Safe House

“That’s him,” she whispered as soon as we walked in the door. He was seated at a café-style table, alone. The table was alone too, standing isolated between two rows of booths against the windows, an island in empty space. I’d been in the joint before. And the Prof had visited yesterday too. No way that table was part of the usual decor—midtown space is way too expensive to set up a restaurant like that. Either he was connected deep or he paid heavy.

Not good news.

Four chairs at the little round table. He was occupying one, a colorless human in a G-man suit. A khaki raincoat with a dark brown zip-in liner was draped over one of the chairs.

We walked over. I took Crystal Beth’s coat off her shoulders, tossed it on top of his. Held out a chair for her. I took my own coat off, carefully draped it over Crystal Beth’s and sat down.

His face was bony and angular, but the flesh around his eyes was pouchy, dark half-moons under each one. His mouth was so thin you had to look twice to see it. Indoor skin. Or a night worker’s.

“You have something for me?” he said to Crystal Beth, somewhere between a question and a command.

“That’s why I’m here,” I told him.

He shifted his head a few micrometers. The pupils of his eyes were a muddy brown, running at the edges like imperfect yolks. “Mr. Burke,” he said.

“And you are . . . ?”

“Mr. Pryce.”

Nobody’s hands moved.

“She,” I said, nodding my head in Crystal Beth’s direction without dropping my eyes, “says you have a problem with something she wants to do.”

“Something she can’t do,” Pryce said, nothing in his voice.

“Because . . . ?”

“We’ve been through this,” he said. “If you’re here for muscle, you’re wasting your time.”

“Why would you think that?” I asked him. “I’m not muscle. That’s not what I do. There’s a problem. I thought maybe I could . . . add some perspective.”

“Yes?”

“She has a client who needs to do something about your . . . client?”

“Not my client,” he said, voice still empty.

“But someone you need to protect?”

“Not that either.”

“I’m not following you,” I said.

“Do you know why I picked this place?” he asked.

“It wasn’t for the service,” I said. Telling him I’d noticed that the waiter was giving the little table a wide berth.

“No. It was for the view. I don’t know your relationship to this . . . situation. You talked about a problem. I understand that I’m that problem to . . . her,” he said, nodding at Crystal Beth the same way I’d done. “And I wanted to be sure you weren’t hired to solve that problem.”

“I wasn’t hired,” I told him. “She’s in it, I’m in it.”

“If you say so,” he said indifferently. “But the problem could still get solved the same way.”

“Which is?”

He drummed his fingers on the tabletop. I noticed the fingers were all flesh-webbed—deep, right up to the first set of knuckles. A muscle twitched under his right eye. “Do you want me to talk in front of her?” he asked.

I could feel the heat from Crystal Beth next to me, but she didn’t move. “Sure,” I said, noncommittal.

He mimed opening a notebook, read from its imaginary pages. “Baby Boy Burke,” he said softly. “That’s what the birth certificate reads. Father unknown. Mother was sixteen at the time of your birth. Or so she told the hospital. A working prostitute . . .” He paused, but I didn’t react. Calling my mother a whore was nothing to me. I’d never met her.

“Baby Boy Burke was left in the hospital. Mother walked out. Presumed missing . . .

“Child was institutionally raised. Four foster homes. Removed from the third one following an investigation into . . . does it matter?”

“Not to me,” I said. Meaning: not anymore.

“Chronic runaway. Three placements. Same pattern. Returned to foster care. The last foster home was closed when it burned to the ground. Arson. Perpetrator never apprehended.”

Again he looked up. Again he saw me looking back.

“First conviction for gang-fighting,” he continued. “Age thirteen. Last placement as a youthful offender was for attempted murder with a handgun. Subsequent adult prison sentences for armed robbery, hijacking, and assault with intent. No current parole holds.”

I made the face of a man desperately trying to look mildly interested. Anyone with access to the computers could get everything he’d spit out so far.

“Employed as a mercenary by a rebel faction inside the Federal Republic of Nigeria between 1968 and 1969,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

“It wasn’t a rebel faction,” I told him. “It was a country. Its name was Biafra. And I was a relief worker, not a mercenary.”

“Yes. With the Red Cross, no doubt,” he said, lifting an eyebrow just a fraction.

I didn’t say anything. The man knew his business. That tribalistic insanity in Africa was the first time in history a Red Cross plane had ever been shot right out of the skies. Up to then, the Red Cross symbol had been a guarantee of safe passage, universally respected. That’s all changed now. . . . Ask anyone in Bosnia.

“Evacuated right near the end,” Pryce continued, “whereabouts unknown for several months. Since then, worked variously as a salesman of various products. No known affiliation with organized crime.”

He was wandering off the track now, mixing rumors with truth. Big deal.

“Listed as suspect in several apparently unrelated homicides over a period of a dozen years. Seven arrests, on a variety of charges, during that period. No convictions.”

I watched him roam through his invisible notebook, reading yesterday’s headlines. He wasn’t close.

“Also known as Arnold Haines. And Juan Rodriguez.”

Ah, that was bad. The Arnold Haines ID was a throwaway, good enough for renting cars and buying airline tickets. It was the name I used on the visiting lists at prisons where I still had contacts too. But Juan Rodriguez was me. My driver’s license, Social Security, everything. Juan was an employee of a junkyard in the South Bronx. Only I really owned the place. The manager wrote me a regular paycheck, did all the withholding and everything. I cashed it and kicked back a piece, but it squared me with IRS. It’s not illegal to use another identity, so long as there’s no intent to defraud.

My whole life was an intent to defraud. And now a carefully constructed piece of it was shot to hell. I kept my face bland, waiting for the rest.

“Known associates include . . .” He looked up at me, held my eyes. And said Wesley’s name out loud.

“Go fix your makeup,” I told Crystal Beth out of the side of my mouth.

As she started to stand up, Pryce made a “sit-down” gesture with his hand. She ignored him.

He pushed his chair back a few inches, looked around the restaurant. “I don’t like that,” he said. The muscle under his right eye jumped again, harder than before. When he interlocked his fingers, the webbing closed, forming a solid mass of pale flesh.

“You think Wesley’s dead?” I asked him, a threat so subtle only a guy who really knew the score would get it.

“Accounts vary,” he said evenly, not telling me if he’d missed it or if it didn’t faze him.

“She’s not your problem,” I told him, moving my head in Crystal Beth’s direction. “Me neither. I got no little notebook on you. When she comes back, we walk out of here. Out of your life, okay? Find another way.”

“There is no other way,” he said, putting his elbows on the table.

But not his cards.

“This guy, Lothar. The one you don’t want busted. He’s not yours, right?”

“That’s right.”

“And the people he’s with, you’re not with them?”

“No, Mr. Burke. I want them.”

“But when you get them, old Lothar walks away, right?” I said, getting it. Finally.

“That’s the deal,” he said. Flat-out, no more playing.

“He get the kid too?”

Pryce shrugged. He was a player all right. And the rest of us were nothing but chips.

“You’re by yourself,” I said. Not a question.

He didn’t react. Even the muscle under his eye was quiet.

“I’m not,” I told him. “Look in that notebook of yours—see what it says about who’s with me. All you can do is protect your boy Lothar from the law. Not from me. You’re worried about what I’m going to do? Think about it—why would I do it to you?”

“What are you saying?”

“Me? I’m not saying anything for your little tape recorder. All you got is this tired old ‘rogue-agent’ routine. And a bunch of halfass ‘info’ any cybergeek could vacuum. The only one committing crimes here is you, threatening a helpless woman to drop charges so some fucking Nazi can keep doing what he does. Promising him a baby as a booby prize. But if something happens to old Lothar, the game’s over, right?”

“Nothing is going to happen to Lothar.”

“I didn’t say it was. I’m just . . . theorizing, okay? What you’re doing, it’s a game. You say ‘Or else.’ Now I get to say ‘Or else, what?’ ”

“It’s not you that gets to say that, Mr. Burke.”

“The bitch will do what I tell her,” I promised him.

“She might,” he agreed, lipless mouth reluctantly releasing the words. “But she’s not the only one who gets a vote.”

“Intelligence,” I told him. “It’s a commodity. Like dope or diamonds. A thing people buy and sell, right?”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes they trade things too.”

“And you have something to trade?”

“You got to bring some to get some,” I said. “What you brought, it’s nothing. And you know it. Just showmanship. Flash and splash. If you’re telling the truth, there’s only one reason why you’re covering Lothar’s play. Maybe I could do something, get you what you want some other way.”

“Provided . . . ?”

“Provided you leave the baby. With the woman. The baby’s out.”

“He won’t—”

“And provided I get paid.”

“What possible guarantees could you—?”

“None right now. I have to see about some things first. Then we meet. You and me. Alone. Anywhere you say. Then we both ante up. Deal?”

“There isn’t much time.”

“Don’t spread it on so thick,” I told him. “There’s always some slack in the rope in these matrimonial things. We can stall the divorce papers, put the whole thing on hold.”

“That’s not the only—”

“Forty-eight hours. A little more if you want the meet to be after dark.”

His neck stiffened. I glanced behind him. Crystal Beth was approaching, slowly. I waved her over. She took her seat meekly, eyes downcast.

“Call her,” I said, jerking my head briefly in Crystal Beth’s direction. “Just tell her the place and the time. I’ll be there. And then you’ll decide.”

“All right,” he said.

“Can I drop the act now?” she asked, walking next to me in the street.

I reached behind her, grabbed one of her pigtails, pulled it sharply. She let out a little gasp. “You know who’s watching?” I asked her.

“No.”

“That’s your answer,” I said.

“Do you know why women always used to walk three paces behind their men?” Crystal Beth asked me as she pulled the jersey turtleneck over her head.

“Because they were property?” I offered, watching the black bra standing sharp against her dusky-rose skin.

“No. And not because they were submissive either. My mother explained it to me. Her people, the ones who didn’t go to the cities, they still do it that way.”

She untied the drawstring at the waist of the long skirt, let it fall to the floor. Then she hooked her thumbs in the top of the black tights and pulled them down. The black panties and bra looked like a modest bathing suit. “They usually had a child between them,” she said. “It was to make a box, to protect the child. If the woman turned around, they would be back-to-back, do you see?”

“Yeah. Like walking point and drag.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“In the jungle, military, you walk a column. The trails aren’t wide enough for more. You put the sharp man ahead, to watch. But you put the heavy firepower at the end, in case they close up behind you.”

“The woman had the harder job,” she said. “Looking behind you is always hardest.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“I am right,” she said, reaching behind her to unhook the bra. Her breasts were wide and round, not sticking out much. The small nipples were dark in the candlelight.

“If I get you a nice hanger, will you take off that beautiful suit?” she asked, walking over to where I was sitting.

She kept the black panties on until right near the end. Moving so slow, kissing and whispering, never impatient, holding my cock like she was taking its temperature, waiting for the right time.

“Can you hear that whistle now?” she whispered against my face.

I entered her then. Or maybe she took me in.

“Did I do it right?” she asked me later, propped on one elbow, looking down at my face, fire-specks of light from the candle playing across her tiny teeth.

“There is no ‘right,’ ” I told her, wishing women wouldn’t always pull that number when sex was done.

“Not . . . that.” She laughed deep in her throat. “I could tell about that. I knew it even . . . before.”

“Before . . . ?”

“Before you did,” she said, flashing a smile. “I meant with Pryce. In the restaurant.”

“Yeah, you did fine.”

“He’s a scary man.”

“There’s two pieces to that,” I said. “There’s the gun. And there’s pulling the trigger, understand?”

“I think so. I thought about that too. What good would it do him to . . . ruin people? It would be too late to stop us—we’d have already done it, right?”

“You know what loan sharks are?” I asked her.

“Sure,” she replied, cocking her head with a question she didn’t ask.

“You know why they break legs?”

“So people will pay.”

“What if the borrower’s broke? I mean, dry-well broke. Tap City. Nobody to touch, nothing to borrow against, nothing for the pawn shops. Every bridge burned. Say he’s already crippled from the last beating. Maybe got cancer too, okay? Maybe he’s ashamed of himself, for what he did to his family. Maybe the only thing he’s got left is some life-insurance policy. Maybe he wants to die and just doesn’t have the guts to do it himself. Any reason to kill him then?”

“Of course not. What good would it—?”

“It’s good for the reputation,” I said quietly. “Word gets out they totaled a guy for not coming up with the cash, it makes all the others pay attention. One killing is worth a lot of beatings, see?”

“So you think he . . . would do it anyway?”

“I don’t know him. But that’s the way he comes off. No way this is the only time he’s done this. Every working extortionist needs a head on a stake once in a while. It’s good advertising.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. You know why he wanted that meet out in public?”

“No. I met him before, and he wasn’t—”

“He thought maybe you were gonna solve your problem.”

“I don’t—”

“Cut him down,” I said softly. “Take him out. He goes away, your problems go away too, right?”

“Kill him?”

“Sure.”

“I wouldn’t—”

“He doesn’t know that. I didn’t either, until we met. He’s an info-player, stacking up his chips. That’s one he doesn’t have.”

“But . . .”

“He’s going to call you. Then you’re going to call me. I’m going to meet him. And then we’re going to decide, you and me.”

“Decide what?”

“If there’s a way out,” I told her. “A way you can live with.”

Early the next morning I stood on the paved area just off the Hudson River across from Riverside Drive, the hood up on my Plymouth like I was having engine trouble. The sun was just making its move. Light downtown-bound commuter traffic flowed past on the West Side Highway. Summertime, this spot would be crowded: guys fishing, working on their cars, chilling with blunt-and-brew combos. But now it was deserted. The radio said it was fifty-four degrees, but it didn’t feel that warm to me.

I was lighting a cigarette when a street-hammered old Audi sedan pulled in a few spaces away. The driver’s door opened and she got out. Wolfe. I’d know her at a hundred yards, the long glossy dark hair with the two white wings standing out so clear. I knew the dark blot that filled the passenger’s window too. Bruiser. A killer rottweiler who had been going to work with Wolfe ever since he was a puppy. He used to lie under her desk when she ran City-Wide. Now he rides shotgun, making the transition from law enforcement to outlaw as smoothly as Wolfe had. I didn’t close the gap between us, letting her come to me—Wolfe never locks her car and I could see the passenger window was down.

She was wearing a quilted orange car coat that came down past her knees, walking with a free and easy stride, like it was a country lane instead of garbage-strewn asphalt.

“Pepper said you wanted to see me,” she said by way of greeting.

“You want to sit in the car?” I asked her.

“No, it’s nice outside today. Makes me think spring’s almost here.”

She was being guarded, but that was her usual style. I got right to it: “You know a guy named Pryce?”

“Yes,” she said, no hesitation.

“I may be . . . in something with him.”

“With him?”

“No.”

“You want what I know, what I can find out . . . what?”

“Same menu?”

Wolfe gave me her enchantress smile. The same one that had lulled a decade of defense attorneys to their doom. “These are inflationary times,” she said.

“How much for what you know?”

“I know a lot,” she said.

“Figured you might. How much?”

“Five thousand dollars.”

“What?”

“Or,” she went on like she hadn’t heard me, “we could trade.”

“What have I got that you want?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Not for sure. But you want the information for a reason. Something’s going on. Or something’s going to happen. Something with Pryce. That’s what I’ll trade you for.”

What do you know, you beautiful warrior-girl? I thought to myself. Wolfe already knew about the stalker—Crystal Beth had told me she was part of the plan. But had Crystal Beth ever mentioned Pryce to her?

“Even up?” I offered, nothing on my face.

“A thousand for what I have. Then you fill me in. And keep me updated.”

“How come you—?”

“Come on.” She smiled again. “You want to pay for that too?”

“They’re so lucky,” Wolfe said, looking out at a tanker going up the Hudson.

“People with jobs?”

“No.” She laughed. “People who get to be on the water all the time.”

“You like that stuff?”

“I love it,” she said quietly. “If I had my way, I think I’d live on a boat.”

“Like a cruise ship?”

“No, a sailboat. A nice three-master that I could sail with a small crew.”

“You could sail it?”

“Sure.” She grinned. “I captained a ship from Bermuda all the way back to Cape Cod once.”

“By yourself?”

“There were other people on board, but I was in charge.”

“Where’d you learn to do that?”

“I was a Sea Scout.”

“A what?”

“A Sea Scout. Like a Girl Scout, only we went out on boats instead of camping.”

“I’d be scared to death,” I told her. “The water . . .”

“You don’t know how to swim?”

“No. I mean, I guess I wouldn’t sink. We used to jump off piers when I was a kid. But it’s so, I don’t know . . . I mean, you don’t know what’s out there.”

“There’s worse things on land,” she said.

I knew she was right, but it didn’t make any difference. Once, when I was small, I went down to the river to see what I could hustle up. It was night—I always felt safer at night. A boat was there. Not a big one, some kind of sport-fishing rig. They had a shark up on a hoist. It was twitching, like it was going to break loose. The men were laughing, drunk, celebrating their conquest. I looked out at the black water. I thought about more sharks being down there. Men hunt them for fun. I wondered if the other sharks wanted revenge.

“Sure,” I said, getting back to it. “This Pryce, is he one of them? Those worse things?”

“I’ve run across his trail a few times over the years. Only met him once face-to-face. He said he was with Justice then, but when I tried a trace, it got lost in the maze they have down there. By the time I worked it through, he was gone. He tells people he’s with the Company sometimes. Or DEA, ATF, whatever. And by the time anyone can check, he’s moved on.”

