Only Child

We gave him five and change. Then we moved out, Max going first. The man was in a backyard that stretched into the vacant lot, with no visible border between them. He was seated on an old couch that the pit must have used for a chew-toy. The dog was chained to a stake a little smaller than a cut-down telephone pole. A long cable ran from its collar to the man’s hand.

“Have a seat,” he said, indicating a couple of aluminum-and-webbing beach chairs.

We did.

“This thing I got here,” he said, holding up the cable, “all I got to do is push on it, that chain comes right off Azumah’s collar. You with me?”

“All the way,” I assured him.

“When I see Ozell, what you want I should tell him about the money you going to make with him?”

“I heard Ozell was the man to see if you wanted to give your dog a roll.”

“Not one word of that sounds like money to me, friend.”

“Anyone can make sounds,” I said. “When it comes to cash, what you want is sight, am I telling the truth?” Before he could answer, I pulled a thick roll out of my jacket pocket.

“I been to Chicago,” he said suspiciously. “Been to Kansas City, too.”

I tossed him the roll. He caught it with his off-hand, never letting go of the cable. He thumbed the rubber band off the roll.

“There’s all twenties here, look like.”

“Your money. If you can help us out.”

“Help you out how?”

“I want to show you a tape of a pit contest. And I want you to tell me—”

“Nah, man. I don’t eat no cheese.”

“Not what I want. Just look at the tape, let me ask my questions. You don’t want to answer them, so you wasted a few minutes. You do, we leave, and the cash stays.”

He bounced the roll on his palm, thoughtfully. “I let Azumah loose and you going to be leaving anyway.”

“You want us to leave, just say so. Toss the money back and we’ll be gone.”

“I’m thinking, maybe that’s right. You should leave. And maybe I should keep something for my trouble, too.”

“You don’t want to be like that,” I said. “We came here respectful. Don’t go all Bogart on us. It’d be a mistake.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah,” I said, sliding the pistol out of the same pocket I’d taken the money from.

“Bullet wouldn’t stop Azumah,” he said calmly, “even if you could hit him on the run.”

“I got a full clip,” I told him. “And that knife you’re holding somewhere won’t stop my partner.”

The man tunnel-visioned in on Max, his pit-trained eyes measuring, adding up the score.

“I ain’t going nowhere with you,” he said warningly. “Money or not.”

“You won’t even have to get off that couch,” I promised him.

“You want me to run it again?” I asked Ozell.

“No need,” he said. “What you want to know? For your money,” he added, quickly.

“You know where this was shot?”

“Could be.”

“Yes or no, friend.”

“Is that enough? For the money, I mean?”

“No. Look, I don’t need to know the exact location where it was shot. Just if you recognize it, so you remember if you were there for this particular bout.”

“Why?”

“Because, if you were, you saw somebody with a camera. The one who made this tape.”

“That’s what you want, man?”

“For the money,” I reminded him.

“It was a white boy,” he said. “I don’t mean a white boy like you is a white boy. I mean a for-real boy. Punk-ass kid, couldn’t be more than, I dunno, twenty, twenty-two?”

“He have a dog going that night?”

“No, man,” he said, dismissing the thought. “He was just this weaselly guy. Comes up to me, asks can he shoot with that fancy camera? I tell him, he don’t get the fuck outta there, I throw his puny ass in the pit, too. He says there’s five yards in it for me. Says I can watch him close as I want—he’s only gonna shoot the dogs, not the people. I know he’s not The Man. So, I figure, why not?”

“How long was he there?”

“Maybe two, three bouts. Paid me up front. I didn’t even see him go. Be lucky if the pussy made it back through the parking lot, that place.”

“Describe him.”

“I told you, man. A gray boy. Nothing special about him. About your height, maybe a inch or two taller. He wasn’t fat and he wasn’t skinny.”

“Hair?”

“He had a cap on, man. Some kind of baseball one, I don’t remember....”

“What about his face?”

“Wasn’t like yours, man. No offense, but I’d know you, I ever saw you again. This kid was just...plain, like. He had, I think he had, an earring,” Ozell said, touching his own left ear, “but I couldn’t swear to it.”

I didn’t trust his ghetto-game accent any more than I did those bad blue eyes. But I went at him another few minutes, and the vacuum bag didn’t get any fuller.

“Thanks,” I told Ozell, holding out my hand to shake. “This guy ever contacts you again, you call that number I left you, there’s five in it for you, all right?” I said, leaving it ambiguous, five hundred or five thousand.

“All right,” he said, not going for the bait. He’d negotiate when he had something to trade, not before.

“Yeah,” I said, moving very close to him. “And one more thing. You don’t want to be calling anybody else, Ozell. I wouldn’t forget your face, either.”

“You like her in those?” Cyn asked me.

Rejji pranced around the room in a pair of side-laced black boots that went to her knees.

“I don’t go for those cloven heels,” I said. “Or those built-up soles, either.”

“You’re old-fashioned. Miss the stilettos, huh?”

“Maybe just old, period.”

“No man’s so old that Rejji can’t make him sit up and pay attention,” Cyn said, smiling knowingly. “That bitch’s got a tongue so educated, she can lick up a bowl of fudge ripple and never touch the ripple.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want you to do that,” she said. “Just sit there, smoke your cigarette, and pay attention.”

“Nothing,” Terry said, his tone somewhere between disgusted and offended. “Two of them, I don’t think they even knew her.”

“It was odds-against,” I told him.

“Worth a shot,” the Prof said.

“The one girl, Heidi, I think she was a friend for real,” Terry said. “She was crying when we talked about it. But she said the cops had talked to her—talked to everybody in the whole school, she said. She didn’t know anything.”

“That wasn’t our last chance,” I assured him.

He didn’t look comforted.

The girl in the pink T-shirt with a black “NHB” curling over her small, high breasts looked vaguely Hispanic. Maybe it was her long, dark hair, or the gold hoop earrings. But her voice was pure Ozone Park Italian.

“You look like you’ve been in some,” she said, “but you’re, like, too old now.”

“I’m the manager,” I told her.

“Manager? You must have us confused with the UFC or Pride, mister. The purses here are five hundred dollars, for the top of the card.”

“That’s all right.”

“You mean him?” she said, tilting her head in Max’s direction.

“Yep.”

“You look like a grappler,” she said to Max.

He bowed his head, very slightly.

“Doesn’t he speak English?” she asked me.

“No,” I told her, truthfully.

“He ever go No Holds Barred before? This isn’t karate, you understand. People get hurt....”

“We understand.”

“Well, you bring him around, I can make him a match.” She looked at Max appraisingly. “He’s what, two twenty?”

“About that,” I agreed. “But we’ll go against whatever you’ve got.”

“All right. Bring him down on Friday. Not this Friday, a week from.”

“Uh, is anyone going to be taping?”

“Taping? You mean like for TV?”

“No. Just...You allow cameras?”

“No. No, we don’t. The only video in there is what we shoot. If you want a copy, it costs—”

“But, sometimes, you let other people tape, don’t you?”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Let me show you. I’ve got a machine in my car.”

“Sixto!” she yelled.

The sound of feet pounding on boards. The door in the back of the dojo opened, and three men walked in. Triangle formation. The guy at the point was half a foot taller than Max and a hundred pounds heavier, with a shaved head and keloid eyebrows. His arms were so densely covered in apolitical ink—crosses, daggers, skulls—that they looked black.

“This guy’s asking questions about taping. He says he’s got something in his car...” the woman told him.

“What is this?” the big man asked, moving closer.

“I want to get my guy into a match,” I said. “So I brought him around, find out what the deal is. See, I heard about this from a tape....”

“What fucking tape, man?”

“That’s what I was trying to explain to this young lady. I watched a piece of tape. Looked pretty good. In fact, unless I miss my guess, you were in it.”

“Me?”

“Sixto, that must have been when—”

“Shut up, Vicki,” he cut her off. Turned to me. “You trying to sell me something?”

“The opposite. I’m buying, not selling.”

“Buying what, man?”

“Look at the tape first,” I said.

“I never saw this before,” Sixto said, fascinated as he watched himself on the portable playback screen. “I took that motherfucker down!”

One of the men with him slapped Sixto’s extended palm. Hard, signifying total agreement.

“So you said you were buying something...?”

“What I’m buying is, who shot that tape?”

“This one here?”

“Yes.”

“What’s it worth?”

“Couple a hundred.”

“Yeah? Give me the money.”

“When you’re done.”

“I’m nobody to fuck with, pal. You just seen that for yourself.”

“Right. And I’m not fucking with you. Who made that tape?”

He stared at me, letting his eyes glaze and his breathing go short and sharp. Prison-yard stuff. I looked between his small, close-together eyes, waited.

“I don’t know his name,” he finally said.

“What do you know?”

“I don’t...Vicki, you know?”

“Yeah,” the woman said. “He paid us; remember, Sixto? To tape just one match. Only we had to let him right in the ring. Remember...?”

“Yeah! Now I do. Sure. That little guy was in-fucking-sane! We warned him he could get himself crippled, doing that. But he said that was okay, it was his risk.”

“What did he look like?” I asked.

“He didn’t look like nothing, man. About like you.”

“White man?”

“Yeah, white.”

“Anything else?”

“Vicki?” he asked, his tone respectful, not role-playing anymore.

“He had real nice teeth,” she said. “All white and perfect. I remember those teeth.”

“Good,” I complimented her. “You have a fine eye. His face, did he have any scars?”

“He didn’t look like you, if that’s what you mean,” she said, smiling.

“What size was he?”

“Next to Sixto, all men look small to me,” she said proudly.

“Was he sporting gold?”

“No. Not that I could see.”

I stroked her for a couple of minutes more, but she was dry.

“Appreciate it,” I told her, handing over the money.

“What you said...when you came in, that was all bullshit, right?”

“Sure.”

“What’d he say, V?” Sixto asked.

“He said this guy here,” pointing at Max, “wanted to get into one of our events. He doesn’t speak English.”

“He’s got the look,” Sixto said. “You want to try me? Right here. We got a ring set up in back. Just for fun?”

“No thanks,” I said. “We were looking for something a little more his speed.”

“I spent a lot of your money,” Cyn said, pointing at a couple of cartons of videotapes. “I went as downscale as I could, but you can’t tell from the labels—a lot of stuff they call ‘amateur’ isn’t. True amateur stuff is actually more expensive, believe it or not.”

“Did you look through it yet?”

“I figured you’d rather do it yourself,” she said, grinning.

“Wouldn’t you and Rejji recognize most of the...performers? If they were pros, I mean?”

“If it’s our kind of stuff, we should,” Cyn agreed.

“Then just save me the ones you don’t,” I told her.

“You got a good guinea suit?”

“Guido, or top-shelf?”

“Either one,” Giovanni said on the phone. “Just don’t get all Seventies on me, okay? I’m picking you up. One o’clock. Northwest corner of Hester and Broadway.”

“One in the morning?”

“The afternoon,” he said, sounding annoyed.

“You look fine,” Giovanni said, taking in my loose-draped charcoal sharkskin suit and teal silk shirt, buttoned to the neck. “This hour, we take the West Side Highway to the Henry Hudson, we’re there in an hour, tops.”

“Where?”

“It’s not the place,” he said, “it’s the person. How you doing?”

I knew he wasn’t social-dancing. “I don’t know,” I said honestly. “There’s things that might lead us in, but I can’t tell. Not yet.”

“You want to run anything past me?”

“No.”

“I’m not asking for anything in writing, Burke. What’s your problem?”

“The problem is, I have to ask you some questions. And the more you know about what I’m doing, the better the chance your answers won’t be as good to me.”

“Asshole!” Giovanni muttered, stabbing at the brakes as a white Corvette shot across our bow, heading for the Ninety-sixth Street exit.

“Good,” I said.

“Good? What’s good?”

“You’re good,” I told him. “A lot of guys would’ve lost it over something like that. Chased the jerk in the ’Vette down and—”

“—and what, grabbed a fucking bat out of the trunk and crunched him? I’m a businessman, not some stupid cafone, throw my life away over shit like that.”

“That’s what I mean; good. Something like...something like what we’re doing, a short fuse could knock it off the rails.”

“What do you want to ask me?” he said, finally getting it.

“You know anything about Vonni besides what her mother told you?”

“I...No, I guess I don’t. You’re not asking me if I ever saw her alone, or anything?”

“I’m asking you what I asked you, Giovanni. This isn’t some grand-jury perjury trap.”

“I know she was—”

“You know if she was gay?”

“What?!”

“Did her mother ever tell you Vonni was—?”

“No,” he cut me off, face so tight I could see the skull beneath the skin. “Her mother never fucking told me Vonni was anything. Just what she was...doing, like. Sometimes. Where’d that come from?”

“The stab wounds,” I said. “So many of them. The...you know, the way she was...mutilated. You’re convinced that proves it was a message to you. But nothing I’ve come up with makes that work.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I conceded. “There’s a bunch of other stuff, stuff I can’t make anything out of yet. Or, maybe, there’s nothing to make out of it. But when the cops find a guy hacked to pieces in his apartment, the first thing comes to their minds is, did he have a boyfriend? That kind of rage...”

“Yeah, sure. And so? How’s a sixteen-year-old girl going to have that kind of...thing in her life, and nobody knows about it?”

“I think that’s true, what you just said. And I also think, if she was...anything, it wouldn’t matter—her mother would have told me. She’d love that girl if she was a mass murderer.”

He stared at me, as if his eyes could decode my words. Said, “So why’d you ask me?”

“Sometimes, a kid will tell a stran— someone she’s not close with, things they wouldn’t tell their own mother, right?”

“I told you, I never spoke to her in my whole life. Not even on the phone,” he said. A vein throbbed in his temple.

“Hi, Gio,” said the dark-eyed girl with a Bronx accent, a lot of lipstick, even more mascara, and still more hair. She looked up at him from behind the receptionist’s desk.

“Hey, Angel. How’s my girl?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “How is she?”

“Don’t be like that, baby,” Giovanni said, taking her hand and kissing it.

“Oh, don’t play with me,” she said, pouting her lips. “You’ve got so many women, I’m surprised you can remember my name.”

“I’m going to surprise you good, one of these days,” he said, smiling.

“I wish!” the girl said. “I know he’s waiting for you. Wait, I’ll go back and tell them.”

I guess she could have used the phone on her desk. But then Giovanni wouldn’t have gotten such a good look at what he’d been passing up.

“Uncle T!” Giovanni crossed the room to where the remnants of a man sat in a wheelchair, his wasted frame propped into position with carefully wedged pillows. Giovanni bent to kiss the old man. “You look a hundred percent better than the last time.”

“Who’s your friend?” the man said, his voice sandpapery but clear.

“Uncle T, this is Nick. Nick, my Uncle T.”

“I’m honored,” I said, offering my hand.

“You Irish?” the man asked.

“Me? No. Why?”

“The Irish, they got that bullshit thing down perfect. Or maybe you seen too many movies, huh? You so ‘honored.’”

“I didn’t mean to insult you,” I said tightly. “Giovanni told me you were a very important, very special man. I didn’t think he brings just anyone here to see you; that’s all I meant.”

“Yeah?” he said, making no secret of studying my face. “But I don’t know you, right?”

“No. You don’t know me. And I don’t know anybody you know, either.” I looked over at Giovanni, said, “You want me to wait outside?”

“Stay right here,” he said. “Uncle T, he’s just looking out for me. Like he always does.”

“Sit down, sit down,” the man said, gesturing to a pair of pinkish side chairs. “Don’t pay no attention to my bad temper; it’s the fucking chemo—takes all of the sugar out of your blood.”

“But it’s working,” Giovanni said. “That’s the important thing.”

“It’s not working, Little G,” the man said, sad and loving, the way you tell a kid Christmas is going to be lean that year. “What it’s doing, it’s keeping the lupi back in the hills, that’s all. They’re just waiting for the right night. That’s when they come, you know. In the night.”

“Hey! You don’t know—”

“I know,” the old man said. He turned to me. “You think I care about who you know? Like your bloodlines? Where you come from? You know how I get my name? Little G, he give it to me. When he was a baby, he couldn’t say my name, ‘Carmine.’ What he says, he says ‘Tarmine.’ What kind of name is that? So we made it into ‘T,’ just for him.”

The old man shifted his head slightly, making sure he had my eyes.

“Little G called me ‘Uncle,’” he said, “because he couldn’t call me ‘Pop,’ the way he always wanted to. You getting this?”

“I got it,” I promised.

He read my face for a full minute. Then he nodded.

I looked over to where Giovanni was sitting. His thumb was pressed against the wall, making a screw-driving motion.

“Anyplace you can smoke around here?” I asked.

“Outside,” the old man said. “They got a little patio thing. Ask the girl out front.”

I gave them a half-hour, most of it spent with Angel pumping me about whether Giovanni was married. Or, even if he was, did he ever...?

When I came back into the room, Giovanni was next to the wheelchair, whispering in the man’s ear. He saw me standing there, gave his uncle another kiss, got up to leave.

“Be careful,” the old man told him.

“Uncle T’s not what you think,” Giovanni said, on the drive back.

“How do you know what I think?”

Giovanni made a bent-nose gesture. “Right?”

“How would I know if a guy’s made?”

“Made? Forget that. Uncle T, he was never in our thing. He was a craftsman, you know what that means? A shoemaker. Not some fucking flunky, puts on soles and heels, like in Grand Central. I mean, he could make shoes, starting from scratch. Custom. He had a little shop on Broome Street. Everybody with coin went there.”

I didn’t say anything; sometimes, that’s the only way to keep the tap open.

“He’s old now. And his mind...from the chemo, it’s not like what it was. Sometimes, he’s sharp. Like today. Other times...

“But what he said. To you, I mean. That was the truth. My father, he was nothing. Nothing to me, nothing to nobody. He went Upstate when I was just a little kid. You believe the movies, you think—what?—the ‘boys’ come around, make sure my mother’s got everything she needs? That’s not the way it happens. My father, he was what they call an around-guy. Only he was never around, you staying with me?”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, my mother never takes me up to see him. What’s the point? I’m just a little kid; I don’t even know him. And my mother, she’s got to earn a living now.

