Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

Masks by Charles Ardai

© 1993 by Charles Ardai

Charles Ardai is one of the youngest writers ever to have been published in EQMM, but his first association with our magazine was not as a contributor. Mr. Ardai came to work at Davis Publications, which then owned EQMM, at the age of sixteen, as a part-time assistant in the subsidiary rights department. Within a very short time he was submitting stories to both EQMM and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and helping to compile anthologies of mystery fiction. He later attended Columbia University and makes his career in investment banking...

Night had fallen, and the sounds of carnival shook the walls with a hungry samba beat. The crowd in the street clapped and cheered and stamped its feet, drowning out the music. Firecrackers exploded and ricocheted from the rooftops. Men cheered. Women sang.

But inside the room, everyone was silent.

The three men who occupied the side of the room closest to the door sat with their hands on the arms of their chairs. One, a tall blond with his hair pulled back in a ponytail, gripped the armrests tightly. Another, a black man in a lightweight silk suit, drummed his fingers against the wood. He tapped steadily, slowly, patiently. The third man wore a sealskin jacket and American designer shoes and a bolo tie with a spider encased in amber for a clasp. He leaned forward and put all his weight onto his forearms, as though at any moment he might launch himself toward the man seated behind the desk.

The man behind the desk held his hands before him, his gloved fingers interlaced, his elbows resting lightly on the blotter. He wore a dark suit with a black shirt and a hat with a long brim. Beneath the brim, a sliver of skin peeked out above the top of a translucent plastic mask. The mask concealed and distorted his features. It was possible to tell that he was dark-skinned, but beyond that nothing could be told for certain.

The lips of the mask did not move even when the lips behind them finally did. The effect, of pink squirming behind the fixed lips of the fixed face, was unnerving. But if the other men found it so, they showed no sign.

“You are not the Jomon.” The voice was flat, muffled, deliberately unmodulated. The words hung in the air over the desk, the more lifeless for being underscored by the sound of music and laughter outside.

“You see the evidence,” the blond said. “You see the pictures.”

“I see pictures. Anyone can take pictures.”

The black man stopped drumming his fingers. “Not anyone could have taken those pictures. They haven’t found Monterrez yet.”

“So you found him. That doesn’t mean you killed him.”

“We killed him,” the blond said.

“So you say.”

The third man rose slightly from his chair, in answer to the insult, but the blond made a motion to him and he sat down again.

The blond said, “Mr...?”

“No names,” the man in the mask said.

“Mr. No Names,” the blond said. “What proof do you want?”

The man in the mask collected the four black-and-white photographs that lay on the desk and held them out to the men. The blond took them and slipped them into his pocket.

“There is a job I know for sure was performed by the Jomon. The name was—” The man looked down at a pad of notes. “Madradas. Lienore and Maria Madradas. Bring me photos of their bodies. If you are the Jomon.”

“And if you are the police?”

“I am not.”

“And if you are...?” the blond said.

“If I am the police, then there are officers already outside the door who will arrest you as you try to leave. You know this is not the case. Waste no more of my time with your games and your pitiful impersonation. The Jomon are not game players. If they knew you were using their name they would leave you dead in a gutter this very night.”

The blond’s knuckles whitened as he clenched the arm of the chair tighter. The black man’s fingers drummed on and on.

“Leave now,” said the man in the mask. “And bring me proof if you can.”

The blond stood up and the others followed. They walked to the door and opened it. There were no officers waiting for them.

With the door open, the tumult from the street was even louder. Then the door was closed, the noise was deadened, and the three men were gone.

Ramon Madradas was a tired-looking man, and had been even when he was young and active. At age forty-three, having lived through war, marriage, the birth of two daughters, and the death of one, he had finally grown into his features. His eyelids hung. His cheeks drooped. The lines in his forehead turned down at either end. Though he smiled easily and often, it was a weary smile. And though he stood straight, it was a weary stance: one hip higher than the other, all his weight resting on one leg as though he barely had the strength or interest to hold himself upright.

His wife, Lienore, was taller than he was, and so was his daughter, Maria. In family photographs, he usually stood between them. In some, they looked at each other and smiled over the top of his head.

