Andrew Vachss - Choice of Evil

“Okay. Can we play chess now?” the child asked.

I agreed. And, as I anticipated, she learned the rudiments of the game with alacrity.

There was a languid, drifting quality about the next several days. My memory of them is. . . imprecise. Zoë continued to prepare her impossibly elaborate meals. I read. . . I believe I read. . . some technical manuals. We played chess together and I began to introduce her to plane geometry. She worked on her drawings.

Tuesday night she woke me up, saying she was afraid. She would not elaborate further. I allowed her to sleep in my bed, sitting next to her in a chair. It appeared to comfort her, and she eventually fell asleep. I suppose I did too. When I awoke, it was Wednesday morning.

Wednesday night, I explained the remainder of the operation to the child. She listened, fascinated as always. Suddenly she looked up at me.

“I know who you are,” she announced.

“What is it you know, child?” I asked her. “My name?”

“No. It doesn’t matter. I have a name I call you, but I won’t tell you what it is. But I know who you are.”

“And who is that, Zoë?”

“You’re my hero,” she said solemnly. “You came to rescue me. Just like in the story I read. I was a princess. Sort of. And you came to rescue me.”

“I do not—”

“That’s your art,” the child said eagerly. “You’re always saying, we have our art. You and me. Zoë me. I draw. And you rescue little kids.”

Try as I might, she refused to discuss the subject further. I saw no reason to interfere with her childish coping mechanisms. I detest cruelty.

Thursday night, Zoë said: “I’m going to tell you a secret.”

“What secret is that, child?”

“I know your secret,” she said.

Friday morning ran like a Swiss watch—pun intended. I returned to the hideout.

“It’s time to say goodbye, Zoë,” I told her.

“I know,” she said, eyes shining as though a special treat were in store.

“Zoë, I have a. . . new art now. One I must practice and learn very well before I can reach the heights of my old art. You are the last of that, do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Zoë, you cannot come with me, child. Do you understand?”

“No!” she said sharply. “I *can* come with you. I’ll help you. Kill her. Kill Angelique. Kill her now!”

Angelique drank the potion I prepared for her. I held Zoë while Angelique departed.

As with all art, practice is essential. Someday, I shall achieve the same perfection with my new art as I had with what I have now discarded.

I will return to this area soon.

To practice.

What the hell? What was he telling me. . . that this was the last transmission? There was only one way to read it—I’d seen it coming a while back. But if he changed and started on. . . No, it was just. . . insane.

“Xyla!”

She was there before the last syllable of her name left my mouth. Dropped into the computer chair, waiting.

>>explain last answer<<

First time he didn’t put a word limit on my response. So I had stung him. “Type this,” I told Xyla. Then I watched it come up on the screen.

any freak can kill random targets.

a professional hits only the target

he is assigned to. *any* target.

When Xyla tapped one last key, the message vanished.

“He’s gone now, right?” I asked her.

“He’s gone every time,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “He can come back anytime he wants, but only if I ask him to. . . .”

“What do you mean?”

“The way it works, I change my address each time too. Then, later, I send out a message with the new one.”

“But. . . he knows you’ve got plenty of time to set up. So you could be waiting to trap him every time he sends a message, right?”

“Sure. He knows. Doesn’t matter. The only time his own modem is actually open is that last little thing at the end—when I send to him. He receives it, and the whole thing comes down. Fingering it would be a waste of time.”

“But if you don’t send him a new address. . .?”

“Hmmm,” she said. “I see what you mean. He couldn’t reach me. Unless he could. . .”

“. . . do what I wanted you to do,” I finished for her. “Right?”

“Right. You think he can?”

“I think he will,” I told her.

“How could you possibly—?”

“Because I know who he is now,” I said.

“You want what?” Wolfe laughed. “A list of every Family man hit during the past. . . what did you say, ten years?. . . Sure. I can get that for you. Only the printout wouldn’t fit in the trunk of your car.”

I was standing in the same box I’d been in the last time I’d met with her. Only this time, besides the pistol, the man I didn’t recognize had something else—a honey-colored pit bull on a snap lead. I’d seen that pit before—she scared me more than the gun.

Yeah, I was standing in the same place, all right. And Wolfe was showing me where I stood with her.

“There’s that many?” I asked her.

“It would be ‘that many’ even if you were talking just the metro area,” she said sarcastically. “New York, New Jersey, Connecticut—give me a break. And national, come on!”

“I just thought. . .”

“You know what?” she said, shifting her posture to a more aggressive one, dropping her voice just a fraction. “I think you’re in something way over your head. You think there’s a pattern somewhere, that’s obvious. But the database is so huge, you couldn’t find it without some serious computer. . . . Oh! You found yourself some new friends, huh?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“And I don’t know what you’re doing. But I really only came here to tell you this. We’re done, you and me. You want to know about dead mobsters, ask your pal—he put more of them in the ground than anyone else.”

She turned and walked away. Her crew stayed in place until I did the same.

The sheets on Strega’s bed were silk. The same color as her hair. Her body slid between gleam and shadow, mottled by the candle’s untrustworthy light.

“Tell me the rest,” she whispered at me. “Quick, before I get hungry again.”

“Dead guys. Assassinations, not accidents. And they have to have been on the street when it happened, not in the joint. Murders, okay? Unsolved murders.”

“Wesley did—”

“For get Wesley,” I said, harsher than I’d meant to. “Listen. I know the list would be too long. You—”

“I’m still working on what you asked me before. You can’t get something like that in—”

“I know. Forget that too. Come here.”

She crawled over to me. Looked down. I shook my head. She dropped hers until her ear was against my mouth.

“This won’t be in any computer,” I told her, speaking soft. “I could do that myself. It has to be a whisper. Dead guys. Mob guys. And they had to have been fucking their own little girls before they—”

“Aaahhh,” she moaned, her fingernails raking my chest. I could feel the blood. She licked it off her talons, kneeling straight up now, witchfire loose and wild in her eyes.

“Not Julio,” I told her softly. “That one’s done, remember? All done.”

She started to cry then. I pulled her down to me, held her against my chest, rubbed her back.

A long time passed.

“I can find out,” she finally said, the steel back in her voice. “But you have to tell me why.”

“You said you’d do anything for—”

“I will do anything for you,” she hissed. “I already have. You’re in me. Forever. I would never let anyone hurt you. But if he’s doing. . . that—killing them—I don’t want to do anything that would—”