Mask Market (3 page)

“They couldn’t be counting on all that,” the Prof said. “Even if nobody did a wallet-and-watch on the dead guy, that pistol’s in two different rivers by now.”

“Somebody spent a lot of money on this one,” I agreed. “That means it’ll make the papers. We might be able to find out something then.”

“The way I see it, whoever this guy wanted you to find, they found him first,” the Prof said, leaning back in his chair and lighting a smoke. “That ain’t us, Gus. None of our gelt’s on the felt.”

“My father is right,” Clarence said, more for the chance to say “my father” than to add anything. He used to do that all the time after the Prof first found him; now it’s only once in a while. “The money you got from that man, whoever he was, there will not be any more.”

“Maybe,” I told them, putting the jewel-cased CD on the table.

I
used my key to work the brick-sized padlock, opened the chain-link gate, and drove my Plymouth inside the enclosure behind the darkened gas station. While I was jockeying the big car into the narrow space, the three pit bulls who live there politely divided up the half-gallon container of beef in oyster sauce I had brought from Mama’s. It sounded like alligators tearing at a pig who had wandered too close to the riverbank. If they hadn’t recognized me, no bribe would have stopped them. By the time I finished stowing the Plymouth, they were back inside their insulated dog condo, probably watching the Weather Channel on their big-screen.

It was almost four when I walked into the flophouse. There was a man behind the wooden plank that held the register nobody ever signs. He looked up at me from his wheelchair and shook his head, the equivalent of the white-dragon tapestry in Mama’s window.

“All quiet, Gateman?”

“Dead as the governor’s heart at Christmas, boss.”

All cons know what Christmas means—pardon time. Last year, Sweet Joe, an old pal of ours, had sent us a kite, saying he was sure to make it this time. “Finally got my ticket to the door,” is what he wrote. His ticket was terminal cancer—the prison medicos had given him six months to live. The parole board responded with a two-year hit, meaning Sweet Joe was going to die behind the walls unless the governor did the right thing.

Sure. When Joe got the bad news, he took it like he had taken the twenty-to-life they threw at him thirty years ago—standing up. He’s gone now. Didn’t even last the six months.

I climbed the foul, verminous stairs, past signs that warn of all kinds of DANGER! The top floor is “Under Construction”—there’s all this asbestos to remove, never mind the mutated rats staring hungrily out from the posters on the walls. That’s where I live.

While I was away the last time, my family knocked down every wall that wasn’t load-bearing and built me a huge apartment. It’s got everything a man like me could ever want, including a back way out.

I never get lonely.

I
woke up at eleven, flicked the radio into life, and took a long, hot shower. While I was shaving, the mirror confronted me with the truth. My own mother wouldn’t recognize me. That’s okay—I wouldn’t recognize her, either. A teenage hooker, she had hung around just long enough to pop me out. Then she fled the hospital before they could run her through the system. Decades later, as soon as they unplugged me from the machines, I’d done the same thing.

“Baby Boy Burke” is what it says on my birth certificate. The rest of it is blanks, guesses, and lies. For “father” it says “Unk.” It should say “The State of New York.” That’s who raised me. Raised me to hate all of them: scum who spend their lives looking the other way…and getting paid to do it.

Having the State as your father bends your chromosomes like no inherited DNA ever could. You come up knowing that faith is for suckers. The only god I ever worshiped was the only one who ever answered my prayers. My religion is revenge.

That’s why, as soon as I escaped the hospital, I went on a pilgrimage. By the time I reached the end, I’d squared things for Pansy.

Getting that done had cost me my retirement fund, and I’d been scratching around for another score ever since—a nice, safe one. I haven’t been Inside since I was a young man, and I don’t get nostalgic for being caged.

While I was gone, a cop named Morales had found a human hand—just the bones, not the flesh—in a Dumpster. There was a pistol there, too. With my thumbprint on it. Far as NYPD was concerned, that upgraded me from “missing and presumed” to “dead and gone.” And the longer I stayed away, the deeper the whisper-stream carried that message into the underground.

I was halfway through shaving when the story came on: Unidentified man found shot to death on the sidewalk, in a quiet neighborhood just a couple of blocks from West Street. The body had been discovered by a building super who had gone out to rock-salt the concrete so his tenants wouldn’t break their necks going to work in the morning. A landlord could get sued for that. The announcer said the police were not releasing any details, pending notification to next of kin. Meaning they knew who the dead man was but they weren’t telling.

That wasn’t news, just a collection of maybes. Maybe the cops found the cash the man in the camel’s-hair coat said was in his car. Maybe they divided it up among themselves; maybe they were holding back the info to use as a polygraph key once they had suspects to question. Maybe the money was in the car, but in a hidden compartment, one they hadn’t found yet. Maybe it was never there at all, and the guy was just heading to his car to make a getaway. Maybe the cops still hadn’t connected him to the Audi….

The print journalists would take a deeper look—they always do—but it would take them longer to come up with anything.

I walked downstairs, picked up my copy of
Harness Lines
and a couple of fresh bagels from Gateman—he’s got a guy who delivers every morning—and ate my breakfast while I decided which horses were worthy of my investment. I only bet the trotters. Like me, they haul weight for their money, and they usually earn it after dark.

I smeared a thick slab of cream cheese on the last of a poppy-seed bagel, and held it under the table.

“You want…?” I started to say, before I choked on the words. Pansy wasn’t lurking by my feet, waiting for the treat she knew was always going to come.

I thought I had stopped…
feeling
her with me. Stopped seeing her looming dark-gray shadow in the corner by the window. Stopped hearing the special sound she always made before dropping off to sleep, like a big semi downshifting to climb a hill.

