Safe House b-10

by Andrew Vachss

  “My father? I adored him.”

  “So you’re doing his work?”

  “His work? My father was a—”

  “Protector, right?”

  “Oh. Yes. I never thought about that. It’s my . . . purpose. Like my mother told me. I didn’t think it was . . .”

  “Ah, what do I know?” I said.

  “Burke?”

  “What, girl?”

  “It must have been so hard. Not to have even . . . known your father.”

  “You think they’re all alike, fathers?”

  “No. I just—”

  “I didn’t miss a fucking thing,” I told her.

  The phone rang. Crystal Beth got off my lap and padded over to a far corner in her bare feet. She pulled some papers off the top of a two-drawer file cabinet and picked up the receiver lying underneath.

  “Hello.”

  She listened, cocking one hip the way Mama had cocked her head—I guess all women listen differently. Then she said: “Yes, I understand. All the way in the back. All right.”

  And hung up.

  “That was him,” she said. “He says to meet him in the Delta parking lot at La Guardia. All the way in the back, against the fence. He’ll be in a white Taurus sedan.”

  “When?”

  “Now. He said he’ll give you an hour.”

  “Okay,” I said, climbing into my clothes.

  “An hour isn’t—”

  “This time of night? No problem,” I assured her.

  She knelt at my feet, carefully threaded the laces of my work boots, tied each one precisely. “Burke, he didn’t say anything about calling you. He had to know you were here.”

  “He’s calling from the meeting place,” I told her. “He’s already there. Probably been there for hours. In a war zone, names don’t matter, just addresses. It’s the only way he can be sure I don’t fill the parking lot with my own people. He’s not watching outside—he was just guessing about me being here. Not a bad guess anyway, right? I told him I was your man, remember? Or maybe he thought you could find me on the phone right away.”

  “Or maybe he has people of his own,” she whispered.

  “Maybe.”

  She stood against me in the dark. Her skin was silky, warm with the blood beneath it. I kissed her tattoo and left her there.

  I took the Brooklyn Bridge to the BQE, the Plymouth gobbling ground effortlessly. It was still cold out, but the pavement was dry and traction was no problem. I kept near the speed limit until a bright-orange Mustang with a huge rear wing shot by me, a white Camaro with a broad red racing stripe in close pursuit. They were doing at least a hundred. Not racing—just screwing around, pushing each other. The BQE isn’t a race road—too many giant potholes, too many reverse-graded curves. When the dragsters want to really throw down, they go over to Rockaway or work the deep end of Woodhaven Boulevard in Queens. But those fools were all the interference I’d ever need on the off-chance some highway cop was lurking in the night. Which I’d never seen on the BQE in my entire life anyway.

  As I went by the McGinnis Boulevard cutoff, the back of the rear seat popped out and Max emerged from the trunk. He climbed into the front seat, dressed in full night-runner gear—a modified ninja outfit, light-eating black, complete with hood and face mask. I handed him the key and he opened the glove compartment. Took out a little square box made out of gunmetal-gray Lexan with a row of tiny Braille-style dots across the top. Max tripped the switch and the dots flashed in sequence before they settled down to only one glowing steady. Green. Pryce didn’t have a tracking device planted anywhere on the Plymouth—the Mole’s technology was as good as anything the government had. Better, probably. Underground research is pure Darwinism—no grants, no bureaucracy, no politics. It works or it dies.

  I checked the rearview mirror. Empty. I rolled over the Kosciuszko Bridge and pulled up on the shoulder just past the LIE turnoff, playing it safe, watching the sparse traffic roll by.

  Nothing.

  Max kept watch as I sketched a rough map of what I wanted. He took one quick look, nodded okay—he’d been there before. I put the Plymouth in gear and pulled back on the highway. Max tore the hand-drawn map into tiny pieces, let them trail from his hand out the open window.

