Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  The Internet would have them all, anyway. And if it was out there, Clarence would find it.

  “You want me to search for this?”

  “Yeah,” I told him. “Remember what Terry taught you? The narrower the parameters, the easier the search. What could be narrower than these?”

  “I will do it, mahn. But . . .”

  He didn’t have to say it aloud.

  I didn’t expect Clarence to come up with anything. Not because the “scene” I told him to search for would be too repulsive—I don’t think that’s actually possible, anymore—but because there’d be too small a market for it.

  People think porn started with under-the-counter magazines, but it’s been around ever since our species developed opposable thumbs. There’s cave paintings of rape. And there was rape before there were paintings.

  Jerkoff artists aren’t the only market for pornography—politicians buy it too. The Meese Commission started a whole “porno turns men into rapists” industry. And now the hucksters who have the public believing kiddie porn started with the Internet are raking in federal grants to “find” it.

  Always the same—you never know if they’re stupid, crooked, or both.

  When you want the purest information, you need the most neutral possible source. Finding one, that’s the trick.

  Especially today, when there’s no such thing as actual “news,” only press releases and “commentators” who go total Rashomon on every story until it all turns into white noise. If you get tired of blah-blah, you can always dial up some blog-blog. Fabricating stories is the new frontier of “freedom of the press.” Anyone can play, and nobody pays . . . except the targets.

  But if you actually want neutral, you go to the total obsessives. They’re so hyper-honed that there’s no room for any agenda besides their own. But you have to hit that agenda on your first pass; their kind don’t accept social calls—they wouldn’t even get the concept.

  “Reform School Girl,” I said into the phone. “By Felice Swados.”

  “Cover?” The other man’s voice was just this side of uninterested.

  “It’s a photo, not a drawing. A weird size, too.”

  “Look for the year,” he instructed.

  “Nineteen forty-eight, it says.”

  “What else? It would be on the—”

  “Diversity Romance Novel #1.”

  “Grade?” he said, now trying to sound calm.

  “Your job, not mine.”

  “Agreed. But I need some indication of—”

  “Looks like it was never read.”

  “Really?” The whole cellular network shuddered at the intensity of the obsessive’s prayer-question. He’d gone from mildly bored to so deeply hooked that he even bypassed the bargaining ritual.

  “I’m not asking you to take my word for it,” I told him.

  “Bagged and boarded?”

  “Might have been. Not now.”

  “You haven’t—?”

  “How else could I give you the info I just did? But I never touched it with my hands. Cotton gloves only.”

  “Listen,” he said, in the same tone a bomb-diffusion expert uses when he has to guide a rookie over the phone. “I want you to open it. Gently. Just enough to read page numbers. Can you do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is there a page three and four?”

  “I . . . Yeah, there is.”

  “I have to see it.”

  He wasn’t kidding about that—the cell phone in my hand was hot, like I’d been on the battery for hours.

  “Name a—”

  “Can you bring it over now?”

  I pulled the Plymouth up to the gate and waited. There was a speaker with an inset communicator button standing on an aluminum pole, but I didn’t bother touching it. I knew the security cameras were on me, so I just got out of the car and stood there in plain sight.

  The gate swung open. I got back in my car and pulled up to the one-story warehouse. There were a couple of dozen parking slots marked in fresh yellow stripes, all unoccupied. I backed into one of them, plucked the silk-wrapped package carefully off the front seat, and walked up to the door.

  The steel-ingot dead bolt retracted with a sound like someone had just jacked a spent round out of an elephant rifle. I turned the handle, stepped inside.

  A big guy with all the movie-cued insignia—shaved head, forearms tattooed with Asian-looking symbols, wife-beater shirt—started to strike a pose. Then his remaining brain cells kicked in, and he remembered why his visual scan had been enough to get me through the gate. I’d been there before. With Max.

  I knew what he was remembering. That first time, the poseur had pointed at Max, jerked his thumb, told me, “Just you, pal. Your friend waits outside.”

