Andrew Vachss - Mask Market

I could feel the Prof vibrating in the corner, a step away from erupting. I held up my hand to silence him.

“Don’t put it on anyone but me, Beryl,” I said. “The whole thing was mine. Everyone else just backed my play. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

“You know what they say about the road to Hell.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you don’t even get that much slack. I know you got paid to bring me back.”

“I did you wrong. I didn’t know it then. I know it now. That’s why I’m here.”

“What, to make it up to me?” she asked scornfully.

“I can’t do that. Because it can’t be done. Nobody could do it for me; nobody can do it for you.”

She gave me a sharp, appraising look, but she didn’t say anything.

“Here’s what I can do,” I told her. “I can get you safe. Not just off the hook—safe forever.”

She gave me a serpent’s grin, certain she was back on her home ground now. “Sure. All I have to do is give back the—”

“Not a dime,” I cut her off. “You walk away free and clear. You won’t have to hide in this basement. You can go right back to being Peta Bellingham, if you want.”

“Just like that, huh?”

“There’s more,” I said. “To sweeten the deal, I’ll even throw in some justice.”

“S he might still run, son,” the Prof said on the drive back, signing with his fingers so that Max could follow along.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “She knows we found her once, we can find her again. Probably thinks we have her watched twenty-four/seven,” I went on, turning my hands into binoculars, then cupping my right ear in a listening gesture. “The deal I offered her is the only way out.”

I turned slowly in my seat, capturing each of them with my eyes until I had them all with me.

“There’s something else, too,” I told them. “She wants to do it.”

“I sn’t this a little flashy for a lawyer?” I asked Michelle. She was busy adjusting the lapels of my tuxedo-black suit, threaded with a faint metallic-blue windowpane pattern. Under the jacket, my shirt was royal purple with vertical stripes of pale lemon. French cuffs, with Canadian Maple Leaf gold coins for links. My tie was a Dalíesque riot of color that you couldn’t look at for long without vertigo. The shoes were black mirrors, softer than most gloves.

“Not for the kind of lawyer you’re supposed to be, sweetheart,” she said, confidently. “And this is the pièce de résistance.” She meant the black leather Tumi attaché case, gusseted to expand to carry a laptop and whatever other tools a bar-certified extortionist might need.

The initials on the case were “ROM.” Roman Oscar Mestinvah wouldn’t come up on a Martindale-Hubbell search, but he was registered with OCA—the New York State Office of Court Administration. Admitted to practice in 1981, and a member in good standing. Roman was an elite lawyer, with a very narrow practice—

Gypsies only. I don’t know his real name—no Gypsy ever has only one—but the one he’d used since law school gave him those inside-joke initials.

If anyone speaking English called his office, his girl would know it was for me, and message me at Mama’s—my rental of his name included a few extra services.

“No diamond watch?” I said, sarcastically.

Michelle gave me one of her patented looks. “You’ll be driving a Porsche, not a Bentley,” she replied, as if that explained the Breitling chronograph she had handed me.

“I guess I’m ready,” I told her.

She stepped very close to me, stood on her toes, and kissed my cheek. “I’m proud of you, baby,” she whispered. “This is the real Burke now. My big brother. Coming home.”

“Y ou want to go over it again?” I asked, as I plucked the EZ Pass transmitter from the inside windshield of Beryl’s metallic-silver Porsche and stowed it in the glove compartment before we hit the Holland Tunnel. She was wearing a navy-blue pinched-waist jacket over a beige pleated skirt, sheer stockings, and simple navy pumps. A successful woman, on her way to work.

“I’ve got it,” she said. “Don’t worry; I’ve been doing this kind of thing all my life.”

“Even before I—?”

“Years before,” she said, flatly.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“To you? What for? You were just another hired man. And it wasn’t me paying your salary.”

“I would never have brought you back,” I said, hearing the defensiveness in my voice. “That happened before. More than once.”

“Sure.”

“It’s the truth,” I said. Hearing You know it is in my mind. Realizing it was Wolfe I was talking to.

“Even if I believed you, which I don’t, where were you going to take me? You think I hadn’t tried telling before then? Way before then? You know what that got me? More hired men, doing more things to me. Before they sent me back, that is. I’ll give you that much: You just drove the merchandise home like you were paid to do, didn’t even make me blow you first.”

I shook off the image, said, “But you weren’t really running away.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Turning to give me a quick, hard stare.

“That pimp, the one you were with, he hadn’t kidnapped you. I’ve seen enough of those to know.”

“Because I didn’t throw my arms around you for rescuing me from the big bad man?”

“Because you weren’t scared,” I said. “You weren’t stoned. And you weren’t hurt.”

“You’re smarter than you look,” she said, smiling sardonically. “At least, you’re smarter now. That’s right. You think some half-wit nigger could have tricked me ? I was playing him, not the other way around. But I didn’t know the game then. Not the whole game. I never figured he’d try to actually sell me.”

“What’s with ‘nigger,’ Beryl?”

“You don’t like the word?”

“It sounds nasty in your mouth, and—”

“Ah. When you spoke to my dear daddy, he told you we were all such wonderful liberals, yes?”

“He did say they were—”

“Fakes,” she said, spitting the word out of her mouth like a piece of bad meat. “Both of them, complete frauds. Every word they ever spoke was a lie. The big ‘radicals,’ fighting oppression. That whole house was a nonstop masquerade ball. Everybody had their own mask. Especially me.”

“Your father was—”

“Weak,” she dismissed him with a single word. “A pathetic, cringing weakling. Funding the revolution from the safety of his living room.”

“And your mother?”

“Oh, she was never weak,” Beryl hissed. “She was even harder than the steel she used on me.”

W e gassed up on the Jersey Pike. While Beryl used the restroom, I thumbed my cell phone into life.

“Anything?” I said.

“Nothing,” Michelle answered. “You know I would have called you if—”

“Yeah.”

“Relax, baby. We’ve got a Plan B, remember?”

B eryl accelerated back onto the turnpike, her fingers relaxed on the wheel. As she settled into the middle lane, I said, “You’re sure you—?”

“If you say fucking ‘reparations’ to me one more time, I’m going to throw up all over that cheesy suit of yours.”

W e stopped at a diner off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Beryl wanted the restroom again. And a cigarette. She was a heavy smoker, but she wouldn’t light up in her car.

“You don’t smoke anymore?” she’d asked me, the first time we’d stopped.