Safe House

She raised her eyebrows, but didn’t say anything, just nodded.

“One more thing,” I said, handing her a sealed white #10 envelope, the kind you can buy in any stationery store. “You have any men in your crew?”

“I’m not running a sperm bank,” she said, smiling to take the sting off. “Why would I need any men?”

“I know you don’t need any, Xena,” I told her. “But I do. To deliver this,” pointing at the envelope she was holding.

“It has to be a man?” she asked, smiling at the gibe. Wolfe was a warrior princess way before any writer’s wet dream came to life on TV.

“An observant man,” I emphasized. “All he has to do is take this to a certain address, ask for a certain person, go up to his apartment and put it in his hand.”

“Anything else?”

“He has to wear a suit, carry an attache case, look like a businessman, the whole bit. And he has to put it in the man’s hands personally, not leave it with a doorman.” Then I gave her the details.

“I can get that done,” Wolfe said. “No risk, right?”

“No risk,” I promised. Thinking maybe the form in the back seat of the Lexus was Pepper’s man, Mick. I’d only seen him once—big guy, long hair, athlete’s build. Max had made him for a fighter, but we’d never needed to find out.

“The parking lot across from Criminal Court,” Wolfe said. “Same time tomorrow?”

“Thanks,” I said, handing her another envelope. She slipped it into her purse without looking. Then she walked across the road and got into the passenger seat of the Lexus. It pulled away with a cheerful chirp from the rear tires, Pepper driving like she talked.

“Put it right over the heart,” I told the old man. We were in the back room of a tailor shop in the Bronx, just off the Grand Concourse. The narrow storefront was surrounded on all sides by members of that heavily armed tribe of bodegueros who operate trading posts in hostile territory throughout the city’s pocket ghettos, selling overpriced Pampers and yesterday’s milk and loose cigarettes for a quarter apiece in a can on the counter. There was also a sprinkling of liquor stores that looked like the inside of Brink’s vans, and a solitary dump that pretended to sell used furniture but whose only real business was exchanging food stamps for cash at a deep discount. The front room of the tailor shop was lined with fabric samples and suits on hooks. A three-sided mirror stood against one wall. Even the dust looked clean.

The old man looked over at the Mole, who said something to him in Yiddish. Or Hebrew—I couldn’t tell the difference. The Mole told me once that the young Israelis spoke Hebrew and the older European Jews spoke Yiddish, but it wasn’t a rule or anything.

Hercules was sitting in what looked like a barber chair, bare-chested, his upper body as deeply ripped as when he’d been Inside and hoisting iron every day. The old man held the tattoo needle steady as he created a black swastika on Herk’s left pectoral, just under the nipple. I watched his hands as they worked. Watched the faint blue row of numbers tattooed on the inside of his forearm in the harshly focused light from the lamp.

“Two days,” he said, covering the fresh tattoo with a clean bandage. “Then it will look old, like it was done a long time ago.”

I thought of what it must have taken for a man who’d been tattooed in a concentration camp to copy the oppressor’s symbol onto living flesh. Then the Mole said something to the old man again, touching Hercules on the shoulder. The old man kissed Hercules on the cheek. Not a mob kiss—gently, as he would kiss a beloved son. “Sei gesund!” he said.

And then I knew what the Mole must have told him.

“Lorraine isn’t on the run from . . . them,” Crystal Beth said to me. Talking softly, her breasts mashed against my chest, face in my neck.

I didn’t say anything, just rubbed my palm in tender circles right above her bottom, wondering why she was telling me about the harsh-faced woman with the clipboard and the Siamese cat.

“She’s much older than most of us,” Crystal Beth said. “A different underground. She’s one of the last ones left.”

“What is she, an ROTC bomber?”

“Something like that,” Crystal Beth said. “It doesn’t matter anymore. For Lorraine, it’s all merged.”

“Into what?”

“Men. She’s very bitter at how weak they all were. They weren’t true, she always says.”

“I guess most of the women in here would say that.”

“No, not what you think. Not true to their ideals.”

“Some are.”

“You?”

“I don’t have any,” I said. “All I’m trying to do is get through this.”

“This . . . ?”

“. . . life,” I finished for her. Leaving out the last word I always spoke in my mind: “sentence.” A life sentence. That’s what I got. Some liberal wet-brain once told me, “We’re all doing life.” I guess that was supposed to be some startling insight, make me see we were all brothers. He was some halfass religion- peddling do-gooder. A missionary to a country where he didn’t speak the language, talking to cannibals who’d feast on his flesh if he spent the night with them. I was only sixteen years old then, locked up. But I knew he wasn’t doing my life.

“I like that,” Crystal Beth said.

“What?”

“You . . . stroking me like that.”

I dropped my hand lower. “You like this too?”

“It’s better than being pinched,” she cooed.

I slapped her bottom, lightly. “Shut up, girl.”

She giggled. “I got that from my mother.”

“What?”

“A big rear end,” she said. “It’s genetic.”

“It’s a gift,” I told her.

“It could be,” she whispered, her right hand dropping to the outside of my thigh.

The door opened. A woman walked into the room. Even without the outrageous silhouette, I knew who it was by the click of the spike heels.

“Can I play too?” Vyra asked.

In the frozen moment, my cock deflated and my eyes widened, riveted on Vyra’s hands, ready to . . . but they were empty.

“This isn’t your business,” Crystal Beth said to her, pulling herself into a sitting position next to me.

“Oh, then he doesn’t know?” Vyra said in a challenging voice, hands on her narrow hips, talking over my body like I was furniture.

“That isn’t his business,” Crystal Beth snapped back. “Why don’t you go downstairs and I’ll come and talk to you . . . privately.”

“I like this better,” Vyra said, stepping closer to the bed, eyes only on the other woman.

“I don’t care what you like,” Crystal Beth told her, climbing off the bed and walking around the end of it to close the gap between her and Vyra. “You’re not in charge here. And your money doesn’t change that.”

Vyra took a quick step back. Her little fox face went feral under the makeup as her heavily lipsticked mouth twisted with soundless words. Crystal Beth took another step toward her, her nude body glistening with kinetic confidence. Vyra’s left hand flashed against Crystal Beth’s tattoo, a sharp crack in the silence. Vyra’s mouth made an O, like she was shocked at herself. Crystal Beth kept coming, stepped right in to her, wrapping her arms around