Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  “Ah,” was all the manager said.

  “One of your employees took me under his wing. He gave me a sense of confidence that I had never possessed before . . . and never lost since. As a result, I was able to make several purchases that truly impressed my father. I vowed that, one day, I would come back and express my appreciation personally.”

  He tilted his head, waiting.

  “But time seems to just slip away from you,” I said, regretfully. “I was too busy running things, making money I never needed in the first place. And . . . well, I never came back. I realize Norbert must be retired by now—I can’t imagine him leaving; this hotel was his life—and I was hoping that you still had him on your books . . . a pension recipient, perhaps?”

  “You wish to contact a former employee of ours?”

  “I do.”

  “Switzerland is a country where we value confidentiality above all, Mr. Jackson.”

  “I understand that. In fact, I respect it deeply. I have had many good reasons to do so,” I told him, implying that I had found my country’s tax laws somewhat burdensome on occasion. “I would never expect you to divulge information. I merely, humbly, request that you transmit a message to Norbert. He, of course, could then decide—”

  “The message?” the manager cut me off, politely.

  “Just that the young man who was about to embark on a great journey in 1969 never forgot his kindness, and would greatly appreciate an opportunity to pay his respects.”

  The manager stood up. We shook hands. His hand came away as empty as it was when he opened it. You don’t insult a man of his status with crass bribery. But I suspected that the three tubes of Canadian Maple Leafs I’d forgotten to take with me when I left the sitting room weren’t going to be called to my attention.

  The cream-colored envelope was slipped under my door at just past two in the morning. I let it stay there, untouched. If a second message was going to come, better to let the deliveryman believe I was fast asleep.

  The gift I’d bought for my wife was in my hand, ready for work. Wüsthof cutlery is made in Germany, but some of the best Swiss shops carry it. I’d told the obsequious salesman that I wouldn’t dare return home without a proper present, and my wife already had more jewelry than a team of Clydesdales could haul.

  He’d been puzzled by my lack of interest in having him mail the set directly to the States: “Those airport people, sir, they can be extremely . . .” I told him that I had quite a number of presents yet to purchase, and the hotel would handle the whole packing-and-shipping thing for me—no point in even gift-wrapping what I’d bought.

  I waited until a little past seven in the morning before I used the point of the knife to pull the envelope all the way inside. I slipped on latex gloves before I opened it, working under the screen I’d made out of one of the shirts I’d packed. The cloth it was made from wouldn’t breathe—if you actually put it on, you’d be sweating like a lobbyist under oath.

  But there was no disposal-dust inside, just a folded piece of hotel stationery. The note was handwritten, using a fountain pen in close-to-calligraphy formal script:

  I was there early. The river was calm. I embraced it, merging its current with my own.

  The man who approached was using some kind of walking stick, but his movements were straight-backed and dignified. His fair hair was thinner, stirred by the faint breeze.

  “It’s me, Norbert,” I assured him, knowing my face wouldn’t resemble the one he’d seen a lifetime ago.

  He sat down next to me. Extended his hand. His grip was the measured strength of a man who knew he didn’t have to prove anything.

  “War wounds?” he said, looking at my face.

  “Some,” I answered, wondering how he could see so well in the night. “The rest is from the lousy repair job they did on them.”

  “I am grateful you returned,” he said. “From Biafra,” he added, telling me two things: I’d never had the class or the decency to even drop him a note when I’d made it back. And I was there now only because I wanted something.

  “You were nothing but good to me,” I told him. “I won’t insult you by claiming I showed up to apologize for never thanking you properly.”

  “Oh, you did that,” he said, gravely. “Those . . . sources I introduced you to, they confirmed I had not misplaced my trust.”

  “How could they know I got out? I was on a—”

  “Not that you got out,” the elderly man said. “That you went in. I believed in your . . . quest then. What I . . . arranged, you know it was not for the money I was paid.”

  “I know.”

  “And now you are back.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me what you came for this time,” Norbert said, cutting right to it. If Alzheimer’s ever saw this man coming it was going to run for cover.

  “When I first came here, I was a kid,” I told him. “A stupid kid. You know what I wanted. What I . . . Ah, that doesn’t matter. Not now. When I finally got out, I actually went into that business. But in America, I was playing on a field I knew. And I managed to win a few.”

  He made a sound I couldn’t interpret.

  “I’m here because I’m trying to find a baby. A baby who was kidnapped.”

  “And you believe the baby is here?”

  “No. Let me tell you how the baby was taken.” I waited for his nod. Then gave him everything I had.

  “Nobody I knew of . . . back then . . . would do such a thing,” he said when I finished.

  Meaning either they didn’t have the ability to work Stateside, or they wouldn’t touch that kind of work. I didn’t ask him which—a man who believed a street kid when he said he was going to be a child-saving hero was entitled to believe some mercenaries had a moral code.

  “It was a team,” I said. “Not one of those regime-overthrowing specialist outfits, and not the kind of ‘private contractors’ who work in Iraq. This was a small, elite unit. So it wouldn’t be incorporated, wouldn’t have a Web site, and wouldn’t take checks. I understand it couldn’t be any of the people you used to . . . know about. But I thought you might be able to ask a few questions of old friends?”

