Flood

by Andrew Vachss

  “That’s all, right?”

  “Well, it doesn’t seem like a lot for five grand.”

  “Since when? That was the deal—there’s no more coming to you.”

  “I’m not saying anything. Just when—”

  “When it happens it happens, Margot. You’ll know because you’re going to be in on it, right?”

  “Yes, I know.” She seemed tired all of a sudden. Walking over to the blackened window, she tapped her nails against the sill. I asked her if she had the News with her, and she pulled a copy of the Times from her giant purse. Did they have the race results in that uptown rag? I sat down to check while Margot kept up a steady patter of insights about the streets and the life. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out how she ended up with the likes of Dandy, but that wasn’t my job. I used to dream about how someday people would pay me to think, but it hasn’t happened yet.

  Nodding occasionally to Margot so she’d keep talking quietly, I was left pretty much to myself. I hadn’t expected anyone in the poolroom to comment about how my face looked, but I’d thought Margot would say something. She never saw it—obsessions give you tunnel vision. I should know.

  I finally found the race results, appropriately displayed in lowercase (and upper-class) type. Damn! Honor Bright, ninth race, the winner, paid $11.60. That was all the information the sissy Times would give me, but it was enough. I was now on the longest winning streak of my life with the horses. Come to think of it, with anything at all. But I didn’t want to spoil the moment by dwelling on it, and I didn’t want to share it with Margot either. So I said, “Okay, I won’t be able to reach you, I guess. So you can call me at the number you have in a couple of days and we can make a meet. By then we should have everything in motion.”

  Margot was drumming her nails against the face of her watch.

  “I don’t want to go back on the streets right away—Dandy might see me or something. You going to stay here long?”

  “No—I got to go to work.”

  Margot leaned forward, partially blocking my way. “You think it shows?”

  “What?”

  “On me—you think it shows . . . being a hooker?”

  “No, when you’re not one.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s not important. Your eye’s healing, right? My face’s going to heal, right?” She noticed my face for the first time.

  “What happened?”

  “I got bit by a baby dragon.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s not important. Look, you call, okay?”

  Margot stood up. “Burke, as long as I’ve got to be here anyway, you want . . . ?”

  I looked at her, tried to smile, not sure if it came off. “It’s the best offer I’ve had in a long time. But not now, I got to work. Can I raincheck it?”

  Margot looked like she’d expected the answer. “I shouldn’t be thinking about tricking all the time, huh?”

  “If I was you, I’d think about something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how I’m going to solve my problems.”

  “You’re going to solve my problems.”

  “I’m going to solve one of your problems, kid. But you make problems for yourself—you do wrong things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like calling the Prophet an old nigger,” I told her, getting up to walk her to the door.

  33

  MARGOT HAD NO sooner walked out the door than Max appeared—he waits as silently as he does everything else. I gave him four grand, holding out one for myself for the running expenses of this case, and told him to stash it for me someplace. Less four hundred for Max, this thing still had the chance to show a decent profit if it worked out.

  I asked Max if he wanted something to eat, purposely avoiding the subject of horseracing, and I saw a tiny flicker pass across his face. So he thought I already knew the results and wasn’t admitting anything. Okay, just for that I’d torture him until he demanded to know the truth.

  I didn’t have long to wait. As soon as we got to the restaurant Max made the sign of a galloping horse to ask me what happened last night. Instead of telling him I showed him that harness horses don’t gallop—that’s against the rules. In fact, they’re called standardbreds instead of thoroughbreds because they’re bred to a standard gait, either a trot or a pace. They evolved from working horses, not from rich men’s playthings like the useless nags who run in the Kentucky Derby. I showed him with my fingers how pacers move their outside legs together and then their inside legs together in rolling motion, while trotters put one front leg and the opposite rear leg forward at the same time. I showed him what it meant to break stride, or go off gait, and why pacers were generally faster and less likely to break than trotters.

