Andrew Vachss: Safe House

The Prof looked at me a long quiet minute. Then he said: “Guess I taught you even better than I thought, son. Two weeks, all right? We put it together by then, good. If not, Herk’s gotta walk his own way.”

I bowed my head in agreement.

“Rollo’s is an old-time thief’s bar,” I told Clarence. We were sitting in my booth at Mama’s a little before midnight, drawing the diagrams. “I been in there a few times over the years. Little round tables in the middle, booths against the wall. Lousy food, watered booze. The tables are for bragging and bullshitting, the booths are for deals. You got something you want to buy or sell, you take a booth. Waitress comes over, you order food, she’s gonna tell you the booth’s reserved. You get stupid, say you wanna eat there anyway, guy they call T.B. comes over. I don’t think that’s his initials—man’s bad enough to be named after a disease, you don’t mess with him. Tall, slim build. Nice looking kid, long knife-scar across his face below the left eye. He’s a kenpo man, snap you like a twig without breaking a sweat. So no Bogarting in there, got it?”

“Yes, mahn. It is clear.”

“But if you ask the waitress, ‘Where’s Mimi tonight?’ she’ll just walk away, no problem. Then you’ll get Mimi. A real pretty Latina. Watch her hands: long nails with black polish, gold wedding ring. You tell her what you want, just work around the edges, you don’t have to come right out with it. No drugs, but anything else is all right. She says okay, you give her a hundred. That’s the rental.”

“I tell her firearms, mahn. I am known for this a bit. From when I was with Jacques.”

That’s when I first met Clarence, a long time ago. When he was a young tiger working for a Jake gun-runner in Brooklyn. He hadn’t come up with the rest of us, but he’d been forged just as hard in another fire.

“That’ll do,” I assured him. “I got a crate of AK’s I been holding back to sting one of those dumb-fuck gangbangers, so we could show the goods if anybody wanted a checkout. Now what you gotta do is dance, brother. Make sure you string it out, stay as long as you can, set it up so you come back a couple of times, right?”

“I have it,” the young man said. He was wearing a black jacket—looked like a regular suit coat, but it came down almost to his knees—over a pale-violet silk shirt buttoned at the neck. Clarence doesn’t really peacock it up until the warm weather hits, clothes blooming with the foliage.

“You know who to look for?”

“Porkpie, you already described him, mahn. And a Chinese girl with one of those pillbox hats, like. And a veil.”

“She may not be Chinese, not Chinese like Mama, anyway. Oriental, though, if Porkpie was right. And we don’t know if that outfit is a trademark or she just wanted to hide her face. Porkpie’s the key. No way he stays away from Rollo’s for long. You got any questions?”

“Who will watch my ride, mahn? I do not like to leave her alone in some nasty parking lot, you know?”

“We’ll cover her,” I promised. Clarence’s beloved British Racing Green 1967 Rover 2000 TC was his prize. He took it for granted that we’d have his back at Rollo’s, but his car was a separate commitment. “We can’t go inside, but the parking lot’s no problem.”

I lit a cigarette and smoked in silence, thinking it through. Rollo’s wasn’t a dangerous place. They had to keep it under control to do their business. But still . . .

“Want the Mole to go along?” I asked Clarence. “Porkpie’s never seen him, and he could—”

“Oh, that’s quick, Slick,” the Prof snarled. “What’s that maniac gonna do if something jumps off, blow the place up?”

“Mole’s smart,” I defended him.

“Smart? Man’s a motherfucking genius!” the Prof shot back. “Did I say no? But he ain’t smart like people, you understand? I don’t want none of his science shit around my boy, see? We be right outside, laying in the cut. One tap on the cellular and we Rambo the joint, we have to, okay? Ain’t no need to go nuclear.”

“I was just—”

“Nix that,” the Prof cut me off, any concern for Clarence’s safety quickly overridden by even the slightest implication that the kid wasn’t competent to handle the job. “Clarence walks point, we cover the joint. Our dice, loaded nice—it’s all on ice.”

But our dice didn’t make one good pass all night. A five-hour investment drew nothing but blanks. “I didn’t see no Chinese woman, mahn,” Clarence said during debriefing. “And never this Porkpie guy either.”

“It worked like I said? With the booth?”

“Yeah, mahn. Just like that. Only two nibbles on the pieces, though.”

“Sound legit?” I asked him, leaning close. In our world, when we’re dealing guns, “legit” means criminal. And “crooked” means the goddamned ATF.

“I think so,” Clarence said. “Hard to tell with those boys. We just . . . talked around it, like. He want to know what I got. I want to know what he want. You know. . . .”

“Yeah. You said two, right?”

“Oh, the second guy, mahn, he was nothing. A kid. One of those European guys from the Bronx, maybe. I could not tell for sure. He wanted a pistol. Just one pistol. It felt like personal, not professional. I blew him off.”

A European guy from the Bronx was Clarence-speak for Armenian. There’s supposed to be a whole tribe of them up there, gunfighters, every one. “He cop an attitude?” I asked.

“Nah, mahn. Nothing like that. I told him bulk only, and he didn’t push. He had his boys with him, over to the side. I think he was just profiling, maybe. Young stupid boy. Probably throw the piece away when the clip get empty.”

If that was so, the kid sure wasn’t Armenian, I thought. “You up for another round?” I asked Clarence.

“I go the distance, mahn.”

The next night was the same. “Place is nasty, brother,” Clarence said afterwards, a disgusted look on his face. “I keep this up, I have a big dry-cleaning bill for sure.” He grimaced, examining the sleeve of his plum-colored worsted sport coat as though it contained the answer to some important question.

“The buyer come back?” I asked.

“I didn’t see him, mahn. But I told him next week, right? He was gonna speak to some people, you know how that go.”

“Yeah.”

I gave it some thought, turned to the Prof. “You think we need a different player? Porkpie, he’d take a booth and just open up shop. He’s a middleman. Whatever you want, he could find it for you. Maybe that’s the kind of guy we need. Clarence set himself up as an arms dealer. This Chinese woman, she’s only looking for muscle, maybe?”

“Or maybe she already found it,” the little man replied. “And she’s not coming back, Jack.”

I wasn’t ready to let go of it. “One more time,” I said. Clarence nodded.

From our vantage point deep in the parking lot, we watched from the front seat of the Plymouth as cars came and went all night long. No way to tell who was inside. Sometimes the cars parked, sometimes they just dropped someone off. The weather was too cold and ugly to make a solid ID, everyone wearing coats, all bundled up. A lot of them had hats too. With the lousy light and the slanted sight-lines, I couldn’t tell Chinese from Swedish. But I’d know Porkpie—and he didn’t show.

The Prof and I talked each new sighting over anyway, just to keep the time moving. It was bone-deep cold in the car. Still, we didn’t want to run the heater. Nobody was cruising the lot peering into car windows, but a plume of smoke from the exhaust would mark us even from a distance.

The cell phone in my pocket buzzed once. Twice. I didn’t touch it. In about ten seconds, it did the same thing again.