Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [29]
“Where did you hear that?”
“There’s a bar in Jersey City, just on the other side of the river, a really weird place. It looks like a roadhouse in West Virginia or something. They play country-and-western music up front and I know they have all kinds of strange meetings in the back rooms.”
“Strange meetings? Like dope deals, guns, what?”
“No—like the KKK or the American Nazi Party.”
“Oh—that kind of strange.”
“Does that scare you?”
“Yes and no,” I said, and it was the truth. The freaks individually don’t scare me—they’re usually terminal inadequates. But the idea scares the hell out of me. It’s unnatural, you know what I mean? Freaks are supposed to stay by themselves—in furnished rooms, with their picture books and inflatable plastic dolls. We’re in bad shape when they start forming fucking affinity groups. “But I have done business with them in the past. I know a few of them.”
“What kind of business could you do with people like that?”
“Purely professional, nothing personal,” I said. No point telling her about the genuine recordings of Hitler’s speeches I sold them. Real expensive, exclusive stuff, pirated out of the bunker where Adolf the Asshole waited for his final reward. Only one other like it in the whole world, and that (of course) was in the archives of a neo-Nazi party in West Germany. Yeah, I had it on the best authority from an old Nazi who escaped to Argentina, where he’s recruiting mercenaries to attack Israel. I couldn’t sell the defectives on that particular venture, but they lapped up the tapes and paid the going rate. They apologized for not being able to understand German, (although one of them told me he was studying it by correspondence) but they said they had the exact translation of Adolf’s final speeches which they had purchased from some other enterprising businessman. What the hell—Yiddish sounds a lot like German anyway, and the six hours of Simon Wiesenthal’s address to the German crowds at a Holocaust memorial rally only cost me twenty bucks. A little reel-to-reel work, some Iron Cross lettering, a swastika or two, and I was ahead well over two grand. I gave them a discount price, of course, because after all; they were true believers. But Flood would never understand what a man has to do to make a living.
She gave me her shrug. “Like the professional recruiting business you do with mercenaries?” Maybe she did understand.
“Yeah, exactly like that. What about that bar?”
“I went there a few times and listened. Your name came up more than once.”
“Just about the mercenary scam?” There was no point in euphemisms anymore.
“Yes, nothing else. You’re quite a legendary figure to those people, Mr. Burke.”
“Yeah—to others too. I’m surprised you didn’t use your famous interrogation tactics on them to get more information.”
Another shrug. “I guess I did with one of them. He told me he had your telephone number in his car. I went out to the parking lot with him to get it and he tried to be stupid.”
“What happened?”
“I left him there.”
“Alive?”
“Certainly he was alive—do you think I walk around murdering people?”
“That action in the alley when you grabbed that kid’s family jewels is liable to stay on my mind for a while.”
“Why?”
“Well, it’s not your everyday act, right? Would you really have given the kid the chop?”
“That’s not important. It was important that the others understood they had to move, had to obey. It took away their will to fight any more.”
“It almost took away my will to hold on to my lunch. Would you really have done it?”
“Do you remember what the one with the bushy hair said he was going to do to me? Do you think he was just trying to frighten me?”
“He was trying to frighten you.” I paused, recreating the scene in the alley. “But he would have done it, that’s right.”
“So I would have done it—but only because I threatened to do it and those are promises you must always keep. I would rather have just killed him.”
“Yeah, what the hell,