  “Save it for when you work the door at one of those velvet-rope clubs,” I told him.

  “You talk pretty tough for such a—”

  He never saw Max move, but there’s nothing like a locked-in choke to stifle a conversation.

  Max was back standing next to me before the fool hit the floor. He wasn’t unconscious—depriving his brain of oxygen wouldn’t have any major effect—but he wasn’t interested in getting up, either.

  This time, I’d come alone. But the guard would have asked around. So he’d know Max hadn’t been hired help; he was family. My family.

  I walked past him like he was furniture, went through another door, and stepped into an open space about the size of an airplane hangar. A temperature-controlled, ionized-air, dust-free airplane hangar.

  It looked like the world’s biggest bookstore. Aisle after aisle of modular shelving, all custom-made out of some space-age material, with adjustable slotting for each individual book. All paperbacks. I didn’t know why the deranged human who had all this built wasn’t interested in hardcovers, and I wasn’t deranged enough to ask.

  He stood up as I entered, walked over to where I was standing. A normal-looking guy, wearing a cleaned-and-pressed blue shirt with a button-down collar, no tie, sharply creased chinos, and a brown open-weave belt. The leather buckle matched the orthopedic loafers on his feet.

  “Bring it over to the examination table” was all he said.

  As I put down the package, he flicked a string of dangling baby-spots into life. I knew they each housed one of those “sunlight” bulbs; he could vary the illumination with a rheostat, and even adjust the distance from each bulb to the table.

  I stepped away, letting him do his thing. He barely bothered with the magnifying glass, relying on his fingers and his nose.

  “A true first,” he finally pronounced.

  “You’re the master,” I said.

  “How much do you—?”

  I cut off his question by stepping away and starting to stroll the aisles. Everything was labeled, sub-labeled, cross-labeled, and color-coded . . . some in colors I never knew existed.

  He followed, knowing I was going to ask him something. I never wondered if he ever thought about why I asked him questions. I knew he’d always answer, either because he knew that it was my price for something he needed worse than any junkie needs a fix, or maybe because he actually liked talking about his collection.

  “‘Worm Noir’?” I asked, pointing at the slotted label above a whole aisle of books.

  “That’s a subset,” he explained. “‘Noir’ itself is a concept, not a genre. Similar to ‘hard-boiled.’ That’s supposed to be a genre, too. Like, say, ‘western’ or ‘romance.’ But that’s not correct; in fact, it causes overlapping,” he said, clearly offended by the concept. “A ‘western’ could certainly be ‘hard-boiled,’ for example. And ‘noir’ could be anything from ‘sci-fi’ to ‘true crime.’”

  “Worm noir is about . . . worms?”

  “No,” he said, patiently. “It’s a field unto itself. Some are pure pastiche, some grossly imitative to the point of plagiarism, but, in general, ‘worm noir’ is the kind of work that calls itself ‘noir,’ do you understand?”
/>   “Because if it didn’t . . . ?”

  “It would be called what it is,” he said. Not making a judgment, a scientist identifying a species. “Some form of simpleminded garbage, with various conventions splattered throughout. Impossible to characterize except as garbage . . . and that term is an adjective, not a classification.”

  He took a breath, made sure I was paying attention, then said: “To qualify, ‘worm noir’ must be part of the pantheon of the certifiably untalented. It has a certain . . . fraudulence about it, a distinctive odor. And all its authors seem to have followed the same path to publication.”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “How could a sheep walk the mean streets alone?” he said, as if dissecting an oxymoron. “What their herd produces is nothing but recycling.” Out of anyone else’s mouth, that would have been disdainful sarcasm, but his voice was as judgment-free as the Dewey Decimal System he had modified for his own purposes.

  I kept strolling around, looking. He knew I was patient enough to keep this up all day. And I knew he wasn’t.

  “What are you looking for?” he finally blurted out.

