The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel by Taylor Stevens Page A

speak freely, she couldn’t dial from within the café.
    An hour of calls and many lies led her to the facility in which Bradford was held, and the confirmation that he was there and he was alive, such a small connection to him, brought both agony and relief.
    —
    The marriage certificate was the first package to arrive. Clock ticking on a booth that she kept paying for, Munroe left for the train station and found an electronics store nearby, where three tightly packed floors of cameras, TVs, computers, and gadgets put American big-box retailers to shame in the way a Swiss village cheese shop trumped a Walmart deli counter.
    In the camera section a question she posed to the first employee seemed to transfer of its own accord through tiny huddles of conspiracy and finally netted her a phone number for a photography studio. A call provided walking directions and Munroe found the place just down the road, four floors up a narrow stairwell, with a coffee shop, hair salon, and restaurant stacked like LEGO blocks beneath it.
    The door led into a single room, the entry separated from the studio by a long, tall glass-topped counter that held a display of urban photography. At the far end of the room, a woman glanced up. In flawless English, she said, “Can I help you?”
    Munroe pulled Bradford’s marriage certificate from the envelope. “I need a document photographed,” she said. “We spoke about thirty minutes ago.”
    “Oh,” the woman said, and then, as if the surprise had escaped her lips before she’d had a chance to censor, she smiled slightly and said, “Your Japanese is very good. I didn’t realize you were a foreigner.”
    “Your English is good, too. California?”
    “Oregon. Went for college and married instead.”
    “You miss it?”
    The woman reached for the document and Munroe handed it to her. “Sometimes,” she said, “though I don’t miss my ex.” She tilted the paper against the light so that the watermarks showed. They were what had turned getting a quality digital copy into more than a visit to a scanner.
    “This shouldn’t be too difficult,” the woman said. “I need to set up the equipment—maybe a half hour or so.”
    Munroe left for the restaurant a few floors down, another little box with a countertop that ran parallel to a windowed wall, the accoutrements of a kitchen behind the counter, and lounge-style seating filling what was left of the space.
    She ate without tasting, without enjoyment or appetite, pork cutlet—
tonkatsu
—and rice and cabbage, satisfying a need for protein and a semblance of nourishment because her brain required fuel. When the food was gone and an hour had passed, she collected her prize from the studio upstairs and returned to the manga café.
    Altering the digital file would have been easier if the available software had been in English, but eventually, pixel by pixel, Bradford’s ex-wife’s name became Munroe’s. A quality print on heavy-weight paper cut down to letter size created a replica so near to the original that only the absence of watermarks separated fake from original, with nothing to indicate that watermarks had originally been there.
    The seal arrived by special delivery in the afternoon and its embossing became the texture of the lie. On such short notice and without connections, the forgery was as close to the real thing as Munroe could get. She ran her fingers over the raised seal, closed her eyes, and breathed in the illusion.
    The marriage certificate was a prop, a way to satisfy bureaucratic expectations. Far more important was her ability to play the role ordained by the paper and so become what those with the power to say yes expected to see and no one thought to question the paper’s provenance.
    She needed one visit, only one. If she failed to acquire that, if the officials insisted on verifying the document before letting her in, then even she, as Bradford’s best hope, wouldn’t be enough to fix this mess and he was already