Lienore was heavyset and broad-shouldered, with features typical of Brazilian women, particularly those born in the north, near Venezuela. She had straight black hair and brown skin, pink fingers, wide eyes. Ramon had the stiff, thick hair of the country-born and the map of minor scars, all along his arms and on his face, that was the property of most men who did not spend their youth in the academy.

Maria showed the advantages of a girl brought up in the city, on good food and clean water. She had her mother’s eyes and hair, but the hair she wore long, down to her waist, and the eyes, when outlined and daubed with shadow, looked almost exotic. She was thin and well proportioned, long of leg and neck and forehead. She almost looked like a heavily tanned North American woman, and once or twice on the beach had in fact been mistaken for one. She had allowed the misconception to take hold and had said nothing to dispel it, not from shame, or at least not entirely, but out of pleasure at being able to cross from one world to the other. Her mother received looks from these men, of contempt and dismissal, that were entirely different from the looks Maria received. When she walked alone on the beach, Maria called herself Maria Stone.

Ramon knew of this and accepted it as inevitable. He had himself left the countryside for the city, had moved from a shanty to an apartment over a store he meant ultimately to own, and had, out of shame and a desire to re-create himself as a cosmopolitan and a success, never recontacted his family. He had been seventeen, as Maria was now. So he understood her impulse and accepted, as a father’s burden, his sorrow.

He had finally bought the store during a drought, when it had seemed that the tourists, too, and not only the rain, had dried up for good. The old man he had worked for had taken sick and then died and his son, who inherited, had wanted nothing to do with the store. He sold it to Ramon for the contents of Ramon’s meager savings account, which left Ramon and Lienore unable to buy a new bed to replace the broken one in which they slept and in possession of a bodega whose stock was stale and whose clientele was currently vacationing elsewhere, in less punishing climates.

But then the drought had ended and the big coastal hotels had gone up, and one evening in a cruelly hot August, infant Maria had come screaming into the world. The store had supported them. A new bed was bought. Ramon bought himself a Jeep and a carved headstone for the grave of Melita, who had suffocated at eleven months in her crib. Lienore had a pair of nice dresses that she almost never took out of their plastic sheaths; Maria had bikinis to wear, and to take off, in front of the boys who stayed at the hotels.

And the day came when, walking in the street, Ramon passed Maria and a tall Caucasian fellow walking arm in arm and Maria blushed, turned her eyes away from him, and steered the young man in another direction so that their paths would not cross. Ramon took this, in an awful way, as fulfillment of all his ambitions. That he could raise a daughter so much better than he was that she could feel embarrassed at the sight of him! How far the Madradas name had advanced in the world! He cried that night when he told Lienore, but he was not entirely unhappy.

For a dozen years, and more than a dozen, the store prospered, and the Madradas fortune, though still meager, grew. Ramon paid visits to the owner of the building next to his, where a steakhouse with outdoor tables did brisk business every night of the week. Discussions began, papers were signed, hands shaken. And now Ramon, who owned a bodega and a steakhouse, felt his eyes start to wander toward the cantina across the street.

But the drought returned, as droughts will, and hotels with huge, always-full pools notwithstanding, the flow of Norte-Americanos slowed to a trickle, and then to less than a trickle — a drip, really.

Ramon took down the outdoor tables — who now wanted to sit outdoors? — and installed a pair of ceiling fans. He put signs up in the windows of the bodega advertising special sales, on suntan oil and postcards and paper fans, and then took the signs down when it became clear that they brought no one in. He had a half interest in the cantina by this time, and people did still come in to drink, but the balance shifted and what had once only pretended to be a rough bar for the benefit of tourists became the genuine article, peopled with out-of-work natives and angry hotel workers laid off by their belt-tightening employers. Ramon cut his steak order in half, and then in half again, and finally switched to grilled hamburgers instead. He closed the bodega for longer siestas every afternoon. Some days he didn’t open at all.

