Only Child

“Homolka was the broad. Blonde chick. Young. She got some nothing sentence. For testifying against the husband. The prosecutor made that deal before they got hold of the tapes. Anyway, she’s the one everyone’s interested in. Even has fan clubs on the Internet. She’s going to be out soon, I think. Word is, she may have a couple of the tapes hidden away....”

“And people say there’s no such thing as snuff films.”

“There’s such a thing as anything. That’s where the matchmaking comes in.”

I nodded at the wisdom. “I want you to look at a couple of tapes,” I told him. “I brought them with me. Tell me what you think.”

“It’s your money,” the man said.

“I could move those,” he said later.

“Every one of them?”

“Not all of them so quick. And not any of them for a lot of coin. The paddling one, that was pretty hot; I could unload that in a few hours. But you’re talking maybe a couple of hundred for it, max. And only if you convince the buyer that it wasn’t faked.”

“You mean, that the girl really got paddled?”

“Nah. Sure she did. So what?” he said, unknowingly echoing Cyn and Rejji. “You’d have to convince the buyer that it wasn’t a scene, understand? That they weren’t working from a script. Buyers are always on the watch for the mass-produced stuff. They’d never trust anything on DVD—video’s the only way to go. If it was a sneak tape, it’d be worth a lot more. Even the toilet freaks, all they want to buy is the spy-cam stuff. You’d think shit is shit, right? Not to those sickos.”

“What about the girl who got the knockout drops?”

“Like I said, I could move it. But you’re talking a real cheap sale, there. The people who buy that stuff, they want to see...a struggle, like. Of course, with that bag over her head, you could say she was a celebrity, maybe....”

“Mole found something!” Michelle greeted me as soon as I walked in.

“What?”

“Come on,” she said, tugging at my hand.

The Mole was hunched over the coffee table, a rectangular magnifying glass in one hand, a videocassette in the other. Terry was sitting next to him, a notebook to his right.

“CV,” the Mole called out, softly.

“Got it,” Terry said. He looked up, saw me, said, “We’ve only got two more to do.”

I sat down on the couch, holding Michelle’s hand so she wouldn’t run over there and disrupt everything in her excitement. “I told you, I told you, I told you,” she whispered at me.

Finally, the Mole stood up. And walked out.

“He’s just going to the bathroom,” Terry said. “Come over here, I’ll show you what we figured out.”

He handed me the magnifying glass, then used what looked like a dentist’s pick to point toward the corner of one of the cassettes. “It’s real small,” he said. “And reverse-embossed. Kind of sunk right into the plastic. So it’s the same color; hard to pick out. Pop said he had some stuff that would bring it up, make it stand out, but he didn’t want to mess with it until you looked for yourself.”

It took me a minute or so before I saw what Terry was talking about. A pair of tiny block letters: FV.

“What does that mean, ‘FV’?” I asked Terry.

“It’s a code of some kind. There’s three of them: CV, FV, and NV. We thought it might be something they did at the factory, so Mom sent me out to buy some blanks, from the same manufacturer. I went to four different stores. And you know what? Not one of the other tapes had anything like this on them.”

“Is there any pattern to them? The letters, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” the kid said. “Pop said that part isn’t science. He said you’d figure it out.”

I turned the cassette over in my hands, as if its weight could tell me something. Shook my head.

“Let me see.” Cyn.

Terry picked up another cassette, waved her over to the table. Cyn bent forward, her barely restrained breasts in the kid’s face, said, “Hold it for me, honey,” as she winked at me over her shoulder.

The kid handed her the magnifying glass and held the cassette in both hands, steady as a dead man’s EKG. “It’s on the bottom,” he said. “Right near the erase-protect piece.”

Cyn stopped playing around. “Tilt it a little toward...Yes!” A few seconds later: “Rej, get over here! Take a look at this.”

The women switched places around Terry like he was a piece of furniture.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Cyn asked her.

“Uh-huh. Let me just...Sure, that’s it, Cyn.”

“What?” I asked them.

“It helps when you’ve seen one before,” Cyn said.

“Seen what?”

“A branding iron,” she said. “This little ‘NV’ thing here? That’s what made it.”

“?Habla espanol?”

“Poquito. Muy poquito.”

“?Y que?”

“Bodega, botanica, bruja, plata, jefe...”

“?Y que mas?...”

“Pistelola, gusano, violencia, puerco, ropa, compadre, mordida...”

“?Maricon?”

“I’ve heard the word.”

“What does it mean?” Felix asked me. His voice was still sable-soft, but his eyes were freezer burns.

“It’s a word for—”

“No, hombre. Not what it is, what it means, comprende?”

“I’m not follo—”

“Somebody calls you un maricon, that means you have to do something, yes?”

“Oh. Yeah, maybe. Depending on who’s saying it. Or where.”

“A man calls you ‘maricon’ in prison, he is saying—what?”

“Inside? Depends who’s doing the calling. Some cliques, that’s the conversation. Play the dozens all day, every day. But that’s only between themselves, see? If you mean to someone you don’t know—like for an insult?—never happen. Nobody challenges you to a fight in there. If you’re really after a guy, you don’t warn him. There’s none of this ‘I’ll see you after school’ stuff,” I said, wondering if he was asking, or testing.

He nodded. Not like he was agreeing, like he wanted me to keep talking.

“Not much fistfighting in there, either,” I told him. “Except for when a guy just loses his temper—it’s mostly the young ones who do that. Now, in the bing, solitary, guys call each other out all the time. You see a lot of cell gangsters, mouth-artists who get real brave when everybody’s locked down. It’s ‘You’re dead, nigger!’ this, and ‘My homeboys are going over to your house and fuck your daughter in her white ass!’ that. Around the clock. Never stops. But it’s just background noise.

“The only reason you might call names in there would be an intimidation thing. A test. You wouldn’t hear ‘maricon,’ though. You’d hear ‘pussy’ or ‘punk.’”

“And what must you do then?”

“Stick ’em or slice ’em,” I said, as no-option flat as when I’d first heard the rules explained to me a million years ago. “Maybe not right that minute, but you have to do it. And pretty soon. A man calls you something like that, he’s trying to break you with words. But behind the words, if you don’t give it up, there’s always a knife. His or yours.”