  Plenty of time. I turned off the BQE to the Grand Central, followed it to Ninety-fourth Street, exited and ran parallel to the highway through East Elmhurst until I was well past the airport. I doubled back through the interchange at Northern Boulevard and grabbed the Grand Central again, heading back toward Manhattan. I kept sliding right until I picked up the service road that leads to a highway gas station. I pulled over just before I reached it. There’s a small parking area there. Limo drivers use it when they have a long wait for a flight—they’re not allowed in the taxi line. At almost one in the morning, the lot was deserted—La Guardia doesn’t handle international flights and it’s usually out of business by midnight. I let Max off. Checked my watch. I still had almost twenty minutes.

  I punched Crystal Beth’s number into the cell phone.

  It rang a dozen times. No answer.

  I smoked a cigarette. Slowly, all the way through. Then I went to meet whatever was waiting.

  The Delta lot is all the way at the east end of La Guardia, the last piece of solid ground before the whole place turns to swamp. I pulled a ticket from the automatic vending machine and the gate lifted to let me in. The lot was sporadically dotted with cars, almost all of them clustered near the exit to the terminal, probably airline personnel. In the warm weather, some people use this lot as a four-dollar-an-hour motel, a Lovers’ Lane where you don’t have to worry about prowlers. But in the winter, it’s all business. I let the Plymouth poke along between the rows of parked cars, feathering the throttle, watching. Halfway through the lot, it turned empty. Except for a white Taurus sedan standing all by itself against the back fence, front end aimed in my direction.

  I docked the Plymouth about five car-widths away, stepped out and walked to the Taurus. Saw it was a SHO model, about thirty-five grand worth of high-speed anonymity. Quick enough for pursuit work, generic enough for shadowing, comfortable for stakeouts. A pro’s choice, even the color—more white cars than any other out there now. The windows were deep-tinted—couldn’t see inside. But I figured he could see out, so I just stood there, looking at the windshield, holding my hands far away from my body, my jacket zipped up tight.

  Nothing.

  I heard pebbles crunch, sensed movement behind me. Not stealthy—letting me know he was coming. I turned around slowly. Pryce was walking toward me from the corner of the lot, hands as empty as mine.

  I wondered if his heart was too.

  “Sorry,” he said as he got close enough to speak. “I had to take a leak.”

  I spread my arms wider, going for a Christ-on-the cross position. “Let’s get this part over with quick,” I said. “It’s too cold to be standing around playing games.”

  He stood there looking at me, his featureless face calm. “I couldn’t do an adequate job out here,” he said. “You know that.”

  “Then do what I’m gonna do,” I told him.

  “Which is?”

  “Don’t say anything you don’t want on tape.”

  He nodded. “Fair enough. You want to talk in the car?”

  “Sure.”

  In the silver leather passenger seat, I turned my right shoulder to the windshield so that I was almost facing him. “Okay if I smoke?” I asked him.

  He turned the ignition key, hit the switch for the power windows. The glass behind me whispered down. Step one. He shifted position so that he was facing me. Two. “I’ve got an idea,” I told him. “But first I have to know some stuff.”

  “Ask your questions,” he said.

  “It all comes down to this,” I started, exhaling a heavy puff of clove-cigarette smoke in his direction. His expression didn’t change, but he pushed the switch, taking his own window down. Three. “Is this Lothar guy the whole mac
hine, or just a tool?” I finished.

  “He’s a tool,” Pryce said without hesitation.

  “Tell me what you’re willing to,” I said. “If there’s blanks, then I’ll ask, okay?”

  He scratched absently at the tip of his nose. Phantom itch? Like you get from an amputated limb. Or plastic surgery. The tip of the nose changes the face radically, a doctor told me once. “Larry James Bretton,” he said. “Now known as Lothar Bucholtz. He changed it legally. I don’t believe his wife knows about the surname, but he’s been calling himself Lothar publicly for some time now. General failure. Trained as a printer, but fired from three straight jobs for using company facilities to put out various propaganda sheets for extremist groups. He doesn’t write the stuff himself—he hasn’t got brains enough even for the intellectual challenge of using ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ in the same sentence. But he’s a true-believer all the way. You know the party line: If the government can be destabilized, if the artificial restraints come off, the streets will run with blood. Knock ZOG off and the kikes won’t be able to stop the niggers fromslaughtering them. Muscle beats brains in the short run, the way they figure it. Of course, the niggers won’t be able to run a government. . . . That’s when the true Aryans come in, the race warriors. With the weapons they’ve been hoarding, they’ll be able to carve out a few states as their own.”

