Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  The old man’s voice never changed volume, but it penetrated like an icepick through cardboard.

  “The whole business—you know, when the Supreme Court cut Ali loose—that was a whore’s kiss. See, Ali, that’s a strong black man. So him fighting in Zaire, that tells the world that Mobutu is one righteous dude.”

  “You’re saying Elijah’s boys had a deal with—?”

  “I’m saying all you got to do is add and subtract, Youngblood. Who was president when the Supreme Court all of a sudden reversed that bullshit case they held over Ali for all those years? Simple trade: Ali makes Zaire all about ‘black liberation,’ and Mobutu keeps the Commies from getting a foothold in the Congo. Fucking sweet, huh?

  “And everybody kept up their end of the deal, right down the line. You know why we never made a move against all that killing in Rwanda? Because Mobutu wouldn’t have liked that—he was fucking backing it.”

  The old man leaned back, closed his eyes. “‘African unity,’ my black ass,” he snapped. “You got to ask yourself: you think Ali picked Zaire? Was he too fucking stupid to know who Mobutu was? Or did he tank for the government, just like Sonny had tanked for him?”

  “So why should I be trusting—?”

  “Now, that’s my son,” the old man said, approvingly. “About time you showed up. Sure, it’s an old, cold trail. But you got to go back down that road. There’s still freelance units working over there. Sure, most of them probably be dead, but it’s the only place where you still carry that cred.”

  “Talk about long shots . . . .”

  “What other shot we got, Schoolboy? That spook Pryce is good for the coin, and he won’t ask questions. We’re down to our last pass, and we got to be dead straight on the hard eight. If we want to know, we got to throw.”

  As Clarence re-entered his room, the Prof slipped into a backward segue so smooth it took me a few seconds to catch up.

  “Only difference between pro boxing and pro wrestling today is the costumes,” he sneered.

  “You’re saying they’re all fixed?” I played along.

  “Why fix a fight when you own both of the fighters, Schoolboy? When I was a kid, they had these carnival fighters. Usually little guys, especially compared to some of those farm boys who’d step up and try them out. Fighters like that, they knew how to do their thing in a ring.”

  “Then why didn’t they—?”

  “What? Sign up with some promoter? A carnival fighter, that was a man. A free man, get it? He might never get to wear no plastic belt, but he made a living with his skills. Fed his family, and didn’t have to kiss ass to do it.”

  “I guess that’s gone now,” I said, more to keep the Prof rolling than anything else.

  “That last part never be gone, son.”

  “I was talking about—”

  “You think they don’t have carnival fighters no more? Hah! You know better than that. You was taught better than that.”

  “You never said anything about—”

  “Where’s the truth?” the old man demanded. “Where you always go to look for it?”

  “Ground up,” Clarence and I answered as one.

  The old man beamed. “Yeah, you my boys, all right. My own boys. Someday”—he paused to look directly at Clarence—“your boys gonna learn from you. The flame never goes out. Nothing changes; it just burns different. Truth stays truth. If it ain’t a lie, it can’t never die.”

  “So where are the carnival fighters?” I challenged him, knowing I’d lose, wanting his younger son to see that happen.

  “You ever hear of Reggie Strickland?” the old man asked, a triumphant grin on his face.

  “No. Who’s—”

  “Reggie is your modern-day carnival fighter, Schoolboy. You know how some clowns get a title shot after a dozen fights? That’s not behind their skills, that’s behind their management. You got more undefeated boxers out there now than there used to be boxers. How’s a thing like that happen?”

  “They put them in against stiffs.”

  “Sometimes,” the old man conceded. “But how long can one of those tomato cans last, doing that? Reggie, he’s been fighting more than twenty years. Over four hundred professional fights. Started out as a forty-pounder, and now he goes against middleweights, light-heavies, cruisers—anybody you pay him to fight, get it?”

  “How could anyone have that many—?”

