Flood

by Andrew Vachss

  Flood looked at me, her face calm and composed. “A whole lot of words.”

  She had me there. I got my things together, and then Flood and I got out her wok and burned up the whole Goldor file. Pablo wouldn’t want it back and I wasn’t about to be walking around with it either. We sat together and watched the flames eat Goldor’s dossier. No answers rose with the smoke.

  I told Flood that I had to make some arrangements before we could go and visit Goldor, that it might be that very night, and she was to stay home and wait for my call. She nodded absently—her thoughts were somewhere else. She walked me to the door, stood on her toes to kiss me goodbye.

  38

  IT TOOK ME a while to get back to my office. I never go there in a straight line anyway, but ever since I watched that videotape I had the feeling that Goldor somehow knew I was coming for him. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced Pablo’s profile was on the money. Goldor did think he was untouchable. “The man who knows Wilson made a movie star out of a corpse,” Michelle had said. Maybe she didn’t know the name, but his product was on the street for everyone to see. We were all just so many bugs to him. He wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep worrying about a Wilson rolling over on him. Sure, he would know the Cobra—he would know anyone in the kiddie-sex business, but the lion doesn’t fear the jackal.

  I checked the office carefully this time, but nobody had come calling. Pansy was as glad to see me as she usually was—once she satisfied herself that it was really me she went back to sleep. I made enough noise moving around the office so she realized I would be there for a while, and I let her out onto the roof while I sat at my desk and went over everything one more time. I would have to go back to the Bronx, but this time to the other end of the world. I couldn’t use Max for this one—who knew how much protection Goldor would put on himself? Flood was in it to the end because it was her beef.

  Too much time had passed without a strike. I would have to call back the phony gunrunners tonight with a way to take some of their money or lose that pair of fish. Time was compressing in on me, I needed room to breathe. I guess when big executives get like this they go to the country, or even out of the country if they’re big enough. I could go them one better—one short trip to the Bronx and I could go right off this planet.

  The Plymouth was waiting for me, kicked over on the first shot like it always does. I worked my way over to the East Side Drive and took the Triboro to Bruckner Boulevard and 138th Street, then nosed the Plymouth into the maze of abandoned side streets and kept driving until I was sure I was flying solo. When I spotted the rusty old cyclone fence wrapped with razor wire I edged the Plymouth along its perimeter until I found the open entrance, drove in a few feet, shut the engine, and waited.

  I didn’t have long to wait. I saw a flash of dark fur, heard a thump on the hood and found myself looking through the windshield at the ugliest Great Dane in the world—a battered old harlequin, black and white, missing an eye and with teeth broken in front. He just sat there on the hood like he was some kind of bizarre ornament, bored with the whole thing. I kept my eyes straight ahead, but I could sense the other dogs gathering around the car. No barking, just low-pitched grunts like wolves nosing the body of an elk they had just downed. The dogs came in all shapes, sizes, and colors. I could recognize traces of their original breeding in some of them, but they were all one version or another of the American Junkyard Dog—loyal, tenacious, intelligent, and dangerous—and most of all, good survivors. I saw what looked like a bull mastiff, several variations on the German shepherd, some smaller terriers, another, darker Dane, even what looked like a border collie. All with thick heavy coats that looked like they had been liberally groomed with transmission fluid. Some circled the car, while the others sat on their haunches and waited.

  I couldn’t drive any deeper into the junkyard because I knew there was a ten-foot drop lying straight ahead. And I didn’t get out of the car—those dogs had never seen a can of Alpo in their lives. It wasn’t even noon yet but the place was dark. It always is.

  When the dogs saw I knew the procedure they all sat back and waited expectantly. The monster Dane on the hood of the car pointed his snout toward the sky and let out a wail that sounded like Kaddish for canines. There was no other sound.

  The Dane hit his aria again. One more time, then stone silence.

