Choice of Evil

by Andrew Vachss

  >>Wesley. Me. Difference? One word<<

  Time to see if I could find a button to push. “Send him this,” I told Xyla, and watched.

  professional

  come up on her screen.

  If I had it figured right, my response would be a stake in his heart. But even if it was, I knew it wouldn’t kill him. Vampires I understood. What else is a child molester but a blood-bandit who breeds others of his tribe from his own venom? But this guy was way past that.

  And I wondered if he’d keep playing by his own rules.

  Back at my place, I sat down with Pansy to watch some TV. She used to love pro wrestling years ago, but now she hates it. I don’t understand why, but she’s real clear about it. Her favorite is this Japanese soap opera, Abarenbo Shogun. Maybe soap opera isn’t right, but I don’t know what else to call the damn thing. It takes place in eighteenth-century Edo, where the Shogun has a secret identity as the resident bodyguard for the boss of the firefighter brigade, and it’s all about him bringing truth and justice to his subjects. He does it with his sword, and the body count is even higher than the old Untouchables used to be. Every time, it ends with the Shogun revealing his true identity to the perps and ordering them to commit seppuku. They, quite reasonably, refuse and decide to fight it out. Fat fucking chance. The Shogun also has a pair of ninjas working for him, a young guy and a dazzlingly beautiful girl who looks like a geisha most of the time and only lets her hair down when she’s slashing and stabbing. The bad guys always retreat behind their hirelings, and the Shogun has to hack his way through to them. He faces off by cocking his sword to display the royal crest—the same flashy way movies show a guy jacking a round into the chamber—and starts his walk, complete with special theme music. The outcome is not in doubt. At the end, he orders his ninjas to finish off the main culprits. Pansy knows her TV.

  Anyway, when I finally got cable here, I learned that there’s an all-news TV show too, just like the radio. I clicked it on. Another dead baby. Beaten to death. ACS wasn’t giving out any explanations, although it admitted the family was “known” to them. ACS: that’s “Administration for Children’s Services.” When I was a kid, they called it BCW. They’ve changed the name half a dozen times since then, usually after a bunch of babies die.

  Even when they die, it doesn’t amount to much. I remember the last big media-play murder. Kid doesn’t show up for school for a whole year. Nobody even checks. Finally, they come around looking. Little girl’s not there. Turns out the mother’s boyfriend strangled her to death while the mother held the kid’s hands so she couldn’t struggle. Then they wrapped the body in plastic and duct tape and trucked it through the snow in a laundry cart to a Dumpster near a vacant lot. The DA offers the mother probation for her testimony, and she gets on the stand and tells it like it happened. The jury’s so full of hate for the DA letting her walk away, they convict the guy only of manslaughter, not murder, trying to divide the blame by sending a message. Same way the jury did with Lisa Steinberg’s killer—his girlfriend got a free pass from the DA too. Wolfe had that kind of case once. Only she took them both down, not going for the sure-thing conviction of the man by free-passing the woman.

  I remembered the “social worker” I had when I was a kid. One of them, anyway. A young girl. . . although I guess she looked pretty old to me then. All I remember about her was her mouth. Her lying mouth. I never looked at her eyes.

  Fuck it. I got up, worked Pansy through a few of her routines, just to keep her sharp. She loves that. I don’t get the way people train dogs. There’s really nothing to it. You wait long enough, the dog will do anything you want. When you see it, you reward it. Sometimes you have to create the situation so it happens, but that’s not so hard. There’s no reason to hit a dog. Every time I think about people doing that, I. . . think about how people starve racing greyhounds, run them until they’re used up, then round them up and shoot them. And how scumbags feed their pit bulls gunpowder. The fucking morons think it makes the dogs tough. All it does is eat the linings of their stomachs, so they get ulcers and they’re always in pain. Makes them vicious, not tough.

  I met a lot of guys who fit that exact description over the years. And vicious hurts the same as tough when you’re on the receiving end. I took a lot of beatings until Wesley pulled my coat. We were just kids, but he knew the truth. “They’re easier when they’re sleeping,” he whispered to me one night in the dorm.

  When I walked into Nadine’s apartment, she told me to have a seat—she had to get something. I took the middle chair. There was a tape playing on the screen. Pony girl, just like she’d bragged about. A chubby blonde on her hands and knees, wearing some kind of mask with little leather ears sticking up, a bridle bit in her teeth, a harness fitted around her upper body. Nadine was riding her, using a crop on the blonde girl’s rump, directing her around a room I didn’t recognize—not the one I was sitting in.

  It ended like you’d expect. Nadine waited for the tape to go blank before she came back in.

  “She loves it,” Nadine said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “She calls me up and begs for it,” Nadine kept on. “She usually comes before she even starts eating me.”

  “That the cop?” I asked her.

  “Yep.”

  “Okay. I already got that message. So what’s your point?”

  “A true submissive will do whatever you tell her. She’d come right over and suck your cock if I snapped my fingers. And she doesn’t like men. . . not at all.”

  “I still don’t get your point.”

  “I just want you to keep your promise.”

  “What promise? The only thing I ever told you was—”

  “—that I’d get to meet him. Be there with you when you did.”

