Another Life (5 page)

* * *

H
e opened with: “A missing kid.”
“You want to me find—?”
“Prince Fazid el Kandal wants you to find. Not you personally—he doesn’t know you exist, and he never will. He wants his son, Amir Aziz Ghazi, returned. And our…government wants his wish granted.”
“Runaway?” I asked. No idle question: runaways may end up on the Most Wanted lists, but most of them start out on the Unwanted one.
“The boy is two years and seven months old,” he said, cutting out my next hundred questions.
“Snatched?”
“Four days ago. No ransom demand, despite the well-known fact that the father has unlimited assets.”
“So did Lindbergh.”
“Meaning what? Lindbergh never got his kid back.”
“Not alive, he didn’t. But they executed a patsy to make it all come out even.”
“This isn’t about covering up a crime,” Pryce said, “or finding someone to pin it on. If it was, we’d hardly need
you.
There’s a whole…department in place for that sort of work, and they’re very good at it.”
“Why me, then? You’ve got access to far more resources than I could ever—”
“Because, whoever took the baby, we think he’s one of yours.”
“I know you must mean something by that, but I don’t like riddles. Just get to it, okay?”
“Not one of your
people,
” he said, as all-in-a-day’s-work as a doctor signing a fake Medicaid claim. “One of…those you hate. The kind you used to hunt. One of your sworn enemies. By tribe, not name. Whoever took the child, he’s somewhere in a world that nobody knows better than you do.”
“And
you
know this because…?”
“We have a deal?”
“You want me to just keep
saying
that, or you want me to get to work?”

* * *

“W
e need you, Father. Please come back to us,” Clarence whispered urgently, as if the presence of all the gleaming, pristine machinery had put the steel back in his voice.
“He is trying,” a white-uniformed nurse said. She was a slender woman with an achingly beautiful café-au-lait complexion, and midnight hair so lustrous it would make a raven jealous. The pain she saw every day had turned her exquisite dark eyes into occupied territory. Any other time, any other place, Clarence would have been siren-called.
But he didn’t even look up. “Father,” he prayed. Very softly, holding the Prof’s hand.

* * *

W
e never left the Prof’s side, handling it in shifts. Except for Clarence, who always seemed to be there.
Michelle spoke, Max touched, the Mole hovered.
We expected Gateman to show. But when we saw Terry pushing his wheelchair, Michelle threw the Mole a look that would have made Godzilla flinch.
The Mole didn’t even blink. Neither did the kid.
Mama came, too. Seeing her outside her restaurant was like running across a polar bear sunbathing in Tucson. The nurse looked at the soup she brought, opened her mouth to say something, scanned the black-ice eyes in Mama’s ceramic face, and let it go.
Clarence finally passed out. The nurse, Taralyn, told us they knew it was going to happen, and they were ready for it. No shortage of “special beds” in
this
hospital.
I wasn’t there as much as the others. I was working. Paying the hospital bill.

