Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  “Then two more. Does the baby have an unusual blood type?”

  “He is the direct linear descendant of—”

  “Not that kind of blood. A rare type that could make a certain transfusion work. Or a bone-marrow donation. Or even a transplant.”

  “They would harvest my—!”

  “I don’t know. I can only work with what we do know. Your baby was taken for a reason. If we can find the reason, we can find the baby. That’s why I’m here.”

  He made a visible effort to calm himself. I would have helped him with his breathing if I didn’t know that it wasn’t the thought of someone chopping his baby up for parts that was making that vein throb in his temple; it was the personal affront. That baby was his property.

  It took a long minute before he could calm himself enough to talk. But by then, he had recaptured the imperiousness of a ruler instructing a slow-witted servant:

  “The child’s blood type is O-positive. He has been examined since birth—before birth—by the finest physicians in the world. Not a trace of unusual . . . anything has ever been detected. He is an exceptionally intelligent child, very handsome—all have remarked upon this. But to even suggest he has some rare genetic trait is insane. All such information would have been presented to me long ago.”

  Yeah. And all you Nazis know what to do with defectives, don’t you? I thought. I knew no member of the Royal House of Saud was going to have a Down-syndrome kid. Not for long, anyway.

  “A ransom demand could still come,” I said out loud. “But it’s been a while. Holding on to a baby is tricky business. For all the kidnappers know, the child could have a serious allergy. A medication he has to take. A special diet. It’s a long list, and every hour increases the risk. Their risk. And there’s one thing we know for sure . . . .”

  He raised his royal eyebrows.

  “The baby must be kept alive. If they want to sell him back to you, they have to show the goods.”

  “But no one has even—”

  “If they wanted him dead, why not do it right there?” I countered. “You, too, for that matter.”

  “You said three,” he said, wanting to get away from all these frightening speculations and return to where he was comfortable.

  “I did. So . . . do you have any enemies?” I asked, blindsiding a man who couldn’t even see what was sitting across from him.

  Minutes passed. The Prince smoked another cigarette, shifted in his chair, play-acting a man thinking through a complex problem.

  I acted like a man wearing a toe-tag.

  “The Jews would never do this,” he finally said.

  “I’m not following—”

  “The Zionists. They are rabid dogs, a blight on Allah’s earth. But they are clever, too; it is in their blood as deeply as their greed. They have many friends in this country, I know. But those are political friends, and such friends cannot be purchased for a lump sum, as one would buy a car. No, that sort of friendship must be fed, as a plant is watered. Otherwise . . .” His voice trailed off as he looked at me, making sure I understood the insights he was sharing. A nod was all I needed to turn the faucet on again.

  “The Jews murder Palestinian children in their beds, but American politicians can still take their money without fear of criticism. They will call anything the Israelis do ‘self-defense,’ or an ‘accident,’ or whatever they need to. No one will challenge them.

  “Yours is a bizarre country. Those Christian leaders who admitted that the destruction of your World Trade Center was proof of their own God’s anger at the moral degradation of America? They, too, hate the Jews. Yet they love Israel,” he said, curling his lips.

  I said nothing, just tilted my head to show I was listening.

  “The Jews are too sly to kidnap the child of a man whose only crime is to love and serve Allah. That would show this country their true nature, and your politicians could no longer support them in safety,” he finished his sermon. Then leaned back, leaving his irrefutable logic on the table.

  I nodded, still looking for a way in. “I was asking about a personal—”

  “Your politicians may be reviled, but the average American is a ‘believer’ of some sort—he does not understand the need for realism in life. Your former president, the one before that simpleminded tool, now he was a master at mixing politics and realism.”

  “Clinton? He was a fool. If he hadn’t—”

  “Meaningless,” the Sheikh scoffed. “Clinton did what any man of power would do. He understood that all the self-righteous hysteria would pass. As it did. You do not appreciate the finesse of a man who could pardon a Jewish thief like Marc Rich, while refusing to release a Zionist patriot like Jonathan Pollard.”

