Mask Market

by Andrew Vachss

  Nobody could miss the mammoth old Buick four-door, though. Originally painted egg-yolk yellow, years of never seeing a garage had faded the rolling hulk to fish-belly white, with a rust-red roof. The Blood Shadows’ war wagon, far out of its territory, orbiting like the mother ship, ready to take everyone home when it got the signal.

  Still no men in tracksuits. No blue van.

  And there was Charlie Jones, walking toward me, making sure I saw him coming.

  “Here,” I said, as he sat down next to me, “put this on.”

  “What for?” he asked, voice quavering as he looked down at the red baseball cap with a white bill I was holding in my lap.

  “It’s to make you easy to pick out, Charlie.”

  “Pick out? For who?”

  “Who do you think I got your address from, Charlie?” I wanted him to hear his own name coming out of my mouth. Over and over again.

  “I don’t…”

  “Yeah, you do,” I told him. “You’re a very smart guy, Charlie. You’ve been fishing in the whisper-stream for so long, you know what to keep and what to throw back.”

  “So you didn’t die,” he said. Like he’d just won a big bet but the bookie wouldn’t pay off.

  “We don’t die, Charlie. None of us. We just come back looking different. You won’t know my brother if you ever see him again, either.”

  “Your…?”

  “Put the cap on, Charlie,” I said. “You wouldn’t want Wesley to hit some citizen by mistake, would you?”

  It took him a while to put the cap on his head—his hands were shaking so badly, he dropped it the first time he tried.

  “How long have you known?” he finally asked.

  “Years and years,” I assured him.

  “So why now? What did I—?”

  “That last job you had for me…”

  “Yeah?”

  “The guy who was going to hire me stepped out to get something from his car. He got gunned down on the way. It was in the papers.”

  Charlie shrugged, saying it all.

  “What I don’t know, Charlie,” I continued, “is whether the shooters want to clean house. My house.”

  “I don’t do names,” he said, a little strength coming into his voice. “You know that, Burke.” Saying my name, reminding me how far back we went, how long his own reputation stretched.

  “The dead guy, his name was Daniel Parks.”

  Charlie just shrugged again.

  “He was looking for someone. Someone he wanted me to find. Maybe the shooters were looking for that person, too.”

  “All I had for that guy was the number I gave you to call,” he said. “That’s all I ever have.”

  “That does sound like you, Charlie. It even sounds like the truth. There’s only one problem, okay? I’m on my way back from your house yesterday and this van pulls up. Out pops some guys dressed like the ones who killed the guy you sent to me. And they try and snatch me, right there on the street. I can’t quite see that as a coincidence. Maybe you can help me out here?”

  He went stone-still for a second. Then a tremor shot through his body like a current. His face looked as if a vampire was clamped to his jugular.

  “Galya,” he said, barely audible. He slumped forward, face in his hands. The red baseball cap slid off his head and fell to the cold concrete.

  If Charlie’s sudden move had been a signal, nobody was tuned in. Sometimes you can feel violence coming, like a rolling shock wave ahead of the actual impact. The penitentiary gets like that when a race war’s running. When you’re trapped in a tiny stone city, when your color makes you a combatant, it changes the air you breathe. Most of the time, you never get a warning—you go from ignorance to autopsy in a fractured second.

  That’s the way Wesley liked it. He wasn’t programmed for fear, but he knew how it worked. Sometimes he used it—to spook the herd so he could spot the one he wanted. But mostly he liked it better the other way.

  “They’re easier when they’re sleeping,” he had whispered to me one night, after one of the dorm bosses told us if we didn’t get money from home we’d have to pay him some other way.

  Detectives were all over the place when we got up in the morning. Word was that the dorm boss’s skull had been caved in, right next to one of his eyes. By the time they discovered the body, the murder kit had vanished: the D-cell batteries returned to the flashlight of the night-shift guard, the gym sock they had been carried in shredded and flushed down a toilet.