  Max sat through this entire explanation with the patience of a tree, figuring he would outwait me. But he finally cracked under the strain, just as I was explaining about new breeds now being developed in Scandinavia, how they aren’t as fast as American-style trotters but they have tremendous endurance. Jumping up, he stalked over to the cash register for the News and fired it over to me hard enough to break bones. Then he folded his arms across his chest and waited.

  As I opened the paper I had a momentary flash of panic. What if the goddamned Times was wrong? But there it was in greasy black and white. We won. I showed Max the chart of the ninth race—Honor Bright had left cleanly, grabbed a quick tuck fourth at the quarter, moved outside with cover at the half, then fired with a big brush on the final paddock turn to blow past the leaders and win going away by almost two lengths. Max insisted I show him what the charted race would have actually looked like if we’d been there watching, so I got some paper and diagrammed the whole thing for him. Max really showed class. He never asked how much we had won—-the victory itself seemed enough. Of course, he could have already figured it out. But the real class showed when he agreed to pick the money up from Maurice and never said a word about making another bet. I’d proved something to him, and that was enough—he didn’t think he’d found the key to the vault.

  I dropped Max at the warehouse where I used a pay phone to call Flood and tell her I wouldn’t be seeing her until very early the next morning. I told her I’d ring her from downstairs before I came up.

  My face hurt a bit and I wanted to change the dressing—and I wanted to sleep. But when I got back to the office I had to explain the whole race again to Pansy and feed her too, so it was after four in the afternoon when I finally lay down.

  34

  THE TINY BATTERY-POWERED alarm woke me just past eight. When I picked up the desk phone to call Flood I heard some freak yell, “Hey, Moonchild, are you on the line?” and hung up quietly. I could have used another shave for cosmetic purposes but it wasn’t necessary for the role I had to play. I had to be a guy waiting around the night court for a friend or a relative. I didn’t want to look too much like a lawyer—I don’t work the Bronx courts (neither does Blumberg or any of my regulars—you have to be bilingual to do it), and I didn’t want people talking to me. I didn’t want to look too much like a felon either—some smartass rookie might decide to ask me if there were any warrants out against me. There weren’t but I had to time things right. I had to be in front of the court at eleven-thirty like I’d been told, so I had to get there earlier to make sure. But not too early—I didn’t want to be hanging around there either.

  I got out a pair of dark chino pants, a dark-green turtleneck jersey, a pair of calf-high black boots, a fingertip leather jacket, and one of those Ivy League caps. I changed quickly, shoved a set of I.D. in my pocket, added three hundred bucks, and snapped a second set of I.D. papers into the jacket’s inner sleeve. No weapons—the court’s full of metal detectors and informants, and Pablito’s people might have even a worse attitude than the law. So no tape recorder either, not even a pencil.

  Now for the bad part—riding the subway without nuclear weapons, or at least a flamethrower. But it was ea
rly enough and I walked until I came to the underground entrance. I played with the local trains for a while, backtracking and crisscrossing until I got to the Brooklyn Bridge station. I found a pay phone there and called Flood—she said she was doing okay and she’d stay there until I called her, sounding subdued but not depressed. It’s bad to be depressed at night—that kind of thing is easier to handle in the morning. That’s why when I’ve only got a couple of bucks in my pocket I get some action down on a horse or a number or something before I go to sleep—something to look forward to. And if it doesn’t come through for me, at least it’s another day where I beat the system—it’s daylight, I’m not looking out through prison bars, the suckers are getting ready to go to work, and there’s money for me to make. It works for me, but I don’t think Flood’s a gambler.

  I grabbed the uptown express, rode it to Forty-second Street, and crossed the tracks like I was looking for the local. I took a look around. Lots of freaks working the second shift tonight—chain snatchers, child molesters, flashers and rubbers, the usual. No Cobra, though. Sometimes you get dumb-lucky, not this time. I waited for two more express trains to come on through and took the third one.

