Not a bad place to die! Charlie thought, inspecting the golf greens. An eightyish couple walking along the smooth black asphalt gave hearty, vitamin-commercial waves as he rolled past in the Lexus. "See?" said Ellie from the passenger seat. "It's really very nice. I've been wanting to show you for so long, Charlie. All these old trees, and the split-rail fences?" She gazed out the window with such sweet hope that the last of his bitterness melted. She was nearly finished decorating the house. Two dozen bushes and flowering trees would arrive the next morning, holes already dug, a bag of fertilizer hunched next to each, the last of the furniture coming the next afternoon. Ellie would spend the night to be sure everything went smoothly. So far, she'd done a perfect job. He was shocked, almost, by how much she'd completed. No doubt thinking that Julia would succeed at getting pregnant. Making a place where a grandchild could run around. Grandchild, grand children. She'd thought of everything. The sprinkler system had digital controls in the garage. She'd specified a high-speed buried-cable hookup, up to ten phone lines if he wanted. Zoned heating, automatic lights that went on when you entered a room, off when you left. A security system so artificially intelligent that it almost read your mind. She'd outfitted him with a beautiful office, too, a deep leather armchair, a lamp, a lovely Oriental in front of the fireplace. On the desk, a new computer, powerful enough to download Teknetrix data. No wonder she'd kept showing him the brochure, loosening him up, preparing him for the idea, so that it was a pleasure, not a shock. The house had beds and linen and dishes. And stationery with the new address, in his desk drawer. And stamps and pens and paper clips. And toothpaste and dishwashing cleanser and a supply of all their medications in the bathroom. And a phone with autodial numbers already programmed. And a complete set of golf clubs in the garage. He'd pulled out the driver, given it a swing in the front yard. His back felt like a dream. He'd prepared the stinky Chinese tea twice a day for three days straight. Stuff worked perfectly, made him feel loose and warm, even a little warm down there, too, a sort of volunteer half-tumescence. Anytime you need me, I'll be ready, ready for Melissa tonight, you old dog. The tea may have been mildly euphoric, too. Somebody could make a mint off this stuff-the pharmaceutical companies were probably working on it. He'd pay quite a bit, if necessary. If he didn't get the tea on time, his head would hurt. Some kind of herbal stimulant in it. So what if it was a little addictive? He had enough of the dry, crackly powder to last one more day, and had left an order with the concierge at the Peace Hotel for more to be made and sent to him. He'd lost a little weight, too. Heart beating slightly faster? Hard to tell. No one really understood those Chinese herbs. Certainly he felt like he had more energy. Ellie had seen it while he swung the club, smiled at the way he cut the air with it, assumed he was happy about the house. Mentioned the new golf shoes waiting for him in his closet. You had to hand it to her, you really did.
Of course, everybody bought everything through the mail now. You could furnish a house in three days if you spent enough time on the phone. And that's what she'd done, weeks and weeks ago, she'd said the previous night, after confessing that she'd closed on the house way back in July, when he was away on business, actually signed a mortgage agreement. When she was worried that she was getting sicker, but before things really started to get worse. And that was when he told her that he'd paid off the house, that Ted Fullman had taken care of everything. By five o'clock that same afternoon, she could consider the Vista del Muerte house and property paid for, forever and ever. She had actually clapped her hands and kissed him. "Oh, Charlie!" The only caveat, according to Ted, was that the property could not be transferred after the death of the surviving spouse to children or any other heirs, and your executors had to sell the property to a buyer previously approved by the Vista del Mar Admissions Committee. A nice little controlled-supply scam, but Ellie and Charlie were ahead on the demographics, Julia had pointed out. The great boomer bulge followed them; there'd be no shortage of potential buyers when the time came. Ellie had hugged him tearfully, pleased that he accepted the place, her decision, this course of action. "I knew this would be fine," she'd said in relief, "I knew."
She was also, he knew, not saying anything about what she thought she remembered reading in their apartment, and the reason was simple. It was gone. As asked, Lionel had dropped Towers's report down the trash chute, telling no one, not even Mrs. Ravich when she returned the next day after her humiliating lipstick-and-nightgown episode, and so, when she could not find the document anywhere, not in the kitchen or the bedroom or Charlie's office, she'd begun to wonder if she'd made it up-fevered it into her pillsy imagination. This he'd surmised upon his return, because not only did she not say anything about the document, but she'd thrown away all her lovely sleeping aids. "I had a bit of drop-off while you were gone" was all that Ellie would tell him, adding only that Dr. Berger was surprised at the mixing and matching of medications to which she'd confessed. "I did get a bit confused about things, but Julia picked me up and took me to Dr. Berger's and I feel really rather good now."
She looked good, too, sitting in the leather seat of the Lexus, her hair pulled back, a kiss of color on her mouth, eyes bright as she inspected the old maple trees. But a lot is going on in there, he told himself, not just happy excitement, but fear and self-doubt. "Perhaps dementia, certainly rising anxiety," Julia had reported to him when he called her from the plane. "What about that piece of paper she thinks she read?" Charlie had asked slyly. "Oh, I don't know, Dad," Julia had answered. "I was over there and looked for it but never found anything. The doctor says that if she was so anxious and possibly a little addicted to the sleeping pills and also perhaps having the first touch of Alzheimer's, then she might have been in a highly suggestible state. He's had patients see things on television and then swear it happened to them that same day." At age fifty-seven? Wasn't that just too young? "I asked him the same thing, Daddy." Julia had sighed bravely, the weight of daughterly responsibility all too clear. "The test results will be back in a few more days. She'll be okay for the short term. She just needs a great deal of reassurance." Reassurance. Yes. Hence the payoff by Ted Fullman, hence Charlie's willingness to be driven in a company car straight from JFK the afternoon before to the new house, where Ellie had been waiting.
"Canada geese." Ellie pointed again as Charlie eased the car around the community lake. "They actually expanded what was a farmer's pond. They said that it used to get cold enough to skate over every winter. The farmer would measure the ice, and if it was three inches thick, then everybody could skate on it."
She wants to be here, he told himself. She knows that if she becomes sicker they will take care of her-because he would not. Not really. Not with a full and easy heart, not with a company to run. She knows I'm just a selfish bastard, Charlie thought, so she's planned accordingly. Very wise, his wife. They'd seen the long-term-care facility, which appeared rather well staffed, and which included not just the acute-care ward, the beds and dining rooms and physical-therapy facilities, but an operating room. Why? he'd asked their guide, the Director of Admissions, a grayster with the soft, soap-clean pleasantness of a retired minister. The man had smiled euphemistically over his half-frames. Why an operating room? Why not? To nip out all the things old people sprouted, the moldy malignancies and ferny polyps and porridge lumps. To perform the colonoscopic cauterizations and Goodyear blimp angioplasties, to reset hips broken on winter ice, to yank up guts falling through hernias into the scrotum, to saw off the bunions of old ladies, to section bowels rotten with cancer, to spoon out the bacon grease clogging the carotid arteries. To keep the Vista del Muerte population alive, their annual fees rolling in.
The entire development spread over some nine hundred acres, and Ellie was eager for him to see all of it. Already they'd inspected the Vista del Mar Community Hall, the business services center, the travel/insurance/brokerage/real-estate agency, the game room, the outdoor pool, the indoor pool, the basketball court, the twenty tennis courts, the three automatic bank machines, the homeowners' association offices. The common buildings, linked by useless picket fences, all smelled like new hotels. The staff wore green uniforms with VdM gold-monogrammed on the shirt breast, and they smiled easily and often, which suggested that they were well paid or terrorized by their superiors or both. The grounds crew seemed to number in the dozens, and everywhere was raking leaves, pruning trees, mulching garden beds. He let the car nose along softly. They passed from the golf course into one of the five residential clusters, and in this one, the oldest, or rather the first one sold out, the trees had started to fill in and the houses already were weathered. It occurred to him that the VdM executives probably tracked the geographical demographics of the place, making sure that not too many of the oldest residents clustered in one neighborhood or block, thus spreading the die-out rate through the whole facility. The elderly expired more often in the colder six months, the common flu knocking off a regular percentage, and so, he surmised, each spring the VdM management could look forward to new selling opportunities spread across their facility. Clever, he thought, somebody very clever put this whole place together.
And how much would all of this cleverness cost him? The night before, he'd inspected the paperwork. He estimated two million dollars, when it was said and done. Two million, yes, sir. Thank you, Sir Henry, for you know not what you have done for me. The membership fee was two hundred and fifty thousand, the house was a million, the landscaping fifty thousand, the furniture-no antiques, either-would top out around two hundred thousand, the in-ground heated forty-foot pool ("Our own," Ellie said, "otherwise you won't do it.") would run about one hundred and fifty, including the decking, cabana, and below-ground pool-machinery room. She was already talking about a guest cottage and a tennis court. Julia loved tennis, played at Yale. He hadn't even asked yet about the property taxes, but figured forty or fifty thousand a year. Real money. But easy money, thanks to Sir Henry Lai and his mouthful of red vomit. Blessings on you, Chinky billionaire-sir. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for Vista del Muerte. I am a true bastard, he thought. Good for me.
Was he free, then? Yes, almost. Depended on how you figured it. There was the question of Melissa Williams and the question of the company. In Shanghai, after bribing Mr. Lo, he'd returned the unused cash to the hotel manager, then spent an hour on the phone to New York, trying to chat up the price of Teknetrix. The scaffolding materials and an army of laborers had reappeared at the factory's construction site the next morning as he was about to leave, Tom Anderson had reported, amazed admiration in his voice, and with Charlie's permission, he'd bring on more men. The construction boom in Shanghai had slowed considerably, and you could pick up welders and electricians willing to work by the day. Perhaps feeling the strange tea, Charlie had approved the extra expense and told Anderson there was a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bonus coming from him, Charlie, personally, if Anderson got the factory on-line on time. Marvin Noff remained unconvinced, but the company's price had lifted off its three-month low. Volume a bit heavier than average. Some good institutional contrarian buying. And Ming had called, pleased, he said, by the press release on the Q4. The company was not out of trouble, not yet anyway, but it was going in the right direction. Companies struggled, that was the truth. They struggled with competitors and the market and with themselves, and so far, Teknetrix had always come out of it, always survived the sudden altitude drop, the unsynched vibration, the low-fuel, one-chance landing.
As for Melissa Williams? Was she an aberration or a trend? A celebration of life or an early shovelful of dirt on his marriage? More R amp;D needed. He couldn't pull out of this particular dive just yet. Not close enough to disaster yet, Charlie-boy; when it gets close you'll pull out, in more ways than one, ha-ha, not so funny, and get yourself on home. Just one more time, he thought. I'll do a better job this time; I can tell. Like going from the T-37 trainer to the F-101 in 1963. You couldn't get it right the first time. You didn't understand the plane's speed, the way it moved. Second time, better. He'd had Karen reserve Suite 840 at the Pierre, the one Teknetrix used regularly. They were due to see each other that night. Ellie had wanted to have sex the night before, but he had begged off, said he was exhausted from the plane, in order to save his shot. Conserve ordnance. He'd be completely hard; he could just tell. His back felt so good that he had not minded, had not been existentially insulted, when, after Karen mentioned a message from the fertility clinic doctor, he'd returned the call and been told that his sperm sample was no good. "Motility average, sperm count insufficient," the doctor told him. "Which means not that you couldn't get someone pregnant, but that we need a better deposit if we are going to use technology to avoid a poor outcome."
But perhaps a poor outcome was good news, of a sort. Perhaps he had an easy chance to forget the whole hire-a-mom thing, no harm done. A little money and time wasted, nothing more. You could look at it that way. Or you could say you still wanted a child, Charlie-boy. Maybe more so, now that Ellie would be packed away in Vista del Muerte. The logistics might be easier. Maybe visit a child from time to time. Just stop by for an hour. Don't need to be involved, just pop in, say, Hi-gee, he's getting heavy. A warm bottle. Fingers and toes. Goodnight moon. And maybe this was where Melissa Williams came in. He'd thought about her, he'd thought about her all too much. In the baby way and in the other kind of way. She'd been so sweet, so generous. He could tell that for a young woman she had a lot of sexual experience, which presented itself as kindness and patience. Women always talked about men being considerate lovers, expecting that men didn't really care how the woman acted, so long as she opened her legs and didn't watch television at the same time, but that was not the case. Certain women put men at ease; they had the gift of sexual generosity, and this you could say about Melissa Williams. He'd had his doubts and anxieties just afterward, but the more he'd thought about her, sitting in the Peace Hotel on his last morning in Shanghai and watching the coal barges move along the muddy flat river outside, the more he'd remembered their night in the Pierre and wanted to repeat it. Clearly he could not get anyone pregnant easily, and clearly she was the kind of girl who didn't pick up diseases and viruses and all the other things running through the population. Towers had told him as much, with the report on her blood donation. So that minor anxiety, that flicker of doubt, had eased, too. She wanted to see him, he wanted to see her. Maybe they'd meet a few more times and he'd raise the question of a baby. Or maybe they would have a sad little talk that night and then go their separate ways forever. He'd apologize for whatever confusion or hurt he'd caused. He didn't know and he didn't mind not knowing. He'd simply leave about four, take the New Jersey Turnpike into the city, park the car, take a shower, call Ellie to say he'd arrived safely, then walk over to the Pierre at seven. There's a Miss Williams staying here, has she arrived? He really did want to see her again. Certainly all that Towers had told him suggested she was the right sort of young woman. Good background, good values.
