Andrew Vachss - Safe House

A lot of security for Wolfe to bring to a meet with me. Or maybe it was just the neighborhood . . . ?

A pair of Puerto Rican kids ambled up the block, approaching Chiara. One of them was holding a spike-collared pit bull of his own on a bicycle chain wrapped around his wrist. The dog was a big, chesty beast, caramel-colored and shovel-headed. He was out of one of the classic red-nose lines, and his strut was pure testosterone. He stopped suddenly and growled something at Honey, tugging at the bicycle chain. Didn’t sound like a threat . . . more like pit-bullspeak for “What’s your sign, baby?”

Honey snarled something back. Easy enough to translate that too: “Skull and crossbones, sucker! Want to play?”

The big pit didn’t back off, but he stopped tugging. And he didn’t protest when the Puerto Rican kids took off, eyes glancing at me over their shoulders. Like their dog, they’d figured out something was going on . . . and they wanted no part of it, whatever it was.

Chiara just stood there, calm and watchful. She had a cellular phone in a leather holster over one shoulder. At least that was what was in the holster the last time I’d seen her.

I turned back toward where Wolfe was waiting across from the Lexus, walked over and handed her a newspaper clipping about the guy Herk did in that alley. Seemed like a long time since that happened. “This guy,” I said, “I need anything you can get me on him.”

“The victim?” she asked, quickly scanning the news clip.

“The dead guy,” I said.

“Oh,” she responded, getting it right away. “This is an Unsolved?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“And you’re looking to—”

“Find out everything I can on the dead guy.”

“You got a TPO. Wouldn’t the cops—?”

TPO. Time and Place of Occurrence. Enough of a locate key for any cop who could tap into the computer. “I don’t want to ask them,” I said. “And I wouldn’t want you to either.”

She nodded. An amateur might have been confused, but for Wolfe it was a large-scale road map—with the route I wanted to travel etched in neon.

“I don’t care about the . . . about what happened,” I told her, drawing the boundaries. “I’m looking for background. As deep as you can go. His mother’s maiden name, where he went to school, military, if he did time . . .”

“It says here he was a security guard.”

“So that means he never did time?”

Wolfe chuckled at that. “No, I just want to know if you want his employment record too.”

“Everything.”

“You mind telling me what you’re looking for?” she asked. “It might narrow the search, make it quicker. You do need it quick, right?”

“Real quick,” I acknowledged. “I’m looking for a Jew,” I said.

Wolfe’s map-of-Israel face hardened. “Any particular Jew?”

“I’m not particular,” I said, so she’d get it clear. “What I need is some Jew in his background. A female relative. His mother would be perfect, but if you can’t do that, then—”

“So you think one of those Nazi groups did—?” Wolfe interrupted.

“Yeah,” I said, planting the lie. Wolfe traffics in information. She wouldn’t shop me, but she might peddle something she picked up while she was working. And if she did that this time, it would blend seamlessly into the whisper-stream. Right where I wanted it.

“If it was one of them who did the job, you’re looking at an ex-con,” she said quietly.

“Why would you say that?” I asked her, alarm bells ringing all around me.

Her gray eyes were clear, not a hint of guile in them. “A knife, that’s a jailhouse weapon. It takes a different head to stab than to shoot. Those misfits running around cross-dressing in swastikas, they don’t like to work close-up.”

“Skinheads don’t seem to mind,” I told her.

“But this was a one-on-one, right?” She dismissed me. Wolfe was too experienced to be played off—every act of skinhead violence law enforcement ever heard about was always a group activity. If you wanted to earn your spiderweb tattoo, you needed a witness, for authentication. “It was me,” she said, “I’d look for someone who was a member of a Nazi prison gang. Probably AB.”

AB. The Aryan Brotherhood. I flashed on my old pal Silver, buried for life Upstate. I didn’t want Wolfe nosing around there. “That’s my piece,” I told her. “You work the opposite end of the tunnel.”

“And stay out of yours?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” she agreed. Too easily? I let it pass. “The security-guard thing should make it simple,” she said. “They’ll have his Social Security, date of birth, all that. Give me . . . how long?”

“Can you get it today?”

She raised her eyebrows, but didn’t say anything, just nodded.

“One more thing,” I said, handing her a sealed white #10 envelope, the kind you can buy in any stationery store. “You have any men in your crew?”

“I’m not running a sperm bank,” she said, smiling to take the sting off. “Why would I need any men?”

“I know you don’t need any, Xena,” I told her. “But I do. To deliver this,” pointing at the envelope she was holding.

“It has to be a man?” she asked, smiling at the gibe. Wolfe was a warrior princess way before any writer’s wet dream came to life on TV.

“An observant man,” I emphasized. “All he has to do is take this to a certain address, ask for a certain person, go up to his apartment and put it in his hand.”

“Anything else?”

“He has to wear a suit, carry an attaché case, look like a businessman, the whole bit. And he has to put it in the man’s hands personally, not leave it with a doorman.” Then I gave her the details.

“I can get that done,” Wolfe said. “No risk, right?”

“No risk,” I promised. Thinking maybe the form in the back seat of the Lexus was Pepper’s man, Mick. I’d only seen him once—big guy, long hair, athlete’s build. Max had made him for a fighter, but we’d never needed to find out.

“The parking lot across from Criminal Court,” Wolfe said. “Same time tomorrow?”

“Thanks,” I said, handing her another envelope. She slipped it into her purse without looking. Then she walked across the road and got into the passenger seat of the Lexus. It pulled away with a cheerful chirp from the rear tires, Pepper driving like she talked.

“Put it right over the heart,” I told the old man. We were in the back room of a tailor shop in the Bronx, just off the Grand Concourse. The narrow storefront was surrounded on all sides by members of that heavily armed tribe of bodegueros who operate trading posts in hostile territory throughout the city’s pocket ghettos, selling overpriced Pampers and yesterday’s milk and loose cigarettes for a quarter apiece in a can on the counter. There was also a sprinkling of liquor stores that looked like the inside of Brink’s vans, and a solitary dump that pretended to sell used furniture but whose only real business was exchanging food stamps for cash at a deep discount. The front room of the tailor shop was lined with fabric samples and suits on hooks. A three-sided mirror stood against one wall. Even the dust looked clean.

The old man looked over at the Mole, who said something to him in Yiddish. Or Hebrew—I couldn’t tell the difference. The Mole told me once that the young Israelis spoke Hebrew and the older European Jews spoke Yiddish, but it wasn’t a rule or anything.

Hercules was sitting in what looked like a barber chair, bare-chested, his upper body as deeply ripped as when he’d been Inside and hoisting iron every day. The old man held the tattoo needle steady as he created a black swastika on Herk’s left pectoral, just under the nipple. I watched his hands as they worked. Watched the faint blue row of numbers tattooed on the inside of his forearm in the harshly focused light from the lamp.