Safe House

by Andrew Vachss

  “I know. And if the girl’s pretty, she gets called something like ‘kitten,’ yes?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Burke?”

  “What?”

  “It shifted again. Your aura.”

  I didn’t need her to tell me that. I could feel the blue in the room. A mist rising from my . . . I don’t know what. “Kitten.” When I was a young man, I called a lot of girls that. They always liked it. I did it so I wouldn’t blow my cover, call one of them by the wrong name. I had a lot of girls then.

  “Had.” Looking back, I know I never understood what that meant. But I remember the last one. Ruth. The more she loved me, the more I knew I had to go away. Before Ruth, it was all game. I knew what they wanted. They knew what I wanted. Fire-dancing, seeing which one of us would tumble in first . . . and get burned. It was never me. You can’t lose what you don’t ante up.

  The only thing I knew for sure about myself back then was that I was no good. Ruth wasn’t like any of the other girls I’d been with. She didn’t want me stealing to buy her jewels, didn’t shake her ass in the street and then come running to me because some clown noticed it, demanding I defend her “honor” . . . be a man. I thought I knew what that meant too, back then—cause pain, and never show any.

  Ruth wanted to be married. Have children. A house. She wanted me to have a job. Be a citizen. Her eyes were the color of nightclub smoke.

  She came from the same place I did, but she wasn’t going to stay there. And she’d wait for me to join her, however long it took.

  I knew how long it was going to take. And I felt so bad about it I had to go.

  But I couldn’t make her see it. When I told her we were done, she said maybe someday I’d understand that she had true love for me and I’d want her back. And she’d come, she said. All I had to do was leave a notice in the paper. People did that then—before the personals columns got degenerate the way they are now—left messages for someone they actually knew.

  “Just say ‘kitten,’ ” she told me. “And I’ll know it’s you.”

  “But I wouldn’t know it was you,” I said. And told her how I used that name. How it was nothing special.

  I told myself I was just being honest, squaring up with her like she deserved. But I saw something die in her eyes right then.

  Every once in a while, I would feel that again. First time I heard Barbara Lynn singing “You’ll Lose a Good Thing,” I felt that way. Sorry. For me. A lot of things happened since then. I never broke up with a woman for her own good again.

  No, they went away from me. Or died.

  When I thought about that, only Hate kept me from drowning.

  Crystal Beth stood up. Held out her hand. Then she pulled me in.

  The Plymouth swam over the Manhattan Bridge, dwarfed by the Brooklyn-bound trucks. It rolled past the car-repair shops and topless bars on Flatbush, me safe inside, listening to the truth girl-growling out of my cassette player, Magic Judy warning her sisters everywhere—if you’re dumb enough to brag about your man to your girlfriends, they’ll double-cross you every time.

  Ten in the morning on a weekday, the Plymouth was invisible in the moderate traffic. I crossed Atlantic, hooked the first sharp left and motored a couple of blocks past the abandoned Daily News printing plant—they do all the work in Jersey now—looking for a place to park.

  I found one close enough. Got out and walked back to the bridge over the railroad yards. Wolfe was standing there, waiting. At the curb across from her a dark-green Lexus GS sedan stood idling—I could see smoke from the exhausts. Pepper waved at me merrily from the driver’s seat, a small, pretty dark-haired girl with an electric smile. I could make out a much larger shape in the back seat. Not the rottweiler, a human shape.

  I lit a smoke, cupping my hands against a nonexistent wind so I could glance over my left shoulder. Sure enough: a young woman with long winter-blond hair in a bright-orange jogging outfit strolled by past the entrance to the bridge behind me, walking like she was cooling down from a long run. I knew who that was. Chiara, one of Wolfe’s crew. I remembered her from our last meeting; her and that honey-colored pit bull she had on a short leash. They both stopped walking and watched me, making no secret of it.

  A lot of security for Wolfe to bring to a meet with me. Or maybe it was just the neighborhood . . . ?

