Andrew Vachss - Mask Market

“Whatever,” Michelle said, airily. “You know who I mean…the ones who handle diamonds. For them, it’s all a handshake business, right? No paper. Everyone knows you can trust those guys. It’s always been that way.”

“So?”

“So the guy I trusted, the one who was setting up that job for us? He never said the diamonds were dirty.”

“You didn’t really trust him, girl. Otherwise, we would just have gone on ahead, right?”

“Oh, I know. But still. I mean, who would ever think one of those super-straight Jews would go anywhere near dirty stuff.”

“They bought diamonds from South Africa even when the boycott was on,” I said. “And uranium, too.”

“Mole says—”

“—they just did what they had to do,” I finished for her. I’ve known the Mole since we were kids. By him, Israel drops a nuke on one of its neighbors, it’s just doing what they had to do.

You could say it’s people like the Mole who keep Israel from finding peace. Or you could say it’s people like the Mole who keep it from disappearing. Me, I don’t care. The only country I care about is about the size of Mama’s restaurant—that’s enough space to hold every member of my family.

“This one was going to be so juicy,” Michelle said, regretfully.

“Been lots of those,” I told her.

By the time the morning light was making a run against the grimy windows, we weren’t any closer to a good scheme. This was the third plan that had gone sour in the past couple of months.

Good scams are harder and harder to come by these days. Too many thieves fishing in the same pool of chumps. Colloidal silver for longevity, “form books” for tax evasion, orgasm enhancers for patheticos who think a lap dance is a relationship. Online auctions for collector cars that don’t exist…and every bidder’s a winner. Even some neo-Nazis were going into the penis-enlargement business to finance their operations—skinheads aren’t much for paying their membership dues, and the self-appointed Führers are too afraid of their own followers to get heavy about collecting.

I used to do violence-for-money. But the older I get, the less it’s worth playing for those stakes. “The gun’s fun, but the sting’s the thing,” the Prof called it, when he first started schooling me.

For lifelong outlaws like us, crime is all about cash. We’re not psychopaths—we don’t need the action to feel alive. Crime’s not about the buzz; it’s a business.

Anyone who’s been running on our track for long enough has learned a few things. Like, you’ll get more time for a gas-station holdup than for taking a few million out of a company pension fund. And a double-nickel jolt for a young man is a very different trip than it is for a guy with a lot of miles on his odometer.

A generation ago, our whole crew got involved with hijacking a load of dope. It was a foolproof scheme. The people we took it from wouldn’t run to the Law—they’d just buy it back from us. Nobody gets hurt, we make a fortune, and they chalk it up to the cost of doing business.

The first half clicked as sweet as stiletto heels on a marble floor. Then the wheels came off. If we’d known how deep some NYPD boys were involved with the dope trade back in the day, we wouldn’t have gone near the job.

I was the only one of us they caught. In an abandoned subway tunnel, with enough heroin to give a small town a collective overdose. The dope never got vouchered; I got to plead to some assaults, avoiding the telephone numbers a possession-with-intent charge would have brought. And best of all, I got to go down alone.

I’m a two-time felony loser. The Prof has three bits under his belt. If either of us ever falls again, we’re looking at the life-without they throw at habitual offenders in this state.

Clarence and the Mole have never been Inside. Max has, but not for long. Just arrests, no convictions. Why plea-bargain when you know the witnesses are never going to show up for the trial?

Michelle was locked up back when she was pre-op. About the hardest time you can do, unless you’re willing to whore out or daddy-up.

She spent most of her time binged, in solitary. Not PC, Ad Seg. You go to Protective Custody—aka Punk City—as a volunteer, to keep yourself safe. You go to Ad Seg—Administrative Segregation, aka The Hole—when you commit a crime inside. Michelle wasn’t big, and she wasn’t fast, but she would cut you, and she was real good at always finding something to do that with.

In our world, showing you can do time counts for something only when you’re young. After that, what earns you the points is showing you can avoid it.

I spent most of my childhood caged. The rest of the time, I was on the run—from the foster parents they “placed” me with, the “group homes” they sentenced me to, and the “training schools” I’d been destined for since birth.

In the juvie joints, it seemed like nobody was ever there for the worst things they did. One guy, he was in for stealing fireworks. He wanted the cherry bombs and ashcans to torture animals with. Another guy was a fire-setter. They caught him doing that a year after they caught him raping his baby sister. He got counseling for the rape, but destruction of property, that was something they couldn’t let slide.

Most of the gang kids were there for fighting, but, to hear them tell it, they’d all gone much further down the violence road. One little Puerto Rican guy was talking about how he chopped an enemy’s hand off with a machete in a rumble. A white kid laughed out loud at the story, as deep a diss as a bitch-slap.

The Puerto Rican kid went back to his bunk, came over to where we were all standing around, and hooked the white kid to the stomach with a needle-sharp file. Gutted him like a fish. The white kid didn’t die, so, instead of going back to court with a new charge, the Puerto Rican kid got shipped to another juvie joint. With a bigger rep.

It was inside that kiddie prison that I first claimed another human being as family. I told the others that Wesley was my brother. I wasn’t worried that anyone would ever ask Wesley if it was true—nobody ever asked Wesley anything. But a kid who called himself Tiger called me on it.

Tiger was twice my size, plus he never walked around alone. So he should have been safe. But, one night, he got shanked in his sleep.

Everyone thought Wesley had done it—that was what Wesley did, even then. But it wasn’t him. It was his brother.

“You have anything, honey?” Michelle asked. “Anything at all?”

“Little Eric in the fifth,” I told her, just to see her smile.

T he noon sun was a throbbing blood-orange blob, pulsating against the mesh screen of a pollution-gray sky. For once, it actually made an impact on my permanently crusted windows. I figured I’d better get it while I could.

“You want something from down the way?” I asked Gateman.

“Which way is that, boss?”

“Diner?”

“Sold. I could really go for some of their bull’s-eye meatloaf today.”

“Two sides?”

“You’re singing my song,” he said, grinning. “Make mine mashed potatoes and spinach, okay?”

I got the same for myself, and brought the whole thing back, hot. Gateman and I admired the way the half-cut hard-boiled egg looked embedded in the thick slab of heavy-crusted meatloaf before we dug in.

“Ever wonder how come this is the only good thing they make in that dive, boss?”

“I figure it’s what they call a ‘signature dish,’ Gate. Every restaurant’s got one. It’s how the chef shows off.”

“Yeah? Well, I been in that joint plenty of times, boss. And if they got a ‘chef,’ I’m a fucking ballerina.”