* * *

“U
nder the Basic Law, all human actions are on a continuum: obligatory, meritorious, permissible, reprehensible, or forbidden.”
“Spare me,” I told Pryce.
“You think Shari’a is—”
“A fraud? No more than any other god-control crap. The
rules
are fine. But any fucking pervert can ‘interpret’ them, like that ‘God Hates Fags!’ tribe of degenerates in Kansas. And everyone knows rules don’t apply to bosses, anyway.”
“Everybody?” he half-scoffed.
“Everybody who’s not a serious candidate for a CAT scan,” I said, slamming back his lob, but working extra hard on using a mild tone. Non-believers can still be fanatics, and evangelical atheists can be dangerous. “You think the high-school football players who kneel in the locker room before a game don’t know that the guys on the other side are doing the same thing? What, they think God has a point spread? The Sunnis and the Shiites who slaughter each other both swear they’re serving Allah. Enough, already.”
Pryce didn’t move.
“It doesn’t matter what oath you take, who you pray to or swear behind: the bosses are always the bosses,” I said. “Like that
omertŕ
handjob the movie boys love so much—you ever met a don you
couldn’t
turn?”
“Gotti—”
“—was dimed out by his personal hit man. Gotti was the top of the pyramid, so what did he have to trade? You know how it works: you have to rat
up,
not down. He’d reached jurors before; maybe he just liked the odds. Or maybe he already knew he had cancer, and wanted to take his rep along for the ride.
“Besides, it’s not like he had a choice. Any soft-sentence deal prosecutors make, they have to sell it to the media first. That’s what counts. That’s
all
that counts. You think New Yorkers would have gone for the sweetheart package they put together for the ‘Preppy Killer’ if the DA’s Office hadn’t talked the victim’s
mother
into holding press conferences supporting it?”
“So you think—?”
I made a chopping motion with my hand, telling him I was done talking. I’d let myself slip, temporarily forgetting how information was plutonium in Pryce’s hands. He’d rather pick a brain like mine than the lock at Fort Knox.
“This isn’t about me,” I said. “How about we stop this debate-society routine and get to the part that is.”
His blue-for-today eyes held my one good one for a long second. Then he moved his head in a barely perceptible nod, released a shallow breath, and then laid it out.
“Prince Fazid el Kandal’s car was found at approximately 3:05 a.m., near an abandoned pier off the Hudson, south of Canal. He was slumped in the front seat, immobilized. The vehicle was his personal car: a bespoke Rolls, rebodied as a ‘shooting brake.’ You know what that is?”
“Brit-speak for ‘station wagon.’”
“Close enough. This one had a lot of custom work, including a column shift, a fold-down padded panel between the front buckets, and a permanent slot for a baby seat, centered in the back. That seat was for his son. The Prince was in the habit of taking the child out in that car during the evening, just the two of them.”
“Not even a—?”
“The windows were prescription glass; you’d need an astigmatism to see inside, especially at night.”
“But he still got nailed?”
“This wasn’t an assassination,” Pryce said. “In fact, whoever’s responsible went to a lot of trouble
not
to go that way. It’s easy enough to detonate any car if you have the right equipment. Or a tank, for that matter. But what this team wanted was
inside
the vehicle, so it had to be a surgical extraction, not a scorched-earth blast.”
I waited, listening to a faint echo of admiration in his voice for whoever had put such a complex operation together.
“The Prince had been chemically restrained; some sort of full-body paralytic. Whoever hit him with it knew exactly what they were doing.”
“You talking about how they hit him, or the dose?”
“What does that matter?”
“If you want to get a specific result with a drug, you need to know a lot more than chemistry.”
“Such as?”
“Weight, blood-alcohol level—”
“He’s a Saudi. They don’t drink.”
“And they never have diabetes? Or bum tickers? Epilepsy? See where I’m going?”
Pryce blinked his eyes. Once, like a camera shutter. “According to the Prince, he was swarmed by a group of men who sprayed some kind of mist in his face. And before you ask, they were all masked, gloved, wearing generic clothing. They never spoke. The Prince was just waking up when a sector car spotted his vehicle.
“Now, this is important: the Prince had
not
been reported missing. The cops were not responding to a BOLO of any kind, just drawn to the sight of such a car in such a place.
“Actually, the Prince was lucky that night. When the uniforms opened his vehicle, he was still wearing all his jewelry. In that neighborhood, if the cops hadn’t gotten there first, he would have been picked clean.”
“In that ‘neighborhood,’ they would have harvested his fucking organs.”
Pryce shrugged. I didn’t waste any focus trying to interpret what that meant.
“The baby was taken. That was all I got from him.”
“And you think someone took all those risks, spent all that money…just to get their hands on a kid?”
“No ransom demand,” Pryce repeated. “You tell me.”
“How could it
not
be some kind of political thing?” I said. “One baby’s the same as another to traffickers. Value varies, but the kid you’re describing, he’d be too old and too dark-skinned to be worth much.”
“Too
old
? He was only—”
“Worth maybe one percent of a blond-and-blue, doll-faced white baby girl. The kind of money it would have cost to put together an operation like you described, it had to be that
particular
kid they wanted. So how could it be anything
but
political?”
“Watch” was all he said, reaching for a thin black box on his desk. His eyes directed mine toward a flat-screen TV.

