Mask Market

by Andrew Vachss

  The reason I fancied him so much for tomorrow night was that he was moving to The Meadowlands. That’s a mile track, with only two turns to negotiate, as opposed to the four at Yonkers. Little Eric could take his time, settle in, and make his move late, down that long stretch. He was in pretty tough, but he could beat that field if he ran his number. And the outside post he drew wouldn’t be as much of a handicap at The Big M.

  Nothing close to a sure thing, but a genuine overlay at the twelve-to-one Morning Line price; maybe even more if the favorite drew a lot of late action.

  Michelle made her entrance in a lipstick-red jacket with shoes to match. She glistened like a cardinal in a snow-covered tree, defying winter to dull her beauty.

  “I’m such a sucker,” she said, as Max held a chair for her to sit down. “I’m still a young girl, but I’ve been around long enough to know better.”

  Max and I put on matching quizzical looks—Michelle sometimes loops around a story like a pilot circling a fogged-in airport.

  “You know what’s the stupidest thing about racism?” she said.

  Max and I shrugged.

  “That it’s stupid,” she said, grinning. “Racism, it makes you think you know a person just because you know his race, see?”

  “Sure,” I agreed, thinking of some of the bogus wisdom I’d been raised on, passed along by the older street boys I was sure were the smartest people on the planet. After all, they lived on their own. And they never seemed afraid. “Niggers are all yellow inside,” they’d counseled me. “In a crowd, they act like they got balls, but get one of them alone…”

  I got one alone once. We both wanted the same shoeshine corner. He was a little bigger; I was a little faster.

  “You didn’t run,” I told him, a few minutes later. It was hard to talk—my mouth was all bloody, and my tongue was swollen to twice its size.

  “You didn’t pussy out, neither,” the colored kid—I’d already stopped thinking of him as “nigger” in my mind, even though I didn’t realize it—said, sounding as surprised as I was.

  I guess some older guys had lied to him, too.

  “Well, you know the hard-core Jews? The ones who dress like the Amish?” Michelle said, accepting a light for her cigarette—a thin black one with a gold filter tip.

  “Hasidim? Like the ones who control a piece of Crown Heights?”

  “Whatever,” Michelle said, airily. “You know who I mean…the ones who handle diamonds. For them, it’s all a handshake business, right? No paper. Everyone knows you can trust those guys. It’s always been that way.”

  “So?”

  “So the guy I trusted, the one who was setting up that job for us? He never said the diamonds were dirty.”

  “You didn’t really trust him, girl. Otherwise, we would just have gone on ahead, right?”

  “Oh, I know. But still. I mean, who would ever think one of those super-straight Jews would go anywhere near dirty stuff.”

  “They bought diamonds from South Africa even when the boycott was on,” I said. “And uranium, too.”

  “Mole says—”

  “—they just did what they had to do,” I finished for her. I’ve known the Mole since we were kids. By him, Israel drops a nuke on one of its neighbors, it’s just doing what they had to do.

  You could say it’s people like the Mole who keep Israel from finding peace. Or you could say it’s people like the Mole who keep it from disappearing. Me, I don’t care. The only country I care about is about the size of Mama’s restaurant—that’s enough space to hold every member of my family.

  “This one was going to be so juicy,” Michelle said, regretfully.

  “Been lots of those,” I told her.

  By the time the morning light was making a run against the grimy windows, we weren’t any closer to a good scheme. This was the third plan that had gone sour in the past couple of months.

  Good scams are harder and harder to come by these days. Too many thieves fishing in the same pool of chumps. Colloidal silver for longevity, “form books” for tax evasion, orgasm enhancers for patheticos who think a lap dance is a relationship. Online auctions for collector cars that don’t exist…and every bidder’s a winner. Even some neo-Nazis were going into the penis-enlargement business to finance their operations—skinheads aren’t much for paying their membership dues, and the self-appointed Führers are too afraid of their own followers to get heavy about collecting.

  I used to do violence-for-money. But the older I get, the less it’s worth playing for those stakes. “The gun’s fun, but the sting’s the thing,” the Prof called it, when he first started schooling me.

