Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  He nodded, waiting for the rest.

  “We leave here about seven tonight, you’re plugged in and running by three in the morning,” I told him. “That gives you about two hours to crack into their system and grab what I need. In case that’s not long enough, I’m bringing enough extra batteries to power that thing for a month. Gets too near daylight, I got a place we can stay, come back the next night. What do you say?”

  “I’ve only got one class this afternoon,” Terry answered, without looking up. “I’ll be ready to go anytime after four. But we’ll only get the one try, Burke. The second they detect an attempted intrusion, they’ll lock it all down.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Pick me up at school,” he said. “I don’t want to have to explain to—”

  “Me, either,” I assured him.

  Anybody asked, I was taking my nephew on a road trip, a last bonding experience before he left home.

  We didn’t stop for food. Mama had us supplied with enough steel-canistered stuff to last a week. And the roadside darkness was all the restroom either of us needed.

  I kept the Roadrunner at a steady nine-over all the way. Too much turnpike means too many troopers. But I did promise the kid we’d do something on the way back.

  The key I’d paid a lot of money for let us in. And my blue-lensed LED Mini Mag found the promised T1 jack. While Terry was setting up, I made a seat for him out of some wood pilings. The windows were already boarded, but I draped a mesh shroud over Terry and the machine anyway.

  “Jesus!” he said a few minutes later.

  Then I heard the battery-powered printer go into action.

  We left pieces of the computer and printer—small pieces, those things don’t seem to handle claw-hammer blows real well—in a couple of dozen different places on the way back. The last traces went flying out the window somewhere past Youngstown.

  The building itself was coming down on Monday. The printouts were in the trunk, in the hidden slot beneath the fuel cell.

  “I can’t believe it,” Terry said. “The Department of Environmental Protection has got everything under the city mapped. See, it’s the clearinghouse, so any other agency, or even a private contractor, can find what they—”

  “What’s so amazing?” I cut him off.

  “What’s amazing is, it’s like they had no protection on it at all. I could have cracked in even without—”

  “Safety first,” I told him, as a Porsche blew by us like wind past a building.

  The kid gave me a look. By the time we caught the Porsche, we were just a little over the century mark. I held the left lane until the other driver got insulted enough to try us. I dropped down a gear and let him stare at taillights until we disappeared.

  “Holy—”

  Before Terry could finish, I was already pulling over and killing the lights, waiting for the Porsche to fly past, chasing a ghost.

  “Want to drive her?” I asked him.

  “This would not be precise,” the Mole said, studying the printouts.

  “I know.”

  “No,” the pudgy little man said, firmly. “You do not. This is a time-and-distance problem.”

  He drew a circle on a sheet of graph paper, then darkened the center boxes. “The object is in motion.” He began to inch the point of a blue marker from an edge of the circle toward its center. “Speed can be estimated only imprecisely, at best. So, the more powerful we make this”—tapping the dark center boxes inside the circle—“the more certain of . . . success.”

  I just nodded, knowing what was coming, steeled for it.

  “The closer to the center, the better. But we cannot control for closeness, so we must expand the center. That means anything within that center will also be . . .”

  “We can cut down those odds some, but it’s still going to be a dice-roll,” I admitted.

  “Is there no other way?” he asked, clearly pained by what my plan could cost.

  That’s when I told him the stake we were playing for.

  “I . . . believe I understand,” he said, minutes later. “But this is the quintessential chain-reaction formula: one faulty link and the whole thing fails. One.”

  “We won’t even get to this part unless everything else is already in motion, Mole.”

  “How will you ever—?”

  “I have to be right,” I told my brother. “It’s as simple as that. I have to be. If it happened any way except the way I believe it did, it’s already over.”

  “But even if you are right, even if you could make it all work, there would be . . . consequences. The pursuit would be relentless.”

  “Mole, can I ask you something?”

  He looked at me, as expressionlessly menacing as an Easter Island statue.

  “If the Nazis had pulled it off, exterminated every Jew on earth, would they have stopped there?”

  “No,” he answered, giving away nothing.

  “After the Gypsies, after the homosexuals, what then?”

  “Anything not—”

  “Come on, Mole. We’re not doing politics here. When someone gets called an ‘anti-Semite,’ that means—what?—he hates Jews, right?”

  The underground man moved his head a fraction.

  “But that’s inaccurate, isn’t it?” I said, deliberately using the language of science, not politics. “Aren’t the Arabs also Semites? Aren’t they as close to your biological brothers as anyone on earth?”

  “In Europe—”

  “Don’t go there, brother. God couldn’t have written the Bible, otherwise it would read the same in every language, never mind this Old and New Testament thing. Men created God, not the other way around. And where was the birthplace of that creation? The cradle of civilization itself? Come on! You know it wasn’t Eden, so where was it? Where did we start? All of us, I mean.”

  “Evolution probably was occurring in different places simultaneously,” he said, calmly. “There was no single starting point.”

  “I buy that. Okay. But tell me Jews and Arabs didn’t spring from the same seed.”

  He went so still that I could only sense his presence. He was doing what he was best at. I was, too. Which is why I outwaited him.

