Down in the Zero b-7

by Andrew Vachss

  "Oh, it's just a wonderful story. So what?"

  "So this— the tape you just looked at, I picked it up from a hideout, where it was stashed. I made a copy, and I put it back. I wasn't around when that tape was made— you said so yourself. Now listen— when I went back to the hideout, the tape was gone. And the only person who was anywhere around it was Charm. Charm, you understand? Cherry isn't even in this country. Hasn't been for quite a while. You said it yourself— Charm always wants the handle. She needs to know how things work…and how to work people. You didn't want her to think she knew about me, right? Well now, if I'm right, she thinks she does."

  "You mean you…knew?"

  "Yeah. At least I thought I did. That tape…the one with you and me we just saw…that's a copy too. The original is right back where it came from."

  "At Rector's?"

  "Sure. You think Cherry's gonna stop by, pick it up?"

  "Maybe Charm just…works for her."

  "Sure, girl. Maybe she does. But what would Cherry want with a tape of me and you? Who's she gonna blackmail? Especially behind that fairy story she told you— about me being a hitman and all. That's why I stood where I did… when you were tied on the bed. I was out of camera range— it's behind that shadow box on the wall. It's that super–safe sex you talked about…Charm'll read it that I was masturbating, watching you. And sooner or later, she'll drop it on me.

  "It doesn't make sense," she said, turning to look up at me.

  "How much truth do you want, little girl?"

  "All of it," she said, taking a breath. "Just do it."

  I slid off the couch, lying down on the carpet next to her. I lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, offered it over. She took it the way I saw a woman take a wet rag in her teeth in the jungle a lifetime ago…biting down so the sounds of childbirth wouldn't alert the enemy soldiers nearby.

  "You and Charm have the same room? When you were kids?" I asked.

  "No. I mean, just when we were real little…"

  "But you were real close to her, right? You didn't keep secrets from each other?"

  "I never did. Charm wouldn't let me. She hated secrets— she had to know everything. We had a bathroom, for the two of us, between our rooms. She would just walk in there and start talking to me, even when I was sitting on the toilet."

  "Why didn't you lock the door when you were in there?"

  "We didn't have any locks on the doors. Not in the whole house, except for— "

  "The room where your father took you."

  "Yes. But— "

  "When you were growing up, did you get your period first, or did Charm?"

  "What?"

  "Your period…who had it first?"

  "Me. I was way ahead of her."

  "And you didn't have it at the same time after that, right? Not the same time of the month?"

  "I…don't know. I don't know when she had hers, but— "

  "She knew when you had yours."

  "How could you know that?"

  "When your father took you in that room, it was never when you were having your period, was it?"

  "Burke!"

  "And he always did it the same way, right? Said the same words, made you do the same thing. Did he have something special he hit you with?"

  "His hand. And a…paddle. A black one. With holes in it."

  "Yeah, he's perfect. A ritualistic scumbag."

  "No. He never…you mean, like Satanism and that stuff?"

  "It's all ritual abuse, girl. Got nothing to do with Satan. Child molesters love their rituals, their secret ceremonies. You remember how you told me Charm never got punished in front of you? That's because it wasn't punishment that was going to happen once the door closed. Not like you got, anyway. Your father was having sex with her. For years and years. You were just the appetizer."

  "Stop it!"

  "Where do you think she learned it, child? You weren't getting punished, you were being used. Spanking kids…the way he did…it's erotic for them. Foreplay, that's all. That's why you hate people who do it— you've always known the truth."

  "Noooo…"

  "Yes. Trauma is scar tissue over memory, but nobody ever really forgets. Charm showed you how to flip things over. Get powerful yourself…at least that's what you thought. You see it in the kiddie joints all the time. The weaker ones get taken off. Raped. You do it to somebody else, you're not the target, see? Sex in prison, it's not really sex. Any more than rape is. You get to beat on somebody else, it doesn't happen to you. Remember how you said it made you feel? Strong?"

  "She was just— "

  "Playing. Sure. Playing you. For your father. With him. He picked her out from the beginning, Fancy— she never had a chance. She's doing the same thing. Getting powerful. Drinking blood."

  "I don't believe you."

  "Yeah you do. Charm set you up in business. So you'd have a 'thing' of your own, isn't that what you said? Instead, you've been a Judas goat, staked out so the prey comes sniffing around. And Charm's always there. With her cameras.

