Terminal

by Andrew Vachss

“Dad needs to see you.”

  “So why not just—?”

  “Now, okay?”

  “Do I need—?”

  “Nothing.” Meaning: No weapons. And come alone.

  “Nice ride,” I told the kid. I’m not a rice-burner man, but I could feel the Scion tC we were riding in had been major-league reworked, even if the boost gauge on the A-pillar hadn’t tipped me off.

  “I had a big fight with Mom about it,” he said, not quite smiling.

  “The only thing Michelle knows about cars is how good the leather on the seats is.”

  “Not that. She wanted to buy it for me, and I wanted to pay for it myself.”

  “She should have been proud of you.”

  “She was. But she said…Well, you know how she gets.”

  “Amen.”

  “I told her she and Dad were already paying for college, and—”

  “She reminded you that you’re on a full scholarship, and you’re not too big to forget you were raised to respect your—”

  “Exactly.” He sighed. “She got kind of upset, Burke. I asked Dad. You know what he said, right?”

  I shrugged.

  The kid burst into laughter. “Yeah. That is what he said. I mean, he’s not exactly afraid of Mom or anything, but…”

  “I know.”

  The kid handled the car expertly. I wondered who’d taught him, maybe feeling a little hurt that he hadn’t asked me. I knew it hadn’t been the Mole; he drives like Ray Charles on Valium.

  “Burke?”

  “What?”

  “You know Mom. You maybe know her better than anyone.”

  “Sure. She’s my kid sister.”

  “Yes,” he said, quiet and serious. “Why did she get so worked up about the car? If it’s none of my business, okay. But don’t tell me you don’t know, okay?”

  If I still smoked—I only do it now when I have to play a role—that would have been one of those times when I’d have reached for one. I took in a long, shallow breath. Let it out.

  “You’re pulling away, T.”

  “From Mom?! Are you—?”

  “No. Not from your mother. Or your father. From The Life, understand?”

  He turned and gave me a quick look.

  “Terry, you know where we all live,” I said, treading softly. “None of us are citizens. None of us are ever going to be. It’s not that we picked our own paths; it’s that those paths crossed. Each one was our way out, and we can’t go back. The Mole and Michelle, you know they don’t want that for you.”

  “But I’d never—”

  “Yeah, you will,” I told him, straight to the heart, the way he deserved, from the uncle who loved him. “You have to. We don’t want another generation coming up with us. We live underground; we want you to live in the light. Whatever we teach you, it’s for ‘just in case,’ okay? Not to earn a living.”

  “They always said…something like that.”

  “Not ‘always,’ son. When they thought you were old enough to understand.” Understand that the freaks who sold you are our blood-enemies; you’re one of us now. And we never give up our own. But I didn’t say that out loud, just: “It’s not so much about what they want from you; it’s about what they expect from you, see?”

  “No,” he said. But he wasn’t telling the truth. Or just refusing to face it.

  “You don’t change the world from underground, Terry. You don’t cure cancer, or isolate the enzyme in mosquitoes that kills the malaria inside them, or figure out how to locate trauma paths in brain-wave patterns or—”

  “People are already working on all that.”

  “Cut it, kid. You know what I mean. Exactly what I mean. Can you even imagine what your father could have discovered if…if things had been different for him, earlier?”

  “And if Mom—”

  “Yeah.”

  “You, too, Burke.”

  “Me? Look, I was talking about—”

  “You know what Dad once told me about you? He said you know more about people than any man he ever met. And that, if you’d been a cop, no freak on earth would ever be safe.”

  “Okay,” I said quickly, trying for a nerve block.

  “But if Mom wants me to go—”

  “She knows you have to go, Terry. She knows it’s right. It’s hard for her to…deal with sometimes, that’s all.”

  “Me, too,” he said, setting his jaw.

  As far as he knew, I never saw the teardrop track his cheek.

