Mask Market

“It isn’t what you think,” I said, not moving from my spot, radiating calm out to him. “I just needed to ask you a question, and I didn’t know where else to reach you.”

He looked over my shoulder, expecting…I don’t know what.

“One question,” I said. “Then I’ll—”

“Pick a place,” he said, his voice so tight it vibrated like a tuning fork. “Pick a time. I’ll be there. Set it up any way you want. Please! Just don’t—”

“You know the plaza next to Penn Station, on the Eighth Avenue side?”

“Yes.”

“Say, eleven tomorrow morning?”

“Yes. Yes, I’ll be there, okay?”

“Don’t ruin a good thing by being cute, Benny.”

He looked at me the way a steer in the killing funnel looks at the rifleman waiting at the end: a stare of dull, helpless hatred. I turned my back on him and started for the subway.

I was about twenty minutes into my meandering half-hour walk when a dark-blue commercial van with tinted windows pulled over to the curb ahead of me. The back doors opened and two men jumped out. I didn’t have to see the tracksuits to know who they were.

The smaller one was a mongoose. He circled behind me, looking for the back of my neck. The big one plowed straight ahead, a charging bull. I glanced over my shoulder. The mongoose was holding what looked like an oversized plastic automatic—Taser! screamed in my head. The bull had his hands spread wide, like we were going to do Greco-Roman. I spun to my right to give them a visual of me running, planted my right foot, torqued hard, and rushed the big one.

I registered a broad face and a flattened nose just before we closed. As he wrapped thick arms around me, my steel-toed boot shattered his right ankle. He grunted in pain and locked on, trying to take me to the ground with him. I drove my inside forearm against his chest, jammed my right hand under his chin, and snapped my wrist as I forked my two front fingers past his nose into his eyes. He shrieked, grabbed at his face, and let go.

I spun to face the mongoose. He danced, looking for the exposed flesh his weapon needed to work. I X-ed my jacketed forearms over my face and ran at him. He stepped back, surprised, and I caught him with a side kick to the thigh. I rolled with the kick and took off running.

I dashed across two lawns, looking for a back yard. Heard shouting behind me, but no shots. Cold comfort—I hadn’t heard shots when they’d snuffed out Daniel Parks, either.

I ran through some back yards and pulled myself over a wooden fence, hoping there was no dog on the other side and cursing Daylight Saving Time.

I made it to the street, scanned the area. Looked clear, but I figured by then the locals were lighting up the 911 switchboard. I turned a corner, pulled off the leather jacket, and dropped it on the ground. I put on the gloves and the orange watch cap, then walked down the sidewalk until I hit the apex of a triangle—Clarence in his Rover at one point, the subway back to Manhattan at the other.

I couldn’t see the blue van, but I couldn’t be sure it hadn’t seen me, so I chose the subway.

I looked over my shoulder as I swiped my Metrocard. Nothing. Down on the platform, I spotted a battered payphone, but the Manhattan-bound train was pulling in. No time.

Two stops later, I got out at Continental Avenue, slipping into the heavy foot-traffic that’s always there at that hour. I crossed over to the cab stand, told the driver I wanted the Delta terminal at La Guardia.

At La Guardia, I dropped the gloves in a garbage can, used an alcohol wipe to clean the congealed eyeball fluid off my right forefinger in the men’s room, and left the watch cap in a stall.

Plenty of working payphones there. I rang Clarence’s cell.

“I’m out,” I said.

“Saw you drop down, mahn.”

I waited my turn on the airport cab line, then rode a Crown Vic with bad shocks to Broadway and Seventy- fifth, just north of what guys my age still call Needle Park. If the cabbie wondered about my lack of luggage, he kept it to himself. Or maybe he intuited that I wasn’t fluent in Senegalese.

I walked over to the 1/9 line, and used my Metrocard one more time.

When violence erupts at me, the same thing always happens. A tiny white dot lasers in my brain, bathing the world in a blue-edged light. I watch myself move through that blue- edged light, like a man underwater, everything so very slow.

Later, I can play it back, like a stored VCR tape.

Over and over again.

What I can never do is erase it.

Max tapped his temple, raised his eyebrows in a question.

“No,” I told him, shaking my head. “I didn’t think.”

The Mongol nodded approval. The foundation to all his teaching is replacement of instinct. That viper-strike he’d taught me is really an escape move; it can’t be thrown from a distance. You have to give your enemy a grip on you to make it work, and that goes against every instinct…especially mine.

I’d been a boxer in prison—one of the Prof’s endless schemes. It didn’t require me to actually win any fights to pay benefits. As a fighter, I was what they used to call “pretty.” Slick and smooth. Very fast hands. I didn’t have one-shot KO power, but I threw cutter’s punches, and I was a good finisher.

I always had plenty of backers, because, even with all my speed, I was never a runner—I stayed in the kitchen and traded. There was never a lot of money on me to win—they don’t pay too much attention to weight classes Inside, and I was usually matched against bigger guys—but I was an ace at going the distance, even against the hardest bangers.

“Fighting’s the same as friendship, Schoolboy,” the Prof told me. “The best ones always try to give a little more than they take.”

When I got out the first time, it took Max about ten minutes to show me I was never going to make a living with gloves on my fists. At first, we sparred a lot. Me trying to hit him, him watching me try. Once he had me dialed in, he worked with what he had. No more boxing, no more rules.

Surprise is speed

Speed is power

Thinking is slow

Slow is weak

I’d been ready for the two men who’d jumped out of the van. Been ready for a long time.

“It was a snatch,” I said out loud, gesturing to include Max. “If they’d wanted to shoot me, I was an easy target.”

“Didn’t even need all that noise and nonsense,” the Prof agreed. “They could have done you just the same way they did that boy who was gonna hire you.”

“Yeah,” I said, slowly. In our world, we know that there’s no such thing as the “precision beatings” you see gangsters order in the movies. Violence isn’t surgery: You send a couple of men out to break a guy’s legs, the guy struggles, the bat slips, and, just like that, the beating’s a homicide.

There’s a thousand ways that can happen. You can’t order a pre-beating medical report on a target, like those degenerate doctors who worked in Southern prison farms used to do, telling the torture-loving guards whether it was safe to keep whipping. One punch can do the trick. All it takes is a heart condition you didn’t know about. Or an eggshell skull.

“It was a capture, not a kill,” I said. “They wanted to talk to me, all right.”

“I was in position the whole time,” Clarence said. “There was nothing like a blue van by the subway.”

“You said you saw me go down there?”

“Oh yes, mahn. As soon as I spotted the orange cap, I knew something had gone wrong. But you were moving nice, and I didn’t see anyone interested in you.”

“I had your back all the way to the hack, Schoolboy,” the Prof said.

“You were in the subway?”