  “Your basic Helter Skelter scenario,” I said. “A Charlie Manson update.”

  “Right. Not many of them acknowledge it, but he’s their visionary all right. Okay, next they’ll get foreign aid from wealthy countries who support their mission, especially the Arabs—after all, exterminating Jews should give them perfect credentials.” He waved a hand dismissively, anticipating me. “Yes, I know, the A-rabs are mud people too. But that’s just the first step in the master plan. After they ship all the niggers back to Africa—the ones they don’t just outright kill in the camps with the kikes—they’ll run the show here. The Day of the Rope will eliminate all the race-traitor whites. Next step is acquisition of nuclear weapons,” he said, face flat but his voice loaded with sneer, “and then it’s time for the A-rabs to pay the piper. Finally, there’ll be a natural link between all the North European tribes—the Aryans, right?—and the true Americans, their descendants. Not the Indians, of course . . .

  “Lothar’s people are divided as to the next step. Some of them want to retain all the mud people in South America and Africa and Asia as slave labor. Some want to just kill them all—you know, nerve gas, poison the water supply, the ovens . . . the usual.”

  “Sure.”

  “Anyway, when they’re not hyping up some of those retarded skinheads into bashing cruising gays or mixed-race couples with baseball bats—or recruiting on military bases—they’re sitting around plotting how to make Oklahoma City look like a pipe bomb in a bus-station locker. And my boy Lothar is a real live member of an action cell.”

  “Bombers?”

  “Oh yes. Major bombers. Domino bombing—you know what that is?”

  “No.”

  “A couple of dozen targets. Virtually simultaneous targets. Congress. The FBI. Post offices. Communications centers. Airports. Train stations. The whole infrastructure. That’s Phase One.”

  “And Phase Two?”

  “The way they figure it, the military has to respond. National Guard first, but soon there’ll be warplanes in the air. And where are they going to respond to? Wherever there’s riots. Whoever starts the looting. And they know who that’s going to be. With the communications cut, it’s all going to be word of mouth. They don’t have the troops for guerrilla warfare, but they have the weapons. Lots of weapons. They’ve been stockpiling for years.”

  “That plan is Swiss cheese,” I told him.

  “It is,” he agreed. “But it’s going to be America that gets the holes punched in it.”

  I felt a chill on the back of my neck. Probably the night air. I wondered if Pryce was feeling it too. I lit another nasty clove cigarette from the stub of the last one just in case he was thinking about zipping up his window.

  “And Lothar’s yours?” I asked him.

  “All mine,” he said. “But if he’s taken out of the play, it won’t work.”

  “What won’t work?”

  “ZOG likes to play dominoes too,” Pryce said, the muscle under his right eye jumping hard.

  I worked it around in my head for a minute. And it didn’t add up. Not for what I needed. “You’re not telling me Lothar’s a government agent,” I said flatly.

  “No. He’s not,” Pryce replied.

  I passed up the invitation. “But he’s not gonna roll either,” I said, no trace of a question in my voice.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Couple of reasons. If he rolls, the best he can hope for is immunity. And that means the Witness Protection Program. Okay for some guys, maybe. But he’s not gonna be able to do his Master Race crap there. And he’s not gonna get his son either. Even if you could find a bent judge to give him custody, the media would have you for breakfast.”

  “He’s not going to get immunity,” Pryce said. “He’s not going to testify at all. When the bust goes down, he’s going to slip through the net. Go into the underground. The sole survivor. He’ll be a hero. And he’ll have his son with him.”

  “He’s stupid enough to buy that?”

  “He’s stupid all right, but it’s the truth. It’s already set up. He’ll leave the country. England first, then Germany. They’ll take him in, never fear.”

