Andrew Vachss - Safe House

“And you’ll keep working him, right? He changes his mind, you’ve got the hammer over his head.”

“That’s right,” Pryce said, refrigerator-voiced.

“And he keeps his kid?”

“That’s the part I thought we were going to negotiate. That’s all you want, isn’t it? Believe me, there’s no way he’s going to bother his wife ever again. He’s going to vanish. New name, new face, the whole works.”

“They’re going to do plastic surgery on the boy too?”

“It’s been done,” he said calmly. “The pedophile rings have been doing it to kidnapped children for years. But I believe you already know about that . . . ?”

I ignored the opening. It hadn’t really been a question anyway, just bait. Any pro interrogator knows that trick—you make the subject think you approve of whatever he did, show some empathy, get him bragging about it . . . and you’ve got him locked. He probably knew about some of the things I’d done in the past, had me tapped as a vigilante. Maybe he thought I’d welcome the chance to unburden myself to a kindred spirit.

Or maybe it was his chance—to show off, the info-warrior flexing his muscles.

“How come you don’t just tell him not to show up for the divorce thing? That it’s a trap?” I asked, like I’d never heard him mention pedophiles.

“I don’t have complete . . . control,” Pryce said. “His son has always been part of the deal. I told him we might be able to . . . obtain the child at a later date, but he’s afraid his wife will just vanish. There’s more than one underground operating in America. His Nazi friends don’t have the resources to find one woman and one child in some safehouse. I don’t even know where the woman is now. Only your . . . friend knows that.”

“So it’s her you threaten?”

He shrugged, dismissing the accusation. “The only thing holding his wife close is legal jurisdiction,” he said. “She has to bring the divorce and the custody in New York, where they both live. She won’t run until that’s over with. But he doesn’t have everything I . . . need yet. Do you understand my dilemma?”

“What if you had another man in there?” I asked, flipping my trump card on the table. “Someone who could get you the information?”

“Forget it,” he said. “Believe me, you are quite well known to those people, Mr. Burke. They don’t have my sources, and they certainly don’t have the . . . extent of my information. You may have some . . . credentials that they would respect. But this isn’t some racist prison gang we’re talking about. If one of them you’ve . . . done business with recognized you, you’d be dead. Right then. And so would the man who brought you into the group.”

“I’ve never done business with—”

“Don’t insult me,” Pryce said softly. “You sold a bunch of original tapes of one of Hitler’s early speeches to some idiot Nazis a number of years ago, remember?”

“No.”

“That was a long time ago, before you became so . . . sophisticated in your operations,” he said, ignoring my denial like I’d never spoken. “It was very easy to trace. How do you think those morons felt when they learned what those original, authentic tapes really were? Oh, they were revolutionary speeches, all right. A call for armed resistance in support of the homeland. Only it was Menachem Begin, exhorting the Irgun to violence.”

I had to laugh. Couldn’t help it. Yiddish sounds like German if you don’t speak either language. I used to do a lot of stuff like that. Not for politics, for the easy score. Freaks are always easy. And they never go to the law.

“I doubt they’d see the humor,” Pryce said dryly. “There’s also the little matter of selling them a few crates of machine guns. Funny how the ATF showed up a few minutes after the money changed hands. And after you’d left.”

I didn’t laugh at that one. And if he said anything about some fake mercenary recruiters who ended up dead in a shabby little Manhattan office, I was going to take something besides tobacco out of the pack of cigarettes I’d left on the dash after I’d smoked the last one.

“There’s a long list,” he said ambiguously, letting me wonder what else he knew. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t work.”

“I didn’t mean me,” I told him. “I got somebody else. Somebody perfect.”

He sat quietly, wrapped around himself. If he was thinking, it didn’t show on his face.

“ ‘Perfect’ is a big word,” he finally said.

“Let’s leave that for a minute,” I told him. “Say I’m right. Say I’ve got a man you could put in there. That means Lothar goes too, you care about that?”

“No.”

“And this other guy, he gets the same deal?”

“If he’s not involved with the . . . if he’s only going in to pipeline back to me, he wouldn’t need the same deal.”

“New face, new ID, full immunity,” I said like I hadn’t heard him.

“Immunity for what? For whatever he had to do to prove himself to the cell?”

“ Full immunity. Not ‘use’ immunity, not ‘transactional’ immunity. No-testimony, walk-away-clear, no-arrest, no-prosecute, dis-a-fucking- peer immunity. You can do that?”

“Yes,” he said, like I’d asked him a stupid question.

“And you can make this Lothar bring someone in? Even this late?”

“If that person had the right bona fides. But they’d have to be good.”

“How much time are they looking at?” I asked him, thinking about how even a double-crossed Lothar could be out in a few years. And go looking for his son.

Pryce held up his webbed hands, ticking off the counts on his fingers. “Conspiracy to commit mass murder, possession of the means to do it, dozens of assorted felonies—mostly armed robbery—in furtherance,” he said. “Plus a load of individual crimes committed by individual members for which they’ve never been arrested. Yet. Homicides, rapes, firebombings . . .

“A couple of thousand years apiece,” Pryce concluded. “Enough to make any of them resist arrest.”

“Okay. This Lothar, he’s not the only one you got, right?”

“I’m not sure what you mean. The only what?”

“The only Nazi. No way you just stumbled on him blind. You’re running some others, maybe in different spots around the country.”

“And if I was?”

“You wanted a credential. I’m gonna give you one. The best. Gilt-edged. Can you get word of a contract put out on someone? Call him a race-mixer, a closet Jew . . . I don’t give a damn.”

“A contract?”

“Don’t be cute,” I told him. “We’re both over the line now. Don’t worry. Your guy doesn’t have to do anything. Just say he heard about this contract, that’s all.”

“When would that have to start?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“I don’t under——”

“Something already . . . happened, okay? Let’s say this guy I’m talking about, he’s gonna say he did it. If he did it off a contract, if he whacked someone for the cause, that’d ace him up, right?”

“Yes,” he said, nodding at the truth. “That would do it.”

“And you can put that together?”

“I can. But I’m still not—”

“I got two things that’ll convince you,” I said. “Number one: You get to meet the guy. Face-to-face. Ask him any questions you want. Satisfy yourself. You like it, he goes in. Deal?”

“You said two things,” he reminded me.

“You think you know me,” I said, my voice as intimate as a caress. “You parked this big white target of a Taurus out here, all by itself. And then you stood aside, waiting in the shadows. Just in case I decided to lob a bazooka round into it, right? One big bang, you’re gone and the problem’s solved. That’s why you wanted me to get in this car with you. You’re a puppeteer, Pryce. Information is your strings. Before you pull them, you better be sure they’re connected.”