Mask Market

“I don’t like it,” the Prof said. “You never get too brave around another man’s cave, because…?”

“That’s the quickest ticket to an early grave.” I finished the rule, to show I hadn’t forgotten the first time he’d taught it to me, eons ago.

“You want to trap a weasel, you don’t look for his den,” the little man rolled on, unmoved. “What you do is, you set a trap in a chicken coop. You don’t need to know where a man lives…?”

“To know where he’s going to visit,” I said. “I know, Prof. But we’ve got no way to put the watch on Charlie, not in that neighborhood.”

“My main man Mole—”

“He got us the pictures, sure. But that was because he knows people who live around there. They weren’t watching for Charlie special; they just snapped off a shot when they ran across him.”

“What’d they take the pictures with?” he asked. From the way he turned toward Clarence, I knew the old man wanted to make sure his audience was in place before he hit me with a jab.

“One of those camera phones,” I said, playing along.

“Camera phone, you said, Schoolboy?”

“I get it, Prof. But it’s not that simple. Who do they call? They don’t know us. And the Mole doesn’t want them to know us. But let’s say he could get them to just ring a number when Charlie was in the street. Where are we going to be sitting in ambush? There’s no hotel close by. No poolrooms or gin joints we could hang out in. Not even a lousy OTB. And we could never rent a house in that neighborhood. So?”

“If my father—” Clarence started to say.

“Nah,” the Prof cut him off. “I never said Burke was wrong, just that I didn’t like it. We’re done, son.”

Max tapped the face of his watch, shook his head in disapproval.

“You, too?” I gestured. “We only get one chance, right?” I said to them all, holding up one finger. “And, from what Mole’s people told him, the window only opens at certain hours,” I went on, my hands saying the words to Max. “So there’s only one way I can see to make our move.”

The next morning, I woke up thinking about Loyal. That hadn’t happened to me before. I guess I stopped thinking of her as a party girl the minute she told me she was always afraid of ending up as one.

The newspaper had a make-you-retch story. Cop arrested for rape and sodomy. Too many counts to list, over too many years, because the victims were his daughters. The Queens DA put out the red carpet for the poor guy. They let him surrender himself at the courthouse, arraigned him in seconds, and cut him loose on his own recognizance, no bail. The paper said the DA wouldn’t identify the cop, because they wanted to “protect the alleged victims.” Nice.

At your age, this is supposed to be an annual examination,” my doctor said. He’s very tall for a Chinese man, good-looking enough to be a movie star, and a magazine survey I read last year said he was one of the top urologists in New York. With all that, his office is still down on Canal Street, his prices haven’t changed, and his receptionist still blinks when I tell her I’m a patient, not a salesman. Or a cop.

“Sorry,” I said, lamely.

“The outcome for prostate cancer is directly related to early detection,” he said, for at least the fifth time since I’d been coming there.

“I know,” I mumbled, holding up my hands in surrender.

“The lab is right around the corner, on Mott Street,” he said, unyielding. “This time, you call for the results, all right? The PSA test isn’t a perfect indicator, but it’s the best lab screen we have now. Last time”—he glanced down at my folder—“you got the test, but you never called for the results.”

“Sorry,” I said again. “What were they?”

“Three point seven,” he said. “That’s not a cause for concern, but anything over four is something we would want to follow closely.”

“Sure.”

“We would call you, but the number on your file never seems to be up-to-date.”

“I move around a lot.”

“Yes. Well, we don’t,” he said, sternly. “We’re right here. And our number hasn’t changed.”

The blood lab on Mott Street had the decor of the waiting room at a Greyhound terminal. I was the only non-Asian in the place. The Oriental flower at the receptionist’s desk took the paper I handed her, pointed at a row of plastic chairs, said, “Few minutes, okay?”

I settled in for the duration, but it turned out the girl was telling the truth. My phlebotomist was a burly Hispanic, with stress-pattern baldness. He wrapped a piece of rubber tubing around my arm faster than a junkie who hadn’t fixed in days, tapped the crook of my elbow to bring up a vein, slid the needle home.

“How many of these you do a day?” I asked him.

“Many, many,” he said, sliding out the needle and slipping a cotton ball over the entry wound in one motion.

As I left, I saw a sex worker waiting to be tested, a young-bodied, older-faced woman in jeans and a too-small stretch top. If she got the same blood-taker I’d had, she’d learn the real meaning of “quickie.”

By the time I climbed off the F train at the Van Wyck/Briarwood stop, spring had arrived, a light rain misting the streets. I walked over to the small branch library just off Queens Boulevard, spotted the Prof sitting on the steps enjoying a leisurely smoke, and strolled on past. I boxed the corner, crossed the boulevard, and set off to find the middleman.

I wore a brown leather jacket that I had picked out of a Goodwill bin, leaving a brand-new nylon one in its place. I hadn’t been looking for a bargain; I wanted something I might have to leave at the scene. Something with enough random DNA on it to confuse the hounds. A white jersey cable-knit, dark-green corduroy pants, scuffed brown work boots. In the pockets of the jacket, a pair of deerskin gloves and an orange wool watch cap.

No gun, no knife, no brass knuckles. I was coming in peace.

Charlie’s street was quiet, but it was time-of-day quiet, not the peligroso silence that falls in some neighborhoods whenever a stranger walks through. The kids were home from school—playing on their computers, not in the street. Working parents weren’t back yet; retirees were watching whichever one of the endless parade of “court” shows was on at the time.

It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where you’d find basketball hoops nailed to telephone poles, or dogs running wild, but it still throbbed with the muted rhythms of life behind the well-maintained façades.

Charlie’s house was a stone-and-stucco job that looked vaguely British to me. Maybe it was the ivy that trellis-climbed on one side, or the small windows broken into even smaller rectangles by the copper-colored panes.

I went up to the front door like I was expected, pushed the little white button nestled inside a silver filigree, and stepped back slightly, hands clasped in front.

“Hello?” the woman said. She was medium height, with thick raven hair pulled back into a single plait, wearing a plain blue dress that was too good a match for her eyes to be off-the-rack. Her smile was open and friendly, showing perfect teeth. I figured her for somewhere in her thirties; would have laid good odds she’d been a swimsuit model or a pageant contestant earlier on.

Was Charlie playing the Benny Siegel role so heavy he got himself a gorgeous Sabra to flesh out the skeleton? I wondered, but I just bowed slightly, said, “Good afternoon, young lady. My name is Kolchan. Meyer Kolchan. I was hoping I could have a quick word with Benjamin….”

“Yes, sure,” she said, smiling again, some kind of Slavic accent in her voice. Not an Israeli, then. “Ben?” she called out, sweetly. “Mr. Kolchan is here to see you. Can you—?”

Charlie Jones stepped past her, grinning. “Go fix supper, woman!” he said, mock-commanding, giving her a swat on the bottom as she turned away, giggling.

“What can I—?” he started to say. Then he saw my face.

“No,” he said, very softly.

“It isn’t what you think,” I said, not moving from my spot, radiating calm out to him. “I just needed to ask you a question, and I didn’t know where else to reach you.”

He looked over my shoulder, expecting…I don’t know what.

“One question,” I said. “Then I’ll—”

“Pick a place,” he said, his voice so tight it vibrated like a tuning fork. “Pick a time. I’ll be there. Set it up any way you want. Please! Just don’t—”

“You know the plaza next to Penn Station, on the Eighth Avenue side?”

“Yes.”

“Say, eleven tomorrow morning?”

“Yes. Yes, I’ll be there, okay?”

“Don’t ruin a good thing by being cute, Benny.”

He looked at me the way a steer in the killing funnel looks at the rifleman waiting at the end: a stare of dull, helpless hatred. I turned my back on him and started for the subway.

I was about twenty minutes into my meandering half-hour walk when a dark-blue commercial van with tinted windows pulled over to the curb ahead of me. The back doors opened and two men jumped out. I didn’t have to see the tracksuits to know who they were.

The smaller one was a mongoose. He circled behind me, looking for the back of my neck. The big one plowed straight ahead, a charging bull. I glanced over my shoulder. The mongoose was holding what looked like an oversized plastic automatic—Taser! screamed in my head. The bull had his hands spread wide, like we were going to do Greco-Roman. I spun to my right to give them a visual of me running, planted my right foot, torqued hard, and rushed the big one.

I registered a broad face and a flattened nose just before we closed. As he wrapped thick arms around me, my steel-toed boot shattered his right ankle. He grunted in pain and locked on, trying to take me to the ground with him. I drove my inside forearm against his chest, jammed my right hand under his chin, and snapped my wrist as I forked my two front fingers past his nose into his eyes. He shrieked, grabbed at his face, and let go.

I spun to face the mongoose. He danced, looking for the exposed flesh his weapon needed to work. I X-ed my jacketed forearms over my face and ran at him. He stepped back, surprised, and I caught him with a side kick to the thigh. I rolled with the kick and took off running.

I dashed across two lawns, looking for a back yard. Heard shouting behind me, but no shots. Cold comfort—I hadn’t heard shots when they’d snuffed out Daniel Parks, either.

I ran through some back yards and pulled myself over a wooden fence, hoping there was no dog on the other side and cursing Daylight Saving Time.

I made it to the street, scanned the area. Looked clear, but I figured by then the locals were lighting up the 911 switchboard. I turned a corner, pulled off the leather jacket, and dropped it on the ground. I put on the gloves and the orange watch cap, then walked down the sidewalk until I hit the apex of a triangle—Clarence in his Rover at one point, the subway back to Manhattan at the other.

I couldn’t see the blue van, but I couldn’t be sure it hadn’t seen me, so I chose the subway.

I looked over my shoulder as I swiped my Metrocard. Nothing. Down on the platform, I spotted a battered payphone, but the Manhattan-bound train was pulling in. No time.

Two stops later, I got out at Continental Avenue, slipping into the heavy foot-traffic that’s always there at that hour. I crossed over to the cab stand, told the driver I wanted the Delta terminal at La Guardia.

At La Guardia, I dropped the gloves in a garbage can, used an alcohol wipe to clean the congealed eyeball fluid off my right forefinger in the men’s room, and left the watch cap in a stall.

Plenty of working payphones there. I rang Clarence’s cell.

“I’m out,” I said.

“Saw you drop down, mahn.”

I waited my turn on the airport cab line, then rode a Crown Vic with bad shocks to Broadway and Seventy-fifth, just north of what guys my age still call Needle Park. If the cabbie wondered about my lack of luggage, he kept it to himself. Or maybe he intuited that I wasn’t fluent in Senegalese.

I walked over to the 1/9 line, and used my Metrocard one more time.

When violence erupts at me, the same thing always happens. A tiny white dot lasers in my brain, bathing the world in a blue-edged light. I watch myself move through that blue-edged light, like a man underwater, everything so very slow.

Later, I can play it back, like a stored VCR tape.

Over and over again.

What I can never do is erase it.

Max tapped his temple, raised his eyebrows in a question.

“No,” I told him, shaking my head. “I didn’t think.”

The Mongol nodded approval. The foundation to all his teaching is replacement of instinct. That viper-strike he’d taught me is really an escape move; it can’t be thrown from a distance. You have to give your enemy a grip on you to make it work, and that goes against every instinct…especially mine.

I’d been a boxer in prison—one of the Prof’s endless schemes. It didn’t require me to actually win any fights to pay benefits. As a fighter, I was what they used to call “pretty.” Slick and smooth. Very fast hands. I didn’t have one-shot KO power, but I threw cutter’s punches, and I was a good finisher.

I always had plenty of backers, because, even with all my speed, I was never a runner—I stayed in the kitchen and traded. There was never a lot of money on me to win—they don’t pay too much attention to weight classes Inside, and I was usually matched against bigger guys—but I was an ace at going the distance, even against the hardest bangers.

“Fighting’s the same as friendship, Schoolboy,” the Prof told me. “The best ones always try to give a little more than they take.”

When I got out the first time, it took Max about ten minutes to show me I was never going to make a living with gloves on my fists. At first, we sparred a lot. Me trying to hit him, him watching me try. Once he had me dialed in, he worked with what he had. No more boxing, no more rules.

Surprise is speed

Speed is power

Thinking is slow

Slow is weak

I’d been ready for the two men who’d jumped out of the van. Been ready for a long time.

“It was a snatch,” I said out loud, gesturing to include Max. “If they’d wanted to shoot me, I was an easy target.”

“Didn’t even need all that noise and nonsense,” the Prof agreed. “They could have done you just the same way they did that boy who was gonna hire you.”

“Yeah,” I said, slowly. In our world, we know that there’s no such thing as the “precision beatings” you see gangsters order in the movies. Violence isn’t surgery: You send a couple of men out to break a guy’s legs, the guy struggles, the bat slips, and, just like that, the beating’s a homicide.

There’s a thousand ways that can happen. You can’t order a pre-beating medical report on a target, like those degenerate doctors who worked in Southern prison farms used to do, telling the torture-loving guards whether it was safe to keep whipping. One punch can do the trick. All it takes is a heart condition you didn’t know about. Or an eggshell skull.

