Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  The old Burke they all knew would have solved my made-up client’s problem with a double-tap for the boyfriend and the mother. But that Burke had vanished years ago, when I’d gone “missing and presumed.”

  I’d been born a suspect. I guess I died one, too.

  The cop who’d made that possible was still around, but he’d never be questioned—he was part of the micro-glassed air that had once been the World Trade Center. Pryce always played it as if he knew the whole story, but he was really just working me: testing, probing, looking for a weak spot, as opportunistic as an infection. But I never gave him an opening. Pryce was like the malaria I still carried—it was in me forever, a permanent standoff: I couldn’t make it leave, but it couldn’t stop me from staying.

  No matter how the people who live below the underground figured it, any version of the Burke they knew would never pass up the chance to make a pile of cash and take out a couple of baby-rapers at the same time. Some people were confused about my motivations, but nobody doubted my hate. If certain humans crossed my path, they were done. Pay me enough, and I’d go out and cross theirs.

  So the whisper-stream’s Help Wanted board got a new entry. Some might wonder why our crew would subcontract work we could do in-house, but most would just put it down to me not being willing to risk those of us still left.

  The first-responders were what I expected: wannabes, with no track record, the kind who used to put ads in Soldier of Fortune. They always exposed themselves quicker than a subway flasher.

  The next wave wanted the kind of info a pro wouldn’t need . . . or even want to know. Too many idiots are using cable broadband for serious business. There’s a reason they call that a “shared pipe,” and the FBI wasn’t just monitoring the traffic, it was contributing some of its own. “Sex slavery” may be what got the trash-TV shows excited, but “domestic terrorism” rang the White House bell even louder than the one in their private chapel.

  Next up, the usual dumbfucks demanding moral assurances. Meaning: make sure they didn’t blow a book-and-movie deal. “Rescuing” a kid—perfect. But abduction-for-dollars—now, that isn’t network material. Not even cable.

  A few teams phrased their inquiries as double-edged as daggers. Very “define the mission” military, with just enough cred slipped in so I could find out if they were solid . . . provided I knew where to look.

  Nice. Only none of them had any Stateside work on their résumés. Some countries sell citizenships like any other product, and they issue passports, too. Those deals always include no jobs on U.S. soil. They never spell it out, but it’s as clear as the image in a sniper’s scope. Foreign aid is America’s biggest weapon, and any country that’ll sell you a passport will sell you even quicker, if Big Daddy says the word.

  Nobody had used the snatch job on the Sheikh’s baby as a prove-in credential. I hadn’t expected to get that lucky, but I had been hoping for some vague references to having done similar work.

  I got a few nibbles, but none close enough for me to snap the jaws.

  “This one is all wrong,” I told Rosie. She was curled up on a nest she’d made out of the rug Mama had sent over as a greeting gift for the new pup. “Persian,” she said, tossing it to me like it was a used rag.

  The pit’s ears went flat against her skull. She hadn’t learned to speak my language completely yet, but I knew hers. I walked over, patted her, told her she was a perfect little beauty, and scratched behind her left ear.

  She watched as I positioned the circle of mirror-polished stainless steel with a red dot painted in its precise center.

  I sat lotus across from the transporter, got my breathing right, and fell into the red dot.

  “Pryce is lying, or he’s being lied to,” I told Max and Clarence much later that night. Like always, I was speaking aloud and signing, too. Max reads lips perfectly, especially mine, but I always used the silent language we’d taught each other anyway, so the others could learn it from me.

  “No way the team that pulled off that snatch was doing it cold,” I said. “That’s the kind of thing you rehearse, over and over, until you can do it blindfolded. Like dry runs for a getaway man, or field-stripping a rifle in the dark.”

  Max made a saluting gesture.

  “Yeah. There’s military in this somewhere, past or present. And this was no snap decision; they had the mission way in advance.”