  “You know these nicknames some fighters got, make you think they got a gorilla for a father and a tiger for a mother? Not Reggie. He about business, okay? For what he does, you don’t need no nickname, you need an alias. Way I hear it, he fights under half a dozen different names. There was even word going around that he fought on the same card twice in one night.”

  “Damn.”

  “That’s right. Reggie, he’s a professional record-builder. Your fighter needs a win, Reggie’s your man. But you not asking the right question, boy. How’s a man stay on the road, go wherever the bus stops, climb off, work a few rounds, get back on the bus . . . and keep doing it for so many years?”

  “I . . . don’t know,” I said, honestly. “What’s he do, flop in the first round every time?”

  “Reggie?” The old man drew back his head, clearly insulted. “My man’s won more fights than most fighters ever have. Even for those Mexican kids they let turn pro when they’re only fifteen, fifty-sixty fights is a long career. Reggie’s no tanker, he’s a boxer. You put him in some four-rounder in your boy’s hometown, you gonna get the decision. Build that record. But that’s all you’re gonna get. See, you can beat Reggie, but you not gonna hurt him.

  “Man’s got to be past forty, fighting kids half his age and twice his size, and they still can’t do nothing with him. Reggie losing, I don’t know, maybe three hundred fights, that’s just like the carnival fighter who lets the farm boy fire those haymakers that never really land, see? He knows how to smother a man’s punches, make sure the local wins the prize for lasting the whole round with the pro, sends the crowd home happy.

  “It’s not about Reggie being a tough guy. You know what happens when a fighter catches too many to the head. Sooner or later, it hurts you just to listen to him talk. Reggie, he got skills.”

  “Has to have,” I admitted.

  “You just got to know where to look,” our father admonished both his sons. “And keep looking until you find it.”

  “If it’s there,” I said.

  “Only one way you get to say.” The old man shifted his head to take us both into his thousand-fathom eyes. “You want to be sure there’s no mouse in a house, you need to spend a few nights there yourself. And leave some cheese out, too.”

  Border-crossing isn’t what it used to be. But Homeland Security never was what it was supposed to be.

  All it took was a quick conversation over a sat-phone, ending with a PIN number that would disgorge bank-certified cash from a certain ATM. The one we used had security cameras that were easier to grease than a poultry inspector. Less than forty-eight hours after my call, I touched down in Geneva.

  The hotel was still there. Same name, same spot. Only now it was part of an international chain. You never have to worry about some Historical Preservation Society interfering in a country where the most treasured tradition is treasure.

  Looking around the lobby, I didn’t see anything I remembered. But I wasn’t looking for memories.

  The last time I’d been there, it had been an all-cash experience. This time, my suite had been direct-billed to an import-export company. That company was as phony as my passport, but it was flush with some of the absolutely real money Pryce had handed over in that gym bag.

  I wasn’t worried about the hotel running any serious check on my personal paperwork, but I knew the credit card would have already been vetted like a candidate for bank president.

  I was booked in for eight days. I had to move fast and walk slow. Like being back Inside.

  Dinner didn’t give me any hints. The only way to tell the weal
thy vacationers from the arms dealers was the age gap between them and their female companions. And even that was a guess. All the servers were too young for me to even think about asking them my question.

  Access to the hotel’s personnel records was about as likely as the chef allowing me to take over the kitchen for the evening.

  The concierge was everything you’d expect in such a joint—he knew all the answers, including the ones he couldn’t give out.

  In a spy novel, I’d charm some luscious chambermaid into bed. Her best pal would be a girl who worked in the pension department. A few hours of expertly inducing full-body orgasms, and I’d have all my answers.

  Me, I went for a walk. At least the damn river still looked the same.

  The little shop where I’d gone after I’d been taught to say, “Avez-vous des livres anglais?” was still there . . . but it wasn’t a bookstore anymore.

  The man who’d taught me that phrase was who I was looking for. Norbert had been a junior concierge when I’d come to this same hotel, eons ago. He was only a few years older than me, but a century ahead in experience.