“It was a capture, not a kill,” I said. “They wanted to talk to me, all right.”

“I was in position the whole time,” Clarence said. “There was nothing like a blue van by the subway.”

“You said you saw me go down there?”

“Oh yes, mahn. As soon as I spotted the orange cap, I knew something had gone wrong. But you were moving nice, and I didn’t see anyone interested in you.”

“I had your back all the way to the hack, Schoolboy,” the Prof said.

“You were in the subway?”

“The Invisible Man,” the Prof chuckled. That’s what he calls himself when he’s dressed as a foot soldier in the Vagrancy Corps. The ankle-length coat he always wore was big enough for three of him, and they only have metal detectors in the subways on special occasions.

“They came awfully quick,” Michelle said, grim-faced.

“It don’t take a lot of time to drop a dime,” the Prof told her.

“Could they have followed you, mahn?”

“How?” I asked Clarence. “From where? Starting when?”

“That clue is true,” the Prof agreed. “Only way that works is if Burke was spotted same time they took out that rich guy, and followed him, right? Come on! That was so, they already passed up a hundred better shots than the one they took.”

“They don’t have anything,” I said, checking my voice to make certain I wasn’t graveyard-whistling. “That night, they never saw where I came from, or where I went. And all Charlie’s got for me is a phone number.”

“He’s got something else,” the Prof said.

“What?”

“He knows where you’re going to be tomorrow morning, son. Time and place leaves him holding an ace.”

“You think he’ll show, then?”

“Got to, honeyboy. He knows where you’ll be one time, sure. But we, we know where he lives.”

The flower boxes outside Penn Station were pure New York: thick concrete tubs surrounding death-brown evergreens, with spikes all along the border to prevent panhandlers from finding a seat between engagements.

I crossed Thirty-third Street to the plaza, where they get a different class of visitor, and sitting is encouraged. I took the place up on its invitation, looked around casually. After dark, this place would be a skateboarder’s paradise. The broad expanse of flat surfaces would magnet the graffiti taggers, too. In another hour or so, the place would be crowded with office workers eating pushcart lunches, eyeing one another like it was a singles bar. But now it was all business.

A scrawny Caucasian in a white mesh jacket with a neck tattoo I couldn’t read at the distance was performing an elaborate set of hand gestures. It looked like he wasn’t having any luck persuading his audience, a big-headed black man in a hugely oversized basketball jersey, red and white, with number 23 on the back.

A flushed-faced man in some kind of green maintenance uniform stared openly at a reddish-brown man sporting an American flag do-rag, trying to make up his mind.

A black pigeon with a perfect circle of white on its head patrolled the grounds, treasure-hunting. A flock of tiny brown birds with pale undersides surrounded me, asking me to slip them something before the pigeon mob caught wise. I crumpled a piece of bagel in my fist, flicked the crumbs behind me. The little birds hit like a flight of locusts.

I didn’t have to glance at my watch to know I was early. The group of Chinese teenagers catty-corner from me had been there since at least midnight. Or maybe they were handling it in shifts. I couldn’t even tell how many of them there were, the way they kept drifting together, then pulling apart to float around the perimeter. They were all wearing shiny fingertip black leather jackets over goldenrod silk shirts buttoned to the throat, their obsidian hair greased into high pompadours.

The gang kids all worked for Bobby Sun, but Max had some sort of treaty with his crew, the Blood Shadows. They left the restaurant—and my personal parking space in the alley behind it—alone, and Max left them alone. But there was more to it than a nonaggression pact. Some of those empty-eyed killer children worshiped Max in a way they couldn’t have explained and didn’t understand…but trusted with all of their life-taking lives.

Anyone who moved on me in that plaza would be Swiss cheese.

Clarence posed against the entrance, resplendent in a bottle-green jacket with wide lapels and exaggerated shoulder pads, a white felt hat shielding his eyes. Charlie had never met Clarence, but he knew the Prof, who was being invisible somewhere close by. Max stood right in the center of the plaza, arms crossed. He looked as if he had sprouted from the cement, still as a statue except for his eyes, which were swiveling like a pair of tank turrets.

Clarence left his post, started a slow strut around the plaza, hands in his pockets. He looked like a peacock, hoping to audition some new hens. But he was really a coursing hound, and the under-clothes bulges he was looking for weren’t female curves.

I watched as a dark-blue BMW coupe slowly drove by. It had been circling the block since before I arrived, passing by irregularly, depending on traffic. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I never would have noticed. Michelle.

Nobody could miss the mammoth old Buick four-door, though. Originally painted egg-yolk yellow, years of never seeing a garage had faded the rolling hulk to fish-belly white, with a rust-red roof. The Blood Shadows’ war wagon, far out of its territory, orbiting like the mother ship, ready to take everyone home when it got the signal.

Still no men in tracksuits. No blue van.

And there was Charlie Jones, walking toward me, making sure I saw him coming.

“Here,” I said, as he sat down next to me, “put this on.”

“What for?” he asked, voice quavering as he looked down at the red baseball cap with a white bill I was holding in my lap.

“It’s to make you easy to pick out, Charlie.”

“Pick out? For who?”

“Who do you think I got your address from, Charlie?” I wanted him to hear his own name coming out of my mouth. Over and over again.

“I don’t…”

“Yeah, you do,” I told him. “You’re a very smart guy, Charlie. You’ve been fishing in the whisper-stream for so long, you know what to keep and what to throw back.”

“So you didn’t die,” he said. Like he’d just won a big bet but the bookie wouldn’t pay off.

“We don’t die, Charlie. None of us. We just come back looking different. You won’t know my brother if you ever see him again, either.”

“Your…?”

“Put the cap on, Charlie,” I said. “You wouldn’t want Wesley to hit some citizen by mistake, would you?”

It took him a while to put the cap on his head—his hands were shaking so badly, he dropped it the first time he tried.

“How long have you known?” he finally asked.

“Years and years,” I assured him.

“So why now? What did I—?”

“That last job you had for me…”

“Yeah?”

“The guy who was going to hire me stepped out to get something from his car. He got gunned down on the way. It was in the papers.”

Charlie shrugged, saying it all.

“What I don’t know, Charlie,” I continued, “is whether the shooters want to clean house. My house.”

“I don’t do names,” he said, a little strength coming into his voice. “You know that, Burke.” Saying my name, reminding me how far back we went, how long his own reputation stretched.

“The dead guy, his name was Daniel Parks.”

Charlie just shrugged again.

“He was looking for someone. Someone he wanted me to find. Maybe the shooters were looking for that person, too.”

“All I had for that guy was the number I gave you to call,” he said. “That’s all I ever have.”

“That does sound like you, Charlie. It even sounds like the truth. There’s only one problem, okay? I’m on my way back from your house yesterday and this van pulls up. Out pops some guys dressed like the ones who killed the guy you sent to me. And they try and snatch me, right there on the street. I can’t quite see that as a coincidence. Maybe you can help me out here?”

He went stone-still for a second. Then a tremor shot through his body like a current. His face looked as if a vampire was clamped to his jugular.

“Galya,” he said, barely audible. He slumped forward, face in his hands. The red baseball cap slid off his head and fell to the cold concrete.

If Charlie’s sudden move had been a signal, nobody was tuned in. Sometimes you can feel violence coming, like a rolling shock wave ahead of the actual impact. The penitentiary gets like that when a race war’s running. When you’re trapped in a tiny stone city, when your color makes you a combatant, it changes the air you breathe. Most of the time, you never get a warning—you go from ignorance to autopsy in a fractured second.

That’s the way Wesley liked it. He wasn’t programmed for fear, but he knew how it worked. Sometimes he used it—to spook the herd so he could spot the one he wanted. But mostly he liked it better the other way.

“They’re easier when they’re sleeping,” he had whispered to me one night, after one of the dorm bosses told us if we didn’t get money from home we’d have to pay him some other way.

Detectives were all over the place when we got up in the morning. Word was that the dorm boss’s skull had been caved in, right next to one of his eyes. By the time they discovered the body, the murder kit had vanished: the D-cell batteries returned to the flashlight of the night-shift guard, the gym sock they had been carried in shredded and flushed down a toilet.

That joint had been lousy with rats. Some informed for favors, some just because they liked to do it. But, even then, nobody ever told on Wesley.

The Blood Shadows looked bored. That didn’t mean anything—they’d look bored in the middle of a shootout. Clarence was on his second circuit. I couldn’t see Max. Hadn’t seen him move away, either.

Charlie hadn’t brought friends.

Or he didn’t have any.

I looked over at him, still slumped. Realized that I’d never seen Charlie Jones in daytime, never mind daylight. He looked defeated. Drained. And old—he looked really old.

“Better tell me,” I said.

“Can I smoke?” he asked me, like I was a cop in an interrogation cell.

“Come on, Charlie,” I said, trying to get him to unclench. But even a hit of liquid Valium wouldn’t have gotten the job done, not once I’d brought Wesley back to life.

Charlie looked down at his shaking hands, as if to add them to the list of people who had betrayed him. “Treyf,” he mumbled to himself.

“What’s not kosher?” I said. “I’ve been straight with you from the—”

“Not you,” he said, sorrow drilling a deep hole in his delicate voice.

Max materialized to Charlie’s left, just as a shadow blotted out the sun to his right. I didn’t have to look to know a couple of the leather-jacketed kids were forming their half of the bracket.

Suddenly Charlie and I had as much privacy as if we were in a hotel room.

“The guys who jumped me, they were either watching your house or…”

“Somebody made a phone call,” he finished for me.

“Yeah.”

“Galya.”

I gave him thirty seconds, then said, “Galya. What’s that?”

“My wife,” he said, like a man watching his oncologist hold up three fingers.

“The girl who came to the door?”

“Yes.”

I waited, patient as the stone I was sitting on. When it finally came, it flowed like pus from a lanced wound.

“Her name is Galina,” he said. “This June, we’ll have been married fifteen years. She was only nineteen when I found her. Nineteen. I was old enough to be her father, but she said that was what she was looking for. She wanted a man, not a boy. A man to take care of her.

“It was through one of those services. A legit marriage bureau, I mean. They screen you, just like they were the girl’s parents. And it’s not some green-card racket, either—I went over there, to Russia, twice before she…before she said she’d come back here with me to live.”

I gave him a no-judgments look, waiting for the rest.

“My Galya wasn’t one of those ‘bought brides,’” the night dweller said, angry at someone who wasn’t there. “That’s just…slavery. Those people sell those girls like they’re fucking cars. Used cars, you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Sure.”

“I was…lonely, okay? Thirty-seven years old, but I felt like I was a hundred. This life…”

I let the silence throb between us, waiting.

“To you, I’m…Never mind,” he finally said, holding up his hand like I’d been about to interrupt him. “I know what I am in your eyes. But where I live, I’m not Charlie Jones, the matchmaker. I’m Benny Siegel, the businessman. I’m respected. Part of the community. I’ve had my house there since I got out of the army. Cost me every dime I had saved up just to make the down, but it was worth it.”

He went silent. I gave him a few seconds, to see if he’d pick it up. When he didn’t, I said, “The army, huh? Were you in—?”

“Yeah, I was there,” he cut me off. “Even got myself a couple of medals for it. Wouldn’t have thought it, would you?”

“I wouldn’t know how to tell,” I answered him, truthfully.

“That’s where I learned to do what I do,” he said. “Down in those fucking tunnels.”

No wonder he’s more comfortable in the dark, I thought, but kept it to myself.

“You weren’t there yourself, were you?” he said, turning his face to me. “No, that’s right. Word is, you were some kind of mercenary. In Africa, right?”

“This isn’t about me, Charlie.”

“No,” he said, forlornly. “I guess it’s not. All right, you want to know, I’ll tell you. Over there, once you got off the line, the whole country was nothing but a giant fucking trading post, like a flea market on steroids. Some people wanted things; other people had things. People wanted things done; there were people who wanted to do those things. Everything got moved: dope, ordnance, medical supplies. Even whole jeeps. I fell into it by accident. A guy asked me, did I know someone who could do something. It doesn’t matter what. Not now. But I did. Know someone, I mean. A sniper.

“That’s where it started. The middle, it’s like a deep trench. You fall into it, then you find out it’s not just deep, it’s long. Endless. One day, you look up, and you can’t see the sky anymore. That’s when you know you’re back in the tunnels. Tunnels so long that you couldn’t walk to the sunlight in your whole life.”

Charlie looked down at his hands, as if seeing the unlit cigarette for the first time. He put it to his lips, used a throwaway butane lighter to get it going. I noticed his hands were steady now. Lancing an abscess will do that sometimes.

“When I came home, I just picked up where I’d left off,” he said. “I had a lot of names and numbers. For a long time, I just worked with people I knew. I’m not sure when it happened, but word got out I was down there, and people looked me up. Like it was my address. Word got around. People who needed things done would look for me. Ask around. And I knew people, too, by then. People I could match them up with. People who knew I could be trusted.”

