Flood

by Andrew Vachss

  I backed into my usual spot facing West Street, lit up, and waited. There were plenty of hustlers working, but no Michelle. Waiting isn’t hard for me, though. Different people use different tricks to make the time go by, but it all comes down to the same thing. You can’t make anything happen, you just have to be ready when it does. Sometimes you have to hide the fact that you’re waiting so you use something like a taxicab and sometimes you find yourself a job to do while you’re waiting so if someone is looking they see the worker, not the watcher. Some places you stand out only if you don’t look like you’re watching, like in the cesspool—Times Square. If you’re tracking a man in that pit, the only thing to do is really gawk around and be obvious as hell about it. Then they only wonder what you’re looking for, not who. This job was like that. All the freaks parading by knew I was waiting for something or somebody. And after I was there a half hour or so, word would get around; they’d talk, compare notes. They’d know I wasn’t law, but they couldn’t be sure I wasn’t trouble.

  In some neighborhoods, especially Italian or Hispanic ones, the young bloods would try their luck with a stranger just to be doing it. Not down here—everybody down here already knows their luck is permanently bad, and the nice-looking man in the cashmere topcoat coming down the block might just have gotten so bored reading muscle magazines every night after his frigid wife went to bed that now he’s stalking the streets with a handgun in his pocket and exorcism on his mind.

  When I wait like this I usually listen to some of my tape collection. I started it by accident. I’d gone to a meeting that I wanted to record and the Mole had rigged me up with one of his devices, using sequential blank-tape banks with minicassettes. It was voice-activated and would record for six hours straight. I kicked it in before I even got out of the car, but I forgot to turn it off. So when I dropped by this cellar club later to unload a couple of gross of phony tickets to a rock concert, the tape was still running. They had a kid playing at the club that night who looked like he left Kentucky to work in the Chicago steel mills, but he was a blues singer, pure and simple. Someone once said the blues are the truth—maybe that’s why I listen so close when I hear that music . . . truth’s in short supply in my line of work. Anyway, when I got back to the office and played the tapes I found a couple of the kid’s numbers at the tail end. The Mole was right about the perfect fidelity—listening to the tape was exactly like being back in the club. And listening to the music was exactly like being back in my own life, like the blues are supposed to be. The blues don’t make you think—they make you remember. If you’ve got no memories, you can’t have the blues. I avoid physical pain like a vulture avoids live meat, but I call up the past sometimes and let it wash over me on purpose. Maybe it helps me survive. Maybe it makes me believe that survival isn’t a waste of time. I don’t know.

  When the tape broke into the cellar club’s sounds I heard the rattle of glasses and the voices of the waitresses hustling drinks and the muted electric hum that meant nobody was listening to anyone else. The kid fronted a classic Chicago-style blues band: he sang and worked a mouth harp off the same microphone, a piano, a slide guitar, rhythm guitar, electric bass, drummer. The kid didn’t have much of a rap—he didn’t have the years and confidence for that yet. But he understood that if you could make people in a basement club stop boozing and snorting and hustling long enough to listen, you had something real. Whatever that something was, the kid wanted it—bad. He leaned a bit into the microphone, said “This is ‘Bad Blood Blues,’ ” and the piano man started into a series of rolls and falls, going with just the bottom line from the bass player. It wasn’t loud, but it was intrusive, insistent—impossible to ignore. So much so that by the time the guitarists and the drummer were there, too, the crowd was waiting to hear what the kid had to say. He cupped the harp around the microphone, then appeared to change his mind and just got to it. Unlike most white blues singers, the kid didn’t try to sound black. The words came out firm and clean, not covered by the band:

  I always tried to do right,

  But everything I did seemed to turn out wrong.

  I always tried to do right,

  But everything I did seemed to turn out wrong.

  I didn’t mean to stay with that woman,

  At least not for very long.

  and you could hear the crowd shut down and shift over to a listening stance. By the middle of the second verse the kid was getting shouts of agreement when he sang:

  Oh I knew that she was evil,

  People told me she was mean.

  Yes, I knew that she was evil,

  And people told me she was mean.

  I knew that she was evil . . .

  But I always thought that she was clean.

  Then the kid bridged into a hard, anticipative harp solo, taken against the bass and rhythm guitar, letting the crowd know he was going to explain the mystery to them in just a little while. And he did:

  Well, she never gave me nothing,

  She just about ruined my life.

  You know she never gave me nothing,

  She just about ruined my life.

  And when she finally gave me something . . .

  (By then, we all knew what he was talking about.)

  I brought it home to my poor wife.

  And behind shouts of “That’s right!” and “Had to be!” the kid picked up the harp again and the blues came out. Just that simple, and damn-near perfect. By then the people knew where he was going, where a story like his had to go:

  Now my life is so empty,

  My wife don’t want to see my face.

  My life is so empty,

  And my wife don’t want to see my face.

  I got to walk this road alone,

  Bad blood, it’s my disgrace.

