I pulled my short-barreled .357, pointed my left hand at the door twice, once at Claw.
He opened the door, stepped inside.
The girl who came out was moving quick, keeping her head down—like she’d probably just been doing—making sure whoever was outside could see she hadn’t seen them. All I could make out was that she was short and real skinny, long black hair in pigtails, carrying some kind of blue robe in one hand, shoes in the other.
I went through the open door.
Thornton was behind an office-surplus desk, in a red vinyl chair, looking like what he was. Claw was to my left, positioned so he could watch the corridor.
“No! I—”
Thornton cut himself off as he saw the pistol go back inside my jacket. “Just talk,” I said. “Like we did before.”
“Oh! You’re—”
“Yeah. You don’t need to see my face, do you?”
“No. Of course not. I mean, all I want—”
“We know what you want. I’m not here to go over all that again. I’m here for something that could help make it happen.”
“What could I have that I haven’t already given you?”
“You told the big man”—if he noticed that I didn’t call the other man “Claw,” like he did, it didn’t register on his face—“that, before you went down, you tapped them a few times, right?”
“Not for—”
“Yes or no.”
“Yes.”
“Two things first. One, how’d you make contact? Two, how’d they make the delivery?”
“I’d just call their office—”
“They don’t work together, right?”
“Right. I just meant, whichever one I was going to—”
“I get it.”
“I’d just call, say I was an old friend from back in the day. Tell whoever answered that I realized Mr. Whoever wouldn’t be able to come to the phone, but I’d appreciate it if I could leave a number, and Mr. Whoever’s assistant could just leave a message on my machine, telling me when it might be convenient to call.”
“The machine wasn’t where you lived.”
“I’m a lot of things,” he said, superiority slipping back into his voice now that he wasn’t scared, “but none of them are stupid.”
“Okay…”
“I’d always get a call back. There’d be a number for me to call and a time. I’d call—from a phone I was never going near again—and there’d be some man at the other end. Not the one I called, but I wasn’t expecting that. This man—I know they had to be different men, all the times I did this, but, I swear, they all sounded like the same voice—he’d say he understood I was calling to negotiate a small venture-capital project, and, depending on the reasonableness of the request, it could probably be arranged.
“And I’d make it reasonable. We’d have a nice talk. I’d give him my ‘business plan,’ we’d talk about stuff like ‘anticipated rate of return,’ crap like that. Anyone listening, it would sound like it was all plausible. I mean, sure, maybe my ‘new concept’ was a little shaky—good cover when the ‘investment’ went sour—but enough for them…. I figured it was all being recorded.”
“But they never paid by check, so what diff—?”
“Who said ‘never’?” he said, giving me a triumphantly sleazy smile.
“You did.”
“Every time but once,” he said. His teeth looked gray in the pus-colored overhead light. “Naturally, I never did a hand-to-hand. I wasn’t going to meet with anyone those guys sent. FedEx to one of those mailbox-rental joints; I used a different routing every time. They get it; they send it…right back out. By the time whoever they were using ran the trace, I’m gone. With the cash. But, one time, Reedy actually sent a check. Didn’t have his name on it or anything, just some ‘company’ he probably got opened and closed in a day. I guess he figured I’d have to cash it somewhere, and the canceled check would tell him…I don’t know, something.”
“How big a check?”
“Twenty-five K.”
“You remember the name of the company he was—?”
“I got better than that,” the weasel said, smirking like he was casually turning a winning hand faceup.
Only tourists think of Manhattan as an island. Most of the people who live here travel underground to get anywhere—some subway stops have longer distances between them, that’s all.
Now, Staten Island, that’s an island. But it doesn’t get tourists.
Neither does the part of the Bronx where the Mole lives. Everything’s the opposite of Manhattan—the subway goes there all right, but it rolls outdoors, on elevated tracks. It’s the Mole who lives underground.
I knew if Michelle ever found out I’d made the ride without asking her to come along, she’d go ICBM on me. I also knew the Mole wouldn’t talk. Thing is, he wouldn’t lie, either, not to his woman. But I needed him for what I had to have, so I risked it.
I celled him from Bruckner Boulevard, heard him pick up. I knew he wouldn’t speak until he heard a voice, so I asked, “Okay to come by now?”
“Yes.”
I thumbed the cell into lifelessness and concentrated on negotiating my way through Hunts Point until I got to the junkyard. Passed by burned-out buildings, so far gone that the gang graffiti had faded—turf not worth claiming. Abandoned cars. Abandoned people. Hungry dogs. Needy junkies. Blood-bank winos. And, not far away, the humans who turned all of that into cash.
The city has a seat at that table, too. I passed by Spofford, the “community-based” juvenile detention center. After one look around the “community,” you could decode that message pretty quick.
The fence looked even rustier than ever, but the flesh-ripping concertina wire woven through and over it was the same smoke color. I knew the Mole had me on visual somewhere, so I just waited for the first gate of the sally port to open, drove inside, locked up behind myself, opened the second gate, docked the Plymouth, and started walking.
