Andrew Vachss - Safe House

Vyra snorted through her tiny custom-built nose, tried to fold her arms over her huge chest, gave it up in frustration. Sat quiet for a long few seconds. Then Crystal Beth started again:

“Marla—that’s her name—she’s one of those girls everybody says doesn’t know any better, do you understand? She got married when she was barely seventeen. It was better than where she was, she thought. That happens a lot—we see it all the time. He’s a lot older than she is. She said it wasn’t all that bad at first. Oh, he hit her and everything, but she was used to that. Her father had . . . been that way, so it wasn’t a . . . surprise, I guess.”

She watched my face for a few seconds, waiting for a reaction—didn’t get one, so she went back to her story.

“No matter what Marla did, it didn’t make any difference. He never stopped. It took her a while, but she finally figured it out. He liked to do it. As simple as that.”

I said nothing, waiting.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, accusingly. “Why didn’t she just leave, right?”

“Or stab him in his sleep,” I offered. “Or poison his food, or—”

“You could never understand,” she cut in. “How could you—?”

“—or hire a hit man,” I went on like she hadn’t spoken.

That stopped her. The room went silent. “She was afraid,” Vyra finally said in a pious tone. “Do you know what it means to be afraid? Really afraid?”

“Better than you ever will, you stupid, spoiled bitch,” I told her, a trigger-pull away from being done with them all. “Save it for the proposal-writing, okay? You want to tell me a story, tell it. You want to give lectures, find someone who wants to get in your pants bad enough to pretend like they’re interested.”

Vyra jumped to her feet, stepped toward me, hand raised like she was going to slap with it. The move was so natural I knew she’d done it before.

“Don’t even think about it,” I told her. “I’m not your husband.”

“You . . .” She couldn’t find the rest of the words. Crystal Beth put her arm around her waist, push-pulled her back to the chair, saying something so softly I couldn’t hear it.

“Let’s be calm,” Crystal Beth said like she was proposing an activity we might all enjoy. “Maybe we’re just all . . . combustible. A bad combination. Would you like it better if we talked alone, just the two of us?” she asked me.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “If you two trusted each other, you wouldn’t both be here anyway.”

Neither of them said anything to that, but Vyra’s face flamed under her makeup.

“If this is a story, you’re a long way from the end,” I told them. “It’s getting late, and I got work to do.”

“What work is that?” Vyra sneered.

“Work I get paid for,” I said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“Bastard,” she said. No more emotion there, just stating a fact.

Crystal Beth dropped to her knees between us, stretched out her hands. Vyra took one. I didn’t. She put that empty hand on my knee like an acupuncture anchor, maintaining the current. She stayed there like that for a long moment, eyes closed. At least she wasn’t chanting.

“She was afraid,” Crystal Beth said quietly. “Or she was used to it. Or she didn’t know any way out. It doesn’t matter. Because once she got pregnant, everything changed.”

“He stopped belting her around?” I asked sarcastically.

“Yes, he did,” Crystal Beth said, surprising me. “He stopped punching her and kicking her, anyway. He just found . . . other things to do to her.”

“You trying to tell me he wanted the baby?”

“Oh yes,” Crystal Beth said. “He wanted the baby very badly. That’s when she found out the . . . rest about him.”

“Which was?”

“He wanted the baby for the race,” she said. “The white race. Do you know what I mean?”

“Sure. Pure stock, right? What was he? One of those halfass Nazi geeks?”

“He’s an Aryan,” Crystal Beth said. “In his mind, a true Aryan.”

“And you’re one of the mud people, right?” I asked her. “And she’s a Jew,” I said, nodding at Vyra, maybe getting the connect between them for the first time.

“Yes. But he doesn’t know us. We’re not in it that way.”

“Isn’t there some shortcut on this road?” I asked her. I didn’t have much more patience. If these women thought all White Night followers were the same, they were too dumb to keep walking where they’d stepped.

“We’re being calm,” Crystal Beth reminded me. “If you listen too fast, you miss some of the words. He kept . . . hurting her. Burning her with cigarettes, making her . . . do things. Degrading her in front of other people. Before she got pregnant, he told her if she ever tried to leave him he’d kill her. Not shoot her, torture her to death. He liked to talk about that. He even had films of it. Torture tapes. Videos. I guess they were acting, I never saw one. But Marla said they looked so real, she couldn’t tell. He made her watch them. She said it didn’t change until he told her he was going to have his son watch them too. So he’d be ready.”

“What changed?” I asked her.

“That’s when Marla knew she was going to leave. She started to feel it when she was deep in pregnancy. Maybe her seventh month, she doesn’t know for sure. She told me she knew they—her husband and his friends—would take her baby. The baby would be one of them. She couldn’t bear the thought of her son torturing one of those women like they were in those videos. She couldn’t bear to kill the baby either. . . . That’s what killing herself would mean. She knew she couldn’t wait until she went into the hospital—she’d be lost then. So she ran away. And she found us.”

“How did she know she was going to have a son?” I asked her. “This happened before she gave birth, you said.”

“Sonogram,” Vyra put in. “Everybody does them now.”

“We have lawyers who advise us,” Crystal Beth said. “They told us Marla would get custody, no contest, but he’d get visitation. Some kind of visitation. Probably even unsupervised, sooner or later. That would be enough. He could just take the child and disappear into the underground. She’d never see him again. One of the other women—‘breeders,’ he called them—would raise the baby. Raise him to be them.”

“So she’s gonna disappear?”

“No. She doesn’t have the resources. It will take time before she learns enough skills to support herself and the baby. And if she took Welfare, it would be easy enough to track her. We came up with a better way. When she left, she took a lot of his stuff. He kept . . . records of what he did. Him and his friends. There’s enough there to put him away for a long time. It’s all set up. She had him served with papers. Legal papers. At the place where he works. He has to come to court. She’s suing him for a divorce. And child support.”

“How’s that going to—?”

“When he shows up, he’s going to be arrested. And they’re going to hold him without bail. A . . . what do they call it?”

“Remand,” I supplied.

“Yes, that’s right! Remand. They set it up perfectly. She called him a couple of times when she was on the run. They have it on tape, him saying what he was going to do to her. To scare her, he reminded her of some other stuff he did. To other people. Him and his friends. They have that evidence too.”

“How do you know you’re not being hosed?” I asked her.

“What’s ‘hosed’?” Crystal Beth asked.

“Tricked. Scammed. Hornswoggled. Whatever you want to call it. To really set this guy up, you’d need more than a friendly cop, you’d need a DA.”