Mask Market

“And you never did.”

“I never did,” he repeated, like taking an oath. “One tunnel’s the same as another. Maybe one’s lined with punji sticks, one’s got those little gas bombs. Another one, there’s a VC pop shooter, sitting there for days without moving, just waiting for the fly to stumble into the web. It doesn’t matter what’s down there. You can’t control that. But you can control how you act.”

“Follow the rules.”

“That’s right. And I have. I always have.”

“You’ve got a good rep,” I acknowledged.

“‘Good’?” he said, snapping away his cigarette. “Fuck you, ‘good.’ I’m not good; I’m gold.”

There! His ferret’s pride finally bursting through the crust of fear, the opening I’d been probing for.

“Easy to say when you’re not looking at a ride Upstate,” I said. And I could say it —everyone in our world knows that when Burke goes down he goes down alone. My diploma was from my last felony jolt, magna con laude.

“I’ve been jugged three times,” Charlie said, like a tennis player returning an easy lob. “Twice as a material witness, once for some okey-doke they made up to put me in the pressure cooker. I just sat there until they cut me loose.”

“So they couldn’t bluff you. That’s not the same as—”

“‘Bluff’?” the ferret said. “The last one, they had a body, and they had the shooter. He was a pro. A contract man.”

He glanced up, as if calling my attention to something we both knew was there. The corner of his mouth twitched. Not a tic, telling me something in a language we shared.

But telling me what? That the contract man had been Wesley. Making an offering out of his honesty?

He couldn’t be bragging about keeping quiet, because nobody in our world would give Wesley up. Not out of loyalty—Wesley was alone. Not out of obedience to some twit screenwriter’s idea of “the code.” No, out of a fear so deep and elemental that it transcended logic and reason. Everybody knew: If you said the iceman’s name aloud to the Law, you were dead.

Or was the little ferret gambling? The whisper-stream had all kinds of rumors running about me and Wesley. Maybe Charlie thought I already knew about the job he was talking about, showing me he could have put me on the spot when he’d had the chance.

“Nobody could make a connection to the dead woman,” he went on, not missing a beat. “They knew it had to be her husband who paid to get it done, but they didn’t have a link. Oh, the shooter rolled on him,” he said, contemptuously, “but the husband was ready for that. Alibi in place, lawyers spread out thick as chopped liver on a bagel. The cops needed me to make the bridge.”

“So the shooter gave you up, too?” I asked, knowing it couldn’t be Wesley he was talking about now.

“Tried to.” Charlie shrugged. “First they offered me a free pass. Tell what I knew and walk away. Not a misdemeanor slap, not even probation. Immunity, straight up. I just looked dumb,” he said, showing me the same blank face he must have shown them. “Then they tried to scare me. A skinny little guy like me, a skinny little white guy, everyone knew what was going to happen if I had to go Upstate, they said.”

“But after the tunnels…”

“Yeah,” he said, unwilling to dignify the attempt to frighten him with another word.

“So what happened?”

“To me? Nothing. My lawyer told them, if they brought me into the case, I was going to testify the shooter was lying—about ever meeting with me—and since the DA needed the shooter to be telling the truth about the hit, they couldn’t risk letting the jury see him lie about any part of it. So they tried it on murder-and-motive.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. The husband would have beat it, too. Only the DA had another card. His girlfriend. She testified she had been pressuring him to get a divorce so they could get married, but his wife had all the money, so he was trapped. He told her they’d be married by Christmas. The wife got smoked in September. When he hadn’t married her by April, she went to the Law.”

“Happy ending.”

“That’s what I want here, too,” the tunnel-runner said. “A happy ending. Tell me what I have to do to get one, Burke. All I need is the rules.”

“You want to go back to being Benny Siegel?”

“I am Benny Siegel. That’s what it says on my birth certificate. On my 214, too. I’m like a farmer, okay? It’s not any one year’s crops I care about so much, it’s the land.”

“I get it.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Jews weren’t allowed to own land,” I said, softly, remembering the Mole’s lessons. “That’s why they wandered.”

“And did the work nobody else wanted to do…” Nodding for me to fill in the blank.

“…but everyone needed done.”

“Yes,” he said, solemnly.

In the silence, he took out another cigarette. His hands were as steady as a dead man’s pulse.

“Were the guys who jumped you Russians?” he asked.

“I don’t know. We didn’t have a conversation.”

“My wife…”

“What?”

“I love her. Tell me how she survives this, and it’s done.”

“Meaning it was her who called in the troops?”

“I don’t know that. But it’s all that’s left.”

“Does she work with you, Charlie?”

“Galya? She doesn’t even know—”

“Yeah, she does,” I cut off his self-delusion at the root. “If you didn’t sic those guys in the van on me—and I don’t think you did, okay?—then it was her. What’s she doing, calling the same crew that executed the man who was trying to hire me, Charlie? The same guy you sent to me?”

“I never told her a—”

“This is your wife, Charlie. She’s not just in your house; she’s in your business. And she’s in deep. At least this piece of it.”

“I—”

“She’s in your business,” I said again. “And if you want to protect her like you say, you better get in hers.”

“Just tell me,” he said, defeated.

“I want to talk to the people who want to talk to me. I want someone to tell them they don’t need to be trying to snatch me off the street to do that.”

“But, you do that, they’ll know who you are,” he said, his ferret’s brain back to professionalism. “And now they don’t know—or they would have come for you already.”

“You let me worry about that. I don’t like things hanging over me.”

“Me, either,” he said, pointedly.

“Then it’s time for you to have a talk with your wife.”

He just nodded—a man who knew the rules.

It took only another few minutes for me to run the whole deal down. Charlie didn’t argue. In fact, he made himself my partner in the enterprise, suggesting a couple of ways we could get what we needed done a little better.

“Call the number I gave you,” he said.

“When?”