “Some of those who do . . . what was done in your case, have what we call a ‘signature.’ A highly stylized way of doing things, as distinctive as a fingerprint. This is even more prevalent for teams. Everything you told my employers was recorded, of course. But that was an account, not an—”

  “I do not submit to interrogations,” he said, in the tone of a man who was making it clear he was used to ordering them.

  “I was going to say ‘interactive conversation,’” I told him.

  “I have a title,” he reminded me.

  “I understand. I even understand what that means to the people I work for. I already told you what I do. No disrespect intended, but I can’t do my work if I have to keep remembering titles; it breaks the rhythm, and I might miss something. Something important.”

  “Then perhaps your employers can provide someone with a better sense of his place.”

  “I’m sure they could. I’m sure they would do whatever you asked them to.”

  “Including disclosing your identity.” He smiled.

  I lit a fresh cigarette, as if his devastating riposte had shaken my confidence. “That’s up to them,” I admitted.

  “I have come this far, you may as well go ahead and ask your questions,” he said, satisfied that things were finally as they were meant to be.

  “You were parked overlooking the Hudson River?”

  “Yes,” he replied, annoyed at having to repeat the memorized lie so many times.

  “Approximately two-thirty in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your vehicle was a . . .”

  “Rolls-Royce. A 100EX drophead.”

  That model was supposed to be a “concept” car, not available to the public. But it wouldn’t surprise me if this human pile of privilege had one of his own, sitting in a private garage. But you’d never find the custom Rolls he used to train his baby there. It wouldn’t be in any police crime lab, either.

  “Your son—”

  “The Prince.”

  “—was in the front seat with you?”

  “Next to me. In his own seat. He is still too young to sit quietly by himself.”

  “And the top was down?”

  “Yes. The sun rises in the east, as Allah intended. We were facing west, because I was teaching him to anticipate its emergence.”

  “No other cars pulled in? After you did, I mean.”

  “None.”

  “And then?”

  “Then!? From nowhere they appeared. I was turned to my right, speaking to my son, when I sensed some kind of movement behind me. Suddenly there was a sharp pain somewhere here”—touching the back of his neck—“and the next thing I remember, two police officers were talking to me.”

  “By then, you were in a different car, in a different place?”

  “Yes. That car was mine as well. Another Rolls, but with custom coachwork.”

  “Do you have any idea how—?”

  “I ended up in the other car? The keys were in my pocket, and the other car was parked within eyeshot, in front of a shipbuilder’s facility. I had arranged all this the day before. The drophead has a panel to cover the area into which the top is lowered. The panel itself is teakwood—as on a yacht—so it requires regular maintenance. I was planning to exchange the cars when the facility opened, and drive the one in which I was later found back to my residence.”

  “So you think the kidnappers changed cars because the one you were originally in would be so visible?”

  “The drophead is a sort of iridescent blue, while the other is plain black, very low-key. How else to explain such conduct? Obviously, these were no common thieves. My wristwatch alone would have brought—”

  “And by moving you all the way downtown to where they did, they bought themselves some time before you’d be discovered.”

  “I am certain that is also true.”

  “So two teams . . .” I trailed off my voice, letting him hear my thoughts. “One to take the baby away; another to transport your other car, with you in it.”

  “It seems so,” he said, not really interested. I’d already shown myself stupid enough to buy his story, so how useful could I be?

  “Do you remember—?”

  “I have already—”

  “—anything you haven’t been asked about,” I went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Like, for example, a strange smell?”

  “A . . . smell?”

  “Whoever took you out had to be very close to do it. That’s what anesthesia is: it doesn’t ‘put you to sleep,’ it knocks you unconscious. No puncture mark was found, so they probably used a nerve block. And your nostrils and upper lip showed slight chloroform burns.”

  “I never smelled any—”

  “Not chloroform; you would have already been out by then. I mean just before there was any physical contact. There had to be a gap there, if only for a split second. It would take a minimum of two men to do what I just described, and—”

  “Alcohol!”

  “Alcohol as in—?”

  “Liquor,” he said, nodding slowly to himself, as if absorbing a revelation. “Liquor is forbidden among our people. I can instantly detect its presence, just as a non-smoker can discern if another person uses tobacco, even if they are not doing so at the time they meet.”

  “Was it overpowering, or just a—?”

  “Not drunk,” he said, thoughtfully. “But it was a man who does drink. It wasn’t his breath, it was his body. Do you follow what I am—?”

  “Yes,” I encouraged him. “Liquor remains in the liver for a long time. That’s why you see alcoholics dying from cirrhosis even years after they quit drinking.”

  “Nobody asked me that question,” the Prince said. He lit another smoke, slightly less ceremoniously this time. “Do you have others?”

  “Did anyone know your plans for the day your son was taken? Or for the night before?”

  “My . . . plans?” he said, as if the very concept was beyond comprehension. Nobody had ever taught him that haughtiness is a lousy disguise for anxiety. “I had no ‘plans.’ I told you, I only wanted my—”

  “Ah. Excuse my poor phrasing,” I assured him, indicating I wasn’t suspicious, just ignorant. “I meant your schedule. A person of your position, there would be a secretary, perhaps more than one? A personal assistant? A chargé d’affaires? And there are always security considerations as well, isn’t that so?”

  “In some situations, certainly,” he said, choosing to respond only to my last question. “But I have no need to travel about with bodyguards all the time.”

  Not unless you go back where you came from, I thought. But I wasn’t going to let him divert the probe so easily: “Still, the staff . . .”

  “I have no need of—”

  “With all respect, someone would have to keep track of your appointments, make reservations—”

  “If you mean at restaurants and the like, I require no reservations. My appearance is sufficient.”

  Real good at talking about what you don’t need, aren’t you? I thought. “But there are so many trivial matters . . . .”

  He demonstrated his understanding of both royal privilege and triviality by not deign
ing to respond. I’d seen that move, too.

  “Your clothes?” I tried another tack.

  “My personal tailor sees to that. He comes to my residence whenever he is summoned.”

  “Jewelry?”

  “I do not go ‘shopping,’ as you Americans seem so addicted to. That is women’s work, shopping. When one of the designers I have deemed acceptable has something to show me, he will call and seek an audience.”

  Call who, you dumb fuck? I kept that one to myself, and switched angles. “Doctors . . . ?”

  “This is quite annoying,” he reminded me. “Apparently, you do not understand. Those who serve me always come to me. Doctors, lawyers, financial managers . . .”

  My turn to remind him. “Somebody knew where you were going to be that night. This was no random attack. They had to have some advance notice in order to get both of those teams in place.”

  Sometimes you have to tighten a soft interrogation, pressurize the situation. But you still have to color inside the lines, keep the subject thinking you believe his story as long as possible.

  “Nobody knew,” he said, firmly. No problem believing that part: no way he told some secretary every time he went out to find another way to show his son that all women were holes.

  “That leaves only one possibility,” I mused out loud.

  “Which is?” he asked. He spoke casually, but his body posture was too rigid to carry it off.

  “Surveillance.”

  “That cannot be done,” he said, with a sureness I knew he couldn’t possibly feel, even if his eyes weren’t already clouding with doubt.

  I was inside before he realized there’d been an opening. “An operation such as you described is very expensive,” I said. “And very risky. Whoever pulled it off had only one objective: the baby. Your baby. That leaves only three possibilities. Ransom—”

  “There has been no request for money. If there had been, I would already—”