“Uncle T, I got to know him ’cause he hired my mother to work the front of his store. The neighborhood, this I find out later, they always thought he had something going with her. But that was never it, no matter what they said.”

Giovanni took a deep breath. Let it out, said, “Finally, my old man catches a shank in Greenhaven, so he never comes home.”

“How old were you then?”

“Four, five, I don’t remember. See, I never thought he was coming home. He wasn’t like a real person to me.” He zipped down his window, lit a cigarette. “My mother, all she ever really told me was, A nigger killed your father. Like it was worse than if a white guy had done him. She said it over and over. Like so I’d never forget.”

“Your mother and T got together?”

“Never! It wasn’t her he wanted, it was me,” Giovanni said. He looked over at me, then flushed scarlet at what he thought I was thinking. “Not for...Uncle T, he couldn’t have kids. I didn’t know why. Something happened, back home. Roma, I mean, not here.

“He was real up-front with me. From the very beginning, soon as I could understand. He always wanted a son, he said. A fine son, like I was. He couldn’t be my father. He didn’t feel that way about my mother, and it would be...dirty, like, to take up with a woman he didn’t care about just to have a son.”

“That’s stand-up,” I said, bowing my head slightly to show respect.

“Oh, let me tell you, Burke. Uncle T, he was a hell of a lot harder than those goombahs sitting around in the sun on Mulberry Street, smoking their Parodis and sipping their anisette.

“One time, the summer when I turned thirteen, I never forget it, I slugged it out with Fat Vinny,” he said, nodding to himself, as if to confirm the memory. “It was right around the corner from Uncle T’s shop. He heard the yelling. It wasn’t just the other kids, the old guys always gathered around when there was a fight; they fucking loved it. And he ran out. Fat Vinny was the biggest of all the kids in our grade, but he was a stone punk weasel coward motherfucker. What happened was, he pulled up Marcella’s skirt. She was the same age as me, but she went to Catholic school. You know those stupid uniforms they had to wear? He pulled up her skirt, right in the street. Big joke, letting everyone see her underpants.

“Marcella was crying like she had a stake in her heart. I ran up and clocked him a beaut, right in the eye. Fat Vinny knows he can’t throw with me, so he keeps rushing, trying to get me on the ground. I know what he’ll do then, so I keep slashing at him. But I’m getting tired.

“All of a sudden, there’s a guy holding me. Holding me back, I mean. And the same with Vinny. A man comes across the street. Slow, like he’s a fucking king, you know? Who’s this? Fat Vinny’s father! And he’s a goddamned capo! I didn’t know any of that before....

“He asks, What happened? And Vinny tells him I sucker-punched him with a brick in my hand!” Giovanni said, as outraged at the injustice as if it were yesterday. “I wanted to tell my side, but Marcella had run home. I didn’t blame her, she was so humiliated by what that fat fuck did. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to tell this guy, Go ask Marcella, she’ll tell you. So I just say, Yeah, I clocked Vinny. I hate the fat piece of shit, I say, but it was a fair one—I didn’t hit him with nothing but my hands.

“That’s when Uncle T runs up, all out of breath. I remember he was wearing his apron, still had an awl in his hand—from working on the shoes. He says to Fat Vinny’s father, ‘I’m Giovanni’s uncle, what is all this?’ And that fat fuck Vinny tells his lies again. But this time, I know someone’s going to listen to me, so I tell Uncle T what really happened.

“We’re all standing there, like frozen. The capo looks at T. He says, ‘You know who I am?’ And I remember, I swear, I can see it as clear as through this windshield right now, Uncle T, he says, ‘I know who you are.’ But the way he says it, Burke. Like, I know it’s Wednesday. A fact, that’s all it was.

“The capo says, ‘He needs a good beating.’ Meaning me. Uncle T grabs me by the neck—his hands, they were like the leather he worked with—tells me to come with him.

“And that was it. I never got that beating. Uncle T makes me tell the whole story. When I finish, you know what he says, my uncle? He says, ‘Giovanni, you were a real man, protecting that girl. I’m proud of you.’”

Tears came down Giovanni’s cheeks, but his voice stayed steely, and his hands on the wheel never moved.

“That’s the kind of man he was, Burke. You understand?”

“I wish he’d been my uncle,” I said, every word a separate truth.

Giovanni pulled into the side-street lot where I’d left my car. He turned off the ignition, looked at me.

“You’re wondering why I brought you up there, right?”

“He’s your polygraph,” I said. “And you wanted his read on me.” When he didn’t say anything, I went on: “I don’t care why you did it, Giovanni. I meant what I told him. It was an honor to meet him. I just didn’t know how much of an honor it was when I said it.”

“After that, Fat Vinny went away,” Giovanni said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “He never came back to school in the neighborhood. I don’t know where his father put him, but the next time anyone saw him, you wouldn’t recognize him. He was, I don’t know, seventeen, eighteen years old. Not an ounce of fat on him; he was buffed out like Schwarzenegger.”

“Did he make a move on you?”

“No. He pretended like he didn’t even know me. He was already working for his father then. Going places. But he was still a punk in his heart. He changed his body. He even changed his name. But he was still the same fuck who did that to Marcella. That’s what I wanted to tell T.”

“I don’t—”

“Fat Vinny,” Giovanni said, dropping his voice so I’d listen close, “when he changed his name, he told everyone to call him Colto.”

I got into the Plymouth, started it up. Just as I was ready to pull away, I saw Giovanni walking toward me. I rolled down the window, waited.

Giovanni leaned in, close. “My Uncle T, he loves me,” he said. “I’m his son. His only child. Anything I ever did, it would be all right with him.”

“I know.”

“No, listen to me. This isn’t about Colto. Things like that, I tell my Uncle T all the time. But...the other thing, I never could have told him, Burke. Not when it first happened. Not now.

“I trust my Uncle T with my life. He’d never say anything, no matter what anybody did to him. It’s not for me I don’t tell him; it’s for him. It would...it would hurt him to know. Hurt him deep in his heart. I could never do that to him.”

On the drive back, I wondered which of Giovanni’s two secrets he believed would have hurt the old man the most. And if he wasn’t disrespecting his uncle’s love, by believing that proud old man would have given a damn about either one.

“You think there’s a key, don’t you, honey?”

“I know there’s one,” I told Michelle. “And I know I’m right next to it. But when I reach out...”

“You know how to do it, baby. You have to let it come to you.”

“Sure,” I said, not hopefully.

Michelle walked across the room, perched herself on the broad, padded arm of an easy chair, crossed her spectacular legs.

“Tell Little Sister,” she said. “Just tell me until you get stuck.”

“The tapes, the ones Vonni had...”

“Yes...?”

“They were real. I mean, as far as we can tell, those things happened. I spoke to those people—not an actor in the bunch. The pit-bull guy, that’s what he does, I saw it for myself. The underground fights, same thing. And Max says the jump-in was real, too, remember?”

“I remember.”

“That sorority stuff, Cyn didn’t recognize any of the players. And she even said it looked like someone stuck a camera through a keyhole, but...”

“But what, honey? It was only the one camera, like you said before. Maybe whoever made the tapes was a fly on the wall.”

“No, girl. He paid to be around at least a couple of the others, remember?”

“You’re thinking he didn’t pay everybody, right? Not all the people on those tapes? And that’s the way in?”

“I don’t know. But that’s not the...Damn! Michelle, you remember that Puerto Rican Day Parade riot a few years ago? When all those girls were getting grabbed and groped? Assholes ripping their tops off, spraying them with those water cannons?”

“I remember that very well. Probably no one would ever even have been arrested for it except...Oh, Burke! That’s right! The cops made the cases from the videotapes.”

“Yeah. Amazing how many good citizens bothered to tape it, instead of trying to stop it, huh? What a shock. And how often every station in town ran some footage of it. But the thing is...remember what Cyn and Rejji told us? About shilling?”

“You don’t think it was a setup, that whole thing? Just so someone could tape it?”

“The parade? No. But I think I know what the difference is now.”

“The difference between what and what?” she asked, impatient despite herself.

“That thing at the parade, it just...happened, I think. A few punks get out of hand, and the mob goes right with it. Even sheep can kick you to death when they stampede.

“Okay, now take the dogfights. That was no accident. If you were tipped, you knew it would be at a certain time and a certain place. It was a planned event.”

“And the thing at the parade wasn’t. So...?”

“So what about the jump-in tape? And when they sprayed those swastikas?”

“Those had to be planned, too. You don’t just suddenly—”

“Planned, sure. But not announced. You had to be a...member, I guess, to even know when it was going down, much less be right there on the scene.”

“Freaks film themselves,” Michelle said, her voice a cold reminder of our childhoods. “You know that as well as me. They take trophies, so they have what they...do, captured forever. And for Nazi graffiti, it’s perfect. No matter how quick someone repaints the church, on the tape the crap they sprayed is always there. You think the scumbags who knocked down the World Trade Center and killed all those people don’t get their rocks off watching the videotapes, over and over?”

“That’s right. They tape everything, right up to rape and murder. One of those tapes was a rape, it looked like—that girl with the hood over her head, she must have been drugged or drunk. But people tape themselves for fun, too, right? Just for their own private use.”

“Like Pamela and Tommy Lee?”

“I don’t know why they made those tapes, girl. Do you?”

“There’s that,” she conceded.

“Anyway, just because we found them all in one place doesn’t mean the same person made them, I know. But that tape of Vonni? Where she was running? It’s not right.”

“I don’t get you. Because it’s a fake, like Cyn said?”

“Not only that. It’s just a snip. Like a sample, or something. All the rest are...stories. Not that they have a beginning and an end, but you can always tell what’s going on. What you’re supposed to be seeing. Except for Vonni’s. It’s a mystery, what she’s running from. And it’s the only mystery in the whole stack.”

“What are we going to do?” Michelle said, standing up. The way she always does.

“Not what’s on the tapes, Mole. The tapes themselves. The whole package.”

“There are no good tests for that,” he said. “Not precise enough ones. I won’t be able to tell you much from—”

“Just take them apart,” I said. “And tell me what you can.”

“I got yearbooks,” Terry said, bursting into the suite. “Look!”

“You did not steal them?” the Mole asked.

“No, Pop. I just borrowed them. I’ll bring them back.”

“That is too much risk,” the Mole said. “Once you have—”

“No, I really borrowed them! From a couple of girls I met. I’ve got this year’s, and...a few others, too.”

“They know you have them?”

“Yes,” Terry said, patient with his father.

“Oh,” the Mole said. And went back to his work.

Every working professional keeps some sort of Rolodex. Mine’s in my head. That “expectation of privacy” crap is fine for attacking a search warrant, but by then the cops already have the info. And that smoke never goes back into the cigarette.

I’ve got a list of experts. In all kinds of things. Carefully culled over the years. Because one thing I’ve learned: just knowing things doesn’t make a person useful.

When I was on my first bit, a group of researchers came into the prison, looking for volunteers. By then, I already knew enough to pay attention when certain people had something to say. Tucker was an old veteran con who’d jailed down south when he was a young man. He was always telling us that New York joints were country clubs compared to The Farm at Angola. There, Tucker said, they used to give you time off your sentence if you let them experiment on you—a new yellow-fever vaccine, stuff like that. But the courts made them stop doing it. I guess they figured, when you spend your life as a work animal in the fields, whipped by freaks who love their work, you spell “volunteer” a little differently.

But some stuff was still okay, like the psych “studies” they were always doing on us. They told us that we wouldn’t get anything if we participated. So, naturally, every con in the house figured the parole board would mark you lousy if you didn’t, and there was never a shortage of “subjects.”

I remember one time, especially. All the visitors wanted was a blood sample and an interview. Big deal. Anyway, everyone said the nurse drawing the blood was a real piece.

That part turned out to be true. She was a Puerto Rican woman, slender, with big brown eyes and wicked thighs. And she smelled like flowers I’d never know the name of. That needle sliding into my vein was the gentlest touch I’d felt since they’d locked me down.

The interviewer was a young guy, only a few years older than me. Bushy-haired, with wire-rim glasses. He was wearing a blue work shirt under a putty-colored corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows. He told me I had an XYY chromosome. I didn’t know what that was, but I could see it made him very excited.

“We can’t be sure,” he said. “The data aren’t all in yet. But this is some of the most important work that’s ever been done in the field.”

“What field?” I asked him.

“Biocriminology,” he said. “Let’s finish your interview, and then I’ll answer any questions you have; fair enough?”

I lied my way through the rest of his questions, practicing my survival skills. When it was over, he gave me one of those “This is going to be profound” looks, said, “Haven’t you ever wondered why you’re...the way you are?”

“The way I am?”

“A violent offender,” he said, looking around quickly, as if he’d just discovered we were alone in the room. “A habitual criminal since early childhood. Haven’t you ever wondered what made you like you are?”

“That XYY thing?”

“It could very well be,” he said solemnly.

So it’s true, what they’ve been saying since I was a kid, I thought to myself. I was born bad.

After I got out, I studied everything I could find about XYY. The library had a ton of stuff on it, but it was just a bunch of people arguing with each other. That’s when I read about this famous professor. The article said, when it came to genetics, he was out on the edge. Supposedly, they kicked him out of some big university because he was too far ahead of the rest of them to fit in.

The article said he lived in New York. I asked around. Picked up that he lived somewhere over on the Lower East Side. In a big loft that he’d turned into some kind of mad-scientist laboratory. No phone.

I didn’t know anything about genetics, but I knew how to find people.

I just showed up one day and knocked on his door. It was opened by a powerfully built black woman with a big afro and startlingly green eyes. I told her I wanted to ask the professor a question about genetics, and she brought me right to him, as if he got visitors like me every day.

He didn’t look like my movie idea of a mad scientist. Didn’t even have a white coat, just a pair of chinos and a flannel shirt. Cleanshaven, with a neat haircut.

I asked him about the XYY.

“Someone told you that was you, yes?” the woman said.

“Yeah.”

“And you think this ‘explains’ something? About your behavior?”

“Maybe,” I said, wondering if the professor was ever going to say anything himself.

“It doesn’t,” she said flatly. “There are those with the extra Y who are pillars of the community. And plenty of vicious psychopaths with the standard XY.”

“Oh.”

“‘Oh’? What’s wrong? You want Dr. Drummund to tell you himself, is that it?”

“No. I mean...I thought...”

“You think I’m his, what, secretary?”

“I thought you were his wife,” I said.

“I’m a whole lot more than that,” she said, suddenly grinning.

“Do you know any Japanese?” the professor asked me.

“Not a word.”

“No, no. I mean, do you know any Japanese people?”

“Sure.”

“Businesspeople?”

“Absolutely,” I assured him. Remembering what Mama had told me about the market for powdered rhino horn and tiger testicles. I knew about markets for other things, too.

“You asked for it,” the black woman said, winking at me.

And then the professor was off. It was a good fifteen minutes before I understood his life’s ambition was to find a way to breed male calico cats. He rattled on about the orange color being sex-linked to the X, and the only way to get a male calico was from an error in chromosome separation, so they’re very rare. And almost always sterile, too.

“But what’s the big deal about—?”

“They’re worth a fortune,” he said, dead serious. “To collectors. In Japan, if you know the right people, you could get maybe twenty thousand dollars for a single cat.”

“Nelson,” the black woman said gently, “let’s have tea.”

By the time I left, I knew that all I had gotten from my bio-parents was my hair and eye color, maybe some physical and mental capacities. “But even those are far more environmentally determined, as they eventually manifest themselves,” the professor told me. His woman looked on, smiling...at me, once she was satisfied I got it.

And the professor had my word, the minute he broke the code to producing male calico cats, I’d get him a pipeline to the Japanese collector market. I’m still good for it.

I dialed up the Rolodex in my mind, did my search. Then I pointed the Plymouth toward a quiet building in Greenpoint.

“Of course there’s a market for keyhole stuff,” the generic-looking man told me. We were in his top-floor apartment, sitting at a kitchen table. He was drinking Zima. I passed.

“There’s only two things that count in this game,” he said. “Rarity and matchmaking.”

“Matchmaking?”

“Let’s say you had a tape of some famous actor taking it in the ass from another famous actor, okay?”

“Okay.”

“All kinds of buyers for product like that, right?”

“Sure. Especially the actors themselves.”

“Exactly. But let’s say they’re not famous, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now who wants to buy it?”

“Someone interested in that kind of porn, maybe?”

“Uh-huh. But only that kind. To you, I couldn’t give it away, because that stuff doesn’t turn your crank. So, sure, it’s got some value. To some people. But it’s no hot product. Nothing you could sell to the Globe or the Star; you’ve got to go out and find a buyer. See what I’m saying? That’s the art to it. Matchmaking.”

“So no matter what I had...?”

“If it was rare enough, I could move it,” he said, his voice utterly devoid of doubt. “There’s people, they’ll buy dirt from a serial killer’s grave, you convince them it’s authentic. That’s the no-starter, authentic. You don’t have that, you’ve got nothing.

“There’s girls making a living selling their smelly panties on the Internet. This one chick I know, she told me she goes through twenty pairs a day, sometimes. Authentic, see?”

“Same for rape tapes?”

“If it was real, and you could prove it, hell, yes. There’s been rumors for years about the Homolka tapes.”

“Homolka?” I asked, faking a blank.

“Bernardo and Homolka, you heard of them, right? Husband-wife team, up in Canada. They snatched young girls, sex-tortured them in their basement. Very heavy stuff. Then they killed them. Anyway, the cops found the tapes. The actual tapes. But the government closed the courtroom when they showed them during the trial. Anyone had one of those, he’d be rich.”

“Why do you call them the Homolka tapes?”

“Homolka was the broad. Blonde chick. Young. She got some nothing sentence. For testifying against the husband. The prosecutor made that deal before they got hold of the tapes. Anyway, she’s the one everyone’s interested in. Even has fan clubs on the Internet. She’s going to be out soon, I think. Word is, she may have a couple of the tapes hidden away....”

“And people say there’s no such thing as snuff films.”

“There’s such a thing as anything. That’s where the matchmaking comes in.”

I nodded at the wisdom. “I want you to look at a couple of tapes,” I told him. “I brought them with me. Tell me what you think.”

“It’s your money,” the man said.

“I could move those,” he said later.

“Every one of them?”

