Andrew Vachss - Down Here

The money man looked everyplace but my eyes.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “You tell Nate what I said, it won’t make him nervous: it’ll calm him down. He’ll know who I am then. We’re old pals. Tell the tough guy over there to go ahead and pull his piece, keep me covered, if it’ll make you feel better, okay?”

The money man slitted his eyes. I counted to six in my head. “Step back,” he said. “Just a few feet, all right? I need some privacy. This is a long-distance call.”

I did what he wanted. He picked up the receiver, covered the mouthpiece with his hand. I looked over at the bounty hunter. He was a real professional: too busy playing stare-down with me to notice Max closing the gap between them.

“Go on back,” the money man said.

I turned to Max, barked something in quasi-Chinese. Even after all those years at Mama’s, I didn’t understand one word of the Cantonese and Mandarin she spoke interchangeably, but I could imitate the sounds enough to fool anyone who didn’t speak either one. It helped that Max nodded, like he was acknowledging what I said.

“I told him to wait out here for me,” I said to the money man. “He doesn’t speak English.”

The money man didn’t say anything. Max slid along the wall, just a few inches, to improve his angle of attack if the bounty hunter decided to role-play.

I walked over to the men’s room, tapped lightly. Heard a seriously solid deadbolt snap open. Turned the knob, and walked inside.

Big Nate was behind a flimsy little wood desk . . . and a transparent wall of Lexan thick enough to bounce a bullet, even at that close range.

“Come closer,” he said, speaking into a microphone he held in one tiny hand. “Talk into the speaker.”

I moved forward slowly, sat down on a chrome barstool with a cracked red leather top. That brought my mouth level with the speaking grid.

Nate was looking down at me. Behind his desk was a raised platform. It compensated for his four-and-a-half-foot height, the same way the specially built-up pedals on his Rolls let him drive.

“I need a bond,” I said. “A big one.”

“Never mind that,” he said, his frail voice amplified into resonant strength by the microphone he was holding. “You said something outside, to my man. Can you back it up?”

“Lucien Lagrande,” I said, pulling the name from my ghost brother’s accounts book. “You want more?”

The silence between us was thicker than the Lexan. But, from the moment I’d said that name, Big Nate knew he was done. Wesley had started his walk.

“You’re not saying you’re . . . ?”

“I’m his brother,” I said. The blood-truth.

Even as I said those words, I remembered the “home” they’d sent me to when I was an orphaned kid. What they did to me there. And what Wesley had whispered to me one night when we were together in the institution: “They’re easier when they’re sleeping,” the baby monster told me. “Fire works.”

It was all down in Wesley’s accounts book. Big Nate had been a visionary. Between the Jakes running ganja, the DRs moving powder, bikers cranking crystal, college kids selling Q, and everyone else slinging rock, money was stacking all over the city. The Italians had a hundred different laundries, but even if they had been willing to take in outsiders, nobody trusted a “family” that didn’t trust its own relatives.

That had become Nate’s real business, setting up custom-tailored laundries. Had them everywhere, and kept all the records in his head. His stock in trade was honesty. You gave Nate a hundred K cash, you got back whatever percentage he promised . . . and a string of receipts that would give a CPA an orgasm.

One night, a man named Lucien Lagrande came to visit Big Nate. Lagrande told him he knew the bail bonds weren’t the little man’s real business.

“You sitting on gold with this bail-bond front,” Lagrande had told him. “But that all finished now. You being . . . encompassed.”

Big Nate had laughed at him. Which Lagrande expected. Then he dropped the hammer. Big Nate had a piece of a Vegas casino. A little piece, but in his own name. If that came to light, Big Nate would lose both licenses—it’s illegal for a bondsman to have a piece of a casino, in either direction.

Big Nate felt his heart stop. “Actually fucking stop, ” is what he told people, later.

“You got a week,” Lagrande told him. “Then you turn it over, or I turn you over. That simple, my man. Don’t worry, now. You get a taste. You keep on getting a taste. Once you encompassed, you part of my operation. A partner, even.

“You don’t play, you lose it all. Everyone scramble for pieces. I get some, but not all, I know that. This way, you go with me, I get the pie, sure, but you get to keep a nice fat slice.”

Lagrande lived in a three-story frame house in Brooklyn. It stood alone on a large vacant lot, the last in a row of condemned-then-razed derelict buildings. Word was, the whole thing was slated to become what the Mayor called an “oasis of greenery.”

The place was a fortress, surrounded by iron fencing, patrolled by dogs, lit by klieg lights at night, and occupied by no less than a dozen of Lagrande’s heavily armed crew. Nobody could get within a hundred yards without being spotted.

It was broad daylight when the house exploded into flames. Lagrande didn’t even make it to the fence before a sniper picked him off.

The police later figured that the shots must have come from a certain rooftop, more than a quarter-mile from the scene. Seven shots. Three into Lagrande, the other four into the men who had run out the front door with him.

“We know this much,” the press conference cop told his audience. “The recovered slugs were all fired from the same weapon. It’s as if whoever was shooting put one into each of them to bring them down, then scanned the field to make sure which one was Lagrande, before he finished him off with those head shots. As impossible as that sounds . . .” he finished, lamely.

That was a lot of years ago. But crime time runs different than citizen time. For permanent outsiders like us, time only matters when you’re doing it.

“I’m not a blackmailer,” I said to Big Nate. “And I didn’t come here to make threats. That name I said, it was just to prove in, okay? So you know where I’ve been, and what I know.”

And what I can do, I said in my mind, vibrating the unspoken words out to him.

The little man looked at the ceiling, as if he was considering a proposal. Then he picked up the microphone and whispered what everyone is too terrified to ask out loud. “Is Wesl—? Is he really . . . ?”

“Nobody knows,” I told him. A face-down hole card. The whisper-stream had it that Wesley was a falcon on my glove. Nobody knew for sure, and nobody liked the odds.

I watched his eyes. Stayed gentle inside myself, showing him respect by acting like I believed he was actually considering calling my bet.

“How big a number I need to write?” he finally said, tossing in his hand.

“ That’s a huge-ass bond,” the Prof said on the drive back. “Sure hope that fucking dwarf don’t think he too big to drop the vig.” The Prof was a couple of inches taller than Big Nate, on a good day.

“I ran it all down for him,” I said. “He knows Wolfe’s not going to jump. And she’s got a nice house, out in Forest Hills Gardens; cover him for more than the nut, it came to that.”

“So we don’t have to put up the fifty large?”

“Not a dime.”

“Honeyboy, listen to me for a minute. You wearing a murder face now. Not like you mad, like you . . . the way Wesley looked all the time. Got those straight-line lips and glass-cutter eyes, you hear what I’m saying?”