"What're you thinking?" Ellie asked suddenly, her voice perky, eyes bright. "You've been quiet for five minutes."
"Values," Charlie said. "Good values."
"You think this place has it?"
"Yes. Absolutely."
She looked at him sweetly. "It is the right thing, Charlie."
"Again, absolutely."
"I wish you could stay a second night."
"I do, too."
"Couldn't Karen send down all the papers and stuff?"
"I need to meet with people, get some things started," Charlie said, watching the road ahead of him even though he was going eleven miles an hour. "Tomorrow is a long day, too."
"These new pills knock me out around nine."
"I'll call when I get in, and then in the morning," he told Ellie.
"That's fine. You're leaving around four?"
"I thought I might."
"There's just one more thing I want to show you," she said happily, "and I'm pretty sure you'll indulge me."
"What is it?"
"The bird feeder in the backyard. I'm surprised you didn't notice it. Up on a big pole near the spruce? Has room for thirty-six purple martins." She smiled at him. "Like a sweet little hotel for birds."
"Yes." He stretched out his arm and took her hand-palm and fingers and wedding ring. "This is all good. We're going to spend a lot of nice time here," he said.
"Oh, Charlie." Ellie beamed, blinking wetly in happiness, cheeks flushed, her eyes clear and large and in love with him all over again, father of her children, her old fly-boy.
He knocked softly at the door of Suite 840, his hair moist, fingernails trimmed, underwear fresh.
The door opened and there was Melissa, in a rather lovely black dress, looking up at him, looking young, and she took his hand and pulled him inside. "I've been waiting," she complained, smiling devilishly. "Just so you know."
"Hey, I came halfway around the world to see you."
She put her cheek against his chest, and seemed to sigh or catch her breath. He felt the warmth of her along his body, her hand in the small of his back, her head touching his chin. She patted the side of his jacket. "You have a phone in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"
"You okay?" he asked, realizing she'd had a drink.
"I'm fine. I was just waiting, that's all."
She seemed preoccupied. Her eyes looked a little bloodshot, her face tired. But it was a twenty-seven-year-old face-how tired could it be? "Anything you want to talk about?" he asked gently.
She shook her head. "Not now."
"Okay." He held her the way he used to hold Julia when she was a girl and upset about something, his hand behind her neck.
"I've been lonely. Missed my mother a lot."
The comment made him feel old, but he realized that she hadn't meant it that way. "Do you want to call your parents?"
"No, I-" She stopped. "I will later."
"If you want to, just call from here," he said.
She hugged him. "No, no, it's fine."
He ran a finger down her spine. "Do you ever go out there?"
"Out where?"
"Seattle."
"Oh," she said distractedly, "no."
He rubbed her neck at the hairline and felt her melt against him. "You talk to your father much?"
"No, not really," she said into his chest, nibbling at his tie.
"Is he very busy?"
She considered the question. "No."
"Not busy?"
She looked up again, her face vulnerable, wanting to forget something. "Charlie?"
"Mmm?"
"You know."
He did. She turned off the lights and pulled down the blanket. He adjusted the air conditioner, and when he turned, she was naked. Her breasts looked larger when she was naked. Some women were like that. He started to unknot his tie.
"No," she insisted. "I'm doing all of it."
Again she undressed him, her hands moving familiarly, and she knelt on the floor and pulled his underwear off last, and as soon as he had stepped out of them, she looked up at him from her kneeling position and took him into her mouth, eyes staying on his. I may be a fool, he thought, but I am a pleasured fool.
She pulled back, keeping her hand moving affectionately. "You're more…" she said.
"Yeah."
"Eager?"
Chinese medicine. "My back's been feeling pretty good."
She followed him into bed and he held her, sensing she wanted this. "Okay," she whispered after a time.
"Uptown or downtown?" he asked. "If you know what I mean."
"I do," she sighed, but held him by the ears when he started to move downward.
"No?"
"Just insert the tab in the slot like the directions specify."
"You got it."
"No, I think you do, Charlie."
It was all flattery, but he'd take it. He set himself above her and she spit into her hands and helped him. She was rather wet, and he went in quickly. So young, he thought, looking into her face. I'm going to count strokes. I don't think she quite came the last time; I was too fast, both of us too nervous. Her eyes were closed and she was biting her upper lip. He took a breath, watching her go into herself. She was in a peaceful, private place. I'm going to concentrate, he thought. He made it to fifty and past it, then, at sixty-two, she convulsed beneath him, her stomach a mound of muscle that rippled and gathered up. He continued, holding her hands loosely above her head. He felt good. Ninety-six. Then she suddenly rose up again, convulsing and whimpering sweetly, the alcohol perfuming her sighs. Then again. One twenty- one. Such fast orgasms, he thought, sort of amazing. She caught her breath easily and glared up at him, eyes fierce now, sweetness gone, ready again, desire merely unfolding. One thirty-two, he counted. She wants more, I can feel it, I'm a fucking old man. Old man fucking. He stopped, breathed deeply, then resumed. His lungs burned a little. I'm so out of shape, he thought. But here we are. He kept on and she kept on, shaking and shuddering every half minute or so, her arms around his neck, five orgasms, six… seven, and he had to pause to keep himself back, holding his breath and squeezing his asshole, and as he slowed she sighed and caressed his cheeks and ears and eyes, and then he started again and she started again, too, right away. Ten more strokes, hard, and she came again, shivering violently. His neck was hot, back sweaty, but none of it hurt anymore, as if the adhesions and cross-stitched nerves had melted away. Twenty more fast strokes and she almost came, but he held off to save himself, and then eighteen more, with a bit of side-to-side grinding-Ellie used to love that before she started to get too dry in her late forties-and she came again, digging her nails into his shoulders, right into the knotty scar tissue, but he barely felt it. He was aware of her great sexual hunger opening up beneath him, taking him in, the tense expectancy of her breathing. She was beginning. He'd barely touched her so far. A few handfuls of rainwater scooped from a full barrel. They'd been at it maybe ten minutes-almost no time at all. She could go on and on, he knew, and he could not. She licked his neck from below, waiting for more. Never seen anything like this, Charlie thought, not with any of the girls before Ellie, not with Ellie when she was young.
"Please," she asked. "Let me get. Knees."
She presented herself. Slow, he told himself, go slow. It's your only chance. She had her face in her hands, as if kneeling in deep prayer, and his long fingers circled her waist. He slipped himself into her, his bony hips pressing the flesh of her ass. She groaned, almost angrily. Again he felt her stomach muscle gather into a rippling knot. Almost doing nothing. He slowed but did not stop, counting to thirty, and her hands flew forward to grasp the headboard. He stopped moving, just rested on his knees behind her. His head felt hot, thighs tiring already. He was not a young man anymore. He started again, best he could, chest a little tight. She was within herself, he could see, far within herself, no talk necessary. He was just something she was using right now, something that went in and out, and that was fine. Her back was covered with sweet-smelling sweat, and now she spread her hands out to either side across the mattress. He reached down and moved her legs closer together. He'd lost his count, would start again. She kicked her foot against the sheet in impatience. I can't go yet, he thought. Well, maybe in and out ever so little. An inch in each direction. One and two. All right. He silently counted to forty-one, glancing out the window toward the shadows across the street. She convulsed again, slapping her hands against the sheet.
"Don't stop," she commanded. He didn't stop and she moaned and kicked her legs against the sheet, growling, sweeping her hand across the bed until she found a pillow that she tossed away for no reason. "Oh, goddamn it," she said.
He kept going. Not too fast, just fast enough that she wanted it faster. A great wetness was emptying itself against his penis, like a stream receiving a fish, except the stream gripped and released him, gripped and released as she shuddered and cried out. This is definitely her, not me, Charlie smiled wickedly to himself in the darkness, I'm not this good, nowhere close, I'm an old man who happens to have a hard dick tonight. But that's all. He stopped and breathed, funny pains crawling across his chest. Have the heart attack now, he commanded heaven, it's as good a time as any. But he didn't. No, sir. He was kneeling behind her, kneeling in a very funny dark church. Devil take the hindmost. Ha-ha, Charlie, you demented fucking fuck. How can you be doing this? Because you must and you will. Her ass was shaking and he spread his hands back and forth across it, calming her. Maybe she needed to stop now.
He sat back on his haunches and she rolled over. She needs to rest, he thought. But she lifted up her legs, hooking them over his shoulders. He could tell she'd shaved her shins and calves very recently, smoothed soft with cream. Then one of her hands lightly slapped his thigh. He didn't move. She slapped his thigh harder. He eased forward and she pulled his penis-hard-and pressed him into her. Tough girl, he thought, a surprisingly tough girl who-And in that moment the disparate, nearly invisible strands of the discrepancy wove together: the absence of a phone number or business card, no eyeglasses or contact lenses in contrast to Towers's information about her driver's license, no talk about her work, her aggressiveness, her vague recognition of his question about Seattle.
A coldness passed into him. "You're not Melissa Williams, are you?" he said.
She opened her eyes. "What?"
"You're not Melissa Williams."
She blinked rapidly and laughed. Nervously, he thought. "What do you mean?"
"I mean you are not Melissa Williams. You're someone else."
She waited while she considered her answer, and while she waited she made sure that he kept moving in and out. So wet, so good. Best in years, best ever, maybe.
"Who do you want me to be?" she finally whispered.
He stared into her face-darkness in the darkness. He was jammed up inside some unknown, strangely orgasmic woman in her late twenties, some woman tough-minded enough that she could pretend to be someone else, pretend to fuck as someone else. She was not Melissa Williams, she was anybody but Melissa Williams. Not a good girl from Seattle but some kind of clever hustler who talked a fast game, sounded educated, and had found her way into the bar of the Pierre Hotel looking for a soft touch, a lonely, self-important jerk-weed like Charlie. This thought made him mad and it made him keep moving. He knew he should stop and pull out and probably stick his dick into a jar of rubbing alcohol or insecticide or something and ask her what the hell was going on, but he was not going to. No. Just the opposite. If he pulled out now, then she'd stolen something from him, and his anger would not allow that. He pushed harder and realized that she liked this, liked him pushing, struggling with him a little violently now; she liked the fact that he did not know who she was, found power in his powerlessness. Something had equalized suddenly, her mystery and youth reversing against his status and age. But if you fuck with me, then I will fuck with you, he told himself, and he pressed down on her, damn the back, damn Ellie, damn Teknetrix, damn Mr. Lo and Vista del Muerte and all of it, and stroked through her with a vicious, teeth-clenched effortlessness he'd not known for almost thirty years, his cock swollen into stone, the Chinese medicine releasing him to press the question over and over, Who are you who are you, mouthing it even, feeling her rise and shake again and again, her orgasms clustering one against another in a kind of angry hallucinatory chaos as she shook her fists in the air and growled almost bitterly, seeming to birth something awful, tearing time out of herself, curled and shaking, and when the moment came he pressed his hot forehead heavily down upon hers, and delivered himself fully into her-the bomb, the hatred, the roar; the joy, the sadness, the dream.
After the bathroom she sat in the window well, naked in the shadows. "Are you mad?" came her voice.
"Yes."
"How did you know?"
"I had someone check a few things about Melissa Williams. Her father is a prominent, busy lawyer in Seattle. She wears glasses or contact lenses."
She shifted to the other side of the window. "Why did you bother?"
"Because I wanted to find out who the hell you were. Or were not, as the case may be."
"Why?" she asked coyly. "I'm probably just some girl who liked your tie."
She's scared, he thought. "How do you know Melissa Williams?"
She shook her head. "Oh, she's just a box of papers that I found in my closet when I moved into my room. Never met the girl."
She slid off the window well toward him. Something about the way she walked, slowly and naked and I know you're looking at me, reminded him of Ellie a generation ago-before Teknetrix, before his father's death, before Ben, before Vietnam. Ellie was no longer confident of her nakedness, kept it to herself now, and it was just as well, in fact. He didn't want to see her anymore.
"Just tell me, please." He watched her parade before him. Don't fall into this, he warned himself, you're not sentimental, you don't believe that this is anything other than a strange little episode. Time is not being cheated here.
She came to the bed and lay next to him. "You really want the truth?" she said softly. "It's not pretty, as they say."
"Tell me the truth or I'll just walk out, you know?"
"Oh, don't." She took his hand and pressed it close to her.
"Give me a reason."
"Well, I like you a lot."
"How about a better reason than that."
She said nothing. He waited a minute, sat up, and swung his feet to the floor. I can still go home and take a bath, he thought, catch the news.
"Wait," she said.
"I am."
She sighed. "I hate telling the truth. It never sets you free, it just makes everything harder."
