Mask Market

by Andrew Vachss

  I didn’t want my car. I knew what direction he’d come from; if I cut the alley right, I’d come out close enough to see that camel’s-hair coat.

  Nothing.

  Quick choice: was he still behind me, or ahead? I felt the Hawk’s bite, remembered how the guy was dressed, and figured he’d be moving as quick as he could. I took off the glasses, switched my black watch cap for a red one, hunched my shoulders against the wind, and started covering ground.

  I saw him cross ahead of me, moving toward the river. I gambled on another alley, and drew the right card. I marked the direction he was going in, and moved out ahead.

  The big Audi was parked mid-block, a purebred among mutts. I floated into a doorway, wrapping the shadows around my shoulders. If he just took off, instead of getting something from inside his ride and walking back to the bar, I’d figure he was busy on a cell phone, and company was coming—I wouldn’t be there when it arrived. But if he really kept that kind of cash in his car, I wanted that license number.

  He walked past me on the opposite side of the street. I stayed motionless, but he never glanced my way.

  Two men came toward him from the far end of the block, walking with too much space between them to be having a conversation. The guy in the camel’s-hair coat was almost to his car before he saw them. He put his hands up and started backing away, making a warding-off motion with his palms.

  A car door opened. A man in a black-and-gold warm-up suit stepped onto the sidewalk behind the man in the camel’s-hair coat. He brought his two hands together and spread his feet in one flowing motion. The man in the camel’s-hair coat went down. The shooter waved the other two back with his free hand, then walked over to the man lying on the sidewalk, an extended-barrel pistol held in profile. The whole thing was over in seconds, as choreographed as an MTV video, on mute.

  A vapor-colored sedan pulled out of its parking spot. The shooter got into the back seat, and it drove off. The two men who had blocked the target were gone.

  The street stayed quiet.

  I took a long deep breath through my nose, filling my stomach. I let it out slowly, expanding my chest as I did.

  Then I got gone.

  My Plymouth looks like a candidate for the junkyard. But it’s a Rolex under all the rust, including an independent rear suspension transplanted from a wrecked Viper some rich guy had thought made him immune to physics, and a hogged-out Mopar big-block with enough torque to compete in a tractor pull. So I feathered the throttle, even though I wasn’t worried about snow on the streets.

  The same year my car had been born, the mayor had been a guy named Lindsay. He was the ideal politician, a tall, good-looking, Yale-graduate, war-veteran, “fusion” Republican who ran on the Liberal ticket. He got a lot of credit for New York not going the way of Newark or Detroit or Los Angeles during the riots the year before. But when the big blizzard hit in February of ’69 and paralyzed the city, Lindsay took the heat for the Sanitation Department being caught napping, and that was the end of his career.

  Every mayor that followed him got the message. New Yorkers will tolerate just about anything on their streets, from projectile-vomiting drunks to mumbling lunatics, but snow is un-fucking-acceptable.

  I made my way over to the West Side Highway, rolled north to Ninety-sixth, exited, and looped back, heading downtown. Even at two in the morning, I couldn’t be sure I didn’t have company—in this city, there’s always enough traffic for cover. But I knew a lot of places that would expose a shadow real quick, some as flat and empty as the Sahara, others as clogged as a ready-to-rupture artery.

  I opted for density. Took a left on Canal, motored leisurely east, then ducked into the Chinatown maze. Made two slow circuits before I finally docked in the alley behind Mama’s joint, right under a white square with a freshly painted black ideogram. My spot. Empty as always—the Chinese calligraphy marked the territory of Max the Silent, a message even the baby-faced gangsters who infested the area understood.

  I flat-handed the steel door twice. Seconds later, I found myself staring into the face of a man I’d never seen before. That didn’t matter—he knew who I was, and I knew what he was there for.