  “And the equipment,” Clarence said. “Scopes, mics—maybe even a tap. Also vehicles, a stash house . . .”

  “Uh-huh. And the manpower, too. This operation was running around the clock long before they made their move. That means they had people on the street, people who could blend right in.”

  “This is not a city of just one color, mahn.”

  Max nodded agreement, spreading his arms wide for emphasis.

  I sat quietly for a few seconds. “One theory fits, but it’s got a real flaw in it . . . a deep crack in the foundation.”

  Both men looked at me, waiting.

  “It smells like G-men,” I said. “Hell, it reeks of them. But if the FBI was running the show, why bring Pryce in on it? He’s too dangerous to play those kinds of games with.”

  Max tapped his heart, tilting his head to mean he was asking, not telling.

  “Pryce? He’s got some kind of access, that’s right,” I said, remembering how quickly he was able to put a team in place outside Federal Plaza, remembering how only one of the RAHOWA boys survived—the one that turned canary on the spot. High-speed interrogation is easy when you can show one captive the price of a wrong answer by killing another one.

  That had closed the books on our deal. Herk got to walk away. All the way into another life. But it wasn’t as simple as a man keeping his word. “Pryce takes government money, sure,” I told them. “But no way he takes orders. If the government hired him, the government wants the kid back. Why? That I don’t know. The only thing I’m sure of is this: the G-men might pay him, but they can’t play him.”

  “Outlaw agents, then? High-rankers who know they will not survive for long after the new boss takes over?”

  I considered Clarence’s hypothesis. “Can’t rule it out,” I said, after a minute. “You could be right. But there’s an even better candidate. The Agency’s been in a turf war over this whole Stateside terrorism thing. They didn’t win any points for getting suckered on the intel about Iraq, and they keep pointing fingers at the FBI over 9/11.”

  “CIA, you’re saying, mahn?”

  “Why not? What if they pull the snatch themselves, and keep it to themselves? They don’t even trust each other, so whoever’s paying Pryce wouldn’t have to be in on it. And if they end up making the Sheikh twist in the wind before they rescue his kid, maybe that convinces the White House to extend their territory to inside our borders. That’s what they’ve always wanted. When Hoover was alive, no chance. Now . . .”

  “But that would be—”

  “What, illegal?” I half-snorted. “It’s not like any of them gives a rat’s ass what the law says. Or Congress, for that matter. You think politicians who take habeas corpus out of the Constitution would draw the line at letting the CIA work local? If the Agency even bothered to tell them, that is.”

  “So we have no chance, then, mahn?”

  “Not if that’s what’s going on, no. But that would mean someone sent Pryce on a wild-goose chase, and that’s the part I don’t buy—they’d be trying to douse a fire with gasoline. If I’m wrong, we’re fucked anyway. But let’s say I’m not. Then there’s another path we could still take.”

  Neither of them moved, so I answered their unasked question, signing to Max as I did: “We just ask Pryce.”

  Waiting for him to call me with a time and place, I patted the couch for Rosie to take a nap with me.

  I don’t know if she dreamed. I know I did. I call it a dream, but it was just a memory, replayed so vividly that I was transported back to a lifetime ago.

  The old man next to me on the bench was too clea
n to be a bum. He was dressed like a dockworker who knew he’d never be picked at the shape-up, but still doggedly showed every morning.

  Big, heavy-boned, with thick, gray-streaked brown hair. His eyes were the color of soot; hands callused on the palms, scarred on the backs.

  “When clowns say ‘anarchy,’ they mean a riot,” he was telling me. “You know, like a ‘state of anarchy’? But anarchy isn’t a condition, it’s a philosophy. Anarchists don’t want a lawless state; they want a state governed by the natural order of humanity. Breaking down the government isn’t enough. In fact, it’s a mistake, because fear is all it takes for fascism to emerge. People want order restored so desperately, they don’t think about what that’s going to cost them later. Or who’s financing it.”