“Trusted,” I said. Just the word.

“Trusted,” Charlie repeated, a touch of pride slipping into his voice. “You know how the tunnels work?”

“No,” I said. I didn’t know which tunnels he was talking about—Vietnam or New York—but I let him run.

“You have to have something to believe in,” the ferret said. “And it has to be something you can do. Not religion. Rules. You have to do things right. By the book. No matter what comes up, there’s a plan for it. You’ll be all right as long as you stick to the rules. The guys who went down and didn’t come back, it’s always because they forgot the rules.”

“And you never did.”

“I never did,” he repeated, like taking an oath. “One tunnel’s the same as another. Maybe one’s lined with punji sticks, one’s got those little gas bombs. Another one, there’s a VC pop shooter, sitting there for days without moving, just waiting for the fly to stumble into the web. It doesn’t matter what’s down there. You can’t control that. But you can control how you act.”

“Follow the rules.”

“That’s right. And I have. I always have.”

“You’ve got a good rep,” I acknowledged.

“‘Good’?” he said, snapping away his cigarette. “Fuck you, ‘good.’ I’m not good; I’m gold.”

There! His ferret’s pride finally bursting through the crust of fear, the opening I’d been probing for.

“Easy to say when you’re not looking at a ride Upstate,” I said. And I could say it—everyone in our world knows that when Burke goes down he goes down alone. My diploma was from my last felony jolt, magna con laude.

“I’ve been jugged three times,” Charlie said, like a tennis player returning an easy lob. “Twice as a material witness, once for some okey-doke they made up to put me in the pressure cooker. I just sat there until they cut me loose.”

“So they couldn’t bluff you. That’s not the same as—”

“‘Bluff’?” the ferret said. “The last one, they had a body, and they had the shooter. He was a pro. A contract man.”

He glanced up, as if calling my attention to something we both knew was there. The corner of his mouth twitched. Not a tic, telling me something in a language we shared.

But telling me what? That the contract man had been Wesley. Making an offering out of his honesty?

He couldn’t be bragging about keeping quiet, because nobody in our world would give Wesley up. Not out of loyalty—Wesley was alone. Not out of obedience to some twit screenwriter’s idea of “the code.” No, out of a fear so deep and elemental that it transcended logic and reason. Everybody knew: If you said the iceman’s name aloud to the Law, you were dead.

Or was the little ferret gambling? The whisper-stream had all kinds of rumors running about me and Wesley. Maybe Charlie thought I already knew about the job he was talking about, showing me he could have put me on the spot when he’d had the chance.

“Nobody could make a connection to the dead woman,” he went on, not missing a beat. “They knew it had to be her husband who paid to get it done, but they didn’t have a link. Oh, the shooter rolled on him,” he said, contemptuously, “but the husband was ready for that. Alibi in place, lawyers spread out thick as chopped liver on a bagel. The cops needed me to make the bridge.”

“So the shooter gave you up, too?” I asked, knowing it couldn’t be Wesley he was talking about now.

“Tried to.” Charlie shrugged. “First they offered me a free pass. Tell what I knew and walk away. Not a misdemeanor slap, not even probation. Immunity, straight up. I just looked dumb,” he said, showing me the same blank face he must have shown them. “Then they tried to scare me. A skinny little guy like me, a skinny little white guy, everyone knew what was going to happen if I had to go Upstate, they said.”

“But after the tunnels…”

“Yeah,” he said, unwilling to dignify the attempt to frighten him with another word.

“So what happened?”

“To me? Nothing. My lawyer told them, if they brought me into the case, I was going to testify the shooter was lying—about ever meeting with me—and since the DA needed the shooter to be telling the truth about the hit, they couldn’t risk letting the jury see him lie about any part of it. So they tried it on murder-and-motive.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. The husband would have beat it, too. Only the DA had another card. His girlfriend. She testified she had been pressuring him to get a divorce so they could get married, but his wife had all the money, so he was trapped. He told her they’d be married by Christmas. The wife got smoked in September. When he hadn’t married her by April, she went to the Law.”

“Happy ending.”

“That’s what I want here, too,” the tunnel-runner said. “A happy ending. Tell me what I have to do to get one, Burke. All I need is the rules.”

“You want to go back to being Benny Siegel?”

“I am Benny Siegel. That’s what it says on my birth certificate. On my 214, too. I’m like a farmer, okay? It’s not any one year’s crops I care about so much, it’s the land.”

“I get it.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Jews weren’t allowed to own land,” I said, softly, remembering the Mole’s lessons. “That’s why they wandered.”

“And did the work nobody else wanted to do…” Nodding for me to fill in the blank.

“…but everyone needed done.”

“Yes,” he said, solemnly.

In the silence, he took out another cigarette. His hands were as steady as a dead man’s pulse.

“Were the guys who jumped you Russians?” he asked.

“I don’t know. We didn’t have a conversation.”

“My wife…”

“What?”

“I love her. Tell me how she survives this, and it’s done.”

“Meaning it was her who called in the troops?”

“I don’t know that. But it’s all that’s left.”

“Does she work with you, Charlie?”

“Galya? She doesn’t even know—”

“Yeah, she does,” I cut off his self-delusion at the root. “If you didn’t sic those guys in the van on me—and I don’t think you did, okay?—then it was her. What’s she doing, calling the same crew that executed the man who was trying to hire me, Charlie? The same guy you sent to me?”

“I never told her a—”

“This is your wife, Charlie. She’s not just in your house; she’s in your business. And she’s in deep. At least this piece of it.”

“I—”

“She’s in your business,” I said again. “And if you want to protect her like you say, you better get in hers.”

“Just tell me,” he said, defeated.

“I want to talk to the people who want to talk to me. I want someone to tell them they don’t need to be trying to snatch me off the street to do that.”

“But, you do that, they’ll know who you are,” he said, his ferret’s brain back to professionalism. “And now they don’t know—or they would have come for you already.”

“You let me worry about that. I don’t like things hanging over me.”

“Me, either,” he said, pointedly.

“Then it’s time for you to have a talk with your wife.”

He just nodded—a man who knew the rules.

It took only another few minutes for me to run the whole deal down. Charlie didn’t argue. In fact, he made himself my partner in the enterprise, suggesting a couple of ways we could get what we needed done a little better.

“Call the number I gave you,” he said.

“When?”

“Anytime after midnight.”

“You’ll have it by then?”

“One way or the other,” he said, grimly.

He lit another smoke.

“It took a lot of guts for you to walk in here,” I said, making a gesture to encompass the whole wired-up plaza. “To come in all alone.”

“I always work alone,” the middleman said. “And this”—imitating the gesture I’d just made—“this is just another tunnel.”

“Charlie Jones, a tunnel rat,” the Prof said, musingly. “Who would’ve thought there was any glory in his story?”

“Everybody’s got a story. That’s not the same thing as an excuse.”

“You didn’t buy his lie, Schoolboy?”

“I…I guess I did, Prof. Even the timing works. The woman who came to the door first—his wife, now we know—she went right back into the house, left me outside talking to Charlie. That’s when she has to have made the call.”

“That’s why he asked you if the snatch team was Russians?”

“Has to be.”

“Which means he knows more than he gave up,” Michelle put in. “Which is what we’d expect.”

“Yeah. But it wasn’t Charlie,” I said, more sure of myself after a few hours of thinking it through. “If he wanted to set me up, all he had to do was ring the number he has for me, make a meet, like he had a job—”

“Like he did before,” Clarence said.

“Right. And if he just panicked, seeing me at his door, and called in muscle, why would they have tried to grab me? If they’re the same crew that hit Daniel Parks, they’re not shy about shooting.”

“So you’re going to talk to them because you think that’s what they want?”

“No, honey,” I said to Michelle. “I’m going to talk to them because the guy they hit is a money man. Was a money man, anyway. We’ve been trying to figure out if there’s something for us in all this. If anyone knows, they do.”

“Or your girl,” the Prof said.

“Yeah. Or her. But, so far, we can’t find Beryl. And we can find the Russians.”

“Uh-huh,” the Prof grunted. Not convinced, and making sure I knew it.

“Any way you want to do it.” Charlie’s voice, on the phone. “It’s not you they want, it’s information.”

“And if I don’t have it, they’re going to take my word for it?”

“They don’t expect you to have it. They know it’s a real long shot.”

“Any way I want to do it?”

“Yes.”

Two-fifteen the next morning. The man in the blue-and-white warm-up suit had been standing on the corner of a Chinatown back street for almost half an hour, as still as a sniper. He never once glanced at his watch.

When the oil-belching black Chevy Caprice—Central Casting for gypsy cab—pulled up, he got into the back seat.

From that moment, his life was at risk. Not because the hands of Max the Silent could find a kill-spot like a heat-seeking missile, but because those hands were on the steering wheel. Max drives like he walks, expecting everything in his path to step aside. He still hasn’t figured out that cars are like guns—they make some morons braver than they should be.

We box-tailed the Chevy all the way out to Hunts Point. If the man in the warm-up suit had brought friends, we couldn’t see any sign of them. I’d already told Charlie what would happen to whoever they sent if we found a transmitter on him. Or a cell phone. Or a weapon.

Wesley rode with me. My brother, still protecting me from the other side. Charlie couldn’t be sure Wesley was really gone, but I was sure he wouldn’t want to bet his life on it.

A riderless bicycle sailed past on the sidewalk. I looked over and saw a clot of kids way short of puberty. They were gathered around a few more bikes, one of them holding his hand high. I knew what would be in it—a piece of fluorescent chalk. The kids were ghost riding. You take a bike—I mean take; the game is played with stolen property—get it going as fast as you dare, then bail out. The trick is to jump off while keeping the bike pointed straight ahead. The bike that goes the farthest before it crashes is the winner; the chalk is for marking the spot.

After all, every educational system needs report cards—otherwise, some child might be left behind.

The Chevy stopped on the prairie. It looked like a black polar bear, alone on a dirty ice floe.

I walked over as Max opened the back door for the guy inside, who stepped out lightly and moved in my direction. I held out my hand for him to stop. He stood still as Max searched him. The Mongol nodded an “okay.” I gestured for the man to follow me. We walked over to the gutted-out shell of what had once been a car. I leaned against the charred front fender, opened my hands in a “go ahead” gesture.

“You were never going to be hurt,” he said, without preamble.

“I couldn’t know that.”

“Oleg only has one eye now.” Looking at my bad one, as if we were sharing something he didn’t need to explain.

I didn’t say anything.

“We don’t want to fight,” he said. Not pleading—stating a fact. He was a burly man, a little shorter than me, and a lot thicker. I could see a gold chain, more like a rope, at his neck, and a diamond on his right hand that threw enough fire to give a pyromaniac an orgasm. His watch cost more than some cars. And that warm-up suit wasn’t the kind you buy where they sell sneakers.

“Me, either,” I said, waiting.

“Okay, then.” He put his hands together like we’d just sealed a deal. “We did not know who you were, or where to find you. We still do not. But we had to talk with you, so we…did what we did. You know how such things are.”

I didn’t say anything.

“We would have preferred to do what I am going to do now,” he said, watching my face as he spoke the words. When I didn’t react, he went on: “Pay you for your time. For your time and your trouble.”

“What’s the going rate for being tortured?”

“You think we were going to—?”

“You weren’t looking to hire me,” I said, keeping my voice edgeless. “So you must think I know something. Something you want to know. If I told you that you were wrong, that I didn’t know anything, what were you going to do? Thank me for my time and cut me loose? Or use that Taser on me?”

“We would never have—”

“I like this way better,” I cut him off.

He grunted something I took for understanding. “My name is Yitzhak,” he said. “But I don’t have to know your name to know you are a professional. So! A man hired you to do something. All we want to know is what he hired you to do.”

“Which man?”

“The man who can’t pay you anymore.”

“What’s it worth to you to know?”

“That depends on what you tell us.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Bravo. What is it worth to you, then?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, making it a question he had to answer, if he wanted us to keep talking.

“This man, he stole from us. Money. A great deal of money. Wherever that money is, it’s not in a wall safe. Or a suitcase.”

“Why didn’t you just ask him?”

“You mean, instead of…? All right, I will tell you. Maybe, if you understand us, you will believe us, too.”

I lit a cigarette, a signal to my backup that I was okay. For now.

“This man was in trouble,” he said. “He thought this trouble was a burden he could transfer. Do you understand?”

“He was a cooperating witness?”

“He was, if our information is correct, negotiating to be exactly that. But the deal had yet to be struck.”

“So you needed to move before—”

“No. Not for that. This man was a thief, and he stole from many. We are businessmen, and money is important. But in our business, there is something much more important than money. It is not just that this man stole from us; it was known that he did it. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

Understand it? I thought to myself. I was raised on it.

