A Bomb Built in Hell

by Andrew Vachss

  Wesley appeared before the Board promptly—unshaven and smoking a cigarette. The Chairman, who was a Reverend, spoke first.

  “Is there any reason why we should parole you at this time?” And Wesley broke into sincere and hearty laughter.

  “What is so funny?”

  “Man, you got to parole me—I’m nine months short.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything to us. We want to know what you’ve done to rehabilitate yourself.”

  “I haven’t done a motherfucking thing. But so what? You guys always parole a man who’s less than a year short—that’s the law, right? Anyway, I’m innocent.”

  “That’s not the law!” the Reverend proclaimed self-righteously. “Your case will be reviewed like any other.”

  “But the guys in the block said...”

  “Oh, so that's it. Who’re you going to listen to, this Board or a bunch of prisoners?”

  “But I thought...”

  “Now we may parole you anyway, but you shouldn’t listen to—”

  “See! I knew you were just kidding me, man.”

  “This hearing is concluded. Return to your unit!”

  The note from the Board said he was being denied parole at this time because of “poor institutional adjustment.”

  24/

  They let Wesley go on a Tuesday. He was among eight men going home that day, but the only one who wasn’t being paroled. He noticed one already nodding from his morning fix and wondered if the pathetic sucker would find the stuff as easy to score on the street as he had Inside.

  The State provided transportation to the Port Authority Terminal in Manhattan, a suit, and twenty-five dollars. The factory-reject suit screamed PRISONER! as loudly as black-and-white stripes would have, and Wesley’s dead-white face made sure the impression stayed with any cops who wanted to look. But nobody was looking. Wesley saw at once why Carmine had told him to learn from Lester—the terminal was a swirling river of predators and prey.

  He thought about getting some fresh clothes, but he knew Israel wouldn’t care what he looked like.

  The Greyhound to Cleveland cost $18.75. Fifteen hours later, Wesley grabbed a cab in Public Square, and he was in front of the King Hotel just before midnight. Wesley watched the whores shriek to passing cars for another fifteen minutes before he went inside, up to the desk clerk.

  “I’ve got a message for Israel.”

  “He not here, man.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  The clerk went to the back and, in about ten minutes, a husky man with a blue-black face and a full beard came down the stairs.

  “I’m Israel,” the man said. “Come on up to my room.”

  They walked upstairs to 717 and went inside. The man motioned Wesley to a chair near the window and pulled a short-barreled pistol from his inside pocket in the same motion. The gun was pointed negligently, only vaguely in Wesley’s direction, but his eyes were locked into Wesley’s face.

  “What are you here for?”

  “I’m Carmine’s son.”

  “And...”

  “I’m here to pick up what he left.”

  “You know what that is?”

  “He said Israel would show me.”

  “He tell you anything else?”

  “That I’d be doing a job of work for you.”

  “You know who?”

  “No.”

  “You care?”

  “No.”

  “If you’re Carmine’s son, you must know the only color he hates.”

  “A cop.”

  “Yeah, a cop. A pig-slob dirty motherfucking cop. He—”

  “I don’t care what he did. You going to get me everything I need?”

  “Which is?”

  “A place to stay, some correct clothing, a street map of this town, some folding money to get around with, a couple of good pieces, some tools, some information.”

  “I can get all that. Shit, I got all that already.”

  “Okay. Show me where I can sleep.”

  “You want me to drive the car?”

  “What car?”

  “He’s a foot patrolman—that’s about the only way you’ll get a shot at him.”

  “I work by myself—I’ll think of something.”

  25/

  It took Israel only a few hours to come up with everything Wesley asked for. Wesley spent an entire day making a silencer for the .357 Magnum and then he decided he couldn’t take a chance with a homemade job and unscrewed the tube with regret. He knew you could only silence a revolver but so much anyway. The pistol was a Ruger single-action—good enough for the first shot, but Wesley had to dry-fire hundreds of rounds before he got the hang of making the piece repeat quickly enough. It reminded him of how the Army taught him to use a .45. They made him drop the hammer endlessly with a pencil jammed down the barrel, so the eraser cushioned the firing pin.

  The target patrolled Central Avenue four-to-midnights; his route took him right by the front door of the hotel. Wesley managed to get up on the roof of the tallest building across from the King, but it was no good. The lighting on the street was lousy. And, anyway, the cop always walked with a partner—he wouldn’t be able to tell them apart at that distance.

  Wesley went back to Israel and told him he needed two things: a good double-barreled shotgun—a .12 gauge that could handle three-inch shells—and a telephone call.

