The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  “Your English is good, too. California?”

  “Oregon. Went for college and married instead.”

  “You miss it?”

  The woman reached for the document and Munroe handed it to her. “Sometimes,” she said, “though I don’t miss my ex.” She tilted the paper against the light so that the watermarks showed. They were what had turned getting a quality digital copy into more than a visit to a scanner.

  “This shouldn’t be too difficult,” the woman said. “I need to set up the equipment—maybe a half hour or so.”

  Munroe left for the restaurant a few floors down, another little box with a countertop that ran parallel to a windowed wall, the accoutrements of a kitchen behind the counter, and lounge-style seating filling what was left of the space.

  She ate without tasting, without enjoyment or appetite, pork cutlet—tonkatsu—and rice and cabbage, satisfying a need for protein and a semblance of nourishment because her brain required fuel. When the food was gone and an hour had passed, she collected her prize from the studio upstairs and returned to the manga café.

  Altering the digital file would have been easier if the available software had been in English, but eventually, pixel by pixel, Bradford’s ex-wife’s name became Munroe’s. A quality print on heavy-weight paper cut down to letter size created a replica so near to the original that only the absence of watermarks separated fake from original, with nothing to indicate that watermarks had originally been there.

  The seal arrived by special delivery in the afternoon and its embossing became the texture of the lie. On such short notice and without connections, the forgery was as close to the real thing as Munroe could get. She ran her fingers over the raised seal, closed her eyes, and breathed in the illusion.

  The marriage certificate was a prop, a way to satisfy bureaucratic expectations. Far more important was her ability to play the role ordained by the paper and so become what those with the power to say yes expected to see and no one thought to question the paper’s provenance.

  She needed one visit, only one. If she failed to acquire that, if the officials insisted on verifying the document before letting her in, then even she, as Bradford’s best hope, wouldn’t be enough to fix this mess and he was already lost.

  The taxi pulled off the street and Munroe, in the backseat, leaned down to see through the window, up the three-story concrete square that housed the precinct police station. The structure was separated from traffic by asphalt and parking on two sides and hedged in by taller, less blocky buildings on the others. There were few windows and no easy unconventional access, and somewhere behind those walls, on one of those floors, was the man she’d schemed to see while the days to his indictment clicked steadily onward.

  Without knowledge of the enemy or of what Bradford may have already said, if he’d said anything at all, she could only pretend to predict the consequences of every word and action, so she’d come alone, without the pretense of an interpreter, willing to face whatever questions and accusations might later arise if her fluency was forced to surface.

  The taxi stopped just shy of the entrance and Munroe paid the white-gloved driver. The passenger door swung open on automatic hinges and she stepped out, into midmorning heat, onto the doorstep of the belly of the beast.

  Munroe pushed through the lobby doors, wedding ring on her finger, the modest dress on her frame, makeup heavy on the feminine, and papers stuffed into an enormous purse that she’d picked up at a boutique in the nearby shopping arcade. The interior was a cool contrast to the stickiness outside, relatively quiet, textured, and fragranced with standard open-floor-office air.

  There were no uniformed officers that she could see.

  No indifferent desk sergeant, burned out by a never-ending chain of human misery; no rank smells; no coughing, sniffling, dull-eyed bodies filling the few seats that lined the nearest wall; no radio background noise and incessant ringing phones; and no relatives and friends waiting with stress and fear and defeat etched into every movement. Instead, paper- and computer-cluttered desks were sandwiched in on one another end-to-end and corner-to-corner behind a wall-to-wall counter, while nonuniformed clerks went quietly about their work.

  One of the women stood when Munroe reached the counter.

  Munroe said, “I’m here to see my husband.”

  The woman smiled the earnest smile of helpful nonunderstanding and slid a laminated sheet onto the counter. She brushed a hand across the page with an encouraging nod, inviting Munroe to point to the problem.

  Cartoon drawings illustrated varied emergencies: I’m lost. I’ve been robbed. I’m hurt. I’ve been in an accident. Munroe shook her head and raised her wrists together in the universal sign of handcuffs. “Gaijin,” she said. She pointed to the ceiling and then to the floor. “He is here.” Then she pointed to the gold band on her finger. “I came to see him.”

  The mental gears clicked and the woman said, “Ehhh.” She turned to her deskmate. She’s here to see the foreigner. She is his wife, maybe.

  No visitors for him without approval, the deskmate said. Call for Mori-san, he should be the one to handle things.

  The woman turned back to Munroe. “Yes,” she said in English. “Seat, please.” She motioned toward the chairs with a polite smile and courteous bow.

  Daichi Mori arrived several minutes later, stepping out from behind a door that had appeared to belong to an office but which, from the force with which he pushed through, had more likely connected to a hallway. He was a man in his early fifties, short and stocky, dressed in impeccably pressed civilian clothes, with thick wild eyebrows and a permanent scowl that hung deep into drooping jowls.

  Munroe stood when he approached, stuck out a tremulous hand, and pushing a quiver into her voice, she said, “Detective Mori?”