  Terry slipped the metallic-ruby coupe inside the junkyard without a trace of drama. Walked through the dog pack like it was a fur-and-fangs turnstile, just like his father always does.

  We walked the rest of the way. Found Simba sitting next to the Mole’s empty chair.

  “I’ll wait here,” Terry said.

  I entered the Mole’s underground bunker, moved through the dark with the confidence of a blind man in his own house, turned the corner—and there he was.

  “Sit,” he said, as he turned from a table covered with tiny bottles and glass tubing.

  I took the special chair Michelle had bought him for Father’s Day a few years ago. None of us ever celebrate our birthdays. We don’t even acknowledge them. Except for the kids: Terry’s, sure. Flower’s, not an option. Max might let it slide; Immaculata might understand; even Flower would let it go. But Mama would…well, none of us were brave enough to find out.

  The Mole dragged over the four-legged wooden stool he sat on whenever Michelle wasn’t around.

  “My people, they want something.”

  “They’ve got it,” I said, knowing there was no other answer.

  “This was not expected,” he said, almost apologetically. “But those I know, they have the younger ones coming. To those, I am not so much a…”

  “I get it.”

  “There is a traitor. An old man now. My people cannot touch him.”

  I can’t speak Hebrew, but I can translate Mole. Some fools think the Rosenbergs were Communists. Or did whatever they tried to do for money. I guess you’re not supposed to spy on your allies. I asked the Mole about that once. “Ally?” he said. “You mean, like Saudi Arabia?” So, when he said “traitor,” I knew he meant a man who had sold one of Israel’s citizen-spies to the federales.

  “He is a wealthy man,” the Mole said.

  Meaning: he could afford security. Nothing the Mossad murder-magicians couldn’t penetrate, but they couldn’t be connected. Or even suspected. This was a job for thugs, not spooks. Maybe a burglary gone bad…?

  “He sold his daughter,” the Mole said, controlling his voice with effort. “If she is convicted, she will be sentenced to life in prison.”

  I looked a question over at him.

  The Mole’s faded-denim eyes glistened behind his thick lenses. Something…something I couldn’t read.

  “If he’s gone in the Grand Jury already, they can still use his testimony if he’s ‘unavailable’ at the time of trial,” I told him.

  The Mole nodded. Meaning: We know. And it’s not a problem.

  “You know I can’t involve my own—”

  “There is a budget,” my demented genius brother said, softly.

  “They expect me to just go out and—”

  “Do you remember—a long time ago?—you were looking for something you needed very badly? I took you to a house. We met a man. The agreement was that he would talk with you. Talk freely. But you could not hurt him.”

  I said nothing.

  “You wanted to hurt him. This was known. You gave your word this would not happen. But the…people who made him…available, they insisted I come with you.”

  “I remember,” I finally said.

  “You did nothing to him. But something happened to him. Later.”

  “Scumbag like that, just a matter of time.”

  “He was a very valuable asset. Some of my people, they have not forgotten.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because wh
at they want from you this time—and this I swear—is the opposite of what they required from you that last time.”

  “I see.”

  “No. No, you don’t, Burke. I am saying to you—what they want, it is something you want, too.”

  “For real?”

  “For everything,” the Mole said, holding out his hand. “Yes?”

  “Yes,” I answered, closing my hand over his.

  He turned, grasped the handle of a metal file box, held it out to me.

  I took it, and turned to leave.

  “Sei gesund,” my brother said.

  “Fifty K?” Gigi said. “That’s—”

  “The front money,” I finished for him. “Half.”

  “For that kind of cash, you’re looking to buy—”

  “You may not have to do anything. Depends on what this guy’s got in place around him. Could be you just sit there and watch. Could be you have to take someone off the count.”

  “Same pay either way?”

  “Either way. What I’m buying is what you can’t get anymore.”

  “Good help?” the Godzilla said, chuckling.

  “Time-tested,” I told him, speaking in the language only men like us understand—by then, Gigi knew the whole story of my new face.

  “I’m no good with guns anyway,” Claw said.