"That's great," Charlie said coldly. "Now we're getting somewhere." He stood up. "I'm leaving. I've been an idiot and you've been a liar." He found his clothes. "Thank you for the sex, however, miss. That was probably the last best sex of my life, and I am in fact grateful, even under the circumstances. You're full of energy and intelligence, and I don't know why the hell you're doing what you're doing, not just to me but to yourself. I actually believe that you're better than this somehow, if only you can get yourself there. That's my cheap psychologizing for the night, lady. I wish you well."
She dropped her head into her hands, pulling her fingers through her hair. "My name is Christina, okay? Christina Welles. I grew up outside of Philadelphia, not Seattle."
"Your parents there?" he asked more gently.
"My father's dead," she told him.
"What'd he do?" asked Charlie.
"He repaired subway cars for SEPTA. Southeastern Pennyslvania Transit Authority. He was a kind man who wore a cheap watch. My mother lives in Sarasota, Florida, now. Her name is Anita Welles. Once upon a time I was a nice little girl who got straight A's and practiced the piano every afternoon…" She stared at him with bitter amusement. "Then things happened. Some usual things and some not-so-usual things. Most pertinently, in respect to your anxiety and self-identity and imagination, I, Christina Welles, the girl you just popped with such mutual gratification, was released from Bedford Hills maximum-security women's prison three weeks ago."
"Oh, Jesus," Charlie said, sitting down.
"My boyfriend ran a ring of truck hijackers and smugglers. I helped him. We got busted bringing a load into New York and I went to prison." She stood and found her bag on the dresser. "It's more complicated than that, but that's the basic explanation. I'm out now, I got released, and I'm trying to make a living, working as a waitress downtown-they think I'm Melissa, too. I'm not really a bad person, Charlie. A little lost, yes. But I'm not some cheap floozy or anything."
"Hot, but not cheap."
She opened a new pack of cigarettes and pulled one out. "Yes. Sure. I'll take that."
"Did you go to college?"
She stuck the cigarette in her mouth and tilted her head to one side as she lit it. "Columbia. I dropped out because I was having some problems. I felt nervous a lot of the time, not safe, sort of. I didn't really like the dorms, the other kids. I was a good student for a couple of years." She lay back in the bed, pulled the covers over herself. "I sort of fell for this guy Rick and just wanted to be with him. He was a bodybuilder. He was beautiful and sad and full of self-important shit like the rest of you guys, and I was pretty crazy about him. For a while, I mean." She blew smoke into the darkness. "I'm fickle," she said, almost to herself, and with no gladness. "I've always been, always will be. You get hurt too much, you get that way. Sorry, but it's true. All my problems started then. I've fucked up a lot of my life so far. But I'm here now, with you, because I like you, Charlie. That's all. Believe me, since I've come back to the city, there've been plenty of offers."
He was getting the full throttle of her personality now, all its edginess and irritation and passion. "There's no trick?"
"No."
"You don't have any communicable diseases, do you?"
She pulled the cigarette from her mouth angrily. "Hey, I've been in prison for four years, Charlie. I've had sex with one other guy since coming out, but he, unlike you, wore a rubber, okay? I don't do drugs, I'm clean, I-"
"Okay," he interrupted, standing again with his pants. "Tell me what's happening now, what the story is."
"I will. Just give me a moment. Don't leave, Charlie, please."
"I'm not, I'm cold." He went over to the air conditioner and turned it down. "Go on. I want to hear about your life of crime."
"You're not mad anymore?"
"Are you?" he asked.
"No," she said flirtatiously.
"Then I'm not, either."
"And you still like me?"
"Yes."
"You still think I'm terrific?"
"The cat's pajamas."
She was pleased. "Good." She propped herself up agreeably on the pillows against the headboard. "I told you I used to help my boyfriend deliver truckloads of stolen stuff, right? After a while he got me to plan the arrival in New York, get the buyers to show up at the right time in the right place and make the whole thing go down smoothly. I sort of liked it."
"An intellectual task."
"Right. I had a map of all the truck stops on the Eastern seaboard in case we had trouble with the truck. I had false importer's invoices printed up… false order forms from a dummy corporation, fake phone numbers, fake answering machines…" She retrieved the pillows absentmindedly and plumped them into shape. "Rick had a legitimate commercial trucker's license. We were careful about having up-to-date licenses on the outside. The way you do that is you use ones from trucks that are being repaired."
Charlie lay back on the bed. "Go on," he said. "Christina, right? Go on, Christina."
She gave him a playful punch. "You'll like me better this way, I'm telling you."
"Sure, okay."
"That is, if you want to see me again."
"If I see you again, I have to go into training first. Keep telling it."
"Simple," she said. "I got tired of it, I wanted to get out. That's all I've really wanted for like five years now, just to be left alone. I wanted to stop being involved with Rick and his people." She spoke toward the dark ceiling. "He wanted to do three more jobs, each one bigger, just to get set up, and then he was going to go legit. Maybe buy into a car dealership, a gym, a bar, something. His older brother was a mob accountant, could have set him up easily. With a really big job he would make maybe a hundred thousand. I went along with it."
"Weren't you worried?" Charlie asked. He couldn't help but run his hand over her belly.
"Three or four days a month were tense, where everybody got nervous, but once the thing went through, you sort of just hung out." She turned over and pushed him onto his side. "We usually took a little trip after a job, just to relax. But I wanted to stop. I never told Rick." She rubbed the scars on his back as she spoke. "I'd done a lot of jobs and I was tired of it. I was tired of Rick. We were going nowhere. But I couldn't get away from the… well, the sex. I wanted to… but I was stupid, I guess. I needed to break it off somehow. But if I simply walked away, then his people would come looking for me."
"You knew too much."
"They couldn't just have me floating around out there. I was scared of this guy Tony Verducci, our boss, I guess you could say. I'd always be looking over my shoulder. We had a job coming up and I spent a lot of time thinking about it. Air conditioners. The thing with these jobs is, you want to get the stuff disposed of quickly. We had to pick up the truck-that was Rick's business-and then get it into the city. The fence wanted to be able to take the cargo out in maybe half an hour with a forklift, which, if the stuff is on pallets, is not a problem, not at all, especially if you have two forklifts and guys who know what they're doing."
He pictured it. "I used to watch forklifts load huge cargo planes."
"Also, we wanted the truck back," she said. "Sometimes we'd pick up a used cab over on Tonnelle Avenue in Jersey City, where they sell them for eight, nine thousand, no questions asked, all cash, maybe use it a few times, then vacuum it, all the hair and everything, then wipe all the fingerprints off and leave it somewhere, but we wanted to keep this one. The load was just air conditioners. In the summer in the city it gets so hot, people just say what the hell and go out and buy them. Or they've been running theirs all day and night and it breaks. A small air conditioner can cost three hundred dollars. The middle of July was the best time. People've come back from the July Fourth holiday and started to settle in for the real heat. If you buy an air conditioner in the end of July, you're going to think to yourself that you made a good decision because you can still run it for another six weeks."
"You sound like a corporate marketing executive."
"I'll come work for you."
He grunted at the impossibility of it. "Keep telling me."
"You enjoying this?"
"Very exotic from my point of view."
She kicked her legs. "See, a young woman like me is very insecure with an older gentleman like you. I worry that I might not make an impression."
"That's a lie and you know it."
She laughed. "Yes. I do know it."
"You have sort of an amazing capacity, miss."
"Depends on who's on the other end." She climbed over his back and kissed his neck. He could feel her breasts, her warm belly.
"Tell me the rest of the story."
She lay next to him, talking into his ear. "Okay, so… we had five fences who were going to buy the stuff off the truck. The air conditioners retailed for eight hundred and forty-nine dollars. We were going to sell that same box for two hundred dollars to the fence, who would have no trouble selling it for four hundred. He's making fifty percent profit with no overhead, no taxes, nothing. And we're grossing two hundred dollars a box. You could fit four hundred and sixteen boxes in a forty-foot trailer. Each box was thirty-nine by twenty-six inches. Each weighed seventy pounds."
"Pretty heavy."
"Doesn't sound like a lot, but that's about fourteen tons of air conditioners. So four hundred and sixteen times two hundred dollars. That's our gross profit. Eighty-three thousand. A lot of costs come out of that, but it's not bad for two or three days' work. We had orders for five hundred air conditioners."
"Why do you take a truckload of stolen stuff into a city that moves so slowly?" he asked. "If they're chasing you, you can't get away, especially with a tractor trailer."
"That makes sense," she answered. "But the advantage of the city is its density. Dispersing four hundred and sixteen air conditioners in New York City is easy. They're there and then gone. You're never going to find them-half the stuff sold in Chinatown is stolen, right? It was a simple job… the problem was that I didn't want to do it. I wanted to get away. Just go sit by the ocean and read trashy magazines or something."
"You felt a change in the season."
She nodded against his back. "I kept telling Rick I wanted to get out, and he actually sent me to Tony, who runs a lot of businesses. He tried to keep me in, get me involved with a restaurant that laundered money, a numbers operations, things like that. Anyway, we went ahead with the air-conditioner job. They came in from Taiwan. The ship was coming in at Newport News and was off-loading something like two hundred containers."
"You told me you didn't know anything about containerized shipping," Charlie remembered.
"Because I wanted you to like me, okay?" she cried. "I'm not really so bad."
I'm crazy to be here, he thought. "If you say so."
"I do. So Rick was getting two containers-he had some deal with the shipping agent, they drop them and break them all the time. They call that 'dock overage.' Rick was going to end up with two truckloads that he and another guy would drive north. The first load they were going to sell in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Philadelphia. You just sell off the back of the truck in the black neighborhoods, North Philly… West Philly. Stuff just disappears. Cash, no questions asked."
She sat up suddenly and he sensed a change in her concentration. "Then Tony asked about how the planning of the job was going. He told us there was only one truck, and that we had to take it straight into New York. Couldn't get two truckloads. I thought that was probably bullshit, because these container ships carry thousands and thousands of whatever it is-air conditioners, televisions, computers. I called the shipping agent and found out where the ship was stopping before it made its way to Newport News. It was stopping in a lot of places, but one of the places was Thailand. Lots of opium is grown in Thailand."
"I know-I lived there."
"You did?" she asked.
"As a pilot."
She mulled this over. "Did you kill a lot of people?"
"Don't ask me that."
"Why?"
"It's too painful."
"I guess you did."
How could she understand?
"But for your country," Christina said.
"At the time I believed that."
"What do you believe now?"
"I believe the Air Force is very good at picking people who believe in absolutes and can fly jets."
"Do they go together?"
"That's a hell of a question." Which he didn't want to answer. "You were saying about Thailand?"
"Okay, so actually I did not know about Tony, not yet. All I had was a coincidence. Then he happened to call up and say he knew somebody who was interested in buying a few of the air conditioners but that the guy was pretty nervous and wanted to be the first guy in, the first guy out. Okay, I said. See, Tony's setting it up and we pay him to do that, but we also pay him a cut. He's going to make maybe twenty thousand on the job, out of our eighty-three. So he tells me about this guy, whose name was Frankie, someone I didn't know. Then I find out he's a known heroin dealer."
"That's a problem." The conversation was starting to worry him.
"Sure is," agreed Christina. "I have to wonder if Tony is smuggling heroin into New York City using me and Rick as his mules. We think we're transporting air conditioners, which we are, but maybe we're also carrying heroin. First I was worried that Tony was trying to set us up. But that didn't make sense, because if we got caught it would've been easy to trace us to him. He really did want us to be successful. We would get the truck already packed. Tony's guy wanted the first ten boxes off of it. He would know which ones, I wouldn't. Each box weighed seventy pounds, as I said. If that's heroin, then it's a huge amount of money."
"Millions and millions," Charlie said, thinking about Sir Henry Lai.
"But probably they have a little bit of heroin inside each air conditioner," Christina went on. "Let's say twenty pounds in each box. Twenty pounds of pure heroin times ten boxes. I thought maybe Tony was trying to get around his Colombian people. If we somehow get arrested, then he can tell them it wasn't his fault. He sets it up to work but in a way that if it doesn't, he's okay. At least, this is what I came up with. I didn't know what was going on-the mob politics, the cartel politics, whatever." She coughed. "I was never privy to that whole set of people. The other problem was that Rick was pretty sure that we were under regular surveillance. Phone taps. Something was going on. He had a phone message drop that supposedly could not be traced to him or anyone, but he thought it was tapped."
"How does that work?" asked Charlie. "I'm in the telecom business, you know."
"I think it's simple from a mechanical point of view," she said. "You need three phones, one of them cellular, and two computers. The call comes in to the first phone, which is connected to a computer. It's a regular phone line. As soon as the call comes in, the computer autodials to a second number, using an attached cell phone. The origin of this second call is not traceable by exact location. Meanwhile, the computer takes a message from the first phone call and hangs up. You can have it do two things, and we did. You have it send a regular voice message, which is digitized, then toned like a fax through the cell phone to the third phone, which has the other computer, which takes the electronic transmission, records it, hangs up, undigitizes it, and plays the message back when you want. The first computer erases its memory after it transmits the call, and the second erases itself after it plays the call to the listener. Or-and this is the part I like-"
"Jesus," Charlie said, "who thought of this?"
