Mask Market

by Andrew Vachss

  “I love these,” Loyal said, fitting the blue leather bustier over her breasts. “But you can’t get into them without help.”

  “At your service,” I said, slowly pulling the laces tight.

  “That’s what you think I am, don’t you?”

  “Huh?”

  “You know what I mean, Lew. I’ve been so honest with you.

  Now it’s coming around to hurt me.”

  “I don’t—”

  “You know what? I thought you loved me. I don’t mean I was your great love. Not that special, once-in-a-lifetime-if-you-get-real-lucky love. But a whole lot more than…than just liking me, I guess. I guess I just told you too much truth, didn’t I?”

  “No, you didn’t. You told me just enough. And you showed me a lot more.”

  “But I’m not the one you—”

  “You are the one,” I said. “Not like you think, but…Look, Loyal, to me you’re a princess. A little princess. And I’ve got a plan for this to have a happy ending.”

  “But not a marriage plan, right?”

  “Better.”

  “What could be—?”

  “Just wait,” I said. “Wait a little bit. You wanted to know what I do for a living, remember?”

  “Yes. But I don’t—”

  “I’m a gambler, little girl. And I’ve got something going now. The dice are already tumbling. If I can throw the hard eight, you’re going to have your happy ending. That’s all I can tell you now. Is that enough?”

  Loyal paused in the act of pulling on one of her stockings. “A coral snake is one of the most beautiful things you could ever see. But one bite and you’re all done. Then there’s milk snakes. They’re just as pretty, but they’re harmless. You know how to tell them apart?”

  “Red and black, he’s a good jack. Red and yella, kill the fella.”

  “Oh!” she said. She raised her chin, looked down at where I was sitting. “You’ve spent some time in the South, haven’t you? I wondered about that, ever since I told you about people saying I looked like Jeannie, remember? And you said I do favor her. That’s not the way people around here talk.”

  “I’ve traveled a little bit.”

  “Gambling?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And you’re going to win me a happy ending?”

  “I’m trying.”

  “That would be the sweetest thing a man could give a woman, a happy ending.”

  “I—”

  “I’m a girl who gives as good as she gets,” Loyal said, turning away from me and bending over the couch. “And you don’t have to wait for yours.”

  “That’s her?” Clarence asked, pointing at his laptop screen.

  “Go through them one more time,” I said.

  He trailed his finger over the touchpad, and a new set of thumbnails popped into life. He clicked on them, one by one, and each new image burst into full-screen life.

  A woman in a beige parka, so densely quilted that it was impossible to tell if she was a stick or a sumo, walked down a tree-lined street, carrying a large green tote bag with a yellow logo.

  The same woman inside a market, the tote draped over the handlebars of a shopping cart. She had pixie-short light blonde hair, bright-red lipstick.

  “I can zoom in on that one,” Clarence said.

  “Go.”

  The woman had china-blue eyes, a beauty mark at the corner of one of them. It looked like one of those tattooed tears gang kids put on their faces, one for each jolt Inside.

  “That’s her,” I said.

  “Are you sure, mahn? She looks nothing like the girl on that—”

  “Her stuff is tough,” the Prof interrupted his son, “but it ain’t close to enough. That’s the same girl Schoolboy and me snatched.”

  “You have not seen her for—what?—twenty years?” Clarence said. Not challenging, fascinated.

  “She’s still got the look,” the Prof said.

  “She does not look afraid to me,” Clarence said, respectful but doubting.

  “She never did,” the Prof answered. “Ain’t that right, Schoolboy?”

  “On the move.” Terry’s voice, over my cell. “Walking.”

  “Probably a Starbucks run,” I said, glancing at my watch. “Gives us twenty minutes, tops.”

  “I can double that for you,” Michelle said. “Drop me off at the next corner.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the Prof. He patted the outside pocket of his ankle-length canvas duster. “I already been in once,” he said. “I left it so’s I can pop that box like I had me the key.”

  “Eight-fifteen,” Clarence said. “The tenants have all gone to work.”

  “You take the wheel,” I told him.

  I heard the sound of a key working the lock. Pointed my finger at Max to warn him.

  She walked into the living room, one hand holding a paper cup. A sixteen-ounce double skinny mocha latte, if she hadn’t changed her usual order.

  “Hello, Beryl,” I said, from the darkness of the couch.

  She was fast, but Max was ready for the move, wrapping her up as she bolted back toward the front door. He held one finger against the buccinator muscle in her right cheek, nerve-blocking the pressure point so she couldn’t scream.

  He lifted her off the ground with his left hand, letting her feel the price of resistance. She got the message and sagged, allowing him to deposit her next to me on the couch.

  “Nobody’s going to hurt you, Beryl,” I said. “Just the opposite. We know people are looking for you; we’re here to fix that.”

  “Who are—?”

  “You know who we are, child,” the Prof said, as he stepped forward. “We’re the ones who got you back from that pimp when you were just a kid. Remember?”

  “You’re…” She paused, looking at Max. “You were there,” she said to the Prof. “And him, too”—nodding at Max. “But who are—?”

  “It’s me, Beryl,” I said. “I had some work done on my face, but—”

  “It is you! I would never have known your face, but that voice, it’s…it’s the same.”

