Dead and Gone - Andrew Vachss [122]
“The part about little girls. He’s not into that at all.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know what he is into, you idiot.”
I risked a glance at the Mole. He was calm as a snake on a hot rock. A venomous snake.
“What makes you think he’d go along with me taking over his identity?” I asked Michelle. Quickly, before she could go into details.
“Like I said, I know what he wants.”
“But we don’t have—”
“Sure. We have,” Mama said, radiating calm. “In special clinic, yes?”
She’d snapped to it way before I had. “What special—?”
“And it would take considerable time to complete all the testing necessary,” the Mole said, soberly.
“Mole,” I said, “we wouldn’t really be—”
Patches of red showed in the Mole’s subterranean complexion as his eyes flicked rapidly behind his Coke-bottle lenses. “I know,” he said. As close to sarcasm as he gets.
Mama knew an outlaw doctor based just outside of Galveston.
The guy only did plastic surgery. And he didn’t keep records. All it took was cash for him to close down his clinic for a month.
Eight days later, Michelle called from Key West to say, smugly, that the old man was ready to travel. I asked her what kind of boat he had.
“It’s me,” I said, when I heard Gem’s voice on the phone.
“I knew you would call.”
“Are you as certain of the phone you’re speaking from?”
“Oh! No, perhaps not.”
“Can you find the corner of Ninth Avenue and Seventeenth Street?”
“Yes.”
“You have your red coat with you?”
“Yes. It is precious to me.”
“Be sure to wear it. A black man with a West Indian accent will meet you.”
“When shall I leave?”
“Now.”
I watched from my back booth as Gem entered Mama’s restaurant with Clarence. Mama was at her register, but didn’t look up as Gem walked back toward me. Clarence went out the way he’d come in.
As soon as Gem was seated, Mama walked over, snapping her fingers for the mandatory tureen of hot-and-sour soup. One of the gunmen who pretend they’re waiters when some tourist mistakes Mama’s for a restaurant brought it over.
Mama took the lid off the tureen, looked a question at me.
I nodded a “Yes” at her, and she put a small bowl before Gem and filled it, making it clear I could serve my own damn self. She regarded Gem thoughtfully, doing an ethnic read. Then she tried a greeting in Tagalog, but Gem smiled and shook her head, replying in Cambodian. Now it was Mama’s turn to shake her head. She tried French, and Gem answered right back.
Mama bowed slightly and sat down next to me, bumping me over to the wall so she could sit directly across from Gem.
“You both speak English,” I said to her. “What’s with all this—?”
Mama cut me off with a look. Gem giggled.
And they went back to speaking French.
I was well into my third bowl of soup when they decided to let me in on the conversation.
“So? You Burke’s wife?” Mama asked in English.
“Yes,” Gem answered her.
“You understand, Burke my son. Not marry for … final unless I say.”
“I understand,” Gem said, solemnly.
“Your mother …?”
“The Khmer.”
“Ah. Sorry. So many …”
“Yes.”
“After this … thing all finish,” Mama promised Gem. At least, it sounded like some kind of promise. I couldn’t figure out what it meant, but I wasn’t dumb enough to ask.
After Mama went back to whatever she had been doing, I read Gem the specs on the old man’s boat I’d written down from my conversation with Michelle.
“It’s a ninety-two-foot Cheoy Lee cockpit motor yacht,” I told her. “Whatever the hell that is.”
“I am sure they could handle it, but I will call to be certain.”
Then I told her the rest of it. Gem didn’t say a word, didn’t interrupt me once. When I was finished, she said, “There is another way I could help, I think.”
Mama came back over to my booth as if she’d been listening in on a wiretap and knew we were done talking.
“Eat now, yes?”
An hour later, Gem was still shoveling it away.
Mama passed by the booth, saw the carnage, and chuckled approvingly.
“The boat should have at least a four-person crew,” Gem told me the next day.
“At least?”
“It is an oceangoing vessel,” she said, as if reciting