Flood

by Andrew Vachss

  “Moving into what?”

  “Into the Square. With kiddie stuff—pictures, films, like that.”

  “And?”

  “I already said enough—maybe it wouldn’t work anyway, it’s just stuff I heard. Look, I just did you a favor, right?”

  “If Michelle’s on Forty, you did.”

  “She’ll be there, baby. I just did you a favor. If I needed one back, could I call you?”

  I looked at her, trying to see the face behind the makeup, trying to see the skull behind the face. The sun was in her eyes, bouncing off the dark glasses she wore. I couldn’t see anything. Her hands were shaking some.

  “You can call me at this number, anytime between ten in the morning and midnight,” I said, telling her Mama’s pay phone. She didn’t say a word, just moved her lips several times memorizing the number. Then she walked away again, without the exagerated wiggle this time. I started the engine, let it idle a minute, tossed the smoke out the window (you can’t use the ashtrays in this car), and took off for Pier Forty.

  I spotted Michelle as soon as I pulled up. She was wearing a big floppy white hat, like you’d see in a plantation movie. It should have looked stupid with the blue jeans and a sweat shirt with some jerko designer’s name on it, but it didn’t. Before I turned off the engine she was already walking over to me. She jumped in on the passenger side, slammed the door behind her, leaned over to whip a quick kiss on my cheek, and draped herself back against the door. “Hi, Burke.”

  “What’s happening, Michelle?”

  “The usual, darling. The bloody usual. It’s getting harder and harder for an honest person to make a living in this town.”

  “I’ve heard that. Listen, Michelle, I need some information about a guy who’s holed up somewhere near here. A stone freak, maybe a baby raper.”

  Michelle looked over at me, giggled, said, “I’m your man,” and giggled some more. She’s not too concerned anymore about being what she is, says even the truckdrivers who pay her for some fast work with her mouth know she’s not a woman. She says they like it better that way—who knows?

  “All I know about this guy is his name, Martin Howard Wilson. He calls himself the Cobra.”

  Michelle cracked up. “The Cobra! Jesus have mercy—he’s not a snake-fucker, is he?”

  “I don’t know, what’s a snake-fucker?”

  “You know, Burke, the kind of guy who’d fuck a bush if he thought there might be a snake in it.”

  “No, that’s not our boy. I don’t really know too much about him—no description, just the name and the nickname. But I thought you might have heard the name yourself—maybe have something for me.”

  “Darling, I have never heard of this particular freak, believe me—but that doesn’t mean I won’t. But I’d have to hear it long distance, you know? The cesspool is even more slimy than usual, if you can believe that. It’s no place for a sweet young thing like me, honey. There’s people working the place now that make even the freaks look good.”

  “I just heard something like that from your friend.”

  “You mean Margot? She’s a trip, all right. Comes out here every day and turns down tricks. Can you believe it? Her man’s elevator must not go to the top floor. She’s smart, though—went to college and all. She’s one of the few girls out here I consider my intellectual equal, honey.”

  “Does she know what she’s talking about?”

  “If you mean about some new scum moving into Times Square, she sure does, baby.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “Yes, darling. There are people who are into sordid things who are not just businessmen—people who just don’t know how to act, if you catch my drift.”

  “Margot said they hate niggers.”

  “That’s part of it, I guess. There’s only a few of them now, and they’re Americans. But they all play like they’re foreigners.”

  “From where?”

  “Think of a country even more vicious to people like me than this one, baby. Think of a country where half the freaks in this country dream of going someday.”

  “Michelle, come on. Geography isn’t my strong point.”

  “Maybe crime is your strong point—think of a country where they use capital punishment like we use fucking probation.”

  “South Africa?”

  “Give the man a gold star or a quick blowjob, whichever you’d prefer,” and Michelle went back to giggling.

  “How do you know it’s South Africa?”

  “Baby, I don’t know. It may be Rhodesia, or whatever they’re calling it today, or something like that. But it’s white men, with this African-soldier rap.”