"I did."
"You did?"
"Conceptually." She poked his back affectionately. "I don't know anything about electronics. They had a guy who did the programming stuff." She took his hand in hers and kissed the scar. "I wanted to do that the first time I saw you," she said, lips against his skin.
"What was the other option?" he asked.
"We had a bunch of messages, coded by number. Like, 'I'll be late' was a certain number, maybe the number three. So the computer at the first phone lets out a tone to leave a message and the caller punches in the number three. The computer takes this number three in and hangs up. Done. Then the computer uses its cell phone to dial the third phone. Or wherever you want to be reached. There was a way to remote-program the redial number, too. The idea is to make enough steps that it's a puzzle that can't be solved after the fact-while you could prove proximity of the receiving phone and the outgoing cellular, you could not prove, using phone logs, that the phones were adjacent, or causally related."
"Unless you got hold of the computers themselves."
"Right. So in this second scenario, the computer calls you wherever you want to be and generates a fax. What does it fax? It faxes an Italian takeout menu." She paused to light another cigarette. "Looks like nothing. You get it and you say, So what. But it's the number of times that the computer faxes it which is the message. You get the same fax three times and three is the message. Somebody grabs that piece of paper, what does it mean? Nothing."
"But you said that this Rick guy thought this wasn't working?"
"No, it was working fine, but they had tapped in somewhere," Christina said. "They were monitoring, probably through the first phone. They weren't catching the pass-along cell call. I don't think. Maybe they knew about the computer and the cell phone and were waiting, using it like a trap. Rick was worried. Had to cancel a couple of things. He got edgy about stuff. But he was right, as it turned out."
He wasn't sure how the phone trickery connected to her truck story. "So at this point you have a hell of a problem," Charlie summarized. "You've got the bad guy with the heroin. You want to get out of the relationship. Lot of stuff happening."
"Sure. I was angry that Tony was making such huge money off of my risk. But the other thing was that this was going to be my last job, forever. I was going to do this one very bad thing and then I was going to do nothing ever again. I wanted to just get free of Rick and the rest of them. And frankly, the best way I could think of to do that was to make the job get fucked up. Get the police to arrive and find and arrest people."
"Hang on." Charlie got up to go to the bathroom. It had a phone on the wall next to the toilet so guys like Sir Henry Lai could call for help as they crapped out on the crapper. Not me, thought Charlie, I'm still banging around. Ellie asleep, dreaming of rosebushes. He let loose a blissful stream, then in the light over the sink he looked at his penis. Pubic hair almost all gray, the flesh under it soft. It hung there, bent left, currently of no use. All those mysterious little veins, red and bluish, thin and thick. I've been staring at this thing my whole life, he thought, still don't know what it is, exactly. Gave her a pretty good shot, by the feel of it. A good shot for him, at least. Fucking substandard sperm sample. It was embarrassing, even if he only had one testicle. But how many guys who'd had an M-16 round hit their scrotums actually had sperm samples? You survive to prosper, you live so that you can fuck. Melissa-he meant Christina-was much more vigorous than Ellie, not even close. He was out of practice, by about twenty-five years. Admit it, he told himself, you like this girl, even though she is dishonest and scares you a little. He rubbed his finger against his penis, touched his nose, and smelled her. Life keeps surprising me, he thought.
"Go on," he called, as her cigarette smoke reached the bathroom. He looked in the mirror at the gray hair on his chest and stomach, drank a glass of water, then filled it again. "I'm listening."
"So I was meeting Rick outside Philadelphia at a mall and we were going to drive into New York," she continued from the bedroom. "If I couldn't get out of driving those boxes, then at least I wanted to see them, see what it was that I was carrying. It bugged me that I didn't know. There were two chances to get at them. One was on the drive up, and one was when we arrived in New York at the loading dock in Chelsea. I thought it'd be better if I could get at the boxes before we arrived in New York. My mother and father used to live outside Philadelphia, in Chester County. I know all the roads out there. It was farmland when I was growing up…" Her voice sounded sad. "Anyway, I planned it with Rick that we would stop for lunch. Just pull the truck in."
He handed her the glass. "Wouldn't that be sort of suspicious for the neighbors?"
"No, not really." She sipped the water. "It wasn't exactly the high-rent district, you know, sort of the edge of the suburbs. A big rig pulled up next to their place was nothing special. My mom and dad were going to move soon anyway-someone could think it was a moving truck. So we pulled into their house and they gave Rick a big welcome. My mother made a big meal for us and everything. Afterward I told Rick that I wanted to have sex, so we went in my old bedroom and had sex, and then he wanted to sleep, which is what I expected. I told him I'd wake him in a little while. My dad was watching television. He wasn't feeling great. He was worried about money and moving down to Florida. He'd just retired. So then I went out to the truck and unlocked it. We had the keys in case we got stopped by the police. Less suspicious if they can look at the load and compare it to the paperwork. The truck was parked so that the back faced into our yard. I jumped up and took a look. The air conditioner boxes were all the same, of course. I hadn't seen how they'd packed the truck. Frankie would expect his ten boxes to be in a certain spot, but they wouldn't necessarily be the first ten boxes you'd naturally take out." She sat up and pulled on Charlie's button-down shirt, the tie still threaded through the collar. "I couldn't find the pattern, so I just started opening boxes. What the hell, right? I opened about eight or nine and then I found one of the special boxes."
"And?" Charlie asked. "Drugs?"
She looked at him. "It wasn't heroin."
"What was it?"
" Cash."
"Cash?"
"Old hundreds and fifties. Two-inch stacks with red rubber bands. Kind of smelled. I carried my mom's bathroom scales out and weighed a box and one of the regular boxes with an air conditioner in it. They weighed the same."
"What did you do then?" Charlie asked, beginning to worry.
"I totally freaked out, what do you expect?" Christina said. "I thought about my dad sitting in there, worrying about how they were going to make it on his pension in Florida. He was sick and had worked his whole life and all he had to show for it was me, who'd dropped out of Columbia University, for God's sake, against his wishes, against his hopes, you know, and I thought I could just do something for him for once."
Suddenly she was crying, and despite his wariness, he pulled her toward him. "Oh, Charlie, it was so stupid, so incredibly stupid. I sort of panicked, which isn't like me! I just thought how much I'd disappointed them. I mean, I was the girl who got a five on her goddamn AP history test, and now I have some boyfriend in there with huge arms and an earring, you know?" She coughed, voice thick. "My mother didn't care, she liked Rick, she made a puddle whenever a man smiled at her, she's probably the orgasm queen of all time, but my father was actually sort of classy in his quiet way. He used to sit in his old chair and read books on the Civil War and everything and I-"
"Okay, now," Charlie said.
"— I was his only child, his only daughter, and I'd already disappointed him so much. And I was so afraid that he was dying and that he wouldn't have-I haven't told anyone this, I just couldn't-it took me a long time in prison to understand what I did-I was so, so stupid. I didn't want to cause any trouble… I've just always had this streak of something, anger and defiance and feeling that I would do everything my way, and my father was always so gentle with me, like you, so caring, he never got angry, he let my mother be the one who got angry, I guess. So all these things were in my head, and I was standing there with this big box of cash and not thinking like I should have been."
"What'd you do?"
She stood up nervously and edged toward the window. "I found another box with cash in it and put the two of them down on the driveway. Then I arranged the outer rows of boxes in the truck to make it look like nothing had been disturbed. You wouldn't be able to tell there was a problem until you removed a complete row of boxes. Then there was a gap."
"You were out of your mind."
" I know," Christina said, touching a fingertip to the glass. "I carried the boxes to the garage. My father had this old Mustang convertible that he fixed up. The upholstery was still original, with the thin steering wheel. My mother wrote me in prison that after my father died her boyfriends wanted to fix it up but she'd never let them."
"Like a shrine." Ellie's closet for Ben.
"Sort of, yes. I knew they were planning to have it taken down to Florida with them. I knew they'd just roll it into the garage down there and leave it. My father was going to be too sick to actually fix it up again. The back was full of spare engine parts. I took them out and put in the two boxes. I don't know how much was there."
"Could be a million bucks," Charlie said, thinking of the forty thousand he'd given Lo in Shanghai, how he'd been able to slip that into his breast pocket. "Easily, in fact."
"Could be more," she said. "I think it is."
"You never counted it?"
"No, I never had the chance. We had to go, we had to deliver the truck. Rick woke up, said we'd be late… so on the way back to New York I'm worrying about what to do. If Tony finds out, then-I don't know, we're in trouble. The delivery was going as planned, though. I could have the truck arrive, but this guy Frankie was going to be the first to unload and would figure out two boxes were missing within a few minutes. First thing he's going to do is call Tony, right? So I'm thinking about it and smoking a million cigarettes and looking out the window and thinking, How am I going to do this? I have to get out of this somehow… I realized that if the police arrive, then Tony can't do anything to me. I actually want the police to arrive. I want us to get busted, but I don't want myself to get arrested. I want to get away at the right moment. The problem with that is that there would be other guys from the crew there, and if they get arrested and I don't, one of them will talk. The police will come right after me. I'm not controlling the situation that way."
He was listening anxiously now. "You wanted it the other way?"
"Exactly," Christina said. "I realized that I had to get myself arrested, not the other way around. I get myself arrested and the others go free. And if I don't talk, at all, maybe Tony calls the whole thing square. Maybe I'm okay. I could wait a few years if I knew I was safe from Tony and my parents would have the money. It seemed like an okay trade-off. I mean, it was stupid to think that, but I was desperate. We were going to drive in there and everything was going to be fucked up. I'd rather deal with the police than with Tony. He has a sadistic streak."
"But if you got yourself arrested-"
"And no one else, then I am controlling what is going on, right?" Christina asked rhetorically. "If I could figure out a way to get arrested sometime during the job, then actually I'm in pretty good shape, right? This is what I'm thinking, at least. Because if I don't identify anyone else, they can't get anyone, not if I plan it right. And maybe I only get eighteen months or two years, something like that. I know that sounds like a lot of time. But it'd get me out from under these people. I'd just read a lot, so I thought. My mother could send me books and I'd read a lot. It doesn't make sense now to think about it, but this is the way I was thinking. Maybe I also knew my dad was going to die and I couldn't face it. Also, I really was scared of these people. Tony had somebody killed every year or two. It was a fact. Prison sounded like the safest place I could be."
Charlie got up and opened the minibar. He took out a sealed jar of cashews and a can of orange juice. "Anything?"
"Juice?"
"Got it." He sat back on the bed. "You want anything else, room service or anything?"
"I'm fine," she said. "Do we have all night?"
"Yes." He opened the cashews. "I have to call my wife at about 8:00 a.m., but that's fine, I can do it at home."
She stole a cashew from his hand. "I'd like to sleep with you, Charlie-real sleep."
"What if I fart up the bed?"
She laughed. "You should try prison."
"I thought women didn't fart."
"Women fart, believe me."
He nodded. "They just try to hide it."
"And men make it louder, which is worse."
"Very nice conversation, I don't think."
"Maybe we could have an early breakfast?"
"It's a deal."
"You don't mind walking out of here with me at seven in the morning or whatever?"
"No." He ate a handful of cashews. "So."
"So… we were due to begin the drop-off at 4:00 p.m. at a warehouse at Twentieth and Ninth Avenue. I'd scouted the street maybe a dozen times. Actually drawn diagrams of all the businesses along there. It was tight backing up into the loading dock, and once you were in, you weren't going anywhere. Rick was very good at handling the truck. The plan was that we backed in, Rick would talk to the guys, I stayed in the cab. We had this worked out with the others that if you saw something you didn't like you hit the horn three times, hard. I knew that was how I'd get rid of everyone. But I also knew that if I hit the horn Rick'd come get me first. He would do that, no matter what. He'd pull me out of the cab before the police could get me."
"Loyal guy, this Rick."
"So we were on the New Jersey Turnpike-"
"I was there today myself-"
"We stopped at the Vince Lombardi Plaza at about three o'clock. I said I had to pee badly, and I went in and used the pay phone. I'm freaking out, actually. We're due to be dropping off in about an hour. I know that we have to get the truck in, get it set up. Now, if I call in to some police station or something, there's not much chance they'll react. Like, 'Hello? Some guys are smuggling air conditioners at four o'clock.' That won't work. Even if it does, it has to go through a lot of police bureaucracy, I'm guessing. They get crazy calls all the time. I can call in a bomb threat on 911 to some building across the street, but that means we don't actually get the truck into the block, start the unloading, because of the fire trucks. It has to really, really look to Tony Verducci's people like the job is going smoothly, that we were surprised, were under surveillance the whole time. The problem is, I don't want the phone call to be revealed later, at a trial or something, to show that I was the one who made it. And Rick is outside in the truck, looking at his watch. I know he's worrying about the traffic, getting into Manhattan, angry that I'm slowing things down."
"What can you do?"