The pack popped up suddenly, like meerkats checking for predators. Except that these dogs were the predators. The most dangerous kind—they were still evolving, learning how to be better at what they do. After so many years running wild, feeding off whatever the nearby Meat Market dumped—and anything else that couldn’t outrun them—it was as if they’d become a breed of their own. They ranged in color and markings, but most were kind of a smog shade, with only two body types: barrel or blade.
“Simba!” I called out, quickly.
As the old beast moved toward me, the pack parted like the Red Sea. Simba was many years past being able to hold his position if any of the young bulls wanted to try him. None ever did. Anyone who says dogs don’t understand respect hasn’t seen a permanent pack.
Simba wasn’t moving fast, but he played it off like he was taking his time, sizing me up. I didn’t move toward him. I understand respect, too.
“Simba-witz!” I greeted him.
He nudged against my leg. I scratched him behind what was left of one ear, knowing his eyes were too filmy to actually see me, trusting his other senses to tell him who I was.
We walked all the way to the clearing outside the Mole’s bunker together. Two good pals, taking in the sun, bragging about old times. I never once looked behind me—the rest of the pack would go piranha on anyone stupid enough to try entering without a passport.
The Mole was outside, sitting on a bucket seat wrenched out of one of the hundreds of junkers that littered his lot. Simba ambled over to him, lay down at his feet. The Mole thumped the monster on the top of his triangular head a couple of times. Simba made a sound in his throat.
“Downstairs?” the Mole said. Meaning: did I need him to do some work, or had I come to talk?
“Here’s good,” I told him, taking a seat on a milk crate with some kind of spongy-looking pad on its top.
I let a couple of minutes slide past. Neither the Mole nor Simba was ever anxious, and they didn’t like it when others were.
“I
have a check—a photocopy of a check—that was written a few years ago. The company that wrote it was a fraud, but the check was good. I need to trace the check so I can connect it with a certain man.”
“Canceled check?”
“No. The guy who cashed it made a copy before he did. It’s all I have.”
“Bank records?”
“This’ll be a long, twisty trail, Mole. Shells inside shells. The company was probably formed just for this one check. No PI could track this. Even if you could get a subpoena—which is impossible here—it would dead-end way before the connection was made. You’d need government-level access to…a whole bunch of different sources.”
“Just the check?”
“There’s also some…files, maybe. Or evidence boxes, maybe in deep storage. Inside a police station.”
“City?”
“Suburbs. Rich suburbs.”
“It would take the government.”
“Yeah. But not necessarily—”
I shut up. The Mole knew what I was asking for. The Israelis have had a spy network running in the U.S. for decades, and whatever units they have on that job are as good at what they do as the ones they sent to Entebbe. I had met Mossad men in this same junkyard. The Mole had done plenty of work for them, but it was never for money.
“Would this be about my—?”
“No,” I said, some part of my mind hearing Claw tell me that he trusted me because he knew I wouldn’t lie to my own. I know how to push the Mole’s button: You say “Nazis” to the dumpy little man and those faded-denim eyes behind his Coke-bottle lenses catch fire. Then his mind—a mind that would make the most powerful AI program on the planet drop to its knees and worship—would start to laser-burn through any obstacle in the way.
But the Mole was my brother. And the Prof had taught me right.
“What, then?”
“Justice and vengeance.”
“Those are the same.”
“I guess so. And money, Mole. That’s there, too.”
He shook his head.
“Justice for a little girl, Mole. Raped, tortured, and murdered. And the rich guys who did it walked away. Walked away laughing. More than thirty years ago. Can this be right?”
Mole wasn’t just my brother, he was Michelle’s man. And Terry’s father. That was another reason I wanted to make sure I came to him alone: I wasn’t going to play those last cards, or even show them, with either one around. And I don’t think the Mole’s woman or his son knew about his special friends, either.
“And I did something for your…friends, too. Remember?” I reminded him.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “So do they. Are you saying—?”
“Uh-uh, Mole. I got nothing to trade this time. If I knew something I thought they didn’t, I would have brought it to you soon as I found out.”
He nodded.
Simba made a sound I hadn’t heard before.
“The Bible says—”
“The what?”
“The Bible,” the Mole answered, looking at Simba as if for backup.
“I thought only Christians—”
“The Old Testament, not those novels they wrote later.”
“But you’re a…a man of science, Mole.”
“I am a Jew.”
“Yeah. But that’s not a religion, it’s a…tribe, right?”
“To the Nazis, we are a race, not a tribe. A different breed of human.”
“Not just to them.”
“I know.”
“But the Bible, Mole? You believe that stuff? Like Eden was a location you could find on a map?”
“Not that,” he said, in a “you can’t be that stupid” tone.
“What, then? Jesus was a Jew, right? Didn’t he tell people not to marry because the end was coming?”
“Revelations is not the word of God.”
“How the fuck could it be?” I said, angry without knowing why I was. “What, the son of God called it wrong? Bet on the wrong Four Horsemen?”
