Tim Green - Exact Revenge

There is a big bay window in the front of the small saltbox house where Dan lives. We stop out front and I roll down my window. Through the bay window, I can see him hugging his wife and swinging her around. I can see the sparkle of tears running down his face. His mouth is open in wild laughter that I don’t have to hear.

I roll up the window and stare straight ahead at the snow-covered street that is lined with four-foot banks.

“Back to New York, Bert,” I say.

“What about Mickey Mouse and Space Mountain and all that?”

“No,” I say. “You liked when I played God, right? Reward a loyal friend? A kind old man? Make his dreams come true? That’s like Disney World. You take the ride, get a little scared, then you get off and have some cotton candy or a turkey drumstick. Take your picture with Snow White. But God’s got a night job too. God is a judge. Yeah, he rewards the good guy, right? Supposedly… But what about the bad?

“God makes a call. Good, you get Disney World. Bad?”

I look Bert in the eye and say, “You go to hell.”

I KNOW THAT SOMEONE like Frank Steffano doesn’t get to where he is by destroying just one man. People like Frank are tumors. They feed off everything decent within their reach. They are worse than parasites who fatten only themselves. Tumors like Frank grow stronger and stronger until they can metastasize. They create other tumors that also grow and thrive. Villay. Rangle. Russo. I’m sure there are others.

I hire Vance International, a private investigative and protective agency made from the cream of the Secret Service, the FBI, and all four branches of the military. I put up a five-million-dollar retainer, which gets their attention. They are my diagnostic team.

You would be shocked at how easy it is to invade someone’s privacy. I’m not talking about getting someone’s phone records or financial statements, or hacking into their e-mails. I’m talking about seeing and hearing what goes on in their bedroom and the table where they eat breakfast.

Vance International isn’t bound by any laws. They have employees who are welcomed into Frank and Lexis’s home, into the Rangles’, into the Villays’. It happens to every American on a weekly basis. We open our doors to complete strangers, giving them access to our secret places. Cable TV workers. Appliance repairmen. The guy who delivers the dry cleaning. The more money people have, the more intruders enter their homes.

If that fails, Vance has other ways of getting in. Skeleton keys. Lock picks. Drills and glasscutters. Cameras and microphones the size of a pencil lead are easily inserted into ceilings and walls. Tiny transmitters send microwave digital data to receivers that are connected into fiber lines and fed to monitoring stations that gather everything. Then Vance boils it down to the good stuff.

For six months they chronicle for me not only every symptom of the disease, but its complete pathology.

Am I collecting information because I want to destroy the tumors perfectly, or because I want justification for what I’m going to do? Maybe I’m really not as comfortable filling in for God as I make myself out to be. It makes me sick to be this weak, but I think that’s the truth. Even after everything that’s happened to me, I need something more. A justification to make my judgment. A rationale to dole out my punishment. As if I didn’t already have enough of both.

And, just like I figured, Vance International digs up other ruined lives besides mine. None of them are as bad as what happened to me, though. None of them except one. A girl named Helena. At first, I decide to look for her because she could serve an important role in my plan. But the more I learn, the more I feel as if we are somehow connected through our losses and our pain and I wonder if she might also be able to take the edge off my loneliness.

It’s late summer when I track her down in a men’s club in Fairbanks, Alaska. She’s emotionally battered and bruised and so bitter that she’s almost wicked. I don’t blame her. She was sold off as a prostitute when she was a child. They used her in some movies and then they just used her. She was fifteen when she escaped a flophouse in West Hollywood. It took her a year to steal her way up to Alaska. Someplace she must have fantasized as being safe.

She dances for the oil workers and fishermen during the week, and in exchange, the owner lets her sing with her clothes on over the weekend. She lives in a small one-room cabin that she built herself. She has electricity, but uses an outhouse. The first time I approach her in the club parking lot, she pulls a little 9mm Chief’s Special out of her bag and stabs it into my ribs.

“You ever use that?” I ask.

“You’re goddamn right,” she tells me.

I buy the men’s club and shut it down. It still takes me two weeks to convince her I am for real.

Finally I pack her into my G-V and take her to a flat I have in Knightsbridge in London. It takes four weeks before she realizes that she’s really safe.

She starts to take walks with me and look me in the eye, and when I take her to a Nathan Lane show near Piccadilly Circus, I catch her smiling halfway through the first act. After the show, when she gets out of the limousine and we walk through the alley into Shepherd’s Market, she holds my hand. We have a drink at Ye Grapes, then go around the corner to a Turkish restaurant called Sofra. We sit in a table by the window and eat hummus and skewers of grilled lamb and vegetables.

Her eyes are dark and liquid and deep, framed by long thick lashes that shadow her cheeks when she looks away. Her nose is narrow and straight, long without being big. Her lips are full. She isn’t a tall girl, but her figure is curved and her stomach flat. I lean across the table and let my lips brush gently against hers. She looks down and brushes her dark silky hair back out of her face. A tear falls, spattering the rim of her plate.

“If you could have anything in the world,” I say, “what would it be?”

“Like, really anything?”

“Really.”

Her eyelids flutter as she looks away and out the window at a passing punk with tall spiked hair, leather, and chains.

She sighs and looks down and says, “A singer. A diva.”

“Like Jennifer Lopez?” I ask.

“Like that,” she says, looking back at me.

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll take care of it.”

Her eyes stare into mine. One corner of her mouth curls up and in a quiet voice she says, “I think you mean that. I can sing, you know.”

I nod that I know and say, “I wasn’t just watching your body.”

“But it takes more than that,” she says, staring at the small candle that burns in its glass by the salt.

“Just money,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says. “I love the way you say that.”

“I mean it,” I say.

“I know you do,” she says.

“No one will hurt you again,” I tell her, reaching out and holding her hand in mine. “No one will touch you. I swear to God they won’t.”

That night I am awaked to find her standing beside my bed. She is touching my cheek with the back of her fingers. I draw back the sheets and she slips inside and clings to me tight. I hold her and stroke the back of her head, drifting back into sleep.

In the morning, I lock myself up alone in my wood-paneled study to make some serious phone calls. I raise my voice and the price often enough to get my point across for some immediate results regarding Helena’s career. Then we go for a walk.