Terminal

by Andrew Vachss

  “Did your father ever tell you that?” Terry shot back.

  “You know I didn’t have no—”

  “But I do,” Terry said fiercely. “A mother and a father. Never once did my dad tell me not to say anything about…anything. Ever.”

  Max touched his heart, made the sign for “child.” Pointed at the daughter who was not there, put his finger to his lips. Nodded forcefully. Meaning: Sometimes, it’s better to keep things from your mother. And he’d asked his beloved Flower to do that himself.

  None of this was doing Terry any good.

  My turn. “What happens if Michelle finds out I’m going to meet the Mole, kid?”

  “She’d have to…Ah, I’m just stupid!”

  “The day you stupid is the day I join the Klan,” the Prof scoffed. “Listen to Burke, boy. He knows the road.”

  “A man’s entitled to his privacy,” I said, in a just-the-facts voice. “So is a woman. You give up that in one of two ways. Voluntarily—that’s why you’re in my house; because I gave you the address—or when they take it from you. Those of us who had it taken, we know how precious it is. The Mole not wanting Michelle to know something, that does not mean he’s keeping secrets from her, understand?”

  “I…guess so,” said the young man, still scared. Even the word “secret” made him tremble in places he wished he didn’t have. But he knew his secrets weren’t secrets to me, so he listened. And trusted.

  “Can you even imagine the Mole getting some on the side?”

  This time, the kid finally laughed. “Mom would—”

  “And dig his fool ass up and do it all over again,” the Prof confirmed.

  “This isn’t them, Terry,” I told him. “It’s something between me and the Mole. Something we’ve had working for a while.”

  “About this?” the kid said, waving his hand to indicate the big room, papered with the photocopies of the police file on the rape-murder of a little girl that happened way before Terry had been born.

  “Yes,” I said, lying now. The Mole had already turned over everything. I’d done my part, and his people had done theirs. So I, for real, didn’t know what he wanted. But making sure Michelle didn’t get involved meant it was something that could end ugly.

  “But Mom already knows about—”

  “Your mother doesn’t know it all,” I said, very quietly. “A man has the right to protect his wife. That’s his job, okay?”

  “And a good son respects his father,” Clarence added.

  Not a single person in that room thought he was talking about bloodlines.

  “I’ll drive you,” Terry said.

  Figuring the Mole wouldn’t have gone through Terry if he hadn’t wanted the kid involved somehow, I went along for the ride. I knew something was hard-core the minute the kid pointed at a beige Toyota Camry sedan, a car about as noticeable in this city as pigeons on the sidewalk.

  It was getting dark when we approached the junkyard. This time, Terry just drove on in instead of walking, so I knew the anonymous Toyota wasn’t going to be my ride back.

  The Mole was waiting for us. Simba, too.

  We took our seats. The Mole turned slightly to face his son. “Burke has taught you pattern recognition?” Social preamble was a foreign language to him, but that didn’t throw Terry at all; he knew his father.

  “Well, I know about it. Clarence and I—”

  “Not pattern-recognition software,” the Mole cut him off. “Not for catching criminals, for decoding. Application of logic.”

  “I—”

  “Did Bush believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?”

  “How could anyone know what he believed?” Terry shot back, showing his credentials.

  “I know,” the Mole said, showing his. “And you should, too.” No contest.

  “But how could I—?”

  “If Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction, what would they have done, the moment they were invaded?” he asked.

  “Fired them off,” Terry said, no hesitation. “That’s what happened the last time. Those SCUD missiles.”

  “Yes. And where were they aimed?”

  “At Israel.”

  “Did Israel retaliate?”

  “I…I don’t think so.”

  “No,” the Mole said, his voice shifting subtly. “And why not?”