  “And you want?”

  “The baby. Only the baby.”

  “There is a reward?”

  “A huge one.”

  “For you?”

  “Not a penny for me. Everything goes to whoever helps me get the baby back to his parents,” I said. Telling the truth and lying at the same time, a skill I’d taken decades of practice to perfect.

  “So many years, you still want to be a hero?” Norbert said, his smile a mixture of wonder and pity.

  The next morning, Norbert introduced him as “mon frère aîné.” To which the hard man seated to my right added only, “Alain.”

  He was at least eighty, thin as a tire iron. Blue-agate eyes, ramrod posture, and the kind of baldness that only a used-daily razor produces. Everything about him screamed Military. At his age, that would have put him in the middle of World War II.

  I had been seated when they approached. It took Norbert’s brother only a half-second to figure out that my right eye didn’t work—I didn’t think his choice of where to sit was an accident.

  He ignored my offered handshake, locked my good eye with his flat-screen blue ones. “You know La Légion Étrangère?”

  “Rumors,” I answered, my body language saying that I didn’t put a lot of stock in them.

  “Most are lies. The French, they are . . . how shall I say?” He made an eloquent gesture with his hands and shoulders, suggesting anything I wanted it to mean.

  He snap-checked my face, saw I wasn’t going to respond. Whether he read that as professionalism or respect, I couldn’t know. What he said was:

  “Their rules are as flexible as their historians. Loyalty is very important to the French. Loyalty to them. They see what they wish to see, so the concept of purchased loyalty does not strike them as illogical.”

  I glanced over
at Norbert. His face was expressionless. I guess he figured I had grown up enough to know when to shut up.

  “You are not looking for soldiers,” the man who called himself Alain said. “Those you seek are not men who fight as brothers-in-arms. True warriors care nothing for some ‘cause,’” he dry-spat, that last word so heavy with revulsion I was surprised it didn’t shatter the stone floor when it fell from his mouth. “Warriors fight because war is their life. The flag under which they fight counts for nothing, the bond between them is everything.”

  We were at the outdoor café where Norbert had told me to be waiting. None of the other tables were occupied. No waitress approached. The place wouldn’t open for business for another couple of hours. People occasionally passed on the sidewalk. Curiosity didn’t seem to be a Swiss trait.

  “Independent units still exist,” the man of unrusted iron said. “They are much in demand, but the same . . . benefits are no longer available. Money, yes. But who wants to become a citizen of some filthy, savage country? Our breed . . . it is dying.”

  He moved his head just enough to indicate he was finished with preambles. “The training required for the operation you described to my brother”—nodding slightly across at Norbert—“would take considerable time and expertise, but there is no shortage of either. There are always men for hire. Some have no homeland to return to—ex-Stasi, perhaps. Some can never return home. Each would have his own reason; none would be asked.

  “Some men who were once part of elite fighting forces from all the world’s armies are well entrenched in the Congo. Some are employed by those who claim to be legitimate rulers. Others are search-and-destroy teams commissioned by those with a political interest in certain areas—the Sahel, for example.

  “To train a team for what you describe requires a purpose-built unit. To capture is far more difficult than to kill. The usual procedure is to question the survivors, rather than isolate any particular one prior to the assault.

  “Therefore, such a unit must be assembled like a fine chronograph. This requires considerable investment, because even the most brilliantly written play will fail if the actors are not sufficiently rehearsed. Sets must be created. Sometimes destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed again. The director must be able to fine-tune, modify . . . perfect the production before it ever goes public.

  “Military intelligence is a flexible concept. What works effectively in one climate will be useless in another—the Russian front in winter is not the jungles of Burma in the rainy season. In addition to everything else required, absolute secrecy must be maintained during preparation. Total isolation; no communication. There is only one place where operatives such as you described could be trained.”

  I waited, making sure he had nothing more to say, before I asked, “Can you tell me—?”

  “I can theorize only,” the man who called himself Alain said. “It would be a camp, but not a permanent one. I cannot tell you where it would be, exactly, but I know the borders within which it must . . . could only . . . exist.”

  “I heard there was an entire ex–SAS unit working in the—”

  “No,” he said, sharply. “I told you: there will always be men who cannot return. Once there was a place in the world even for them. A place where no judgments were made except those of the warrior. You are”—he scanned me as dispassionately as an MRI—“nicht reinrassig, yes? Perhaps Zigeuner?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t need a translator. He wanted to make sure I understood he knew I was no purebred.

  “That would not matter to us,” he told me, telling me my translation was all wrong. He wasn’t being magnanimous or condescending when he ID’ed me as a man with Gypsy blood; he was just telling me how it was. Once. “A legionnaire is a fighting man,” he said. “He who becomes one of us leaves everything behind: his politics, his religion, his family. The only blood that ever mattered to us was that of the enemy.”

  I nodded. Whether what he was saying was true or not didn’t matter to me. But what he said next did.

  “We were a fighting force, not hired killers paid to use machine guns against machetes. To those kind of people, bloodlines would matter. In fact, they would be raison d’être.”

