trunk. The kid jumped out first, the goalie's mask gone, his baby face glowing with pride.
'Hey, Burke!'
'Keep it down,' I told him, climbing out of the car.
'Did you see it? It went perfect!' He was bouncing up and down like he just hit a home run in Little League. Snatching money off the street was as close as Terry would ever get.
The Mole slowly emerged from the darkness of the gypsy cab. He was wearing a greasy pair of coveralls, a heavy tool belt around his waist, with another strap running over his shoulder. Something glinted off his Coke-bottle lenses - I couldn't tell if it was the sun. He walked into the shadow where our two cars touched and squatted on the ground, fumbling in his leather satchel. Terry hunkered down beside him, his hand on the Mole's shoulder, trying to peer inside the satchel. The Mole's pasty-white hands with their stubby fingers looked too awkward to open the clasp, but he had a touch like a brain surgeon. He pulled out the foil disk and dropped it in my palm, looking up at me with a question.
'Let's see,' I told him, unwrapping it carefully.
In a neat, almost prim hanchriting were the words 'Maltrom, Ltd.' Nothing else. I didn't need anything else.
'Nice work, Mole,' I told him.
The Mole grunted.
'You drop Max off?'
He grunted again. Max the Silent didn't get his name because he moved so quietly. A Mongolian free-lance warrior who never spoke, Max made his living as a courier, moving things around the city for a price. His collateral was his life. He was as reliable as cancer, and not nearly as safe to play with. The wino who stumbled into the switchman had been Max. He'd taken the kicks to the ribs, even though he could have snapped the switchman like a matchstick. A professional.
The Mole was still hunkered down in the shadows. The kid was next to him. Waiting quietly now, like he'd been taught.
'I got about an hour,' I told the Mole.
His face moved - the Mole's idea of a smile. 'You don't want to call your broker first?'
I don't have a broker. I don't get mail and I don't have a phone. Maybe it's true that you can't beat them - you don't have to join them either.
'I have to see Michelle,' the kid piped up.
I caught the Mole's eye, nodded okay.
'Give her my share,' he said.
5
I wheeled the Plymouth across the highway and started to work my way through the back streets of SoHo. Carefully, like I do everything.
Lily runs a special joint that works with abused kids. They do individual and group therapy, and they teach self-defense. Maybe it's all the same thing.
Max's woman works there. Immaculata. It wasn't so long ago that she tried to stop three punks from attacking what she thought was an old man on the subway. The old man was Max. He went through the punks like a chain saw through Kleenex, left them broken and bleeding on the subway floor, and held out his hand to the woman who stood up for him. Their baby was born a few months ago - two warriors' blood in her veins.
Terry watched me without turning his head, working on what we'd been teaching him. But he was doing it for practice - he wasn't scared anymore. The first time I took him away in a car, he was a rental from a pimp. We were working a deep con, looking for a picture of another kid. We picked up Michelle on the street so she could watch Terry while we got ready to deal with his pimp.
I lit a cigarette, thinking back to that night. 'Want one?' I asked him.
'Michelle doesn't want me to smoke.'
'I won't tell her.'
The kid knew better than to use the dashboard lighter in the Plymouth. I snapped a wooden match into life, held it across to him. He took a deep drag. We had a deal.
I watched him scan the passing streets with his eyes, not moving his head.
I was in Biafra during the war. It got bad near the end. Staying alive was all there was. No food, landlocked, soldiers pinching all four corners, planes spitting death - low enough in the sky to hit with a rifle. If you had a rifle. Too many ways to die. Some screamed, some ran. Nohody won. I saw kids lying like litter all through the jungle, their faces already dead, waiting. I had a 9mm pistol with three bullets left in the clip, half a pack of cigarettes, a pocketful of diamonds, and almost a hundred grand in Swiss francs. I left a sack of Biafran pounds back in the jungle. About a million face value, if Biafra won the war. It wasn't going to; and carrying a sack of money from a defeated country while you're running for your life is what they mean by 'dead weight.' I didn't even bury it - I wasn't coming back. Another big score gone to dirt. The gunfire stopped, and the jungle got dead quiet. Waiting. A young woman ran past me on my right, wearing only a pair of tattered men's shorts way too big for her, every breath a moan. I heard a grunting sound and hit the ground, the pistol up in front of me. A wounded soldier? If he had a rifle, maybe I could trade up. It was a little boy, about three years old, a tiny head on a stick body, his belly swollen, naked. Alone. Past being scared. The woman never broke stride; she scooped the baby up on the run, shoving him up toward her slender neck, holding him with one hand. If she made it, the baby would have a new mother.
That's what Michelle did with Terry.
6
I parked a couple of blocks away. Terry and I walked over to Lily's, not talking. The black guy at the front desk was reading a thick book through horn-rimmed glasses.
'Hey, Terry!'
'Hey. Sidney!' the kid greeted him. 'Sidney's going to law school,' he told me.
Somehow I didn't think Sidney would end up making deals with guys like me in the back of limos. 'Is this your father?' he asked Terry. 'The one who teaches you all that electronic stuff?'
That cracked the kid up. 'Burke?' It was the Mole's thought, but the laugh was Michelle's. It's not just chromosomes that make blood.
Sidney waved us past. We walked down a long corridor to the back offices. The right-hand wall was all glass. On the other side, groups of kids were running, jumping, screaming their lungs out. Everything from disciplined martial-arts classes in one corner to some crazy game with kids taking turns trying to dive over a mound of pillows. Business as usual.
Immaculata burst out of one of the back offices, her long glossy hair flying behind her, a clipboard in one hand.
'Lily!' she yelled out.
'We're all back here,' echoed a voice.
Immaculata saw us and spun in a graceful arc, her long nails flowing together as she pyramided her hands at the waist. She bowed gently to us.
'Burke. Terry.'
'Mac.' I bowed back.
Terry tried to bow too, but he was too excited to get it right. 'Is Max here?'
'Max is working, honey.'
'But is he coming? Maybe later?'
Immaculata's smile ignited the highlights in her eyes. 'Who knows?'
'Max is the strongest man in the world!' the kid said, not inviting a dispute.
Immaculata bowed again. 'Is strength so important? Do you remember what you have been taught?'
