Andrew Vachss: Safe House

“Why didn’t we get together, figure something out?” he wanted to know.

“This one’s mine,” I told him. “Herk was with us Inside, but it’s me who owes him. Then the whole thing with Crystal Beth’s safehouse. And the women . . . I wasn’t gonna drag everyone else in it with me.”

“I don’t feel a thing for most of them,” Michelle piped up, dismissing all the women under Crystal Beth’s protection in one fell swoop. “They don’t protect their babies, they’re not real women in my book. They’re stupid or they’re cowards, makes no difference to me. Some of them would go on a date with Ted Bundy and leave John Wayne Gacy to babysit the kids.”

She drew a deep breath, steadying herself. “But this isn’t about them. What’s wrong with you, baby? Okay, you made a mess. Got yourself in a jackpot. It’s not the first time. Not the first time for any of us. You know how to work my boy, don’t you? Say ‘Nazi’ to the Mole, and he’s in. And Clarence got you . . . what you needed for that job, right? You’ve kept us all on the edges, and it’s not right.”

“You said it yourself, Prof,” I reminded him, looking for backup. “About Clarence.”

“That was before—”

“It wouldn’t be right to bring Clarence in, that’s what you said. And you,” I said, turning to Michelle, “you’re right. . . . I did look for help, okay? But I never brought anyone right down next to it. This could blow up, honey. And you wouldn’t like prison.”

“Don’t you even think about patronizing me,” she snarled. “I was Inside too. When I was just a girl. Before I had the . . . before I became myself. You try doing time in a men’s prison when you’re a woman. I stood up there, I can stand up now.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I—”

Max reached across and tapped me on the chest. It felt like the wrong end of a crowbar. He pointed at me. Made the sign of fists holding prison bars. Then he pointed at himself. And made one of the signs we use for the Mole, open-circled fists held up to the eyes to mime the Mole’s Coke-bottle glasses. He bowed his head. Reminding me of that time we’d gotten trapped in a subway tunnel trying to sell a load of hijacked heroin back to the mob. We’d been ratted out, and the tunnel was full of police. I’d held them at bay with a pulled-pin grenade while everyone else made it out the other end. Reminding me of his debt.

“If we don’t know, we can’t show,” the Prof told me, eyes locked on mine. “This ain’t the usual choice. It ain’t between bail or jail. We want to do right now, we got to play live-or-die—only a punk plays for the tie.”

“I am with my father,” Clarence said, his hand on the Prof’s shoulder. “Always.”

“It’s a done deal,” Davidson told me on the phone. “Can you come in, let me show it to you?”

And pay you the rest of your money, I thought.

“Sure,” I said.

“They tried to fold some interlocking contingencies into the mix,” Davidson told me in lawyer-speak.

“Meaning?”

“He gets immunity. But in order to get the new ID and everything, he has to come in.”

“So?”

“So now we have two separate instruments,” he said, smiling. “If your . . . friend decides not to come in at all, he won’t have the new ID, he won’t be in the Witness Protection Program, he won’t get the plastic surgery or anything. But he’ll still have the immunity. And even if he’s dropped for anything subsequent —he’s covered for the entire period past.”

“What period?”

“Your friend has been a government agent—not an informant, Burke, a government agent, on the payroll—for almost six months. Well prior to the period when the . . . incident occurred.”

“I never heard of—”

“Happens all the time,” Davidson assured me. “The FBI had a man inside the Klan car that killed one of the Freedom Riders. They had men inside the Panthers too. And just about everyplace else. People like that have to have ongoing immunity, risky as that is, otherwise they’d reveal themselves by refusing to participate in . . . whatever.”

“And there’s no ‘truthful-testimony’ stuff in the deal?”

“No testimony at all. Not even a debriefing.”

“Does he have a control?”

“That’s this Pryce individual.”

“You meet him?”

“I don’t know. The AUSA identified himself. And there was a woman from ATF. A man from the FBI. Big Irish guy, good-looking—I’ve seen him around before. A Treasury guy too. But there were a couple of other people in the room that never spoke. And I couldn’t see their faces—they were back out of the light.”

“Sounds pretty intense,” I said, sliding the rest of Davidson’s money across the desk in a plain white envelope.

“I’ve been in worse,” he replied. “This time, at least, I was representing one of the good guys.”

Three days later . . .

“They said he was a hero,” Hercules told me, sitting in the bedroom of Vyra’s suite. The king-sized bed was wrecked. The room smelled of just-done sex. The shower was running, with Vyra inside it. “He died for the race.”

“When did they find out?”

“It was on the news. Before the meeting, even. The way they figured it, he went after his wife. When the cops showed, he took himself out so’s he wouldn’t crack under torture.”

“Torture?”

“Oh yeah, man. They said ZOG has got these brain things they put on your head. And chemicals they can inject you with, make you give up your own mother. So Lothar, he knew this. And he protected the race.”

“They sound like a crew of real paranoids.”

“Paranoid? You don’t know nothin’ about paranoid, brother. You should hear them. Always talking about black helicopters and shortwave intercepts and remote telemetric surveillance and a whole bunch of other crap I don’t even listen to anymore. Jesus.”

“They didn’t say anything to you about Lothar?”

“To me? Nah. They was too busy talking to themselves. I just went along.”

“You believe they bought the story?”

“I’m here, ain’t I? Besides, Lothar told them he was gonna do somethin’ like that anyway, someday. He had plans for that cunt, that’s what he kept telling ’em. So they wasn’t surprised. Maybe a little at him killing himself and all, but not even that much.”

“Paranoid as they are, they didn’t panic?”

“Well, not really. But we all had to stay together for a couple of days. At least that’s the way it ended up. They said they couldn’t be sure Lothar didn’t have something on him that would trace back to us, so some of them wanted to split up. But the others wanted to stay. I dunno if it was ’cause they was scared to be alone or they wanted to watch everyone or what. But Scott said we had to hang tough. Nobody went out. They got enough stuff in the basement there, you could live for years, man. All kindsa dried food and water in bottles. And guns . . . man, they got boxes of fucking guns.”

“What did you do, all that time?”

“Watched TV. Worked out. Listened to them going on about the race.”

“They say anything about their plans? Or a date?”

“April thirtieth. That’s the one they was gonna use. You know that’s the day Hitler killed himself in his bunker? To keep from being taken alive. Just like Lothar, that’s what they said.”

“April thirtieth. That’s still a long—”

“Not no more,” Hercules interrupted me. “See, everyone don’t have the date. I mean, there is no date, like.”

“I’m not following you.”

“The cells. They ain’t in touch. With each other. Soon as one starts, the others go right behind them. But it’s this one—this cell—that gets to start. And they want to get on with it now.”