  A guy in the seat across from me was wearing a tattered raincoat buttoned to the neck, denim washpants, new loafers with tassels, no socks. He had neatly trimmed hair and crazy eyes. Nice disguise, but he’d left the plastic hospital tag around his wrist when he’d gone over the wall. He had one hand in his pocket and his lips were moving. I got up quietly and moved to another car.

  A kid about the size of a two-family house was standing in the middle of the next car, playing his giant portable stereo loud enough to crack concrete. Everybody was looking the other way. A citizen with a delicate beard and a belted trenchcoat was complaining to the girl next to him about noise pollution. The kid watched the whole conversation with reptile eyes. I moved on to the next car.

  A young transit cop with the obligatory mustache walked through the train listening to his walkie-talkie and nodding to himself. I saw a skinny Spanish kid about fourteen years old practicing his three-card monte moves on a piece of cardboard. He had very smooth hands, but his rap was weak—I guess he was an apprentice. Two blacks in Arab robes with white knit caps on their heads moved through the cars, rattling metal cups, looking for donations with a story about a special school for kids in Brooklyn. Some people went in their pockets and put coins in the cups.

  I moved through a couple of cars again. Sat down next to a blond kid wearing only a cut-off sweatshirt, no jacket. He looked peaceful. I checked his hands—one large blue letter tattooed on each knuckle. H A T E. The letters were set so they faced out. I moved on before the fellows collecting money asked this boy for a contribution.

  The last car had nothing more troublesome than some kids staring out the front window like they were driving the train, and it lasted all the way to 161st Street.

  The South Bronx—not a bad place if you had asbestos skin. A short walk to the Criminal Court Building, almost eleven now. The Bronx Criminal Court is a brand-new building—the juvenile court is in the same building, just with a different entrance. I guess the city figured there was no point making the delinquents walk a long distance before they reached their inevitable destination.

  I found a quiet bench, opened my copy of the News, and kept an eye on my watch. Nobody approached. It was getting near the end of the arraignment shift and only a few losers were waiting around. I spotted one of the hustlers, a young Spanish guy with a lawyer’s suit. I’d heard about this one—he works Blumberg’s game, only in the Bronx. Next to him, Blumberg is Clarence Darrow.

  I left the bench with five minutes to spare, climbed out of the basement to the first floor, and went out the 161st Street exit. I lit a cigarette and waited. At eleven-thirty a dark red gypsy cab with the legend Paradiso Taxi on the door and a foxtail on the antenna pulled up. I walked out of the shadows, smartly said, “Hey, my man,” and the driver looked me over. “Where to, amigo?”

  “Oh, someplace downtown, you know?”

  “Like the Waldorf?”

  “That’s it.” I climbed in the back without further negotiations. The cab shot straight up 161st like it was headed for the highway to go downtown and I leaned back and closed my eyes. Rules are rules. The local cops aren’t too bad, but some of the federal lunatics don’t believe the Constitution applies to banana republics like the South Bronx. If I ever got strapped into a polygraph, I wanted the needles to read No Deception Indicated when they asked me where Una Gente Libre had its headquarters.

  35

  EITHER THE DRIVER really worked a gypsy cab as a regular job or he was a hell of an actor. Even with my eyes closed I could feel the lurch of the miserably-maintained hunk of metal every time we floundered around a corner. Normal potholes put my head against the ceiling, and each genuine home-grown South Bronx edition almost knocked me unconscious. He had the radio tuned to some Spanish-language station at a volume that reminded me of the holding tank at Riker’s Island—and for an added touch of authenticity he screamed “Maricon!” and waved his fist out the open window at another driver who had the audacity to attempt to share the road with us.

  We turned a sharp corner; the driver doused the radio. He switched to a smooth cruising mode and spoke distinctly without taking his eyes from the windshield. “At the next corner, I stop the cab. You get out. You walk in the same direction as I drive for half a block. You see a bunch of lobos in front of a burn-out. You walk right up to them and they let you through. You go into the burn-out and someone meet you there.”