  That joint had been lousy with rats. Some informed for favors, some just because they liked to do it. But, even then, nobody ever told on Wesley.

  The Blood Shadows looked bored. That didn’t mean anything—they’d look bored in the middle of a shootout. Clarence was on his second circuit. I couldn’t see Max. Hadn’t seen him move away, either.

  Charlie hadn’t brought friends.

  Or he didn’t have any.

  I looked over at him, still slumped. Realized that I’d never seen Charlie Jones in daytime, never mind daylight. He looked defeated. Drained. And old—he looked really old.

  “Better tell me,” I said.

  “Can I smoke?” he asked me, like I was a cop in an interrogation cell.

  “Come on, Charlie,” I said, trying to get him to unclench. But even a hit of liquid Valium wouldn’t have gotten the job done, not once I’d brought Wesley back to life.

  Charlie looked down at his shaking hands, as if to add them to the list of people who had betrayed him. “Treyf,” he mumbled to himself.

  “What’s not kosher?” I said. “I’ve been straight with you from the—”

  “Not you,” he said, sorrow drilling a deep hole in his delicate voice.

  Max materialized to Charlie’s left, just as a shadow blotted out the sun to his right. I didn’t have to look to know a couple of the leather-jacketed kids were forming their half of the bracket.

  Suddenly Charlie and I had as much privacy as if we were in a hotel room.

  “The guys who jumped me, they were either watching your house or…”

  “Somebody made a phone call,” he finished for me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Galya.”

  I gave him thirty seconds, then said, “Galya. What’s that?”

  “My wife,” he said, like a man watching his oncologist hold up three fingers.

  “The girl who came to the door?”

  “Yes.”

  I waited, patient as the stone I was sitting on. When it finally came, it flowed like pus from a lanced wound.

  “Her name is Galina,” he said. “This June, we’ll have been married fifteen years. She was only nineteen when I found her. Nineteen. I was old enough to be her father, but she said that was what she was looking for. She wanted a man, not a boy. A man to take care of her.

  “It was through one of those services. A legit marriage bureau, I mean. They screen you, just like they were the girl’s parents. And it’s not some green-card racket, either—I went over there, to Russia, twice before she…before she said she’d come back here with me to live.”

  I gave him a no-judgments look, waiting for the rest.

  “My Galya wasn’t one of those ‘bought brides,’” the night dweller said, angry at someone who wasn’t there. “That’s just…slavery. Those people sell those girls like they’re fucking cars. Used cars, you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “Sure.”

  “I was…lonely, okay? Thirty-seven years old, but I felt like I was a hundred. This life…”

  I let the silence throb between us, waiting.

  “To you, I’m…Never mind,” he finally said, holding up his hand like I’d been about to interrupt him. “I know what I am in your eyes. But where I live, I’m not Charlie Jones, the matchmaker. I’m Benny Siegel, the businessman. I’m respected. Part of the community. I’ve had my house there since I got out of the army. Cost me every dime I had saved up just to make the down, but it was worth it.”

  He went s
ilent. I gave him a few seconds, to see if he’d pick it up. When he didn’t, I said, “The army, huh? Were you in—?”

  “Yeah, I was there,” he cut me off. “Even got myself a couple of medals for it. Wouldn’t have thought it, would you?”

  “I wouldn’t know how to tell,” I answered him, truthfully.

  “That’s where I learned to do what I do,” he said. “Down in those fucking tunnels.”

  No wonder he’s more comfortable in the dark, I thought, but kept it to myself.

  “You weren’t there yourself, were you?” he said, turning his face to me. “No, that’s right. Word is, you were some kind of mercenary. In Africa, right?”

  “This isn’t about me, Charlie.”

