Safe House

by Andrew Vachss

  Which is where Pryce could end up if he played me wrong.

  It was after dark by the time I got back from meeting with Hercules. When I cruised by Mama’s, the white-dragon tapestry was in the front window. All clear.

  But as soon as I came out of the kitchen into the main room I knew something was up. Mama wasn’t at her register—she was on her feet, hands on hips, waiting for something. Max was sitting at one of the tables, eyes closed the way he gets just before he has to work, a violence machine with its battery on trickle-charge.

  At another table, three young Orientals, all dressed in identical black leather dusters and red silk shirts buttoned to the neck. They were all razor-built, with long glossy black hair and delicate features. They didn’t look like brothers, but the tribal relationship was stamped deep . . . the kind of deep only the crucible creates.

  And in a booth, an elderly Chinese woman, bird-faced and stick-thin, wrapped in a heavy dark-green shawl, eyes aimed at the floor.

  Mama gestured for me to come over to my booth. She sat down across from me. No soup this time.

  “Tigers have her nephew,” she said, voice low-pitched, head cocked slightly to indicate the old woman. “He owe big money. Thirty thousand.”

  I didn’t need a translator. The nephew was an illegal, smuggled in by one of the gang operations that supply so much of the cheap labor in Chinatown. The family back home picks the youngest, strongest one to go first. When that one works off the debt in the sweatshops, they can send another.

  That’s one of the reasons you see guys making a couple of bucks an hour off the books get so deep into gambling. Their families back home encourage it, especially those relatives far down in the next-to-go chain. It’s the only way to pay off the transporters quick. In the sweatshops, thirty grand would take a decade, minimum.

  “Kuan Li old friend. From home. Everything set, okay?” Then she told me the plan.

  The squat Chinese who opened the door had a cop’s nightstick in his right hand, the leather thong wrapped around his wrist. The brutish expression on his face didn’t change until he saw that the three young men in their matching black coats also had matching black semi-autos, each one aimed at a different part of his body, as professional as it gets. He moved his hands away from his sides, the nightstick dangling loose and useless, eyes only on me.

  One of the young men stayed with him, the other two came along as I moved down a passage so narrow it was more like a tunnel than a hall.

  The basement was divided into wire-mesh cages, Bowery flophouse­style. Maybe thirty, forty illegals slept there. One toilet, one shower—just a rusty nozzle poking out of the wall with a drain underneath. A hundred bucks a month apiece. Overheated from human cargo, it stank like the hold of a slave ship.

  I swept my eye through the cages. Third from left, lowest tier, Mama had said. Her description of the nephew was photo-perfect. I pointed at his face. One of the young men showed him his pistol, said something to him in bad-accent Cantonese. The nephew said something back. The gunman chopped at his face with the pistol. The nephew came along, hands at his sides, head down.

  We walked out into the afternoon. The gunman shoved the nephew into the back seat of a Chinatown war wagon, an old Buick four-door sedan with welded-up fake plates. The other two piled in right behind him. The car took off. The squat doorman poked his head outside. Max came up behind him and did something to his neck. The doorman crumpled to the ground. I stepped into a fog-gray Lincoln that had pulled to the curb. One of Mama’s cooks was at the wheel.

  The street vibrated the way it always did, no change.

  “Not like old ways,” Mama told me back in the restaurant. “Tigers not with the Tongs. Nephew go someplace else, they never find.”

  “They’re supposed to think I had a beef with him, hired those other guys to take him out of there?”

  “Yes, maybe think so.” Mama shrugged.

  “Won’t the Tigers look for their money from the guys who took him?”

  “What guys?” Mama smiled.

  “The Chinese guys. The young ones in the jackets.”

  “Not Chinese,” Mama said. “Cambodia. How old you think?”

  “Twenty, twenty-five?”

  “Fifteen,” Mama said. “Oldest, fifteen. Khmer not kill, Tigers not kill either.”

  “Jesus. They’re operating down here now too?”

  “Sure,” Mama said.

