Mask Market b-16

by Andrew Vachss

  “C harlie Jones, a tunnel rat,” the Prof said, musingly. “Who would’ve thought there was any glory in his story?”

  “Everybody’s got a story. That’s not the same thing as an excuse.”

  “You didn’t buy his lie, Schoolboy?”

  “I…I guess I did, Prof. Even the timing works. The woman who came to the door first—his wife, now we know—she went right back into the house, left me outside talking to Charlie. That’s when she has to have made the call.”

  “That’s why he asked you if the snatch team was Russians?”

  “Has to be.”

  “Which means he knows more than he gave up,” Michelle put in. “Which is what we’d expect.”

  “Yeah. But it wasn’t Charlie,” I said, more sure of myself after a few hours of thinking it through. “If he wanted to set me up, all he had to do was ring the number he has for me, make a meet, like he had a job—”

  “Like he did before,” Clarence said.

  “Right. And if he just panicked, seeing me at his door, and called in muscle, why would they have tried to grab me? If they’re the same crew that hit Daniel Parks, they’re not shy about shooting.”

  “So you’re going to talk to them because you think that’s what they want?”

  “No, honey,” I said to Michelle. “I’m going to talk to them because the guy they hit is a money man. Was a money man, anyway. We’ve been trying to figure out if there’s something for us in all this. If anyone knows, they do.”

  “Or your girl,” the Prof said.

  “Yeah. Or her. But, so far, we can’t find Beryl. And we can find the Russians.”

  “Uh-huh,” the Prof grunted. Not convinced, and making sure I knew it.

  “A ny way you want to do it.” Charlie’s voice, on the phone. “It’s not you they want, it’s information.”

  “And if I don’t have it, they’re going to take my word for it?”

  “They don’t expect you to have it. They know it’s a real long shot.”

  “Any way I want to do it?”

  “Yes.”

  T wo-fifteen the next morning. The man in the blue-and-white warm-up suit had been standing on the corner of a Chinatown back street for almost half an hour, as still as a sniper. He never once glanced at his watch.

  When the oil-belching black Chevy Caprice—Central Casting for gypsy cab—pulled up, he got into the back seat.

  From that moment, his life was at risk. Not because the hands of Max the Silent could find a kill-spot like a heat-seeking missile, but because those hands were on the steering wheel. Max drives like he walks, expecting everything in his path to step aside. He still hasn’t figured out that cars are like guns—they make some morons braver than they should be.

  We box-tailed the Chevy all the way out to Hunts Point. If the man in the warm-up suit had brought friends, we couldn’t see any sign of them. I’d already told Charlie what would happen to whoever they sent if we found a transmitter on him. Or a cell phone. Or a weapon.

  Wesley rode with me. My brother, still protecting me from the other side. Charlie couldn’t be sure Wesley was really gone, but I was sure he wouldn’t want to bet his life on it.

  A riderless bicycle sailed past on the sidewalk. I looked over and saw a clot of kids way short of puberty. They were gathered around a few more bikes, one of them holding his hand high. I knew what would be in it—a piece of fluorescent chalk. The kids were ghost riding. You take a bike—I mean take; the game is played with stolen property—get it going as fast as you dare, then bail out. The trick is to jump off while keeping the bike pointed straight ahead. The bike that goes the farthest before it crashes is the winner; the chalk is for marking the spot.

  After all, every educational system needs report cards—otherwise, some child might be left behind.

  The Chevy stopped on the prairie. It looked like a black polar bear, alone on a dirty ice floe.

  I walked over as Max opened the back door for the guy inside, who stepped out lightly and moved in my direction. I held out my hand for him to stop. He stood still as Max searched him. The Mongol nodded an “okay.” I gestured for the man to follow me. We walked over to the gutted-out shell of what had once been a car. I leaned against the charred front fender, opened my hands in a “go ahead” gesture.

  “You were never going to be hurt,” he said, without preamble.

  “I couldn’t know that.”

  “Oleg only has one eye now.” Looking at my bad one, as if we were sharing something he didn’t need to explain.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “We don’t want to fight,” he said. Not pleading—stating a fact. He was a burly man, a little shorter than me, and a lot thicker. I could see a gold chain, more like a rope, at his neck, and a diamond on his right hand that threw enough fire to give a pyromaniac an orgasm. His watch cost more than some cars. And that warm-up suit wasn’t the kind you buy where they sell sneakers.

  “Me, either,” I said, waiting.

  “Okay, then.” He put his hands together like we’d just sealed a deal. “We did not know who you were, or where to find you. We still do not. But we had to talk with you, so we…did what we did. You know how such things are.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “We would have preferred to do what I am going to do now,” he said, watching my face as he spoke the words. When I didn’t react, he went on: “Pay you for your time. For your time and your trouble.”

  “What’s the going rate for being tortured?”

  “You think we were going to—?”

  “You weren’t looking to hire me,” I said, keeping my voice edgeless. “So you must think I know something. Something you want to know. If I told you that you were wrong, that I didn’t know anything, what were you going to do? Thank me for my time and cut me loose? Or use that Taser on me?”

