Strega

by Andrew Vachss

  "No," said the Mole, his pasty face indistinct in the candlelight.

  The Prof chipped in, "Burke, you know what the people say—when it comes to junk, the Silent One don't play."

  And Max himself just shook his head from side to side.

  I knew what the Prof meant. Max would carry anything, anywhere. His delivery collateral was his life. But everybody knew he wouldn't move narcotics. If he suddenly agreed to do this, it'd make the bad guys suspicious. Even if they let him walk away, he'd have to make dope runs from then on. No matter what kind of sting we pulled off, if Max was the courier he was finished.

  There wasn't much to say after that. I watched the candle flame throw shadows on the walls, burning up my plans to be free of this nickel–and–dime hustling once and for all. I wasn't going into the dope business, and I wasn't giving this up without another try.

  "Prof, your cousin still work for the post office?"

  "Melvin's a lifer, brother—he's hooked on that regular paycheck."

  "Would he hold out a package for us if we paid him?"

  "Have to pay him a good piece, Burke—he loves that joint. What's the idea?"

  "The idea is, we mail the stuff back to them. Mole, how much was in the suitcases?"

  "Forty kilos—twenty bags in each case. Plastic bags. Heat–sealed."

  "Prof, that's worth what on the street?"

  "Depends—how pure is it now, how many times you step on it

  "Mole…?"

  "It's ninety, ninety–five percent pure."

  "Prof?"

  "They could hit it at least ten times. Figure twenty grand a key, at the least."

  "So they'd pay five?"

  "They'd pay the five just to stay alive.

  "That's two hundred thousand, okay? How about we mail them four keys, okay? No questions asked. Just to show good faith? And we give them a post–office box number, and tell them to mail us the money for the next installment. We keep running like that until we're near the end. All they can beat us for is the first and last piece, right?"

  "No good," said the Prof. "They'd trace the box, or have some men waiting. You know."

  "Not if Melvin intercepts the shipment. He still works in the back, right? All he has to do is pull their package of money off the line when it shows up."

  "Melvin don't work twenty–four hours a day, man. He's bound to miss some of them."

  "So what? We don't need all of them. Every exchange is twenty grand coming from them. If Melvin can pull ten out of twenty, it's still fifty apiece, right?"

  "It's shaky, man. I don't like it."

  I turned to Max. He hadn't moved from his place against the wall, standing with his corded forearms folded, no expression on his face. He shook his head again. No point asking the Mole. We were back to Square One. The Prof was looking at me like I was a bigger load of dope than the one we'd hijacked.

  I lit a cigarette, drawing into myself, trying to think through the mess. Keeping the dope wasn't a problem—the Mole's junkyard was as safe as Mother Teresa's reputation, and heroin doesn't get stale from sitting around—but we took all this risk and now we had nothing to show for it. Waiting didn't bother Max, and the Prof had done too much time behind the walls to care. I watched the candle flame, looking deep into it, breathing slowly, waiting for an answer.

  Then the Mole said, "I know a tunnel." He didn't say anything else.

  "So what, Mole?" I asked him.

  "A subway tunnel," he explained, like he was talking to a child, "a subway tunnel from an abandoned station back out to the street."

  "Mole, everybody knows about those tunnels—in the winter, half the winos in the city sleep down there."

  "Not a way in—a way out," said the Mole, and it slowly dawned on me that we could still pull it off.

  "Show me," I asked him. And the Mole pulled out a mess of faded blueprints from his satchel, laid one flat on the basement floor, and shone his pocket flash for us all to see.

  "See here, just past Canal Street? You come in any of these entrances. But there's a little tunnel—it runs from Canal all the way up to Spring Street …see?"—pointing a grubby finger at some faint lines on the paper and looking up as though even an idiot like me would understand by now.

