Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [47]
“You got it prepared already?”
“Always ready, always on stove cooking. Cook adds things during the day, but same soup, okay?”
I nodded yes and sat down at one of the front tables. The place wouldn’t open for another couple of hours, and the curtains were drawn across the windows. One of the cooks came out with a big bowl of soup and some hard noodles, the Daily News and tonight’s Harness Lines, which is the working-class version of the Daily Racing Form. It was a perfect breakfast, sitting there with the hot soup and the papers. Quiet, peaceful, safe. I couldn’t concentrate on the racing form, so I let my mind drift off and slowly finished the soup. If this James was up to something in Africa, it had to be diamonds, ivory, or soldiers. A connection with Wilson? No, Wilson couldn’t know I was looking for him. Besides, James had been calling Mama’s even before this business with Flood started. It wouldn’t come together.
I cleaned off the table and took out a pack of cigarettes, arranging ten of them in a star formation with the filters pointing toward the open center, then stared deep into the center until the cigarettes disappeared and walked around in the empty space in my mind for a while. Nothing came. Tendrils of thought licked at my brain but nothing ignited—I would have to wait for it to surface when it was ready. I’d already taken too many chances with the Flood thing.
I got up, returned all the cigarettes but one, stuck that one in my mouth unlit, went out to the kitchen with the plates. “See you later, Mama.”
“Burke, when you call this man on the telephone, you meet him at the warehouse, not your office, okay?”
“Mama, I’m not going to call him. I don’t need the work right now. I already have a case.”
“You meet him at the warehouse, okay? With Max, okay?”
“How do you know I’m going to meet him, Mama?”
Mama just smiled, “I know.” She went back to her ledgers.
I made the alley, fired up the car, and headed for the library to meet Flood.
18
I GOT TO Bryant Park around nine-thirty. This little plot of greenery located behind the Public Library is supposed to enhance the citizens’ cultural enjoyment of their surroundings. Maybe it did once—now it’s an open-air market for heroin, cocaine, hashish, pills, knives, handguns—anything you might need to destroy yourself or someone else. There’s a zoning law in effect, though—if you want to have sex with a juvenile runaway from Boston or Minneapolis, or to buy a nine-year-old boy for the night, you have to go a few blocks further west.
Not too much activity when I first got there. The real scores are at lunchtime. But the predators and the prey were already doing their dance: broads walking through with gold chains and swinging handbags, solid citizens hustling to get to whatever hustle they do for a living, amateur thugs who wouldn’t know an easy score from a steady job lurking as subtly as vultures in a graveyard, small packs of kids moving through fast on their way to one of the porno movies in Times Square, some old lunatic feeding the pigeons so bloated from slopped-around junk food that they couldn’t fly, a bag lady looking for a place to rest her body for a few minutes before she nomads on.
I looked around carefully. There were no real hunters on the set (like someone who got burned in a dope deal looking for the salesman). I sat down on a bench, lit up. Like always, I was early. Sometimes if you come late for one of those meetings, you never leave.
I was smoking my cigarette and watching the flow around my bench when I saw the Prof approach. He was making his way carefully through the clots of people, occasionally stopping to exchange a few words but moving steadily in my direction. Not quite a midget, he was maybe four-and-a-half feet tall, even with the giant afro that shot out of his skull like it was electrified. Maybe forty years old, maybe sixty. Nobody knows all that much about the Prof. But he knows a lot about people: some say “Prof” is short for “Professor,” some say it stands for “Prophet.” Today he’s