A Bomb Built in Hell
Andrew Vachss
Andrew Vachss' pre-Flood novel A Bomb Built in Hell was written in 1973. It was rejected by every publisher, one of whom described it as a "political horror story," others of whom berated it for its "lack of realism," including such things as Chinese youth gangs and the fall of Haiti. And the very idea of someone entering a high school with the intent of destroying every living person inside was just too ... ludicrous.
Readers of Vachss' Burke series will immediately recognize Wesley, the main character of A Bomb Built in Hell. This is his story.
A Bomb Built in Hell
Andrew Vachss
Author’s Notes
In 1972, I was represented by the John Schaffner Agency, largely on the strength of some short stories I published in minor magazines.* My first full-length effort was, essentially, the journal I kept during my time in the infamous NYC Welfare Department between 1966 and 1969, ending when I left to enter the warzone inside a country calling itself Biafra.** That book was (as was all my work prior to Flood) considered unacceptable by the publishing establishment, on the grounds that there was no market for “this kind of material.”
Victor Chapin, my tireless agent, who never lost faith in me, thought my varied ground-zero experiences (including, by that time, not only the genocidal madness in Africa, but a stint as a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, working as an organizer in Lake County, Indiana, running a center for urban migrants in Chicago, a re-entry joint for ex-cons, and a maximum-security prison for violent youth) would lend themselves perfectly to a “hardboiled” novel of the type that was so successful in the ’50s. A Bomb Built in Hell followed.
And (again) was unanimously rejected by publishers. They professed to love the writing, but felt the events depicted were considered a “political horror story” and not remotely realistic. The rejection letters make interesting reading today. Included in the “lack of realism” category were such things as Chinese youth gangs and the fall of Haiti. And, of course, the very idea of someone entering a high school with the intent of destroying every living person inside was just too ... ludicrous.
Naturally, the book was also “too” hardboiled, “too” extreme, “too” spare and violent. I heard endlessly about how an anti-hero was acceptable, but Wesley was just “too” much.
Bomb was meant to be a Ph.D. thesis in criminology without the footnotes, exploring such areas as the connection between child abuse and crime, and the desperate need of unbonded, dangerous children to form “families of choice.” Thus, the narrative is third person, and the tone is flat and detached.
Victor, ever-loyal, insisted that there was no dispute about my ability as a writer, but that I needed to add some intimacy to a book everyone called “dry ice.” So ... Flood. Same themes, but first-person narrative, interior monologues, fleshed-out backstory, (some) characters with which the reader could identify (and even, presumably, like). Some sense of human connection. But the same themes.
Victor read the manuscript and told me I had finally done it ... we were winners. And then he died. Suddenly and unfairly.
Years later, after Flood came out, offers for Bomb magically appeared. Some from the same publishers who had rejected it the first time. I never took the offers, thinking of the original book as a “period piece.” Later, at the suggestion of Knopf publisher (and my editor) Sonny Mehta, I cannibalized pieces of it— Bomb was Wesley’s story, Flood was Burke’s—for Hard Candy, and Wesley remained a character in the series (despite being dead since Candy) until its 2008 conclusion, Another Life.
Rumors of the original book’s existence were sparked by an excerpt published in the HBJ series A Matter of Crime in 1988, edited by Richard Layman.
The rumors were true. And how I wish some of the book’s predictions had not proven to be so.
I dedicated Flood to Victor Chapin. And I dedicate this to him as well. It’s been a long wait, old friend. I hope it reads as well from where you are now.
Andrew Vachss
New York
notes:
*One of which was later cannibalized into “Placebo,” which, still later, came to anchor the threeact play, “Replay,” both featured in my first short story collection, Born Bad.
**Neither the country nor the name survived. Nigeria won. And the world has seen the result.
1/
Wesley sat quietly on the roof of the four-story building overlooking the East River near Pike Slip. It was 4:30 on a Wednesday afternoon in August, about eighty-five degrees and still clear-bright. With his back flat against the storage shack on the roof, he was invisible to anyone looking up from the ground. He knew from observation that neither the tourist helicopter nor the police version ever passed over this area.
In spite of the heat, Wesley wore a soft black felt hat and a dark suit; his hands were covered with dark grey deerskin gloves. The breeze blew the ash away from his cigarette. Aware of his habit of biting viciously into the filters, he carefully placed the ground-out butt into his leather-lined side pocket before he got to his feet and stepped back inside the shack.
A soft green light glowed briefly as he entered. Wesley picked up a silent telephone receiver and held it to his ear. He said nothing. The disembodied voice on the phone said, “Yes,” and a dial tone followed at once. So Mansfield was going to continue his habit: Wednesday night at Yonkers, Thursday afternoon at Aqueduct. It never varied. But he always brought a woman to the Big A, so it would have to be tonight. A woman was another human to worry about, another pair of eyes. It increased the odds and Wesley didn’t gamble.
He walked soundlessly down the steps to the first floor. The building was a hundred years old, but the stairs didn’t creak and the lock on the door was virtually unbreakable. The door itself was lead between two layers of stainless steel, covered with a thin wood veneer.
