Mask Market

Mama made a satisfied sound, her ceramic face yielding to some version of a smile. “You working?”

“I was,” I said. I told her what had happened. When I got to the part about the shooting, Mama held up a hand for silence, barked out a long string of harsh-sounding Cantonese. Two men in white aprons came out of the kitchen. One went to the front door, crouched down, and positioned himself so he had a commanding view of the narrow street. The other vigorously nodded his head twice, then vanished.

I went back to my story and my soup.

A few minutes later, the front door opened, and the man who had gone back to the kitchen area walked in. He conferred with the man by the window. They came over to where we were sitting. Rapid-fire conversation. I didn’t need a translator to understand “all clear.”

“So?” Mama said.

“I don’t think it had anything to do with me, Mama. The way I see it, whoever this guy was, he was important enough for someone to have a hunter-killer team on his trail. Once the spotter had him pinned, he called in the others.”

“We do that, too, now, yes?”

“Right,” I agreed. I got up and headed for the payphones.

Everyone was there in less than an hour. The Prof and Clarence drove in from their crib in East New York. The warehouse where Max the Silent lives with his wife, Immaculata, was only a short walk away.

I’d been on the scene when they first met, on a late-night subway train, a lifetime ago. Immaculata was part Vietnamese, part who-knows? First dismissed as a “bar girl” by Mama, she was instantly elevated to Heaven’s Own Blessing when she gave birth to Max’s baby, Flower. The moment her sacred granddaughter decided on Barnard College, Mama had personally emptied the school’s merchandise catalogue.

Apparently, she considered the sweatshirt she had presented to me last year to be adequate compensation for the fortune she’d extorted from me over the years “for baby’s college.”

I told the story of my meet, gesturing it out for Max, even though he can read my lips like they were printing out words.

“The boss pay for a toss?” the little man asked, miming a man bent over a victim, rifling through his pockets. Max nodded, to let us know he was following along.

“Didn’t look like it, Prof. The shooter plugged him once, then walked over and made sure,” I said, gesturing to act out my words. “But I didn’t see him search the body, and the other two were already in the wind.”

“If he had a silencer, it must have been a semi-auto,” Clarence said. The young man usually didn’t speak until he thought the rest of us were finished. But when he was on sure ground, he would.

“My son knows his guns,” the Prof said, approvingly. “The shooter pick up his brass?”

“Not a chance,” I said. “The street was too dark, and he fired at least three times.”

“The police, they will know it was an execution,” Clarence said, his West Indian accent adding formality to his speech. “If the killers did not search the dead man, he will still have everything with him.”

“If the street skells don’t loot the body before the cops get on the scene,” I said. “That neighborhood, that hour, who’s going to call it in, some good citizen? Besides, you couldn’t hear the shots, even as close as I was.”

“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