“What are we going to do?” Michelle said, standing up. The way she always does.
“Not what’s on the tapes, Mole. The tapes themselves. The whole package.”
“There are no good tests for that,” he said. “Not precise enough ones. I won’t be able to tell you much from—”
“Just take them apart,” I said. “And tell me what you can.”
“I got yearbooks,” Terry said, bursting into the suite. “Look!”
“You did not steal them?” the Mole asked.
“No, Pop. I just borrowed them. I’ll bring them back.”
“That is too much risk,” the Mole said. “Once you have—”
“No, I really borrowed them! From a couple of girls I met. I’ve got this year’s, and...a few others, too.”
“They know you have them?”
“Yes,” Terry said, patient with his father.
“Oh,” the Mole said. And went back to his work.
Every working professional keeps some sort of Rolodex. Mine’s in my head. That “expectation of privacy” crap is fine for attacking a search warrant, but by then the cops already have the info. And that smoke never goes back into the cigarette.
I’ve got a list of experts. In all kinds of things. Carefully culled over the years. Because one thing I’ve learned: just knowing things doesn’t make a person useful.
When I was on my first bit, a group of researchers came into the prison, looking for volunteers. By then, I already knew enough to pay attention when certain people had something to say. Tucker was an old veteran con who’d jailed down south when he was a young man. He was always telling us that New York joints were country clubs compared to The Farm at Angola. There, Tucker said, they used to give you time off your sentence if you let them experiment on you—a new yellow-fever vaccine, stuff like that. But the courts made them stop doing it. I guess they figured, when you spend your life as a work animal in the fields, whipped by freaks who love their work, you spell “volunteer” a little differently.
But some stuff was still okay, like the psych “studies” they were always doing on us. They told us that we wouldn’t get anything if we participated. So, naturally, every con in the house figured the parole board would mark you lousy if you didn’t, and there was never a shortage of “subjects.”
I remember one time, especially. All the visitors wanted was a blood sample and an interview. Big deal. Anyway, everyone said the nurse drawing the blood was a real piece.
That part turned out to be true. She was a Puerto Rican woman, slender, with big brown eyes and wicked thighs. And she smelled like flowers I’d never know the name of. That needle sliding into my vein was the gentlest touch I’d felt since they’d locked me down.
The interviewer was a young guy, only a few years older than me. Bushy-haired, with wire-rim glasses. He was wearing a blue work shirt under a putty-colored corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows. He told me I had an XYY chromosome. I didn’t know what that was, but I could see it made him very excited.
“We can’t be sure,” he said. “The data aren’t all in yet. But this is some of the most important work that’s ever been done in the field.”
“What field?” I asked him.
“Biocriminology,” he said. “Let’s finish your interview, and then I’ll answer any questions you have; fair enough?”
I lied my way through the rest of his questions, practicing my survival skills. When it was over, he gave me one of those “This is going to be profound” looks, said, “Haven’t you ever wondered why you’re...the way you are?”
“The way I am?”
“A violent offender,” he said, looking around quickly, as if he’d just discovered we were alone in the room. “A habitual criminal since early childhood. Haven’t you ever wondered what made you like you are?”
“That XYY thing?”
“It could very well be,” he said solemnly.
So it’s true, what they’ve been saying since I was a kid, I thought to myself. I was born bad.
After I got out, I studied everything I could find about XYY. The library had a ton of stuff on it, but it was just a bunch of people arguing with each other. That’s when I read about this famous professor. The article said, when it came to genetics, he was out on the edge. Supposedly, they kicked him out of some big university because he was too far ahead of the rest of them to fit in.
The article said he lived in New York. I asked around. Picked up that he lived somewhere over on the Lower East Side. In a big loft that he’d turned into some kind of mad-scientist laboratory. No phone.
I didn’t know anything about genetics, but I knew how to find people.
I just showed up one day and knocked on his door. It was opened by a powerfully built black woman with a big afro and startlingly green eyes. I told her I wanted to ask the professor a question about genetics, and she brought me right to him, as if he got visitors like me every day.
He didn’t look like my movie idea of a mad scientist. Didn’t even have a white coat, just a pair of chinos and a flannel shirt. Cleanshaven, with a neat haircut.
I asked him about the XYY.
“Someone told you that was you, yes?” the woman said.
“Yeah.”
“And you think this ‘explains’ something? About your behavior?”
“Maybe,” I said, wondering if the professor was ever going to say anything himself.
“It doesn’t,” she said flatly. “There are those with the extra Y who are pillars of the community. And plenty of vicious psychopaths with the standard XY.”
“Oh.”
“‘Oh’? What’s wrong? You want Dr. Drummund to tell you himself, is that it?”
“No. I mean...I thought...”
“You think I’m his, what, secretary?”
“I thought you were his wife,” I said.
“I’m a whole lot more than that,” she said, suddenly grinning.
“Do you know any Japanese?” the professor asked me.
“Not a word.”
“No, no. I mean, do you know any Japanese people?”
“Sure.”
“Businesspeople?”
