Mask Market b-16

by Andrew Vachss

T he next morning, I woke up thinking about Loyal. That hadn’t happened to me before. I guess I stopped thinking of her as a party girl the minute she told me she was always afraid of ending up as one.

  The newspaper had a make-you-retch story. Cop arrested for rape and sodomy. Too many counts to list, over too many years, because the victims were his daughters. The Queens DA put out the red carpet for the poor guy. They let him surrender himself at the courthouse, arraigned him in seconds, and cut him loose on his own recognizance, no bail. The paper said the DA wouldn’t identify the cop, because they wanted to “protect the alleged victims.” Nice.

  A t your age, this is supposed to be an annual examination,” my doctor said. He’s very tall for a Chinese man, good-looking enough to be a movie star, and a magazine survey I read last year said he was one of the top urologists in New York. With all that, his office is still down on Canal Street, his prices haven’t changed, and his receptionist still blinks when I tell her I’m a patient, not a salesman. Or a cop.

  “Sorry,” I said, lamely.

  “The outcome for prostate cancer is directly related to early detection,” he said, for at least the fifth time since I’d been coming there.

  “I know,” I mumbled, holding up my hands in surrender.

  “The lab is right around the corner, on Mott Street,” he said, unyielding. “This time, you call for the results, all right? The PSA test isn’t a perfect indicator, but it’s the best lab screen we have now. Last time”—he glanced down at my folder—“you got the test, but you never called for the results.”

  “Sorry,” I said again. “What were they?”

  “Three point seven,” he said. “That’s not a cause for concern, but anything over four is something we would want to follow closely.”

  “Sure.”

  “We would call you, but the number on your file never seems to be up-to-date.”

  “I move around a lot.”

  “Yes. Well, we don’t,” he said, sternly. “We’re right here. And our number hasn’t changed.”

  T he blood lab on Mott Street had the decor of the waiting room at a Greyhound terminal. I was the only non-Asian in the place. The Oriental flower at the receptionist’s desk took the paper I handed her, pointed at a row of plastic chairs, said, “Few minutes, okay?”

  I settled in for the duration, but it turned out the girl was telling the truth. My phlebotomist was a burly Hispanic, with stress-pattern baldness. He wrapped a piece of rubber tubing around my arm faster than a junkie who hadn’t fixed in days, tapped the crook of my elbow to bring up a vein, slid the needle home.

  “How many of these you do a day?” I asked him.

  “Many, many,” he said, sliding out the needle and slipping a cotton ball over the entry wound in one motion.

  As I left, I saw a sex worker waiting to be tested, a young-bodied, older-faced woman in jeans and a too-small stretch top. If she got the same blood-taker I’d had, she’d learn the real meaning of “quickie.”

  B y the time I climbed off the F train at the Van Wyck/Briarwood stop, spring had arrived, a light rain misting the streets. I walked over to the small branch library just off Queens Boulevard, spotted the Prof sitting on the steps enjoying a leisurely smoke, and strolled on past. I boxed the corner, crossed the boulevard, and set off to find the middleman.

  I wore a brown leather jacket that I had picked out of a Goodwill bin, leaving a brand-new nylon one in its place. I hadn’t been looking for a bargain; I wanted something I might have to leave at the scene. Something with enough random DNA on it to confuse the hounds. A white jersey cable-knit, dark-green corduroy pants, scuffed brown work boots. In the pockets of the jacket, a pair of deerskin gloves and an orange wool watch cap.

  No gun, no knife, no brass knuckles. I was coming in peace.

  Charlie’s street was quiet, but it was time-of-day quiet, not the peligroso silence that falls in some neighborhoods whenever a stranger walks through. The kids were home from school—playing on their computers, not in the street. Working parents weren’t back yet; retirees were watching whichever one of the endless parade of “court” shows was on at the time.

  It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where you’d find basketball hoops nailed to telephone poles, or dogs running wild, but it still throbbed with the muted rhythms of life behind the well-maintained façades.

  Charlie’s house was a stone-and-stucco job that looked vaguely British to me. Maybe it was the ivy that trellis-climbed on one side, or the small windows broken into even smaller rectangles by the copper-colored panes.

