Safe House (21 page)

Pryce waved his hand toward the sectional, taking one of the suspension chairs for himself. Herk and I sat down. I slid over a few feet so that Pryce couldn’t watch us both without turning his head a bit.

“This is your man?” he asked without preamble.

“This is Hercules,” I said.

He swiveled his head to Herk. “And you’re a Nazi?” he asked suddenly.

“I’m an Aryan warrior,” Herk said, no hesitation. I was proud of him.

“What does
that
mean?” Pryce stayed on him.

“It means I love my race. I would die for my people. And kill for them too.”

“Your . . . race?”

“The white race,” Herk said, trying to keep his voice calm like I’d schooled him, but unable to keep the juice bubbling out—he was proud of himself, a kid eager to show he’d learned his ABCs.

“Define ‘white,’ ” Pryce said.

“Huh? What’s so fucking hard? White.”

“So not blacks and . . . ?”

“And not browns and not yellows and not reds and not no other fucking
shade,
okay?” Herk told him, a step shy of aggressive.

“And Jews?”

“Jews? They ain’t white people. They ain’t people at all.”

Pryce went “Ummm . . .” like he was considering this newly presented wisdom. “Tell me about the man you killed,” he said finally.

“I don’t know nothin’ about no—”

“You first,” I interrupted, holding Pryce’s eyes.

“This is a leaderless cell,” Pryce said, like he’d never asked the homicide question. “A super-cell, in point of fact. It’s been in place just a few months. There are only a half-dozen or so members, and they all have conventional lives. Relatively conventional. The meetings are in various places, but they use a bookstore in lower Manhattan for an information drop. They’re only in New York until—”

“What’s a super-cell?” I asked him.

He nodded like a college professor who got asked a moderately intelligent question—one that showed the students were paying attention. Finally. “Each of them is a . . . representative,” he said. “From one of the original leaderless cells scattered throughout the country. Eventually, each of them will return to his base area to a pre-determined residence and await contact. Their home cells may have changed composition or personnel by then. Or they may have disappeared. But if they
are
contacted when they return, each member of the super-cell passes the word. The date for the unified action.”

“And you don’t know that date?”

“No. I don’t believe it
is
known. Yet.”

“Or the target list?”

“There’s no way to know that at all. Each of the local cells has that. The way it’s set up, the member they detached to the super-cell doesn’t know it either.”

“Why can’t you just shadow each of them when they split?”

“Do you know the kind of surveillance effort that would require? And without tipping them off? No, we need the date. Anything else we get would be gravy.”

I raised my eyebrows at the mention of gravy. If he noticed, Pryce gave no sign.

“Up to now, they’ve been taking their cues from the newspapers. The church arsons, that’s an example. One cell just goes out and commits an . . . action, they call it. Another reads about it, does the same thing. There’s no communication between them. None at all. But this one’s different.”

I looked around for an ashtray. Couldn’t see one. Lit a cigarette with a wooden match. A real one this time, no damn cloves. I watched Pryce’s face. Nothing. Okay. I took out a small metal box, the kind some cough drops come in, and opened it up. Pryce nodded approvingly. Good. Let him get used to me taking things out of my pockets.

“You telling me
each
of them has a home cell?”

“Yes.”

“So where’s Lothar’s?”

“Right here,” Pryce said. “New York City.”

“And he’s gonna give them up too?”

“He already has,” the colorless man replied, the muscle jumping under his eye.

“So they’re being watched?”

“He has no contact with them, I told you. And we don’t have the resources to do that anyway.”

I wondered who “we” was in that sentence. Whoever it was, it wasn’t the FBI. It has enough damn “resources” to watch anyone. Could they already be in custody?

I dragged on my cigarette, thinking. The whole thing was as snaky-shaky as a politician’s promise.

“Herk’s gotta be a
member,
right?” I put it to him. “Not some free-lance assassin—a card-carrying, true-believing member. He’s gotta be inside.”

“That’s true.”

“And his credential is that he did some . . . job for them, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you can cover that?”

“Yes.”

I got it then. “So Herk was in Lothar’s cell? From the jump, right?”

“Right.”

“And the guy he . . . took care of, that guy was in the cell too?”

“Yes.”

“An informant?”

