Andrew Vachss: The Weight

“Everything you asked for,” he said. “And now it’s my turn.”

“I thought you said it was already-”

“I apologize,” he said, holding out his hand.

His grip felt just right.

Lynda took the Greyhound to Chicago. Took her only a couple of days to find a place. For her and her husband. He was coming after he cleared up all the paperwork at his office. Their plan was to buy a home, so they were really only looking for something for maybe six, seven months. So she could just pay the whole thing now, if the landlord wanted.

She’d have to pay cash, because she didn’t have a Chicago bank account yet. She hoped that was okay with the landlord. He turned out to be a real agreeable guy.

While Lynda was setting up, I got put on videotape. And everything I said was the truth.

I asked the cameraman to come in real close. In case they wanted to show the girl who’d gotten raped what my face looked like when I said the part about doing time for another man’s crime. And my promise to kill him if I ever found him.

The guy who sold me the used Ford Crown Vic in Youngstown didn’t mind cash, either. I told him I’d bring back the plates as soon as I got it registered. The way he shrugged, I could see the plates were already NFG-probably his insurance had run out or something like that.

I left the Toyota in a mall lot. Nothing was open that early in the morning. And I could see a lot of them weren’t going to open-the place looked like a ghost town. I left the keys in the ignition.

It was Lynda who showed me how I could read the Daily News without buying a copy. Or even being in New York.

I wouldn’t have asked her, myself. I knew I’d never trust any planner again, and I wasn’t ever going back home, either. So I didn’t care about checking to see if anything looked ripe for a one-man job.

Lynda, she liked the Times .

“Honey,” she said one day, “come here. Take a look at this.”

Her voice was quiet, but something else was in there. The headline said:

EXPLOSION IN EAST SIDE BUILDING

TERRORIST ACTIVITY SUSPECTED

The address was Solly’s. Solly’s office, I mean. The story said there’d been what they called a “targeted explosion” in the basement. Nobody hurt, but the first two floors had to be evacuated while they checked to see if they would hold.

I didn’t know if one of those glass bottles was something that you had to keep cold, or if the hard men who visited Albie had found his last note.

But terrorism? That was so weird, I kept reading.

It was a long article. Whoever wrote it, they must have been on the trail a long time before the explosion happened.

Started off about how a guy named Morales had blown his own hands off while he was trying to put together a bomb for the FALN back in ’78. They took him to Bellevue for surgery, but his people busted him right out.

Morales made it to Mexico, but he got caught in a shootout down there. They hit him with a long sentence for that, plus he was supposed to be sent back here when he maxed it out. Only, Mexico pulled a fast one. They cut his time in half, and then shipped him to Cuba.

The article said Morales is still there, and some woman who’d been busted out around the same time was, too. Only, this woman was supposed to be a Black Panther, and she’d been busted out of a prison in New Jersey.

Another woman had been convicted of being part of both escapes-a white woman who they said was the “armorer” of the Black Liberation Army. She was still in a federal pen.

The same year they bagged Morales in Mexico, the FALN took down an armored car for around seven million.

The reporter didn’t come right out and say it, but you could see he thought some of that money went to Mexico, because it was that same year Mexico shipped Morales to Cuba.

“Does this make any sense to you?” I asked Lynda.

She printed out the story, sat down, and read it a bunch of times.

“I don’t know, Sugar,” she told me. “I guess it could all be tied together.”

“Just because-?”

“Well, remember, there were a lot of bombings back then. You read about them, maybe?”

“Not me.”

“Well, I did. My teacher said it was important to know those things.”

That’s what she called Albie now: “my teacher.” She never spoke his name.

“I was just a little kid when all this stuff happened. And I didn’t go to school much, anyway.”

“Stuff happened before this,” Lynda said. “There was a brownstone in Greenwich Village, I think. It exploded when some of the people there were trying to make a bomb.”

“White people?”

“Rich white people.”

“Were they Jewish?”

“I don’t remember. But we could find out easy enough.”

“Nah. I just wanted to make sense out of it. It doesn’t matter what they say in the papers. If they want to think Solly blew himself up trying to make bombs, that’s fine with me.”

“They don’t say anyone was killed, Sugar.”

“So I guess we’ll never know what happened, girl. But bet on this: no way Solly was some ‘terrorist.’ Where’s the money in that?”

“How far back did you go with him?” is all she said.

Maybe I couldn’t connect all the dots in that story, but one thing I knew for sure: Solly wasn’t going to be explaining anything to anyone.

I didn’t go outside for months. But that was fine. Lynda made it fine.

Funny, huh? This all started with me being railroaded. And now I’m on the Amtrak, headed for someplace west.

My name is Henry K. Lynch. Height/weight: six three, two fifty-five. Hair: blond. Eyes: blue/brown. Born: March 3, 1972; Alton, Illinois. The “K.” is for “Ken.”

The scar’s impossible to see now. Where there used to be a space in my eyebrow, there’s a black tattoo.

The woman with me, her name is Lynda Leigh Lynch. We got married in Chicago, six months ago.

If I have to go back to work, I will. But on my own. No more planners, no more partners.

Crime wasn’t on my mind, not the way it used to be. I have to make up my own rules now.

But I won’t have to do that alone. Never again.

Andrew Vachss has been a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, a social-services caseworker, and a labor organizer, and has directed a maximum-security prison for “aggressive-violent” youth. Now a lawyer in private practice, he represents children and youths exclusively. He is the author of numerous novels, including the Burke series, two collections of short stories, and a wide variety of other material, including song lyrics, graphic novels, essays, and a “children’s book for adults.” His books have been translated into twenty languages, and his work has appeared in Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, Playboy , the New York Times , and many other forums. A native New Yorker, he now divides his time between the city of his birth and the Pacific Northwest.

The dedicated Web site for Vachss and his work is www.vachss.com.