Mask Market (2 page)

“That’s right,” he said, nodding vigorously.

I waited.

“Uh, is this a good place to talk?” he said, looking over his right shoulder.

“Depends on what you’re going to say.”

“I wouldn’t want the waiter to—”

“They don’t have any here,” I told him. “Go to the bar, get a refill on whatever you’re drinking, a whiskey double for me, and bring them back. Nobody’ll bother us.”

It was warm in the bar, but, even all wrapped up, I wasn’t uncomfortable. When I was a young man, I had done some time in Africa. I was on the ground as the Nigerian military slaughtered a million people, made the whole “independent” country that tried to call itself Biafra disappear. The UN, that useless herd of toothless tigers, wouldn’t call it genocide—that would mean they might have to send in troops. Didn’t call what went down in Rwanda by its right name, either. Same for the Sudan. But they drew the line in Kosovo. Ethnic cleansing? Go ahead; just remember to keep it dark.

I got out of Biafra just before it fell, and I took home malaria as a permanent souvenir. Ever since, I can wear a leather jacket in July and not break a sweat. But the Hawk can find my bone marrow under the heaviest cover.

The man came back, sat down, put my whiskey in front of me, held up his own drink. “To a successful partnership,” he said.

I didn’t raise my glass, or my eyes.

He put down his drink without taking a sip. “I was told you specialize in finding people.”

“Okay.”

“Yes. Well…I, I need someone found.”

If life was a movie, I would have asked him why he wanted the person found. He would have told me a long story. Being hard-bitten and cynical, I wouldn’t have believed him. But, being down on my luck, I would have taken the case anyway. Unless he’d been a gorgeous girl—then I would have taken it for nothing, of course.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Can you tell me how much it would cost to do that? Find…the person, I mean.”

“No,” I said. “I can’t tell you that. Here’s how it works: You pay me by the day. I keep looking until I find whoever you’re looking for, or until you tell me to quit trying.”

“Well, how much is it a day, then?”

“Same as you just paid me. I cover all expenses out of that. And there’s a twenty-G bonus if I turn up what you want.”

“Ten thousand a week,” he said, the slightest trace of a question mark at the end of the sentence.

“We don’t take weekends off,” I told him. “One week, that’s fourteen. Payable in advance.”

“That could run into a lot of money.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’ll have to think that one over.”

“You know where to find me,” I said.

“Well, actually, I don’t. I mean, the man who I…spoke to, he just took my number, and you called me, remember?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“So how do I…? Oh. You mean, now or never, right?”

“Right.”

He took a hit off his drink. “I don’t walk around with that kind of cash,” he said. “Who does?”

“Best of luck with your search,” I said, moving my untouched glass to the side as I started to stand up.

“Wait,” he said. “I’ve got it.”

I settled back into my seat. If we were still in that movie, I would have told him that lying was a bad way to start a relationship. If we were going to work together, I would need the truth, all the way. Down here, we play it different: “true” means you can spend it.

“Not on me,” he said. “But close by. In my car. I keep an emergency stash. You never know….”

I let my mouth twitch. Let him guess what that meant.

“Hold on to this,” he said, handing me a black CD in a pale-pink plastic jewel case, as if it sealed a bargain between us. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, and we’ll go over everything.”

I pocketed the CD. Folded my gloved hands like a kid waiting for the teacher to come back.

H
e got up and left. I counted to thirty; then I got up, too, heading for the restrooms. I walked past the twin doors until I found myself in the open space behind the bar. I crossed the space, moving like the Prof had taught me a million years ago. I can’t phantom through a room without displacing the air like he does, but I can move smooth enough not to disrupt the visuals unless someone’s staring directly at me.

The back door had a heavy alarm box next to it, but I could see it was unplugged. I opened the door just wide enough to slide through, clicked it
soft
behind me, and made my way down a short flight of metal steps to the alley.

I didn’t want my car. I knew what direction he’d come from; if I cut the alley right, I’d come out close enough to see that camel’s-hair coat.

Nothing.

Quick choice: was he still behind me, or ahead? I felt the Hawk’s bite, remembered how the guy was dressed, and figured he’d be moving as quick as he could. I took off the glasses, switched my black watch cap for a red one, hunched my shoulders against the wind, and started covering ground.

I saw him cross ahead of me, moving toward the river. I gambled on another alley, and drew the right card. I marked the direction he was going in, and moved out ahead.

The big Audi was parked mid-block, a purebred among mutts. I floated into a doorway, wrapping the shadows around my shoulders. If he just took off, instead of getting something from inside his ride and walking back to the bar, I’d figure he was busy on a cell phone, and company was coming—I wouldn’t be there when it arrived. But if he really kept that kind of cash in his car, I wanted that license number.

He walked past me on the opposite side of the street. I stayed motionless, but he never glanced my way.

Two men came toward him from the far end of the block, walking with too much space between them to be having a conversation. The guy in the camel’s-hair coat was almost to his car before he saw them. He put his hands up and started backing away, making a warding-off motion with his palms.

A car door opened. A man in a black-and-gold warm-up suit stepped onto the sidewalk behind the man in the camel’s-hair coat. He brought his two hands together and spread his feet in one flowing motion. The man in the camel’s-hair coat went down. The shooter waved the other two back with his free hand, then walked over to the man lying on the sidewalk, an extended-barrel pistol held in profile. The whole thing was over in seconds, as choreographed as an MTV video, on mute.

A vapor-colored sedan pulled out of its parking spot. The shooter got into the back seat, and it drove off. The two men who had blocked the target were gone.