  “We would never have—”

  “I like this way better,” I cut him off.

  He grunted something I took for understanding. “My name is Yitzhak,” he said. “But I don’t have to know your name to know you are a professional. So! A man hired you to do something. All we want to know is what he hired you to do.”

  “Which man?”

  “The man who can’t pay you anymore.”

  “What’s it worth to you to know?”

  “That depends on what you tell us.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Bravo. What is it worth to you, then?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, making it a question he had to answer, if he wanted us to keep talking.

  “This man, he stole from us. Money. A great deal of money. Wherever that money is, it’s not in a wall safe. Or a suitcase.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask him?”

  “You mean, instead of…? All right, I will tell you. Maybe, if you understand us, you will believe us, too.”

  I lit a cigarette, a signal to my backup that I was okay. For now.

  “This man was in trouble,” he said. “He thought this trouble was a burden he could transfer. Do you understand?”

  “He was a cooperating witness?”

  “He was, if our information is correct, negotiating to be exactly that. But the deal had yet to be struck.”

  “So you needed to move before—”

  “No. Not for that. This man was a thief, and he stole from many. We are businessmen, and money is important. But in our business, there is something much more important than money. It is not just that this man stole from us; it was known that he did it. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

  Understand it? I thought to myself. I was raised on it.

  Inside, if a sneak thief takes your stuff, it’s nothing personal—it’s just part of living there, like rain falling in Seattle. But if the thief shows off what he took, it’s like he raped you. If you don’t square that up, you don’t get to keep anything that’s yours.

  You’ve got a pack of Kools in your cell. A fresh, new pack. You go to tak
e a shower, come back, and find it’s gone. That happens. And that night, you see a guy on the tier smoking a Kool, holding a whole pack in his other hand. Still nothing—the commissary sells them to anyone with money on the books. But then the guy says, “Thanks for the smokes, punk.” And now, now you have to hurt him. You don’t do that, you’re going to be meat on some freak’s plate.

  But all I said to Yitzhak was, “If other people thought it was safe to steal from you…”

  “Americans see with wide eyes,” he said, sounding more like a Talmudic scholar than a businessman who regarded hunter-killer teams as a line item on a budget. “You say ‘Russian’ to an American, and he thinks he knows all there is to know. But there are Odessa Beach Russians—you know the people I mean—and there are…others.

  “We have been on this earth for thousands of years. But, every place we go, we have to establish our own identity. In American minds, a Jew is always motivated by money. Money comes first. That is a perception we have to change, if we are to be allowed to conduct our own business. You understand this?”

  “If you don’t build a rep for always getting even, it makes people think you’re weak.”

  “Correct!” he said, pleased with the pupil. “The stereotype is that we are clever people, but not strong people. In our business, it is more valuable for our enemies to believe we are crazy than that we are clever.”

  “Which is why this guy who stole from you couldn’t just disappear. You needed his head on a stake.”

  His shrug was eloquent.

  “But the money…?”

  “We made our own inquiries. Before we…acted. This was a sophisticated thief. There was some system in place—it is too complicated for me to understand; that is not my role—but the money was vacuumed right out of his accounts, and then it just disappeared. The thief himself would not know where it ended up.”

  “Then what good would it do him?”

  “He had a confederate. Maybe more than one. Someone he trusted.”

  “And you think I know who that is?” I said, snapping my unsmoked cigarette into the darkness.

  “No,” he said, smiling. “If you knew where that much money was, you would be long gone. Far away.”

  “So what did you want to snatch me for?”

  “We know you met the thief. We had to learn whether you were…”

  “His ‘confederate’? Get real.”

  “Yes, we understand that. We understand that now. The information we had was…sketchy. A man such as that one, he would have no friends.”

  I understood what the Russian was telling me. “Friends,” as in those who would avenge his death.

  “So what was I supposed to tell you?”

  “We still want the money,” the man said. “We thought maybe you could help us find it.”

  “You think this guy told me?”

  “No,” he said, brushing off my sarcasm. “We don’t think this man knew we knew he was a thief. But he knew we would find out eventually.”

  “That explains it,” I said.

  “What?” he asked, too eagerly.

  “Why in the world a white man would want to go to Africa.”

  “Please,” he said, tilting his chin at me for encouragement.

  “I did some…work over there. Years ago. But I keep up my contacts. It’s a good thing to have people in a country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty.”

  “Where?”

  “Nigeria.”

  “Nigeria?” His voice reeked suspicion. “Free-lancers haven’t worked there since—”

  “Nineteen seventy,” I finished for him. “But it’s still the most corrupt country on the planet.”

  “You have not been to Russia recently,” he said, as if his nationalistic pride had been insulted.

  “I haven’t been to Russia at all. But I know how to get things done in Nigeria.”

  “And that’s what this man wanted?”

  “He didn’t know specifics. All he’d heard was that I could get someone set up in an African country where a lot of cash would guarantee a lot of safety. I think, from the little bit he said, that he thought it was South Africa, but he wasn’t particular.”

