Flood

by Andrew Vachss

  James said, “Yes, exactly. Just the right touch.”

  Gunther glared over at me. “You said something about publicity?” He made it sound like a threat, and stalked off into the back room. Gunther was as tough to read as yesterday’s race results.

  “Is he okay?” I asked James, just loud enough for Gunther to hear.

  “Oh, he’s fine, Mr. Burke. Just nerves. Gunther’s more a man of action, you might say. I’ll handle the recruiting.”

  “Okay . . .” Like I really gave a damn. There was a soft knock at the door and the Mole entered, wearing his Ma Bell uniform, carrying a toolbox and sporting a giant leather belt around his waist full of enough gadgets to perform brain surgery on a rhino. Not on Gunther, though—the Mole didn’t carry a microscope.

  Without a word to anyone the Mole walked the length of the front room, his eyes blinking rapidly behind the thick lenses. He squatted down, pulled a couple of push-button phones out of his toolbox, and went to work. He put the white phone on James’s desk and went back to put the red one on the long table. Gunther gave him a fearsome stare and expanded his chest—the Mole never changed expression, just went on with his wiring job. The whole number took him about ten minutes, after which he walked over to James and extended one damp, plump white hand, palm up. James seemed to be thinking it over for a split-second, then reached in his wallet, pulled out a hundred, and handed it over. The Mole turned and exited.

  James looked over at me. “Your man’s not much of a conversationalist, is he?”

  “Try the phones,” I suggested.

  James sat down at his desk, hit 411, asked the operator for the number of the Waldorf-Astoria, got the number, dialed the Waldorf, made reservations for two in a suite for one week from then. I guess he expected his ship to come in.

  I got up to leave. “You’ll be hearing from this reporter I told you about. That should give you all the publicity you’ll ever need. Call me at this number,” I said, handing him a card, “and I’ll be back in touch with you within one hour no matter what time you make contact, okay?”

  “Certainly,” said James, extending his hand. I shook it, waved at Gunther, who glowered back, and walked out to the elevator.

  A few minutes later I was climbing the stairs to Michelle’s little room. As I got to the top step I saw the Mole standing in a corner, watching and waiting—even with his pasty skin you had to look twice to see him sometimes, he was so motionless. I waved him on and we went into the little room. Michelle was facing the door—she looked up from her book when she saw me and really flashed to life when she saw I wasn’t alone.

  “Mole, baby! How’s things in the underground?”

  The Mole blinked a few more times than usual, gave Michelle his best try at a smile, but said nothing, as usual. He began to empty out his toolbox with the sure movements of a professional. He didn’t need to check out the room, he had worked this place before. Out of the toolbox came a square metal rig with all kinds of toggle switches on its face as well as two little lights, one red and one green. He plugged in a phone mouthpiece and receiver, then ran some wires over to a little box that looked like the face of a pocket calculator. He opened up the mouthpiece, screwed in one of the supressor discs, ran some wires over to the wall, snapped in some other piece of equipment, touched two wires together, took a reading, opened a tripod with a flat top, and put the phone unit on top of that. All the time he was working, Michelle watched him with hawk’s eyes.

  The Mole pulled out two more phone sets, plugged them into the major unit, and ran some more wires toward the back wall. All this took him the better part of a half hour. Michelle and I didn’t say a word—this was complicated work and we knew the Mole didn’t like kibitzers. He moved with assurance and grace—no microsurgeon could have been better with his hands. When he finished he played with the setup for a couple of minutes, wearing his rubber gloves, then finally turned to us. “When the red light is on you make no calls. Green light, it’s okay to use. The left phone picks up downstairs. The next phone is incoming to you from all the numbers you gave me. You dial out only with this box.”

  “Thanks, Mole,” I said, slipping him his money, which disappeared someplace into his uniform.

  As the Mole turned to go Michelle said, “Mole,” making him turn to face her. “Mole, you remember I asked you to find out about that operation? The one for me?”

  The Mole nodded, blinking behind his glasses.

  “Would it work, Mole? Would it be what I want?”

