The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  Munroe breathed deeply, and with a soft, slow exhale the urge to flee and strike receded completely.

  This was easy now, compared to how things had once been.

  The years, as they faded, brought fewer triggers to yank her back into the brutality of adolescence and the equatorial rain forest and the man who’d beat her with fists and kicks and throws until she’d grown strong enough, fast enough, to fend him off; the man who’d put a blade in her hand and used her body as his carving board until the knife became her own way to salvation.

  She was seventeen when she killed him, sneaking after him in the falling dusk, with the wind of the coming storm covering the sound of pursuit. She’d shot him in the back with a tranquilizer gun and stood over him as his eyes rolled up. Had straddled him in the driving rain and slit his throat.

  The missionary’s daughter, made to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, had come out the other side an apex predator.

  She’d left his body to rot and buried the fear instead.

  Time had tempered the rage and violence. A little.

  Bradford’s fingers stroked her hairline and traced down her jaw.

  The touch came without warning and set her pulse racing again, a rush that would have, in another time and place, thrust her into savagery.

  He knew this as well as she did.

  Eyes closed, she said, “That’s a very dangerous game you play, Mr. Bradford.”

  He leaned in, lips brushing against her cheek and toward her ear. “I’m not afraid of you,” he whispered.

  The words reached down to her spine and she relaxed into him, felt the soft burn of his touch, measured his weight and movement, and when he continued down to nuzzle against her neck, she found leverage in his body. She pulled his arm out beneath him, flipped him, and straddled him.

  He smiled and said, “Yes, please.”

  He was stronger, and taller than her five foot ten by an inch or so. He was former Special Forces, now high-stakes private security—a kinder, gentler term for mercenary—better trained, and had likely killed more people than she had. But he would never be faster. Speed was the skill that kept her alive, speed that had been sliced into her psyche one savage cut at a time.

  She would need a few more nights sleeping beside him, a few more evenings of calm contentment, before the animal brain began to purr and stretch and the claws retracted. She brushed a finger along his nose and kissed his lips. “You should still be careful,” she said, then stepped off the bed for the bathroom.

  Bradford caught her hand and tugged her back. He studied her. Streetlight and moonlight filtered in through the wide glass window. She knew his thoughts, just as he knew hers: a year could be an eternity when filled with death and the threat of losing what meant most.

  He pulled her closer.

  “You’ll be late for work,” she said.

  “They won’t miss me.”

  “Let me go with you,” she said.

  He squeezed her hand, swung his feet to the floor. “There’ll be plenty of time for that later,” he said. He wrapped his arms behind her and drew her to him.

  If she’d trusted him less, if she’d remained guarded around him the way she was in all other aspects of life, she would have sensed what she would only discover in hindsight. Instead she leaned down and kissed him, and he rolled her to the bed, and they both knew that in spite of their best efforts there was no way he wouldn’t be late.

  —

  Bradford dressed and, knowing that Munroe watched, his teasing smile turned two minutes into five in a reverse Chippendale segue from pants to shirt to string tie. When he pulled the boots off a shelf, Munroe sat up and said, “No way. You can’t be serious.”

  He held the brown ostrich leather out for inspection and dropped into the accent, thickening the honeyed drawl that only ever surfaced when he spent enough time back home around his family. “I hail from Texas,” he said. “There are expectations, and no sense bringing disappointment.”

  Tone dry, she said, “You’re missing the hat.”

  Bradford reached into the armoire, pulled out a cattleman, slipped it onto his head, tipped the rim, and said, “Ma’am.”

  Munroe rolled her eyes and scooted toward him.

  In the years she’d known him, his uniform, depending on the occasion, had been jeans and a T-shirt, or camo and tactical gear, and his headgear, when he wore it, was a baseball cap or helmet. Out at his house, where land was plentiful and not all roads were paved, he sometimes wore shit kickers and a hat as mud- and grease-stained as his jeans, but he’d never worn anything like this. Hell, she could count on one hand the people she’d met in Texas who’d dressed like this for any reason other than a night out on the town.

