Andrew Vachss - Strega

Max smiled knowingly. He rubbed the first two fingers and his thumb together in the sign for money, shrugged his shoulders, and spread his hands to ask how much I'd invested. I held up two fingers. Max reached over and pulled one toward him-he wanted to take half my action. The last time he'd done that was the first time he'd ever bet on a horse-back when Flood was here. And we'd won. I hadn't hit a horse since- maybe my luck was changing. But it was probably just that Max was standing up with me. He knew I'd been blue, and his own good fortune in finding Immaculata made him feel even worse for me.

When I wrapped up my sentence for the heroin scam, Max took me over to the warehouse and handed me an old airline carry-on bag. It was stuffed with money-almost forty thousand bucks. He took a paper packet of sugar out of his pocket, tore it open, and dumped the sugar on the table. He spread it flat, then divided it precisely in half with one fingernail. He swept half off the table into his hand, and pointed to the other half, and then to me. I got it-from the day I got arrested, he'd put away half of every score he'd made and saved it for me so I wouldn't have to start all over when I got out.

I didn't know what to say. Max cupped one hand on the table and used two fingers to burrow through it. The Mole. He put one hand on his chest, and spread the other wide in a gesture of impassioned oration. The Prof. The bag was half of everything they'd all made while I was inside. Then he touched his heart with his fist, and extended an open hand to me. Telling me that money didn't square the debt-he would always owe me.

I've done time with a lot of gangsters over the years. The cream of the crop, the real elite, were the "made men," the guys who get to cut their fingers and swear undying loyalty to some boss. They keep their mouths shut and do their time, just like the movies say. When they finally make it back to the streets, they get a kiss on both cheeks and a few bucks from their boss. And they call themselves "wiseguys."

IT WAS another few minutes until Immaculata came back. She had an armful of paper with her.

"Look at this," she told me, and sat down next to Max.

They were kids' drawings: stick figures, crude crayons-they didn't mean anything to me.

"So?" I asked.

"Look at them again, Burke. Look closely."

I lit a cigarette and went through them again. "How come the pictures of the kids have no arms?" I asked her.

"That's it. Now you see. The children have no arms. And see how small they are next to the big figures? Look at this one…"

It was a picture of a little child looking at a giant penis pointed at her face. The child had no arms-her mouth was a straight line.

"She's trapped," I said.

"Yes. She is without power, you understand? She is small, her abuser is huge. The penis is her whole world. She has no arms to fend it off. She has no legs to run. She's in a cage."

"How do you break her out?" I wanted to know.

Immaculata took a deep breath. "Some of them never do break out. We have to give them back a sense of control before that happens. If we start too late, they look for control with drugs, or they try suicide. Or they surrender."

"Surrender?"

"To the feelings. It's not just the loss of power. Children have sexual feelings too. If you awaken them too early, they get out of control, and the kids themselves look for sex…it's what they think is love."

"Fucking maggots."

Immaculata didn't say anything. Max reached across and took a couple of the wooden matches I used for my smokes. He broke one until it was about a third the size of the rest, and put it next to a full-size match. Then he took the big match and snapped it off until it was even smaller than the first one. He looked at Immaculata.

"It won't work. To the child, the abuser is always all-powerful. You can't make him small-you have to make the child big."

I took the tiny piece of match that was supposed to be the parent, lit another match, and touched it to the little piece. It went up in flames.

"That won't work either, Burke. You can make the perpetrator disappear from the earth, but not from inside the child's mind."

I didn't say anything. Immaculata's face was calm, her eyes watchful but showing nothing. I looked at Max-his face was a concrete mask. He wasn't buying this any more than I was.

"What's this got to do with the tape recorder, Mac?" I asked her.

"In my office, the child has to not just be safe, she has to feel safe. She has to learn she can control parts of her life. She has to learn she has the right to say 'No!' Okay?"

"Okay."

"Most of the kids have been involved in a conspiracy of silence. The offenders make them promise not to tell-keep it a secret. Or they make the kids believe something terrible will happen if they do. So I tell them if there's something they don't want to go on the tape recorder, all they have to do is reach over and turn it off. So they are in control."

"And they turn it off when they get to the stuff you need for court?"

"Sometimes they do," she said.

I lit another smoke and closed my eyes, buying some time to think. When it came to me it was so simple I was sure they'd already thought of it.

"Use two tape recorders," I told Mac.

"Two tape recorders?"

"Sure. The one on top of the table-the one the kids can turn off if they want, right? And you keep another one out of sight, maybe under the table or something. And you let that one run all the time. So even when they turn off the first one, you still have everything on tape."

Immaculata put the two fingernails back against her cheek, thinking it over. "That would be dishonest," she told me.

"Better to let some scumbag walk away laughing?" I asked.

She waited a second or two. "No," she said. And a smile broke across her lovely face. "That's what we'll do."

Max made an "I told you so" gesture to his woman, now smiling himself. Immaculata reached over and squeezed my hand, and Max's smile broadened.

Immaculata was the first woman ever to come into our clubhouse. She'd be the last. Like all truly dangerous beasts, Max would mate for life.

I left them with each other and went in the back to make my call.

IT WAS just getting dark as I walked through the catacombs behind the warehouse. The cellar was one of many that ran under all the buildings on the block. The City Planning Office sold me a set of the plans years ago, and the Mole figured out how we could make all the basements connect to each other by drilling a few holes. It took almost a month for us to finish, but once you got to the warehouse basement, you could get out a dozen different ways. We originally did it just in case we had to leave quickly, but once we were under there, the Mole showed me how we could tap into the telephone lines in the other buildings. The warehouse is owned by some corporation Mama Wong set up, but it belongs to Max. His temple is upstairs, and the rest of the space is for whatever we need. For Mama, it's a warehouse. For me, it's the post office.

I found the metal footlocker, rooted through it past the stuff we kept there-coats, hats, glasses, anything to make you look different. I found the field telephone and the set of alligator clips. I walked through our cellar into the next basement. Above us was a firm of Chinese architects, and they never worked late. I clipped the field phone onto the junction points the Mole had shown me and I got a dial tone right away. I used the little box that looked like the face of a calculator and punched out the number Julio had written down, lit a cigarette, and waited.

I didn't have long to wait-she must have been sitting by the phone. "Hello." It was the redhead.