Mask Market (20 page)

“What kind of name is that?” he said, almost angrily. “I mean, it doesn’t connect to…anything I know.”

“I can’t tell you. Not yet, anyway.”

“You thought I might know where she is…but that I wouldn’t want to tell you?”

“Right. I thought she might be…aware of the situation. That the rumor I’d heard had some truth to it. I thought she might be staying underground until things got straightened out. Maybe staying with you, I don’t know.”

“You wanted to help her?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did. I still do.”

“Because…?”

“I don’t have a good answer for that one. Maybe I’m just chasing down things I did when I was young.”

“Things you did wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I couldn’t know that until I talk to her.”

“Bringing her back to me!” he said suddenly. “
That’s
what you thought you might have done wrong.”

I didn’t deny it.

“I don’t know where she is,” Jeremy Preston said. He stood up, paced in front of the cold fireplace for a minute, then turned to face me. “I don’t know where she is,” he repeated. “But I’ll pay you to find her.”

“Why?”

“Because I want the answer to your question, too, Mr. Burke. A lot more than you ever could.”

P
reston told me he met the woman who would become his wife when he’d been a student at Harvard—“That’s right,” he interrupted himself, sharply, as if I had challenged his words. When I didn’t respond, he visibly relaxed, then went on again. All ponderous and pedantic, like a celebrity twit being interviewed.

“Those were tumultuous times. Not just Vietnam. The civil-rights movement, feminism, music…When they talk about a ‘counterculture,’ that’s very accurate. I was a senior, my wife was a sophomore. At BU, just across the river. I met her at a teach-in. Later, she told me that she wanted to marry me from the minute I stood up and…well, made a little speech, I guess.

“We had an understanding. A contract, even. We weren’t going to be dropouts, we were going to be…participants. Change-agents. Not by living on some commune, or marching in protests. It’s all very well and good to talk about the inevitable rise of the proletariat, but we knew revolutions need financing to move forward, the same way a car needs gas.

“Her father brought me into his company, but I was never the son-in-law,” he went on, as hyper-vigilant to attacks on his credentials as an abused child is to a subtle shift in a parent’s voice tone. “I hadn’t studied business in college—I don’t think
anybody
studied business back then—but I had an aptitude for it, and it came to the surface quickly. Before I was thirty, I was virtually running the company. And when my father-in-law died—heart attack; he wasn’t a man who ever listened to doctors—the segue was as natural as if I’d been groomed for the position since birth.”

“But your wife was the actual owner? Is that what you meant earlier, when you said—?”

“That this was mine?” he said, sweeping his hand in a gesture meant to encompass the whole house. “Yes, that’s exactly right. When we divorced, the prenup—I remember us laughing when I signed it: just a piece of paper her bourgeois father insisted upon, it was never going to matter to
us
—kicked in. There was never an issue of child support. Beryl had been gone quite a while, and she was no longer a minor, anyway.”

“Beryl was an only child?”

“Yes,” he said. “I wanted more kids. Especially later, when Beryl started to…act out. I thought, if she had a little brother or a little sister, it would be…I don’t know, a good experience for her. For them both, I mean.”

“Did she ever have a pet?” I asked. Remembering that she hadn’t when her father had first come to me, wondering if they’d ever tried that.

“You mean, like a dog or a cat? No, my wife was highly allergic.”

“She couldn’t be around animals?”

“Well, she could tolerate them in small doses. Like when we visited a friend’s house and they had a dog, she would pat it and everything. But to have one in the
house,
well, that would have been impossible for her.”

I shifted position to show I was listening close, said, “You were still together when Beryl came back to visit you, that last time?”

“Together? We were still married, yes. But the life we planned for ourselves had already disappeared.”

“You never got to be bankrollers?”

“Oh, we certainly did
that.
You wouldn’t believe some of the people who were guests in our home. That was part of what we wanted from our…contributions, I suppose. For Beryl to be exposed to the finest thinkers of our generation. The best minds, the best causes. And she was. My wife and I funded some
major
initiatives. And plenty of them weren’t tax-exempt, either.”

“Did you attract government attention?”

“Oh, I’m sure we did. Everyone in our circle was under some form of surveillance—it came with the territory.”

And made you feel like a real player, too,
I thought, but kept it off my face.