Wesley stepped into a garage full of commonplace cars. The only exception was a yellow New York City taxicab, complete with overhead lights, numbers, a meter, a medallion, and the “crashproof” bumpers that city cabbies use so well.
An ancient man was lazily polishing one of the cars, a beige El Dorado that looked new. He looked up as Wesley entered. Wesley pointed to a nondescript 1973 Ford with New York plates.
“Ninety minutes.”
“Plates okay?”
“Give me Suffolk County.”
Without another word, the old man slipped a massive hydraulic jack under the front of the Ford and started pumping. He had the front end off the ground and the left wheel off before Wesley closed the door behind him.
2/
Wesley took the back staircase to his basement apartment. It was actually two apartments; the wall between them had been broken through so they formed a single large unit. He twisted the doorknob twice to the left and once to the right, then slipped his key into the lock.
A huge Doberman watched him silently as he entered. Its ears had been completely, amateurishly removed, leaving only holes in the sides of its skull. The big dog moaned softly. It couldn’t bark; the same savage who had cut off its ears when it was a pup had cut out its tongue and damaged its larynx in the process. The Doberman still had perfect hearing, and Wesley didn’t need it to bark.
The dog opened its gaping mouth and Wesley put his hand inside. The dog whined softly, as though remembering the emergency surgery Wesley had performed to stop it from choking on its own blood.
Wesley would have killed the human who carved up the dog anyway; dogs weren’t all that he liked to cut, and a practicing degenerate like that automatically attracted the police, even in this neighborhood.
He had ghosted up behind the target, still squatting obliviously before a tiny fire he
had built out on the Slip. Wesley sprawled in the weeds like a used-up wino and quickly screwed the silencer onto a Ruger .22 semi-auto.
The first shot sounded like a soft-wet slap, audible for only about fifty feet. It caught the freak in the back of the skull. Wesley stayed prone and pumped three more bullets into the target’s body, working from the chest area upwards.
He was about to leave when he heard the moaning. He thought it might have been a little kid—the freak’s usual prey—and he was about to fade away when the dog struggled to its feet. Wesley went over then; a dog couldn’t identify him.
Wesley still didn’t know why he had risked someone spotting him as he quickly cleaned the dog’s wounds—protecting his hands against the expected attempts to bite that never came—and carried it back to the old building. It wasn’t playing the percentages to do that. But he hadn’t regretted it since. A man would have to kill the dog to get into Wesley’s place, and the Doberman had proved itself very hard to kill that night on the Slip.
The police-band radio hummed and crackled as Wesley showered and shaved. He carefully covered his moderate-length haircut with Vaseline jelly; anyone searching for a grip there would end up with a handful of grease instead.
Wesley changed into heavy cotton-twill work pants that were slightly too baggy from the waist to the thighs, ankle-length work boots with soft rubber soles, and an off-white sweatshirt with elastic concealed around the waistband. The steel-cased Rolex came off his left wrist, to be replaced by a fancy-faced cheap “aviator” watch. A Marine Corps ring with a red pseudo-ruby stone went on his right hand; a thick gold wedding band encrusted with tiny zircons on his left.
Wesley carefully applied a tattoo decal to his left hand, a tri-color design of an eagle clutching a lightning bolt. The legend “Death Before Dishonor” ran right across the knuckles, facing out. The new tattoo looked too fresh, so Wesley opened a woman’s compact that contained soot collected from the building’s roof. He rubbed some gently onto his hand until he was satisfied.
Next, he took an icepick from a long steel cabinet and carefully replaced the thick wooden handle with a much slimmer one. The new handle had a sandpaper-roughened surface and a passage the exact size of the icepick steel right through its middle. The old steel was anchored to the new handle with a four-inch screw at the top. Wesley applied a drop of Permabond to the screw-threads before tightening the new tool.
Laying the icepick on the countertop, Wesley crossed the room to a brightly lit terrarium which held several tiny frogs. The terrarium was too deep to allow the frogs to jump directly out; still, it was covered with a screen as a precaution. Four of the frogs were the color of strawberries; the others were green-and-gold little jewels.
Wesley slowly reached in with a tropical-fish net and extracted one of the green-and-gold frogs. He placed the little creature on a Teflon surface that was surrounded by wire mesh. After immediately replacing the cover of the terrarium, Wesley gently prodded the tiny frog until clear drops stood out visibly on its bright skin. Holding the frog down with a forked piece of flexible steel, Wesley rolled the tip of the icepick directly across the skin of the squirming frog.
He put the icepick aside, returned the frog to its home, replaced the wire screen across the top, and then dropped the Teflon pan in the steel sink. Holding the icepick in one hand, he immediately poured boiling water over the Teflon surface so that the residue ran into the drain. He knew, from extensive tests, that the minute secretions of the Golden Poison-Arrow Frog were almost instantly fatal. The two men he had tested it on were slated to die anyway and the buyer hadn’t been particular about how they exited. A circlet of cork was placed around the tip of the icepick, which was then inserted into the screwdriver pocket of the work pants. Wesley flexed his leg and saw the outline did not show—he wasn’t surprised.