“Absolutely,” I assured him. Remembering what Mama had told me about the market for powdered rhino horn and tiger testicles. I knew about markets for other things, too.
“You asked for it,” the black woman said, winking at me.
And then the professor was off. It was a good fifteen minutes before I understood his life’s ambition was to find a way to breed male calico cats. He rattled on about the orange color being sex-linked to the X, and the only way to get a male calico was from an error in chromosome separation, so they’re very rare. And almost always sterile, too.
“But what’s the big deal about—?”
“They’re worth a fortune,” he said, dead serious. “To collectors. In Japan, if you know the right people, you could get maybe twenty thousand dollars for a single cat.”
“Nelson,” the black woman said gently, “let’s have tea.”
By the time I left, I knew that all I had gotten from my bio-parents was my hair and eye color, maybe some physical and mental capacities. “But even those are far more environmentally determined, as they eventually manifest themselves,” the professor told me. His woman looked on, smiling...at me, once she was satisfied I got it.
And the professor had my word, the minute he broke the code to producing male calico cats, I’d get him a pipeline to the Japanese collector market. I’m still good for it.
I dialed up the Rolodex in my mind, did my search. Then I pointed the Plymouth toward a quiet building in Greenpoint.
“Of course there’s a market for keyhole stuff,” the generic-looking man told me. We were in his top-floor apartment, sitting at a kitchen table. He was drinking Zima. I passed.
“There’s only two things that count in this game,” he said. “Rarity and matchmaking.”
“Matchmaking?”
“Let
’s say you had a tape of some famous actor taking it in the ass from another famous actor, okay?”
“Okay.”
“All kinds of buyers for product like that, right?”
“Sure. Especially the actors themselves.”
“Exactly. But let’s say they’re not famous, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Now who wants to buy it?”
“Someone interested in that kind of porn, maybe?”
“Uh-huh. But only that kind. To you, I couldn’t give it away, because that stuff doesn’t turn your crank. So, sure, it’s got some value. To some people. But it’s no hot product. Nothing you could sell to the Globe or the Star; you’ve got to go out and find a buyer. See what I’m saying? That’s the art to it. Matchmaking.”
“So no matter what I had...?”
“If it was rare enough, I could move it,” he said, his voice utterly devoid of doubt. “There’s people, they’ll buy dirt from a serial killer’s grave, you convince them it’s authentic. That’s the no-starter, authentic. You don’t have that, you’ve got nothing.
“There’s girls making a living selling their smelly panties on the Internet. This one chick I know, she told me she goes through twenty pairs a day, sometimes. Authentic, see?”
“Same for rape tapes?”
“If it was real, and you could prove it, hell, yes. There’s been rumors for years about the Homolka tapes.”
“Homolka?” I asked, faking a blank.
“Bernardo and Homolka, you heard of them, right? Husband-wife team, up in Canada. They snatched young girls, sex-tortured them in their basement. Very heavy stuff. Then they killed them. Anyway, the cops found the tapes. The actual tapes. But the government closed the courtroom when they showed them during the trial. Anyone had one of those, he’d be rich.”
“Why do you call them the Homolka tapes?”
“Homolka was the broad. Blonde chick. Young. She got some nothing sentence. For testifying against the husband. The prosecutor made that deal before they got hold of the tapes. Anyway, she’s the one everyone’s interested in. Even has fan clubs on the Internet. She’s going to be out soon, I think. Word is, she may have a couple of the tapes hidden away....”
“And people say there’s no such thing as snuff films.”
“There’s such a thing as anything. That’s where the matchmaking comes in.”
I nodded at the wisdom. “I want you to look at a couple of tapes,” I told him. “I brought them with me. Tell me what you think.”
“It’s your money,” the man said.
“I could move those,” he said later.
“Every one of them?”
“Not all of them so quick. And not any of them for a lot of coin. The paddling one, that was pretty hot; I could unload that in a few hours. But you’re talking maybe a couple of hundred for it, max. And only if you convince the buyer that it wasn’t faked.”
“You mean, that the girl really got paddled?”
“Nah. Sure she did. So what?” he said, unknowingly echoing Cyn and Rejji. “You’d have to convince the buyer that it wasn’t a scene, understand? That they weren’t working from a script. Buyers are always on the watch for the mass-produced stuff. They’d never trust anything on DVD—video’s the only way to go. If it was a sneak tape, it’d be worth a lot more. Even the toilet freaks, all they want to buy is the spy-cam stuff. You’d think shit is shit, right? Not to those sickos.”
“What about the girl who got the knockout drops?”
“Like I said, I could move it. But you’re talking a real cheap sale, there. The people who buy that stuff, they want to see...a struggle, like. Of course, with that bag over her head, you could say she was a celebrity, maybe....”
“Mole found something!” Michelle greeted me as soon as I walked in.
“What?”
“Come on,” she said, tugging at my hand.
The Mole was hunched over the coffee table, a rectangular magnifying glass in one hand, a videocassette in the other. Terry was sitting next to him, a notebook to his right.
“CV,” the Mole called out, softly.
“Got it,” Terry said. He looked up, saw me, said, “We’ve only got two more to do.”