  And the kid rolled the harp down with the rest of the band and finished. He had them all moving now and he went uptempo but stayed with the blues. The harp barked into a fast lead, the piano floated off the top, and then the kid sang his own road song:

  I got a long way to travel, honey,

  I’m sorry you can’t come

  And people in the crowd who knew what he meant chuckled in agreement.

  I got a long way to travel, honey,

  I’m sorry you can’t come.

  You are all used up, babe,

  And I have just begun.

  Like a lot of the blues, sex got mixed up with everything else. The kid grabbed a breath:

  I got a long way to go, babe,

  And I know that you don’t care.

  I got a long way to go, babe,

  And I know that you don’t care . . . just where

  You wouldn’t like it anyway, babe,

  They ain’t got no suburbs there.

  And the harp barked its challenge to the crowd, wailing out the don’t-mind-dying credo of all bluesmen as the tape finally ran to its end.

  That was the first tape in my collection—I’ve added dozens since. I got some early Paul Butterfield, Delbert McClinton, Kinky Friedman (and if you think this guy’s just a quasi-cowboy clown, listen to “Ride ’Em Jewboy” just once), Buddy Guy, Jimmy Cotton—all live. I had a Muddy Waters tape too, but it sounded like he was playing Prom Night in the suburbs someplace, the same way Charley Musselwhite did when I caught him at some college hangout near Boston. I don’t blame either of them, but I erased the tapes. I have some stuff I didn’t record myself too, some Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, stuff like that. I keep the tapes in the Plymouth to help me do the waiting—I’ve got more sense than to listen to them inside a closed room.

  About an hour later I saw a black Lincoln Town Coupe pull up under the elevated portion of the West Side Highway, the part they’re never going to finish building. Saw a flash of nylons as a woman climbed out of the front seat, working before she hit the ground. She disappeared into the shadows and the Lincoln pulled away. I thought I recognized the woman, but it was long distance and I didn’t have time to put the monocular to my eye. I tu
rned off the tape, set the system up to record instead, lit a smoke, and waited.

  I was right. Margot approached from the far right. She must have crossed the street under the El, doubled back to the side, and walked along the river’s edge by the piers. She was swinging her purse like she was planning to do business. It might have fooled the pimp in the Lincoln if he was watching her, but it wouldn’t have fooled anyone who’d seen me sitting there for a couple of hours.

  As Margot got closer, I saw she was wearing giant sunglasses that covered half her face. I slowly rolled down the window in time with her approach so that she arrived as the glass disappeared.

  “Waiting for me, Burke?”

  “I don’t know, Margot, am I?”

  “Listen, I think he’s watching me, okay? Let me in the car—I’ll get on the floor like I’m giving you head and talk to you.”

  “No good. I’ve been here too long. Other people have seen me—they know I’m not waiting this long just to get off.”

  “I got to talk to you.”

  “Go back where you were, okay? I’ll meet you—”

  “No. Forget it—no, wait. Let me get in the car and just drive away. They’ll think you were waiting for me, right? A hotel job.”

  “What’s the rate for that?”

  Margot lifted up the sunglasses so I could see her face. One eye was swollen shut and there were traces of dried blood over a plucked eyebrow. She spoke in a flat, deliberate voice. “It used to be fifty, but now Dandy says I’m a full-fledged three-way girl so it costs a yard.” I just looked at her face—her eyes were dead. Her voice didn’t change. “And he says if I don’t make a success of myself going three-way I can try the Square and do some chain jobs. He gets two yards a night or I get worse—get it?”

  We had already talked too long, in front of too big an audience.

  “Get in the car,” I told her, and fired up the Plymouth. Pulling out of my slot, we rolled onto the highway, heading south toward the World Trade Center, hooked a deep U-turn, and rolled back north toward uptown. Nobody following.

  I motored around for another twenty minutes to make sure. Still nothing. So I drove over to a basement poolroom with the dirty neon sign that said Rooms over the entrance and got out. Told Margot to come with me and keep her mouth shut no matter who said what to her. I handed her an empty attache case I keep in the back seat and said to hang on to it like it was full of money.

  We went down the short steps to the basement and stopped by the wire cage, where an old man was watching a small-screen color TV with his back to us. To the right of the cage was a flight of steps leading upstairs, to the left was the basement with the pool tables. I rapped my knuckles on the counter. The old man didn’t even turn around from the TV. “No vacancies, pal.”

  “It’s me, Pop,” I said, and he turned around, looked at me, saw Margot, and raised one eyebrow. “It’s business.” I pointed at the attache case. The old man reached under the counter, took out a key with the number 2 on the attached paper tag, and I handed him two fifties. He turned his back to us and went back to the TV set. I motioned Margot upstairs in front of me and we climbed in silence.

  Pop only rents rooms to certain people and only for business. The key says #2, but it really means the whole second floor. When you’re finished you leave the key on the hook by the door, leave the door unlocked, and go down the fire escape. The rate is a hundred bucks until the next morning, no matter when you check in. And nobody stays past the next morning, no matter what they want to pay—house rules. Pop uses Max the Silent for evictions, but they don’t happen often.

