Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  Cyn nodded slowly. “So he’d have to rent,” she said, thoughtfully. “And no spanking-for-sale stuff. He’d need merchandise he could return in very poor condition.”

  Rejji nodded her own agreement.

  “That’s got to be a small list,” I said.

  “Small enough,” Cyn answered me, her mouth a hard, straight line. “We’ll call you.”

  On the way back to my place, I saw a splash of graffiti. A lot of work had gone into this one. A huge section of the wall had been sprayed white; then the message was painted over it in spilled-blood red:

  BUSH WAS PRO-CHOICE

  AND HE CHOSE WAR

  This was no teenage tagger’s work; the message was stenciled, not freehand. I touched it lightly: the whole thing had been clear-coated with some kind of transparent material. That kind of operation takes teamwork and organization. I would have bet good money the same exact sign was popping up all over the country. Certain parts of it, anyway.

  One of the first things I’d learned from Max was “hard to soft; soft to hard.” Some men have concrete skulls, but no man’s got a concrete liver. You don’t “block” incoming; that’s a good way to break whatever you block with. What you do is turn, deflect, absorb. The power of any strike is in where you place it.

  Whatever “style” you call it, the foundation stone is always the same: balance disruption.

  All that movie crap isn’t just decaying people’s brains, it’s getting their bodies broken. They all know the screenplay answer to the “ancient master’s” question: “Would you rather be an oak or a willow?” Me, I learned the real answer to that one in places where the grading wasn’t “pass/fail,” it was “live/die.” That answer is a question: “Am I trying to withstand a hurricane, or fracture a skull?”

  When you’re up against humans whose moral compass is True South, the only rule is: Get it done. “Done,” as in finished. Over. Ended. The only ceremony you care about is the autopsy.

  In prison, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” never stays permanent. It’s a radioactive isotope, with a half-life that could turn out to be your own.

  Too bad we don’t send politicians to prison before they get elected, maybe they’d learn something. Instead, we get ideologues and morons—like there’s a difference—who give major weapons and top-quality training to any government who’s fighting our enemy du jour. Then, when our “friends” turn on us, the politicians point fingers at each other. If they’d pointed missiles in the first place, and aimed them at the right targets, we might actually have bought ourselves some safety. Maybe even some respect.

  Cyn had told me she would be working a short list. While she did that, I worked on making my own list shorter, trying to narrow it down to that single thread I’d need to pull.

  I turned on CNN to watch the scroll, the “mute” locked on so I didn’t have to listen to the bobblehead dolls.

  Turned out to be newsreel footage about a Russian journalist named Ivan Safronov who supposedly committed suicide—a step up from just gunning them down in the street like they’d done to Anna Politkovskaya when she’d dared to send dispatches from Chechnya.

  I guess the point was how the same mask kept dropping everywhere. They showed Shinzo Abe putting his personal stamp on his tenure as Prime Minister of Japan by claiming that the “comfort women” forced into sex slavery to service soldiers during World War II were a myth. Oh, there may have been some women working in brothels, but the numbers were insanely exaggerated. Anyway, the ones who did that work were whores before they were chosen to “serve,” so what was all the fuss about?

  Maybe Iran will invite him to their next Holocaust Denial Conference. By then, they should be nuke-proof enough to do whatever they feel like.

  The footage rolled on. A quarter-century ago, Denmark had set aside a squatter’s roost for assorted anti-establishment types. Fit right in with the temper of the times then. Anarchists and artists from all over the world visited the huge building they called the Ungdomshuset. Some of them stayed, made it their home. But the Danish government sold the whole building to an evangelical Christian. Maybe they needed the money to do something about all the neo-Nazi biker gangs that had opened for business there.

  Next, a Mississippi grand jury returning a “No True Bill” against Carole Bryant, the woman Emmett Till was supposed to have “wolf-whistled” in a little country store. Emmett Till was a black child. From Chicago. And he didn’t know his place. Three strikes.