  I went up to the front door like I was expected, pushed the little white button nestled inside a silver filigree, and stepped back slightly, hands clasped in front.

  “Hello?” the woman said. She was medium height, with thick raven hair pulled back into a single plait, wearing a plain blue dress that was too good a match for her eyes to be off-the-rack. Her smile was open and friendly, showing perfect teeth. I figured her for somewhere in her thirties; would have laid good odds she’d been a swimsuit model or a pageant contestant earlier on.

  Was Charlie playing the Benny Siegel role so heavy he got himself a gorgeous Sabra to flesh out the skeleton? I wondered, but I just bowed slightly, said, “Good afternoon, young lady. My name is Kolchan. Meyer Kolchan. I was hoping I could have a quick word with Benjamin….”

  “Yes, sure,” she said, smiling again, some kind of Slavic accent in her voice. Not an Israeli, then. “Ben?” she called out, sweetly. “Mr. Kolchan is here to see you. Can you—?”

  Charlie Jones stepped past her, grinning. “Go fix supper, woman!” he said, mock-commanding, giving her a swat on the bottom as she turned away, giggling.

  “What can I—?” he started to say. Then he saw my face.

  “N o,” he said, very softly.

  “It isn’t what you think,” I said, not moving from my spot, radiating calm out to him. “I just needed to ask you a question, and I didn’t know where else to reach you.”

  He looked over my shoulder, expecting…I don’t know what.

  “One question,” I said. “Then I’ll—”

  “Pick a place,” he said, his voice so tight it vibrated like a tuning fork. “Pick a time. I’ll be there. Set it up any way you want. Please! Just don’t—”

  “You know the plaza next to Penn Station, on the Eighth Avenue side?”

  “Yes.”

  “Say, eleven tomorrow morning?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’ll be there, okay?”

  “Don’t ruin a good thing by being cute, Benny.”

  He looked at me the way a steer in the killing funnel looks at the rifleman waiting at the end: a stare of dull, helpless hatred. I turned my back on him and started for the subway.

  I was about twenty minutes into my meandering half-hour walk when a dark-blue commercial van with tinted windows pulled over to the curb ahead of me. The back doors opened and two men jumped out. I didn’t have to see the tracksuits to know who they were.

  The smaller one was a mongoose. He circled behind me, looking for the back of my neck. The big one plowed straight ahead, a charging bull. I glanced over my shoulder. The mongoose was holding what looked like an oversized plastic automatic—Taser! screamed in my head. The bull had his hands spread wide, like we were going to do Greco-Roman. I spun to my right to give them a visual of me running, planted my right foot, torqued hard, and rushed the big one.

  I registered a broad face and a flattened nose just before we closed. As he wrapped thick arms around me, my steel-toed boot shattered his right ankle. He grunted in pain and locked on, trying to take me to the ground with him. I drove my inside forearm against his chest, jammed my right hand under his chin, and snapped my wrist as I forked my two front fingers past his nose into his eyes. He shrieked, grabbed at his face, and let go.

  I spun to face the mongoose. He danced, looking for the exposed flesh his weapon needed to work. I X-ed my jacketed forearms over my face and ran at him. He stepped back, surpris
ed, and I caught him with a side kick to the thigh. I rolled with the kick and took off running.

  I dashed across two lawns, looking for a back yard. Heard shouting behind me, but no shots. Cold comfort—I hadn’t heard shots when they’d snuffed out Daniel Parks, either.

  I ran through some back yards and pulled myself over a wooden fence, hoping there was no dog on the other side and cursing Daylight Saving Time.

  I made it to the street, scanned the area. Looked clear, but I figured by then the locals were lighting up the 911 switchboard. I turned a corner, pulled off the leather jacket, and dropped it on the ground. I put on the gloves and the orange watch cap, then walked down the sidewalk until I hit the apex of a triangle—Clarence in his Rover at one point, the subway back to Manhattan at the other.

  I couldn’t see the blue van, but I couldn’t be sure it hadn’t seen me, so I chose the subway.

