Only Child

“What field?” I asked him.

“Biocriminology,” he said. “Let’s finish your interview, and then I’ll answer any questions you have; fair enough?”

I lied my way through the rest of his questions, practicing my survival skills. When it was over, he gave me one of those “This is going to be profound” looks, said, “Haven’t you ever wondered why you’re...the way you are?”

“The way I am?”

“A violent offender,” he said, looking around quickly, as if he’d just discovered we were alone in the room. “A habitual criminal since early childhood. Haven’t you ever wondered what made you like you are?”

“That XYY thing?”

“It could very well be,” he said solemnly.

So it’s true, what they’ve been saying since I was a kid, I thought to myself. I was born bad.

After I got out, I studied everything I could find about XYY. The library had a ton of stuff on it, but it was just a bunch of people arguing with each other. That’s when I read about this famous professor. The article said, when it came to genetics, he was out on the edge. Supposedly, they kicked him out of some big university because he was too far ahead of the rest of them to fit in.

The article said he lived in New York. I asked around. Picked up that he lived somewhere over on the Lower East Side. In a big loft that he’d turned into some kind of mad-scientist laboratory. No phone.

I didn’t know anything about genetics, but I knew how to find people.

I just showed up one day and knocked on his door. It was opened by a powerfully built black woman with a big afro and startlingly green eyes. I told her I wanted to ask the professor a question about genetics, and she brought me right to him, as if he got visitors like me every day.

He didn’t look like my movie idea of a mad scientist. Didn’t even have a white coat, just a pair of chinos and a flannel shirt. Cleanshaven, with a neat haircut.

I asked him about the XYY.

“Someone told you that was you, yes?” the woman said.

“Yeah.”

“And you think this ‘explains’ something? About your behavior?”

“Maybe,” I said, wondering if the professor was ever going to say anything himself.

“It doesn’t,” she said flatly. “There are those with the extra Y who are pillars of the community. And plenty of vicious psychopaths with the standard XY.”

“Oh.”

“‘Oh’? What’s wrong? You want Dr. Drummund to tell you himself, is that it?”

“No. I mean...I thought...”

“You think I’m his, what, secretary?”

“I thought you were his wife,” I said.

“I’m a whole lot more than that,” she said, suddenly grinning.

“Do you know any Japanese?” the professor asked me.

“Not a word.”

“No, no. I mean, do you know any Japanese people?”

“Sure.”

“Businesspeople?”

“Absolutely,” I assured him. Remembering what Mama had told me about the market for powdered rhino horn and tiger testicles. I knew about markets for other things, too.

“You asked for it,” the black woman said, winking at me.

And then the professor was off. It was a good fifteen minutes before I understood his life’s ambition was to find a way to breed male calico cats. He rattled on about the orange color being sex-linked to the X, and the only way to get a male calico was from an error in chromosome separation, so they’re very rare. And almost always sterile, too.

“But what’s the big deal about—?”

“They’re worth a fortune,” he said, dead serious. “To collectors. In Japan, if you know the right people, you could get maybe twenty thousand dollars for a single cat.”

“Nelson,” the black woman said gently, “let’s have tea.”

By the time I left, I knew that all I had gotten from my bio-parents was my hair and eye color, maybe some physical and mental capacities. “But even those are far more environmentally determined, as they eventually manifest themselves,” the professor told me. His woman looked on, smiling...at me, once she was satisfied I got it.

And the professor had my word, the minute he broke the code to producing male calico cats, I’d get him a pipeline to the Japanese collector market. I’m still good for it.

I dialed up the Rolodex in my mind, did my search. Then I pointed the Plymouth toward a quiet building in Greenpoint.

“Of course there’s a market for keyhole stuff,” the generic-looking man told me. We were in his top-floor apartment, sitting at a kitchen table. He was drinking Zima. I passed.

“There’s only two things that count in this game,” he said. “Rarity and matchmaking.”

“Matchmaking?”

“Let’s say you had a tape of some famous actor taking it in the ass from another famous actor, okay?”

“Okay.”

“All kinds of buyers for product like that, right?”

“Sure. Especially the actors themselves.”

“Exactly. But let’s say they’re not famous, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now who wants to buy it?”

“Someone interested in that kind of porn, maybe?”

“Uh-huh. But only that kind. To you, I couldn’t give it away, because that stuff doesn’t turn your crank. So, sure, it’s got some value. To some people. But it’s no hot product. Nothing you could sell to the Globe or the Star; you’ve got to go out and find a buyer. See what I’m saying? That’s the art to it. Matchmaking.”

“So no matter what I had...?”

“If it was rare enough, I could move it,” he said, his voice utterly devoid of doubt. “There’s people, they’ll buy dirt from a serial killer’s grave, you convince them it’s authentic. That’s the no-starter, authentic. You don’t have that, you’ve got nothing.

“There’s girls making a living selling their smelly panties on the Internet. This one chick I know, she told me she goes through twenty pairs a day, sometimes. Authentic, see?”

“Same for rape tapes?”

“If it was real, and you could prove it, hell, yes. There’s been rumors for years about the Homolka tapes.”

“Homolka?” I asked, faking a blank.

“Bernardo and Homolka, you heard of them, right? Husband-wife team, up in Canada. They snatched young girls, sex-tortured them in their basement. Very heavy stuff. Then they killed them. Anyway, the cops found the tapes. The actual tapes. But the government closed the courtroom when they showed them during the trial. Anyone had one of those, he’d be rich.”

“Why do you call them the Homolka tapes?”