Terminal

by Andrew Vachss

  “I apologize.”

  He gave me a slow, appraising look. “Say why, Sly.”

  “Because you’re giving me something, and I’m being disrespectful. I know everyone here respects you. I know you know things. I know you have…powers, or whatever they call it. I don’t know why you picked me—”

  “Now you cooking.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You white, right? So why should some old nigger be teaching you something if he wasn’t running a scheme on the scene?”

  I didn’t say anything, ashamed that I’d been so trusting, but not regretting it.

  “Southern blacks, they know the show. White man smiles at you, always got to be something he wants behind that. You know what Mr. Charlie says if a white tries to fuck with a black man that’s worked for him all his life? He says, to the other white guy, ‘Step off, that’s my nigger.’ They all put us last. Even the best of them, they always going with their own first. We know this right from our first taste of mother’s milk.

  “But, you think it through, you know it can’t be true. Got to be some white men who’re righteous, for real. As down as old John Brown. You play it safe, stick only with your own kind, you miss some chances. That’s my power, you see what I’m saying to you? I can tell. You…you can’t tell nothing. So you got to decide with what you got.”

  “What have I got?”

  “You got a gift, son. I can feel it in you. You learn to trust that, you trust me. You don’t, walk on.”

  “How do I—?”

  “I’ll teach you,” the little man said. “But that means you mind me like I’m your father.”

  “I never had—”

  “You think I can’t see that, fool?”

  “I…I know you can.”

  That was it, from that moment. It was the Prof who taught me the rules. “A real second-story man is a ghost, Schoolboy. He can unhook a pearl necklace from a woman sleeping on her silk sheets and never wake her up. I don’t care if she’s sleeping nude, and she’s the finest piece of ass you ever seen. You touch her and you’re over the line. Not a thief, not no more. You can never be one of us then, never.

  “You can’t be a thief unless you about the money. Nothing else. So, like I’m saying, a real second-story man, he don’t use weapons, he uses tools. No guns, ever—that’s for another kind of work.

  “Now, I’m not saying you can’t be a stickup artist or a hijacker or even a gunslinger. ‘Thief,’ it’s not about what you do; it’s about what you won’t do, okay?

  “You want to be a pro slip-in man, you always move light and you always carry light. Don’t fit in your pocket, you leave it. Only junkies steal TV sets. Any fool can count cash. You got to learn to tell a Timex from a Rolex, a diamond from glass, a piece of gold from a slab of brass.”

  “I thought you were here for—”

  “What’d you do, boy? Ask one of the hacks? Tune into the jailhouse vine? Pull my records?”

  “I just heard—”

  “You heard I’m on this bit for dropping the hammer. But what I am, I’m a thief. I’m out there to steal, but sometimes some fucker will force you to deal.”

  “Dope?”

  “Dope? You wasn’t so damn childish, I’d be insulted behind that. Dope! They named it right, Schoolboy. Never went near it, and I wouldn’t work with anyone who did. This bit I’m working on is for armed robbery. When I say I’m a dealer, I mean I dealt it out. We were halfway out the door when the fool they paid to guard the place tried to earn his money.”

  “So if…?”

  “Look, now. Listen up. Hijacking ain’t always smart, but it’s not the same as dropping a dime, or taking your crime partners down with you. You want your rep to be carved in stone, you always go down alone. But if you got your ear to the ground, if you plugged in, if you listen, you keep picking up cards. When they got you—I mean, got you wrapped and trapped, jury ready to drop you, judge ready to top you—then it’s time to deal.”

  “But if you can’t give the cops anything—”

  “You can’t give them yours,” the little man said. “You can’t even give them your own kind. But there’s one kind I don’t mind.”

  When he explained the kind of humans he was talking about, I knew he was my father. Every Child of the Secret wishes he had different parents. I was still a kid in my heart or I wouldn’t have asked him, one day: “Prof? What’s your real name?”

