Andrew Vachss - Strega

The underground newsletters kept the pictures pretty clean. Lots of arty photography-nude kids posing, playing volleyball, wrestling with each other. Plenty of contact information-post-office boxes, mail drops, like that. But every Vice Squad cop in the country was probably on the mailing list and it would takes months to work my way through the maze and actually make a decent buy. They'd try me out first-tame stuff, semilegal-with a ton of rhetoric about "man-boy love" for me to wade through.

I looked through my list of overseas addresses. Almost all kiddie porn used to come from places like Brussels and Amsterdam. The European countries are still a safer harbor for pedophiles, but the real heavy production was all home-grown now. Kiddie porn is a cottage industry. You can walk into a video store and come out with enough electronic crap to make a major motion picture. I didn't need the expensive stuff-a Polaroid was all the kid told Strega about. That was all I needed, and a lot more than I had.

Crime follows dollars-that's the way of the world. No buyers-no sellers. The professionals in the hard-core business have the technology to supply the huge amounts of filth humans want to buy, but the professionals were too big a target for me. Too spread out, too detached. The organized-crime guys were into kiddie porn for the money-if I wanted to find one lousy Polaroid, I'd have to go to someone who was in it for love.

IT WAS just past midday, probably early enough to risk using the hippies' phone, but I was going out anyway. Pansy was sprawled out on the Astroturf, an expectant look on her ugly face. "You can come with me later," I told her. I was going to see the Mole, and I couldn't risk turning my beast loose near the junkyard-if she didn't get into mortal combat with the dogs the Mole keeps around she might just decide to stay.

I called the Mole from a pay phone a few blocks from the office. No point in wasting a trip if he wasn't around, and only God knew the Mole's hours.

He answered on the first ring the way he always does-he picks up the phone but he doesn't say anything.

"Can I come up and talk with you?" I said into the mouthpiece.

"Okay," came the Mole's voice, rusty from lack of use. He broke the connection-there was nothing else to say.

The Lincoln drove itself north on the East Side Drive. I set the cruise control to fifty and motored up to the Triboro Bridge. A decent suit on my back, no gun in my pocket, and a set of clean papers for a car that wasn't stolen-I hadn't been this much of a citizen since I was ten.

I met the Mole when I was doing a job for an Israeli guy, but I didn't really get to know him until I did another job, much later. Another one of those anonymous Israeli guys came to my office one day. He wasn't the same guy I'd met the first time, when they wanted me to find some ex-Nazi, a slimeball who'd worked as a concentration-camp guard. I did that job, and now they wanted a gun-runner. The Israeli said he wanted to buy weapons and needed me to set up the meet. Somehow I thought there was a bit more to it. The man he wanted to meet sold heavy-duty stuff-shoulder-fired missiles, antitank cannons, stuff like that. And he sold them to Libya.

I told the Israeli I wouldn't meet with the guy myself-I didn't do business with him and I didn't want any part of someone else's beef. When I said I didn't trade with the gun-runner, the Israeli asked me if I was Jewish. He's the only guy I ever met who asked me that.

It was the Israeli who took me to the junkyard the first time. They left me alone in the car, the dog pack cruising around me in the night like sharks lapping against a rubber raft. I don't know what they talked about, but the Israeli got back into my car carrying a little suitcase.

The Mole has no politics-he doesn't consider blowing up Nazis political. After the second job, I was a friend to Israel. And after a lot of years, I was the Mole's friend too. After I took the weight down in the subway tunnel, I was his brother.

I threw a token into the Exact Change basket, hooking a left and then a right to Route 95. But I ducked into the warehouse district off Bruckner Boulevard, finding my way to the Mole's junkyard. Hunts Point- New York 's badlands. Topless bars. Diesel-fuel stations. Whores too raunchy to work Manhattan stalked the streets and waved at the truckers, flashing open their coats to show their naked bodies, then closed them quickly before the customers got a good look. I heard pistol shots, spaced a couple of seconds apart. Over to my right, two men were standing a few feet away from an abandoned old Chrysler, pumping shots into the body. Glass flew out of the windows; the old wreck's body rocked with each shot. It wasn't a homicide going down-just a seller demonstrating his goods for a prospective buyer. Hunts Point is a dead zone for police patrols-no citizens allowed.

I turned the corner near the entrance to the Mole's joint, driving slowly, scanning the street with my eyes. I heard a horn beep. The Mole's head popped up in the front seat of a burnt-out Volvo sitting at the side of the road. He climbed out, wearing his dirt-colored jumpsuit, a tool belt around his waist and a satchel in his hand. He looked like another part of the wrecked car.

He walked over to the Lincoln and climbed into the front seat. "Mole!" I greeted him. He nodded, confirming my diagnosis. We drove around to the side entrance, a rusting old gate secured by a dime-store lock. It wouldn't keep a self-respecting thief out for ten seconds. The Mole jumped out, selected a key from the several dozen he had on a saucer-sized ring, and popped the lock. I pulled the Lincoln inside while he locked up behind me. I kept the windows up as we pulled deeper into the junkyard-I couldn't hear them, but I knew they were around. I glanced in the rearview mirror-the ground around the gate was already covered by a thick blanket of dogs. More of them loomed up from the dark depths of the yard, padding forward slowly, all the time in the world. The gate wouldn't keep a thief from getting in, but no power on earth was going to get him out.

The dogs were all sizes and shapes. I remembered the old Great Dane-a black-and-white Harlequin monster, now missing an ear. A matched set that looked like boxers approached from the front with something that might have once been a collie on their flank. But the real pack bounded up on my side of the car-lupine heads closer to wolves than German shepherds, alert, intelligent black faces over broad chests, thick tails curled up on their backs. Their coats looked like brown fur dipped in transmission fluid, matted and heavy. Only their teeth looked clean, flashing white in the dim sunlight. The pack had been working and making puppies in the South Bronx jungle for so many years that they had evolved into a separate breed-the American junkyard dog. They never saw a can of dog food. Or a vet. The strongest survived, the others didn't.

There were safer places to walk around than the Mole's junkyard-like Lebanon in the busy season.

The Mole jumped out of the Lincoln, shifting his head for me to follow. I slid over and got out his side. The Mole blundered through the dog pack like a farmer walking through a herd of cows, me right on his tail.

The dogs nosed my legs experimentally, wondering how I'd taste. One of the pack growled a threat, but the Mole ignored it like he does everything else they do. The Mole's underground bunker was on the other side of the junkyard-we weren't going there.

A red Ford station wagon was sitting in a patch of sunlight ahead of us, its entire front end smashed all the way into the front seat-a head-on hit. The back seat had been removed, propped up against the rear bumper. A cut-down oil drum was on one side, a thick book with a plain blue cover on top. The Mole's reading room.