  For lifelong outlaws like us, crime is all about cash. We’re not psychopaths—we don’t need the action to feel alive. Crime’s not about the buzz; it’s a business.

  Anyone who’s been running on our track for long enough has learned a few things. Like, you’ll get more time for a gas-station holdup than for taking a few million out of a company pension fund. And a double-nickel jolt for a young man is a very different trip than it is for a guy with a lot of miles on his odometer.

  A generation ago, our whole crew got involved with hijacking a load of dope. It was a foolproof scheme. The people we took it from wouldn’t run to the Law—they’d just buy it back from us. Nobody gets hurt, we make a fortune, and they chalk it up to the cost of doing business.

  The first half clicked as sweet as stiletto heels on a marble floor. Then the wheels came off. If we’d known how deep some NYPD boys were involved with the dope trade back in the day, we wouldn’t have gone near the job.

  I was the only one of us they caught. In an abandoned subway tunnel, with enough heroin to give a small town a collective overdose. The dope never got vouchered; I got to plead to some assaults, avoiding the telephone numbers a possession-with-intent charge would have brought. And best of all, I got to go down alone.

  I’m a two-time felony loser. The Prof has three bits under his belt. If either of us ever falls again, we’re looking at the life-without they throw at habitual offenders in this state.

  Clarence and the Mole have never been Inside. Max has, but not for long. Just arrests, no convictions. Why plea-bargain when you know the witnesses are never going to show up for the trial?

  Michelle was locked up back when she was pre-op. About the hardest time you can do, unless you’re willing to whore out or daddy-up.

  She spent most of her time binged, in solitary. Not PC, Ad Seg. You go to Protective Custody—aka Punk City—as a volunteer, to keep yourself safe. You go to Ad Seg—Administrative Segregation, aka The Hole—when you commit a crime inside. Michelle wasn’t big, and she wasn’t fast, but she would cut you, and she was real good at always finding something to do that with.

  In our world, showing you can do time counts for something only when you’re young. After that, what earns you the points is showing you can avoid it.

  I spent most of my childhood caged. The rest of the time, I was on the run—from the foster parents they “placed” me with, the “group homes” they sentenced me to, and the “training schools” I’d been destined for since birth.

  In the juvie joints, it seemed like nobody was ever there for the worst things they did. One guy, he was in for stealing fireworks. He wanted the cherry bombs and ashcans to torture animals with. Another guy was a fire-setter. They caught him doing that a year after they caught him raping his baby sister. He got counseling for the rape, but destruction of property, that was something they couldn’t let slide.

  Most of the gang kids were there for fighting, but, to hear them tell it, they’d all gone much further down the violence road. One little Puerto Rican guy was talking about how he chopped an enemy’s hand off with a machete in a rumble. A white kid laughed out loud at the story, as deep a diss as a bitch-slap.

  The Puerto Rican kid went back to his bunk, came over to where we were all standing around, and hooked the white kid to the stomach with a needle-sharp file. Gutted him like a fish.
The white kid didn’t die, so, instead of going back to court with a new charge, the Puerto Rican kid got shipped to another juvie joint. With a bigger rep.

  It was inside that kiddie prison that I first claimed another human being as family. I told the others that Wesley was my brother. I wasn’t worried that anyone would ever ask Wesley if it was true—nobody ever asked Wesley anything. But a kid who called himself Tiger called me on it.

  Tiger was twice my size, plus he never walked around alone. So he should have been safe. But, one night, he got shanked in his sleep.

  Everyone thought Wesley had done it—that was what Wesley did, even then. But it wasn’t him. It was his brother.

  “You have anything, honey?” Michelle asked. “Anything at all?”

  “Little Eric in the fifth,” I told her, just to see her smile.

  The noon sun was a throbbing blood-orange blob, pulsating against the mesh screen of a pollution-gray sky. For once, it actually made an impact on my permanently crusted windows. I figured I’d better get it while I could.

  “You want something from down the way?” I asked Gateman.

