Andrew Vachss - Flood

“So ten thousand?”

“Exactly.”

“So I put up ten thousand, and you put up what?”

“Mr. Burke, we put up title to the goods-in your name or in whatever name you desire. Title to the goods in your name, F.O.B. London. Of course, the goods will never leave the States until you hand us the certificate, but you will have title.”

“So what would prevent me from just selling the goods on my own?”

That was Gunther’s cue to role-play again. He leaned forward. “It wouldn’t be worth it to you.” Picking up the brass knuckles, he rapped them on the table for emphasis.

I sat back like I was thinking about it but then Gunther had to overact again and spoil everything. He looked over at Max. “What’s the matter with the chink? How come he don’t talk?”

James looked pained, as if Gunther were a dangerous madman just barely under control. A good act, but the wrong stage.

“He talks,” I said. “I interpret for him.”

“Oh yeah? That’s real nice. Ask the chink what year this is?”

“What year?”

“Yeah, you know. The gooks all have names for years, right? Like the Year of the Dragon or the Year of the Horse. Ask him what year this is-I got a feeling this is the Year of the Pussy.”

I knew I shouldn’t have made that crack about faggots, but it was obviously too late now. Max looked at Gunther, smiled, tapped his forehead, and shook his head negatively. I was in it anyway by then, so I translated. “He says he knows what year it isn’t.”

“What year is that, wise guy?”

Max repeated his earlier gestures, then reached out onto the table with his hand like he was groping for something, stopped when he found it, and turned his palm over. Then he made a disgusted face, gently turning his palm over again, and shook his head once more.

“He says it’s not the Year of the Maggot,” I told them.

Gunther glared over at Max, who gave him a beautiful soft smile in return. When he spoke he accented each word with vicious precision. “Tell that slant-eyed punk that one day I’m going to meet him when you’re not around with that scattergun to save his ass. Tell him that I’m going to make him polish my boots with his tongue. Tell him that.”

Max smiled even more sweetly. Taking the brass knuckles in his two hands, he rotated them against each other. His forearms looked like twisted ropes of heavy telephone cable, his face was flat-lips parted just enough to show a tiny gleam of white. His nostrils flared, his ears flattened against his head and the flesh moved away from his eyes. The deaf-mute gook had become the Mongol warrior lord as though the metal in his hands had flowed into his face and upper body. The brass knuckles resisted, then yielded, bending almost double in his grip.

Gunther’s face lost its blood, but he couldn’t look away from Max. I put the shotgun on the table butt-first toward Gunther, shoving it right into his hands. “Want to try this?” I leaned my chair back against the wall. A smell that you can find in the lobby of most any housing project suddenly filled the room. Gunther got up, backing away from the table and the shotgun as if they were radioactive. James slowly pushed his own chair back and walked over to Gunther. The shotgun and the brass knuckles lay untouched on the table.

“Don’t ever come back,” I told them. “Don’t ever think about coming back. I’ll call you at your number three nights from now, at six o’clock, and tell you if I’m interested in your deal. You understand?”

James mumbled yes and they walked out the door, his hand on Gunther’s arm.

Max and I sat there for a second, then got up to get away from the aroma. Max put his hands together and flicked them back and forth to show me he would clean up. I went over to the cab to get my cigarettes, lit two, and let them burn in the glass ashtray. Max came over, took one. He touched his hand to his heart to thank me for showing him respect by putting a loaded shotgun in the hands of his enemy. I made an it’s-nothing gesture to indicate that even with the shotgun Gunther was no match for him. Max drifted to the front of the warehouse to see if they might have some crazy idea about coming back. While he was out front I took up the shotgun and exchanged the blank shells inside it for some real ones in case they did.

MAX WAS BACK in a couple of minutes to let me know James and Gunther had vacated the immediate area. He touched his eyes and made a circle in front of his face, parallel to the ground, to let me know he was going out to see what happened to them. I told him I’d wait right where I was and sat in the empty warehouse. I didn’t enjoy the quiet. My first thought was that Gunther’s reaction had been unprofessional, that they were amateurs who had blundered their way into a weapons contract and didn’t know how to move from there. But it wouldn’t wash. They were professionals all right-but professional scam artists, not gunrunners.

If I could get my hands on a valid End Use Certificate, I wouldn’t need the likes of Gunther and James to do the merchandising for me. Any damn fool with money can buy all the weapons he wants in this country. The real money was out there for transportation and delivery, not outright purchase. The ten-grand deposit was all the money that they meant to change hands-sort of an international version of the Pigeon Drop game, except instead of an envelope stuffed with newspaper I’d get a phony Bill of Lading, F.O.B. London, telling me I was the proud owner of a bunch of nonexistent weapons. You can’t really cheat an honest man, someone once said, and they were right. Those lames thought I’d make the deposit an investment in my own ripoff scheme and steal the guns for myself. It told me two things-they thought I had some real contacts in Africa from the Biafra episode, and they thought I was a thief. Like most losers, they were about half-right.

So why did I tell them I’d get back to them? One reason was that I didn’t want them to do anything stupid, and James might have thought the con was still running for them. But there was something else, something I couldn’t isolate in my mind. They must be good for something, maybe something connected to this whole Cobra business, but I didn’t yet see exactly what or how.

I knew one thing, though: in the joint, the major child molesters and the neo-Nazis had one thing in common: they all wanted to be part of “law enforcement.” One of them-he had been running a school “for disturbed kids” with sodomy as therapy-told the Prof that he was working for the FBI. When the Prof played him along, he said he had a code name and everything-that the lawyer who came to see him regularly was really a Bureau agent. He told the Prof that he was gathering information about rival kiddie-porn dealers and passing it along. Just a good citizen. I didn’t think anything about it-it was just good information to have. But when I saw this creep buddy-up with a guy who called himself Major Klaus, I knew they had to have something in common. One of the mistakes I make sometimes is to lump all freaks together in my mind-like there are brand names for certain kinds of humans. I should know better. My survival instincts told me to keep James and Gunther on the hook, but a connection to the Cobra wouldn’t come to the front of my thinking. It was just lurking somewhere in the back. I didn’t press it. Whatever instincts, intuitions I had had kept me alive so far. From experience, I figured when it was time for the connection it would come to me.

While I was trying to dope out how they came to connect me with African work (and giving it up as a bad job because a lot of people knew something about that craziness-diamonds that weren’t there and starving kids that were), Max rolled back. He gestured that the two losers had been picked up in a cab about ten blocks from our base. He didn’t bother to find out where they went since it wouldn’t mean anything to us. I could see Max was still up for battle, pumping fire inside but handling it well. If you didn’t know what to look for, you wouldn’t see anything, but I did-this hadn’t been the first time. He followed the cab back to the taxi garage in the Plymouth. I turned in the hack, picked up my four hundred bucks from the half-a-grand deposit with the dispatcher (he returns all but a yard as the rental fee), and we headed home.