Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

“Just a suspicion.”

  “Go.”

  “Cui bono?”

  “I didn’t know you studied Latin in prison. But I do know you didn’t call another meet just to tell me this wasn’t a ransom snatch again.”

  “No, I didn’t. I think you knew that even before you called me. But I also think you hired me to find porterhouse in a fish store.”

  “English, okay?”

  “Not a ransom, so has to be a freak. Maybe a sex freak, maybe a Master Race freak. Or one with dual membership. That’s your math, right? So your next play is, ask the man who knows them.”

  “And?”

  “Sometimes, you can bond a man to you with gratitude. Especially if you do something for him money can’t buy. You know all that; you did all that. Only the tree you planted sprouted a lot of branches.”

  He made some faint gesture with his right hand.

  “Someone wants something from your sheikh,” I told him. “Not money. Something he could get done, but nothing you could make him do . . . unless he was bonded to you, too.”

  “Maybe,” he conceded.

  “You’d think he could just have another baby. Ten more, if he wanted.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And that . . . training he was doing—he liked doing it. Right also?” I pressed.

  “Yes,” Pryce said. You had to be listening real close to catch the slight change in his breathing. I always listen real close.

  “The baby gets his value because he’s a direct descendant of the OG himself. That’s what your boy told me,” I said.

  “It’s true.”

  “But that bloodline runs through the father, not the mother.”

  “So you’re saying the baby isn’t irreplaceable. Unless . . .”

  “He can’t make another one.”

  “But he could,” Pryce said, sticking a pin into that balloon. “There was no fertility clinic involved in the birth of this one. No embryo implant, no special . . .”

  “And if the mother was shipped home, tried for infanticide, and found guilty, what then?”

  “Tried?” Pryce snorted.

  “Exactly. So the Sheikh starts over. No shortage of choices. Maybe even covers his bets, since he needs a son if he wants the kid to stay in the running for the throne.”

  “Yes. So?”

  “So it still wouldn’t be the same for him. He had years invested into training his successor. Starting over, that would be tricky. Especially with what he has to figure you found out about him by now. But if this baby was recovered somehow, and handed back to him—maybe with a hint that it cost a few lives to pull it off—then he might . . . might be grateful.”

  “A man like—”

  “I know. Anything he gets, he believes he’s entitled to. Probably doesn’t even know what gratitude feels like. But whoever returns that baby gets two cards, not one. One might pile up some gratitude, but that’s no ace of trumps. The other is: the Sheikh has to be thinking, ‘Maybe the people who returned the baby to me are the same ones who took him.’ Which means—”

  “—they could do it again.”

  “Anytime they wanted,” I said, using language the Sheikh himself would understand.

  Pryce went so still that his pulse rate probably couldn’t be detected.

  Time passed.

  “You think the Prince went to the wrong people for help, before he came to us?” he finally said.

  “Could be.”

  He studied me for a long minute. “He did,” the shape-shifter admitted. “But they didn’t. Never mind the theorizing, okay? Just keep doing your work. I’ve got some of my own to do now.”

  He handed me a gym bag.

  “There’s enough in there for whatever you could possibly need, next two, three weeks. Don’t reach out for me. Every contact you have is already erased. When I’m ready, I’ll find you.”

  “Good enough,” I agreed. “But what if I find the kid myself, looking where you told me to? I’ve got to have some way to—”

  “Tell the guy who manages that flophouse you live in to wear a bright-red jacket next time he walks the dog.”

  “He’s in a—”

  “I know. He won’t have to go far; a couple of blocks’ll be enough.”

  “Got a camera on me, have you?”

  “Better,” he said. Then he slipped out of the Roadrunner and back into the darkness.

  The garage door rolled up. I rolled out.

  It took the Mole a round-the-clock session with his machines before he finally announced: “Not in here.”

  He might have completed the sweep-job quicker if Michelle hadn’t shown up. The Mole just tuned her out, leaving the harder work to me.

