Mask Market

by Andrew Vachss

  “Restaurants?”

  “Not in front, where you can see them. In the back. Doing the dirty work.”

  “You mean like illegals, working off the books?”

  “Yes. I read in the paper this morning where they arrested a man in Queens for bringing in dozens of people from—I forget the exact country, but it was in South America, maybe?—and they had to work doing all kinds of terrible things for almost no money. They were all living in his basement, like pigs in a pen. It was disgusting. Like they were slaves.”

  “They were,” I told her. “It’s called debt bondage. They take out a loan to be smuggled here, then they have to work it off. That’s all they do, work. Believe me, they pay ‘rent’ for that basement pen you’re talking about. By the time they send a little money home—which is what they came here for in the first place—there’s almost nothing left.”

  “How come the people who do them that way don’t go to jail?”

  “Sometimes they do, but not often. It’s big business, supplying bodies for labor. There are contractors who’ll find illegals for whatever you want done: picking crops, loading trucks, cleaning toilets. Guaranteed not to gripe about working conditions, complain about the pay, or join a union. They open their mouths, and they get shipped back across the border.”

  “But…”

  “Anytime there’s a big profit margin, you’ll get people who want to play, Loyal. Going to jail, that’s a business risk. And, in that business, not much of one.”

  “But they don’t tell them, right?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The…workers. They don’t tell them what’s really going to happen once they get here, do they? I mean, they promise them all kinds of wonderful things, to get them to make the trip.”

  “Yeah, they do. How’d you know?”

  “Because that happened to a girlfriend of mine,” she said. “It almost happened to me, too.”

  In the short time we were inside, the weather had changed again. It was warmer after dark than it had been all day, and the air smelled fresh after the rain.

  “I could never do that,” she said, as we stepped onto the sidewalk.

  “What?”

  “Not tip a waiter. I can’t believe you did that.”

  “You think it was wrong?”

  “Well,” she said, taking my arm, “I don’t think I’d go that far.

  But they all work for tips, don’t they?”

  “Yeah. And I gave him one that’ll pay off a lot better than the few bucks I stiffed him out of.”

  “What do you mean, sugar?”

  “He thinks tips are a percentage play, understand?”

  “No, I don’t!” she said, deliberately bumping me with her hip.

  She was looking up at me from under those impossibly long lashes, biting her lower lip. “Don’t use…language with me, Lew,” she said, pleadingly. “I’m smart, but I don’t talk the same way you do.”

  I drew in a shallow breath, thinking how right she was.

  “Whoever schooled that waiter told him people always tip some set amount—in this town, most folks just double the tax and call it right. So he figures, if he embarrasses people into spending more money just to prove they’re not cheap—”

  “Oh! Like he tried to do with you?”

  “Yeah. If he does that, the check for the meal will be bigger. And so will his tip. But that’s not going to work all the time. And when it backfires, you get nothing. So if you do the math—”

  “He comes out with less,” she said, nodding in understanding.

  “Right. Some people come to restaurants to be bullied by the waiters, true enough. But not that restaurant.”

  I paid the parking tab. Added a fin on top, since the car jockey had listened to my “Keep it ready, okay? Two hours.” My Plymouth was right next to his booth, aimed out at the street.

  I held the door open. Loyal sat behind the wheel for a second, then wiggled her way over to the passenger side.

  “Have you ever been in one of those restaurants?” she asked, as I aimed the car at the West Side Highway. “Where people like to be bullied by the waiters?”

  “I have.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “I wasn’t the one who had the reservations. I was the guest.”

  “So?” she said, not to be deterred.

  “I never like it, little girl. I don’t like it, period. Not when someone tries it on me, not when they try it on other people, either.”

  “I hate bullies, too,” she said. “I always did.”

  Images flashed in my mind. Quicksilver fire, candlepoints of pain in inky blackness. I closed them off.

  “The last time I was in a big old car like this, I was in school,” she said. “A boy I went out with, he was going to be a stock-car racer.”