“Transferred, maybe?”

“Not a chance. I think he’s sanctioned, but he’s on permanent-disavowal status.”

“What the hell is that?”

“Pretty much what it sounds like,” she said, combing both hands through her thick mane of dark hair as a river breeze came up. “He does contract jobs, but he works for cash, not on the books.”

“Active work?”

“I don’t think so. He’s an information guy, not hands-on. What he is, I think, is kind of a bounty hunter. A bounty spotter, if there’s any such thing. He doesn’t make collars, he doesn’t do wet stuff. He works the edges, tracking. And he manipulates situations. There’s no holds on him—he doesn’t have to play by the rules.”

“Could he get favors done?”

“From the feds? Probably. At least he could from certain agents he’s bird-dogging for.”

“And he doesn’t play for headlines?”

“I remember one thing he said to me. ‘I never take credit. Only cash.’ I think that about sums him up.”

“You had a beef with him?”

“Not at all. He was very polite, very respectful. Said he knew about a pedophile ring. A new twist—on-line molestation in real time.”

“Huh?”

“One of the freaks would get the little girl—they only used girls in this one—in his studio. Then he’d set up the cameras, notify the rest of them and flash her image over their modems. They could tell him what they wanted him to do to the little girl, and they could all watch as he did it.”

“And Pryce knew this how?”

“He didn’t say. But I got the impression that he had reached one of the freaks. Had him in his pocket.”

“Was he trying to make a deal, have this one guy roll over on the rest in exchange for a walk-away?”

“No. He doesn’t work for defense attorneys. It wasn’t anything like that. As near as I could tell, he was willing to let his own guy go down with the rest.”

“So what was the problem?”

“He wanted to get paid. Not a favor, cash.”

“How much did he want?”

“He didn’t say exactly. Six figures, anyway.”

“And you wouldn’t go for it?”

“No. I couldn’t. We don’t have a budget for things like that. Nobody posts a reward until there’s a victim, right?”

“Yeah. And nobody knew—?”

“Nobody knew anything. This was the first I’d heard of it. I tried to put some pressure on him. Told him, if he didn’t turn over the information, not only was that one little girl going to continue to be gang-raped over the Internet, there had to be others too. He said that should make it worth more. I tried to spook him about ‘withholding information’ and he just laughed. I never saw him again.”

“So it just went on?”

“Actually, it didn’t. A week later there was a big bust. Federal. The FBI vamped on the whole operation, took it down in one fell swoop. A beautiful case: even the first one to roll got major time.”

“You think Pryce sold it to the Gee?”

“There’s no way to know. I asked a friend over there how they got the case, and he just said it started with a CI, that was all he knew.”

“But he didn’t mean Pryce was the Confidential Informant?”

“No. But he could have been running the CI, whoever he was. Or it all could have been bogus, a setup to justify the search warrant.”

“You got anything else?” I asked her.

“No, that’s it. But if I hear anything, I’ll call you.”

“Okay.”

“Your turn,” she said, giving me another deadly smile.

I was telling Wolfe the story, spooling it out in bits and pieces, not going anywhere near Hercules. We both played outside the lines now, but we didn’t play the same. I trusted her, but Wolfe was a cop in her heart. A rule-busting cop, sure, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. There’s a hell of a difference between concocting probable cause to take bad guys down and taking money from them. The only difference between Wolfe’s operation and a vigilante team was that Wolfe’s crew got paid. She still made her living busting crime—I still made mine committing it.

We were standing against my car, talking quietly, all by ourselves on that isolated patch of ground. Years ago, I used to think things could be . . . different between us. Not thinking, really—wanting. She drew the line. Once in a while we got to hold hands over it, but I couldn’t pull her to me, and she’d never tried to pull me to her.

Wolfe took a photograph out of her pocket. Not a mug shot, some kind of surveillance photo. “Is this him?” she asked me.

It was murky, indistinct. “I got a flashlight in the trunk,” I told her.

She was standing by herself between the Plymouth’s dead headlights when the egg-yolk-yellow Pathfinder rolled into the parking lot. No music coming from it. Bad sign. I looked up as it slid within ten feet of Wolfe. A young guy bounced out: shirt to his knees, sleeves past his knuckles, worn over baggy pants ending at half-laced ultra sneakers endorsed by some role-model basketball star and made in some sweatshop in Southeast Asia, black knit watch cap with White Sox logo turned sideways, representing. Hip-hopper or wigger—I couldn’t tell his color in the early light.

“Yo bitch!” he shouted at her.

I came around the back of the Plymouth with the tire iron in my hand. The guy said “Oh shit!” and piled back into the Pathfinder. It took off, grinding its chunky tires against the crusty blacktop.

“Bruiser, out!” Wolfe yelled. That’s when I saw the rottweiler, closing ground like Judgment Day wrapped in black fur.

“Who knows what that was really about,” Wolfe said to me, leaning on the Plymouth’s hood, smoking one of my cigarettes, the rottweiler sitting next to her, calm now. “They could have been after anything from a hassle to a rape. There’s something about being in a car that gives punks courage.”

“It isn’t the car,” I told her. “It’s the gang. And a woman alone.”

“I guess.”

“And don’t call it courage,” I said. “Your dog, he’s the one with the balls.”

“Don’t remind me,” Wolfe chuckled, reaching in her pocket and pulling out a disgusting-looking length of what looked like dark-red sinew. The rottie watched it, eyes narrowed in. But he didn’t move a muscle. “Bruiser, okay!” Wolfe said, handing it over. The beast immediately snatched it, lay down, grasped the prize in his front paws and started tearing into it. The sounds he made would have scared a forest ranger.

“What is that you gave him?” I asked her.

“It’s a dried beef tendon,” she said. “One of his favorites. Next to fresh pineapple. But I can’t carry that around with me.”

“Well, he earned it,” I said. “I never saw a dog that big move so fast. He ever bite anybody?”

“Sure,” Wolfe said, grinning at the stupid question.

I hefted the tire iron, feeling foolish. I don’t carry a gun anymore. Don’t keep one in the car either. It’s got nothing to do with search warrants or being an ex-con. I’m just . . . careful. Ever since I tried to kill my childhood and killed a child instead.

“I don’t know what’s going down with this Pryce guy,” I lied, playing the flashlight over the photograph Wolfe had. It was him all right. “Maybe nothing. I’ll let you know.”

“Either way,” she said, pulling a promise with the words.

“Either way,” I agreed.

I rolled the Plymouth onto the highway, merging with the traffic, blending back in. A lot of stops to make that day, but I couldn’t really get started until the comic shops opened. The rest of what I needed for Herk was already stashed in the trunk.

Which is where Pryce could end up if he played me wrong.

It was after dark by the time I got back from meeting with Hercules. When I cruised by Mama’s, the white-dragon tapestry was in the front window. All clear.

But as soon as I came out of the kitchen into the main room I knew something was up. Mama wasn’t at her register—she was on her feet, hands on hips, waiting for something. Max was sitting at one of the tables, eyes closed the way he gets just before he has to work, a violence machine with its battery on trickle-charge.

At another table, three young Orientals, all dressed in identical black leather dusters and red silk shirts buttoned to the neck. They were all razor-built, with long glossy black hair and delicate features. They didn’t look like brothers, but the tribal relationship was stamped deep . . . the kind of deep only the crucible creates.

And in a booth, an elderly Chinese woman, bird-faced and stick-thin, wrapped in a heavy dark-green shawl, eyes aimed at the floor.

Mama gestured for me to come over to my booth. She sat down across from me. No soup this time.

“Tigers have her nephew,” she said, voice low-pitched, head cocked slightly to indicate the old woman. “He owe big money. Thirty thousand.”

I didn’t need a translator. The nephew was an illegal, smuggled in by one of the gang operations that supply so much of the cheap labor in Chinatown. The family back home picks the youngest, strongest one to go first. When that one works off the debt in the sweatshops, they can send another.

That’s one of the reasons you see guys making a couple of bucks an hour off the books get so deep into gambling. Their families back home encourage it, especially those relatives far down in the next-to-go chain. It’s the only way to pay off the transporters quick. In the sweatshops, thirty grand would take a decade, minimum.

“Kuan Li old friend. From home. Everything set, okay?” Then she told me the plan.

The squat Chinese who opened the door had a cop’s nightstick in his right hand, the leather thong wrapped around his wrist. The brutish expression on his face didn’t change until he saw that the three young men in their matching black coats also had matching black semi-autos, each one aimed at a different part of his body, as professional as it gets. He moved his hands away from his sides, the nightstick dangling loose and useless, eyes only on me.

One of the young men stayed with him, the other two came along as I moved down a passage so narrow it was more like a tunnel than a hall.

The basement was divided into wire-mesh cages, Bowery flophousestyle. Maybe thirty, forty illegals slept there. One toilet, one shower—just a rusty nozzle poking out of the wall with a drain underneath. A hundred bucks a month apiece. Overheated from human cargo, it stank like the hold of a slave ship.

I swept my eye through the cages. Third from left, lowest tier, Mama had said. Her description of the nephew was photo-perfect. I pointed at his face. One of the young men showed him his pistol, said something to him in bad-accent Cantonese. The nephew said something back. The gunman chopped at his face with the pistol. The nephew came along, hands at his sides, head down.

We walked out into the afternoon. The gunman shoved the nephew into the back seat of a Chinatown war wagon, an old Buick four-door sedan with welded-up fake plates. The other two piled in right behind him. The car took off. The squat doorman poked his head outside. Max came up behind him and did something to his neck. The doorman crumpled to the ground. I stepped into a fog-gray Lincoln that had pulled to the curb. One of Mama’s cooks was at the wheel.

The street vibrated the way it always did, no change.

“Not like old ways,” Mama told me back in the restaurant. “Tigers not with the Tongs. Nephew go someplace else, they never find.”

“They’re supposed to think I had a beef with him, hired those other guys to take him out of there?”

“Yes, maybe think so.” Mama shrugged.

“Won’t the Tigers look for their money from the guys who took him?”

“What guys?” Mama smiled.

“The Chinese guys. The young ones in the jackets.”

“Not Chinese,” Mama said. “Cambodia. How old you think?”

“Twenty, twenty-five?”

“Fifteen,” Mama said. “Oldest, fifteen. Khmer not kill, Tigers not kill either.”

“Jesus. They’re operating down here now too?”

“Sure,” Mama said.

I played cards with Max until early the next morning. We used to play gin rummy, a life-sentence game we’d started years ago—keeping score, but agreeing that we wouldn’t settle up until we both crossed over. Figuring that, if it was divided up like people say it is, we’d both end up on the same side of the line.

Max had owed me a fortune until he’d tapped into that perfect vein of gold all gamblers dream of—the Prime Roll. It only lasted a few hours, but Max was unbelievably unbeatable. Every card fell for him. He was a rampaging tsunami—I was a balsa-wood beach house. I survived, but I was barely on the plus side when the wave passed. Ever since, he’d refused to return to gin, knowing he’d never see a run like that again in life. So we switched to casino. He doesn’t play that game any better, and I had his debt back into six figures.

Mama continued to monitor just about every hand in her self-appointed role as Max’s adviser. She was lousy at it. Even worse than at gin—at least she knew how to play gin, casino was a total mystery to her. Mama speaks a half-dozen languages, including math, but any form of gambling got her blood up and made her forget the odds, so she never indulged. Didn’t mind helping Max out, though.

She tapped Max’s shoulder, nodded her head, grinned as he tossed the four of clubs on the four of hearts, building eights against the one he held in his hand instead of just taking one four with another. I slapped the deuce of spades on top of his build, against the ten of diamonds I held. I knew Max didn’t hold any tens—the other three had already been played. The diamond card is the Big Ten in casino—the only one worth two points. The deuce of spades was another point card. . . . A lovely score. Max scowled. Mama’s face indicated that the whole thing was his own fault.

The pay phone in the back rang. I looked at my watch—it was just past two in the morning. Mama got up, walked to the back, grabbed the receiver, said something . . . listened. Then she came back to our booth.

“Girl. Name Vyra.”

“Tell her I’m not here,” I said.

Mama nodded, nothing on her face.

I went back to my office, let Pansy use her roof, watched some early-morning TV with her after she polished off a quart of some stuff Mama put together—mostly beef chunks in oyster sauce.

Then I slept.

Once I got up, I started rolling. Spent the next twenty-four checking on leads, just in case Pryce went for what I was going to offer him. But the paths were too twisted—I couldn’t pipeline down to a core truth strong enough to bank on. The White Night underground is a poisonous brew, fed by rumors and driven by psychos. American-born Nazis working as mercenaries in Croatia, slaughtering Serbs, cleansing the ethnic cleansers, the whole operation set up by fascist groups in Germany who had fond World War II memories of the Croats helping out; a range war between two Hitler-loving crews—mostly a talk war over the shortwave bands—one leader saying the head of the rival crew was gay, that guy saying his opposite number was a crypto-Jew; the tax resisters and the do-it-yourself litigation clubs; virulent anti-Semites calling themselves the true Israelites; one-member fascist organizations blindly cyber-groping with anti-IRA skinheads in England and transplanted American biker gangs in Denmark. . . all riddled with undercover agents and free-lance informants and ready-to-roll rats.

Not a network, threads. Some of them as unanchored as the lunatics who tried to grab on and pull themselves up to the Fourth Reich. Just outside Chicago, one of those deadly defectives gunned down a plastic surgeon, convinced the doctor was giving non-whites an “Aryan” look. Maybe he was following the footprints of the white supremacist on the coast who blew away a beautician years ago because he heard she was bleaching Jewess hair.

More Führers than storm troopers, sure. But any one of them strong enough to lift a suitcase can level a building now.

The reason the media never gets it right is that the media lives on spokesman interviews, and nobody could ever speak for that collection. How do you speak for a congregation that screams the Holocaust never happened while it prays for it to happen again? You think if you assembled a hundred rapists they’d all tell you they rape for the same reason? “Their rap don’t mean crap, honeyboy,” the Prof had told me once. “Their trail always tells the tale.” On the prison yard, a hundred years ago. I was full of questions then.

I’ve been dealing with the hyper-whites for years, selling and scamming. They’ve got no loyalty, so they’re easy. But mining their ranks for truth is like looking for a congressman’s ethics.

But I asked around anyway. Working the edges, careful like always. Keeping a flat face as they flashed their self-awarded decorations, tattoos: the “88”—for “Heil Hitler,” the eighth letter of the alphabet being “H,” borrowed from the way the bikers used to wear the number “13” on their denims . . . “M” for “marijuana.” And the spiderwebs on their elbows, meaning they killed for the race . . . although most of them upgraded any two-bit assault to that status. Skinhead sheep with red laces on their Doc Martens and Iron Crosses around their necks, certain they were the vanguard to Valhalla. A Mafia don’s omertà, an emir’s jihad, or a Führer’s race war, it’s always the same—only the congregation sees the prison cells or catches the bullets, never the preachers.

I heard all about how only the NRA was standing up to ZOG—Zionist Occupation Government in Nazi-speak—and how gun control was just the prelude to registration of all citizens. Saw enough copies of The Turner Diaries in grungy furnished rooms to crack a best-seller list. Tapped into some of the fax chains. Read the luno-newsletters. Listened to the Ballad of Ruby Ridge and what really happened at Waco. Heard a half-dozen different accounts of why the Swiss banks kept looted Jewish gold in their vaults all these years, waiting for that cable from Paraguay to release the assets. And how Hitler was ordained, a minister of Jehovah, sent by God to punish the Jews for killing His son. Watched self-proclaimed “constitutionalists” applauding more marches through Skokie, this time on the Internet. Even sat with a Mossad agent the Mole brought me to, an Arabic-looking man with pianist’s hands and slot-machine eyes.

I listened to it all. But when it came to anyone named Lothar operating in New York, I drew a handful of blanks.

“I always wore clothes when I was a child,” Crystal Beth said. She was lying on the mattress on her belly, nude, smoking one of her hand-rolled cigarettes, candle-flicker shadows dancing over the perfect parabolic curve of her bottom before disappearing into the blackness around her thick thighs.

I didn’t say anything, watching her.

“A lot of the kids didn’t,” she said. “On the Farm. That’s what we called it mostly, the Farm. Their parents thought children should be free, not have to wear clothing until they were older. My mother didn’t believe in that.”

“Were there fights about it?” I asked her.

“Fights? Nobody fought. It was a commune, but it wasn’t a government commune. There were no laws from on high, that isn’t the way we did it. A parent could raise a child any way they wanted.”

“Could they hit their kids?”

“You mean like spank them?”

“Whatever you call it.”

“Burke,” she said softly. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter. I was just making conversation.”

“Your face . . . Oh, you’re going to think I’m a ditz.”

“You’re losing me,” I told her.

“Come over here, okay? Just lie down next to me for a minute.”

I did that.

She stubbed out her cigarette, rolled over on her side to look at me. “Your aura changed,” she said. “Please don’t laugh. It’s not some New Age thing. People do have auras. Not everyone. At least not powerful ones, ones that you can see. Do you think that’s crazy?”

“No,” I said, not lying. Martial artists call it ki. They don’t talk about seeing it, just feeling it, but it’s really the same: a force field. When I was young, before I learned to make my temper go the same place as my pain, when the rage in me built high enough I could move people out of a room without saying anything. A long time later, when Max explained it to me, he used his hands to indicate waves coming off me. I don’t know where Max got his knowledge, but it wasn’t from books. And it wasn’t new.