  A pair of Puerto Rican kids ambled up the block, approaching Chiara. One of them was holding a spike-collared pit bull of his own on a bicycle chain wrapped around his wrist. The dog was a big, chesty beast, caramel-colored and shovel-headed. He was out of one of the classic red-nose lines, and his strut was pure testosterone. He stopped suddenly and growled something at Honey, tugging at the bicycle chain. Didn’t sound like a threat . . . more like pit-bull­speak for “What’s your sign, baby?”

  Honey snarled something back. Easy enough to translate that too: “Skull and crossbones, sucker! Want to play?”

  The big pit didn’t back off, but he stopped tugging. And he didn’t protest when the Puerto Rican kids took off, eyes glancing at me over their shoulders. Like their dog, they’d figured out something was going on . . . and they wanted no part of it, whatever it was.

  Chiara just stood there, calm and watchful. She had a cellular phone in a leather holster over one shoulder. At least that was what was in the holster the last time I’d seen her.

  I turned back toward where Wolfe was waiting across from the Lexus, walked over and handed her a newspaper clipping about the guy Herk did in that alley. Seemed like a long time since that happened. “This guy,” I said, “I need anything you can get me on him.”

  “The victim?” she asked, quickly scanning the news clip.

  “The dead guy,” I said.

  “Oh,” she responded, getting it right away. “This is an Unsolved?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re looking to—”

  “Find out everything I can on the dead guy.”

  “You got a TPO. Wouldn’t the cops—?”

  TPO. Time and Place of Occurrence. Enough of a locate key for any cop who could tap into the computer. “I don’t want to ask them,” I said. “And I wouldn’t want you to either.”

  She nodded. An amateur might have been confused, but for Wolfe it was a large-scale road map—with the route I wanted to travel etched in neon.

  “I don’t care about the . . . about what happened,” I told her, drawing the boundaries. “I’m looking for background. As deep as you can go. His mother’s maiden name, where he went to school, military, if he did time . . .”

  “It says here he was a security guard.”

  “So that means he never did time?”

  Wolfe chuckled at that. “No, I just want to know if you want his employment record too.”

  “Everything.”

  “You mind telling me what you’re looking for?” she asked. “It might narrow the search, make it quicker. You do need it quick, right?”

  “Real quick,” I acknowledged. “I’m looking for a Jew,” I said.

  Wolfe’s map-of-Israel face hardened. “Any particular Jew?”

  “I’m not particular,” I said, so she’d get it clear. “What I need is some Jew in his background. A female relative. His mother would be perfect, but if you can’t do that, then—”

  “So you think one of those Nazi groups did—?” Wolfe interrupted.

  “Yeah,” I said, planting the lie. Wolfe traffics in information. She wouldn’t shop me, but she might peddle something she picked up while she was working. And if she did that this time, it would blend seamlessly into the whisper-stream. Right where I wanted it.

  “If it was one of them who did the job, you’re looking at an ex-con,” she said quietly.

  “Why would you say that?” I asked her, alarm bells ringing all around me.

  Her gray eyes were clear, not a hint of guile in them. “A knife, that’s a jailhouse weapon. It takes a different head to stab than to shoot. Those misfits running arou
nd cross-dressing in swastikas, they don’t like to work close-up.”

  “Skinheads don’t seem to mind,” I told her.

  “But this was a one-on-one, right?” She dismissed me. Wolfe was too experienced to be played off—every act of skinhead violence law enforcement ever heard about was always a group activity. If you wanted to earn your spiderweb tattoo, you needed a witness, for authentication. “It was me,” she said, “I’d look for someone who was a member of a Nazi prison gang. Probably AB.”

  AB. The Aryan Brotherhood. I flashed on my old pal Silver, buried for life Upstate. I didn’t want Wolfe nosing around there. “That’s my piece,” I told her. “You work the opposite end of the tunnel.”

  “And stay out of yours?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” she agreed. Too easily? I let it pass. “The security-guard thing should make it simple,” she said. “They’ll have his Social Security, date of birth, all that. Give me . . . how long?”

  “Can you get it today?”

  She raised her eyebrows, but didn’t say anything, just nodded.

  “One more thing,” I said, handing her a sealed white #10 envelope, the kind you can buy in any stationery store. “You have any men in your crew?”