  “Because…because they had a deal with us? And, anyway, the war was over so quick that—”

  “Because those missiles were counterfeits,” his father interrupted. The Mole hated speculation, but he loved crushing it with the pile-driver of logic. “The consequence of tyranny is that such a country never develops its own thinkers. When great minds are discovered, instead of being nurtured, they are eliminated. That butcher bought his weapons from Russian outlaws, but none of his own people had the skill to check their viability. So he hired people to do that, the way a man who can’t get a woman to love him buys sex. And smart whores always tell customers whatever they want to hear. So the experts he hired told Saddam they were in good working order. It wasn’t just for the money; they knew what would happen to them if they responded any other way. Do you understand?”

  Terry nodded. Said, “If those missiles had actually worked, if a lot of people died, then Israel would have—”

  “Correct,” the Mole said. “Now imagine if, instead of mere explosives, Israel had been hit with chemical and biological weapons. The key word is not ‘destruction,’ it is ‘mass’—do you understand that, too?”

  “Like what happened when Hitler…?”

  “Leolam Lo Odd,” I said.

  The Mole nodded, gravely. “If Israel were hit with such weapons, Iraq would have disappeared.”

  “Nuclear?” the kid said, just short of shocked. “That could start a—”

  “Holocaust?” the Mole spat bitterly. “Is that the word you search for? Listen to me, my son. For a Jew, better the whole planet vanish than we go back to the camps. Nobody doubts our commitment to this. Otherwise, Israel would not still exist.”

  “So, if Bush thought Iraq actually had the weapons, he never would have invaded!” the kid said, angry himself now. “He would have been the man who kicked off a nuclear war. Instead of a hero, he’d be a…”

  “Pattern recognition,” the Mole said.

  “Is it…teachable?” the kid asked, back to the cold-logic place in his mind that always comforted him.

  “You can teach almost anyone to play chess,” his father answered. “How many become grand masters?”

  “So it’s a…gift?”

  “At its highest levels, yes. One can learn all that can be taught, but the top of the mountain is only for those who have the gift.”

  “You have the—?”

  “Me?” the Mole said, quietly. “No. I can apply logic and reason. But I don’t sense things; I have to work them through. Your uncle, he is the gifted one. So you learn from both of us, yes?”

  “That’s what I’ve been doing,” Terry assured him. “But if it takes—”

  “Oh, you have the gift, my son,” the Mole assured him. “It probably comes from your mother.”

  The kid stayed outdoors with Simba as I followed the Mole downstairs. When we were seated, the underground man faced me squarely, as if we were going to fight, not talk.

  “You think my devotion is blind, yes?”

  “To Michelle? Don’t be—”

  “Stop!”

  I spread my hands in a “What the…?” gesture.

  “You think I would do anything for my people,” the Mole said, an edge to his voice I’d never heard before. “And you are not wrong.”

  “That’s not news.”

  “But I never had to make a choice,” he said. “You are my brother. Just as Terry is my son. And Michelle is my wife. Yes?”

  “How else could it be?” I said. When the Children of the Secret form a family, bloodlines never count. And that’s not just for us: if Malcolm X could say he hated every drop of white blood in him, couldn�
��t this Felton guy Claw had told me about hate every drop of black blood in himself, too?”

  “Everybody trades. Even allies. They bargain, they make deals.”

  “Not between us. Not in our family.”

  “Yes,” he said, sadly. “I know. And I am ashamed.”

  “Mole, I don’t get this. Any of this. You think I’m mad because you held back the files until your people saw I got the job done?”

  “I looked at the files,” he said, refusing to take his eyes off mine. “You are…back. When we first—”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “Yes. You know. But me, the man who taught you ‘Leolam Lo Odd,’ maybe I never taught you the meaning.”

  “‘Never again.’”

  “A slogan. It actually means we are never to forget. That does not mean just building memorials or writing history books. It is literal. I know why you wanted those files.”

  “I never said—”

  “I know my own brother,” the Mole said. “I know the man who brought me my son. I know why. And I have been guilty of forgetting all that.”