  I played cards with Max until early the next morning. We used to play gin rummy, a life-sentence game we’d started years ago—keeping score, but agreeing that we wouldn’t settle up until we both crossed over. Figuring that, if it was divided up like people say it is, we’d both end up on the same side of the line.

  Max had owed me a fortune until he’d tapped into that perfect vein of gold all gamblers dream of—the Prime Roll. It only lasted a few hours, but Max was unbelievably unbeatable. Every card fell for him. He was a rampaging tsunami—I was a balsa-wood beach house. I survived, but I was barely on the plus side when the wave passed. Ever since, he’d refused to return to gin, knowing he’d never see a run like that again in life. So we switched to casino. He doesn’t play that game any better, and I had his debt back into six figures.

  Mama continued to monitor just about every hand in her self-appointed role as Max’s adviser. She was lousy at it. Even worse than at gin—at least she knew how to play gin, casino was a total mystery to her. Mama speaks a half-dozen languages, including math, but any form of gambling got her blood up and made her forget the odds, so she never indulged. Didn’t mind helping Max out, though.

  She tapped Max’s shoulder, nodded her head, grinned as he tossed the four of clubs on the four of hearts, building eights against the one he held in his hand instead of just taking one four with another. I slapped the deuce of spades on top of his build, against the ten of diamonds I held. I knew Max didn’t hold any tens—the other three had already been played. The diamond card is the Big Ten in casino—the only one worth two points. The deuce of spades was another point card. . . . A lovely score. Max scowled. Mama’s face indicated that the whole thing was his own fault.

  The pay phone in the back rang. I looked at my watch—it was just past two in the morning. Mama got up, walked to the back, grabbed the receiver, said something . . . listened. Then she came back to our booth.

  “Girl. Name Vyra.”

  “Tell her I’m not here,” I said.

  Mama nodded, nothing on her face.

  I went back to my office, let Pansy use her roof, watched some early-morning TV with her after she polished off a quart of some stuff Mama put together—mostly beef chunks in oyster sauce.

  Then I slept.

  Once I got up, I started rolling. Spent the next twenty-four checking on leads, just in case Pryce went for what I was going to offer him. But the paths were too twisted—I couldn’t pipeline down to a core truth strong enough to bank on. The White Night underground is a poisonous brew, fed by rumors and driven by psychos. American-born Nazis working as mercenaries in Croatia, slaughtering Serbs, cleansing the ethnic cleansers, the whole operation set up by fascist groups in Germany who had fond World War II memories of the Croats helping out; a range war between two Hitler-loving crews—mostly a talk war over the shortwave bands—one leader saying the head of the rival crew was gay, that guy saying his opposite number was a crypto-Jew; the tax resisters and the do-it-yourself litigation clubs; virulent anti-Semites calling themselves the true Israelites; one-member fascist organizations blindly cyber-groping with anti-IRA skinheads in England and transplanted American biker gangs in Denmark. . . all riddled with undercover agents and free-lance informants and ready-to-roll rats.

  Not a network, threads. Some of them as unanchored as the lunatics who tried to grab on and pull themselves up to the Fourth Reich. Just outside Chicago, one of those deadly defectives gunned down a plastic surgeon, convinced the doctor was giving non-whites an “Aryan” look. Maybe he was following the footprints of the white supre
macist on the coast who blew away a beautician years ago because he heard she was bleaching Jewess hair.

  More Führers than storm troopers, sure. But any one of them strong enough to lift a suitcase can level a building now.

  The reason the media never gets it right is that the media lives on spokesman interviews, and nobody could ever speak for that collection. How do you speak for a congregation that screams the Holocaust never happened while it prays for it to happen again? You think if you assembled a hundred rapists they’d all tell you they rape for the same reason? “Their rap don’t mean crap, honeyboy,” the Prof had told me once. “Their trail always tells the tale.” On the prison yard, a hundred years ago. I was full of questions then.

  I’ve been dealing with the hyper-whites for years, selling and scamming. They’ve got no loyalty, so they’re easy. But mining their ranks for truth is like looking for a congressman’s ethics.