  “What you think, boy?” the little man said as he drew himself up to his full height and pumped out his chest. “There ain’t but one name the Man ever had for a nigger like me. I never went to class, and I never kissed ass. You can hang me from a tree, but I’m always going to be. I’m never gonna die, and that’s no lie. You want my true name? I’m John Henry, fool.”

  It was the Prof who taught me how to find a way in. “If you press, you stress, Schoolboy. Once you have the power, you have to lay in the cut until you see the gut. Stealing ain’t about thrill; it’s about chill. Let it come to you—then you’ll know it’s true.”

  I was trying to do that now. The clock was ticking for the cancer-man, not for me.

  There’s two places I can always go. For one, I get in the right position in front of a mirror I use—a round one with a red dot painted exactly in its center. I breathe the way I learned to do, until I fall into that dot. Sometimes, it’s hours before I come back.

  This morning, I was going the other route. I just relax—today, with a tall, frosted glass of pineapple juice and some roasted almonds—and take in random information. I dial my subbrain to “scan,” looking for answers to questions nobody has asked me yet. I don’t know how it works, but I know it happens—one part of my brain takes in the info; another part is gnawing at it like a rat in a concrete cage.

  I had WABC on for background music. Yeah, I know it’s talk radio, but something about the Huff & Puff Show in the morning has the predictable tonal quality of a schizo arguing with the voice in his head. It’s music, so long as you don’t try to make sense out of the lyrics.

  The newspaper was a comedy act. The feds had an ex–NYPD cop on trial, said he was actually working for the mob. Not just selling info, going all the way, right down to participating in hits. The ex-cop says it’s all a pack of lies; he’s never had anything to do with the mob. Then he puts up a couple of million bail, and hires John Gotti’s old lawyer to represent him. Should have pleaded insanity.

  One of the giant ISPs says that configuring its software so China can finger dissidents and send them to torture camps is just showing respect for another country’s culture. Of course, our culture prevents them from IDing the kiddie-sex trollers who use their servers. After all, us Americans have the right to privacy.

  If hypocrisy was a virus, the Internet would crash tomorrow.

  I killed the radio—the show had gone from its usual white noise to some other level. I hadn’t realized there was anything lower than “dull” before. Time for a little TV.

  Jurors were being interviewed. Must have been some kind of major case. They all agreed it was just disgusting that the killer hadn’t shown the slightest trace of remorse. “He never shed a tear for her, not once,” one blobby woman in a blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar said. Her own piggy eyes dutifully welled up as she reached for her personal Oprah moment.

  I didn’t know if the guy they were talking about was guilty or not, but I felt a wave of disgust for that jury, anyway. TV trials have turned jury service into a media opportunity, and the slugs know their lines by heart: If the poor bastard says he’s innocent, they want to fry him because he’s not “sorry.” And if he blows any chance of appeal by admitting he did it, any tears that come out of his eyes are dismissed as phony.

  It’s all a show. Like those “Victim Impact Statements” in mandatory-sentence cases. It’s really uplifting to watch people read their pre-typed scripts: “You’re going to be in prison for life, but your mother can still visit you. The only place I can visit my son is in the cem
etery.” Yeah, okay, we got it already. We know dead people can’t have babies, or go to college, or whatever dreams you had for them. Why tell the guy who made that happen? Think it’s going to make him feel bad? Or did you just need “closure”?

  The teleprompter-reader announced that Nigeria and China had just signed some sort of treaty, the centerpiece of which was cooperation between their governments. Nigeria announced it was irrevocably committed to a “one-China” policy, meaning, the day the Chinese decide to attack Taiwan, they could count on Nigerian oil to keep flowing to their war machine. Nice two-way street: if Biafra—or any other separatist movement—ever tries to rise again, and the Nigerian generals go back to their genocide program, China’s going to veto any UN Security Council vote to intervene.

