Andrew Vachss - Only Child

“You asked for it,” the black woman said, winking at me.

And then the professor was off. It was a good fifteen minutes before I understood his life’s ambition was to find a way to breed male calico cats. He rattled on about the orange color being sex-linked to the X, and the only way to get a male calico was from an error in chromosome separation, so they’re very rare. And almost always sterile, too.

“But what’s the big deal about—?”

“They’re worth a fortune,” he said, dead serious. “To collectors. In Japan, if you know the right people, you could get maybe twenty thousand dollars for a single cat.”

“Nelson,” the black woman said gently, “let’s have tea.”

By the time I left, I knew that all I had gotten from my bio-parents was my hair and eye color, maybe some physical and mental capacities. “But even those are far more environmentally determined, as they eventually manifest themselves,” the professor told me. His woman looked on, smiling...at me, once she was satisfied I got it.

And the professor had my word, the minute he broke the code to producing male calico cats, I’d get him a pipeline to the Japanese collector market. I’m still good for it.

Idialed up the Rolodex in my mind, did my search. Then I pointed the Plymouth toward a quiet building in Greenpoint.

“Of course there’s a market for keyhole stuff,” the generic-looking man told me. We were in his top-floor apartment, sitting at a kitchen table. He was drinking Zima. I passed.

“There’s only two things that count in this game,” he said. “Rarity and matchmaking.”

“Matchmaking?”

“Let’s say you had a tape of some famous actor taking it in the ass from another famous actor, okay?”

“Okay.”

“All kinds of buyers for product like that, right?”

“Sure. Especially the actors themselves.”

“Exactly. But let’s say they’re not famous, okay?”

“Okay.”

“ Now who wants to buy it?”

“Someone interested in that kind of porn, maybe?”

“Uh-huh. But only that kind. To you, I couldn’t give it away, because that stuff doesn’t turn your crank. So, sure, it’s got some value. To some people. But it’s no hot product. Nothing you could sell to the Globe or the Star; you’ve got to go out and find a buyer. See what I’m saying? That’s the art to it. Matchmaking.”

“So no matter what I had...?”

“If it was rare enough, I could move it,” he said, his voice utterly devoid of doubt. “There’s people, they’ll buy dirt from a serial killer’s grave, you convince them it’s authentic. That’s the no-starter, authentic. You don’t have that, you’ve got nothing.

“There’s girls making a living selling their smelly panties on the Internet. This one chick I know, she told me she goes through twenty pairs a day, sometimes. Authentic, see?”

“Same for rape tapes?”

“If it was real, and you could prove it, hell, yes. There’s been rumors for years about the Homolka tapes.”

“Homolka?” I asked, faking a blank.

“Bernardo and Homolka, you heard of them, right? Husband-wife team, up in Canada. They snatched young girls, sex-tortured them in their basement. Very heavy stuff. Then they killed them. Anyway, the cops found the tapes. The actual tapes. But the government closed the courtroom when they showed them during the trial. Anyone had one of those, he’d be rich.”

“Why do you call them the Homolka tapes?”

“Homolka was the broad. Blonde chick. Young. She got some nothing sentence. For testifying against the husband. The prosecutor made that deal before they got hold of the tapes. Anyway, she’s the one everyone’s interested in. Even has fan clubs on the Internet. She’s going to be out soon, I think. Word is, she may have a couple of the tapes hidden away....”

“And people say there’s no such thing as snuff films.”

“There’s such a thing as anything . That’s where the matchmaking comes in.”

I nodded at the wisdom. “I want you to look at a couple of tapes,” I told him. “I brought them with me. Tell me what you think.”

“It’s your money,” the man said.

“Icould move those,” he said later.

“Every one of them?”

“Not all of them so quick. And not any of them for a lot of coin. The paddling one, that was pretty hot; I could unload that in a few hours. But you’re talking maybe a couple of hundred for it, max. And only if you convince the buyer that it wasn’t faked.”

“You mean, that the girl really got paddled?”

“Nah. Sure she did. So what?” he said, unknowingly echoing Cyn and Rejji. “You’d have to convince the buyer that it wasn’t a scene, understand? That they weren’t working from a script. Buyers are always on the watch for the mass-produced stuff. They’d never trust anything on DVD—video’s the only way to go. If it was a sneak tape, it’d be worth a lot more. Even the toilet freaks, all they want to buy is the spy-cam stuff. You’d think shit is shit, right? Not to those sickos.”

“What about the girl who got the knockout drops?”

“Like I said, I could move it. But you’re talking a real cheap sale, there. The people who buy that stuff, they want to see...a struggle, like. Of course, with that bag over her head, you could say she was a celebrity, maybe....”

“Mole found something!” Michelle greeted me as soon as I walked in.

“What?”

“Come on,” she said, tugging at my hand.

The Mole was hunched over the coffee table, a rectangular magnifying glass in one hand, a videocassette in the other. Terry was sitting next to him, a notebook to his right.

“CV,” the Mole called out, softly.

“Got it,” Terry said. He looked up, saw me, said, “We’ve only got two more to do.”

I sat down on the couch, holding Michelle’s hand so she wouldn’t run over there and disrupt everything in her excitement. “I told you, I told you, I told you,” she whispered at me.

Finally, the Mole stood up. And walked out.

“He’s just going to the bathroom,” Terry said. “Come over here, I’ll show you what we figured out.”

He handed me the magnifying glass, then used what looked like a dentist’s pick to point toward the corner of one of the cassettes. “It’s real small,” he said. “And reverse-embossed. Kind of sunk right into the plastic. So it’s the same color; hard to pick out. Pop said he had some stuff that would bring it up, make it stand out, but he didn’t want to mess with it until you looked for yourself.”

It took me a minute or so before I saw what Terry was talking about. A pair of tiny block letters: FV.

“What does that mean, ‘FV’?” I asked Terry.

“It’s a code of some kind. There’s three of them: CV, FV, and NV. We thought it might be something they did at the factory, so Mom sent me out to buy some blanks, from the same manufacturer. I went to four different stores. And you know what? Not one of the other tapes had anything like this on them.”

“Is there any pattern to them? The letters, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” the kid said. “Pop said that part isn’t science. He said you’d figure it out.”

I turned the cassette over in my hands, as if its weight could tell me something. Shook my head.

“Let me see.” Cyn.

Terry picked up another cassette, waved her over to the table. Cyn bent forward, her barely restrained breasts in the kid’s face, said, “Hold it for me, honey,” as she winked at me over her shoulder.