Inside, if a sneak thief takes your stuff, it’s nothing personal—it’s just part of living there, like rain falling in Seattle. But if the thief shows off what he took, it’s like he raped you. If you don’t square that up, you don’t get to keep anything that’s yours.

You’ve got a pack of Kools in your cell. A fresh, new pack. You go to take a shower, come back, and find it’s gone. That happens. And that night, you see a guy on the tier smoking a Kool, holding a whole pack in his other hand. Still nothing—the commissary sells them to anyone with money on the books. But then the guy says, “Thanks for the smokes, punk.” And now, now you have to hurt him. You don’t do that, you’re going to be meat on some freak’s plate.

But all I said to Yitzhak was, “If other people thought it was safe to steal from you…”

“Americans see with wide eyes,” he said, sounding more like a Talmudic scholar than a businessman who regarded hunter-killer teams as a line item on a budget. “You say ‘Russian’ to an American, and he thinks he knows all there is to know. But there are Odessa Beach Russians—you know the people I mean—and there are…others.

“We have been on this earth for thousands of years. But, every place we go, we have to establish our own identity. In American minds, a Jew is always motivated by money. Money comes first. That is a perception we have to change, if we are to be allowed to conduct our own business. You understand this?”

“If you don’t build a rep for always getting even, it makes people think you’re weak.”

“Correct!” he said, pleased with the pupil. “The stereotype is that we are clever people, but not strong people. In our business, it is more valuable for our enemies to believe we are crazy than that we are clever.”

“Which is why this guy who stole from you couldn’t just disappear. You needed his head on a stake.”

His shrug was eloquent.

“But the money…?”

“We made our own inquiries. Before we…acted. This was a sophisticated thief. There was some system in place—it is too complicated for me to understand; that is not my role—but the money was vacuumed right out of his accounts, and then it just disappeared. The thief himself would not know where it ended up.”

“Then what good would it do him?”

“He had a confederate. Maybe more than one. Someone he trusted.”

“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.”

“Are 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?”

“Oh 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.”

If 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.

A business-class ticket on the Acela Express gave me access to the “quiet car”—the one place on the train where cell phones were banned. I had figured it would be packed—the cars I walked through to reach it sounded like they were full of magpies on angel dust—but it was just about empty.

I cracked open my newspaper. A human—the paper called her a “mother”—in Florida had been prostituting her little girl for years. Twenty bucks a trick. Extras were extra. Her older daughter, almost twelve, had finally resisted the beatings. So the mother just sold her outright. A used car plus five hundred in cash, and some lucky vermin got to make his slimy dreams come true.

I wished I had a bullet for every one of them. Not a simple death-dealer, a magic bullet—the kind that would take one life and give back another.

In my world, you get even because you’re nothing if you don’t, but it’s never enough. It can’t be. You can’t really get even. You can make someone who hurt you dead, but whatever they took from you is never coming back.

The ride was less than three hours, right on time. Even more on time was the canary-yellow Corvette convertible waiting at the curb outside, a truly spectacular redhead behind the wheel.

“Toni?” I said, as I walked up to her.

“Who else?” she answered, grinning.

Some women get annoyed if you stare at their breasts. This gorgeous Titan didn’t care where I looked, so long as it wasn’t at her Adam’s apple.

“So you’re Michelle’s big brother,” she said, appraisingly. “Somehow, I thought you’d be…”

“Better looking?”

“No!” she giggled, patting my thigh.

“More sophisticated? Smarter? Taller?”

“Stop it! I just meant…Well, you know Michelle. She’s so…refined. You look a little rough around the edges, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“You’re not the first. And most don’t say it so euphemistically.”

“That’s what I was looking for! Michelle said you were a real intellectual.”

“Is that right?” I said, reaching into the breast pocket of my Harris-tweed jacket and slipping on a pair of plain-glass spectacles.

“Oh, those are perfect! You’re some kind of investigator, aren’t you?”

“I guess I am.”

“Well, anyone who works with that husband of hers must be smart. That Norm, he’s a genuine genius, she says.”

“She’s not lying,” I promised, finally learning the name Michelle assigns the Mole for social occasions that require bragging. “He’s way past being a genius. Their son’s going to win a Nobel Prize someday.”

“Terry? That’s if Hollywood doesn’t grab him first. That is a gorgeous young man!”

“That’s outside my area of expertise.”

“What exactly are we doing, you and me?” she said, making it clear she was just curious—the answer would have no effect on her participation.

“We’re going to look at a house. You already have the address.”

“A house you’re thinking of buying?”

“No. There’s a woman living there; it’s her I’m interested in,” thinking, Michelle said she was one of us. “Interested in professionally.”

“Oh?”

“Michelle told you what I do for a living?”

“Well, of course. Like I said. You’re some kind of investigator, aren’t you?”

“An investigator who doesn’t know one end of this part of the country from another.”

“Toni the Chauffeur, at your service,” she said, saluting.

“I appreciate it, Toni. Very much. But this isn’t about finding a house as much as it is finding a way inside it, do you follow me?”

“In broad daylight?” she said, sliding the ’Vette through an intersection on the caution light.

“We’re not talking about a burglary here. I want to talk to the person who’s inside—who I hope is inside. Not because she’s the one I’m looking for; because she can…maybe…lead me in the right direction.”

“And you don’t think she’ll be, what’s the word you guys use, ‘cooperative’?”

“I can’t even guess,” I said, truthfully.

“So where do I come in?” Toni asked.

“I’m not sure yet,” I told her. “I was hoping you might have some ideas.”

“This neighborhood is first-tier,” Toni said, her sheer-stockinged legs flashing in the sun as she changed gears. “Not absolutely top of the heap—the plots are too small for that. But these are all seven-figure houses.”

“There’s slums in New York where you could say the same thing.”

“Oh, I know. Michelle showed me around the last time I was up. I couldn’t believe it.”

I looked down at the map spread open in my lap. “What’s a ‘crescent’?” I asked.

“If you mean when they use it for an address, it’s just a fancy name for ‘street.’ Probably shorter than most, maybe a cul-de-sac. How far…?”

“Next left.”

“How fast do you want to go by?”

“Like we’re just passing through. On our way to somewhere.”

“What number?” she asked, turning in.

“Twenty-nine.”

“Be on your side.”

The house was two stories with an attached garage. Dark green, with white shutters around the windows.

“Nothing special,” Toni said. “Four bedrooms, three baths, probably. But they spent seriously on the landscaping.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” I said. We were at the end of the block, and Toni turned the Corvette onto a slightly wider street.

“Those back trees are old growth,” she said. “The way the plantings were arranged beneath them, it’s almost like outdoor bonsai, with the flower beds and those hedges and all.”

“A privacy thing?”

“Could be. You think whoever you’re looking for could be staying there?”

“You should consider a change of careers,” I told her.

“You mean I’m right?” she said, flashing another smile.

“On the money.”

“Let’s get coffee,” she said.

“This is her?” Toni asked, holding the blown-up photo of Beryl Preston. The redhead’s long nails were beautifully manicured, heavy bracelets concealing wide wrists.

“Yep.”

“How long ago was this taken?” A woman’s question. A suspicious woman.

“I don’t know exactly. But she’d be in her early thirties now, so it looks recent, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” she said, grudgingly.

“I was going to just walk up and see who answers the door. But…”

“What?”

“Well, you’re about the age of the girl I’m looking for. A bit younger, sure, but close enough.”

“Yes?” she said, widening her improbably greenish eyes.

“If you were to just ring the bell, and say you were looking for Beryl, who knows? Her mother—that’s the woman who lives there—might just call her downstairs or something. Hell, it might be Beryl herself who answers the door. She’s got no reason to think anyone would be looking for her here.”

“But she does know people are looking for her?”

“Oh yeah.”

“This isn’t a—?”

“What did Michelle tell you?” I said, letting my voice harden.

“I know,” she said, working her lips like she was making a decision.

I sipped my hot chocolate, feeling the minutes slow-click against the clock in my mind.

“Let’s talk outside,” she said.

“I was a runaway,” Toni said. “I didn’t know what I was, but I knew what I wasn’t. Do you understand what I’m—?”

“Yeah,” I said. And I did.

“I…My family had money. They sent me to…professionals. That didn’t work: I was still a girl inside, no matter what they called it. I was…I was sad, but I wasn’t suicidal. Until they sent me to the healer.”

I made an encouraging sound in my throat.

“It was a…They called it a Christian retreat, but it was a prison.”

“Because you couldn’t leave?”

“Because they had bars on the windows,” Toni said, fingering the tiny gold cross that caught a shaft of sunlight as it twinkled against her white sweater, standing between her prominent breasts like a warning. “Because there was no privacy. No privacy ever. Not even in the bathroom. Because they were afraid you might…do something to yourself.

“What I had…what I had inside me, they said that was being possessed. Satan had my soul. But if I worked hard enough, if I prayed hard enough, if I did everything they told me to, I could drive it all out.

“Only I didn’t want it out. I wanted to be…I wanted to be myself. Me.”

I nodded my head.

“At first, I kept that to myself. When I finally said it out loud, that’s when the beatings started.”

She shifted position, opening her stance like a boxer loading up to throw the equalizer. Her voice dropped into a metallic baritone.

“They called it ‘correction.’ The rod, right out of the Bible they made me read after each time. My parents never knew. Part of the program was that they couldn’t have any contact with me for the first six months. ‘Total immersion in the Lord,’ is what they called it.

“I was only fifteen. And sheltered, too—my parents had taken me out of school years before that. Because of my…problem. So I didn’t know much about the world. But it didn’t take me long to understand. They taught me a lot in that place. And the first thing I learned was, those beatings, they liked doing that. It was exciting for them. Got them all…you know.”

“I do know,” I said, reaching for her hand. She let me take it, but didn’t return the squeeze I gave.

“We were at the zoo. To see the baby pandas. It was like a field trip. Only for students who had been good. Obedient, they meant. I knew how to be ‘good’ by then. That’s when I ran.

“I knew I couldn’t go to my grandmother’s—she would have just called my parents. And I didn’t have any other place to go. I kept seeing New York in my mind. The biggest city in the world. Magic was there, I was sure of it.

“Michelle found me on my second night. I was looking for a place to sleep. These two men were…taunting me. It was at this old empty building, right next to a pier, all the way downtown. But they had been there first, they said, so it was their home. And I had to pay rent.

“I would have done it. Whatever ‘it’ was, it would have been better than going back. And then Michelle just burst in. She’s so small—I was bigger than her even then, and the men were much bigger. But they were scared of her. She was so fierce. And she had a razor….

“I stayed with her for a few weeks. She worked nights, but we talked when she came home. Every day. I told her everything.

“One day, she told me she had to go away for a while. She promised she’d be back, and made me promise I wouldn’t go out while she was gone.

“I don’t know how she did it, but when she came back, she told me it was time for me to go home. I was so scared, but I believed her. And when I got home, it was like I had different parents. They apologized to me. My mother was crying, and my father was…well, I don’t know what to call it, but he was very, very determined.

“That’s when I started to become Toni. The doctor they sent me to was so good and kind. I couldn’t have the surgery until I was of age, but he explained I had to live as a girl for at least two years first anyway, just to be sure.”

“Your parents turned out to be really something.”

“They did,” she said, relaxing her shoulders, her hand soft and damp in mine. “They were Christians, but real Christians, like Jimmy Carter, not fundamentalist freaks. That…place they sent me to, it was out of ignorance. When my father found out what they really did in there, he…I don’t know exactly what he did. But I know there was a big lawsuit, and the place ended up closed.”

“That’s quite a story.”

“Oh, it’s a long story, I know,” she said. “But I told it to you for a reason.”

“Did you, Toni?”

“Yes. I wanted you to understand what I’m going to say now.”

I waited.

“Michelle said, anything I did for you, it would be the same as doing it for her. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“And I’d do anything for Michelle,” the big redhead told me. “That’s N. E. Thing. Understand now?”

Toni dropped me off at a bowling alley. Luckily, they also had a few pool tables. I wasn’t even finished with the first rack before a pudgy kid in a short-sleeved shirt big enough to be a dust cover for a refrigerator wobbled over and asked me if I wanted to play some nine-ball.

The hustler was patient. I was up fifty bucks—the worm on the hook he was baiting—when Toni walked in. She sashayed her way over to me, snapping necks as she went, mane of red hair bouncing.

“How much have you managed to lose so far?” she said, hands on her hips, but smiling to show she was being the indulgent girlfriend, not a harpy.

“Hey! I’m up about fifty, right?” I said, turning to the fat kid for confirmation.

“That’s right,” the kid said, gravely, nodding his head to reluctantly acknowledge my clear superiority with the cue.

“Well, we are late,” Toni announced.

“Just one more game?”

“One more,” she said, warningly. Then she perched herself on a high stool, crossed her long legs, and cupped her chin in one hand.

“Double or nothing?” I said to the fat kid.

“Oh, hell, it’s the last game, let’s make it for a hundred.”

“Your break,” I said, winking at Toni.

