Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  “What’s on their shelves?”

  I nodded again, thinking this was maybe the first time in his life that the obsessed man had ever asked a question about books that had nothing to do with collecting.

  But that thought was replaced by what I’d just learned. Even if I got lucky and found the “why” of that sheikh’s freakish home-schooling, it wouldn’t get me any closer to the reason his student had been snatched. “I appreciate your time,” I told the lunatic.

  “As I appreciate you bringing me the book. What are you asking—?”

  “Token of respect,” I said.

  “Respect for . . . ?”

  “What you taught me,” I answered, watching for the tell.

  While he was making up his mind about what to say, I had plenty of time to see the truth.

  Driving back, my mind was recalibrating the pattern-recognition software that self-activates whenever I’m tracking. I could feel this new element downloading. The next time the cops were looking for a Green River Killer type—and I knew they would be, soon enough—they should be looking for books.

  I’d been in a Wal-Mart once. I noticed they were real Christian-agenda about what books they allowed on their fiction shelves, but their “True Crime” section was exempt from that rule—sex-torture titles were the clear favorite.

  Where’s a serial killer going to shop for his tools? Some little hardware store that might remember a guy who keeps running out of duct tape? Or a big, anonymous joint with ever-changing personnel that sells everything from shampoo to dog food? Especially a store a lot more worried about the government finding out who its “subcontractor” hired to clean up after closing time than what its customers buy.

  The national chains make sure every purchase goes into their computers. Collecting people’s personal information is maybe the most lucrative business of all—ask Google. And I bet, if a certain government agency made the request, it might be allowed to run a scan for habitual purchasers of a certain kind of paperback. Especially if that same agency had enough juice to tell the Labor Department to look the other way.

  There’s one sure thing about serial killers—every one’s a repeat customer.

  Telling Pryce might get that info into the right hands. But Pryce was programmed for distrust. He could be dying of cancer, but if I offered him a no-charge cure, he’d spit out the pill.

  I hoped that book on Kallinger might show me a parallel, but it didn’t come close. Yeah, he had brought his boy along with him, all right, but that kid was no baby; he was a teen. Kallinger himself had died a mystery. In prison.

  I wasn’t all that surprised. Facts don’t change beliefs; facts get “interpreted” to fit those beliefs, and I’m not just talking about sadists who use “the Bible says” to justify everything from beating children to forcing them to “marry” men old enough to be their grandfathers. If you get to write the definitions, you control a lot more than the dictionary. You don’t have to justify Iraq to people who believe “supporting our boys” means sending their parents condolence cards.

  Hank Ballard was a bluesman in disguise. “Annie Had a Baby” was the truth. But his biggest hit was “The Twist.” And he wasn’t the singer.

  Michelle once showed me something she’d printed off some Internet “encyclopedia.” It was this heated discussion about whether some woman had been a warrior against sexual exploitation or a self-promoting fraud. One poster whose favorite word seemed to be “FemiNazi” said the woman’s claim of having been raped had to be a lie, since she was a grossly obese, truly ugly-looking individual. My little sister was fuming. “Why doesn’t someone tell that low-watt limp-dick about the Boston Strangler? That’d shut his nasty mouth,” she hissed.

  “No, it wouldn’t, honey,” I’d told her. “Sure, everyone ‘knows’ the Strangler targeted old ladies, but the whole DeSalvo story was hype. With all those rape-murders, the law had to come up with something or the press would keep crucifying them. So they got together and cooked up an everybody-wins scenario. DeSalvo wasn’t the Strangler, but his ‘confession’ solved a lot of problems for a lot of people. Remember, he was never tried for any of those crimes—he was already going down for life on other stuff.

  “But you’re right; there’s an entire porn industry based on ‘preferences.’ There’s guys walking around who jerk off to photos of four-hundred-pound women. Or raped grandmothers. Never mind the double-amputee, or conjoined twins or . . . You know what I’m talking about.