“By the time Beryl was, oh, I don’t know, maybe eight or nine years old, it seemed like the revolution was dying. You know, the Age of Reagan and all that. The country changed…and so did our…raison d’être, you might say. Oh, we still contributed—the Southern Poverty Law Center, for example—but we weren’t dealing directly with the principals anymore. Instead of sitting around our living room, being in on the strategy, we were going to galas and writing checks.

“If you study history, you come to understand that everything changes in cycles. A wave crests, breaks, and the water is calm again. I knew, eventually, we would return to a time of…involvement, I suppose you’d call it.”

Good fucking luck,
I thought. But my expression told him I was paying attention to every word he spoke.

That’s technique. Professionalism. And it’s going out of style. If America is a nation of sheep, TV is the shepherd. Jurors think
CSI
is a documentary. They’ll vote to acquit even when three witnesses saw the defendant shoot the victim, because there were no fingerprints on the recovered pistol—the one with checkered wood grips. Defense attorneys sum up in child-molestation cases by shrieking, “Where’s the DNA?” at juries who just
know
every human contact leaves traces a lab can detect. After all, the TV told them so.

Cops get infected with the same virus. They overdose on
Law and Order
reruns and end up thinking they have to “win” every interview. It’s not about the information anymore; it’s about the repartee.

I don’t care what side of the law you work: You
never
want to confront your subject while he’s still talking. In fact, you don’t want to interrupt him at all. Threats are for amateurs; verbal dueling is for fools. A pro knows there’s no reason to get your man talking if you’re not going to listen.

Good interrogation is like panning for gold. You let everything the other guy says pass through the mesh of your attention, encouraging him to keep it coming, knowing that the little nuggets won’t be obvious until you’re done sifting.

There’s a rhythm to it. When the flow slows, you have to tap the right nerves to get it moving again.

“You don’t think that Beryl…I don’t know…felt let down when things changed around your home?” I probed. “When you stopped…participating so actively?”

“Beryl? She was hardly ‘political’ at that age. And, the truth is, she never seemed to care. Oh, she got along well enough with the people we had over, and she understood why her mother and father were so committed to social change. She knew racism was wrong. She knew Vietnam had been an ongoing war crime, perpetrated against innocent citizens. She knew about the grape boycotts. About apartheid. About…well, a whole
range
of progressive movements. And she seemed, if not enthusiastic, at least supportive. But it was never her passion.

“She had a wonderful collection of…mementos, I suppose you’d call them. Special little gifts that people who came to visit would bring to her.” He gestured toward a chest-high shelf hung on two wrought-iron brackets, standing against the wall to his left. The shelf was crowded with small objects, a random sprinkling of wood, metal, and stone. I wasn’t close enough to see more.

“She never took them with her,” he said, sadly. “Even that last time.”

“So when you and your wife stopped…?”

“It was fine with Beryl,” he said. “She had plenty of activities. Piano, dance, art lessons, horseback riding—I let her do anything she wanted to try. Except that karate. That was going just too far. I mean, we were all for young women growing up with self-confidence, but the only place she could have gone for classes was run by a man my wife said made her very nervous. People didn’t talk about it back then, but we all knew some…pedophiles deliberately put themselves in a position to have access to children.”

“Did you ever meet the guy?”

“Well, I did, actually. Beryl was just so insistent, and I could never really say no to her, so I drove over there myself one night. Frankly, I couldn’t see what my wife had gotten so worked up about—the instructor seemed like a perfectly innocuous individual.”

“Was he Asian?”

“That’s right,” Preston said, defensive again. “But that had nothing to do with my wife’s decision, I assure you. His English wasn’t all that…precise; I guess that would be an accurate assessment.”

“He didn’t try and sell you anything, then?”

“You mean for Beryl? No. In fact, he said he personally didn’t teach the children’s classes. But he did suggest I might want to study with him myself.”

“You?”

“Yes. Do you find that so strange?”

“Not at all. I was just wondering if you listened to him.”

“How do you mean?”

“The way you explained it to me when I first got here. How you’ve got a gift for—”

“I didn’t say it was a gift,” he cut me off, somewhere between aggressive and defensive again. “I said it was a technique, listening for qualities in a person’s voice. And that I discovered I had some aptitude for it.”

“Okay. So when you were talking to the sensei…?”

He closed his eyes, going back there. I could
see
him listening then.