  I looked over my shoulder as I swiped my Metrocard. Nothing. Down on the platform, I spotted a battered payphone, but the Manhattan-bound train was pulling in. No time.

  Two stops later, I got out at Continental Avenue, slipping into the heavy foot-traffic that’s always there at that hour. I crossed over to the cab stand, told the driver I wanted the Delta terminal at La Guardia.

  At La Guardia, I dropped the gloves in a garbage can, used an alcohol wipe to clean the congealed eyeball fluid off my right forefinger in the men’s room, and left the watch cap in a stall.

  Plenty of working payphones there. I rang Clarence’s cell.

  “I’m out,” I said.

  “Saw you drop down, mahn.”

  I waited my turn on the airport cab line, then rode a Crown Vic with bad shocks to Broadway and Seventy-fifth, just north of what guys my age still call Needle Park. If the cabbie wondered about my lack of luggage, he kept it to himself. Or maybe he intuited that I wasn’t fluent in Senegalese.

  I walked over to the 1/9 line, and used my Metrocard one more time.

  W hen violence erupts at me, the same thing always happens. A tiny white dot lasers in my brain, bathing the world in a blue-edged light. I watch myself move through that blue-edged light, like a man underwater, everything so very slow.

  Later, I can play it back, like a stored VCR tape.

  Over and over again.

  What I can never do is erase it.

  M ax tapped his temple, raised his eyebrows in a question.

  “No,” I told him, shaking my head. “I didn’t think.”

  The Mongol nodded approval. The foundation to all his teaching is replacement of instinct. That viper-strike he’d taught me is really an escape move; it can’t be thrown from a distance. You have to give your enemy a grip on you to make it work, and that goes against every instinct…especially mine.

  I’d been a boxer in prison—one of the Prof’s endless schemes. It didn’t require me to actually win any fights to pay benefits. As a fighter, I was what they used to call “pretty.” Slick and smooth. Very fast hands. I didn’t have one-shot KO power, but I threw cutter’s punches, and I was a good finisher.

  I always had plenty of backers, because, even with all my speed, I was never a runner—I stayed in the kitchen and traded. There was never a lot of money on me to win—they don’t pay too much attention to weight classes Inside, and I was usually matched against bigger guys—but I was an ace at going the distance, even against the hardest bangers.

  “Fighting’s the same as friendship, Schoolboy,” the Prof told me. “The best ones always try to give a little more than they take.”

  When I got out the first time, it took Max about ten minutes to show me I was never going to make a living with gloves on my fists. At first, we sparred a lot. Me trying to hit him, him watching me try. Once he had me dialed in, he worked with what he had. No more boxing, no more rules.

  Surprise is speed

  Speed is power

  Thinking is slow

  Slow is weak

  I’d been ready for the two men who’d jumped out of the van. Been ready for a long time.

  “It was a snatch,” I said out loud, gesturing to include Max. “If they’d wanted to shoot me, I was an easy target.”

  “Didn’t even need all that noise and nonsense,” the Prof agreed. “They could have done you just the same way they did that boy who was gonna hire you.”

  “Yeah,” I said, slowly. In our world, we know that there’s no such thing as the “precision beatings” you see gangsters order in the movies. Violence isn’t surgery: You send a couple of men out to break a guy’s legs, the guy struggles, the bat slips, and, just like that, the beating’s a homicide.

  There’s a thousand ways that can happen. You can’t order a pre-beating medical report on a target, like those degenerate doctors who worked in Southern prison farms used to do, telling the torture-loving guards whether it was safe to keep whipping. One punch can do the trick. All it takes is a heart condition you didn’t know about. Or an eggshell skull.

  “It was a capture, not a kill,” I said. “They wanted to talk to me, all right.”

  “I was in position the whole time,” Clarence said. “There was nothing like a blue van by the subway.”

  “You said you saw me go down there?”

  “Oh yes, mahn. As soon as I spotted the orange cap, I knew something had gone wrong. But you were moving nice, and I didn’t see anyone interested in you.”

  “I had your back all the way to the hack, Schoolboy,” the Prof said.

  “You were in the subway?”

