Andrew Vachss - Mask Market

“And you think I know who that is?” I said, snapping my unsmoked cigarette into the darkness.

“No,” he said, smiling. “If you knew where that much money was, you would be long gone. Far away.”

“So what did you want to snatch me for?”

“We know you met the thief. We had to learn whether you were…”

“His ‘confederate’? Get real.”

“Yes, we understand that. We understand that now. The information we had was…sketchy. A man such as that one, he would have no friends.”

I understood what the Russian was telling me. “Friends,” as in those who would avenge his death.

“So what was I supposed to tell you?”

“We still want the money,” the man said. “We thought maybe you could help us find it.”

“You think this guy told me?”

“No,” he said, brushing off my sarcasm. “We don’t think this man knew we knew he was a thief. But he knew we would find out eventually.”

“That explains it,” I said.

“What?” he asked, too eagerly.

“Why in the world a white man would want to go to Africa.”

“Please,” he said, tilting his chin at me for encouragement.

“I did some…work over there. Years ago. But I keep up my contacts. It’s a good thing to have people in a country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty.”

“Where?”

“Nigeria.”

“Nigeria?” His voice reeked suspicion. “Free-lancers haven’t worked there since—”

“Nineteen seventy,” I finished for him. “But it’s still the most corrupt country on the planet.”

“You have not been to Russia recently,” he said, as if his nationalistic pride had been insulted.

“I haven’t been to Russia at all. But I know how to get things done in Nigeria.”

“And that’s what this man wanted?”

“He didn’t know specifics. All he’d heard was that I could get someone set up in an African country where a lot of cash would guarantee a lot of safety. I think, from the little bit he said, that he thought it was South Africa, but he wasn’t particular.”

“So what happened?”

“You know better than me,” I said. “I told him I needed twenty-five thousand just to start the process. I thought we’d have to make another meet, but he said he had it with him. Not on him, in his car. He went out to get it…and he never came back.”

“Did he leave anything with you?”

“Yeah. The tab for the drinks we’d ordered.”

He said something under his breath. Sounded like Russian.

“Did he come to you directly?” Asking me a question he already knew the answer to.

“No.” The truth.

“Will you tell me the name of the person who introduced you?” Testing me; they already knew it had been Charlie, thanks to his wife.

“No.”

“A man must choose his own path,” he said, very deliberately. “Must it be your choice to stand in mine?”

“I’m no different from you,” I answered. “If I gave you a name, my own name would be hurt. And that would put me out of business.”

“For fifty thousand dollars? Cash?”

“No.”

He made a guttural sound I took for approval. “You are a businessman, fair enough. Let us say the name of the person who introduced you to the thief means nothing to us, yes? But, should you happen to run across information—say, from another source—that might be of value, you understand that you would be compensated?”

“Sure.”

“What do you think is fair?”

“For…?”

“For your time and trouble, as I said.”

“For my past time and trouble?”

“If you like.”

“I like the number you mentioned.”

“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.”

“A re 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?”

“O h 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.”

I f 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.