Andrew Vachss - Safe House

“Yes. Thank you! I—”

I clicked off the cellular.

Impossible to know which buttons would drop his elevator, so we’d pushed them all. Maybe it was the high-pitched sound blast ripping his ear when he picked up his home phone. Maybe it was the message on his computer screen when he fired it up, black-bordered like an obituary:

Maybe knowing we had copies of everything he’d stored on his hard drive made him real nervous and he popped a Valium. Big mistake—the perfect-match lookalike pills we substituted would give him bad enough stomach cramps to make him think he’d been poisoned. And if he tried to drive himself to the Emergency Room, the air bag exploding into his face when he turned the ignition key in the BMW wouldn’t calm him down much.

And after what we left in his bed, somebody was going to get a great condo at a bargain price. Kind of a pre-fire sale.

“Harriet told me what happened,” Crystal Beth said to me. “Well, I guess, she didn’t actually know what happened. But he’s gone. Really gone, she thinks.”

“If she doesn’t call him,” I said, nothing in my voice but the words.

We were at a small table by ourselves, seated next to the palm-print-smeared window of a coffeehouse on the Lower East Side. Some residents call it the East Village, part of the neighborhood-renaming frenzy that hit the city during the co-op boom. They tried other names for it too—Alphabet City, Loisaida—anything that would make it sound sweeter than it is. Lots of new names came to Manhattan for different pieces. “SoHo.” “TriBeCa.” Even Hell’s Kitchen became “Clinton.” I’ve known that sorry game since I was a little kid. When they put me in a POW camp and called it a foster home.

Crystal Beth had picked the place. With a day’s notice, I’d sent Clarence over to check it out. “Big nothing, mahn,” he said. “No action.”

The street outside was covered in a thin film of the gray filth that passes for snowfall down here. She took a long hit off one of her hand-rolled cigarettes, letting the smoke bubble slowly from her broad nose, wafting up past her almond eyes. “I should be angry at that,” she said.

“At what?”

“At your . . . assumptions. That women ask for it.”

“I never make assumptions,” I lied. All of us, all the Children of the Secret, we all make assumptions. We assume you’re going to hurt us. Use us. Betray our love and violate our trust. We all lie too. You taught us that.

“So why would you say Harriet would ever call him?” she challenged.

“I don’t know Harriet. I know the . . . dynamic.”

“Yeah,” she said, sadly acknowledging. “I do too. I hope she never—”

“Her choice,” I said. “At least she’s got one now.”

“Choices aren’t cheap,” Crystal Beth replied. “Are they?”

“I paid heavy for mine,” I told her. Thinking about when I was too small to know what it cost. Or to steal the price. But while I was learning, a lot of people paid. Mostly the wrong ones.

I love it when citizens talk about hard choices. Where I live, you don’t get many. And the ones you do get are all hard.

“Speaking of which—” She started to reach in her purse.

“Not here,” I cut her off. “You don’t flash cash in a joint like this.”

“I know better than that,” she came back, insulted.

“Oh. You did this before?”

Her face turned to her left, the tattoo clear in the feeble afternoon sunlight. “Why would you . . . ?”

“Porkpie ever come back for his money?” I asked her, trying to catch those almond eyes.

“Porkpie?”

“It was five K, right?” Then I told her enough of what I knew to show her there was more.

As soon as I was finished talking, she went into herself. Deep. I know what it looks like. What it feels like too. Her eyes were open but unfocused, her breathing was so shallow I couldn’t see her chest move. Her hands were gently folded on the table between us.

I left her there, undisturbed. Sat waiting, not smoking or sipping my hot chocolate. Table sounds all around us, but she was safe in her capsule, untouched.

I knew what she was doing. She wasn’t in shock, she was looking for answers. I could walk down the same path, but I couldn’t join her, so I stayed where I was.

Time passed. Prison-slow.

Her eyes refocused. “Want to take a walk with me?” she asked suddenly, her mouth straight and serious, the corners turned down slightly.

“In this weather?”

“It’s not far.”

“Okay.”

I left a ten-dollar bill on the table. Figured it was more than enough to cover my hot chocolate and Crystal Beth’s mint tea. But she tossed another bill on top as we were getting up—I couldn’t see what it was. She wasn’t doing some feminism number—the joint was a dive, but it was probably chic enough to charge uptown prices.

On the street, she flicked the hood up over her shiny hair, tucked her hands into the pockets of her long red coat. I put on a pair of leather gloves, zipped my jacket to the neck, turned the collar up. The wind cut at us with ice-edged neutral hostility. Nothing personal—city winter hates everyone. Crystal Beth stuffed her hands into black mittens, inhaled a deep breath through her flat nose.

“This way,” she said, bumping her hip against me to move us to the right.

At the corner, she waited for the light to change even though traffic was so light we could have slipped across easily. We were heading east, the Bowery somewhere just behind us. The streets narrowed. We passed an open strip of vacant lot, its ground cover of broken glass sparkling in the lousy sunlight that followed the dirty sleet. Splattered across the dead-eyed wall of a semi-abandoned building in huge jagged letters was a troubadour’s message:

As if anyone needed a reminder that the privileged princes and princesses of Generation X had rebelled against their elders by rejecting cocaine. And embracing heroin, snorting it in the deep delusion that only the needle could bring death.

Poor little rich kids. Never learned how to act. The FDA doesn’t regulate street drugs. The same fifty bucks that bought you a mild buzz on Friday night will buy you a quiet ride down to the Zero the next weekend.

Crystal Beth reached over and took my hand, held it like a trusting child. A trusting bossy child. She never looked at me, just tugged slightly when she wanted me to cross another street. We were walking down a long block, all by ourselves. Crystal Beth pulled her hand free, put it in her mouth and pulled the mitten off with her teeth. Then she wrapped her small hand around one of my fingers and gently tugged at the glove until it came off. She handed it to me without a word. I put it in my pocket. She took my hand again, swinging it slightly between us.

Three men came out of a bar down the street. They turned in our direction and started moving toward us in a tight triangle. I tried to pull my left hand away from Crystal Beth. She held it tighter.

“Drop it,” I told her, cold, eyes on the men.

She did. I put the glove back on, unzipped my jacket so I could reach inside, stepped forward quickly, putting her a half-pace behind me. I followed the rules for dealing with a pack—take the alpha first. The lead man in the triangle was a Latino, shorter than me but thicker in the body. Our eyes touched, dropped at the same time. The triangle moved past us. I reached over for Crystal Beth’s hand, but she yanked it away, making a snorting sound through her broad little nose.