  “Look, Mole, I never—”

  “An apology is words, not behavior,” he cut me off. “And only behavior can be the truth.” He reached behind him without taking his eyes off me, pulled something off his workbench, and handed it to me.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked him, holding a dull-gray box, maybe five times the size of a cell phone, with twin antennas in the closed position.

  “It is many things,” the Mole answered. “It is a satellite phone, with an embedded harmonizer and a GPS-diverter.”

  “Huh?”

  “When you speak into this phone, your voice will be digitally reprocessed—broken apart and reassembled. It will not be your voice, but it will be a human voice. Even if recorded, voiceprinted, subjected to stress analysis, it will be as unique as a snowflake, and just as untraceable.

  “The diverter will retriangulate any trace attempt. The caller’s number will not be blocked, so the person being called will recognize it on their Caller ID and know it is authentic. But their equipment—any equipment they have—will tell them the call is coming from…well, from random places. You cannot set the diverter yourself, so their trace will show the call as coming from anywhere at all—from next door to the other side of the world.”

  “What do I need this for?”

  “Open it up,” the Mole commanded.

  I did. It looked like a big fat phone: keypad, viewing screen, the usual.

  “I still don’t see…”

  “The buttons are pre-set,” the Mole said. “That is one reason it is so heavy. If you press ‘88,’ you have approximately two-point-five seconds before a charge ignites. Like Semtex, but much more potent. That is one reason it is so heavy, the shaped charge inside. Anything within a fifty-yard radius is unlikely to survive. As they get closer, and the space they occupy is more enclosed, the possibility of survival drops to below measurable.”

  “So it’s a bomb. Why all the—?”

  “You can press remotely, if you are connected at the time,” he went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Understand?”

  “If anyone I’m on the line with presses that ‘88,’ I vaporize. Why set it up that—? Never mind,” I said, interrupting myself as I began to understand what the Mole had built.

  “If you press ‘11,’” he continued, in the same patient voice you use when you’re making sure, “the screen becomes a receptor—a real-time receptor—and the person dialing into it can send whatever image they wish.”

  “Mole…”

  “There are other button combinations, too,” he rolled on, inexorably. “For proof, you will use ‘22’ and then ‘23.’”

  “Proof? Of what?”

  “I will explain, be patient,” he said. “If you press ‘33,’ it will ring the personal cell phone of one Carlton John Reedy. He is the only person to carry that phone, and only a few highly trusted individuals have the number. This does not include his wife, his children, his mistress, or his friends. If that number rings, he will answer it.”

  “Son of a bitch!” I shook my head at the power of what my brother had just handed me. “I knew you could build a bang-machine this small, Mole. But that number—”

  He held up his hand, meaning “Enough!” as clearly as if he had shouted it.

  “Your father is a real man,” I said to Terry on the drive back in the kid’s tC.

  “You think I need you to tell me that?” the kid snapped at me. The Mole was right—he had his mother in him, all right.

  “No,” I said. “I just felt the need to say it out loud, and you were the only one here.”

  “I’m sorry, Burke. I know you weren’t—”

  “And I never would, T.”

  I levered my bucket seat so it was almost reclining, closed my eyes.

  After a few minutes, Terry turned on the radio. Must have had a satellite hookup, because doo-wop flowed from the speakers.

  Some things never die. Dion always was a bluesman, even back in the day. I hear he’s doing the traditional stuff now. Not walking a new road, going back to where he’d never known he’d started from.

  But this was some weird station the kid had tuned to. The play list was all covers: the Cadillacs’ version of “Gloria” going back-to-back with the one by the Passions, the Willows and the Diamonds both with “Church Bells May Ring,” then “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” by the Shirelles, followed with a version by what sounded like Kathy Young and the Innocents. I recognized “There’s No Other Like My Baby” by the Crystals, but the next version rang through like Rosie and the Originals. I thought they’d only done one record—I flashed on me and Flood, slow-dancing to Rosie’s “Angel Baby,” just after she dueled a freak to the death. His.