Wesley walked back into the entranceway where the Doberman now reclined. He didn’t bother to see if the dog had food—it knew how to get food or water by pushing one of the levers under the sink. He checked the closed-circuit TV screen above the door, saw that the hallway was empty, and left. The door locked silently behind him.
3/
6:00 p.m. Wesley went up to the garage. The old man was checking tire pressures on the Ford. Wesley noted that the plates had been changed to ones with the characteristic “VI” prefix of Suffolk County. He climbed behind the wheel and slipped a key into a slot hidden beneath the dash. An S&W Airweight dropped into his waiting palm. He pushed the release and examined the opened cylinder—three flat-faced aluminum wadcutters and two steel-jacketed slugs—then snapped it closed and returned it under the dash. He held the pistol in place and turned the key again—the electromagnets re-gripped and the gun disappeared.
The Ford had fifteen coats of carnauba wax on its dusty-appearing flanks; it wouldn’t leave paint smears unless it hit something head on. Even in the nearly airtight garage, the idling engine was as silent as a turbine. Wesley raced the engine, but the volume rose only slightly. He looked questioningly at the old man, who said: “It robs you of some power, but it don’t make no noise. If you want to go and you don’t care about the sound, just pull the lever next to the hood release.”
Wesley pulled the lever with the engine idling and the motor instantly began to rumble threateningly.
“Muffler bypass,” said the old man.
Wesley drove slowly out of the garage’s mouth. The street was empty, as it usually was. The old man would have told him if it were otherwise. He turned onto the FDR Drive, heading for the Triborough Bridge. Traffic was still slow.
The races didn’t begin until 8:05 p.m. Of course, Mansfield would be there early, since the Daily Double window opened about 7:25. Wesley hit the Exact Change lane on the bridge—one less face to remember him or the car, as unlikely as that was. Traffic lightened up as he approached Yankee Stadium and was moving along fairly quickly by the time he spotted the track ahead on the right. He paid the parking-lot attendant $1.25 and nosed the Ford carefully along the outer drive of the lot, looking for the spot he wanted. He found just the place and pointed the front of the Ford back toward the highway.
Just as he was about to get out, a red-faced attendant ran up screaming, “Hey, buddy, you can’t park there!”
Wesley computed the risk of arguing and making himself memorable against the gain of having a safe place to exit from. He immediately rejected the idea of a bribe—nobody bribes parking-lot attendants at Yonkers and any attempt would be remembered. He decided in an instant; either he got the spot he wanted, or he’d wait for another night.
The attendant was a fiftyish clown with an authoritarian face. His wife probably kicked him all over the house; but here in the lot he was boss, and didn’t want an ignorant working stiff like Wesley to forget it.
“Get that fucking car outta that spot!”
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know. I’ll do it right now.”
Wesley climbed back into the Ford and pressed the ignition-disconnect button with his knee. The starter screamed, but the engine stayed dead. “Shit! Now the fucking thing won’t even start!” Wesley sounded frightened of the attendant’s possible anger; but the clown, having established his power, relaxed.
“S’alright, probably just the battery. Maybe it’ll start after the races.”
“Goddamn! I’ll call a garage ... but I’ll miss the...”
“Oh, hell. Leave it there,” said the clown, magnanimously.
And Wesley did. He walked toward the back gate, paid his $2.25, got a large token in exchange, slipped it into the turnstile, and passed inside. Wesley bought a program at a booth that offered programs 75¢ in huge letters across its top. He gave the man three quarters, took the program and a tiny pencil from a cardboard box on the counter, and turned to leave.
The man’s voice was loud and obnoxious. “Hey, sport, it’s a dime for the pencil!”
Wesley never changed expression; he reached in his jacket pocket for another dime and paid the man. Outside,
he moved toward the track, looking for the target. He had plenty of time; Mansfield was a known railbird, and he’d be glued to the finish line before the first race went off. The mob guys usually sat up in the Clubhouse and had flunkies bet for them, but Mansfield liked to see the action up close.
That didn’t make things easier for Wesley, just different.
He drifted away from two old ladies on the rail. Experience taught him that the elderly were the most observant, next to children. At 7:30, Wesley went to the $2 Win window and bought five tickets on the Number Five horse, Iowa Boy. The jerk just in front of him screamed, “The Six horse, ten times,” and threw down his hard-earned twenty bucks as though he had just accomplished something.
Wesley drifted over to the Double window and saw Mansfield just turning away with a stack of tickets in his manicured hands. Probably wheeled the Double, Wesley thought to himself, watching to see if anyone else was paying attention.
No point following Mansfield. Wesley went to the men’s room. It was filled with the usual winos, misfits, and would-be high rollers, all talking loudly and paying attention to nobody but themselves. Too crowded; it would have to be outside after all. Wesley had watched Mansfield for three weeks and time was getting short. The sucker might be leaving for the Coast any day now, and that would end the contract; Wesley could only operate in New York.
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