  I badly wanted a cigarette but I just sat there, hands on top of the wheel. If things weren’t as they were supposed to be I could just throw the Plymouth into reverse and make believe I had never seen the place—that is, if the Mole hadn’t added some new nonsense since the last time I had visited. I wasn’t anxious to find out.

  I watched the Dane. When his head swiveled sharply toward the side I knew what was coming. The brindle-colored dog bounded into the clearing about ten feet ahead of the car, effortlessly clearing the deep ditch. A mastiff-shepherd cross from the looks of him—a handsome bastard with a bull’s body and a wolf’s face. He had the same fur coat as the others but with a broad, arrogant tail that curled up over his back toward his neck. Perfect long white teeth flashed in a lupine grin. He slowly cruised the outside of the circle the other dogs had formed, moving with the delicacy and strength of a good welterweight, in no hurry. I heard answering grunts and growls from the other dogs, but they each made way for him. He shouldered his way through the pack until he was standing right next to my window, cocked his massive head, and gazed up at me. It was time. I slowly and evenly rolled down the glass, letting my face emerge so he could see me. But this beast was no sight-hound, and I had to use my voice—fast, before I couldn’t use it anymore at all.

  “Simba, Simba-witz,” I called out. “What a good boy. How’s by you, mighty Simba? You remember me, pal? Simba-witz, I’m here to see my landsman, the Mole. Right, Simba? Okay, boy?”

  I kept a running patter of stuff like that until I saw that Simba remembered my voice. I knew he wouldn’t attack if he heard his full name called, but I wanted to be sure. Calling him Simba would get his head up and paying attention, but Simba-witz was his full Hebrew name and only the Mole’s people would know that. The Mole once told me that Simba looked too much like a German shepherd—so even though he was the smartest of the pack, a natural leader and the father of dozens of the pups that were born in the junkyard every year, the Mole couldn’t love him until he figured out a solution. And thus Simba became the very first Israeli shepherd, dubbed Simba-witz, the Lion of Zion. The Mole told him this stuff so often that I think the beast believed the legend. I don’t really know if he thought he was a lion, but I did know he didn’t have to worry about a goddamned thing—he had his first pick of the food and his first pick of the women. A beautiful life, although the accommodations left a lot to be desired.

  Simba gave me a short bark, rose up until his gnarled paws were resting on the rolled-down window. I kept talking to him, leaned forward, and he licked my face.

  I slowly opened the door and climbed out, patting his head. I would have liked to throw some of the dog biscuits I keep in the car to the other dogs to make friends, but I knew what they would do if they were offered food without the magic word, like I have for Pansy. I didn’t know the word, and I didn’t want to be the food, so I left it alone.

  Simba listened to me say “Mole” about ten times and then just turned and walked away. I followed as carefully as I could. The rest of the pack brushed against my legs, without malice—sort of herding me in the right direction. We walked until I found a solid piece of ground, then I went back to the Plymouth and pulled it around until it was out of sight from the street. I followed Simba and the pack deeper into the junkyard. When we finally came to a huge shack made of tarpaper and copper sheeting somewhere near the back fence, I stopped. I knew what to do from there, and Simba did too. He went off someplace into the artificial darkness, and I stood there waiting.

  The pack hadn’t exactly lost interest in me, but you could tell they weren’t going to get excited. Most of them probably had
n’t seen anybody get this far before. I kept my eyes on the shack as though the Mole would emerge any minute. I knew better, but I knew the rules too.

  I heard Simba grunting behind me and knew the Mole was coming, but I didn’t turn around until I felt his hand on my shoulder. I turned, and there he was. The Mole—even in the dim light, his skin looked transparent, the blue veins corded on his hands like there wasn’t enough skin to cover everything. Short, stubby, clumsy-looking Mole, blinking his tiny eyes rapidly at the unaccustomed light of day. He was wearing one of those one-piece coverall outfits like mechanics use in gas stations and carrying a toolbox. In spite of his pale skin he was so dirty from his work that he looked like he was prepared for night surveillance. He moved close to me, bumping Simba aside like the beast wasn’t there. And Simba, with that respect for genuine lunacy shared by all animals, moved aside without even a growl.