The street stayed quiet.

I took a long deep breath through my nose, filling my stomach. I let it out slowly, expanding my chest as I did.

Then I got gone.

M
y Plymouth looks like a candidate for the junkyard. But it’s a Rolex under all the rust, including an independent rear suspension transplanted from a wrecked Viper some rich guy had thought made him immune to physics, and a hogged-out Mopar big-block with enough torque to compete in a tractor pull. So I feathered the throttle, even though I wasn’t worried about snow on the streets.

The same year my car had been born, the mayor had been a guy named Lindsay. He was the ideal politician, a tall, good-looking, Yale-graduate, war-veteran, “fusion” Republican who ran on the Liberal ticket. He got a lot of credit for New York not going the way of Newark or Detroit or Los Angeles during the riots the year before. But when the big blizzard hit in February of ’69 and paralyzed the city, Lindsay took the heat for the Sanitation Department being caught napping, and that was the end of his career.

Every mayor that followed him got the message. New Yorkers will tolerate just about anything on their streets, from projectile-vomiting drunks to mumbling lunatics, but snow is un-fucking-acceptable.

I made my way over to the West Side Highway, rolled north to Ninety-sixth, exited, and looped back, heading downtown. Even at two in the morning, I couldn’t be sure I didn’t have company—in this city, there’s always enough traffic for cover. But I knew a lot of places that would expose a shadow real quick, some as flat and empty as the Sahara, others as clogged as a ready-to-rupture artery.

I opted for density. Took a left on Canal, motored leisurely east, then ducked into the Chinatown maze. Made two slow circuits before I finally docked in the alley behind Mama’s joint, right under a white square with a freshly painted black ideogram. My spot. Empty as always—the Chinese calligraphy marked the territory of Max the Silent, a message even the baby-faced gangsters who infested the area understood.

I flat-handed the steel door twice. Seconds later, I found myself staring into the face of a man I’d never seen before. That didn’t matter—he knew who I was, and I knew what he was there for.

The restaurant never changes, just the personnel. Like an army base with a high turnover. I went through the kitchen, past the bank of payphones, and sat down in my booth. The place was empty. No surprise—the white-dragon tapestry had been on display in the filthy, streaked front window when I had driven past. If it had been blue, I would have kept on rolling. Red, I would have found a phone, made some calls.

Mama appeared from somewhere behind me, a heavy white tureen in both hands. “Come for visit?” she said.

“For soup.”

“Sure, this weather, good, have soup,” Mama said. She used a ladle to dole out a steaming portion into a red mug with BARNARD in big white letters curling around the side. Mama is no more a cook than the place she runs is a restaurant, but her hot-and-sour soup is her pride and joy. Failure to consume less than three portions per visit would be considered a gross lack of respect.

I took a sip, touched two fingers to my lips, said, “Perfect!”—the minimally acceptable response.

Mama made a satisfied sound, her ceramic face yielding to some version of a smile. “You working?”

“I was,” I said. I told her what had happened. When I got to the part about the shooting, Mama held up a hand for silence, barked out a long string of harsh-sounding Cantonese. Two men in white aprons came out of the kitchen. One went to the front door, crouched down, and positioned himself so he had a commanding view of the narrow street. The other vigorously nodded his head twice, then vanished.

I went back to my story and my soup.

A few minutes later, the front door opened, and the man who had gone back to the kitchen area walked in. He conferred with the man by the window. They came over to where we were sitting. Rapid-fire conversation. I didn’t need a translator to understand “all clear.”

“So?” Mama said.

“I don’t think it had anything to do with me, Mama. The way I see it, whoever this guy was, he was important enough for someone to have a hunter-killer team on his trail. Once the spotter had him pinned, he called in the others.”

“We do that, too, now, yes?”

“Right,” I agreed. I got up and headed for the payphones.

E
veryone was there in less than an hour. The Prof and Clarence drove in from their crib in East New York. The warehouse where Max the Silent lives with his wife, Immaculata, was only a short walk away.

I’d been on the scene when they first met, on a late-night subway train, a lifetime ago. Immaculata was part Vietnamese, part who-knows? First dismissed as a “bar girl” by Mama, she was instantly elevated to Heaven’s Own Blessing when she gave birth to Max’s baby, Flower. The moment her sacred granddaughter decided on Barnard College, Mama had personally emptied the school’s merchandise catalogue.

Apparently, she considered the sweatshirt she had presented to me last year to be adequate compensation for the fortune she’d extorted from me over the years “for baby’s college.”

I told the story of my meet, gesturing it out for Max, even though he can read my lips like they were printing out words.

“The boss pay for a toss?” the little man asked, miming a man bent over a victim, rifling through his pockets. Max nodded, to let us know he was following along.

“Didn’t look like it, Prof. The shooter plugged him once, then walked over and made sure,” I said, gesturing to act out my words. “But I didn’t see him search the body, and the other two were already in the wind.”

“If he had a silencer, it must have been a semi-auto,” Clarence said. The young man usually didn’t speak until he thought the rest of us were finished. But when he was on sure ground, he would.

“My son knows his guns,” the Prof said, approvingly. “The shooter pick up his brass?”

“Not a chance,” I said. “The street was too dark, and he fired at least three times.”

“The police, they will know it was an execution,” Clarence said, his West Indian accent adding formality to his speech. “If the killers did not search the dead man, he will still have everything with him.”

“If the street skells don’t loot the body before the cops get on the scene,” I said. “That neighborhood, that hour, who’s going to call it in, some good citizen? Besides, you couldn’t hear the shots, even as close as I was.”