The only thing is, ki doesn’t work on everyone. Some people aren’t tuned to the signal. That’s why a street punk will try you when a pro would give you a pass.

“When you asked about . . . hitting children, your aura turned . . . ”

“Dark?”

“No. It’s always dark. This was like . . . Did you ever see heat lightning? It doesn’t make a sound, just kind of . . . flashes?”

“Yeah.”

“Like that. Did . . . people hit you when you were a child?”

“People did everything to me when I was a child,” I told her.

She reached over, took my hand, put it on her proud soft breast. “Feel my heart,” she said.

“Nobody ever hit children there,” she said about an hour later.

“What?”

“On the Farm. Remember, you asked me? Nobody ever did that. Once I came inside from playing and my mother and father were there. They didn’t see me at first. My mother was cleaning the table. My father walked behind her and gave her a slap on the bottom. A hard slap, I could hear it crack. I got angry and I started to run to her, to protect her. Then I heard her . . . not laugh, or even giggle . . . some kind of sweet sound. I was so confused I started to cry. Then they saw me. My father tried to get me to sit on his lap, the way he did when he explained things to me. But I wouldn’t do it.

“My mother took me for a walk. She told me my father was just playing. It didn’t hurt her at all. I asked her if all men played like that, and she told me they didn’t. But she also told me it didn’t matter how men played. All that mattered was how the women wanted them to play. Men should never play any way women didn’t want.

“A couple of days later, I remember asking my father if he wanted to smack me on the bottom, like he did my mother. He got very upset. My father was a very dramatic man. My mother had to calm him down. You know how she always did that?”

“No.”

“Like this,” Crystal Beth said, planting her broad little nose in my chest and pushing so hard with her head that I had to grab her and brace myself to keep from staggering backward. “See how it works?” she whispered, nuzzling me, her hands locked together behind my back.

“Yeah.”

She kept pushing until I felt the easy chair against the back of my legs. I sat down, pulling her with me. She snuggled into my lap, gave me a quick nip on the neck.

“It was so easy when my mother explained it,” she said softly. “There are things a man does with a woman that he doesn’t do with a child. Not his child, not any child. She said someday a man would do things with me. I asked her what things. And she told me. Some of them, anyway. That’s how I learned about sex. My mother knew when it was time. My father, he never would have known.”

“You really loved him, huh?”

“My father? I adored him.”

“So you’re doing his work?”

“His work? My father was a—”

“Protector, right?”

“Oh. Yes. I never thought about that. It’s my . . . purpose. Like my mother told me. I didn’t think it was . . .”

“Ah, what do I know?” I said.

“Burke?”

“What, girl?”

“It must have been so hard. Not to have even . . . known your father.”

“You think they’re all alike, fathers?”

“No. I just—”

“I didn’t miss a fucking thing,” I told her.

The phone rang. Crystal Beth got off my lap and padded over to a far corner in her bare feet. She pulled some papers off the top of a two-drawer file cabinet and picked up the receiver lying underneath.

“Hello.”

She listened, cocking one hip the way Mama had cocked her head—I guess all women listen differently. Then she said: “Yes, I understand. All the way in the back. All right.”

And hung up.

“That was him,” she said. “He says to meet him in the Delta parking lot at La Guardia. All the way in the back, against the fence. He’ll be in a white Taurus sedan.”

“When?”

“Now. He said he’ll give you an hour.”

“Okay,” I said, climbing into my clothes.

“An hour isn’t—”

“This time of night? No problem,” I assured her.

She knelt at my feet, carefully threaded the laces of my work boots, tied each one precisely. “Burke, he didn’t say anything about calling you. He had to know you were here.”

“He’s calling from the meeting place,” I told her. “He’s already there. Probably been there for hours. In a war zone, names don’t matter, just addresses. It’s the only way he can be sure I don’t fill the parking lot with my own people. He’s not watching outside—he was just guessing about me being here. Not a bad guess anyway, right? I told him I was your man, remember? Or maybe he thought you could find me on the phone right away.”

“Or maybe he has people of his own,” she whispered.

“Maybe.”

She stood against me in the dark. Her skin was silky, warm with the blood beneath it. I kissed her tattoo and left her there.

I took the Brooklyn Bridge to the BQE, the Plymouth gobbling ground effortlessly. It was still cold out, but the pavement was dry and traction was no problem. I kept near the speed limit until a bright-orange Mustang with a huge rear wing shot by me, a white Camaro with a broad red racing stripe in close pursuit. They were doing at least a hundred. Not racing—just screwing around, pushing each other. The BQE isn’t a race road—too many giant potholes, too many reverse-graded curves. When the dragsters want to really throw down, they go over to Rockaway or work the deep end of Woodhaven Boulevard in Queens. But those fools were all the interference I’d ever need on the off-chance some highway cop was lurking in the night. Which I’d never seen on the BQE in my entire life anyway.

As I went by the McGinnis Boulevard cutoff, the back of the rear seat popped out and Max emerged from the trunk. He climbed into the front seat, dressed in full night-runner gear—a modified ninja outfit, light-eating black, complete with hood and face mask. I handed him the key and he opened the glove compartment. Took out a little square box made out of gunmetal-gray Lexan with a row of tiny Braille-style dots across the top. Max tripped the switch and the dots flashed in sequence before they settled down to only one glowing steady. Green. Pryce didn’t have a tracking device planted anywhere on the Plymouth—the Mole’s technology was as good as anything the government had. Better, probably. Underground research is pure Darwinism—no grants, no bureaucracy, no politics. It works or it dies.

I checked the rearview mirror. Empty. I rolled over the Kosciuszko Bridge and pulled up on the shoulder just past the LIE turnoff, playing it safe, watching the sparse traffic roll by.

Nothing.

Max kept watch as I sketched a rough map of what I wanted. He took one quick look, nodded okay—he’d been there before. I put the Plymouth in gear and pulled back on the highway. Max tore the hand-drawn map into tiny pieces, let them trail from his hand out the open window.

Plenty of time. I turned off the BQE to the Grand Central, followed it to Ninety-fourth Street, exited and ran parallel to the highway through East Elmhurst until I was well past the airport. I doubled back through the interchange at Northern Boulevard and grabbed the Grand Central again, heading back toward Manhattan. I kept sliding right until I picked up the service road that leads to a highway gas station. I pulled over just before I reached it. There’s a small parking area there. Limo drivers use it when they have a long wait for a flight—they’re not allowed in the taxi line. At almost one in the morning, the lot was deserted—La Guardia doesn’t handle international flights and it’s usually out of business by midnight. I let Max off. Checked my watch. I still had almost twenty minutes.

I punched Crystal Beth’s number into the cell phone.

It rang a dozen times. No answer.

I smoked a cigarette. Slowly, all the way through. Then I went to meet whatever was waiting.

The Delta lot is all the way at the east end of La Guardia, the last piece of solid ground before the whole place turns to swamp. I pulled a ticket from the automatic vending machine and the gate lifted to let me in. The lot was sporadically dotted with cars, almost all of them clustered near the exit to the terminal, probably airline personnel. In the warm weather, some people use this lot as a four-dollar-an-hour motel, a Lovers’ Lane where you don’t have to worry about prowlers. But in the winter, it’s all business. I let the Plymouth poke along between the rows of parked cars, feathering the throttle, watching. Halfway through the lot, it turned empty. Except for a white Taurus sedan standing all by itself against the back fence, front end aimed in my direction.

I docked the Plymouth about five car-widths away, stepped out and walked to the Taurus. Saw it was a SHO model, about thirty-five grand worth of high-speed anonymity. Quick enough for pursuit work, generic enough for shadowing, comfortable for stakeouts. A pro’s choice, even the color—more white cars than any other out there now. The windows were deep-tinted—couldn’t see inside. But I figured he could see out, so I just stood there, looking at the windshield, holding my hands far away from my body, my jacket zipped up tight.

Nothing.

I heard pebbles crunch, sensed movement behind me. Not stealthy—letting me know he was coming. I turned around slowly. Pryce was walking toward me from the corner of the lot, hands as empty as mine.

I wondered if his heart was too.

“Sorry,” he said as he got close enough to speak. “I had to take a leak.”

I spread my arms wider, going for a Christ-on-the cross position. “Let’s get this part over with quick,” I said. “It’s too cold to be standing around playing games.”

He stood there looking at me, his featureless face calm. “I couldn’t do an adequate job out here,” he said. “You know that.”

“Then do what I’m gonna do,” I told him.

“Which is?”

“Don’t say anything you don’t want on tape.”

He nodded. “Fair enough. You want to talk in the car?”

“Sure.”

In the silver leather passenger seat, I turned my right shoulder to the windshield so that I was almost facing him. “Okay if I smoke?” I asked him.

He turned the ignition key, hit the switch for the power windows. The glass behind me whispered down. Step one. He shifted position so that he was facing me. Two. “I’ve got an idea,” I told him. “But first I have to know some stuff.”

“Ask your questions,” he said.

“It all comes down to this,” I started, exhaling a heavy puff of clove-cigarette smoke in his direction. His expression didn’t change, but he pushed the switch, taking his own window down. Three. “Is this Lothar guy the whole machine, or just a tool?” I finished.

“He’s a tool,” Pryce said without hesitation.

“Tell me what you’re willing to,” I said. “If there’s blanks, then I’ll ask, okay?”

He scratched absently at the tip of his nose. Phantom itch? Like you get from an amputated limb. Or plastic surgery. The tip of the nose changes the face radically, a doctor told me once. “Larry James Bretton,” he said. “Now known as Lothar Bucholtz. He changed it legally. I don’t believe his wife knows about the surname, but he’s been calling himself Lothar publicly for some time now. General failure. Trained as a printer, but fired from three straight jobs for using company facilities to put out various propaganda sheets for extremist groups. He doesn’t write the stuff himself—he hasn’t got brains enough even for the intellectual challenge of using ‘nigger’ and ‘kike’ in the same sentence. But he’s a true-believer all the way. You know the party line: If the government can be destabilized, if the artificial restraints come off, the streets will run with blood. Knock ZOG off and the kikes won’t be able to stop the niggers fromslaughtering them. Muscle beats brains in the short run, the way they figure it. Of course, the niggers won’t be able to run a government. . . . That’s when the true Aryans come in, the race warriors. With the weapons they’ve been hoarding, they’ll be able to carve out a few states as their own.”

“Your basic Helter Skelter scenario,” I said. “A Charlie Manson update.”

“Right. Not many of them acknowledge it, but he’s their visionary all right. Okay, next they’ll get foreign aid from wealthy countries who support their mission, especially the Arabs—after all, exterminating Jews should give them perfect credentials.” He waved a hand dismissively, anticipating me. “Yes, I know, the A-rabs are mud people too. But that’s just the first step in the master plan. After they ship all the niggers back to Africa—the ones they don’t just outright kill in the camps with the kikes—they’ll run the show here. The Day of the Rope will eliminate all the race-traitor whites. Next step is acquisition of nuclear weapons,” he said, face flat but his voice loaded with sneer, “and then it’s time for the A-rabs to pay the piper. Finally, there’ll be a natural link between all the North European tribes—the Aryans, right?—and the true Americans, their descendants. Not the Indians, of course . . .

“Lothar’s people are divided as to the next step. Some of them want to retain all the mud people in South America and Africa and Asia as slave labor. Some want to just kill them all—you know, nerve gas, poison the water supply, the ovens . . . the usual.”

“Sure.”

“Anyway, when they’re not hyping up some of those retarded skinheads into bashing cruising gays or mixed-race couples with baseball bats—or recruiting on military bases—they’re sitting around plotting how to make Oklahoma City look like a pipe bomb in a bus-station locker. And my boy Lothar is a real live member of an action cell.”

“Bombers?”

“Oh yes. Major bombers. Domino bombing—you know what that is?”

“No.”

“A couple of dozen targets. Virtually simultaneous targets. Congress. The FBI. Post offices. Communications centers. Airports. Train stations. The whole infrastructure. That’s Phase One.”

“And Phase Two?”

“The way they figure it, the military has to respond. National Guard first, but soon there’ll be warplanes in the air. And where are they going to respond to? Wherever there’s riots. Whoever starts the looting. And they know who that’s going to be. With the communications cut, it’s all going to be word of mouth. They don’t have the troops for guerrilla warfare, but they have the weapons. Lots of weapons. They’ve been stockpiling for years.”

“That plan is Swiss cheese,” I told him.

“It is,” he agreed. “But it’s going to be America that gets the holes punched in it.”

I felt a chill on the back of my neck. Probably the night air. I wondered if Pryce was feeling it too. I lit another nasty clove cigarette from the stub of the last one just in case he was thinking about zipping up his window.

“And Lothar’s yours?” I asked him.

“All mine,” he said. “But if he’s taken out of the play, it won’t work.”

“What won’t work?”

“ZOG likes to play dominoes too,” Pryce said, the muscle under his right eye jumping hard.

I worked it around in my head for a minute. And it didn’t add up. Not for what I needed. “You’re not telling me Lothar’s a government agent,” I said flatly.

“No. He’s not,” Pryce replied.

I passed up the invitation. “But he’s not gonna roll either,” I said, no trace of a question in my voice.

“Why do you say that?”

“Couple of reasons. If he rolls, the best he can hope for is immunity. And that means the Witness Protection Program. Okay for some guys, maybe. But he’s not gonna be able to do his Master Race crap there. And he’s not gonna get his son either. Even if you could find a bent judge to give him custody, the media would have you for breakfast.”

“He’s not going to get immunity,” Pryce said. “He’s not going to testify at all. When the bust goes down, he’s going to slip through the net. Go into the underground. The sole survivor. He’ll be a hero. And he’ll have his son with him.”

“He’s stupid enough to buy that?”

“He’s stupid all right, but it’s the truth. It’s already set up. He’ll leave the country. England first, then Germany. They’ll take him in, never fear.”

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

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

“And he keeps his kid?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So it’s her you threaten?”

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

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

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

“I’ve never done business with—”

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And if I was?”

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

“A contract?”

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

“When would that have to start?”

“A few weeks ago.”

“I don’t under——”

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

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

“And you can put that together?”

“I can. But I’m still not—”

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

“You said two things,” he reminded me.

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

“Which means what?” he said, only boredom in his voice.

I tapped the pack of cigarettes to take one out. A tiny black cylinder fell into my hand. “This is a flashlight,” I said in the same gentle tone of voice I’d been using. “If I had taken it out, shined it in your face at any time, we’d be done talking.”

“Nobody’s that good a shot,” he said. “Even with the window—”

I touched the flashlight, but I didn’t aim it at his face. A tiny dot of red light showed in the windshield. And then Max the Silent touched the back of his neck.

“Don’t turn around,” I told him. “Don’t do anything stupid. You’re not gonna get hurt, understand?”

“Yes,” he said, holding his head rigid.

“It wouldn’t take a bullet,” I said. “And it wouldn’t have to make any noise. Or it could make a lot of noise. But one thing would always be the same. You know what that would be?”

“No.”

“You’d never see it coming,” I told him.

He sat there without moving for a couple of minutes after Max pulled his hands away and went back into the night.

“This is a battlefield friendship,” I said quietly. “You and me. Your enemies are my enemies, that makes us friends, right? Or allies, anyway.”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to do my piece. Do it right. Like I promised. You too. No more threats. You already did your threats, and you’re gonna get what you want. Don’t do them anymore, okay?”

“Yes.”

“We’re going to have to meet again. You’re going to need to see the man I have. You’re going to have to know some things about him. That’s the only way we can play this, you and me. Together. The way I scan it, you’re a lone wolf. Whatever you know, you’re the only one. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s be clear. You want this cell. Lothar’s a chip. You’re going to ante that chip. I’m going to put up my man. He goes in. Lothar brings him in. You take care of that. I take care of getting you the information. I make sure the information is right. I guarantee you keep getting it even if Lothar turns unreliable. Information, that’s what you get from me. You cash that information when they all go. That about cover it?”

“Yes.”

“And when you get paid, I get paid.”

That got his attention. He shifted position for the first time since Max took hold of him, his lipless mouth twitching to match the muscle under his eye. “We never discussed that,” he said.

“Yeah we did. In the restaurant. Only thing we didn’t agree on was the price. How much is ZOG paying for hard-core terrorist cells these days?”

“It . . . depends. On a number of factors out of my control.”

“Sure. Look, I know we’re not fifty-fifty on this. All I could do is take a wild guess. And I’m not gonna do that. But I don’t think I’d be much off if I was thinking seven figures. . . .“

“That’s—”

“Sure, I know. Let’s just pretend I’m an agent. Your agent. Agents get a cut. Ten percent, right?”

“You want a hundred thousand dollars?”

“Yeah.”

“Done,” he said, no expression on his face.

I handed the parking ticket to the drone at the gate. He made an impatient gesture, waving his hands in aggravation. A small TV set flicked in his booth.

“What?” I asked him. Not friendly—people tend to remember anything unusual.

He pointed at a slot on the outside of the booth. I fed the ticket into the slot. A panel lit up: $4.00. I handed him a five-dollar bill. He managed to overcome his annoyance at me not having exact change long enough to hand me a single. Compared to him, the toll-takers on the bridges were complex mathematicians.

I exited the airport, taking the highway east toward Long Island. Did the same double-back I’d done coming in and picked Max up where I’d dropped him off.

On the way back, he made a series of gestures I hadn’t seen before. It took me a few tries before I got what he was telling me.

In the country, the morning sound of early spring is birds calling. Down here, it’s car alarms screaming their impotence. In either place, only the tourists pay attention.