  “Pryce is watching us, honey,” I told her. “We have to know where he’s watching from.”

  “How do you know that he’s not just—?”

  “Pryce doesn’t work that way. Besides, he’d have to see the signal we agreed on for it to do him any good.”

  “Okay, so he’s got a way to watch the street. Why would he want to plant anything inside your place, too?”

  “I don’t know. Truth is, I don’t think he could. But information is his god, and he never misses a service.”

  I turned to Max. He’d spent the night crawling the rooftops. Nothing.

  “What’s that leave,” I asked my family, “a fucking satellite?”

  Either Terry didn’t get my sarcasm, or he shared his father’s respect for my techno-knowledge. “That could be it” was all he said.

  The Mole nodded. “The mechanisms are already in place. What he would need is a private channel. There is only one way Gateman could exit—”

  “Two,” I reminded him.

  The Mole shrugged. “If Pryce already has images—and he must—he could load the channel with recognition software. It would alert only if its pre-sets were triggered.”

  “He gets a picture of Gateman,” Terry explained. “He gets one of Rosie. He makes a series of digital files. He knows the height of the dog, and the height of the wheels on Gateman’s chair. When both show up at the same time, all he’d need was a color-code activator.”

  “I hope that’s exactly what he’s got,” I told them all.

  “What?” Michelle wasped out at me.

  “If Pryce has what it takes to get that private channel you’re talking about, he’s also got enough to find out if the CIA took the baby. And one thing we know for sure: the FBI’s been fighting to keep the CIA out of Stateside work. Maybe they’ve succeeded, maybe not.

  “So they can argue over who gets to cover what ground, but there’s no argument about who covers the skies. That probably means the CIA’s in this. But it also means they didn’t take the kid, and they don’t know who did.”

  “What does that make us?” Michelle said.

  “Even, honey,” I told her. “Dead even.”

  When Clarence showed up carrying a slim black aluminum attaché case, wearing a perfectly fitted midnight-blue suit instead of his usual peacock regalia, I knew he’d consulted Michelle. Diagnosis confirmed by the bouquet of deep-purple orchids he presented to Taralyn, with a courtly bow and a simple, “This is a poor way to show my gratitude and my admiration. I hope someday you will permit me to do better.”

  At least somebody’s plans were working out.

  The Prof shooed them both away, glanced around the spacious room, made a “come on with it” gesture to me.

  “I can’t make it add up,” I told him. “There’s a piece of this, a percentage of that, but nothing I can build anything with.”

  “Even if—”

  “Yeah. Even if I figure they’re all lying, it doesn’t get me anywhere. I know some people lie just to be lying—maybe they can’t help themselves, maybe they get off doing it, who knows? But there’s truth somewhere in all this. The baby did get snatched. That Sheikh does want him back. And Pryce for damn sure wants the Sheikh to get what the Sheikh wants.”

  “What you saying, boy? You can’t go un
til you know?”

  “Maybe that’s right, Prof. But I know this much already: that asshole had never even considered the possibility of his kid being snatched.”

  “He told you that?”

  “Yeah,” I said, not bothering to explain that I didn’t need words to ask a freak a question, or use my ears to get an answer. “This one thinks he’s untouchable . . . and he probably is, as far as the Law is concerned. But this game of his was strictly private, and he wouldn’t want some tabloid putting him on the front page, so he knew he was in a risk zone every time he went out on one of his training exercises. Training the baby, I mean.”

  The Prof nodded at the indisputable truth of life at street level. Every hooker who steps into a stranger’s car knows she may be getting ready to turn the Death Trick. But the john never thinks that the whore climbing into his front seat could be wiggling her hips like that alligator snapping turtle’s tongue. She could have a pistol in her purse and Aileen Wuornos on her mind, seeing everything in trauma-vision.

  “Yeah, he stinks of entitlement,” I said. “You can smell it on him. But he’s not retarded. Or nuts. If he thought bullets would bounce off him, why have bodyguards at all?”

  “So . . . ?”