  “No,” he said, forlornly. “I guess it’s not. All right, you want to know, I’ll tell you. Over there, once you got off the line, the whole country was nothing but a giant fucking trading post, like a flea market on steroids. Some people wanted things; other people had things. People wanted things done; there were people who wanted to do those things. Everything got moved: dope, ordnance, medical supplies. Even whole jeeps. I fell into it by accident. A guy asked me, did I know someone who could do something. It doesn’t matter what. Not now. But I did. Know someone, I mean. A sniper.

  “That’s where it started. The middle, it’s like a deep trench. You fall into it, then you find out it’s not just deep, it’s long. Endless. One day, you look up, and you can’t see the sky anymore. That’s when you know you’re back in the tunnels. Tunnels so long that you couldn’t walk to the sunlight in your whole life.”

  Charlie looked down at his hands, as if seeing the unlit cigarette for the first time. He put it to his lips, used a throwaway butane lighter to get it going. I noticed his hands were steady now. Lancing an abscess will do that sometimes.

  “When I came home, I just picked up where I’d left off,” he said. “I had a lot of names and numbers. For a long time, I just worked with people I knew. I’m not sure when it happened, but word got out I was down there, and people looked me up. Like it was my address. Word got around. People who needed things done would look for me. Ask around. And I knew people, too, by then. People I could match them up with. People who knew I could be trusted.”

  “Trusted,” I said. Just the word.

  “Trusted,” Charlie repeated, a touch of pride slipping into his voice. “You know how the tunnels work?”

  “No,” I said. I didn’t know which tunnels he was talking about—Vietnam or New York—but I let him run.

  “You have to have something to believe in,” the ferret said. “And it has to be something you can do. Not religion. Rules. You have to do things right. By the book. No matter what comes up, there’s a plan for it. You’ll be all right as long as you stick to the rules. The guys who went down and didn’t come back, it’s always because they forgot the rules.”

  “And you never did.”

  “I never did,” he repeated, like taking an oath. “One tunnel’s the same as another. Maybe one’s lined with punji sticks, one’s got those little gas bombs. Another one, there’s a VC pop shooter, sitting there for days without moving, just waiting for the fly to stumble into the web. It doesn’t matter what’s down there. You can’t control that. But you can control how you act.”

  “Follow the rules.”

  “That’s right. And I have. I always have.”

  “You’ve got a good rep,” I acknowledged.

  “‘Good’?” he said, snapping away his cigarette. “Fuck you, ‘good.’ I’m not good; I’m gold.”

  There! His ferret’s pride finally bursting through the crust of fear, the opening I’d been probing for.

  “Easy to say when you’re not looking at a ride Upstate,” I said. And I could say it—everyone in our world knows that when Burke goes down he goes down alone. My diploma was from my last felony jolt, magna con laude.

  “I’ve been jugged three times,” Charlie said, like a tennis player returning an easy lob. “Twice as a material witness, once for some okey-doke they made up to put me in the pressure cooker. I just sat there until they cut me loose.”

  “So they couldn’t bluff you. That’s not the same as—”

  “‘Bluff’?” the ferret said. “The last one, they had a body, and they had the shooter. He was a pro. A contract man.”

  He glanced up, as if calling my attention to something we both knew was there. The corner of his mouth twitched. Not a tic, telling me something in a language we shared.

  But telling me what? That the contract man had been Wesley. Making an offering out of his honesty?

  He couldn’t be bragging about keeping quiet, because nobody in our world would give Wesley up. Not out of loyalty—Wesley was alone. Not out of obedience to some twit screenwriter’s idea of “the code.” No, out of a fear so deep and elemental that it transcended logic and reason. Everybody knew: If you said the iceman’s name aloud to the Law, you were dead.

  Or was the little ferret gambling? The whisper-stream had all kinds of rumors running about me and Wesley. Maybe Charlie thought I already knew about the job he was talking about, showing me he could have put me on the spot when he’d had the chance.