  “And you’ll keep working him, right? He changes his mind, you’ve got the hammer over his head.”

  “That’s right,” Pryce said, refrigerator-voiced.

  “And he keeps his kid?”

  “That’s the part I thought we were going to negotiate. That’s all you want, isn’t it? Believe me, there’s no way he’s going to bother his wife ever again. He’s going to vanish. New name, new face, the whole works.”

  “They’re going to do plastic surgery on the boy too?”

  “It’s been done,” he said calmly. “The pedophile rings have been doing it to kidnapped children for years. But I believe you already know about that . . . ?”

  I ignored the opening. It hadn’t really been a question anyway, just bait. Any pro interrogator knows that trick—you make the subject think you approve of whatever he did, show some empathy, get him bragging about it . . . and you’ve got him locked. He probably knew about some of the things I’d done in the past, had me tapped as a vigilante. Maybe he thought I’d welcome the chance to unburden myself to a kindred spirit.

  Or maybe it was his chance—to show off, the info-warrior flexing his muscles.

  “How come you don’t just tell him not to show up for the divorce thing? That it’s a trap?” I asked, like I’d never heard him mention pedophiles.

  “I don’t have complete . . . control,” Pryce said. “His son has always been part of the deal. I told him we might be able to . . . obtain the child at a later date, but he’s afraid his wife will just vanish. There’s more than one underground operating in America. His Nazi friends don’t have the resources to find one woman and one child in some safehouse. I don’t even know where the woman is now. Only your . . . friend knows that.”

  “So it’s her you threaten?”

  He shrugged, dismissing the accusation. “The only thing holding his wife close is legal jurisdiction,” he said. “She has to bring the divorce and the custody in New York, where they both live. She won’t run until that’s over with. But he doesn’t have everything I . . . need yet. Do you understand my dilemma?”

  “What if you had another man in there?” I asked, flipping my trump card on the table. “Someone who could get you the information?”

  “Forget it,” he said. “Believe me, you are quite well known to those people, Mr. Burke. They don’t have my sources, and they certainly don’t have the . . . extent of my information. You may have some . . . credentials that they would respect. But
this isn’t some racist prison gang we’re talking about. If one of them you’ve . . . done business with recognized you, you’d be dead. Right then. And so would the man who brought you into the group.”

  “I’ve never done business with—”

  “Don’t insult me,” Pryce said softly. “You sold a bunch of original tapes of one of Hitler’s early speeches to some idiot Nazis a number of years ago, remember?”

  “No.”

  “That was a long time ago, before you became so . . . sophisticated in your operations,” he said, ignoring my denial like I’d never spoken. “It was very easy to trace. How do you think those morons felt when they learned what those original, authentic tapes really were? Oh, they were revolutionary speeches, all right. A call for armed resistance in support of the homeland. Only it was Menachem Begin, exhorting the Irgun to violence.”

  I had to laugh. Couldn’t help it. Yiddish sounds like German if you don’t speak either language. I used to do a lot of stuff like that. Not for politics, for the easy score. Freaks are always easy. And they never go to the law.

  “I doubt they’d see the humor,” Pryce said dryly. “There’s also the little matter of selling them a few crates of machine guns. Funny how the ATF showed up a few minutes after the money changed hands. And after you’d left.”

  I didn’t laugh at that one. And if he said anything about some fake mercenary recruiters who ended up dead in a shabby little Manhattan office, I was going to take something besides tobacco out of the pack of cigarettes I’d left on the dash after I’d smoked the last one.

  “There’s a long list,” he said ambiguously, letting me wonder what else he knew. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t work.”

  “I didn’t mean me,” I told him. “I got somebody else. Somebody perfect.”

  He sat quietly, wrapped around himself. If he was thinking, it didn’t show on his face.

  “ ‘Perfect’ is a big word,” he finally said.

  “Let’s leave that for a minute,” I told him. “Say I’m right. Say I’ve got a man you could put in there. That means Lothar goes too, you care about that?”