Mask Market (24 page)

“Yeah. Yeah, I can. And when you go now, after you sell your apartment, you’ll have been a hardworking actress who saved her money.”

“I sure will. I’ll be able to fix up the house so it’s one of the nicest ones around. Have a swell car. Maybe even…”

“Meet a guy?”

“I…don’t know about that,” she said, letting me in on a conversation she must have had with herself a hundred times. “Here’s what I do know: I can’t go back home just to be getting a job in some store. I need to come back with enough money to live right, so people know I made something of myself while I was away, be proud of me for it. It wouldn’t take a fortune for me to be somebody back home. I just don’t want to be a fraud.”

I touched the vertebrae at the base of her neck. She made a little moaning sound that didn’t have a trace of fake in it.

“It looks like you’re staying the night, for once,” she said, reaching for me.

L
oyal slept with her face buried so deep in the pillow I couldn’t see how she got a breath, but her rib cage moved rhythmically as I punched in a number on my cell. I stepped into the living room and waited for the call to be answered.

“Gardens.”

“It’s me, Mama. Can you find the Prof, ask him to meet me, anytime this afternoon?”

“Twelve hours?” Mama said, making sure.

“Perfect.”

“Max, too?”

“No, I won’t need—”

“Yes,” she said, hanging up.

“Y
ou don’t take coffee even in the morning?” Loyal asked me. We were back at her kitchen table. She was bustling around, wearing a pair of baggy gray shorts and matching jersey top. I was just sitting still, stealing glances at my watch. Almost ten in the morning.

“Well, you have to have something in your stomach to start the day,” she said, firmly. “At least let me make you some toast.”

“That would be great.”

“And have some juice, too. I’ve got…” She bent at the waist to look in the refrigerator.

“You keep juice on the bottom shelf?”

“Oh, you!” she said, turning over her shoulder to smile at me. “You know all a girl’s tricks, don’t you?”

“Not even close,” I said, as much truth as I’d ever told in three words.

“Well, you sure know what a girl likes.”

I chuckled. Said, “Even I know
that
trick.”

“Hmmpf!” she said, turning around, hands on hips, face glowing with mock annoyance.

“Come here for a minute, girl.”

She took that as a request to sit on my lap.

“What?” she said, innocently.

“Remember last night? You were telling me about how you almost got into real trouble. A girlfriend of yours went somewhere….”

“Oh! That’s right, I was. I forgot. You really want to know about that?”

“Yeah, I do.”

She squirmed around in my lap. Not playing, getting comfortable. “I never thought I was better than anyone else,” she said, her tone telling me it was very important to her that I believe her. “I met a lot of girls like me. Not just when I was…modeling. When I worked in bars, too. And went on casting calls, of course. I was kind of in the middle of them. Not one of those dreamy-eyed ones who believe they’re going to be ‘discovered’ someday, and not one of those who believe you have to put out for producers if you ever want to get a part, either.

“You know how they say there’s lines you shouldn’t ever cross? Well, I found out that those lines move. Right in front of your eyes. Even if they don’t move for you, they move for your
judgments.
Do you see what I’m saying, Lew?”

“What you might have once thought was…wrong, or whatever, you learned that there might be good reasons for it.”

“Yes! I may be very old-fashioned. I guess I’m even country in my heart. But, to me, there’s always going to be a difference between a woman who sells herself for money to buy a fur coat, and one who does it to keep a roof over her kids’ heads.”

“And before you came to this city, you would have thought the same of both, that’s what you’re saying?”

“That
is
what I’m saying. It’s easy to point the Bible at folks like you’re aiming a gun, but it’s just a book, isn’t it? Everybody who reads it comes away with whatever they bring to it. So it wasn’t going to be me casting that first stone.”

“Right,” I said, squeezing her waist slightly to underline my approval.

She took a deep breath. Let it out slowly. Then she stood up, went to the sink, and drew herself a glass of tap water.

“The job was what they called being an ‘entertainment hostess.’ Like a B-girl, but very, very high-class. It was a six-week contract, working for this club. They paid for everything: plane fare, your hotel room, meals, the works. And you came back with thirty thousand dollars. In cash, no taxes.”

“Where was this, Tokyo?”

She gave me a long, measured look. “Yes, that’s right. How did you know?”

“Just a guess.”

“Uh-huh. Then I bet you could guess the rest of the story, too.”

“I might. When your girlfriend got there, they took her passport away. And her visa. That was to make sure she fulfilled her contract, they told her. And they told her she’d misinterpreted what they meant by ‘entertainment,’ too.”

“I’m not sure about that last part,” Loyal said. “I mean, about them fooling her. Lace—that’s what she called herself—she was…I’m not going to call names, but I think she might have known what she was going to have to do. What she didn’t know was that she wouldn’t have any choices. It wasn’t one man. Or even one man a night. By the time they allowed her to leave, it wasn’t even one man at a
time.
When they let her go, they took most of the money away from her, too.”

“She told you this when she came back?”

“Yes. I told her she should report it. To the UN or something, I don’t know. I mean, Japan, that’s not someplace where they don’t have laws. It’s a very civilized country. And we do all kinds of business with them, don’t we?”

“All kinds,” I agreed.

“Lace said she was mad, but she wasn’t crazy. ‘They’ve got different rules for whores,’ is what she told me. It made me sick.”

“I don’t think you were lucky, girl.”

“What do you mean?” she said, frowning.

“It wasn’t luck that kept you from going over there. You were either too smart or too scared.”

“Scared.”

“When it comes to an offer like that, one’s as good as the other.”

She came back over to me, threw one leg over mine, and sat down on my lap again, this time facing me.

“I told you a lot of truth, these last few hours.”

“I know.”

“Yes. I think you do. I think you
do
know it was the truth.” She bounced slightly, as if she were making up her mind what to do next.

“What?” I said.

“How about you tell me some truth, Lew?”

“What truth would you like, girl?”

She leaned in so close I lost focus on everything but her eyes. “Tell me why you pretend you’re married,” she said, very softly.

“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.”

T
he 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.

“A
t 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.”

T
he 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.”

B
y 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.