Mask Market (28 page)

“Okay, then.” He put his hands together like we’d just sealed a deal. “We did not know who you were, or where to find you. We still do not. But we had to talk with you, so we…did what we did. You know how such things are.”

I didn’t say anything.

“We would have preferred to do what I am going to do now,” he said, watching my face as he spoke the words. When I didn’t react, he went on: “Pay you for your time. For your time and your trouble.”

“What’s the going rate for being tortured?”

“You think we were going to—?”

“You weren’t looking to hire me,” I said, keeping my voice edgeless. “So you must think I know something. Something you want to know. If I told you that you were wrong, that I didn’t know anything, what were you going to do? Thank me for my time and cut me loose? Or use that Taser on me?”

“We would never have—”

“I like this way better,” I cut him off.

He grunted something I took for understanding. “My name is Yitzhak,” he said. “But I don’t have to know your name to know you are a professional. So! A man hired you to do something. All we want to know is what he hired you to do.”

“Which man?”

“The man who can’t pay you anymore.”

“What’s it worth to you to know?”

“That depends on what you tell us.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Bravo. What is it worth to
you,
then?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, making it a question he had to answer, if he wanted us to keep talking.

“This man, he stole from us. Money. A great deal of money. Wherever that money is, it’s not in a wall safe. Or a suitcase.”

“Why didn’t you just ask him?”

“You mean, instead of…? All right, I will tell you. Maybe, if you understand us, you will believe us, too.”

I lit a cigarette, a signal to my backup that I was okay. For now.

“This man was in trouble,” he said. “He thought this trouble was a burden he could transfer. Do you understand?”

“He was a cooperating witness?”

“He was, if our information is correct,
negotiating
to be exactly that. But the deal had yet to be struck.”

“So you needed to move before—”

“No. Not for that. This man was a thief, and he stole from many. We are businessmen, and money is important. But in
our
business, there is something much more important than money. It is not just that this man stole from us; it was
known
that he did it. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

Understand it?
I thought to myself.
I was raised on it.

Inside, if a sneak thief takes your stuff, it’s nothing personal—it’s just part of living there, like rain falling in Seattle. But if the thief shows off what he took, it’s like he raped you. If you don’t square that up, you don’t get to keep
anything
that’s yours.

You’ve got a pack of Kools in your cell. A fresh, new pack. You go to take a shower, come back, and find it’s gone. That happens. And that night, you see a guy on the tier smoking a Kool, holding a whole pack in his other hand. Still nothing—the commissary sells them to anyone with money on the books. But then the guy says, “Thanks for the smokes, punk.” And now, now you
have
to hurt him. You don’t do that, you’re going to be meat on some freak’s plate.

But all I said to Yitzhak was, “If other people thought it was safe to steal from you…”

“Americans see with wide eyes,” he said, sounding more like a Talmudic scholar than a businessman who regarded hunter-killer teams as a line item on a budget. “You say ‘Russian’ to an American, and he thinks he knows all there is to know. But there are Odessa Beach Russians—you know the people I mean—and there are…others.

“We have been on this earth for thousands of years. But, every place we go, we have to establish our own identity. In American minds, a Jew is always motivated by money. Money comes first. That is a perception we have to change, if we are to be allowed to conduct our own business. You understand this?”

“If you don’t build a rep for always getting even, it makes people think you’re weak.”

“Correct!” he said, pleased with the pupil. “The stereotype is that we are clever people, but not strong people. In our business, it is more valuable for our enemies to believe we are crazy than that we are clever.”

“Which is why this guy who stole from you couldn’t just disappear. You needed his head on a stake.”

His shrug was eloquent.

“But the money…?”

“We made our own inquiries. Before we…acted. This was a sophisticated thief. There was some system in place—it is too complicated for me to understand; that is not my role—but the money was vacuumed right out of his accounts, and then it just disappeared. The thief himself would not know where it ended up.”

“Then what good would it do him?”

“He had a confederate. Maybe more than one. Someone he trusted.”

“And you think
I
know who that is?” I said, snapping my unsmoked cigarette into the darkness.

“No,” he said, smiling. “If you knew where that much money was, you would be long gone. Far away.”

“So what did you want to snatch me for?”

“We know you met the thief. We had to learn whether you were…”

“His ‘confederate’? Get real.”