"My only hope," she continued, "is that Rick is right about the phone drop being tapped. If it is, then I have a chance. First, I call the computer phone, bypass the crazy menu and message option, and reprogram it so that the cell phone, the one that makes the next call, will dial information the next time the first phone gets a message. Five-five-five-one-two-one-two. Remember, I have to do this because the computer is going to take whatever next message comes in and use the cell phone to relay it-I don't want my message sent on to the usual second number, where the other machine is, because maybe Tony gets that message later somehow and listens to it and finds out it's me. So I fix that. The next call that comes in is going to be relayed to an information operator who's going to think it's a screwed-up home answering machine and hang up, after which the first machine is going to erase its message. I'm doing this real fast. Rick is outside in the truck. A couple of guys will be waiting to help us unload at the drop-off. The fences are going to arrive at just the right time."
"You have to call back, though," Charlie said.
"Right. Exactly. So then I call the first machine back and say something like 'Hello, it's me. A good load. Today, 3:45 p.m., Twentieth Street and Ninth Avenue. Middle of the block. Full rig. And the big man will be there at 3:45 sharp. Be there or be nowhere.'" Christina laughed dismissively. "Something incredibly straight-on like that. So straight-on you can't believe it, but if they're listening, they are going to be curious. They have to check it out, they-"
"Wait," Charlie interrupted. "You said the drop-off was supposed to be at 4:00. Why say 3:45?"
"I have a good reason. I want them waiting. We're going to pull in at four sharp and I have to time it perfectly. I want to make sure they're there when I need them. So we pull in through the Holland Tunnel and work our way up to Twentieth and it's real hot-you know how it gets in the late afternoon-and I'm just sitting all slouched in sunglasses and burning up, the sun in my face, and really worried that maybe I'm just completely fucked here. I don't know if anybody was listening to the phone message or, if they were, what they're going to do. Rick is relaxed. We're back on schedule. He doesn't know anything, he's listening to the radio, shifting the gears. He's having a great time. I'm sitting there praying that the police are, right then, setting up to grab us. If they aren't, then Frankie will find out about the missing cash within a few minutes and call Tony, who will immediately send over a car. I'm scared. Really scared. I'm smoking and trying not to jump around in my seat. But okay, what can I do? We get to Twentieth Street and pull along the block. The loading dock is empty, like it's supposed to be, nobody blocking us. We pull in, everything is fine. Nothing looks bad. We look like a bunch of ordinary people. A truck making a delivery, you know. Not a big deal. One of the unload men, this guy Mickey Simms, is there. A big fat guy with no hair. He says everything looks great, the fences are waiting. Frankie says he'll take his boxes into the building and out the other side into a van. Fine. I'm looking all over the place hoping to see some undercover cops. If they're going to be there, they're there already. Sitting in front of me. Down the block somewhere. Watching with binoculars and radios, the whole thing. But I can't see anyone. And Rick is not nervous, which gets me even more nervous. So after about five minutes, when Frankie is almost done loading, I ask Rick to go get me some cigarettes. The deli is way down the block. He says, Now? And I sort of just beg him with my eyes and he smiles and says okay and I ask also, How about a turkey sandwich with lettuce and tomato and onion-something that will take a few minutes to make, you know-and then he tells the others he'll be back in a minute. Mickey Simms goes with him. When I see Rick's gone into the deli, actually gone inside so he can't hear the street, I hit the horn three times, loud as I can, and watch the guys get freaked out and run away through the back of the building, all these ways we'd thought out ahead of time as we always did, and about five seconds after that, the cops are pulling up and all over the truck. They were there, after all! I kept my hands up so they wouldn't shoot me. They pulled me out of the cab and put me up against the door and they were pretty pissed off, like why did I signal, where did everybody go and everything, but I felt so good. I was safe! Rick was still in the deli and I knew he'd see the police cars and just disappear. Later I heard that he came out of the deli and saw the cops and was going to run get me, but that Mickey Simms stuck a gun in his face and wouldn't let him."
Charlie felt funny. She was a criminal, a brilliant little criminal.
"So," finished Christina, "that's that."
He checked the time. It was late, after midnight. He needed to sleep, he knew, but he was enjoying his precipitous plunge into Christina's identity. She had told him a great deal, but he couldn't quite connect everything. "But, going back," he said, "why put the money in the old Mustang anyway? It seems like a vulnerable place."
"Oh, that was-" Christina paused. "The car just meant a lot to me."
"What do you mean?"
She stood up and walked around in his shirt. "You know almost everything else… I guess I can tell you this."
"What?"
She sat in the chair and straightened her legs, feet together like a gymnast. She looked back at him, then looked away.
"You don't have to tell me," he said.
She dropped her feet to the floor, stared at the blank television. "When I was sixteen, Charlie, this guy followed me from a job I had as a waitress, and he knew which car was mine because he parked his van next to it. He hit me really hard in the mouth and then in the nose. He broke it, in fact." Her voice held a far remembrance of the moment of terror, a weariness of this long burden. "I was almost unconscious, and he tied me up and started to drive along the highway… It was night. You could hide a van anywhere."
Which, from her expression, Charlie understood the man had done.
"He had me for three or four hours, and it was not so much the rape that was bad-I mean, that was horrible, I'd never had sex before, either-it was he hit me so much. For no reason. I couldn't resist anymore. I could barely breathe. My nose and face were swollen up. He kept trying to make me say I loved him."
"Did you say it?" Charlie asked, sickened by the idea.
"No."
"He kept hitting you?"
"He said, Say you love me, say you love me. And I'd shake my head and he'd hit me again."
"You were a strong kid." He rubbed his forehead in sadness, picturing Julia as a sixteen-year-old. Long legs, still wore bangs. Chewed gum all the time. You have a daughter and you cry for all the daughters, he thought. She's telling me this for some reason. "Jesus, I'm sorry," he finally said.
"He left me on the highway. He threw me out of the car. He just opened the back door and threw me out. I think he thought I was going to die. I didn't have any clothes. I didn't care, I just walked along the road until I came to a little house. I remember standing on the porch ringing the doorbell. With no clothes on. The lady who answered the door was so surprised. But she understood, she was so great. Her husband understood right away and took this big hunting jacket off a peg and put it around me. They did everything. They called the police and my family. I loved them so much, you know, they just got it."
"Did they catch the guy?"
She nodded. "Someone at the restaurant knew who he was. He totally confessed. Or they beat it out of him, I don't know."
"He go to prison?"
"Six years. I used to worry about what would happen when he got out. It bothered me to think that he was around somewhere. I was anxious a lot of the time. I'd think I was having a heart attack… I was scared, especially when the day came around each year. You always remember the date. Because you're changed after it. Just different. You have a hard time trusting anything, trusting the universe, if you know what I mean. I was a total virgin before, barely kissed a guy. When I started to see Rick I told him. Turns out the guy was about to be released. The guy was on parole, had to report in. But I was still kind of nervous. He might have tried to call me once. Rick went away for a couple of days, and when he came back, he told me not to worry about the guy. He'd found him in Pennsylvania. I don't think Rick killed him-that wasn't like him. But he did something. You have to understand that Rick was a big guy. He scared people. He always wanted to protect me. Sometimes I liked it, sometimes I didn't. You like knowing you have a friend, right? But it got all messed up. He visited my mother, which I didn't want him to do, and they talked a lot about the rape, and my mother told him things he wasn't supposed to know."
"Like what?"
She tucked her feet under her, still looking at the empty television. "The guy made me pregnant. I'd never had sex before, and here I was raped and pregnant. I know this sounds strange… but I wanted to keep the baby. It was like all this painful stuff had happened but I was going to get a baby out of it. It seemed-you have to remember I wasn't even sixteen, I didn't know anything-it seemed like maybe, if all this bad stuff had happened, then I was getting this good thing, this baby. It didn't really matter where it had come from, it was mine. The baby was innocent, the baby didn't know anything, so why should the baby's life be destroyed? That's the way I thought about it. Also, I think the idea of an abortion sounded like more violence, and I just couldn't deal with that.
"I had tried to go back to school, but people were talking about me, my face was all smashed up. They sent my schoolwork home. I couldn't really go yet. But my mother kept saying, You have to get rid of this thing, it's not a baby yet, it's not anything, and it will slow you down, it will mess up your whole life. There'll be a better time to have a baby, later. I sort of knew she was right, but I–I couldn't say I wanted to do it. My father stayed out of it. I think he was ambivalent. My mother got nervous, because some time went by, weeks and weeks. They didn't know I was pregnant for a long time. I hadn't gotten my period, but that could have been because of the trauma. Also, sixteen-year-olds are not totally regular yet. So finally my mother took me to the doctor and said it was just for an examination, but as soon as the nurse put this IV in my arm and I looked at their faces, I knew. I fought them. They had to hold me down. They-"
She stopped. She was not crying. "They were forcing my legs open. It was terrible. I tore out the tube, I bit my mother's hand. I was wild. When I woke up, it was over. We had a hard time after that. She did what she thought was right, she meant well. I understand that. But it was forced on me, it never got talked about." Christina went to the window. "My father didn't know until afterward. My mother tricked him, too. So we went for a lot of drives. I needed somebody to help me, and he said he was going to teach me to drive his Mustang, and he did. We went for a lot of long drives-I mean like two hundred miles-and he'd let me drive and smoke cigarettes, anything I wanted. He understood. He understood I had to work this out. He'd talk to me, he was very understanding. He'd say that I was strong and I'd get past this and I was going to be okay. After a few months, I was allowed to drive the Mustang by myself. It made my mother upset. She wasn't allowed to drive it. My father knew I would be careful with it and I was. I paid for the gas. The driving calmed me down. I got through like two years that way, and then I was fine. I had sex, real sex I mean, in that car for the first time, and I told my dad, maybe a little defiantly, like, Look what I did. And he was very sweet. He asked, Was the guy gentle? And I said yes. He was treating me like an adult, unlike my mother.
"So I guess that was why I put the money in the car. I wanted my father to find those boxes and not have to worry. It was stupid, Charlie, it was so incredibly stupid. I loved him so much, you know? I just wanted to-I don't know, I wanted-"
"Redemption," Charlie said, in a voice far from himself. "You wanted redemption." He was tired now, but he asked, "I don't understand why you didn't just head down to Florida as soon as you got out of prison."
"Because I don't want my mother caught in this." She lit a new cigarette. "I think Tony got me out of prison, Charlie. My sentence wasn't over yet. I think he did something with the police, paid somebody, and they just released me."
"He knows you took the money."
She nodded. "I have to assume that."
"What does Tony want now, the money or revenge?"
"Probably the money," she answered.
"Could you retrieve it and give it back?"
She didn't answer him directly but instead went to her purse and pulled out a picture. "This is what they did last week, that first night we were together. This is what was waiting for me when I went home, Charlie."
He looked at the Polaroid. A man holding the wet stump of his arm, T-shirt spattered with what looked like blood. "Who is that?"
"That's Rick."
Leave, he told himself. "Where's he now?"
"I don't know… I doubt they killed him, though."
Charlie studied the photograph, then set it aside. I need sleep, he thought. I'll deal with all this in the morning, figure out what to do next. They were safe in the hotel. He picked up the phone and requested a 6:45 wake-up. She got under the blankets. He rolled onto his side behind her. Ellie's sleeping alone, he thought sadly. Alone in her sleeping-pill dreams.
"Been a long time since I spent the night with a man," Christina murmured. "It's nice."
"You feel safe?" he asked softly.
She gathered his hand toward herself. "Starting to."
Awake, running on China time, light melting in through the window, clock said 6:15. He eased out of bed, wanting to leave now yet afraid to break the spell and rush back into his life. Teknetrix, Ellie. Back felt stiff. Needed the smelly tea. He looked at his feet-bony, chopped up on one side, cadaverous veins. He felt exhausted-sleepy, mouth sour-yet oddly alive. Get yourself into the game, Charlie. He drifted through the room. She looked small and vulnerable in the bed. He turned on the television, hitting the mute button, flashed through thirty channels, saw Dan Marino throw a touchdown pass. Still kind of missed Don Shula. He turned it off and stared at her cigarette butts. Goddammit, Charlie, he told himself, you're fifty-eight years old, you spent the night with a woman who just got out of prison, who lied to you…
He noticed the photo of the boyfriend on the table. A big guy standing there holding his wet stump. Frightening. I really should just leave, he thought. Melissa-he meant Christina-was nothing but trouble. She lay there so innocently, dead asleep, hair a mess, a knuckle against her lips. He found her bag and not-so-guiltily looked inside. A brush, some change. A cell phone. He examined the brand and smiled to himself-it probably had Teknetrix components inside. Cosmetics. Pencil. Not much. Same stuff as Ellie, probably. Women were funny about their purses-regarded them as their privates. The menu of a restaurant called the Jim-Jack. A tiny flask of perfume. His own business card, with all his work printed on it, including his cell phone. Her wallet. What was inside? No credit cards, no driver's license, just a tattered Social Security card. Nothing with her picture on it. How could that be? She'd talked a lot about driving but had no license. Do they take away your license if you go to prison? He doubted it. Nothing in the bag absolutely verified the identity of the woman on the bed.