  I didn’t say anything. Clinton had been slick at dispensing that special brand of compassionate largesse. Like when he commuted the sentence of Mel Reynolds, a Chicago pol who used an intern for sex.

  Don’t go for the cheap joke: Reynolds’s intern wasn’t a mistress or a wannabe wife, she was an underage girl. And then there was that solicitation to get her to pose for porn, too. While Reynolds was doing time on that charge, a federal indictment dropped on him, for all kinds of political corruption. That was the sentence Clinton cut, so Reynolds could serve the rest of his time in a halfway house. Working for Jesse Jackson.

  You know what they call a Chicago politician who lives on his salary? Unfit for office.

  The Sheikh took my blanked-out face for skepticism, and answered the question I hadn’t been planning to ask. “A man of higher intelligence is capable of recognizing the commitment of his enemies. Pollard was a Zionist fanatic, but his acts were in service to his filthy people, not for personal profit. That is the difference between a soldier and a mercenary. Both fight, but one for a cause, the other for cash.

  “A man clever enough to balance the interests of others is simultaneously serving his own. Clinton was a friend to our people, as was Bush. A wise man understands that different tools may be used for the same purpose, if employed skillfully.”

  “Personal enemies,” I repeated, kicking myself for having given him an excuse to continue his pompous little Realpolitik lecture. Another Machiavelli disciple who didn’t know his idol had spent his last years on earth rotting in a dungeon. But I knew better than to derail an interrogation by arguing, so I stayed subdued and patient: “Someone who hates you enough to want to do whatever would hurt you the deepest way possible. Not some petty grudge, a blood-and-bone hatred. And it would have to be someone with significant resources, too.”

  Another couple of minutes of silence. His thinking was transparent: in his mind, most of his subjects might fit the first criterion, but none could fit the second.

  “There is no one like that,” he finally said.

  “There’s a clock on this one, and it’s ticking way down,” Pryce said. He was seated across from me in my booth at Mama’s, sipping “house soup” that might have cyanide as its secret ingredient, nervous as a wolverine watching a squirrel.

  “Clock? Well, I’m ready to punch mine,” I told him. “Go home for the day, or call it a day, whichever you want.”

  “Why did you go so . . . extreme?” he asked, ignoring my offers.

  “This sheikh of yours, the way his mind works, I’m sitting there, disguised in the darkness, because I’m someone he might see again one day.”

  “You mean when that van he had stashed a few miles away returned to the place where you set up the meet . . .”

  “That ‘van’ was a rolling lab. As soon as his little caravan passed by, it was going to move in. No way humans occupy space without leaving some kind of trace evidence. I wasn’t even wearing gloves.”

  “Wouldn’t a simple fire have worked as well? That explosion sent the whole building into orbit.”

  “A fire big enough to cleanse that Quonset hut would bring all kinds of attention.”

  “And an explosion wouldn’t?”

  “Nope. That’s the badlands out there. Right on
the frontier; a known trading post for contrabandistas, especially those who deal in weapons. Somebody test-firing product before they buy, that’s just business-as-usual. Boom! So what? But arson, now, that’s suspicious. Better the whole thing just disappears.”

  He took another sip of his soup.

  “Besides,” I said, “doing it the way we did sends your pal a message he needed to hear.”

  He shifted posture to ask the unspoken question.

  I shifted mine, to say I wasn’t going to answer.

  “You wanted him to know you expected him to return and vacuum the place for some clue to your identity,” he finally said. “And that you were the type of individual who doesn’t take those chances?”

  I nodded, thinking of the scar decal now gone from my hand.

  “What if some of his people had been—?”

  “They wouldn’t send anyone in right away; no way for them to know when I’d vacate the premises,” I explained. “Anyway, they couldn’t possibly get the van there in under ten minutes. The place was a hole in the ground thirty seconds after I left.”

  I didn’t bother telling Pryce that a few dead prince-protectors would bother me about as much as canceling reruns of The Brady Bunch.