  “Was his name Junior?”

  “Don’t be so smart,” she said, reaching over to punch me on the upper arm. “His name was Holden. All the girls knew his trick.”

  “His trick?”

  “I don’t know what you call it in New York, but where I come from, if a boy had a special way he’d use to get a girl…to do stuff, we’d call it his trick.”

  “And Holden’s was his car?”

  “Not the car itself, the way he drove it. He’d take a girl out on the back roads and drive like the devil was in his rearview mirror. My girlfriend Rhonda told me he got her so scared she wet her pants.”

  “Maybe that was what—”

  “Oh, just stop!” she said, punching me again. Harder. “I know what you mean, but that isn’t what she was saying. She meant…you know.”

  “So you went out with him to show Rhonda he couldn’t make you do that?”

  “Well, maybe not that, exactly. But you’re right, it was sort of that way.”

  “So what happened?”

  “It was pretty much like Rhonda told it. Holden was a maniac, all right. A few times, I was just sure we were going to wreck. But it wasn’t scary at all. I kind of liked it.”

  “You think Holden was disappointed?” I said, turning onto the highway, heading north.

  “Oh, I know he was,” she said, grinning.

  As we passed the Ninety-sixth Street turnoff, Loyal asked, “Where are we going, Lew?”

  “It turned out to be a beautiful night. I thought you might want to take a little ride.”

  “I sure would. But where can you really ‘ride’ in this city?”

  “Just be patient,” I said.

  “Watch me,” she retorted, sticking out her tongue.

  I paid the extortion to get onto the Henry Hudson, and finally got to let the Plymouth run a little on the Saw Mill River Parkway.

  “Hmmm,” Loyal said, as we shot past a big BMW sedan. “This thing feels like it’s not even trying.”

  “Wait,” I promised.

  Another tollbooth allowed us to get to Yonkers. From there, it wasn’t far to a narrow road that ran as jagged as a mid-attack EKG. The Plymouth had been there before, when I’d had to leave the area in a hurry—the big car acted like it remembered.

  “Whooo-ee!” Loyal whooped, as I whipped around an S-curve in low gear and floored it just as I got the nose aimed right. The Roadrunner’s xenon lights ripped blue-white holes in the blackness ahead. She flipped open her seat belt and slid over so she was jammed up against me, her left hand on my thigh to hold her in place.

  I came off the back road into an underpass, hooked the entrance ramp, and charged onto the highway again, looking for an opening. It was there, and I had the Plymouth past the century mark in a finger-snap. We slipped off at the next exit, found the side road again, and went back to corner-carving. For a finale, I powered her through a full-sideways slide, making more noise than I needed to about it.

  “Over there!” Loyal said, pointing to a side road as if we were being chased.

  I nosed the Plymouth along cautiously. I knew she was a tiger on pavement—even wet pavement—with that Viper IRS under
her, but I didn’t want to try my luck on dirt. I spun the wheel hard left as I braked, then backed into a small clearing barely big enough to let us in.

  “Oh, that was fine!” Loyal said, a little breathless. “I can see why you’re putting money in this one, Lew”—patting the dashboard. “She’s got a nice big butt under that shabby old skirt, doesn’t she?”

  “Surprised a lot of people with it, too,” I agreed.

  Loyal took a pack of cigarettes out of her little red purse.

  “I’m a secret smoker,” she said. “When I was in school, nice girls didn’t smoke. But when I came to New York, it seemed like the girls who knew what was going on, they all did. So I picked it up. Then, all of a sudden, it was, like, if you smoked, you were some kind of a degenerate. So I stopped. Only not really. And sometimes I just want one, you know?”

  “I do,” I said, taking the pack from her. I tapped out a pair of smokes, lit them both, handed her one.

  “It’s beautiful here,” she said, later. “Even though you can’t see the sky because of all those branches, you know the stars are out. It’s that kind of night.”