The pudgy kid’s shot hit the rack like a cannonball going through crepe paper. The balls ran for cover—three of them so terrified they ducked down into the pockets. The cue ball was centered, a little short of the head spot. He cut in the one-ball, came three rails for perfect shape on the two, tapped it into the side, pirouetted like a bullfighter, and comboed the four-nine without drawing a breath.

“In between tournaments?” I asked him, as I paid up.

“You recognized me?” he said, caught between surprise and pride.

“Sure,” I lied.

“You’re pretty good yourself. Want to go one more time?”

“You see that girl over there?”

“I sure do, bro.”

“That’s all the luck I’m ever going to find in this place, son.”

“She was the third house I visited,” Toni said. “I’m a broker—for real; that’s what I do—Michelle must have told you. I told the woman I have a client who’s much more interested in the right neighborhood than in any individual house. He and his wife have three school-age children, and he’s done his research. I didn’t get where I am today by waiting for the right MLS to pop up—I go out in the field and scout around. Occasionally, you run across someone who wasn’t thinking of selling…until they hear the kind of money my client’s willing to put on the table.”

“Very nice,” I said, giving her a con man’s respect for a superior opening shtick.

“It’s actually true,” she said, smiling. “If someone were to make a phone call to my office, it would get verified, too.”

“Even better.”

“She was last on my list,” Toni said. “Fortunately, the first house I tried, no one was at home. And the second one, it was only the maid. But if anyone had been watching…”

“Beautiful.”

“The woman who answered the door isn’t your girl. Too old. Not that she doesn’t keep herself up—she was all toned-and-tucked, believe me—but she hasn’t seen thirty for a good long time. Has to be the mother.”

“Did you get the sense anyone else was there?”

“Well, there was at least one more,” Toni said. “The baby. More like a toddler…? I don’t know; I’m not good with guessing ages when they’re that small. Young enough for the mother to be carrying her around in one arm, anyway.”

“Did she act like—I’m not sure how to put this—did she act like the baby was her baby? Or a kid she was watching for someone else?”

“Oh, it was her baby. She had that…protective way of standing you see in mothers.”

“Some mothers.”

“Some mothers,” Toni agreed. “But there was more…. She was, like…I don’t know how to say it…. Maybe the way she talked, like the baby was in on the conversation. She didn’t treat her like a baby. Didn’t just make noises at her, she called her by her name. Elysse. That was her baby, Burke. I’d bet a month’s commissions on it.”

“She let you come in?”

“Not exactly. She didn’t tell me to get lost, but—this is all part of the way she was standing; I can’t quite explain it—she wasn’t going to give any ground. She acted like she had all the time in the world. Even took my business card. But she wasn’t offering me a cup of coffee. Not even when I said my client was a seven-figure buyer, all cash.”

“That’s great, Toni. You did a perfect job.”

“Thanks. I would have felt better if she’d let me in, but I didn’t want to push it.” She glanced at the dashboard, said, “If you’re not going back to see her today, we can still make your train.”

“Let’s get that train,” I told her.

“When you spend your life going in and out of houses, you get a feel for them,” she said. “That place was big, but it was empty, too. I got the distinct impression that she lives there by herself. Her and the baby, I mean.”

“Well, it was long odds.”

“She might have a cat. Everyone says cats are so curious, but some of them couldn’t be bothered to get up just because someone’s at the door.”

“But a dog…”

“That’s right,” she said, “a dog is different. My Samson—he’s a Jack Russell terrier—if you let a mosquito in the door, he’d have to go and see for himself.”

“Jack Russells are all lunatics.”

“That’s true!” she said, laughing. “But there was no dog in that woman’s house at all. I could just tell.”

I didn’t say anything, watching the scenery change as we got back inside the D.C. limits.

“Maybe she doesn’t think she needs a dog,” Toni said, as she pulled up to the station. “Just inside the front door, there’s a blue box on the wall. Some of my clients have the same one. It’s a central-station system. If that alarm goes off, it doesn’t ring some clown who’s supposed to dial 911 for you; it rings right inside the cop shop.”

The next morning, the newscaster said Amtrak was taking the Acela out of service for a few months. Something about the brakes not being trustworthy.

Another man might have taken that for an omen.

The restaurant was Japanese, not far from the old tennis stadium in Forest Hills. The hostess had a treacherously demure smile, too much rouge, and glossy black agate eyes. She showed me over to a corner booth shielded from the rest of the place by rice-paper screens.

Charlie saw me coming, stood up, shook hands like we were business friends.

“Hello,” the dark-haired woman next to him said. Polite smile, wary eyes.

“John, I’d like you to meet my wife,” he said. “Galina, this is John Smith.”

She reached up and extended her hand. It wasn’t so much cold as neutral. Inanimate.

I sat down across from them, noting that Charlie had set it up so that I was facing the entrance, my back to the wall.

“Do you know my husband a long time?” Galina asked, as the waiter placed bowls of miso soup in front of us.

“More years than I care to remember,” I told her, smiling to show I wasn’t being hostile, just regretting my age.

All the way through the meal, we talked about everything except what I’d come for. A New York conversation, ranging from superficial to fraudulent. Taxes, real estate, crime.

“Dessert?” the waiter asked.

“Let us think about that,” Charlie told him, handing over some folded bills.

“He won’t come back until I call him,” he said to me.

That was my cue. Turning to face Galina, I said, “When I came by your house the other day, you told your husband I was there, then you went back inside. While you were there, you made a phone call.”

Her face was a mask of polite interest.

“Your husband promised you would explain that to me,” I went on. “I’m sure he told you how important…how very important this is.”

“Yes.”

“Then, please…”

She looked over at Charlie. He nodded.

“I am Ashkenazi,” she said. “You know what this is?”

“Jews born in Eastern Europe?”

A quick flash of surprise registered in her dark eyes, opening them to a new depth. “It is more complicated than that, but yes. I was born in Russia. My family, too. And their family. My ancestors fought the Nazis. In the Red Army. Many died. Those who lived, maybe they thought things would be different for them when the war was over. But it was not.

“To be a Jew in Russia was always dangerous. And so it is today. More than ever, maybe. The skinhead gangs, they say they are targeting immigrants, but their alliances are with their brothers in Poland. In Croatia, too. The fascists are there in strength.

“The way we survive is the way we have always survived—we do not look to the government for protection; we look to each other.”

My eyes never left her face. A faint flush rose in her cheeks.

“You do not believe me?”

“About what you just said? Sure I do. But I guess I don’t understand what all that has to do with the phone call you made.”

“Because you are not a threat, so why should we need protection from you?”

“You don’t need protection from me. I didn’t even know you existed until a few days ago. You made that phone call because you already knew whoever you called wanted to talk to me.”

“So?” she said, raising her chin as if I was the butler, defying the mistress of the manor.

“That’s it?” I said to Charlie.

“No,” he said quickly. “Just have a little patience, all right?”

I sat back, waiting. He looked at his wife.

“The people I called are my family,” Galina said. “They ask; I do. This is always.”

I didn’t move. She looked at her husband.

“Yes, I knew they wanted to talk with you,” she finally said. “They are…crazy people. But they are my people. By blood. So if they want something from me…”

“They want a lot more than phone calls from you, Mrs. Siegel,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Remember I said I didn’t even know you existed until recently? Well, your people knew I existed before that. They knew I went to a meeting. A meeting with a client. Nobody knew about that meeting but me and the client. Your people might have been following the client. Maybe that’s how they spotted me.”

Her dark eyes never left my one good one.

“But I don’t think so,” I went on. “I think they knew my client had a meeting. I think they were listening in on his calls. And there’s only one way they get his number to do that.”

“We already talked it over,” Charlie said. “Galina was just doing—”

“Please don’t say ‘what she had to do,’” I said, chopping off whatever speech he was going to make. So long as Charlie Jones stayed a lizard, he could survive in the desert world of middlemen. But if he tried to go warm-blooded, the climate would kill him.

I squared up so I was right on Galina. “You understand what’s at stake?” I said.

“Yes,” she answered. She put her left hand to her mouth, kissed her wedding ring. Her way of telling me the man next to her wasn’t some long-term meal ticket; he was her heart. Charlie had been right—this one was no “bought bride.”

“I want to walk away from all this,” I said, just barely above a whisper. “That’s what you want, too. Your husband and I, we’re never going to do business again. You go back to your life; I go back to mine. If you ever see me again, feel free to call whoever you want. Understand?”

“Yes.” Ice-cold, now, and at home with it.

“Showing up at a man’s house without being invited, I understand how that could be seen as an act of aggression,” I said, rolling my shoulders slightly to include both of them in what I was saying. “But you understand…you understand now…I didn’t come for that reason, don’t you? You understand I had no choice.”

“Yes,” they replied, as one.

I shifted my total focus to the woman.

“I will never need to do that again,” I said. “I know how to reach your family now. I met with—”

“—Yitzhak, yes. He is my cousin.”

“And I know how to reach him,” I repeated. “But that would be my choice, not his. If I see him again, if I see anyone connected with you, even by accident, everything changes. I have people, too. Ask your husband.”

“I understand,” she said. “And it is fair.”

“That’s not what we sell in our store, and you know it,” Pepper said, her voice a hard, tight ball of Freon.

“It’s information. And you deal in—”

“It’s information we can’t get.”

“Yeah, you—”

“We can’t get it,” Pepper said, as clear as spring water, and as cold. “Only she could do that. And you were already told—”

“I’m not coming sideways, Pepper. There’s only one thing I want,” I lied.

“Yes, one thing: You want her to take a risk. Worse, you want her to ask someone else to take a risk. More than one, actually. What you want, it’s complicated.”

“I know.”

“We came all the way down here,” she said, looking around at the restaurant, “because you said you had something very important. Too important to say on the phone.”

“And it was, right?”

“Important? I don’t have any idea. Important to you, maybe.”

“It’s…Look, Pepper, here it is. I told you what I want. What I want to buy, remember? I’m not asking to meet with Wolfe. I got that message, all right? I just want your crew to do what you do. Not for me, for—”

“Money.”

“Not for that, either. This is something…this is something you’d want to do.”

“Yes?” Skeptical-suspicious.

“I can’t tell you any more than I already have,” I said, knowing I’d already blown it. But I’d had to try.

Pepper exchanged a look with Mick. I couldn’t see a muscle move in his face, but she nodded like she’d just finished reading a long letter. Mick got up from the booth and walked out the front door. Max waited a few heartbeats, then moved out in the same direction.

Pepper stepped out of the booth, took out her cell phone, and deliberately turned her back to me as she walked off.

In a minute, she was back. “You have the best food in the whole city,” she sang out, as Mama passed by on her way to the kitchen.

Mama held one finger to her lips, but she was smiling.

One of the payphones rang.

Mama came back over to my booth.

“Police girl,” she said.

“I thought we had an understanding.” Wolfe’s voice, through the receiver.

“We do,” I said. “But this, what I need, you’re the only one who can get it for me.”

“Even if that was true, why should I?”

“I’m back to…what I was when you met me.”

“When I met you, you were a lot of things.”

“You know what I mean.”

She was quiet for a few seconds. Then: “Yes, I know what you mean. What I don’t know is whether you mean it.”

“I swear I do.”

“On what?”

I stayed silent, waiting.

“What does a man like you swear on, Burke?”

I’d never said it before. Not out loud. And, probably, if I’d thought about it, I wouldn’t have said it then. I was just reaching for one true thing, and…

“I swear on my love,” I told the woman who had always known.

“Won’t you have another slice, sugar?”

“Slice?” I said, looking at the gaping empty wedge in the French-silk chocolate pie sitting on the kitchen table. “That was a slab, girl. Three normal pieces, easy.”

“Didn’t you like it?”

“It was the best pie I ever had,” I told her, holding up my palm in a “the truth, the whole truth” gesture. “I’m just not used to eating so much.”

“Oh, I can see that. You’re way too skinny, Lew. You’re not one of those men who think skinny means high-class, are you?”

“Come here, brat.”

“Men are so lucky,” she said, an hour later. “Fashions don’t change for you. A big deal is when ties get narrower, or lapels get wider—stuff like that. For us, you can go from being just right to all wrong in a month.”

“I don’t see what that mat—”

“Do you like these jeans on me?” she said, turning her back and looking over her left shoulder.

“Who wouldn’t?”

“Uh-huh. Except nobody hardly even makes jeans like this anymore.”

“They’re just regular—”

“They are not. These are old-fashioned. See how high the waist is? The new ones, they ride so low on your hips they almost make your butt disappear.”

“There’s no chance—”

“Don’t you even say it!” she said, her voice caught between threat and giggle. “The point is, I’m not built for the new ones. Everything they make now is for those girls with Paris Hilton bodies.”

I made a sound of disgust.

“What? You don’t think she’s cute?”

“I think she looks like a really effeminate man. And when she opens that lizard-slit of a mouth, she makes Anna Nicole sound like Madame Curie. I wouldn’t just kick her out of bed; I’d burn the sheets.”