On the Mole, sarcasm was about as effective as Mexican law enforcement. “A book can contain truth without being truth,” he said, calmly. “The Torah is the Law. The Law came from the Old Testament. The Law is the code of conduct for our people—how we are to act on earth.”
“So you don’t buy the Seven Days thing?” I asked.
“Evolution is a theory—”
“So is Christianity. And Islam. And any other explanation. Just because you can’t prove something doesn’t mean it isn’t true, right?”
“Yes,” he admitted. He should have; he’s the one who taught it to me.
“So life’s nothing but a goddamn horse race, and we’re all two-dollar bettors? ‘My soul, on Allah, to win.’ Or on Jesus. Or Buddha. Or a pile of rocks. There’s your ‘proof,’ Mole. How can there be more than one God?”
“Or, how can God allow six million of us to—?”
“Right. It’s a long list, brother.”
“Yes. That is why it is called ‘faith.’ Not because it cannot be proven; but because it is the only way to reconcile that which refutes it.”
I looked at Simba for a long minute.
“You don’t buy any of it,” I said, finally.
“This is truth,” the Mole said. “Objective, proven truth. Our people have been persecuted since the beginning of our time on this earth. We have learned there is only one way, and that way is not inside the temple or the Torah.”
“Self-defense.”
The Mole made a sound in his throat that only someone real close to him would recognize as a sort-of laugh.
“Mole, I came in here naked. I got nothing to trade. That…service I did for your friends, it’s no secret that there was something in it for me and mine. You were there, for chrissakes. This thing I’m in now, I’m bound to do it.”
“Because of the little girl?”
“Yeah.”
“What you want, there is risk?”
“Got to be. Even if the paper trace I need doesn’t hit any trip wires, getting into a police station and removing—”
“Real risk,” the Mole said. Meaning: was there going to be any anti-personnel work anywhere along the road? There’s work you can do without leaving a trace, but some you can’t do without leaving a body.
“Not for them,” I promised.
The subway runs to Brooklyn, too. The building was one of those old factories being converted into luxo-lofts. A work-in-progress, its value growing faster than the construction. The front was coated in some high-tech glaze that wouldn’t protect spray-painted messages against a water hose. But some tagger must have figured one day’s worth was good enough for what he wanted to say:
what came first: computers or icons?
I stepped inside, between two industrial-looking pillars. By the time I got to the man sitting behind a table covered with what looked like architectural plans, I’d been photographed, scanned, screened, and recorded.
The man behind the desk looked up. The two men moving in from different corners were wearing tool belts and hard hats. I knew what tools they were good with, and I knew those hats would turn a bullet.
“My name is Pearl,” I said to the man behind the desk.
He watched me the way a mother-to-be watches her first sonogram.
“I’m here to see Mr. Gentile.”
The man behind the desk pointed to a staircase that looked like it might be worth a fortune on the Antiques Roadshow. It was so deliberately discordant in that place that I knew it had to mean something…but not to me.
I started climbing. Footsteps behind me, making no effort at masking their sound. As I moved, the occasional microdot flash told me the whole staircase was photo-celled.
At the first landing, I kept climbing. Saw nothing but beams and girders until I reached the top floor.
I crossed to what looked like the one of those steering-wheel doors they use on bank vaults. There was a faint hiss as it swung open.
I stepped into a windowl
ess area I immediately realized had been constructed within the core of the building, invisible from outside. I’d been in dirtier operating rooms.
“Yes?” A woman’s voice, about as soft and sweet as liquid titanium.
I turned in her direction. She was medium-height, with long black hair worn in an elaborate French twist. The white lab coat wrapped her body like a sheath. Her prominent nose gave her a hawkish look that her dark eyes didn’t diminish even a little bit.
“Leolam Lo Odd,” I answered.
“Come,” she said, turning her back on me as she stepped through a door to my left.
I followed her, not too closely. And not because it was a treat to watch her walk. Just as well, because she suddenly spun on one heel and turned to face me, moving in very close.
“The password you gave, do you know what it means?”
“‘Forever no more.’”
“In English?”
“Never again.”
“You learned this where?”
“From my brother.”
“Your brother? No. Your half brother, maybe?”
“You’re a geneticist?”
She stepped back a fraction, trying to gauge whether I was deliberately insulting her. But all she said was, “Your face has been altered.”
“It wasn’t cosmetic surgery.”
“I see.” She stepped very close. Even her perfume was hard. She put her hand to my face the way a blind person does, feeling for truth. “You are Rom, yes?”
“I don’t know.”
“How can you not—?”
“I had no mother.”
“Every man has a mother.”
“Whoever gave birth to me left me in the charity ward of the hospital.”
“Yes,” she said, undeterred. “But on your birth certificate it says…?”
“Baby Boy Burke,” I told her. “For ‘mother,’ the hospital used whatever name she gave them, made up on the spot. For ‘father,’ they just put in ‘U-N-K.’ You understand?”
She nodded, lowered her eyes for a second, then said, “You have a Gypsy face. But a Gypsy woman would not leave a child. Children are treasure to them. As they are to us.”
“And they were right behind you on the line for the camps.”
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