  “And anyone who’s done time with them knows there’s power-freaks prowling every night. Drive one of them to the finest whorehouse in town, hand him a no-limit credit card, and he’d never go near the front door. He’d rather wait outside, in an alley.

  “Humans like that aren’t looking for stiletto heels and garter belts. Pay a bitch for some fake moans, where’s the jolt in that? It’s the ‘fake’ part that they can’t stand. Turns them right off. But fear, now, that’s real. Terror. Pain. Blood. Not what you buy, what you take.

  “You can buy anything in this town. Anything at all. But once you pay for it, the costumes don’t matter. You’re not the dominator, you’re the trick.”

  “I know, but—”

  “See, they’re all wrong on this one, baby girl,” I told her, holding up the printout she’d handed me. “Both sides are just spouting the party line. Rape is about sex, but, for some, it’s only the taking that makes it sexy. Get it? Once a belief system clamps down, it stays locked—reality never gets in the way.”

  I rubbed my temples, knowing I could never touch what really hurt. Michelle lit a smoke and sat back in her chair. She’d been with me too long to think I was done.

  “A man gets arrested for sexual abuse of his kid. If he’s convicted, it ‘proves’ that kids never lie about things like that. To one side, that is. To the other, it ‘proves’ there’s a witch-hunt going on, and the kid was ‘alienated’ into making up the story to please his mother. One side screams, ‘False memories!’ the other screams, ‘Believe the children!’

  “So fuck the facts—no matter what they are, you can always make them fit. The truth never matters. Say that same guy is acquitted. Well, that ‘proves’ that some people are falsely accused . . . to one side. To the other, it ‘proves’ that people get away with child sexual abuse all the time.”

  “But not everyone—”

  “You don’t need everyone to win an election, sis. Hell, you don’t even need a majority, not in this country. A true-belief system is the perfect sponge. It can absorb anything, but it never changes.

  “It’s an amazing thing to watch in action. Newt Gingrich campaigns to get Clinton impeached for having sex with a White House intern at the same time he’s having sex with a congressional aide. So what? He’s still a ‘family values’ guy, right? He divorced the wife he was cheating on and married the mistress, but that ungodly slime Clinton never divorced his wife to marry the intern. See the difference?”

  “No,” my sister snapped at me. She sipped her tea, cigarette smoldering in the ashtray.

  “You go in blank-slate, sweetheart. Patterns are good for narrowing things down, but that just takes you to where the real work starts. There’s always a truth, no matter how deep it’s buried. You start believing in things, you’re screwed from the start.”

  “There’s things I believe in,” she said, quietly.

  “Me, too, girl. But that’s believing the truth we found, not what we were told, right?”

  She leaned over and kissed the scar on my cheek.

  “You think you really get it, don’t you?” Cyn asked me.

  I was half reclining in a body-molding sponge chair, watching her prance around in a black leather corset that had to have been put together by a structural engineer.

  She was in full costume, right down to the six-inch heels and domino mask. She must have just finished a session with Rejji: live-feed, subscribers only. Not even close to illegal, but a lot more lucrative than either of them could make working st
raight jobs. Cyn had a master’s in psychology; Rejji had graduated magna from Brandeis.

  “I don’t even get what you think I think I get.”

  Cyn reached up and took a long, thin metal rod down from a shelf. The rod had a tiny little circlet at its end. She tapped it into her black-gloved palm.

  “We told you what we know,” she said.

  “And, the way you add it up, this guy hired props so he could teach his kid to be some kind of dom?” I asked her.

  “He’s no dom, not if he’s paying for it.”

  Rejji giggled.

  “Shut up, bitch!” Cyn said, without turning her head. “This isn’t about his pathology, Burke. It’s not about what he is; it’s about what he can do.”

  “Because he’s got the cash to buy—”

  “It’s not for sale,” Rejji said.

  Cyn strode over to where Rejji was chained and slapped her, hard. Then she whirled and came back over to me.

  “You know what this is?” Waving the metal rod in one hand.

  “Not a clue.”

  Cyn snapped her fingers. “Come!” she commanded.