  I hadn’t used any of the Mole’s “budget” to buy him in. Whether he believed me when I told him that I was trading the job we were going to do for the second half of what we needed to move on our targets, I don’t know. But he believed me when I told him that, if I didn’t get this one done, I couldn’t do the one he needed.

  Or wouldn’t. From where he was sitting, same thing.

  It took me three days and nights just to work through the stuff the Mole’s people supplied. I’d never seen surveillance work like it. They had draftsman’s-quality blueprints of everything, right down to the wiring of the apnea monitor; terrain maps; wiretap tapes; camera work—telephoto to macro. Plus, CAD/CAM 3-Ds; the combination to the floor-mounted safe; and even a list of weapons the bodyguards carried. There were two of those, and they never left the place. Slept in shifts sometimes, but they were both always on the job when it got deep-dark.

  “You get the shooter,” I told Claw. “The karate guy’s yours,” I said to Gigi.

  “I already got the car,” the humongoid assured me. “Motherfucker’s put together like a jigsaw puzzle. We can leave it anywhere and walk. But we can’t get stopped.”

  I nodded. We each had our own reasons, but none of us were going back Inside. If some trooper lit us up on our way back from this job, court was in session.

  “Cocksucker!” Gigi cursed. Again. “You didn’t tell me this was gonna be no fucking cross-country trip, man.”

  “There’s no dogs, inside or out,” I said, softly, into the soft night. “The old man’s afraid of them. No fence, either. What do you want to do, drive up to the front door?”

  Claw never said a word. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

  The house was mostly dark. A few lights on, all on the first story. The key I’d been given opened the back door. The security codes I punched in clicked.

  Then we started working.

  The bodyguards were in one of those “great rooms,” their eyes magneted to the gangbang porn playing on a wall-sized plasma screen. Claw had his spike deep in the shooter’s neck before the glazed-over slug could even touch leather, but the karate guy caught the peripheral flash and was out of his chair like a rocket, launching a kidney-killing side kick at Claw’s back. Gigi plucked him out of the air like a gorilla snatching a butterfly on the wing.

  I went up the carpeted stairs, rubber-soled and plastic-gloved. A faint glow spilled from the room I wanted. I slipped inside. The old man saw me. I wasn’t wearing a mask. He had to know what that meant, but he didn’t move.

  I knew what he was, right in that moment. The kind of human that would make lice jump off his skin and vultures refuse to eat his flesh.

  I crossed to him. The room’s shadow shifted, darkness inside gloom. Before I could whirl, a heavy forearm wrapped around my neck like constrictor cable. Something slammed into the back of my thigh. I slid down, not resisting, trying to get my chin tucked while I still had time.

  The choke artist came down with me, still locked on. Darkness was closing.

  I thumbed my sleeve knife open and stabbed his cabled forearm deep, raking the serrated edge through muscle tissue. He made an ugly noise as his grip loosened. I slipped out, stepped back, sucked in a deep, ragged breath. The choke artist, a powerfully built black man, staggered to his feet, left arm limp at his side. I circled, buying time, hoping the knife would make him hold off long enough for me to get more air into my lungs.

  But he knew, and he stepped right to me, firing a Shotokan right hand off his front foot. His balance was off enough for me to slip the punch, toss the knife to my left hand, and hook him to the liver with it. He made a sound I recognized as he went down.

  Quick! rang in my head as I spun toward the old man. He still hadn’t moved. Hadn’t reached for a phone or a panic button. Just kept staring at a portfolio-sized display case, standing open on a shelf. Inside were dozens of tiny compartments, mirror-backed.

  “I warned that filthy little cunt,” he said, rheumy eyes blazing with righteous conviction.

  His last words.

  I heard a crack-snap noise behind me. Spun again, weaponless. But it was just Gigi, making sure the bodyguard the Mole’s friends hadn’t known about wasn’t going to bleed out.