Then a day came when the bills started to arrive three at a time and the money he kept in the bank, no longer as savings but as a buffer against catastrophe, was gone, down to the last cruzeiro. Sales at the bodega were stagnant. Ramon’s suppliers refused to come to restock the shelves. Pescador Street was half-deserted, storefronts empty after having been abandoned by their discouraged owners. Having lived through a drought before, Ramon was determined to see this one through as well. But in the end he arrived reluctantly at the conclusion that without additional money from some source — any source — there was no way that he could.

It was then that one of his suppliers, a man named Borges who was full of pity and small kindnesses and who never stopped coming to see Ramon even after his bosses told him that Ramon’s bodega was off-limits, told Ramon, in a whisper, of the Jomon.

He said their name quickly and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as soon as the word was out, as though its mere passage between his lips had dirtied him. Ramon, who had never heard of the Jomon, nevertheless picked up on the significance of Borges’s gesture.

“They are loansharks, the Jomon?”

Borges shook his head, but said, “Yes, they are loansharks. But they are more than that.”

“What more?”

Borges groped with his hands in the air, as though trying to pick out with them the words his mouth found so distasteful. “They are... young men. Who think of themselves as criminals. And they are criminals, of course, but not the type they think they are. They fancy themselves gangsters, you understand? Like the Mafia in Chicago. But they are just three punks with guns. They—” Borges spat on the floor and then rubbed it out with the tip of his shoe. “They are killers.”

“You mean,” Ramon said, “they lend money and then kill you if you do not pay it back?”

“They kill you if you do not pay it back. They kill you if you pay it back but they don’t like the way you look at them. They kill you if someone says, ‘Here’s some money, kill this man whom I don’t like.’ ”

“You mean they kill for money?”

“I mean they’d kill for a glass of tequila.”

“So why are you telling me about them?”

“Because,” Borges said, “you are my friend. I see you every week starving a little more. Without money your stores will die and you will die, too. I see Maria and she is too skinny. I tell you because I don’t have any money to give you and you need money and if you want it, the Jomon will give you what you need.”

“And then they will kill me.”

“No, not if you pay them back the way they tell you to. They do not kill everyone with whom they deal. I have taken their money, Ramon, and I am still here. I seriously say to you: think about it. Because I cannot see you like this any longer, it breaks my heart.”

That night, Ramon sat behind the counter at the bodega and listed on a sheet of paper all the monies he needed to repay and figured out how much it would take to keep the stores going at a minimum level for six months. By which time the drought, which had persisted through two summers already, would have to have lifted — nothing lasted forever. He added up his column of figures, circled the sum, and sat staring at it until dawn. Then he telephoned Borges to have him put the word out on the street that he was in need of the Jomon’s services.

The man in the mask held the pictures in front of him one at a time. He looked at them slowly, through the milky layer of plastic and the pinprick holes in front of his eyes. One picture showed a middle-aged woman collapsed against the foot of a staircase, her hands outstretched above her head, a bullet hole in her neck. The other showed a young woman on the floor of a dressing cabinet of the sort that were set up on the periphery of every beach. Her long black hair covered most of her face, but anyone who knew Maria Madradas — or Maria Stone — would have recognized her. And the purple marks on her throat from where she had been strangled were clearly visible.

The man in the mask passed the photos back across the desk and along with them he passed a plastic shopping bag filled with rubber-banded thousand-cruzeiro notes. The blond pocketed the photos and passed the bag to the man sitting next to him. This man, who had worn a sealskin jacket the day before, was now wearing a white T-shirt and, over it, a suit jacket. He pulled out several stacks of bills and thumbed through them.

“The proof is to your satisfaction?” the blond said.

The man in the mask nodded.

“Good. So who is it you want us to kill?”

The man said nothing. He passed a photograph of his own across the desk. It showed a man in an overcoat smiling for the camera.

The blond’s eyebrows rose.

Ramon sat across a wide wooden table from the three young men, sunlight streaming into his eyes from a window high on the wall above their heads. He found himself unable to sit still. Borges’s warnings rang in his ears: be polite, answer their questions, be direct. They are doing you a favor. Keep this in mind.

Ramon wrung his hands under the table and tried to keep the sound of his anxiety out of his voice. “I need the money until the first of October. By then, I will be on track again and I will begin to pay you back. You will have all the money and the interest by Christmas.”