  Rejji crawled over, still chained by one ankle.

  “Remember Star?” Cyn demanded.

  “Yes, Mistress.”

  “Tell Burke where she got her name.”

  Rejji looked up at Cyn. In response to a nod, she got up from being on all fours and knelt as if saying a prayer. “Star worked the Holy Coast for years,” she said. “Not L.A., San Diego. Just far enough away, but close enough, get it?”

  “No,” I told her, truthfully.

  “Her clients were all ‘directors.’ They got off on being obeyed. Star had her own rules. You could dress her up, spank her—with just about anything you wanted to use—but that was it. No blood, no handcuffs, and no sex, ever. She said it was the easiest gig she ever had. Maid, serving girl, geisha-type stuff.”

  “I don’t get the last part.”

  “That was where the money was. She had to be . . . I guess ‘worshipful’ is the word I’d use. Tell the trick what a god he was, listen to him brag about how, when he said, ‘Jump!’ the biggest names in the industry jumped.

  “Naturally, she’d jump, too. Fetch him whatever he wanted: a drink, a whip, it was all the same. Of course, she had to keep her clients separately catalogued, so she remembered what made each one such a big deal. That way, she could act like she was his little slave because she wanted to be.

  “Money was never mentioned—that would have killed the image. Not just because they could never see themselves as tricks; there was a lot more to it than that. To keep them coming back, she had to be a better actress than anyone they ever ‘directed.’

  “They couldn’t even be her sugar daddies. It had to be like she’d pay them, if only she had the money. And the only reason she didn’t have the money was because she couldn’t hold a job and still be available twenty-four/seven for a visit from her master, could she?”

  “She only had one at a time?”

  “Jeez!” Rejji said, caustically. “There was no twenty-four/seven, Burke. Game, game, game. All of them had to make appointments, like any trick. Naturally, they didn’t call them ‘appointments,’ they called them ‘commands.’”

  “She was a star.”

  “Sure was.” Rejji smiled. “Only thing is, when you make a living pretending some sorry little loudmouth is your lord and master, you never get to be what you want.”

  “The money—”

  “For some, that’s right,” Cyn said. “What Rejji’s telling you is the part you’re missing.”

  I made an “explain it to me, then” gesture.

  “If you’re going to do men,” Rejji went on, making a face to show that the very idea was distasteful, as if what had happened between us one night a few years ago . . . hadn’t, “being a domina is the way to go. You wouldn’t believe the captains of industry who can’t wait to crawl down to some dungeon and be punished. See, that works for them—something about paying a woman so they can lick her boots balances out their world.”

  “They’re still in control?”

  “Of course. You know why?”

  “Like you said, they pay—”

  “No! Because they’ve got choices. They’re not looking for a connection with another person; they’re connecting with themselves. If one domina doesn’t work out for them, they just find another. They know they’re playing at being a slave, which means they can play anywhere they can pay. That fits.”

  “Don’t they ever—I don’t know, get . . . attached to one of the girls they pay?”

  “They may like one better than another, but the only real attraction is to what they do. It’s never more than that.”

  “How does this help me?”

  “You know what this is?” Cyn asked me again, holding up the metal rod. “No? Well, this, this is the part you don’t get.”

  I waited.

  “A branding iron,” she explained, handing it to me. The tiny circlet was some intertwined initials. “Rejji wants me to brand that perfect ass of hers. Been begging for it for years, haven’t you, bitch?”

  “Yes!” Rejji gasped, licking her lips.

  Cyn never turned her head. “One time, I had just given this one a really serious whipping. Then I told her to get dressed and go out and buy me a nice hairbrush; I wanted her shopping while her ass was still on fire. The second I told her that, she came so hard she fainted. A few days later, she came back with this.”

  Cyn took the branding iron back from me. “I harnessed her up real tight, gagged her stupid mouth, and used a riding crop until she was blistered. Then I took out her gag and asked her, what did she want? When she begged for that branding iron, you know what I did?”

  I waited.