“Yes, we understand that. We understand that
now.
The information we had was…sketchy. A man such as that one, he would have no friends.”

I understood what the Russian was telling me. “Friends,” as in those who would avenge his death.

“So what was I supposed to tell you?”

“We still want the money,” the man said. “We thought maybe you could help us find it.”

“You think this guy told me?”

“No,” he said, brushing off my sarcasm. “We don’t think this man knew
we
knew he was a thief. But he knew we would find out eventually.”

“That explains it,” I said.

“What?” he asked, too eagerly.

“Why in the world a white man would want to go to Africa.”

“Please,” he said, tilting his chin at me for encouragement.

“I did some…work over there. Years ago. But I keep up my contacts. It’s a good thing to have people in a country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty.”

“Where?”

“Nigeria.”

“Nigeria?” His voice reeked suspicion. “Free-lancers haven’t worked there since—”

“Nineteen seventy,” I finished for him. “But it’s still the most corrupt country on the planet.”

“You have not been to Russia recently,” he said, as if his nationalistic pride had been insulted.

“I haven’t been to Russia at all. But I know how to get things done in Nigeria.”

“And that’s what this man wanted?”

“He didn’t know specifics. All he’d heard was that I could get someone set up in an African country where a lot of cash would guarantee a lot of safety. I think, from the little bit he said, that he thought it was South Africa, but he wasn’t particular.”

“So what happened?”

“You know better than me,” I said. “I told him I needed twenty-five thousand just to start the process. I thought we’d have to make another meet, but he said he had it with him. Not on him, in his car. He went out to get it…and he never came back.”

“Did he leave anything with you?”

“Yeah. The tab for the drinks we’d ordered.”

He said something under his breath. Sounded like Russian.

“Did he come to you directly?” Asking me a question he already knew the answer to.

“No.” The truth.

“Will you tell me the name of the person who introduced you?” Testing me; they already knew it had been Charlie, thanks to his wife.

“No.”

“A man must choose his own path,” he said, very deliberately. “Must it be your choice to stand in mine?”

“I’m no different from you,” I answered. “If I gave you a name, my own name would be hurt. And that would put me out of business.”

“For fifty thousand dollars? Cash?”

“No.”

He made a guttural sound I took for approval. “You are a businessman, fair enough. Let us say the name of the person who introduced you to the thief means nothing to us, yes? But, should you happen to run across information—say, from
another
source—that might be of value, you understand that you would be compensated?”

“Sure.”

“What do you think is fair?”

“For…?”

“For your time and trouble, as I said.”

“For my
past
time and trouble?”

“If you like.”

“I like the number you mentioned.”

“What we did was wrong, but we had no other way,” he said. “That is worth something, I agree. But not fifty thousand. That was an offer for information. This you declined. So, for the time and trouble, let us say…ten?”

When I nodded, he unzipped his warm-up suit. “If you want to earn ten times this, all you have to do is call me.”

“Call you with what?”

“With the name of anyone else who wants to go to Nigeria.”

“A
re we okay now?” The voice of Charlie Jones on the phone. Soft, with just the faintest trace of a tremor.

“You’re still into me,” I told him. “Into me deep.”

“Could I square it with—?”

“This isn’t about money,” I told him. Meaning it wasn’t about money
now.

“What, then?” he said, his voice already sagging under the weight of what he felt coming.

“I have to talk to her.”

“Not my—?”

“Yeah. You can be there, too. But there’s questions I have to ask.”

“Just tell me and I’ll—”

“You know I can’t do that,” I said.

His end of the line went on semi-mute; the only sounds were his shallow breathing and the cellular hum. Then…

“When will this be over?”

“When I know I’m safe, that’s when you’ll know you are, too.”

That brought me more silence. I waited. Then…

“It can’t be here. At the house, I mean.”

“Of course not,” I said, as if we had agreed on everything up to then. “Let me treat you to dinner. Wherever you’d like.”

“Not in Manhattan.”

“Wherever
you’d
like. Fair enough?”

“O
h God! How could you
know
?” Loyal squealed, staring into the box she had unwrapped so daintily that the floor was carpeted in shredded paper. “This is
just
like the dolly I had when I was a little girl. She was too big to be a baby, but that’s what I called her. ‘Baby.’”

“I’m glad you like it,” I said.

“‘Her,’” she corrected me.