  When he saw I still wasn't with him, the Mole's tiny eyes blinked hard behind his thick lenses. He hadn't done this much talking in the last six months and it was wearing him out. "We meet them in the tunnel near Canal. We get there first. They block all the exits. We give them the product and we take the money. We go out heading west…see, here?…they go out heading east. But we don't go out the exit. We take this little tunnel all the way through here"—tracing the lines—"and we come out on Spring Street."

  "And if they follow us?"

  The Mole gave me a look of total disgust. He was done talking. He took his satchel, pushed it away from him with his boot, so it was standing between us. "Tick, tick," said the Mole. They wouldn't follow us.

  Now I got it. "How long would it take us to get to the Spring Street stop?"

  The Mole shrugged. "Ten minutes, fifteen. It's a narrow tunnel. One at a time. No lights."

  Yeah, it could work. By the time the wiseguys figured we weren't coming out any of the Canal Street exits, they'd have to go back inside to look for us, and we should be long gone by then. They'd figure we'd be hiding out, waiting for darkness to fall, or that we'd try to slip away in the rush–hour crowd. And even if they did tip to the plan, we'd have too much of a head start.

  "It's great, Mole!" I told him.

  The Prof extended his hand, palm up, to offer his congratulations. The Mole figured the Prof wanted to see his blueprints, and tossed the whole bundle into the Prof's lap. Some guys are just culturally deficient.

  I looked at Max. He was watching the whole thing, but his face never changed. "What's wrong now?" I asked him with my hands.

  Max walked over to us, squatted down until his face was just a few inches from mine. He rolled up his sleeve, pulled off an imaginary tie, and looped it around his biceps he put one end in his teeth and pulled it tight. Then he drove two fingers into the crook of his arm, where the vein would be bulging, used his thumb to push the plunger home, and rolled his eyes up. A junkie getting high. Max watched my face carefully. He folded his arms in the universal gesture of rocking a baby, then opened his arms to let the baby fall to the floor. And he shook his head again. Max the Silent wasn't selling any dope.

  I pointed to my watch, spread my hands again. "Why now?" I wanted to know.

  Max tapped his heart twice with a balled fist, nodding his head "yes." Then he rubbed his fingers together to make the sign for "money," moving his hands back and forth with blinding speed. He was a warrior, not a merchant.

  Fuck! I threw up my hands in total disgust. Max watched my face, his own immobile as stone. I used my hands to shape the one–kilo packages of dope in the air, laid them end to end until Max got the idea. We had a whole pile of heroin between us. Then I rubbed my first two fingers and thumb together the way he had before. Money, right? Then I separated my hands, and crossed them in front of my chest, opening them as I did so. Exchanging one for the other. "How?" I wanted to know.

  Max smiled his smile: just a thin line of white between his flat lips. He bowed to the Mole and the Prof, then to me. He made the same signs for the dope as I had, and followed it with a gesture that meant throwing something away. Okay, we disposed of the dope—maybe threw it in the river. And then?

  Max pointed to the blueprints, nodding his head "yes." We'd make the meet in the tunnel like the Mole wanted, only we wouldn't have any dope with us. I spread my hands wide for him again—how would we get out of there with the money? Max bowed, stepped back out of the circle of light cast by the candle, and vanished. It was dead silent in Mama's basement. I watched the candle burn down, along with my hopes of making a respectable score for the first time in my life.

  "Hey, Burke," called the Prof, "when Max comes back, I want you to say somet
hing to him for me, okay?"

  "Yeah?" I asked him, too depressed to give a damn.

  "Yeah. You know how to make the sign for 'chump'?"

  The Prof was good at this. Plenty of times he'd cheer us all up on the yard when nothing was happening. It didn't even bring a smile this time.

  It got darker and darker in the basement, so quiet I could hear water dripping off in the distance. All of a sudden, the Prof shot straight into the air as if he'd been hoisted by an invisible crane. "Put me down, fool!" he barked, his short legs dangling helplessly. Max stepped into the tiny circle of light, holding the Prof by his jacket in one hand. He opened the hand and the Prof unceremoniously dropped to the floor. I pulled a fresh candle from my pocket and lit up. The shadows flickered on the walls and the darkness moved back another few feet. Now I understood.