  “It’s beautiful here, all right. But it would be even if it was the middle of a rainstorm.”

  She moved against me. Just a tiny bit, more like a twitch than a snuggle.

  “You know something else good girls didn’t do?”

  “Drink?”

  “Yes. That and have sex in cars. Well, not have sex, even. Just be seen in a boy’s car in certain spots outside of town. I did that once. Because I didn’t know any better, I let this boy talk me into taking a ride, and we ended up parked in one of those places. He never did anything more than kiss me, but by the time Monday came around, it was like I was the Whore of Babylon.”

  “Your brother must not have cared for that.”

  “Oh my goodness, he did not. Speed went up to the boy that had been telling the story and asked him to fight. Well, the boy wasn’t going to fight Speed, and Speed couldn’t just up and start beating him. But Speed was so smart. He said something to the boy that made him have to fight.”

  “What was that?”

  “Well…” She looked down at her lap. “He told the boy, ‘I know you didn’t do what you’ve been telling everybody you did. Because you can’t bust a girl’s cherry with your nose.’”

  “I guess that would do it,” I said, admiringly.

  “Uh-huh. I was only fourteen then. It was right after that when Speed had that talk with me.”

  “He was a fine brother.”

  “He still is,” she said. “And he’ll always be.”

  “You think I’m silly, don’t you?” Loyal said. It was a little after midnight. I was lying on her bed, a pillow propped under my head. She was standing with her back to me, candlelight playing over her lush curves, holding a cigarette in her right hand.

  “Because you only smoke in your house when you can open a window?”

  “This is my whole stake,” she said. “I can’t do anything that might mess it up.”

  “I understand.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said, as she dropped her cigarette into a glass of water. She left the window open as she padded into the bathroom in her bare feet. I heard the toilet flush. Then the hiss of the lemon-scented aerosol can she kept on a little shelf next to the sink.

  She brought the spray can back with her, gave the bedroom a liberal blast before she closed the window. She returned the can to its resting place and crawled back onto the bed. She stopped when she got as far as my knees, posing on all fours as if she couldn’t make up her mind.

  “I want to tell you something, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t you want to know what?”

  “When you tell me, I’ll know.”

  She didn’t move for a few seconds. Then she crawled the rest of the way toward me, gave me a soft kiss on the mouth, and curled herself into me, her cheek against my chest.

  “Remember what I told you, about needing a place to stay for a couple of years?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That was a lie,” she said. “A little lie. But it’s part of a lot of other ones.”

  I didn’t say anything. My hand on her back didn’t so much as flex.

  She went quiet. I matched my breathing to hers, waiting.

  “You know what I want?” she whispered.

  “No.”

  “I know you’re mad, Lew. I don’t blame you. But I still want to do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Tell you the truth,” she said.

  “I don’t own this place,” she said, as if confessing to a mortal sin. “I mean, I do, but I don’t own it all.”

  It took her a solid minute to figure out that I wasn’t going to be asking questions: I was the audience at a one-woman show.

  “What I mean is, there’s a mortgage on it. A big one. And it seems like every year the maintenance goes up, too. When I bought it, I used everything I had saved up just to make the down payment. And I had to get…someone…to lie for me about my income, too. The board here is very strict.”

  I moved my knuckle along her spine, just enough to tell her I was listening.

  “For a long time, that worked out okay. I didn’t have a job, not a real one, but I never missed a payment. It’s all one payment here, every month. Your mortgage and your maintenance—the taxes are in there, too.

  “But I haven’t worked in…in a long time, Lew. If I sold this apartment tomorrow, I’d walk away with maybe two hundred, two hundred and fifty. And that’s only because prices have gone up so much. So I have to gamble. I know the bubble’s supposed to break, but that’s what everyone said a couple of years ago, and the elevator still keeps climbing. I have to keep riding it, and jump off just before the cable snaps. That’s what I meant about waiting another two or three years. But if I take out one of those home-equity loans to cover the maintenance, I’m never going to come out with the cash I need.”