  The Mole put his hands in his pockets, looked carefully at me for a moment or two, and mumbled something to Simba, who immediately trotted off. Then he motioned that I should walk ahead of him to the shack.

  As soon as I got past the hanging door I smelled muscatel, urine, and old wet rags. There was an orange crate in one corner with some old newspapers on top and a dirty raincoat lying open on the ground like it was a wino’s bed. Some empty bottles, candy wrappers, a broken piece of wood that had been a chair once. The Mole walked past the stuff like it wasn’t there, and I breathed through my mouth as I followed him.

  At the very back of the shack he fiddled with some levers and pulleys, then bent and yanked something and there was an opening in the ground. He sent me in first, climbed down after me, reached back and made some more adjustments. I felt the Mole slip past me in the dark, then he led the way through the tunnel. We must have walked a hundred yards or so until he found the door and stepped through, and then we were in his den.

  I’m not sure how he worked it, but it’s like a half-underground, half-above-ground bunker. The top is covered with the bodies of wrecked and rusting cars, but there was some way that light filtered through because the place wasn’t that dark. It was as clean as the shack had been foul, and much bigger inside.

  The room we entered was like the Mole’s parlor, or whatever the equivalent would be for underground bunkers. He had an old leather easy chair with matching ottoman in one corner, a two-person sofa facing it on an angle. I think the floor was hard-packed dirt but it was covered with several sheets of flattened linoleum and there was an oval throw rug in the middle. I had never gotten past this room but I knew there were others—a place to sleep and some kind of bathroom in the back, maybe even a kitchen. It smelled clean down there, but the air was sharp, like the filtered stuff you get in operating rooms. The Mole had some way to vent everything to another part of the junkyard, but I don’t know how he did it.

  The junkyard itself wasn’t open to the public. The Mole and the dogs and God knows what else lived there in perfect symbiosis. We all pick our ways to survive, and the Mole decided this was his way a long time ago. He never left the place except to do his work. I thought I knew the city as well as anybody, but I would never have known of the Mole except for one of my forays into bounty hunting. A man from the Israeli secret service (at least that’s what he told me) found me a few years ago and asked my price for locating a Nazi concentration camp guard who had come to the States after the war and gone underground somewhere in Manhattan. You could see the Israeli was a professional, but he didn’t know what he was looking for. He came to me because I had done some business with a neo-Nazi group out in Queens and he figured all Nazis were alike. Anyway, I did find the old freak and gave the information to the man who said he was from Israel. I watched the papers for a few weeks after that, but I didn’t see anything.

  I met the Mole when the Israeli took me out to the junkyard and told him I was working for their cause on a special assignment and to help me if he could. He couldn’t then, but he has a few times since, as I’ve already mentioned.

  The Mole will do anything to hunt down Nazis, but he’s not interested in too much else—so most every time I come back to see him it’s about Nazis. I’m not a political analyst, but it seemed to me that Goldor qualified, and Wilson was a likely candidate too. It didn’t matter—the Mole never asked for details. Each time I went to him you could see him balancing the risk that I would bring the heat back with me against the chance that there could be one or two less Nazis doing the looking. Each time I caught the green light.

  The Mole flopped into his chair without ceremony, took some gadget out of his overalls, and started fiddling with it. Finally he looked over at me, blinking. “So, Burke?”

  “I need a car, Mole. Some license plates. And some help with a power system.”

  The Mole just kept looking at me, nodding and blinking. There was no question but that he would do it—he always had. If there’s one thing I know about it’s how to survive, and here was one of the few people living who could teach me something more on the subject. But the Mole had his survival down so well he never talked about it. He looked up. “I’ll see you outside. Wait for me. Sit, have a smoke, talk with Simba-witz. I’ll come soon.”

