A Bomb Built in Hell

by Andrew Vachss

  70/

  The uniformed parking-lot attendant gave him a “Thank you, sir!” and a stamped ticket in exchange for his car keys. Surrendering the keys didn’t make Wesley uncomfortable—he had a second set in his coat pocket. Pet’s book said this wasn’t a membership club. Sure enough, Wesley slid through the huge front door without incident. It was like any other bar. It may have been way upscale, but there must be places to fade into, just like there were in the Hudson River waterfront joints Wesley had grown up in, he thought. The J. Press would hold him unless someone tried to strike up a conversation. The Rolex told him that Norden should have already been there for thirteen minutes, so he went into the large, dimly lit room with the horseshoe-shaped bar looking for a man sitting alone.

  There weren’t many. The brunette hostess swayed over to the space Wesley was occupying. She looked like a high-class version of the Times Square hustler, and Wesley tried hard not to catch her eye. She tried just as hard to catch his ... and succeeded. Her smile was bright and professional, and her appraisal of his clothing was so quick as to seem instinctive. Pet had told him that professional speed with a knife has to come from a combination of breeding and practice—he guessed her skill was acquired the same way. She took his order, brought his rye and ginger to him quickly: “Would you like this mixed, sir?”

  “No thanks.”

  Wesley didn’t pick up any fear-reaction from her at all. He suddenly realized that he must be as foreign to these people as a man from Venus. They weren’t looking for a shark in their swimming pool, so they didn’t see one. Wesley relaxed and smiled and the hostess flashed him a genuine-looking smile in return. That must take a lot of practice, he thought admiringly. He watched her as she glided away, her hips gently swaying, not wiggling like Wesley had expected.

  Wesley had the Norden candidates narrowed down to a field of three, but Pet’s written description could have fit any of them. They all looked alike to Wesley anyway. He was about to look for a pay phone when he noticed the hostess bringing a dial phone with a short cord to another patron at the far end of the bar. She smiled and plugged it in somewhere behind the bar. The man immediately picked up the receiver and started talking.

  Wesley had left the change from a twenty on the bar. He didn’t want the liquor, but he needed to get the hostess’ attention. So he threw back the rye, hardening his throat ... but it slipped down so smoothly he felt it must have been watered.

  The hostess caught his eye before he could raise his hand or his voice. She was in front of him in a flash.

  “Could you refill this?” Wesley asked her. “And get me a phone, please?”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  She was back with both, reduced Wesley’s seventeen dollars down to fourteen, and was gone again, leaving another smile, before Wesley could even crank up his face to respond.

  He noted that there was no number on the phone’s dial. Wesley dialed the Sequoia Club direct, and told the professionally nice voice that answered that he would like to have Mr. Norden paged.

  “It’ll be just a moment, sir,” the voice told him, and then he heard the mechanism telling him he was on hold. Wesley signaled the hostess. She signaled back “just a minute,” and went out from behind the bar to carry a phone over to a beefy-looking man sitting at a small round table alone in the back.

  She bent over further than seemed absolutely necessary to plug in the instrument, but the man was too detached to notice. Wesley watched him pick up the receiver, then he heard “Yes?” in his ear.

  “I’ll be there in five minutes,” Wesley responded.

  “Who is this?”

  Wesley hung up. He saw Norden speaking into a dead phone for a couple of seconds, then watched as the man gently replaced the receiver. Wesley walked over to Norden’s table—he could get no real sense of the depth of the room and he had to decide between watching the wall behind them or the entrance. He took the second choice and sat down.

  Norden looked intently at Wesley: “You’re...?”

  “The man on the telephone,” Wesley answered.

  “How do I know who you really are?”

  “Mr. P. gave me your name and number, you understand?”

  “Okay, okay. Look, I don’t want to talk in here.”

  “The parking lot?”

  “I’ll meet you out there in two minutes.”

  “Forget that. We walk out together, or you won’t see me again.”

  “I hope you don’t think I would...”

  Wesley didn’t answer. He kept both hands flat on top of the little round table, a gesture as incomprehensible to Norden as Wesley’s earlier threat had been. Norden signaled to the hostess, who immediately came over. She gave Wesley an extra-bright smile and took the twenty Norden handed her. She didn’t pretend she was going to make change. Wesley wished he was negotiating with her instead of this weasel.

  They hit the outside door, copping a “Goodnight, sir!” to each of them from several different flunkies, and then they were in the lot. When the attendant left with their tickets and Norden’s five-dollar bill (Wesley couldn’t tell if this was for the both of them and paid nothing), Wesley said, “Drive up the road about a half-mile and pull over. I’ll be right behind you and we’ll talk.”