  Bryant’s husband and his race-protecting buddy had grabbed the boy one vile night, right in front of witnesses, took him away, and tortured him to death. After a Mississippi jury took an hour to hand down the mandatory acquittal, the killers took a reporter’s money to brag about how they’d given the little nigger what he deserved. Years later, the same reporter tried the same trick with James Earl Ray . . . but all he got for his money that time was a useless stack of snide-smiled lies.

  No question that Bryant and his partner had pulled up in a car that night. No question that it took the two of them to wrestle the kid into the death car, while someone else sat behind the wheel. Fifty years later, the FBI decided to check its files. They turned over the information they’d had all along to the local authorities, with the mild suggestion that they might want to look into Carole Bryant.

  I thought about all the people who had been murdered in Mississippi to stop blacks from voting. And why the killers even bothered.

  The cobbled-up documentary wasn’t working for me—anger interferes with concentration. So I kept pressing buttons on the remote until I landed on a Road Runner cartoon.

  “We always root for Wiley,” I explained to Rosie, scratching her behind her right ear. “You know why? I’m going to tell you a secret, little girl. Wiley’s not a coyote; he’s actually a pit bull in disguise. You know how you can tell? Because, no matter what, he never quits. He’s been trying to nail that lousy bird for a million years. Gotten himself blown up, dropped off cliffs, had boulders dropped on his head . . . but he keeps right on coming. Now, what’s that but a pit bull?”

  She made a chesty little noise.

  “That’s right,” I told her. “And that’s us, too.”

  When the cartoon was over, I pushed buttons until I found another of those Law and Order episodes where the DA gets the suspect to spill his guts by offering the ultimate prize: “We’ll take the death penalty off the table.”

  “Now, this is what they call a sitcom,” I explained to Rosie. “Even when there was a death penalty in New York, every working criminal knew it was a rubber check—only a Hoosier wouldn’t spot it as worthless. They haven’t executed anyone in this state since I was a kid. Even when a prisoner raped and killed a female guard, that didn’t get it done. He’s still waiting for the needle, and that was over twenty years ago.”

  Rosie snarled. I didn’t know her well enough to understand if she was showing contempt or disgust—takes time for partners to sense each other that deep.

  I gave up on the tube, tapped the CD player, closed my eyes, and felt the blues mist over me.

  Charles Brown, Chuck Willis, Jerry Butler, Chris Thomas King, Luther Alison, Freddie King, Junior Parker, James Cotton, Otis Spann, Dion, Dave Hole, Fats Domino, Solomon Burke, Bobby Bland, Dave Specter, Hank Williams, Delbert McClinton, Albert King, Lowell Fulson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, when he was walking that road with Billy Bizor. Magic Judy, Marcia Ball, Etta James, Irma and Carla Thomas—not connected by DNA, by something deeper—Bonnie Raitt, Barbara Lynn, Dorothy Moore, Koko, Aretha—before she made a wrong turn and ended up lost in Motown . . .

  As I came out of wherever I’d gone to, Johnny Ace was moaning “The Clock.” He’d died young—gunshot wound to the head. The story was he’d been playing Russian Roulette. Some bought it. Some still don’t.

  I made a phone call.

  “Where is the money in a whorehouse?” the black-coated man scoffed. He had a rabbinical face, with gentle, moist eyes. We’d done business before. />
  He took a deep hit off a hand-rolled cigarette that looked as crudely effective as an Uzi, said: “When a man goes to a whorehouse, he pays, he finishes, and he leaves. But a strip club, if everything is handled properly, instead of minutes, the man stays hours. And instead of taking a few dollars, you can bleed him white.

  “Even those escort services, what is the ceiling—a couple of thousand, maybe, for all night? In a well-managed club, a man will spend many times that. He can buy magnums of champagne, glittery gifts for the girls, Cuban cigars . . . we have it all.

