Andrew Vachss - Only Child

“Freaks film themselves,” Michelle said, her voice a cold reminder of our childhoods. “You know that as well as me. They take trophies, so they have what they...do, captured forever. And for Nazi graffiti, it’s perfect. No matter how quick someone repaints the church, on the tape the crap they sprayed is always there. You think the scumbags who knocked down the World Trade Center and killed all those people don’t get their rocks off watching the videotapes, over and over?”

“That’s right. They tape everything, right up to rape and murder. One of those tapes was a rape, it looked like—that girl with the hood over her head, she must have been drugged or drunk. But people tape themselves for fun, too, right? Just for their own private use.”

“Like Pamela and Tommy Lee?”

“I don’t know why they made those tapes, girl. Do you?”

“There’s that,” she conceded.

“Anyway, just because we found them all in one place doesn’t mean the same person made them, I know. But that tape of Vonni? Where she was running? It’s not right.”

“I don’t get you. Because it’s a fake, like Cyn said?”

“Not only that. It’s just a snip. Like a sample, or something. All the rest are...stories. Not that they have a beginning and an end, but you can always tell what’s going on. What you’re supposed to be seeing. Except for Vonni’s. It’s a mystery, what she’s running from. And it’s the only mystery in the whole stack.”

“What are we going to do?” Michelle said, standing up. The way she always does.

“Not what’s on the tapes, Mole. The tapes themselves . The whole package.”

“There are no good tests for that,” he said. “Not precise enough ones. I won’t be able to tell you much from—”

“Just take them apart,” I said. “And tell me what you can.”

“Igot yearbooks,” Terry said, bursting into the suite. “Look!”

“You did not steal them?” the Mole asked.

“No, Pop. I just borrowed them. I’ll bring them back.”

“That is too much risk,” the Mole said. “Once you have—”

“No, I really borrowed them! From a couple of girls I met. I’ve got this year’s, and...a few others, too.”

“They know you have them?”

“Yes,” Terry said, patient with his father.

“Oh,” the Mole said. And went back to his work.

Every working professional keeps some sort of Rolodex. Mine’s in my head. That “expectation of privacy” crap is fine for attacking a search warrant, but by then the cops already have the info. And that smoke never goes back into the cigarette.

I’ve got a list of experts. In all kinds of things. Carefully culled over the years. Because one thing I’ve learned: just knowing things doesn’t make a person useful.

When I was on my first bit, a group of researchers came into the prison, looking for volunteers. By then, I already knew enough to pay attention when certain people had something to say. Tucker was an old veteran con who’d jailed down south when he was a young man. He was always telling us that New York joints were country clubs compared to The Farm at Angola. There, Tucker said, they used to give you time off your sentence if you let them experiment on you—a new yellow-fever vaccine, stuff like that. But the courts made them stop doing it. I guess they figured, when you spend your life as a work animal in the fields, whipped by freaks who love their work, you spell “volunteer” a little differently.

But some stuff was still okay, like the psych “studies” they were always doing on us. They told us that we wouldn’t get anything if we participated. So, naturally, every con in the house figured the parole board would mark you lousy if you didn’t, and there was never a shortage of “subjects.”

I remember one time, especially. All the visitors wanted was a blood sample and an interview. Big deal. Anyway, everyone said the nurse drawing the blood was a real piece.

That part turned out to be true. She was a Puerto Rican woman, slender, with big brown eyes and wicked thighs. And she smelled like flowers I’d never know the name of. That needle sliding into my vein was the gentlest touch I’d felt since they’d locked me down.

The interviewer was a young guy, only a few years older than me. Bushy-haired, with wire-rim glasses. He was wearing a blue work shirt under a putty-colored corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows. He told me I had an XYY chromosome. I didn’t know what that was, but I could see it made him very excited.

“We can’t be sure,” he said. “The data aren’t all in yet. But this is some of the most important work that’s ever been done in the field.”

“What field?” I asked him.

“Biocriminology,” he said. “Let’s finish your interview, and then I’ll answer any questions you have; fair enough?”

I lied my way through the rest of his questions, practicing my survival skills. When it was over, he gave me one of those “This is going to be profound ” looks, said, “Haven’t you ever wondered why you’re...the way you are?”

“The way I am?”

“A violent offender,” he said, looking around quickly, as if he’d just discovered we were alone in the room. “A habitual criminal since early childhood. Haven’t you ever wondered what made you like you are?”

“That XYY thing?”

“It could very well be,” he said solemnly.

So it’s true, what they’ve been saying since I was a kid, I thought to myself. I was born bad.

After I got out, I studied everything I could find about XYY. The library had a ton of stuff on it, but it was just a bunch of people arguing with each other. That’s when I read about this famous professor. The article said, when it came to genetics, he was out on the edge. Supposedly, they kicked him out of some big university because he was too far ahead of the rest of them to fit in.

The article said he lived in New York. I asked around. Picked up that he lived somewhere over on the Lower East Side. In a big loft that he’d turned into some kind of mad-scientist laboratory. No phone.

I didn’t know anything about genetics, but I knew how to find people.

I just showed up one day and knocked on his door. It was opened by a powerfully built black woman with a big afro and startlingly green eyes. I told her I wanted to ask the professor a question about genetics, and she brought me right to him, as if he got visitors like me every day.

He didn’t look like my movie idea of a mad scientist. Didn’t even have a white coat, just a pair of chinos and a flannel shirt. Cleanshaven, with a neat haircut.

I asked him about the XYY.

“Someone told you that was you, yes?” the woman said.

“Yeah.”

“And you think this ‘explains’ something? About your behavior?”

“Maybe,” I said, wondering if the professor was ever going to say anything himself.

“It doesn’t,” she said flatly. “There are those with the extra Y who are pillars of the community. And plenty of vicious psychopaths with the standard XY.”

“Oh.”

“‘Oh’? What’s wrong? You want Dr. Drummund to tell you himself, is that it?”

“No. I mean...I thought...”

“You think I’m his, what, secretary?”

“I thought you were his wife,” I said.

“I’m a whole lot more than that,” she said, suddenly grinning.

“Do you know any Japanese?” the professor asked me.

“Not a word.”

“No, no. I mean, do you know any Japanese people ?”

“Sure.”

“Businesspeople?”

“Absolutely,” I assured him. Remembering what Mama had told me about the market for powdered rhino horn and tiger testicles. I knew about markets for other things, too.