Safe House

by Andrew Vachss

  “What, Herk?”

  “This ain’t like before. This time I’m listening real good.”

  “You don’t like my shoes?” Vyra asked Hercules, standing at the foot of the stairs, one red spike heel on the floor, the other propped one step up, posing.

  “I didn’t notice ’em,” Herk said, moving past me toward her, standing close. “That first time, the shoes was the first thing I seen. Coming down. This time I was looking at you.”

  “At me?”

  “At your eyes,” Herk told her. “I never seen a color like that.”

  Vyra’s eyes were an everyday brown. She clasped her hands under her breasts, cocked her head, said “Really?”

  “Yeah. They’re the same color as . . . Ah, you wouldn’t understand. It wouldn’t sound so good to you.”

  “Tell me,” Vyra said, taking her foot down to stand in front of him, looking up from under her eyelashes.

  “Peat moss,” Herk told her shyly. “You know peat moss? Like for growing roses? It’s so . . . rich. Rich and strong. That’s the color.”

  On my climb upstairs, I figured out how the amorous fool got away with stuff like that. He meant it.

  “If I had lost the bet, I would have shined every last one of her damn shoes,” Crystal Beth said ruefully, waving her arms to indicate the pitiful cleaning job Vyra had done.

  “I believe you,” I said.

  “Ah, that’s Vyra.” She laughed. “She has no discipline.”

  “And no purpose?”

  “You’re not . . . making fun of me?”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Sometimes people . . . tease. They don’t mean anything by it, but it still . . . hurts.”

  “Crystal Beth?”

  “What?”

  “Would you do me a favor?”

  “Sure, honey.”

  “Go sit down. In that chair.”

  She did it, a questioning look on her upturned face. I walked over to the bed, sat down myself. “Now get off your fat ass and come over here,” I told her.

  She giggled, bounced over to where I was sitting.

  “What?” she asked, laughter in her eyes.

  “It’s never really the words,” I said softly. “Not the plain words. It’s what they mean. I make a crack about your fat ass, it doesn’t bother you, right?”

  “Well, I am at my winter weight. . . .”

  “Cut it out, girl. It didn’t bother you because you know I think you’re beautiful. If you really thought I was making a nasty crack about your weight, your feelings would be hurt, wouldn’t they?”

  “Yes,” she said seriously.

  “That’s the difference. I know it and you know it. And I would never rank on you about your purpose. You’re sure I think you have a great butt. . . . You’re not so sure I take you seriously. That’s it, right?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Right?”

  “Yes,” she said, head down.

  “I do, little bitch. I swear.”

  “Oh, Burke. I know. . . . But you’re wrong about Vyra. She doesn’t have a purpose, but she’s looking for one. That’s more than most people ever do.”

  “It’s more than I ever did,” I told her.

  “Come here,” Crystal Beth said softly, opening her arms.

  Lightning tore the sky that night. It was about nine. Pansy and I were watching TV, some show that had a dog in the cast. One of those perky, cute ones that get to talk in a human voice. Like “Baywatch,” I guess. Across the bottom of the screen, a string of words crawled: SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING IN EFFECT IN SUSSEX AND UNION COUNTIES UNTIL 8:30 P.M. DETAILS AT 11:00. Even Pansy sneered at it.

  I found one of those trash-news shows. They had an interview with some money-for-pussy slut telling the world that she’d written her book about how her politician boyfriend liked to dress up like a French maid and clean her house because she wanted all her fellow Americans to be aware of what kind of man was making important decisions about their lives. The hardest trick that whore ever turned—coming up with a pious reason for selling secrets. Probably her pimp’s idea.

  I didn’t like the idea of that politician much either. Who wants a government official dumb enough to trust a whore?

  Then they did another “exposé” of strip bars invading middle-class communities. Devoted about three minutes to shots of anonymous thonged buttocks and beyond-genetics boobs, then about fifteen seconds to the winter-dressed picketers outside. I wondered, if surgeons could do brain implants, would anybody get them?