  But I asked around anyway. Working the edges, careful like always. Keeping a flat face as they flashed their self-awarded decorations, tattoos: the “88”—for “Heil Hitler,” the eighth letter of the alphabet being “H,” borrowed from the way the bikers used to wear the number “13” on their denims . . . “M” for “marijuana.” And the spiderwebs on their elbows, meaning they killed for the race . . . although most of them upgraded any two-bit assault to that status. Skinhead sheep with red laces on their Doc Martens and Iron Crosses around their necks, certain they were the vanguard to Valhalla. A Mafia don’s omertà, an emir’s jihad, or a Führer’s race war, it’s always the same—only the congregation sees the prison cells or catches the bullets, never the preachers.

  I heard all about how only the NRA was standing up to ZOG—Zionist Occupation Government in Nazi-speak—and how gun control was just the prelude to registration of all citizens. Saw enough copies of The Turner Diaries in grungy furnished rooms to crack a best-seller list. Tapped into some of the fax chains. Read the luno-newsletters. Listened to the Ballad of Ruby Ridge and what really happened at Waco. Heard a half-dozen different accounts of why the Swiss banks kept looted Jewish gold in their vaults all these years, waiting for that cable from Paraguay to release the assets. And how Hitler was ordained, a minister of Jehovah, sent by God to punish the Jews for killing His son. Watched self-proclaimed “constitutionalists” applauding more marches through Skokie, this time on the Internet. Even sat with a Mossad agent the Mole brought me to, an Arabic-looking man with pianist’s hands and slot-machine eyes.

  I listened to it all. But when it came to anyone named Lothar operating in New York, I drew a handful of blanks.

  “I always wore clothes when I was a child,” Crystal Beth said. She was lying on the mattress on her belly, nude, smoking one of her hand-rolled cigarettes, candle-flicker shadows dancing over the perfect parabolic curve of her bottom before disappearing into the blackness around her thick thighs.

  I didn’t say anything, watching her.

  “A lot of the kids didn’t,” she said. “On the Farm. That’s what we called it mostly, the Farm. Their parents thought children should be free, not have to wear clothing until they were older. My mother didn’t believe in that.”

  “Were there fights about it?” I asked her.

  “Fights? Nobody fought. It was a commune, but it wasn’t a government commune. There were no laws from on high, that isn’t the way we did it. A parent could raise a child any way they wanted.”

  “Could they hit their kids?”

  “You mean like spank them?”

  “Whatever you call it.”

  “Burke,” she said softly. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing’s the matter. I was just making conversation.”

  “Your face . . . Oh, you’re going to think I’m a ditz.”

  “You’re losing me,” I told her.

  “Come over here, okay? Just lie down next to me for a minute.”

  I did that.

  She stubbed out her cigarette, rolled over on her side to look at me. “Your aura changed,” she said. “Please don’t laugh. It’s not some New Age thing. People do have auras. Not everyone. At least not powerful ones, ones that you can see. Do you think that’s crazy?”

  “No,” I said, not lying. Martial artists call it ki. They don’t talk about seeing it, just feeling it, but it’s really the same: a force field. When I was young, before I learned to make my temper go the same place as my pain, when the rage in me built high enough I could move people out of a room without saying anything. A long time later, when Max explained it to me, he used his hands to indicate waves coming off me. I don’t know where Max got his knowledge, but it wasn’t from books. And it wasn’t new.

  The only thing is, ki doesn’t work on everyone. Some people aren’t tuned to the signal. That’s why a street punk will try you when a pro would give you a pass.

  “When you asked about . . . hitting children, your aura turned . . . ”

  “Dark?”

  “No. It’s always dark. This was like . . . Did you ever see heat lightning? It doesn’t make a sound, just kind of . . . flashes?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like that. Did . . . people hit you when you were a child?”

  “People did everything to me when I was a child,” I told her.

  She reached over, took my hand, put it on her proud soft breast. “Feel my heart,” she said.

  “Nobody ever hit children there,” she said about an hour later.

  “What?”

