Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  “I know you are. I’m the one who came to you. After no ransom demand came, I thought there must be another motive, and that you’d know how to find people with that kind of motivation.”

  “I still think I do. Only—”

  “Only my original idea was no good. So why not just go through the motions? You already got what you wanted. All you promised was to look, and I know you’ve been doing that.”

  “Because you crossed the same trail?”

  “No,” he said. “Because I know you. No way you don’t go all-out on this one. Because you know me, too.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. Meaning his analysis, not our bargain. In our world, bargains don’t have to be fair, they just have to be kept.

  “So why are you still working? What’s left to do, except for this crazy—”

  “First of all, I’m not all done. I dropped a lot of rocks into a lot of different pools, and the circles are still radiating. I don’t have high hopes, but I’m playing it out until you call me off. I already told you: I don’t think this is a cold-trail case, I think it’s a no-trail case.”

  “Yeah. I remember. Can you run that down for me, one more time?”

  “Because . . . ?”

  “Because, even though I think you’re insane, I don’t have anything else. And I can make what you want happen. But if I do that, I’ll be playing for higher stakes than I like. In fact, I don’t like playing at all.”

  So I spent a couple of hours sitting in that atrium. Trying to convince the shape-shifter why he should step into the light long enough to cast a shadow.

  Pryce wouldn’t commit; said he had to think it over first. I didn’t like that—the longer we waited, the worse the odds. I needed to find a way to hedge my bet.

  There was only one other group that might have what I needed, but I couldn’t find them on my own. And I knew what would happen if I tried.

  “Let me just—”

  “No,” the Mole said.

  “But you know what I’m trying to—”

  “They don’t trust you.”

  “Don’t trust me? I did plenty of jobs with them, and never once—”

  “You made trades with them,” the underground man said. “And you kept your part of the bargain each time, that’s true.”

  “So they know me, right?”

  He gave me a look I couldn’t decipher. Said, “What they know is what they know. What I know, that is different. They know what you did. They know what you do. I know you. They would not make such a distinction.”

  I closed my eyes for a minute. When I opened them, nothing had changed.

  “Will you ask them for me, brother?”

  He nodded.

  Later that night, we met in his bunker. Terry and Michelle were outside, waiting their turn.

  “They won’t do it,” the Mole said.

  “Why not?” I asked him, half angry, half puzzled.

  “If there was a single cockroach in your house, would you spend every penny you had on a platinum brick to crush it with?”

  “Risk versus gain, then? No more than that?”

  “No more than that,” he affirmed.

  “It was worth a shot,” I told him, shrugging my shoulders to show what I thought my chances had been.

  The Mole turned away. He got the joke, but he didn’t think it was all that funny.

  Mama pointed at the space behind my booth, held up three fingers. One of the four pay phones was ringing. I could never hear any difference between them, but she could.

  I picked up the receiver, said, “What?”

  “El Cañonero ha ido de nuevo a su hogar.”

  The line went dead.

  It didn’t matter how I translated the message, it all came out the same. The UGL’s sniper wasn’t around. Maybe he’d gone jibaro, disappearing into the hills of Puerto Rico. Maybe he was in prison, or too deep underground to reach. But no maybe about one thing: he wasn’t going to be doing any job for me.

  Like with the Mole, even though I knew I didn’t have a chance, I still had to ask. Sometimes you just have to spin the wheel, even if all the numbers but one are double-zeros.

  “You can’t go on the market for this one, son,” the Prof had told me, and I didn’t argue. Assassins can always be found, if you know where to look. Most don’t, which is why fools who want their spouses removed generally end up hiring undercover cops. Makes for good TV, but not very good results.

  I’d known that, just by asking, I was telling Pablo I couldn’t call on Wesley. If the word got around that Burke was looking for a take-out artist, the whisper-stream would hum . . . and the cloak of protection my ghost brother had wrapped around me when he blew himself into mystery would disappear. Secrets are power, and trust is the path to them. But I never felt the slightest flicker of anxiety—if a man like Pablo would betray me, I was too wrong about the world to want to stay in it.

  “I tried the Mole, but his people—”

  “What’s in it for them?” the Prof cut to the core. “Forget all that mad-scientist shit, Schoolboy. Two to the head, make him dead. Trick is, without . . . Wesley, we got to get close, and that’s a high motherfucking wall to climb.”

  “If I can’t promise to—”

  “How many times you got to tell me the same thing, boy? You think I don’t know when a lie won’t fly? You get near enough to make that promise, you got to keep it.”

  “Who is that, mahn?” Clarence asked, transfixed by Dinah Washington’s “Long John Blues” as it velveted out of the speakers in my workroom.

  “That’s Judy Henske’s mother,” I told him. “Listen to this.” I pushed a button, and Magic Judy’s “Oh, You Engineer” came driving through. “See?”

  “I . . . I do. Yes. They both have voices you could hear in church, but they are so . . .”

  “They’re women, Clarence. Not half-dressed booty-shakers who think whining three octaves on the same syllable makes them divas. Torch singers know that the best sex is always in the promise. Not any promise they’re making, the promise any man who wants to ride a champion filly like them has to keep, see?”

