Safe House

nth degree.”

“Sexual?”

“Of course it’s sexual. They call it a lot of things, but it all comes out the same. Stalkers are rapists. They try and take by force what they can’t have by consent. That’s all those anti-choice people are, every one.”

“Anti-choice?”

“That’s what they really are, those so-called pro-lifers. They get to make the choice; that’s what they want, not to save some fetus. If a woman is raped and they force her to carry that vicious animal’s child to term, what is that but more rape? Self-righteous rapists, that’s them. All of them.”

“But if they—”

“Maybe you think it’s funny, a man like you,” she said. Her nostrils were flared, almond eyes crackling with anger. A vein throbbed in her throat.

“Funny? Why would I—?”

“People do, don’t they? There’s whole sitcoms based on it now. And movies. Stalking as a hobby. Isn’t that hilarious? Of course, that’s women doing the stalking. When it’s—”

“—your cousin . . .” I prompted, trying to bring her back.

“My cousin?” She caught a breath, eyes focusing like they’d just caught her own reflection in a mirror. “Oh. Yes. He’s just . . . hounding her. He calls up and cancels her credit cards. Steals her mail. He bribed somebody at the phone company to get her unlisted number and he calls . . . hundreds of times a day, but he never speaks. You know what he told her? She’s going to die. He’s going to kill her, and then himself. So he won’t even be punished. He couldn’t stand going to jail, because then he wouldn’t be in power anymore. He’s going to do it.”

“She go to the cops?”

“Sure,” she laughed, a dry, brittle sound in the empty restaurant. “You think life is like the movies? Some cop’s going to fall in love with her, devote all his off-duty time to watching her house?”

“So she wants . . . what?”

The woman who called herself Crystal Beth ground out her cigarette, not saying anything, eyes downcast.

It was a long minute before she looked up at me. “Help,” she said.

I sat there by myself for a long time after she left. If she had the motorcycle again, there wasn’t much point in trying to follow her. We didn’t have the personnel for a three-car box. Clarence was good, but the Prof couldn’t drive at all. Max piloted a car with all the finesse of a bull rhino. And compared to the Mole, he was a surgeon. But if we could score a license number . . .

Clarence was the first one back. He greeted Mama, then came back to where I was sitting. I waited patiently for him to have the first cup of soup—Mama was watching.

“The bike was parked two blocks over, mahn. I got the number.” He handed me a piece of paper torn from a small spiral notebook.

“Good,” I told him. “It’ll probably dead-end, but it’s worth a look. Any problems?”

“Could have been a problem, mahn. Maybe a big one. She had the bike chained up tight to a parking meter, so it took a long time to get it unhitched. Couple of young boys said something to her. She gave them something back. I think they were drunk. They came across the street like they were going to . . . I don’t know, make trouble, maybe. Then they saw Max, standing over to the side. So they turned around and split.”

“Did she see him?”

“No, mahn. Not a chance. I had her eyeballed the whole time.”

“What color coat was she wearing?” I asked him.

“Black, mahn. All black. With a hood.”

When Max came in, Mama sat down with us. She stared at Max’s face for a long moment, then said to me: “That girl, she same as Max.”

“Same as . . . ?”

“Not Chinese,” Mama said.

Then I got it. Max wasn’t Chinese either. He was a Mongol. From Tibet. I dimly remembered reading something about Eskimos when I was in prison. Weren’t the Inuits originally a Mongol tribe? I couldn’t pull it up on my screen. When I was locked down, I read everything I could get my hands on, telling myself you never knew what you could use on the streets. But that wasn’t the real reason I spent so much time reading. I was trying to get out. Any way I could. And, sometimes, for a few hours, it worked. Now part of my mind is like some crazy trivia game—I know all kinds of things, but I can’t always connect the dots.

“I think you’re right,” I told her. Naturally, Mama took that as an insult.

Nobody asked me what the woman had wanted until the Prof made the scene. Then I ran it down, simultaneously gesturing for Max. “It’s all here,” I said, tapping a sheaf of photocopy paper. “Got his name, address, phone numbers, photographs. Got everything on her too. The woman Crystal Beth says is her cousin.”

“She wants the guy whacked?” the Prof asked, getting right to it.

“No. Not a chance. She wants it to stop, doesn’t much care how it gets done. But I don’t think she was looking for a hit man when she met Porkpie that time.”

“Maybe so,” the Prof said. “But no way the bitch has two relatives with this kinda problem.”

“There’s that,” I acknowledged. “And she didn’t blink when I told her it’d be twenty large to make it stop. Guaranteed.”

“She had that much cash with her, mahn?” Clarence asked.

“I don’t know. She didn’t flash it. But she did have five. And she put it up.”

Max pointed at me, made a face.

I shook my head no. Five up front hadn’t been my idea. She’d negotiated it. Like she’d done it before. Which meant maybe she still owed Porkpie some money. And if the little weasel had lied about that . . .

“What you gonna do, Schoolboy?” the Prof asked.

I fanned the money out on the table. Circled my fingers around my eyes to make the sign for glasses, then gestured like I was pulling a satchel off the ground. I cut a thousand out of the pot and set it aside. Money for the Mole. The Prof took a thousand for himself. Then Clarence did the same. Then Max.

All in.

Mama watched silently. But she didn’t protest when we each pulled two hundred off our shares and handed it over to her.

“First thing,” I told them, “I go and talk to this cousin of hers.”

The apartment building was on the West Side, just off Amsterdam, a few blocks south of Ninety-sixth. Soot-gray stone, six stories, faded gilt numbers just above the smudged glass doors. I stepped into the lobby and almost broke my neck sliding on the throw rug of leaflets scattered all over the tile floor. Take-out restaurants, sex-phone services, stereo repair. Armies of off-the-books humans sweep through the city every day, carpet-bombing neighborhoods with their load of useless paper like it was propaganda for invaders. It makes every citizen mad, but petitioning that coalition of pathological slugs they call the City Council would be like trying to get a hooker to take an IOU.

No doorman in this place. Probably one of those rent-controlled joints the landlord’s trying to empty out. Uptown, they’d let the rats and roaches run wild, not repair the plumbing, have a super with a felony record who kept in practice on the tenants. They wouldn’t have to get so intense in this neighborhood—probably most of the building had gone co-op during the boom a dozen years ago.

I hit the button for 4-C. Waited for a count of ten. No response. Maybe the buzzer didn’t work. I tried it again,