  The Mole spoke like he was reading from a book. “The operation is for true transsexuals—only for transsexuals. Biologically it would work. Assuming competent surgery and proper postoperative care, the only associated problems are psychological.”

  “You know what a transsexual is, Mole?” Michelle asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “What?” demanded Michelle, looking intently at him. For her, I wasn’t in the room anymore.

  “A woman trapped inside a man’s body,” said the Mole.

  “Do you understand that?” asked Michelle.

  “I understand trapped,” said the Mole, not blinking so much now.

  “Thank you, Mole,” said Michelle, getting up and kissing him on the cheek. I thought the Mole blushed, but I couldn’t be sure. He faded out the door and was gone.

  Michelle sat there for a long time, tapping her long fingernails on the cover of her compact. I lit a cigarette, smoked in silence. A tear gathered in the corner of her eye and rolled down her face, leaving its track against the soft skin. I lit another cigarette, handed it to her. She took it, held it absently for a minute, gave me a half-smile and pulled in a deep drag. She exhaled, shook herself. “I’m going to fix my face,” she said, and went into the bathroom.

  It was another couple of smokes before she walked out—fresh, new, and hard again.

  “Let’s go to work, baby,” she said, and sat down in front of the bank of phones.

  I called the preppie reporter, told him I had located the mercenary recruiting outfit but my info was that they would only be there for another day or so and he said he’d move on it that afternoon. He thanked me for the tip, said he would make it up to me.

  Then I called the ATF—that’s Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, with heavy emphasis on the last—and told them I couldn’t give my name but a guy answering Wilson’s description was making the rounds of the after-hours joints offering a half-dozen .45-caliber machine guns, complete with silencers, for immediate sale. When I said “silencers” I could just feel the excitement build on the line—a silencer bust to the ATF boys is like ten pounds of pure heroin to the narcotics cops. They kept pressuring me until I finally told them, “Look, I said all I’m going to. This is a bad fucking guy, he’s nobody to play with. You know who he is—the Cobra, right? He said he’s dealt with you all before.”

  I broke the connection and headed to the restaurant, where I found Mama in the kitchen.

  “Max here twice already. He come back soon, okay?”

  “Okay, Mama. Thanks.”

  “You want some soup?” came the inevitable question.

  “Sure.”

  I sat down, the waiter came and Mama and I had some soup and hard noodles, eating in silence, thinking our thoughts.

  Max floated in from the back before we were finished. He bowed to Mama, who bowed back. Mama offered him some soup. Max shook his head no—Mama insisted, grabbed his shoulder, and pushed him into the booth. A faint smile twitched over Max’s face as he submitted.

  Max showed me the racing form and I shook my head to tell him I was under pressure. I made the sign of squeezing a wound—gritted my teeth to show I was putting on all the pressure I could, clenched my fist. Max understood.

  I showed him my watch, moved my fingers to indicate seven o’clock, then showed him the Cobra’s picture, shaded my eyes like I was looking into the sun, twisting my head from side to side. I made a want-to-come-along? gesture.

  Max reached his hand behind h
is back, slapped himself hard—he wasn’t interested in hunting the freak, but he would come along to watch my back. Okay. I tapped my heart to thank him—he did the same to say we were brothers and it was expected of him, no big deal.

  I said I would pick him up later at the warehouse, but for now I needed some sleep. In the movies tough guys never sleep. Maybe Flood was right, I wasn’t so tough.

  50

  BACK AT THE office I took care of Pansy by opening the back door and she took care of her business topside. The phone was still open and I called Flood. Told her nothing would be happening until tomorrow and I wouldn’t be able to see her until then. Then I called Michelle, saying I’d stop by much later to bring her some food and spell her at the phones.

  “Burke,” she said, “the cub reporter made his move downstairs.”

  “Sound like he knew what he was doing?”

  “Not hardly.”

  “That’s my man. I’ll call in later on, okay?”

  “Okay, baby. Not to worry, everything’s fine here.”