  “Captain Mori,” he replied, his English lightly accented. He wore an air of unquestionable authority, but his voice was soft and his demeanor gentle.

  He stared at her outstretched hand as if disgusted by the idea of touching it, then shook it gingerly. Munroe drew in a nervous breath and brushed strands of hair away from her tear-rimmed eyes. “My husband is missing,” she said, and her voice quivered again. “I’m told that he’s been arrested and that I can find him here. I don’t know what’s happened, but I have to see him, please can you help me?”

  Mori held her gaze and Munroe pleaded in silence, desperate and hurting, while he sized her up. She’d come prepared to segue into tears, then hysterics, and if those failed, to quote chapter and verse of local laws to prove that she knew her rights—few as they were—and to dig in her heels with threats of publicity and noise, refusing to leave until she was able to see her husband. But Mori motioned a hand toward the counter and said, “There is some paperwork.”

  He walked with her, then stood beside her long enough to give a round of instructions to the clerk, and when he turned to go, Munroe held up a plastic bag. “I have clothes and hygiene items,” she said. “I was told that these are things he’s allowed to have.”

  “We will have to inspect them first,” Mori said. He nodded to the woman again and another set of forms made its way onto the counter.

  Munroe filled out papers written in a language she couldn’t read, and the red tape and formality consumed an hour—certainly long enough for the station officer to contact the prosecutor’s office to inform them of her arrival and allow official objections to put an end to hope. But the opposition never came and in the end the marriage certificate was an afterthought, necessary only because the last name on her passport didn’t match Bradford’s.

  A young officer arrived to take the items in the plastic bag, assuring Munroe that they would get to their intended recipient, and shortly thereafter another led her from the front and down an empty hall to a small room, where she was required to leave all personal belongings before continuing on.

  The visitation area was a box of a room with institutional paint, one institutional chair, and a wall interrupted
by a single plexiglass window. Munroe took a seat in front of the rectangle where a series of holes were drilled below mouth level. Bare walls and an empty chair faced her on the other side.

  The young officer who’d escorted her in stood to the side, a few feet to her left, in no apparent hurry to go anywhere, and she waited in silence for several long minutes, counting the time in her head because there was no way to keep track otherwise. And then a flash of movement and color caught her eye, a reflection of a reflection on the other side of the plexiglass, and a moment later Bradford was in front of her, hair greasy, eyes bloodshot above dark circles, wearing the same clothes she’d last seen him in, now dirty and wrinkled.

  He sat across from her, separated by the window, and he smiled a sad, sad smile.

  Seeing Bradford, seeing him like this, hurt, and Munroe hated that she hurt. He leaned forward and, his voice hoarse, full of disbelief and abandoned hope, said, “Thank you for coming.”

  She matched the smile. “It’s a pretty pickle you’re in.”

  Bradford sighed and she could read in his exhaustion the desperation that came from having been cut off from real life with no way to communicate, no way to know if anyone knew where to find him or if they’d even try, and the caution of knowing that anything they said here would be interpreted, possibly reworded, and used against him.

  They sat quietly for a long while, as if neither of them really knew where to start. “I didn’t,” he said finally.

  “I know,” she said.

  Bradford rubbed a hand over his eyes and then dragged his palm across several days’ worth of stubble. “How bad is it?” he said.

  “You need a really good lawyer.”

  Lips pressed together, he glanced off to the side.

  “I’ve already called the local U.S. consulate,” she said, “as well as the embassy in Tokyo. I’ll contact your office once I get out of here today—I didn’t want to call them until I had something worth saying. I know someone who used to work with the David House Agency and I’ve put out some lines to see if this is something that meets their criteria.” She paused. “If you’ve got any strings worth pulling, they’d certainly be useful now.”

  “Whatever strings I have, the office will know how to utilize,” he said. “What’s the David thing?”

  “International crisis resource organization. They take on cases where geopolitics and corruption make getting justice a difficult thing. At the least they might be able to make sure you don’t get screwed over by your local lawyer—whenever you get one.”

  Bradford stared at the ceiling and the silence ticked on, and then he searched her face in the way of a starving man looking through to the diners in a restaurant window. “Is it fixable?” he said.

  “You lied to me,” she mouthed. And then, voice barely loud enough to carry through the drilled holes, “You shut me out when I desperately needed the work and then used me anyway. You knew I’d go looking,” she said. “That’s what burns me most of all, you and your Easter eggs after the fact when I was there all along. I begged you, Miles, every fucking day, going crazy with boredom while trying to play happy and domestic.”

  Bradford’s eyes closed in a long, slow blink. She wanted him to argue, to contradict, to tell her she was wrong and give her a reason to fight with him and lash out, but he only offered silence. “I waited out these months for you,” she said, “for us—for love—out of hope of what better things could be. You knew what it meant, and in return you gave me lies and stole what I would have given you freely.”

  Bradford put his fingertips to the glass and his mouth opened, though it took a half-second for the words to form. “It wasn’t like that, Mike,” he said.