  “If that happens.”

  “It’ll happen,” she said confidently. “It was meant to happen.”

  “Better stick to your toys and games,” I told her. “I don’t see a crystal ball around here.”

  “Never mind,” she said. “I know it. So it doesn’t matter what you believe. That won’t change anything.”

  “Yeah, fine. So. . . why the videotape?”

  “You know why,” she said. “And you’ll be back.”

  Where I went back to was where I’d find Xyla. And there he was, waiting:

  “It is all a matter of timing,” I told Zoë later that day. “Any transfer, electronic or paper, can be traced. However, I have set it up so that, within minutes after the money reaches the receptor account, it will be transferred from there to twenty-one *other* accounts in various parts of the world. As soon as the transfer is effectuated, the receptor account will automatically close. A trace will dead-end at the bank. By the time the authorities discover how the money was distributed, it will have been emptied from each of the new accounts into a funnel account, and *that* account too will be closed. . . with the money withdrawn.”

  “That sounds hard.”

  “Not really,” I said, annoyed at myself for the ascertainable trace of pride in my voice. “The Swiss are quite cooperative in such ventures. They have a long history of separating money from morality.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It simply means that they will not question—indeed, they will deliberately avert their eyes from—the *source* of cash so long as they are paid a goodly sum for their ‘handling’ of it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Are you certain you understand, child?”

  “Sure. Maybe they’re not bad themselves, but they don’t care if *you’re* bad, right?”

  “Yes, that is a worthy approximation.”

  “Doesn’t that make *them* bad, too?”

  “One could certainly argue that, Zoë.”

  “Do they?”

  “Do they what?”

  “*Argue* about it?”

  “Oh. Yes, certainly. In fact, such arguments seem to provide an endless source of entertainment for some individuals. But nothing change
s as a result.”

  “People always do it, right?”

  “Do what, Zoë?”

  “Bad things. I mean, it’s not new. People always did bad things, didn’t they?”

  “Yes. And good things. That is human nature, to be both bad and good. Or to have that potential within us, anyway.”

  “So it’s a choice?”

  “I don’t follow—”

  “You can be good if you want, right? I mean, nobody *has* to be bad. . .”

  “It’s not that simple, child. But, generally speaking, I believe you are correct.”

  Oh, he was on the money there, the crazy bastard. The first time I really understood it, I was in prison. Reading. I killed a lot of time doing that. I remember something about a “choice of evils.” And it made me think. About the other guys in there. How some didn’t have much choice. The thieves, mostly. If you wanted to live like a human being, if you were culled out of the herd when you were little so you couldn’t earn honestly, what was left? But the ugly ones—the rapists, the child molesters, the torture freaks—they weren’t bad guys the way thieves were, they were stone evil. And it was their choice. That’s what they picked. They didn’t do it for money, they did it for fun. That’s what evil is, when you strip away the crap. It’s choice. This guy wasn’t sick. The way he was telling it, the rules didn’t apply to him, that’s all. He was above it. Above everything. He was killing kids for art. And that was his choice. I snapped out of it and started scrolling again, fast now, to make up for the lost time.

  “Okay. Can we play chess now?” the child asked.

  I agreed. And, as I anticipated, she learned the rudiments of the game with alacrity.

  There was a languid, drifting quality about the next several days. My memory of them is. . . imprecise. Zoë continued to prepare her impossibly elaborate meals. I read. . . I believe I read. . . some technical manuals. We played chess together and I began to introduce her to plane geometry. She worked on her drawings.

  Tuesday night she woke me up, saying she was afraid. She would not elaborate further. I allowed her to sleep in my bed, sitting next to her in a chair. It appeared to comfort her, and she eventually fell asleep. I suppose I did too. When I awoke, it was Wednesday morning.

  Wednesday night, I explained the remainder of the operation to the child. She listened, fascinated as always. Suddenly she looked up at me.

  “I know who you are,” she announced.

  “What is it you know, child?” I asked her. “My name?”

  “No. It doesn’t matter. I have a name I call you, but I won’t tell you what it is. But I know who you are.”

  “And who is that, Zoë?”

  “You’re my hero,” she said solemnly. “You came to rescue me. Just like in the story I read. I was a princess. Sort of. And you came to rescue me.”

  “I do not—”

  “That’s your art,” the child said eagerly. “You’re always saying, we have our art. You and me. Zoë me. I draw. And you rescue little kids.”

  Try as I might, she refused to discuss the subject further. I saw no reason to interfere with her childish coping mechanisms. I detest cruelty.

  Thursday night, Zoë said: “I’m going to tell you a secret.”

  “What secret is that, child?”

  “I know your secret,” she said.

  Friday morning ran like a Swiss watch—pun intended. I returned to the hideout.

  “It’s time to say goodbye, Zoë,” I told her.

  “I know,” she said, eyes shining as though a special treat were in store.

  “Zoë, I have a. . . new art now. One I must practice and learn very well before I can reach the heights of my old art. You are the last of that, do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Zoë, you cannot come with me, child. Do you understand?”