  I couldn’t get to sleep, so I deliberately overloaded my brain, knowing I could force it to kick out and spin into overdrive that way. I loaded it with names, places, pictures, faces, schemes, plans, tricks, hoaxes. I used to try this in prison but it never worked there. In prison the world is narrow and you can hold all the information you need to survive in a small part of your brain. Out here it’s different. I’ve tried to make my world as small as possible, but every once in a while someone like Flood comes along to screw it up. Soon I felt my eyes close and the room go away . . . When I woke up a few hours later I didn’t feel any better but I knew the sleep would help me later. I dressed slowly, loading up with a bunch of bullshit private-eye gear. If we got popped by the police tonight I’d tell some story about working on a case for the father of the kid I’d delivered to McGowan. He’d back me up on anything less than a felony-in-progress charge. He’s done it before.

  Max was waiting just inside the warehouse. I showed him the picture of the Cobra again and he nodded to show it was already in his memory bank. Max wasn’t so good with faces (did all us Occidentals really look alike?), but once he saw a man move he could pick him out of a crowd at fifty yards.

  It was dark by the time we turned the Plymouth toward Times Square. Where else to look for a freak with no address? We cruised Eighth Avenue, from the upper thirties to the fifties. The cold neon flashed on and off across Max’s face, his eyes hooded against the street’s night glare, with the sun-shield Lexan film on the inside of the windows, you’d need X-ray vision to see inside the Plymouth. That kind of stuff is illegal on the Coast but it’s okay here in New York. Cops hate it. It makes it hard for them to claim that the pistol (or bag of dope, or human head, or whatever) was in “plain view” when they stopped the car for a broken taillight.

  We didn’t expect to spot Wilson just bopping down the street. He was moving now—out of his hole and running hard. But I already had the government to watching the airports and the bus stations for me. I had to do something, at least be in motion.

  Garbage floated all around the cruising Plymouth—teenage girls working the streets with their built-up shoes and their broken-down spirits; the younger ones, the children who hadn’t had their first periods yet, they worked the inside—the massage parlors and the hotels. The older ones worked the bars and the clubs. Even the pit has its own sense of order—rough-off teams stalking the sidewalks and lurking near the corners, looking for an excuse to take a wallet or a life; gaudy pimpmobiles parked all around the Port Authority Bus Terminal, dumb iron horses that ate human flesh, waiting for the pilot fish in their zircon rings and fake-fur hats to bring them new little girls; the videogame parlors with their load of little boys waiting for the chicken hawks to come calling. Those little boys were just for rent—if you wanted to buy one for keeps you had to see a man in a brownstone office and pay heavy cash. No deposit, no return. Very little heroin for sale down here; uptown’s the stop for that stuff. But the streets were full of dirtbags in long filthy overcoats selling their methadone from the nearby clinic, and young hustlers were hawking ’ludes and speed everywhere. If you knew where to go, you could buy genuine prescriptions for Valium, or Percodan, or whatever travel ticket you wanted. The gold-buying shops stayed open late to accommodate the chain-snatchers. The gleaming windows of the electronics stores displayed giant portable stereos, the better to achieve self-induced retardation. And in the back rooms the same joints sold gravity knives and fake pistols to smooth the passage of the stereos from the retardates to the muggers. There were theatrical supply houses that would sell you all the goodies you’d need to disguise yourself if you were into armed robbery or rape. And little shops that sold “marital aids” that looked like tools for felonious assault. Bookstores sold crash-courses in achieving orgasm through torture, and films—documentary proof of things that shouldn’t exist.

  When I was a little kid I once saw a bunch of men get together on the street in Little Italy. There was this vacant lot with all kinds of old rotting stuff in it, and rats were living there right out in the open. One of them had bitten a kid. The men surrounded the lot and poured gasoline all over the place and then set it on fire. When the rats poured out, the waiting men formed a line and tried to hammer them all to death with baseball bats. They killed a lot of them but a lot more got away. One poor bastard hadn’t been prepared—he hadn’t dressed for the part. A shrieking rat ran up his pants leg and tried to rip its way to freedom with its teeth. When they finally pulled off the guy’s pants there was only blood where his testicles should have been. If they ever started one of those fires down here it’d be worse than what happened to that poor guy.