The sun was bright and strong when I got up, spring’s promise closer to truth now. The refrigerator was empty, so I trudged over to one of those all-night Korean bodegas that pop up so often down here. They usually close just as quick, soon as they find out all the working people disappear after dark. Even the strip bars do most of their business in daylight.

I loaded up heavy on provisions, but Pansy scarfed most of it in one sitting.

When I called in, Mama said, “Girl call. Late.” Meaning earlier that morning.

“Vyra?”

“No. Other girl.”

“Okay. She say what she wanted?”

“Talk to you.”

“Did it go all right?” Crystal Beth asked as soon as she heard my voice on the phone.

“I’ll tell you all about it. Later, okay?”

“When later?”

“Tonight. Around . . . nine?”

“Good. Are you—?”

“You got room there?”

“Room?”

“For a . . . guest. Part of what we’re doing.”

“Sure. As long as she’s—”

“See you then,” I said, thumbing the cellular into silence.

“You wanted another chance,” I told him. “This is it.”

“Be a rat? That’s your fucking idea of another chance?”

“This isn’t being a rat, Herk. It’s like being a . . .” I searched for the word “. . . spy. Like behind enemy lines, during a war.”

“Dropping a dime is still—”

“This isn’t dropping a dime, okay? What we got is a bunch of lunatic motherfuckers planning to blow up some buildings, kill a whole bunch of people. The Man already knows about them. They been penetrated to the max. The Man already has a guy inside. Only thing is, he’s one of them, see?”

“One of who?” Herk asked. A reasonable question.

“One of the Nazis. Now, he’s a rat, see what I’m saying? Those are his boys. And he’s gonna dime them, just like you said. You know how it works. The Man’s gonna give him a free pass. New face, new ID, new everything. We play this right, that’s yours. Instead of his, yours.”

“Oh man, I ain’t doing no Witness Protection—”

“You’re not gonna be a witness, Herk. This isn’t about testimony. And you’re not gonna be in the Program either. You’re not gonna have a PO, nobody to report to. You get all the new stuff, a little bit of cash to get you started, and then you’re on your own.”

“What about the guy I—?”

“Forget that. It’s gonna be covered, all right? The Man won’t be looking for you. Not for Hercules, not for the new guy, whoever that’s gonna be. You, I mean.”

“Burke, I dunno. . . .”

“Listen, Herk. This all started with . . . you know. Okay, let’s say you slide on that beef. So what? Where are you? Back where you was, right? Nowhere. This here is what you said you wanted. Another chance. What you got going here that’s so fucking great?”

“Nothing, I guess. But . . .”

“You’re going back to the joint,” I told him. “Sure as hell, that’s where you’re going. You got no job, no trade, a long record. What do you know how to do except fuck people up? And you don’t even like to do that. You go back to the street, the wiseguys are gonna use you until the Man takes you down. You pull this off, you can be a gardener, right? Find yourself a greenhouse somewhere out west maybe. Start fucking over.”

He paced the little room, listening to me. Then he finally snapped to what he was doing—practicing for his next bit, already boxed up in an eight-by-ten in his mind. When he looked over at me, I said: “It’s a dice-roll, partner. You throw a few naturals, you make your point and catch it, you’re golden. You’re crap out, and it’s over. One way or the other, you go into this, you don’t come out the same.”

“Those books you gave me? The last time you was here? I gotta, like, memorize all that?”

“No. Not word for word. But you heard it all before, right?”

“I guess. . . .”

“Sure you did,” I encouraged him. “Inside. Plenty of guys were into that.”

“And I gotta cut my hair?”

“Why?”

“Look like one of them skinhead motherfuckers, right?”

“Nah. You go in the way you are, Herk. You look like a fucking Viking anyway—it’ll be perfect.”

“You’d be like . . . around?”

“Not in there with you. But I’d be like your . . . coach, okay? There’s stuff we have to find out first, but we don’t have much time, Herk. If you don’t wanna do it, that’s okay. I got some cash here. Right with me. Say the word and you’re in the wind.”

“Burke . . .”

“What?”

“You’re right, bro. Fuck it, I ain’t goin’ back Inside. Let’s do it.”

I parked Herk in Mama’s. The Prof was already there. He’d handle the first round of coaching. Pryce was going to call Crystal Beth around midnight, so I fired up the Plymouth and headed over there.

But I didn’t go straight to the Lower East Side. First I had to stop in the South Bronx. At the Mole’s bunker, where I said the magic words to him—the only words absolutely guaranteed to ring his bell.

Nazis in the house.

I rapped on her back door at nine. She opened it immediately, like she’d been waiting.

“What happened?” she greeted me.

I just pointed to the staircase, then swept my arm like an usher to indicate she should go first.

She threw me a look over her shoulder, but she went up the stairs without another word.

Inside her room, she bent to light the candle. I stood there, watching, unzipped my jacket. She came over to where I was standing, put her arms around my neck. I reached behind her, grabbed her bottom through the loose cotton slacks and pinched with both hands, hard.

“Ow! What was that for?” she squeaked.

“I just wanted to see if you were sore,” I told her, leaving my hands where they were.

“I am now,” she said, pulling her hands down from my neck and trying to rub her bottom. My hands stayed in the way, keeping her from doing it. I pinched her again for emphasis.

“Burke, stop it!” she yelped, trying to wiggle free. “What are you talking about?”

“I thought that fat butt of yours might be a bit tender,” I said in her ear. “Riding a motorcycle over that rough terrain in the middle of the night and all.”

She stopped struggling. “I was just—”

“Spying,” I said. “Or playing some game I’m not in on. You tell me.”

“I didn’t think you saw me following you,” she said, no repentance in her voice. “I ran the whole way without lights.”

“What’s the deal, Crystal Beth? You weren’t close enough to listen.”

“I wasn’t trying to listen. I was just . . . afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Not of anything. I was afraid for you.”

“So you were gonna protect me?”

“Yes!” she said defiantly.

“With what?”

“I don’t know,” she almost moaned. “I just . . . He’s a very bad man. I thought, if he had other people there, I could ride up and . . .”

“What? Have me jump on the bike so we could make a getaway?”

“All right, I didn’t know. I didn’t have a plan. But I had a . . .”

“Purpose?”

“Yes. Go on, mock me. There wasn’t anything I could do . . . here. Just sitting and waiting. I got you into this and . . .”

“It’s okay,” I said, patting her where I’d pinched. “But why didn’t you tell me?”

“Would you have let me go?”

“No.”

“That’s why,” she said, flashing her smile. “I know what men are like.”

“You don’t have a clue,” I told her.

“I know what my father was like,” she said. “He never would have let my—”

“I’m not your father, little girl.”

“I know. I didn’t mean—”

“Never mind.”

“Burke, I’m sorry, okay? I’ll—”

“I thought we had a deal,” I told her. “You were going to do what I told you.”

“I did.”

“Not just in the damn restaurant, Crystal Beth. Until this is done. Until it’s over.”

“And then?”

“Then you can do what you want.”

“Whatever I want?” She smiled.

“Don’t press your luck,” I said.

She put her nose in my chest and rubbed like she had before. It worked. I sat in the easy chair and she plopped herself in my lap. Then I told her a pretty close version of my conversation with Pryce. Everything but the money part.

“Are you really going to . . . put somebody in there? With Lothar?” she asked when I was done.

“Yeah.”

“When?”

“Pryce is going to call here tonight. He’s going to want another meet. I figure he’ll do it the same way. You know, he’ll already be in place. We’ll have to leave right away.”

“We? You mean you want me to—?”

“No. I mean me and the guy I’m putting in. He’s going be here later. Around eleven-thirty. And he’s got to stay here until we move him out.”

“Stay here? A man?”

“Yeah. Pryce won’t give me time to go and pick him up. And I already moved him out of where we had him staying. It’ll just be for a day or two.”

“I can’t let him. . . . There’s no men living here.”

“You got a basement, right?”

“Yes. But it’s not really set up for living. There’s no—”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s stayed in worse. We can fix it up easy enough. All right?”

She didn’t say anything, one fingernail idly scratching the back of my neck.

“All right?” I asked her again.

“All right,” she agreed.

She was quiet for a few minutes after that. Then she shifted her weight so her hips were resting on the arm of the easy chair. “I’ll bet I’m bruised,” she said on the wings of a soft breath. “From where you pinched me.”

“It wasn’t that hard,” I said.

“Yes it was,” she said. “There’s bruises. Big ones, I’m sure of it. You better take a look.”

We waited downstairs together. Eleven-thirty sharp, knuckles hit the outside door. I motioned Crystal Beth to one side and opened it. Herk and Clarence stood there. And the Mole, an indistinct blob in his dirt-colored jumpsuit, a toolbox in his right hand.

I waved them in. “This is Hercules,” I said to Crystal Beth.

“I’m glad to meet you,” she said, holding out her hand for him to shake.

“You’re goddamn gorgeous!” Herk said, staring. He can do that—say something like that to women without a trace of a leer or a sneer—I’ve seen him do it before.

Crystal Beth flushed, mumbled something under her breath.

“And this is Clarence,” I told her.

“I am honored to meet you,” the West Indian said in his formal voice.

“The honor is mine,” she replied, on safer ground now.

“That’s the basement?” I asked, pointing to my left.

“Yes.”

The Mole walked past us without a word and disappeared down the dark stairs, Clarence right behind him, trusting the Mole to see in the dark. Crystal Beth gave me a look. I ignored it. “Let’s talk upstairs,” I said.

She started up the steps. I elbowed Herk out of the way before he could tell her what a beautiful butt she had and fell in right behind her, leaving him to follow.

In her room, Crystal Beth hit a switch and three separate lamps snapped into light. The place looked different in artificial light. Colder, more efficient.

“It’s gonna be tonight,” I told Herk. “This guy, Pryce, he’ll call here. And we’ll go to the meet. You’ll stay here until he has it set up.”

“Here?” Herk asked, smiling at Crystal Beth.

“In the basement,” I told him. “We’re gonna rig something down there.”

“There’s a toilet,” Crystal Beth said helpfully. “I think it works. And there’s a sink, and a—”

“Whatever,” I cut her off. “We’ll make it work. It won’t be for more than a couple of days, max.” Then I turned to Hercules. “You can’t come upstairs,” I told him. “Not for nothing, period. This is supposed to be an all-women’s joint, understand? Nobody else can see you. Got it?”

“I got it,” he replied, not bitching.

“We’ll take my car to the meet. Pryce has already seen it. And I’ll bring you back. By then, the guys will have it set up downstairs, okay?”

“Sure, Burke. Like you said.”

“You’ve been reading that stuff I left with you?”

“Yeah. It ain’t all that complicated. Just . . . stupid, like.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Jews run everything, right? That’s what the books said. They run the government, the newspapers, the TV, everything, okay?”

“Okay . . .”

“And these guys, they fucking hate the Jews, and . . . Ah, excuse me, miss. I didn’t mean to . . . curse, like. I’m an ignorant asshole sometimes.”

Crystal Beth’s laugh was a merry sound in the room. “That’s all right,” she said.

Goddamn Hercules. He probably could have been the world’s greatest pimp if he didn’t love women so much.

“Go ahead,” I prompted him.

“Okay, so I’m the Jews, right? And I got all this power, right? And these Nazis or whatever, they wanna wipe me out, right? So how come I don’t just wipe them out?”

“Good question,” I told him. “But not a question you want to ask these guys you’ll be with.”

“Oh yeah, I know. I was just—”

“Herk, this is no game. Don’t be wondering anything. No talking, all listening, got it?”

“I got it.”

The phone rang. Crystal Beth walked over to pick it up. Hercules watched her like a kid in an ice-cream forest.

“Hello.”

There was a long pause as she listened, brushing away her hair to get the receiver right against her ear.

After a minute or so, she said: “I understand. Nine-E as in ‘Edward,’ right? I’ll tell him.”

She hung up. Gave me an address on the East Side in the Seventies. “He said to ask for Mr. White,” she said.

“When?”

“Right now, if you want. Or anytime between now and four in the morning, that’s what he said.”

So Pryce didn’t know I had Herk with me, was giving me time to pick him up. Good.

I turned to Crystal Beth. “If I so much as hear a motorcycle . . .”

“I got enough bruises for one night,” she said softly, stepping close to me, sticking her nose into my chest. “Anyway, you have to bring . . . Hercules back, don’t you?”

“Stay put,” I told her, the warning still in my voice.

We all came downstairs together, walking silently past the closed doors on the second and third floors. Lights were on in the basement. We went down the stairs and saw an army cot with a full bedroll all set up. A folding table and matching chair were in place, plus a small TV set, a radio with a cassette player, a little cube of a refrigerator, a hot plate and a bunch of books . . . race-hate literature to comics. Herk’s duffel bag was standing next to the cot. Looked like my place.

“It’s great!” Hercules said.

I held out my hand to the Mole, palmed what he had in his. We all walked upstairs together, then out the back door. Crystal Beth closed it behind us.

“You got those keys made fast, Mole,” I told him in the street, slipping them into my pocket.

“Where are the Nazis?” was all he wanted to know.

The apartment building had a circular driveway in front with a drop-off area protected by a canopy. I cruised past it twice, just checking. Then I found a parking place about a block away and we walked back together.

The uniformed doorman wasn’t asleep. A bad sign, made me edgy. I told him we were there to see Mr. White in 9-E. He raised an eyebrow. I didn’t respond.

“Two gentlemen to see you, sir,” he said into the house phone, eyes never leaving my face. He was a tallish man in his fifties, built blocky, like an ex-athlete who hadn’t kept up the training regimen. His hair was buzz-cut, gone mostly gray. His eyes were small, porno-movie blue. They didn’t blink.

He listened, no expression on his face. “Go on up,” he said. “Last elevator on your left.”

The walls of the elevator car were mirrored, with rows of tiny lights inset into the ceiling. A bell in the control panel pinged a greeting when the car reached the ninth floor.

The door to 9-E was right across from the elevator. It opened before I could knock.

“Come on in,” Pryce said, stepping to one side so we could.

Just past the foyer, there was an oversized living room with a broad expanse of glass facing east. Might have been a river view behind it but I couldn’t tell from where I was standing. The main furniture was one of those sectional leather sofa-chair combos, muted ecru, extending in a J-curve toward the window. A pair of complicated-looking chairs were positioned right across from it, strips of tan leather pulled taut over black wrought iron. A free-form glass coffee table sat between them, all set off nicely by the thick wine-colored carpet. The walls were bare except for some old movie posters from the Forties, framed in chrome.

Pryce waved his hand toward the sectional, taking one of the suspension chairs for himself. Herk and I sat down. I slid over a few feet so that Pryce couldn’t watch us both without turning his head a bit.

“This is your man?” he asked without preamble.

“This is Hercules,” I said.

He swiveled his head to Herk. “And you’re a Nazi?” he asked suddenly.

“I’m an Aryan warrior,” Herk said, no hesitation. I was proud of him.

“What does that mean?” Pryce stayed on him.

“It means I love my race. I would die for my people. And kill for them too.”

“Your . . . race?”

“The white race,” Herk said, trying to keep his voice calm like I’d schooled him, but unable to keep the juice bubbling out—he was proud of himself, a kid eager to show he’d learned his ABCs.

“Define ‘white,’ ” Pryce said.

“Huh? What’s so fucking hard? White.”

“So not blacks and . . . ?”

“And not browns and not yellows and not reds and not no other fucking shade, okay?” Herk told him, a step shy of aggressive.

“And Jews?”

“Jews? They ain’t white people. They ain’t people at all.”

Pryce went “Ummm . . .” like he was considering this newly presented wisdom. “Tell me about the man you killed,” he said finally.

“I don’t know nothin’ about no—”

“You first,” I interrupted, holding Pryce’s eyes.

“This is a leaderless cell,” Pryce said, like he’d never asked the homicide question. “A super-cell, in point of fact. It’s been in place just a few months. There are only a half-dozen or so members, and they all have conventional lives. Relatively conventional. The meetings are in various places, but they use a bookstore in lower Manhattan for an information drop. They’re only in New York until—”

“What’s a super-cell?” I asked him.

He nodded like a college professor who got asked a moderately intelligent question—one that showed the students were paying attention. Finally. “Each of them is a . . . representative,” he said. “From one of the original leaderless cells scattered throughout the country. Eventually, each of them will return to his base area to a pre-determined residence and await contact. Their home cells may have changed composition or personnel by then. Or they may have disappeared. But if they are contacted when they return, each member of the super-cell passes the word. The date for the unified action.”

“And you don’t know that date?”

“No. I don’t believe it is known. Yet.”

“Or the target list?”

“There’s no way to know that at all. Each of the local cells has that. The way it’s set up, the member they detached to the super-cell doesn’t know it either.”

“Why can’t you just shadow each of them when they split?”

“Do you know the kind of surveillance effort that would require? And without tipping them off? No, we need the date. Anything else we get would be gravy.”

I raised my eyebrows at the mention of gravy. If he noticed, Pryce gave no sign.

“Up to now, they’ve been taking their cues from the newspapers. The church arsons, that’s an example. One cell just goes out and commits an . . . action, they call it. Another reads about it, does the same thing. There’s no communication between them. None at all. But this one’s different.”

I looked around for an ashtray. Couldn’t see one. Lit a cigarette with a wooden match. A real one this time, no damn cloves. I watched Pryce’s face. Nothing. Okay. I took out a small metal box, the kind some cough drops come in, and opened it up. Pryce nodded approvingly. Good. Let him get used to me taking things out of my pockets.