  When we got to the first-floor landing we saw the steel door with no doorknob. I told Margot to wait, and in a few seconds it buzzed and popped open. I pulled it closed from the other side, knowing there was no way to go back through it. If anyone else tried to come through the door legit, Pop would buzz once like he just did and they’d get through. But if someone was forcing him to do it he’d hit the buzzer a few times rapidly. That wouldn’t open the door, but it would seem like he was trying to—anyone in the building would know it was time to split. Even if the law hit the door with the usual fireaxes and battering rams you’d have at least fifteen minutes to get out. More than enough. Pop didn’t allow any dope-dealing in the place, but anything else went, and guys sometimes went up and down these stairs with enough explosives to put the whole block into orbit.

  I used the key to open the first door on the second floor, and Margot and I went inside. Large, barely furnished suite of rooms, two bathrooms, convertible couch, empty refrigerator. If you wanted it, you had to bring it. I found an ashtray and lit up. Margot let out what sounded like a groan and sat down on the couch. I looked over at her. “So?”

  “I’ve got a job for you.”

  “I don’t need a job, Margot. I need to talk to Michelle.”

  “I already talked to her. I’ve got a message for you.”

  “Which is?”

  “First I want to talk about the job.”

  “Hey, what is this crap? Just tell me what Michelle said.”

  She took off her glasses again, gave me a dead smile to go with her eyes. “Don’t be tough, Burke—don’t be a hard guy. Don’t threaten me. I’ve had everything that can be done to a person done to me except killing and I don’t care about that. Don’t threaten me, just listen to me, okay?”

  I said nothing, smoking. Margot lit one of her own.

  “Something has to be done about Dandy.”

  “Your pimp?”

  “My pimp.”

  “I don’t know him, never heard of him.”

  “He’s from Boston. He just came down here.”

  “What has to be done?”

  “Murder.”

  “You’re talking to the wrong man. That’s not me.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “Then you heard wrong.”

  “How much?”

  “Forget it. You’re a fucking dummy—you don’t want this creep, get on a bus and split.”

  “I can’t leave.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit—first he has to die.”

  “Don’t even tell me about it.”

  “Would five thousand do the job?”

  I got up from the couch and walked over to the window. Layers of filth made it impossible to look through, even in the daylight. I still needed that message from Michelle, so I gave Margot some free advice. She listened like it was worth what I was charging. “Look, dummy. You pay a man five G’s to knock off some halfass pimp and he takes your money and says thank you and never does it. Then what the fuck do you do?”

  “I earn some more money and now I have a list of two people.”

  “At that rate you’ll be on social security before you find someone who’s for real, and he’ll want a million dollars for your whole list.”

  “I can make a million dollars if I have to—I got my money-maker right here,” Margot said, slapping herself on the rump and smiling her dead smile. We were getting nowhere.

  “Look, I don’t do that kind of work. Just leave him and be done with it.”

  “He has to be dead first.”

  “Because he’ll come after you or what?”

  “The first.”

  “If I could—and I’m not saying I can—arrange it so he never comes near you again in life, would that do it?”

  “You don’t know him.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “I thought you said you’d never heard of him.”

  I blew an attempt at a smoke ring at the ceiling, went back over to the couch and motioned her to come over and sit next to me. Margot hesitated, biting her swollen lower lip. “What the fuck’s the matter with you?” I asked her. “You come into a strange place with a strange man, you ask him to kill someone, and now you’re afraid of a couch?”

  It didn’t even get a smile out of her, but she did walk over and sit next to me. And listened.

  “Look, le
t’s say a man works in a maggot factory. You know, where they dig up maggots from under rocks and put them into little containers for people who need maggots, like fishermen and scientists and abstract artists or whatever. Okay, he works in this factory for twenty years, right? He watches maggots work, he watches them play, he watches them breed. He sees them individually and in groups. He observes their every fucking characteristic, all right? Now you find a man like this and you ask him if he knows your personal maggot. And he says no. But he knows maggots, you understand? And one maggot’s not a hell of a lot different from the other maggots? Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “So I never heard of this Dandy.”

  “I got it.”

  “Okay, now what’s the message from Michelle?”

  “Wait. You’ll do something with Dandy?”

  “For five thousand dollars. But I won’t kill him—and you’ll have to participate.”

  “Why? How?”

  “The why is so you don’t end up testifying against me and my people. The how I don’t know yet.”

  “This is straight?”

  “You tell me.”

  Margot looked into my face like there was something she could learn. There wasn’t, but she was satisfied, I guess. She nodded okay.

  “Now . . .”

  “This is the message from Michelle, word for word. She said, ‘Tell Burke that the man who knows the Cobra made a movie star out of a corpse.’ That’s all.”

  “That’s the whole thing—that’s all she said?”

  “That’s it. She made me say it twenty times until I got it down perfect.”

  “What’s she think I am, Sherlock-fucking-Holmes?”

  “Burke, I don’t know. That’s what she said. Not like it was a riddle but like you’d understand.”

  “Okay.” I told her I’d drop her off wherever she wanted.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ve got to be off the streets for a few hours. I’ll tell Dandy I turned a freak trick for two bills. That’s what he wants anyway. He says that’s where the money is.”