Another Life

by Andrew Vachss

  If I could land one, I knew I could end it. But to do that, I had to keep my moves razor-honed. Play the role, and play it perfect.

  I couldn’t think it; I had to be it.

  As the plane touched down, so did I. I’d gone to Phoenix with questions, and I’d come back with answers.

  Some answers.

  But, like Dryslan had reminded me, there’s some I’ll never know.

  “What difference would that make?”

  “You already know,” I told Pryce. “This has to be one-on-one.”

  “What if I could get you a simultaneous translator?” he countered. “Just like in the UN. You each put on headphones, it’s like you’re talking to each other in the same language.”

  “No.”

  “Because I told you she speaks English, or because you don’t want me to have access to—?”

  “I’ve got no choice about that,” I said, “so what’s your problem? I need your people to make it happen. No matter how you get your part done, you’re going to set up a way for you to listen in.”

  “Couldn’t you—?”

  “No,” I cut him off, trying to get past the reflexive bargaining his kind always tries. “And I’m not putting any of my people in this, understand? Not to convince her, not to set up a meet, not to snatch her, not . . . nothing. That part’s yours. We’re not playing find-the-middle here. Say yes or say no.”

  “Why can’t your—?”

  “I don’t have a crystal ball. If she turns the wrong way, I have to be the only one she gets to turn on.”

  He tried a bored-scornful face, watching mine. Finally said: “What makes you think she even knows anything? You think she hasn’t already been debriefed?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if they went fucking total Guantánamo on her. But if I’m right, anything they did—anything they know how to do—they’d be wasting their time.”

  “But you, you’ve got some magic you think will work?”

  “You think so, too,” I slapped away his tsetse fly sarcasm. “If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here.”

  He tapped his fingertips lightly on the countertop. “You know I work alone.”

  Nice try. “I know you don’t have partners,” I said. “That’s not the same thing.”

  “What’re the odds?”

  “If I’m right, you’re a mortal lock for hero status. And whatever goes along with that.”

  “And if you’re not?”

  “Then the only way you stay out of a grave is to put me in one. And even if you managed that, you could end up in the plot next to me.” I laid it out, straight. “If I can’t pull this off, the best we can hope for is a lot of fires that have to be put out. And you’d better pray that the people who hired you think you’re the only one with a big enough hose to do it.”

  “Sounds like a pass to me,” he said, hedging.

  “Is that right? I don’t have to call to see your hand this time, Pryce. I know what you’re holding—you’ve been drawing dead since the flop. So you can either try and double-talk your bosses, or you can open the door for me. There’s no option three.”

  I watched his eyes. Saw something I’d never seen on any of his faces before. Indecision.

  “I know I can make it happen,” I took one last try. “But I need a way in to do it.”

  “Do it for her? Or to her?”

  “That’s yours; I already said that. You get me that one-on-one with her. Then it’s all on me.”

  “You’re that confident?”

  “I’ve got one card to play,” I told him, sending out the truth, hoping he could pick it up. “That card is me—and I’m the only one who can play it.”

  “You know what happens if you’re wrong.”

  “That doesn’t change anything. Can’t change anything. Like I said, I don’t know what you’re ready to bet, but I put down everything I had the minute I asked you to set up the meet with her, didn’t I? And that was my choice. I could have just fan-danced my way through some ‘investigation,’ told you I struck out, and walked away.”

  “Then why didn’t you just let it play itself out?” he asked, narrowing his eyes. “You already got paid. And not half in front, either—you’ve already collected it all. So what’s in this for you?”

  “You’re not the one I have to answer that question for,” I told him.

  I worked hard the next few days. Supposedly to practice, get my timing right. Focus, concentration, one-strike finishers. I never left the dojo, except for meals with Max’s family.

  I might have fooled Flower, but Immaculata knew why I’d moved in. I saw it as she watched me say goodbye to her daughter, even though that word never passed my lips.

  Flower gave me the same kiss she’d been giving her uncle Burke since she hit her teens, standing on her toes and reaching her hand into my outside jacket pocket for the “secret” money she knew would be there.

  Immaculata kissed me, too. Said something in that French-Vietnamese language I didn’t have to translate to understand.

  Max and I tried a formal bow. It didn’t work for either of us.

  “I must—”

  “Only me, brother,” I told Clarence, turning to our father for confirmation.

  “Ain’t none of us can be around when this one goes down,” the old man agreed. “The boss even smells a cross, he’s gonna nuke the whole juke.” He looked at me carefully. “You skydiving on a real old parachute, son.”

  “At least this time I bought my own ticket,” I told him.

  The old man squeezed my forearm. “You ain’t gonna miss the wedding, Schoolboy. Ain’t no place you end up that I can’t go and fetch you back.”

  “This is it?”

  “You expected something more . . . elaborate?” the Mole answered.

  “I guess I did,” I told him, fingering a short length of inch-thick stuff that looked as if it came off a roll of insulating material. Only this wasn’t rough fiberglass; it was putty-colored, and smooth as a top-class escort’s legs.