“You telling me each of them has a home cell?”

“Yes.”

“So where’s Lothar’s?”

“Right here,” Pryce said. “New York City.”

“And he’s gonna give them up too?”

“He already has,” the colorless man replied, the muscle jumping under his eye.

“So they’re being watched?”

“He has no contact with them, I told you. And we don’t have the resources to do that anyway.”

I wondered who “we” was in that sentence. Whoever it was, it wasn’t the FBI. It has enough damn “resources” to watch anyone. Could they already be in custody?

I dragged on my cigarette, thinking. The whole thing was as snaky-shaky as a politician’s promise.

“Herk’s gotta be a member, right?” I put it to him. “Not some free-lance assassin—a card-carrying, true-believing member. He’s gotta be inside.”

“That’s true.”

“And his credential is that he did some . . . job for them, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you can cover that?”

“Yes.”

I got it then. “So Herk was in Lothar’s cell? From the jump, right?”

“Right.”

“And the guy he . . . took care of, that guy was in the cell too?”

“Yes.”

“An informant?”

“No!” he said sharply. “There can’t even be the hint of such a thing. They would instantly disband if they had any reason to believe they’d been infiltrated. Just fold their tents and go.”

“But not drop the plan?”

“Of course not. But there’d be no way to pick them up again.”

A thought crossed my mind. Something I’d never asked. But it could blow the whole thing higher than Timothy Leary. “This guy you . . .” I asked Herk. “He was white?”

“Uh, yeah,” Herk said. He hadn’t thought about it either.

“No he wasn’t,” I said leaning forward, flushed with relief. Elbows on knees, looking only at Herk, shutting Pryce out of my vision. “He was a Jew. His mother, or his grandmother, whatever, was a Jew. That makes him a Jew. That’s the way they do it in Israel. He’d changed his name, but the cell discovered it. That’s when you got the word to—”

“That’s when you volunteered,” Pryce interjected, with me now.

I shifted my eyes back to the colorless man. “They have some kind of mail drop?” I asked him. “I know they can’t contact the old cell, but is there some way for the cells to reach out to them?”

“Yes. They use a P.O. box on—”

“Okay.” I spun it out. “Lothar gets word that . . . one of his cell buddies was rotten, okay? Now listen, he tells the other guys in his unit that he got this word. He can get the details, but, to do it, he’s gotta meet with someone from his old cell. That’s Herk.”

“They might panic and—”

“And that’s the game,” I said flatly. “If they run, they run. But if they want to hear what really happened, calm themselves down, make a decision whether to abort or not, they have to meet with Herk. And once they meet with him, he’s gotta stay with them until it’s over, right?”

“Yes,” Pryce said slowly. “That’s the way they would behave. Once he was there, he couldn’t go back. But it’s a risk. . . .”

“Any other bullshit way you try and stick Herk in there is a risk too. Only question is, who takes the risk? And here’s the answer: it’s not gonna be us.”

“It’s my decision,” Pryce said. “Not yours.” He scratched the tip of his nose with his index fingernail. “Unless you can guarantee that this divorce business will be dropped.”

“I can’t do that,” I told him. “My way’s the only way. You can get a meet with Lothar, right? That’s when he meets Herk. He wouldn’t necessarily know all his cell buddies that good anyway. This is the way to do it, and you know it.”

“We’ll need good information, very good information about the . . . Jew.”

“I can get all that,” I promised him.

“How fast?”

“Twenty-four hours, max.”

He took a shallow breath. “You have complete control? Of that woman?”

I knew who he meant. “Total,” I promised him.

“Get the information,” he said. “We don’t have much time. You two stay together. Wait for my call. I’ll call her. Two, three days at the most.”

“Done,” I said. To remind him about the money.

I called Crystal Beth on the cellular to tell her we were on our way. As soon as I tapped lightly on her back door, it popped open. If she wondered how I could get past the padlock on the outside gate, she kept it to herself.

“Everything went fine,” I said to her. “Let me get Herk established in the basement and I’ll come back here and tell you about it.”

“I’ll help,” she said, starting to go downstairs.

“Go on up,” I said. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“I’ll wait here,” she said firmly. “If you don’t want me to go downstairs, I’ll wait right here. You can’t wander around upstairs by yourself. If Lorraine saw you, it would be—”

“Okay,” I agreed, cutting off the speech.

In the basement, I went over everything with Herk again. Then I palmed the cellular and left a message for Wolfe.

As Crystal Beth and I walked past the doors, I noticed one of them was open just a crack, a yellow band of light outlining the frame. Lorraine’s room?

“Tell me,” she said as soon as we got into her room.

“There isn’t a lot to tell. We’re going to try to do it. Depends on a bunch of things that have to happen in the next day or so. Pryce, he’s going to call here. You reach out for me and—”

“You’re not going to be here?”

“Not twenty-four/seven. There’s people I have to see.”

“I could come with you.”

“No. You couldn’t.”

“Because—?”

“Because I fucking said so,” I told her, my voice as tired as I felt.

“You don’t have to snap at me.”

“And you don’t have to pout like a spoiled brat,” I told her. “This is business. My business, not your business.”

“I thought you trusted me.”

“I do trust you, bitch. That’s my risk. I don’t make my people take my risks, understand?”

She didn’t say anything, just stood there facing me squarely, one hand pulling idly at her hair. Then she said, “Why do you use that word like that?”

“What?”

“ ‘Bitch.’ You say it like some other man would say ‘honey’ or something.”

“I don’t know. I just—”

“You do know,” she said. “People know why they do things, if they would just think about them.”

“Okay, I guess I never thought about—”

“Do it,” she said. Then gave me a sweet smile. “Please.”

I sat down in the easy chair and closed my eyes. Crystal Beth came around behind me, put her hands over my eyes. Little hands. Soft. Smelled like purple lilacs and dark tobacco. Her nose nuzzled gently against the back of my head. I let myself go into it.

“When I was a kid, I had a dog,” I said, thinking and talking to her at the same time. “A fox terrier. A walking death warrant for rats. She was my great pal. I loved her. When I went to one of those foster homes, they took her away from me. I never saw her again.”

“Why wouldn’t they let you take your dog?” she asked, more anger than sadness in her voice.

“I’m sure they had their reasons. Reasons that looked good on paper. But I knew what it really was. They wanted to hurt me. They all did.”

“But . . .”

“I was right,” I told her, cutting that off before the feelings came back too strong. “I always swore I would have a dog someday. My own dog. In the juvie joint, the fucking ‘reform school,’ other guys dreamed of cars. Mostly cars. Where I came from, nobody thought about having a house, so it was cars we dreamed about. Fantasies, I guess they were.”

“You didn’t fantasize about girls?” she asked, her voice more flirtatious than teasing.

“I meant fantasies you could talk about,” I told her. “Out loud. Girls, the play was you already had them, see?” And mothers too, I thought to myself, remembering how kids in the joint would fight to the death if you called their mother a name . . . even if that mother was a drunken whore who never showed up on visiting day.

“And you could talk about them? About girls?”

“Lie about them mostly,” I told her, keeping my voice light. Thinking of the boys in there who were already talking about girls they hadn’t met . . . and what they were going to do to them when they did. “But me, my fantasy, my dream was to have a dog.”

“Did you ever get one?”

“I got the best dog in the world,” I said. “Her name is Pansy. She’s a Neapolitan mastiff. One of the original war dogs. They came over the Alps with Hannibal. Marco Polo took one to China.”

“Are they smart?”

“Smart? I don’t know. In some ways, I guess. But that’s not her big thing. Pansy would die for me. She’s not some pet,” I said scornfully, “like a tropical fish. Or one of those damn cats.”

“What do you have against cats?” she asked. “Lorraine has one, and it’s—”

“Cats are the lap-dancers of the animal world,” I told her. “Soon as you stop shelling out, they move on, find another lap. They’re furry little sociopaths. Pretty and slick—in love with themselves. When’s the last time you saw a seeing-eye cat?”

Crystal Beth took her hands away from my eyes and walked around the chair. She knelt in front of me, hunched forward, almond eyes widening, not listening so much as opening herself, as if to make her body understand me too.

“But when I come back to . . . where I live,” I went on, “Pansy’s always glad to see me. It doesn’t matter what I look like. It doesn’t matter whether I’m a success or a failure. Or even whether I have food for her. She’s so . . . loyal. Loyal and true.”

“And she’s a bitch?”

“And she’s a bitch. Maybe that’s it. I’m not sure. We get the words all wrong. A man steps out on a woman, he gets called a dog. But if the woman’s ugly, she gets called a dog.”

“I know. And if the girl’s pretty, she gets called something like ‘kitten,’ yes?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Burke?”

“What?”

“It shifted again. Your aura.”

I didn’t need her to tell me that. I could feel the blue in the room. A mist rising from my . . . I don’t know what. “Kitten.” When I was a young man, I called a lot of girls that. They always liked it. I did it so I wouldn’t blow my cover, call one of them by the wrong name. I had a lot of girls then.

“Had.” Looking back, I know I never understood what that meant. But I remember the last one. Ruth. The more she loved me, the more I knew I had to go away. Before Ruth, it was all game. I knew what they wanted. They knew what I wanted. Fire-dancing, seeing which one of us would tumble in first . . . and get burned. It was never me. You can’t lose what you don’t ante up.

The only thing I knew for sure about myself back then was that I was no good. Ruth wasn’t like any of the other girls I’d been with. She didn’t want me stealing to buy her jewels, didn’t shake her ass in the street and then come running to me because some clown noticed it, demanding I defend her “honor” . . . be a man. I thought I knew what that meant too, back then—cause pain, and never show any.

Ruth wanted to be married. Have children. A house. She wanted me to have a job. Be a citizen. Her eyes were the color of nightclub smoke.

She came from the same place I did, but she wasn’t going to stay there. And she’d wait for me to join her, however long it took.

I knew how long it was going to take. And I felt so bad about it I had to go.

But I couldn’t make her see it. When I told her we were done, she said maybe someday I’d understand that she had true love for me and I’d want her back. And she’d come, she said. All I had to do was leave a notice in the paper. People did that then—before the personals columns got degenerate the way they are now—left messages for someone they actually knew.

“Just say ‘kitten,’ ” she told me. “And I’ll know it’s you.”

“But I wouldn’t know it was you,” I said. And told her how I used that name. How it was nothing special.

I told myself I was just being honest, squaring up with her like she deserved. But I saw something die in her eyes right then.

Every once in a while, I would feel that again. First time I heard Barbara Lynn singing “You’ll Lose a Good Thing,” I felt that way. Sorry. For me. A lot of things happened since then. I never broke up with a woman for her own good again.

No, they went away from me. Or died.

When I thought about that, only Hate kept me from drowning.

Crystal Beth stood up. Held out her hand. Then she pulled me in.

The Plymouth swam over the Manhattan Bridge, dwarfed by the Brooklyn-bound trucks. It rolled past the car-repair shops and topless bars on Flatbush, me safe inside, listening to the truth girl-growling out of my cassette player, Magic Judy warning her sisters everywhere—if you’re dumb enough to brag about your man to your girlfriends, they’ll double-cross you every time.

Ten in the morning on a weekday, the Plymouth was invisible in the moderate traffic. I crossed Atlantic, hooked the first sharp left and motored a couple of blocks past the abandoned Daily News printing plant—they do all the work in Jersey now—looking for a place to park.

I found one close enough. Got out and walked back to the bridge over the railroad yards. Wolfe was standing there, waiting. At the curb across from her a dark-green Lexus GS sedan stood idling—I could see smoke from the exhausts. Pepper waved at me merrily from the driver’s seat, a small, pretty dark-haired girl with an electric smile. I could make out a much larger shape in the back seat. Not the rottweiler, a human shape.

I lit a smoke, cupping my hands against a nonexistent wind so I could glance over my left shoulder. Sure enough: a young woman with long winter-blond hair in a bright-orange jogging outfit strolled by past the entrance to the bridge behind me, walking like she was cooling down from a long run. I knew who that was. Chiara, one of Wolfe’s crew. I remembered her from our last meeting; her and that honey-colored pit bull she had on a short leash. They both stopped walking and watched me, making no secret of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The dead guy,” I said.

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

“Yeah.”

“And you’re looking to—”

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

“You got a TPO. Wouldn’t the cops—?”

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

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

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

“It says here he was a security guard.”

“So that means he never did time?”

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

“Everything.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And stay out of yours?”

“Yeah.”

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

“Can you get it today?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Anything else?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Two days,” he said, covering the fresh tattoo with a clean bandage. “Then it will look old, like it was done a long time ago.”

I thought of what it must have taken for a man who’d been tattooed in a concentration camp to copy the oppressor’s symbol onto living flesh. Then the Mole said something to the old man again, touching Hercules on the shoulder. The old man kissed Hercules on the cheek. Not a mob kiss—gently, as he would kiss a beloved son. “Sei gesund!” he said.

And then I knew what the Mole must have told him.

“Lorraine isn’t on the run from . . . them,” Crystal Beth said to me. Talking softly, her breasts mashed against my chest, face in my neck.

I didn’t say anything, just rubbed my palm in tender circles right above her bottom, wondering why she was telling me about the harsh-faced woman with the clipboard and the Siamese cat.

“She’s much older than most of us,” Crystal Beth said. “A different underground. She’s one of the last ones left.”

“What is she, an ROTC bomber?”

“Something like that,” Crystal Beth said. “It doesn’t matter anymore. For Lorraine, it’s all merged.”

“Into what?”

“Men. She’s very bitter at how weak they all were. They weren’t true, she always says.”

“I guess most of the women in here would say that.”

“No, not what you think. Not true to their ideals.”

“Some are.”

“You?”

“I don’t have any,” I said. “All I’m trying to do is get through this.”

“This . . . ?”

“. . . life,” I finished for her. Leaving out the last word I always spoke in my mind: “sentence.” A life sentence. That’s what I got. Some liberal wet-brain once told me, “We’re all doing life.” I guess that was supposed to be some startling insight, make me see we were all brothers. He was some halfass religion-peddling do-gooder. A missionary to a country where he didn’t speak the language, talking to cannibals who’d feast on his flesh if he spent the night with them. I was only sixteen years old then, locked up. But I knew he wasn’t doing my life.

“I like that,” Crystal Beth said.

“What?”

“You . . . stroking me like that.”

I dropped my hand lower. “You like this too?”

“It’s better than being pinched,” she cooed.

I slapped her bottom, lightly. “Shut up, girl.”

She giggled. “I got that from my mother.”

“What?”

“A big rear end,” she said. “It’s genetic.”

“It’s a gift,” I told her.

“It could be,” she whispered, her right hand dropping to the outside of my thigh.

The door opened. A woman walked into the room. Even without the outrageous silhouette, I knew who it was by the click of the spike heels.

“Can I play too?” Vyra asked.

In the frozen moment, my cock deflated and my eyes widened, riveted on Vyra’s hands, ready to . . . but they were empty.

“This isn’t your business,” Crystal Beth said to her, pulling herself into a sitting position next to me.

“Oh, then he doesn’t know?” Vyra said in a challenging voice, hands on her narrow hips, talking over my body like I was furniture.

“That isn’t his business,” Crystal Beth snapped back. “Why don’t you go downstairs and I’ll come and talk to you . . . privately.”

“I like this better,” Vyra said, stepping closer to the bed, eyes only on the other woman.

“I don’t care what you like,” Crystal Beth told her, climbing off the bed and walking around the end of it to close the gap between her and Vyra. “You’re not in charge here. And your money doesn’t change that.”

Vyra took a quick step back. Her little fox face went feral under the makeup as her heavily lipsticked mouth twisted with soundless words. Crystal Beth took another step toward her, her nude body glistening with kinetic confidence. Vyra’s left hand flashed against Crystal Beth’s tattoo, a sharp crack in the silence. Vyra’s mouth made an O, like she was shocked at herself. Crystal Beth kept coming, stepped right in to her, wrapping her arms around the skinny girl, holding her immobile. “Stop that!” she said. Vyra struggled in her grip for a few seconds. Then she started to cry.

Crystal Beth walked her over to the bed, arms still wrapped around her. She muscled Vyra onto the mattress, right next to me, holding her down with one shoulder, her hips over Vyra’s thighs. “Stop it,” she said again, kissing Vyra’s cheek. “Just stop it, now.”

Vyra went from sobbing to sniffling, then gulped a breath and shuddered down into silence. “Good baby,” Crystal Beth said softly to her. “That’s right.”

I got up and started to put my clothes on.

Crystal Beth unbuttoned Vyra’s blouse. Vyra sat up slightly so it could come off her shoulders.

I zipped up my jeans, grabbed my jacket off the back of the easy chair.

Crystal Beth whispered something to Vyra.

“I’ll bet he can’t,” Vyra giggled, unhooking her bra.

Crystal Beth turned her face toward me. “Stay there,” she said. Then to Vyra: “What do you want to bet?”

Vyra whispered something.

“No,” Crystal Beth said. “This.” And whispered something back to her.

I put one arm into my jacket.

“Please stay,” Crystal Beth said, sweetly this time. “Just sit in the chair for a few minutes, smoke a cigarette, okay? Just watch us. Then we can talk.”

I turned around and sat in the chair. Then I took my eyes out of focus and watched them through a soft filter as Crystal Beth helped Vyra undress. When it got to her shoes, Vyra put up a battle and they wrestled around for a while, but Crystal Beth finally wrenched them off and threw them across the room.