“Not all of them so quick. And not any of them for a lot of coin. The paddling one, that was pretty hot; I could unload that in a few hours. But you’re talking maybe a couple of hundred for it, max. And only if you convince the buyer that it wasn’t faked.”

“You mean, that the girl really got paddled?”

“Nah. Sure she did. So what?” he said, unknowingly echoing Cyn and Rejji. “You’d have to convince the buyer that it wasn’t a scene, understand? That they weren’t working from a script. Buyers are always on the watch for the mass-produced stuff. They’d never trust anything on DVD—video’s the only way to go. If it was a sneak tape, it’d be worth a lot more. Even the toilet freaks, all they want to buy is the spy-cam stuff. You’d think shit is shit, right? Not to those sickos.”

“What about the girl who got the knockout drops?”

“Like I said, I could move it. But you’re talking a real cheap sale, there. The people who buy that stuff, they want to see...a struggle, like. Of course, with that bag over her head, you could say she was a celebrity, maybe....”

“Mole found something!” Michelle greeted me as soon as I walked in.

“What?”

“Come on,” she said, tugging at my hand.

The Mole was hunched over the coffee table, a rectangular magnifying glass in one hand, a videocassette in the other. Terry was sitting next to him, a notebook to his right.

“CV,” the Mole called out, softly.

“Got it,” Terry said. He looked up, saw me, said, “We’ve only got two more to do.”

I sat down on the couch, holding Michelle’s hand so she wouldn’t run over there and disrupt everything in her excitement. “I told you, I told you, I told you,” she whispered at me.

Finally, the Mole stood up. And walked out.

“He’s just going to the bathroom,” Terry said. “Come over here, I’ll show you what we figured out.”

He handed me the magnifying glass, then used what looked like a dentist’s pick to point toward the corner of one of the cassettes. “It’s real small,” he said. “And reverse-embossed. Kind of sunk right into the plastic. So it’s the same color; hard to pick out. Pop said he had some stuff that would bring it up, make it stand out, but he didn’t want to mess with it until you looked for yourself.”

It took me a minute or so before I saw what Terry was talking about. A pair of tiny block letters: FV.

“What does that mean, ‘FV’?” I asked Terry.

“It’s a code of some kind. There’s three of them: CV, FV, and NV. We thought it might be something they did at the factory, so Mom sent me out to buy some blanks, from the same manufacturer. I went to four different stores. And you know what? Not one of the other tapes had anything like this on them.”

“Is there any pattern to them? The letters, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” the kid said. “Pop said that part isn’t science. He said you’d figure it out.”

I turned the cassette over in my hands, as if its weight could tell me something. Shook my head.

“Let me see.” Cyn.

Terry picked up another cassette, waved her over to the table. Cyn bent forward, her barely restrained breasts in the kid’s face, said, “Hold it for me, honey,” as she winked at me over her shoulder.

The kid handed her the magnifying glass and held the cassette in both hands, steady as a dead man’s EKG. “It’s on the bottom,” he said. “Right near the erase-protect piece.”

Cyn stopped playing around. “Tilt it a little toward...Yes!” A few seconds later: “Rej, get over here! Take a look at this.”

The women switched places around Terry like he was a piece of furniture.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Cyn asked her.

“Uh-huh. Let me just...Sure, that’s it, Cyn.”

“What?” I asked them.

“It helps when you’ve seen one before,” Cyn said.

“Seen what?”

“A branding iron,” she said. “This little ‘NV’ thing here? That’s what made it.”

“¿Habla español?”

“Poquito. Muy poquito.”

“¿Y que?”

“Bodega, botanica, bruja, plata, jefe...”

“¿Y que mas?...”

“Pistelola, gusano, violencia, puerco, ropa, compadre, mordida...”

“¿Maricón?”

“I’ve heard the word.”

“What does it mean?” Felix asked me. His voice was still sable-soft, but his eyes were freezer burns.

“It’s a word for—”

“No, hombre. Not what it is, what it means, comprende?”

“I’m not follo—”

“Somebody calls you un maricón, that means you have to do something, yes?”

“Oh. Yeah, maybe. Depending on who’s saying it. Or where.”

“A man calls you ‘maricón’ in prison, he is saying—what?”

“Inside? Depends who’s doing the calling. Some cliques, that’s the conversation. Play the dozens all day, every day. But that’s only between themselves, see? If you mean to someone you don’t know—like for an insult?—never happen. Nobody challenges you to a fight in there. If you’re really after a guy, you don’t warn him. There’s none of this ‘I’ll see you after school’ stuff,” I said, wondering if he was asking, or testing.

He nodded. Not like he was agreeing, like he wanted me to keep talking.

“Not much fistfighting in there, either,” I told him. “Except for when a guy just loses his temper—it’s mostly the young ones who do that. Now, in the bing, solitary, guys call each other out all the time. You see a lot of cell gangsters, mouth-artists who get real brave when everybody’s locked down. It’s ‘You’re dead, nigger!’ this, and ‘My homeboys are going over to your house and fuck your daughter in her white ass!’ that. Around the clock. Never stops. But it’s just background noise.

“The only reason you might call names in there would be an intimidation thing. A test. You wouldn’t hear ‘maricón,’ though. You’d hear ‘pussy’ or ‘punk.’”

“And what must you do then?”

“Stick ’em or slice ’em,” I said, as no-option flat as when I’d first heard the rules explained to me a million years ago. “Maybe not right that minute, but you have to do it. And pretty soon. A man calls you something like that, he’s trying to break you with words. But behind the words, if you don’t give it up, there’s always a knife. His or yours.”

“But outside of prison? Then, for an insult...?”

“Sure. That’s right. Then it is a challenge. Or something you yell out your window at a guy who just cut you off.”

“A great insult,” he said. “It is calling someone a coward, yes? To most people, means the same thing. Maricón, it means you have no courage?”

“Like another word for ‘punk’?” I said. “Yeah, that’s right. I guess it all comes around in a circle, words like that. When I was a little kid, I thought ‘punk’ meant someone who wouldn’t fight—like when you ‘punk out,’ okay? But as soon as I got Inside, I found out ‘punk’ is what you are if some jocker owns your ass.”

Felix leaned forward, lit a cigarette. “In my...culture, in my world, you understand what it would mean, to be thought of...that way?”

“Yeah. I did enough time with Latinos to—”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think an Anglo could know. It’s different from prison. When you were there, did you know of maricónazo who could fight?”

“Sure. Hell, I knew some that loved to. I mean flat-out gay guys who were way too bad to fuck with. One guy, Sidney, he was a sensational boxer. Lightheavy. Take you out with either hand, and look pretty doing it. I knew some who were blade men, too. Everybody walked soft around them.”

“So they are not all alike?”

“Nobody’s all alike.”

“That is the difference between our worlds, Burke. In mine, un maricón could be accepted. He could do work—there is a contract killer, muy famoso, everybody knows what he is—but he could never lead, you understand?”

“If you say so.”

“I read once, in World War I, some white men died because they would not take a blood transfusion from black men. I do not know if this is true. But I know this. For those who play ‘mas macho,’ they would never follow a leader who was not, in their eyes, a ‘man.’ And that will never, ever change.”

“Maybe not.”

“You give nothing away, do you?”

“You called this meet, Felix. I thought Giovanni would be here, too. So I drive all the way uptown, find this place, and...it’s just you.”

“You are very trusting,” he said, sarcasm dusting his voice.

“You had plenty of chances, if that’s where you were going,” I told him. “From the very first meeting. Way before you spent any money.”

“So? I brought you here because I wanted you to understand that this thing you are doing, it is a very delicate matter.”

“I always knew that.”

“And you also knew...about me and Gio, didn’t you?”

“Not before I met you.”

“But then, yes?”

“Yes.”

“You think it is so apparent?”

“No. Not at all. You let me see, didn’t you? A test?”

“Of a sort. If it was, how do you know if you passed?”

“Because I’m not dead,” I said.

“You think I am a killer?”

“I think you just told me you were.”

“Gio thinks it is a federale.” Felix tilted his head, as if Giovanni were in the room with us. “He already told you why. But there is another possibility. One I believe you have not considered.”

“What’s that?”

“That the message was not for Gio; it was for me.”

I watched his eyes, asked, “A message that whoever did it knows things?”

“Yes.”

“What would be the point?”

“For me to step away. Gio would not be a problem for...for the people in my organization. He is not one of us. Who you do business with, that is just business. If I moved aside, whoever took over for me, that man could continue with Gio, as before.”

“That doesn’t add up for me,” I told him.

“Why not?”

“If somebody knows something, something that would make you move over, if they had proof, why wouldn’t they just mail you a sample of that? What’s the point of a homicide?”

“Because they would need me to move away,” Felix said. “But they would need Gio to stay.”

“So what are you telling me? That Giovanni would stay?”

“Sí, he would stay. This they would expect. Business is business. And Gio doesn’t know any other business. In their minds, he would not be...emotional about it.”

I didn’t say anything.

“They don’t know him,” Felix said, very softly. “Gio would defend me. But, if he had to fight on two fronts, he could not win.”

“Why tell me all this?”

“Because I am trapped,” he said calmly, a man who’d been there before and recognized the landmarks. “I cannot tell Gio. I cannot tell him that maybe his daughter was killed because of someone who wants something from me. That would mean it is one of my people, not some ‘fed.’ But I know information is a weapon. And I want you to have it all, for what you must do.”

“What happens if I can’t find out, not for sure?”

“Then it could end as if each of our bosses called me and Gio ‘maricón,’” he said, almost in a whisper. “What choice would we have?”

“I’ve got something for you.” The note was under my door in the hotel. Signed “C.”

I walked through two sets of connecting doors to the last suite. Cyn was sitting in an armchair. Rejji was kneeling in a far corner, her back to me. She was nude except for a pair of red stiletto heels. Her hands were bound behind her back with a red silk scarf.

“I got your message,” I said to Cyn.

“She’s so pretty when she’s been bad,” Cyn said.

“You said you had something for me?”

“Don’t you like her?”

“I like you both.”

“Ooo!”

“Cyn...” I said, shortly, in no mood to play.

“We found her.”

“Who?”

“The sorority girl.”

“From the tape?”

“Yep. The one using the paddle.”

“Are you sure?”

“We looked at that tape a hundred times, Burke. We bothered the Mole so much that...Michelle—is that his wife, for real?—Michelle went off on us.

“So he showed us how to stop the frames and do everything ourselves. Then we took the yearbooks, that the kid got us? It was a long shot, but we had to do something to kill time out here, so...”

“Let me see.”

“Look,” she said, pointing to a blown-up photocopy of a picture of a teenage girl whose most striking features were long straight hair and a prominent nose. “And here’s a still from the tape. The Mole hooked it up with some cables so we could just—”

“Sssh,” I said.

“Do you know what calipers are?” I asked Cyn.

“Sure. To measure. In school, we had to—”

“In the room where we keep the equipment, on the long table, there’s a whole set of them. Little ones, with metal points at both ends. They’re in a leather case, blue plush lining. Could you get them for me?”

“What do you need them for?”

“I’ll show you when you get back.”

“Okay.” She walked over to where Rejji was kneeling and lifted her thick dark hair with one hand, revealing a red collar and a short length of chain. Cyn grabbed the chain and pulled it sharply, forcing the brunette’s head all the way down until her nose was in the corner. “Stay!” she said.

“Was she a good bitch while I was gone?” Cyn.

“Perfect.”

“I doubt it,” Cyn said, taking a leather riding crop from a dresser drawer and walking purposefully over to the corner.

“What are you doing?” Cyn demanded, a few minutes later.

“It’s a very good match,” I told her. “And whoever thought to make the two blowups the same scale knew what they were doing—”

She leaned over, very close. “That was Rejji,” she whispered. “But she’s still being punished, so I’ll tell her later.”

I nodded, went on: “But we’re comparing a relatively sharp photo, from the yearbook, with one that has a lot more grain, from the videotape. And they weren’t taken at exactly the same angle, so I’m trying to narrow things down.”

“With those?” she asked, meaning the calipers I was holding.

“Yeah. There’s things about your appearance you can change—hairstyles, gum in your cheeks, a mustache—but there’s some things that always stay the same. A guy named Bertillon discovered this a long time ago. Way before fingerprints. The distance between the pupils of the eyes, that’s one of them.”

“Your eyes, they...”

“Yeah, I know. But that’s one in a million, Cyn. For most people, even with plastic surgery on other parts of their face, like, say, a nose job, that distance would stay the same. Nobody’s going to get their eye muscles severed just to change their appearance. You lose your—”

“I didn’t mean...”

“It’s okay. Here, look: this thing is measured in tiny units. Every time you move the points, there’s a little click.... See?”

“Oh!”

“So we lock it in like this...one tip in the center of each of her eyes, okay? Now we move it to...here, and...”

“It’s the same!”

“I think it is, girl,” I said cautiously. “I think it is.”

“You hauling the load, you get to pick the road, Schoolboy,” the Prof said.

He had just finished telling me how he and Clarence had run down a couple of members of the crew that had beaten the Latin kid. “Our boy, he don’t just pop up on the set, bro. This video guy, he pulls one of the gang aside. Says he knows they jump in new members; maybe they want a tape of the next time they do one? The guy he speaks to, he goes back to the whole crew. Or maybe just to the boss, I don’t know. Anyhow, he gets permission. I asked the ones we spoke to, why didn’t they just kick the video guy’s ass and take his tape when he was finished? One of the boys, he says, yeah, that’s exactly what he would have done. But the leader, he put the kibosh on it.”

“Sure,” I said. “The boss wanted to be in a fucking movie.”

“That’s what I say, too, mahn.” Clarence. “It is true what you tell us from the start. These young ones, they are insane for this.”

“You get anything on the video man?”

“Same as you, Schoolboy. White man, nothing special.”

“They didn’t know him? From around?”

“Nope. They said he was a little older than what your guy said, but I figure that’s just in the way people see things, right? Your man Ozell, probably Mr. Video looks like a punk kid to him, so he comes up younger in his eyes. The kids we talked to, they were—what?—nineteen, tops. So a guy twenty-five, he’s old, to them.”

“Not even his car?”

“Zero, bro. Never saw it.”

“Out here, if he’s driving some generic, nobody in that age group would see it. Unless he’s trying to make his wheels stand out, they’d be invisible.”

“That’s why it’s your play to say, son. You want to use those obey-for-pay broads, it’s your call, that’s all.”

“There’s only so many ways to get people to talk,” I told them. “We’ve got a lot of cards in our hand. And we can put most of them on the table. But we can’t make people tell us what they don’t know. And if Cyn and Rejji are right, and it is the same girl, she knows more than anything we’ve got so far.”

“You’re incredible,” I said.

“That’s the consensus.” Michelle smiled. “Besides, we already had her name, from the yearbook. The rest was as easy as a crack whore.”

“Where’s this camp, exactly?”

“Up in Dutchess County,” Terry said. “We could pick up Ninety-five North at—”

“We can’t take a whole convoy up there, Terry.”

“But...”

“Anyway, I need you here. You’re our best bet at getting some of these kids to talk. If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t even have the yearbook.”

“He’s right, honey.” Michelle.

“Pop?” the kid appealed.

The Mole caught Michelle’s eye, quickly ducked his head and concentrated on his equipment.

“She was a senior in that yearbook, and that was over three years ago. So she’s at least twenty now.”

“Michelle said she’s a junior in college. That sounds right,” Cyn said.

“This camp, it’s just a summer job. Supposedly, she’s done it every year since she was fifteen. Pretty fancy place.”

“We’re not just going to walk up to Administration and ask for her, are we?” Rejji said.

“Last resort,” I told them. “The map says there’s a town about ten, twelve miles from the camp. I don’t know what’s in it, or even if the counselors get weekends off, but it’s worth a shot first.”

“You’re going to pass yourself off as a college boy?” Cyn laughed.

I reached over to where she was sitting, pinched the top of one smooth thigh, hard. “I’m a casting director, you stupid bitch,” I said.

Cyn squealed...a lot more than the pinch merited.

Rejji giggled from the back seat.

“I’ll see you later, miss,” Cyn mock-hissed at her.

“The bar is called The LSAT,” Rejji said, the minute she walked into the motel room. “That’s for ‘Law School Admission Test.’ The story is, the owners were planning on going to law school, but they got such a low score on this test—I guess you need to get a certain number to get into any law school—that they decided to open up this bar instead.”

“And it’s the right crowd?” I asked her.

“I think so,” she said. “There’s a little college not far from here, but it’s pretty much closed down for the summer. So there’s only the trade from the camp, and how much could that be? This isn’t the kind of town where a lot of the young people stick around after high school. It’s got a few bars, but they’re either gin mills or topless joints—either too rough or too expensive for college kids to hang out in. No, this is the only one it could be.”

“All right,” I told them both, “let’s play it that way. Tonight’s Friday. We’ll give it two nights. If she doesn’t show, we’ll take a ride over to the camp on Sunday.”

“That’s probably the worst time,” Rejji said.

“Why?”

“Visiting day. The parents will be up, they’ll have all kinds of activities.... No way the counselors would get any time off.”

“You know a lot about this stuff, Rej?” Cyn asked her, curious.

“Yeah,” Rejji said. She got up, went into the bathroom, closed the door.

“Want to dance?” The guy was standing at our booth, arms crossed so he could puff out the biceps his neatly cut-off sweatshirt displayed.

“I’m with him,” Cyn said, pointing at me.

“What about you?” Muscles asked Rejji.

“Me, too.”

“You’re both with him?”

“Sure,” Rejji said.

“You their father?” he asked me, leaning forward, locker-room aggressive.

I looked at his tanned-and-bland face, wondering if those big white teeth were caps. “Their manager,” I said.

“Yeah? What do they do?”

“We’re entertainers,” Cyn told him, no smile.

“That means we get paid to entertain,” Rejji said helpfully, her mouth as flat as Cyn’s.

Muscles stood there for a minute, downloading. Then he went away.

Rejji’s hand, under the table, on the inside of my thigh, squeezing. “That’s her! That’s her!” she whispered.

“You sure?”

“Let me go talk to her, I’ll tell you in a minute.”

“You know what to—?”

“Yes! Let me out, Burke. Quick, before she gets stuck in a booth.”