  “No?” she said. “Then tell me what it was.”

  “You know what it was. Trying to give us a chance, same as it’s always been.”

  Her eyes cut toward the officer. “This is giving us a chance?”

  “I had no idea it would become this.”

  “Don’t play semantics. You knew something was going down.”

  “Nothing I could lay out logically, nothing I could point to.”

  “Fuck that,” she said. “I was right there, every single goddamned day, right there, begging, enduring, and you knew, Miles, you knew! And then you left a nice little parting gift when it was too late to do a fucking thing about it.”

  Bradford shook his head, wearing that same sad smile. “That’s not what it was, not what it looks like.”

  “So you keep saying, but you’ve said a lot of things, haven’t you?”

  “Dammit, Mike, yes, I knew what it cost you. I wanted to give you what you wanted. That’s why I put things in motion, processed the paperwork.”

  “And then just let it sit there while the world burned down?”

  He put his other hand to the glass, both of his palms pressed in toward her as if he would have reached out and held her and buried his face in her neck. He said, “You think that was easy? You think I didn’t hurt every damn day I went into that building without you, wondering if this would be the day you’d had enough and got up and walked away again? You think saying no was fun? I’m trying to keep you alive, Mike, I’m trying to keep us alive. What kind of hypocrite does that make me if the moment I think my own ass might be on the line, I’m suddenly willing to risk yours again? I’d rather die than put you in that position.”

  “That wasn’t your fucking choice,” she hissed. “You had no right to control my decisions by withholding the truth. You’d rather die? This is death, and I would’ve given anything to keep it from happening.”

  “I would’ve done anything to keep it from happening. You think I knew? Things got…” Bradford paused. “Things were…”

  She crossed her arms. “Complicated, you said.”

  “For God’s sake, Mike, I’m not an easy man to take down, you know that. Not after twenty years of staying alive while people around me were blown to hell. I had this. I figured whatever came at me, would be more of the same ol’, same ol’, not this underhanded bullshit.”

  “But you sat and waited for them.”

  “Of course I did. This isn’t Afghanistan. Different sandbox, different rules. That was the only way to fight it, and you know it. You would have done the exact same thing.”

  “No, I would have fucking called you.”

  “Michael,” he said, his voice low, chiding and knowing, full of protective pain. “I call you, you show up—and you know you would have—and that makes you an accomplice and buries you in the same shit I’m in.”

  Munroe glared.

  Bradford stopped. “You’re right,” he said. “I should have called. But would you have, had the roles been reversed?”

  His question ground the conversation to silence. She would have done the same as he—tried to distance him, protect him just as he had her, and he would have been just as angry as she was now. Munroe shifted back into the chair and straightened her legs. Bradford’s fingertips remained pressed against the glass.

  She felt his hurt inside her chest, as if her own heart had been squeezed and wrung, as if it had been she who’d spent the last four nights unable to sleep, believing quite possibly that what she’d tried to hold on to had abandoned her for good. She wanted to reach for him, to comfort him and make things better, but that just made her mad and so she stayed where she was, arms crossed, glaring at the small ledge beneath the window. Finally she said, “How long have you known? How far back does this go?”

  “As far as I know, the day I got there.”

  He paused, as if he’d left the sentence unfinished. She looked up and met his eyes. He said, “You see atrocity and you think of me, you know it?”

  The belt, the murder weapon.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Maybe two weeks on the Easter egg squares—”

  Information left on the calendar sheets.

  “It’ll flow from there like Chutes and Ladders—”

  Follow the trail.

&
nbsp; “You have the jewelry box?”

  Have you looked at the external drive?

  “I tried on the three pendants,” she said. “They don’t fit.”

  “That’s all I had, all I could afford. You might have to take it back to the store. I left you the receipt.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’ve gone back to look at a few pieces but haven’t had a chance to go shopping.”

  Another beat of silence.

  “I didn’t know, Mike,” he said. “Not like this.”

  “You should have told me from the beginning.”

  “In hindsight I see that.”

  She waited, then said, “Remember what I told you in Argentina? Back when Logan and his friends were using me to get what they wanted—when you begged me to stop because you thought the risk was too high?”

  “Choice,” Bradford said, and he searched her face. “You chose to let them use you, knowing it might be the end.”

  “We’ve come around full circle,” she said. “I’m here now because I choose to be, not out of some sense of duty or obligation or even because I love you, but because untangling these types of puzzles is what I fucking live for.”

  Bradford glanced down and, lips pressed together again, he traced a finger in random patterns on the counter that edged out on his side. Finally he said, “Never mind the big picture. Are we fixable? Can I undo what I’ve done?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Pain etched in his facial creases. He sat back and sighed, then nodded and went back to the previous subject. “What about the current situation?”

  Munroe jutted her chin toward the glass, the walls. “Have you said anything?”

  He shook his head.

  “They won’t stop.”

  “There’s nothing to confess,” he said, but he said more with his eyes and his expression than he did with his words and in everything he left unspoken he told her that he knew how the system worked and that he would hold out against the worst of it.