* * *

“C
ar tricks are always scary.” I put the age of the woman on the screen at anywhere from sixteen to thirty—impossible to tell more because of the slightly out-of-focus image and hazy lighting. I figured the tape had been diffused to produce the copy Pryce was showing me, so I didn’t put much stock in the voice being her own, either.
She looked like an upscale streetwalker: a lush packaging of illusion and delusion, from the plastic breasts to the expensive wig to her pass-a-polygraph belief that what she did was all about “love.” Half reclining in a stark white padded chair, she recited her lines: “All G.K.’s ladies stroll, but he won’t let us do business outdoors. He’s got a deal with a
very
fine place—private parking around the back, no register, satin sheets, fresh flowers…everything.
“G.K. says a john isn’t buying sex; he’s buying an experience. You don’t buy
us,
you buy our time. We’re actresses, not hookers. That’s why G.K.’s the king of—”
Something out of camera range induced her to cut out the infomercial and get back to what she was being paid for
this
time: a quick round of Truth or Dare. And Dare wasn’t an option.
“Look,” she said, haughtily, “you want a quick blowjob while you’re sitting behind the wheel of your hoopty, you drive on over to Skankville. G.K. says I’m double-fine enough to work outcall, but we all live by his Three Commandments: no credit cards, no paper trails, and no partners. Some other girls use the Internet, but even that’s a—”
Whoever cut her off the first time did it again.
“Okay,” she said, after a little pause…long enough for her complexion to get closer to the color of the chair. “One time, a cop got me in his car. He told me I could either take a ride around the corner and do him for free, or take a ride downtown. My choice: front seat or back. I told him I’d take the back,” she said, pride swelling her fake chest. “I carry a panic button, and I knew G.K. would have a lawyer—a
real
lawyer—waiting for me at arraignment.
“Besides, G.K. says, you give it away to a cop even once, he keeps coming back for more. You call his bluff, he
might
bring you in, but most of the time it’s not a collar he’s trolling for.
“And G.K. was
right.
The cop went into this rap about working for Internal Affairs, just ‘testing’ me, some line of bullshit like that. Whatever, I was done for the night. That’s another of G.K.’s rules: any cop contact means your shift is over. And he knows I’d never lie to him.”
The interrogator, whoever he or she was, had the good sense or natural instinct to stay quiet. Let the whore keep rolling, even if that meant listening to her explain why she could have been a grand-an-hour outcall star.
“So I was on my way to get a cab,” she said, “but when I saw
that
car, I knew it was something supernova. Maybe a pro baller, maybe an actor, maybe even an out-of-town player, trying to pull me. That happens
all
the time,” she boasted, “but my man knows he doesn’t have to worry. He’s got my heart.
“I remember thinking to myself, no way the Law’s got a ride like that. I mean, it wasn’t flash, it was just…
better,
you know what I’m saying?
Way
past anything I ever saw in my life. I know a Rolls when I see one—who doesn’t?—but to go
custom
on one? No way. That’s not bling; that is
class.
”
That last word almost made her come. For real, for once.
“The window slides down and I get over there
quick,
before one of those other…But that wouldn’t have mattered; it was
me
he wanted. ‘Mink,’ he said, soon as I get close. So I knew he’d been scouting me, using my name like that,” she said, still excited about winning the pageant.
She tossed her store-bought dark-streaked mane of cornsilk hair, said, “A thousand, cash. In my hand.
Before
he so much as touched me. I hadn’t even gotten in the car! Anyway, we end up under the FDR. Dark, but not scary. Plenty of people close by there. Always is.
“That front seat was
big.
Then he said I could have another thousand if I did exactly what he told me to do.
“The man was way cool, how he put it. No bargaining, no games. If I didn’t want the extra thou, I could leave right then. Just open the door and step out.
With
the money he’d already given me.”
She looked over at whoever was on the other side of the thick slab of matte-black material that formed some kind of table between them.
“Naturally, I went for it. He gave me orders. Nothing special; nothing I hadn’t heard before. He didn’t hit me, or make me call him ‘master’ or any of that scene, but he was very, very precise: get on all fours, unzip him, pull up my skirt….
“When it was over, he said—God, I swear I will never forget this—he said, ‘You see? A whore will always do as she is told. You pay; she obeys. Whatever you want. Anytime you want. However you want. You
want,
the whore
does.
That is the world.’
“At first, I thought he was talking to himself—some of them do that, especially afterwards—but I…couldn’t help myself, I guess. I looked where
he
was looking. Into the back seat. And that’s when I saw it.”
Silence.
“A
baby
! Strapped into one of those little seats. I couldn’t even tell if the kid understood a word, or what he might have seen, but it scared me worse than the time a trick made me suck off his gun. He put the barrel right in my mouth and made me slobber it good. When he cocked it, I…”
Maybe the interrogator made some gesture; I couldn’t tell. But this time, it didn’t slow the flow:
“That psycho with the gun, he was doing himself at the same time, with his hand. He spermed all over the dash when I…”
Silence from the interrogator. Same result:
“That time—with the gun, I mean—I just kind of staggered out of the car,” the hooker said. “I remember throwing up. I remember pulling off my panties and throwing them away. Then I washed myself with every towelette I had on me. I couldn’t stop shaking. I could smell myself.
“But
this,
this was a million times worse. I can’t explain it, but…seeing that baby, thinking about it
watching,
I just…”
Silence.
“Then the guy in the Rolls told me to get out. He didn’t call me dirty names like some of them do when they’re done. He was very calm. But I’ll never forget those words. ‘I have no more use for you, hole.’
“He said ‘hole,’ not ‘whore.’ I could hear it. He made
sure
I heard it. I
still
hear it. He said, ‘When you close the door behind you, it is as if I have flushed the toilet.’ And then he said: ‘You see?’ He was talking to the
baby.
”
By then, her hands were shaking too violently to pull a cigarette out of her pack. A hand reached into the frame, holding one out to her, already lit. A web-fingered hand.
The hooker took a long, deep drag. Closed her eyes. Said: “Please don’t make me talk about this anymore. You promised me, if I told you everything, you’d take care of—”
“That’s already been done,” Pryce’s undisguised voice said.