“I don’t know anything about a videotape,” the girl said. Her long black hair and hawkish nose gave her a proud, near-exotic look, but her eyes were like tiny Japanese lanterns—bright light behind fragile paper.

“You brought me all the way up here for this?” I said to Cyn, sharp-voiced.

“You said yourself she’d be perfect,” Cyn said, half-annoyed.

“But if she’s not the same one who—”

“You don’t want an audition?” Rejji asked the girl, brisk and businesslike.

“That was supposed to be an—” the girl said, then cut herself short as she realized what she had just admitted.

“I’m not responsible for amateurs,” I said, clipped and impatient. “I have to look at miles of tape just to get a few winners, every time. That’s the way it works. We’ve been casting for a few weeks now, and your loop turned up in a huge pile of stuff. Cyn over here, she spotted you first; got me to take a look. And I agreed, you might be perfect. But, you understand, those things are not my decision; it’s the director’s call.”

She opened her mouth to say something. I held up a hand to cut her off, said, “Look, if it’s not you on the tape, there’s nothing to say. The camera loves some people. Others, it doesn’t. I need the quality I saw on the tape. If that’s not you, I’m sorry we bothered you. But if it is you, I hope you won’t let whoever sold you a bill of goods spoil your chances in the business.”

“What would you...? I mean, if I was...?”

“It’s the same for everyone,” I told her. “You know how it works. I’m the casting director. Myself and my crew interview the prospects. The best ones, the ones we think the director will love—those we put on tape. Free-form, no set lines. We’re looking for a quality, not a specific performance. If you get through the interview, you go on tape. And if they pick you...”

“It was me,” she said, biting her thin lower lip.

“Don’t go too heavy on the makeup,” Cyn said to the girl through the open bathroom door. “When you get on the set, they’ll create a look for you right there.”

She came out, a little self-conscious, but not nervous. Maybe it was that half-hour she’d spent on the phone, on our tab, in one of the other rooms we rented. Or maybe it was the minibar we’d left her the key to. Cyn pointed her toward a chair with a spiral back and a round, padded seat. Rejji tightened the locknut on the tripod, adjusting the minicam, while Cyn rheostatted the lights up and down until Rejji nodded agreement.

“Come in tight,” I told Rejji. “Tight on her eyes, tight on her lips.”

“She’s not miked,” Cyn reminded me.

“We need some tape of just pure expression,” I said. “Eyes and mouth, that’s what talks. It doesn’t matter what they say.... What we’re looking for is expressive, got it?”

I turned to the girl. “Tell me about your audition,” I said. “Tell me with your eyes as you talk.”

She arched her back, widened her eyes, said, “Well...it’s a little complicated. It was a play-within-a-play, like Hamlet. Only it was a different form. Unique. We didn’t really have lines.”

“Like improv?” Cyn asked her.

“No. Not like improv at all. Because there was a script. Only I was the only one who knew what it was.”

“How did that work?” I asked, making a “Give me more!” gesture toward my face.

“It’s a new form of vérité,” she said, darting her tongue quickly over her upper lip. “Very complicated. They...the other girls...they were supposed to be auditioning for parts in a movie. I mean, the movie was that they were supposed to be auditioning. Like, that was the plot. Only, there were two plots. The real plot was that Adrienne had humiliated me at school, and I planned the whole thing to get even. The movie, I mean. It was all a fake. Am I telling this all right?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I assured her. “Just keep talking, so we get enough tape. And bring your hands into it a little. Just touch your cheek once in a while. Like...that! Yes, exactly!”

“Perfect,” Rejji pronounced.

“I had the only acting job, actually,” the girl went on in a cat-with-cream voice. “But the others never knew it. I had to make it real. Like, I really had set the whole thing up myself, just so I could give it to Adrienne. See, they were acting like they were acting, that was the script. The plot, I mean. One of the plots. But I was acting like I wasn’t acting, see?”

“Ummm...”

“Vision was right, about what he told me. He said people want to be in the movies so bad, they use their fantasies like a shoehorn—they make things fit.

“I mean, Adrienne, nobody could see her face. What did she think she was auditioning for, ass model? So, if I had set the whole thing up, just so I could do that to her, it would have worked. In real life, I mean. The same exact thing. That’s the vérité. I didn’t actually set it up, but if I was a good enough actress, it would be just like I did.”

The girl glanced over at Rejji, who gave her an encouraging nod. She darted her tongue again, went on:

“You know what I told him? Vision? I told him, if this was really real, like I had planned it all for revenge, you know what would happen? We’d have to do a lot of takes. So Adrienne’s fat ass could get paddled over and over again.”

“Was that what you did?”

“No,” she said, pouty. “Vision said that the camera would know.”

“What does that mean?” Cyn asked her, a reporter interviewing a star.

“Well,” the girl said, tossing her hair slightly, “in real life, she wouldn’t start with her ass all red, see? That would give the whole thing away. So we had to do it all in one take. And I did it, perfect,” she said, chesty with self-satisfaction.

“What happened with your audition?” I asked.

“Well...nothing. Yet. Vision said, even if I didn’t get picked for a part, my tape would make the rounds. He had more of me, too, in case they wanted to see other stuff. Like more of my face, like you’re doing here. And I got paid, too,” she said proudly.

“Is that right?”

“I made five hundred dollars,” she said smugly. “Plus, I got to beat Adrienne’s ass. And she didn’t get paid a cent.”

“What’s the score?” I said into the cell phone.

“I’m not gonna lie; we been playing for the tie.”

“That’s not us. We need another move.”

“Got one,” the Prof said. “But Michelle finds out what we running, she’s gonna come gunning, bro.”

“You got Terry out there alone?”

“What you want us to do, Schoolboy? Play ofay? This here’s the boy’s turf, not ours.”

“But you’ve got Clarence close?”

“He’s right here with me,” the little man said. “Just a coupla niggers in the parking lot of this monfucious mall, anybody looks.”

“Does the Mole know?”

“Man wants to speak to you,” the Prof said, answering my question.

“You’re a light sleeper,” Rejji said.

“And you two would make lousy burglars,” I told them, glancing at my watch—three-thirteen. “What’ve you been up to? This town can’t have that much going for it.”

“We were with Kori,” Cyn said. “Playing sorority initiation.”

“You’re sure?” I asked Rejji, who was draped over the foot of the bed, on her belly, a pillow under her hips.

“She’s an amateur,” Rejji said. “But she knows what she likes.”

“I appreciate you taking one for the team,” I told her.

“Me? Please! We taught her a new game. It’s called ‘turning the tables.’ Maybe you heard of it.”

“Yeah. What did you get out of her?”

“You mean, after Cyn made her—”

“Rej, you can tell me all about it some other time, okay? But, for now, how about you go back to where you started?”

“She’s not a rocket scientist, Burke. But she’s smart enough to know when to be scared.”

“Of this ‘Vision’ guy?”

“No. According to her, he’s a real sweetheart. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. It’s the twins.”

“Who?”

“Stop teasing, bitch,” Cyn said, walking over and giving Rejji a loud spank on the bottom. She sat down on the bed, facing toward where I was propped up against the headboard. “Twin brothers,” she said to me. “Brett and Bryce Heltman. Used to be hot-stuff athletes, a few years ago. Big, strong boys. With really foul tempers. Kori says she heard they got away with murder when they were in school—they were seniors when she was still in junior high, so it’s just rumors, but she sure believes every word.”

“And they’re with Vision?”

“Not ‘with’ him, like part of his crew or anything. But...And I want to tell you, Burke, this is all stuff she ‘heard,’ okay? So it could be one hundred percent bullshit....

“There was this girl mad at Vision. Because of some video thing, Kori doesn’t know for sure. The girl ended up gang-banged. They didn’t just fuck her, they fucked her up. Broke her jaw and one of her arms. And they stuck a—”

“I get it. And word is that was these twins’ work?”

“That’s all it is, the ‘word,’” she said. “The girl never...Well, it never went to court. The girl said she didn’t know who did it. But, supposedly, she told one of her friends that it was the twins.”

“Maybe it was. But that doesn’t mean there was any—”

“Kori knows of at least two more.”

“Girls who got raped?”

“No. People who got the crap pounded out of them right after they had some kind of beef with Vision. And here’s what’s not a rumor. Kori went to meet him, Vision, once. At the Tackapausha Preserve—that’s, like, a big nature park, somewhere around where they live. She figured Vision wanted to tape her outdoors or something. When she got there, he walks her down this trail. At the end, sitting on a tree trunk, there’s the twins. She said they didn’t do anything, but they scared her to death—it was like being in a cave, back in those woods.”

“What was Vision doing?”

“Taping.”

“Taping what?”

“Taping her being scared, Kori said. And probably taping her when she ran away.”

“Which one is the paddling tape?” I asked Michelle.

“They’re all labeled, honey. With Post-its. I’ve got the master list here.” She ran her finger down a column, said, “It’s number four.”

I carried it over to the workbench the Mole had put together. Flicked on the gooseneck halogen, picked up the magnifying glass, double-checking.

“NV,” I said.

“What does that tell us?” Michelle asked.

“I don’t know yet, girl. We need to sort them first.”

It took longer than I’d have thought, rechecking the tiny little brands. When we were done, we had one high stack, and one short one. And one orphan.

CV: The dogfights, the NHB contest, the jump-in tapes...

NV: The swastika spray-painters, a girl trying on blue jeans in a booth, the sorority paddling...

FV: Just one. Vonni. Running.

“We tanked,” Terry said, walking into the suite, disconsolate.

“Burke didn’t,” Michelle said brightly.

“What’d you crack, Jack?”

“I’m not sure,” I told the Prof. “Where’s Cyn and Rej?”

“I’ll get them,” Terry volunteered, ignoring his mother’s look.

“Those codes must mean something,” I told them. “And Cyn and Rej may have given us a roadmap.”

Rejji ducked her head, modestly. Cyn crossed her long legs, displaying the pronounced flex-line on her thigh.

“The NV and the CV ones, they look alike, right?” I said. “Real. Like someone snuck a camera into whatever was going on. Only what this Kori told us, the NV one—the one she did, anyway—it was a scam. A production, all right, but not the one the players thought it was. And one of them, Kori, she was in on it from the beginning. An acting job. For her, not for the rest, no matter what they thought. If we assume all the NV ones are the same game, then one of the spray-painters was in on it with Vision, but the others thought they were making a movie. Acting.”

“Or maybe they didn’t know at all,” Cyn said thoughtfully.

“But what would be in it for—?” Michelle asked.

“For Kori, it was doing something she wanted to do, any-way,” I said, as Cyn nodded agreement. “And getting paid for it. Plus believing that she was the only one doing the real acting. That’s a big-hit trifecta. It could be the same for the play-Nazis, if one of them wasn’t playing. Let’s say he wants to be the leader of some ‘white power’ crew, but he doesn’t have what it takes to pull that off. Vision tells them that they’re acting, okay? Auditioning for the movies. But the guy, the one who’s in on it, he gets to be what he wants, if only for a little while. Just like Kori did. And the tape is the proof.”

“That young woman. The one trying on the dungarees. She was alone, mahn,” Clarence pointed out.

“I think I have that one scoped, too,” I said. “None of these loops have titles, or credits. I don’t know whether we’re seeing the whole thing, or just some snip out of the middle. But it could have been a deal where the script is supposed to be some girls playing a trick on their friend, sticking a little camera in their pocketbook, so they made a tape of her changing. Then they post it on the Internet or something.”

“If that was the script, then which one would be the actor?”

“Not the one we saw,” Cyn said. “Not the girl pulling her pants down, the one taping it. I’ll bet there was more to it. The stripper knows it’s a ‘movie,’ so she takes her pants off while ‘acting’ like she doesn’t know she’s being taped. But the one doing the taping, she’s doing the real acting, because her job is to get those pants off. Same as with Kori, see?”

“Huh!” I said as it hit me.

Cyn put her arms over her head, stretched luxuriously. “I just look like this,” she said. “It’s not all I know.”

“Tell him!” Michelle applauded.

“But what do they get from this, mahn?” Clarence asked me. “The tape would be the same if the girl was acting or not, yes? All the cameraman wants is to see her pants come down.”

“No,” I said, “he wants more than that. I’m just not sure what.”

“I got it! I got it!” Terry said, running over to the VCR and hitting “Pause.”

“What do you have?” the Mole asked.

“‘CV.’ I know what it stands for. All those tapes, they weren’t acting, right? They were just real things, that the guy taped. Cinéma vérité!”

“What’s that?” I asked him.

“Just what’s on those tapes, Burke. Like Frederick Wiseman did in Titicut Follies.”

“Terry, I got no idea who...”

“No, listen to me,” the kid said, all worked up. “Cinéma vérité just means, like, super-realistic. You watch it, you don’t know if it’s a documentary or a story. That’s what all that stuff was like, right? The pit bulls and the fighting and stuff?”

“Yeah...”

“And ‘CV’? Come on!”

“I am certain he is correct,” the Mole said.

“When’s the last time you watched a movie?” Michelle said to him. “But he is so right,” she said to us.

“Okay...But, if the CV stuff is real, and the NV stuff is acting, at least for some of the players, what’s FV?” I asked the room. “Because that’s the only one Vonni’s in.”

Nobody said anything.

“I never heard of them,” Wolfe told me.

Rain slanted across the windshield of her battered old Audi. Bruiser was lying across the back seat, a thick blot of darkness in the shadow.

“I’m not looking for their reps,” I told her. “What I need is their location.”

“So you can...?”

“Ask them some questions.”

“I know who you’re doing this work for, remember?”

“I’d never ask you to put someone on the spot.”

“Ask me? No, you wouldn’t do that. What you’re offering to do here is pay me.”

“If I was doing it so I could take them out, you’re the last person I’d bring into it,” I told her, truthfully.

“And why’s that? Because you respect me so much?”

“You know that’s true,” I said, ignoring her tone. What I didn’t say was the other truth—if I used Wolfe to bird-dog a hit, I knew exactly how she’d pay me back.

“You think it’s someone from our world?” Cyn asked me that night.

“Your work world?”

“Yes. Power power power.”

“I don’t see how, Cyn.”

“There’s those who say violent porn causes people to...”

“That’s not your world.”

“No, no; I didn’t mean me and Rejji, the way we play. But...you know about our Internet business?”

“No.”

“The deal is, we live together—which is the truth—and I own her—which is true—and if you’re a subscriber—we take credit cards, checks, and money orders—you can dial up our daily channel and watch me discipline her. If you’re a premium subscriber, you can tell me how you want her disciplined, and watch it on a private channel.

“It’s simple enough. We seeded the ground with a few pictures. I have a special boudoir chair I punish Rej in. It kind of makes her lean way forward....”

Rejji got up off the floor, walked over, and sat on a straight chair so she was facing backwards, her legs positioned outside the rungs. She turned her head to the side, arched her back deeply so her bottom protruded over the edge.

“See?” Cyn said. “That’s a good example. And there’s plenty of others. Always a market for le vice anglais. Me birching her, topless, that was our best seller.”

“You making any money?”

“Look at her,” Cyn said pridefully. “We’re making a ton.”

“Nothing illegal about it, either,” I complimented her. “If you can skate under the IRS, you’re golden.”

“We’re a small business,” she said, smiling. “We even have a pension plan. And health insurance.”

“Okay, but what does this have to do with...?”

“Burke, if you saw some of the ‘requests’ we get, you’d lose your lunch.”

“People have weird tastes.”

“Some of them want me to hurt her. I don’t mean make her cry, Burke. I mean—”

“Yeah, but...”

“But what? Do you understand what I’m really talking about?”

“Yeah. And I don’t think whoever asks for stuff like that got the idea from you spanking your girlfriend.”

“Come here!” Cyn said to Rejji. The dark-haired girl slid off the chair and crawled over to where we were sitting on the couch.

“Tell him,” Cyn ordered her.

Rejji put her head in Cyn’s lap. The blonde girl patted her. Gently, comforting.

“That’s how it started. Before we were on the Net. With Gresham. She wanted to do it to me herself,” Rejji said softly. “Hurt me for real. She...she terrified us. And when we wouldn’t go along, that’s when she—”

“I know,” I said. “And it’s all over now. But this thing...with Vonni, it doesn’t scan for me like S&M gone ballistic.”

“You know that woman, Lana something, the one up in the Northwest somewhere?” Cyn asked me, stroking Rejji’s hair.

“Never heard of her.”

“She was a branded slave in a power-exchange group. That’s supposed to be an all-consent thing, right? Exchange. Like me and Rejji do, our pact. You know how it ended up there? The ‘masters,’ they finally couldn’t get it up for consent. So they kidnapped and raped some college girls, visiting here from Japan. They figured Japanese girls, they’d be natural submissives. And this woman, she was right there with them. Helping out.”

“So they were morons as well as freaks. What’s your point?”

“It can spring back on itself,” Cyn said. “If you can’t control being in control, it can amp over. Master the master.”

“That’s not just for sex,” I said.

Rejji looked up from Cyn’s lap, turned her head toward me. “Power power power,” she said, barely whispering the words.

Sleep sneered at me. My mind was so hard on Vonni that I felt a stabbing pain behind my eyes. I tried to drift—sometimes that worked.

I wondered if I was really looking at the same kind of overlap Cyn had been talking about. Where the truth was.

Power power power.

I’d walked Candy on a leash. Listened to her wet-whisper how she’d do whatever I told her to; whatever it took. Candy took a lot. Mostly people’s lives. Candy would be whatever she thought you wanted her to be. She used the roles like a deranged Doberman I’d known once. He hated other dogs; I never knew why. His trademark was to pretend to be injured or crippled. So they’d come close.

Belle liked to be spanked. She also liked driving getaway cars, brawling, and revenge. She was about as submissive as a pit bull on angel dust. But she could take it, all right. The last thing she took was a hail of police bullets meant for me. I told her I loved her only that one time, just before she went over.

Fancy dished it out, in full costume. Her sister, Charm, took it. Fancy held the whip, but Charm held the handle. Tricks and games, but not fun ones—the roots were too twisted.

Strega would do anything for me. A lot of women say things like that. The way Strega meant it scared me as much as it drew me.