  The show closed with some geek who writes incest-torture comic books shrieking that he’s the new John Peter Zenger.

  Sure wished I had cable.

  The cellular rang just before midnight.

  “It’s me,” Crystal Beth said. “He just called.”

  “He wants a meet now? Don’t say where on the phone. I’ll be—”

  “No. Tomorrow afternoon. Can you—?”

  “I’ll be there before twelve,” I promised her.

  As I patted Pansy before I took off the next morning, I felt a tremor. Didn’t know how it was transmitted, from her to me or the other way around. But I felt it, and I trusted it.

  So I stashed the Plymouth on Houston. Leaned up against a building to kill some time. Lit a smoke. A woman in a loden-green wool coat with fancy horn buttons down the front walked by, making a sour face at my cigarette. The after-trail smell from her perfume was enough to gag a coroner.

  A few minutes later, I took the subway to Bleecker Street. I couldn’t set up a box for any meet with Pryce. Not a tight one, anyway. If he smelled it, he’d disappear. But I could make it hard for him to do the same to me.

  On the subway I watched a man with his arms folded inside a dirty white sweatshirt, seeking the comfort of the straitjacket he remembered so fondly, his face going insanely serene when he found just the right position. Like the way a newly sprung convict moves into a one-room apartment even if he can afford more. There’s something soothing about the familiar, even if it’s ugly.

  “Where’s he want to meet?” I asked Crystal Beth as soon as she let me inside.

  “He didn’t say,” she answered. “He’s going to call at three and—”

  I nodded, cutting her off. And felt myself relax. That’s what had been spooking me—no way a man like Pryce tells you the address of a meet fifteen hours in advance unless he has enough personnel to keep the place under watch all that time.

  As we walked past the second floor, I heard a door open behind us. I didn’t turn around.

  “Where’s Vyra lurking?” I asked when we got to her place.

  “She doesn’t come every day. Sometimes I don’t see her for a week or so. It depends.”

  “I wasn’t trying to get into your business,” I told her. “I just wanted to know if she was going to make one of her appearances.”

  “You could, you know.”

  “Could what?”

  “Get into my business. You’re already in my . . . life. Don’t you want to know about . . . me and Vyra?”

  “No.”

  “It was my . . . idea, I guess,” she said, as though I’d answered the other way. “She’s not gay. Well, I guess I’m not either. She’s not bi—I was the first time she ever . . .”

  “It doesn’t—”

  “I love Vyra. She’s not what you think. What you might think, anyway—I don’t know what you think. She’s . . . lost. I wanted to help her find . . . herself, I guess. It’s a natural thing.”

  “Why are you telling me?”

  “Because you didn’t ask, I guess. That’s the way I am. I don’t like secrets between . . . friends. But if anyone tries to make me tell . . .”

  “I wouldn’t try and make you do anything,” I said. No, little girl, I thought, you can’t be muscled into stuff. You have to be tricked.

  “Vyra’s fun. You’d think I’d know more about fun than she would, the way we were raised. So different. But that’s not true. M
aybe because I have a purpose . . . I don’t know. I have a pair of shoes like hers. She made me buy them. I mean, she paid for them, but she made me go with her and get them. You want to see them?”

  “Sure.”

  Crystal Beth walked barefoot to her closet and came out with a pair of hot-pink spikes with a little round black dot inset on each toe. “Four-and-a-half-inch heels,” she said, grinning. “They make me really tall.”

  “They’re, uh . . . remarkable,” I said, struggling for the right word and missing it.

  “I can’t imagine where I’d wear them. Or what I’d wear them with. Vyra says I’m lucky. That I have such small feet.”

  “Is that genetic too?”

  “I think so. My mother had tiny feet. Not my father, though. You want to see how they look?”

  “Sure.”

  She slipped the shoes on her feet and paraded around a bit, pulling up her slacks at the ankles so the shoes could be displayed. “Do you think they look silly?” she asked me.