  The restaurant never changes, just the personnel. Like an army base with a high turnover. I went through the kitchen, past the bank of payphones, and sat down in my booth. The place was empty. No surprise—the white-dragon tapestry had been on display in the filthy, streaked front window when I had driven past. If it had been blue, I would have kept on rolling. Red, I would have found a phone, made some calls.

  Mama appeared from somewhere behind me, a heavy white tureen in both hands. “Come for visit?” she said.

  “For soup.”

  “Sure, this weather, good, have soup,” Mama said. She used a ladle to dole out a steaming portion into a red mug with BARNARD in big white letters curling around the side. Mama is no more a cook than the place she runs is a restaurant, but her hot-and-sour soup is her pride and joy. Failure to consume less than three portions per visit would be considered a gross lack of respect.

  I took a sip, touched two fingers to my lips, said, “Perfect!”—the minimally acceptable response.

  Mama made a satisfied sound, her ceramic face yielding to some version of a smile. “You working?”

  “I was,” I said. I told her what had happened. When I got to the part about the shooting, Mama held up a hand for silence, barked out a long string of harsh-sounding Cantonese. Two men in white aprons came out of the kitchen. One went to the front door, crouched down, and positioned himself so he had a commanding view of the narrow street. The other vigorously nodded his head twice, then vanished.

  I went back to my story and my soup.

  A few minutes later, the front door opened, and the man who had gone back to the kitchen area walked in. He conferred with the man by the window. They came over to where we were sitting. Rapid-fire conversation. I didn’t need a translator to understand “all clear.”

  “So?” Mama said.

  “I don’t think it had anything to do with me, Mama. The way I see it, whoever this guy was, he was important enough for someone to have a hunter-killer team on his trail. Once the spotter had him pinned, he called in the others.”

  “We do that, too, now, yes?”

  “Right,” I agreed. I got up and headed for the payphones.

  Everyone was there in less than an hour. The Prof and Clarence drove in from their crib in East New York. The warehouse where Max the Silent lives with his wife, Immaculata, was only a short walk away.

  I’d been on the scene when they first met, on a late-night subway train, a lifetime ago. Immaculata was part Vietnamese, part who-knows? First dismissed as a “bar girl” by Mama, she was instantly elevated to Heaven’s Own Blessing when she gave birth to Max’s baby, Flower. The moment her sacred granddaughter decided on Barnard College, Mama had personally emptied the school’s merchandise catalogue.

  Apparently, she considered the sweatshirt she had presented to me last year to be adequate compensation for the fortune she’d extorted from me over the years “for baby’s college.”

  I told the story of my meet, gesturing it out for Max, even though he can read my lips like they were printing out words.

  “The boss pay for a toss?” the little man asked, miming a man bent over a victim, rifling through his pockets. Max nodded, to let us know he was following along.

  “Didn’t look like it, Prof. The shooter plugged him once, then walked over and made sure,” I said, gesturing to act out my words. “But I didn’t see him search the body, and the other two were already in the wind.”

  “If he had a silencer, it must have been a semi-auto,” Clarence said. The young man usually didn’t speak until he thought the rest of us were finished. But when he was on sure ground, he would.

  “My son knows his guns,” the Prof said, approvingly. “The shooter pick up his brass?”

  “Not a chance,” I said. “The street was too dark, and he fired at le
ast three times.”

  “The police, they will know it was an execution,” Clarence said, his West Indian accent adding formality to his speech. “If the killers did not search the dead man, he will still have everything with him.”

  “If the street skells don’t loot the body before the cops get on the scene,” I said. “That neighborhood, that hour, who’s going to call it in, some good citizen? Besides, you couldn’t hear the shots, even as close as I was.”

  “They couldn’t be counting on all that,” the Prof said. “Even if nobody did a wallet-and-watch on the dead guy, that pistol’s in two different rivers by now.”

  “Somebody spent a lot of money on this one,” I agreed. “That means it’ll make the papers. We might be able to find out something then.”

  “The way I see it, whoever this guy wanted you to find, they found him first,” the Prof said, leaning back in his chair and lighting a smoke. “That ain’t us, Gus. None of our gelt’s on the felt.”