  “We make that man a king, yes? He snaps his fingers, and a dozen gorgeous women are at his feet. They stroke him, put on shows for him, call him whatever he wants to be called. Any whore can spread her legs; our girls know how to work the mark. This is no easy task, and it takes more than beauty to be successful at it . . . but their rewards are spectacular.

  “With a club, we can take credit cards. Corporate accounts. Men bring their friends for business lunches, gather their associates to celebrate a big deal they just closed. Girls for everyone, on the house!

  “If they have the money, they can be tycoons, Mafia chieftains, movie producers . . . anything at all. When they enter our club, what they wish to be is what they are. The world becomes their world. Only a privileged few get a glimpse of paradise, but for those who do, it is more addictive than any drug.

  “These are gentlemen’s clubs,” he said, his voice shifting toward a hint of what might happen to anyone who took his establishments for anything else. “No stuffing cash in G-strings, no ATM machines in the lobby, no blowjobs under the table. It is not sufficient that the women be beautiful; they must be cultured and refined as well. The furnishings must be correct. The lighting is very important. No blasting music, no . . . garishness of any kind. Ambience is critical. And security is discreet.

  “We create all this magnificence. No matter what the outside world holds for him, once inside one of our clubs, the client is far more than a mere sultan; he becomes a god. What would you pay to be a god?”

  I watched him puff on the coarse cigarette, keeping my body posture attentive to my role. Part of that role was not answering questions that weren’t questions.

  “In a whorehouse, the merchandise is used. Used hard; used often. And what is used must, eventually, be used up. We rotate the girls among our clubs, keep them fresh, like flowers.

  “Of course, we still have to accommodate the local police, but the expense is minor . . . especially compared to an actual bordello. That is why all the real competition is over territory. You can open a club anywhere, but the finest setup will not attract the clientele we require if it is located in some remote area. So . . .”

  He never finished the last sentence, but the firebombing of a newly opened strip club on the West Side was still a hot story on the news. No suspects.

  Time to show I’d been paying attention. “The blackmail risk is next-to-nothing, too,” I said. “Every time a madam gets busted, she threatens to open her black book if they bring her to trial. But you show a tape of a guy walking into a strip club, it won’t even cost him a divorce, much less a career.”

  “Uh . . . occasionally, an employee will overestimate the value of certain information,” he said, opening his hands slightly. “No matter how well a casino screens its employees, there will always be some dealer who palms chips. Or cooperates with a team of signal-passers at the blackjack table. It costs money to prevent the loss of money. You see?”

  “Yeah. In your business, blackmail threats are aimed at the customers, not the house, but protection is part of what your customers pay for. Same reason why a casino has to guarantee the games aren’t fixed.”

  “Correct. And there is also what you people call an ‘ancillary benefit.’ The targets of such threats are generally not experienced in how to deal with them. So they turn to those who are.”

  I nodded.

  “All they have to do is keep on paying,” the black-coated man said. “For as long as their money lasts, the world is as they wish it to be. We create that world. And we maintain that world, as any blackmailers quickly discover. Although you claim otherwise, America has its own class system. Money. Whorehouses are for peasants. Our establishments, they are for royalty.”

  “I’ve been doing this all wrong,” I told the Prof, the minute Clarence left us alone.

  “Ain’t the first time,” he said.

  They should have kept you on that morphine drip longer, old man, I thought.

  “This was never about the fucking Prince” was all I said aloud.

  “Couldn’t have been,” the Prof agreed. “To groove that move, the snatch-men had to know the Sheikh was a freak. They wanted to shake him down, how hard could it be to find a whore who’ll work with a camera in the room? And if they wanted to ice him, they coulda done that same time they took the kid.”

  “He’s not shakedown material,” I said, beginning to see . . . something. “How would that kind of tape be worth a dime to him? So he’s teaching his kid that all women are sluts. Pigs, whores. Things, even. What’d he call them? ‘Holes,’ right? Who’s that going to hurt his status with? The fucking Taliban? That’s their national anthem. The State Department? Come on: they’re already whores, and who knows that better than the Prince?”