  “I feel this. In my heart. Like our father says, you never lie to your prize.”

  “Taralyn?” I said, knowing Clarence wasn’t making a social call.

  “I know only one way to get money,” he said, solemnly. “But . . . I have, I have struggled with this, Burke. I have studied on it, but I find . . . nothing. How I can prove I am the man for her? The true man?”

  “You loved your mother?” Not questioning, opening a door.

  “She was my heart,” the once-lost boy said.

  “What did she want for you?”

  “Not what I became,” he said sorrowfully, thinking of the teenager who had drifted the second his anchor had been pulled loose. “Not that.”

  “Are you a man of honor? Do you keep your word?”

  “Burke—”

  “Would you step between your family and death?”

  He gave me one of those “are you insane?” looks.

  “You honor your father? And your mother’s memory?”

  “Please. You do not—”

  “Yeah, I do. It’s you that doesn’t, little brother. I’m going to tell you a truth now. Not just make a truthful statement, tell you a truth. You know the difference?”

  “I do.”

  “Yeah, you do. Because you were taught, and you listened. Now listen one more time. Your father is my father. He pulled me to him as he pulled you. So hear me now: the Prof is in terrible pain. Not from bullets, from guilt.”

  “But he has done nothing but—”

  “He loves you, Clarence. And he knows, deep in his heart, that you were never meant to be one of us.”

  “No! You are my—”

  “Your family is always going to be your family. But look at us. Your sister, Michelle, can she step over some invisible line and turn into a citizen? Can Mama? Max? Me?

  “When the Prof found me, I was so crazy
with hate that all I wanted was to be Wesley. You never met him, but you know who he was. Who he still is. And that’s what I wanted to be.

  “All I ever wanted in life was to never be afraid again. I didn’t want to be a good man; I wanted to be a good criminal. I didn’t know the difference between earning respect and building a rep. I just wanted people to say: ‘Don’t fuck with Burke. You don’t want to pay what that’ll cost you.’ See?

  “The Prof pulled me off that path. We both love him the same, but I know him like you never could. One day, I don’t know when it was, maybe just a short time ago, he started to count the days. He knows I’m going to carry on when he’s gone. Remember, ‘You carry my name; never bring me shame’? He expects that from you, too. But not the same way.”

  “I know,” Clarence said, his love-torn eyes on my one good one, telling me he truly did. “My father wants me to be a man who can raise his grandchildren to be . . . ah, it does not matter. But not outlaws, as we are.”

  “Not all of us,” I reminded him. “We taught Terry lots of different things, but we hope he never needs to use them. True?”

  “It is,” he admitted.

  “Yet what have any of us taught Flower? For her, the sky is open. Anytime she walks out the door, her mother worries for her. Immaculata is a mother, and a true mother always does this. But Immaculata, she worries about . . . things that might happen to her child, not anything her child might do.”

  “That is not me,” the Islander said, grimly. “When my father found me, I was already grown. He never forbid me to . . . live as the rest of us do.”

  “It wasn’t the right time yet,” I said.

  “So what would my father fear for me now? Prison? How could I fear prison, when I have seen my father laugh at death itself? You were there, Burke. You saw it, too.”

  “He saw it coming, and he faced it, Clarence. But he didn’t go looking for it.”

  “You are saying, now there is one thing my father does fear, yes?”

  “Yes. Not for himself, for you.”

  “I know,” Clarence said. “He didn’t even have to say. And I know that Taralyn is for me, Burke. This was decided in a way I will never understand. Taralyn never knew her own father, just as I. But her mother, she never strayed from her duty. Her daughter is her life’s work. If I am to be worthy of this, I must . . .”

  His voice dissolved. I held my little brother against my chest as he sobbed out his mourning.

  “We’ll fix it,” I promised him. “Your family will make it work.”

  “What do you want this for?”

  “I ask you to do something for me, now I have to fucking explain it first?” I said to Terry, my voice harder than it should have been.

  “It’s . . . all over the map, Burke,” he said, ignoring me, concentrating on the task. His father’s son. “If I knew what you were looking for, I could narrow the search and—”

  “I need all of this stuff first, kid. I have an . . . Ah, it’s not even good enough to call it an idea, not yet. But it’s not for me. It’s not even for this . . . job we have. It’s for Clarence.”

  “Why didn’t you just say—?”

  “I didn’t think I had to. But I guess you’ve got more of your mother in you than I thought.”

  “Fifty-fifty,” the kid said, as focused on his work as a mongoose. “You know what that means?”

  “Half of each?”

  “No, Burke. It means I’m theirs. Nobody else’s. Everything in me is from them. Not one hundred percent, more. I’m not a total; I’m a gestalt. And there’s no room for anything else in that equation.”

  “I shouldn’t have run my stupid mouth,” I apologized.

  “That’s what Mom’s always telling you,” he said, chuckling to show I was forgiven.

  New York’s famous for its rats, but we’ve got the same vermin problem every other town has—the ones we voted into office.

  The reason some of those imbeciles won’t let you teach evolution in school is because they don’t believe there’s any such thing. Why should they? If evolution was real, how could they stay that stupid for so many generations?