Gem would say, “Yes, master,” slyly, expecting a smack on the bottom as a response. But she’d been her own boss since she was a baby. She’d had to be—her childhood had been the Khmer Rouge, hunting and haunting.

Belle and Candy were dead and gone. If there’s anything to the Bible, they’d gone in opposite directions.

Fancy was just gone, leaving Charm just dead. I didn’t know where Strega was, but that wouldn’t stop her if she wanted to see me.

One way or another, women always left me. They didn’t all die. Sometimes, when whatever brought us together was done, so were we.

Gem didn’t end like that. I’d left her. In Portland. I told her I couldn’t send for her until I knew how it would be for me back home. And now I wondered if I would ever know.

Or if she’d still be there when I did.

Who’d want one of those “true submissives” that inadequates are always trolling for, anyway? “Every man wants to spank a domme,” Michelle had told me years ago, winking as if she knew something more than she was saying. And maybe there’s some truth in that. At least it would be special. Just for you. A person, not a role.

I like spike heels and seamed stockings. On some women. If their legs are too thin, the seams don’t look erotic; they look like huge varicose veins.

I like bratty, sometimes. Hate bitchy, all across the board.

I knew a girl, years ago. She’d spent years as a slave to some guy, wearing the collar, living the life. When he told her he was “moving on,” she Swiss-cheesed him with his own custom-made shotgun. Stupid bastard died because he’d never learned the first rule of survival when your girlfriend’s a borderline: abandonment is a capital offense.

If the only way you can make it work is with a woman who lets you tie her up, that’s one thing. But if the only women you can get are those who’d let anybody tie them up, then who’s the one in bondage?

No matter what any chump thought he was buying from their Internet business, Cyn and Rejji were true partners. And the bond between them didn’t come in leather.

I found the house easily enough; it looked like it had been the first one in the neighborhood to surrender.

The woman was expecting me. Short and stocky, dressed in an orange jumpsuit that looked like it was on loan from the county jail. She opened the huge white floor-standing freezer and took out a plastic bag that was sealed crooked at the top. Not a Ziploc, one of those do-it-yourself jobs they sell on infomercials.

The woman laid the bag on a fake-wood chopping block, and sliced open the top with a Ginsu knife. She poured the contents onto a sheet of imitation Saran Wrap, folded it over lightly, then tossed it in a grungy gray microwave. When the oven beeped, she opened the door, unfolded the wrap, and rolled some of whatever was in there into a cigarette. She lit the confection with a Zippo lighter sporting the Harley-Davidson logo. “Very collectible,” she assured me.

“My man? Rodney? Did you know he used to be with another woman? But when he lost his arm in that motorcycle accident, she up and left him.”

“Because he had to go on disability?” I played along.

“Nah. Because he couldn’t applaud with only one hand,” the woman said, cracking herself up.

“That’s a good one,” I told her. “And that’s the kind of material you did for Vision?”

“Yep! The way he explained it, we’d both get what we want. I’d get an audition tape I could send around to the clubs. And he’d get White Trash Wanda on tape before I get famous. You have any idea of what tapes of Roseanne before she made it would be worth?”

“A lot, no doubt about it,” I said, paying the freight. “So how do you get in touch with Vision?”

“Oh, I don’t,” she said loftily. “As soon as he’s finished with the editing, he’s going to bring it by.”

“Did you ever wonder how we knew where to find you that first time?” Cyn asked me that night.

“I do work,” I said. “People—some people—know.”

“There’s plenty of men who...I mean, when that...happened to us, we could have gotten ourselves a—”

“You could have gotten yourselves in a worse jackpot, and you knew it,” I said. “You wanted a man for hire, a professional. Someone who does his work, gets paid, and gets gone.”

“That’s why you did it, for the money?”

“Why else?”

“We’re doing all...this, with you, now, aren’t we? And we’re getting paid, too, sure. But the money’s not that great. And we’re not making anything out of our business while we’re helping you.”

“What are you saying?”

“Just what we heard—that you take money, but certain kinds of stuff you like doing. Just like us.”

“What difference? As long as I get it done.”

“I...don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure. Rejji and I, we love to play. And getting paid for it, that’s perfect. I always thought, if we didn’t love it, maybe we wouldn’t do it so well on camera, understand?”

“Sure.”

“Except that’s not...Well, what I mean, I see now, it wouldn’t matter. If Rejji didn’t like it, there’d be a buyer for that. That was what Gresham...”

“You say that name too much,” I told her. “Isn’t that what you told Rejji when I first came to see you?”

“This is different,” she said, brushing aside what was in her way. “You, you’re doing this for that girl, no matter what you say. The way you’re doing it, it’s like the way you were when we...”

“She’s right,” Rejji said over her shoulder, from the corner where she was standing. “And that’s part of the word on you, too.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked them both.

“You got it bad for...certain kinds of people.”

“Gresham was just a freak. Nothing personal. A job. I didn’t feel anything for her.”

“You felt something for us,” Cyn said. “Tell the truth.”

“That’s me, all right, Cyn. A knight in shining armor.”

“Oh, you’ve got plenty of armor, all right,” Rejji said.

“Somehow, I never pictured you as a sports nut,” Cyn said later.

“You ever watch this?” I asked her, pointed at the screen where Bryant Gumbel’s Real Sports was running on HBO.

“No. We don’t like—”

“Shut up and give it a chance.”

“Ooo! You better do it, Cyn,” Rejji teased. “You know what Burke’ll do if you’re a bad girl.”

“You silly...” Cyn stopped herself, caught by the images on the screen. Children playing baseball together. Lots of children, with all kinds of disabilities. Blind, in wheelchairs, brittle-bone syndrome, muscular dystrophy. Something they called the “Miracle League,” organized by a bunch of parents who just wanted to give the kids a chance to play. Each kid had a special buddy, another kid, an athlete who went every step of the way with the kid who needed it, from helping to hold a bat to pushing a wheelchair around the bases.

Rejji came over to see what we were looking at. She sat down, and watched, transfixed, until it was over.

“Some people,” she said, choked up, “they...they torture their own kids. And these ones, they...”

“Makes you think there’s two different species, huh?” I said.

“There are,” Cyn said, holding Rejji’s hand.

I spent the next day working the phones. Calling in favors. Hard to do secondhand, but Mama was an ace at relays.

The strip mall a few minutes away had a halfway-decent deli. I had them make me a rare roast beef on rye with a slice of red onion and Russian dressing. A side of potato salad, and a bottle of Dr. Brown’s black cherry. Picked up a copy of the Post, took it all back to my room, and sat down to watch the news.

It was the usual mulch. My eyes drifted back to the paper. I was deep into a self-righteous article about “unprovoked” shark attacks when the TV suddenly blurted something about a “daring daylight assassination” of a “known mob figure.” I dropped the paper, upped the volume. The victim had been sitting at the wheel of his white Cadillac SUV—in a no-standing zone in midtown, the announcer said, as if this confirmed some significant point—when someone walked by and put a single slug into his left ear. A police spokesman solemnly announced it “had all the trademarks of a professional killing.”

It had gone down in broad daylight. Nobody had seen or heard a thing, not even the SUV’s passenger. He had just stepped into a local store for a few minutes, asking the driver to wait. Found the body when he came back out.

The screen showed a close-up photo of the dead man. He had a round face that made his little eyes look even smaller. The announcer asked anyone with information to call a special number the cops had set up. The name of the victim was in bold black type beneath his photo. Vincente “Colto” Zandrazzi.

I was still watching television, thinking maybe the late news would have more on the killing, when the connecting door between our rooms opened and Rejji crawled in.

She came over to where I was sitting, said, “Cyn told me I had to—”

“You don’t have to do anyth—”

“I need to tell you a secret,” she said. “Please?”

“Rejji, I don’t want—”

“I know. Please...?”

“What?”

She crawled over to the TV set, poked around until she found the switch, turned it off. The room went into darkness, except for the light spilling from the connecting door.

She crawled back to where I was sitting. “I have to stand up to tell you, all right?”

“Sure.”

She stood up, bent over so her lips were right against my ear. I thought of Colto.

“I want to do this,” she whispered. “I want to see what it feels like. I want to know. But I can’t just...Cyn has to make me. But not really. You know what I’m...”

“What about me?” I asked her.

“What?”

“What do I want to do, Rejji?”

“Do me,” she whispered.

“Not with—”

“She won’t come in,” Rejji said. “And I won’t look.”

“Uh! Uh! Uh!”

Rejji, on her hands and knees, blindfolded, making an explosive little noise, somewhere between a grunt and a squeal.

I was right behind her.

“Don’t untie me,” she whispered, dropping her shoulders to the bed. “Not yet, okay?”

“It was like...a string of little firecrackers, going off in me.”

“Did you find out what you wanted to know?”

“Yes. Cyn was right.”

“About what?”

“You know,” she said. “Can she come in now?”

“You know what I do hate,” I said to Cyn, much later that night. “Movies.”

“Movies?” she said, propping herself on one elbow. “You mean some movies, right?”

“Remember what you always said is the answer to every question?”

“Power power power,” Rejji whispered, from the foot of the bed.

“Yeah. You ever see a movie called The Bad Seed? An old one, from the Fifties, black and white...but they show it all the time on TV, still.”

“I did!” Rej said. “It was the scariest movie I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“I’ve seen it, too,” Cyn said. She reached out one hand, pulled on Rejji’s chain so that the dark-haired girl came closer to her.

“You think it was true?” I asked them both.

“You mean, like, based-on-a-true-story true?” Rejji asked.

“Yeah.”

“I think it probably was,” Cyn said guardedly. “Parts of it, anyway.”

“So you think that little girl, the one who committed all those murders, she was born the way she was?”

“She was,” Rejji said. “It...skipped a generation, like. Wasn’t it her grandmother who was also—”

“I don’t even remember,” I said. “What I do remember is the whole idea of the movie. Some people are just born evil; it’s in their genes. It doesn’t matter how they’re raised, or who raises them; they are what they are. Destiny. That little girl in the movie, she had great parents. They adored her. Even the neighbor, some woman, she was mad about the kid. They gave her everything.”

“Why does that make you so furious?” Cyn asked, tuned in now.

“Because it’s the dirtiest fucking lie ever told,” I said, remembering the calico cats. “The worst one of all. No kid is born bad. Or born good, either. There’s no genetic code for rapist, or serial killer.”

“But there’s been kids from good homes who—”

“This isn’t about some abuse-excuse rap,” I said. “Some people turn out to be no fucking good no matter how they’re brought up. But they weren’t born to it. There’s nothing about their DNA that makes them that way.”

“Why is that so important?” Cyn asked.

“Because that one miserable fucking movie probably did more to condemn kids than anything the government ever did. You think people on juries get their information from scientific studies? They get their ‘knowledge’ from movies. You just proved it, the both of you.”

“Well, how are we supposed to—?”

“I’m not blaming you, Cyn. I guess I’m agreeing with you. It’s all about power. And the movies have it, in spades.”

“Well, there isn’t a lot you could do about that, honey, is there?”

“We can find this Vision,” I told her.

“Vision?” the Prof scoffed, the next morning. “Motherfucker’s name should be ‘Invisible,’ hard as we’ve looked for him.”

“We don’t know the turf,” I said. “It’s not like any tracking we ever did.”

Cyn and Rejji sat quietly, together, listening. Michelle was off somewhere with the Mole. Terry was out working the teens.

“You think the children know, mahn?” Clarence.

“You know what, brother? I did think so. But now I don’t. Whoever he is, he rides the thermals, drops down whenever he sees something he wants, then skies away. I think the mistake we’ve been making is assuming he’s like other freaks—the kind we’re used to. You see what I’m saying?”

“Yeah, Schoolboy. You can always tell where they going by where they been. Not this boy.”

“Not this boy,” I agreed.

“Come on with it,” the Prof encouraged me. Like he’d been doing since I’d hit the prison yard that first time.

“It’s not a new thing, right?” I said. “Cameras. They’ve been used as everything from lures to kill-props since they were invented. When I was just a little kid, I remember hearing about this maggot. Glatman, I think his name was. He did it real simple. Just put an ad in the papers for photo models. He was smart. Worked L.A.—that’s a refugee camp for pretty girls from everyplace else. When a woman would answer his ad, he’d tell them he was on assignment from one of those ‘detective’ magazines they had back then. Needed some damsel-in-distress stuff...no nudity, just a little cleavage. And some ropes.

“The ones who went for it, he just drove them to the ‘location,’ out in the desert, tied them up, did what he did, then left them there, dead.”

“There’s always been that,” the Prof agreed. “Most of it’s not about murder. Sometimes, it’s just a scam to get a woman’s clothes off. And some cockless motherfuckers, they need the prop, you know? Remember when the Times Square joints used to have those ‘camera clubs,’ son? You could rent a camera from them, pose the girl the way you wanted. Only thing they wouldn’t let you in those rooms with was a roll of film.”

“Yeah.”

“But we don’t know what this Vision guy wants,” the Prof said, tapping one temple.

“Not yet we don’t,” I said. “But I’m sure of one thing. That camera of his, Prof, it’s no prop. He’s not faking. Whatever he wants, he wants it on tape.”

“Burke! Wait till you hear this!”

“Calm down, Cyn. What’s so—?”

“We went back to see Kori...the paddle girl...again,” Rejji said.

“Why?”

“Because Cyn always knows,” Rejji said. “And she was right.”

“You found out where this Vision...?”

“No,” Cyn said. “She really doesn’t know any more about that than she told us. But you know what she does know?”

“Cyn...”

“She knows about a guy who pays teenage girls to pose. Just like that Glatman freak you were telling us—”

“Bondage photos?” I asked her, listening hard now.

“No...” Cyn said reluctantly. “‘Naughty schoolgirl’ stuff.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Oh, you know, Burke. A cheerleader lifting up her skirt to show her panties, like that.”

“So what makes you think—”

“Well, he only uses actual schoolgirls. He has to see a birth certificate, a photo ID from school, and even a report card! He’s only into the real thing....”

“That’s a long ways from homicide.”

“But, come on, he might know something, right?” Cyn said, almost pleading with me.

“Tomorrow afternoon,” I promised her. “Now let me get some sleep.”

I didn’t even try.

One of the channels had a story about this guy who killed his girlfriend and stuffed her into a trunk in his apartment. He was a well-connected rich boy, so they gave him bail. He jumped bond and made it out of the country. Ended up living in France. Living good, too. For years, the French wouldn’t extradite him, because he was facing the death penalty here, which went against their high moral principles. France is famous for protecting people from oppression. Ask Roman Polanski.

I heard the echo of Terry’s school conversation in my head. Movies are amazing.

And Cyn. Power power power.

“Not to be conceited, but I am, like, so cute, all my friends tell me I could be a model, except I’m not tall,” Michelle girl-gushed into the phone. “Is it, like, for real that you have a studio and everything?”

...

“Oh, wow! I know where that is. That would be perfect. Only, it has to be after school, all right? Like right around this time? Not at—”

...

“Do you pay, like, by the hour?”

...

“Oooh! Really? How many hours could I—?”

...

“A gif? You want me to send you a...Oh, you mean, like, to see if I...”

...

“Couldn’t I just...?”

...

“Oh, okay. But I don’t have any really good pictures of myself. I mean, that’s what I wanted you to...”

...

“I’ll do it tonight! Just give me your addy....”

...

“Thanks! Buh-bye!”

“You did it perfect, honey,” I told Michelle.

“Swear to God, I closed my eyes, I thought you were seventeen,” Rejji praised her.

“But it’s no good, right?” Cyn said, catching my eye.

“I don’t think so, Cyn. You see what he’s doing, scamming girls into sending him pictures of themselves over the Inter-net, so they can ‘audition’ to be ‘models’ for him. He probably does have a little studio set up in his house. Maybe even actually pays a girl, every once in a while. It’s sleazy, but probably not even a crime. He didn’t ask you for nude shots, did he, Michelle?”

“No, baby. I gave it back to you, word-for-word. He wasn’t even suggesting anything. But, you know, some of those stupid girls, they’re going to go ahead and...”

“Sure,” I agreed, guessing their real reason was closer to the need-greed border than it was to stupidity.

“Couldn’t you at least go and talk to him?” Cyn said.

“There’s one thing that would qualify him,” I said to them all. “But I have to go back to the City and ask.”

I looked a question at Gateman as I came through the door. He shook his head. As good as the white-dragon tapestry in Mama’s window.

I went up to my place. My empty place.

It only took me a few minutes at the keyboard to get the answer. The Mole had scanned all of Wolfe’s paper on Vonni’s case into the hard drive of an IBM laptop, and Terry had shown me how to search the documents.

I cross-checked the info from Cyn—name, address, phone number. Nothing. Then I tried some keywords for the kind of thing he liked to do. Blank.

The man who scammed teenage girls into cyber-sending him naughty-cheerleader pictures had never been interviewed by the cops.

Late that night, alone in my place, I wanted the comfort of the blues. I cued up some Roy Buchanan, drifted along with “Drowning on Dry Land.” Rode all the way up to Chicago with Charlie Musselwhite, a bluesman who had made that same trip. Spent some time there with native son Paul Butterfield, then went back down to Texas for some of Delbert’s honkytonk.

Finally, I put some Henske on, closed my eyes, got myself lost in Magic Judy’s “Dark Angel.” When I got to the end of that road, I picked up the cellular and dialed Gem’s number.

It rang twice. Then came the series of tones that were a signal to leave a message.

I never could think of one to leave. But I let her hear the music for a few seconds, so she’d know it was me.

I looked out my window. Down into the dark. The deep dark. The Zero. But it didn’t pull at me like it had once. The Zero is everywhere. Always waiting. If I had wanted to...just not be anymore, I wouldn’t have come home to do it.

“What do you want?” He was a middle-aged white male, nothing remarkable, standing in the doorway of a modest Cape Cod. Nine-fifteen on a Thursday evening; just past dark.

“Allow me to introduce myself, sir,” I said. “My name is Mr. White. And this,” I said, nodding toward Clarence, “is my associate, Mr. Black.”

“I’m not buying—”

“And we’re not selling, sir. May we come in?”

“What is—?” he said. But by then we were all inside.

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “This won’t take a minute. Is there a place where we could sit down?”