  No point in staying in the background any longer—too many people could catch wise by now anyway. Max and I hit the street with the Cobra’s picture at the ready, without much real hope, but we had to give it a try. Who knew?

  The street didn’t look any better close up than it had from behind the car windows. Max and I stood near the corner watching the flow, me thinking of our next move, Max indifferent. I scanned the length of the block—the only living thing doing legitimate work was a seeing-eye dog that had no way of knowing his owner had 20/20 vision and a few dozen pills for sale in his tattered pockets.

  I picked a dive at random. The side of beef at the door was wearing a skin-tight red muscle shirt under a pair of thick black suspenders and carrying a flashlight that did double duty as a night stick. He held out a beefy palm, and I gave him twenty to cover admission for Max and me. We found a table in the smoke-clogged darkness a few feet away from the long bar on which two tired-looking girls exposed themselves to music. It was about as sexy as a visit to the morgue, and nowhere near as clean.

  The waitress took one look at us, saw we weren’t citizens, threw us the single obligatory shake of the silicone, and brought us the two lukewarm Cokes that came with the cover charge we’d paid at the door. The joint was useless—the Cobra could be sitting ten feet away and we wouldn’t spot him. I took out the picture, held it so the waitress would see it was something she was supposed to notice. She pretended to take a close look.

  “Seen him recently?”

  “Never saw him before, honey.” A waste of time.

  Max and I got up to leave. We approached the side of beef and I took out the picture again and held it up. “You know this guy?”

  “Maybe,” meaning, what’s in it for me?

  “Maybe yes, or maybe no?”

  “Just plain maybe, pal. We don’t like private cops asking questions in here.”

  “Look, my friend has something to give this guy, okay? Maybe he could just give it to you instead.”

  “You ain’t giving me nothin’,” he snarled. Max grabbed one of his hyperflexed biceps like he was feeling the muscle. The beef’s face shifted color under the greasy lights, his hand went toward his back pocket . . . until he looked at Max’s face and thought better of it.

  “Hey, what is thi
s? I don’t know the fuckin’ guy, all right? Lemme go.”

  I could see it was no use and signaled to Max. We walked out the door leaving the beef rubbing his bicep and muttering to himself.

  We checked a couple of porno shops, admired the MONGOOSE stenciling of the Blood Shadows, drew nothing but more blanks.

  Over on Forty-fourth we ran into McGowan. He flashed his Irish grin, but his partner hung back, wary. A new guy.

  “Burke, how’s it going? And Max?”

  I said, “Okay,” and Max bowed. I showed McGowan the picture but he shook his head.

  “Seen the Prof?” I asked the detective.

  “He’s around. I heard he had some trouble with a pimp, got slapped around a bit . . .”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I heard that too.”

  McGowan just nodded. He just wanted to be sure I had the information—whatever happened to a pimp wouldn’t cost him any sleep.

  Another two hours on the street and we could see we weren’t going to score. We found the Plymouth, rolled over to the Village, checked a few of the leather bars, even the one that specialized in police costumes. Nothing. We tried a few of the sleazo hotels off West Street, but the desk clerks were their usual fountains of information. Even with flashing some fairly serious money, we kept drawing blanks.

  But the Cobra was out there—I could smell him. He hadn’t left. Not yet. Going underground was impossible for him—I lived there and he’d just be a tourist. But time was pressing against us and we weren’t any closer. All he had to do was go hop a Greyhound to anyplace and he’d be out of our reach. My one hope now was that the cub reporter would do a newspaper number in his column by tomorrow’s edition and Wilson would snap at the bait. He didn’t have the credentials to work professional crime—no working thief would include a freak like him as part of a team. He’d need the VA money soon. Did he have a passport? And if the government bagged him before I did, could I work something out? Getting him canceled in prison was no problem, but it would be too long a wait. For Flood. For me too.