Mask Market

The windowless, slab-sided building in Sunnyside had a fresh display of swastikas, spray-painted by some glue-sniffing member of the master race. I thought how nice it would be to introduce him to my new pal, Yitzhak. Or dip him in a vat of meat gravy and throw him over the fence that surrounded my car.

The bouncer looked like a recycling project from wherever they dump disbarred bikers: greasy hair pulled back into a Shetland ponytail, jailhouse tattoos across the knuckles of both hands, bad teeth, wraparound shades. If he had a name, I didn’t remember it.

The first time I’d been there, he had followed me out into the parking lot.

“Hey!”

“What?” I had said, turning to face him.

“You a cop?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t want to fuck with me,” he growled, moving in.

“That’s right, I don’t.”

“We don’t like motherfuckers coming in here asking questions.”

“I’m not a fighter,” I said, edging backward.

“I heard that one before,” he taunted. “You’re not a fighter, you’re a—”

“—shooter,” I finished for him, showing him the .357.

“Hey!” he half yelled, spreading his arms wide. “I was just—”

“No, you weren’t,” I told him, cutting off the “just doing my job” speech he was going to launch into. “Go back inside, call your boss on the phone. You handle it right, he’ll think you’re being smart, just checking out this guy who was acting suspicious. Instead of shaking down the customers, that is.”

“You don’t know my boss.”

“Tell Jiffy, Burke said hello,” I told him.

The next time I visited, the bouncer had pointedly ignored me. He did the same tonight.

“Hello, Dolly,” I said to the waitress who came over to my table. It wasn’t a line; that’s her name.

“Hey!” she said, giving me a smile as genuine as Ted Bundy’s remorse.

“Sit down with me for a little bit.”

“You know I can’t do that, baby. Only the dancers…”

I spread five twenties on the tabletop. “So you’ll share,” I said.

Dolly had been a dancer once. A drop-down after she started sagging too much to work escort. She’d kept sagging all the way down to table hostess in a Grade C strip joint. I didn’t want to think about what was next for her. Neither did she. Cocaine helps her with that.

“Nope,” is all she’d said when I showed her Beryl’s picture. It had been a long shot, but that’s what you do when you’re killing time.

“Show it around,” I told her. “I’ve got a grand for an address.”

“These girls,” she said, glancing at the stage, where a scrawny brunette with ridiculously huge breasts was humping a pole, next to a cellulite blonde who was fingering herself and moaning from boredom, “they’re all on drugs. They’ll tell you anything you want to hear.”

“An address,” I said again. “Not a story.”

“I got to get back to work,” Dolly said.

Even in springtime, the basement apartment was cold. Not A/C cold, but the clammy cold of damp, moldy rot. The man who lived there was dressed for his role: He wore enough layers of clothing to pass for the Michelin Man. Had the right skin color for it, too. Fingerless gloves on his hands— hands he warmed over the glow of the money he had stashed somewhere in the place.

I knew about the money, but I didn’t know how much it really was, never mind where he had it hidden. It would take a team of greenback-trained bloodhounds years to dig through the fetid swamp of that basement to find it.

If it was even there.

A long time ago, a no-neck mutant named Harold who lived in the same building figured out that the man in the basement must be hoarding something. After all, he never went out. Never. Lived on take-out food passed through a slot cut into the steel door to his den, the same way they do it in supermax prisons. He hadn’t needed the landlord’s permission to put in that door—he owned the building.

The mutant didn’t know that; he wasn’t the research type. His idea of a complex extortion scheme was to pound on the man’s door and scream, “Give me money, motherfucker!” When that didn’t work out for him, he remembered a technique he’d heard about in prison. So the next time he came back, he had a plastic squeeze bottle full of gasoline with him. Told the man inside that he was going to roast him alive unless he got paid.

I was the one who got paid instead. I used some of the money to buy my partner Hercules a nice suit. Had to go to a tailor for it—department stores don’t make suits to fit guys who spend most of their time Inside hoisting iron.

“What?” the mutant yelled in response to my knock.

“Open the door, Harold,” I said. “Mr. G. sent us.”

“Who the fuck is Mr. G.?”

“Harold…” I said, my voice clearly losing patience.

He flung open the door like a Bluto cartoon. “What the fuck are—?”

The sight of Hercules calmed him right down. I guess he remembered more about prison than just the burnouts.

We had a nice talk. I explained that the man who lived in the basement was the crazy old uncle of a very important individual. Harold the Mutant never asked who “Mr. G.” was; maybe he thought he knew. In fact, he seemed to be getting smarter by the minute. When I told him if he ever went near the basement again he was going off the roof without a parachute, his comprehension was perfect.

“How many steps?” the man in the basement asked me, through the slot in the door.

“Eleven,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. I counted them,” I told him, connecting us.

The door swung open soundlessly. That always surprised me—I expected it to squeak like the ones in horror movies—but I guess he kept it lubricated, somehow.

I didn’t offer to shake hands; I knew he didn’t like that.

He didn’t offer me a seat, just looked at me with the beyond-disappointment eyes of an orphan staring into a shopwindow at Christmastime. I don’t know how he ended up where he is now. But I know he knows money.

“Is it hard to set up an account in Nauru?” I asked him, without preamble.

I waited for him to count the syllables in my question. I knew it had to be an even number, or he wouldn’t respond. He doesn’t care how the dictionary breaks up a word, only how it comes out of someone’s mouth.

“No,” he said, playing out his ritual: questions are even, answers are odd.

“Why do people do it?”

“Secrecy.”

“Like a Swiss bank account?”

“Liechtenstein.”

“Like that?”

“No.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked, knowing he’d hear “difference” as two syllables.

“Government.”

“You need big money to do it?”

“Yes.”

“Do they make money doing it?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s like a big laundry job?”

“Yes.”