  “Which way is that, boss?”

  “Diner?”

  “Sold. I could really go for some of their bull’s-eye meatloaf today.”

  “Two sides?”

  “You’re singing my song,” he said, grinning. “Make mine mashed potatoes and spinach, okay?”

  I got the same for myself, and brought the whole thing back, hot. Gateman and I admired the way the half-cut hard-boiled egg looked embedded in the thick slab of heavy-crusted meatloaf before we dug in.

  “Ever wonder how come this is the only good thing they make in that dive, boss?”

  “I figure it’s what they call a ‘signature dish,’ Gate. Every restaurant’s got one. It’s how the chef shows off.”

  “Yeah? Well, I been in that joint plenty of times, boss. And if they got a ‘chef,’ I’m a fucking ballerina.”

  “Got to look past the cover, bro,” I said mildly, holding out a clenched fist.

  Gateman tapped my fist with his own, acknowledging the mistake more than one man had made about him. Dead men now. Gateman is one of the reasons they have to make prisons wheelchair-accessible. He was a pure shooter, and he could conjure up the pistol he wore next to his colostomy bag like a fatal magic trick.

  A couple of years back, the Prof had bet Max that Gateman could drill the center out of the ace of hearts at ten yards. Took a couple of weeks to set up the match, trucking sandbags down to the basement. The lighting down there was so lousy I could barely make out the white card, never mind the red heart in its center.

  I should have known something was up when Clarence put down a hundred on Gateman. The Prof and Max were both hunch-players, but Clarence was a gunman. Still, I faded his action, saying, “No disrespect” to Gateman first.

  Gateman braced himself in his chair, holding his compact 9mm Kahr in both hands, turning himself into a human tripod. He exhaled a soft sigh, then he punched out the center of the card with his first shot.

  “Got something for tonight?” he asked.

  “Just a guess,” I cautioned him.

  “That’s all there ever is, right?”

  “At the track, sure.”

  “It’s all a bet,” Gateman said. “Everything. All that changes is the stakes, boss.”

  I started telling him what I liked about Little Eric. By the time I was up to my two favorite trotters of all time, Nevele Pride and Une de Mai, duking it out at the International—I never saw that race; that was the year I spent in Biafra—Gateman’s eyes were starting to glaze over. He wanted action, not ancient history.

  “On the nose, okay?” he said, shoving a twenty over to me.

  As I let myself back into my apartment, one of the half-dozen cell phones I keep on a shelf in separate charging cradles rang. I have each one marked with a different-colored piece of vinyl tape so I don’t make a mistake, but I don’t really need that system anymore, since I finally figured out how to give each one a different ring tone.

  I pushed the button, said, “Lewis.”

  “It’s me.”

  “Okay.”

  “You don’t sound happy, honey.”

  “I was expecting another call,” I lied. Only one person had the number to the phone I was holding, and she was at the other end of the conversation.

  “I won’t keep you. I just thought you might like to come over and see me later.”

  “How much later?”

  “In time to take me to dinner?”

  “Ah…”

  “Oh, come on, sugar. We all have to eat, don’t we? So why can’t we do it together?”

  “I’m a private person.”

  “There’s plenty of places we can go where you won’t—”

  “There’s no place where you won’t draw a damn crowd,” I said, trying for the soft deflection.

  “I won’t dress up, I promise. Please? You won’t be sorry.”

  I let the cellular silence play over us for a minute. Then I said, “Eight, okay?”

  “Okay!”

  I hung up without saying goodbye. She was used to it.

  The easiest person in the world to lie to is yourself. Anyone who’s done time knows how seductive that call can be. The Prof warned me about it, back when I was still a young thug, idolizing the big-time hijackers who pulled major jobs and lived like kingsuntil the money ran out. Then they went looking for another armored car.

  “You pick up a pattern, it’s harder to shake than a hundred-dollar-a-day Jones, Schoolboy. You let motherfuckers read your book, they always know where to look.”

  I had a few hours before dinner, and I knew I wasn’t going to sleep where I’d be spending the night, so I grabbed a quilt and curled up on my couch.