“No. You will pay us the total sum on the first of October.” This came from the tall blond man sitting directly across from Ramon.

Ramon swallowed. “Yes, sir.”

“And the interest, let’s see...” He conferred briefly with the other two. “For interest you will owe ten percent.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“Per month.”

The room fell silent and except for his own breathing, Ramon heard no sound at all. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“And if you do not pay,” the blond said, holding up a photograph of Ramon with his wife and daughter that had been taken from a moving car outside the bodega, “we will kill you. Third.” He pointed first to Lienore and then to Maria. “Third, you understand, because we will kill them first.”

Ramon felt his stomach turn to water. “Yes. I understand. You will be paid.”

“We will be paid, that is correct. Remember that and we will do business well together.”

Ramon sat, squinting against the light, and prayed. He prayed for a good season, prayed for rain, prayed for his family’s safety, prayed that the Jomon were honorable men. Under their cool gaze, he prayed that everything would work out well.

And he prayed that Lienore would never find out what he had done.

“Ramon Madradas?”

The man in the mask nodded.

The blond lowered the photograph. “Why do you want Madradas dead?”

“Is that your business?”

“No.”

“Correct,” said the man in the mask. “So don’t ask.”

The blond passed the photograph to the man sitting next to him, who looked at it and passed it on to the black man. Each scrutinized the picture carefully.

“How did you know we killed Madradas’s family?” the blond asked.

“Everyone knows,” the man in the mask said. “Except the police.”

“Yes, except the police,” the blond agreed. The men he was with smiled.

“You will find Madradas outside his bodega tonight at eight-thirty. He will turn his back to lock the night gate. This is when you will come up behind him and shoot him.”

The blond nodded.

“You will each shoot once.”

“Why?” This was from the man in the T-shirt, who had just finished counting the money.

“Because I want to make sure he is dead.”

“Dead only requires one bullet,” the blond said.

“Maybe,” the man in the mask said. “But I am paying you triple what you asked. That buys me three.”

“Very well. Three shots. What then?”

“Then we never see each other again.”

“Naturally. I mean what do you want done with the body?”

The man in the mask paused, as though in thought, before answering. “Just leave it in the street,” he said. “Let someone else clean up the mess.”

The money had come in a courier package. Ramon had received it from a young boy, thinking that the parcel contained boxes of envelopes and postage labels he had ordered from Sao Paolo. Instead, it held paper-wrapped bundles of currency. Ramon had the package half unwrapped before he realized what it was and from whom it had come. He looked up, but the delivery boy was already gone.

With the money had come a note: “10 %, October 1.”

Ramon hid the money in a cabinet in the cellar and rationed it carefully, day by day, buying only what he needed, paying off his bills one at a time. To Lienore he explained by saying that business was improving — which, in fact, by small degrees it was. Suppliers agreed to supply him again now that his debts were erased. Borges resumed making legitimate stops, restocking Ramon’s shelves with snack cakes and soft drinks. Sales remained slow, but Ramon had the money to fall back on. The store survived through the worst of it.

And as the heat of summer passed, as, at last, occasional storms came to invigorate the parched landscape, Ramon saw tourists return. When it rained in the middle of the day and tourists angrily ran to take shelter in his store, or his restaurant, or the cantina, Ramon was overjoyed. The drought was ending; life was resuming.

When the first of October came, he found he had used only a little more than half of the original loan — he had, he discovered, overestimated his need. He had also collected enough to pay the interest, which was more than half again as much as the original amount. It galled him to think that he could have asked for less and thereby paid less in interest, but the past was the past. For now he was only concerned to get over the need to repay the loan.

He returned, on the morning of the first, to the house where he had met the Jomon before, carrying his precious parcel under his arm. He placed it on the table with a great sense of relief and accomplishment, feeling as though he were completing a legitimate business transaction. Ramon was not ashamed of what he had done.

But the three men then counted the money, insisting that Ramon remain while they did so; and when they were finished they asked him a question that swept over him like a cold wind and made his soul curl up inside him.

“Where,” the blond asked in an easy and innocent tone, “is the rest of it?”

“The rest?” Ramon said.