“Oh, you’re so mean.”

“You asked me.”

She came over to where I was sitting, turned, and dropped into my lap. “How about we go for another ride in that car of yours, big boy?” she giggled. “I’m all dressed for it.”

“People around here don’t do this,” Loyal said, her shoulder just brushing mine. “Go for drives, I mean. They get in their cars to be going someplace, not just to be going.”

“We’re going someplace,” I said.

“Where, Lew?”

“I don’t mean tonight. I just meant, you and me, we’re going someplace, aren’t we?”

“You’re the driver,” she purred.

“Where do you get all that music of yours?”

“The CDs? A friend of mine mixes them for me.”

“‘Mix’ is the truth,” Loyal said. “I never heard such a…collection of different songs before.”

“You like any of them?” I asked her. Between the Midtown Tunnel and the Suffolk County line, the Plymouth’s speakers had gushed out a real medley: Little Walter’s “Blue and Lonesome,” Jack Scott moaning “What in the World’s Come Over You?,” Dale and Grace begging you to “Stop and Think It Over,” Chuck Willis pleading “Don’t Deceive Me,” Sonny Boy’s “Cross My Heart,” even a rare cut of Glenda Dean Rockits, “Make Life Real,” sounding like Kathy Young backed by Santo and Johnny.

“That ‘Talk of the School’ one was so sad. Kids can be so mean, especially in high school.”

“You know who that was, singing?”

“No. But I’m sure I never heard him before.”

“But you did, girl. That was Sonny James.”

“The Sonny James?”

“Yep.”

“But he’s country, not—”

“Not doo-wop? Roy Orbison had a doo-wop group himself once.”

“For real?”

“Sure. Roy Orbison and the Roses.”

“My goodness.”

She drifted into a sweet, connected silence. We were encapsulated, the Plymouth sliding smoothly through the night.

“I loved that girl singer,” she finally said. “You know the one?”

“Sounded like a young Patsy Cline?”

“Yes! Can we play hers again?”

I hit the “back” button until I found the cut. A driving, insistent bass line, the plaintive haze of a steel guitar hovering over the top. A nightingale’s voice cut through the steel like an acetylene torch:

You say that was your cousin

But I know what I saw

And if that girl was your cousin

You both was breaking the law

“Oh, I know I should just hate that,” Loyal said, chuckling, “but that Kasey Lansdale is just too good! That child’s going to be big someday.”

“Why should you hate it? The song, I mean.”

“Well, it’s another of those stupid stereotypes, isn’t it? You know, rednecks and incest. Tobacco Road stuff. We’re supposed to be all kinds of bad, Southerners. To hear some of the people around here talk, we’re all Bible-thumping, ignorant racists with no teeth, living in shacks. Well, you know what, sugar? That’s just another kind of prejudice.”

“It is.”

“You’re not going to argue with me?” she said, lightly scraping her fingernails over the top of my thigh. “Or are you just making sure I’m going to be nice to you later?”

“I can’t speak for the South. I haven’t spent enough time there to say. But anyone who thinks there’s no racism in New York hasn’t lived here long.”

“I know,” she said, vehemently.

“And anyone who thinks one part of the country—one part of the world—has got a patent on incest is in a coma.”

“There’s good and bad people everywhere,” Loyal said, a schoolgirl, reciting a hard-learned lesson.

I’m a lifelong gambler, but I never go all-in unless we’re playing with my deck. Hedging bets is more my style.

When I left Loyal’s apartment building, I drove downtown. I like the subway better, but this time of the year it’s a hermetically sealed disease-incubator, a particle accelerator for germs. Winter flu’s bad enough, but springtime flu can drop you quicker than a Jeff Sims overhand right.

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. New York is a city of streets. Five blocks away from where I stopped, ruptured-synapse zombies trembled in doorways, down to nothing but the prayer that the next rock they bought with blood-bank money would be a sweet crackling in their glass pipes, not a tiny chunk of drywall pretender. But I was standing in that sparkling piece of Manhattan where they shoot those perky and precious romantic comedies. The block was lined with wonderful little shops and reeked of ambiance. The princes who lived there kept their organically grown marijuana in rosewood humidors.

I used my cell phone instead of ringing the bell. Stayed on the line until I was buzzed in. Took the tiny little elevator cage to the top floor.

The man who let me in was built like a jockey, all muscle and bone. He had a shaved and waxed skull, a ruby in his ear so heavy it had elongated the lobe, and a red soul patch under his lower lip, the same color as his tank top. His eyelids sagged, dark half-moons stood out against the bleached whiteness of his cheeks. He looked as weary as a platitude in a mortician’s mouth.

“So?” he said, exhaustedly stepping aside to let me in.

I walked over and took a seat at one end of a long, narrow slab of butcher block. He followed me languidly, sat down at the other end.

I slid a copy of the CD Clarence had made over to him like I was dealing a card. It was an edited version of the one Daniel Parks had handed over.

“I’d like to find that woman,” I said.

“That’s nice,” he said. Like any good psychopath, he lived in the Now, and whatever ethics he had were long past their sell-by date. He knew that the only way the meek were going to inherit the earth was if the last predator to go left it to them in his will.

“I’d consider it a big favor,” I told him.

“Redeemable for…?”

“The last job I did for you…”

“You were paid for that, as I recall.”

“I was paid to do one thing,” I reminded him. “The job turned out to be more than you said it was going to be.”

“I never promised—”

“You told me someone had something that belonged to you, and you’d pay me to get it back.”

He raised what would have been his eyebrows, if he hadn’t shaven them off.

“It wasn’t yours,” I said, placidly.

“Well, that’s a matter of some dispute.”

“The dispute turned into a bullet wound.”

“So you’re here for more—”

“I told you what I’m here for,” I said. “Be a good listener; that’s how people stay friends.”

“I’m not alone here,” he said. “You don’t think I would have just let you come over if I was, do you?”

“You don’t think, if I wanted to do something to you, I’d call first, do you?”

He folded his arms across his chest, eyes involuntarily darting over my left shoulder. “Point-blank, I didn’t know Hector was going to go psycho on you, Burke. Polygraph that.”

“Oh, I believe you. I just figured you’d feel bad about how it turned out. And you’d want to make it up to me.”

“And if I don’t?”

I looked over at the wall of glass to my right. “You know how people talk about a ‘window of opportunity’?” I said. “You know why leaving it open a little’s always better than keeping it shut?”

“I’ll bite.”

“Because that way the glass never has to get broken.”

He touched his temples, tuning into whatever frequency guided his ship.

“I can’t promise anything,” he said.

When I got up the next morning, the whole right side of my head throbbed. A quick glance at the mirror showed me my right ear was inflamed. I get that from grinding it against the pillow all night. Only happens when I dream so deep and dark that it’s a blessing not to remember any of it.

I stepped out of the flophouse into the red-and-gold blaze of a chemical sunset. That’s this city for you, a toxic-waste garden, full of beautiful artificial flowers.

The pit bulls let me reclaim my Plymouth, even though all I had was a couple of gyros I bought from a vendor on the walk over.

It wasn’t about the quality of the bribe for them; they just wanted to be shown some respect.

The orca female sat and watched me for an extra minute. I tossed her a cube of steak I had saved from Mama’s. She snapped it out of the air without a sound. We both looked at the other two pits. Neither of them had seen a thing. Our secret.

The windowless, slab-sided building in Sunnyside had a fresh display of swastikas, spray-painted by some glue-sniffing member of the master race. I thought how nice it would be to introduce him to my new pal, Yitzhak. Or dip him in a vat of meat gravy and throw him over the fence that surrounded my car.

The bouncer looked like a recycling project from wherever they dump disbarred bikers: greasy hair pulled back into a Shetland ponytail, jailhouse tattoos across the knuckles of both hands, bad teeth, wraparound shades. If he had a name, I didn’t remember it.

The first time I’d been there, he had followed me out into the parking lot.

“Hey!”

“What?” I had said, turning to face him.

“You a cop?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t want to fuck with me,” he growled, moving in.

“That’s right, I don’t.”

“We don’t like motherfuckers coming in here asking questions.”

“I’m not a fighter,” I said, edging backward.

“I heard that one before,” he taunted. “You’re not a fighter, you’re a—”

“—shooter,” I finished for him, showing him the .357.

“Hey!” he half yelled, spreading his arms wide. “I was just—”

“No, you weren’t,” I told him, cutting off the “just doing my job” speech he was going to launch into. “Go back inside, call your boss on the phone. You handle it right, he’ll think you’re being smart, just checking out this guy who was acting suspicious. Instead of shaking down the customers, that is.”

“You don’t know my boss.”

“Tell Jiffy, Burke said hello,” I told him.

The next time I visited, the bouncer had pointedly ignored me. He did the same tonight.

“Hello, Dolly,” I said to the waitress who came over to my table. It wasn’t a line; that’s her name.

“Hey!” she said, giving me a smile as genuine as Ted Bundy’s remorse.

“Sit down with me for a little bit.”

“You know I can’t do that, baby. Only the dancers…”

I spread five twenties on the tabletop. “So you’ll share,” I said.

Dolly had been a dancer once. A drop-down after she started sagging too much to work escort. She’d kept sagging all the way down to table hostess in a Grade C strip joint. I didn’t want to think about what was next for her. Neither did she. Cocaine helps her with that.

“Nope,” is all she’d said when I showed her Beryl’s picture. It had been a long shot, but that’s what you do when you’re killing time.

“Show it around,” I told her. “I’ve got a grand for an address.”

“These girls,” she said, glancing at the stage, where a scrawny brunette with ridiculously huge breasts was humping a pole, next to a cellulite blonde who was fingering herself and moaning from boredom, “they’re all on drugs. They’ll tell you anything you want to hear.”

“An address,” I said again. “Not a story.”

“I got to get back to work,” Dolly said.

Even in springtime, the basement apartment was cold. Not A/C cold, but the clammy cold of damp, moldy rot. The man who lived there was dressed for his role: He wore enough layers of clothing to pass for the Michelin Man. Had the right skin color for it, too. Fingerless gloves on his hands—hands he warmed over the glow of the money he had stashed somewhere in the place.

I knew about the money, but I didn’t know how much it really was, never mind where he had it hidden. It would take a team of greenback-trained bloodhounds years to dig through the fetid swamp of that basement to find it.

If it was even there.

A long time ago, a no-neck mutant named Harold who lived in the same building figured out that the man in the basement must be hoarding something. After all, he never went out. Never. Lived on take-out food passed through a slot cut into the steel door to his den, the same way they do it in supermax prisons. He hadn’t needed the landlord’s permission to put in that door—he owned the building.

The mutant didn’t know that; he wasn’t the research type. His idea of a complex extortion scheme was to pound on the man’s door and scream, “Give me money, motherfucker!” When that didn’t work out for him, he remembered a technique he’d heard about in prison. So the next time he came back, he had a plastic squeeze bottle full of gasoline with him. Told the man inside that he was going to roast him alive unless he got paid.

I was the one who got paid instead. I used some of the money to buy my partner Hercules a nice suit. Had to go to a tailor for it—department stores don’t make suits to fit guys who spend most of their time Inside hoisting iron.

“What?” the mutant yelled in response to my knock.

“Open the door, Harold,” I said. “Mr. G. sent us.”

“Who the fuck is Mr. G.?”

“Harold…” I said, my voice clearly losing patience.

He flung open the door like a Bluto cartoon. “What the fuck are—?”

The sight of Hercules calmed him right down. I guess he remembered more about prison than just the burnouts.

We had a nice talk. I explained that the man who lived in the basement was the crazy old uncle of a very important individual. Harold the Mutant never asked who “Mr. G.” was; maybe he thought he knew. In fact, he seemed to be getting smarter by the minute. When I told him if he ever went near the basement again he was going off the roof without a parachute, his comprehension was perfect.

“How many steps?” the man in the basement asked me, through the slot in the door.

“Eleven,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. I counted them,” I told him, connecting us.

The door swung open soundlessly. That always surprised me—I expected it to squeak like the ones in horror movies—but I guess he kept it lubricated, somehow.

I didn’t offer to shake hands; I knew he didn’t like that.

He didn’t offer me a seat, just looked at me with the beyond-disappointment eyes of an orphan staring into a shopwindow at Christmastime. I don’t know how he ended up where he is now. But I know he knows money.

“Is it hard to set up an account in Nauru?” I asked him, without preamble.

I waited for him to count the syllables in my question. I knew it had to be an even number, or he wouldn’t respond. He doesn’t care how the dictionary breaks up a word, only how it comes out of someone’s mouth.

“No,” he said, playing out his ritual: questions are even, answers are odd.

“Why do people do it?”

“Secrecy.”

“Like a Swiss bank account?”

“Liechtenstein.”

“Like that?”

“No.”

“What’s the difference?” I asked, knowing he’d hear “difference” as two syllables.