  Norden started to answer, and then apparently thought better of it. His white Cadillac Coupe de Ville was easy to follow; Wesley counted 6/10 on his odometer before the Caddy pulled off to the side. It was a wide field that Wesley thought was a farm until he spotted the stone gate, set in about fifty yards from the road. Wesley pulled the Firebird just in front of Norden’s car, then backed up so that the Caddy couldn’t leave first without using reverse.

  “Pull up your hood so it looks like I’m helping you with the engine. In case somebody stops,” said Wesley, opening his trunk.

  “Who would stop?”

  “The cops, right?”

  “Not around here, they wouldn’t. Anyway, that’s not important. It’s my wife, she—” Wesley started to say it didn’t matter ... but some almost-dormant instinct told him that this rich man needed to talk or there’d be no contract—“has all the money, really. It used to be alright, but now she’s getting older and crazier and I can’t... Well, look, will you do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you make it look like an accident?”

  “No. I’m no mechanic—you’re going to be someplace else at the time. It’ll look like a robbery ... or,” watching his face, “a rape that went wrong ... something.”

  “It won’t be painful to her? I wouldn’t want—”

  “No pain. She won’t feel a thing. For a hundred thousand dollars.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “That’s what it costs for a perfect job. She goes, and I say nothing if I’m caught ... ever.”

  “Oh, I know the Code. Mr. Petraglia told me how you all—”

  “Then you know how things are,” Wesley cut him off. “Okay. I need half up front in cash, you understand. You know what to do: nothing bigger than fifties, no serial numbers in sequence, no new bills. And don’t fuck with powders or anything; I got the same lights as the feds.”

  “I wouldn’t do anything like that.... But it’ll be hard to raise that kind of cash without making her suspicious.”

  The woman was no longer “my wife,” Wesley noticed. “So what? She won’t be around long enough to do anything about it.”

  “I need a week. Can I meet you right here next Tuesday night?”

  “No. Stay by your phone; I’ll call between nine and nine-thirty one night, tell you where to come.”

  “But ... well, I guess that’s the way you—”

  “I’ll call you then.”

  Wesley slipped back into his car and drove off. He thought the whole thing over. Maybe Norden’s car was wired; maybe they were picking up his conversation with a shotgun mike from behind that stone fence; maybe...

  But they’d never play that square with him. Wesley knew he’d never die in
prison, because he’d never come to trial. He thought about the mark’s “code” and wondered where Pet had gotten the cojones to shovel that much crap. He remembered Carmine telling him about the “code.”

  “What fucking ‘code,’ kid? Here in prison? Shit! The ‘code’ that says skinners can’t walk the Yard? You know DeMayo? That miserable slime fucked a four-year-old girl until she died from being ripped open. He walks the Yard and nobody says nothing. Why? Because he carries and he kills. That much for the fucking ‘code’! You know why cons always target baby-rapers? Because they’re usually such sorry bastards—old, sick, weak ... or young and fucked up in the brain, you know? The kind that can’t protect themselves. And this bullshit that the cons fuck them up because they love kids, or ‘cause they got kids of their own’ ... crap! They kill them and they rip them off because they are fucking weak ... that’s the only rule in here. There’s no ‘code.’ There’s no fucking nothing ... except this,” a tightly balled fist, “this,” a flat-edged hand, “this,” the first two fingers rubbed against the thumb in the universal symbol for money. “And you handle it all with this!” tapping his temple.

  “What about this?” Wesley asked, smacking his fist against his chest.

  “Kid, all the heart does is pump blood,” Carmine told him. “Listen, take this racial shit, right? A nigger can’t walk certain places, right? So how come Lee, he walks where he wants?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Because he won’t be fucked with, that’s why. He don’t mind dying. That’s the only thing they respect, kid ... in here and out there.”

  “You said a few things with your hands.”

  “They’re all the same thing: power. You got it and you don’t use it, it goes away. You do use it, it grows. You don’t have it, you better get some.”

  “Who do you get it from?”

  “Power in America is money. You can steal money, but you will never be able to join their fucking rich-man’s club. You could steal a billion fucking dollars and not run for senate ... but you could buy a senator, you see?”

  “So what kind of power could I get? My freedom?”

  “Not freedom, Wes, freedoom. People like us are never free to say how we live; but some of us can say how and when we die. That’s the only thing really free for us out there ... or in here. And those are the only two places in the world—in here or out there.”

  “Is the whole ‘code’ really fucked up that bad? When I was in the reform school, we—”

  “It’s all gone, now. Look around the Yard, what do you see? Me, I see maggots—motherfuckers that would sell your life for a carton, never mind a parole. I see junkies, walking around dead. I see colored guys in here for being colored and little kids in here for bullshit beefs, ‘cause they had no coin. The only real criminals are outside anyway. Things have changed ... you don’t see the man who steals anymore, the good clean thief, the professional. No, it’s all ragtime, Wes. It’s all sick and dead....”