Then they made love, generous to each other.

It ended with Crystal Beth on her belly, face buried in a pillow, moaning softly, Vyra behind her, face buried in Crystal Beth. They let go at the same time, explosively. Then stayed softly locked together for a couple of minutes, just off the edge of passing out until . . .

Crystal Beth took her face out of the pillow and looked over her shoulder at Vyra. “I win,” she said, a happy laugh bubbling in her voice.

“Sleepy,” Vyra murmured, her face against Crystal Beth’s broad hip.

I covered them both with the sheet and went downstairs.

“You know how much this weighs?” Herk asked me. He was doing curls with some setup he’d jury-rigged from the supplies we’d laid in—two pairs of two-and-a-half-gallon plastic jugs of water threaded together with insulated wire through the handles and anchored with a piece of wood he used as a grip. He had one set in each hand.

“About forty pounds apiece,” I told him.

“How’d you know that, bro?” he asked, grunting rhythmically with each lift.

“Quart of water weighs about two pounds,” I said. “Four quarts to a gallon. That’s eight, right? Times two and a half is twenty. Double that and you got each hand.”

“No. I mean, I can do numbers. That kind, anyway. How’d you know what a quart weighs and all?”

“I don’t know, Herk,” I said honestly. I know stuff, stuff I read, stuff I heard. It’s all in there somewhere, mixed in so thick I could never separate it out.

“You know how big an acre is?” he asked me.

“About the size of a city block. The whole block, square.”

“Yeah! That’s the kinda stuff I gotta know too.”

“For farming?”

“Nah. I ain’t gonna be no farmer. Gardens, they ain’t like farms.”

“Because they’re smaller?”

“ ’Cause you do it all with your hands, gardening. Remember when they asked old Dante if he wanted to be a trusty, work outside on the grounds?”

“Yeah.”

“He wouldn’t do it, right?”

“Dante was old-school,” I said. “He thought all trusties were rats.”

“Maybe. But that wasn’t it,” Herk said, not breaking the rhythm of his curls, banded muscle popping out on his forearms. “You know what he told me? They had nice gardens outside. Flowers and all. But they worked the beds with those little tractors. Dante, he wouldn’t have none of that crap. He said, if you didn’t work it with your hands, you wasn’t a gardener, you was a farmer.”

“I got it.”

“He gonna go for it?” Herk asked.

I knew what he meant. Didn’t know the answer. Shrugged.

“But if he don’t, you got another plan, right?” the big man asked hopefully.

“Got a bunch of them,” I promised.

“Knock knock.” A woman’s voice at the head of the stairs. Herk and I both turned in the direction of the sound. And the click of spike heels on the steps.

Vyra popped into view, all dressed up again but with her hair piled on top of her head and the makeup gone.

“Can you come—?”

She stopped when she saw Hercules. He stood bare-chested, his long hair matted with sweat, frozen halfway through a curl, the bandage white against his skin. Over his heart, where the swastika lurked.

“Crystal Beth didn’t tell you to come downstairs, did she?” I asked mildly.

“She said to get you,” Vyra said, a defensive tone in her voice.

Hercules just stared at her.

“She said to call me, right?” I told her. “Not to come down here.”

“Well, it’s too late for that, isn’t it?” Vyra came back, standing with her hands on her hips.

I said Fuck it to myself. And out loud: “Vyra, this is Hercules. Herk, this is Vyra.”

The big man carefully placed the water bottles on the basement floor, wiped his palms on the side of his jeans and walked over to where Vyra was standing. He held out his hand. “I’m pleased to meet you,” he said.

“Likewise.” She smiled.

“Those are beautiful shoes,” Herk said.

Vyra looked down at her feet. At the iridescent green high heels with a tiny dot of gold at the toes. Kept her head down while she said “Thank you” in a little girl’s happy-embarrassed voice.

I left them there.

“Now you know,” Crystal Beth said defiantly. As though she was expecting something bad. And was ready to deal with it.

“What is it that I know?”

“About me and Vyra. About what we . . . do.”

“So what?”

“So that’s what Pryce knows too. That’s what he knows that would end everything for her.”

“I don’t get it,” I told her, puzzled.

“Her husband. He would never . . . I don’t know if I can explain it to you. Men have . . . boundaries. Different ones for different men. He knows Vyra has . . . relationships. But he would never—”

“How can you know that?” I asked her. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“They watch . . . movies together. Not movies, I guess. Tapes. Vyra picks them up. She picks everything up for him—he almost never goes out of the house. He doesn’t much . . . It takes a lot to get him . . .”

“What?”

“Look, I’m not . . . comfortable with this.”

“Just say what it is, Crystal Beth. Whatever it is, it’s not yours, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, drawing a breath like she was about to get a shot from the doctor. “He’s not easily . . . aroused. The tapes . . . help him. And some of Vyra’s . . . outfits too. As he gets older, it gets harder and harder. Whoops!” She giggled. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know.”

“Anyway, Vyra would get different tapes. She knows what he likes. Once she was talking to some other women. At some club she belongs to. And they all agreed, nothing turns a man on more than seeing two girls . . . make love. So she got a few of those tapes and brought them home. But when he saw the first one, he went ballistic. Told her it was the most disgusting thing he’d ever seen. He pulled the tape right out of the cassette. He told her, if she ever brought filth like that into the house again, he’d divorce her. Vyra said he looked like a maniac. It scared her.”

“How did Pryce find out about you and Vyra?”

“I don’t know,” she said, voice cracking around the edges. “I don’t know how he knows anything.”

“He has photos? Wiretaps? What?”

“I don’t think he has anything. Not like what you’re talking about. But it wouldn’t matter. Vyra is a lousy liar.”

I knew how true that was, but I kept the thought to myself.

“Vyra’s really confused now,” Crystal Beth whispered to me later in bed.

“What do you mean?”

“Remember when you were . . . watching us?”

“Yeah.”

“You know what our bet was about? The one between me and Vyra?”

“No . . .”

“She said if you watched us you’d get turned on and . . .”

“And . . . ?”

“Want to join in.”

“Oh.”

“She’s . . . been with you, she says. A lot. But she doesn’t know you.”

“And you do?”

“Yes,” she said, turning to throw one thick thigh over the top of mine. “She doesn’t understand how important self-control is to you.”

“Meaning?”

“Vyra thought you would get turned on. And then you’d do something about it.”

“But you thought—?”

“I thought you’d get turned on. But I knew you’d just sit there unless . . .”

“Unless what?”

“Unless we asked you to . . . join us. Did you want to?”

“I don’t know,” I told her.

“How could that be? Either you did or—”

“It’s not that simple. Part of me, I guess, wanted to. But it also seemed like it wouldn’t be . . . private, I guess.”

“Privacy is important,” she said solemnly. “I understand.”

“You think so?” I asked her. “Me, I’ve been in places where there wasn’t any privacy. None at all. Where you can’t even be alone with your thoughts. I just wanted to . . . respect whatever you were doing. Even if I didn’t understand it.”

“You don’t understand two women making love?”

“I didn’t understand why you were . . . why you didn’t want me to leave.”

“Maybe I hoped Vyra would win the bet,” she said in my ear.

“What was the bet anyway?” I asked her, stepping away from where she was going.

“Next time you come here, you won’t recognize my place,” she said. “Vyra has to clean it all. Top to bottom. Every square inch.”

“What if you had lost?”

“I would have had to shine her shoes.”

“That doesn’t sound—”

“All her shoes,” Crystal Beth said.

“Nah, you didn’t want to lose,” I told her, wrapping my arm around her neck to pull her down to me, pictures of her and Vyra together flashing on and off my screen.

By first light, I was on the roof with Pansy. She had greeted the assortment of cold cuts I’d picked up at the all-night deli with mixed enthusiasm, turning her nose up at the dark-edged liverwurst. I didn’t think twice about trying it myself, settling for some rye toast and a few fresh celery sticks with ice water.

I dialed up Mama on the cellular. Nothing happening.

After we came down from the roof, I looked around the dump I lived in, thinking maybe I should have been in on the bet with Vyra. Then I spent a couple of hours cleaning, filled two thirty-gallon plastic trash bags before I was done. Pansy followed me around for a while, then gave it up when she saw it wasn’t going to be any fun.

When I was done, we took a break. Pansy got a quart of honey-vanilla ice cream. I got a cigarette. She finished first, licking the bowl so hard she even took the smell off.

I put on the TV set for her, changing channels until she settled down. I wished I had cable. The only old stuff you can get on regular TV is crap like “The Three Stooges.” I always hated that show when I was a kid. Fucking buffoons. They weren’t partners, those guys. Not like Abbott and Costello. Or good criminals, like Bilko.

Around noon I went back over to Crystal Beth’s. Called her first so she could let me in downstairs. She’d never offered me a key of my own. Sending me a message? Or maybe she’d figured out that the Mole had already taken care of it.

I spent most of the afternoon with Herk, rehearsing. Called Mama around five.

“Man come. With envelope. Two envelopes.”

“White man? Tall? Broad shoulders, clean face, long hair?”

“Not long hair,” Mama said. Meaning the rest of my description was on the money. I’d figured the messenger to be Mick, Pepper’s man. But his hair was long.

“Can you open it, Mama?” I asked her. Like she already hadn’t.

“Sure.” After about ten seconds: “Paper.” Meaning: not money.

“A lot of paper?”

“One, two, three . . . seven pages,” Mama said, taking her time. The only thing she speed-counted was cash. “And picture.”

“Anything else? In the other one?”

“More paper. Writing. Say ‘Call me.’ ”

“That’s all? No signature?”

“Say ‘Call me.’ ”

“Okay, Mama. Thanks. I’ll pick it up later.”

“You working, right?” Meaning: doing something against the law. For money.

“I’m working,” I assured her.

During the drive to Mama’s, I reached out for Wolfe on the cellular. Left word where I’d be, thinking how it was time for our crew to change numbers—the Prof was picking up a fresh set of cloners from the Mole.

The pay phone at Mama’s was ringing as I came through the kitchen.

“You got my package?” Wolfe asked as soon as she heard my voice.

I hand-signaled to Mama, who brought the two envelopes over. I leafed through the contents quickly, holding the phone against my shoulder with my head. “Yeah.”

“The picture is . . . the subject. From his employment application.”

“Thanks.”

“There’s . . . enough there,” she said. “To make the connection. Be sure you look through the thick one first.”

“Got it.”

“Listen, that envelope you wanted dropped off?”

“Yeah.”

“There is no Mr. White at that address. Mick was insistent—he had the apartment number, remember? So they showed him the place. It’s the model suite—the one they use to attract tenants. Nobody lives there.”

“Okay.”

“Anything else?”

“No. Thanks. Hey, did Mick cut his hair?”

“All part of the job.” Wolfe chuckled. “A small sacrifice.”

The security guard’s photo showed a man in his thirties, black hair cut fashionably short, generic European face with an unprominent, slightly bladed nose, staring straight into the camera, unsmiling. Nothing there.

He was born on Long Island. Mother’s maiden name was Wallace. On the birth certificate, someone had placed one of those red plastic pull-off arrows that say “Sign Here”—the kind lawyers attach to contracts they want you to sign in a half-dozen places—next to the name. Why? I kept looking. High-school graduate. Unremarkable military career. Associate-of-arts degree in criminal justice from a community college. Employed steadily, but he changed jobs a lot. Process server, credit-collection agency, store detective. All quasi-cop “investigator” stuff. Almost three years as an auxiliary police officer. That fit—authority freaks gravitate to stuff like that.

Credit report showed him as slow-pay. Not enough to discourage a sizable loan on a 1991 Corvette, bought used in 1995. Arrest record was clean, attached to his application for a pistol permit. Must have been before his short stay on Rikers Island—I guess the security-guard companies don’t do periodic rechecks. Once he got the piece, his pay had gone up to $9.50 an hour. Married a few years ago. Divorced. No children.

His medical scanned normal, except for asthma. Attached was a photocopy of a printout from a fertility clinic. He and his wife had been trying to have a baby some years back. Genetic counseling was checked on the form. That was marked with one of the red plastic arrows too.

I went to the second envelope. Just two pieces of paper. The first was an exact duplicate of the birth certificate, only this version had an official certificate embossed into the lower right corner and a stamp on the back indicating it was a “true and accurate copy.” I followed the red arrow—now his mother’s maiden name was Wasserstein.

The other page was a duplicate of the fertility-clinic stuff. The red arrow took me to the genetic counseling section—now it said: SCREEN FOR TAY-SACHS. The substitute papers were beautiful work, impossible to distinguish from the originals. Wolfe was more outlaw than I’d thought. And she had access to some fine forgers too.

I removed the red plastic arrows, substituted the new pages for the old and sat down to reread the new, unified version.

The death warrant.

I’ve heard that plenty of women clean house in the nude, but I’d never seen one do it in lipstick-red four-inch heels. When Crystal Beth showed me into her place, Vyra was wrestling with the vacuum cleaner like it was an artifact left behind by aliens, muttering to herself, her pale skin shining under a thin sheen of sweat. She saw me, bent to find the cut-off switch, a puzzled look on her face. After a minute of hunting around, she ripped the cord out of the wall in one mighty tug, then looked up in triumph.

“I didn’t want to mess up my outfit,” Vyra said to Crystal Beth, nodding her head in the direction of the bed, where a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of red and black and white silk stuff lay in a confused jumble. “Anyway, I’m almost done.”

“Almost done?” Crystal Beth laughed. “You only started a few minutes ago.”

“Well, what else is there?” Vyra demanded, crossing her arms under her breasts. She always did it that way. For the lift—I think she knew they were way too big to look good without a bra.

“There’s the baseboards, the shelves, the bathroom, the—”

“The bathroom? I’m not cleaning anybody’s—”

“Yes you are,” Crystal Beth said, advancing on her. “You lost fair and square.”

Vyra turned away from the onslaught, walked over and sat down on the arm of the easy chair, crossing her legs and arching her back as though a camera lurked. “Well, I wouldn’t have lost if you weren’t such a wuss,” she said to me.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Yes, well, it’s not you that has to do all this work. It’s your fault—the least you could do is help.”

“And miss a chance to watch you? No way.”

Vyra flashed me a smile, taking it as a compliment. But she didn’t go back to work.

“I’ve gotta go talk to Herk for a bit,” I told Crystal Beth. “Let me know when Vyra’s done.”

“I’ll let you know,” Vyra said.

“Better put some clothes on first,” I told her. “It’s drafty down there.”

“This is like in the joint, huh?” Herk said to me.

“The joint? This place is fucking Paradise compared to—”

“I didn’t mean . . . this,” Herk said, making a sweeping motion with his arm. “I mean . . . talking, like. Remember, in there? The Prof was always tryin’ to explain stuff. Like how to do crime good and all?”

“Sure.”

“Well, this is like that. You been explaining to me, right? How I gotta act and everything.”

“That’s right.”

“Only it’s different this time, Burke. Real different.” He took a deep breath, thought showing on his face, the heavy bone structures prominent under the flesh. The white flesh. Part of the passport he’d use to slip past a checkpoint very soon. “In there,” he said, “the trick was, like, not to come back, you know what I mean? We was gonna do crime, right? All of us. We was thieves. So we made plans. This time it’s different.”

“How?” I asked him.

“This deal here, it’s my last crime, Burke. I swear to fucking God. We pull this off, it works like you say, I’m done. And you know what else?”

“What, Herk?”

“This ain’t like before. This time I’m listening real good.”

“You don’t like my shoes?” Vyra asked Hercules, standing at the foot of the stairs, one red spike heel on the floor, the other propped one step up, posing.

“I didn’t notice ’em,” Herk said, moving past me toward her, standing close. “That first time, the shoes was the first thing I seen. Coming down. This time I was looking at you.”

“At me?”

“At your eyes,” Herk told her. “I never seen a color like that.”

Vyra’s eyes were an everyday brown. She clasped her hands under her breasts, cocked her head, said “Really?”

“Yeah. They’re the same color as . . . Ah, you wouldn’t understand. It wouldn’t sound so good to you.”

“Tell me,” Vyra said, taking her foot down to stand in front of him, looking up from under her eyelashes.

“Peat moss,” Herk told her shyly. “You know peat moss? Like for growing roses? It’s so . . . rich. Rich and strong. That’s the color.”

On my climb upstairs, I figured out how the amorous fool got away with stuff like that. He meant it.

“If I had lost the bet, I would have shined every last one of her damn shoes,” Crystal Beth said ruefully, waving her arms to indicate the pitiful cleaning job Vyra had done.

“I believe you,” I said.

“Ah, that’s Vyra.” She laughed. “She has no discipline.”

“And no purpose?”

“You’re not . . . making fun of me?”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“Sometimes people . . . tease. They don’t mean anything by it, but it still . . . hurts.”

“Crystal Beth?”

“What?”

“Would you do me a favor?”

“Sure, honey.”

“Go sit down. In that chair.”

She did it, a questioning look on her upturned face. I walked over to the bed, sat down myself. “Now get off your fat ass and come over here,” I told her.

She giggled, bounced over to where I was sitting.

“What?” she asked, laughter in her eyes.

“It’s never really the words,” I said softly. “Not the plain words. It’s what they mean. I make a crack about your fat ass, it doesn’t bother you, right?”

“Well, I am at my winter weight. . . .”

“Cut it out, girl. It didn’t bother you because you know I think you’re beautiful. If you really thought I was making a nasty crack about your weight, your feelings would be hurt, wouldn’t they?”

“Yes,” she said seriously.

