Safe House b-10

by Andrew Vachss

  “What was the choice?”

  “For the . . . for the network, for Crystal, I don’t know. For the women, I don’t know. For me, I know. The rest of them, it was to protect their . . . lives, or their children. Or something important. Me, it was to protect my spoiled little ass. My . . . money.”

  “And now you feel guilty?”

  “You’re a miserable person to talk to me like that,” she said bitterly.

  “I’m not downing you, Vyra. It’s way too late for petty bullshit like that. Herk said I misjudged you. Maybe I did. I never got to know you, and—”

  “—now you never will,” she finished for me.

  “No, I never will,” I agreed. “And if that’s my loss, I’ll have to carry it.”

  “I never got to know you either.”

  “That was no loss,” I promised her.

  “Oh God, I wish he’d call,” she said softly.

  Vyra finally agreed to go take a nap after I swore I’d wake her as soon as her phone rang. But it was my cellular that buzzed first.

  “Have your lawyer go to the Southern District tomorrow, first call. Tell him to go to the fourth floor and just wait. Tell him to wear a carnation in his lapel.”

  “What color?”

  “This time of year? He’ll be the only one wearing a flower, don’t worry. Tell him to just wait. Somebody will come and get him.”

  “And make the deal?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sure there’s anybody to make a deal for?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. And hung up.

  The buzzing of the cell phone had woken Vyra, and now she wouldn’t go back to sleep.

  “He’s so different,” she said. “I never met a man . . . I never met anyone like him.”

  “Yeah, Herk’s one of a kind, all right.”

  “You don’t understand a word of what I’m saying, do you?” she said sadly. “He told me about his life. His whole life. From when he was a little boy. You never told me anything like that. I’ve known you for years . . . and you’re a stranger to me. And he asked me about my life too. You never did that. Burke,” she giggled, “you know what he said?”

  “How would I—”

  “He asked me about growing up. What it was like for me. I told him I was a JAP. You know what he said? He said: ‘I thought you was a Jew.’ Can you believe it?”

  “From Herk? Sure.”

  “You don’t get it,” she said, peat-moss eyes alive in her made-up face. “Okay, he didn’t know what ‘JAP’ means. So what? Where he was raised, he’d never heard the term. But the thing is, it didn’t make any difference to him. It’s me he likes. Not my money. Not just my . . . tits,” she said, flicking her hand against her breasts like she was dismissing them.

  When she started to cry, I told her a shower might make her feel better. Naturally, she argued, but I made the same promise I had when she took her nap, and she finally went along.

  When the hotel phone rang, I hit the bathroom on the first ring. I pulled the shower curtain away, held my fist to my ear like it was a telephone. Vyra leaped out of the shower covered in suds, hair wet, a loofah in one hand. She ran to the phone, snatched it up.

  “Hello.”

  She held the phone slightly away from her ear so I could listen, but I didn’t move . . . just in case.

  “Ah, you promised, honey,” she cooed into the receiver. Then she listened for a minute before she said: “All right, baby. Whatever you say. You’re the boss. I’ll wait for you, okay?”

  Whatever he said in return was real short. Vyra whispered, “I love you, Hercules,” and hung up.

  Then she started to cry, hands over her face. I stepped to her, gently held her shoulders, standing at arm’s length to keep her breasts off my chest. “What?” I asked her.

  “He’s all right. He’s all right,” she sobbed.

  “So why are you crying?”

  “Because I’m happy, you moron!”

  “What did he say?”

  Vyra walked over to the bed and sat down, oblivious to the instant puddle she created.

  “He said he couldn’t keep our date. For tonight. He told me I was his bitch, and he’d come when he could. And to shut up and do what he told me,” she said, a sunburst smile turning her little face lovely like I’d never seen it in all the years I’d known her.

  I went down to my own room in the hotel and called Davidson, gave him the word.

  “Wear a carnation?” he squawked. “Jesus, are these guys for real?”

  “Oh yeah,” I told him. “No question.”