  We ransacked the place like amateurs on angel dust. Grabbed all the loose cash, cleaned out the medicine cabinet, chopped off the shooter’s ring finger, and left it there—some TV-trained cop would spend a lot of time checking pawnshops for a ring that had never existed.

  But the prize was the display case: constructed of what looked like Hawaiian koa wood, it folded into the size of an artist’s portfolio. The intricate fastening clamps were gold. I saw the OCR-font printout from one of the pages the Mole had given me as clearly as if it was projected on the wall:

  Among certain individuals, it is well known that Target possesses these items. They were created a minimum of two hundred years ago, each of handcrafted ivory. One of a kind, every one. Unduplicatable. Literally priceless, but could never be sold openly. The security Target employs is to protect his treasure, not his person.

  I couldn’t stop myself from looking before I closed the case. Each tiny figurine was really two: an adult male and a girl child. I wished the craftsman whose magic hands had created such intricate, complex scenes on such a small scale was still alive. So I could take my own trophy.

  While I was doing the hophead-burglar thing—opening the chest of drawers starting at the top, then turning each one upside down—Claw was razor-slitting a bunch of cushions, the way you do when you’re looking for a hidden stash and don’t have much time. He made sure to take the shooter’s piece—looked like a Sig P210, way too expensive for junkies to pass up, even with the serial number showing—and empty everyone’s wallets. He even snatched the karate guy’s G-Shock watch and platinum neck chain.

  Gigi just wrecked everything, including a Sub-Zero that it should have taken two men even to move, much less turn over.

  We went out the way we came in. Standing outside, Gigi kicked in the back door, then smashed the wall next to the security box with a brass-knuckled fist. Claw immediately reached in and cut the wires.

  Then we split for real, leaving enough clues to keep crime-scene techs busy for months. Every meth-head within fifty miles was in deep trouble.

  Back at the car, we all stripped, tossing everything we’d been wearing into a thick canvas bag. I tied it at the top, wrapping the wire around one of the Mole’s little boxes and put it in the trunk. Anyone who tried to open that bag before it got to the crematorium would destroy a lot more than evidence.

  We’d gone in double-sheathed; all our prints were in the system. But we�
�d also splattered some random DNA—carried in baggies, emptied by hands covered in surgeon’s gloves—in a few spots.

  For cops, the only thing worse than no clues is too many.

  Gigi dropped Claw at a subway on the West Side. Dropped me on a corner in Chinatown.

  “It’s mine from here,” he said. “This”—meaning the car—“is a big fucking paperweight in a couple of hours.”

  We’d already divided up the cash—equal shares. Everything else went into another bag for the Disposal Three-Step: cremation; sledgehammer; then the river. The “collection” was going to stay inside the paperweight. I trusted Gigi to handle that part. He was a stand-up con, and he wouldn’t back-deal a partner. Plus, even if he looked, he’d know he’d have to reach way out to sell something like that. But trust only goes so far—I’d spent the return trip sitting in the backseat, carefully using a pair of needle-nose pliers to crush each of the figurines into ivory dust.

  I didn’t need to get word to the Mole; it was all over the papers. TV, radio, Internet. Every media outlet had a different version of what happened. Every “expert” had a different guess as to why: cults, criminals, or crazos. The cops were “still evaluating the evidence.” Too bad the maniacs—“probably flying on speed,” one genius solemnly intoned—had busted up all the computers. I mean, that’s the first thing you check, right?

  “Call for you,” Mama said.

  I got up from my booth, picked up the phone, said, “What?”

  “It’s Bishop, man.”

  “Sorry. You must have the wrong number.”

  “Hey! You haven’t even heard my—”

  I hung up on him. Bishop was a menace. Not to society, to any thief who went near one of his ideas. He was a lifelong failure—the kind of guy you usually have to pass through a metal-detector to visit. The hapless fool never falls hard—small-time all the way; no violence, ever—but with Bishop, falling is such a guarantee that the Prof calls him “Gravity.”