  “This is likely true,” he finally conceded. “But, today—”

  “I’m not running for boss of the fucking UN, Mole. I’m telling you why this could work.”

  “Because the pursuers would believe it was—?”

  “I don’t know where they’d look,” I told my brother. “But I know where nobody would be looking.”

  “My people didn’t need no Einstein to discover infinity,” the Prof said, his voice bitter enough to etch glass. “The trail never ends, ’cause there’s nothing at the end. I can preach, I can teach, and I can reach. This is pure truth: the only place we go when we’re gone is where we’ve already been.”

  “What we do here—”

  “That’s what stays behind, Schoolboy. The only thing. They used to tell us, You’ll get pie in the sky when you die. And we believed it, ’cause it was the only way to make sense out of the life we had. But that pie was a lie, and some of us, we felt that like a fire inside us. A fire you have to keep inside, because you don’t want it ever put out, and the whole world is nothing but steady rain.

  “This fire, it burns so bright, it makes you see the light. The light you follow. I know some of us, we fed those slaveholders a whole lot of pie before we died. Look back with me,” he said, closing his eyes. “You see it?”

  “Yes.” And I did.

  “But I still believe,” the old man said, fiercely. “Not in that hustler’s handbook they preach from, but in the Word.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I believe in the truth,” he said, reaching for my hand. He folded my hand into a fist. “You can’t punch through the wall, son. Maybe you can’t even make a little crack in it. But if you believe, you’ll keep on hitting it until you can’t hit no more, see? Then someone comes up behind you, hits that
wall in the same spot. And someone else after that.

  “And someday—not tomorrow, not next year, but some glorious day—that wall starts to look like a windshield that got hit by a rock. Spiderweb cracks all over it, and now you know: long as we keep punching, it’s not gonna hold. That’s the Word.

  “You know why? I’m here to tell you. We on one side of that wall; they on the other. And you know what they doing over there? They ain’t waiting on a fight; they getting ready to run. Motherfuckers are all froze up with fear, like a field mouse when a hawk’s high in the sky. They know we coming. And we ain’t taking prisoners.”

  “Amen.”

  “They got it all wrong, son. Money’s the wall; blood’s the punch. You got to pay the cost, all right. But not ‘pay the cost to be the boss’ that rhyme is past its time. You pay the cost so nobody gets to be the boss. You tell the Mole to play his role. Tell him I’m going down the road with you. Right to the end.”

  I kissed his cheek. Thanking my father for backing my play this one last time.

  “We’re going to have it right here,” Michelle told Clarence. The poor kid was trapped in my booth at Mama’s, Michelle towering over him in her heels, hands on hips, bending forward to punch home every word.

  I would have felt sorry for him, but I’d spent enough time with Taralyn to know he might as well get used it. I remember Clarence complaining to the Prof: “That girl, in a second, she can switch from cane sugar to what they use to cut it with,” he said, lost in puzzlement and love. “I don’t mean she’s bossy. It’s not like she nags or anything. No man could want a sweeter woman. But, mahn, when she plants her feet, you could not budge her with a bulldozer.”

  “What other kinda woman you want, fool?” the Prof demanded. “Didn’t I explain all that to you already? Her kind, they mate for life, understand? You play her wrong, she ain’t gonna jump in your lunch, go all ghetto on your sorry ass. No. You do that, she gonna die inside.

  “You hear me, boy? A woman like your Taralyn, even if you buy yourself twenty years Inside, you don’t ever need to worry about Joe the Grinder comin’ to call. She’s gonna stand her ground, go every round. So if you ain’t ready to go all the way, don’t you even try and play, hear?”

  “Yes, Father. I was not—”

  “Don’t be developing those habits, son.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You hear the Max-man talk about his woman?”

  “Yes,” Clarence said, putting his palm over his heart to imitate Max’s gesture.

  “That ain’t talking about her, boy; that’s talking about his feelings for her. You want to tell your buddies you love your woman, go on with it. But don’t you ever complain, because you end up having to explain. Always gonna be some moke who don’t get the joke, see?”

  “Yes,” Clarence said, nodding.

  “A true-hearted woman like your Taralyn, you can’t buy her, you can’t sell her, and you sure as hell can’t tell her. You think she some no-pride bitch you can stay out all night on, buy her some jewelry and that’ll make it right? No! You leave that kind of game to this one,” he mocked, nodding in my direction.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Poor bastard. And now he had to sit through Michelle “explaining” that the only place he could formally propose would be in a restaurant where ptomaine goes to die, the dirt is thicker than the carpet, and the vinyl had lost its virginity before he was born. “What were you going to do?” she mocked. “Take her out to eat, bury the ring in the dessert, some cheesy stunt like that?”

  From the look on Clarence’s face, apparently so. Me, I pretended I was somewhere else.

  “We’ll redecorate!” she said, half orgasmic at the very prospect. “You won’t recognize the place, I swear.”

  “But this is not our—”

  Mama strolled over from her perch by the cash register, tracking straight as a steel-hulled icebreaker.

  “For one night,” she said, closing the deal. “We get a car—” She cut herself off in mid-sentence, seeing Clarence start to open his mouth. “Not your car. Limousine. All special. Flowers, crystal. Make perfect.”