  “Then consider it done,” he said. “Give me a call tomorrow night. Anytime after six.”

  “You heard from the Prof?” I asked Mama.

  “Right here,” she said. “You come now, okay?”

  “I’m rolling,” I told her.

  It wasn’t just the Prof at the restaurant. Clarence was there too. And Max. And Michelle.

  “What’s all this?” I asked them.

  “Grab a pew, Schoolboy,” the Prof said. “We need to sound what’s going down.”

  “With . . . ?”

  “With that fool Hercules. And you.”

  I sat down. Had some soup while the others waited, their faces masks of patience. Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough for them to try and take on Mama.

  Then I told them. Everything.

  “You capped a guy? In front of a fed?” the Prof asked, an angry-puzzled look on his face.

  “I don’t think he’s a fed,” I said. “Not like any fed I ever heard of, anyway. Wolfe says he’s an outlaw. Me, I don’t know. He got stuff done. . . . I don’t know how a free-lancer could pull that kind of weight.”

  “I fucking knew it,” the little man said. “This was a hoo-doo from the get-go. I thought you was done with guns, son.”

  “I am. Or I was. I . . . There was no other way to do it, Prof. Without the immunity, Herk was just a piece of Kleenex to this guy Pryce. Use him and throw him away, right?”

  “Why didn’t we get together, figure something out?” he wanted to know.

  “This one’s mine,” I told him. “Herk was with us Inside, but it’s me who owes him. Then the whole thing with Crystal Beth’s safehouse. And the women . . . I wasn’t gonna drag everyone else in it with me.”

  “I don’t feel a thing for most of them,” Michelle piped up, dismissing all the women under Crystal Beth’s protection in one fell swoop. “They don’t protect their babies, they’re not real women in my book. They’re stupid or they’re cowards, makes no difference to me. Some of them would go on a date with Ted Bundy and leave John Wayne Gacy to babysit the kids.”

  She drew a deep breath, steadying herself. “But this isn’t about them. What’s wrong with you, baby? Okay, you made a mess. Got yourself in a jackpot. It’s not the first time. Not the first time for any of us. You know how to work my boy, don’t you? Say ‘Nazi’ to the Mole, and he’s in. And Clarence got you . . . what you needed for that job, right? You’ve kept us all on the edges, and it’s not right.”

  “You said it yourself, Prof,” I reminded him, looking for backup. “About Clarence.”

  “That was before—”

  “It wouldn’t be right to bring Clarence in, that’s what you said. And you,” I said, turning to Michelle, “you’re right. . . . I did look for help, okay? But I never brought anyone right down next to it. This could blow up, honey. And you wouldn’t like prison.”

  “Don’t you even think about patronizing me,” she snarled. “I was Inside too. When I was just a girl. Before I had the . . . before I became myself. You try doing time in a men’s prison when you’re a woman. I stood up there, I can stand up now.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I—”

  Max reached across and tapped me on the chest. It felt like the wrong end of a crowbar. He pointed at me. Made the sign of fists holding prison bars. Then he pointed at himself. And made one of the signs we use for the Mole, open-circled fists held up to the
eyes to mime the Mole’s Coke-bottle glasses. He bowed his head. Reminding me of that time we’d gotten trapped in a subway tunnel trying to sell a load of hijacked heroin back to the mob. We’d been ratted out, and the tunnel was full of police. I’d held them at bay with a pulled-pin grenade while everyone else made it out the other end. Reminding me of his debt.

  “If we don’t know, we can’t show,” the Prof told me, eyes locked on mine. “This ain’t the usual choice. It ain’t between bail or jail. We want to do right now, we got to play live-or-die—only a punk plays for the tie.”

  “I am with my father,” Clarence said, his hand on the Prof’s shoulder. “Always.”

  “It’s a done deal,” Davidson told me on the phone. “Can you come in, let me show it to you?”

  And pay you the rest of your money, I thought.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “They tried to fold some interlocking contingencies into the mix,” Davidson told me in lawyer-speak.