“The rest. Ten percent weekly over a period of six months equals two hundred sixty percent. Plus the original amount, of course.” The blond then did some calculations on a pocket calculator and came up with a figure, which he showed Ramon.

“I am sorry, sir,” Ramon said, with all the calmness he could command, “but you said ten percent per month. Not per week.”

“Per month? Are you mad? You could practically get money from a bank at that rate.”

“But it is what you said,” Ramon whispered desperately.

“Is it? Show me.”

And Ramon pulled the note that had come with the money out of his pocket, suddenly aware that it said neither week nor month on it, and knowing in that instant that this had been a deliberate omission. They took the note from him, pretended to look at it, noted that it said only what it said, “10 %, October 1,” and nothing more. But, of course, they said, it was understood by all that interest was a weekly matter.

Ramon could not contain himself. He threw himself at the table, knocking over the stack of money he had collected so painstakingly over the course of half a year. “Here is your money,” he screamed. “It is what you asked for, to the cruzeiro. You know that as well as I do. I cannot pay you more. I cannot pay what you ask. I don’t have it. Take this — it is what we agreed on.” He turned to leave and made it almost to the door.

“Your family will not appreciate your attitude,” the blond said.

Ramon turned back and said, with great fear in his voice, “You will not touch my family.”

“Not if you pay,” the blond said.

“I cannot pay.”

“In cash, maybe not,” the blond said. “But I think we can make other arrangements. Your restaurant has been prosperous, I believe; and you own a piece of El Cantoria. Sign these over to us and we will consider the debt canceled.”

So this was the point of the double cross, Ramon thought, to steal from him all he had spent his life to earn. “I will not give you that. And you will not touch my family,” he said. “I have paid. Our dealings are through.” Then he turned and left, on legs so unstable that he had to sit for twenty minutes in his Jeep before he felt he could drive home safely.

That they would try to squeeze extra money out of him Ramon might have imagined — but on this scale! He could not comprehend it. Did they really think that a poor man, even one with successful businesses, could pay almost three hundred percent interest? Then to request that he relinquish his businesses to them! Had they really expected him to give in?

He drove home in a rage, ready to pack Lienore and Maria up and take them away: out of the country, into the United States, anywhere. He would not be a slave to a gang of sharks, nor would he live in fear for his life. They would go away, even this very night if necessary. They would start fresh and make none of the same mistakes again. He prepared his explanation to Lienore as he walked through the bodega to the stairs in back that led up to their apartment.

But when he got there, he found Lienore lying dead against the stairs, her arms flung up over her head, blood still draining from the wound in her neck.

Ramon ran to her, knelt next to her, cradled her corpse in his arms. Her blood ran onto his hands and down his neck. He started to howl like a baby. One of the men who worked in the steakhouse heard his cries and found him, holding Lienore tightly to his chest. The man left and returned a few moments later with a policeman.

The police decided that Lienore had been the victim of a burglar. And when, later that day, they found Maria’s body in a changing booth at the beach, they dismissed it as the work of a sex criminal. These were the kind of random tragedies that happened every day; that it had happened to two members of the same family in a single day seemed to the disinterested police merely an odd twist of fate. They offered Ramon their condolences, but not their protection or their further assistance.

Ramon numbly accepted all they told him and said not a word about the Jomon. He barely heard the policemen’s explanations or his own account, which he repeated three times, of how he had found his wife’s body. His mind was filled with the picture of his wife’s blood pouring onto his palms and running between his fingers, of his daughter’s bruised throat and lifeless eyes, and of the Jomon’s threat that they would kill him, too, should he fail to cooperate. His ears burned with the words of his daughter’s friends, who had told him (but not the police) that they had seen Maria last in the company of a long-haired blond who had asked them, before leading Maria away, to give his regards to her father.

Ramon ran, first thing the next morning, to his safety-deposit box in the bank. He took the papers of ownership for the steakhouse and the cantina to the house of the Jomon and begged to be let in. Then, with tears streaming down his face, he handed the papers over into the hands that had murdered his daughter, felt those hands clasp his and clap his back and then push him once more out into the street, where he lay down in the dark mouth of an alley and wept.

