Strega Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR

  Andrew Vachss

  "Burke is the ultimate creature of the streets…the best character in years!"

  —Dallas Times Herald

  "Vachss seems bottomlessly knowledgeable about the depth and variety of human twistedness."

  —The New York Times

  "Burke would eat Spade and Marlowe for breakfast, not even spitting out the bones. [He] is one tough, mean, pray–god–you–don't–meet–him hombre."

  —Boston Herald

  "There's no way to put a [Vachss book] down once you've begun…The plot hooks are engaging and the one–liners pierce like bullets."

  —Detroit Free Press

  "Vachss's writing is like a dark rollercoaster ride of love and hate."

  —New Orleans Time–Picayune

  "Burke is the toughest talking first–person narrator since Mike Hammer….Vachss can write!"

  —Los Angeles Times

  "Vachss is a contemporary master."

  —Atlanta Constitution

  Andrew Vachss

  Andrew Vachss has been a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, a social caseworker, a labor organizer, and has directed a maximum–security prison for youthful offenders. Now a lawyer in private practice, he represents children and youths exclusively. He is the author of numerous novels, including the Burke series, two collections of short stories, and a wide variety of other material including song lyrics, poetry, graphic novels, and a "children's book for adults." His books have been translated into twenty different languages and his work has appeared in Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, The New York Times, and numerous other forums. He lives and works in New York City and the Pacific Northwest.

  The dedicated Web site for Vachss and his work is www. vachss.com

  BOOKS BY

  ANDREW VACHSS

  Flood

  Strega

  Blue Belle

  Hard Candy

  Blossom

  Sacrifice

  Shella

  Down in the Zero

  Born Bad

  Footsteps of the Hawk

  False Allegations

  Safe House

  Choice of Evil

  Everybody Pays

  Dead and Gone

  Pain Management

  STREGA

  STREGA

  Andrew Vachss

  Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

  Vintage Books

  A Division of Random House, Inc. New York

  For Doc, who heard it all while he was down here.

  For Mary Lou, who can hear it all now.

  For Sam, who finally gave up his part–time job.

  And for Bobby, who died trying.

  Different paths to the same door.

  Copyright © 1987 by Andrew H. Vachss

  All rights reserved under International and Pan–American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1987, and in trade paperback by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1996.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Knopf edition as follows:

  Vachss, Andrew.

  Strega.

  I.Title

  PS3572.A33S7

  1987

  813'·54

  86–46019

  eISBN 0–375–71902–4

  This book is also available in a print version:

  ISBN 0–679–76409–7

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  To Ira J. Hechler, the master–builder content to allow others to engrave their names on the cornerstones of his achievements, I acknowledge my gratitude and proclaim my respect.

  STREGA

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  1

  IT STARTED with a kid.

  The redhead walked slowly up the bridle path, one foot deliberately in front of the other, looking straight ahead. She was dressed in a heavy sweatsuit and carrying some kind of gym bag in her hand. Her flaming hair was tied behind her with a wide yellow ribbon, just as it was supposed to be.

  Forest Park runs all through Queens County, just a dozen miles outside the city. It's a long narrow piece of greenery, stretching from Forest Hills, where Geraldine Ferraro sells Pepsi, all the way to Richmond Hill, where some people sell coke. At six in the morning, the park was nearly deserted, but it would fill up soon enough. Yuppies working up an appetite for breakfast yogurt, jogging through the forest, dreaming of things you can buy from catalogues.

  I was deep into the thick brush along the path, safely hidden behind a window screen. It had taken a couple of hours to weave the small branches through the mesh, but it was worth it—I was invisible. It was like being back in Biafra during the war, except that only branches were over my head—no planes.

  The redhead stopped on the path, just across from me, about twenty feet
away. Moving as if all her joints were stiff in the early–spring cold, she pulled the sweatshirt over her head, untied the pants, and let them fall to the ground. Now she was dressed in just a tight tank top and a skimpy pair of silky white shorts. "No panties, no bra," the freak had told her on the phone. "I want to see everything you got bounce around, you got it?" She was supposed to do three laps around the bridle path, and then it would be over.

  I had never spoken to the woman. I got the story from an old man I did time with years ago. Julio called me at Mama Wong's restaurant and left a message to meet at a gas station he owns over in Brooklyn. "Tell him to bring the dog," he told Mama.