  Robert Johnson stood at the Crossroads, but he didn’t get to keep the fruits of his bargain long, I thought. But you, you still have yours more than fifty years later, don’t you? You made a deal with the devil to protect your baby brother. And when that devil died by his own cowardly hand, you made a deal with another, to keep yourself alive. You had nothing America wanted; all you knew was soldiering, not rocket science or nuclear fusion. But the French, they always had work that needed doing.

  I got it then: asking this man for anything more than he’d already told me would be like trying to sculpt marble with a butter knife.

  Back in my room, I added it up. Norbert’s brother hadn’t been “theorizing” he’d been giving me an expert’s analysis. His credibility was his own past. This was a man who would stand in front of a firing squad and refuse the blindfold; he’d want the executioners to see a warrior’s final contempt for murderers who called themselves “soldiers.” His funeral shroud would be his own loyalty. Not loyalty to some “Fatherland.” Not loyalty to an army, or a team of mercenaries. Loyalty to his blood-oath. I don’t know who whispered “Protect your little brother” to him so many years ago. But I knew he had never wavered, no matter the cost.

  So when he’d told me snatching the Sheikh’s baby hadn’t been the work of any mercenary unit, I believed him. When he told me where the team who had done the job must have been trained, I believed him.

  I believed—because I knew what telling me had cost him.

  “I am very grateful,” I told Norbert that same night, looking at the river. It seemed to have grown blacker, less settled.

  “Non pas rien.”

  “No,” I said. “I know the value of things. What you did was . . . everything.”

  “How do you know Alain was . . . accurate?” He chose the last word delicately.

  “I can’t tell you. Not because I don’t want to, because I don’t know a way to say it that won’t make me sound insane. I have . . . a gift.”

  “You trust this . . . gift, then?”

  “Yes, my friend, I do.” I handed him a slip of paper with the number that redirects to one of the pay phones right behind my booth at Mama’s. “Please tell your brother that, should he ever require whatever assistance I might be able to provide, this will find me.”

  His unlined face flexed just enough to tell me he believed me. Believed in me. And in my gift.

  “If they already moved him, he’s out of reach,” I told my family, Rosie curled at my side on the couch. “But if they’re still here—in the city, I mean—we can find them. Maybe.”

  “Why not just tell this man Pryce?” Clarence asked. “Surely, he would have better resources . . . if what you were told is true.”

  “It was all true,” I answered, thinking, Even the things Alain never said in words. “But the people who hired Pryce don’t want theories, they want a baby.”

  “And the people who took him, what would they want?”

  “I did have an idea, but I’ve let go of it, honey,” I said to Michelle. “If the goal was to humiliate the Sheikh, there were better ways, especially with the kind of money they spent on this. What we know for sure is that they weren’t out to cancel his ticket. He was there for the taking, and they passed.”

  Max rubbed his thumb against the first two fingers of his hand, the universal sign for money, shaking his head at the same time.

  “This can’t be about money,” I agreed with my brother. “That would make it all some kind of stupid gamble, like Pryce first thought . . . and there’s not a trace of stupid in any of this.”

  “That is the only theory which fits the known facts,” the Mole said, firmly.

  “Not a word on the Web,” Terry added. “Nobody taking credit. There wasn’t even much screening to do, because—”
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  “The newspapers don’t have the story, so there is no way for the usual frauds to claim credit,” Clarence finished for him.

  Terry tapped some keys, said: “NYPD has it coded as a gun-point robbery. Victim was a homeless man named Milton Johnson. Black. Age fifty-seven. Long sheet. In fact, he was arrested a couple of days later, whole list of petty misdemeanors. Died in custody before they could even transport him. Autopsy is mandatory in all such cases. Cause of death was multiple organ failure—he was a long-term drug-and-alcohol abuser.”

  How Pryce got that done, I don’t know, but every paper door had already been sealed shut. Even one of the docket-divers looking for something to sell the tabloids wouldn’t stumble over the Prince’s name.

  “It is time to visit my father,” Clarence said, looking at his watch.

  Max gestured drinking from an imaginary mug held in both hands, making it clear who he was going to consult.

  The Mole, Michelle, and Terry took off to have dinner together. Ever since Pryce had delivered Terry’s birth certificate, Michelle couldn’t stop introducing him to everyone who crossed their path. She hadn’t worked out the mechanics yet, so she alternated between pride and suspicion anytime someone told her she looked too young to be his mother.

  “You think he got those looks from his father?” She’d vipersmile, inviting a look at the Mole’s remarkable resemblance to a formless mass wearing Coke-bottle glasses and a stunned-ox expression. Michelle could do magic with clothes, but the Mole was immune—give him five minutes, and he could transform a four-grand suit into something you’d pass up in a Goodwill bin.

  Terry suffered in silence. His father had taught him a lot more than science.

  On our way out, Gateman was already ordering a pizza. Apparently, Rosie loved hers with extra cheese. The minute I’d explained how chocolate was toxic to dogs, Gateman had tossed out his entire stash, Godiva and all.