“Very insightful.”
She shrugs again. “I found out early that I had a gift for estimating behavior.”
Except for your own, I think. But then, I guess that’s true for all of us.
“Next question: why that particular business plan? You say your motivation was money. Keeping someone for seven years seems like a very long time to wait for a payoff.”
She shakes her head once, impatient with me. “You keep saying that. The motivation wasn’t money, it was survival. Money just happens to be crucial to survival in this society at this time.”
“I apologize. But why that plan?”
She pauses for almost a full minute before answering. “I examined the subject of wherewithal in detail a long time ago. Unless you are very lucky and win the lottery, or inherit, or have a special talent such as an actor or musician, wealth is unlikely. The surest way is to take from those who have.”
Her face is almost animated as she talks. This is a subject she feels something about, at whatever level.
“Think about it. Commerce at its core is simple. It’s about finding someone with money and taking it from them. In the traditional non-criminal world, that translates into bargaining, and since force is not applied, the outcome is always uncertain. Perhaps he likes the car you’re selling but his wife doesn’t. Perhaps the stock market takes a downturn that was never expected and—worse—was beyond your control.” She shakes her head, dismissing the idea of being a victim to these scenarios. “As I said before, you can never control every factor in life. The key to survival is to control the ones you can, and criminal enterprises satisfy that paradigm. You identify the man with the money, and you take it from him. That’s the most controlled way, the most likely way, to acquire wealth.”
I interrupt her. “Why is wealth so important? If it’s all just about survival, like you say, then what’s the worry about an excess? Isn’t it enough to pay the grocery bill and the rent?”
“Factors, control. Better to have too much money and never need it. Abundance deals with probabilities. It increases the possibility of survival in the face of eventualities you can’t predict.”
It’s an answer to the question, but it seems empty somehow. In spite of everything I’ve heard so far, I still can’t feel Mercy. The intimacy I usually achieve, that sense of almost becoming what they are, is absent. When I try to understand her, it’s as if I’m peering into a void. It’s like trying to merge with nothing.
“Go on.”
“So I examined all the most direct methods. Theft. Bank robbery. Selling drugs or women. They all had their pluses and minuses, but one glaring fact stood out: Most criminals end up in jail. It’s almost inevitable. Rather than picking a criminal enterprise and planning how not to get caught, I decided to look at the factors that encourage that outcome and derive from there.
“I spent a lot of time listing the reasons a criminal ends up in prison. There were two I kept returning to as basic common denominators. One of them is partly an answer to your question about waiting. It’s also an answer, though you haven’t asked, about why I always had a plan for my retirement.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. This is important. I can sense it.
“What were they?”
She ponders me for a moment, as though she’s trying to decide whether or not to share these insights. “The first became a kind of axiom. I even wrote it that way: a greater or lesser inability to define and control the factors of the environment in which the crime is committed.”
It’s my turn to frown. “Sorry, I don’t follow.”
“Let’s use the thief who breaks into homes as an example. Each time he goes out to commit his crime, he’s stepping into someone else’s environment. It’s not his. It doesn’t belong to him. However much he plans, something could have changed the day before he enters the house. Perhaps the family bought a dog that morning, or the father finally gave in to his wife and signed that contract with the alarm company.”
“When you took those people, you were entering into an environment that wasn’t yours,” I point out.
“True. But remember what I said: You can never control every factor, you simply control as many as you can. If you look at my business, there were really only two times I had to leave the environment I controlled: when I kidnapped the women, or in the rare instance when I was forced to punish husbands who refused to pay. Everything else was done if, where, when, and how I decided, within the environment I had created.
“Of all the variables in a strange environment, the one that can be the most unpredictable is the human factor. The more people there are, the less control you’ll have, no matter how much you plan. In my business model, the human factor is kept very, very low. Me, the husbands, the wives. That’s it. Control of the environment.”
There are a hundred possible holes in Mercy’s logic, but I remember what Callie said about Mercy’s assessment of risk and reward, and decide she was right. Mercy had accepted that zero risk was impossible, so that wasn’t the goal; the goal was the least for the most.
“What was the second factor?” I ask.
“The answer to your original question: time. Kill once in a lifetime and you’re far more likely to get away with it than if you kill every year. Kill every year and your chances of getting caught are less than if you kill once a month, and so on. That encompasses going on too long, which is why I had a retirement plan envisioned before I even started.
“From another view, steal a valuable item and sell it a week later and your chances are worse than if you wait a decade. Speed is greed. My father used to say that.” She nods, partly to herself, caught in a memory. “My business model wasn’t perfect, because perfection is impossible, but it certainly solved the time factor.”
She smiles at this, and then she stretches, her bones creaking comfortably. She settles back, regarding me. She seems as she has since I came here: relaxed, patient, neither striving nor avoiding. “The thing is,” she says after a moment, “I’ve answered your question, but I don’t think you’ll ever understand it. Not really.”
It’s an echo of my own earlier doubts. I want to understand, I really do. I’ve spent my life hunting these creatures. In the end, whatever the twists or turns involved, I’ve always come to that understanding, deep and intimate, of who they are. It’s what’s kept me sane. Shine the sun on them and they lose their power over you. Fail to drag them out of the shadows …
“Try me,” I say.
She leans forward, intent. “All we are is our next breath, and joy is everything that comes after survival. As long as I had sufficient funds to keep a roof above my head and to eat my next meal, time wasn’t important. It wasn’t about acquiring wealth quickly. It was about knowing it would be there one day and not getting caught in the meantime.”
The last part of that gets my attention, and I pounce on it. “Where does freedom fit with your philosophy, Mercy? If it’s all about meals and a roof, what’s the big deal about jail? You’ll go on breathing, sleeping. You have your three hots and a cot right here.”
Regret flashes in her eyes. “I was right,” she says, shaking her head at my apparent obtuseness. “You’ll never understand.” She rubs her eyes with one hand, like a teacher with a difficult student, searching for patience. “We’ll try it one more time. Listen. Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
She speaks slowly, enunciating the words as if she were talking to someone a little slow on the draw. “The only thing wrong with prison happens to be the most important thing that can be wrong: It’s an environment you can’t control. A lack of control always includes the possibility of death. It’s not about the freedom, it’s about the variables and how they could affect your ability to draw that next breath.”