“I...” A guy who’d made a career out of suggesting—hinting, implying, making sure you got the message, without actually saying anything himself. He’d read Clarence’s shoulder holster like a billboard. His eyes never left us as he walked over to a living room dominated by a blank-faced projection TV set.

“All we want is for you to take a look at this photograph,” I said, sitting down.

His mud-brown eyes came alive when I said “photograph,” but I didn’t know him well enough to guess whether it was fear or excitement.

I handed him Vonni’s picture. He took it, tentatively at first, then visibly relaxed as he examined it.

“Have you ever seen her?” I asked him, already knowing the answer.

“No,” he said—indignant, now that he was innocent. “What’s this all about?”

“We’re trying to locate anyone who might have been in contact with her,” I said.

“Why? Is she a runaway or something?”

“She’s dead, sir.”

“Oh. I didn’t...I mean, what happened?”

“It was in all the papers,” I told him. “About a year ago. That’s Vonni Greene.”

“That’s her? I mean, I know what you’re talking about now. I think I did see a picture...in the papers, right...but this doesn’t look like that one, I don’t think. You guys, you’re not cops, are you?”

“No, Mr. Trebin, we’re not the police. That’s what interested us. When the police were investigating the case, they talked to everyone who might have been involved in this girl’s life. Anyone who might have come into contact with her in any way at all. And it seems like they never talked to you.”

“That’s because I never—”

“That’s because they didn’t have your name,” I cut him off. “But we can fix that, if you’d like.”

“I...I don’t care,” he said, falling way short of defiant. “I told you, I’ve never even seen—”

Clarence caught my eye, nodded. But we kept him talking for another few minutes, just to make sure.

“I don’t like ghosting those country cribs,” the Prof said, back at the house. “People out in the sticks, they don’t mind their own business the way city folks do.”

“How long did it take you?” I asked.

“To get in? It was a cheesebox, Schoolboy. Maybe ten seconds. We didn’t have a floor plan, but I could hear you all talking, so I knew where I had to keep to.”

“Where was it?”

“Basement, bro. Just like we’d figured.”

“And he had a computer?”

“Yeah. I don’t know nothing about the damn things, but he sure had him a big-ass screen for it. Like you said, I didn’t touch it.”

“Find anything else?”

“Pictures, bro. Motherfucker had hundreds of them, minimum. Tacked up all over the place.”

“And they were all—”

“What Cyn said, honeyboy. Like a yearbook from a girls’ school, only in color. Nothing he’s ever gonna go to jail for. One thing, though...”

“What?” Rejji asked.

“No blacks, no Asians, no Latinas—hell, no fucking Indians. Not one. For this boy, all-white was all right.”

“That clinches it,” I said. “He’s not the one.”

“These two are a prize pair of dirtbags,” Wolfe said, handing over a couple of mug shots.

They looked identical, right down to where their bullet heads just inched past the “74” on the vertical measuring bar. Nice specimens. Square-jawed, heavy cheekbones, not a lot of nose or forehead. Prominent trapezius ridges sloped from their thick necks to their wide shoulders. They even had the same expressions on their faces—barely blunted aggression, just a few hundred RPM short of redline.

“What did they go down for?” I asked her.

“They didn’t,” she said. “These are from the arrest. Never went to trial.”

“What were they charged with?”

“This time? Rape. Before that, Assault Two, Assault Three. That’s kind of their specialty.”

“They never went to trial? On any of all that?”

“They pled out to YO on some of them.”

“Some of them?” Youthful Offender status is usually a one-time present from the criminal-justice system.

“That’s right. Probation. And sealing.”

“No expungement?”

“They did get expungement, on the ones that were dismissed.”

“And this one, for rape, it was dismissed?”

“That one, too.”

“But don’t the cops have to destroy the photos and prints when the court—?”

“Please!” she said scornfully.

“Sorry. You have anything else?”

“Oh, there’s a lot. The boys were impressive athletes in high school. Brett was a wrestler; Bryce played lacrosse. Despite marginal transcripts, they each did very well on the SATs. They went to school upstate, on full scholarships.”

“And...?”

“On their records, it says they withdrew. Truth, they were kicked out.”

“You know what for?”

“They’re rapists,” she said, cold and flat. “But even with all those muscles, they’d still rather use drugs.”

“Date-rape drugs?”

“Oh yes. More than once, at that same school. Nothing ever proven. What they could prove was steroids. Using and selling.”

“That was...back in ’97. They get popped any since then?”

“Sure. They’re hired muscle; it goes with the job description. But the victims not pressing charges, that’s one of the job benefits. So getting busted, it’s only a minor inconvenience. Never lasts long.”

“Are they mobbed up?”

“Not that I could see. And they don’t seem to have any ambition to go into business for themselves. They may be twins, but they’re not exactly the Krays.”

“You have an address?” I said, getting to it.

“All the paper we could find in New York directs to the same place, out on the Island. But that’s their parents’ house—they haven’t lived there for years.”

“Damn.”

“They’re in Jersey now, I’m pretty sure.”

“How come?”

“Because I know where they work,” Wolfe said, handing me a piece of paper.

“Is it a mob joint?”

“You mean, does a family own it?” Giovanni replied. “I don’t know; I can find out. But that’s territory, down there. I mean, it’s mapped territory. So a family man may own it, or may have a piece of it. Or not. But no matter what, I promise you this much: to operate a strip joint anywhere within a hundred miles of Trenton, they’re paying tolls.”

“I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.”

“I can handle it.”

“See, that’s the thing,” I told him. “It can’t be handled in front. If I work this right, there’s no reason for anyone to know I’ve even been there. It only has to be handled if the wheels come off. That happens, I just want to be sure these guys aren’t able to call in any heavy artillery.”

“Give me a couple of days,” he said.

“They’re not with this Vision guy,” I said. “No reason why they wouldn’t talk to me, especially for some cash.”

“Why not ask boss?” Mama said.

“I’m not...”

“Ask their boss. For permission. Boss say, You talk,” she said, pointing her finger at me, “they talk, right?”

“You’re right, Mama. Only the person who’d have to ask their boss, Giovanni, he can’t come into this.”

“Ah.”

“I don’t feature those ’roid boys, bro,” the Prof said. “Motherfuckers would have to mainline Valium to get calm enough to reason with.”

“I’m still saying, why not?” I insisted. “They’re not master criminals. Or even angle-players. Just muscle-for-hire. I’m not interested in anything they did. All I want is where to find the guy who makes the tapes.”

“It sounds so reasonable, mahn,” Clarence said. “But my father’s wisdom is a good guide. If they do not...accept you, you must be prepared.”

“Take Max,” Mama said, settling it.

“Max, Giovanni. Giovanni, Max.”

Giovanni extended his hand. Max shook it briefly, bowing his head a fraction of an inch.

“I heard about him,” he said to me. “Max the Silent.”

“He’s in the room,” I said.

“I’m sorry. I thought he...you couldn’t hear,” he said, turning to Max.

Max pointed to his lips, then folded his hands into a book, scanned it with his eyes.

“You read lips!” Giovanni said—delighted, like a kid who just got a present.

Max nodded.

“It’s better to gesture while you speak,” I said. “And you have to watch Max to hear what he’s saying, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said to me, impatient. To Max: “You’re a karate expert, right?” stepping into a boxer’s crouch.

Max held his thumb and forefinger close together.

“He says ‘a little bit,’” I told Giovanni.

“I can see what’s he saying, Burke.” Giovanni took a coin from his pocket, held it out on his open palm. He made a gesture of snatching the coin away with his other hand, then extended the coin hand toward Max.

Max’s lips twisted. He made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, held it to one eye, and mimed cranking a reel with the other.

“Only in the movies!” Giovanni laughed. “I love it. Your friend is some—”

The coin jumped off Giovanni’s palm into the air. Max opened his fist. The coin was inside.

“Christ! How’d he—” Giovanni caught himself, turned to Max, said, “How’d you do it?”

Max handed the coin back to Giovanni. Opened his hand, tapped the palm. Giovanni nodded, replaced the coin in his own hand. Max moved his right hand, slow-motion, so we could see the middle two fingers welded together. He swept them beneath Giovanni’s palm, touched the underside of that same hand.... The coin jumped up like his palm was a trampoline. Max’s hand flashed, and the coin vanished again.

“Madonna mi!” Giovanni said. “I never saw it. Not any of it.”

“You never would,” I told him.

The joint was a free-standing one-story building in the middle of a partly paved lot. It looked like a warehouse wrapped in neon.

“He’s inside,” I said to Giovanni. I pointed toward the back, nodded a “Yes” so that Max could hear, too. “It’s him. Or, I should say, one of them. They’ve got him working the curtain.”

“Lowlife skell,” Giovanni muttered.

“We don’t care what he is,” I told him. “Just what he knows, remember?”

“I’m ice,” Giovanni assured me.

I turned to Max. Made a gesture of driving a ridge hand to the neck, shook my head “No.”

Max nodded, patiently. We’d been over it a dozen times. One thing I learned as a kid—even if you hit someone a good shot, especially with something like a tire iron, you never know the result. One guy gets a headache; another one gets dead.

“It’s a little after two,” I said to Giovanni. “I don’t know how long they keep a place like this open, but I figure we’re in for a wait.”

“Yeah. Maybe some of those hillbillies like to stay up late, catch the Grand Slam at Denny’s before work.”

“We’re not that far from Trenton here.”

“Far enough,” Giovanni said. “This is like something out of fucking Kansas, all those farms and crap.”

“If he lives close by, we’d have a lot of trouble tailing him, especially if it’s off one of those back roads we passed on the way in. I don’t want to spook him. So we’re going with the original plan.”

“You know what he’s driving?”

“No. But there won’t be many left in the parking lot after closing time.”

“I don’t see why we don’t just stick a pistola in his mouth. He’s a sex freak, right? I never heard of one of them that was a hard guy.”

“You watch too many movies,” I told him.

“What’s that mean?”

“I’ve known baby-rapers who were cold as winter marble, and twice as hard. Stereotypes can get you killed. We’re trying cash first.”

“You’re the driver,” Giovanni said, settling down in the back seat to wait.

I passed some of the time by taking a set of Velcro-backed New Mexico plates out of the trunk. They were handcrafted fakes—two different sets cut down the middle, with the mismatched halves epoxied back together. I slapped them over the New York ones that matched the Plymouth’s registration, using a simple loop. I didn’t expect anyone to be reading the numbers, but their sunburst-yellow color might stick in someone’s memory bank, give us a little edge.

My watch said four-nineteen when the back door opened and he came out. By then, there were only three cars in the rear lot: a black Lincoln Navigator; a turquoise Thunderbird, one of the new ones; and a red Mustang drop-top resting on huge chromed rims.

“Three to one on the Mustang,” I said to Giovanni.

“Go!” he whispered.

The target was wearing a waist-length white satin jacket, carrying what looked like a gym bag in one hand. I opened the door to the Plymouth. The dome light didn’t go on. I slipped out, leaving the door slightly ajar.

I hadn’t gone ten yards when I heard a sharp chirp! The Mustang sprang to life like something in a horror movie: the headlights snapped on, then the engine turned over. Was someone waiting for—? His arm was extended, holding something. Sure. One of those remote starter devices they sell to people in real cold climates, so they can warm up their cars without leaving the house.

I moved sideways until I was coming from behind him, as if I’d been inside the club all along.

“Mr. Heltman...?” I called out, in a respectful tone.

He whirled to face me, pulling the gym bag behind his hip like he was cocking a right hook.

“Who’re you?”

“My name is Casey,” I told him, closing the space between us. “I wonder if I could buy some of your time.”

“For what?”

“Just to talk. About a business proposition,” I said, still moving.

“I don’t know you,” he said.

I was close enough to see the thick veins in his neck. “Well, let me introduce myself,” I said. “As I said, my name’s—”

“Cocksucker!” he grunted, driving his left into my ribs.

I was already spinning away from him when the punch landed, but it still felt like an anvil on a chain. I went down, rolling. He charged, the gym bag held club-high in his right hand. I X-ed my forearms for protection, brought a knee up to shield my groin, just as he...made a strangled sound and staggered back. Max had him in a one-arm choke. But when he shifted his weight to lock it in, the twin screamed—and launched Max over his back like a catapult.

Max landed on one knee, pivoted and came up ready to...But Heltman was already sprinting in the opposite direction.

The Mustang roared out of the lot, leaving us both on the ground.

Max beat me to the Plymouth by a couple of seconds, dived into the back. The motor was idling quiet, Giovanni behind the wheel. I shoved him over, stomped the gas, and plowed sideways across the gravel, the Mustang’s lights still in sight. I took the hint, hit the rocker switch on the dash, and our own taillights went dead.

He had maybe a quarter-mile on us as he wheeled onto a stretch of two-lane blacktop. The Plymouth swallowed the distance in a gulp.

“He’s heading for home,” I yelled. “We don’t stop him first, we’re done.”

“He’s the one who’s done,” Giovanni said, jerking a chrome semi-auto out of an ankle holster. “Get alongside of him.”

The Mustang’s taillights were huge in our windshield. They went bright red as it skidded almost to a full stop before suddenly lurching off to the left.

“He knows he can’t take us on the straights, so he’s going for the twisties,” I said.

“He’s ours,” Giovanni said, patting the Plymouth’s dash affectionately.

Heltman knew the roads, but it wasn’t enough. I held the Plymouth in second gear, barnacled to his rear bumper.

The Mustang slashed back and forth, trying to shake us loose. I had to end it before the noise woke up the wrong people. As he leaned into a long right-hand sweeper, I hit the high beams and the landing lights at the same time, flooding his mirror with blue-and-white fire. I dropped the hammer. The Mustang seemed suspended in place as the Plymouth came on like a rock from a slingshot, dead-aimed at his exposed right rear quarter-panel. I rammed the soft spot, and he lost it. The Mustang went into a wild spin as we powered on past.

I decked the brakes, threw it into reverse, and ripped back to the scene, Giovanni watching out his opened window. The Mustang was against a tree, crushed all the way into the windshield. Its airbag had deployed, but the driver’s face was buried under blood—he hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt.

Max hauled him out and laid him out on the ground.

“His wallet,” I said to Giovanni. “Quick! We need an address.”

I ran back to the Mustang, wrenched open the glove compartment. A pair of black leather gloves, some condoms, and the owner’s manual. The gym bag was on the floor in front of the passenger seat. I ran back to where the others were.

“He’s out,” Giovanni said. “This was in his back pocket”—holding up an alligator billfold.

“We’ve got to split,” I told him. “Even way out here, someone might have heard the crash, called it in. Don’t worry about him; he won’t be able to identify any of us.”

Giovanni looked down at the sprawled body, said, “Any chance he was one of the ones?”

“Giovanni...”

“One of the ones that killed my daughter?”

“I don’t know. Come on!”

Giovanni dropped to one knee, pinched the twin’s nose closed with one hand, blocked his mouth with the other.

“Giovanni, no! It’ll take minutes for that to...”

Max grabbed Giovanni under his arms, lifted him off the ground, and tossed him to the side. He looked at me. I nodded. Max rolled the twin on his stomach, mounted him, one knee against the spine. He took the twin’s head in both hands, pulled it all the way back, and gave it a short, vicious twist.

“Maiden Lane,” I said, my mini-Mag trained on the driver’s license we’d found in the dead man’s wallet. “That’s right around here, close by; I remember seeing it on the map. This must be a good address. Only I can’t see asking for directions at this hour. Even a gas-station attendant would...”

“Maiden Lane,” Giovanni said into his cell phone.

He listened for a minute, then said, “Drive, Burke. We’ve got a street map on the screen. Just go where I tell you.”

The Plymouth’s right-side low beams still worked, but they threw light at the same angle as the Mustang driver’s neck. I couldn’t feel any difference in the steering; it tracked straight and true. When you build a car to bounce off the wall at Talladega, nerfing a Mustang isn’t going to change its personality.

The wood-frame house stood well back from the road. My flash picked up a “30” on the mailbox.

“This is the one,” I said. “Let Max out,” I told Giovanni.

I counted to a hundred in my head, said, “Some of the lights are on. He’s not going to spook at a car coming up the drive; he’ll be expecting his brother. Max is going to come in from the back. Ready?”

“Yeah, yeah. Come on!”

I motored up the long driveway, not trying to be especially quiet, but not making a show of it, either. As soon as I saw the pristine red Mustang convertible at the far end, I knew the dead man’s driver’s license hadn’t lied.

We walked up to the front door, Giovanni behind me and to my left. I pounded on the door with the side of my fist.

Nothing.

I did it again.

Heard sounds of someone moving, somewhere in the house.

I pounded harder.

“Who is it?” An angry, guarded voice, slurred with...sleep?

“Fucking key!” I grunted, hitting the door again.

The door opened a little. “You asshole...,” someone said. I hit the door with my shoulder, drove it open as Giovanni slipstreamed in behind me, his pistol up. The twin chopped at Giovanni’s wrist, as panther-quick as his brother had been. The pistol hit the floor. I dived for it, took a sharp kick in the side of my neck. Giovanni was against the wall, his right arm dangling useless at his side. “Come on, pussy!” he offered the twin.

But Max had him by then. With both arms this time.

“Move the car around the back,” I told Giovanni, urgently. “Make sure it’s in shadow. I don’t know how fast they’ll find the wreck, but if they run its plates, they could be coming here, and we’ll need the edge. Pull the dummy plates off the Plymouth. And take that white square off the driver’s-side door. It’s not painted on—just a piece of vinyl—there’s a couple of pull-tabs along the top.”

In the back bedroom, I found a woman. Naked, lying on her belly, head twisted to one side. She was breathing raggedly through a wide-open mouth, a thin line of drool trailing down her chin to her neck. A large blue dildo was sticking out of her like a freakish flagpole, anchored in what looked like dried blood.

“Filthy fucking animals,” Giovanni said, over my shoulder.

“An address book,” I reminded him. “Anything that looks like names and phone numbers.”

I was expecting a computer. Hoping for a laptop.

Nothing.

There was a big-screen TV and a VCR, but the tape collection was all commercial porn.

A sharp crack! Max snaps his fingers when he wants you to come and he’s out of sight-line.

