Mask Market

“The Invisible Man,” the Prof chuckled. That’s what he calls himself when he’s dressed as a foot soldier in the Vagrancy Corps. The ankle-length coat he always wore was big enough for three of him, and they only have metal detectors in the subways on special occasions.

“They came awfully quick,” Michelle said, grim-faced.

“It don’t take a lot of time to drop a dime,” the Prof told her.

“Could they have followed you, mahn?”

“How?” I asked Clarence. “From where? Starting when?”

“That clue is true,” the Prof agreed. “Only way that works is if Burke was spotted same time they took out that rich guy, and followed him, right? Come on! That was so, they already passed up a hundred better shots than the one they took.”

“They don’t have anything,” I said, checking my voice to make certain I wasn’t graveyard-whistling. “That night, they never saw where I came from, or where I went. And all Charlie’s got for me is a phone number.”

“He’s got something else,” the Prof said.

“What?”

“He knows where you’re going to be tomorrow morning, son. Time and place leaves him holding an ace.”

“You think he’ll show, then?”

“Got to, honeyboy. He knows where you’ll be one time, sure. But we, we know where he lives.”

The flower boxes outside Penn Station were pure New York: thick concrete tubs surrounding death-brown evergreens, with spikes all along the border to prevent panhandlers from finding a seat between engagements.

I crossed Thirty-third Street to the plaza, where they get a different class of visitor, and sitting is encouraged. I took the place up on its invitation, looked around casually. After dark, this place would be a skateboarder’s paradise. The broad expanse of flat surfaces would magnet the graffiti taggers, too. In another hour or so, the place would be crowded with office workers eating pushcart lunches, eyeing one another like it was a singles bar. But now it was all business.

A scrawny Caucasian in a white mesh jacket with a neck tattoo I couldn’t read at the distance was performing an elaborate set of hand gestures. It looked like he wasn’t having any luck persuading his audience, a big-headed black man in a hugely oversized basketball jersey, red and white, with number 23 on the back.

A flushed-faced man in some kind of green maintenance uniform stared openly at a reddish-brown man sporting an American flag do-rag, trying to make up his mind.

A black pigeon with a perfect circle of white on its head patrolled the grounds, treasure-hunting. A flock of tiny brown birds with pale undersides surrounded me, asking me to slip them something before the pigeon mob caught wise. I crumpled a piece of bagel in my fist, flicked the crumbs behind me. The little birds hit like a flight of locusts.

I didn’t have to glance at my watch to know I was early. The group of Chinese teenagers catty-corner from me had been there since at least midnight. Or maybe they were handling it in shifts. I couldn’t even tell how many of them there were, the way they kept drifting together, then pulling apart to float around the perimeter. They were all wearing shiny fingertip black leather jackets over goldenrod silk shirts buttoned to the throat, their obsidian hair greased into high pompadours.

The gang kids all worked for Bobby Sun, but Max had some sort of treaty with his crew, the Blood Shadows. They left the restaurant—and my personal parking space in the alley behind it—alone, and Max left them alone. But there was more to it than a nonaggression pact. Some of those empty-eyed killer children worshiped Max in a way they couldn’t have explained and didn’t understand…but trusted with all of their life-taking lives.

Anyone who moved on me in that plaza would be Swiss cheese.

Clarence posed against the entrance, resplendent in a bottle-green jacket with wide lapels and exaggerated shoulder pads, a white felt hat shielding his eyes. Charlie had never met Clarence, but he knew the Prof, who was being invisible somewhere close by. Max stood right in the center of the plaza, arms crossed. He looked as if he had sprouted from the cement, still as a statue except for his eyes, which were swiveling like a pair of tank turrets.

Clarence left his post, started a slow strut around the plaza, hands in his pockets. He looked like a peacock, hoping to audition some new hens. But he was really a coursing hound, and the under-clothes bulges he was looking for weren’t female curves.

I watched as a dark-blue BMW coupe slowly drove by. It had been circling the block since before I arrived, passing by irregularly, depending on traffic. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I never would have noticed. Michelle.

Nobody could miss the mammoth old Buick four-door, though. Originally painted egg-yolk yellow, years of never seeing a garage had faded the rolling hulk to fish-belly white, with a rust-red roof. The Blood Shadows’ war wagon, far out of its territory, orbiting like the mother ship, ready to take everyone home when it got the signal.

Still no men in tracksuits. No blue van.

And there was Charlie Jones, walking toward me, making sure I saw him coming.

“Here,” I said, as he sat down next to me, “put this on.”

“What for?” he asked, voice quavering as he looked down at the red baseball cap with a white bill I was holding in my lap.

“It’s to make you easy to pick out, Charlie.”

“Pick out? For who?”

“Who do you think I got your address from, Charlie?” I wanted him to hear his own name coming out of my mouth. Over and over again.

“I don’t…”

“Yeah, you do,” I told him. “You’re a very smart guy, Charlie. You’ve been fishing in the whisper-stream for so long, you know what to keep and what to throw back.”

“So you didn’t die,” he said. Like he’d just won a big bet but the bookie wouldn’t pay off.

“We don’t die, Charlie. None of us. We just come back looking different. You won’t know my brother if you ever see him again, either.”

“Your…?”

“Put the cap on, Charlie,” I said. “You wouldn’t want Wesley to hit some citizen by mistake, would you?”

It took him a while to put the cap on his head—his hands were shaking so badly, he dropped it the first time he tried.

“How long have you known?” he finally asked.

“Years and years,” I assured him.

“So why now? What did I—?”

“That last job you had for me…”

“Yeah?”

“The guy who was going to hire me stepped out to get something from his car. He got gunned down on the way. It was in the papers.”

Charlie shrugged, saying it all.

“What I don’t know, Charlie,” I continued, “is whether the shooters want to clean house. My house.”

“I don’t do names,” he said, a little strength coming into his voice. “You know that, Burke.” Saying my name, reminding me how far back we went, how long his own reputation stretched.

“The dead guy, his name was Daniel Parks.”

Charlie just shrugged again.

“He was looking for someone. Someone he wanted me to find. Maybe the shooters were looking for that person, too.”

“All I had for that guy was the number I gave you to call,” he said. “That’s all I ever have.”

“That does sound like you, Charlie. It even sounds like the truth. There’s only one problem, okay? I’m on my way back from your house yesterday and this van pulls up. Out pops some guys dressed like the ones who killed the guy you sent to me. And they try and snatch me, right there on the street. I can’t quite see that as a coincidence.