  “You have your father’s gift.”

  “My…what?”

  “Your father’s gift,” I said again. “He’s real good with voices, too.”

  “My father sent you?”

  “You mean, like he did before?”

  “That wasn’t him,” she said, as if the words were poison in her mouth.

  “I know,” I told her. “I didn’t know then, but I do now.”

  “You think so?” she said, curling her lip. She shrugged out of her coat, crossed her legs, telling us she wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Let’s see,” I said. “You were involved with a man named Daniel Parks. A money manager. He siphoned off money from a hedge fund he was running. A lot of money. He probably knew a lot more about high finance than he did about the people who put their money into his fund. So maybe he figured the most he was risking was a civil suit. Or even a fraud prosecution he could lawyer his way out of. How am I doing so far?”

  “You’re talking,” she said, opening a silver box on the coffee table. She took out a prerolled joint, lit up, and pulled a heavy hit of Maryjane into her lungs.

  “We don’t know exactly how much Parks stole. Probably take years to figure that out. But we know you ended up with a pile of it. He thought you were his secret bank. But the first time he started talking about making a withdrawal, you disappeared on him. You must have been planning it for a long time. It’s easy when they trust you, huh?”

  “He was in love,” Beryl said, her drawl suggesting, “If God didn’t want them sheared…”

  “Men aren’t your favorite humans, huh?”

  “Good guess, Sherlock. If it weren’t for my mother, I’d be as queer as Ellen and Rosie combined.”

  “Got it,” I said, trying to get her train back on the track I wanted. “You figured it for a low-risk play too, and you were right. So Parks gets arrested, so what? So he d
ecides to name names, big deal. Far as you were concerned, he was just a generous lover.”

  “Some men are,” she said, smiling ugly and dragging deep on her joint. She didn’t even bother to hold the smoke down—plenty more where that had come from.

  “Then he gets himself gunned down, right on the street. Now you know the people he ripped off aren’t going to the Better Business Bureau. And they’re going to be looking for their money.”

  “And so are you,” she said, her voice so thick with contempt I could barely make out the words. “Just like you were the last time.”

  I could feel the Prof vibrating in the corner, a step away from erupting. I held up my hand to silence him.

  “Don’t put it on anyone but me, Beryl,” I said. “The whole thing was mine. Everyone else just backed my play. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  “You know what they say about the road to Hell.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, you don’t even get that much slack. I know you got paid to bring me back.”

  “I did you wrong. I didn’t know it then. I know it now. That’s why I’m here.”

  “What, to make it up to me?” she asked scornfully.

  “I can’t do that. Because it can’t be done. Nobody could do it for me; nobody can do it for you.”

  She gave me a sharp, appraising look, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Here’s what I can do,” I told her. “I can get you safe. Not just off the hook—safe forever.”

  She gave me a serpent’s grin, certain she was back on her home ground now. “Sure. All I have to do is give back the—”

  “Not a dime,” I cut her off. “You walk away free and clear. You won’t have to hide in this basement. You can go right back to being Peta Bellingham, if you want.”

  “Just like that, huh?”

  “There’s more,” I said. “To sweeten the deal, I’ll even throw in some justice.”

  “She might still run, son,” the Prof said on the drive back, signing with his fingers so that Max could follow along.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “She knows we found her once, we can find her again. Probably thinks we have her watched twenty-four/seven,” I went on, turning my hands into binoculars, then cupping my right ear in a listening gesture. “The deal I offered her is the only way out.”

  I turned slowly in my seat, capturing each of them with my eyes until I had them all with me.

  “There’s something else, too,” I told them. “She wants to do it.”

  “Isn’t this a little flashy for a lawyer?” I asked Michelle. She was busy adjusting the lapels of my tuxedo-black suit, threaded with a faint metallic-blue windowpane pattern. Under the jacket, my shirt was royal purple with vertical stripes of pale lemon. French cuffs, with Canadian Maple Leaf gold coins for links. My tie was a Dalíesque riot of color that you couldn’t look at for long without vertigo. The shoes were black mirrors, softer than most gloves.

  “Not for the kind of lawyer you’re supposed to be, sweetheart,” she said, confidently. “And this is the pièce de résistance.” She meant the black leather Tumi attaché case, gusseted to expand to carry a laptop and whatever other tools a bar-certified extortionist might need.

  The initials on the case were “ROM.” Roman Oscar Mestinvah wouldn’t come up on a Martindale-Hubbell search, but he was registered with OCA—the New York State Office of Court Administration. Admitted to practice in 1981, and a member in good standing. Roman was an elite lawyer, with a very narrow practice—

  Gypsies only. I don’t know his real name—no Gypsy ever has only one—but the one he’d used since law school gave him those inside-joke initials.

  If anyone speaking English called his office, his girl would know it was for me, and message me at Mama’s—my rental of his name included a few extra services.

  “No diamond watch?” I said, sarcastically.

  Michelle gave me one of her patented looks. “You’ll be driving a Porsche, not a Bentley,” she replied, as if that explained the Breitling chronograph she had handed me.

  “I guess I’m ready,” I told her.