  “So what happened?”

  “You know better than me,” I said. “I told him I needed twenty-five thousand just to start the process. I thought we’d have to make another meet, but he said he had it with him. Not on him, in his car. He went out to get it…and he never came back.”

  “Did he leave anything with you?”

  “Yeah. The tab for the drinks we’d ordered.”

  He said something under his breath. Sounded like Russian.

  “Did he come to you directly?” Asking me a question he already knew the answer to.

  “No.” The truth.

  “Will you tell me the name of the person who introduced you?” Testing me; they already knew it had been Charlie, thanks to his wife.

  “No.”

  “A man must choose his own path,” he said, very deliberately. “Must it be your choice to stand in mine?”

  “I’m no different from you,” I answered. “If I gave you a name, my own name would be hurt. And that would put me out of business.”

  “For fifty thousand dollars? Cash?”

  “No.”

  He made a guttural sound I took for approval. “You are a businessman, fair enough. Let us say the name of the person who introduced you to the thief means nothing to us, yes? But, should you happen to run across information—say, from another source—that might be of value, you understand that you would be compensated?”

  “Sure.”

  “What do you think is fair?”

  “For…?”

  “For your time and trouble, as I said.”

  “For my past time and trouble?”

  “If you like.”

  “I like the number you mentioned.”

  “What we did was wrong, but we had no other way,” he said. “That is worth something, I agree. But not fifty thousand. That was an offer for information. This you declined. So, for the time and trouble, let us say…ten?”

  When I nodded, he unzipped his warm-up suit. “If you want to earn ten times this, all you have to do is call me.”

  “Call you with what?”

  “With the name of anyone else who wants to go to Nigeria.”

  “A re we okay now?” The voice of Charlie Jones on the phone. Soft, with just the faintest trace of a tremor.

  “You’re still into me,” I told him. “Into me deep.”

  “Could I square it with—?”

  “This isn’t about money,” I told him. Meaning it wasn’t about money now.

  “What, then?” he said, his voice already sagging under the weight of what he felt coming.

  “I have to talk to her.”

  “Not my—?”

  “Yeah. You can be there, too. But there’s questions I have to ask.”

  “Just tell me and I’ll—”

  “You know I can’t do that,” I said.

  His end of the line went on semi-mute; the only sounds were his shallow breathing and the cellular hum. Then…

  “When will this be over?”

  “When I know I’m safe, that’s when you’ll know you are, too.”

  That brought me more silence. I waited. Then…

  “It can’t be here. At the house, I mean.”

  “Of course not,” I said, as if we had agreed on everything up to then. “Let me treat you to dinner. Wherever you’d like.”

  “Not in Manhattan.”

  “Wherever you’d like. Fair enough?”

  “O h God! How could you know?” Loyal squealed, staring into the box she had unwrapped so daintily that the floor was carpeted in shredded paper. “This is just like the dolly I had when I was a little girl. She was too big to be a baby, but that’s what I called her. ‘Baby.’”

  “I’m glad you like it,” I said.

  “‘Her,’” she corrected me.

 
; “Baby.”

  “Yes,” she mock-pouted, cuddling the oversized porcelain doll Michelle had promised me would be worth the fat chunk of my money she’d spent on it.

  “What happened to your…to the original one?” I asked her.

  “I gave her away,” Loyal said. Her eyes were damp, but her chest was puffy with pride. “When I was only…about twelve, I think, I saw this story in the paper. It was about this little girl, a real little girl, much younger than me. She lived in another part of town. There was a big fire, and her whole house got burned up. Her momma went right into the flames to save her, and she died doing it.

  “The little girl—Selma was her name—she was in the hospital. In the paper, it said she was going to live with her mother’s family. I asked my father, what about her daddy, why wasn’t he going to take her home? My father told me Selma didn’t have a daddy. I was young, but I wasn’t dumb. I knew enough to ask Speed, and he explained it to me.

  “The next day, I made him drive me over to the hospital. They wouldn’t let me see the girl—she was burned up too bad to have visitors, they said—but they let me leave Baby there for her.

  “When I told my father, I thought he might be mad enough to…Well, I thought he’d be mad for sure, because that doll had cost a pretty penny, and I knew it. But he put me on his lap and gave me a kiss and told me I was a fine girl.

  “I never forgot that. Because, just the week before, when I tried to sit on his lap, he said I was getting too old for that kind of thing.”

  “Do you ever think about her? That little girl, Selma?”

  “I do,” she said. “And when I do, I think about her with my Baby, and I feel good inside myself. I could never explain it. It was like, when I heard that child’s story, my heart just went out to her. Went out to her and never came back.”

  I f you need to get to D.C., Amtrak’s a lot better than a plane. No baggage scanning, no real ID check, and door-to-door quicker, too.

  A business-class ticket on the Acela Express gave me access to the “quiet car”—the one place on the train where cell phones were banned. I had figured it would be packed—the cars I walked through to reach it sounded like they were full of magpies on angel dust—but it was just about empty.