“This late in the day, you’re probably on your third quart of French vanilla up there, huh, girl?” I said aloud.

If you think I’m crazy to be talking to my dog like I do, fuck you. And if you don’t get how that’s better than crying over her, fuck you twice.

M
y little sister called a couple of hours later.

“That bar you recommended? Well, baby, let me tell you, it is
beyond
tacky. Imagine, putting ice in a Bloody Mary!”

So the stash we had gotten word about
was
from Sierra Leone. That shifted the risk-reward odds too far to the wrong side for us to take the shot. Stealing a load of “blood diamonds” would be like hijacking counterfeit bills. Sure, we could find someone to take the loot off our hands, but the discount would shred our profit down to cigarette money.

“I thought it sounded too good to be true, the way it was described to me,” I said, not surprised.

“Maybe we should open our own place,” Michelle said, switching to the liquid-honey voice she earned her living with.

“I was about to,” I said. “But the financing fell through.”

“That, too, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s this weather, sweetie. Winter is the suicide season. Like it’s raining depression. But it won’t last, you’ll see.”

“Sure.”

“All right, Mr. Grouch. Want to buy me dinner?”

“Okay. I’ll see you at—”

But I was talking to a dead line.

D
riving through Chinatown at night is like riding the subway past one of those abandoned stations. You feel the life beyond the shadows, but all you ever get is a glimpse—then it’s gone, and you’re not really sure if you actually saw anything. You might be curious, but not enough to leave the safety of your steel-and-glass cocoon to get a closer look.

I was explaining to Max why we might want to consider investing a significant chunk of our betting kitty in a ten-dollar exacta wheel tomorrow night. For seventy bucks, we could have all the possibilities covered, provided this six-year-old we’d been following since he was a bust-out flop in his freshman season came home on top.

With Max, this is never a hard sell. Anytime he falls in love with a horse, he’s ready to go all-in. And Max gets there faster than a high school kid in a whorehouse.

This particular horse, a gelding named Little Eric, was a fractious animal who was prone to breaking stride, a move that takes a trotter out of any chance to win. But Max and I had watched some of those races, and we had marked every single time it happened. We decided the breaks weren’t because Little Eric was naturally rough-gaited. He couldn’t handle the tight turns at Yonkers very well, so he usually spent a lot of every race parked out. He was okay on the outside, but every time he tried for a big brush to get clear, he’d go off-stride. He didn’t have the early foot to grab the lead right out of the gate, but he was a freight train of a closer. And he liked the cold weather, too.

The reason I fancied him so much for tomorrow night was that he was moving to The Meadowlands. That’s a mile track, with only two turns to negotiate, as opposed to the four at Yonkers. Little Eric could take his time, settle in, and make his move late, down that long stretch. He was in pretty tough, but he could beat that field if he ran his number. And the outside post he drew wouldn’t be as much of a handicap at The Big M.

Nothing close to a sure thing, but a genuine overlay at the twelve-to-one Morning Line price; maybe even more if the favorite drew a lot of late action.

Michelle made her entrance in a lipstick-red jacket with shoes to match. She glistened like a cardinal in a snow-covered tree, defying winter to dull her beauty.

“I’m such a sucker,” she said, as Max held a chair for her to sit down. “I’m still a young girl, but I’ve been around long enough to know better.”

Max and I put on matching quizzical looks—Michelle sometimes loops around a story like a pilot circling a fogged-in airport.

“You know what’s the stupidest thing about racism?” she said.

Max and I shrugged.

“That it’s stupid,” she said, grinning. “Racism, it makes you think you know a person just because you know his race, see?”

“Sure,” I agreed, thinking of some of the bogus wisdom I’d been raised on, passed along by the older street boys I was sure were the smartest people on the planet. After all, they lived on their own. And they never seemed afraid. “Niggers are all yellow inside,” they’d counseled me. “In a crowd, they act like they got balls, but get one of them alone…”

I got one alone once. We both wanted the same shoeshine corner. He was a little bigger; I was a little faster.

“You didn’t run,” I told him, a few minutes later. It was hard to talk—my mouth was all bloody, and my tongue was swollen to twice its size.

“You didn’t pussy out, neither,” the colored kid—I’d already stopped thinking of him as “nigger” in my mind, even though I didn’t realize it—said, sounding as surprised as I was.

I guess some older guys had lied to him, too.

“Well, you know the hard-core Jews? The ones who dress like the Amish?” Michelle said, accepting a light for her cigarette—a thin black one with a gold filter tip.

“Hasidim? Like the ones who control a piece of Crown Heights?”

“Whatever,” Michelle said, airily. “You know who I mean…the ones who handle diamonds. For them, it’s all a handshake business, right? No paper. Everyone knows you can trust those guys. It’s always been that way.”

“So?”

“So the guy
I
trusted, the one who was setting up that job for us? He never said the diamonds were dirty.”

“You didn’t really trust him, girl. Otherwise, we would just have gone on ahead, right?”

“Oh, I know. But
still.
I mean, who would ever think one of those super-straight Jews would go anywhere near dirty stuff.”

“They bought diamonds from South Africa even when the boycott was on,” I said. “And uranium, too.”

“Mole says—”

“—they just did what they had to do,” I finished for her. I’ve known the Mole since we were kids. By him, Israel drops a nuke on one of its neighbors, it’s just doing what they had to do.

You could say it’s people like the Mole who keep Israel from finding peace. Or you could say it’s people like the Mole who keep it from disappearing. Me, I don’t care. The only country I care about is about the size of Mama’s restaurant—that’s enough space to hold every member of my family.