  She made a moaning sound, dropped her shoulders. I reached over, held her hand. It was damp.

  "There's more," I told her. "Charm used Sonny too. When he was just a kid. Got him involved in sex way before he was ready, and it really fucked with his head. She may have been with his mother too…Cherry's gay, right? There's a wire on my phone, in the caretaker's apartment. That's her work too. I thought it was you at first, when I saw the tape. But there's money floating around here. Big money. More than Charm could score from some lousy little blackmail scheme."

  "But why…?"

  "Your mother knew it too, Fancy. Remember when you told her, what she did? She gave her daughter away. Handed her over like a present."

  "I saw that once…what you said. On 'Oprah.' How people get abused when they're kids and they remember it all of a sudden, years later."

  "I know."

  "But there's like nothing they can do, right? I heard it on the show, the Statute of Limitations. It's too late to make them go to jail…"

  "Yeah. They need to call it the Statute of Liberty instead. The freak does his work good enough, he makes the kid block it right out…and then he walks away giggling."

  "You think Charm…doesn't remember?"

  "I don't think she ever forgot. That's what turned her. Into whatever she is, now."

  She was quiet a long time, all inside herself. Then she looked over at me, gray eyes in the dark. "My own sister," she said. "My twin. Now I don't have anybody."

  I made her come back to the caretaker's apartment with me. Showed her the tiny microphone that had sat inside the phone until I pulled it loose.

  I took her to the bedroom. Undressed her slowly. We made love. A deep, rich vanilla.

  "I want you to stay with Sonny," I told her the next morning. "All day, no matter what, wherever he goes. Whether he likes it or not."

  "Okay."

  "Don't 'okay' me, Fancy. It's important. Make a promise."

  "I swear," she said, her hand over her heart.

  I puffed on my smoke, absently, wondering if she knew. "Fancy, what happened to your other sister?"

  "My other sister?"

  "Charm said you were originally triplets, remember?"

  "Charm tells stories," she answered, looking somewhere else.

  I walked over to the big house. Sonny was awake, at the kitchen table.

  "I think I'm close now," I told him. "I need you to do something."

  "You got it."

  "Fancy's upstairs. Over in the garage apartment. I want you to stay with her. No matter what she does. Don't let her out of your sight. Don't take no for an answer. Stay with her until I get back."

  "I'll take care of it," he said. In a man's voice.

  The junkyard was shrouded in what passes for morning mist in Hunts Point— a nasty mix of industrial pollution and half–burnt garbage no converter could ever recycle. Terry was right near the gate, as if he was expecting me.

  "Mole had
a fight," he said.

  "A fight? Is he okay?"

  "Oh sure. It was, like, not a physical thing. With Zvi."

  "The Israeli?" I asked, climbing aboard the shuttle.

  "Yes. He didn't want you to know anything about…whatever they took. I couldn't follow it all. He said you weren't one of them. But Mole said, you were one of him, and he was going to show it to you. They had this big argument. Then this Zvi guy, he offered Mole money. For the information, he said. Mole got really mad then. They started arguing, in Jewish, I guess, I couldn't understand. Then this Zvi guy left."

  "Don't fuss about it, kid. They won't do anything to the Mole."

  "Oh, I know that. I just never saw him, like, mad before."

  The Mole was in his bunker. If the argument with the Israeli had him worked up, you couldn't see it on his face.

  "You cracked the code?" I asked him.

  "Yes. It was what I thought— a sort program. It matched all the names— before and after."

  "You have a copy?"

  "Yes."

  "Any trouble. With…?"

  "No," he said, handing me a thick sheaf of papers.

  "They do plastic surgery there," I told him. "It's the perfect cover for the ID business."

  "They do something else, too."

  "What?"

  "I'm not sure. See this?" he said, holding up a clipboard covered with calculations.

  I nodded, waiting— the Mole had already used up his supply of words for the week and I didn't want to throw him off the track.

  "This was an experiment, like I told you. A double–blind, with a probability matrix."

  "Huh?"