  Time for me to participate. “So the plan is, you find another place to live, rent this one out, make enough to cover the mortgage and maintenance, build some more equity, and hope the co-op market keeps climbing?”

  “That’s right,” she said, sounding as if she was ashamed of herself for such a devious scheme. “I could only rent to someone who the board approved, but that wouldn’t be hard—other owners in the building have done it.”

  “Why couldn’t you just do that, and use the money you get from renting this place to rent a smaller apartment? If you rented this one furnished, you could get a pile of money. If you’re willing to live outside the city, it wouldn’t cost all that much. Then, when you go back to work…”

  “I’m not going back to work, Lew. Not ever again. The last job I was going to apply for changed all that.”

  “What was the last job?” I asked, shifting my weight slightly.

  “You were,” Loyal said, reaching down to cup me in her soft, warm little hand.

  “It’s all in there,” she said, an hour later.

  We were sitting at a café-style table that barely justified an ad that would someday read “eat-in kitchen.” Loyal in a pink silk kimono, me in a white terry-cloth bathrobe that she’d given me when I got out of bed—a brand-new one, still in the original wrapper. She thrust an accordion file folder at me, as if I had demanded it, then folded her arms over her chest.

  “What am I going to be looking at?”

  “Everything. My bank account, my checking account, my mutual fund, my tax returns, the papers for the co-op…”

  “I don’t need to see any of this, Loyal.”

  “Don’t you want to know if I’m telling the truth?”

  “I always want to know if you’re telling the truth.”

  “I haven’t been.”

  “Like you said, the whole business about needing a place to stay, it wasn’t exactly the lie of the century.”

  “You know what’s not in there, Lew?”

  “What?”
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  “How I earned my money. What I do for a living.”

  “That’s not my business.”

  “No? Then how come you’re so careful about condoms? Most men hate them.”

  “I don’t want children,” I said. A truth, with a lie at its heart—my vasectomy had taken that possibility off the table a long time ago.

  She gave me a searcher’s look.

  “So if I told you I had my tubes tied…?”

  “I—”

  “It wouldn’t change anything,” she said, cutting me off. “You don’t know who I’ve been with, for one. And, for two, I could be lying. Plenty of girls who sleep with married men deliberately get pregnant, don’t they? Maybe they want to force the man’s hand. Or maybe it’s just about collecting a fat child-support check every month. It could even be for blackmail.”

  “I suppose,” I said, as if none of that had ever occurred to me.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said gravely. “I never had my tubes tied.” She waited for a reaction. When none came, she went on, “And I never would,” clasping her hands prayerfully. “I couldn’t even have an abortion.”

  “You’re Catholic?”

  “No, no, no. I’m a…Well, I don’t know what I am. Not that way, I mean. I was church-raised, but I haven’t gone since I was last home. To say goodbye to my daddy. But that…other thing, it’s got nothing to do with church. I wouldn’t fault a woman for protecting herself, no matter what she had to do. I couldn’t do it because…”

  “Because…?”

  “Never mind,” she said, moving her hands to her hips.

  I nodded, accepting her judgment.

  “That’s it?” she said sharply.

  “What are you—?”

  “You just let me get away with that? What’s wrong with you, Lew?”

  “I don’t under—”

  “When a woman says, ‘Never mind,’ you’re supposed to ask her again. At least once.”

  “Why?”

  “To show you’re interested, silly. Of course, if you’re not…”

  I wasn’t that slow. “Sure I am, honey. I was just respecting your—”

  She leaned forward, generous breasts threatening to spill out of the pink kimono. “That’s my secret dream,” she said, librarian-serious. “A baby of my own. When I was growing up, I never thought much about things like that. I never thought about a big church wedding, or having kids. I don’t know when it got into me. Since I’ve been up here, I know. Someday, I’d love to have a little girl. I’d be a good mother. A real good one. And I could teach her things, too.”