Another Life (15 page)

* * *

I
t took the Mole a round-the-clock session with his machines before he finally announced: “Not in here.”
He might have completed the sweep-job quicker if Michelle hadn’t shown up. The Mole just tuned her out, leaving the harder work to me.
“Pryce is watching us, honey,” I told her. “We have to know where he’s watching from.”
“How do you know that he’s not just—?”
“Pryce doesn’t work that way. Besides, he’d have to
see
the signal we agreed on for it to do him any good.”
“Okay, so he’s got a way to watch the street. Why would he want to plant anything inside your place, too?”
“I don’t know. Truth is, I don’t think he could. But information is his god, and he never misses a service.”

* * *

I
turned to Max. He’d spent the night crawling the rooftops. Nothing.
“What’s that leave,” I asked my family, “a fucking satellite?”
Either Terry didn’t get my sarcasm, or he shared his father’s respect for my techno-knowledge. “That could be it” was all he said.
The Mole nodded. “The mechanisms are already in place. What he would need is a private channel. There is only one way Gateman could exit—”
“Two,” I reminded him.
The Mole shrugged. “If Pryce already has images—and he must—he could load the channel with recognition software. It would alert only if its pre-sets were triggered.”
“He gets a picture of Gateman,” Terry explained. “He gets one of Rosie. He makes a series of digital files. He knows the height of the dog, and the height of the wheels on Gateman’s chair. When both show up at the same time, all he’d need was a color-code activator.”
“I hope that’s exactly what he’s got,” I told them all.
“What?” Michelle wasped out at me.
“If Pryce has what it takes to get that private channel you’re talking about, he’s also got enough to find out if the CIA took the baby. And one thing we know for sure: the FBI’s been fighting to keep the CIA out of Stateside work. Maybe they’ve succeeded, maybe not.
“So they can argue over who gets to cover what ground, but there’s no argument about who covers the skies. That probably means the CIA’s in this. But it
also
means they didn’t take the kid, and they don’t know who did.”
“What does that make us?” Michelle said.
“Even, honey,” I told her. “Dead even.”

* * *

W
hen Clarence showed up carrying a slim black aluminum attaché case, wearing a perfectly fitted midnight-blue suit instead of his usual peacock regalia, I knew he’d consulted Michelle. Diagnosis confirmed by the bouquet of deep-purple orchids he presented to Taralyn, with a courtly bow and a simple, “This is a poor way to show my gratitude and my admiration. I hope someday you will permit me to do better.”
At least
somebody’s
plans were working out.
The Prof shooed them both away, glanced around the spacious room, made a “come on with it” gesture to me.
“I can’t make it add up,” I told him. “There’s a piece of this, a percentage of that, but nothing I can build anything with.”
“Even if—”
“Yeah. Even if I figure they’re
all
lying, it doesn’t get me anywhere. I know some people lie just to be lying—maybe they can’t help themselves, maybe they get off doing it, who knows? But there’s truth
somewhere
in all this. The baby
did
get snatched. That Sheikh
does
want him back. And Pryce for
damn
sure wants the Sheikh to get what the Sheikh wants.”
“What you saying, boy? You can’t go until you know?”
“Maybe that’s right, Prof. But I know this much already: that asshole had never even
considered
the possibility of his kid being snatched.”
“He told you that?”
“Yeah,” I said, not bothering to explain that I didn’t need words to ask a freak a question, or use my ears to get an answer. “This one thinks he’s untouchable…and he probably is, as far as the Law is concerned. But this game of his was strictly private, and he wouldn’t want some tabloid putting him on the front page, so he knew he was in a risk zone every time he went out on one of his training exercises. Training the baby, I mean.”
The Prof nodded at the indisputable truth of life at street level. Every hooker who steps into a stranger’s car knows she may be getting ready to turn the Death Trick. But the john never thinks that the whore climbing into his front seat could be wiggling her hips like that alligator snapping turtle’s tongue. She could have a pistol in her purse and Aileen Wuornos on her mind, seeing everything in trauma-vision.
“Yeah, he stinks of entitlement,” I said. “You can smell it on him. But he’s not retarded. Or nuts. If he thought bullets would bounce off him, why have bodyguards at all?”
“So…?”
“So…so it’s like, to him, exactly what he says on the tape. Women are holes. Plenty of men think that’s all they’re good for, but how many think that’s all they
are
? A hole’s not dangerous, unless you step into one…and that he’d never do. So he’s in total control. That’s why the conversation through the window first. That’s his screening interview. He thought he had it all covered.
“Kidnap his son? Outdoors? In the middle of New York City? That’d never cross his mind. He’s no military guy, but he’s got a stalker’s mind. He knows you have to plan things. And who’d plan
that
?
“The capper is, even after it happens, he’s
still
not really believing it. Who would plan such a thing, pull it off, and
not
be doing it for money? That’s the ultimate mind-fuck for him, because it violates the one thing I
know
he believes in.”
“And that ain’t Allah, true enough. But…come on, son: they jumped him, then they just dumped him. Like they didn’t—”
“—care if he lived or died, I know. Where’s the money in that? Fuck, if some skells
had
come along and cut his throat to make sure he wouldn’t wake up while they were helping themselves to his jewelry, where would ransom money even
come
from?
“That’s how I know there’s no way he staged it himself, just to watch the White House kiss his royal ass. He was
seriously
out of it when the cops found him. He just got lucky that he woke up and started pulling strings, before someone came along and cut his.”
The Prof closed his eyes. Not from being tired. I’d watched him do the same thing a million times, closing his eyes to see deeper. Saying anything to him while he was working criminal algorithms in his head would be like pulling the plug on a running mainframe.
I sat there and waited. I’m good at it.