  “Meaning?”

  “He gets immunity. But in order to get the new ID and everything, he has to come in.”

  “So?”

  “So now we have two separate instruments,” he said, smiling. “If your . . . friend decides not to come in at all, he won’t have the new ID, he won’t be in the Witness Protection Program, he won’t get the plastic surgery or anything. But he’ll still have the immunity. And even if he’s dropped for anything subsequent—he’s covered for the entire period past.”

  “What period?”

  “Your friend has been a government agent—not an informant, Burke, a government agent, on the payroll—for almost six months. Well prior to the period when the . . . incident occurred.”

  “I never heard of—”

  “Happens all the time,” Davidson assured me. “The FBI had a man inside the Klan car that killed one of the Freedom Riders. They had men inside the Panthers too. And just about everyplace else. People like that have to have ongoing immunity, risky as that is, otherwise they’d reveal themselves by refusing to participate in . . . whatever.”

  “And there’s no ‘truthful-testimony’ stuff in the deal?”

  “No testimony at all. Not even a debriefing.”

  “Does he have a control?”

  “That’s this Pryce individual.”

  “You meet him?”

  “I don’t know. The AUSA identified himself. And there was a woman from ATF. A man from the FBI. Big Irish guy, good-looking—I’ve seen him around before. A Treasury guy too. But there were a couple of other people in the room that never spoke. And I couldn’t see their faces—they were back out of the light.”

  “Sounds pretty intense,” I said, sliding the rest of Davidson’s money across the desk in a plain white envelope.

  “I’ve been in worse,” he replied. “This time, at least, I was representing one of the good guys.”

  Three days later . . .

  “They said he was a hero,” Hercules told me, sitting in the bedroom of Vyra’s suite. The king-sized bed was wrecked. The room smelled of just-done sex. The shower was running, with Vyra inside it. “He died for the race.”

  “When did they find out?”

  “It was on the news. Before the meeting, even. The way they figured it, he went after his wife. When the cops showed, he took himself out so’s he wouldn’t crack under torture.”

  “Torture?”

  “Oh yeah, man. They said ZOG has got these brain things they put on your head. And chemicals they can inject you with, make you give up your own mother. So Lothar, he knew this. And he protected the race.”

  “They sound like a crew of real paranoids.”

  “Paranoid? You don’t know nothin’ about paranoid, brother. You should hear them. Always talking about black helicopters and shortwave intercepts and remote telemetric surveillance and a whole bunch of other crap I don’t even listen to anymore. Jesus.”

  “They didn’t say anything to you about Lothar?”

  “To me? Nah. They was too busy talking to themselves. I just went along.”

  “You believe they bought the story?”

  “I’m here, ain’t I? Besides, Lothar told them he was gonna do somethin’ like that anyway, someday. He had plans for that cunt, that’s what he kept telling ’em. So they wasn’t surprised. Maybe a little at him killing himself and all, but not even that much.”

  “Paranoid as they are, they didn’t panic?”

  “Well, not really. But we all had to stay together for a couple of days. At least that’s the way it ended up. They said they couldn’t be sure Lothar didn’t have something on him that would trace back to us, so some of them wanted to split up. But the others wanted to stay. I dunno if it was ’cause they was scared to be alone or they wanted to watch everyone or what. But Scott said we had to hang tough. Nobody went out. They got enough stuff in the basement there, you could live for years, man. All kindsa dried food and water in bottles. And guns . . . man, they got boxes of fucking guns.”

  “What did you do, all that time?”

  “Watched TV. Worked out. Listened to them going on about the race.”

  “They say anything about their plans? Or a date?”

  “April thirtieth. That’s the one they was gonna use. You know that’s the day Hitler killed himself in his bunker? To keep from being taken alive. Just like Lothar, that’s what they said.”