I sat down on the couch, holding Michelle’s hand so she wouldn’t run over there and disrupt everything in her excitement. “I told you, I told you, I told you,” she whispered at me.
Finally, the Mole stood up. And walked out.
“He’s just going to the bathroom,” Terry said. “Come over here, I’ll show you what we figured out.”
He handed me the magnifying glass, then used what looked like a dentist’s pick to point toward the corner of one of the cassettes. “It’s real small,” he said. “And reverse-embossed. Kind of sunk right into the plastic. So it’s the same color; hard to pick out. Pop said he had some stuff that would bring it up, make it stand out, but he didn’t want to mess with it until you looked for yourself.”
It took me a minute or so before I saw what Terry was talking about. A pair of tiny block letters: FV.
“What does that mean, ‘FV’?” I asked Terry.
“It’s a code of some kind. There’s three of them: CV, FV, and NV. We thought it might be something they did at the factory, so Mom sent me out to buy some blanks, from the same manufacturer. I went to four different stores. And you know what? Not one of the other tapes had anything like this on them.”
“Is there any pattern to them? The letters, I mean?”
“I don’t know,” the kid said. “Pop said that part isn’t science. He said you’d figure it out.”
I turned the cassette over in my hands, as if its weight could tell me something. Shook my head.
“Let me see.” Cyn.
Terry picked up another cassette, waved her over to the table. Cyn bent forward, her barely restrained breasts in the kid’s face, said, “Hold it for me, honey,” as she winked at me over her shoulder.
The kid handed her the magnifying glass and held the cassette in both hands, steady as a dead man’s EKG. “It’s on the bottom,” he said. “Right near the erase-protect piece.”
Cyn stopped playing around. “Tilt it a little toward...Yes!” A few seconds later: “Rej, get over here! Take a look at this.”
The women switched places around Terry like he was a piece of furniture.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Cyn asked her.
“Uh-huh. Let me just...Sure, that’s it, Cyn.”
“What?” I asked them.
“It helps when you’ve seen one before,” Cyn said.
“Seen what?”
“A branding iron,” she said. “This little ‘NV’ thing here? That’s what made it.”
“¿Habla español?”
“Poquito. Muy poquito.”
“¿Y que?”
“Bodega, botanica, bruja, plata, jefe...”
“¿Y que mas?...”
“Pistelola, gusano, violencia, puerco, ropa, compadre, mordida...”
“¿Maricón?”
“I’ve heard the word.”
“What does it mean?” Felix asked me. His voice was still sable-soft, but his eyes were freezer burns.
“It’s a word for—”
“No, hombre. Not what it is, what it means, comprende?”
“I’m not follo—”
“Somebody calls you un maricón, that means you have to do something, yes?”
“Oh. Yeah, maybe. Depending on who’s saying it. Or where.”
“A man calls you ‘maricón’ in prison, he is saying—what?”
“Inside? Depends who’s doing the calling. Some cliques, that’s the conversation. Play the dozens all day, every day. But that’s only between themselves, see? If you mean to someone you don’t know—like for an insult?—never happen. Nobody challenges you to a fight in there. If you’re really after a guy, you don’t warn him. There’s none of this ‘I’ll see you after school’ stuff,” I said, wondering if he was asking, or testing.<
br />
He nodded. Not like he was agreeing, like he wanted me to keep talking.
“Not much fistfighting in there, either,” I told him. “Except for when a guy just loses his temper—it’s mostly the young ones who do that. Now, in the bing, solitary, guys call each other out all the time. You see a lot of cell gangsters, mouth-artists who get real brave when everybody’s locked down. It’s ‘You’re dead, nigger!’ this, and ‘My homeboys are going over to your house and fuck your daughter in her white ass!’ that. Around the clock. Never stops. But it’s just background noise.
“The only reason you might call names in there would be an intimidation thing. A test. You wouldn’t hear ‘maricón,’ though. You’d hear ‘pussy’ or ‘punk.’”
“And what must you do then?”
“Stick ’em or slice ’em,” I said, as no-option flat as when I’d first heard the rules explained to me a million years ago. “Maybe not right that minute, but you have to do it. And pretty soon. A man calls you something like that, he’s trying to break you with words. But behind the words, if you don’t give it up, there’s always a knife. His or yours.”
“But outside of prison? Then, for an insult...?”
“Sure. That’s right. Then it is a challenge. Or something you yell out your window at a guy who just cut you off.”
“A great insult,” he said. “It is calling someone a coward, yes? To most people, means the same thing. Maricón, it means you have no courage?”
“Like another word for ‘punk’?” I said. “Yeah, that’s right. I guess it all comes around in a circle, words like that. When I was a little kid, I thought ‘punk’ meant someone who wouldn’t fight—like when you ‘punk out,’ okay? But as soon as I got Inside, I found out ‘punk’ is what you are if some jocker owns your ass.”
Felix leaned forward, lit a cigarette. “In my...culture, in my world, you understand what it would mean, to be thought of...that way?”
“Yeah. I did enough time with Latinos to—”
Only Child Page 20