* * *

I
hadn’t looked at my watch, so I couldn’t tell how much time passed before the Prof suddenly said, “Remember what I taught you, son: only a dope always stays inside the ropes.”
Meaning: playing by the rules is playing the game of the guy who
made
the rules. Outlaws have rules, too. But they’re
our
rules. Robbing a bank violates your laws. Ratting out a crime partner violates ours.
“I can’t get past—”
“Yeah, you
can,
Schoolboy. A bigger punch don’t mean the other guy’s gonna eat your lunch.” He tapped his temple. Brought his palms together in Max’s gesture for “focus.” “You remember that ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ bullshit? Soon as Foreman figured out the script, he up and quit.”
“I remember.”
“Break it down,” the old man said.
I took that as a single question on a bigger test, said: “Yeah, Foreman quit all right, they just
called
it a KO. That second Duran-Leonard fight?
‘No más’
didn’t mean ‘I quit,’ it meant ‘Fuck this!’ Duran wasn’t hurt, he was just disgusted. Once he realized he couldn’t sucker Leonard into playing
‘Quién es más macho?’
like he had the first time, Duran knew he didn’t have a chance. So he just walked away.
“But Foreman didn’t have that problem. He was an intimidator, a stone thug who could back up the look with the stones in his gloves. Sent Norton into cardiac arrest before their fight even started. But that was never his whole game. Guys he couldn’t scare, like Frazier, he’d just pound on them until they
stayed
down. Not like Tyson. He never could beat a man who wasn’t scared of him in front.”
“That’s what Holyfield knew, that secret,” the Prof agreed. “Heart. You go against Tyson thinking survival, he tears you apart. But if you go in thinking destruction, Tyson don’t know what to do. You didn’t have to hit harder than he did, you just had to take what he threw and
keep
throwing back.
“That would never work with Big George. You remember Ron Lyle? How was
he
gonna be scared of any prizefight? You can’t hold a shank in a boxing glove. And Lyle, he could put you to sleep with either hand. But he was a prison fighter—spent too much time with the weights, never got his head straight.
“Ron
drops
George a couple of times, but George, he just keeps getting up. It was a hell of a fight, but George finally put Lyle down for the count. You could outbox George—Jimmy Young showed that—but that’s like dancing around a building: looks easy, but you better make sure the fucking thing don’t fall on you.”
“Prison fighters,” I said, nodding. “Jumbo Cummings looked like he could knock out a buffalo, but…And remember that head case, Etienne?”
It wasn’t really a question; I knew the Prof tracked anything that came out of his birthplace. Clifford “The Black Rhino” Etienne had proven he was the perfect parole candidate by winning the Louisiana prison boxing championship. Soon as he was cut loose, he turned pro, won a lot of fights, made some excellent money. His biggest score was the million-plus he got for lasting less than a minute with Tyson. Now he’s back where he started, doing a telephone-number sentence for aiming a gun at the cops after a botched robbery.
“How’m I gonna forget that sorry-ass dope fiend?” the old man said. “Louisiana ain’t never gonna change. Now, Leadbelly, he could sing his way out of the camps more than once, because a bluesman only gets better with age. Ain’t no boxer who ever did that.”
“No,” I said, thinking of Ricky Womack, an undefeated heavyweight who turned pro young, did a long stretch Inside for a homicide, then went back to Detroit and climbed into the ring. He was forty by then, but he put together a few straight wins…and then he died. The coroner said it was suicide.
Bobby Halpern was even closer to home—did his time right here. Older than Womack when he finished his stretch, he was one of the first guys to lose to Trevor Berbick. Probably had no illusions about big money, but he could fight locally, make a few bucks on the side. Ten days after his last fight, person or persons unknown used him for target practice. Bobby survived, but his boxing career didn’t.
I remembered how network TV covered the career of James Scott for years. A light-heavy contender, Scott was supposed to be the next great thing, so doing a life sentence for murder wasn’t a problem—they just brought the cameras inside.
