Andrew Vachss - Choice of Evil

Anyway, when I finally got cable here, I learned that there’s an all-news TV show too, just like the radio. I clicked it on. Another dead baby. Beaten to death. ACS wasn’t giving out any explanations, although it admitted the family was “known” to them. ACS: that’s “Administration for Children’s Services.” When I was a kid, they called it BCW. They’ve changed the name half a dozen times since then, usually after a bunch of babies die.

Even when they die, it doesn’t amount to much. I remember the last big media-play murder. Kid doesn’t show up for school for a whole year. Nobody even checks. Finally, they come around looking. Little girl’s not there. Turns out the mother’s boyfriend strangled her to death while the mother held the kid’s hands so she couldn’t struggle. Then they wrapped the body in plastic and duct tape and trucked it through the snow in a laundry cart to a Dumpster near a vacant lot. The DA offers the mother probation for her testimony, and she gets on the stand and tells it like it happened. The jury’s so full of hate for the DA letting her walk away, they convict the guy only of manslaughter, not murder, trying to divide the blame by sending a message. Same way the jury did with Lisa Steinberg’s killer—his girlfriend got a free pass from the DA too. Wolfe had that kind of case once. Only she took them both down, not going for the sure-thing conviction of the man by free-passing the woman.

I remembered the “social worker” I had when I was a kid. One of them, anyway. A young girl. . . although I guess she looked pretty old to me then. All I remember about her was her mouth. Her lying mouth. I never looked at her eyes.

Fuck it. I got up, worked Pansy through a few of her routines, just to keep her sharp. She loves that. I don’t get the way people train dogs. There’s really nothing to it. You wait long enough, the dog will do anything you want. When you see it, you reward it. Sometimes you have to create the situation so it happens, but that’s not so hard. There’s no reason to hit a dog. Every time I think about people doing that, I. . . think about how people starve racing greyhounds, run them until they’re used up, then round them up and shoot them. And how scumbags feed their pit bulls gunpowder. The fucking morons think it makes the dogs tough. All it does is eat the linings of their stomachs, so they get ulcers and they’re always in pain. Makes them vicious, not tough.

I met a lot of guys who fit that exact description over the years. And vicious hurts the same as tough when you’re on the receiving end. I took a lot of beatings until Wesley pulled my coat. We were just kids, but he knew the truth. “They’re easier when they’re sleeping,” he whispered to me one night in the dorm.

When I walked into Nadine’s apartment, she told me to have a seat—she had to get something. I took the middle chair. There was a tape playing on the screen. Pony girl, just like she’d bragged about. A chubby blonde on her hands and knees, wearing some kind of mask with little leather ears sticking up, a bridle bit in her teeth, a harness fitted around her upper body. Nadine was riding her, using a crop on the blonde girl’s rump, directing her around a room I didn’t recognize—not the one I was sitting in.

It ended like you’d expect. Nadine waited for the tape to go blank before she came back in.

“She loves it,” Nadine said.

I didn’t say anything.

“She calls me up and begs for it,” Nadine kept on. “She usually comes before she even starts eating me.”

“That the cop?” I asked her.

“Yep.”

“Okay. I already got that message. So what’s your point?”

“A true submissive will do whatever you tell her. She’d come right over and suck your cock if I snapped my fingers. And she doesn’t like men. . . not at all.”

“I still don’t get your point.”

“I just want you to keep your promise.”

“What promise? The only thing I ever told you was—”

“—that I’d get to meet him. Be there with you when you did.”

“If that happens.”

“It’ll happen,” she said confidently. “It was meant to happen.”

“Better stick to your toys and games,” I told her. “I don’t see a crystal ball around here.”

“Never mind,” she said. “I know it. So it doesn’t matter what you believe. That won’t change anything.”

“Yeah, fine. So. . . why the videotape?”

“You know why,” she said. “And you’ll be back.”

Where I went back to was where I’d find Xyla. And there he was, waiting:

“It is all a matter of timing,” I told Zoë later that day. “Any transfer, electronic or paper, can be traced. However, I have set it up so that, within minutes after the money reaches the receptor account, it will be transferred from there to twenty-one *other* accounts in various parts of the world. As soon as the transfer is effectuated, the receptor account will automatically close. A trace will dead-end at the bank. By the time the authorities discover how the money was distributed, it will have been emptied from each of the new accounts into a funnel account, and *that* account too will be closed. . . with the money withdrawn.”

“That sounds hard.”

“Not really,” I said, annoyed at myself for the ascertainable trace of pride in my voice. “The Swiss are quite cooperative in such ventures. They have a long history of separating money from morality.”

“What does that mean?”

“It simply means that they will not question—indeed, they will deliberately avert their eyes from—the *source* of cash so long as they are paid a goodly sum for their ‘handling’ of it.”

“Oh.”

“Are you certain you understand, child?”

“Sure. Maybe they’re not bad themselves, but they don’t care if *you’re* bad, right?”

“Yes, that is a worthy approximation.”

“Doesn’t that make *them* bad, too?”

“One could certainly argue that, Zoë.”

“Do they?”

“Do they what?”

“*Argue* about it?”

“Oh. Yes, certainly. In fact, such arguments seem to provide an endless source of entertainment for some individuals. But nothing changes as a result.”

“People always do it, right?”

“Do what, Zoë?”

“Bad things. I mean, it’s not new. People always did bad things, didn’t they?”

“Yes. And good things. That is human nature, to be both bad and good. Or to have that potential within us, anyway.”

“So it’s a choice?”

“I don’t follow—”

“You can be good if you want, right? I mean, nobody *has* to be bad. . .”

“It’s not that simple, child. But, generally speaking, I believe you are correct.”

Oh, he was on the money there, the crazy bastard. The first time I really understood it, I was in prison. Reading. I killed a lot of time doing that. I remember something about a “choice of evils.” And it made me think. About the other guys in there. How some didn’t have much choice. The thieves, mostly. If you wanted to live like a human being, if you were culled out of the herd when you were little so you couldn’t earn honestly, what was left? But the ugly ones—the rapists, the child molesters, the torture freaks—they weren’t bad guys the way thieves were, they were stone evil. And it was their choice. That’s what they picked. They didn’t do it for money, they did it for fun. That’s what evil is, when you strip away the crap. It’s choice. This guy wasn’t sick. The way he was telling it, the rules didn’t apply to him, that’s all. He was above it. Above everything. He was killing kids for art. And that was his choice. I snapped out of it and started scrolling again, fast now, to make up for the lost time.