  “I’m not running a sperm bank,” she said, smiling to take the sting off. “Why would I need any men?”

  “I know you don’t need any, Xena,” I told her. “But I do. To deliver this,” pointing at the envelope she was holding.

  “It has to be a man?” she asked, smiling at the gibe. Wolfe was a warrior princess way before any writer’s wet dream came to life on TV.

  “An observant man,” I emphasized. “All he has to do is take this to a certain address, ask for a certain person, go up to his apartment and put it in his hand.”

  “Anything else?”

  “He has to wear a suit, carry an attaché case, look like a businessman, the whole bit. And he has to put it in the man’s hands personally, not leave it with a doorman.” Then I gave her the details.

  “I can get that done,” Wolfe said. “No risk, right?”

  “No risk,” I promised. Thinking maybe the form in the back seat of the Lexus was Pepper’s man, Mick. I’d only seen him once—big guy, long hair, athlete’s build. Max had made him for a fighter, but we’d never needed to find out.

  “The parking lot across from Criminal Court,” Wolfe said. “Same time tomorrow?”

  “Thanks,” I said, handing her another envelope. She slipped it into her purse without looking. Then she walked across the road and got into the passenger seat of the Lexus. It pulled away with a cheerful chirp from the rear tires, Pepper driving like she talked.

  “Put it right over the heart,” I told the old man. We were in the back room of a tailor shop in the Bronx, just off the Grand Concourse. The narrow storefront was surrounded on all sides by members of that heavily armed tribe of bodegueros who operate trading posts in hostile territory throughout the city’s pocket ghettos, selling overpriced Pampers and yesterday’s milk and loose cigarettes for a quarter apiece in a can on the counter. There was also a sprinkling of liquor stores that looked like the inside of Brink’s vans, and a solitary dump that pretended to sell used furniture but whose only real business was exchanging food stamps for cash at a deep discount. The front room of the tailor shop was lined with fabric samples and suits on hooks. A three-sided mirror stood against one wall. Even the dust looked clean.

  The old man looked over at the Mole, who said something to him in Yiddish. Or Hebrew—I couldn’t tell the difference. The Mole told me once that the young Israelis spoke Hebrew and the older European Jews spoke Yiddish, but it wasn’t a rule or anything.

  Hercules was sitting in what looked like a barber chair, bare-chested, his upper body as deeply ripped as when he’d been Inside and hoisting iron every day. The old man held the tattoo needle steady as he created a black swastika on Herk’s left pectoral, just under the nipple. I watched his hands as they worked. Watched the faint blue row of numbers tattooed on the inside of his forearm in the harshly focused light from the lamp.

  “Two days,” he said, covering the fresh tattoo with a clean bandage. “Then it will look old, like it was done a long time ago.”

  I thought of what it must have taken for a man who’d been tattooed in a concentration camp to copy the oppressor’s symbol onto living flesh. Then the Mole said something to the old man again, touching Hercules on the shoulder. The old man kissed Hercules on the cheek. Not a mob kiss—gently, as he would kiss a beloved son. “Sei gesund!” he said.

  And then I knew what the Mole must have told him.

  “Lorraine isn’t on the run from . . . them,” Crystal Beth said to me. Talking softly, her breasts mashed against my chest, face in my neck.

  I didn’t say anything, just rubbed my palm in tender circles right above her bottom, wondering why she was telling me about the harsh-faced woman with the clipboard and the Siamese cat.

  “She’s much older than most of us,” Crystal Beth said. “A different underground. She’s one of the last ones left.”

  “What is she, an ROTC bomber?”

  “Something like that,” Crystal Beth said. “It doesn’t matter anymore. For Lorraine, it’s all merged.”

  “Into what?”

  “Men. She’s very bitter at how weak they all were. They weren’t true, she always says.”

  “I guess most of the women in here would say that.”

  “No, not what you think. Not true to their ideals.”

  “Some are.”

  “You?”

  “I don’t have any,” I said. “All I’m trying to do is get through this.”

  “This . . . ?”