“That’s the difference. I know it and you know it. And I would never rank on you about your purpose. You’re sure I think you have a great butt. . . . You’re not so sure I take you seriously. That’s it, right?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Right?”

“Yes,” she said, head down.

“I do, little bitch. I swear.”

“Oh, Burke. I know. . . . But you’re wrong about Vyra. She doesn’t have a purpose, but she’s looking for one. That’s more than most people ever do.”

“It’s more than I ever did,” I told her.

“Come here,” Crystal Beth said softly, opening her arms.

Lightning tore the sky that night. It was about nine. Pansy and I were watching TV, some show that had a dog in the cast. One of those perky, cute ones that get to talk in a human voice. Like “Baywatch,” I guess. Across the bottom of the screen, a string of words crawled: SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING IN EFFECT IN SUSSEX AND UNION COUNTIES UNTIL 8:30 P.M. DETAILS AT 11:00. Even Pansy sneered at it.

I found one of those trash-news shows. They had an interview with some money-for-pussy slut telling the world that she’d written her book about how her politician boyfriend liked to dress up like a French maid and clean her house because she wanted all her fellow Americans to be aware of what kind of man was making important decisions about their lives. The hardest trick that whore ever turned—coming up with a pious reason for selling secrets. Probably her pimp’s idea.

I didn’t like the idea of that politician much either. Who wants a government official dumb enough to trust a whore?

Then they did another “exposé” of strip bars invading middle-class communities. Devoted about three minutes to shots of anonymous thonged buttocks and beyond-genetics boobs, then about fifteen seconds to the winter-dressed picketers outside. I wondered, if surgeons could do brain implants, would anybody get them?

The show closed with some geek who writes incest-torture comic books shrieking that he’s the new John Peter Zenger.

Sure wished I had cable.

The cellular rang just before midnight.

“It’s me,” Crystal Beth said. “He just called.”

“He wants a meet now? Don’t say where on the phone. I’ll be—”

“No. Tomorrow afternoon. Can you—?”

“I’ll be there before twelve,” I promised her.

As I patted Pansy before I took off the next morning, I felt a tremor. Didn’t know how it was transmitted, from her to me or the other way around. But I felt it, and I trusted it.

So I stashed the Plymouth on Houston. Leaned up against a building to kill some time. Lit a smoke. A woman in a loden-green wool coat with fancy horn buttons down the front walked by, making a sour face at my cigarette. The after-trail smell from her perfume was enough to gag a coroner.

A few minutes later, I took the subway to Bleecker Street. I couldn’t set up a box for any meet with Pryce. Not a tight one, anyway. If he smelled it, he’d disappear. But I could make it hard for him to do the same to me.

On the subway I watched a man with his arms folded inside a dirty white sweatshirt, seeking the comfort of the straitjacket he remembered so fondly, his face going insanely serene when he found just the right position. Like the way a newly sprung convict moves into a one-room apartment even if he can afford more. There’s something soothing about the familiar, even if it’s ugly.

“Where’s he want to meet?” I asked Crystal Beth as soon as she let me inside.

“He didn’t say,” she answered. “He’s going to call at three and—”

I nodded, cutting her off. And felt myself relax. That’s what had been spooking me—no way a man like Pryce tells you the address of a meet fifteen hours in advance unless he has enough personnel to keep the place under watch all that time.

As we walked past the second floor, I heard a door open behind us. I didn’t turn around.

“Where’s Vyra lurking?” I asked when we got to her place.

“She doesn’t come every day. Sometimes I don’t see her for a week or so. It depends.”

“I wasn’t trying to get into your business,” I told her. “I just wanted to know if she was going to make one of her appearances.”

“You could, you know.”

“Could what?”

“Get into my business. You’re already in my . . . life. Don’t you want to know about . . . me and Vyra?”

“No.”

“It was my . . . idea, I guess,” she said, as though I’d answered the other way. “She’s not gay. Well, I guess I’m not either. She’s not bi—I was the first time she ever . . .”

“It doesn’t—”

“I love Vyra. She’s not what you think. What you might think, anyway—I don’t know what you think. She’s . . . lost. I wanted to help her find . . . herself, I guess. It’s a natural thing.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“Because you didn’t ask, I guess. That’s the way I am. I don’t like secrets between . . . friends. But if anyone tries to make me tell . . .”

“I wouldn’t try and make you do anything,” I said. No, little girl, I thought, you can’t be muscled into stuff. You have to be tricked.

“Vyra’s fun. You’d think I’d know more about fun than she would, the way we were raised. So different. But that’s not true. Maybe because I have a purpose . . . I don’t know. I have a pair of shoes like hers. She made me buy them. I mean, she paid for them, but she made me go with her and get them. You want to see them?”

“Sure.”

Crystal Beth walked barefoot to her closet and came out with a pair of hot-pink spikes with a little round black dot inset on each toe. “Four-and-a-half-inch heels,” she said, grinning. “They make me really tall.”

“They’re, uh . . . remarkable,” I said, struggling for the right word and missing it.

“I can’t imagine where I’d wear them. Or what I’d wear them with. Vyra says I’m lucky. That I have such small feet.”

“Is that genetic too?”

“I think so. My mother had tiny feet. Not my father, though. You want to see how they look?”

“Sure.”

She slipped the shoes on her feet and paraded around a bit, pulling up her slacks at the ankles so the shoes could be displayed. “Do you think they look silly?” she asked me.

“It’s hard to tell this way,” I said, scratching my chin, deep in thought. “Try it with the pants off,” I advised her solemnly.

It was almost four when the phone rang. This time it was an address on West Fifty-sixth. An office building, if I remembered the block right. I scooped Herk out of the basement and we hiked west to Eighth Street near NYU. Then we grabbed the N train to Fifty-seventh, and walked over to the address Pryce had given me.

There was an attendant in the lobby, but he didn’t pay any attention to us as we walked toward the elevator. I quickly scanned the tenant directory, but I couldn’t see anything next to 1401. We rode up anyway.

The hall carpet had been fresh when you could still buy a De Soto in a showroom. The walls were a dingy shade of layered nicotine. The overhead lighting alternated between pus-yellow and missing as we moved along the corridor. The office doors were a uniform dull brown, identified by the remnants of gilt decals displaying the numbers. We found 1401 just past a right-angle turn in the corridor, standing alone next to a window overlooking an air shaft. The window was the kind of stained glass you don’t see in churches.

I rapped lightly on the door. The man who opened it was a little taller than me, with thinning light-brown hair and watery blue eyes. He raised his eyebrows like he expected me to say something. I didn’t.

“You’re—?”

“Yeah,” I told him, moving past him into the office. Herk was right on my shoulder. I heard the door close behind us.

We were in what once had been a waiting room. The back wall was a receptionist’s booth, complete with a sliding-glass window cut into the wall. Both empty. I opened the door beside the receptionist’s window. Pryce was in the next room, seated behind a wood desk in one of those green vinyl swivel chairs they gave typists in the Fifties. He stood up when we walked in.

“Let’s get started,” he said.

We followed him to another room. It was small and square, with a nausea-colored linoleum floor and a single window that had been painted over with that silver stuff they use on bathroom glass. The only furniture was a knock-down card table with a clear glass ashtray on it and four black metal folding chairs. The walls were bare, painted an off-white that years of neglect had degenerated into just “off.”

Pryce gestured for me to pick a chair. I took the one with its back to the window, nodding at Herk to sit on my right. Pryce sat with his back to the door, leaving Lothar to face Herk.

I handed him photocopies of the printouts I’d gotten from Wolfe. He scanned through them, eyebrows going up slightly when he came to the substituted pages. He handed the dead man’s photo to Lothar without a word.

Lothar looked at the photo and nodded in recognition. Then he said the dead man’s name.

Damn.

“Did you know him well?” I asked Lothar quickly, keeping my face calm.

“Only met him a couple, three times,” Lothar said smoothly, looking at Pryce for approval. “That was the way we worked it.”

“And when do you get the word?”

He looked at Pryce, who said: “Tuesday, there’ll be a message at the drop. From Hercules. You’ll turn it over—not the physical message, you’ll destroy that—to the others. Offer to meet with Hercules yourself. They’ll tell you to bring him someplace. Or they’ll tell you to go there alone, but they’ll be there too.”

“They might—”

“No they won’t,” Pryce cut him off. “They’ll have to find out. It’s too close. Now, what you need to do is spend the next couple of hours together. Get familiar with each other, like I told you. This will be the last chance you get.”

“How about a beer?” Lothar said to Herk, standing up.

“Okay, brother,” Herk replied, following him out of the room.

We sat in silence until I heard the sound of a door close somewhere to my right. Then I leaned forward and dropped my best card on the table, my one shot at getting Crystal Beth out of the line of fire.

“We don’t have to do this anymore,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“The threat to you is Lothar getting busted when he comes in on the divorce thing, right?” I asked, keeping my voice so low Pryce had to twist his head to turn his ear toward me—no chance they could hear us in the next room. “But if we just wait,” I told him, “it all fixes itself. And I can get that done now.”

“Explain,” he said, voice even lower than mine.

“The woman doesn’t go in. I don’t care if it’s all set up or not. She just doesn’t go in. Not now. Her lawyer gets an adjournment, whatever. How long is this gonna take, anyway? Another two weeks, three weeks?”

“I don’t know. I told you, I don’t know the date that they intend to—”

“Whatever. It won’t be long, you know that much. All we have to do is wait. Why do we need all this undercover stuff now? I can guarantee you the woman will wait. And that’s all she has to do. When this thing they’re planning goes down, then she makes her move. And Lothar, he just defaults—doesn’t show up at all. They can issue all the warrants they want for him—he’ll be underground, right? Gone for good. And that’ll get her everything she wants. Once he disappears, she’s free.”

“How can you make that guarantee? You don’t even know the woman’s name,” he said, watching my face. “Or, even if you do, you don’t know where she is. You may control that . . . other woman, but not the one that counts.”

“Wherever she is, she’s dependent,” I said. “She’s not going to be able to do this by herself. She needs the others. That’s the way it works. There’s a whole support system. Not just money—she needs emotional support too. She’s safe where she is. Her baby too. It may be a little tense, but it’s not dangerous. She can wait. When this started, you wanted the whole thing called off. Well, we don’t have to call it off, right? All we have to do is delay it. For as long as you want.”

“It’s not that simple,” Pryce said. “Too much time has gone by. He—Lothar—is getting nervous. Not about the others—he’s very confident there. About me. He wants something from me. A show of strength.”

“What’s that got to do with—?”

“He wants to see his son.”

The weather changed in the room. The baby. I felt little dots of orange behind my eyes. My hands wanted to clench into fists. I pictured my center. Saw it start to fracture. Pulled it into a latticework, holding it with my will. I turned the blossoming rage into ugly green smoke, let it pass through the lattice. To somewhere else. Tested my voice in my head until it sounded calm, all the jagged edges rounded into smoothness. Then I let it out.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said, checking the audio on my voice to be sure it was calm and peaceful. “He can’t take the kid into the cell. Even if he has someone who’d take care of the baby, he’d never get him back once the wheels come off.”

“He doesn’t want to take him,” Pryce replied. “Not now. He just wants to see him.”

“To be sure you can deliver?”

“Yes. He knows I can handle the . . . other part. After all, we need his cooperation, so he can expect to be treated very well. But the . . . government doesn’t know where his wife and baby are.”

“And neither do you,” I said, getting it for the first time.

He shrugged, as if it were a minor problem. One he could expect to have solved sooner or later.

“And that’s what the threats were all about, huh? It was never about delaying some scam divorce. That was the deal you made with him—that you’d find his kid. And maybe—yeah!—and deliver the kid when he goes away. Hand him right over.”

He shrugged again.

“But if he brings Herk in, he’s skewered. You’d have your own source. If he rats Herk out, he goes down too.”

Another shrug.

“Very nice,” I told him, meaning it. “But I can get what I want without doing anything now. You might have threatened Crystal Beth into getting the woman to drop the divorce thing, but you know you don’t have enough horsepower to make them give up the baby. Let’s go back to where we started. Forget the divorce. It’s not gonna happen, okay? Lothar won’t come in. He won’t get busted. You play out your own string.”

“It’s too late for that,” Pryce said. “I have to have that baby. For an hour. Two hours, tops.”

“Can’t do it,” I told him.

“You said you had total control of—”

“It doesn’t matter anymore. Everyone has limits. That would be hers.”

“I don’t care about hers,” he said quietly. “Only about yours. We have a deal. What you get is your friend Hercules. Vanished. With full immunity.”

“That’d be good. But we can live without it.”

“There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

“What murder?”

He idly fingered the photo of the dead man, not saying a word.

“That’s a guess,” I told him. “Not an indictment.”

He looked up at the ceiling, like he was seeking divine guidance. “Everybody’s been lying to you, Burke,” he said. “When you see your girlfriend, ask her about Rollo’s.”

“What about Rollo’s?”

“You think she was a stranger there? They’re all part of it.”

“Part of what?”

“Her network. This Mimi, the one who runs the place. Her. The bouncer, T.B. Rusty, the big guy who sits in a corner and draws pictures. Even her husband.”

“Crystal Beth has a—”

“Not her, Mimi. Her husband is the owner of the place. He never goes there, but he owns it. And half a dozen others like it, all around the country.”

“So he owns a few bars, what—?”

“Not bars. Nerve centers. He’s one of the bankrollers, like this Vyra person. But it’s Crystal Beth who’s in charge. This stalking thing, it’s out of control. So many people just living in terror. It was only a matter of time before they banded together. Your friend Crystal Beth, she’s running a lot more than you think.”

“So she’s a liar,” I said. “So they’re all liars. It doesn’t matter. I’m out of this now. Why should I help you get your hands on that baby?”

“This immunity thing, it’s really quite wonderful,” Pryce said smoothly. “You can always trade up. Give prosecutors a homicide, they’ll give you a pass on a whole bunch of other stuff.”

“So?”

He picked up the photo of the dead man again, held it like it was a delicate shard of spun glass. “So it’s all a chain. But I hold the link that can snap it. If you don’t believe me, maybe you should ask Anthony LoPacio.”

“Who the hell is Anthony LoPacio?”

“Ah, that’s right. You probably know him by some other name. Try ‘Porkpie.’ ”

I lit a cigarette to buy time, not surprised that my hands didn’t tremble—I was dead inside. My brainstem felt clogged with all the messages. Only one came through clearly, acid-burning all the others out of the way.

Murder would fix this.

A pair of murders. Right here. Right now.

I looked up at Pryce, feeling my eyes go soft and wet. My eyes were Wesley’s now, watching prey. I was born a motherless gutter rat. And when I’m cornered . . .

He saw where he was walking. His Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times. The muscle jumped under his eye. “There’s another way,” he said softly, playing for his life, putting his hands flat on the table, palms down. “We can be partners.”

I listened to every word he said, pushing killing him and his boy Lothar behind a door in my mind. But I left the door ajar. Then I went over the deal. Again and again.

Summed up:

Even if he was telling the truth, even if he was the only one who was, he’d walk away with all the cards.

And he could always come back and play them again.

“Why should I trust you?” I asked him.

“Because you know what I want . . . and because I’m the only one in this whole thing you can say that about,” he told me. “The rest of them all have their games. Whether they want to save the world or destroy it, what difference? You and I, we’re professionals. I can’t do this without you, okay? And you can’t get what you need done without me either.”

I kept his eyes, but my mind went walking. Years ago, I did time with an Indian. He had some tribal name, but he never used it Inside. We called him Hiram. He told me a lot of stuff, and I always listened. Hiram told me that there was no separate Chickasaw tribe—“Chickasaw” was just the Cherokee name for “once were here, now are gone”—those who chose war as a way of life. The last to fall to the white man’s guns—but the first to “adapt,” which was why the BIA began calling them one of the “Civilized Tribes” as they walked the Trail of Tears. But Hiram said they were just biding their time then, waiting.

And some of their children’s children still were.

Hiram told me there was no tribe called Seminoles either. That was just a name laid on them by Andrew Jackson . . . before he shipped them out to Oklahoma, where they could join the survivors from the Trail of Tears. What they really were was part of the Creek nation Jackson drove down into Florida from the Georgia border.

He said some of their children were still waiting too. Maybe, if the tribes hadn’t warred with each other, if they’d ever joined forces, the whole thing would have come out different.

Hiram told me something else too. He said the badger and the coyote sometimes hunt together. In the high Northwest, in winter, when game gets scarce. The coyote has the better eyes, but he can’t penetrate the rock-hard ground. And the badger can only see close-up. So the coyote would spot the prey, and alert the badger. Then the badger would dig it out, and they’d share the kill.

And go their separate ways, until the next time.

A temporary alliance of predators.

I had called Pryce a lone wolf, and he hadn’t argued. But professionals never correct mistakes you make about them. And what had Wolfe called him? A bounty spotter? Maybe . . .

I kept his hands pinned to the table with my eyes, waiting.

When he couldn’t wait any longer, he said: “And then there’s the money.”

“Which you can’t front,” I responded, back to where I was.

“How could I front it? I work on spec. All the risk is on my end. There’s no contract. Strictly COD. You know how that works. It’s all on the come, but I’ll go fifty-fifty when it shows. What could I do to convince you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Name it and it’s yours,” he said. “But I have to have that baby.”

“Any surprises?” I asked Herk. We hadn’t talked all the way down on the subway, but now we were in the Plymouth. Heading north.