  “No!” she said sharply. “I *can* come with you. I’ll help you. Kill her. Kill Angelique. Kill her now!”

  Angelique drank the potion I prepared for her. I held Zoë while Angelique departed.

  As with all art, practice is essential. Someday, I shall achieve the same perfection with my new art as I had with what I have now discarded.

  I will return to this area soon.

  To practice.

  What the hell? What was he telling me. . . that this was the last transmission? There was only one way to read it—I’d seen it coming a while back. But if he changed and started on. . . No, it was just. . . insane.

  “Xyla!”

  She was there before the last syllable of her name left my mouth. Dropped into the computer chair, waiting.

  >>explain last answer<<

  First time he didn’t put a word limit on my response. So I had stung him. “Type this,” I told Xyla. Then I watched it come up on the screen.

  any freak can kill random targets.

  a professional hits only the target

  he is assigned to. *any* target.

  When Xyla tapped one last key, the message vanished.

  “He’s gone now, right?” I asked her.

  “He’s gone every time,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “He can come back anytime he wants, but only if I ask him to. . . .”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The way it works, I change my address each time too. Then, later, I send out a message with the new one.”

  “But. . . he knows you’ve got plenty of time to set up. So you could be waiting to trap him every time he sends a message, right?”

  “Sure. He knows. Doesn’t matter. The only time his own modem is actually open is that last little thing at the end—when I send to him. He receives it, and the whole thing comes down. Fingering it would be a waste of time.”

  “But if you don’t send him a new address. . .?”

  “Hmmm,” she said. “I see what you mean. He couldn’t reach me. Unless he could. . .”

  “. . . do what I wanted you to do,” I finished for her. “Right?”

  “Right. You think he can?”

  “I think he will,” I told her.

  “How could you possibly—?”

  “Because I know who he is now,” I said.

  “You want what?” Wolfe laughed. “A list of every Family man hit during the past. . . what did you say, ten years?. . . Sure. I can get that for you. Only the printout wouldn’t fit in the trunk of your car.”

  I was standing in the same box I’d been in the last time I’d met with her. Only this time, besides the pistol, the man I didn’t recognize had something else—a honey-colored pit bull on a snap lead. I’d seen that pit before—she scared me more than the gun.

  Yeah, I was standing in the same place, all right. And Wolfe was showing me where I stood with her.

  “There’s that many?” I asked her.

  “It would be ‘that many’ even if you were talking just the metro area,” she said sarcastically. “New York, New Jersey, Connecticut—give me a break. And national, come on!”

  “I just thought. . .”

  “You know what?” she said, shifting her posture to a more aggressive one, dropping her voice just a fraction. “I think you’re in something way over your head. You think there’s a pattern somewhere, that’s obvious. But the database is so huge, you couldn’t find it without some serious computer. . . . Oh! You found yourself some new friends, huh?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “And I don’t know what you’re doing. But I really only came here to tell you this. We’re done, you and me. You want to know about dead mobsters, ask your pal—he put more of them in the ground than anyone else.”

  She turned and walked away. Her crew stayed in place until I did the same.

  The sheets on Strega’s bed were silk. The same color as her hair. Her body slid between gleam and shadow, mottled by the candle’s untrustworthy light.

  “Tell me the rest,” she whispered at me. “Quick, before I get hungry again.”

  “Dead guys. Assassinations,
not accidents. And they have to have been on the street when it happened, not in the joint. Murders, okay? Unsolved murders.”

  “Wesley did—”

  “Forget Wesley,” I said, harsher than I’d meant to. “Listen. I know the list would be too long. You—”

  “I’m still working on what you asked me before. You can’t get something like that in—”

  “I know. Forget that too. Come here.”

  She crawled over to me. Looked down. I shook my head. She dropped hers until her ear was against my mouth.

  “This won’t be in any computer,” I told her, speaking soft. “I could do that myself. It has to be a whisper. Dead guys. Mob guys. And they had to have been fucking their own little girls before they—”

  “Aaahhh,” she moaned, her fingernails raking my chest. I could feel the blood. She licked it off her talons, kneeling straight up now, witchfire loose and wild in her eyes.

  “Not Julio,” I told her softly. “That one’s done, remember? All done.”

  She started to cry then. I pulled her down to me, held her against my chest, rubbed her back.

  A long time passed.

  “I can find out,” she finally said, the steel back in her voice. “But you have to tell me why.”

  “You said you’d do anything for—”

  “I will do anything for you,” she hissed. “I already have. You’re in me. Forever. I would never let anyone hurt you. But if he’s doing. . . that—killing them—I don’t want to do anything that would—”

  “He’s stopped,” I said, sure it was the truth. “And he’s moved on.”

  “How do you—”

  I pulled her close to me. And, for the first time in all the years I’d known her, I told her some of my secrets.

  I spoke to the ice-man the way I always do. In my mind. If I told people that Wesley answered, they’d institutionalize me. But regular people don’t get it. We have our own language, the Children of the Secret. It’s garbled gibberish to anyone else. But that wasn’t my link to Wesley. He was my true brother. We had gene-merged in the crucible of the State system for abused and abandoned kids. Even the grave couldn’t silence him when I reached out.