  “Porn,” I told him. The most expensive record album ever sold had been the copy of John Lennon’s Double Fantasy he’d autographed to Mark David Chapman. But if this guy had been into record albums, all he would have cared about was the condition; his obsession was collecting, not contents. So I wasn’t surprised when he simply asked me, “Hard or soft?” like a salesman asking what size jacket I wore.

  “Hard, I guess,” I said, not really sure what he meant.

  He led me over to a corner section. “Porn writing is how many fine authors began their careers . . . using pseudonyms, of course,” he said, as if disclaiming any such association on their behalf. “But the market for it dried up decades ago.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Oh, absolutely. I am referring to porn qua porn, not its gratuitous insertion into another genre. The entries from the Fifties and the Sixties never professed literary merit; they prided themselves on delivering a product. A conventional bookstore would not carry them, but there were stores which sold nothing but. And did quite well at it, too.

  “Interestingly enough, while covers are usually the sine qua non of value to paperback collectors, the cover was rarely a factor to the original consumers of this material. For them, the value was all inside. They bought the books to read them,” he said, as if that was a clear indication of mental illness.

  I shifted to a respectful “I’m all ears” posture, said nothing.

  “As I’m sure you can envision,” he went on, permitting himself a delicate smile, “the Internet has utterly destroyed that market.”

  I had to shore up the levee quick; this guy could spill over at any second. “I understand,” I said. “Now, some of the covers you showed me one time—”

  “Those were subtle references,” he corrected me. “Bondage covers, for example, were always presented as plot-relevant. Damsel-in-distress kind of thing. The pulps were actually more graphic in that area. The only pornography that still survives in current form is either ‘literary’ or visual. Some comic books, for example, are illustrating what it would be illegal to photograph.”

  He checked to see if I was still paying attention. Satisfied, he resumed the lecture: “The pornography in fiction today is always called something else. Like the plain brown wrapper they used to mail these in.” His hand swept the shelves, leaving no doubt about what he was referring to.

  I noticed his voice was devoid of disappointment. None of this mattered to him. He didn’t want more product produced; his only need was to acquire all of it that existed.

  I scanned the category labels. And the meticulously subdivided ones. No simple “Incest” here: “Daddy-Daughter” was positioned next to “Mother-Son,” with “Father-Son” and “Mother-Daughter” ranked below.

  Apparently, he didn’t like “Kiddie Porn” as a category name, but he left the “Sibling,” “Cousin,” and “Uncle/Aunt” stuff on clearly separated shelving. He hadn’t labeled any of it “Incest Between Consenting Adults,” but his obsession demanded total obedience: every book had to be in its rightful place.

  I moved past every fetish known to humanity, including some that required non-humans for completion, but nothing jumped out at me.

  “If you could give me some idea . . .”

  How he managed to actually read enough of all these books to set up his insanely complex system I’ll never know, especially when he didn’t like to physically touch any of the rarer ones, but I knew he never faked knowledge. So I said: “I’m looking for a plot where a guy has sex with women—not romantic sex; with prostitutes, or even rape—and brings his son along to watch, so he can teach the kid how to do it.”

  “We’re in the wrong section,” he said.

  “Here,” he pronounced, a couple of minutes later. The delay wasn’t caused by the search; we’d had a lot of ground to cover to reach the area he wanted.

  I took the paperback from him. Black cover framing a window, backlit, shades mostly drawn, but pulled up enough to show a man’s hands, clasped at the wrist, holding some kind of small club. The man was already inside, waiting. I glanced at the title: The Shoemaker. Didn’t ring any bells.

  “Joseph Kallinger,” the obsessive told me. “Serial sex-killer. Among other things. Check the author.”

  “Flora Rheta Schreiber?”

  “Yes,” he said, sounding vaguely disappointed. “She was the author of Sybil.”

  “So this Kallinger was a multiple?”