  “It has to withstand moisture for as long as several days. And it must remain in place, too,” the Mole said, as if that explained anything.

  “But it’ll definitely—?”

  “Or more, depending on how close it can be placed,” the man with the cottage-cheese complexion promised. His denim eyes were magnified by the Coke-bottle lenses, as unreadable as ever.

  When we came upstairs, we told Michelle and Terry. Not everything, just enough. Despite what the Prof had said, once they found out the Mole was going to walk with me, I had to give them each some part to play.

  There are places in this city where you can buy any uniform you might want. Not a copy, the real thing. Cop, firefighter, sanitation, you name it. Even federal: FBI, DEA, ATF, whatever. Badges and insignia, too. But I couldn’t use any of those places—they all have authentic telephones, too.

  “This is just a generic jumpsuit,” Michelle said, after examining the photos I showed her. “There has to be a better image I can work from.”

  “I don’t need to leave the computer to do that,” Terry said, going to work.

  “You are ruining those shoes,” she snapped at the Mole. He was meticulously replacing the steel shanks in her strappy spike heels with an exact match made of something else. Since his craftsmanship was far superior to the original, everyone in the room translated Michelle’s bitching to: “You have to buy me another pair.”

  Mole smiled at that one. He knew his woman. Knew she was really saying, “You’ll be back.”

  The subway is closer to the sidewalk, but we had to start down in the sewer system. And stay down there until we found the access point.

  We plodded along, miner’s lamps blazing on our yellow hardhats. Anyone we ran into down there wouldn’t expect EPA workers to be moving around in the dark without them. The oxygen masks we wore over our faces wouldn’t look out of place, either.

  And nobody who saw us carrying orange equipment packs with T O X I C stenciled across th
e back was going to try and start up a conversation.

  We didn’t run across any alligators. I don’t know if those old urban legends ever had any truth in them, but it didn’t matter. There isn’t an alligator on earth who’d stand a chance against the mutated rats that owned this part of the city.

  In fact, it was those same rats who showed me how we could pull this off. When that video of them invading a fast-food restaurant had aired on every TV station in town a while back, I’d filed away some vital information—rats don’t have food preferences. This city is rotting from the bottom up, the barriers between the underground and the street getting weaker every day. That fast-food joint had just been sitting over a thin spot. Since the same restaurant had been given a passing grade by the “health inspector” the day before, the media went berserk.

  The City Council immediately responded with the perfect solution—they shut down the restaurant. I guess they figured those rats had been strolling down the street like those hapless foodies whose idea of a “date” is checking sidewalk-window restaurant menus. One rat says to the other, “This one looks interesting,” and it’s game on. Yeah, right.

  The same tracks run beneath penthouses and slums. If you think your building’s basement is rat-proof just because you pay a few grand a month for a one-bedroom, change your meds.

  I kept my stride as unvarying as possible, checking the pedometer strapped to my ankle. The Mole had some kind of sonic probe with him, too, but we still followed the plastic-coated map I carried, brightly colored arrows marking our route.

  We both stopped in the same spot. The Mole nodded his okay. His method of calculating distance was light-years ahead of mine, but he was a scientist in his soul, and he never ran an experiment without a control.

  The subway station at Sixty-third and Lex had never actually opened for business, but the tunnels were still operational. So was the “Authorized Personnel Only” elevator.

  I guess they thought the sign was security enough. Why bother locking the door to an abandoned house?

  The elevator took us to just below the sidewalk, where we rechecked the maps. We’d ended up so close to our target point that finding the exact spot only took another minute.

  I unfolded the collapsible aluminum ladder so that it formed a horizontal platform between the two sets of rungs. Standing, we each had plenty of room to reach up and work.

  My watch glowed 12:09. Plenty of lunch-hour foot traffic would be right above us, perfect cover for Michelle. We had told her twelve-fifteen.

  She was early. We couldn’t hear the tap of her heels on the sidewalk above us, but the Mole’s meter went from pale green to bright red, held for a second or two, then back to green.

  When the meter repeated the message, he nodded and we unfurled the putty-colored stuff, carefully peeling off the self-stick backing. Then we patted it into place, neither of us being gentle about it.

  Once satisfied it would hold, the Mole took what looked like four spikes from his kit, handed me two of them. We pulled the cork off the tips, then pushed them in deep. One went into each of the short sides of the rectangular blanket, the other two into the center.

  We climbed down. The Mole used his flash to check one more time. Then I folded up the ladder and looped it over my shoulder. The Mole signaled “go back” with a gloved finger.

  The only company we had along the way was the occasional rat. Some of them were ready to take on moving food, but we were too big, walking too steadily, and didn’t smell like prey. The Mole never had to use the spray-hose connected to whatever he had loaded in that oxygen tank.

  By the time we were halfway back, we’d negotiated a treaty with the rats. Everybody survives; nobody talks.

  While the uniforms were being incinerated—including the gloves and boots and hooded bodysuits we’d worn under them—the Mole and I took a shower with military-grade disinfectant. The biggest danger lurking in prison today isn’t AIDS, it’s hep-C . . . and what we just walked through would probably kill diphtheria on contact.

