Flood - Andrew H. Vachss [93]
“This man is a friend of Goldor?”
“Possibly. It is also possible that he may be an enemy.”
“An informant, then?”
“He may be.”
“If you find this man, will it help Goldor?”
“No.”
“Will it hurt him?”
“Most likely not.”
Pablo paused for a moment, looking at me. Then he got up from the table, disappeared back into the shadows—they blended around him until I was alone in a pool of light. I couldn’t make out a single word of what they said this time, but it didn’t sound like an argument. After few minutes Pablo came back to the table and the shadows followed him again. “For me to tell you what we know about Goldor it is necessary to tell you some other things, some things that otherwise you would not know. But first I tell you this, and I tell you out of friendship only. Goldor is dead. His body is still moving above the ground but his death is certain. If you go and speak with him it may be that later el porko will want to speak with you, understand? You must be able to say another reason to have spoken with him. Agreed?”
“Yes.”
Pablo took another deep breath, reached over and took the cigarette from my hand, put it to his lips, took a deep drag. “Goldor is not a human being. You have no word for him in English, nor do we in Spanish. The closest we could come is gusaniento, you comprende?”
“Like rotten—full of maggots?”
“Something like that, yes. He is the head of an industry which sells the bodies of human beings for the pleasure of others. But not like a whoremaster or a common pimp. No, Goldor is special—he sells children in bondage. If you buy a boy or a girl from Goldor’s people, that child is yours to keep—to torture, to kill, whatever you want. Goldor is above the street. He is like a broker of degeneracy—you tell him what you want and he finds it and delivers it to you. Goldor is not human, as I told you. He is a demon, a thing who worships el dolor, the pain of others. He believes in pain, my friend. Where he finds women who share his beliefs we do not know, but we do know that many of his victims are volunteers. The police know of him but he cannot be touched. To the authorities, his hands are not dirty.”
“He’s not alone in this.”
“Compadre, you come right to the point. Why would we want to deal with such a man when there are so many others like him? I will tell you. On the Lower East Side you know we have a community. It is a bad place to live but survival is possible—you know about survival. We have many operations down there, as we do in the Bronx. We hear many stories about young Puerto Rican boys who just disappear, but with no complaints to the police. So we look for ourselves. We see that some of those boys are in foster care—but not foster care like with the city. Some kind of informal arrangement, we are told. Some of the mothers believe that their children will have a better way of life, more opportunities—at least they say so to us. But some—and we know this for certain—they have just sold their children. We look, we ask questions, we spend some money until we are sure. It is Goldor doing this. Not personally, but it is him.
“We have a meeting about what is to be done—by then we know much about this Goldor. One of our people, a brave jibaro not too long in this country, she volunteers to get with Goldor to learn the whereabouts of the children he has taken. Her name was Luz; we all called her Lucecita, which means Little Light. Lucecita was not a child, Burke. She knew that she would have to have sex with the demon, but it was a price she was willing to pay. We are a disciplined people, not like the newspapers think. Her man is sitting right in this room. He fought with her in front of all of us. He wanted to kill Goldor, not to send Luz to him. But we as a group decided that killing him would not find the children—it would not kill the thing he does. Lucecita got a job in a restaurant where