  I’m not sure what tipped him, but the possibilities were endless: my clothes weren’t right; I couldn’t speak French or German, never mind Russian or Chinese; I didn’t know “steak tartare” meant raw meat. And the only time I’d seen the inside of a prep school had been during a burglary.

  After I’d waited a couple of days, Norbert came over to where I was sitting in the lobby. I was smoking the last of the Dunhills I’d picked up in England, figuring they’d give me some class.

  He asked me if he could be of any assistance, phrasing it so I’d know he wasn’t putting me down. I told him I was just waiting for some friends—we’d all arranged to meet in Geneva before taking off to go skiing.

  Norbert smiled thinly. Then he asked me if I had ever seen the Rhone at night. It was a unique spectacle, not something I’d want to miss. And there were benches just a short walk from the hotel’s door.

  He was there when I arrived. I’d seen plenty of men sitting on benches in my life, but this was the first time I saw one do it elegantly.

  I knew I was in the kind of jungle where I couldn’t tell the parrots from the piranhas, but something in Norbert pulled me hard, and I ended up telling him as much of the truth as I could.

  “Biafra?” he said when I finished, making the word into a question.

  “Yeah,” I repeated.

  “All those children.”

  I just waited for the rest.

  “You are a very brave man” was what he said.

  I didn’t feel brave; I felt worthless. That’s the core truth of why I had grabbed at the chance to be a hero, and get paid big money, too. I knew at least some of what the men in suits had told me was the truth. A whole nation was being exterminated while the world watched. So sad. Enough to make you change channels.

  When the Nigerians got the money they needed from the countries that wanted their oil, they stepped up the slaughter. The generals bought a lot of new toys, from surplus fighter jets—and Egyptian pilots—to missiles, bombs, and river-killing poisons. By then, they had the Biafrans completely landlocked, like they were all trapped in the same cellar. The only exit led to a tornado of bullets and bombs . . . or they could just stay in there and starve to death, if they didn’t suffocate first.

  At first, the world got to see it happening. But after the Nigerians turned up the heat, the reports stopped coming. The journalists were the last to go—once all the communication links were cut, they couldn’t file their stories. When the “war” turned into an extermination project, it stopped being televised. For the first time in history, a Red Cross plane was shot down.

  The outcome was never in doubt, just the timetable. The only way to get food into what was left of Biafra was to fly unarmed cargo planes, taking off every night from São Tomé. If they got past the attacking jets, a radio signal would direct them to “Uli Airport,” a dirt strip in the jungle lit only by flares. They had thirty seconds to get down before the flares went out. Then only a few minutes to unload and get back up—the flares always drew fire.

  The world’s heartstrings had almost snapped from the earlier images, and money flowed in to anyone collecting it. Some of that actually got turned into food, but most of that food was rotting in warehouses. You couldn’t get anything humans needed to survive past the blockade, only over it. And even the few planes that made it didn’t have the cargo capacity to make any real difference.

  So when men in suits approached a State-raised kid who’d just been released from his first adult prison sentence, I was so dumb and so desperate that I never questioned why they would pick someone like me for such an important mission.

  All I could think of was, When I come back, I’ll be a different man. In their eyes, and my own, too. I wouldn’t be a kid who’d spent his life never being wanted by anyone except the police. I’d be the hero who helped save all those starving kids. And have some legit money in my pocket, too.

  My assignment was to find an overland route into the landlocked area. The men in suits said they could convoy food and supplies through Cameroon—they called it an “open market” area, a place where cash solves all problems. The supplies themselves were stockpiled in Gabon, the next country over. That one was a “friendly,” one of the few countries that actually recognized Biafra.

  The way they explained it to me, I was perfect for the job. They told me to picture Biafra as one of those juvie joints I’d grown up in. My job was to escape . . . and leave trail markers behind. All I had to do was get over the border into Cameroon. They told me what names to say as soon as I made it across.