  “Need to work on your authenticity,” she said.

  Bradford grinned, scooped laundry off the floor, and tossed it into a bin beside the cupboard. “No one’s complained about my performance.”

  “If they knew better, they would,” she said. “Hey, I brought you something.” Munroe snagged her backpack from the foot of the bed, dragged it toward her, and rummaged through too much traveling crap to get to the bottom, then pulled out a box and handed it to him.

  Bradford kissed her forehead, her mouth, and then took the box. “Now?” he said.

  Munroe smiled. Nodded. She leaned back to watch as he tore at the ribbon and opened the lid, then chuckled when he laughed, a deep throaty laugh that made her heart hurt.

  “You could hardly call this authentic,” he said.

  “It’s atrocious,” she said. “Found it in a boutique window, as far away from Texas as you could hope to get. Made me think of you in its own weird way. Had to have it.”

  He pulled the belt out of the box: brown-red crocodile leather and gaudy aluminum buckle that half filled his oversize hand in an interesting imitation of western wear. “Nice,” he said. “You see atrocity and you think of me.”

  “Was made for you,” she said, and jutted her chin toward him instead of pointing, “given your new taste in clothes.”

  If she’d known then how prophetic those words would be, and what pain would come of such a harmless gift, she would never have bought the belt, never have given it to him, would have torn the leather from his hands. Instead, she giggled as he pulled off the old and slipped her gift through the loops.

  “I love that you were thinking of me,” he said. He leaned down to kiss her again. “You’re crazy,” he said. “Crazy but perfect.”

  Smiling made her cheeks hurt. “Go,” she said, but she was reluctant to let go of his collar and he made no effort to pull away.

  She shoved him playfully.

  Bradford grabbed a phone off a stack of papers on the floor and tossed it to her. “My numbers are already in,” he said. “Charger’s in the kitchen. So are the instructions if you need them. I’ll call you when I’m on my way home—maybe seven or eight.”

  She walked with him to the front and stood there in his T-shirt long after the door had shut, because he hadn’t really gone. The cues reached out to her automatically, silences and lack of vibration on the floor, on the door: subtleties that most people would absorb without thinking if they were accustomed to listening for them, but most people weren’t.

  The door opened again and Bradford stuck his head inside.

  “I missed you,” he said, and he closed the door before she could reply. To the empty space she whispered, I’ve missed you, too.

  Bradford’s shoebox of an apartment was on the fourth floor of a ten-story block building just southeast of Osaka’s center, where the streets were narrow even for his little Mira, and telephone and electrical wires hung overhead like strung spaghetti, and adjacent structures abutted tightly against each other all around.

  They’d parked in an underground garage and taken the elevator to a covered breezeway of clean brick tile and doors that seemed impossibly close together. His apartment opened to a sunken entryway, a genkan, where they left outside footwear, then st
epped up to clean wood floors in a tight hallway, where two bedrooms stood across from the one toilet, in its own little closet, the larger sink room doubling as a laundry room, and the ofuro for bathing.

  Capping the hallway, like the top of a T, was the kitchen-dining-living room, and there, at the start of the workday bustle, Munroe rolled open the balcony door, stepped out onto the narrow concrete strip, and leaned over the rail, scanning the density of cars and buildings, and glancing over signs and shops, for a first glimpse at how she might fill her daytime hours.

  Bradford had been in Japan for a month, his car, apartment, and phone all part of the compensation package on a security contract that danced around the edges of what he did for a living—no guns, no bullets, no personal threats or people to protect, though that had made sense in a strange sort of way when he’d first explained it—while she’d arrived on a whim, with a tourist visa, a carry-on suitcase, and nothing to do.

  After more than a decade spent working off-radar, a life spent scheming and adapting to find for some what others preferred to keep hidden, her mind ever plotting multiple moves in advance, she was now, quite suddenly, without purpose.