  She stepped very close to me, stood on her toes, and kissed my cheek. “I’m proud of you, baby,” she whispered. “This is the real Burke now. My big brother. Coming home.”

  “You want to go over it again?” I asked, as I plucked the EZ Pass transmitter from the inside windshield of Beryl’s metallic-silver Porsche and stowed it in the glove compartment before we hit the Holland Tunnel. She was wearing a navy-blue pinched-waist jacket over a beige pleated skirt, sheer stockings, and simple navy pumps. A successful woman, on her way to work.

  “I’ve got it,” she said. “Don’t worry; I’ve been doing this kind of thing all my life.”

  “Even before I—?”

  “Years before,” she said, flatly.

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “To you? What for? You were just another hired man. And it wasn’t me paying your salary.”

  “I would never have brought you back,” I said, hearing the defensiveness in my voice. “That happened before. More than once.”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s the truth,” I said. Hearing You know it is in my mind. Realizing it was Wolfe I was talking to.

  “Even if I believed you, which I don’t, where were you going to take me? You think I hadn’t tried telling before then? Way before then? You know what that got me? More hired men, doing more things to me. Before they sent me back, that is. I’ll give you that much: You just drove the merchandise home like you were paid to do, didn’t even make me blow you first.”

  I shook off the image, said, “But you weren’t really running away.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Turning to give me a quick, hard stare.

  “That pimp, the one you were with, he hadn’t kidnapped you. I’ve seen enough of those to know.”

  “Because I didn’t throw my arms around you for rescuing me from the big bad man?”

  “Because you weren’t scared,” I said. “You weren’t stoned. And you weren’t hurt.”

  “You’re smarter than you look,” she said, smiling sardonically. “At least, you’re smarter now. That’s right. You think some half-wit nigger could have tricked me? I was playing him, not the other way around. But I didn’t know the game then. Not the whole game. I never figured he’d try to actually sell me.”

  “What’s with ‘nigger,’ Beryl?”

  “You don’t like the word?”

  “It sounds nasty in your mouth, and—”

  “Ah. When you spoke to my dear daddy, he told you we were all such wonderful liberals, yes?”

  “He did say they were—”

  “Fakes,” she said, spitting the word out of her mouth like a piece of bad meat. “Both of them, complete frauds. Every word they ever spoke was a lie. The big ‘radicals,’ fighting oppression. That whole house was a nonstop masquerade ball. Everybody had their own mask. Especially me.”

  “Your father was—”

  “Weak,” she dismissed him with a single word. “A pathetic, cringing weakling. Funding the revolution from the safety of his living room.”

  “And your mother?”

  “Oh, she was never weak,” Beryl hissed. “She was even harder than the steel she used on me.”

  We gassed up on the Jersey Pike. While Beryl used the restroom, I thumbed my cell phone into life.

  “Anything?” I said.

  “Nothing,” Michelle answered. “You know I would have called you if—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Relax, baby. We’ve got a Plan B, remember?”

  Beryl accelerated back onto the turnpike, her fingers relaxed on the wheel. As she settled into the middle lane, I said, “You’re sure you—?”

  “If you say fucking ‘reparations’ to me one more time, I’m going to throw up all over that cheesy suit of yours.”

  We stopped at a diner off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Beryl wan
ted the restroom again. And a cigarette. She was a heavy smoker, but she wouldn’t light up in her car.

  “You don’t smoke anymore?” she’d asked me, the first time we’d stopped.

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t go with the new face?”

  “You’re smart enough to be anything you want,” I told her. The truth.

  “Oh, Daddy!” she mock-squealed, clasping her hands behind her back and stepping close to me. “That’s so sweet. You just want your Berry to be the very bestest little girl she can be, don’t you?”

  I looked away.

  “Now I made you mad,” she said, reaching down and pulling the hem of her skirt high over her thighs. “You think I should be punished?”

  “Give it a rest, Beryl.”

  “Why? You’re not much of a conversationalist, but it’s been a while, and I could always use the practice.”

  I looked away.

  “Makes you mad, that I’m such a little whore?”

  “That’s your business,” I said.

  “Exactly,” she retorted, sticking out her tongue in a deliberately cold parody of a sassy brat.

  “Did you ever tell him?”

  “Who? My father?”

  “Yeah. You said you tried to tell people, but you never said you actually did it.”

  “He knew,” she said, with a sociopath’s unshakable certainty.

  “Just like that? You said your mother had a special—”

  “Just because he was a coward doesn’t mean he was a stupid one.”

  “But you couldn’t be—”

  “Yes, I could,” she snapped. “I could be sure. I’m sure he would have just closed his eyes, no matter what I showed him. You know why?”

  “No.”

  “Because my mother had the power,” she said, licking her lips as if the very word was caressing her under her skirt. “If you have power, you can do anything you want, go anywhere you want, get away with anything. It’s all yours. Everything. And you know what makes power? Money. If you have enough money—”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “You’re right; it’s not,” she snapped. “If you’d let me finish what I was going to say, you would have heard this: If you have enough money, and the spine to use it, every door opens. The whole world is nothing but a market. And humans are just another commodity.”