  Thursday night. Wesley had been in the hotel for four weeks without going outside more than once. The patrolman and his partner turned off Euclid and started walking up Central toward 55th. Israel came up to Wesley’s room and knocked softly.

  “They’ll be out front in five to ten minutes.”

  “Sound like a real nigger on the phone.”

  “Don’t worry about a thing, man—I am a real nigger.”

  Israel picked up the phone and deliberately dialed the police emergency number. When the Central Exchange answered, they heard: “Lawd have mercy! Po-leece! Dem niggahs got dat nice detective an’ his friend bleedin’ in da street! They gonna kill ‘em—they all crazy! You got to... What? Right next to dat Black Muslim place on Superior. Dey gonna... No, ah cain t hang on, ah got to...”

  Israel rang off just as Wesley passed by his door with the shotgun under a brown raincoat. The barrels had been sawed off down to fourteen inches, and the gun fit comfortably.

  The two officers walked by the front entrance to the hotel, past the winos and the junkies and the hustlers and the whores and the idlers and the vermin. Mr. Murphy and Mr. and Mrs. Badger and Miss Thing ... all waiting on Mr. Green. Business as usual.

  Wesley stepped out of the doorway and brought up the shotgun, pulling the wired-together triggers simultaneously. Both cops were blown backwards against a parked car. Wesley had two shots from the Ruger into each of them before the sea of people could even start to disappear. Wesley didn’t know which cop was his target. He walked over to what was left of them and placed the barrel of the piece against the right eye of one and pulled the trigger—the back of the cop’s head went flying out in a swirling disc of bloody bone. Wesley did the same to the other cop and stepped back quickly into the hotel lobby. It was empty—even the desk clerk was gone.

  As he walked calmly up the stairs, Wesley wiped down the guns. He left them on the bed in his room, picked up the envelope lying there, and stuffed it deep into his belt over the tailbone. Then he grabbed the waiting airline bag and climbed out the window. The fire escape took him within six feet of the next building. He climbed across and took the next fire escape to the roof. He went down the other side into the shadows on 55th and got into a parked cab whose lights immediately went on.

  As the cab motored serenely toward Burke Airport, Wesley noted with satisfaction that the meter already read $3.10, just in case.

  26/

  Wesley caught the 2:30 a.m. flight to LaGuardia, walked all the way across the huge parking lot and down to Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. It took him more than an hour, but he wasn’t in a hurry.
He grabbed an IRT Elevated on Roosevelt and changed at 74th Street for an E train, which took him right into the Port Authority. He lit a cigarette with the airline ticket stub and checked his pocket for the stub he had picked up from the cabdriver in Cleveland—half of a roundtrip bus ticket between Port Authority and Atlanta, Georgia.

  Inside Port Authority, he bought a copy of the Daily News, drank some prison-tasting orange juice, and watched the degenerates parade until it was almost ten in the morning. Then he took a cab uptown to 60th Street and, with the expensive leather suitcase he had purchased and carefully scuffed up, checked into the Hotel Pierre. He was not asked to pay in advance; the suit Israel had picked out for him in Cleveland easily passed muster.

  In the hotel bathroom, he examined the envelope for the first time. It held two-hundred-twenty-thousand dollars in hundreds. The tightly packed bills looked used and the serial numbers were not sequential.

  27/

  Wesley settled his bill at the Pierre. They never even glanced at the hundred-dollar notes. The hotel was far more expensive than others he could have used, but the guidebook he’d read in prison said the Pierre wasn’t the kind of joint where the night clerk would be on the police payroll. Wesley took a cab to the corner of Houston and Sixth, paid the driver and threw a half-buck tip. He walked north until he saw the cab circle back and re-enter traffic. Then Wesley turned around and headed for Mama Lucci’s.

  It was 4:15 in the afternoon, but the restaurant was evening-dark. Wesley didn’t know what Petraglia looked like, except that he’d be old. He walked to a table near the back, deliberately selecting a seat with his back to the door, and waited for the waiter to take his order. Wesley ordered spaghetti and veal cutlet Milanese and asked if Mr. Petraglia was there yet.

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I do.”

  “Who’re you, a cop?”

  “I’m from the Board of Health.”

  The waiter laughed and left the table. In about ten minutes an ancient old man sat down silently across from Wesley. His voice was so soft Wesley had to lean forward to catch all of the words.

  “Who’re you related to that I know?”

  “To Carmine. I’m his son.”

  “So! How do I know this?”

  “Put your hand under the table.”

  Wesley slipped the envelope he had picked up in Cleveland into the old man’s hard-dry hand.

  “Take that someplace and open it up,” he said. “Carmine said you’d show me a building to buy.”

