Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [104]
I met the Mole when the Israeli took me out to the junkyard and told him I was working for their cause on a special assignment and to help me if he could. He couldn’t then, but he has a few times since, as I’ve already mentioned.
The Mole will do anything to hunt down Nazis, but he’s not interested in too much else—so most every time I come back to see him it’s about Nazis. I’m not a political analyst, but it seemed to me that Goldor qualified, and Wilson was a likely candidate too. It didn’t matter—the Mole never asked for details. Each time I went to him you could see him balancing the risk that I would bring the heat back with me against the chance that there could be one or two less Nazis doing the looking. Each time I caught the green light.
The Mole flopped into his chair without ceremony, took some gadget out of his overalls, and started fiddling with it. Finally he looked over at me, blinking. “So, Burke?”
“I need a car, Mole. Some license plates. And some help with a power system.”
The Mole just kept looking at me, nodding and blinking. There was no question but that he would do it—he always had. If there’s one thing I know about it’s how to survive, and here was one of the few people living who could teach me something more on the subject. But the Mole had his survival down so well he never talked about it. He looked up. “I’ll see you outside. Wait for me. Sit, have a smoke, talk with Simba-witz. I’ll come soon.”
I stumbled my way back through the tunnel to the shack—the doors to the outside were already open. I don’t know how he does that. I found my way outside, sat down on an empty milk crate, and lit up. Simba came back into the yard and stood there looking at me. He approached slowly. When he got close enough I scratched him behind his ears—even his growl of contentment sounded life-threatening. I told him, “Simba-witz, have I got a girl for you! Her name’s Pansy and she is a thing of beauty—a face like an angel and a body that just won’t quit. I told her all about you and she’s anxious to get together. What do you say, pal? Down for a little action?”
Simba snarled, which I took for agreement. Depending on how this caper came out, I might have to go someplace for a few months, and if I did I wanted to be sure Pansy had a home. And the puppies would be beautiful, no doubt about it.
The Mole materialized from the shadows. When he was just a kid he used to read Scientific American like it was a comic book, and his teachers said he was wasting his time in school—that he should be in a doctoral program somewhere. But his parents thought he was a strange kid and that he needed to be socialized, so they kept him in the public school.
He was the target of a lot of freakish games by other kids, and he got beat up a lot. He would come home all battered and his father, a dockworker, would tell him to go back and fight it out with the kids or he would give the Mole worse than what he got from the bullies—very creative psychology on a kid with a genius I.Q. The Mole built some kind of homemade laser gun in his basement, went back to school, and blew away half a wall instead of the biggest tormentors—even then, his eyesight wasn’t too good.
The police came to his house, there was some kind of confrontation with his father, some talk about therapy, and the Mole ran away from home.