Oh shit, he thought. Maybe the Christina name is made up, too. He retrieved her cell phone, clicked it on, and scrolled through its screen of phone numbers, a hundred or more, finding it a very strange group: pharmaceutical companies, German photo agencies, an East Side furniture dealer, a hotel in London he'd never heard of, two women's names to which "enema ok" was appended-and, all with addresses in lower Manhattan, a plumber, an electrician, a house painter, a plasterer, and a heating oil company. No one named Rick or Tony or Christina or Melissa or any of the other names she'd mentioned. I don't fucking get it, Charlie thought, putting the phone back in her bag, I'm completely lost here.
Coming up to 6:30. He remembered the Sir Henry Lai phone in the bathroom and went in and closed the door. And turned on the heater. The hum would mask his voice. Sarasota, Florida, she'd said, Anita Welles. He called information down there. There is only an A. Welles listed, said the operator. He wrote the number down. She could've made this name up, he thought. I wonder if this number really is her mother's; maybe Christina is actually Anita. The name's not so far off. Maybe A. Welles is Christina's husband, a fact that I would not mind knowing. Allan Welles. Albert Welles. And what might any of this have to do with German photo agencies? Everything she told me could have been false, Charlie decided. I need a baseline reality.
He picked up the phone again. I have the right to do this, he thought.
He punched in the Florida number. On the third ring, a woman's voice croaked, "Hello?"
"Is this the home of Christina Welles?"
"I'm her mother," came the reply.
"Anita Welles?"
"Yes. Where is she?"
"She's here in New York," said Charlie, relieved. "She's fine. I apologize about how early it is."
"Oh, I've been up an hour, sugar," said her mother agreeably, as if talking to an old friend. "Had too much coffee already. We might get another hurricane. I'm sick of them. Last one wrecked my garage. This her friend? She's been trying to reach me. Tell her I'm here, will be here all day, and I want to talk to her."
"Sure," Charlie answered, feeling much better.
"You're calling from New York, you say?"
"I'm a friend."
"She's fine?"
"She's asleep right now."
The mother was getting curious. "You sound like an older friend."
"I suppose I am." He wanted to get off the phone. "Would you like her to call you at any certain time?"
"I'll be here all day. Maybe I should call there, just so I don't miss her."
"Oh."
"May I have your number?"
He stared at the phone. Christina might not want her mother to know where she was. On the other hand, she might be glad. On the third hand, they'd be leaving the room soon anyway.
"I have a pencil," said her mother, prompting him.
He gave her the hotel number. "Ask for Suite 840."
"You tell her I can't wait to talk."
Now he stood over Christina for a few minutes, watching her affectionately. He wanted to see her naked again, especially her smooth breasts, but didn't dare pull away the sheet. The night came back to him. It'd be better for all concerned, he realized, if he just somehow forgot the sex, particularly if he wanted to be able to putter along with Ellie once a week or so, go back to old-people sex. And maybe it was better if Christina did not see him naked in the morning light.
In the bathroom, again with the door shut, he canceled the wake-up call, then dialed his apartment to see if Ellie had left a message, which she hadn't. In the game here, Charlie told himself. He showered then, letting the hot water pound him as he soaped and resoaped his crotch. He'd be walking into his apartment building unshaven, he realized, in the same clothes from the day before, but so be it. He toweled off and dressed in the steamy bathroom, and when he finally emerged, he found Christina sitting awake in the bed.
"You want some breakfast?"
"Sure," she said groggily.
"I let you sleep a little longer."
She pulled a pillow toward her. "What time is it?"
"Almost seven-thirty."
"That's nice."
"I did a sort of ridiculous, paranoid thing," he confessed with a smile.
She rolled over, as if to drift back to sleep. "What?"
"I called your mother."
She frowned. "Say that again?"
"I called your mother."
She looked at him in horror, no longer sleepy. "When?"
"Maybe an hour ago. I just wanted to check to see if you were who you said you were. She said she might give you a call here."
"You gave her this number?"
"I didn't think it compromised me much."
"You?" She suddenly threw back the covers and looked for her clothes. "You? I can't believe it."
"What?" he said.
"That was incredibly stupid," she cried hatefully, wriggling into her panties and bra. "Who gave you the right? Now they know where I am! God! For someone who makes fucking phone parts, you're pretty stupid!"
"Wait, now-" he began, confused and hurt.
She was shaking, eyes wild. "I have to get out of here."
He put his arms around her. "Now, look-"
"You fucking jerk!" she screamed, breaking loose from him and pulling on her heels. "They're probably downstairs, waiting!"
She stuffed her remaining things in her bag and walked straight out the door. He looked around the room quickly, gathered up his watch and wallet and the picture of the boyfriend, since it seemed somehow incriminating, and followed her.
In the elevator down, she shook her head in fury. "Tony or the cops or somebody has her phone bugged."
"You didn't tell me that."
"I didn't think you would fucking call my mother, Charlie!" The elevator doors opened. Christina stalked quickly toward the hotel entrance, head down. "I can't believe you did that," she hissed.
They exited the hotel on Sixty-first Street, and he was about to suggest they find a place to eat breakfast when she hurried away from him.
"Hey!" Charlie called. " Hey! "
She waited at the curb for two taxis to pass, taking the opportunity to slip off her heels, then ran barefoot across Fifth Avenue into Central Park, dark hair bouncing behind her- too fast, Charlie thought, I couldn't catch her in a million years. He watched her run with one shoe in each hand, then disappear through the trees. He looked up and down the street, feeling confused. What was the problem? Except for calling her mother, hadn't he comported himself well? They'd had a nice night, hadn't they? I pay for a great room, he thought bitterly, I give her a great fucking time, and she runs away from me? What's she so scared of? No one's here. He glowered at an elderly woman who stood admiring her small dog as he deposited a tiny curl of shit onto a piece of tissue paper.
Then he eased along the avenue, actually enjoying the morning but feeling an odd new pain in his back. All that screwing last night, he thought proudly, pulled something. But it'd been worth it. Would he ever be able to do it again like that? Why not? He still had some of the Chinese tea in the apartment. And more on the way! Thinking of it put him in a better mood. He'd look at the paper with breakfast. Eggs, he could make eggs, for God's sake. Read about the Jets. Bill Parcells. Call Ellie and listen to her babble about the azalea bushes.
As he turned the corner to Sixty-third Street, a tall man carrying the New York Post appeared in front of him. "Like to introduce myself, sir." He extended his hand. "Name's Tommy."
Charlie gave the man a vague nod but kept walking. Kelly the doorman stood in front of the apartment building flagging down a taxi. In and out of the heat all day, always a smile.
"Sir?" called the tall man, following Charlie.
He turned around in irritation. "What?"
The man slid the newspaper back, revealing a black semiautomatic pistol. "Get in the car."
Which had slid up behind Charlie silently, another man getting out of the back door, a third in a green baseball jacket behind the steering wheel.
"Hey, fellows," said Charlie agreeably, "you got the wrong guy here."
The driver in the green jacket lifted up his sunglasses at the same moment as the first man slipped a tight hand around Charlie's arm. "I don't think so," he said politely.
They drove downtown, with Tommy looking through Charlie's billfold and finding the Vista del Mar papers in the breast pocket of his coat. His hands were cuffed tightly. The driver introduced himself as Morris.
"We didn't expect your girlfriend to go running into the park."
Charlie stayed silent.
"Ran pretty fast, too."
"I guess so."
"You'll help us out, won't you?"
"This guy's name is Charles Ravich," announced Tommy. "We have his home address, work address, and this looks like-some kind of vacation place in New Jersey."
"See if he has a wife."
Tommy consulted the Vista del Mar papers. "Elizabeth."
"What else? Keep looking."
"Phone in his pocket."
"Charles," asked Morris. "Does she have your number?"
"Yes."
"Turn it on, Tommy. See if she calls him."
"Hey, hey!" cried Tommy, finding the photo of the boyfriend and waving it in front of Morris. "Look at this."
"What kind of animal would do that?" Morris shook his head. "Fucking barbaric."
They drove south for five minutes, then cut west on Fourteenth Street and then one block south into the meatpacking district. There they stopped and hustled him out of the car in front of a rusty door in a wall. I'm going to get out of this, Ellie, he told himself, don't worry.
"You got back trouble?" Morris asked, watching Charlie.
"I'm fine," he said.
Inside the building, they pushed him up some cement steps and then across what appeared to be an old factory floor. He noticed a rotten mattress to one side. In front of him stood a large worktable, some utility lamps, and three heavy chairs. Sitting in one was a man of about sixty.
"You go… here," said Morris, pushing Charlie onto the stained, chopped-up table and cuffing one of his arms to a ring. "This is Mr. Ravich," he said.
"Hello, Mr. Ravich." The older man lifted a hand.
"Who are you?" said Charlie. "Tony?"
Morris smiled. "I told you we got the right guy."
Tony stood up. "Mr. Ravich, I can see you're a successful businessman."
He shrugged.
The phone in Tommy's hand trilled. He handed it to Morris. "Yeah?" He listened. "It's her," he said.
"Let me have it." Tony took the phone. "You got my five million dollars now, Christina?… Didn't you see what happened to your last boyfriend?… I don't care about that-I want it in three hours. You've wasted a lot of my time, you know that? Years. And what is this fucking IRS shit? I have to meet my wife for lunch. If I don't have something by eleven o'clock, your new boyfriend will be something you can put on a sandwich. Then we'll go after your mother, okay? We know she's home now, we know where she is in her little pink bedroom
… Don't call me that… And don't call anybody down there… If my guys don't get my-It's not bullshit. My guy says she's watering her lawn right now, bunch of flowers climbing up the garage… Now you believe me?" He looked at Charlie. "She wants to talk to you."
Tony held the phone to Charlie's ear. "I'm sorry," cried Christina. "I'm sorry."
"Tell them where-"
Tony pulled the phone away. "You call back in ten minutes. Ten minutes… You're going to help us out here."
Now Tony called another number that Morris had given him. "Yes, hello, Mrs. Ravich?… This is the Bell Atlantic office, yes. Just checking the line, ma'am." He nodded at Charlie. "Everything's fine
… We had some workmen in the vicinity. Yeah. Thank you." Tony hung up. "Sounded like a nice lady. So, Charlie, here's the situation. We have you and we know where your wife is. We don't have Christina, but we know where her mother is. She knows where the five million is that she stole from me, but she isn't saying."
I don't want to tell them, Charlie thought, but they've got Ellie. And Christina, or whoever she is, couldn't care less. "It's in two large boxes in the backseat of an old blue Mustang convertible in her mother's garage," he said. "She told me that."
"No, it's not," answered Tony. "We've been through that place like mice. There's no car like that. We found a bunch of antique dolls and things, but nothing like that. I know. I been on this for months."
"I can't help you," said Charlie. He noticed Tommy carrying in two large toolboxes.
"Sure you can," responded Tony, smiling as he looked at Charlie's card.
"How?"
"I'm seeing here that you're the chief executive officer of a company named Teknetrix. Sounds like big money to me. You're the deep pockets. Your girlfriend stole my money and you're going to pay me. She can pay you back herself."
"You guys've made a big mistake," Charlie said in a let's-forget-everything voice. "I don't have that kind of money. And I don't know where your money is. I thought it was in the air-conditioner boxes."
Morris pulled a drill out of the toolbox and plugged it in.
"It's just money," Charlie added.
"It's not just money." Tony shook his head, tired of being misunderstood. "It's a lot of things, Charles. It's the dishonesty, the lack of respect. It's the fact that it wasn't my money, not exactly. I had to pay that out of other funds. Which set me back, you know? Another little problem developed… that also cost me money. Also, we thought it was somebody else for three years. A stand-up guy named Frankie. He knew we wouldn't believe him when he said he didn't do it." He nodded at Morris. "My friend here is very persuasive. We got some information out of her boyfriend and he didn't want to give it to us."
"Tony, Tony," said Charlie, pulling against his handcuff experimentally. "Let's be reasonable."
The cell phone rang again. "Yeah?" said Tony. "Just a-" He held the phone out. "Okay."
Morris started the drill.
"You hear that, sweetie?" asked Tony, waving at Morris to stop. "That's right. We'll do that to your mother if you don't help me out here." He handed the phone to Charlie.
"Yes?" he said. "Yes?"
"Charlie?" asked Christina. "You all right?"
"I'm fine."
"I'll do anything, Charlie."
"Give them their fucking money back!"
"I don't have it!"
"Last night you told-"
"My mother got rid of the car!" she cried. "I didn't know."
"When?" he screamed. "When didn't you know?"
"I just found out," cried Christina in his ear. "Yesterday, Charlie."
"You could have told me."
"I'm sorry. I can't call the police."
He missed a breath. "Because these guys have your mother?"
"Yes, Charlie."
"So it's me or your mother?" he said in frustration.
"No, no, not exactly, Charlie."
Morris took the phone. "Give me the number of your phone," he said to her. He wrote it down. "Don't go anywhere." Morris clicked off, then handed the phone to Charlie.
Tony's face soured and he shot his lower jaw out. "Start calling, start getting me my money, you asshole." He pulled out a book of crossword puzzles, checked his watch. "Three hours. I'm not sitting here longer."