Even with handcuffs on his wrists, the twin looked dangerous. Giovanni held the pistol in his left hand. Max kept his forearm over the twin’s Adam’s apple.

“We came for the tapes,” I told him, flat. His brother had taught me not to offer money, so I was groping, blind.

“I don’t know nothing about no—”

“Then you’re dead,” I said, doing the math for him.

“Who sent—?”

“Vision, who else? Now guess how many times I’m going to ask you again.”

“That little cocksucker. He said we could—”

“He changed his mind,” I said, placing my bet. “This is simple enough even for you, wet-brain. Yes or no. Live or die.”

“I...I got it hidden.”

“It better be hidden here.”

“You’re gonna kill me anyway,” he said, stalling. Thinking his brother would be home soon.

“We just want the tapes, you fucking moron,” I told him, lying with my eyes.

“What for? I mean, all we got’s a copy. He said we could—”

“He doesn’t want it floating around no more,” I said. “Come on. You give us what we came for, that’s the end of it.”

“You swear?”

“May my mother die,” I said. The one statement I could always pass a polygraph on.

“Let me get up.”

I nodded to Max, who changed grips.

The kitchen counter was lined with gallon-sized plastic jars of bodybuilding supplements. A stainless steel blender stood next to several bottles of yohimbe and shark cartilage. The hiding place was a cut-out slot in the wall behind the double-wide refrigerator. Not bad, actually—if Max had to strain to wrench it away from the wall, it would take at least two normal men to do the job.

I unwrapped the package like it was a Bomb Squad assignment. “There’s only one tape here, pal,” I said to the twin, looking at the standard-size cassette. The label showed four naked women, on their hands and knees in rows of two. They were yoked together by some kind of harness. Standing behind them, another woman in porno-regulation black leather, brandishing a whip. The title said: International Slut Racing Tournament!

“That’s the only one he let us keep,” he said, annoyed. “It’s proof, man. That we didn’t do anything. It don’t show no...Hey! What are you going to do?”

“We’re going to watch the movie,” I said.

The tape opened with a woman standing at an easel on which the rules of the race were printed, taking questions from an audience of “reporters.” The race contestants were all chained to a long wall, waiting. Some were facing the wall; others looked at the camera. A couple were lapping up something from bowls with their names on them.

“This is just—” Giovanni said, before I cut him off with a chopping motion of my right hand.

The tape rolled on, as predictable as a fixed fight, then suddenly became a plain gray screen with white lines of static running horizontally. Another few seconds passed; then...

A long corridor, mostly dark, with a few pools of reflected light. Looked like an industrial building, maybe an old factory. Abandoned, or maybe just closed for the night. A figure flitted past the far corner, then disappeared—all I could see was some kind of black robe, with a hood.

And a long knife.

A woman zipped across the screen. She was dressed in white shorts and a white T-shirt, white sneakers and white socks. A white hair-ribbon flamed from her dark hair as she ran.

Another black robe popped out of a doorway.

The only sound was breathing. Two, three separate tracks, as distinctive as voices would have been.

The woman in white turned a corner. Stopped when she spotted a ladder. Hesitated, as if making up her mind, then started to climb. The camera filled the frame with her from the waist down, coming in tight on her buttocks and thighs, frantic, in sync with her high, frightened breathing.

Somewhere behind her, confident, in-control breathing. Low-register grunting. Getting louder.

The woman made it to a higher floor. A more open space than what she’d left, but still mazelike from the play of shadow against lighter pockets of dark.

The images chased each other for what seemed like a long time, sometimes running, sometimes creeping. It was half-ass- surrealistic, black-and-white-in-color “symbolism.” A bad movie with a worse script.

Suddenly, the woman in white turned a shadow corner and ground to a stop in a puddle of diffused light. The black robes, two of them, had her bracketed. The camera rushed in on her face as she opened her mouth to scream, her eyes wide with shock.

Vonni.

I turned to the handcuffed twin, said “Where was the—?” just as Giovanni put his pistol against Heltman’s temple and blew skull fragments all over the room.

“The shell casing,” I said. “Find it, Giovanni.”

“I...”

“We don’t have time!” I snapped at him, and ran for the back bedroom.

The sodomized woman hadn’t even twitched. The drugs they’d fed her must have been near-terminal.

“They were the ones,” Giovanni said. “It was them who...”

I didn’t say anything.

“Burke, he had to go.”

“I’m not arguing.”

“But I shouldn’t have...gone off like that, right? We should have made him tell us—”

“It’s done,” I said, as I slid the Plymouth through wide streets, past landscaped lawns. “Get Felix on the phone, tell him we’re coming in.”

“There!” Giovanni said, pointing at a substantial brick Tudor, barely visible from the street.

Even as he spoke, the garage door started going up.

“That was slick, that pull-off stuff you got,” Giovanni said. He was talking to keep from going jagged, and I let him run with it. “When I yanked it off, it looked like a different car.”

“I must have swapped paint with that Mustang somewhere,” I said. “I’m going to need a whole new front end clip.”

“I’m good for—”

“I know,” I told him. “That’s not the problem now. Thing is, can I leave my car here?”

“Felix?” he asked his partner.

“For a couple of days, no problem. I can have someone come by, flat-bed it out, get it to the crusher.”

“No way!” Giovanni said. “You should have seen how this—”

“It doesn’t have to be disposed of,” I told Felix. “Just worked on. The people you’re talking about, they’re trustworthy?”

“Mi famiglia,” he said.

We pulled out in the late afternoon, me and Max in Giovanni’s BMW, Felix and Giovanni in a cream-colored Infiniti Q45. By Exit 12 on the Jersey Turnpike, we lost sight of them.

The Mustang driver’s wallet had nothing in it but cash, a few credit cards, and assorted ID, all in the name of Brett Heltman.

But his gym bag was the other side of the legit coin—a red-zone pharmacy. Dozens of clear plastic sheets of pop-out Dianabol pills, a half-dozen dark little rubber-topped bottles of Testovit, and a huge assortment of different kinds of alleged “andro,” flies just under the FDA’s radar. Inside the bag’s flap pockets were a Rambo knife, a cell phone, a handful of syringes, individually wrapped. And one of those “personal digital assistants,” a Palm m105.

I ran through the cell phone’s menu. All the stored numbers were 609 area codes, local. The last number the twin had dialed was to a gym.

That left the PDA. “He liked gadgets,” I told the crew, remembering his remote-starter trick. “I don’t even want to turn this damn thing on. Maybe he’s got it passworded or something, nuke everything if you do it wrong.”

“Give it to me,” the Mole said.

“It’s an emergency, Pepper.”

“Leave your number, chief. And not a wireless.”

“That one’s an NV, too?” Cyn said, tilting her head in the direction of the cassette I’d brought back from New Jersey.

“Yeah.”

“Burke...Burke, what does it mean?”

“I think I know, now,” I told her. “The NV tapes, for some of the people in them it’s an acting job, and for some it’s the real thing.”

“But the guy making the movies...?”

“For him, it’s all real,” I said. “And he’s in charge.”

“How many?” Wolfe, on the phone.

“A hundred and seventy-seven, total,” I told her, the results of the Mole’s invasion of the Palm Pilot spread out in front of me. “But—”

“You’re joking.”

“But I only need the 516 and 631 ones.”

“And that’s...?”

“Seventy-one.”

She made a sound of disgust. Asked, “The names on each bill?”

“Names and addresses. But if any one of them made calls to or received calls from these numbers,” I said, giving her the number from the cell phone in the gym bag, and the one I’d copied off the wall phone in their kitchen, “that’s the only one I need.”

“This could take—”

“Price no object,” I said. “Even a few hours could mean the difference.”

I became a news junkie: print, radio, and TV going simultaneously, scanning for “Twin Brothers Found Murdered in New Jersey!”

Nothing.

There was always the chance that the cops hadn’t connected what they thought was a hit-and-run with what had to be a deliberate homicide—maybe the Mustang’s plates dead-ended instead of taking them to the address we’d pulled from the driver’s license. Or maybe the woman in the back bedroom gave them enough likely suspects to keep them working local for a long time.

Or maybe they were keeping the media lid down until they tightened the noose.

“You understand it’s not like the City out there,” Wolfe said, on the phone. “You’ve got 516 for Nassau, 631 for Suffolk, but 516 is also the area code for all the cell phones on Long Island. There’s no separate cell prefix, like our 917.”

“And you can’t get into cell phone records because there’s so many different...?”

“We got one hit,” she went on, like I hadn’t said anything. “Out of all seventy-one numbers, only one call was made to either of the Jersey numbers. It went to their house phone.”

“When?”

“About six weeks ago.”

“Do you have the—?”

“I don’t think you’re getting this,” she said. “What I did, I had...some people do a back-check. Instead of pulling all the records for seventy-one customers, they focused on matching any of those numbers with the phone records for the Jersey numbers...the two you gave me, understand?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering how my brain had gone so numb. Grateful that Wolfe’s never did.

“And what we found was a cluster of calls,” she said, crisp to the edge of impatience. “A pattern. Mostly from the cell, a few from the house. All to the same number in Suffolk County. And when we looked at that customer’s records, we found that single call to the house in Jersey I just told you about. Clear enough?”

“Perfect.”

“Not so perfect,” she said. “The calling number’s a cell phone. The customer’s name is Robert Jones. And the address is a PO box. The credit card’s a dud, too.”

“Byron, can you do something for me? With the studio?”

“I only paid the interest, brother.” A honeyed baritone voice on the phone. “Just say what you need.”

“The Lloyd Segan Company. How may I direct your call?”

“To Mr. Segan, please,” I said, pronouncing the name with the accent on the first syllable, like Byron had said to.

“May I tell Mr. Segan who is calling?”

“My name is Burke. I was told he’d be expecting my—”

“Mr. Burke, yes. Hold, please.”

A short pause, then...

“Lloyd Segan.”

“Mr. Segan...”

“Lloyd.”

“Lloyd. My name is Burke. Byron said you’d—”

“What can I do for you?” the man said, his voice friendly with warmth and sharp-edged at the same time.

“What I need, Lloyd, is a favor. A number someone can call, and someone to answer it, do a little routine. And some...coaching, I guess you’d call it. So I can play my role.”

Two-thirty in the afternoon. Half past eleven in Hollywood.

I pointed across the room, where Michelle was poised at the desk, a headset buried somewhere in her hair, only the mouthpiece at the end of the wand visible.

She nodded, blew me a kiss, and dialed.

I tried to hear the phone ring at the other end in my mind—we couldn’t risk putting it on speaker.

“Good afternoon, I have Mr. Chenowith, from Acidfree Productions, for Mr. Vision.”

...

“Oh, certainly, sir. We’re at area code 323....”

“What’s he doing?” Cyn asked, pacing anxiously.

“Checking out Acidfree Productions,” I told her. “Or getting across a border.”

When the direct line rang, I knew Lloyd had come through. Now it was time to see how good a coach he was.

“Acidfree Productions,” Rejji answered the bounced call.

...

“Mr. Vision, is Mr. Chenowith expecting your call?”

...

“Hold, please,” she said, sliding out of the chair as Michelle slid in, giving Rejji a “Nice job!” pat on the bottom.

“Mr. Chenowith’s office,” Michelle said.

...

“Oh, Mr. Vision. Thank you so much for calling. May I give you to Mr. Chenowith?”

...

Michelle pointed at me. I took a centering breath, picked up the extension, said, “This is Stan Chenowith. Do I have The Vision himself?”

Rejji dropped to her knees in front of me, hands clasped. Not playing. Praying.

“I can get word to him,” the voice said.

“Oh. All right. Can you tell him we would like to take a meeting with him, concerning backing one of his projects?”

“What do you mean, backing?”

“Well, financing, actually. I don’t know what you know about our—”

“I know how it works,” the voice said, as if I’d offended him. “How did you...I mean, have you seen any of...the work?”

“To be honest, I have not,” I said. “But you know how this industry works. The buzz is that The Vision is going to be very hot. And if you think the elevator’s going up, way up, the ground floor’s the best place to get on.”

“People are talking about...the work?”

“Oh, everybody’s talking about it. Word is, he’s on the edge. New concepts. I’ve heard Blair Witch meets Fight Club; is that outrageous? But, I have to tell you, your client isn’t the easiest man to get hold of.”

“Where would this meeting be?”

“That would be up to him, of course. I’m only calling now because I have to red-eye in tomorrow, and I’d hoped we could get together in the evening. But if that’s not convenient...”

“You’d meet in New York?”

“At the Helmsley Park Lane. On Central Park South,” I said, underlining that I was a Holy Coaster. A New Yorker would have said “Fifty-ninth Street.” “If that would be all right. It’s where I always stay.”

“What time?”

“Any time The Vision wants. We bring more than money to our projects. We bring flexibility.”

“Like nine o’clock?”

“You got it! Just have The Vision come to the front desk and ask for my suite. One of my people will come down to get him. Or would you like us to send a car...?”

“Okay.”

“Okay, you’ll ask The Vision?”

“No. Okay, he’ll be there. I can...I have the authority to make commitments for him.”

“Will you be coming, too, Mr....?”

“Just him,” he said.

“I was afraid you were going to lose him,” Cyn said. “Why didn’t you tell him you’d actually seen his ‘work’?”

“Way too risky,” I told her. “Next thing, he asks me which of the tapes I’ve seen. And, in his mind, he’s wondering how I got them. Besides, it would make sense to him that the ‘word’s out’ without anyone actually seeing product.”

“You’ve got him hooked, honey,” Michelle assured me.

“I would have felt better if he’d let us send that car for him,” I said.

“I know why Vonni had those tapes now. This Vision—he gave them to her. Let her in on his high-concept idea. Because he knew he had her.”

“She wanted it,” the Prof agreed.

“Wanted what, then?” Clarence.

“Wanted to be a star,” Michelle put in. “Or maybe that’s not fair to her. Wanted to be in the movies, anyway. Remember, she was in the drama club....”

“And she left that morning, she told the little boy she was going to be famous,” Cyn put in.

“That tape? The one of her running into nowhere?” I said to them all. “I know what it was now. A rehearsal. Vision wanted her to prove she could act frightened to death. That was her role.”

Nobody said anything.

“That was her role,” I went on. “And right up to the end, she thought she was playing it.”

I was connected to Vision as close as if we shared an artery. Desire and fear warring in both of us, pumping our blood. I could feel him. He wanted it to be true, a Hollywood production company discovering him, making him rich and famous. Power, spreading long sweet shapely legs for him.

But had they really heard of him? And what had they heard?

Come or run?

And me? What if he didn’t show? What if I’d spooked him, given him a head start? How much money did a guy like that have? Did he already have a backup plan, a place to run to?

The door opened. Cyn. Dressed in a black sheath. And Rejji. Nude.

“We couldn’t sleep, either,” Cyn said.

“No!”

“It’ll be subtle,” Giovanni promised me. “I’ve been in plenty of places like this before. The guys who work the desk, they’re used to a little grease.”

“Forget it.”

“You say we don’t know what he looks like...and that’s right. But he doesn’t know us, either. We’ll be in the lobby, just hanging. We scoped it out. The registration desk’s way over to one side; he won’t even look where we’ll be, okay? The desk man gives us the high sign, and...”

“And what? You jump him right there, in front of fifty witnesses, minimum?”

“Come on! I just want to—”

“You just want to fuck this up,” I said, very quiet and calm. “One, he could send someone else. Like a point man, see if this whole thing’s for real. So we have to talk to him, see if he is, understand? Two, you pay a man for a service, doesn’t mean someone else can’t pay him, later, to talk about it. You get all anxious now, you’re going to blow it up.”

“I’ve got to be there,” he said, adamant.

“So you can lose it? Again? You’re putting me in a cross, Giovanni. We needed a public place to meet, the ritzier the better. You see how the joint’s laid out, how many people we’re going to need to make it work. You think you can bang a guy out in a hotel lobby in that neighborhood, and just fade?”

“I’m not going to—”

“You’re not going to be there, period. You said I was driving the car, remember?”

“Burke, listen to me,” he said urgently. “He’s the one. Not the feds, him. I was blind insane to ever think it could be...but who could have ever...I...Burke, he fucking made a movie of my...”

“The only way we’re going to know for sure is if he talks. That’s what I do. What I’m good at. You’re not. You only know the one way,” I said.

“So?” he demanded. “You think he could—?”

“Who are you talking to, Giovanni? Some Godfather fan? You stick a gun in a guy’s mouth, cock the trigger, maybe he spills, that’s right. And maybe he panics. Goes catatonic. Has a heart attack. Who knows? Thing is, you don’t. Nobody does.

“And you can’t ever trust what someone says, a situation like that. He’s going to say whatever he thinks you want him to say. A nine-millimeter’s not a lie detector.

“If all you want to do is take him off the count, you do it away from me. Far away. But you can’t even do that until you know he’s the right guy, because if you do the wrong guy this time you’ll never get another chance.”

Giovanni bowed his head, clasped his hands, as if asking for strength. When he opened his eyes, they were clear and calm. “You be the lie detector, Burke,” he said. “Soon as you know for sure, you just ring me. I’ll be right downstairs.”

“I’ve been with you on this?” I put it to him. “Right down the line?”

“You have,” he said, no hesitation.

“Then listen to me now,” I told him. “Because I’ve got a better idea.”

“Always it is the black man who is the chauffeur,” Clarence mock-complained. Trying to lighten the fear we all shared.

“So who should drive?” I asked him, playing along. “The Mole?”

“Schoolboy’s telling it true,” the Prof added. “I was still doing banks, I’d rather have Ray Charles for a wheelman.”

“Any of us could have been seen,” I said. “During all those ‘interviews’ we did. And maybe he’s got a pipeline—maybe more than a couple of those kids we spoke to were in one of his little movies. But I don’t think they were looking at anything besides the camera.”

“Without the patch, you look very different, honey,” Michelle assured me. “And once I add those streaks to your hair, and you put on a suit...”

“I’ve got a dynamite maid’s uniform,” Rejji said, grinning.

“I don’t want to overload it,” I said. “The way this suite’s laid out, we can keep him isolated. And if we do have to go to Plan B, the credit card we put it all on won’t tell them anything.”