  “So it’s the baby,” my father said.

  “It’s the baby.”

  “That means one thing, Schoolboy. It ain’t the whole deck we need to worry about, it’s just that fifty-third card. ’Cause that one, it ain’t no sleeve ace; it’s a joker. And it’s running wild.”

  I stayed with the Prof until Clarence finally came back. With Taralyn. As I walked out, the old man was explaining how Hillary and Obama had done their best to cancel each other out: “Couple of dumb-ass dogs—fighting over a Big Mac when there’s a juicy T-bone a few feet away,” he jeered. “Only thing that could have made it worse would have been one comes out with an endorsement from Satan, and the other comes out, period.”

  I’d already heard that speech: the Prof always worked himself up over how blacks and Latins cancel each other out in this city.

  “Black folks finally get their chance here, what do they do with it?” he had ranted at me, years ago. “They pick a monkey too stupid to unpeel a banana. So busy taking care of his friends, he never takes care of business. Look at OTB. Got to be the biggest bookie operation of all time, and it ends up broke. You ever heard of a syndicate bookmaker losing money, son?”

  “Long-term, I don’t even see how it’s possible,” I co-signed. “And with OTB it’s even worse. They get their own separate take-out on top of the track’s, and every bettor has to front the cash, too.”

  “Yeah, well, it ain’t all on Dinkins. Sure, he was the lame who wrecked the train, but he don’t deserve all the blame. We finally get a chance to headline the show, and we pick Stepin Fetchit to be the star!?

  “And what’s he do? Throws the whites into a panic. Voted Democrat all their lives, but when they see Dinkins giving away everything to the spooks, this Giuliani toad starts looking real good to them. By the time the fools in Queens and Brooklyn realize that ‘their’ man don’t care about nothing but his people—not white people, rich people—it’s too late.

  “Then the Latinos say, okay, it’s our turn now. And what do the blacks do? They just shuffle back on over to where the money is. Remember how it was Inside? Ain’t no different out here.”

  He had it right. That’s how we ended up with a white Republican mayor in a town where whites are a minority and Republicans barely exist.

  Of course, the only reason the guy became a Republican is that the Democratic clubhouse wouldn’t give him the nomination. With a few billion in spare change of his own, he didn’t need financing, just a spot on the ballot. You can see his next move just as clear: he’s going to bide his time until there’s an opening, then pull a Perot.

  I guess Clarence and Taralyn went on listening, maybe for different reasons. But the reaso
n their hands stayed clasped was the same for both.

  “Would they have it online?”

  “The subway, for sure,” Terry said. “The sewer system, I don’t think so, but I can check.”

  “I don’t need subway maps, kid. I can grab one at any station. What I need is under the underground. I know there’s stations all over the city where no train ever stops. Some abandoned, some never put into service. Stations mean tunnels, and tunnels stay open even if no trains go through. It’s one of those that we need.”

  “The sewer system has to be on the city’s computers, so they could locate any problem immediately.”

  “But not on some Web site?”

  “I don’t think so. Especially now, with all the terrorism scares.”

  “I’ve got an address,” I told him. “There’s no subway stop close by, but we can walk there from one of the abandoned stations I already know about. It’s the sidewalk that counts. They have to lay the concrete over something, right? I want to get as close to that sidewalk as I can. And that means we have to find the route from underneath, see?”

  “I can try.”

  I handed him a briefcase. “There’s a laptop in there. Brandname. All factory parts, but there’s no record of it existing. No serial number, not even on the components. Supposed to be the latest thing going; just came off the assembly line last week.”

  “That’s great if it gets seized, but the IP—”

  “There’s a building in Cleveland that’s slated for demolition,” I interrupted. “Somebody ran a T1 line into the basement. I’m not sure how they did it, but I think it was bridged from a downtown brokerage house. I don’t want you on any security cameras, anywhere. So you and me, we’re going to take a drive, okay?”