  And I thought of Mama Wong, and the dog with the dark colored spine—a Rhodesian Ridgeback, the kind they breed for tracking down runaway slaves. They can even climb trees. Not supposed to be good pets, but some folks are crazy about them. Michelle saw I was trying to catch the tip of a thought and run it down. She kept quiet, smoking. I thought about all the conversations in the yard when I was inside. The guys with the short bits dreamed about parole—the guys with the telephone-number sentences only thought about escape. And the warrior whites, the neo-Nazis, the cons with race war on their minds at all times . . . they always talked about Rhodesia like it was the Promised Land. Where they could be themselves.

  “Michelle, what do they want?”

  “Honey, God only knows, and She’s not telling. But they’re here and making a lot of trouble for some people.”

  “What kind of trouble.”

  “I can’t tell you. I don’t get up there much anymore. I just hear it around that they’re bad people to deal with, that they don’t know how to play the game, you understand?” I just sat there, looking out the windshield to the street. Michelle looked over at me. “You got some more questions, honey, or did you change your mind about the kiss of life?”

  “One more question. Will you ask around about this freak I told you about?”

  “Anything you say, Burke. Is there any money in this? I still want to visit Denmark and come back a blonde.” The giggle again.

  “I honestly don’t know, Michelle, but there might be. I can give you this twenty on account,” and gave her a piece of last night’s cash.

  More giggling. “On account of what?”

  I touched my forehead in a half-salute and she slithered out of the car.

  I didn’t know which Michelle needed more . . . an operation on her plumbing or her head, but it didn’t matter to me. Maybe the guys who paid her twenty-five bucks for a car trick weren’t exactly sure what they were buying, but I was. Her gender might be a mystery, but in my world, it’s not who you are, it’s how you stand up.

  7

  I FIRED UP the engine. The Plymouth rolled away from the pier and headed north as surely as though it had a radar cone dialed to Sleaze in its nose. I stayed as close to the river as I could on my way uptown, looking for someone I knew. Most of the street signs have long since disappeared once you get into the West Thirties, but I didn’t need them. I stopped for a red light beneath the underpass and made eye contact with a youngish guy wearing an army raincoat and black beret. He walked carefully toward the car, trying for a smile out of his bloated face. I kept looking at him, didn’t move. He opened the raincoat to display what looked like a scabbard with a long handle at the top and looked up at me to see if I was still watching. When he saw that I was, he pulled the handle up to show me part of a gleaming machete blade. Then he put the blade back into the scabbard, closed the coat, tried for a smile again, and held up his open right hand. Flashed it open and closed three times to show me he wanted fifteen bucks for the blade, raising his eyebrows to see if I wanted to buy or to bargain. I reached in my pocket and held up a gold shield—if you got close enough to read it, you’d see it said I was an official peace officer for the ASPCA. He didn’t get any closer but he didn’t run either. Just stepped backward a few feet until he disappeared. Like I said, I don’t need the signposts.

&nbs
p; I drove slowly up and down the back streets in the West Forties until I found what I was looking for—a parking place, complete with attendant. The muscular black kid hardly looked up when I parked, didn’t move when I walked over to him. It wasn’t even dark yet and he didn’t have to work for a couple of hours. He was already dressed for work in green leather sneakers with bright yellow soles and gold suede stripes, dull green slacks topped off with a broad-banded green-and-gold short-sleeved T-shirt and green knitted tam with a big yellow button. Heavy leather bands studded with brass were on each wrist. He flexed his biceps when I first approached, but switched to flexing his leg muscles when I looked too much like a cop to suit him.

  I took out a twenty, finally catching his full attention, and carefully tore it in half. I held out half the bill to him. “I don’t want anyone to bother my car for a couple of hours, okay?” He took the bill, gave me a quick look, nodded his head. I smiled to tell him there was nothing worth more than twenty bucks in the car, kept smiling at him until he realized I was memorizing his face, and walked off down the block. I didn’t look back—a survivor works with what he’s got. This was costing me a lot of cash already, but I figured there was still a thousand-dollar pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