“Government.”

“You need big money to do it?”

“Yes.”

“Do they make money doing it?”

“Yes.”

“So it’s like a big laundry job?”

“Yes.”

“For criminals, then?”

“Yes.”

“And everybody knows?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have any contacts there?”

“No.”

“Thank you.”

He made some noise. I wasn’t sure what the word was, but I knew it was a single syllable.

I tried other places. Other people. Other possibilities. Even a “journalist” who spent his slimy life pawing through garbage looking for morsels to peddle to the sleaze-sheets. He promised he’d sniff around. I believed him—that’s just what dung beetles do.

I wasn’t holding good cards, but I wasn’t down to drawing dead, either. Not yet. Beryl’s picture was circulating all over the city. Favors were being called in, pressure was being put on.

You can’t really do surveillance on houses as isolated as her father’s, or in neighborhoods as ritzy as her mother’s. Not unless you have a government-sized budget and government-level immunity for felonies. I know how to get in touch with some sanctioned black-bag boys, and I know what it takes to turn their crank, too. But telling your business to people like that will guarantee you go on a list. The bone-and-pistol package Morales had planted had gotten me off a bunch of those, and I didn’t want to start new ones.

With the kind of money that Daniel Parks had made disappear, Beryl could have disappeared, too. She could be anywhere. But it didn’t feel like that to me. And I’d found her once….

“Say where and when.”

“You know where I used to work? There’s a parking lot, the public one. The upper deck is outdoors.”

“Got it.”

“I’m there now.”

“Give me an hour.”

I thumbed off the cell phone, slipped it into the pocket of my jacket.

“That’s her, isn’t it?” Loyal said.

“‘Her’?”

“Yes, ‘her.’ Not that fake ‘wife’ of yours, the one woman you really love.”

“This is just business,” I said.

“Sure,” she said, soft and somber, like in church. “When you’re done with your ‘business,’ you come right on back here, sugar, and I’ll fix whatever she broke. That’s the kind of woman I am.”

The Chrysler was standing by itself in the farthest corner of the lot. I parked at the other end, backing into the open space. At midnight, the lot was empty. The courthouse was closed, visiting hours were over at the jail, City Hall was shut down.

The Chrysler’s passenger door opened and Wolfe got out. Instead of moving toward me, she opened the back door, and a thick black shape flowed onto the ground.

Great! I thought. Just what I need, another one of my big fans.

Wolfe snapped on the Rottweiler’s chain and stepped over to where I was parked. Her shiny lime-green raincoat was tightly belted at the waist, blazing in the night.

I got out of the Plymouth. Slowly.

Not slow enough. The Rottweiler let out a threatening growl.

“Bruiser!” Wolfe said. “Enough.”

“Hey, Bruiser,” I greeted him.

He said something like “Go fuck yourself!” in Rottweiler. The barrel-chested beast had decided to hate me the first time he saw me. And once he locked his bonecrusher jaws around a feeling, he never dropped the bite.

“Your dog’s a real party animal,” I said to Wolfe.

“Bruiser? He’s a sweetheart,” she said, patting the monster’s huge head. “You’re the only one he doesn’t like.”

Wolfe walked over to the edge of the lot, leaned her elbows on the railing, and looked down at the dark. I stayed where I was.

“Down!” she told the Rottweiler.

He did it in slow motion, his “give me a reason” eyes pinning me all the way.

I moved over to the railing, my hands already coming up with a flared match for Wolfe’s cigarette.

“Thanks,” she said.

“I’m the one who needs to be thanking you. You found—?”

“Maybe not much,” she said. “Maybe enough.”

“How did you—?”

“That little tombstone was a perfect surface for prints.” I didn’t bother telling her that that was why I’d pocketed an item from the shelf full of artifacts bestowed on little Beryl by professional revolutionaries grateful to her parents for their financial support. It was a lead-cast miniature of a clenched fist rising from the engraved tombstone of Fred Hampton. “You’re lucky nobody had polished it.”

“Just how lucky did I get?”

“There were three different partials that could be lifted. One of them matched to a Beryl Eunice Preston, DOB nine, nine, seventy-two. That’s her, right?”

“Right,” I said, not surprised to see Wolfe’s hands holding nothing but her cigarette—I’d seen her cross-examine expert witnesses for hours without ever glancing at her notes.

“She was in the system,” Wolfe said. “Arrested eleven, twenty, ninety-seven. Attempt murder, CCW, whole string of stuff.”

“All one event?”

“Yes,” she said, exhaling so that smoke ran out of her nose. “This was in Manhattan. She was working for one of the escort services, claimed the john had demanded she do something she didn’t want to do, then got violent with her when she refused.”

“A self-defense case?”

“It might have been, if it had ever gone to trial,” Wolfe said. “The escort service said they’d never heard of her, big surprise, but she posted bail and walked. Then the complaining witness stopped complaining. When the detectives leaned on him, he said the whole thing had been a mistake. He was showing her the knife—said he was some kind of collector, and this was a fancy one he’d just bought—and he slipped and fell on it. The hotel never should have called the cops.”

“Anyone buy that?”

“Why would they?” Wolfe said. “But what were they going to do, threaten to tell his wife he was using his credit card to have some fun? Bluff the girl into taking an assault plea? This is real life, not a TV show. They dropped it like it was on fire.”

“Nothing since? For Beryl, I mean?”

“As far as the system’s concerned, she could have joined a convent.”

“You pulled an address?”

“Sure,” she said. And gave me the condo in Battery Park.

When I didn’t say anything, she said, “You had that one, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” I admitted, not trying to keep the disappointment out of my voice.

“The arraignment judge played it like it was a stand-up assault with a deadly weapon,” Wolfe said, grinding out her cigarette with one precision stab of her spike heel. “Set bail at a quarter-mil. Your girl, she didn’t use a bondsman.”

“She put up that much in cash.”

“No,” Wolfe said. “A friend put up his house.”

“Must have been some house.”

“Oh, it was.” Her white teeth flashed in the night. “Want the address?”

“She had that hideout in place for a long time,” Michelle said. “Even before she met that Daniel Parks guy, you think?”

“Yeah. That is what I think. She bought the property in ’94.”

“She would have been…twenty-two years old then,” Clarence said, looking up from his laptop.

“Pretty young to be that smart,” Michelle said. “She must have had a crystal ball, too, buying a house in that neighborhood back then. I’ll bet it’s worth five times what she paid for it.”

“It wasn’t leveraged, either,” I told them, tapping a stack of paper in front of me. “She put a hundred down, leaving her with a twenty-one-hundred-dollar-a-month nut for everything—mortgage, taxes, insurance, the whole thing. It’s a two-family, and she was getting eight fifty for the first floor, seven hundred for the second. The C of O for the building says it’s strictly a two-family, but I’ll bet the basement’s another apartment, off the books.”

“You sure it’s our girl?” the Prof said.

I looked around the table, ticking the points off on my fingers: “One, the name on the ownership papers is ‘Jennifer Jackson.’ That’s a motel-register name. Two, whoever owned that property put up the whole thing, deed and all, to make bail for Beryl when she was arrested. Three, we know she knows how to change her name, and how to move money around, too. And, four, she’s the kind of operator who never builds a house without a couple of back doors.”

“Park Slope’s gone way upscale, but it’s no gated community,” Michelle said, looking over at the Mole.

I love these,” Loyal said, fitting the blue leather bustier over her breasts. “But you can’t get into them without help.”

“At your service,” I said, slowly pulling the laces tight.

“That’s what you think I am, don’t you?”

“Huh?”

“You know what I mean, Lew. I’ve been so honest with you.

Now it’s coming around to hurt me.”

“I don’t—”

“You know what? I thought you loved me. I don’t mean I was your great love. Not that special, once-in-a-lifetime-if-you-get-real-lucky love. But a whole lot more than…than just liking me, I guess. I guess I just told you too much truth, didn’t I?”

“No, you didn’t. You told me just enough. And you showed me a lot more.”

“But I’m not the one you—”

“You are the one,” I said. “Not like you think, but…Look, Loyal, to me you’re a princess. A little princess. And I’ve got a plan for this to have a happy ending.”

“But not a marriage plan, right?”

“Better.”

“What could be—?”

“Just wait,” I said. “Wait a little bit. You wanted to know what I do for a living, remember?”

“Yes. But I don’t—”

“I’m a gambler, little girl. And I’ve got something going now. The dice are already tumbling. If I can throw the hard eight, you’re going to have your happy ending. That’s all I can tell you now. Is that enough?”

Loyal paused in the act of pulling on one of her stockings. “A coral snake is one of the most beautiful things you could ever see. But one bite and you’re all done. Then there’s milk snakes. They’re just as pretty, but they’re harmless. You know how to tell them apart?”

“Red and black, he’s a good jack. Red and yella, kill the fella.”

“Oh!” she said. She raised her chin, looked down at where I was sitting. “You’ve spent some time in the South, haven’t you? I wondered about that, ever since I told you about people saying I looked like Jeannie, remember? And you said I do favor her. That’s not the way people around here talk.”

“I’ve traveled a little bit.”

“Gambling?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re going to win me a happy ending?”

“I’m trying.”

“That would be the sweetest thing a man could give a woman, a happy ending.”

“I—”

“I’m a girl who gives as good as she gets,” Loyal said, turning away from me and bending over the couch. “And you don’t have to wait for yours.”

“That’s her?” Clarence asked, pointing at his laptop screen.

“Go through them one more time,” I said.

He trailed his finger over the touchpad, and a new set of thumbnails popped into life. He clicked on them, one by one, and each new image burst into full-screen life.

A woman in a beige parka, so densely quilted that it was impossible to tell if she was a stick or a sumo, walked down a tree-lined street, carrying a large green tote bag with a yellow logo.

The same woman inside a market, the tote draped over the handlebars of a shopping cart. She had pixie-short light blonde hair, bright-red lipstick.

“I can zoom in on that one,” Clarence said.

“Go.”

The woman had china-blue eyes, a beauty mark at the corner of one of them. It looked like one of those tattooed tears gang kids put on their faces, one for each jolt Inside.

“That’s her,” I said.

“Are you sure, mahn? She looks nothing like the girl on that—”

“Her stuff is tough,” the Prof interrupted his son, “but it ain’t close to enough. That’s the same girl Schoolboy and me snatched.”

“You have not seen her for—what?—twenty years?” Clarence said. Not challenging, fascinated.

“She’s still got the look,” the Prof said.

“She does not look afraid to me,” Clarence said, respectful but doubting.

“She never did,” the Prof answered. “Ain’t that right, Schoolboy?”

“On the move.” Terry’s voice, over my cell. “Walking.”

“Probably a Starbucks run,” I said, glancing at my watch. “Gives us twenty minutes, tops.”

“I can double that for you,” Michelle said. “Drop me off at the next corner.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the Prof. He patted the outside pocket of his ankle-length canvas duster. “I already been in once,” he said. “I left it so’s I can pop that box like I had me the key.”

“Eight-fifteen,” Clarence said. “The tenants have all gone to work.”

“You take the wheel,” I told him.

I heard the sound of a key working the lock. Pointed my finger at Max to warn him.

She walked into the living room, one hand holding a paper cup. A sixteen-ounce double skinny mocha latte, if she hadn’t changed her usual order.

“Hello, Beryl,” I said, from the darkness of the couch.

She was fast, but Max was ready for the move, wrapping her up as she bolted back toward the front door. He held one finger against the buccinator muscle in her right cheek, nerve-blocking the pressure point so she couldn’t scream.

He lifted her off the ground with his left hand, letting her feel the price of resistance. She got the message and sagged, allowing him to deposit her next to me on the couch.

“Nobody’s going to hurt you, Beryl,” I said. “Just the opposite. We know people are looking for you; we’re here to fix that.”

“Who are—?”

“You know who we are, child,” the Prof said, as he stepped forward. “We’re the ones who got you back from that pimp when you were just a kid. Remember?”

“You’re…” She paused, looking at Max. “You were there,” she said to the Prof. “And him, too”—nodding at Max. “But who are—?”

“It’s me, Beryl,” I said. “I had some work done on my face, but—”

“It is you! I would never have known your face, but that voice, it’s…it’s the same.”

“You have your father’s gift.”

“My…what?”

“Your father’s gift,” I said again. “He’s real good with voices, too.”

“My father sent you?”

“You mean, like he did before?”

“That wasn’t him,” she said, as if the words were poison in her mouth.

“I know,” I told her. “I didn’t know then, but I do now.”

“You think so?” she said, curling her lip. She shrugged out of her coat, crossed her legs, telling us she wasn’t going anywhere.

“Let’s see,” I said. “You were involved with a man named Daniel Parks. A money manager. He siphoned off money from a hedge fund he was running. A lot of money. He probably knew a lot more about high finance than he did about the people who put their money into his fund. So maybe he figured the most he was risking was a civil suit. Or even a fraud prosecution he could lawyer his way out of. How am I doing so far?”