They all nodded silently. Plan B was the Mole. In another room. On a higher floor. If he went into action, nobody was going to pay any attention to our two suites. Not with a fire raging through the hotel.

“Do I look all right?” Michelle asked. For maybe the tenth time in the last hour.

“You look gorgeous,” Rejji told her. “So in control. I love it.”

“You slut.” Michelle laughed.

I refused to look at my watch.

The phone rang.

Michelle started to fly across the room, stopped, smoothed her skirt over her hips, walked over, and picked it up just past the second ring.

“Yes, please?”

...

“Please tell the party that someone will be down to collect him directly. Thank you.”

She hung up.

“Oh God,” Rejji said.

“Keep it together, now, bitch,” Michelle said. “You’re up next.”

“Do you think it’s really going to be—?”

“No more,” I told Rejji, holding my finger to my lips.

A soft double rap at the door.

“Danielle!” I called out.

Rejji practically trotted over to the door. She stepped to the side as she held it open, one hand gently waving an invitation.

He was older than I thought he’d be, from the vague descriptions we’d gathered. Late twenties, early thirties. A bit taller than medium height, light-brown hair, cut into a neat sculpture. His face was narrow, with fleshy lips over the perfect teeth the NHB girl had remembered, large dark eyes the most prominent feature. Wearing a safari jacket, with a briefcase-sized red nylon bag on a strap over his shoulder.

Michelle stayed next to him, one hand on his arm, steering him over to me as I stood up to greet him.

“Mr. Chenowith...The Vision,” she made the introduction.

“Vision!” I said, extending my hand.

He took it, returning my moderate squeeze with a firm one of his own. His palm was as dry as statistics.

“Sit down, sit down,” I said, indicating the best chair in the room.

“Thanks, Mr.—”

“Stan, please. It’s me who’s honored to meet you, Vis...Can I call you ‘Vision’?”

“Yeah, sure. It’s my...it’s my name, for professional purposes.”

“It has real strength,” I congratulated him. “And, from what I’ve heard, it’s a perfect fit, too.”

“You’ve never seen my work, is that right, Mr....Stan?”

“Not a single frame of your reel,” I assured him. “But that’s...Ah, excuse me, I’m a little excited. Would you like something to drink?”

“Sure. Whatever you’re—”

“When you’re with us, Vision, it’s whatever you want. Danielle...”

Rejji sashayed over, bent forward just enough to show off a little, said, “What can I get you, sir?” to him.

“Uh...vodka rocks.”

“Yes, sir. Is Absolut all right?”

“Sure,” he said.

“I’ll have what The Vision is having,” I told her.

Michelle handed me a sheaf of papers, FedEx’ed over from Lloyd’s office, tapping one spot on the top page with a red talon.

“I don’t want to put any pressure on you,” I told him, “but I don’t want to insult you by not putting real cards on the table, either. As Alana just reminded me, we’re looking for a three-picture commitment.”

“A three-picture...?”

“With escalators, of course,” I assured him. “But you can understand why we don’t want to commit substantial development money to you if you’re free to just walk after the first one.”

“But you haven’t—”

“This isn’t about what you’ve done; it’s about what you’re going to do. Do you know what Hollywood runs on, Vision? Buzz! And you’ve got it going on. You’re all over it. The word’s out. Hot hot hot. Don’t get me wrong. We’ll want to see everything. But it’s not your reel that’s driving the car, it’s your concept, are you with me?”

“I didn’t realize word got out so—”

“This business is all about high-stakes gambling. Today becomes yesterday like that!” I said, snapping my fingers. “The winning bettors are the ones who can see tomorrow.”

Rejji put down coasters, handed us our drinks. I took out a red box of Dunhills, offered it to him. He took one, gratefully. Rejji reached in her apron, caught my slight shake of the head just in time. I wanted to see if he had his own lighter, and if a cigarette would calm him a little.

Yes. To both.

“So,” I said. “Tell me all about your concept.”

“Mr. Chenowith...” Michelle, pointing to the papers.

“All right, Alana,” I said to her. “It’s up to you,” I said to the target. “Do you want to see our offer first?”

“Well...”

“This is really just boilerplate,” I told him. “The blank spaces are where the numbers get filled in. I mean, some things are industry-standard, five points on the gross, separate card for the director’s credit.... You’re a writer-director, yes?”

“Absolutely. The way I—”

“Look, Vision, I won’t jerk you around. I’ve got a ceiling. A limit I can go to. But I promise you, promise you, that if your concept is as revolutionary as we’ve heard it is you’ll hit that ceiling. Right in this very contract. Fair enough?”

“I...I’d have to...”

“Well, of course, your people would have to look it over. I’m not a lawyer, either. My game’s finance; your game’s creativity. But that’s a marriage, am I right? Financing and creativity? That’s the way movies get made.”

“But when you said Blair Witch, I thought you—”

“You thought we were looking ultra-low-budget?” I said, in disbelief. “No way! I mean, look, I won’t deny that this is a business. We’re here to make money. But we know you have to bring some to get some. Our company can’t finance some hundred-million-dollar spectacle. And we don’t want to. We were thinking of a moderate investment. Say, two and a half to, maybe, four. All on digital.”

“That’s...”

“What? Not enough? Listen to me, Vision. It’s more than enough, believe me. We’ve got the distribution contacts, the overseas market—this isn’t some straight-to-video pitch I’m making here.”

“No. I mean, that could be...it could be plenty, if it was handled right.”

“Take the contracts with you,” I told him. “But, first, tell me about your concept. Tell me everything. So we can fill in some of those blanks.”

“My inspiration,” he said, leaning back, “my original inspiration was seeing one of those convenience-store holdups on videotape—not a re-enactment, the actual robbery—on one of those surveillance cameras they keep in those stores? I was struck by the...immediacy of it.”

He leaned forward to light another cigarette, then leaned back again for the first drag, keeping the interviewer on “Pause,” just as he’d rehearsed it in front of his mirror a thousand times.

Rejji came over, removed his near-empty tumbler, and deftly replaced it with a fresh drink, giving him a little extra wiggle, now that it was clear he was a VIP for real.

“There’s a power to that kind of...performance,” he intoned. “An impact never duplicated in conventional cinema. I became a kind of connoisseur of the entire...genre, if you will. There was something about those tapes that was absolutely special. Unique. So I decided to deconstruct the tapes as a totality. Not in the formal sense, of course,” he said, breezily, “more in the way of disassembling the mechanism...isolating the elements to understand the gestalt.

“From that work came my vision,” he said, in the solemnly portentous tone a pop star uses when explaining that global warming isn’t a cool thing.

“And your name,” I said, saluting him with an upraised glass.

“That wasn’t until later,” he corrected me. “Those surveillance tapes, the closest label you could put on them, artistically, would be a kind of cinéma vérité. But they’re not actually creations; they’re not even documentaries. Why? Because there’s no control—the filmmaker isn’t directing; it’s nothing more than the camera itself. Now, for some, that is the goal...to make the director disappear, so that the audience ‘sees’ directly into the life. But without control, there is no art. You might capture something fantastic on tape, but that’s just a question of being in the right place at the right time. That’s not art. It’s not even skill. Just dumb luck. The Zapruder film is world-famous, right? A piece of history. But nobody ever talks about his...gift. Or his art. And,” he said, in a tone of finality, “he never made anything else.”

“But you can’t direct real life,” I said, gently fanning the flame.

“No?” he said complacently.

“Well, how could you?” I asked. “I mean, if you direct it, then it’s...acting.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” he said, his voice getting tumescent with confidence. He segued into full lecture mode. “I remember watching that robbery tape. Over and over. Thinking how much better it could have been if they’d positioned themselves differently. Or said different words. Because just because something’s real doesn’t mean it’s even interesting. Much less art. That’s when I began scripting. Before that, all my work was just...filming. Without any real...vision,” he said, chuckling at himself. He shifted his shoulders, positioning himself to deliver another dose of insight. “For a while, I did straight vérité. Have you ever seen a dogfight?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve heard about them, but...they’re...I mean, only hillbillies do them, isn’t that true? Like cockfights being a Hispanic thing?”

“No...” He was starting to educate me, then caught himself before the topic veered too far from his favorite one. “Anyway, I filmed one. It was incredible. I filmed other things, too. Things you’d probably never see on tape in your life. But I couldn’t control any of it. So what I had was a lot of amazing footage, but none of it—even all of it together—would add up to a movie.

“It all...evolved,” he said. “It took a long time. Years. My next stage was when I used actors to ‘be’ real. I’d put them in situations, and whatever happened, happened. Kind of vérité cranked up. And what I saw was that I had a lot of control but it cost me the realism. Like, have you ever seen a trial on Court TV?”

“OJ,” I replied. “And when Frank Dux sued Jean-Claude Van Damme.” A safe Hollywood answer.

“Do you think any of them would have behaved the same way if they hadn’t known the cameras were on them every second? The lawyers, the witnesses, even the judge? And those ‘reality’ TV shows. Survivor? Right! Big Brother? Sure! That Jenny Jones thing, where the guy thought he was going to meet someone who had a secret crush on him, and it turned out to be another guy? But on camera, what happens? Not so much. Off camera? He fucking kills the queer. Blows him away. You see what I mean? What if I’d had that?”

I nodded, unwilling to interrupt the flow of something so important with speech.

“Don’t you see?” he said. “Even if all I did was set the...boundaries, like, it still wasn’t real. Because, if they knew the camera was rolling, that changed everything. I threw most of that crap out. You know what I called it, finally? Faux vérité!”

“Wow,” I said softly, overawed.

“Everybody’s a screenwriter,” he said caustically. “They want to write ‘realism’ and call it their ‘creation.’ But they don’t get it. If you create the realism, it isn’t real!”

“That is heavy,” I said. CV for cinéma vérité; FV for faux vérité. And NV...?

“That’s when it came to me,” he said. “Can I show you something?”

Without waiting for a response, he opened the flap on his shoulder bag and took out a cassette. I felt Michelle freeze next to me.

“You’ve got a VCR here...?”

“Of course,” Michelle assured him. She stood up and took the cassette from him, walked over to the console, turned it on, inserted the tape. She came back and handed the remote to Vision.

“Thanks,” he said. Without further preamble, he pointed the remote at the console and kicked the tape into life.

Darkness.

The camera’s eye picked up a synagogue.

“Jews!” a harsh, off-camera whisper. “Fucking Jews.”

Figures running across an expanse of lawn.

Heavy breathing.

Swastikas springing from spray cans.

“Heil Hitler!”

“The white man is coming, kike bastards!” A different voice.

Fade to black, deeper than darkness.

In the silence, I said, “How did you know they’d be—”

“What you’ve just seen,” he interrupted, “is a very early example of what I call noir vérité.”

“I love that name!” Michelle.

He bowed slightly, taking his due, but not finished opening our eyes. “With cinéma vérité, I had realism but not control,” he said. “With faux vérité, I had control but not realism. But with noir vérité, I finally had both.”

“How is that...I mean, how is what we just saw...both?” I asked him, my tone a study in confused admiration.

“How many actors did you see?”

“Uh...four, I think, right?”

“No,” he said. Waited a beat. “You saw one. One of them knew this was a movie. The other three, they thought they were going on an ‘action.’”

“You mean they were set up to...?”

“Not set up! They wanted to do exactly what they did. It was the actor’s assignment to get them to do it when they did it, and where they did it, that’s all. For the actor, this was a role. But for the others...”

“I think I under—”

“That was just the beginning,” he said. “The first step.”

“Now, who was acting in that one?” he asked, eyes on Rejji, who he’d spotted sneaking peeks at the screen.

“It can’t have been the one doing the paddling,” I said. “Why would the others have just gone along and—?”

“This is the final stage,” he said. “Or nearly it, anyway. Because they were all acting. But only one of them knew the script.”

“I don’t...”

“Okay, look,” he said, leaning forward, intense. “They all thought they were acting. In a movie. The script was this sorority thing...like you saw for yourself. But the girl doing the paddling, she was told that this was a different movie. And the plot of that movie was a girl who wants to get even with another girl, so she makes up this whole ‘movie’ thing.”

“Unreal!” I said.

“Completely real,” he corrected. “The concept is that everyone knows they’re on camera, but only some of them know that the script isn’t really the script. But even the ones who think they know, they don’t understand that their role is another role. One that only the director knows. And when it all comes together, at that perfect moment, it’s totally real. And totally under my direction.”

“Oh my God!” Michelle said.

“Noir vérité,” he said proudly. “That’s why it’s always done with a single camera. The last thing I want is a Rashomon effect. Here, each of the actors has his or her own reality, but the only truth is what goes into the camera. And there can be only one truth. That,” he said, pausing, the way he’d rehearsed this moment before his mirror so many times, “was my vision.”

“That’s...amazing,” I said. “So, in each movie you make, the star—”

“The catalyst,” he said. “Not the star. In noir vérité, there are no stars. Because there are no limits, do you see?”

“Not...really.”

“The ultimate control is the director’s. In noir vérité, the director directs. Not just the lines, or the sets. He directs reality. The catalyst—there can be more than one—their job is to create the opportunity for conduct. But the conduct itself is real.”

“So if you let the...person think they’re the catalyst, but they’re really playing the role of catalyst...?”

“Exactly,” he said.

“Everything I heard about you was gospel,” I told him, admiringly. “This is a new concept. Nobody’s got this one. And it truly has no limits. You could do...anything with it.”

“No limits,” he agreed.

“Couldn’t it ever get...I don’t know, out of hand?”

“Even if it did,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, “whatever happened, it wouldn’t be real. It would be something else entirely. My creation. Noir vérité.”

Before he left, he inked the deal memo Michelle handed him.

“I’ll just sign it ‘Vision,’ if that’s all right,” he said. “It’s the name I’ll be known by.”

“Oh, you already are,” I promised him. “We just need your Social Security number for the accounting department. You know, the tax boys. You better get used to a lot of attention from them, Vision.”

He put his copy of the contract into his briefcase, as Michelle tapped a single digit on her cellular.

“Please bring the car around,” she said. “You are to take our guest wherever he directs.”

“Better ring Fong, too,” I told her. “A little security wouldn’t hurt, considering...”

“Considering what?” The Vision asked me.

“Considering your signing bonus isn’t a check,” I told him. “Alana...”

Michelle handed me a Gucci bag of soft blue leather. I unzipped it, so Vision could see the banded stacks of bills. Then handed the bag to him.

He took it in both hands, torn. Then he made his decision and zipped it closed without counting. All class. Or maybe he wanted to keep the bag.

I’d expected a man so driven, he’d be almost vibrating with barely contained power. A psychopath, radiating evil ki. Not this. Not this lethal little cliché.

We shook hands.

Michelle took him downstairs, to the waiting limo.

“What if he—?”

“There’s no way,” I said to Rejji. “Not now.”

“Burke...”

“They heard it all?” I asked Cyn.

“Every word. I was right there.”

“I stationed Max behind Giovanni, just in case.”

“He didn’t move, Burke. Not a muscle. I don’t see how he did it. I wanted to...just...”

“How do you think I felt?” Rejji said to her. “And I was close enough to do it.”

“Why isn’t Michelle with you?” Cyn asked.

“She stayed behind to clean up anything he might have touched. And to check out. She’s going to ride over with Mole and the Prof.”

“And he can’t possibly...?”

“There’s some reality he doesn’t get to direct,” I promised her.

I pulled up to the barbed-wire-laced chain-link gate, flashed my brights three times.

The gate swung back from both sides. I drove the Plymouth through. The gate closed behind me.

“Watch those spike heels,” I told the women. “The ground here is all busted up.”

We got out. Made our way over to a small building with a single gas pump in front.

“You wait over there,” I told them. “Next to the car.”

The white stretch limo ghosted up to the gate, flashed its brights three times.

I watched as the gate swung back.

The limo pulled into the shadows.

The back door opened. The Vision climbed out, Max right behind him. The driver’s door opened, and Clarence stepped out, his semi-auto aimed at the ground.

I slipped back into the shadows, got to the shack before they arrived.

When the door opened, The Vision saw me sitting on an old office chair.

“Have a seat,” I told him, pointing to the chair’s mate.

“What...what are you doing? I thought we had—”

“Sit down, Vision,” I said gently. “I’ll explain everything.”

“People know where I am!” he said.

“You don’t even know where you are,” I told him. Words I’d said to another man, years ago. Another man like him. “That’s part of all this. Your own concept, right?”

His mouth opened, but he didn’t speak. His eyes were dull.

“Come on, sit down,” I said. “I have one more thing to show you.”

“I didn’t do anything,” he said, fear spiderwebbing his voice like a rock against a windshield.

“I know you didn’t,” I said, my voice wafting through the lattice of the professional interrogator’s faked empathy. “It was those insane twins, wasn’t it?”

“That’s what this is about? Those psychos? They’re steroid abusers. You know what that does to people. I never meant for them to—”

“Oh, I know, Vision,” I told him. “It’s not your fault that you’re a genius.”

“I’m not saying I’m a—”

“Well, even if you’re not, I am. Because you are, my friend. Noir vérité. It’s so strong, it just takes over. You never filmed the actual killing, did you?”

“No! I’m telling you, it wasn’t supposed to be...real. It’s...it’s like you said. They just got out of control. I wasn’t the director anymore. I wouldn’t film that.”

“I know.”

“You’re not a...producer, are you?”

“That’s exactly what I am,” I assured him. “And your concept, it just killed me. In fact, we’re going to be doing one of your projects, and that’s a promise.”

“Then all this...like, kidnapping stuff, you’re just...?”

“Making a movie,” I said. “Getting the feel of what you told us. Sorry if it looked scary. But I just wanted to see for my-self.”

“Oh! Oh, I get it. So when do I—?”

“Just sit here for a few minutes, Vision. I’ll have the car brought around for you.”

He expelled a long breath, said, “I thought—”

“Five minutes,” I promised him, and stepped out the door.

It took less than that for the limo to vanish.

I piloted the Plymouth carefully across the waste ground, the moon’s cold glare lighting the way.

Rejji was sitting next to me, her trembling thigh pressed against mine. She pointed at the shadow-shrouded building. “For real,” she whispered.

Giovanni and Felix didn’t come with us. The last I saw of them, they were putting on long black robes, adjusting the hoods over their heads.