  “That’s a lot of steel and concrete, brother,” I said.

  “The signal won’t be traveling the same route.”

  “But it’ll still set off the—?”

  “Yes,” the underground man said. “And my son will be nowhere near.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know,” he said, kindly.

  A Mercedes S600 long-wheelbase sedan with diplomatic plates pulled up outside a très-elite salon. An alert man slid out of the back seat, followed by a slender woman in a simple blue dress and matching pumps. The man didn’t offer her his hand, never made physical contact of any kind.

  They waited on the sidewalk until a third man emerged, from the front passenger side. Same height as the first, but bulkier in build.

  The black Benz pulled off immediately. Smart move. The woman’s standing appointment was for three hours, so waiting at the curb was out of the question. Cops in that precinct hated limo drivers on general principles, and Arab diplomats already owed the city millions in unpaid parking fines.

  The two men bracketed the woman as they walked her to the door. Not bodyguards; body-guarders.

  The bulky one opened the door. The woman stepped inside. The second armed servant followed. We knew who they served.

  “Princess Aabidah!” the exotic-looking ornament at the front desk trilled.

  Within seconds, a straw-thin male wearing a burgundy smock and enough attitude to keep the Goodyear Blimp floating for weeks flounced in.

  “Princess,” he said, very formally. Then he made an imperiously ushering gesture toward a remote section of the salon that was behind a set of “Look how expensive I am!” Japanese paper screens.

  The body-guarders took up positions on either side of the front door, watching the shadow-play of their charge being seated behind the screen.

  A mirror fell to the floor, shattering on impact. “Oh, no!” an effeminate voice shrieked. Everyone’s head swiveled at the noise as a river of burgundy smocks rushed between the guards and the screen. A few seconds passed before the smaller bodyguard smoothly removed his right hand from inside his suit jacket.

  As long as they kept their distance, the property-protectors would never realize that their charge was already behind another door. The woman whose shadow they were now watching was getting a bonus whoever she worked for hadn’t offered in the hiring brochure.

  We had no doubt they would keep their distance. To directly observe the Princess in the midst of such an intimate moment was forbidden; it had taken months to work out this special arrangement before their master had been satisfied.

  The Princess had no time to even gasp before the thick door closed behind her with a hissing sound that announced it had been soundproofed. “Please sit,” I said formally, indicating a chair opposite her. When she didn’t move, I held up a large, blown-up photo of her missing baby. I remained seated, made no move of any kind.

  “I demand to—”

  Balance disruption, I reminded myself. “You are Aabidah Amatullah,” I said aloud, my voice carrying the low-volume potency of the not-to-be-doubted. “Your baby was stolen. I know the truth of that. You believe you know that truth, but you do not. You are in no danger. You are not a prisoner. All this”—I pointed to the heavy padding that covered each inch of the room we were in—“is to protect you.”

  I waited three heartbeats, then said, “We understand you are under the scrutiny of the men who brought you here. At this very moment, your husband’s servants are watching a woman behind the Japanese screens. They will never dare to come closer, as you know.

  “You are safe here. Not just from them, from us as well. If you wish to leave, nobody will stop you. All I can do—all I will do—is to beg you to listen first to what I must tell you. I told you that you were in no danger, Aabidah Amatullah. That was the truth. But your son, Ghazi, is in danger. Mortal danger. If you will let me explain, I will prove this to you. And I will show you how to save him.”


  Her face showed no trace of inbred royalty; she had the profile of a desert hawk. And the eyes.

  What those eyes saw was a man whose face was a road map of damage, hurt, and pain. His eyes were two different colors. The keloid dimple in his cheek was something she might have seen before, in her earlier life—a poorly repaired bullet wound.

  Suddenly she sat down. Saying nothing with her mouth, and everything with the gesture.

  “Those people your husband sent to guard you will know nothing of this meeting,” I promised her. “When you emerge from behind the screen, your hair will be done, your skin treated, a manicure and pedicure if you wish. All I ask is that you not look at the person performing such services.”

  She said nothing.

  I struck without warning: “Your son was not kidnapped.”

  She had been trained since birth to keep emotion from her face, but she couldn’t stop her eyes from telegraphing. She was fighting off shock, using her will as a sword.

  “You arranged for him to be taken,” I said. Still formal, still respectful. Not accusing, reciting a fact. “I know why you did this. I admire you enormously for the decision you made. No mother ever made a greater sacrifice.”

  Her body was stone, but her eyes had shaken off the paralysis, soundlessly screaming.

  I went deep into myself, reaching out to sync her heartbeat with mine.

  I knew I had locked on when she finally spoke: “Why would you say such things?”

  “I say what I know.”

  “How could you know such a thing?”

  “Because you did for your son what my mother did for me,” I told her, sensing her heartbeat accelerate as I textured my voice. “My mother was in a burning building. She knew rescue for herself was impossible, so she threw her son out into the black night, with only her prayer that someone below would catch him.”