  “Mama, I so very deeply appreciate everything. But I would be . . . embarrassed, if I had to—”

  “You think we be here?” Mama stared him down. “Sure, someplace here. But not in room. Waiters come, sure. Serve all special dishes. But not stay. You finish food, you signal, everybody disappear. Okay?”

  “But the minute she accepts, then we can all—?”

  “Yes, little sister,” he said to Michelle, grinning despite his anxiety.

  Everyone was quiet, breathing in the moment.

  “After we finish the job,” I reminded them all, breaking the spell.

  “We found six,” Cyn said. “Certified.”

  “Okay, just give me the—”

  “Already done,” she said, looking over at Rejji as she spoke. “Three of them haven’t had a customer in months. Two’re still in the hospital; the other was just discharged. The only other one wouldn’t go near an Arab; she only does Nordic.”

  I looked a question.

  “Nazi torture chamber. The tricks play dress-up while they do her. There’s two more we know of, but we couldn’t reach them. One’s been in Vegas for almost a year; the other one’s not talking.”

  “Maybe if I offered her—”

  “Too late for that,” Rejji said, on the borderline between making a judgment and not giving a damn.

  “You must find that child,” Taralyn said. She was looking at me, but speaking to Clarence. “Your father has made remarkable progress, but he is going to need several more weeks of rehab and at least one more refitting before he can even think of—”

  The Prof wasn’t going to let anyone talk about him like he wasn’t in the room. “Girl, I wanted to slide away, you think I’d tip the play?”

  “Mr. Henry—”

  “’Sides, you think I’d ever put my own son under the gun?” the old man said, hitting her with a smile that made it impossible to disbelieve him.

  If you didn’t know him.

  It took a while to get in touch with everyone, but we managed to get together just before midnight. I looked around the table, thinking how some of us were in each other’s life from way back and some of us just knew each other’s back-story. And how none of that made any difference now.

  Michelle and me had been together since we were kids. Max hadn’t been born deaf, and after so many years of keeping the vow he made never to speak while he was learning the death arts, he probably couldn’t anymore. I’d been there when he’d told Mama how he lost his hearing. I knew why the Mole hated sunlight, but I was probably the only one.

  The Prof had adopted Clarence as he had me, but before the young gunman ever spent any time behind the Walls. Terry knew his own truth, but he’d known his true family longer. His “childhood” had been a dirty little glass bead until Michelle used the telekinesis of love to roll a twenty-ton boulder over it.

  Gateman had been in that wheelchair since he was a little boy. His father hadn’t put him in there, but he liked dumping him out of it, especially when he came home drunk.

  Nobody knew much of anything about Mama, but her name was no accident. Neither was Flower not being with us that night. She’d been kept out from the start. From her start.

  “I can do it, boss,” Gateman assured me. “The whole block is shorter than a damn football field, and his place is just about in the middle. I can park myself at the corner. You know, the whole begging-bowl bit—nobody’ll even look at my face. At that distance, I can put one in his eye socket without breaking a sweat. You know I can.”

  “Making the shot ain’t the same as getting off the block,” the Prof vetoed. He shifted in his chair, pillows bracing his stump.

  We’d only gotten the Prof out after Clarence promised Taralyn we’d bring him back. He’d taken her hand and kissed it, said, “I swear on my love,” and made her look into his eyes.

  “I k
now it is true, then” was all she said.

  “I done it before,” Gateman told the Prof. “You know I have.”

  “Ain’t no doubt you got the chops,” the old man agreed. “But this ain’t down where we live, Gate. This is rich man’s country. People don’t be going all Ray Charles when somebody gets himself popped off the count. Streets be jammed, too. Only way you get out is blast yourself a path. And you got too far to roll, bro.”

  “I’d only need to get as far as the van,” Gateman insisted. “We done it before.”

  “Not in that neighborhood,” I echoed the Prof. “Those car chases through midtown, that’s only in the movies. Nobody has to be chasing you; the regular traffic is a perfect roadblock. Remember, you’re going crosstown. There isn’t a getaway man alive who could make that run.”

  Michelle opened her cell phone, turned it so the screen was aimed at Gateman, said, “Gotcha!”

  “Mom’s right,” Terry said. “Everybody walks around with one of those things. You could be on YouTube before you got ten blocks away.”

  That was true. Terry’s words took me back to the freak who told me all about how he had invented “noir vérité” . . . just before he died. Now it was an epidemic, with “directors” posting their kitten-in-microwave masterpieces on video Web sites, to the delight of creepy-crawly fans all over the world.

  One endlessly recycled fave was the prison surveillance tapes of Father John Geoghan being strangled in his cell. The notorious “pedophile priest” had been murdered nine years ago. But the guy accused of doing it demanded a showcase trial . . . which meant the tapes were part of the discovery evidence the prosecution had to turn over. How that tape got so popular on the Internet is less of a mystery than why so many people keep insisting there’s no such thing as snuff films.

  Gateman had picked up some of Rosie’s habits; he wasn’t going to drop the bite. “But what if I—?”