  Julio loves my dog. Her name is Pansy and she's a Neapolitan mastiff—about 140 pounds of vicious muscle and dumb as a brick. If her entire brain was high–quality cocaine, it wouldn't retail for enough cash to buy a decent meal. But she knows how to do her work, which is more than you can say for a lot of fools who went to Harvard.

  Back when I did my last long stretch, the prison yard was divided into little courts—every clique had one, the Italians, the blacks, the Latins. But it didn't just break down to race—bank robbers hung out together, con men had their own spot, the iron–freaks didn't mix with the basketball junkies…like that. If you stepped on a stranger's court, you did it the same way you'd come into his cell without an invite—with a shank in your hand. People who don't have much get ugly about giving up the little they have left.

  Julio's court was the biggest one on the yard. He had tomato plants growing there, and even some decent chairs and a table someone made for him in the wood shop. He used to make book at the same stand every day—cons are all gamblers, otherwise they'd work for a living. Every morning he'd be out there on his court, sitting on a box near his tomato plants, surrounded by muscle. He was an old man even then, and he carried a lot of respect. One day I was talking to him about dogs, and he started in about Neapolitans.

  "When I was a young boy, in my country, they had a fucking statue of that dog right in the middle of the village," he told me. "Neapolitan mastiffs, Burke—the same dogs what came over the Alps with Hannibal. I get out of this place, the first thing I do is get one of those dogs."

  He was a better salesman than he was a buyer—Julio never got a Neapolitan, but I did. I bought Pansy when she was a puppy and now she's a full–grown monster. Every time Julio sees her, tears come into his eyes. I guess the idea of a cold–blooded killer who can never inform on the contractor makes him sentimental.

  I drove my Plymouth into the gas station, got the eye from the attendant, and pulled into the garage. The old man came out of the darkness and Pansy growled—it sounded like a diesel truck downshifting. As soon as she recognized Julio's voice her ears went back just a fraction of an inch, but she was still ready to bite.

  "Pansy! Mother of God, Burke–she's the size of a fucking house! What a beauty!"

  Pansy purred under the praise, knowing there were better things coming. Sure enough, the old man reached in a coat pocket and came out with a slab of milk–white cheese and held it out to her.

  "So, baby—you like what Uncle Julio has for you, huh?"

  Before Julio could get close enough, I snapped "Speak!" at Pansy. She let the old man pat her massive head as the cheese quickly disappeared. Julio thought "Speak!" meant she should make noises—actually, it was the word I taught her that meant it was okay to take food. To Julio, it looked like a dog doing a trick. The key to survival in this world is to have people think you're doing tricks for them. Nobody was going to poison my dog.

  Pansy growled again, this time in anticipation. "Pansy, jump!" I barked at her, and she lay down in the back seat without another sound.

  I got out of the car and lit a cigarette—Julio wouldn't call me out to Brooklyn just to give Pansy some cheese.

  "Burke, an old friend of mine comes to me last week. He says this freak is doing something to his daughter, making her crazy—scared all the time. And he don't know what to do. He tries to talk to her and she won't tell him what's wrong. And the daughter—she's married to a citizen, you know? Nice guy, treats her good and everything. He earns good, but he's not one of us. We can't bring him in on this."

  I just watched the old man. He was so shook he was trembling. Julio had killed two shooters in a gunfight just before he went to prison and he was standup all the way. This had to be bad. I let him talk, saying nothing.

  "So I talk to her—Gina. She won't tell me neither, but I just sit and we talk about things like when she was a little girl and I used to let her drink some of my espresso when she came into the club with her father—stuff like that. And then I notice that she won't let this kid of hers out of her sight. The little girl, she wants to go out in the yard and play and Gina says no. And it's a beautiful day out, you understand? They got a fence around the house, she can watch the kid from the kitchen—but she's not letting her out of her sight. So then I ask her, Is it something about the kid?

  "And then she starts to cry, right in front of me and the kid too. She shows me this brown envelope that came in the mail for her. It's got all newspaper stories of kids that got killed by drunk drivers, kids that got snatched, missing kids…all that kind of shit."