  “It’s hard to tell this way,” I said, scratching my chin, deep in thought. “Try it with the pants off,” I advised her solemnly.

  It was almost four when the phone rang. This time it was an address on West Fifty-sixth. An office building, if I remembered the block right. I scooped Herk out of the basement and we hiked west to Eighth Street near NYU. Then we grabbed the N train to Fifty-seventh, and walked over to the address Pryce had given me.

  There was an attendant in the lobby, but he didn’t pay any attention to us as we walked toward the elevator. I quickly scanned the tenant directory, but I couldn’t see anything next to 1401. We rode up anyway.

  The hall carpet had been fresh when you could still buy a De Soto in a showroom. The walls were a dingy shade of layered nicotine. The overhead lighting alternated between pus-yellow and missing as we moved along the corridor. The office doors were a uniform dull brown, identified by the remnants of gilt decals displaying the numbers. We found 1401 just past a right-angle turn in the corridor, standing alone next to a window overlooking an air shaft. The window was the kind of stained glass you don’t see in churches.

  I rapped lightly on the door. The man who opened it was a little taller than me, with thinning light-brown hair and watery blue eyes. He raised his eyebrows like he expected me to say something. I didn’t.

  “You’re—?”

  “Yeah,” I told him, moving past him into the office. Herk was right on my shoulder. I heard the door close behind us.

  We were in what once had been a waiting room. The back wall was a receptionist’s booth, complete with a sliding-glass window cut into the wall. Both empty. I opened the door beside the receptionist’s window. Pryce was in the next room, seated behind a wood desk in one of those green vinyl swivel chairs they gave typists in the Fifties. He stood up when we walked in.

  “Let’s get started,” he said.

  We followed him to another room. It was small and square, with a nausea-colored linoleum floor and a single window that had been painted over with that silver stuff they use on bathroom glass. The only furniture was a knock-down card table with a clear glass ashtray on it and four black metal folding chairs. The walls were bare, painted an off-white that years of neglect had degenerated into just “off.”

  Pryce gestured for me to pick a chair. I took the one with its back to the window, nodding at Herk to sit on my right. Pryce sat with his back to the door, leaving Lothar to face Herk.

  I handed him photocopies of the printouts I’d gotten from Wolfe. He scanned through them, eyebrows going up slightly when he came to the substituted pages. He handed the dead man’s photo to Lothar without a word.

  Lothar looked at the photo and nodded in recognition. Then he said the dead man’s name.

  Damn.

  “Did you know him well?” I asked Lothar quickly, keeping my face calm.

  “Only met him a couple, three times,” Lothar said smoothly, looking at Pryce for approval. “That was the way we worked it.”

  “And when do you get the word?”

  He looked at Pryce, who said: “Tuesday, there’ll be a message at the drop. From Hercules. You’ll turn it over—not the physical message, you’ll destroy that—to the others. Offer to meet with Hercules yourself. They’ll tell you to bring him someplace. Or they’ll tell you to go there alone, but they’ll be there too.”

  “They might—”

  “No they won’t,” Pryce cut him off. “They’ll have to find out. It’s too close. Now, what you need to do is spend the next couple of hours together. Get familiar with each other, like I told you. This will be the last chance you get.”

  “How about a beer?” Lothar said to Herk, standing up.

  “Okay, brother,” Herk replied, following him out of the room.

  We sat in silence until I heard the sound of a door close somewhere to my right. Then I leaned forward and dropped my best card on the table, my one shot at getting Crystal Beth out of the line of fire.

  “We don’t have to do this anymore,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The threat to you is Lothar getting busted when he comes in on the divorce thing, right?” I asked, keeping my voice so low Pryce had to twist his head to turn his ear toward me—no chance they could hear us in the next room. “But if we just wait,” I told him, “it all fixes itself. And I can get that done now.”

  “Explain,” he said, voice even lower than mine.