  “So . . . nothing?”

  “He didn’t tell any lies you didn’t already know,” I confirmed.

  “How about some truth?” he asked, still politely sipping his soup. I was having some, too, only mine was in one of the BARNARD mugs Mama used for family. Pretty generous of her to buy us each one of those mugs, considering she’d been slicing a piece off every score “for baby’s college” from the moment Max’s woman, Immaculata, had announced she was pregnant.

  Flower came from inside Immaculata’s body; Michelle had taken Terry’s shivering little body into her arms and never let him go. That happened in the backseat of my car, as I was driving away from what I’d left of the pus-sack who’d been renting the kid out.

  Came from, came to—no difference. They’re both ours. Our blood.

  How you look at it doesn’t matter to us. Citizens think a trial verdict depends on the evidence; we know all that counts is who’s on the jury. Some of you get to visit our world, but none of you really sees it. Some of you try too hard, stick your nose in too deep. Then you don’t get to leave.

  “He doesn’t have a clue,” I told Pryce. “And not just because he’s a forty-watt bulb who thinks he’s a chandelier. But he’s not lying when he says he wants the baby back—whoever has that kid could be a billionaire tomorrow.”

  “And you still don’t think it was a job?”

  “A job? Sure. Contracted out, too. But that kind of work has rules—you never work where you live.”

  “So . . . not Americans?”

  “It doesn’t matter where they were born. I’m saying, if this was an orchestrated snatch, you’re dealing with top-tier players. Internationalists. The kind of globalized organization that could make a hundred mil wire-transfer disappear in seconds, and turn the cash into precious metals before the commodities market closes that day.”

  “High-stakes gamblers, then?”

  “No,” I said. He was grasping, without a straw in sight.

  “No? Think of the investment involved in a project like this. Surveillance isn’t just manpower; it’s equipment. Expensive equipment. Some information can’t be gathered; it has to be bought. Then there’s the cost of transporting a baby out of the—”

  “That’s not gambling,” I cut him off. “If this was done by the kind of organization you’re talking about, they wouldn’t extend their risk by holding on to the kid. Which means they were hired guns, not working for themselves.”

  “We’ve reached out—”

  “And struck out, or you wouldn’t have come near me. And I’m telling you: there is no way this was a kidnap scheme.”

  Pryce nodded. “It wasn’t any of the contract organizations we know about.”

  “And the reason you know that is because they know you, see? That means they know you’ve not only got the cash to pay them, you’ve also got ways to make them pay if they don’t take it.”

  He nodded again.

  “There isn’t a baby on this planet that’s worth what this whole deal had to cost. The kind of freaks you think could have done it—the reason you came to talk to me in the first place—there’s even less chance this was their work.”

  “Because you asked around or . . . ?”

  “I did ask around. But I’m saying it because somebody wanted that particular kid. Only that kid. The baby-snatchers you’re thinking of, they’re opportunity-players. Sure, their sensors are always out, and they’ve got trip wires strung all around. A kid steps into the wrong spot, he’s gone.

  “And, yeah, sometimes they work in pairs. Pairs, not teams. But telling a kid walking home from school that you’ve got a puppy in the back of your van isn’t exactly ‘professionalism.’ This was a coordinated operation, tightly planned. Different men, different specialties. Very specific orders. And lots of rehearsal time.”

  He opened his lizard-slit of a mouth. I held up my hand to stop him. “Yeah, sometimes you get a freak who fixates, death-grips on his obsession. Maybe some child star, maybe some kid who got his picture in the papers. Doesn’t matter how it happens, but the freak just knows they’re meant to be together.

  “Those kind, some of them stalk, some of them shoot, some of them snatch. And nothing is ever going to change their minds. Not restraining orders, not prison time, not fucking ‘counseling.’ Once the wires get twisted in their heads that tight, the only way to untangle them is with a .45-caliber lobotomy.

