Andrew Vachss - Mask Market

I took a drag off the cigarette I hadn’t remembered lighting, put it back in the ashtray that hadn’t been on the table when I’d started reading. “I’ve got him,” I said.

The Prof and Clarence came back to where I was sitting. I looked up and there was Max, right across from me; he had never left.

“Charlie hired Wesley four times,” I said. “Not directly, but he made the matches.”

“Everything go okay?” the Prof asked. He wasn’t asking if the hits had gone down, that was never a question; he was asking if Wesley had been paid. The one time we knew he hadn’t been, the iceman had turned the whole city into a killing ground.

“Yeah,” I said, still thinking about one of the jobs I’d run across in the book. Looked like Charlie Jones had known some politicians.

“Must have followed him home,” the Prof said. “No way my man pays anyone for info.”

“It doesn’t say. But he’s got an address here, all right.”

“Where was the little weasel holing up back then?” the Prof asked, frankly curious.

“Over in Queens. Briarwood.”

“Briarwood?” the Prof jeered. “In that neighborhood, Charlie’d stick out like the truth in Jesse Jackson’s mouth.”

“He might,” I said, my finger on the page where I’d found him. “But Benny Siegel wouldn’t.”

“T hat boy is big-time slick,” the Prof said, his preacher’s voice garnished with admiration. “You got to give it to him. Folks been trying to pass ever since there was folks, but that’s a one-way street—people trying to move up, not down. Charlie got to be the first time I ever heard of anyone trying to pass for Jewish.”

“You know how Wesley worked it,” I said, looking over my shoulder to make sure Mama wasn’t close by. “You wanted work done, you never got to see him face-to-face. You hired a voice on the phone, sent the money to wherever he told you. But it was a different number and address for every job. So Charlie, he had to know a way to find Wesley. Or to leave word for him, anyway.”

“Do you think they ever met?” Clarence asked. He was the only one of us who hadn’t known Wesley, but he’d been hearing the legend since his early days working for a Jake gunrunner in Brooklyn. He always wanted to know more, but he had to balance his curiosity against the Prof’s disapproval.

“You mean, like, were they pals?” the little man said, bitterly. “Forget that. Wesley, he was about as friendly as a cobra with a grudge.”

“But if he and Burke—”

“We came up together,” I said, hoping to cut off the young man’s questions before we had a problem.

“Still. If he was as—”

“Look, son,” the Prof said, gruffly. “Wesley was the mystery train. You never knew where he was going, but you always knew where he’d been—dead men be all over the tracks. Nobody knows why he picked Burke out when they were little kids. Ain’t no point talking about it. Nobody knows. And nobody ever gonna know, okay?”

“Your father’s right,” I told Clarence, gently guiding him away from the edge. “When it comes to Wesley, you ask a question, the answer’s always the same: Nobody knows. But I can tell you this for sure: He wasn’t friends with Charlie Jones. He wasn’t partners with him. That wasn’t Wesley. He was always one up. If Charlie knew where to leave a message for Wesley, then Wesley had to know where Charlie lived; it’s as simple as that. Wesley wasn’t a gambler. The only way he’d play is with a marked deck.”

“He has been gone a long time, mahn.”

“You mean, the address might be no good now? Sure, that’s true. But if Charlie went to all the trickery and expense involved in a complete ID, he could still be there. Remember, we know one thing—he never crossed Wesley.”

“How could we know that, then?”

Nobody answered. It only took the young man a few seconds to catch up.

F or some places, a cab is the perfect surveillance vehicle. You can circle the same block a dozen times, go and come back, even park close by and eat a sandwich, and nobody pays attention. A leaf on a tree, a bird in the forest.

But that wouldn’t work in Briarwood, a community of upper-middle-class houses and even higher aspirations. The only Yellow Cabs you see in that neighborhood are making airport drop-offs, the cabbies seething at the “shortie” trip. For the drivers, waiting on an airport line is a dice-roll. A Manhattan run is a soft six. A carful of Japanese tourists who don’t have a firm grasp of the exchange rate is a natural. Briarwood, that’s snake eyes.

Walk-bys would be even riskier. In that neighborhood, people were peeking out from behind their curtains decades before anyone ever heard of Neighborhood Watch. The population is aging and house-proud, the kind of folks who keep 911 on speed dial. Nobody hangs out on the corners at night. And the community has enough political clout to ensure for-real police patrols, too.

But this is still New York, where info is just another peach to pick. If you can’t reach the branches, you have to know how to shake the trees.

Some do it with research, some do it with subpoenas. People like me do it with cash.

T here’s two kinds of bribes—the ones where you get asked, and the ones where you offer. A building inspector looking for mordida knows he has to make the first move—too many DOI stings going on today for an experienced slumlord to take the chance. But the pitch is always so subtle you have to be listening close to catch it.

That kind of bribe, it’s just the cost of doing business, an everyday thing. But if you want someone to go where they’re not supposed to, it’s a lot trickier to put a deal together. The phone company’s wise to employees selling unlisted numbers; the DMV knows what the home address of a celebrity is worth; and there’s always a bull market for Social Security numbers. So there’s all kinds of safeguards in place: You access the computers from inside the company, you’re going to leave a trail. You say the wrong thing on the phone, someone could be listening. Somebody’s always watching, and they’re not anyone’s brother.

Computers make it a lot easier to check on what your employees are doing. But putting all the information in one place is a party where you have to screen the guest list. Not all hackers spend their time trying to write the ultimate virus or crack into a secure site. Some of them are people like me. Working criminals.

The best tools to unlock an account are a Social Security number and a date of birth. We didn’t have either one for Charlie Jones, but we had the name he had been living under and the address where he lived at the time. If that info was dead, so were our chances.

I know a few cyber-slingers, but I don’t trust any of them enough to let them work a name when its owner might wind up deceased. So I had to go to people who don’t trust me.

P epper is a sunburst girl. She’s got more bounce than a Texas high-school cheerleader, and a smile that could make Jack Kevorkian volunteer to teach CPR. She probably likes everybody on this planet, except…

“It’s me,” I told her, on the phone.

“Okay,” she answered, warm as a robbed grave.

“I want to buy a package.”

“She’s not going to meet you.”

Pepper was talking about Wolfe, the warrior woman who headed up their operation. Back when she was still a prosecutor, she had let me hold her hand for a minute. But then the road we were walking divided, and I took the wrong fork. I did it knowing she’d never follow, hoping she’d wait for me to come back. When I did, she was still in the same spot. But she wasn’t waiting for me. She was doing what she always did—standing her ground.