  One of the cells woke me. The ring tone told me it was family.

  “What?” I said.

  “There was a lot on that CD, mahn.”

  “A lot of stuff, or stuff that’s worth a lot?” I asked Clarence.

  “A lot of stuff for sure. I cannot tell you about the other, mahn. You probably want to look for yourself, yes?”

  I glanced at my wristwatch. Couple of minutes after six.

  “Could you bring it by tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  I cut the call. Showered and shaved. Put on a pair of dark cords with a leather belt polished with mink oil—a trick I learned from a couple of working girls whose private joke was that I’m a closet dom. A rose silk shirt—I know a sweet girl who gets them made in Bali for a tiny percentage of what I used to pay Sulka—a black tie, and a bone leather sport coat that was pulled out of inventory before it ever got the chance to fall off a truck. Alligator boots with winter treads and steel toes, and I was ready to walk.

  I strapped a heavy Kobold diver’s watch on my left wrist, fitted a flat-topped ring onto my right hand: a custom-made hunk of silver housing a tiny watch battery that powers a series of micro-LEDs on its surface in random patterns. I slipped a black calfskin wallet into my jacket. It held a complete set of ID for Kenneth Ivan Lewis.

  I shrugged into a Napapijri Geographic coat, a Finnish beauty like the ones they used in the Antarctic Research Mapping Survey. It’s made of some kind of synthetic, with enough zippers, straps, hooks, and Velcro closings to stock a hardware store. Weighs nothing, but it sneers at the wind and sheds water like Teflon.

  By seven-fifteen, I was on the uptown 6 train.

  I answered the doorman’s polite question with “Lewis.” He opened his mouth to ask if that was my first or last name, caught my eye, changed his mind.

  “I’ll be right with you, sir,” he said, making it clear he wanted me to stay where I was while he walked over and picked up the house phone.

  I couldn’t hear his end of the conversation…which was the whole point.

  “Please go on up, sir.”

  “Thanks.”

  I took the elevator. The building was new enough so that it actu
ally had the thirteenth floor marked.

  I stood outside the door to 13-D, waiting. I didn’t touch the tiny brass knocker, or the discreet black button set into the doorframe.

  “How come you never knock?” she said as the door opened.

  “You’re going to look through the peephole before you open the door, right? And you knew I—or someone, anyway—was on the way up, so you’d be on the watch.”

  “What do you mean, ‘someone’?” she said, standing aside to let me into the apartment.

  “You don’t use video in this building. All the doorman had was a name. Anyone can use a name.”

  “He described you, too,” she said, slightly sulky.

  “And that description would fit—what?—a million or so guys in Manhattan alone.”

  “Oh, don’t be so suspicious,” she said, standing on her toes to kiss me on the cheek, right over the bullet scar. “That’s how you get lines on your face, being suspicious of everything.”

  “Then my face should look like a piece of graph paper,” I said, putting my coat in her outstretched hands.

  “I’m not dressed yet,” she announced, as if coming to the door in a lacy red bra and matching panties hadn’t been enough of a hint. “Go sit down; I’ll only be a few minutes.”

  She turned and walked down the hall with the confidence of a woman who expects to be watched and is ready for it. I sat down in a slingback azure leather chair and watched tropical fish cavort in the flat-screen virtual aquarium on the far wall. I slitted my eyes against the vibrant pixel display until it became the kind of kaleidoscope you get when you press your fingers against your eyelids. I don’t mind waiting; it’s one of the things I do best.

  The lady I was waiting for was a zaftig blonde without a straight line anywhere on her body, like a pinup girl from the fifties; the kind of woman who turns a walk to the grocery store into an audition. A sweet little biscuit, bosomy and wasp-waisted, with big hazel eyes like a pair of jeweler’s loupes. Her idea of foreplay is what she calls “presents,” and the right ones make her arch her back like a bitch cat in heat.

  I met her in a BMW showroom on Park Avenue. I was there to see a guy who does beautiful custom work…on VIN numbers. She was just window-shopping, keeping in practice.