  “My father is right,” Clarence said, more for the chance to say “my father” than to add anything. He used to do that all the time after the Prof first found him; now it’s only once in a while. “The money you got from that man, whoever he was, there will not be any more.”

  “Maybe,” I told them, putting the jewel-cased CD on the table.

  I used my key to work the brick-sized padlock, opened the chain-link gate, and drove my Plymouth inside the enclosure behind the darkened gas station. While I was jockeying the big car into the narrow space, the three pit bulls who live there politely divided up the half-gallon container of beef in oyster sauce I had brought from Mama’s. It sounded like alligators tearing at a pig who had wandered too close to the riverbank. If they hadn’t recognized me, no bribe would have stopped them. By the time I finished stowing the Plymouth, they were back inside their insulated dog condo, probably watching the Weather Channel on their big-screen.

  It was almost four when I walked into the flophouse. There was a man behind the wooden plank that held the register nobody ever signs. He looked up at me from his wheelchair and shook his head, the equivalent of the white-dragon tapestry in Mama’s window.

  “All quiet, Gateman?”

  “Dead as the governor’s heart at Christmas, boss.”

  All cons know what Christmas means—pardon time. Last year, Sweet Joe, an old pal of ours, had sent us a kite, saying he was sure to make it this time. “Finally got my ticket to the door,” is what he wrote. His ticket was terminal cancer—the prison medicos had given him six months to live. The parole board responded with a two-year hit, meaning Sweet Joe was going to die behind the walls unless the governor did the right thing.

  Sure. When Joe got the bad news, he took it like he had taken the twenty-to-life they threw at him thirty years ago—standing up. He’s gone now. Didn’t even last the six months.

  I climbed the foul, verminous stairs, past signs that warn of all kinds of DANGER! The top floor is “Under Construction”—there’s all this asbestos to remove, never mind the mutated rats staring hungrily out from the posters on the walls. That’s where I live.

  While I was away the last time, my family knocked down every wall that wasn’t load-bearing and built me a huge apartment. It’s got everything a man like me could ever want, including a back way out.

  I never get lonely.

  I woke up at eleven, flicked the radio into life, and took a long, hot shower. While I was shaving, the mirror confronted me with the truth. My own mother wouldn’t recognize me. That’s okay—I wouldn’t recognize her, either. A teenage hooker, she had hung around just long enough to pop me out. Then she fled the hospital before they could run her through the system. Decades later, as soon as they unplugged me from the machines, I’d done the same thing.

  “Baby Boy Burke” is what it says on my birth certificate. The rest of it is blanks, guesses, and lies. For “father” it says “Unk.” It should say “The State of New York.” That’s who raised me. Raised me to hate all of them: scum who spend their lives looking the other way…and getting paid to do it.

  Having the State as your father bends your chromosomes like no inherited DNA ever could. You come up knowing that faith is for suckers. The only god I ever worshiped was the only one who ever answered my prayers. My religion is revenge.

  That’s why, as soon as I escaped the hospital, I went on a pilgrimage. By the time I reached the end, I’d squared things for Pansy.

  Getting that done had cost me my retirement fund, and I’d been scratching around for another score ever since—a nice, safe one. I haven’t been Inside since I was a young man, and I don’t get nostalgic for being caged.

  While I was gone, a cop named Morales had found a human hand—just the bones, not the flesh—in a Dumpster. There was a pistol there, too. With my thumbprint on it. Far as NYPD was concerned, that upgraded me from “missing and presumed” to “dead and gone.” And the longer I stayed away, the deeper the whisper-stream carried that message into the underground.

  I was halfway through shaving when the story came on: Unidentified man found shot to death on the sidewalk, in a quiet neighborhood just a couple of blocks from West Street. The body had been discovered by a building super who had gone out to rock-salt the concrete so his tenants wouldn’t break their necks going to work in the morning. A landlord could get sued for that. The announcer said the police were not releasing any details, pending notification to next of kin. Meaning they knew who the dead man was but they weren’t telling.