Charlie stared at the phone. This wasn't happening. An hour ago he was in the shower in the Pierre Hotel. His head pounded. No coffee, no tea, past 8:00 a.m. already.
"And anything stupid, we'll go say hello to the missus."
"I get it, all right," Charlie muttered bitterly.
He dialed Ted Fullman at Citibank. How hard can this be? he thought. Ted works in a bank. He'll send over some money and I'll get out of this. Five million easy come, five million easy go-a briefcase from Sir Henry Lai. "Ted, Charlie Ravich."
"What can I do for you today, so early?"
He heard the sound of computer keys. "Do you ever make cash disbursements?"
"Sometimes, depending."
He rubbed his temple. "I mean, can you send cash over to my office?"
"How much?"
"A lot. Six or seven figures?"
"We generally don't provide cash in such sums."
"Of course."
"We'll provide a bank check."
"How fast?"
"Same day, a few hours by messenger."
"Do you ever provide cash?"
"Not on short notice, Charlie. Not seven figures. We have a lot of forms that have to be compiled when the sum is quite large on a personal account."
"Forms?"
"Government forms, money-laundering, all that kind of thing. How much you want?"
"A lot."
"Anything over, maybe, fifty thousand will need a signature from someone downstairs, and then-"
"Just a moment."
"I can get a bank check," he said to Tony, his hand over the phone.
"You gotta be kidding me." He flipped through his puzzle book, looking for one that he hadn't completed. "Cash, Mr. Ravich. Cash is king."
"How about a wire transfer to an offshore bank account?"
"No way," answered Tony. "I don't trust it."
Charlie returned to the phone, starting to worry. "Ted, I want to do something else. Will you wire one third of those new funds back to Jane in London?"
"That I can do. One third?"
"More or less. Say, five million even."
"Things okay, Charlie?"
"Fine. Everything's fine."
Ted chuckled. "You're up to your old tricks?"
"Yes," said Charlie anxiously. "We should have lunch before the end of the year, Ted."
"Great."
"How soon will the money go back to Jane?"
"Two minutes it'll be on her screens, I'd say."
"Good, good. I'll call you tomorrow."
He hung up.
"Where's the money?" asked Tony.
"I'm working on it." Keep your voice even, he told himself.
"You sent it to London?"
"That loosens it up," he said. "It's not a bank, it's a brokerage."
"You fucking sent it to London?"
"I sent it to another computer," Charlie muttered.
He thought: Five million in an account in London. How do you turn it into cash? You can't buy stocks or bonds and just be given the certificates. Everything was electronic these days. He looked at his watch. Eight-thirty here, one-thirty there. The thing could drag out for a while. He'd run into time-zone problems. He called Jane.
"Charlie?" she asked.
"Jane, would you check my account?"
"Sure. Just a moment." He watched Morris pull a work light closer. "Your bank just sent us five million dollars," she exclaimed. "Want to buy euros?"
"No thanks. I don't want to make any trades."
"What can I do for you?"
"Does your New York office disburse cash?" he asked.
"I doubt it."
"You buy gold contracts?"
"Sometimes."
"What happens when they're settled?"
"Oh, the gold never changes hands, really," she explained. "It's just paperwork. I don't even know where the actual gold is. Some bank somewhere."
"Right. I need someone in your New York office to help me."
"I can switch you over now. Same screen, a broker there."
"You're around a few more hours, though?"
"Two. But we're very busy today." He heard a beep. "Timothy, this is Charlie Ravich. I told you about that trade on GT a few weeks ago? This is the guy. He needs some help. Charlie's one of our favorite customers, so please dance the fandango if he asks. I would, I know that."
"Thanks, Jane," he said miserably, watching Tony find a pencil in his pocket.
"What can I do for you today, sir?"
"You got my account there on your screen?"
"I do."
"How much cash is in it?"
"Five million-plus."
"Good. You guys don't disburse real cash, I suspect."
"No, sir. We bounce money around, we never see it."
"You guys ever deal with what we used to call bearer's bonds? Those things that are practically cash?"
"Those are more or less obsolete, sir. I don't think they're used in this country anymore."
"I'm an old man."
"Yes, sir."
"You're there all day?"
"All day, sir."
"I'll call you back."
"What you got?" asked Tony, his voice echoing against the far broken windows. "Nothing?"
"I'm working on it."
"He's not getting anywhere," Morris noted.
"I can call back my banker, but then he's going to know there's a problem," Charlie said.
"Then don't do that," snapped Tony.
Morris handed Tony something. "You saw this?"
"Where's it come from?" The photo of the boyfriend.
"It was in Charles's coat pocket."
"You guys piss me off," said Tony. "She was right there in the hotel with Mr. Ravich here. How could you miss her?"
Tommy opened his hands. "You told us not to go inside in front of the cameras."
"There were cameras on the outside of the building, too," added Morris. "We were careful, Tony."
Tony nodded. "Keep going, Charles."
He put the phone down on the table, trying not only to figure out a way to make some money appear but also to appraise Ellie's vulnerability. He remembered that she was having trees delivered that morning, which was good. Workmen around.
The phone rang. Tony picked it up. "Yeah, he's here," said Tony, "but you're going to listen now." He nodded at Morris. "Help her see it my way."
Morris pulled an electric saw out of the large box.
"Oh, for God's sake," said Charlie. "You don't have to do this."
The men pulled off his shoe. "I'm going to clamp it," said Morris. "Just to be sure."
"Hey, hey!" yelled Charlie as his sock was pulled off. "You don't need to do-"
"He's already missing some toes," noted Morris. "Someone has been here first." He dropped Charlie's foot and examined his hand. "What was this-let me see… It moved slightly off perpendicular to the plane of the palm… very high speed…"
"It was an M-16 round."
"You took a machine gun bullet through your hand?" Morris rubbed his nose in thought. "Something's different here."
"What do you mean?" asked Tony, keeping the phone held out.
"I don't know." Morris looked at Charlie. "Lift your arms."
He complied, stiffly. Just do what they say, he told himself. Don't give them a reason to get angry.
"Stand up."
He stood.
"What the fuck is this?" Tony asked. "Aerobics?"
"Bend over," ordered Morris. "Just drop your hands down."
He went as far as he could.
"What's wrong with your back?" asked Morris.
"Nothing."
"Can't you go farther?"
"No."
"You're fucking wasting my time!" yelled Tony. "Call back in five minutes," he said into the phone.
Morris lifted up Charlie's shirt. "I knew it. Major spinal damage."
"What are you doing?" cried Tony.
"Just give me a few minutes, Tony." They pushed Charlie flat onto the table and Morris brought over a work lamp. "Your lumbar aponeurosis is all torn up… You definitely damaged-what? The fourth and fifth lumbar? Maybe the sacrum as well." He pinched one of the vertebrae. "That might be a tiny chip on the articular process here, or some very hard scar tissue…" His fingers probed the ridges of Charlie's lower spine, hurting him. "This was my specialty. I-it's a fusion!" he exclaimed. "Right?"
"Yes." Charlie watched Tony unwrap a stick of gum.
"This is my first fusion patient." Morris rummaged in his toolbox again. He pulled out one small item after another, discarding each. "Somewhere I have…" he muttered. "Cabinetmakers use them."
"Tony!" yelled Charlie from his stomach. "You want me to try to get you your money or you want me to have a medical exam?"
Morris returned to the table. "Did they use screws or plates?"
"What?" Charlie cried.
"Screws, plates? Also rods. Sometimes even little titanium cages, too." Morris pushed Charlie's spine with his thumbs. "They did that for one of the football players, I think."
"Who the fuck cares?" asked Tony.
"What year?" inquired Morris. "When did they do it?"
"Twenty-five years ago!" shouted Charlie at the floor. "Tony, let me have that phone, I'll work on it, all right?"
"That's a shame," said Morris, ignoring his outburst. "There's a technique now called the autogenous iliac crest bone graft. They take the bone cells out of the hip and-"
"What the hell you talking about?" Charlie spat at him.
Morris considered Charlie coldly. "Just hit him once," he told Tommy.
Tommy came over and punched Charlie in the side of the head.
"Oh, God," he moaned, blinking, eyesight black for a moment, rubbing his temple.
"Conventional spinal fusion used to involve a thoracotomy," Morris continued. "That's what you had, I bet. This spinal scar is almost a foot long. They took out a rib and used the bone to fuse the vertebrae." He took off his green jacket and laid it carefully on one of the chairs. "These days they have the spinal endoscopy, which results in smaller incisions, and pull the bone out of the hip. They stick it between the vertebrae to stabilize them and maintain disk spacing. They're starting to test this new stuff, recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein-stuff stimulates bone growth." He turned to Tony. "Boss, I want to open him up and see how they did this."
"Will he be able to use a phone?" said Tony.
"Sure, sure. I have an epidural needle here." Morris returned to his toolbox. "I've been keeping this around." He pulled out a needle wrapped in plastic and a long tube that attached to a drip bottle. "Okay," he told Charlie, "this is what you give a woman in labor. Or someone getting a spinal tap. Once I get the needle in, you won't feel anything."
"Where are you putting that?" he demanded.
"It goes directly into the spinal nerve. I saw a guy do this once in medical school. The patient must lie absolutely still."
"Hey, Tony, this is not the way to get money out of me!" yelled Charlie. "This is crazy, Tony, this doesn't-" He tried to struggle but the two big men held him down, one with a hand on his neck.
"Go ahead," called Tony.
"Don't move a hair," Morris instructed Charlie. "Not a… In the hospital you have to sign a special release for this procedure because of the risk of paralysis… Hold that up, Tommy… okay …"
Charlie felt a sharp puncture in his back, then nothing.
"That's it." Morris pulled over one of the work lamps and taped the drip bottle to it. "Works almost right away. Don't move or roll around, Charles, you might dislodge the needle. If it breaks off, I don't have another one. This kind of anesthetic wears off immediately."
"Oh, Jesus."
But his back felt-felt like nothing, better even than with the Chinese tea. "I can't feel anything," he said.
"Your spinal nerve is drugged," said Morris. "You shouldn't feel anything much, assuming the dosage is correct."
"What are you looking for, anyway?" asked Tony.
"I want to see how they did this. Was it a cage or plates, where they put them."
"For God's sake," cried Charlie, sweating now. "Stop! Let me get the money."
"You'll be able to do that while I work," Morris said. "If you work fast, we'll take you to the hospital with the drip still in."
The phone trilled again. He lay on his stomach panting, feeling like a dog forced to the ground. They handed him the phone.
"Charlie?"
It was Christina. "Yeah," he breathed. "Is there any way you can help me?"
"If I could."
"I've got cash in a brokerage account here, but they don't disburse it. They'll do all kinds of other things. I can't buy stocks and bonds. What the fuck am I going to do here, Christina?"
"Can you buy something with it and give it to Tony?"
Morris lifted a small scalpel from the box and tore off the sterile wrapper.
"Like what?" he said anxiously, watching Morris.
"Gold, diamonds, I don't know."
He squeezed his eyes, head pounding. Morris was pressing something into his back. "Gold is well under three hundred an ounce these days."
"So five million is at least… sixteen thousand ounces, which is exactly a thousand pounds. That's not so heavy," she noted. "You could put that in ten suitcases."
"Gold?" Charlie hollered at Tony. "Gold?"
"Gold is a commodity," he answered. "I want cash."
"I can't get cash!"
Tony shrugged. "That's your problem."
"He won't take gold," Charlie said to Christina.
"Why don't you buy some cigarettes?" she suggested.
He wanted to see what Morris was doing to him. "I don't understand."
"They come into the docks in Newark in containers. Middlemen sell them. It's a spot market," she said. "You buy them before they even hit the shore, and you get a bill of lading and present it at the dock, and they bring it out and stick the container on the truck. It's a very liquid situation. Five million is probably a huge quantity of cartons. But you can sell that easily. It's cigarettes."
"I don't know how the hell to do that." He turned his head.
"Don't move!" Morris screamed. "I'm close!"
"Call your broker or whoever and see if he'll issue a letter of credit," came Christina's voice. "I'm going to call around."
"Don't leave me!"
"I'm not, I'm not."
He called back Timothy at the brokerage. "You guys issue a letter of credit?"
"No."
He called Ted Fullman, feeling tingling against his spine. He wiggled his foot, wasn't sure if it moved or not. "Ted, will you issue a letter of credit for me?"
"Sure."
"How long does that take?"
"Hell, twenty minutes."
"Can you messenger it?"
"Yes. Or fax it." Ted listened for a moment. "Are you in trouble, Charlie?"
"No, no, I'm just helping a friend." He tried to even out his breathing. Tommy, he noticed, was interested in whatever Morris was doing.
"I looked into the cash question," Ted Fullman went on. "We could provide it as soon as the day after tomorrow if we get the signatures. If that would be soon enough-"
"Please prepare a letter of credit for five million."
"I can't."
"You just said you could!" Charlie cried in despair.
"You don't have five million in the account anymore," replied Ted smoothly. "You bought the house and had me send the other eight million to your accountant's escrow account, remember?"
