Mask Market

“What we did was wrong, but we had no other way,” he said. “That is worth something, I agree. But not fifty thousand. That was an offer for information. This you declined. So, for the time and trouble, let us say…ten?”

When I nodded, he unzipped his warm-up suit. “If you want to earn ten times this, all you have to do is call me.”

“Call you with what?”

“With the name of anyone else who wants to go to Nigeria.”

“Are we okay now?” The voice of Charlie Jones on the phone. Soft, with just the faintest trace of a tremor.

“You’re still into me,” I told him. “Into me deep.”

“Could I square it with—?”

“This isn’t about money,” I told him. Meaning it wasn’t about money now.

“What, then?” he said, his voice already sagging under the weight of what he felt coming.

“I have to talk to her.”

“Not my—?”

“Yeah. You can be there, too. But there’s questions I have to ask.”

“Just tell me and I’ll—”

“You know I can’t do that,” I said.

His end of the line went on semi-mute; the only sounds were his shallow breathing and the cellular hum. Then…

“When will this be over?”

“When I know I’m safe, that’s when you’ll know you are, too.”

That brought me more silence. I waited. Then…

“It can’t be here. At the house, I mean.”

“Of course not,” I said, as if we had agreed on everything up to then. “Let me treat you to dinner. Wherever you’d like.”

“Not in Manhattan.”

“Wherever you’d like. Fair enough?”

“Oh God! How could you know?” Loyal squealed, staring into the box she had unwrapped so daintily that the floor was carpeted in shredded paper. “This is just like the dolly I had when I was a little girl. She was too big to be a baby, but that’s what I called her. ‘Baby.’”

“I’m glad you like it,” I said.

“‘Her,’” she corrected me.

“Baby.”

“Yes,” she mock-pouted, cuddling the oversized porcelain doll Michelle had promised me would be worth the fat chunk of my money she’d spent on it.

“What happened to your…to the original one?” I asked her.

“I gave her away,” Loyal said. Her eyes were damp, but her chest was puffy with pride. “When I was only… about twelve, I think, I saw this story in the paper. It was about this little girl, a real little girl, much younger than me. She lived in another part of town. There was a big fire, and her whole house got burned up. Her momma went right into the flames to save her, and she died doing it.

“The little girl—Selma was her name—she was in the hospital. In the paper, it said she was going to live with her mother’s family. I asked my father, what about her daddy, why wasn’t he going to take her home? My father told me Selma didn’t have a daddy. I was young, but I wasn’t dumb. I knew enough to ask Speed, and he explained it to me.

“The next day, I made him drive me over to the hospital. They wouldn’t let me see the girl—she was burned up too bad to have visitors, they said—but they let me leave Baby there for her.

“When I told my father, I thought he might be mad enough to…Well, I thought he’d be mad for sure, because that doll had cost a pretty penny, and I knew it. But he put me on his lap and gave me a kiss and told me I was a fine girl.

“I never forgot that. Because, just the week before, when I tried to sit on his lap, he said I was getting too old for that kind of thing.”

“Do you ever think about her? That little girl, Selma?”

“I do,” she said. “And when I do, I think about her with my Baby, and I feel good inside myself. I could never explain it. It was like, when I heard that child’s story, my heart just went out to her. Went out to her and never came back.”

If you need to get to D.C., Amtrak’s a lot better than a plane. No baggage scanning, no real ID check, and door-to-door quicker, too.

A business-class ticket on the Acela Express gave me access to the “quiet car”—the one place on the train where cell phones were banned. I had figured it would be packed—the cars I walked through to reach it sounded like they were full of magpies on angel dust—but it was just about empty.

I cracked open my newspaper. A human—the paper called her a “mother”—in Florida had been prostituting her little girl for years. Twenty bucks a trick. Extras were extra. Her older daughter, almost twelve, had finally resisted the beatings. So the mother just sold her outright. A used car plus five hundred in cash, and some lucky vermin got to make his slimy dreams come true.

I wished I had a bullet for every one of them. Not a simple death-dealer, a magic bullet—the kind that would take one life and give back another.

In my world, you get even because you’re nothing if you don’t, but it’s never enough. It can’t be. You can’t really get even. You can make someone who hurt you dead, but whatever they took from you is never coming back.

The ride was less than three hours, right on time. Even more on time was the canary-yellow Corvette convertible waiting at the curb outside, a truly spectacular redhead behind the wheel.

“Toni?” I said, as I walked up to her.

“Who else?” she answered, grinning.

Some women get annoyed if you stare at their breasts. This gorgeous Titan didn’t care where I looked, so long as it wasn’t at her Adam’s apple.

“So you’re Michelle’s big brother,” she said, appraisingly. “Somehow, I thought you’d be…”

“Better looking?”

“No!” she giggled, patting my thigh.

“More sophisticated? Smarter? Taller?”

“Stop it! I just meant…Well, you know Michelle. She’s so…refined. You look a little rough around the edges, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“You’re not the first. And most don’t say it so euphemistically.”

“That’s what I was looking for! Michelle said you were a real intellectual.”

“Is that right?” I said, reaching into the breast pocket of my Harris-tweed jacket and slipping on a pair of plain-glass spectacles.

“Oh, those are perfect! You’re some kind of investigator, aren’t you?”

“I guess I am.”

“Well, anyone who works with that husband of hers must be smart. That Norm, he’s a genuine genius, she says.”

“She’s not lying,” I promised, finally learning the name Michelle assigns the Mole for social occasions that require bragging. “He’s way past being a genius. Their son’s going to win a Nobel Prize someday.”

“Terry? That’s if Hollywood doesn’t grab him first. That is a gorgeous young man!”

“That’s outside my area of expertise.”

“What exactly are we doing, you and me?” she said, making it clear she was just curious—the answer would have no effect on her participation.

“We’re going to look at a house. You already have the address.”

“A house you’re thinking of buying?”