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The Getaway Man
Chasing a Professional Getaway Man
Eddie is the main character in the Andrew Vachss novel The Getaway Man. The best description of Eddie comes from the first paragraph of Voltaire social criticism, Candide: “His face was the true index of his mind.” And the description applies to Vachss’s leading man. Eddie’s face is one that other characters in Vachss book read into it what they want to read. And Eddie happily allows them to believe what they choose.
“Look at you,” Daphne a wealthy girl Eddie meets midway through the book says, “I don’t know you. I don’t even know if your name is a real one. You seem like some kind of a criminal to me. A dangerous man. Are you a dangerous man, Eddie? The response is as follows. “Only behind the wheel,” I said, thinking of that judge when I was a kid. The judge had written those very words on his record after being caught stealing a bright orange Camaro.
We first meet Eddie as a teenager stealing cars for joy rides. He enters the juvenile detention system as a repeat offender, then one night he is confronted with that bright orange Camaro with the driver-side door wide open and the engine running. He takes the car and leads the cops on a chase that ended with the Camaro running over a spike strip in the road and a lots of cop cars surrounding him with armed cops guns drawn behind them. He’s thrown into a juvenile detention farm for older kids. There he learns the skills he needs to survive the adult prisons his life of crime will inevitably drive him into.
Throughout the story, Vachss is describing the workings of a criminal underground populated with characters such as Mr. Clinton who strips the cards down for parts and Virgil and Tim, two brothers that Mr. Clinton direct Eddie to after Eddie is busted for theft of a blue Mercedes. Actually the public defender plea-bargain the charge down to use without authority from grand theft auto. Virgil and Tim are armed robbers. Though they use weapons in carrying out their crime, they explain they have never had to shoot anyone to get what they wanted.
Vachss draws his characters Tim and Virgil as men with their own code of ethics. The reader sees this as Vachss describes a bank robbery that goes completely wrong. The bank manager resists, draws a pistol, and kills Virgil only to be shot dead by Tim who waits inside the bank for the police to arrive hoping they will be able to get Virgil to a hospital in time to save his life. The cops arrive, shoot up the getaway car and Eddie in the process, and then take Tim and the wounded Eddie and Virgil into custody as Virgil’s life, what little there was left, slowly ebbs.
Tim takes the stand during his trial and tells his story to the dismay of his attorney. “’Me and Virgil robbed plenty of places,’ Tim cut him (the district attorney) off. “And all that time, we never shot nobody. Never beat anyone up. Never raped any of the women. If that punk had just kept his hands in his pocket, he’d still be alive. And me and Virgil would be down on the beach in Biloxi, spending that bank’s money.” During the testimony the DA attempted to get Tim to implicate Eddie as an accomplice but Tim protects Eddie by portraying him as an unwitting dupe who he and Virgil found to drive the getaway car but had no prior knowledge of the bank robbery. The ploy works as Eddie was not charged with the murder nor the robbery but with a lesser charge Vachss does not detail.
Up to now, the novel has been Eddie’s odyssey through the criminal world that exists along side the genteel world of Middle America. His journey is not unlike Candide’s travels. Like Voltaire’s main character, Eddie meets an odd assortment of characters living their lives in Vachss’s dark world of child molestation, men-on-women violence, and imprisoned men-on-men violence. Now sentenced to five years of hard time in an adult prison, Eddie is spared the initiation rites associated with each new arrival, thanks to a prison heavy weight called J.C., who sees in Eddie—a stand-up driver who didn’t cut and run when Tim and Virgil blew their robber—he will need once J.C. has served his time and left prison.
The plot of the larger story begins with Eddie leaving prison and going to work for J.C. as a driver. Pick up a car in one location and drop it off in another, never look in the trunk. If he is picked up explain that he was hired to drive the car from one location to another. Asked about the contents of the trunk he was to simply say he had no idea of its contents and request a lie detector test to verify his statement. Unlike Virgil, Tim, and even Mr. Clinton, J.C. is a darker character. And the reader sees it emerge as Eddie is drawn into J.C.’s plan for an armed robbery that will enable all involved to retire.
Vachss is the author of a series of books based on an underworld, self-style crusader against child molestation. The theme emerges in all of his stories even in the The Getaway Man. The major difference in the tone of this work and the Burke series is with Burke, Vachss gets inside the main character’s head and lets the reader see its workings. In this work and one other Stella also reviewed on this site, the reader does not get the grand tour of the main character’s head. You could almost believe that the characters of both books are somewhat simple-minded but their actions and their skills surviving in the world they each inhabit suggest a cunning mind smarter than the cops and robbers both encounter, confront, and end the end overcome.
I read The Getaway Man on an overseas flight and found it completely engrossing. I’ve recently reread the work wanting to get a better enjoy the work at a slower pace than my first read when I was trying to get to the ending and see how it turns out. It still holds up the second time around.
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