  “I gagged her again. Tight. Like I would if I thought she was going to scream. I let her wait a little . . . then I bent down and kissed her ass.”

  Rejji suddenly broke into tears.

  Cyn ignored her, turned to me, said: “I told her that nobody tells me what to do with my property. If I wanted to brand her, I’d do it. She never gets to make that decision. Any decision. You let a sub tell you how she wants to be punished, who’s really in charge? Get it now?”

  “Maybe,” I said, moving slowly, navigating without a map. “You’re saying this guy, he wouldn’t have stopped. If his baby hadn’t been snatched, eventually he would have taught him how to . . .”

  “Guaranteed,” my consultant confirmed.

  “But that would come later,” I said, thinking of Kallinger, and how old his son had been when he took him along on his rampages. “After puberty. In the meantime, if he wanted to program the baby, the rougher he wanted to handle the merchandise, the more he’d have to pay to do it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So it wouldn’t be someone like this Star girl. He’d need . . .”

  “For the extra-heavy stuff, you’d need a slave. I don’t mean a captive. That happens, I know, but it’s way too dangerous. This freak was building a dominator, not a murderer, and you can’t let a captive go when you’re done with her.

  “Besides, even to a little kid, it would be obvious that the women were being forced. And he was teaching the baby that all it ever takes is money.”

  Cyn patted Rejji gently as she looked down at me, making sure I was still with her:

  “You might find a woman who’d go along with damn near anything—you know, Story of O–type crap. But that kind needs a live-in, not an occasional visit.”

  “Like us,” Rejji said, boldly. “You think, because I do whatever Mistress tells me, I’ve got nothing to say?”

  “I don’t know how it works,” I told her, truthfully.

  Rejji reached up and cupped one of Cyn’s enormous breasts. “While you’re telling him about branding irons, why don’t you tell him about these?” she said, sounding about as submissive as a silverback.

  Cyn took a seat on a padded ottoman. Crossed her long legs. Took off
the domino mask. Said: “Rejji told me I’ve got two more years, max. Then, if I didn’t have the surgery, she’d leave me.”

  I must have looked puzzled.

  “You think these are store-bought?” Cyn said, bitterly. “No. They’re all mine. And, believe it or not, all they ever did for me was get in the way. So the less seriously people took me, the more serious I got.

  “I didn’t bring Rejji out; she brought me. After we’d been together for a while, the orthopedist told us—we went together—that if I didn’t have breast-reduction surgery I’d end up with curvature of the spine. But the minute I have the surgery, our business will take a real hit. We’ve got money put away, but not enough to maintain our lifestyle. We’d have to give up a lot of the things we’ve gotten used to.”

  I knew the “things” she was talking about: the designer dresses, the palatial two-floor apartment, the vacations, the gunmetal-gray Porsche with the Day-Glo orange bumper sticker:

  YOU DECIDE IF I GET AN ABORTION?

  THEN I DECIDE IF YOU GET A VASECTOMY

  “But we’d get to keep the only thing that counts,” Rejji said, tenderly interrupting my inventory-taking. She turned to face me squarely: “Exchange, get it? Tonight, I’ll be polishing those boots she’s wearing. With my tongue. I give that to her, because I want to, and I want to because I love her. But I’d never give her the right to cripple herself.”

  “See why it could never fit?” Cyn said, recrossing her legs. “This . . . piece of filth who’s training his baby, he has to show him money can make any woman do whatever he says—they’re all ‘holes,’ right? So he’d need variety. A different one each time, I’m thinking.”

  “But there’s a—”

  “Limit? Please. There’s more girls for rent than Hertz has cars. Some of them, they’re not just commodities, they’re consumables. You pay enough, you’re not expected to return her when you’re done.”

  “No good.”

  “Why?”

  “Because his game is way more complicated than that, Cyn. He doesn’t need to teach the baby that you can torture a woman for fun . . . or even kill her. Where he lives, you can do that, if you’re royalty like him. What he’s teaching the baby is that ‘secret’ all the freaks share: women want to be used.”