  “Nobody could make a connection to the dead woman,” he went on, not missing a beat. “They knew it had to be her husband who paid to get it done, but they didn’t have a link. Oh, the shooter rolled on him,” he said, contemptuously, “but the husband was ready for that. Alibi in place, lawyers spread out thick as chopped liver on a bagel. The cops needed me to make the bridge.”

  “So the shooter gave you up, too?” I asked, knowing it couldn’t be Wesley he was talking about now.

  “Tried to.” Charlie shrugged. “First they offered me a free pass. Tell what I knew and walk away. Not a misdemeanor slap, not even probation. Immunity, straight up. I just looked dumb,” he said, showing me the same blank face he must have shown them. “Then they tried to scare me. A skinny little guy like me, a skinny little white guy, everyone knew what was going to happen if I had to go Upstate, they said.”

  “But after the tunnels…”

  “Yeah,” he said, unwilling to dignify the attempt to frighten him with another word.

  “So what happened?”

  “To me? Nothing. My lawyer told them, if they brought me into the case, I was going to testify the shooter was lying—about ever meeting with me—and since the DA needed the shooter to be telling the truth about the hit, they couldn’t risk letting the jury see him lie about any part of it. So they tried it on murder-and-motive.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. The husband would have beat it, too. Only the DA had another card. His girlfriend. She testified she had been pressuring him to get a divorce so they could get married, but his wife had all the money, so he was trapped. He told her they’d be married by Christmas. The wife got smoked in September. When he hadn’t married her by April, she went to the Law.”

  “Happy ending.”

  “That’s what I want here, too,” the tunnel-runner said. “A happy ending. Tell me what I have to do to get one, Burke. All I need is the rules.”

  “You want to go back to being Benny Siegel?”

  “I am Benny Siegel. That’s what it says on my birth certificate. On my 214, too. I’m like a farmer, okay? It’s not any one year’s crops I care about so much, it’s the land.”

  “I get it.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Jews weren’t allowed to own land,” I said, softly, remembering the Mole’s lessons. “That’s why they wandered.”

  “And did the work nobody else wanted to do…” Nodding for me to fill in the blank.

  “…but everyone needed done.”

  “Yes,” he said, solemnly.

  In the silence, he took out another cigarette. His hands were as steady as a dead man’s pulse.

  “Were the guys who jumped you Russians?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. We didn’t have a conversation.”

&nbs
p; “My wife…”

  “What?”

  “I love her. Tell me how she survives this, and it’s done.”

  “Meaning it was her who called in the troops?”

  “I don’t know that. But it’s all that’s left.”

  “Does she work with you, Charlie?”

  “Galya? She doesn’t even know—”

  “Yeah, she does,” I cut off his self-delusion at the root. “If you didn’t sic those guys in the van on me—and I don’t think you did, okay?—then it was her. What’s she doing, calling the same crew that executed the man who was trying to hire me, Charlie? The same guy you sent to me?”

  “I never told her a—”

  “This is your wife, Charlie. She’s not just in your house; she’s in your business. And she’s in deep. At least this piece of it.”

  “I—”

  “She’s in your business,” I said again. “And if you want to protect her like you say, you better get in hers.”

  “Just tell me,” he said, defeated.

  “I want to talk to the people who want to talk to me. I want someone to tell them they don’t need to be trying to snatch me off the street to do that.”

  “But, you do that, they’ll know who you are,” he said, his ferret’s brain back to professionalism. “And now they don’t know—or they would have come for you already.”

  “You let me worry about that. I don’t like things hanging over me.”

  “Me, either,” he said, pointedly.

  “Then it’s time for you to have a talk with your wife.”

  He just nodded—a man who knew the rules.

  It took only another few minutes for me to run the whole deal down. Charlie didn’t argue. In fact, he made himself my partner in the enterprise, suggesting a couple of ways we could get what we needed done a little better.

  “Call the number I gave you,” he said.

  “When?”

  “Anytime after midnight.”

  “You’ll have it by then?”