  “The woman doesn’t go in. I don’t care if it’s all set up or not. She just doesn’t go in. Not now. Her lawyer gets an adjournment, whatever. How long is this gonna take, anyway? Another two weeks, three weeks?”

  “I don’t know. I told you, I don’t know the date that they intend to—”

  “Whatever. It won’t be long, you know that much. All we have to do is wait. Why do we need all this undercover stuff now? I can guarantee you the woman will wait. And that’s all she has to do. When this thing they’re planning goes down, then she makes her move. And Lothar, he just defaults—doesn’t show up at all. They can issue all the warrants they want for him—he’ll be underground, right? Gone for good. And that’ll get her everything she wants. Once he disappears, she’s free.”

  “How can you make that guarantee? You don’t even know the woman’s name,” he said, watching my face. “Or, even if you do, you don’t know where she is. You may control that . . . other woman, but not the one that counts.”

  “Wherever she is, she’s dependent,” I said. “She’s not going to be able to do this by herself. She needs the others. That’s the way it works. There’s a whole support system. Not just money—she needs emotional support too. She’s safe where she is. Her baby too. It may be a little tense, but it’s not dangerous. She can wait. When this started, you wanted the whole thing called off. Well, we don’t have to call it off, right? All we have to do is delay it. For as long as you want.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Pryce said. “Too much time has gone by. He—Lothar—is getting nervous. Not about the others—he’s very confident there. About me. He wants something from me. A show of strength.”

  “What’s that got to do with—?”

  “He wants to see his son.”

  The weather changed in the room. The baby. I felt little dots of orange behind my eyes. My hands wanted to clench into fists. I pictured my center. Saw it start to fracture. Pulled it into a latticework, holding it with my will. I turned the blossoming rage into ugly green smoke, let it pass through the lattice. To somewhere else. Tested my voice in my head until it sounded calm, all the jagged edges rounded into smoothness. Then I let it out.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said, checking the audio on my voice to be sure it was calm and peaceful. “He can’t take the kid into the cell. Even if he has someone who’d take care of the baby, he’d never get him back once the wheels come off.”

  “He doesn’t want to take him,” Pryce replied. “Not now. He just wants to see him.”

  “To
be sure you can deliver?”

  “Yes. He knows I can handle the . . . other part. After all, we need his cooperation, so he can expect to be treated very well. But the . . . government doesn’t know where his wife and baby are.”

  “And neither do you,” I said, getting it for the first time.

  He shrugged, as if it were a minor problem. One he could expect to have solved sooner or later.

  “And that’s what the threats were all about, huh? It was never about delaying some scam divorce. That was the deal you made with him—that you’d find his kid. And maybe—yeah!—and deliver the kid when he goes away. Hand him right over.”

  He shrugged again.

  “But if he brings Herk in, he’s skewered. You’d have your own source. If he rats Herk out, he goes down too.”

  Another shrug.

  “Very nice,” I told him, meaning it. “But I can get what I want without doing anything now. You might have threatened Crystal Beth into getting the woman to drop the divorce thing, but you know you don’t have enough horsepower to make them give up the baby. Let’s go back to where we started. Forget the divorce. It’s not gonna happen, okay? Lothar won’t come in. He won’t get busted. You play out your own string.”

  “It’s too late for that,” Pryce said. “I have to have that baby. For an hour. Two hours, tops.”

  “Can’t do it,” I told him.

  “You said you had total control of—”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. Everyone has limits. That would be hers.”

  “I don’t care about hers,” he said quietly. “Only about yours. We have a deal. What you get is your friend Hercules. Vanished. With full immunity.”

  “That’d be good. But we can live without it.”

  “There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

  “What murder?”

  He idly fingered the photo of the dead man, not saying a word.

  “That’s a guess,” I told him. “Not an indictment.”

  He looked up at the ceiling, like he was seeking divine guidance. “Everybody’s been lying to you, Burke,” he said. “When you see your girlfriend, ask her about Rollo’s.”