“Baby.”

“Yes,” she mock-pouted, cuddling the oversized porcelain doll Michelle had promised me would be worth the fat chunk of my money she’d spent on it.

“What happened to your…to the original one?” I asked her.

“I gave her away,” Loyal said. Her eyes were damp, but her chest was puffy with pride. “When I was only…about twelve, I think, I saw this story in the paper. It was about this little girl, a real little girl, much younger than me. She lived in another part of town. There was a big fire, and her whole house got burned up. Her momma went right into the flames to save her, and she died doing it.

“The little girl—Selma was her name—she was in the hospital. In the paper, it said she was going to live with her mother’s family. I asked my father, what about her daddy, why wasn’t he going to take her home? My father told me Selma didn’t have a daddy. I was young, but I wasn’t dumb. I knew enough to ask Speed, and he explained it to me.

“The next day, I made him drive me over to the hospital. They wouldn’t let me see the girl—she was burned up too bad to have visitors, they said—but they let me leave Baby there for her.

“When I told my father, I thought he might be mad enough to…Well, I thought he’d be mad for sure, because that doll had cost a pretty penny, and I knew it. But he put me on his lap and gave me a kiss and told me I was a fine girl.

“I never forgot that. Because, just the week before, when I tried to sit on his lap, he said I was getting too old for that kind of thing.”

“Do you ever think about her? That little girl, Selma?”

“I do,” she said. “And when I do, I think about her with my Baby, and I feel good inside myself. I could never explain it. It was like, when I heard that child’s story, my heart just went out to her. Went out to her and never came back.”

I
f you need to get to D.C., Amtrak’s a lot better than a plane. No baggage scanning, no real ID check, and door-to-door quicker, too.

A business-class ticket on the Acela Express gave me access to the “quiet car”—the one place on the train where cell phones were banned. I had figured it would be packed—the cars I walked through to reach it sounded like they were full of magpies on angel dust—but it was just about empty.

I cracked open my newspaper. A human—the paper called her a “mother”—in Florida had been prostituting her little girl for years. Twenty bucks a trick. Extras were extra. Her older daughter, almost twelve, had finally resisted the beatings. So the mother just sold her outright. A used car plus five hundred in cash, and some lucky vermin got to make his slimy dreams come true.

I wished I had a bullet for every one of them. Not a simple death-dealer, a magic bullet—the kind that would take one life and give back another.

In my world, you get even because you’re nothing if you don’t, but it’s never enough. It can’t be. You can’t
really
get even. You can make someone who hurt you dead, but whatever they took from you is never coming back.

The ride was less than three hours, right on time. Even more on time was the canary-yellow Corvette convertible waiting at the curb outside, a truly spectacular redhead behind the wheel.

“Toni?” I said, as I walked up to her.

“Who else?” she answered, grinning.

S
ome women get annoyed if you stare at their breasts. This gorgeous Titan didn’t care where I looked, so long as it wasn’t at her Adam’s apple.

“So you’re Michelle’s big brother,” she said, appraisingly. “Somehow, I thought you’d be…”

“Better looking?”

“No!” she giggled, patting my thigh.

“More sophisticated? Smarter? Taller?”

“Stop it! I just meant…Well, you know Michelle. She’s so…refined. You look a little rough around the edges, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“You’re not the first. And most don’t say it so euphemistically.”

“
That’s
what I was looking for! Michelle said you were a real intellectual.”

“Is that right?” I said, reaching into the breast pocket of my Harris-tweed jacket and slipping on a pair of plain-glass spectacles.

“Oh, those are perfect! You’re some kind of investigator, aren’t you?”

“I guess I am.”

“Well, anyone who works with that husband of hers must be smart. That Norm, he’s a genuine genius, she says.”

“She’s not lying,” I promised, finally learning the name Michelle assigns the Mole for social occasions that require bragging. “He’s way past being a genius. Their son’s going to win a Nobel Prize someday.”

“Terry? That’s if Hollywood doesn’t grab him first. That is a
gorgeous
young man!”

“That’s outside my area of expertise.”

“What exactly are we doing, you and me?” she said, making it clear she was just curious—the answer would have no effect on her participation.

“We’re going to look at a house. You already have the address.”

“A house you’re thinking of buying?”

“No. There’s a woman living there; it’s her I’m interested in,” thinking,
Michelle said she was one of us.
“Interested in professionally.”