  Dictatorships sticking together, forming mutual-support alliances. Doesn’t anybody remember the last time that happened? Or maybe that info wasn’t in the script the spray-haired “journalist” was reading from.

  A man who survived Katrina by pulling his family out just in time was being interviewed. He told some girl “reporter” it was like he had been raped, but didn’t understand why he felt that way. She made sympathetic noises, and cut to commercial.

  I know why. Everyone knows that kids who’ve been sexually abused by strangers have a much higher recovery rate than when the perpetrator was inside their own family. It always comes down to what the victim expects for a response, and how close that expectation comes to the truth.

  For Katrina victims, FEMA was the cop who tells a gang-raped woman that nothing would have happened if she hadn’t worn that short a skirt and gone to that bar and let a stranger buy her a drink….

  Katrina didn’t rape New Orleans. Everybody knows who the real rapist was. But do you think any of those organizations that live on government grants are going to say it out loud? You know who I mean: the same ones who run around gushing over how Congress is “protecting our kids.” I mean, look at all they’ve done! Why, we even register sex offenders now, so any “father” who’s fucking his own kid can go on the Internet and make sure his property’s not exposed to danger from a stranger. The “missing children” thing went dry when the half-wits who run the show finally figured out that just about all of those “missing” kids were custodial interference cases, not abductions. So they just switched to “Amber Alerts” and slid themselves into the “Internet safety” business. Now the mother who pimps her kid can make sure some chat-room predator doesn’t get to teach the kid how to make his own money.

  I remember something a working girl told me, a long time ago. I’d done her a favor—her coat-hanger-loving pimp had never seen me coming—and she was trying to repay me in the only coin I wanted back then: survival skills. “You get a trick hot enough, he’ll pay you the same for a hand job as the full ride,” she’d told me.

  She might have been talking about the people who vote in this country. She sure as hell was talking about the ones who don’t.

  “I need some things,” I said into the cloned-chip cell phone.

  “What?”

  “From him, not you.”

  “Can you say?” Meaning “say on the phone.”

  “Business records. His.”

  “From the joint he—?”

  “He might have them there, but I need to go back much further than that. He started a lot of businesses, none of them worked out. Those records.”

  “His place isn’t that far away from…from where you and me last ate. Under an hour, depending on the time of day.”

  “After dark,” I told him.

  The “strip club” was a faceless slab of fatigue-cracked concrete, with the usual signs outside. Even the neon looked greasy.

  “His office is in the back,” Claw said. “No way in except through the front door. There’s a bouncer, but he’s about as much as you’d expect, a place like this.”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “There’s a fire exit out back.”

  “Yeah, but they’re always locked from the inside. And an alarm goes off if you open them.”

  “Not tonight,” I promised.

  I backed the Plymouth into an open slot on the broken asphalt behind the club. He watched as I threw some switches, not asking what they were for.

  The back of the building was completely tagged. Overriding all the graffiti was the symbol “MS-13” in huge white letters, edged in blue.

  “What?” Claw said, watching me stare at the sign.

  I stepped back into the deeper darkness next to my Plymouth, nodded an “okay” when he took out a smoke, knowing he’d cup it. When he had it going, I explained why we were waiting.

  “In this city, the only way you get a piece of anything is to take it. If you’re reaching from the bottom—new kids on the block, no politicians in your pocket, no cops on your pad, no unions, no nothing—your only way in is with product or power. The Colombians brought both. They had their own pipeline, and they were truly vicious bastards, too. The Russians had the gas scam locked down tight: no-tax gas in this town is gold, if you can guarantee enough stations regular deliveries. Then the Albanians decided they wanted to play, too. They didn’t have any sources, so they had to go psycho. It all got settled one night in the Bronx. The tanker was right there, pumping, when they had their meet. Everyone had guns, but the Albanians brought hand grenades. The Russians told them, you toss those things near the tanks, we all get blown to pieces, where’s the profit in that? The Albanian boss told the Russians every man he had with him came there to die. The Russian boss didn’t read it for a bluff.”

