Mask Market

“But now that the man who was looking for her is…out of the picture, would she not come back to her own home?” Clarence asked.

“Maybe he wasn’t the only one looking,” the Prof said, lighting a cigarette.

“Right,” I agreed. “We don’t know anything about the shooters. If they were working for her, that’s one thing. She’s got that kind of protection in place, making too much noise looking for her is a good way to get ourselves dead. But if they were looking for her themselves…”

“Yeah,” the Prof rode with me. “Same thing. But we can’t go nosing around the dead guy’s life. The cops would get on that like a priest on an altar boy.”

“I’m not worried about that end of it,” I said. “Not now, anyway. If she stole from the dead guy, she’s got the money. Finding her, that’s what we have to do. But I’m not even going to start looking until we know one thing: How did the shooters know where the guy who hired me was going to be that night? That’s the only way to know if I’m in the crosshairs, too.”

Nobody said anything for a few minutes.

Finally, Max got up. He returned with a handful of objects he had pulled off other tables. Identifying each one with gestures, he constructed a triangle on the tablecloth: the guy who hired me, the girl, and the shooters. Then he built another: the guy who hired me, the shooters, and me. One more: the guy who hired me, the shooters…and Charlie Jones. Using chopsticks, he built a matrix. When he was done, a wooden arrow pointed right at the ferret.

“Charlie tipped off the shooters?” the Prof said, touching Max’s chart.

Max shrugged his shoulders.

“Even if he did, he would not have to bring Burke’s name into it, would he?” Clarence said.

Now it was the Prof’s turn to shrug. “Who we gonna ask?” he said. “We don’t know who the shooters are. And nobody knows where Charlie cribs.”

“If he’s kept the same place he had years ago, we might know,” I said.

“How?” the Prof asked. But his voice was already tightening against what he knew was coming.

“The book,” I told them, gesturing to Max at the same time.

The book was Wesley’s once. Mine now. It had shown up in one of my drop boxes after Wesley had canceled his own ticket. What the media called his “suicide note” was a confession to a whole string of paid-for homicides. A couple of those had been mine. Wesley knew how things worked: If he left the cops enough to clear those cases, it was the same as clearing me.

But Wesley hadn’t told them everything. That was in the book he had mailed to me. The killing machine had recorded it all, the details of every hit: who got done, who paid for it, and how much. That was my legacy, a Get Out of Jail Free card, but I could only play it once. I hoarded it tight, my most valuable possession.

I knew Charlie Jones had to be in that book. He’d never put a penny in Wesley’s hand, but he was a bridge to plenty who had. And the iceman always covered his back trail.

“Mama,” I said, when she came over to where we were sitting, “could I have the book?”

I didn’t have to say anything more. Her eyes narrowed, but her expression didn’t change. Mama was our family’s bank, and Wesley’s book was in what passed for a safe-deposit box. Only, in Mama’s house, you never say the iceman’s name out loud.

“Now you want it?”

“Please.”

“Order food. I get it, okay?”

Meaning: The book was buried somewhere in the catacombs under the building that housed the restaurant, and it would take a while for her to dig it out.

“Bring me some duck for luck,” the Prof said to one of the white-coated hard men who passed for waiters in Mama’s joint.

It was almost an hour before Mama came back. She put a thick notebook about the size of my hand on the tablecloth and walked away, as if afraid it was going to explode. The book was bound in oxblood leather, with a gold ribbon page-marker, its fine linen pages almost three-quarters full of Wesley’s tiny, machinelike printing. I always wondered where he had found such a book, and what he would have done when he ran out of pages.

I’d been through the book plenty of times before, but every time I opened it, there always seemed to be more than I remembered, as if my ghost brother was still making entries from wherever he was. There was no real organization or index, but it moved in rough chronological order. From looking at the first date, I could tell Wesley hadn’t started his book when he’d started killing. That would have been a long time earlier, back when we were kids.

I felt the book throb in my hands. Not like a beating heart; like an oncoming train. I opened it, and started reading.

I took a drag off the cigarette I hadn’t remembered lighting, put it back in the ashtray that hadn’t been on the table when I’d started reading. “I’ve got him,” I said.

The Prof and Clarence came back to where I was sitting. I looked up and there was Max, right across from me; he had never left.

“Charlie hired Wesley four times,” I said. “Not directly, but he made the matches.”

“Everything go okay?” the Prof asked. He wasn’t asking if the hits had gone down, that was never a question; he was asking if Wesley had been paid. The one time we knew he hadn’t been, the iceman had turned the whole city into a killing ground.

“Yeah,” I said, still thinking about one of the jobs I’d run across in the book. Looked like Charlie Jones had known some politicians.

“Must have followed him home,” the Prof said. “No way my man pays anyone for info.”

“It doesn’t say. But he’s got an address here, all right.”

“Where was the little weasel holing up back then?” the Prof asked, frankly curious.

“Over in Queens. Briarwood.”

“Briarwood?” the Prof jeered. “In that neighborhood, Charlie’d stick out like the truth in Jesse Jackson’s mouth.”

“He might,” I said, my finger on the page where I’d found him. “But Benny Siegel wouldn’t.”

“That boy is big-time slick,” the Prof said, his preacher’s voice garnished with admiration. “You got to give it to him. Folks been trying to pass ever since there was folks, but that’s a one-way street—people trying to move up, not down. Charlie got to be the first time I ever heard of anyone trying to pass for Jewish.”

“You know how Wesley worked it,” I said, looking over my shoulder to make sure Mama wasn’t close by. “You wanted work done, you never got to see him face-to-face. You hired a voice on the phone, sent the money to wherever he told you. But it was a different number and address for every job. So Charlie, he had to know a way to find Wesley. Or to leave word for him, anyway.”

“Do you think they ever met?” Clarence asked. He was the only one of us who hadn’t known Wesley, but he’d been hearing the legend since his early days working for a Jake gunrunner in Brooklyn. He always wanted to know more, but he had to balance his curiosity against the Prof’s disapproval.

“You mean, like, were they pals?” the little man said, bitterly. “Forget that. Wesley, he was about as friendly as a cobra with a grudge.”

“But if he and Burke—”

“We came up together,” I said, hoping to cut off the young man’s questions before we had a problem.

“Still. If he was as—”

“Look, son,” the Prof said, gruffly. “Wesley was the mystery train. You never knew where he was going, but you always knew where he’d been—dead men be all over the tracks. Nobody knows why he picked Burke out when they were little kids. Ain’t no point talking about it. Nobody knows. And nobody ever gonna know, okay?”

“Your father’s right,” I told Clarence, gently guiding him away from the edge. “When it comes to Wesley, you ask a question, the answer’s always the same: Nobody knows. But I can tell you this for sure: He wasn’t friends with Charlie Jones. He wasn’t partners with him. That wasn’t Wesley. He was always one up. If Charlie knew where to leave a message for Wesley, then Wesley had to know where Charlie lived; it’s as simple as that. Wesley wasn’t