Andrew Vachss - Mask Market

“No.”

“Doesn’t go with the new face?”

“You’re smart enough to be anything you want,” I told her. The truth.

“Oh, Daddy!” she mock-squealed, clasping her hands behind her back and stepping close to me. “That’s so sweet. You just want your Berry to be the very bestest little girl she can be, don’t you?”

I looked away.

“Now I made you mad,” she said, reaching down and pulling the hem of her skirt high over her thighs. “You think I should be punished?”

“Give it a rest, Beryl.”

“Why? You’re not much of a conversationalist, but it’s been a while, and I could always use the practice.”

I looked away.

“Makes you mad, that I’m such a little whore?”

“That’s your business,” I said.

“Exactly,” she retorted, sticking out her tongue in a deliberately cold parody of a sassy brat.

“D id you ever tell him?”

“Who? My father?”

“Yeah. You said you tried to tell people, but you never said you actually did it.”

“He knew,” she said, with a sociopath’s unshakable certainty.

“Just like that? You said your mother had a special—”

“Just because he was a coward doesn’t mean he was a stupid one.”

“But you couldn’t be—”

“Yes, I could,” she snapped. “I could be sure. I’m sure he would have just closed his eyes, no matter what I showed him. You know why?”

“No.”

“Because my mother had the power, ” she said, licking her lips as if the very word was caressing her under her skirt. “If you have power, you can do anything you want, go anywhere you want, get away with anything. It’s all yours. Everything. And you know what makes power? Money. If you have enough money—”

“It’s not that simple.”

“You’re right; it’s not,” she snapped. “If you’d let me finish what I was going to say, you would have heard this: If you have enough money, and the spine to use it, every door opens. The whole world is nothing but a market. And humans are just another commodity.”

“In some places—”

“In every place! You think it’s not a market just because the buyers wear masks when they shop? If you have the price, you can have whatever you want—it’s just that simple.”

“Not all prices are money,” I said, thinking of Galina’s cousin.

“I don’t like word games. They’re just another way for liars to lie. I don’t care what you call it. Some say money; some say God. Some call it a button—a button you push to make people do what you want. Everybody’s got one; you just have to look for it.

“And if you don’t know where to look, there’s tricks to make it come to the surface, where you can see it. I learned something from everyone who ever had me. And I took something from them, too. Like a vampire does. It all comes down to the same thing. Power. That’s all that counts.”

“If that’s all that counts, then most people don’t.”

“Good boy!” she said, rewarding a dog.

“W hy do you want to know?” she asked me, a few more miles down the road.

“So I can learn.”

“How bad do you want to know?”

“I don’t know how to measure that.”

“Did you ever fuck a girl outdoors? Like in a park, where anyone might come along and see you?”

“What diff—?”

“We’re trading,” she said. “You tell me, I tell you.”

“And me first, right?”

“Money in front,” Beryl said, giving me a whore’s wink.

“T hose so-called feminists make me retch,” she said, lighting another cigarette. We were sitting at a wooden picnic bench at a rest stop. We were the only customers. “They say they’re all about choice—like abortion, how they adore abortion—but you’re only allowed the choices they say are okay. They whine about ‘empowerment,’ but you can only be empowered if you lap up every word they say, like a tame dog.”

“You’re talking about—?”

“You know what the great buzzword is now? The high-concept plot for the movie they all think they’re starring in? ‘Trafficking.’ This great evil that’s been set loose on the world. It’s all those kind of people can talk about.”

“It’s not worth talking about?”

“Why? Because, if enough people talk about it, someday they’ll actually do something about it? That was my parents’ line. All that ‘consciousness raising’ they wrote checks for.”

“What’s your answer, then?”

“My answer?” she said, twisting her lips to show teeth, not smiling. “I don’t even have a question. Because this ‘trafficking’ thing, it’s all just another mask. Read the papers. Watch TV. Go to a cocktail party. Nobody cares about trafficking in children so long as you’re going to use them the way they’re supposed to be used,” she said, planting the barb and twisting to make sure it hooked deep. “You know, like making them work in diamond mines, or sewing soccer balls, or plowing fields.”

She turned to me full-face, her own beautiful mask crumbling against the acid of her hate.

“Every kid’s nothing but property, anyway. If you want to sell your own property, who cares? The only time anyone bitches about it is when they get sold a lemon, like when some yuppies adopt one of those Russian babies with fetal alcohol syndrome.

“And the media? The only time those whores get excited is when they can do a story on ‘sex slaves,’ because that’s what sells, okay? And you know what? Most of those girls, they’re not slaves at all. They’re just women who made a deal. A choice, okay?”

“You mean, like to be hookers?”

“You think that’s never a choice?” she said, mockingly. “You think every stripper is a domestic-violence victim? You think every girl who acts in a porno movie is a drug addict? You think every escort was sexually abused as a child? You think Linda Lovelace didn’t like fucking and sucking?”

“I wasn’t saying—”

“That’s right,” she said, making a brushing-crumbs gesture. “You weren’t saying anything. All that ‘trafficking’ hysteria is just so much political bullshit, a good way for thieves to get grants. A woman grows up in a country where there isn’t enough food to eat. She makes a decision to come to a place where she can make more money on her back in an hour than her whole family could earn in a month—what’s wrong with that? She’s a whore to you, fine. But she’s a hero to her family.”

“What about the girls who think they’re coming here to work in factories, not whorehouses?”

“Grow up!” she snapped. “You really think even they believe that? You really think they’re going to pay twenty, thirty grand for the chance to earn five bucks an hour?”

“That’s not an investment,” I said, my one good eye scanning her mask, looking for an opening, “that’s debt bondage. They have to work off the cost of their passage. And if they open their mouths, they get deported.”

“Isn’t that a crying shame.”

“Not enough to make you cry, I guess.”

“Who cried for me?”

“So that means—?”

“It means I found my own way out,” Beryl said, pure self-absorption wafting off her like thick perfume. “You think anyone cares about slavery? There’s people in slavery all over the world, aren’t there? You buy something made in China, it was probably out of some forced-labor camp. Are you going to pretend that makes a difference to you?

“Slavery, my sweet white ass. All anyone pays attention to is the sex part. And here’s a nice irony for you: That is a choice, okay? These women, they come here, like you said, they know they have to work off their debt. They can be maids, take them twenty years to get caught up. Or they can gobble some cock for a few months, and end up flush.