  “You think it was?”

  “No.”

  “So what’s with that MS-13 thing?”

  “Mara Salvatrucha. Started on your coast, all guys from El Salvador. Got together for the reasons anyone crews up. Same reasons you did. At first. Then they started pulling from all over Central America: Guatemala, Honduras, like that.

  “You grow up with death squads owning the night, people ‘disappearing’ all the time, the threat of dying doesn’t have any impact on you after a while. Some of them were street kids who got across the border; some of them were the same soldiers who used to hunt them. They’re not into ‘organized’ crime…at least, not yet. Dope is the same as robbery or a shakedown to them—a thing you do for money. But they never hire out—they get money by violence, not for it, see?”

  “They ink up?”

  “Big-time. Some of them, right on the face. In Honduras, an MS-13 tattoo buys you serious time. Just for the tattoo, I mean. So it’s a commitment. In for life, whether it’s on the bricks or behind bars. They’re big on messages. Heads on stakes. The kind of thing the newspaper clowns call ‘senseless violence.’ But it makes perfect sense to them. Works, too.

  “See, they’ve got no rules, no boundaries. Never had a treaty with anyone. They can’t be infiltrated—undercovers can slip into the Mafia if they’re good earners, but MS-13 wants to see you make a body, up close. Got to be with a blade, and it’s got to be slow. They don’t even pretend to be legit businessmen. Forget the tax boys, forget the wiretaps, forget the forensic accountants to catch them laundering money.

  “Their life expectancy is death, see? They’re proud of being crazy. And anyone who’s not crazy is scared of them. Scared to death.”

  Claw tuned right in. Prison is a pyramid. Actually, a row of pyramids. In some joints, especially down south, you have convict bosses running the dorms or the blocks. But even the biggest bulldog isn’t going to scare an elephant, and if the real boss—the warden—decides he wants to change the regime, that’s all it ever takes.

  Not so many years ago, it was right out on Front Street. They had cons guarding cons. Armed cons, ready to shoot if you made a break from the fields. No problem making sure those boys walked the line: one slip and they’re back in the fields themselves. With a life span until sundown.

  Today, they just use bus therapy—move the problem to another prison, a prison that’s
already got a boss. Where Claw had done his time, they do it different. Known gang members are deep-freezed, dropped down into the Shoe—that’s how you say Special Housing Unit, SHU. The only way out is to “debrief.” The ones who do it for real, give up all they know about their gang—codes, leadership hierarchy, signs, stashes—they get released into “protected housing.” Putting them back into Population would make them the prize in a shank lottery.

  The stand-ups sometimes make it out of the Shoe on their own, especially if they’ve got real lawyers on the job. Men like them would never take a voluntary PC, and they go right back to the block, certain their rep will hold.

  But their crew can never be sure. And some of them might decide not to take the chance…especially if the man who was running things while the boss was away got to like his new job.

  “You think they’re shaking down our guy’s place?” he asked.

  “They marked the territory.”

  “Just because other gang kids didn’t overtag them doesn’t mean—”

  “I don’t care what it means. They could be bleeding the place dry, it’s nothing to us.”

  “So why are we watching?”

  “They’re not talkers,” I told him. “If they’re inside right this minute, they’re either collecting or they’re using their machetes. There’s some parties you don’t crash.”

  Fifteen minutes was enough. We stepped through the shimmed-open fire door in the back. Claw pointed to his right. I followed him down an unpainted plywood-walled corridor, pulling my watch cap down into a ski mask. Music—or something like it—boomed from the front of the building. We passed an unmarked door. I was guessing bathroom, but I didn’t like the idea of a door opening behind me, so I switched stances—still following, but with my back against the wall.

  The last door had the kind of sign you buy in a hardware store; peel off the backing tape and stick wherever you want: PRIVATE.