  Without a description, I didn’t expect to run into the Cobra on the street, but I knew enough to check certain places first. Once before I was working on a locate and the target was a porno freak, so I dropped into a joint in the Village where I knew the owner. The place was called Leather Pleasure, and the owner was the prime mover in some kind of society where they get together for coffee and consensual torture. I told him my subject was addicted to porn, and the owner told me he ran a specialty house that didn’t cater to the general trade. When I asked him what he was talking about he launched into a long-winded explanation that began somewhere with the Roman Empire, touched on his unique brand of nationalism—“The Germans don’t understand the creativity in pain, they don’t understand that you have to give to get. Only the British genuinely conceptualize human relationships”—and ended up with a generous splat of snobbery. “If you just want porn, you know, like dirty pictures and all that, my friend, you must go to Times Square. Down here, each shop has its own unique character, its own personality, if you will. A client will know he’s in the wrong place in a minute should he come in here without the proper attitude.” Funny place—the owner was this pleasant guy who sounded like a college professor and his merchandise was full of all this violence.

  All the porn houses looked about the same from the outside. Only the joints that featured live human beings did any promotion, and they promised anything the mind could dredge up for ten bucks. But the magazine and photo joints just had windows that were painted over or boarded up or were solid-faced storefronts, with the usual menu on the outside—“Bondage, Discipline, Animal Love, Lesbian Love, Latest from Denmark.”

  Nothing on the covers of these dumps indicated kiddie porn on the inside. I went into the first door I came to, checked the fat guy sitting at a register by the opening, and saw row after row of sterile-looking aisles. Magazines and books, all in plastic shrink-wrap, were neatly arranged according to topic—a sort of Dewey Decimal System of Dirt. But there was no kiddie stuff. I kept walking up and down the aisles, occasionally taking a magazine off the shelves, glancing at the front and back cover, putting it back. It was a good place to work, actually, since all of the other five customers studiously looked down. No eye contact—big surprise. I made two circuits before I found the back section marked Adults Only. Maybe the boss had a sense of irony—it had nothing but pictures of kids, books about kids, and magazines with kids. Nice stuff—everything from naked kids romping in the sun to a little boy with his hands and legs hog-tied behind him being double-sodomized.

  There was just one guy in this section. Nicely dressed, he had a three-piece suit, polished shoes, briefcase. Wandered from shelf to shelf like he was in a daze, not touching anything. Not my man, I could tell. Over to the left, still further back, were some booths with doors on them marked “Private Reading Area. See Attendant for Key.” I knew what the private areas looked like—all plastic and vinyl so the Lysol wouldn’t stick to fabric when they prepared for the next customer.

  As I walked past the attendant, I pulled my coat open with both hands to show I wasn’t glomming any of his merchandise. He gave me a quick glance and went back to whatever he was doing. I thought a moment and decided on the direct approach. No use flashing a phony badge down here. Half the quasi-cops (like the Civilian Patrol, or the characters that carry PBA cards like they’re members of a secret society, or the lames who send away to magazines for their International Organization of Private Investigators credentials) in the city hang out down here. I also know there aren’t too many independent operators left in the Pit.

  After I loomed over the guy at the desk for a minute or so, he looked up. “I don’t want to waste your time,” I said. “I’m a private investigator looking for a young woman who’s got to be down here. If you can help me, I’ll make it worth your while.”

  “Look, pal. A lot of women come down here—you’d be surprised. I don’t take no notice. I just do my job.”

  “The boss would want you to do this one, friend.”

  “Huh?”

  “Look, she’s a member of one of those wacko organizations that want to close down these dens of sin, you understand?”

  “So? We get them in here all the time too—on tours or something. Don’t mean nothing.”

  “This broad means business, my friend. She just got out of Mattawan for throwing a firebomb into one of these places—killed a guy. She said Jesus told her to do it. Remember, it was on Forty-fourth, about two years ago?”

  He looked at me, mentally plodding through his file of potential dangers to himself. Balanced the odds. “So?”

  “So Carlo gave me this job, told me to find her and take care of her before she blows up one of his joints, right?”

  “So?”

  “So I was promised cooperation from your boss, you understand?”

  “My boss ain’t named Carlo.”