  “I thought anarchists threw bombs,” I said.

  “Some people hang a black man from a tree, then go right to church.”

  “So it’s all a lie?” I asked, ready to believe that.

  “Nothing’s all a lie.” The old man drew in a deep breath, expanding his chest like he was going to shout, but he never raised his voice. “Anarchism is anti-authority, not pro-violence. Anarchism is the enemy of exploitation, in any form. It’s not about blowing things up for the sake of destruction; it’s about razing a foul structure, so you can build a better one. Collectively.”

  “That sounds like—”

  The old man knew the joint I’d just been released from had no shortage of explain-it-all philosophers, and he sensed which one I’d been about to quote. “Anarchism is not Marxism, young man. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ is still a dictatorship. We broke with that crowd a long time ago.”

  I knew the old man was IWW. Maybe one of the last. I knew they were stand-up guys. Even high-status cons talked about them with respect. That was about all I knew, but more than enough to make me listen.

  “No government doesn’t mean no law,” he said. “While you were locked up, you ever read any Proudhon?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “I figured,” he said. Not surprised, resigned. “But I know you heard the story about the guy who wouldn’t let the government pick the time for him to die. The guy who made a bomb out of match heads packed into a hollow leg of his bunk, lay down next to the radiator, and blew himself up right on Death Row, just a few hours before they were going to execute him?”

  “Sure!” Cons treasure that story the way career soldiers do Medal of Honor winners.

  “But you think it’s a folk legend, am I right? You know, like how the guy they gunned down in Chicago wasn’t really Dillinger?”

  “I . . .”

  “It’s no bullshit, son,” he said. Not persuading, just laying it out for me. “Louis Lingg was the man’s name. And he wasn’t some crazy ‘anarchist,’ he was one of us.”

  “Us?”

  “A syndicalist,” he said, proudly. “The government always tried to make us out to be all the same, but the Wobblies weren’t fighting to take over the country; we were fighting for social justice. Years before the unions rotted from the top down, we were out there, organizing the workers.

  “Yeah, some of us used dynamite instead of pamphlets—like the McNamara brothers when they blew up the L.A. Times Building. But those men weren’t after anything but justice. They believed. And if that whore Darrow hadn’t sold them out—”

  “Clarence Darrow?”

  “You heard me,” he said, still not raising his voice. “The newspapers were all killing us. Look how they lied about Haymarket Square—maybe that’s why our biggest force is still in Chicago.

  “But how they really nailed us was to make out like we were against the war. World War I, I’m talking about. They said we were anti-American, agents of the enemy. Sedition! Treason! Vigilante mobs attacked us everywhere . . . and the cops helped them do it.”

  I offered my pack of cigarettes to the old man. He took one, lit up. So did I.

  He exhaled like a sigh of relief. “Centralia, Washington. November 11, 1919. That’s when they lynched Wesley Everest. They had him locked up for organizing, which they called spreading sedition. Now, Wesley wasn’t some theoretician; he was a combat veteran. So when they came for him, he didn’t go quiet. There was a big shoot-out, but they finally wounded him bad enough so they could drag him to jail.

  “Then the guards handed him over to a lynch mob. Those dirty cowards castrated Wesley before they strung him up, then they used his body for target practice. People cheering, taking pictures. Real patriots, they were. The coroner wrote it up as a suicide. Where were the ‘reporters’ then, huh?”

  “I never—”

  “—thought that happened to white men, right? Yeah, well, it did. But even that couldn’t stop us. It was the damn Commies who got that job done.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Emma Goldman—you ever heard of her?” He didn’t even wait for me to confirm what he suspected, just rolled on as if I’d admitted I hadn’t. “She supported the Bolsheviks. But the minute they took over, they kicked her out of Russia, so she came over here. Even did time on Welfare Island for campaigning against the First World War.