“No,” he said, slowly, dragging out the syllable. “There wasn’t anything there I would…mistrust.”

“But your daughter never did go for lessons?”

“No. As I said, her mother was opposed. And she was entitled to her own instincts. I always respected that.”

“A
re you still in touch with your wife? Your ex-wife, I mean?”

“She knows where I live. I know where she lives. That’s about the extent of it. We’re not enemies or anything, but there’s really nothing left between us. Nothing to talk about.”

“Where does she live?”

“In Virginia. Not too far from Washington, D.C.”

“Did she ever remarry?”

“Not to my knowledge,” he said, not faking his lack of interest. “But she could have, for all I know.”

“Did she ever resume her maiden name?”

“Oh yes. Summerdale is her name now. Beryl Summerdale.”

“Your daughter was named for—?”

“Yes,” he said, adding a dash of unhappiness to his depression cocktail. “But she always had my name, too. Beryl Preston.”

“Look,” I told him, “all I wanted to do was to see if she’s doing okay. Don’t ask me why. Maybe I’m just getting older, and I wanted to…look back, see if I ever really accomplished anything back then.”

“You don’t do that sort of work anymore?”

“I…do. But not very much of it. I don’t know if I could find her—”

“But you’ll try?”

“Yeah. But if I do, she’s an adult now. I’m not bringing her back.”

“I understand,” the gray man said. “I want the same thing you do, Mr. Burke. Just to know she’s all right. That’s worth something to me. It always has been.”

I
spent another couple of hours there. Half a dozen cups of coffee for Preston, another couple of hot chocolates for me. I kept panning until I was sure there wasn’t another nugget in the riverbed.

He offered me money. I told him that if I
did
turn something up, it would be the same as last time: COD.

Darkness was dropping by the time I left. It didn’t feel like city night to me. There wasn’t a hint of menace in it. Softer, like a blanket of comfort.

I knew better than to trust it.

I
knew how to run different programs in my head at the same time way before anyone heard of “multitasking.” Any kid who’s been tortured learns how to do it. You can call it splitting off. Or compartmentalizing. Dissociating, if that makes you happy. It all comes down to the same thing: not being there while it’s happening. You watch them doing…whatever they want…to you, but you don’t feel it.

Not physically, I mean.

Not every kid learns it the same way. Some learn it so good that pain loses all meaning. It just doesn’t register. Prison guards call guys like that “anesthetics.” When they go, they go. Clubs bounce off their heads; they wear mace like it was a coat of sweat; they pull stun-gun wires out of their bodies and strangle you with them.

You can’t hurt them. It takes death to stop their pain.

Other kids split off for good. When it’s happening to them, they’re not there. It’s not that they
go
somewhere else like the splitters do; they
are
someone else.

There’s names for them, too.

I found another way. When it was happening, I watched it. Watched them, watched me. And in a little corner of my mind, a place they could never go, I was watching another movie, on a different screen.

That’s where I found my religion, watching that other screen.

I prayed and prayed. No one answered, but I never lost faith. I
had
to believe my god was true. Because I knew, if there was no god for kids like me, if the real God was the one the people who beat me and raped me and hurt me for fun had pictures of in their houses, I was lost.

I was still trying to understand when Wesley found me.

We were both just kids, locked-up, powerless kids. But where I had fear, Wesley had hate. I cried; Wesley plotted.

One night, he showed me how to do it.

Years later, I finally had something to show him, too. I had a family. One I made for myself. They chose me; I chose them. I wanted him with us. But it was too late for Wesley. He never came close to the campfire. He watched from the shadows until the day he checked out.

I know Wesley loved me, in the only way he could. When he crossed over, he left me the only thing that ever had meaning for him in life: a weapon.

I
drove on autopilot, rerunning the session with Preston in my mind, looking for a loose thread to pull.

Beryl’s mother wasn’t hiding; she had a listed phone number. If I could just 411 her, Daniel Parks could have, too. A man like him would have exhausted every possibility before he ever went near the places where you could find a Charlie Jones.

But the CD Parks had given me hadn’t had a single line of info about parents. He knew where
Peta
lived, where
Peta
kept her money, where
Peta
shopped. He had to have been close with her. Intimate, anyway—those nude photos of her didn’t look commercial.

Daniel Parks had known a lot about Peta Bellingham. But he hadn’t known Beryl Preston. Not even that she existed.