The door closed behind the Jomon; the noises from outside grew quiet once more. The man in the mask picked up the telephone on the desk.

He dialed the police.

“Tonight, at eight-thirty, a man will be killed on Pescador Street by the Jomon. I suggest you have men on hand to apprehend them.”

Then, as the tiny voice started squeaking questions at him through the earpiece, the man in the mask hung up.

The police, in masks of gold brocade and beaded ponchos and feather headdresses, filter onto the street and mix with the crowd. It is not yet eight o’clock and the sun has just set.

The revelry begins slowly tonight — the army of marchers is farther uptown, at the start of the grand parade, and though the parade will pass along Pescador Street on its way to the beach, it begins in a more prosperous area, at the request of that area’s merchants, barmen, and restaurateurs. The crowd on Pescador Street as the hour changes is all native: dressed madly, gaily, beating tambours and stamping its feet, but not in stagey fashion, not, this time, for the benefit of American television.

A pair of drunks stagger around the entrance to El Cantoria, unaware that they do so in front of a dozen policemen. On another night they might be taken in, but tonight they are let be. The police communicate with silent glances and small gestures. Thirty minutes remain.

In his bodega, Ramon Madradas tallies the day’s receipts and makes a note of the amount in a log he keeps on the shelf under the register. He strips off his apron, balls it up, and leaves it lying on the counter. He moves with short, quick steps around the store, checking each aisle, pushing cans of food back into place, restacking a fallen pile of newspapers. He fears the foot-stamping outside and ticks off in his mind the minutes before the parade will reach Pescador Street. There is just enough time to close the shop. Normally he would then climb upstairs to the apartment he once shared with his wife and daughter, but tonight — tonight is the anniversary of their death and of his capitulation, and tonight will be different.

Ramon turns face down a photograph of himself and his family that he keeps beside the register. He lays it down gently, careful not to scratch the delicate frame. Today, Maria would have been nineteen. Lienore would have been forty-six. If Ramon had died when they died, he would never have aged past fifty. But he is fifty-one now and they are dead, the buildings next door and across the street are in the hands of their killers, and Ramon feels pressing down upon him as though it were a physical weight the wrongness of it all, the enormity of the injustice.

Atone! a voice from deep inside him cries. For cowardice and weakness, atone! And Ramon, knowing it for the voice of his soul, shies away, nervously wrings his hands, searches around the bodega for anything to do rather than step outside into the street.

In the back room of El Cantoria, the Jomon arrange their costumes. They are dressed as oriental kings, with spangled vests and bright turbans and made-up faces. Each carries a revolver in the pocket of his sash. The blond checks his wristwatch and looks out through the slats of the front door. It is almost eight-thirty; the parade is coming closer every minute.

At the edge of the sidewalk, the captain of police, who is dressed as a gaucho, glances around at every face he can scan, looking for a sign. All are strained with anticipation — the music and carousing of the parade is almost here. But which face, the captain asks himself, is that of a man about to die? Which is the face of the killer? And where, among all the painted faces and papier-mâché masks, is the man who called in the tip? There is no way to tell. And as the darkness deepens, it becomes more and more difficult to keep everything in view. Faces emerge from shadow and then disappear once more as people dance past streetlights. Lanterns on the walls create as many shadows as they dispel.

The numbers on the captain’s watch dial glow green with faint luminescence. 8:26. Four more minutes. He walks across the street toward the Madradas bodega, whose lights are still on. Perhaps from there he will be able to see something that will help him.

Ramon paces just inside the door. He remembers, all of a sudden, the last look Maria gave him on the day she died. She was leaving in the morning to walk on the beach and with her goodbye kiss she gave him a look of fervent anticipation that seemed to say that she expected something good to happen that day. It was a look he’d seen often in Maria’s eyes; he had taken no special notice of it and no special pleasure. Had he known he would never see it again, he might have held her longer, might have drunk deeper of the moment. Now the memory of it flits before him, teasing him. Already it is gone. He cannot get it back, though he tries. Now he can only picture her dead eyes and Lienore’s blood on the stairs and his own tears as he knelt cringing before the Jomon and begging for his own life to be spared.

The memory hardens him. He flicks off the lights in the store and steps outside.

