Andrew Vachss - Dead and Gone

The building directory was all in Chinese. I followed Max up the stairs. On the second floor, he made a gesture like pulling a tooth, telling me the office we wanted belonged to a dentist. The mute Mongol turned the handle of the office door and stepped inside. It was almost two in the morning, but a young Chinese woman in a white dental smock bowed to Max in greeting as if he were an expected patient. She didn’t acknowledge my presence. Max made a series of quick hand signals. The dentist led us into an operatory, then left the room. Max went over to what looked like a closet. It turned out to be an opening to a flight of stairs, leading down. I followed him again, and we ended up in an alley.

We walked for a couple of blocks, then Max rapped on a door the exact color—New York dirt—of the building it led into. The door opened. A Chinese man with a small meat-cleaver in his right hand stood there. He bowed to Max and stepped aside. I followed, still invisible.

This time, the exit was from the basement. But not into an alley, into a tunnel. It had obviously been there a long time, probably built by coolie labor for one of the Tongs, back when Chinatown was another country and tourists weren’t welcome.

When a branch of the tunnel finally took us into the cellar of Mama’s restaurant, I wasn’t surprised.

It took me a while to tell the story. When I was finished, the Prof spoke first. “Ain’t but one way for us to play, Schoolboy.”

The “us” came out of him so natural that I had to bite my lip to keep my face flat. Almost dying had really fucked up my internal controls.

“If we could find where he is …” the Mole offered.

“Not a prayer, Mayor,” the Prof chopped him off. “Motherfucker’s not putting himself on the spot. We want a date, we got to have the bait.”

“And he will have plenty of firepower behind him, Father,” Clarence added. “That team that tried to kill Burke …”

“Soldiers,” Mama said. “Very expensive.”

“What are you saying, Mama?” I asked her.

“All about money. This … place you talk about.”

“Sure, but …”

“Money is bait,” she finished for me. “Money bring him to you.”

“But he’s got all the—”

“No, he doesn’t, honey,” Michelle put in. “Mama’s right. If he did, why would he still be raising all this cash? You said the operation’s still going on, right? Still soliciting in the right places.”

“Sure!” the Prof backed her up. “Motherfucker had his whole rack stacked, he’d just jet off the set.”

“Okay, so he’s still collecting cash. How does that—?”

“Investor,” Mama said. “Big investor.”

I thought it through, taking my time. And kept coming up against the same flaw.

“No way this guy’s going to go face to face without knowing who he’s dealing with,” I told them. “I’d need an X-ray-proof ID, back-legend and all.”

“Didn’t your girl build you one of those before, youngblood?” the Prof asked.

“Wolfe won’t … won’t work with me anymore.”

“I can do it,” Michelle piped up.

Nobody said anything, waiting.

“I know just the man,” she said. “An old man. Lives in Key West. A real recluse. A rich recluse. Never goes out. I think he needs oxygen just to get around.”

“How’s that going to—?”

“Baby, let me tell it, all right? He’s an old man, if you understand what I’m telling you. He spends his money on anything that might give him back what he’s lost. Powdered rhino horn, tiger testicles—you know. Plus, he’s a real fascist. Anyone checks him out, they’ll see he’s been giving money to those save-the-race freakshows for years.”

“Yeah, fine. But this Darcadia—why bother? He’s already got his paradise right here, all that money.”

“No, sweetheart. There’s one thing he’s heard that’s guaranteed to give him back what he wants. Little girls. Fresh ones, understand? But he’s scared to death of trusting any kiddie pimp. Plus, he’s afraid to fly, so he only travels by boat. His own boat.”

“So maybe he’d want to buy a piece—”

“ — a big piece.”

“—a big piece, okay, of this operation so he could have what he wanted … hell, be a king down there. Christ.”

“It sounds very perfect,” the Mole said.

“What are you saying?” Michelle challenged.

“That it is not true. It sounds as if you took Burke’s specifications and built a person to fit them.”

“Just some of it is built,” Michelle said, not resenting the Mole’s insight.

“How much?” I asked, already tired from the weight.

“The part about little girls. He’s not into that at all.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know what he is into, you idiot.”

I risked a glance at the Mole. He was calm as a snake on a hot rock. A venomous snake.

“What makes you think he’d go along with me taking over his identity?” I asked Michelle. Quickly, before she could go into details.

“Like I said, I know what he wants.”

“But we don’t have—”

“Sure. We have,” Mama said, radiating calm. “In special clinic, yes?”

She’d snapped to it way before I had. “What special—?”

“And it would take considerable time to complete all the testing necessary,” the Mole said, soberly.

“Mole,” I said, “we wouldn’t really be—”

Patches of red showed in the Mole’s subterranean complexion as his eyes flicked rapidly behind his Coke-bottle lenses. “I know,” he said. As close to sarcasm as he gets.

Mama knew an outlaw doctor based just outside of Galveston.

The guy only did plastic surgery. And he didn’t keep records. All it took was cash for him to close down his clinic for a month.

Eight days later, Michelle called from Key West to say, smugly, that the old man was ready to travel. I asked her what kind of boat he had.

“It’s me,” I said, when I heard Gem’s voice on the phone.

“I knew you would call.”

“Are you as certain of the phone you’re speaking from?”

“Oh! No, perhaps not.”

“Can you find the corner of Ninth Avenue and Seventeenth Street?”

“Yes.”

“You have your red coat with you?”

“Yes. It is precious to me.”

“Be sure to wear it. A black man with a West Indian accent will meet you.”

“When shall I leave?”

“Now.”

I watched from my back booth as Gem entered Mama’s restaurant with Clarence. Mama was at her register, but didn’t look up as Gem walked back toward me. Clarence went out the way he’d come in.

As soon as Gem was seated, Mama walked over, snapping her fingers for the mandatory tureen of hot-and-sour soup. One of the gunmen who pretend they’re waiters when some tourist mistakes Mama’s for a restaurant brought it over.

Mama took the lid off the tureen, looked a question at me.

I nodded a “Yes” at her, and she put a small bowl before Gem and filled it, making it clear I could serve my own damn self. She regarded Gem thoughtfully, doing an ethnic read. Then she tried a greeting in Tagalog, but Gem smiled and shook her head, replying in Cambodian. Now it was Mama’s turn to shake her head. She tried French, and Gem answered right back.

Mama bowed slightly and sat down next to me, bumping me over to the wall so she could sit directly across from Gem.

“You both speak English,” I said to her. “What’s with all this—?”

Mama cut me off with a look. Gem giggled.

And they went back to speaking French.

I was well into my third bowl of soup when they decided to let me in on the conversation.