As soon as he dropped a couple of fights, they dropped the coverage, but the same deal still works, even today. When the women’s junior-flyweight world title became vacant, the match to determine the championship was held inside a Thai prison. After the Thai won the fight, the government immediately announced she was going to be freed. After all, she could be stripped of her title if she didn’t defend it within six months. Such injustice cannot be tolerated in a democracy, even one where making fun of the King is a double-digit crime.
“So—Ali, then?” the Prof came back to it, boring in, demanding more.
“I think, that first time, he
was
scared of Liston,” I said. “But that didn’t matter; Sonny did what the people who owned him told him to do.
“After a while, Ali wasn’t scared of anyone. Somehow, he discovered he could take a shot to the head like nobody else. That was his secret weapon, and he used it too often. Look at him now.
“Foreman knew he couldn’t scare Ali, but he figured he didn’t need to—with what he was packing, it’d only be a matter of time. A few rounds later, Foreman found out the truth. Throwing bombs at Ali was like pounding on the heavy bag—it’s a great workout, but sooner or later you’re too gassed to throw another punch. When the other guy keeps taking your best shots and laughing them off, he takes your heart, too.”
“That ain’t the question,” the old man said, shifting from Professor to Prophet. His eyes could slice diamonds.
“I don’t under—”
“Try it this way,” my father said. “Ali. What was that boy…a fool or a tool?”
“You mean the Muslim thing?”
“Damn! What we really talking about here? We got places to go, and not much time to get there. Come on, son. Use what you got. ‘The Rumble in the Jungle,’ they called it. You remember
which
jungle?”
“Zaire,” I said, just starting to catch a glint…like the reflection off a straight razor in a dark alley.
“So Ali goes to fucking
Zaire
because he’s all about liberating his people?
What
fucking people? ‘Zaire’ was just the name that baby-killing snake Mobutu slapped on the piece of the Congo he controlled. That butcher murdered more black folks in a day than the Klan did in a century.
“You know how many of his slaves—that’s right, I know what the fucking word means—you know how many of them died to build the goddamn stadium they held that fight in?
“For years, that Mobutu motherfucker was big-time pals with every president we had. Just like the Shah used to be. All he had to do was dance for his masters and they’d let him rule the other niggers. Same as they used to do with the convict bosses. Make those field hands
work
during the day, you could do whatever you wanted to them after dark.
“Mobutu, he was always a good nigger; always knew his place.
Hated
those fucking Commies. And that’s all it took, back in those days.”
The old man’s voice never changed volume, but it penetrated like an icepick through cardboard.
“The whole business—you know, when the Supreme Court cut Ali loose—that was a whore’s kiss. See, Ali, that’s a
strong
black man. So him fighting in Zaire, that tells the world that Mobutu is one righteous dude.”
“You’re saying Elijah’s boys had a deal with—?”
“I’m saying all you got to do is add and subtract, Youngblood. Who was president when the Supreme Court all of a sudden reversed that bullshit case they held over Ali for all those years? Simple trade: Ali makes Zaire all about ‘black liberation,’ and Mobutu keeps the Commies from getting a foothold in the Congo. Fucking sweet, huh?
“And everybody kept up their end of the deal, right down the line. You know why we never made a move against all that killing in Rwanda? Because Mobutu wouldn’t have liked that—he was fucking
backing
it.”
The old man leaned back, closed his eyes. “‘African unity,’ my black ass,” he snapped. “You got to ask yourself: you think
Ali
picked Zaire? Was he too fucking stupid to know who Mobutu was? Or did he tank for the government, just like Sonny had tanked for him?”
“So why should I be trusting—?”
“Now,
that’s
my son,” the old man said, approvingly. “About time you showed up. Sure, it’s an old, cold trail. But you got to go back down that road. There’s still freelance units working over there. Sure, most of them probably be dead, but it’s the only place where you still carry that cred.”
“Talk about long shots….”
“What other shot we
got,
Schoolboy? That spook Pryce is good for the coin, and he won’t ask questions. We’re down to our last pass, and we got to be dead straight on the hard eight. If we want to know, we got to throw.”