Dead and Gone

“All right,” I said. “Maybe I’m dense, but …”

“The overwhelming majority of that laundered money comes from Russian organized crime,” Heidi said.

I shut up. And paid attention.

Lune took over again. “Ever since the failed coup on Dominica, there have been numerous schemes, mostly but not exclusively promoted on the Internet, to purchase ‘citizenship’ in various ‘republics.’ The promoters purport to be creating these in the Pacific by purchasing and developing unclaimed … or even mostly submerged … islands,” he said. “Each project targets certain types. Mostly right-wingers who want freedom from any government intrusion into their lives—taxes, gun control, education. And there are the supremacists who want to live exclusively among their own while they arm themselves for Armageddon. But there are other groups seeking ‘paradise,’ too. A place where they can behave as they wish without fear of consequences.”

“Freaks,” I said, getting it now.

“Pedophiles, polygamists, incest-breeders, child-pornography manufacturers … yes,” Lune said, nothing in his voice but the patterns.

“Where does this all tie in?” I asked him.

“Darcadia,” he said. “A Pacific island with enough land mass to accommodate a small nation. It is undeveloped. Completely raw. It has a natural freshwater supply, but no infrastructure at all. Estimated cost to fully develop so that it could sustain, say, twenty thousand people …?”

“Somewhere around ten billion,” Heidi answered. “A prospectus of sorts has been floating around for almost two years now. The shares are in blocks of a hundred thousand, but ‘citizenships’ go for ten thousand.”

“What’s a—?”

“A ‘citizenship,’ ” Heidi continued, “buys you the right to bank there, be free from personal income taxes … and a passport.”

“All right, so someone’s building a degenerate’s heaven on some island. I’ll probably die of old age before it ever really happens.”

“I don’t think so,” Lune said. “The pattern is complete. Because we know the name of the person at the top of the Darcadia pyramid.”

He tapped his keys. The wall cleared. And then a single name popped up in red letters.

I looked at the name. Nothing. I stared at the red letters, reaching for the connection, dropping deeper and deeper into myself, the way I used to do with the red dot I had painted on my mirror years ago. Deliberately dissociating, going somewhere else … where the answers always were.

I never thought of him by a name. Never thought of him as a person. He was always the Mentor to me. More than fifteen years ago, when I first met him. A little boy had been raped by a maggot in a clown suit. Someone had taken a Polaroid of it—and the child believed his soul had been captured. A witch named Strega hired me to get it back. I went down one tunnel after another, looking. And ended up in a junkyard bunker in the South Bronx.

“Mole,” I said, “I’ve got a picture I need to find. The way it was taken, Polaroid camera and all, it had to be for sale. If it goes in a magazine, then it’s in the stream of commerce and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

He looked up, listening the way he always does—silently.

“But I don’t think that’s the deal,” I told him. “I think it was taken for a collector—a private thing. If they put it in a magazine, someone could see it. Cause a lot of problems. I need some freak who gets off looking at this stuff. You understand? Someone who’s got shoeboxes full of pictures like that.”

The Mole nodded, not arguing with my logic. So far.

“So I need to talk to a collector, ” I went on. “A serious, hardcore pedophile. Someone with the money to buy things like this. This is a no-consent picture, understand? The freaks might trade copies back and forth, but this one would be too risky for general commerce.”

“I don’t know anyone like that.”

“Mole,” I said, keeping my voice level, “you have friends. Associates, anyway. People I did some work for a couple of times. When we first met.” No point mentioning names—they were all part of some wet-work group.

The Mole turned so he was facing me. “So?”

I was fast-talking now, knowing the door wouldn’t stay open long.

“So they have to keep files on freaks like that. Blackmail, whatever. They have to know what’s going down on the international scene—know who the players are. I know they don’t do law-enforcement or vice- squad stuff, but information … that’s something all the services want. Anything to give them a leg up … a handle.”

We made our deal. It took a while to set up, and I had to let the Mole come with me, but it finally went down.

A limestone-front townhouse just off Fifth Avenue, three stories high, level with the rest of the buildings on the block. Maybe thirty-five feet wide. A seven-figure piece of property in that neighborhood, easy. Four steps took us to a teak door, set behind a wrought-iron grating. The Mole’s stubby finger found the mother-of-pearl button, pushed it once.

We didn’t have long to wait. The teak door opened. A man was standing there, waiting. You don’t need a peephole when you have a couple of hundred pounds of iron between you and whoever’s at the door. I couldn’t see into the dark interior. The man at the door was tall and slender, both hands in the pockets of what looked like a smoking jacket.

“Yes?” he asked.

“Moishe Nineteen,” the Mole said.

“Please step back,” said the man. He had a semi-British accent, as if he’d been born here but gone to prep school over there or something.