As he drove out of the village, the hall clock struck four, and Mr. Dillet started up and clapped his hands to his ears. It was not the first time he had heard that bell.
Awaiting an offer from the other side of the Atlantic, the dolls’ house still reposes, carefully sheeted, in a loft over Mr. Dillet’s stables, whither Collins conveyed it on the day when Mr. Dillet started for the seacoast.
Masks
by Charles Ardai
© 1993 by Charles Ardai
Charles Ardai is one of the youngest writers ever to have been published in EQMM, but his first association with our magazine was not as a contributor. Mr. Ardai came to work at Davis Publications, which then owned EQMM, at the age of sixteen, as a part-time assistant in the subsidiary rights department. Within a very short time he was submitting stories to both EQMM and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and helping to compile anthologies of mystery fiction. He later attended Columbia University and makes his career in investment banking...
Night had fallen, and the sounds of carnival shook the walls with a hungry samba beat. The crowd in the street clapped and cheered and stamped its feet, drowning out the music. Firecrackers exploded and ricocheted from the rooftops. Men cheered. Women sang.
But inside the room, everyone was silent.
The three men who occupied the side of the room closest to the door sat with their hands on the arms of their chairs. One, a tall blond with his hair pulled back in a ponytail, gripped the armrests tightly. Another, a black man in a lightweight silk suit, drummed his fingers against the wood. He tapped steadily, slowly, patiently. The third man wore a sealskin jacket and American designer shoes and a bolo tie with a spider encased in amber for a clasp. He leaned forward and put all his weight onto his forearms, as though at any moment he might launch himself toward the man seated behind the desk.
The man behind the desk held his hands before him, his gloved fingers interlaced, his elbows resting lightly on the blotter. He wore a dark suit with a black shirt and a hat with a long brim. Beneath the brim, a sliver of skin peeked out above the top of a translucent plastic mask. The mask concealed and distorted his features. It was possible to tell that he was dark-skinned, but beyond that nothing could be told for certain.
The lips of the mask did not move even when the lips behind them finally did. The effect, of pink squirming behind the fixed lips of the fixed face, was unnerving. But if the other men found it so, they showed no sign.
“You are not the Jomon.” The voice was flat, muffled, deliberately unmodulated. The words hung in the air over the desk, the more lifeless for being underscored by the sound of music and laughter outside.
“You see the evidence,” the blond said. “You see the pictures.”
“I see pictures. Anyone can take pictures.”
The black man stopped drumming his fingers. “Not anyone could have taken those pictures. They haven’t found Monterrez yet.”
“So you found him. That doesn’t mean you killed him.”
“We killed him,” the blond said.
“So you say.”
The third man rose slightly from his chair, in answer to the insult, but the blond made a motion to him and he sat down again.
The blond said, “Mr...?”
“No names,” the man in the mask said.
“Mr. No Names,” the blond said. “What proof do you want?”
The man in the mask collected the four black-and-white photographs that lay on the desk and held them out to the men. The blond took them and slipped them into his pocket.
“There is a job I know for sure was performed by the Jomon. The name was—” The man looked down at a pad of notes. “Madradas. Lienore and Maria Madradas. Bring me photos of their bodies. If you are the Jomon.”
“And if you are the police?”
“I am not.”
“And if you are...?” the blond said.
“If I am the police, then there are officers already outside the door who will arrest you as you try to leave. You know this is not the case. Waste no more of my time with your games and your pitiful impersonation. The Jomon are not game players. If they knew you were using their name they would leave you dead in a gutter this very night.”
The blond’s knuckles whitened as he clenched the arm of the chair tighter. The black man’s fingers drummed on and on.
“Leave now,” said the man in the mask. “And bring me proof if you can.”
The blond stood up and the others followed. They walked to the door and opened it. There were no officers waiting for them.
With the door open, the tumult from the street was even louder. Then the door was closed, the noise was deadened, and the three men were gone.
Ramon Madradas was a tired-looking man, and had been even when he was young and active. At age forty-three, having lived through war, marriage, the birth of two daughters, and the death of one, he had finally grown into his features. His eyelids hung. His cheeks drooped. The lines in his forehead turned down at either end. Though he smiled easily and often, it was a weary smile. And though he stood straight, it was a weary stance: one hip higher than the other, all his weight resting on one leg as though he barely had the strength or interest to hold himself upright.
His wife, Lienore, was taller than he was, and so was his daughter, Maria. In family photographs, he usually stood between them. In some, they looked at each other and smiled over the top of his head.
Lienore was heavyset and broad-shouldered, with features typical of Brazilian women, particularly those born in the north, near Venezuela. She had straight black hair and brown skin, pink fingers, wide eyes. Ramon had the stiff, thick hair of the country-born and the map of minor scars, all along his arms and on his face, that was the property of most men who did not spend their youth in the academy.
Maria showed the advantages of a girl brought up in the city, on good food and clean water. She had her mother’s eyes and hair, but the hair she wore long, down to her waist, and the eyes, when outlined and daubed with shadow, looked almost exotic. She was thin and well proportioned, long of leg and neck and forehead. She almost looked like a heavily tanned North American woman, and once or twice on the beach had in fact been mistaken for one. She had allowed the misconception to take hold and had said nothing to dispel it, not from shame, or at least not entirely, but out of pleasure at being able to cross from one world to the other. Her mother received looks from these men, of contempt and dismissal, that were entirely different from the looks Maria received. When she walked alone on the beach, Maria called herself Maria Stone.
Ramon knew of this and accepted it as inevitable. He had himself left the countryside for the city, had moved from a shanty to an apartment over a store he meant ultimately to own, and had, out of shame and a desire to re-create himself as a cosmopolitan and a success, never recontacted his family. He had been seventeen, as Maria was now. So he understood her impulse and accepted, as a father’s burden, his sorrow.
He had finally bought the store during a drought, when it had seemed that the tourists, too, and not only the rain, had dried up for good. The old man he had worked for had taken sick and then died and his son, who inherited, had wanted nothing to do with the store. He sold it to Ramon for the contents of Ramon’s meager savings account, which left Ramon and Lienore unable to buy a new bed to replace the broken one in which they slept and in possession of a bodega whose stock was stale and whose clientele was currently vacationing elsewhere, in less punishing climates.