  "You get it, Mole?" I asked.

  "Yes."

  "Prof?"

  "Yeah. We meet them in the tunnel, Mole kills the lights, and Max does his thing, right?"

  "Right."

  Max bowed to each of us, waiting for recognition of his superior problem–solving ability. The Prof was right—he was a chump.

  "It's no good," I told them. "It'll take too long. If Max jumps them all in the tunnel, we'll be running for our lives, okay? And even if we get away with it, they'll never stop looking for us. It doesn't play, okay? It's not what we planned."

  "You mean it's not what you planned, man," countered the Prof. "We took the shot to score a lot. Max don't want to give them the dope, and you don't want to rough off the money. That leaves us with what?"

  That's when I got my brilliant idea that saved me twenty years in the joint. "Mole, you said the stuff was near pure, right?" He didn't answer—the Mole doesn't say anything twice. "Okay, how do you know?"

  "Test," said the Mole.

  "Test?"

  "Heroin is morphine–based. You add something to it, it turns a certain color, you know it's good."

  "Mole," I asked him, trying to keep the hope out of my voice, "can you make it turn the right color even if it isn't real dope?"

  The Mole went into one of his trances—lost in thought. We all kept quiet, like people do around a volcano that might go off. Finally he said, "There would have to be some of the morphine–base——or else they would have to pick the right bag to test."

  "How far down could you cut in and still make it pass the test?"

  "I don't know…" said the Mole, his voice trailing off. He pulled out a pencil as stubby and greasy as he was, and starting scribbling formulas on the side of the blueprints, lost to the world.

  Finally, he looked up. "How will they pick a bag to test?"

  "Who knows?" I told him, looking over at the Prof, who nodded in agreement.

  "Two bags of pure," said the Mole, "six bags cut deep. The rest no morphine–base at all. Okay?"

  "Okay!" I told him. The Prof's grin split the darkness. And then there was Max. But before he could say anything, I took a deck of cards out of my pocket, held it up for him to see, and motioned for him to come close with the others. I dealt out forty cards, one for each bag of dope. Then I separated the cards into four stacks, shoving one in front of each of the others, and keeping one in front of me. I reached over and took the stack away from Max, held it up before his eyes, made a motion like I was spitting on the cards, and tossed them into the darkness of the cellar. I did the same thing with the Mole's share. And then with the Prof's. From my stack, I slowly counted off two cards, then six more—the amount the Mole said he needed to work the scam. And I threw my other two cards away too. I looked at Max, caught his eyes, then took six cards from my little remaining stack and tore them into small pieces. I threw away the big pieces, leaving only scraps behind—and two untouched cards.

  There was a long count. Then Max slowly nodded, and we had a deal.

  14

  I WAS only on the phone for a few minutes with the wiseguys. Two hundred thousand in cash in exchange for forty kilos of their product. And I told them where and when. The gangster who answered the phone listened patiently—I could feel his desire for my death coming over the wire, but he kept his voice quiet. Sure, sure…whatever we wanted, no problems…very reasonable.

  The meet was for five–fifteen on a Thursday evening. Maximum rush–hour mess, so they'd think we planned to lose them in the crowds after we made the switch. We got there just after eleven the night before, set up camp, and started to do what we all did best—wait.

  We waited at the apex of the tunnels. The wiseguys would have to come from the east, and they'd have people planted in the tunnel from the west. Plenty of room to do whatever they planned. All we needed was a few minutes to get lost, and I had something with me that would take care of that. I didn't care if they sent Godzilla down the tubes after us—we had it wired.

  It was five–fifteen on the dot when Max snapped his fingers and pointed to the east. I couldn't see anything at first, but then I glimpsed a faint beam of light moving slowly in our direction—from the west, where they weren't supposed to come from. And then I heard footsteps, lots of footsteps, coming from the right direction. The Mole put his satchel on the ground, one hand inside. The Prof thumbed back the hammers on my sawed–off, and I fingered the baseball–shaped piece of metal in my jacket pocket. It was going down.

