Andrew Vachss: A Bomb Built in Hell

A Bomb Built in Hell

Andrew Vachss

Author’s Notes

In 1972, I was represented by the John Schaffner Agency, largely on the strength of some short stories I published in minor magazines.* My first full-length effort was, essentially, the journal I kept during my time in the infamous NYC Welfare Department between 1966 and 1969, ending when I left to enter the warzone inside a country calling itself Biafra.** That book was (as was all my work prior to Flood ) considered unacceptable by the publishing establishment, on the grounds that there was no market for “this kind of material.”

Victor Chapin, my tireless agent, who never lost faith in me, thought my varied ground-zero experiences (including, by that time, not only the genocidal madness in Africa, but a stint as a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, working as an organizer in Lake County, Indiana, running a center for urban migrants in Chicago, a re-entry joint for ex-cons, and a maximum-security prison for violent youth) would lend themselves perfectly to a “hardboiled” novel of the type that was so successful in the ’50s. A Bomb Built in Hell followed.

And (again) was unanimously rejected by publishers. They professed to love the writing, but felt the events depicted were considered a “political horror story” and not remotely realistic. The rejection letters make interesting reading today. Included in the “lack of realism” category were such things as Chinese youth gangs and the fall of Haiti. And, of course, the very idea of someone entering a high school with the intent of destroying every living person inside was just too ... ludicrous.

Naturally, the book was also “too” hardboiled, “too” extreme, “too” spare and violent. I heard endlessly about how an anti-hero was acceptable, but Wesley was just “too” much.

Bomb was meant to be a Ph.D. thesis in criminology without the footnotes, exploring such areas as the connection between child abuse and crime, and the desperate need of unbonded, dangerous children to form “families of choice.” Thus, the narrative is third person, and the tone is flat and detached.

Victor, ever-loyal, insisted that there was no dispute about my ability as a writer, but that I needed to add some intimacy to a book everyone called “dry ice.” So ... Flood . Same themes, but first-person narrative, interior monologues, fleshed-out backstory, (some) characters with which the reader could identify (and even, presumably, like). Some sense of human connection. But the same themes.

Victor read the manuscript and told me I had finally done it ... we were winners. And then he died. Suddenly and unfairly.

Years later, after Flood came out, offers for Bomb magically appeared. Some from the same publishers who had rejected it the first time. I never took the offers, thinking of the original book as a “period piece.” Later, at the suggestion of Knopf publisher (and my editor) Sonny Mehta, I cannibalized pieces of it— Bomb was Wesley’s story, Flood was Burke’s—for Hard Candy , and Wesley remained a character in the series (despite being dead since Candy ) until its 2008 conclusion, Another Life .

Rumors of the original book’s existence were sparked by an excerpt published in the HBJ series A Matter of Crime in 1988, edited by Richard Layman.

The rumors were true. And how I wish some of the book’s predictions had not proven to be so.

I dedicated Flood to Victor Chapin. And I dedicate this to him as well. It’s been a long wait, old friend. I hope it reads as well from where you are now.

Andrew Vachss

New York

notes:

*One of which was later cannibalized into “Placebo,” which, still later, came to anchor the threeact play, “Replay,” both featured in my first short story collection, Born Bad .

**Neither the country nor the name survived. Nigeria won. And the world has seen the result.

1/

Wesley sat quietly on the roof of the four-story building overlooking the East River near Pike Slip. It was 4:30 on a Wednesday afternoon in August, about eighty-five degrees and still clear-bright. With his back flat against the storage shack on the roof, he was invisible to anyone looking up from the ground. He knew from observation that neither the tourist helicopter nor the police version ever passed over this area.

In spite of the heat, Wesley wore a soft black felt hat and a dark suit; his hands were covered with dark grey deerskin gloves. The breeze blew the ash away from his cigarette. Aware of his habit of biting viciously into the filters, he carefully placed the ground-out butt into his leather-lined side pocket before he got to his feet and stepped back inside the shack.

A soft green light glowed briefly as he entered. Wesley picked up a silent telephone receiver and held it to his ear. He said nothing. The disembodied voice on the phone said, “Yes,” and a dial tone followed at once. So Mansfield was going to continue his habit: Wednesday night at Yonkers, Thursday afternoon at Aqueduct. It never varied. But he always brought a woman to the Big A, so it would have to be tonight. A woman was another human to worry about, another pair of eyes. It increased the odds and Wesley didn’t gamble.

He walked soundlessly down the steps to the first floor. The building was a hundred years old, but the stairs didn’t creak and the lock on the door was virtually unbreakable. The door itself was lead between two layers of stainless steel, covered with a thin wood veneer.

Wesley stepped into a garage full of commonplace cars. The only exception was a yellow New York City taxicab, complete with overhead lights, numbers, a meter, a medallion, and the “crashproof” bumpers that city cabbies use so well.

An ancient man was lazily polishing one of the cars, a beige El Dorado that looked new. He looked up as Wesley entered. Wesley pointed to a nondescript 1973 Ford with New York plates.

“Ninety minutes.”

“Plates okay?”

“Give me Suffolk County.”

Without another word, the old man slipped a massive hydraulic jack under the front of the Ford and started pumping. He had the front end off the ground and the left wheel off before Wesley closed the door behind him.

2/

Wesley took the back staircase to his basement apartment. It was actually two apartments; the wall between them had been broken through so they formed a single large unit. He twisted the doorknob twice to the left and once to the right, then slipped his key into the lock.

A huge Doberman watched him silently as he entered. Its ears had been completely, amateurishly removed, leaving only holes in the sides of its skull. The big dog moaned softly. It couldn’t bark; the same savage who had cut off its ears when it was a pup had cut out its tongue and damaged its larynx in the process. The Doberman still had perfect hearing, and Wesley didn’t need it to bark.

The dog opened its gaping mouth and Wesley put his hand inside. The dog whined softly, as though remembering the emergency surgery Wesley had performed to stop it from choking on its own blood.

Wesley would have killed the human who carved up the dog anyway; dogs weren’t all that he liked to cut, and a practicing degenerate like that automatically attracted the police, even in this neighborhood.

He had ghosted up behind the target, still squatting obliviously before a tiny fire he had built out on the Slip. Wesley sprawled in the weeds like a used-up wino and quickly screwed the silencer onto a Ruger .22 semi-auto.

The first shot sounded like a soft-wet slap, audible for only about fifty feet. It caught the freak in the back of the skull. Wesley stayed prone and pumped three more bullets into the target’s body, working from the chest area upwards.