“No!” he said sharply. “There can’t even be the
hint
of such a thing. They would instantly disband if they had any reason to believe they’d been infiltrated. Just fold their tents and go.”

“But not drop the plan?”

“Of course not. But there’d be no way to pick them up again.”

A thought crossed my mind. Something I’d never asked. But it could blow the whole thing higher than Timothy Leary. “This guy you . . .” I asked Herk. “He was white?”

“Uh, yeah,” Herk said. He hadn’t thought about it either.

“No he wasn’t,” I said leaning forward, flushed with relief. Elbows on knees, looking only at Herk, shutting Pryce out of my vision. “He was a Jew. His mother, or his grandmother, whatever, was a Jew. That makes
him
a Jew. That’s the way they do it in Israel. He’d changed his name, but the cell discovered it. That’s when you got the word to—”

“That’s when you
volunteered,
” Pryce interjected, with me now.

I shifted my eyes back to the colorless man. “They have some kind of mail drop?” I asked him. “I know they can’t contact the old cell, but is there some way for the cells to reach out to them?”

“Yes. They use a P.O. box on—”

“Okay.” I spun it out. “Lothar gets word that . . . one of his cell buddies was rotten, okay? Now listen, he
tells
the other guys in his unit that he got this word. He can get the details, but, to do it, he’s gotta meet with someone from his old cell. That’s Herk.”

“They might panic and—”

“And that’s the game,” I said flatly. “If they run, they run. But if they want to hear what really happened, calm themselves down, make a decision whether to abort or not, they have to meet with Herk. And once they meet with him, he’s gotta
stay
with them until it’s over, right?”

“Yes,” Pryce said slowly. “That’s the way they would behave. Once he was there, he couldn’t go back. But it’s a risk. . . .”

“Any other bullshit way you try and stick Herk in there is a risk too. Only question is, who takes the risk? And here’s the answer: it’s not gonna be us.”

“It’s my decision,” Pryce said. “Not yours.” He scratched the tip of his nose with his index fingernail. “Unless you can guarantee that this divorce business will be dropped.”

“I can’t do that,” I told him. “My way’s the only way. You can get a meet with Lothar, right? That’s when he meets Herk. He wouldn’t necessarily know all his cell buddies that good anyway. This is the way to do it, and you know it.”

“We’ll need good information,
very
good information about the . . . Jew.”

“I can get all that,” I promised him.

“How fast?”

“Twenty-four hours, max.”

He took a shallow breath. “You have complete control? Of that woman?”

I knew who he meant. “Total,” I promised him.

“Get the information,” he said. “We don’t have much time. You two stay together. Wait for my call. I’ll call her. Two, three days at the most.”

“Done,” I said. To remind him about the money.

I
called Crystal Beth on the cellular to tell her we were on our way. As soon as I tapped lightly on her back door, it popped open. If she wondered how I could get past the padlock on the outside gate, she kept it to herself.

“Everything went fine,” I said to her. “Let me get Herk established in the basement and I’ll come back here and tell you about it.”

“I’ll help,” she said, starting to go downstairs.

“Go on up,” I said. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

“I’ll wait here,” she said firmly. “If you don’t want me to go downstairs, I’ll wait right here. You can’t wander around upstairs by yourself. If Lorraine saw you, it would be—”

“Okay,” I agreed, cutting off the speech.

In the basement, I went over everything with Herk again. Then I palmed the cellular and left a message for Wolfe.

A
s Crystal Beth and I walked past the doors, I noticed one of them was open just a crack, a yellow band of light outlining the frame. Lorraine’s room?

“Tell me,” she said as soon as we got into her room.

“There isn’t a lot to tell. We’re going to try to do it. Depends on a bunch of things that have to happen in the next day or so. Pryce, he’s going to call here. You reach out for me and—”

“You’re not going to be here?”

“Not twenty-four/seven. There’s people I have to see.”

“I could come with you.”

“No. You couldn’t.”

“Because—?”

“Because I fucking said so,” I told her, my voice as tired as I felt.

“You don’t have to snap at me.”

“And you don’t have to pout like a spoiled brat,” I told her. “This is business. My business, not your business.”

“I thought you trusted me.”

“I do trust you, bitch. That’s
my
risk. I don’t make my people take my risks, understand?”