  “. . . life,” I finished for her. Leaving out the last word I always spoke in my mind: “sentence.” A life sentence. That’s what I got. Some liberal wet-brain once told me, “We’re all doing life.” I guess that was supposed to be some startling insight, make me see we were all brothers. He was some halfass religion-peddling do-gooder. A missionary to a country where he didn’t speak the language, talking to cannibals who’d feast on his flesh if he spent the night with them. I was only sixteen years old then, locked up. But I knew he wasn’t doing my life.

  “I like that,” Crystal Beth said.

  “What?”

  “You . . . stroking me like that.”

  I dropped my hand lower. “You like this too?”

  “It’s better than being pinched,” she cooed.

  I slapped her bottom, lightly. “Shut up, girl.”

  She giggled. “I got that from my mother.”

  “What?”

  “A big rear end,” she said. “It’s genetic.”

  “It’s a gift,” I told her.

  “It could be,” she whispered, her right hand dropping to the outside of my thigh.

  The door opened. A woman walked into the room. Even without the outrageous silhouette, I knew who it was by the click of the spike heels.

  “Can I play too?” Vyra asked.

  In the frozen moment, my cock deflated and my eyes widened, riveted on Vyra’s hands, ready to . . . but they were empty.

  “This isn’t your business,” Crystal Beth said to her, pulling herself into a sitting position next to me.

  “Oh, then he doesn’t know?” Vyra said in a challenging voice, hands on her narrow hips, talking over my body like I was furniture.

  “That isn’t his business,” Crystal Beth snapped back. “Why don’t you go downstairs and I’ll come and talk to you . . . privately.”

  “I like this better,” Vyra said, stepping closer to the bed, eyes only on the other woman.

  “I don’t care what you like,” Crystal Beth told her, climbing off the bed and walking around the end of it to close the gap between her and Vyra. “You’re not in charge here. And your money doesn’t change that.”

  Vyra took a quick step back. Her little fox face went feral under the makeup as her heavily lipsticked mouth twisted wi
th soundless words. Crystal Beth took another step toward her, her nude body glistening with kinetic confidence. Vyra’s left hand flashed against Crystal Beth’s tattoo, a sharp crack in the silence. Vyra’s mouth made an O, like she was shocked at herself. Crystal Beth kept coming, stepped right in to her, wrapping her arms around the skinny girl, holding her immobile. “Stop that!” she said. Vyra struggled in her grip for a few seconds. Then she started to cry.

  Crystal Beth walked her over to the bed, arms still wrapped around her. She muscled Vyra onto the mattress, right next to me, holding her down with one shoulder, her hips over Vyra’s thighs. “Stop it,” she said again, kissing Vyra’s cheek. “Just stop it, now.”

  Vyra went from sobbing to sniffling, then gulped a breath and shuddered down into silence. “Good baby,” Crystal Beth said softly to her. “That’s right.”

  I got up and started to put my clothes on.

  Crystal Beth unbuttoned Vyra’s blouse. Vyra sat up slightly so it could come off her shoulders.

  I zipped up my jeans, grabbed my jacket off the back of the easy chair.

  Crystal Beth whispered something to Vyra.

  “I’ll bet he can’t,” Vyra giggled, unhooking her bra.

  Crystal Beth turned her face toward me. “Stay there,” she said. Then to Vyra: “What do you want to bet?”

  Vyra whispered something.

  “No,” Crystal Beth said. “This.” And whispered something back to her.

  I put one arm into my jacket.

  “Please stay,” Crystal Beth said, sweetly this time. “Just sit in the chair for a few minutes, smoke a cigarette, okay? Just watch us. Then we can talk.”

  I turned around and sat in the chair. Then I took my eyes out of focus and watched them through a soft filter as Crystal Beth helped Vyra undress. When it got to her shoes, Vyra put up a battle and they wrestled around for a while, but Crystal Beth finally wrenched them off and threw them across the room.

  Then they made love, generous to each other.

  It ended with Crystal Beth on her belly, face buried in a pillow, moaning softly, Vyra behind her, face buried in Crystal Beth. They let go at the same time, explosively. Then stayed softly locked together for a couple of minutes, just off the edge of passing out until . . .