Free Mask Market by Andrew Vachss Page A

like this soup. I mean, it’s not terrible or anything, but it’s not yours.”
    “Ah!” she said, expressionlessly. “No time last night. Cook make soup himself.”
    Every year or so, Mama tests to see if I recognize the one thing in that restaurant she makes herself. It would never occur to her to question that I love her, but she occasionally needs some reassurance that I love her soup.
    I bowed slightly, brought my fingertips together. She removed the steaming tureen and my Barnard cup without another word.
    “Prawns today,” she said. “Cook fix them good, okay?”
    “I’m not hungry, Mama.”
    “Max coming?”
    “Should have been here already.”
    “Okay,” she said, getting up and walking over to her post by the front register just as Max loomed up behind me.
    As soon as he sat down, I made a gesture of ladling out a cup of soup, taking a sip. Then I made a face to indicate the soup was lousy today. Max nodded his thanks—Mama wasn’t going to waste a bogus pot of hot-and-sour without testing it on more than one of us.
    I was in the middle of regaling Max with Little Eric’s monumental triumph over the Forces of Evil—that’s the Morning Line, for all you hayseeds—when the Prof strolled in with Clarence at his side. He slid in next to me, spoke out of the side of his mouth in a barely audible prison-yard whisper: “What’s with the old woman, Schoolboy?”
    “What do you mean?” I said, charitably not mentioning that the Prof himself was older than corruption. Or that I knew why he was keeping his voice down.
    “She tells me it’s cold out, maybe I want some soup. It’s the off-brand stuff today, am I right?”
    “On the money.”
    “Damn, son. You’d think she’d stop trying to gaff us with that tired old trick after all these years.”
    “You want her to think up a new one?”
    The little man turned and gave me a look.
    “Where is my little sister?” Clarence asked, looking at his watch.
    “Michelle’s not in on this,” I said. “Not this part, I mean.”
    “I thought there was green on the scene,” the Prof riffed. “Something my boy found in that computer thing.”
    “There was money,” I said. “All over that CD Clarence looked at, sure. But—”
    “Right!” the Prof interrupted. “So—we did the scan, now we need a plan. And if we’re going to go in soft, we need our girl to walk point, don’t we?”
    “The money on that CD, it belongs to the girl the guy who hired me was looking for.”
    Max pointed his finger, ratcheted his thumb in the universal gesture of a hammer dropping.
    “Yeah,” I said. “The guy who got smoked. And, it turns out, he was some kind of money man. Other people’s money.”
    “So he wasn’t looking for the girl, he was looking for her stash?”
    “I…I don’t think so, Prof. But we can’t start looking for either one without some answers.”
    “But you know the girl, mahn,” Clarence put in. “That is what you said.”
    “I know who she is. But the last time I saw her, she was just a kid. You saw her, too, Prof. You, too, Max,” I said, miming the last sentence.
    The waiter brought a tureen of the booby-trap soup. Mama left her register just in time to see Max spit out a mouthful. He lurched to his feet, bowed an apology to the waiter.
    “What’s up with this stuff?” the Prof said, pointing to the tureen. “You serving us tourist food now?” He wasn’t faking the annoyed look on his handsome face—if there’s one thing the Prof hates, it’s being upstaged.
    “Oh, sorry,” Mama said. “Big mistake, okay?”
    “This isn’t Mama’s soup,” I explained.
    Max pointed an accusing finger at me, for not warning him.
    Mama’s lips twisted—whether with pleasure at her family’s immediate recognition of the impostor, or in admiration of Max’s drama-queen performance, I couldn’t tell.
    As soon as she left, I told Clarence about the time we had rescued Beryl Preston, watching the recognition flash in Max’s