Mask Market

“Not know your address,” the iceman said. “Know you. They know that, your address don’t matter—they can get you to come wherever they need you to be.”

That was a long conversation for Wesley. He had the same one with me, over and over again, right up to the time he checked out of the hotel he had hated from the moment the State had booked his room.

I might have kept going like I was: working the edges of the fringes, a poacher on rich men’s estates, a liar, con artist, thief…and, sometimes, a man who found kids and brought them home. But after I shot a pimp, McGowan stopped recommending me. And the people who started coming to me for tracking jobs after that weren’t looking for rescue work.

I might have kept going anyway—my lifestyle didn’t require a lot of income—but things kept…happening.

I thought I was done with things like that.

“Why did you give me this?” I asked Mama. I held up my cup of soup as if I was toasting an audience, so there wouldn’t be any doubt about what I was saying.

“You don’t like soup?” she said, ominously.

“I don’t like this soup. I mean, it’s not terrible or anything, but it’s not yours.”

“Ah!” she said, expressionlessly. “No time last night. Cook make soup himself.”

Every year or so, Mama tests to see if I recognize the one thing in that restaurant she makes herself. It would never occur to her to question that I love her, but she occasionally needs some reassurance that I love her soup.

I bowed slightly, brought my fingertips together. She removed the steaming tureen and my Barnard cup without another word.

“Prawns today,” she said. “Cook fix them good, okay?”

“I’m not hungry, Mama.”

“Max coming?”

“Should have been here already.”

“Okay,” she said, getting up and walking over to her post by the front register just as Max loomed up behind me.

As soon as he sat down, I made a gesture of ladling out a cup of soup, taking a sip. Then I made a face to indicate the soup was lousy today. Max nodded his thanks—Mama wasn’t going to waste a bogus pot of hot-and- sour without testing it on more than one of us.

I was in the middle of regaling Max with Little Eric’s monumental triumph over the Forces of Evil—that’s the Morning Line, for all you hayseeds—when the Prof strolled in with Clarence at his side. He slid in next to me, spoke out of the side of his mouth in a barely audible prison-yard whisper: “What’s with the old woman, Schoolboy?”

“What do you mean?” I said, charitably not mentioning that the Prof himself was older than corruption. Or that I knew why he was keeping his voice down.

“She tells me it’s cold out, maybe I want some soup. It’s the off-brand stuff today, am I right?”

“On the money.”

“Damn, son. You’d think she’d stop trying to gaff us with that tired old trick after all these years.”

“You want her to think up a new one?”

The little man turned and gave me a look.

“Where is my little sister?” Clarence asked, looking at his watch.

“Michelle’s not in on this,” I said. “Not this part, I mean.”

“I thought there was green on the scene,” the Prof riffed. “Something my boy found in that computer thing.”

“There was money,” I said. “All over that CD Clarence looked at, sure. But—”

“Right!” the Prof interrupted. “So—we did the scan, now we need a plan. And if we’re going to go in soft, we need our girl to walk point, don’t we?”

“The money on that CD, it belongs to the girl the guy who hired me was looking for.”

Max pointed his finger, ratcheted his thumb in the universal gesture of a hammer dropping.

“Yeah,” I said. “The guy who got smoked. And, it turns out, he was some kind of money man. Other people’s money.”

“So he wasn’t looking for the girl, he was looking for her stash?”

“I…I don’t think so, Prof. But we can’t start looking for either one without some answers.”

“But you know the girl, mahn,” Clarence put in. “That is what you said.”

“I know who she is. But the last time I saw her, she was just a kid. You saw her, too, Prof. You, too, Max,” I said, miming the last sentence.

The waiter brought a tureen of the booby-trap soup. Mama left her register just in time to see Max spit out a mouthful. He lurched to his feet, bowed an apology to the waiter.

“What’s up with this stuff?” the Prof said, pointing to the tureen. “You serving us tourist food now?” He wasn’t faking the annoyed look on his handsome face—if there’s one thing the Prof hates, it’s being upstaged.

“Oh, sorry,” Mama said. “Big mistake, okay?”

“This isn’t Mama’s soup,” I explained.

Max pointed an accusing finger at me, for not warning him.

Mama’s lips twisted—whether with pleasure at her family’s immediate recognition of the impostor, or in admiration of Max’s drama-queen performance, I couldn’t tell.

As soon as she left, I told Clarence about the time we had rescued Beryl Preston, watching the recognition flash in Max’s face, hearing the Prof say, “Oh yeah. That one,” next to me.

“Her name is different now,” the West Indian said. “Why would that be?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She came from money, that much we know. If only her last name was different, maybe she got married. But…”

“What’s the front name she’s using now?” the Prof asked.

“Peta.”

“And it was, what, Sapphire or something?”

“Beryl.”

“Middle name, maybe?”

“Nope. The girl we pulled away from that pimp, her middle name was Eunice. This one—on the CD—didn’t have a middle name at all.”

“Maybe the guy who wanted you to find her, he didn’t know it.”

“No, Father,” Clarence told the Prof. “There was a wealth of information there. Very, very detailed. If the woman had a middle name, it would have been there, I am sure.”

“And the guy who hired me, I don’t think it was money he was after,” I added, more sure of myself than when the Prof had first asked, even though I couldn’t say why.

Max responded to my rubbing my first two fingers and thumb together and giving a negative shake of my head with a “What then?” gesture.

“I don’t know,” I told them all. “He did have a whole lot of financial information on that CD, but if he was her money manager, he’d have known all that, anyway. And those photographs…that’s personal, not professional. It’s like the only reason he had all the financials listed was just to help whoever was going to look for her.”

“You think she played the player?” the Prof said.

“That would fit. He wouldn’t be the first manager to get himself managed. But let’s say she did—why would she just disappear after that? If the stuff on the CD is true, she had loads of assets in her own name. Legit, aboveground stuff. She gets in the wind, she can’t get her hands on any of that. Who gets to steal so much that they can afford to walk away from millions?”

“This guy, the one who hired you, he had money, right?”

“Looked like it, sure. But I only saw him that one time; it could have all been front.”

Max clasped his hands in front of him, then slowly pulled them apart. His fingers made a plucking gesture, one hand taking from the other. The looted hand balled into a fist as the thieving hand fled.

“They were a partnership, maybe working some kind of paper scheme, and she ran off with all the cash? Could be,” I acknowledged. “That’d make him spend time and money looking for her, sure.”

“And if she really had all that coin, she could buy herself major muscle,” the Prof said.