“Nah. He’s a weak little punk, Burke. All that stuff about being a warrior and dying for the Race. His fucking ‘brothers.’ Like I don’t know he’s gonna give them all up, right?”

“Yeah.”

Silence after that as the Plymouth ate up the miles.

“You ever know any of them?” he asked suddenly.

“Nazis? Sure. When I was in—”

“Not them. Jews. You ever know any Jews?”

“Herk, for Chrissakes. Who do you think put that tattoo on your chest?”

“Oh. Yeah. I wasn’t—”

“Vyra’s Jewish,” I told him.

“Vyra?”

“Yeah, Vyra. The girl with the shoes.”

“She’s Jewish?”

“Sure. What’s so—?”

“I dunno. I never thought about . . . I mean, listening to that Lothar and all. Reading them books you got me. I never thought about girls being Jewish.”

What do you say to that?

“Can you do it?” I asked the Mole.

“It wouldn’t be precise,” he said calmly.

“But you could make it look like this?” I asked, pointing to a sheet of graph paper on which I’d roughed out a sketch. “And it would work?”

“Yes,” he said, giving me a look of mild surprise.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him.

“It’s very . . . intelligent,” the Mole said.

“What’s this?” Pryce asked, taking the thin flesh-colored wrap from my hand. It was three days after I’d gone to see the Mole.

“It’s an ankle cuff,” I told him. “The latest thing. Weighs less than a quarter of what the old ones did. Space Age plastic with titanium wire. For monitoring pedophiles in those outpatient programs. You put it on, I seal it, it stays on until I take it off. If you have it cut off yourself, that’ll break the signal.”

“And you expect me to wear this?”

“That’s the deal,” I said. “You wear this, I know where you are. Not precisely, but close enough.” He couldn’t know how much of a lie that was. The major dope cartels use satellite tracking systems that can show the precise location of a tiny boat in hundreds of miles of empty sea. But they have the millions to hire Silicon Valley whiz kids to write the software, and billions’ worth of product to protect. Me, what did I have?

He thought it over for a minute. “And what good would that do you?” he finally asked.

“If you try and run with my money, I’ll know it. And I’ll find you easy enough.”

“How do I know you won’t just—?”

“Take you out when you deliver the cash? I don’t expect you to trust me either. You can mail it. I’ll give you an address. The cash shows up, you’re off the hook.”

“But you’ll still be able to track me.”

“Only for about thirty days—that’s all the battery’s good for. You can have it cut off as soon as you’ve sent the cash. The transmitter doesn’t have that much of a range. I’d know you ran, but I wouldn’t know where to.”

“But in the interim . . . ?”

“I already found you,” I reminded him. “I found you tonight. Every time we’ve been alone, it’s like I found you, right?”

“So I wear this bracelet and you give me the baby?”

“You wear this bracelet and I let Lothar see the baby.”

“Yes.”

“And one more thing.”

“Which is?”

“I need an address.”

“Yes?”

“Porkpie hasn’t been around lately,” I explained it to him.

“Once Hercules goes in,” he said quietly. “And Lothar sees the baby.”

“Deal.”

He took a breath. “You don’t expect me to put this on now?”

“Why not?”

“You’re not an engineer, are you?”

“No.”

“Well, neither am I. It isn’t that I don’t trust what you said, but I’d like to have this . . . device examined before I put it on.”

“Take it with you,” I told him.

“See the baby?” Crystal Beth said. “No way.”

“It’s the only way,” I told her. “Lothar won’t be able to snatch the kid—we’ll have him covered. But without that card, he’s not gonna play. And if he doesn’t, then Pryce . . .”

“You believe he’d do it?” Vyra asked me. “Bring everything down?”

“Yeah,” I told her. “I do.”

“I don’t trust him,” Crystal Beth said. “I’d never trust him. He doesn’t have to do this. He’s a pig. A filthy, lousy pig.”

Vyra stood up. Walked near the window, bending her left hand at the wrist so the afternoon sun would fire the big emerald-cut diamond on her hand. She admired it for a minute. Turned to Crystal Beth like I wasn’t in the room. “That’s the only way you get truffles, honey,” she said.

Crystal Beth walked over to where Vyra was standing. Put her hands on Vyra’s neck and pulled her close. Whispered something.

Vyra walked to the door, swinging her narrow hips hard. She slammed it behind her.

Crystal Beth left the window and plopped on the bed, face up. She patted the covers for me to lie down next to her. I did it. She tugged at the back of my head. “What?” I asked her.

“I want to tell you a story,” she said, guiding my head into her lap, twirling her hands in my hair. I closed my eyes. “When I was a little girl,” she said, “I was afraid of heights. Not great heights, like in a city. There wasn’t anything all that tall on the land we had. But we had a shed. For storing machinery. It was probably only ten feet off the ground, but I was afraid to go up there. On the roof, I mean. We were playing, and the ball got stuck up there. It happened all the time. We took turns going up there to get it. But when it was my turn, I wouldn’t go. I was afraid. . . .

“Nobody made me go. But I felt bad. On the farm, everybody had to take turns doing stuff. But climbing that shed, I could never take mine. I never told my parents. I was . . . ashamed, I guess. Anyway, one day, one of the other kids teased me about it. And my mother heard.

“So she made a jump pool. Like a swimming pool, but out of blankets. And mattresses. And some bearskins she had. It was huge. It took hours and hours to make it, everything piled so high and soft. Then she got a ladder. I went first. She was right behind me, arms wrapped around me so I couldn’t fall. Then we just sat up there. Everybody was watching. My mother told me we could sit up there as long as we liked. She told me stories. The kind I loved. About polar bears and sled dogs and seals and whales. And after a while, it was time to jump.

“We stood up and we held hands. My mother said we would be polar bears, jumping into the water from a little cliff. She was the mother bear and I was the cub. We did it, holding hands. Everybody cheered. It was so great. I was never afraid of heights after that.”

“Your mother knew how to do it,” I said.

“I thought that too. For a long time. Then my father told me the real story. My mother was afraid of heights herself. Where she was raised, it was all flat. Going up scared her. My father said she didn’t even like to go in elevators.”

“She had a lot of guts.”

“Enough to give me some. I know how to jump into things now,” she whispered.

Then she reached down and tugged at my hair, pulling me up to her.

“Got him,” the Prof’s voice barked over the cellular.

I cut the connection. Pryce was about four blocks away, rolling toward the meet in the same white Taurus he’d used at the airport. I’d told him the meet was coming a couple of days ago, told him to have a cell phone handy and to get me the number. I rang him an hour ago, asked him how long it would take to get to an address in East Harlem. He said to give him an hour. We had a spotter up there too. I rang in on his cellular as soon as the Taurus turned into the street I’d given him, told him about the change of plans. It was just a short hop over the Willis Avenue Bridge to the new address, twenty minutes ETA.

Finding an abandoned warehouse in the South Bronx is no great feat. Securing the premises was another matter, but we’d had people in place since noon the day before, thirty-four hours ago.

From my vantage point on the second floor, I could see the white Taurus pull up. Pryce was all-in now—he couldn’t know this wasn’t a hit, but he couldn’t get to the baby unless he ran the risk. One of the Cambodian trio stepped out from the shadows and walked toward the Taurus, right hand in his coat pocket. He motioned with his empty hand for the window to come down. It did. He walked right up to the driver’s side, leaned in and said something. Pryce and Lothar got out. The Cambodian slipped behind the wheel and the Taurus took off.

I looked over to where we’d rigged a pool of light, using a generator to drive a single hanging overhead fixture. The floor had been swept in a ten-foot circle. Two milk crates were the only furniture in the artificial island. One of the Cambodians came up the stairs first, nodding to me to indicate the speed-search had gone okay—no weapons. Then Pryce. Then Lothar. Then the third Cambodian. “That’s for you,” I said to Lothar, pointing at one of the milk crates.

“I thought you were gonna take us someplace to see my—”

“Just sit down,” I told him. “Be patient.”

Max the Silent came out of the darkness. With a baby in his arms.

“Gerhardt!” Lothar yelled, reaching out for the infant.

Max shifted his body, throwing his shoulder as a barrier.

“Sit down,” I told Lothar. “We’ll hand you the kid, okay?”

Lothar looked at Pryce. Getting the nod, he took his seat. I made a motion to Max. He closed the gap, handed the baby down. From his shoulder, Max unslung a blue cloth bag, placed it at Lothar’s feet. Lothar held the child at arm’s length, as if examining him for defects.

“He looks thin,” he said to no one in particular. “That cunt had better be . . .” He turned to face me. “Where is she, anyway?”

“That wasn’t the deal,” I told him. “You wanted to see the kid, there he is.”

“I thought—”

“Nobody gives a fuck what you thought,” I told him, hardening my voice. “That’s your kid, right?”

“Yeah,” he said resentfully. “But I thought—”

“It’s what you asked for,” Pryce said to him, like he was a pizza-delivery guy. You asked for anchovies, you got anchovies. You changed your mind, too bad.

“I want to be alone with him,” Lothar said. “I don’t like all these . . .” He left it blank, but I didn’t need a translator. “. . . standing around watching me.”

“It doesn’t matter what you want,” I told him, no-flexibility ice in my voice. “I had to make some promises in order to borrow the kid for a few hours. One of them was that you wouldn’t be alone with him. And I keep my promises.”

“A promise to a cunt don’t mean—”

“I drove for almost six hours to set this up, and I got a long ride to take him back,” I lied. A professional habit, planting barren seeds. “And I made a deal too. You’re not getting off that box. In that bag there’s a bottle with some formula, a clean diaper, everything you’ll need. And everybody’ll step back, okay?” I waved my hand and Max did just that. Lothar’s eyes swept the room, but the harsh overhead lighting kept him from seeing anyone. Even his wife, not thirty feet away, probably holding her breath.

I tugged gently at Pryce’s coat, drawing him back deeper into the dark. He came along without protest. We moved along until I found the stairs. Then I went up one flight, Pryce right behind.

We had the next floor lit too. One room, anyway. Another pair of milk crates with a plank across them made a little table. On that table, a bowl of tepid water, an aerosol can of shaving cream, a thick white hotel towel, and a disposable safety razor in plastic shrink-wrap. Plus a half-dozen maroon-and-white sealed packets marked CORTABALM on the sides.

“Your turn to deliver,” I told him.

“What’s the other stuff for?” he asked.

“You have to shave the ankle before you attach the cuff. Like you would before you’d tape it up to play football, same thing. Otherwise you can sweat under there, the itch can be awesome. That’s what the cortisone patch is for. It keeps the area fresh and clean for the whole thirty days.”

He took the monitoring anklet—the one I’d let him take with him the last time—from a coat pocket. Without saying another word, he pulled up a cuff on his dark slacks, took off his shoe and sock and wet the ankle thoroughly. His hand was perfectly steady as he shaved.

No reason for him to be nervous. He’d had plenty of time to have an expert look at the cuff, tell him that there was no thread of Semtex wound through it. And that the wafer-thin battery would be damn lucky to last the thirty days.

When he was finished shaving, he toweled off the area. I handed him one of the cortisone packets. He tore it open. “Make sure it’s flat,” I told him. “Once this cuff gets clamped on, any bumps are going to stay there until it comes off.”

The white cortisone pad was thin and moist. He smoothed it down with the fingers of both webbed hands. “Okay,” he said.

I locked it on.

Fifteen minutes later, Lothar was done. The baby was getting antsy—he knew his mother was close and he wanted that comfort back—and Lothar finally figured out the kid’s only response to anything said to him was to gurgle a few times.

Besides, Lothar had shown the cunt who was boss. He wanted to see his kid—he saw his kid. He handed the baby back to Max. The warrior’s face didn’t change, but I could feel his contempt all the way across the room.

It was as lost on Lothar as Max’s ki had been.

“Tomorrow you get the letter in your box,” Pryce told him. “There’ll be a number there. Pay phone. You call. Meet with Hercules. And then you bring him in.”

“I know, I know.”

“Go downstairs with Alexander,” I told them, nodding toward one of the Cambodians. “He’ll stay with you until your car gets brought back around.”

“Alexander?” Lothar said. “What kinda name is that for a gook?”

“It’s a secret society,” I said to him quietly. “They always take the name of the last man they kill. This is his fifth one.”

Lothar looked at me, started to open his mouth. Shut it. He glanced over at the Cambodian, who showed him a brilliant smile. Half his teeth were the color of lead. The rest were missing.

They went downstairs. I watched as the white Taurus came up the street, watched the first Cambodian get out. They climbed in and took off. I didn’t insult Pryce’s tradecraft by writing down the license number.

The phone buzzed in a minute.

“Moving off,” said the Prof.

“He said black hair was okay,” the baby’s mother was telling Crystal Beth as I came back to the second floor. “He hated it at first. He wanted it to be blond. Aryan. But later he said that Hitler had black hair.”

“He’s gone now,” Crystal Beth said to her.

“He scared me,” the woman replied. “Even here. With all these . . . people around. You don’t know him.”

“I know him,” I told her. “You won’t see him again.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, tension wire-taut in her voice.

“We’re sure,” Crystal Beth promised her.

“What’s the kid’s real name?” I asked her.

“Huh?”

“His real name. Lothar called him Gerhardt. Is that what you named him?”

“Oh! Yes, that’s what Larry named—oh, I see. You mean, I could name him . . .”

“Whatever you want,” I told her. “Starting right now.”

“How long do I have to—?”

“This is for you too, right?” I told Vyra. “You can’t just go back to your life the way you usually do. Part of this deal was to get you off the hook, remember?”

“Fine, I remember. But how long—?”

“Two weeks, three maybe. What’s the big deal? This joint is beautiful,” I told her, glancing around the hotel suite. “You can handle the time easy enough.”

“But I can’t stay inside for that long. My husband would—”

“You don’t have to stay,” I said, thinking how long I’d stayed—lived—inside places smaller than this joint’s bathroom. “You got a private line there. When you go out, forward the calls to your cellular. When Herk calls, you’re here, understand? Make sure you talk that way on the phone. Then call me. And get your ass in gear so you can be back before he shows up.”

“But what’s the difference whether I’m here or not? It’s just so you can meet with him. . . .”

“Yeah. That’s right. But we don’t know who’s watching.”

“I thought you had Pryce—”

“It’s not Pryce we’re worried about now, Vyra.”

“Oh, all right.” She sighed dramatically, snapping open one of the four suitcases she’d brought with her.

She found a pair of magenta pumps and slipped them on. That seemed to make her feel better. Then she sat on the padded arm of a chair in the living room and watched as I made a full circuit of the place, checking.

“You think I’m a hypocrite, don’t you?” she asked. But the tone of her voice made it clear she was accusing me of something.

“Huh?”

“What word didn’t you understand?” she demanded, getting to her feet. “Okay, I’m stuck in this. Because of that . . . man. Pryce. And his nasty little threats. But that business with . . . Lothar, or whatever name you call him. You know I drive a Mercedes. . . .”

“So?”

“So I’m a Jew. You know that. I never made a secret of it. That’s me, right? A Jewish American Princess. With big tits. And a rich husband. That about sums me up, doesn’t it?”

“You tell me.”

“And I drive a German car,” she went on like I hadn’t spoken. “What does that make me?”

“It makes you a person with money,” I told her. “What the hell are you talking about? Nazis didn’t build your stupid car. The Germans today, they’re just . . . people. Like us. Americans, I mean. Hell, we probably got more Nazis here now than they do.”

“But their ancestors—”

“Don’t mean a fucking thing,” I cut her off. “Nobody’s ancestors mean anything. People are what they do, not what someone else did.”

“But you think I’m . . . weak, don’t you?”

“Vyra, what is this?”

“It’s still about money. My husband would dump me if he found out about me and . . . Crystal. He told me that once. He thinks when women . . . it’s the most disgusting thing in the world. That’s the only threat to me—money. It’s different for the rest of them.”

“That’s the way it is,” I said. “You wouldn’t be in this if you hadn’t put money into Crystal Beth’s operation. And you did that because you . . . well, for whatever reasons you had.”

“Good reasons.”

“Okay. Whatever you say.”

Vyra walked away from me. Sat down on a straight chair facing a corner, sulking. I left her there, went back to checking the place for problems.

“Are you still mad at me?” she finally asked. Not turning around—talking over her shoulder.

“Mad at you? For what?”

“For Crystal? For what we—”

“That’s your business,” I told her.

“You were with her too.”

“Okay.”

“That’s it? ‘Okay’? What does that mean?”

“It means I don’t want to argue with you. Not now. When this is all done, you can throw a fit if that’s what you want.”

“What do you want, Burke?”

“I want this to be done.”

“Me?”

“What?”

“You want me?” she asked, standing up and turning around. “You want me to take my clothes off now? This is a hotel room, isn’t it? That’s us—you and me. That’s what we do.”

“Not now.”

“You mean not ever, don’t you?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”

“Well, you better think about it. What happens after—?”

“Vyra, this isn’t the way to do it, putting pressure on me.”

“You think she’s better than me, don’t you?”

“Who?”

“Don’t be such a swine. Crystal! Because she has that . . . purpose she’s always talking about. Me, all I do is spend money, yes? Maybe, if you listened to me once in a while, you’d hear something. I’m a person too.”

“I played square with you,” I told her. “I never hustled you, never scammed you, never took your money, nothing.”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Nothing.”

“It’s too late for that now.”

“You’re not getting another chance,” she said, unbuttoning her blouse to play what everyone had been telling her was her trump card since she’d been thirteen.

“Whoever does?” I asked her. Then I walked out the door.