  I guess they figure God created fossils to throw heretics off the scent.

  You want proof evolution is for real, don’t waste your time with fossils; just check out the New York City rat. They started out as immigrants, stowaways in some ship’s cargo hold. Only the survivors got to breed, and they’ve been improving with every new litter. Smarter, faster, stronger. Getting ready to rule. Manhattan wouldn’t be the first island they took over.

  That’s where I got the idea for the mission I sent Terry on. Half of it, anyway.

  “It’s a shadow-stat,” the kid told me, a couple of days later.

  “Dumb it down, little bro,” Gateman begged him. Rosie sat up expectantly, like she understood every word, but she didn’t fool me—Pansy used to do the same thing.

  “You wanted to know how many cases of child abuse are never reported, right?”

  I nodded, encouraging Terry to go on.

  “That’s what they call a pure unknown,” he explained. “If you can find one, that means you’re never sure you found them all, see?”

  “Cocksucker finally beats his kid to death, that’s when they find out he’s been doing it for years?”

  “Yes,” Terry said to Gateman. “That’s it, exactly. We know some cases of child abuse are never reported, but how many? That number could never be anything but a guess.”

  “Right. But how many crimes committed on kids by strangers aren’t reported?” I asked.

  “Absolute strangers?” the kid asked. “Not teachers, or coaches, or ministers, or—”

  “Total strangers,” I told him. “Mad-dog tree-jumpers, street snatchers, opportunity-grabbers.”

  “Like I said, you can’t measure an unknown. But you can reason logically from known data, and come up with something pretty close.” He tapped some keys, looked, tapped some more. “If . . . if any of the type of cases you described wasn’t reported, that would be no more than a micro-percentage of the total.”

  “Sure! That’s what blew the whole ‘missing children’ scam out of the fund-raising game. They got the grant money, all right. Only when the funders actually looked at the cases, they found out that almost all of them were some kind of custodial interference, not stranger abductions.”

  “But some of them had to be—”

  “Yeah, Gate. And those still get maximum media. Nothing like a good old Amber Alert to grab the headlines, right? But how many times you see the parents go on TV and beg for whoever snatched their precious baby to return her . . . and, later, it turns out the kid’s buried in their own backyard?”

  “Somebody hurt my kid, I’d never call the cops,” the wheelchair-bound shooter said.

  “You might have to,” I confronted him. “Sure, if you knew who did it, you could TCB yourself. But what if it was a wrong-place, wrong-time stranger-snatch? You’d have every lawman on the planet looking. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You’re not,” the old-school con admitted—it hurt him to even think about the prospect.

  “Now, there’s reasons why this fucking prince, or sheikh, or whatever he calls himself, there’s reasons why he wouldn’t go to NYPD. But he reported the kidnapping to somebody. Otherwise, the people who hired Pryce would never have known about it.

  “And now that we know what he was doing with that kid, I buy his story. The part about how he got taken down, I mean, not the car-switch crap. If he wanted that baby dead, all he had to do was ship him home. And no way he lets himself be humiliated, or takes a chance on some stranger stumbling over him.

  “So I do believe he was still coming out of whatever they spiked him with when he first told the story. Later, when he realized what kind of problems that might cause, he had the clout to make the report go away. NYPD brass probably got a real quick visit from some very heavy hitters. Word’s out—any cop who runs his mouth about this one is a friendly-fir
e candidate.”

  “So that fucking little dirtbag, he does want the baby back?”

  “Not a doubt in my mind,” I answered Gateman.

  “You know where the most expensive house in this whole country is?” Terry piped up.

  “What difference does that—?”

  “It’s in Colorado,” the kid said, unruffled. “Appraised at a hundred and forty-five million dollars. For a house. You know who owns it? Some former ambassador. Came here from Saudi Arabia.”

  “Okay . . .” I let the thought trail off, as close to impatient as I allow myself to become.

  “I get it now,” the kid said, proudly. “Why you wanted me to look that other stuff up.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah,” he said, speaking in a blend of his parents’ voices. “For some people, a billion dollars is nothing. For others, a dime would be the world.”

  “That ain’t news,” Gateman said, kindly.

  “It’s not about the fact, but what you can do with the fact,” Terry said. “You were right, Burke. This is the perfect way for Clarence to . . .”

  He never said “live in the same world I’m going to” out loud, but my heart heard every word.

  The restaurant was closed to customers. Nothing new: Mama still has the sign the last health inspector threatened to slap on the door if she didn’t pay the “tax.”

  He was a real piece of work, that guy. Figured Mama claiming not to understand English was a ruse, so, when she wouldn’t cough up, he came back and showed her he meant business.

  It was only when he returned to pick up his loot that he learned she did, too. The restaurant hasn’t been inspected since, but the CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE NEW YORK CITY BOARD OF HEALTH sign still goes up whenever it’s needed.

  The big round table in the corner usually had a plastic RESERVED sign on it, tastefully ornamented with dead flies. Today, it was covered in linen you could make a bridal gown from.

  All of us were there except for the Prof. You don’t bring a man to his own surprise party until you finish building the gift you’re going to present him with.