  The absence, like a cloak ripped away, left nakedness in its stead.

  In the bathroom-size kitchen Munroe dragged her fingers along Formica countertops so low they barely reached her hips. She nudged through cupboards and then the fridge, finding items that approximated what she would have found on Bradford’s shelves in Dallas, albeit in much smaller sizes. Morning sunlight said food, but her stomach was still on Frankfurt time.

  She plugged in the phone to charge, pulled out a liter of milk, found coffee, brewed a cup, and then sat at the two-person table. In the emptiness she stared out the window while the minutes ticked by and small sounds rose from the street to mingle with the electrical hum of the air-conditioner and appliances. She blew at the rim of her mug and sighed.

  If this was what retirement felt like, retirement was a bitch.

  She left the apartment on foot, carrying the phone, spare keys, and enough money to get her through the day.

  She kept to the street edges, walking on gutter covers because there were no sidewalks, peering down intersections with round traffic mirrors that stood in for stop signs and traffic lights. She branched off in new directions at whim while cars squeezed by on streets for two-way traffic that only had space for one. She passed umpteen bicycles and an overabundance of convenience stores—konbini—while snippets of conversation lifted on the air and the jumble of unfamiliar words hit her brain like jumpers to a dead battery, and discomfort, familiar and unavoidable, oozed down her spine into the pit of her stomach.

  Soon enough she would find rhythm in the language, prosody to key the aural lock. Like a fish to a hook, her brain would latch on and the patterns would reel her in. Fluency would come whether she wanted it to or not.

  This was her gift, her poisonous gift, a cursed blessing that had been with her since her earliest memories: the same ability that had guided her as a teenage interpreter into the arms of gunrunners, the same juju that had bisected her path with the path of the mercenary who, in teaching her to hate, would make her what she was.

  Juju. Magic. Destiny.

  A few weeks to grow comfortable, then another month—never more than two—for the strange wiring in her head to fully do its thing.

  The need for food beckoned and an A-frame chalkboard on the ground level invited her to something like a café—kissaten—one floor up, with enough seating for ten, though she was the only customer. The menu was an interesting take on continental fare. She ate slowly, ears attuned to the television on the near wall with its pitch dipping and climbing between shows and commercials that could only have been produced under the influence of acid.

  The discomfort inside her head charged on.

  Munroe ate, then left the café to wander again. She took turns at random, stopping to compare the quantity and quality of vending machines more ubiquitous than parking spots; discovered the dichotomy of quiet temples, shrines, and hokora tucked in amid busy city streets; stepped into every shop and restaurant that drew her interest, touching and tasting and breathing and learning, until the evening came and she followed the trail of bread crumbs through Osaka’s crowded footprint, home.

  Bradford leaned in to kiss her as he did each morning, and Munroe opened her eyes when his lips caressed her cheek. Early light from the encroaching sun crept beneath the shades.

  “Good morning, beautiful,” he said. “I love you, go back to sleep.”

  His smile made her heart hurt with happy.

  She stretched and rolled over as if he’d never disturbed her, as if she really would manage to fade back into oblivion after he tiptoed out: the same game they played each morning because pretending that they were normal somehow made it true.

  Sleep, though still elusive, had become longer and deeper.

  For her. For him.

  Munroe followed Bradford’s footsteps into the hall. In a few minutes he’d return to dress and she’d ask him if she could come with him, ask him to give her work, the same as she did every morning. He’d kiss her again and tell her not today, and she’d pretend that she didn’t care.

  In so short a time they’d found a routine, as if they’d always been. Being near him, even in spite of the separation that accompanied his long work hours, brought peace and contentment. That was enough.

  Bradford’s shadow filled the doorway and she reached a hand for him. He held her fingers and she let go reluctantly, all part of the morning ritual. But this time he leaned back down and, his face inches from her ear, said, “Come with me to work today?”