  Those convoys in Gabon were all ready to roll on through. They just needed to know a spot where it was safe to slip into Biafra.

  And, me, I would have helped save all those babies.

  Me.

  When you’ve got no one to trust, you end up trusting anyone. If I’d been anything other than a born-to-lose kid with nothing in his future but more time behind bars, if I’d had anyone I could talk to, if I’d . . .

  It doesn’t matter now. I took the “assignment.”

  I must have believed what they told me. Or wanted to so badly that it didn’t make a difference. Because, when I explained my “mission” to Norbert, his dry blue eyes teared up.

  The very next morning, people came to visit me at the hotel. One of them brought a bunch of official-looking papers. “The Swiss love their documents,” Norbert told me, tonelessly.

  Next stop, Lisbon. More exchanges, and I was on my way to Angola.

  After that, it got ugly. Biafra fell. Maybe a million dead. Later, I found out that the people who sent me actually got what they wanted. No surprise: they were used to getting what they paid for. Maybe that’s how my name first surfaced in Pryce’s parallel universe; I’ll never know.

  What I do know is that I never got to be a hero. I was just a thing they used. I guess those men in suits were my guidance counselors, because they sure picked my career for me.

  I learned a lot during that career, most of it by watching. And listening. What I don’t know would fill a galaxy. But what I do know, I know better than any of them.

  Patience. Waiting. Being sure. Every time I’d been wrong about someone, I’d go back and figure out what I’d missed. One time, it took years. But I had plenty of time to think during that stretch.

  Now I know. Humans who could flat-line a polygraph wouldn’t get past the first round with me. All it takes is a few minutes of conversation, and I know you. Not because I have X-ray eyes. Not because I have powers. Because, whoever you are, I’ve met you before.

  Baby-rapers don’t “age out” the way armed robbers do. Deep truth doesn’t change. If Norbert was still alive, he’d know how to find people who could put together an operation like snatching a baby from a sheikh.

  And I knew, somehow, that if I asked him, he’d do it.

  I wasted one more day of my second visi
t to Geneva before I accepted what I should have known from the opening bell. All I’d ever had was a puncher’s chance, and I couldn’t keep waiting for the other guy to come to me.

  So I unpacked the stupid-expensive outfit Michelle had separately stored in my luggage, remembering her warning that it wouldn’t “work” if I left out any single piece. Then I called, asked for the manager, and politely inquired if I might have a few moments of his time. His assistant asked if noon would be satisfactory.

  I shaved, showered, and dressed. Then I sat in my corner and waited for the bell.

  “I have not visited your hotel for a long time,” I told the short, round-faced Eurasian man. We were in the private sitting room reserved for consultations with guests—guests who had booked suites big enough to hold revival meetings.

  He raised his perfectly sculpted eyebrows a quarter-millimeter.

  “I was a guest in 1969,” I said, smiling nostalgically. “A lifetime ago, it seems. I was a young man, doing what my parents thought of as the ‘Grand Tour.’”

  I didn’t think the guest register from 1969 would be preserved on some damn computer he could instantly access, but I was prepared to explain the name change, if those eyebrows of his moved again.

  “Anyway,” I continued, “I really was very naïve, about so many things. And I believe I learned more during my stay here than I did from any educational institution, before or since.”

  “We are honored,” he said. His body posture was expectant, not anxious.

  “My father started a coin collection for me when I was born. Not simple currency like this,” I said, placing a ten-coin clear plastic cylinder of Canadian Maple Leafs on the coffee table, a thick slab of pure-white marble with an orange sunburst inlaid in its center, “but true numismatic gems.”

  I put another cylinder on the table, unscrewed the top, dropped a coin into my hand, and hockey-pucked it across the marble with my finger. “Gold coins are quite good for some transactions, especially in places where the local currency is . . . unstable. But,” I continued, taking out a third cylinder, “I was only looking for rarities, hoping to find something special to show my father when I returned.”