The lights in the bodega go off. The police captain moves off toward the well-lit comer where he sees two of his lieutenants standing. Maybe they have seen something from there.

The Jomon watch as Ramon emerges from his bodega. They swing open the cantina’s doors and step out into the street. The parade still has not arrived. But it will any minute. Everyone in the street seems to be holding his breath. The Jomon walk slowly across the street.

Ramon looks over the crowd milling about in the street, winces as the wave of sound washes over him. The door slams shut behind him from its own weight. Reluctantly, he turns to pull the night gate down and lock it.

The captain looks at his watch — 8:31.

At last the parade rounds the comer, led by a trio of acrobats who turn cartwheels, shouting. The crowd moves out of their path, flowing onto the sidewalk.

The Jomon reach the sidewalk outside the bodega. They are surrounded on all sides, but everyone is watching the parade as it barrels down the middle of the street. They pull their guns.

Ramon struggles with the night gate’s lock. The key turns but the lock doesn’t catch. He shakes the key; he shakes the lock.

The Jomon stand behind him.

Raise their guns.

Fire into his head. His back. And finally, since a third shot was promised, into the fleshy part of his right leg.

The shots go almost unheard amid the cracks and pops of firecrackers and Roman candles. Almost. But the police hear them and know them for what they are. They glance quickly around to find their source.

Ramon collapses in his pooling blood. The Jomon begin to vanish, moving as quickly as they can through the crowd. A woman next to Ramon screams.

The police captain sees her scream, sees the terror in her face, sees the men moving away from her in three different directions. He blows a shrill blast on his police whistle which cuts through all the other noise. The police push people to the ground as they chase the fleeing killers. One policeman tackles the blond around the knees. Another steps into the black man’s path and, seeing the man’s gun come up, fires point-blank into his chest. The third man disappears into the steakhouse, but the police captain pursues him inside and comers him in the back of the kitchen. Once the man is handcuffed, the policeman leads him back outside.

The street is in chaos. The grand parade, unaware of what it is heading into, continues to pour into Pescador Street. Some of the policemen try in vain to calm the crowd. Two men lie dead in the street, two men lie in handcuffs. No one knows what has just happened.

The police captain stands with one of his lieutenants over the body of Ramon Madradas. He has to shout to make himself heard. “I don’t understand it. Why him? Why would anyone want Madradas dead?”

“Perhaps he failed to pay off a debt,” the lieutenant shouts back.

“But then why did we get the tip on when and where the murder would be?”

The lieutenant shrugs. “Someone wanted Madradas dead and wanted the Jomon caught also.”

“Yes, but who?” The captain holds tight to the cuffed wrists of his captive. He turns and addresses the question to him. “Who?”

The young man shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says. “He wore a mask.”

The man in the mask let the receiver drop into its cradle, silencing the voice of the woman at the police station. Who are you? she had started to ask. Where are you calling from? How do you know about this?

He stood up, pushed the chair back from the desk, and walked to the window. It was light outside; eight-thirty felt a lifetime away. But the Jomon would be successful, he was sure. That meant he had only five hours left to live.

He dropped the hat and gloves on the desk, pulled the mask over the top of his head, and smoothed down his thick, stiff hair. His hair needed to be cut, and looking at his hands he realized that his fingernails needed cutting as well. It didn’t matter any longer, but it bothered him, so he pulled a penknife out of his pocket, sat on the edge of his desk, and pared his tough, yellow nails.

If the Jomon lived, they would lead the police to this office he had rented, where they would find nothing. The money, all saved in cash over the course of the year, was untraceable. The mask and hat he would throw away on his way to the bodega. Amid the refuse of Carnivale, with its thousand identical masks and hats, they would never be found.

He would not be buried at the public expense. All the money he had left would go to Borges, who would use it for a proper funeral.

And the Jomon, caught committing a murder under the very eyes of the police, would surely get the punishment they deserved.

Ramon closed and pocketed his penknife. Then he began the trek back to the bodega. Siesta was over.

He threw the mask out in one street-corner garbage can, the hat in another. His hand trembled as he unlocked the bodega’s front door for the last time.