Andrew Vachss: Down in the Zero

"She was just— "

"Playing. Sure. Playing you . For your father. With him. He picked her out from the beginning, Fancy— she never had a chance. She's doing the same thing. Getting powerful. Drinking blood."

"I don't believe you."

"Yeah you do. Charm set you up in business. So you'd have a 'thing' of your own, isn't that what you said? Instead, you've been a Judas goat, staked out so the prey comes sniffing around. And Charm's always there. With her cameras.

She made a moaning sound, dropped her shoulders. I reached over, held her hand. It was damp.

"There's more," I told her. "Charm used Sonny too. When he was just a kid. Got him involved in sex way before he was ready, and it really fucked with his head. She may have been with his mother too…Cherry's gay, right? There's a wire on my phone, in the caretaker's apartment. That's her work too. I thought it was you at first, when I saw the tape. But there's money floating around here. Big money. More than Charm could score from some lousy little blackmail scheme."

"But why…?"

"Your mother knew it too, Fancy. Remember when you told her, what she did? She gave her daughter away. Handed her over like a present."

"I saw that once…what you said. On 'Oprah.' How people get abused when they're kids and they remember it all of a sudden, years later."

"I know."

"But there's like nothing they can do, right? I heard it on the show, the Statute of Limitations. It's too late to make them go to jail…"

"Yeah. They need to call it the Statute of Liberty instead. The freak does his work good enough, he makes the kid block it right out…and then he walks away giggling."

"You think Charm…doesn't remember?"

"I don't think she ever forgot. That's what turned her. Into whatever she is, now."

She was quiet a long time, all inside herself. Then she looked over at me, gray eyes in the dark. "My own sister," she said. "My twin. Now I don't have anybody."

I made her come back to the caretaker's apartment with me. Showed her the tiny microphone that had sat inside the phone until I pulled it loose.

I took her to the bedroom. Undressed her slowly. We made love. A deep, rich vanilla.

"I want you to stay with Sonny," I told her the next morning. "All day, no matter what, wherever he goes. Whether he likes it or not."

"Okay."

"Don't 'okay' me, Fancy. It's important. Make a promise."

"I swear," she said, her hand over her heart.

I puffed on my smoke, absently, wondering if she knew. "Fancy, what happened to your other sister?"

"My other sister?"

"Charm said you were originally triplets, remember?"

"Charm tells stories," she answered, looking somewhere else.

I walked over to the big house. Sonny was awake, at the kitchen table.

"I think I'm close now," I told him. "I need you to do something."

"You got it."

"Fancy's upstairs. Over in the garage apartment. I want you to stay with her. No matter what she does. Don't let her out of your sight. Don't take no for an answer. Stay with her until I get back."

"I'll take care of it," he said. In a man's voice.

The junkyard was shrouded in what passes for morning mist in Hunts Point— a nasty mix of industrial pollution and half–burnt garbage no converter could ever recycle. Terry was right near the gate, as if he was expecting me.

"Mole had a fight," he said.

"A fight? Is he okay?"

"Oh sure. It was, like, not a physical thing. With Zvi."

"The Israeli?" I asked, climbing aboard the shuttle.

"Yes. He didn't want you to know anything about…whatever they took. I couldn't follow it all. He said you weren't one of them. But Mole said, you were one of him , and he was going to show it to you. They had this big argument. Then this Zvi guy, he offered Mole money. For the information, he said. Mole got really mad then. They started arguing, in Jewish, I guess, I couldn't understand. Then this Zvi guy left."

"Don't fuss about it, kid. They won't do anything to the Mole."

"Oh, I know that. I just never saw him, like, mad before."

The Mole was in his bunker. If the argument with the Israeli had him worked up, you couldn't see it on his face.

"You cracked the code?" I asked him.

"Yes. It was what I thought— a sort program. It matched all the names— before and after."

"You have a copy?"

"Yes."

"Any trouble. With…?"

"No," he said, handing me a thick sheaf of papers.

"They do plastic surgery there," I told him. "It's the perfect cover for the ID business."

"They do something else, too."

"What?"

"I'm not sure. See this?" he said, holding up a clipboard covered with calculations.

I nodded, waiting— the Mole had already used up his supply of words for the week and I didn't want to throw him off the track.

"This was an experiment, like I told you. A double–blind, with a probability matrix."

"Huh?"

"Don't play stupid, Burke— I don't have time. There was a group of subjects, all right? It was divided in half. Half received some…input. A substance, a treatment, exposure to radiation…I can't tell. The other didn't— maybe they got a placebo, maybe nothing. Again, I can't tell. Now for the group which got the input, there was a certain result predicted. That's the probability matrix…the experimenter was looking for a result, and that result was something you would expect to get in a certain percentage of cases anyway, understand?"

"You got a group of a hundred people. You give fifty of them a pill that causes headaches— you give fifty of them nothing. In the first group, ten of them get headaches. But you gotta figure, people get headaches without the pills. So the question is…how many more? Is that it?"

"Yes. The difference must be statistically significant for the input to be the cause."

"But you don't know who…or what?"

"No."

"Did the…experiment work?"

"I don't know. It's not in the data. The running time was ninety days. They run it four times a year, with different split groups. Whatever they expected to happen, it did happen. But I don't know the probability of it happening without the input."

"Wouldn't they know it?"

"They made…educated guesses. It seems they don't have hard data on it."

"So after ninety days, the…input…it's not gonna work."

"That's what it seems. If it works at all."

"It fucking fits," I muttered.

"You think you know…?"

"Mole, you know all about the experiments in the camps. Remember you told me about them?"

"Yes," he said, Nazi–hate blazing behind his thick glasses.

"They were just experiments for the sake of experiments, right? Not science at all."

"Not science at all," he agreed bitterly. "Sadism. Torture. Freakish ugliness."

"But…even if someone wanted to do real experiments, like for cancer or whatever…you couldn't do it on humans, could you?"

"Not legally. I've heard…about places in the Third World where you can…buy subjects."

"Mole, listen for a minute. Is there a drug that could make people suicidal? Make them kill themselves?"

He stroked the side of his face, took off his glasses, polished them on a greasy rag lying on his workbench. "There are drugs that cause depression, drugs that interfere with cognition, affect mood. All kinds of results. But to actually make people kill themselves…no. If they were already disposed, maybe…"

I drove out of the junkyard dazed, brain spinning crazy, info–pinballing, colors and numbers bouncing off the corners. Trying to pick a drop of mercury off a slick Formica surface through a cloud of smoke.

Until I faced it. The same way I did with the child I killed in that basement. Just looked at it and looked at it until it told the truth.