“Oh?”

“Michelle told you what I do for a living?”

“Well, of course. Like I said. You’re some kind of investigator, aren’t you?”

“An investigator who doesn’t know one end of this part of the country from another.”

“Toni the Chauffeur, at your service,” she said, saluting.

“I appreciate it, Toni. Very much. But this isn’t about finding a house as much as it is finding a way inside it, do you follow me?”

“In broad daylight?” she said, sliding the ’Vette through an intersection on the caution light.

“We’re not talking about a burglary here. I want to talk to the person who’s inside—who I
hope
is inside. Not because she’s the one I’m looking for; because she can…maybe…lead me in the right direction.”

“And you don’t think she’ll be, what’s the word you guys use, ‘cooperative’?”

“I can’t even guess,” I said, truthfully.

“So where do I come in?” Toni asked.

“I’m not sure yet,” I told her. “I was hoping you might have some ideas.”

“T
his neighborhood is first-tier,” Toni said, her sheer-stockinged legs flashing in the sun as she changed gears. “Not absolutely top of the heap—the plots are too small for that. But these are all seven-figure houses.”

“There’s slums in New York where you could say the same thing.”

“Oh, I
know.
Michelle showed me around the last time I was up. I couldn’t
believe
it.”

I looked down at the map spread open in my lap. “What’s a ‘crescent’?” I asked.

“If you mean when they use it for an address, it’s just a fancy name for ‘street.’ Probably shorter than most, maybe a cul-de-sac. How far…?”

“Next left.”

“How fast do you want to go by?”

“Like we’re just passing through. On our way to somewhere.”

“What number?” she asked, turning in.

“Twenty-nine.”

“Be on your side.”

The house was two stories with an attached garage. Dark green, with white shutters around the windows.

“Nothing special,” Toni said. “Four bedrooms, three baths, probably. But they spent seriously on the landscaping.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” I said. We were at the end of the block, and Toni turned the Corvette onto a slightly wider street.

“Those back trees are old growth,” she said. “The way the plantings were arranged beneath them, it’s almost like outdoor bonsai, with the flower beds and those hedges and all.”

“A privacy thing?”

“Could be. You think whoever you’re looking for could be staying there?”

“You should consider a change of careers,” I told her.

“You mean I’m right?” she said, flashing another smile.

“On the money.”

“Let’s get coffee,” she said.

“T
his is her?” Toni asked, holding the blown-up photo of Beryl Preston. The redhead’s long nails were beautifully manicured, heavy bracelets concealing wide wrists.

“Yep.”

“How long ago was this taken?” A woman’s question. A suspicious woman.

“I don’t know exactly. But she’d be in her early thirties now, so it looks recent, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” she said, grudgingly.

“I was going to just walk up and see who answers the door. But…”

“What?”

“Well, you’re about the age of the girl I’m looking for. A bit younger, sure, but close enough.”

“Yes?” she said, widening her improbably greenish eyes.

“If you were to just ring the bell, and say you were looking for Beryl, who knows? Her mother—that’s the woman who lives there—might just call her downstairs or something. Hell, it might be Beryl herself who answers the door. She’s got no reason to think anyone would be looking for her here.”

“But she
does
know people are looking for her?”

“Oh yeah.”

“This isn’t a—?”

“What did Michelle tell you?” I said, letting my voice harden.

“I know,” she said, working her lips like she was making a decision.

I sipped my hot chocolate, feeling the minutes slow-click against the clock in my mind.

“Let’s talk outside,” she said.

“I
was a runaway,” Toni said. “I didn’t know what I was, but I knew what I wasn’t. Do you understand what I’m—?”

“Yeah,” I said. And I did.

“I…My family had money. They sent me to…professionals. That didn’t work: I was still a girl inside, no matter what they called it. I was…I was sad, but I wasn’t suicidal. Until they sent me to the healer.”

I made an encouraging sound in my throat.

“It was a…They called it a Christian retreat, but it was a prison.”

“Because you couldn’t leave?”

“Because they had bars on the windows,” Toni said, fingering the tiny gold cross that caught a shaft of sunlight as it twinkled against her white sweater, standing between her prominent breasts like a warning. “Because there was no privacy. No privacy ever. Not even in the bathroom. Because they were afraid you might…do something to yourself.