  “Drop you off, keep the car?”

  “Nyet,” he said. “Come with me, keep me company.”

  Munroe bolted upright, knocking her head into his chin. She rubbed her forehead. “Ow,” she said, then, “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said, his face lit, “really.”

  Munroe scrambled to his side of the bed. “Girl clothes or boy clothes?” she said.

  Bradford pushed hangers aside in the narrow armoire and then pulled off the only modest dress she owned and tossed it at her. “Girl clothes,” he said. “Very, very girl clothes.”

  Munroe stuck out her tongue.

  “Hey.” He leaned down and, cupping his hands around her face, kissed her lips, then pulled away and said, “Be quick, woman, don’t make me late.”

  She smacked him with the dress.

  Laughing, he ducked and she darted around him for the sink room and ofuro and locked him out.

  He knocked and said, “Come on, Mike, let me in.”

  “Busy,” she said, singsong and teasing. “Go make breakfast.”

  —

  The commute was a forty-minute stop-start along a route that would have taken thirty without the traffic, and maybe fifteen without the traffic and the stoplights, to a facility on the eastern outskirts of Osaka’s sprawl: two stories aboveground and two below. The building filled nearly half a block and, aside from the two-story glass entrance that sheared off and flattened one of the building’s corners and the crisp neon signage that spelled out ALTEQ-BIO above the glass, it didn’t even come close to imitating the high-tech image the company projected online and in brochures.

  The parking lot, with its access arm beside a tiny guard box, wrapped from the street entrance around to the back and, although generous insofar as Japanese parking lots went, was but a fraction of what would have been needed if every employee drove to work. At seven-thirty in the morning the lot was already half filled.

  They walked to the sheared-off corner, to doors that opened to a wide entry with a large stairwell at its center. Hallways branched off in multiple directions and the elevator to the lower level was off to one side.

  Bradford stopped at the front desk and, under the watchful eye of two uniformed guards, signed Munroe in, then waited for a temporary badge while the ding, ding chimes of employees passing through the entry
stiles filled the air.

  The machines, like subway ticket controls, had arms that opened in response to the badges, and they lined the front from the rear of the guard desk to the opposite wall—enough to ensure that each visitor and employee had active clearance to enter the building, but nothing to keep a stolen badge from coming in with the wrong person: heavy security compared to other local facilities, but not much at all for a company serious enough to hire Bradford.

  As if reading her thoughts, Bradford said, “Most everything up here is boring.”

  One of the uniforms handed Munroe a badge and she draped the lanyard around her neck. Bradford nodded toward the elevator, where another guard desk stood behind a small queue of employees. “To get to the fun stuff, you’ve gotta go the extra round,” he said, “and even my badge wouldn’t get us through that.”

  Bradford led down linoleum-tiled halls.

  With the exception of a few potted ferns at the front, the building’s colors were limited to institutional white or varied shades of beige, making the interior even less impressive than the exterior.

  Bradford’s office was worse: a tiny space nearly filled by the one desk and two chairs that stood in for furniture. The window, which was hardly a window, opened out to the concrete of the building next door. Chairs and shoes—and possibly a table at one point—had scuffed up the paint, and the floor was industrial carpeting that had seen more tread and food and god-knew-what than its life span would have indicated.

  Munroe said, “They must not like you very much.”

  “Nah, this is pretty standard. Money goes into research while everything else falls apart. Come, I’ll show you the rest of the place.”

  He led back to the wide glass entry and down another hall just as plain and bare as the one they’d been in. Doors on either side broke the monotony, as did the occasional turn or hallway branch, but nothing differentiated one from the next.

  Employees streaming in through the front stiles arrived in greater numbers, heads down, seeing and yet not seeing as they wound their way to their workstations, but the overall people volume never rose. Rather, the facility hummed with the background noise of electronics and machines and the collective motions of hands and feet on many busy bodies.