  And then the wheels came off. "This is the police!" came a voice on a bullhorn. "You men are surrounded. Drop your weapons and walk toward the sound of my voice with your hands in the air!"

  The miserable fucking maggots! Why take a chance of dealing with renegades when they could get their dope back and hand their cop pals some major felony arrests at the same time?

  I had to stall them, get time to think.

  "How do I know you're the cops?" I shouted back down into the tunnel.

  "This is Captain Johnson, N.Y.P.D., pal. Precinct Number One. You are under arrest, you got it? You got two minutes—I don't see hands in the air, I'm going to see blood on the ground."

  It was the cops all right, and not the Transit Police either—only the bluecoats talk like that—and only when they've got an audience. I turned to face my brothers. There was nothing to discuss—the Mole wouldn't last an hour locked up. If the Prof took another fall, they'd hold him for life. And without someone to watch out for him, Max would kill a guard sooner or later. "Prof," I snapped at him, "hit the little tunnel, okay? Take the bags with the real dope with you, leave me the rest. You go first—make sure it's clear on Spring Street before you step out. The Mole follows you. Max brings up the rear in case anyone gets past me. You know where the car is. Got it?"

  "Burke," the little man said, "I'm down for the next round. Fuck these blue–coated thieves!"

  "Get in the tunnel, Prof. The Mole can't make it without you. Don't let Max do anything crazy."

  "Come with us," the Mole told me, hefting his satchel.

  "Not a chance, Mole. It won't give us enough time. It's the Man, brother, not the mob. We can't outrun a fucking radio. Go!"

  "What're you going to do?" asked the Prof.

  "Time," I told him.

  The Prof looked back for a second, squeezed my arm hard, and hit the tunnel, the Mole right behind. That left Max. I pointed into the tunnel, patted my back to show he had to protect the others, and Max touched his chest, made a motion like he was tearing out his heart, and put his fist in my open palm. He didn't have to tell me—I knew.

  I turned in the direction of the bullhorn. "I'm not going back to jail!" I screamed at them. "I'll hold court right here, you understand!" I'd been waiting to use that line since I got out of reform school the first time.

  "Give it up, buddy!" came back the cop's voice. "You got no place to go."

  "Any of you guys ever been in 'Nam?" I yelled down the tunnel shaft, buying time with every word.

  Silence. I could hear mutters, but no words. They'd move in soon.

  Finally a hard voice came back down the tunnel to me. "I have, friend. Eighty–seventh
Infantry, Charlie Company. Want me to come back there alone?"

  "Yeah!" I shouted back. "I want you to tell your cop friends what this is!" I pulled the metal baseball out of my pocket—a fragmentation grenade with the pin still in—and lobbed it down the tunnel in their direction. I listened to it bounce around the walls and then everything went quiet. It must have fallen onto the tracks.

  "What was that, friend?" my Vietnam buddy wanted to know.

  "Shine your light and see for yourself," I told him. "But don't worry—the pin's still in!"

  The place went as quiet as a tomb—because that's what they all thought it had turned into. I saw flashlights bounce off the dripping walls of the tunnel, but none of them came closer to me from either side. Then I heard "Holy shit!" and I knew they'd found it.

  "You know what that is?" I called out to them.

  "Yeah," came back the infantryman's weary voice, "I seen enough of the fucking things."

  "You want to see more, just come on back," I invited him. "I got a whole crate of them just sitting here."

  More silence.

  "What do you want?" he called down to me.

  "I want you guys to clear out of this tunnel, okay? And I want a car full of gas at the curb on Canal Street. And a ride to J.F.K. And I want a plane to Cuba. You got it? Otherwise, the Number Six Train's going to have a major fucking detour for the next ten years.