  "Don't play stupid, Burke— I don't have time. There was a group of subjects, all right? It was divided in half. Half received some…input. A substance, a treatment, exposure to radiation…I can't tell. The other didn't— maybe they got a placebo, maybe nothing. Again, I can't tell. Now for the group which got the input, there was a certain result predicted. That's the probability matrix…the experimenter was looking for a result, and that result was something you would expect to get in a certain percentage of cases anyway, understand?"

  "You got a group of a hundred people. You give fifty of them a pill that causes headaches— you give fifty of them nothing. In the first group, ten of them get headaches. But you gotta figure, people get headaches without the pills. So the question is…how many more? Is that it?"

  "Yes. The difference must be statistically significant for the input to be the cause."

  "But you don't know who…or what?"

  "No."

  "Did the…experiment work?"

  "I don't know. It's not in the data. The running time was ninety days. They run it four times a year, with different split groups. Whatever they expected to happen, it did happen. But I don't know the probability of it happening without the input."

  "Wouldn't they know it?"

  "They made…educated guesses. It seems they don't have hard data on it."

  "So after ninety days, the…input…it's not gonna work."

  "That's what it seems. If it works at all."

  "It fucking fits," I muttered.

  "You think you know…?"

  "Mole, you know all about the experiments in the camps. Remember you told me about them?"

  "Yes," he said, Nazi–hate blazing behind his thick glasses.

  "They were just experiments for the sake of experiments, right? Not science at all."

  "Not science at all," he agreed bitterly. "Sadism. Torture. Freakish ugliness."

  "But…even if someone wanted to do real experiments, like for cancer or whatever…you couldn't do it on humans, could you?"

  "Not legally. I've heard…about places in the Third World where you can…buy subjects."

  "Mole, listen for a minute. Is there a drug that could make people suicidal? Make them kill themselves?"

  He stroked the side of his face, took off his glasses, polished them on a greasy rag lying on his workbench. "There are drugs that cause depression, drugs that interfere with cognition, affect mood. All kinds of results. But to actually make people kill themselves…no. If they were already disposed, maybe…"

  I drove out of the junkyard dazed, brain spinning crazy, info–pinballing, colors and numbers bouncing off the corners. Trying to pick a drop of mercury off a slick Formica surface through a cloud of smoke.

  Until I faced it. The same way I did with the child I killed in that basement. Just looked at it and looked at it until it told the truth.

  Only one question left— who else was in? And how deep?

  The Plymouth was wedged in the driveway like a roadblock. The garage doors were closed. I jumped out of the Lexus, headed inside. They were in the living room: Sonny, Wendy…and Fancy. She was on a padded chair in the living room, knees together, hands in her lap.

  "Hey, Burke! We've been playing a game. You want to play too?"

  "What's the game?" I asked her.

  "Bondage," she said, holding up her hands, wrists together, as if she was wearing invisible handcuffs.

  Sonny's face reddened. Wendy stretched her long legs out on the couch, protective and watchful, not saying anything.

  "I don't get it," I said.

  "Well, it seems like your young friend here got it into his head that I wasn't supposed to leave."

  Sonny nodded agreement with the accusation. Hard to believe this was the same kid Charm had slapped into submission such a short time ago. "Good work," I told him as I took Fancy by the hand and pulled her out of the room.

  Back in the caretaker's apartment, Fancy sat on the bed as I changed my clothes. "Why did you do that?" she asked.

  "Do what?"

  "Play that trick. To make me stay there…with Sonny?"

  "It didn't have anything to do with Sonny. I just wanted to be sure you didn't wander off somewhere."

  "Where would I go?"

  "To Charm."

  "But you told me— "

  "Some things, not the whole thing. I've been stupid. This suicide thing, it didn't start when I came out here. I didn't get it because I was in it. Me, not them. I came here with too much baggage, and the weight made me blind. There's one more thing I've got to tell you…and then it's up to you."

  "Tell me what?"

  "The truth, Fancy. The truth about Charm, and your father."

  "You already told me," she wailed. "I don't want to— "

  "It doesn't matter what you want anymore. Things are gonna happen. Happen soon. I don't want you making any more offerings."

  "I don't know what— "

  "Offerings. Like the way your mother served you up to your father. Like the way Charm uses you for her blackmail videos. I'm not here for the same reason now."

  "In Connecticut?"

  "On this earth. I am going to fix things. This time. This one time. I looked into the Zero and I saw it. You know what I got, little girl? Another chance."

  "Burke, you're scaring me."