  That wasn’t news, just a collection of maybes. Maybe the cops found the cash the man in the camel’s-hair coat said was in his car. Maybe they divided it up among themselves; maybe they were holding back the info to use as a polygraph key once they had suspects to question. Maybe the money was in the car, but in a hidden compartment, one they hadn’t found yet. Maybe it was never there at all, and the guy was just heading to his car to make a getaway. Maybe the cops still hadn’t connected him to the Audi….

  The print journalists would take a deeper look—they always do—but it would take them longer to come up with anything.

  I walked downstairs, picked up my copy of Harness Lines and a couple of fresh bagels from Gateman—he’s got a guy who delivers every morning—and ate my breakfast while I decided which horses were worthy of my investment. I only bet the trotters. Like me, they haul weight for their money, and they usually earn it after dark.

  I smeared a thick slab of cream cheese on the last of a poppy-seed bagel, and held it under the table.

  “You want…?” I started to say, before I choked on the words. Pansy wasn’t lurking by my feet, waiting for the treat she knew was always going to come.

  I thought I had stopped…feeling her with me. Stopped seeing her looming dark-gray shadow in the corner by the window. Stopped hearing the special sound she always made before dropping off to sleep, like a big semi downshifting to climb a hill.

  “This late in the day, you’re probably on your third quart of French vanilla up there, huh, girl?” I said aloud.

  If you think I’m crazy to be talking to my dog like I do, fuck you. And if you don’t get how that’s better than crying over her, fuck you twice.

  My little sister called a couple of hours later.

  “That bar you recommended? Well, baby, let me tell you, it is beyond tacky. Imagine, putting ice in a Bloody Mary!”

  So the stash we had gotten word about was from Sierra Leone. That shifted the risk-reward odds too far to the wrong side for us to take the shot. Stealing a load of “blood diamonds” would be like hijacking counterfeit bills. Sure, we could find someone to take the loot off our hands, but the discount would shred our profit down to cigarette money.

  “I thought it sounded too good to be true, the way it was described to me,” I said, not surprised.

  “Maybe we should open our own place,” Michelle said, switching to the liquid-honey voice she earned her living with.

  “I was about to,” I said. “But the financi
ng fell through.”

  “That, too, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s this weather, sweetie. Winter is the suicide season. Like it’s raining depression. But it won’t last, you’ll see.”

  “Sure.”

  “All right, Mr. Grouch. Want to buy me dinner?”

  “Okay. I’ll see you at—”

  But I was talking to a dead line.

  Driving through Chinatown at night is like riding the subway past one of those abandoned stations. You feel the life beyond the shadows, but all you ever get is a glimpse—then it’s gone, and you’re not really sure if you actually saw anything. You might be curious, but not enough to leave the safety of your steel-and-glass cocoon to get a closer look.

  I was explaining to Max why we might want to consider investing a significant chunk of our betting kitty in a ten-dollar exacta wheel tomorrow night. For seventy bucks, we could have all the possibilities covered, provided this six-year-old we’d been following since he was a bust-out flop in his freshman season came home on top.

  With Max, this is never a hard sell. Anytime he falls in love with a horse, he’s ready to go all-in. And Max gets there faster than a high school kid in a whorehouse.

  This particular horse, a gelding named Little Eric, was a fractious animal who was prone to breaking stride, a move that takes a trotter out of any chance to win. But Max and I had watched some of those races, and we had marked every single time it happened. We decided the breaks weren’t because Little Eric was naturally rough-gaited. He couldn’t handle the tight turns at Yonkers very well, so he usually spent a lot of every race parked out. He was okay on the outside, but every time he tried for a big brush to get clear, he’d go off-stride. He didn’t have the early foot to grab the lead right out of the gate, but he was a freight train of a closer. And he liked the cold weather, too.