  “Look, I’m trying to be reasonable. I thought I was dealing with an intelligent guy.” I imitated his squeaky voice: “My boss ain’t named Carlo!” His head shot up. I said, “You asshole—I mean your fucking boss, not the flunky who tells you when to open this dump—understand now?”

  He looked around behind him like something was gaining on him. Then he glanced quickly over at the pay phone in the corner. I played out the string. “Look, pick up the phone, call your boss, and tell him Tony’s here to do a job for Carlo. You think you can maybe do that without getting confused?”

  He looked at me again, trying to make up what some uninformed person might call his mind. I said, “Look, go ahead and call, I’ll watch the jerkoff artists for you,” and got his attention again as I pulled the .38 partway out of the underarm holster.

  He rubbed the side of his head. “If you’re from downtown, what’s my name?” I looked into his eyes, seeing fear. He looked into mine and saw what he expected. I trotted out my whisper-of-the-grave voice. “Don’t make yourself more important than you are.”

  We looked at each other. He blinked, wiped his forehead with a dirty sleeve. I opened the front door slightly as though to throw my cigarette butt into the street, at the same time making a quick gesture with my hand that he cleverly picked up with his sensitive vision. He decided. “You said there was something in it for me?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “A cunt came in here maybe an hour ago—short blonde cunt. Asked me a lotta stupid questions about the kiddie shows over on Eighth. I thought she was comin’ on to me, you know? I said something to her and she fucking sapped me—right in the fucking face. I think she broke a tooth or something—hurts like a motherfucker.”

  “She hit you with a sap?”

  “I didn’t see it, but it must of been a sap. Didn’t even see her fucking hand mov
e.”

  “Yeah, she sounds like the one, all right. You did the right thing, not trying to stop her—probably carrying one of those firebombs right in her purse.”

  He looked gratefully at me. “Yeah, I figured she was carrying something, you know? What a sicko bitch.”

  “You see where she went?”

  “No, man. She just zipped out the door.”

  “You call downtown?”

  “Uh . . . no, man. I mean, I figured . . . she was just another sicko, like I said. I didn’t know anyone gave a shit.”

  “Yeah, you did right. Okay.”

  “You said there was something in it for me?”

  “Yeah, I got something for you.” Against my better instincts, I reached in my pocket for a pair of twenties, folded the two bills, and stuffed them in the pocket of his knit shirt. He tried to display some class, but he had his hand in his pocket almost before I was out the door.

  Back on the bricks I moved away quickly before he got the idea of making a phone call and picking up some congratulations for his cooperation. Flood was around. I knew she’d be down here—all guts and no brains—with a lousy interrogation technique and a worse temper. No surprises so far.

  But where would she go next? Even someone like Flood would know better than to think she could just slap and kick her way down Forty-second Street until she got some answers. If I stayed on the trail long enough, I’d have to come up with some myself.

  I had been walking aimlessly until I looked up and saw I was headed toward the Port Authority Building. Flood wouldn’t be there. Plenty of freaks, all right, but not the kind she was looking for. I kept walking—past the whores, the winos, the stud-hustlers, the dope peddlers and the rough-off artists, past narrow alleys. Nothing. I checked faces, looking for whatever—cold neon lights flashing off dead eyes, lost kids, dirtbags looking for lost kids to turn a profit, Jesus freaks, bag ladies, bored cops. Nothing.

  Then I spotted a huge Spanish-looking kid sitting on a milk crate at the mouth of an alley, giant transistor radio held next to his head so close it looked like it was growing out of his ear. He was singing to himself. Other street kids walked by in front of me, checked out the Spanish kid, looked over his shoulder into the alley, and kept rolling fast. Something smelled. I walked by too, glancing over his shoulder, and saw a flash of white in the alley, no sound. Too many people around to take the kid out of the play—and I didn’t want him behind me if I went past. No time. Past the kid, I turned into the first door, a topless club next to the alley. It was dimly lit, blue smoke inside, disco music, no conversations. Sluggo braces me at the door: “Ten dollars cover charge.” Wonderful. Probably took him a week to memorize the words. I threw ten bucks at him and went past, checked out the topless dancers with their sagging bodies and dead brains, and walked the length of the bar. I kept moving like I was looking for a good seat.