  “But, remember, that’s always about a ‘relationship,’ okay? That holds true even if the relationship has to be with a corpse. Ask that smirking little slime they exported from Thailand after he convinced a pack of dimwits that he was on the scene when JonBenet Ramsey was killed. Now he’s on permanent ‘pervert interview’ status, guaranteed to perform his little ‘Maybe I know something, but I’m not telling’ act on camera at a moment’s notice. The only reason he can’t get the book-and-movie deal he’s been chasing is that he’d have to actually prove it. The ‘if I did it’ trick only works if everyone already believes you did.

  “Anyway, the ‘relationship’ freaks never want an infant; they need a kid old enough to ‘love’ them, okay?

  “The kind who do want babies—that’s another tribe entirely. Disturbos who’ve been padding their stomachs for months, telling everyone they’re pregnant. Or baby-rapers who need fresh meat; peddlers who have a pre-sold market for the product . . .

  “That last kind, they buy wholesale and sell retail. Some sell to the ‘collector’ kiddie-porn filmmakers who never recycle their product, just the evidence of what was done to it. Some sell to yuppies who don’t want to wait for an adoption agency . . . although the Estonians and the Chinese have just about killed that market.”

  “I didn’t know you liked puns,” he said, telling me he knew that even a too-damaged-to-sell baby could have some perfectly useful organs. The Chinese rulers know the value of things: adults are good for slave labor, the used-up ones can be parted out, and the babies can be sold intact.

  They know the price of remembering things, too. Like the Rape of Nanking. You can’t sell product if you alienate your market, so they put their scientific geniuses to work and found a way to get tigers to breed in captivity. Now they sell the newly manufactured tigers. Not the animals themselves, the surgically dissected remains. There’s a huge demand for every single part of a tiger, from the teeth to the testicles.

  In Japan.

  The Chinese press releases say they’re breeding tigers as an anti-poaching measure. Buy that, chump. And why not? If they can hand out Olympic gold medals in Tiananmen Square, what’s next? A Nobel Peace Prize for torture?

  But you only talk about things like that when you’re with your own kind. Pryce was a diamondback who’d evolved enough to grow a silencer where the rattle shou
ld be. So all I said out loud was:

  “None of that was in play when that baby was taken. Whether you call it high-stakes gambling or risk-gain investing, it still doesn’t add up, not the way I see it. Somebody’s got their own in this.”

  “Now you see why I came to you?” Pryce said. I didn’t think he was talking about Mama’s soup.

  Pryce wasn’t handicapped by ego or image—his idea of a profile was not to have one. Never uses a passport, just morphs his way across borders, takes what he needs, and atomizes. He might leave all kinds of carnage behind him, but he’d never leave tracks.

  An aikido master once told me that the ability to generate force, no matter how powerful, was a second-tier skill. Redirecting force, that was the ultimate. Creation always yields to control.

  Max can feather-brush a nerve juncture and put you down, temporary or permanent. His target’s vulnerabilities stand out for him like candle points in a crypt. Pryce was a grandmaster, too, only his discipline was information. He knew how to get it; he knew how to use it. He could make it reproduce, pay dividends, blow up networks—whatever he needed done.

  Control.

  Pryce frightened me, but he never used that fear on me—he’d seen for himself how I react when I get too scared.

  And there’s another reason why Pryce never played that card.

  Wesley.

  Hovering somewhere.

  Maybe.

  Frightening Wesley wasn’t possible. The human-skinned demons who assembled him from spare parts of terror-traumatized babies left fear out of their creation. They ended up with a thing fueled by a chemical coldness not found in nature.

  “Motherfucker’s got more blood on his hands than the Red Cross,” the Prof had said about Wesley once. “But not a drop of it in his veins. Dracula got his fangs into that boy, he’d die of starvation.”

  Pryce never lied to himself. He knew no man can stop the rain. All you can do is seek shelter, wait it out, and hope your supplies last. Pryce was a lot of things, but he was no gambler. My hole card wasn’t Wesley; it was Pryce not knowing . . . not for sure.