  “Love You So” always hit me. A teenage girl sent me the lyrics when I was locked down as a kid. Only she sent them as a poem. It wasn’t until later that I realized those weren’t her words. Or her feelings. That was the Ron Holden version. But the cover by Little Isidore and the Inquistors didn’t touch me at all.

  When “A Thousand Miles Away” came on, I came out of my altered state. Something about…then it hit me. Shep and the Limelights. Or the Heartbeats, whatever they were calling themselves back then. They’d earned their way in the same way Magic Sam had: you didn’t get to do one of Alan Freed’s live shows unless you could deliver the mail, and the crowd at the Apollo was downright savage if you showed weak.

  “Shep” was James Sheppard. His textured lead vocals are a model for doo-wop revivalists to this day. But his day was over real quick. They found his body on the Van Wyck Expressway in Queens one January morning in 1970. He’d been beaten with ugly precision, then stripped. Maybe it was the blows, maybe he froze to death. Another murder, never solved. I wondered if anyone was looking for the killers.

  “Who’s sponsoring this flimflam, Western Union?” I heard the Prof sneer as Terry and I walked in.

  I guessed they were all taking a break, sprawled around the TV, watching a boxing match. At least the Prof was limiting his running commentary to his disgust with fighters who telegraph their punches, and not still trying to talk Max into entering one of those “ultimate fighting” leagues. I’d heard him pitch that proposition a dozen times. Every time, Max would show him how deaf he could really get.

  “You got money on this one?” I asked, finding myself a seat.

  “Money? I don’t bet on pig races, Schoolboy. Only mystery in this fight is which one of those out-of-shape slobs gasses out first. This is so pathetic, motherfuckers be changing channels even if it was pay-per-view.”

  “I got something…” I started to say, just as one of the fighters collapsed to the canvas from a slow-motion left hook to his flabby side-pillow. His opponent staggered to a neutral corner, sucking in huge gulps of air through his mouth.

  The Prof waved a disgusted hand at the screen, hit the “mute” without waiting for the count.

  “We
got a shot?” he said, turning to me.

  “Yeah. Just an idea I’m working on,” I told him, signing to Max by tapping my temple.

  “Let it cook till you can set the hook,” the Prof answered. Meaning: whatever I had, I didn’t need to say it in front of Terry.

  I nodded agreement. “I need to go over those files again.”

  “If we just knew what you were looking for, mahn…”

  “I can’t know that,” I explained. Again. “But when I see it, I’ll know.”

  “It has to be there for you to see it,” Terry tossed in. His father’s son.

  “Dog hears a whistle you can’t,” the Prof said. “What’s that mean, there wasn’t no whistle at all?”

  “Okay,” the kid said, throwing up his hands.

  “The soup is the best you ever made,” I said to Mama.

  She shrugged, but the faint pink that suffused her cheeks was the truth-teller.

  The Prof raised his mug—a white one, with BARNARD in bright-red letters—in agreement.

  “This could never be duplicated,” Clarence echoed.

  Max tapped his heart twice, either in appreciation of the soup or of the fact that, from the moment his daughter Flower had chosen to attend Barnard, Mama switched from her traditional small bowls to the mugs that displayed her granddaughter’s achievement.

  The mugs were for family only, same as the soup. Hell, it should be—we’d all been kicking in a piece of every score “for baby’s college” since Flower had been born. I figure the kid had enough cash in there to attend grad school on Mars, and come home on holidays, too.

  I ran down what the Mole had given me. They all listened in silence until I was done.

  “So it ain’t just Terry that’s out,” the Prof said. “Our girl can’t play, no way.”

  “Right.”

  “So we’re down to four.”

  “Claw could play a role,” I suggested. I’d never told any of them about how he already had.

  “Those boys are all dogs,” the Prof dismissed the idea. “And the only trick I want any of them to do is play dead.”

  “I’m not saying take him in with us, Prof. But when you’ve got a man with nothing to lose…”