  “So . . . so it’s like, to him, exactly what he says on the tape. Women are holes. Plenty of men think that’s all they’re good for, but how many think that’s all they are? A hole’s not dangerous, unless you step into one . . . and that he’d never do. So he’s in total control. That’s why the conversation through the window first. That’s his screening interview. He thought he had it all covered.

  “Kidnap his son? Outdoors? In the middle of New York City? That’d never cross his mind. He’s no military guy, but he’s got a stalker’s mind. He knows you have to plan things. And who’d plan that?

  “The capper is, even after it happens, he’s still not really believing it. Who would plan such a thing, pull it off, and not be doing it for money? That’s the ultimate mind-fuck for him, because it violates the one thing I know he believes in.”

  “And that ain’t Allah, true enough. But . . . come on, son: they jumped him, then they just dumped him. Like they didn’t—”

  “—care if he lived or died, I know. Where’s the money in that? Fuck, if some skells had come along and cut his throat to make sure he wouldn’t wake up while they were helping themselves to his jewelry, where would ransom money even come from?

  “That’s how I know there’s no way he staged it himself, just to watch the White House kiss his royal ass. He was seriously out of it when the cops found him. He just got lucky that he woke up and started pulling strings, before someone came along and cut his.”

  The Prof closed his eyes. Not from being tired. I’d watched him do the same thing a million times, closing his eyes to see deeper. Saying anything to him while he was working criminal algorithms in his head would be like pulling the plug on a running mainframe.

  I sat there and waited. I’m good at it.

  I hadn’t looked at my watch, so I couldn’t tell how much time passed before the Prof suddenly said, “Remember what I taught you, son: only a dope always stays inside the ropes.”

  Meaning: playing by the rules is playing the game of the guy who made the rules. Outlaws have rules, too. But they’re our rules. Robbing a bank violates your laws. Ratting out a crime partner violates ours.

  “I can’t get past—”

  “Yeah, you can, Schoolboy. A bigger punch don’t mean the other guy’s gonna eat your lunch.” He tapped his temple. Brought his palms together in Max’s gesture for “focus.” “You remember that ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ bullshit? Soon as Foreman figured out the script, he up and quit.”

  “I remember.”

  “Break it down,” the old man said.

  I took that as a single question on a bigger test, said: “Yeah, Foreman quit all right, they just called it a KO. That second Duran-Leonard fight? ‘No más’ didn’t mean ‘I quit,’ it meant ‘Fuck this!’ Duran wasn’t hurt, he was just disgusted. Once he realized he couldn’t sucker Leonard into playing ‘Quién es más macho?’ like he had the first time, Duran knew he didn’t have a chance. So he just walked away.

  “But Foreman didn’t have that problem. He was an intimidator, a stone thug who could back up the look with the stones in his gloves. Sent Norton into cardiac arrest before their fight even started. But that was never his whole game. Guys he couldn’t scare, like Frazier, he’d just pound on them until they stayed down. Not like Tyson. He never could beat a man who wasn’t scared of him in front.”

  “That’s what Holyfield knew, that secret,” the Prof agreed. “Heart. You go against Tyson thinking survival, he tears you apart. But if you go in thinking destruction, Tyson don’t know what to do. You didn’t have to hit harder than he did, you just had to take what he threw and keep throwing back.

  “That would never work with Big George. You remember Ron Lyle? How was he gonna be scared of any prizefight? You can’t hold a shank in a boxing glove. And Lyle, he could put you to sleep with either hand. But he was a prison fighter—spent too much time with the weights, never got his head straight.

  “Ron drops George a couple of times, but George, he just keeps getting up. It was a hell of a fight, but George finally put Lyle down for the count. You could outbox George—Jimmy Young showed that—but that’s like dancing around a building: looks easy, but you better make sure the fucking thing don’t fall on you.”

  “Prison fighters,” I said, nodding. “Jumbo Cummings looked like he could knock out a buffalo, but . . . And remember that head case, Etienne?”