  The old man left the table. He returned within a minute.

  “If you hadn’t brought it back here, I never would have known. Carmine never said anything to me, never described you, nothing—you could’ve left the country with that cash. Carmine told me his son would come here one day with the money. But he told me all this before they took him away the last time. I didn’t know what you’d look like or when you’d be coming.”

  “But you knew I’d come?”

  “Yes. This means Carmine’s dead?”

  “They buried his body.”

  “I understand. You come with me now. I got to set you up until we can get the building.”

  The old man’s car was a dusty black 1959 Ford with a taut ride. He drove professionally, whipping through traffic without giving the appearance of going fast.

  “We’ll talk in the car. Nobody hears then, okay?”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “I got the building all picked out. It’s on the Slip ... you know where that is?”

  “Over far east, by the river?”

  “Yeah. It used to be a shirt factory, but now it’s nothing. We can get it for about half of this money and use most of the rest to fix it up right.”

  “I’m going to live there?”

  “You and me too, son.”

  “My name’s Wesley.”

  “Pet—my friends call me Pet.”

  “Carmine said Mr. Petraglia.”

  “That was so I could make the decision first, right? You call me Pet. What if you got to call me in a hurry—you gonna say all them syllables?” The old man laughed high up in his dry throat. Wesley nodded in agreement.

  28/

  Petraglia took him to a house in Brooklyn. Its garage led directly into the basement, which was double-locked from the outside.

  “You stay here. Maybe three weeks, maybe a month. Then we’ll be ready to move into the building. There’s a john in the back, plenty of food in the refrigerator, got a TV and a radio. But only play them with the earplugs—nobody knows you’re down here, right?”

  “Okay.”

  “You’re not worried that it might take so long?”

  “I been waiting a lot longer than that.”

  “I figured you had to be Inside with Carmine. We got to do something about that paleface shit—a cop could spot you in a second. There’s a sunlamp down here too, and some lotion.”

  “Will the people upstairs hear the toilet flush?”

  “Just me is upstairs and I don’t hear a thing. I’m not really worried about anybody seeing you—I’d just prefer it, you know? You got a PO to report to?”

  “Just you, Pet.”

  The old man smiled and went out, leaving Wesley alone. Wesley dialed his mind back to solitary confinement and did the next nineteen days in complete silence. He kept the radio on and the earplugs in most of the time, listening to the news with careful attention. He watched the TV with the sound off and looked carefully at the styles of clothing, haircuts, and cars; the way people carried themselves. He familiarized himself with how the Yankees were doing and who was mayor and everything else he could think of, since there was no library in Pet’s basement. There was no telephone, and Wesley didn’t miss one.

  29/

  When Petraglia returned to the basement, he found Wesley totally absorbed in the TV’s silent screen, lying perfectly motionless on the floor in what looked like an impossibly uncomfortable position. The old man motioned Wesley to turn the set off, ignoring the pistol which had materialized in the younger man’s hand when he entered the door.

  “How in hell can you lay on the floor like that?”

  “I can do it for three hours,” Wesley assured him.

  “How d’you know that?”

  “I already did it yesterday. I found the piece in the toilet tank.” The old man seemed to understand both Wesley’s gymnastics and his search of the premises and said nothing more about it. They got back into the Ford and drove all the way out to the old shirt factory. It was dark on the FDR, and it was pure pitchblack by the time they turned into the Slip. Every streetlight in the neighborhood seemed to be smashed. The old man pressed the horn ring, but no sound came out—the side of a filthy wall seemed to open up and he drove inside almost without slowing down. Another press on the horn ring and the same door closed silently behind them.

  “This here is the first floor. We’ll use it like a garage, since it used to be a loading bay. You going to live just below this. The rest of the place is empty and it’s like a damn echo chamber. I got the whole place mined—I’ll show you the schematic before we go upstairs—enough stuff to put this building into orbit. We got a phone in the electrical shack on the roof.”

  “What’s an electrical shack? What if someone hears it ring?”

  “The shack is where they used to keep the compressors and the generators for the factory before they closed this place. And the phone don’t ring. It flashes when someone’s calling in—I got a light hooked up. I know what I’m doing, Wesley.” The old man sounded mildly hurt.

  “I know that. Carmine said you were the best.”

  “One of the best is what Carmine would have said, but he didn’t know what was happening out here. The rest are gone and now I am the best.”

  Wesley smiled and, after a second, the old man smiled too. They walked down the stairs to the apartment Pet had fixed up for him, Pet showing the security systems to Wesley as they walked. The walls on the lower level were all soun
dproofed, but Pet still kept his voice supersoft as he talked.