Mask Market

immaculate, white-fronted look-alikes. Pushing the doorbell triggered some ethereal quasi-Asian music. I tucked the meter under one arm and waited, not hopeful.

The man who opened the door was a compact blond, with delicately precise features. He was wearing a thin black mock-turtleneck pullover that had to be cashmere tucked into cream-colored slacks with elaborate pleats. His pale hands were as neat as a surgeon’s.

“Yes?”

“Uh, I was looking for Peta. Peta Bellingham?”

“I think you have the wrong address,” he said, politely.

“No, I don’t,” I said, letting a current of concern into my voice. “I’ve been here before. To see—”

“‘Peta.’ Yes, I understand. But that must have been a while ago.”

“Not so long ago,” I said, taking the risk.

“Ah,” he said. “You must mean whoever lived here before I did.”

“I…guess. I mean, I always thought this was her own place. But I could be…”

“Well, I don’t think so,” he said thoughtfully, one hand on his hip. “Not with the way the owner has things set up.”

“Damn.”

“You haven’t seen her…Peta…in quite a while, have you?”

“I’ve been away,” I told him, watching his eyes to see if it registered.

“You’re not some stalker, are you?”

I shook my head sorrowfully. “No, I’m not a stalker,” I said. “I’m a professional disappointment. Peta’s not my girlfriend; she’s my sister. Maybe if I’d ever answered her letters while I was…away, I’d know where she is now. She’s the only one in the family who stuck by me. I figured, let me…finish what I had to do by myself, not drag her into it, you know?”

He studied me for a long minute, making no secret of what he was doing.

“Do you think the owner might have a forwarding address for her? You know, where to send the security deposit and all? All I want to do is send her a letter, tell her I’m…”

“That wouldn’t be much help, I’m afraid.”

“Maybe not. But it would be worth a try. I’ve got no one else to—”

“No, I mean…Oh, come in for a minute, I’ll show you what I’m talking about.”

I followed him into a living room that looked like a Scandinavian showroom, only not as warm.

“Just sit down anywhere,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

I found a metal-and-leather thing that I guessed was a chair, right next to a wrought-iron sculpture—another guess—and a plain black cylinder that seemed to be growing out of the hardwood floor.

He came back into the room, a purple file folder in one hand, a black-and-white marble ashtray in the other.

“You smoke, don’t you?” he said.

“Yeah, I do,” I lied. “How did you know?”

“I’m good at things like that,” he said, just this side of smug. He placed the ashtray in the precise center of the black cylinder—at least now I knew what it was for. I took out a pack of Barclays, tapped a cigarette free, and fired it up with a wooden match.

He seated himself on a severe-looking bench the same color as his hair, and handed me the file folder.

“This is why I don’t believe the owner would be of any help to you,” he said. “I’ve never met him. Take a look at the lease. Did you ever see anything so bizarre?”

I opened the folder. It looked like a conventional lease, on a preprinted form. On the last page, just above the line for the tenant’s signature, was a paragraph in large bold type. It specified that the rent was to be paid via wire transfer to a numbered account in Nauru; the tenant was to authorize auto-debit from his own account no later than the third day of each month. Then, in big red letters:

THIS CLAUSE IS DEEMED TO BE AND SHALL BE THE ESSENCE OF THE AGREEMENT. IT IS UNDERSTOOD AND AGREED THAT ANY VIOLATION OF SAID CLAUSE CONSTITUTES A WAIVER OF ALL TENANT’S RIGHTS TO OCCUPY THE PROPERTY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE RIGHT TO CONTEST IMMEDIATE EVICTION PROCEEDINGS.

“My attorney told me that’s all nonsense,” the blond man said, as if to calm my anxiety over the prospect of him being evicted. “Absolutely unenforceable. But, as you can see, it’s all so very mysterious, isn’t it?”

“Sure is,” I agreed. Thinking, Here’s something that wasn’t on your little dossier, Mr. Certified Financial Planner.

“I’m truly sorry,” the blond man said. “I wish I could have helped you.”

“You did,” I told him, grinding out the cigarette I’d allowed to burn down in the ashtray. “If you know a room’s empty, saves you the time of knocking on the door, right?”

“Well, my door…I mean, if you think of something that I might be able to help you with, please come back.”

“I just might,” I lied, again.

Patience. I knew I had to wait for Wolfe’s crew to get back to me with something—like a solid confirm on the address Wesley had for Charlie Jones, or whatever was in the police file on the divorce papers filed by Daniel Parks’s wife—before I made my next move. There wasn’t any point working the rest of the info on that CD. If Beryl still owned the condo in Battery Park—and it felt like she did—she’d had it all locked and loaded way before she got in the wind.

I was spending money like I was actually working for Parks, but he was never going to settle his bill. In my world, that’s just wrong. But I had a writhing viper by the back of its neck, and I couldn’t just drop it and walk away until I was sure it wasn’t me it wanted to bite.

I stayed low, waiting. Every time Loyal called, I told her I was trying to put a deal together, and it needed all my attention.

“Has it got anything to do with…what we talked about, baby?”

“It…it could, is the best I can say now, little girl.”

“Well, are you sure you can’t come by? Even for an hour or so? I’ll bet you’d work better if you got your batteries recharged every so often.”

“I’d work happier,” I said. “But not better. When you’re on top of a deal like this, you can’t take your eye off the ball, or it gets dropped.”

If she knew that was all deliberately vague snake oil, she didn’t let on.

“Nobody call,” Mama said, in response to a question I hadn’t asked.

I made an “It’s out of my hands” gesture.

Max looked down at his own hands, a pair of oversized slabs of bone and sinew, each with a horned ridge of callus along the chopping side, the first two knuckles as dark and bulging as ball bearings.

I shook my head No. With nobody to answer our questions, it didn’t matter if we came on sweet or sour.

The Mongol’s face settled into lines of calm. He reached inside his jacket and took out a deck of cards, still in the original box, and put them on the table between us, raising his eyebrows.

“Let’s do it,” I said.

Out came Max’s score pad. Probably Volume 90—we started our life-sentence gin game a million years ago. When we had gotten bored with the steady diet, I taught him to play casino. Now we alternate randomly.

But it didn’t matter what game we played; we always kept score in dollars. At one point, Max had been into me for six figures, built up over a decade. He was lousy at cards to start with—a hunch-playing, omen-trusting, logic-hating sucker to his core—and Mama’s incessant-insistent kibitzing made him even more incompetent. Then, one day, he caught a streak gamblers only fantasize about. Before we stopped—Max wouldn’t let me walk while he was on his prime roll—it was more than thirty-six hours later, and he was just about even.

Took me another few years to get it all back.

I opened the pack of cards as Mama, smelling an opportunity to screw things up for Max, drifted over from her register. Mama worships numbers. Adores them. She can work her way through the toughest sudoku puzzle faster than the Prof can pick a lock—“Not Japanese!” she had hissed at me the first time I