  “On the Farm. Remember, you asked me? Nobody ever did that. Once I came inside from playing and my mother and father were there. They didn’t see me at first. My mother was cleaning the table. My father walked behind her and gave her a slap on the bottom. A hard slap, I could hear it crack. I got angry and I started to run to her, to protect her. Then I heard her . . . not laugh, or even giggle . . . some kind of sweet sound. I was so confused I started to cry. Then they saw me. My father tried to get me to sit on his lap, the way he did when he explained things to me. But I wouldn’t do it.

  “My mother took me for a walk. She told me my father was just playing. It didn’t hurt her at all. I asked her if all men played like that, and she told me they didn’t. But she also told me it didn’t matter how men played. All that mattered was how the women wanted them to play. Men should never play any way women didn’t want.

  “A couple of days later, I remember asking my father if he wanted to smack me on the bottom, like he did my mother. He got very upset. My father was a very dramatic man. My mother had to calm him down. You know how she always did that?”

  “No.”

  “Like this,” Crystal Beth said, planting her broad little nose in my chest and pushing so hard with her head that I had to grab her and brace myself to keep from staggering backward. “See how it works?” she whispered, nuzzling me, her hands locked together behind my back.

  “Yeah.”

  She kept pushing until I felt the easy chair against the back of my legs. I sat down, pulling her with me. She snuggled into my lap, gave me a quick nip on the neck.

  “It was so easy when my mother explained it,” she said softly. “There are things a man does with a woman that he doesn’t do with a child. Not his child, not any child. She said someday a man would do things with me. I asked her what things. And she told me. Some of them, anyway. That’s how I learned about sex. My mother knew when it was time. My father, he never would have known.”

  “You really loved him, huh?”

  “My father? I adored him.”

  “So you’re doing his work?”

  “His work? My father was a—”

  “Protector, right?”

  “Oh. Yes. I never thought about that. It’s my . . . purpose. Like my mother told me. I didn’t think it was . . .”

  “Ah, what do I know?” I said.

  “Burke?”

  “What, girl?”

  “It must have been so hard. Not to have even . . . known your father.”

  “You think they’
re all alike, fathers?”

  “No. I just—”

  “I didn’t miss a fucking thing,” I told her.

  The phone rang. Crystal Beth got off my lap and padded over to a far corner in her bare feet. She pulled some papers off the top of a two-drawer file cabinet and picked up the receiver lying underneath.

  “Hello.”

  She listened, cocking one hip the way Mama had cocked her head—I guess all women listen differently. Then she said: “Yes, I understand. All the way in the back. All right.”

  And hung up.

  “That was him,” she said. “He says to meet him in the Delta parking lot at La Guardia. All the way in the back, against the fence. He’ll be in a white Taurus sedan.”

  “When?”

  “Now. He said he’ll give you an hour.”

  “Okay,” I said, climbing into my clothes.

  “An hour isn’t—”

  “This time of night? No problem,” I assured her.

  She knelt at my feet, carefully threaded the laces of my work boots, tied each one precisely. “Burke, he didn’t say anything about calling you. He had to know you were here.”

  “He’s calling from the meeting place,” I told her. “He’s already there. Probably been there for hours. In a war zone, names don’t matter, just addresses. It’s the only way he can be sure I don’t fill the parking lot with my own people. He’s not watching outside—he was just guessing about me being here. Not a bad guess anyway, right? I told him I was your man, remember? Or maybe he thought you could find me on the phone right away.”

  “Or maybe he has people of his own,” she whispered.

  “Maybe.”

  She stood against me in the dark. Her skin was silky, warm with the blood beneath it. I kissed her tattoo and left her there.

  I took the Brooklyn Bridge to the BQE, the Plymouth gobbling ground effortlessly. It was still cold out, but the pavement was dry and traction was no problem. I kept near the speed limit until a bright-orange Mustang with a huge rear wing shot by me, a white Camaro with a broad red racing stripe in close pursuit. They were doing at least a hundred. Not racing—just screwing around, pushing each other. The BQE isn’t a race road—too many giant potholes, too many reverse-graded curves. When the dragsters want to really throw down, they go over to Rockaway or work the deep end of Woodhaven Boulevard in Queens. But those fools were all the interference I’d ever need on the off-chance some highway cop was lurking in the night. Which I’d never seen on the BQE in my entire life anyway.