  I stumbled my way back through the tunnel to the shack—the doors to the outside were already open. I don’t know how he does that. I found my way outside, sat down on an empty milk crate, and lit up. Simba came back into the yard and stood there looking at me. He approached slowly. When he got close enough I scratched him behind his ears—even his growl of contentment sounded life-threatening. I told him, “Simba-witz, have I got a girl for you! Her name’s Pansy and she is a thing of beauty—a face like an angel and a body that just won’t quit. I told her all about you and she’s anxious to get together. What do you say, pal? Down for a little action?”

  Simba snarled, which I took for agreement. Depending on how this caper came out, I might have to go someplace for a few months, and if I did I wanted to be sure Pansy had a home. And the puppies would be beautiful, no doubt about it.

  The Mole materialized from the shadows. When he was just a kid he used to read Scientific American like it was a comic book, and his teachers said he was wasting his time in school—that he should be in a doctoral program somewhere. But his parents thought he was a strange kid and that he needed to be socialized, so they kept him in the public school.

  He was the target of a lot of freakish games by other kids, and he got beat up a lot. He would come home all battered and his father, a dockworker, would tell him to go back and fight it out with the kids or he would give the Mole worse than what he got from the bullies—very creative psychology on a kid with a genius I.Q. The Mole built some kind of homemade laser gun in his basement, went back to school, and blew away half a wall instead of the biggest tormentors—even then, his eyesight wasn’t too good.

  The police came to his house, there was some kind of confrontation with his father, some talk about therapy, and the Mole ran away from home. He’s been out here ever since, first in an apartment over on Chrystie Street and now in the junkyard. I guess he will stay here until he dies. I know this much—if they ever come to take the Mole to a psychiatric ward, he is going to put his own personal Middle East policy into effect. I’m not sure exactly what this is, but one time the Mole asked me if I could get him some plutonium.

  When it became obvious that the Mole wasn’t going to be any more conversational than usual, I told him what I wanted. “I need you to take out the security system in this house I have to visit.”

  The Mole blinked a lot of times. “What kind of security system?”

  “I don’t know exactly. I’ll draw you what I have from the plans, but I think there’s also a hookup to the police station. I want the whole damn system to go down, and only at a certain time. Like at eight o’clock, bang! nothing works . . . okay?”

  “You want a bang?”

  “No, Mole. That’s just an expression.”

  The Mole stared at me as he would any lower form of life. “Do
es it have to be restorable?”

  “No, I don’t care if the system stays down forever. You set it up so you can kill the whole thing at a certain time, right? Then you do it, and you leave. That’s all.”

  “In the city?”

  “Westchester County.”

  “Multiple dwelling?”

  “No, a big house.”

  “Access?”

  “Up to you. No guards, no dogs that I know of. But a wealthy neighborhood—the Man will be around all the time.”

  “How about a Con Ed Total?”

  A Con Ed Total is when the Mole shuts down the utilities for an entire community, but it wouldn’t play here. I just wanted Goldor disarmed from calling help, not the whole neighborhood alerted that something was going down.

  “No,” I told him, “just this one house. And not the lights either, just the special communications systems and especially the phone lines. Can you do it?”

  The Mole refused to acknowledge such a stupid question. He came closer and I knelt in the dirt and began to draw the plans of Goldor’s place that I had gotten from Pablo and his people. I gave the Mole the exact address and he nodded like he already knew it—maybe he did. He asked an occasional question, and we finally settled on nine o’clock that night. I would have to take a chance on catching Goldor at home, and alone, because once the Mole was programmed to act there was no way to stop him.

  We walked through the junkyard until we found a steel-gray Volvo sedan, somewhat battered around the edges but apparently quite serviceable. The Mole said he had good papers for it, but it was actually a cannibal job of several cars and impossible to trace even if I had to leave it on the street when I was done. We kept walking until we found two current license plates, which the Mole sliced up with his cutting torch. He then welded the halves together to make a single license plate with nonexistent numbers. If somebody did manage to read the plates while I was working, the computer wouldn’t help them.