Andrew Vachss - Flood

“Flood, you’re a clown, you know that?”

“What did I do?”

“Never fucking mind,” I told her, and tried to keep from laughing myself. She got up without using her hands and floated off to the shower. I got dressed, lit up another smoke, and took out the Goldor file. It was everything Pablo had promised: full name (Jonas James Goldor), date of birth (February 4, 1937, in Cape May, New Jersey), height (5’ 11”), weight (175), rap sheet (two arrests for assault, the last one in 1961, no convictions), military service (none), marital status (never married), mother’s maiden name, father’s occupation at time of Goldor’s birth (note that both parents were deceased. Too bad-I hated to have anything in common with him). A long list of corporations and partnerships in which he held an interest. Location of two known safe-deposit boxes in commercial banks. Copies of driver’s license, ownership registration certificates for four cars (a Rolls, a Porsche 928, a Land Rover, and a 500-series Benz sedan), copies of some cancelled checks written on two of his corporations, a copy of his 1979 IRS return (showing a gross income of $440,775 with a net of $228,000, all from a series of subChapter -S corporations, a pass-through tax trick so that he could be the sole stockholder and not be taxed corporately and individually). Also a floor plan of his house in Scarsdale, complete with all the switch-box locations for the electronic protection system. A note that said Goldor kept nobody but himself on the premises at night, but that he had a silent alarm setup connected directly to the local police station-and another note that said they didn’t know all the locations for the switches that would set it off. They even had a copy of a New York City carry-pistol license. Other random notes: Goldor was a health-food freak, gobbled tons of vitamins and supplements every day. Worked out regularly, had a complete gym with Nautilus equipment and a sauna in his basement. He had all his clothes custom-made, even his shoes. A gun collector, but not of modern weapons.

And that was it, except for some blue onionskin pages typed with an ancient IBM Model-B using italic type. A psychiatric profile, obviously prepared by Pablo at long distance from the subject. I scanned it once quickly, then settled down to read:

“Goldor from relatively wealthy family, sent to British boarding school from age nine to fifteen, when he returned to the States. Return probably occasioned by death of his father. Managed a variety of his father’s holdings, gradually at first, then took exclusive control just prior to death of his mother when he was about twenty. Obsession with hairlessness probably traceable to preoccupation with bodybuilding (note: body builders routinely shave all body hair so as to better display muscular development and vascularity). No validatable information concerning early development. Runs a variety of sex-oriented businesses concurrently with more legitimate enterprises. Projects image of power and dominance in business relationships.”

Then came these underlined words: “What follows is, at best, an educated guess. This represents theorization absent sufficient data and should be so weighted.” Then a lot of mumbo-jumbo about “homosexual ideation,” “situational impotence,” “unresolved Oedipal conflicts,” “sadistic obsessions which the subject believes he tightly controls,” “suspect enuresis, fire-setting, cruelty to small animals, classic triad,” “possibility of iatrogenic therapy prepuberty,” “grandiosity bordering on belief in omnipotence,” “utterly self-contained,” and “functioning psychopath.”

I was still reading when Flood came back wearing one of her robes, this time a bottle-green job with wide black piping on the sleeves. I handed her the stuff without a word and sat and smoked while she read through it. It didn’t take her long. “You know what this stuff means?” she asked.

“Yes-remember, a lot of it is just guessing.”

“I understand some of it-enuresis is bed-wetting, right? But what’s this classic-triad stuff? And what does iatrogenic mean? And-”

“Hold up a minute, Flood. The classic triad is the kid who wets the bed, sets fires, and tortures small animals, especially his own pets. If all three things are going on with the same kid the odds are in favor of him pulling a homicide or two before he grows up. And iatrogenic means a therapeutic treatment that makes a disease worse, like pouring salt on a wound. The whole thing boils down to Goldor being a confirmed degenerate, someone who can never get better no matter what you do with him-or to him.”

“Is this just words, or does it help us?”

“I don’t know. Most of the time it would mean a lot of nothing, but the people who put this together know what they’re doing.”

“They say he’s a functioning psychopath. I thought all psychos were just looney-you know, off the wall.”

“You know what a psychopath is, Flood?”

“I guess not.”

I got to my feet, walked over a few paces and turned to face her. “Imagine you got thrown into a totally dark room, okay? You can’t see a thing. What’s the first thing you do?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Reach out my hands to see where the walls are.”

I reached out my own hands. “Right, you want to find the limits of your environment. Less fancy-you want to know where you stand, what’s going on. That’s why some kids act so bad when you put them in institutions… they don’t know the limits and they don’t know how to ask, so they act up so people will step in and show them. But a psychopath, you throw him in a blacked-out room and you know what he does?”

As Flood looked up at me I wrapped my arms around my biceps like I was giving myself a hug. “A psychopath has everything he needs right inside himself. He doesn’t need an environment, doesn’t have to work with it. He doesn’t see people, he sees things. And he could move these things around or throw them out and break them the same way you might rearrange furniture.”

Flood looked at me, her face calm and composed. “A whole lot of words.”

She had me there. I got my things together, and then Flood and I got out her wok and burned up the whole Goldor file. Pablo wouldn’t want it back and I wasn’t about to be walking around with it either. We sat together and watched the flames eat Goldor’s dossier. No answers rose with the smoke.

I told Flood that I had to make some arrangements before we could go and visit Goldor, that it might be that very night, and she was to stay home and wait for my call. She nodded absently-her thoughts were somewhere else. She walked me to the door, stood on her toes to kiss me goodbye.

IT TOOK ME a while to get back to my office. I never go there in a straight line anyway, but ever since I watched that videotape I had the feeling that Goldor somehow knew I was coming for him. The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced Pablo’s profile was on the money. Goldor did think he was untouchable. “The man who knows Wilson made a movie star out of a corpse,” Michelle had said. Maybe she didn’t know the name, but his product was on the street for everyone to see. We were all just so many bugs to him. He wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep worrying about a Wilson rolling over on him. Sure, he would know the Cobra-he would know anyone in the kiddie-sex business, but the lion doesn’t fear the jackal.

I checked the office carefully this time, but nobody had come calling. Pansy was as glad to see me as she usually was-once she satisfied herself that it was really me she went back to sleep. I made enough noise moving around the office so she realized I would be there for a while, and I let her out onto the roof while I sat at my desk and went over everything one more time. I would have to go back to the Bronx, but this time to the other end of the world. I couldn’t use Max for this one-who knew how much protection Goldor would put on himself? Flood was in it to the end because it was her beef.