She didn’t say anything, just stood there facing me squarely, one hand pulling idly at her hair. Then she said, “Why do you use that word like that?”

“What?”

“ ‘Bitch.’ You say it like some other man would say ‘honey’ or something.”

“I don’t know. I just—”

“You
do
know,” she said. “People know why they do things, if they would just think about them.”

“Okay, I guess I never thought about—”

“Do it,” she said. Then gave me a sweet smile. “Please.”

I sat down in the easy chair and closed my eyes. Crystal Beth came around behind me, put her hands over my eyes. Little hands. Soft. Smelled like purple lilacs and dark tobacco. Her nose nuzzled gently against the back of my head. I let myself go into it.

“When I was a kid, I had a dog,” I said, thinking and talking to her at the same time. “A fox terrier. A walking death warrant for rats. She was my great pal. I loved her. When I went to one of those foster homes, they took her away from me. I never saw her again.”

“Why wouldn’t they let you take your dog?” she asked, more anger than sadness in her voice.

“I’m sure they had their reasons. Reasons that looked good on paper. But I knew what it really was. They wanted to hurt me. They all did.”

“But . . .”

“I was right,” I told her, cutting that off before the feelings came back too strong. “I always swore I would have a dog someday. My own dog. In the juvie joint, the fucking ‘reform school,’ other guys dreamed of cars. Mostly cars. Where I came from, nobody thought about having a house, so it was cars we dreamed about. Fantasies, I guess they were.”

“You didn’t fantasize about girls?” she asked, her voice more flirtatious than teasing.

“I meant fantasies you could talk about,” I told her. “Out loud. Girls, the play was you
already
had them, see?”
And mothers too,
I thought to myself, remembering how kids in the joint would fight to the death if you called their mother a name . . . even if that mother was a drunken whore who never showed up on visiting day.

“And you could talk about them? About girls?”

“Lie about them mostly,” I told her, keeping my voice light. Thinking of the boys in there who were already talking about girls they hadn’t met . . . and what they were going to do to them when they did. “But me, my fantasy, my dream was to have a dog.”

“Did you ever get one?”

“I got the best dog in the world,” I said. “Her name is Pansy. She’s a Neapolitan mastiff. One of the original war dogs. They came over the Alps with Hannibal. Marco Polo took one to China.”

“Are they smart?”

“Smart? I don’t know. In some ways, I guess. But that’s not her big thing. Pansy would die for me. She’s not some
pet,
” I said scornfully, “like a tropical fish. Or one of those damn cats.”

“What do you have against cats?” she asked. “Lorraine has one, and it’s—”

“Cats are the lap-dancers of the animal world,” I told her. “Soon as you stop shelling out, they move on, find another lap. They’re furry little sociopaths. Pretty and slick—in love with themselves. When’s the last time you saw a seeing-eye cat?”

Crystal Beth took her hands away from my eyes and walked around the chair. She knelt in front of me, hunched forward, almond eyes widening, not listening so much as opening herself, as if to make her body understand me too.

“But when I come back to . . . where I live,” I went on, “Pansy’s always glad to see me. It doesn’t matter what I look like. It doesn’t matter whether I’m a success or a failure. Or even whether I have food for her. She’s so . . . loyal. Loyal and true.”

“And she’s a bitch?”

“And she’s a bitch. Maybe that’s it. I’m not sure. We get the words all wrong. A man steps out on a woman, he gets called a dog. But if the woman’s ugly,
she
gets called a dog.”

“I know. And if the girl’s pretty, she gets called something like ‘kitten,’ yes?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Burke?”

“What?”

“It shifted again. Your aura.”

I didn’t need her to tell me that. I could feel the blue in the room. A mist rising from my . . . I don’t know what. “Kitten.” When I was a young man, I called a lot of girls that. They always liked it. I did it so I wouldn’t blow my cover, call one of them by the wrong name. I had a lot of girls then.

“Had.” Looking back, I know I never understood what that meant. But I remember the last one. Ruth. The more she loved me, the more I knew I had to go away. Before Ruth, it was all game. I knew what they wanted. They knew what I wanted. Fire-dancing, seeing which one of us would tumble in first . . . and get burned. It was never me. You can’t lose what you don’t ante up.