  “April thirtieth. That’s still a long—”

  “Not no more,” Hercules interrupted me. “See, everyone don’t have the date. I mean, there is no date, like.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “The cells. They ain’t in touch. With each other. Soon as one starts, the others go right behind them. But it’s this one—this cell—that gets to start. And they want to get on with it now.”

  “You know when?”

  “They ain’t decided yet. But I know the place they’re gonna hit. Twenty-six Federal Plaza.”

  “Federal Plaza? On lower Broadway?”

  “That’s the one. It’s perfect, bro. You know what’s in there? The FBI. IRS. And Immigration too. Everything they hate. All in one place. And it’s only a block away from the federal court too.”

  “That building’s a monster. They’d never get a truck close enough to—”

  “Bullshit,” Herk cut in. “It ain’t that tight. They showed me—it was in the papers—this fucking loon got on the goddamn roof there. Said he was going to off himself, take the dive. People standing around on the ground, yelling up at him to jump and all. You can’t get into the underground garage, the way they did at the World Trade Center, but you know what? You can park cars all around the place. On Broadway, on Worth, on Lafayette, and on Duane. They ain’t gonna use no dumbass rental truck, like Oklahoma City. They bought the stuff. A lot of stuff. For years, they been buying the stuff, just waiting. Got legit plates for the rigs and all. There’s seven of us. That’s more than enough.”

  “You’re getting to be a real pro at this terrorism stuff, huh?”

  “Oh man, it’s just jive-talk. You know, like in the joint—we call things different names than they do out in the World. This Federal Plaza goes up, we don’t need no communications—the media’ll do it for us, that’s what they said. Soon as it’s on the news, the other cells take the word. And it all goes up. You know what else? They said all kindsa stuff is going up just from copycats. Like with the nigger churches.”

  “What are you talking about, Herk?”

  “Ah, I didn’t mean it, man. I been down with them, I talk like them. You know how I feel about the Prof. I wouldn’t never—”

  “Not about words, Herk. The churches. What about them?”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, the way they explained it, see, they used to firebomb colored churches. In the South, right? A long time ago. To stop the spooks from voting and all. Okay, so, like, it’s started again, right? You see churches going up all over the place. Only it ain’t just the Klan and all. It’s, like, everyone. Motherfuckers see it on the
TV, they want to do it too. You got kids painting swastikas—like I got,” he said, tapping his chest—“all over the place. And they ain’t Nazis or nothing. Some of them, they’re, like, mud people themselves. You know, Pakis and Koreans and all. They don’t know nothin’ about the Jews, they just follow the pack. Go along. That’s what’s happening with the churches, that’s what the guys say. You know what? They even got colored guys burning down colored churches. So when we blow the building, it ain’t just the other cells gonna do it, man. Everybody’s gonna be jumping on.”

  “Fuck! And they have everything they need already?”

  “Sure. They was pulling jobs. Bank jobs. And armored cars. Before I got there. To raise money for all the stuff they got. That came up, once.”

  “Huh?”

  “That I was the only one who hadn’t . . . I mean, even Lothar, he went along on a couple of the jobs. I was the only one who didn’t do none of the robberies.”

  “So what happened?” I asked him, suppressing my frustration at the big man rambling through a mine field.

  “Well, this guy, Kenny, he tried to like get in my face, you know? It’d never happen Inside, a punk motherfucker like that trying to aggress me. But I guess maybe he felt safe, I dunno. Anyway, you not allowed to ask anyone what they did—in their own cells, I mean, that’s the rules—but he asked me if I knew what it felt like to stick a gun in a Jew banker’s face and take his precious money.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And I asked him if he knew what it felt like to stab a motherfucking Jew in the heart and stand there and watch him die.” He laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “These guys better not go Inside, bro. At least, not this Kenny punk. I wanted it, he woulda given me his ass right then.”

  “Yeah. Okay. But you don’t have the date, right?”

  “I’m telling you, Burke. Nobody got the date. I ain’t no genius, but I got this much figured out. Once they got the date, ain’t nobody leaving. We’re all gonna go together. In separate cars. Then we go to the scatter plan.”