  “The Invisible Man,” the Prof chuckled. That’s what he calls himself when he’s dressed as a foot soldier in the Vagrancy Corps. The ankle-length coat he always wore was big enough for three of him, and they only have metal detectors in the subways on special occasions.

  “They came awfully quick,” Michelle said, grim-faced.

  “It don’t take a lot of time to drop a dime,” the Prof told her.

  “Could they have followed you, mahn?”

  “How?” I asked Clarence. “From where? Starting when?”

  “That clue is true,” the Prof agreed. “Only way that works is if Burke was spotted same time they took out that rich guy, and followed him, right? Come on! That was so, they already passed up a hundred better shots than the one they took.”

  “They don’t have anything,” I said, checking my voice to make certain I wasn’t graveyard-whistling. “That night, they never saw where I came from, or where I went. And all Charlie’s got for me is a phone number.”

  “He’s got something else,” the Prof said.

  “What?”

  “He knows where you’re going to be tomorrow morning, son. Time and place leaves him holding an ace.”

  “You think he’ll show, then?”

  “Got to, honeyboy. He knows where you’ll be one time, sure. But we, we know where he lives.”

  T he flower boxes outside Penn Station were pure New York: thick concrete tubs surrounding death-brown evergreens, with spikes all along the border to prevent panhandlers from finding a seat between engagements.

  I crossed Thirty-third Street to the plaza, where they get a different class of visitor, and sitting is encouraged. I took the place up on its invitation, looked around casually. After dark, this place would be a skateboarder’s paradise. The broad expanse of flat surfaces would magnet the graffiti taggers, too. In another hour or so, the place would be crowded with office workers eating pushcart lunches, eyeing one another like it was a singles bar. But now it was all business.

  A scrawny Caucasian in a white mesh jacket with a neck tattoo I couldn’t read at the distance was performing an elaborate set of hand gestures. It looked like he wasn’t having any luck persuading his audience, a big-headed black man in a hugely oversized basketball jersey, red and white, with number 23 on the back.

  A flushed-faced man in some kind of green maintenance uniform stared openly at a reddish-brown man sporting an American flag do-rag, trying to make up his mind.

  A black pigeon w
ith a perfect circle of white on its head patrolled the grounds, treasure-hunting. A flock of tiny brown birds with pale undersides surrounded me, asking me to slip them something before the pigeon mob caught wise. I crumpled a piece of bagel in my fist, flicked the crumbs behind me. The little birds hit like a flight of locusts.

  I didn’t have to glance at my watch to know I was early. The group of Chinese teenagers catty-corner from me had been there since at least midnight. Or maybe they were handling it in shifts. I couldn’t even tell how many of them there were, the way they kept drifting together, then pulling apart to float around the perimeter. They were all wearing shiny fingertip black leather jackets over goldenrod silk shirts buttoned to the throat, their obsidian hair greased into high pompadours.

  The gang kids all worked for Bobby Sun, but Max had some sort of treaty with his crew, the Blood Shadows. They left the restaurant—and my personal parking space in the alley behind it—alone, and Max left them alone. But there was more to it than a nonaggression pact. Some of those empty-eyed killer children worshiped Max in a way they couldn’t have explained and didn’t understand…but trusted with all of their life-taking lives.

  Anyone who moved on me in that plaza would be Swiss cheese.

  Clarence posed against the entrance, resplendent in a bottle-green jacket with wide lapels and exaggerated shoulder pads, a white felt hat shielding his eyes. Charlie had never met Clarence, but he knew the Prof, who was being invisible somewhere close by. Max stood right in the center of the plaza, arms crossed. He looked as if he had sprouted from the cement, still as a statue except for his eyes, which were swiveling like a pair of tank turrets.

  Clarence left his post, started a slow strut around the plaza, hands in his pockets. He looked like a peacock, hoping to audition some new hens. But he was really a coursing hound, and the under-clothes bulges he was looking for weren’t female curves.

  I watched as a dark-blue BMW coupe slowly drove by. It had been circling the block since before I arrived, passing by irregularly, depending on traffic. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I never would have noticed. Michelle.