  Wesley realized that Norden didn’t know any of this—the stupid movie-mythology was gospel truth to the mark.

  71/

  The kid was waiting for Wesley when he pressed the horn ring and slipped the car inside. He had the grease gun leveled—it didn’t flicker until Wesley stepped out into the soft glow of the diffused spots.

  “Okay?” the kid asked.

  “Only thing may be a make on the plates and the car color. We can’t use those plates again, but otherwise...”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  It took Wesley only fifteen minutes to reach his own place, shower, dispose of the clothing, snap a leash on the dog, and return to the garage. He led the dog to a spot right in front of the garage door, unsnapped the leash, said, “Guard!”

  “You got the right kind of clothes for the roof?” he asked the kid.

  “This time of night?”

  Wesley nodded.

  “Yeah. In the chest of drawers over there.”

  “Get dressed and meet me up there, okay?”

  The kid walked over to the chest, still carrying the grease gun.

  “I’m going to meet a guy from Pet’s old client book,” Wesley told the kid later. “A week from tonight. He wants me to hit his wife. I told him to lay fifty K up front and that I’d call him and tell him where to bring it. I figure he’ll be looking for the same car. You follow me with the Caddy. I’ll have him meet me in a field out there. You bring the nightscope and a quiet rifle. Anything happens, you hit him and split ... okay?”

  “Why we going to hit his wife?”

  “For the money.”

  “There’s a risk, right?”

  “Always a risk.”

  “So why risk? I could just as easy pop him soon as he gets out of his car. Then we got fifty thousand and no risk.”

  “That’s good thinking, kid. There’s no code, we don’t owe the sucker anything. But if he’s got cover and you hit him, we’re in a firefight. And that’s a bigger risk, right?”

  “Yeah,” the kid said. “I see.”

  “So what we do is take the weasel’s money and just don’t make the hit on him ... or his wife. We just disappear.”

  “And we get the fifty thousand.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Somehow it don’t seem right.”

  “Not to hit the wife?”

  “Not to hit him. It don’t seem safe to leave him alive.”

  “Don’t think like a sucker. This is no hit on a mob guy. What’s he gonna do, run to the Law, say we cheated him? Right now, he wouldn’t begin to know where to look for me. A trail of bodies is easier to follow than a trail of fucking rumors.”

  “But he’s seen your face.”

  “Kid, he never saw my face.”

  72/

  After the kid went back downstairs, Wesley stayed on the roof to focus on the choices he had: if he took the money from Norden and just walked away without fulfilling the contract, the overwhelming odds were that Norden would never be in a position to retaliate—he would never see Wesley again, or hear of him. But Pet’s established business had been based upon two foundations: regular employment by the conservative old men who formed an ever-loosening and sloppy fraternity ... and occasional jobs from an even sloppier and far hungrier group of wealthy humans. The latter group depended on their own telegraph for information, and Wesley’s distinct failure to carry out the contract might curtail future employment.

  It wasn’t nearly as simple as he had represented it to the kid. But the kid had to be taught to think a few steps in advance, and this was the best way to teach him. Wesley calculated the cash he and Pet had hidden in various spots throughout the building, in stashes elsewhere in the city, and in various banks and safe-deposit boxes around the country. Wesley could put his hands on almost half a million and never leave the building, but he could hardly bank the whole thing and expect to live on the interest. Even this huge sum of money was nothing compared to what they had actually earned in their profession. Pet routinely discounted all payoffs from employers against the possibility that the money was somehow marked, in special serial sequence, or just plain bogus. The discounters charged seventy percent for brand-new money with sequential serial numbers all the way down to twenty percent for money that looked, felt, and smelled used. They, in turn, deposited the money with a number of foreign banks—banks of friendly South American governments ran a close second to those in the Caribbean. Pet had laughed out loud once before reading Wesley a Times article about the “unstable” governments in South America:

  “Simple-ass educated motherfuckers! Listen to this, Wes. The fools talk about fucking predicting which countries is stable and which ain’t. Now any asshole could tell you which was which if he would just ask the discounters. Wherever they put their money, you know there ain’t going to be no fucking revolution.”

  “I thought you said some of them banked in Haiti.”

  “So?”

  “So how about if that Poppa Doc takes it all and tells them
to go fuck themselves?”

  “No way. Why you think America sends troops in there like they do? So many rich motherfuckers got their money in that place, and it’s those same rich motherfuckers who bankroll the politicians. They’re all criminals.”

  “Like us.”

  “Wrong. Stealing to eat ain’t criminal—stealing to be rich is.”