  “That’s when it started to all go wrong for us. See, the IWW led the world in anti-fascism. Wesley Everest, he served in that war, because it was the right thing to do. We were the first to fight for equal pay for equal work; that’s not the same as goddamn Communism, and it never was. So we blazed that trail, but what are we now?”

  “I don’t know. I just heard you—”

  “I know,” the old man said, not bothering to hide his sadness anymore. “Look, I just gave you enough information so you could do some work, maybe even discover you haven’t been spending this afternoon talking to a crazy old man. Then, when you see I wasn’t lying, maybe you’ll pay attention to the one thing I have that’s actually worth something to you.”

  “I will,” I said, knowing it was a promise I was making.

  “Always stand your ground,” the old man told me then. “Yeah, you know that. Think you do, anyway. But standing your ground means not just picking the right ground to stand, it’s making sure you’ve got the right people to stand it with.

  “There’s where we went wrong. And, by the end, we had more martyrs than we had movement.”

  I never saw him again.

  Never forgot him, either.

  I woke up realizing that, even way back then, I was always paying attention. Listening to anyone who I thought might have answers for questions no kid should ever have to ask.

  I was trying to find the path. Not to some Taoist ideal, to someplace where I could belong. The path that would prove my father—the State—was wrong. They thought I belonged in some kind of cage. As I got older, they kept changing the names of the cages, but they never changed their mind.

  Every time I got back on the streets, I knew prison was somewhere down the road, a cheap motel with a bright, blinking VACANCY sign. Even stronger than the hate in my heart was my need to believe prison was a stop on my journey, not the final destination.

  Belonging to a street gang wasn’t what I was looking for. I’d been there, and I knew. A gang is something you belong to, not with.

  It was a long time before I figured out the only place you ever truly belong is the place you make for yourself.

  You can’t buy it; you have to build it. “Blood in, blood out”—that’s just another pair of handcuffs. Tattoos don’t make you anyone’s “brother.”

  I was searching for something . . . anything . . . to explain why I’d been picked for the diet of blood, terror, and pain I was raised on.

  Back when I was still a gang kid, I thought prison was where true men of honor were formed: a test you had to pass, with self-respect the top grade. I finally learned that was a lie, but I learned it in prison. From my true father.

  “You can’t do your own time in here, Youngblood,” he broke it down for me. “You try, you die. This school only got two rules. You volunteer for lockup, or you walk the
yard.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was there to listen. And we were standing on the yard.

  “Yeah,” he said, as if I’d answered a question correctly. “Okay, boy, here’s the slant on the plant: you don’t diss, you never kiss, but if your name still gets called, make sure you don’t miss.”

  I nodded, still too awed to speak. The Prof was a legend Inside. And he had picked me to school.

  “Only thing that’s true is what you do” is what he taught.

  I live that. That’s how I found the one place I rightfully belong. My heart and my life. Your life doesn’t mean any more to me than I ever meant to any of you. Trespassers should bring their own body bags.

  The one-use-only, cloned-chip cell buzzed.

  “Location Four,” Pryce said. “Plus two.”

  I checked my watch: 11:00 p.m. Plenty of time. I threw in a stack of bootlegged CDs and listened to Stevie Ray Vaughan destroy a stereotype with “The Sky Is Crying.” I went out of the door on Bobby Bland’s “I’ve Got to Know.”

  “You want company, boss? Ain’t nobody going to check in this late, especially in this weather.”

  “No thanks, Gate. But I’d appreciate it if you’d—”

  By then, Rosie had already vaulted into his lap.

  Pryce didn’t like public places. Liked them even less after dark. I reversed the Plymouth into the open bay of a Brooklyn factory slated for the wrecking ball. I wasn’t surprised when the accordion door descended in front of my windshield, sliding on soundless runners.

  He climbed into the front seat of the Roadrunner, making the capture a two-way street. Pryce wasn’t into ceremony or bravado; he was the kind of man who keeps his copyrights up to date.

  “You have something?” he opened.