Mask Market

“You got transportation?”

“A car?”

“That’ll do,” I said. I gave him the information I wanted him to have, walked to the end of the alley I’d been using as an office, and put the cell phone on top of a garbage can. Whoever found it would see there were plenty of minutes left. Probably use it to call his parole officer.

I pulled the glove off my left hand, fished a Metrocard out of my side pocket, and dropped below the sidewalk.

“Charlie,” said the little black man with the ageless, aristocratic face. “That boy’s one diesel of a weasel. He might slouch, but he’d never vouch.”

“I know, Prof. But no matter who this guys turns out to be, there’s no way that it’s me he’s looking for. If anyone asked Charlie to put him in touch with a specific guy, it would have spooked him right out of the play.”

The only father I’d ever known closed his eyes, looking into the past. The ambush that had almost taken me off the count years ago had been set up by a middleman, too. Only, that time, I was told the client wanted me for the job. Me and only me.

“How much green just to make the scene?” he asked.

“Two to meet. For me to listen. That’s as far as it’s gone.”

“It’s a good number,” the little man mused. “That’s serious money, not crazy money.”

“The job is finding someone, Prof.”

“Charlie don’t find people,” the little man said. “He finds even one, he’s all done.”

“I did meet him, though.”

“Charlie?”

“Yeah. And I called the spot.”

“So, if he was fingering you…”

“Right. That diner, it’s down by the waterfront. All kinds of bums hanging around. And, in this weather, you could put a dozen men on the street in body armor, and nobody’d even look twice.”

“There’s something else about Charlie,” the Prof said, nodding to himself.

“What?”

“Maybe he’s going along with you being your own brother, maybe he’s not.” The little man’s voice dropped and hardened at the same time. “But he knows what number he called to get you to show up. You be Burke, you be his brother, don’t make no difference. Because Charlie, he knows you not by yourself. You got family. He can’t snap no trap on all of us. He double-crosses you, he’s out of the middle. For as long as he lives. No way our boy bets that number.”

Icicles fringed the bottom of the venom-yellow streetlight reflected in my rearview mirror, turning it into one of those old-fashioned parlor lamps, the kind with tassels hanging off the bottom of the shade.

I felt right at home. Waiting.

I’d set the meet for one in the morning, at a West Side bar in a building slated for demolition. New York is a big piece of machinery; it needs its gears greased to keep running. So the whole neighborhood was getting plowed over, like a field being readied for a different crop. That’s Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.

In the neighborhood I’d picked, strip joints where “upscale” meant five bucks for a bottle of Bud Light were driving out residential buildings. Only the rumors that our sports-whore mayor was going to find a way to green- light massive razing so he could build a gigantic football stadium near the Javits Center kept the whole area from being leveled. Building owners were laying in the cut, waiting to see the City’s hole card.

My ’69 Plymouth was huddled against the alley wall, its black-and-primer body mottled into an urban camouflage pattern. Anonymous, near-invisible. Like me, to most.

A cinnamon Audi sedan—a big one, probably an A8—circled the block for the third time, cruising for a place to park. I figured it for the guy I had been waiting for. There was an open space in front of a fire hydrant just across from me, but parking tickets can cost you more than money—ask David Berkowitz.

My watch read six minutes short of the meet time when a man came up the sidewalk toward the bar. He was bareheaded, hunched over against the razoring wind, wearing a camel’s-hair topcoat with a white scarf. The kind of guy who would drive a hundred-grand car, and be used to parking it indoors.

I let him get inside before I made my move. I hadn’t seen enough of his face to pick him out of a crowd, but I wasn’t worried—it wasn’t the kind of joint where you checked your coat.

He was standing at the bar, facing the doorway, the camel’s- hair coat opened to reveal a charcoal-gray suit, white shirt, and geometric-pattern tie that flashed green-gold in the dim light. He had a shot glass in his right hand, a pair of butter-colored gloves in his left.

I walked toward him. He saw a man in a well-traveled army jacket, winter jeans, and work boots. If anyone asked him later, he would say the man’s hair was covered with a watch cap that came down over the top of his ears, and his eyes were unreadable behind the heavy lenses of horn-rimmed glasses. My face was temporarily unscarred, thanks to Michelle’s deft touch with the tube of Cover-mark she always carries.

The man coming toward him had a pair of gloves, too…on his hands.

I nodded my head to my left. He stepped away from the bar and walked in the direction I had indicated. I slipped past him and took a seat in an empty wood booth, facing the door. He sat down across from me.

Up close, he was older than his voice, but a guy who took care of himself, or had people do it for him: hundred-dollar haircuts, facials, manicures. I was guessing a heavy pill regimen, regular workouts, maybe even a little nip-and-tuck, too.

“Are you—?”

I held up two fingers.

He nodded, reached into the inside pocket of his coat, and brought out a plain white envelope. He put it on the table between us. I picked it up, slipped it into a side pocket.

“You’re not going to count it?”

“You want something done, what’s in it for you to stiff me on the front end?” I told him.

“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