“You’re talking,” she said, opening a silver box on the coffee table. She took out a prerolled joint, lit up, and pulled a heavy hit of Maryjane into her lungs.

“We don’t know exactly how much Parks stole. Probably take years to figure that out. But we know you ended up with a pile of it. He thought you were his secret bank. But the first time he started talking about making a withdrawal, you disappeared on him. You must have been planning it for a long time. It’s easy when they trust you, huh?”

“He was in love,” Beryl said, her drawl suggesting, “If God didn’t want them sheared…”

“Men aren’t your favorite humans, huh?”

“Good guess, Sherlock. If it weren’t for my mother, I’d be as queer as Ellen and Rosie combined.”

“Got it,” I said, trying to get her train back on the track I wanted. “You figured it for a low-risk play too, and you were right. So Parks gets arrested, so what? So he decides to name names, big deal. Far as you were concerned, he was just a generous lover.”

“Some men are,” she said, smiling ugly and dragging deep on her joint. She didn’t even bother to hold the smoke down—plenty more where that had come from.

“Then he gets himself gunned down, right on the street. Now you know the people he ripped off aren’t going to the Better Business Bureau. And they’re going to be looking for their money.”

“And so are you,” she said, her voice so thick with contempt I could barely make out the words. “Just like you were the last time.”

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.”

“She 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.”

“Isn’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.”

“You 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.”

We 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?”

Beryl 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.”

We 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.

“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.

“Did 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.

“Why 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.

“Those 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.

“You think if you ‘rescued’ them they’d jump at the chance to be stuffed into some basement, sewing until their fingertips got paralyzed or they went blind from the lousy lighting? Fucking’s not just better paid; it’s easier work, too.”

“Work?” I said, thinking back to how I had dismissed that woman in the blood lab as a “sex worker.” Not liking myself for it now.

“It is work,” she said, as hotly composed as a high-school debater. “The higher up the scale you go, the better it’s paid. And safer, too. You know those legalized houses they have in Nevada? When’s the last time you ever heard of a girl being killed in one of them?”

“I don’t think I ever did.”

“Right!” she said, triumphantly. “Those serial killers, they grab girls off the streets, not out of houses.”

“So an escort service is better?”

“You know about that, too, huh? That was when I was still learning. I worked in houses, too. But, really, it’s all the same. You only have yourself. They promise you all the ‘security’ in the world, but when you’re alone in that room, it’s all on you.”

I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t a strategy—her hate had just run me empty.

“And it’s the same when you’re all alone in the world,” she said. Slowly, as if concerned I’d miss something important. “You know where I learned that?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, that’s right, Mr. Knight in Shining Armor. In a little room. A little girl in a little room. All alone. That’s what you brought me back to. My hero.”

We stopped one more time, to switch places. The Porsche was supposed to be the lawyer’s car, not the client’s.

I hit my phone. “It’s me,” I said, when it was picked up at the other end.

“She was home an hour and fifteen minutes ago,” Toni said. “I dropped by with an even better offer. She wasn’t any more interested than she was the last time.”

“You’re a doll,” I told her.

She blew a kiss into the phone.

The woman who came to the door was dressed in workout clothes, a sweatband around her head, towel around her shoulders.

“What can I—?” she started to say, then froze as her eyes went past me to Beryl.

“Hello, Mother. You’re looking good.”

“I…”

By then we were inside. Beryl closed the door behind us as her mother stood there, mouth half open, as if frozen in the act of speech.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Summerdale,” I said. Oil in my mouth, too-bright smile on my face. “My name is Mestinvah, Roman Mestinvah. I represent your daughter—”

“Represent?” she said, voice hardening. “What do you think you have to ‘represent’ anyone about in this house?”

“Let’s all sit down, Mother,” Beryl said, sweetly. “This won’t take long.”

“It will take less than that for me to call the police,” her mother said, standing with her fists clenched at her sides.

“Do it!” Beryl suddenly hissed at her. “Do it, you fucking cunt.

Come on!”

Her mother sagged like she’d been body-punched.

We all sat down in the living room, like the civilized adults we were. Nobody offered coffee.

Beryl lit a cigarette.

“We don’t allow smoking in—”

Beryl blew a puff of smoke in her mother’s direction.

“Ms. Summerdale, I understand this all may be a bit…traumatic for you, seeing your daughter after all these years,” I said. “We came here in the hopes we can settle things without the need to…well, without the need to leave this room, frankly.”

“What ‘things’?” she said, as Beryl flicked the ash from her cigarette into a crystal vase that held a single blood-red rose.

“Reparations,” Beryl said, on cue.

“What are you—?”

“My client,” I said, holding up my hand as if to stop Beryl from saying anything more, “has a number of causes of action she intends to pursue, Ms. Summerdale. You would, needless to say, be the defendant in any such litigation. And please don’t tell me about the statute of limitations,” I went on, as if she’d tried to interrupt. “A team of eminent treatment professionals has already provided sworn affidavits that my client had suppressed all memory of the horrors inflicted on her until very recently. We are quite confident that we could survive any motion to dismiss.”

“I don’t under—”

“I told them everything, Mother,” Beryl said, vomiting the last word.

“I have no idea what you think you might have ‘told’ anyone,” the mother said, strength coming back into her voice. “You have a very troubled history, Beryl. Your mental state was never—”

“That’s what happens to little girls who get turned into trained dogs, Mother. Lap dogs, remember?”

“You’re being—”

“You still have your collection of baby-sized speculums, you filthy fucking bitch? You still have your model-train transformer? The one with the extra wires for bad little girls who don’t learn to make Mommy happy?”

“You are insane,” the woman said. Emphatically enough, but I could hear the stress fractures in her voice. “You’ve been insane since you were a child.”

“Nobody’s insane here,” I said, soothingly. “Nobody’s even unreasonable. You see, your husband—your ex-husband, I should say—was very forthcoming, Ms. Summerdale.”

“He never knew any—” she blurted out, before she realized what she was saying, and clamped down on the words.

“He knew more than you ever imagined,” I said, finishing her thought. “And it wasn’t just that he had an idea; he had proof. I wonder if the people who bought your house in Westchester ever found the wires for the microphones.”

She sat there, stone-still, not moving a muscle. Her face was a frozen, expressionless mask.

“Your ‘crafts room,’” I said. “The one with the lock on the door, the double-pad carpet, and the acoustical tiles on the walls. The room where you were teaching Beryl private mother-daughter stuff. The room your husband was never allowed in. You thought he bought that, didn’t you? Everybody needs their own space, right? And, after all, he had his den, didn’t he?”

She still didn’t move. Didn’t react when Beryl dropped her burning cigarette butt into the vase, and immediately lit another.

“There are over twenty boxes of cassette tapes,” I lied. “No video, but the audio makes it clear enough.”

“I was in therapy for years and years,” Beryl said, on cue again. “But I could never figure out what was wrong. If it wasn’t for those tapes, I’d still be loaded up on antidepressants, walking around like a zombie. Good old Daddy. All those years, you thought you had him castrated. But he was doing just what you were doing, only coming at it from a different angle. You were both fucking me. Fucking your little girl. You did it for fun, and Daddy did it for money. Your money. Now it’s my turn.”

“What do you want?” the woman said, dead-voiced. Speaking to me as if Beryl wasn’t in the room.

“My client is going to need a lot of treatment,” I said, greasily. “Expensive treatment. This is much more important to her than digging up the past. What good would that do?”

The mother’s mask shifted. “You think you can come into my own home and blackmail me, you grubby little shyster? I’ve got lawyers that would crush you like the cockroach you are.”

“I’m sorry you characterize a sincere attempt to settle a viable case out of court as ‘blackmail,’ Ms. Summerdale,” I said, reaching for my attaché case. “I did warn you this was a possibility,” I said to Beryl.

“I like it better this way,” she said, licking her lips. “I can’t wait.”

We hadn’t even gotten to our feet before the mother caved.

“How do I know you won’t be back?” the mother said, a half-hour later.

“Because we’re going to give you not only a properly executed and fully binding release of any and all claims against you for any reason, covering my client’s life from birth to the present day, but a cast-iron confidentiality agreement, one that requires my client to pay you triple the amount of the settlement as liquidated damages should she disclose any of the…material we discussed.”

“I…”

“And,” I said, “something even better. A notarized affidavit from my client acknowledging that the…allegations we discussed were a complete fabrication. I have all the documents right here,” I said, soothingly, fondling the black leather attaché case. “You’re not settling a lawsuit; you’re agreeing to pay for your daughter’s desperately needed long-term treatment.”

“It’s a lot of money.”

“Oh, please, Mother,” Beryl said, in a teenager’s voice. “It’s, like, only a fraction of what you’d be leaving me in your will anyway, isn’t it? Just look at it as an accelerated inheritance.”

“When do you expect to—?”

“Right this second,” Beryl told her, both hands on the leash. “You’ve got a computer somewhere in this house. And you’ve got online access to your money, too. Maybe not all of it, but more than enough to cover what you’re going to pay me. A few mouse-clicks, and it’s all wire-transferred.”

“Even if I could—”

“Oh, you can, Mother. Come on, let’s go play.”

Beryl tapped keys on her cell phone.

“It’s there,” she said. “Move it out, and close the account down. Now!”

“I never want to see you again,” the woman said, spent.

“Oh, you won’t, Mother. Just one more thing, and we’re out of here forever.”

“What?” she said, hollowed out way past empty.

“The baby,” Beryl told her, a hideous smile playing over her lips. “After what you taught me, I always wanted a little girl of my own.”

“You’re…”

“You can just buy another one. And I know you will. After all, you haven’t even started ‘training’ this one yet. But I need more than money, Mother. I need to take something from you.” She clasped her hands in a prayerful gesture, said, “Oh, please, please, tell me you understand,” as soft-voiced as a scorpion.

“Sign there…and there,” I told Beryl.

“I still don’t see why I should have to split the money with you. It was me she did those things to, not you. And if you hadn’t brought me back…”

“We went over all that. You keep what you got from Parks; we split what we got from your mother.”

“Maybe I changed my mind.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Yes.”

“Haven’t you already stolen enough? From me, I mean.”

“You already played that card.”

“I always thought my so-called father was the most pathetic man on earth,” the beautiful viper said. “Thanks for showing me otherwise.”

“Sign both,” I reminded her, pointing at a line on the papers below which her name and Social Security number had been typed. An embossed notary’s seal was already on the page.

“What do you want that baby for?”

“What do you care?”

“I don’t,” she said. I believed her.

Her silver Porsche pulled away, leaving me on the downtown sidewalk with a baby girl in my arms.

Toni’s Corvette came around the corner.

I punched in a twelve-digit number. When Yitzhak answered, I said, “I have something for you.”

“She has all of it?” he asked me later that night, out on the prairie.

“I don’t know how much ‘all’ is,” I said, reasonably. “But she has out-front assets of something like thirty mil. On paper, it was all supposed to have come from her father’s business, but all that paper’s bogus…just a screen.”

“How do you know this?”

“Daniel Parks wasn’t just stealing from you,” I said. “He had a whole long sucker-list. But he had to find a place to stash the money. Spend some money yourself, check out the divorce papers his wife had filed. Parks had a mistress. Her name, her real name, is Beryl Summerdale.”

“Beryl Summerdale,” the Russian repeated carefully, committing the name I’d given him to memory.

“That’s right. And I’ve got something else for you, too. She’s got access to her money online. Right over a modem. If you could get her to tell you the right numbers…”

The AP wire said, “Luxury Home Firebombed!”

Beryl Summerdale’s neighbors hadn’t heard a thing until the house on Castle Crescent suddenly burst into flames at approximately three in the morning.

It took the local Fire Department only minutes to respond to their frantic calls, but the house was already incinerated.

The Arson Squad said a highly sophisticated series of incendiary devices had been used, but no more information could be released at this time.

The crime-scene investigators said “human bone fragments” had been located.

The lead detective on the case said that the house was known to have been owned and occupied by Ms. Summerdale and her infant daughter. Both were presumed to have perished in the explosion.

The Special Agent in Charge of the local FBI office said that speculation about terrorists targeting the wrong house “has, to the best of our knowledge, no basis in fact at this time,” although he acknowledged that the neighborhood was home to several prominent D.C. insiders.

Beryl Summerdale had no known enemies. Her ex-husband had been ruled out. The police had no suspects.

Loyal stood on the sidewalk outside her building. A white Cadillac sedan was at the curb. The trunk was full of luggage. The back seat was full of baby stuff.

“Her name is Charisse, after my mother,” Loyal said. “Of all the things you did for me, she was the best. I never even knew how much I wanted—”

“It’s what I wanted, too,” I said. Pure truth.

“You know where I’ll be, Lew.”

“You’ll be home.”

“Home with my little girl,” Loyal said. She stood close, her heart in her eyes. “Your home, too, if you ever want one,” she said, very softly.

“I just might,” I said, lying to her for what I knew was the last time.