"Jesus." He looked at the wooden floor, noticed old paint or blood. "I'll have the brokerage send the money back."
He called Timothy at the brokerage. His line was busy.
"How're we doing?" asked Tony. "Tommy, call Peck, tell him to get over here."
The phone rang in Charlie's hand. It was Christina. "I got the name of a wholesale distributor of cigarettes. He explained a lot of this."
"Let me have his number," said Charlie, writing it down.
"This guy sells cigarettes by the containerload."
"Where are you?"
"I'm way downtown. I went back to the restaurant where I used to work."
He felt a cool scraping sensation in his back. "You'll stay there?"
"Yes."
I can't feel my feet, Charlie realized. Like they're gone. He called back Timothy at the brokerage. "Wire the money back into my bank account."
"I don't understand."
Now a trickle of pain came up his back. "Wire it all, right away."
"Well, the authorization-"
"Just send it back, what's the fucking problem?"
"Sir, Mr. Ravich, the authorization for a sum that large has to come-"
"Listen, you little fuck," Charlie croaked. "I'm in a hell of a jam, all right? That's my money! I've had a business relationship with your brokerage for twenty"-Morris was pulling something-"years, you understand? Send that money now or I'm all over you. All the numbers are there, just send it right back to my account care of Ted Fullman at Citibank."
"Yes, sir."
Tony stood up from his chair, walked four feet away, bent slightly at the waist, farted loudly, straightened up, and sat down again. He pointed at Morris. "You're like a kid with a toy train set."
"I'm feeling something," said Charlie.
"I'm feeling something, too," added Tony. "I'm feeling an emptiness. In my pocket."
"I'm gonna get this," Morris muttered to himself.
The money is going back to Citibank, thought Charlie. I've made exactly no progress. He called the cigarette wholesaler. "You guys sell large lots of cigarettes?"
"Yes," came a voice.
"How can I buy five million worth?"
"First, sir, you need to talk to our salesmen and see what they have available. Then-"
"No, no. I mean now, right now."
"He's buying cigarettes?" asked Tony. "I've seen everything."
"We don't do that," came the voice. "Goodbye."
"You have a plate." Morris looked up. "It's good work."
He got Christina's number from Tony and called her.
"Yes? Charlie?"
"No on the cigarettes."
"I know, I just figured that out," she said. "I've got another guy who buys spot loads."
"What's that mean?"
"This guy's got all kinds of stuff moving around. He buys distressed situations from speculators, dock overage, canceled orders, things like that. His office is here and the docks are in Newark. He takes the money by wire, then endorses the bill of lading. You want me to call?"
"I will." He took the number.
"Bob here," said a voice, phones trilling in the background.
Charlie asked about wholesale cigarettes.
"I don't have any cigarettes right now," Bob barked. "Who're you?"
Charlie wondered if his foot was quivering. "What else?"
"I got… I got old gasoline that might have oil in it, I got lumber and some fucking frozen fish-you don't want that-I got caviar, I got… Japanese car tires, Nikon cameras, I got all kinds of stuff."
"How's it work?" Charlie breathed, trying to concentrate.
"You got a binding letter of credit, right?"
"Yes. I mean I can get one."
"Have the bank deliver that here," answered Bob. "Hard copy only. We run it through our infrared scanner to check for inking alterations. Make sure all the particulars are on it-the account number, the officer at the bank and his number. Without that, you don't even get a kiss from your mother. We only deal with banks that are members of the New York clearinghouse-Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Credit Suisse, the big ones. We want same-day electronic settlement, to our account. I don't negotiate on that point, ever. Then we call to be sure the money is in your account. Assuming it is, then you just tell me what you want. We can write over the bill of lading to you here, which we advise against, or we'll take you down to the pier and, on a very quiet basis, you understand, for an extra fee, you can pay the dock cooper to open up the container to be sure it's got what you want. He removes the lead seal and-"
"What do you have right now," asked Charlie desperately, "ready to go?"
"How much you spending?"
"Five million."
"That's a lot. Maybe you want caviar? Now, with that," he continued impatiently, "you get very good mark-up and you can break up the load as much as you want. Freshness is a factor. We have a shipment that the buyer couldn't-"
"Hang on."
"I don't hang on for anybody," said Bob. "Call me back."
"How about caviar?" Charlie asked Tony.
"Caviar? You eat it."
He dropped his head. "What the fuck are you doing?" he cried fearfully to Morris. "I can feel that."
"In an open laminectomy, the surgeon usually has available to him automated suction and laser ablation," Morris narrated. "But I've been careful about the bleeding."
"I can't believe this," Charlie moaned. He felt a wetness, fingers pushing numbly against a piece of bone. Then a filing sensation. His phone rang. It was Christina. "The guy has caviar," he exhaled.
"That's good."
"Tony doesn't think-oh! Oh, please! Oh, God!" he screamed, his back suddenly a valley of pain.
"Wait, wait! The needle!" said Morris. He adjusted it. "Is that better?"
"No, no! Oh, God, what are-!"
"Charlie, Charlie?" came the phone.
" That? " asked Morris. "That has to be better."
It was. The pain softened, became a cloud, blew away. He collapsed on the table in exhaustion, his mouth dry.
"Needle slipped," Morris noted. "Lucky it didn't break."
"Tell him that he can sell five million of caviar for seven or eight or more," came Christina's voice. "No, wait, let me talk to Tony."
He handed over the phone. "You could sell it for more, she says."
"What?"
"She says you could sell it for more."
Tony took the phone. "Yeah? I said cash. What do I want with that? Fuck you. Christina, we're going to chop up your boyfriend… No, no, explain it to me… You get a piece of paper? No, no… what? It says that I'm going to pick it up?… Wait." He looked up. "How much does caviar cost these days?"
"Couple hundred bucks an ounce usually," said Morris.
"You can get it cheaper," observed Tommy.
"Not in a restaurant."
"Even the cheap stuff is expensive," Morris told Tony. "Most people don't know the difference."
"Yeah… Why do I want that?" Tony was saying. "It's not like the airport, exactly… You have to have an examiner to know if it's any good… I'll take something I can dump in Chinatown, something I can sell to anybody…"
"Cameras?" cried Charlie. "The guy has Japanese cameras."
"Cameras I'll take," Tony said into the phone. "I need it by eleven. What? That's what I said-we'll do that. A load of new cameras
… We can break it up… Five million is less than wholesale, probably. You call here at ten forty-five and we'll send a-What?… Your mother will be-no. No. Soon as you give me that piece of paper, you little bitch, then we square everything." He grunted and pulled a piece of licorice out of his pocket. "She's smart, that one, smartest I ever saw. I'm making a profit off this." He handed the phone to Charlie. "She's going to get that bill of lading for a container of new Nikon cameras and bring that here. She's a smart girl, Charles."
"Listen to me," Christina said to Charlie now. "Did you write down the number of the spot-buyer guy?"
"Yes."
"Scribble it out."
He looked at his piece of paper. "Why?"
"Just do it."
"Okay." He did.
"Do you remember the name?" she asked.
"Bob somebody."
"He can't send a guy to get me this way," she said.
"Oh," replied Charlie, not necessarily following her logic. "What do I do now?"
"Tell me your banker's name."
"Ted Fullman. Citibank."
"Call him," Christina said, "and say I'll call with the particulars, which I will. It's a three-party transaction. I get this now. They show me the bill of lading, which has the description of the load and the number of the container. All containers have numbers. The bill of lading is a transferable document of ownership. It has to be transferable, because the container goes from seller to shipper to maybe another buyer, another shipper, and so on. It's probably been transferred a couple of times already at this point. Sometimes it's altered, but this guy is reputable. I'm not saying the cameras aren't stolen, just that the cameras are in the container. The money gets wired from the bank to the spot-market agent, the agent gives me the bill of lading, and I give the bill of lading to Tony. He's free to pick up the cameras at that point."
"I think I got that."
"So call your banker, Charlie. Say my name is Sally."
"Okay." He was too tired to understand all of it. When she hung up, he called Ted back. "You get the cash from my broker?"
"Yes," said Ted. "Now what?"
"My representative, whose name is Sally, will call you and tell you where to send the letter of credit. I'm sorry about all this confusion, Ted."
"What's the deal, Charlie?"
"Oh hell, Ted, you're going to think I'm crazy." He tried to sound jovial. "I got a great price on a load of… caviar. It's a distressed situation. The mark-up is huge and I've already got a buyer."
Ted chuckled. "You're always a gambler there, Charlie. We'll get the letter delivered and then wire the funds after they call."
"Great," he breathed, barely able to keep energy in his voice. "Thanks, Ted. Thanks a bunch. She'll-Sally-will call. Thanks."
Tony was shaking his head. "No way is that girl going to show up with a bill of lading here that's worth five million dollars. All she has to do is have them change the name to her and then she's got it and then she can sell it to someone else. I been down there in those freight warehouses. They can do some funny stuff down there."
"So?" asked Morris.
"So we find out from Charles what the hell she just told him. We watch the place and get her right as she comes out."
Charlie's phone rang again. Tony answered it. "Yes, sweetheart, he's still here. He's fine. Now, when you get the bill of lading, I don't want you to call this number, I want you to call this other one." He read from a piece of paper. "That one. Then we'll work out the pickup. Don't try any of your little tricks, either." He hung up. "This is my backup. She calls that number, Peck's guys have her location in under ten seconds, even if it's a cell phone. Then they call us, and we go and they try to keep her on the line." He leaned forward and put his hand on the epidural drip, pinching the tube experimentally. "That's our backup if Charles here doesn't do something nice for us now."
Morris turned to Charlie. "You going to tell us?"
"What?"
"The name of the guy that's selling the cameras."
"I don't know it." They wanted the location, he understood. "She just gave me the phone number."
"What's the number, then?"
He looked at his scribbled piece of paper and stiffened. "She told me to cross it out."
Tony and Morris looked at each other in silence. Then Morris shook his head in disgust. "This girl is slick."
Now I'm expendable, Charlie realized. They can kill me right now and they lose nothing.
"No disrespect, Tony," said Morris, "but your backup plan won't work if she doesn't call that other number."
"She'll call it," Tony said. "If she wants her mother to be-"
"Wait," Morris said.
"What?" asked Tony.
"He remembers the fucking number!" said Morris, eager now, pointing at Charlie. "Look at him!"
He didn't-not for the life of him did he remember the number. But if he pretended to remember it, he realized with sudden clarity, then they'd torture him for it, they'd keep him alive. Maybe long enough to get out of this, go kiss Ellie.
"He knows the number," Morris yelled, lips wet. "I can see it in his face!"
"He's protecting her," said Tommy.
"You shouldn't do that," warned Morris. "Why would you do that?"
"Why anything?" Charlie said.
"Is that your explanation?" screamed Morris. "Is that all you can say?"
He took a deep breath. What could they do to him in a few hours? He'd lasted three months in the hands of the North Vietnamese.
"You going to tell us?"
"No."
Morris looked disbelievingly at the other men, happy to be insulted, then back at Charlie. "You understand that I have exposed your spinal nerve back here?"
"I understand that," Charlie answered. "I understand the whole situation."
Now Tony rose out of his chair slowly, like a man being called to dinner, and stepped forward, concern in his eyes. "Tell us the phone number, Mr. Ravich. It'd be better, you know?"
"I can't," Charlie said.
"You're saying we have to torture it out of you?" asked Tony.
Every minute longer that I live, Charlie thought, gives me a chance for another. He turned his head as far as he could and looked Morris in the eye, confident of his hatred for the man. "I'm saying that, yes."
Morris nodded coldly. "Then it's showtime," he said.
He yanked the needle out of Charlie's back.
He felt nothing. No one spoke. Morris checked his watch. Still nothing. I'm okay, thought Charlie.
Then, flaming up his spine, came a red ganglion of pain that frayed outward in searing, incomprehensible complexity-and when he arched his back in shocked torment, the pulsing hot bud at the base of his spine bloomed again while simultaneously reappearing within itself, detonation within florid detonation. "Oh, God," he screamed, "God, God, God."
The men held him down and Morris took a pair of pliers from the toolbox. He ripped something from Charlie's spinal column. The pain became hallucinatory-icy worms writhed in one foot, his anus spasmed. "Jesus," he screamed. "Jesus, please!"
Someone grabbed his hand. He opened his eyes.
Morris, smiling at the great good humor of life, pressed a bloody steel screw into Charlie's quivering palm. "Bone atrophy," he explained. "This was getting loose."
"Oh, please," Charlie cried hoarsely. "Just let me call my wife." He dropped the screw and fell flat upon the table, the pain sparking and crackling brightly. "Just give me the phone… and let me-" But the pain rode up his back again, like the wheel of a freight car, and he had to tuck into himself, let it go past. I can ride this, he thought, I know I can. He noticed Morris examining a steel clamp. I'm stronger than they are, Ellie, don't worry. I've done this before. Now his back jerked in convulsions, the nerves and muscles confused, red lights popping before his eyes. They can't kill me, sweetie, I promise. He was going to hold and hold and hold. Stay conscious. It's fine, Ellie! Tell Julia. Tell Ben.