  "So what?" I ask her. What's this got to do with your kid? And she tells me that this stuff comes in the mail for weeks, okay? And then this animale calls her on the phone. He tells her that he did a couple of these kids himself, you understand what I'm saying?—he snatches the kids himself and all. And her kid is going to be next if she don't do what he wants.

  "So she figures he wants money, right? She knows that could be taken care of. But he don't want money, Burke. He wants her to take off her clothes for him while she's on the phone, the freak. He tells her to take the clothes off and say what she's doing into the phone."

  The old man's eyes were someplace else. His voice was a harsh prison whisper, but reedy and weak. There was nothing for me to say—I don't do social work.

  "She tells me she goes along with it, but she don't really take nothing off, okay ?—and the freak screams at her that he knows she's not really doing it and hangs up on her. And that's when she hit the fucking panic button—she believes this guy's really watching her. All the time watching her, and getting ready to move on her kid."

  "Why come to me?" I asked him.

  "You know these people, Burke. Even when we were in the joint, you were always watching the fucking skinners and the baby–rapers and all. Remember? Remember when I asked you why you talk to them—remember what you said?"

  I remembered. I told the old man that I was going to get out of that joint someday and I'd be going back to the streets—if you walk around in the jungle, you have to know the animals.

  "Yeah," I told the old man, "I remember."

  "So what am I gonna fucking do, ask one of them psychiatrists? You know about freaks—you tell me what to do."

  "I don't tell people what to do."

  "Then tell me what's going on—tell me what's in his head."

  "He isn't watching her, Julio," I told him. "He just figured she wasn't going along, that's all. He's a freak, like you said—you don't ever know why they do something."

  "But you know what they're going to do."

  "Yeah," I told him, "I know what they're going to do." And it was the truth.

  We smoked together in silence for a bit. I knew Julio, and I knew there was more coming. Finally, he snubbed out his skinny, twisted black cigar on the Plymouth's faded flank and stuck it in his pocket. His old, cold eyes grabbed mine.

  "He called her again"

  "And…?" I asked him.

  "He told her to come to the park, you know, that Forest Park, near her house in Kew Gardens? And he says she has to go jogging in the park Friday morning, okay? And not to wear no underwear, so's he can watch her bounce around. He says if she does that, they'll be even and he'll let her kid off the hook."

  "No," I said.

  "No fucking what?" shouted the old man. "No,
she don't go to the park—no, he don't let the kid off the hook…what?"

  "The kid's not on the hook, Julio; this freak is. He's a degenerate, okay? And they never stop what they do. Some of them step it up, you understand? They get into more freakish shit. But they don't stop. If she goes into that park, he'll call again. And the next time he'll want more."

  "He's gonna rape her?"

  "No, this kind doesn't do that. He's a watcher—but he wants to hurt women just the same. He wants to make them dance to his tune. And the ones that dance, he speeds up the music."

  The old man slumped against the fender. All of a sudden he looked ancient. But an old alligator can still bite.

  "She's good people, Burke. I never had a daughter, but if I did I wish it would be her. She's got a heart like steel. But this kid of hers, Mia, she turns her to water. She ain't scared for herself."

  "I know," I told him.

  "And she can't tell her husband. He'd wanna file a fucking lawsuit on the guy or something."

  "Yeah," I agreed, sharing the old man's profound respect for citizens.

  "So what do we do?" the old man asked me."Where did this 'we' come from, Julio?"

  "You do bodywork, right? I heard around for years—you do this kind of work, like private–eye shit and all."

  "So? This is different."

  "What's so different? Just nose around and find out this guy's name for me—where he lives and all."

  "Not a chance," I told him.

  The old man looked into my eyes, slipping into a new game quicker than a striking snake.

  "Burke, this is family."

  "Yeah," I said, "your family."

  "In the joint, we was like family," he told me, his voice quiet.

  "You been reading too many books, old man. I was never in your fucking family."

  "Hey, come on, Burke. Just 'cause you ain't Italian don't mean nothing to me," he said, with all the sincerity of a real–estate broker.

  "I went to prison because I wasn't going to spend my life kissing ass," I said, "and kissing some old man's pinky ring don't race my motor either. A boss is a boss—I don't have much but at least I don't have a fucking boss, you hear me?"

  The old man kept his face flat against this sacrilege, but his lizard eyes blinked. He said nothing, waiting for me to finish.