  I said nothing—he obviously wasn’t going to answer questions. Lobo may mean wolf in Spanish, but I understood he was describing a street gang that would be in front of an abandoned building.

  The cab stopped at the corner and got moving again as I was swinging the rear door closed. I looked at the cab as it moved away—it sure looked like a gypsy cab, but someone must have stolen the rear license plate. I marched the half block until I spotted about a dozen kids—some sitting on the steps of the abandoned building, some standing. Only about half of them were looking in my direction.

  The lobos came fully equipped—they all wore denim cut-offs with a winged and bloody-taloned bird of prey on the back—the birds had human skulls instead of heads. I spotted bicycle chains, car antennas, and baseball bats—one kid had a machete in a sheath. No firearms on display, but two of them were sitting next to a long flat cardboard box.

  As I got closer I could see they weren’t kids at all—none of them looked under twenty years old. They wouldn’t fool a beat patrolman too easily either—no radios playing, no wisecracking among themselves, just quietly watching the street.

  I glanced up and saw a gleam of metal at one of the windows—there wouldn’t be any winos sleeping in that building tonight. A car turned into the block from the other end and came toward me. The lobos moved off the steps and I stepped back in the shadows. The car was a year-old white Caddy—it never slowed down but I glimpsed three people in the front seat—two girls and a driver with a plantation hat. Some pimp was on his way to the Hunts Point Market, and suddenly I knew just about where I was in the South Bronx.

  When I got within fifty feet of the building I saw hands go into pockets but I kept on coming. It wasn’t bravery—there was no place else to go. When the hands came out of the pockets with mirror-lensed sunglasses I figured I was going to be all right. Nobody needs a disguise to take your life.

  I approached the gang. They looked briefly at me then past me to see if I had come alone. I kept walking up the broken steps, heard movements behind me, didn’t turn around. I went through the door into a black pit—and stopped. A voice said: “Burke. Don’t move, okay? Just stay where you are.”

  I didn’t. I felt a hand on my arm. I didn’t jump—it was expected. The hand groped, found mine, and a heavily knotted rope was pushed into my palm. I grabbed one of the knots and felt a gentle tug. I got the message and followed along in the directi
on I was pulled. I couldn’t see a damned thing—the guy leading me must have been using sonar or something.

  The same voice finally said, “In here,” and I stepped through a door covered with dark blankets. Now I could see a dim light ahead and I followed the back of the man leading me down a long flight of stairs until we came to another blanket-covered door at the bottom. My guide felt his way through the blankets until he found a bare spot, knocked three times, waited patiently, heard two raps from the other side, rapped once in response, waited, rapped one more time. He gently pushed against my chest to indicate that we should stand back, and then from the other side of the wall bolts sliding, metal scraping, something heavy being moved. I wanted a cigarette but I didn’t want to move my hands. After a couple of minutes the door slid open and a large man parted the blankets and stepped out. I couldn’t see him too well but there was enough light to catch the highlights bouncing off the Uzi submachine gun he held in one hand. He stood there covering us both for what seemed like a long minute, saying nothing.

  Then I felt a breeze on the back of my neck and heard Pablo’s voice behind me saying, “This way, Burke,” and I turned and entered the door behind me, my back now to the man with the Uzi. By the time anyone broke down the blanketed door and confronted the guard, the people in the room I was stepping into would have been long gone.

  The big room was as anonymous as a cell block—a round table in the center, several couches and old stuffed chairs scattered around, concrete floor, plasterboard walls. A light fixture dangled from someplace in the blacked-out ceiling, hanging so low it was almost touching the table—no windows that I could see. There was a large TV set in one corner on a metal stand with a videotape deck hooked up below it. The rest of the room was in shadow. The chairs and the couches were occupied but I couldn’t see anything except shapes.

  I didn’t need anyone to tell me where I was to sit. As I approached the table I noticed a large ashtray on top and a green plastic garbage bag sitting underneath. When we all left this room, it would be as if nobody had ever been there. Fine with me.