  It wasn’t really a question; I knew the Prof tracked anything that came out of his birthplace. Clifford “The Black Rhino” Etienne had proven he was the perfect parole candidate by winning the Louisiana prison boxing championship. Soon as he was cut loose, he turned pro, won a lot of fights, made some excellent money. His biggest score was the million-plus he got for lasting less than a minute with Tyson. Now he’s back where he started, doing a telephone-number sentence for aiming a gun at the cops after a botched robbery.

  “How’m I gonna forget that sorry-ass dope fiend?” the old man said. “Louisiana ain’t never gonna change. Now, Leadbelly, he could sing his way out of the camps more than once, because a bluesman only gets better with age. Ain’t no boxer who ever did that.”

  “No,” I said, thinking of Ricky Womack, an undefeated heavyweight who turned pro young, did a long stretch Inside for a homicide, then went back to Detroit and climbed into the ring. He was forty by then, but he put together a few straight wins . . . and then he died. The coroner said it was suicide.

  Bobby Halpern was even closer to home—did his time right here. Older than Womack when he finished his stretch, he was one of the first guys to lose to Trevor Berbick. Probably had no illusions about big money, but he could fight locally, make a few bucks on the side. Ten days after his last fight, person or persons unknown used him for target practice. Bobby survived, but his boxing career didn’t.

  I remembered how network TV covered the career of James Scott for years. A light-heavy contender, Scott was supposed to be the next great thing, so doing a life sentence for murder wasn’t a problem—they just brought the cameras inside.

  As soon as he dropped a couple of fights, they dropped the coverage, but the same deal still works, even today. When the women’s junior-flyweight world title became vacant, the match to determine the championship was held inside a Thai prison. After the Thai won the fight, the government immediately announced she was going to be freed. After all, she could be stripped of her title if she didn’t defend it within six months. Such injustice cannot be tolerated in a democracy, even one where making fun of the King is a double-digit crime.

  “So—Ali, then?” the Prof came back to it, boring in, demanding more.

  “I think, that first time, he was scared of Liston,” I said. “But that didn’t matter; Sonny did what the people who owned him told him to do.r />
  “After a while, Ali wasn’t scared of anyone. Somehow, he discovered he could take a shot to the head like nobody else. That was his secret weapon, and he used it too often. Look at him now.

  “Foreman knew he couldn’t scare Ali, but he figured he didn’t need to—with what he was packing, it’d only be a matter of time. A few rounds later, Foreman found out the truth. Throwing bombs at Ali was like pounding on the heavy bag—it’s a great workout, but sooner or later you’re too gassed to throw another punch. When the other guy keeps taking your best shots and laughing them off, he takes your heart, too.”

  “That ain’t the question,” the old man said, shifting from Professor to Prophet. His eyes could slice diamonds.

  “I don’t under—”

  “Try it this way,” my father said. “Ali. What was that boy . . . a fool or a tool?”

  “You mean the Muslim thing?”

  “Damn! What we really talking about here? We got places to go, and not much time to get there. Come on, son. Use what you got. ‘The Rumble in the Jungle,’ they called it. You remember which jungle?”

  “Zaire,” I said, just starting to catch a glint . . . like the reflection off a straight razor in a dark alley.

  “So Ali goes to fucking Zaire because he’s all about liberating his people? What fucking people? ‘Zaire’ was just the name that baby-killing snake Mobutu slapped on the piece of the Congo he controlled. That butcher murdered more black folks in a day than the Klan did in a century.

  “You know how many of his slaves—that’s right, I know what the fucking word means—you know how many of them died to build the goddamn stadium they held that fight in?

  “For years, that Mobutu motherfucker was big-time pals with every president we had. Just like the Shah used to be. All he had to do was dance for his masters and they’d let him rule the other niggers. Same as they used to do with the convict bosses. Make those field hands work during the day, you could do whatever you wanted to them after dark.

  “Mobutu, he was always a good nigger; always knew his place. Hated those fucking Commies. And that’s all it took, back in those days.”