  He made a gesture I couldn’t translate. “I catalogue them as any library would. If the publisher calls it ‘non-fiction,’ then so be it. The operative word in ‘true crime’ is ‘crime,’ not ‘true.’ Some are later exposed as frauds—I have those separately shelved—some are merely suspected of falsification, but never conclusively proven. And others, of course, are actual journalistic accounts.”

  “Okay. But what’s so special about this one?”

  “Kallinger took his son along with him on many of his . . . crimes. Sex crimes.”

  I kept my voice calm, asked: “This paperback you’re holding, it was a big hit?”

  “I couldn’t say. ‘Best-seller’ is a meaningless term. There is no way to know how many copies of Pimp: The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim actually sold. It was perhaps the seminal outsider novel, and has never gone out of print. But why would the publisher, who, presumably, would owe a royalty on each sale, announce sales figures? I have several copies that don’t even indicate which printing they were.

  “This particular copy,” he went on, opening The Shoemaker quickly, then handing it to me, “is a ninth printing. By the Eighties, that had no special meaning. The paperback market was believed to be skyrocketing, but it was actually peaking, nearing the top of a parabola. This one was no Sybil, that’s for sure.”

  Meaning no movie, I guessed.

  “Anything else?” I asked him.

  “You’ve been looking in the wrong place all along,” he said. “I don’t mean for . . . whatever you’re doing. I mean you’re missing the intersection.”

  I looked confused. It wasn’t an act.

  “Why do you think I need multiple copies of some books?” he asked, going all Socratic on me.

  “So you have extras to trade for stuff you want?”

  “Of course,” he said, the way you speak to anyone stating the blatantly obvious. “But there’s a more important reason. Remember what I said about overlap? Here, look at this one,” he said, handing me a pristine copy of The Indiana Torture Slaying.

  I knew better than to remove the book from its protective housing, so I just scanned the cover. It showed a photo of a young girl next to one of a grown woman who looked evil enough for Leni Riefenstahl to worship in one of her “documentaries.”

  The subtitle was Sylvia Likens’ Ordeal and Death. The cover promised all the sleazy details inside, including “sadism that shocked the n
ation.”

  “Published in 1966,” he said.

  “Written by John Dean,” I read aloud. “Not the same—?”

  “No. In fact, the person who wrote this changed his name after Watergate.”

  “What am I missing?” I asked.

  “The publisher,” he said, pleased at my admission. “Bee-Line Books was, essentially, a porno house in that same era I showed you before. Notice the price?”

  “Seventy-five cents.”

  “Yes. Now, let’s go over here . . . .”

  He found what he wanted in seconds. Handed it over. Shipboard Stud by David Key. The cover was about what you’d expect.

  “‘David Key’ was most likely a house name,” he said. “But it was published around the same time, also by Bee-Line. Note the price.”

  “Ninety-five.”

  “Keep that in mind,” he said, and took off again. He found the spot he wanted, pulled out a new-looking copy of Doomsday Mission. “This was by Harry Whittington, one of the all-time great paperback-original writers. See the price? Sixty cents. Year published? Nineteen sixty-seven. And look at this one: Somebody’s Done For, the last book from the immortal David Goodis. Also 1967. And also sixty cents.”

  “So, back then, porn cost more than regular paperbacks?”

  “Significantly. Don’t think in terms of nickels and dimes; think of the percentage difference between sixty and ninety-five . . . and then multiply by, say, a few hundred thousand . . . per title! But let’s go back to Bee-Line.”

  I followed behind him, thinking he must put in an easy ten miles a day.

  When we returned to the “True Crime” section, he wordlessly handed me The Coppolino Murder Trial by Leonard Katz.

  “Bee-Line,” I said, to show I’d been paying attention. “Ninety-five cents.”

  “Nineteen sixty-seven,” he replied. “Have you ever been inside one of their places?”

  I knew who he was asking about . . . and I had been inside lots of “their” places. A furnished room, the basement of a tract house, a prison cell . . . I nodded my head “yes.”