Afterburn

by Colin Harrison

  "At the top, sixteen."

  "How many women?"

  "Two or three, depending."

  "Christina was the only one who went down?" asked Paul.

  "Yeah."

  "But there were a couple of other women around."

  "They didn't do as much. They just helped with the little stuff."

  "No, but apparently they're still active. Anyway, according to the original complaint, they had about eleven of your crew under surveillance and only made ID on five or six. The rest are what they call 'lost subjects.' They never got names on them. Two were women. Peck decided he could switch Christina for one of them. Just say it wasn't Christina who was in the truck but one of the female lost subjects. Somebody who he'd subsequently come across."

  Rick didn't even remember the names of the other women. Patty someone. Girlfriends of the guys. He'd always tried not to know too much.

  "The beauty of it is that he is sure the lost subject was around," Paul went on, shaking his head in the dark of the car. "No. That's not the real beauty of it. The real beauty of it is that it makes Peck look like a good guy! So honest that he's willing to lose an old collar that no one would have hassled him about. Also, it helps if the old lost subject has been maybe arrested since then, been hanging out with fuck-ups, whatever. See, the original prosecutors go back and say to themselves, The undercover cop says the real suspect is one slummy chick who's still being watched by Narcotics, somebody who is not exactly an upstanding citizen of the City of New York, and then you've got Christina, never been in prison before, never arrested, was a good student at Columbia before she got mixed up with the bad people, especially that fucking mope Rick Bocca, who they never nailed, and she had a perfect prison record, and that gets into the head of the prosecutor. It eats at him. He has to do something about it. He thinks about it all the time, he talks to his wife about it. He feels guilty, he thinks maybe they were trying to get at you by putting her away. See, these guys have a lot of power. If they really think somebody is innocent, they can get them out in a few days."

  "I didn't know that."

  "It's true. I checked that out with two different people downtown. All the prosecutors have to do is get the motion before the judge. It happens so rarely that the judge is always going to say yes. The judge knows these guys work their asses off to get convictions and aren't going to switch one unless they are really sure the person is innocent."

  "So, boom, Christina is out, Tony gets to find her, and then he serves up some people to Peck. Pays him back?"

  "That's the way it was explained to me."

  "Who are these people?" Rick asked anxiously.

  "I don't know. I couldn't get that."

  "Why did Peck come visit me, then?"

  "I don't know. I have theories."

  "He wanted me to come back into the city, do something stupid, and then he could get me."

  "Maybe," Paul agreed. "If that's true, then he would feel much better about letting Christina out. He gets her out, throws you in, then he's basically traded up."

  "Or," Rick worried aloud, "he plans to fuck over Tony by getting me on something and then getting me to say everything I know about Tony. Give him all kinds of stuff."

  "Maybe he thinks you'll be so grateful to him for giving you a chance to help Christina that you'll give up Tony."

  Rick rubbed his eyes. A web of maybes. Most of them too complicated. He'd learned that if a plan had too many twists and turns it usually broke down.

  "Or maybe you were one of the people that Tony promised to Peck," whispered Paul. "Ever think of that?"

  "You're saying that Tony is going to give him old stuff on me? He's trading me into prison to get Christina out?"

  "I think it's possible."

  "Fuck that."

  "But if he said that, then he was lying to Peck. He might tell Peck that he could arrest you and everything, but no way Tony is really going to let that happen, not if he's smart. If he's smart, then he gets ahold of Christina before Peck gets ahold of you, and then, once he has her helping him, he grabs you and sends you somewhere."

  "Somewhere I won't come back from."

  "It's just a theory. Maybe Tony has promised Peck other people. But I don't know why else you would have been pulled in."

  "How did you get all of this?"

  "I talked to some people who had different pieces, little bits of information. I hasten to add that I could be wrong, Rick, in part or in whole."

  "No, I think you got it nailed down."

  Paul was silent. "I've done all I can do here, I think."

  "Yeah. I mean, hey."

  Paul wasn't looking at him now. "Rick, I'm trying to say I don't have sufficient influence in this situation."

  "I understand that, Paulie, I do. You did a hell of a lot."

  Paul pulled an envelope out of his coat.

  "No, no, Paulie, I got plenty of money."

  "Open it."

  Rick took the envelope. Inside was a new passport—his passport, with an old photo, a plane ticket to Vancouver, a reservation at a hotel there, an American Express gold card in Rick's name, and five thousand in blank traveler's checks.

  "The card bills to me. Use it for anything you need."

  "Oh, Paul, man."

  His older brother turned to him. "I did everything I could, Rick. I had to be sure I did everything I could." His voice broke. "I can't go see Dad on Sunday and be thinking I didn't do enough."

  Rick opened his door. The ferry would soon leave.

  "Take the plane," said Paul. "I'm not just asking you."

  "What do you know?"

  "I told you everything."

  Rick looked at his brother. "You know something that makes you scared."

  "Yes! Of course I do, you asshole!" Paul pounded the steering wheel. "You!" he whispered savagely. "I know you, Rick."

  | Go to Contents |

  Jim-Jack Bar & Restaurant

  Broadway and Bleecker, Manhattan

  September 15, 1999

  HIRING, announced a sign on the glass door when Christina stepped out of the hot morning sunlight into the restaurant's smoky coolness to call her mother. She liked the way she could sit up at the end of the curved mahogany bar and lean against the wall while using the pay phone. The clever ease of it comforted her, and she could use a little comfort; that morning she'd woken to the sound of someone moaning down the hall, and not yet opening her eyes, she had despaired at what awaited her—the futile passage of the hours, Mazy talking too much, the unmopped floors of the nursery—a day dead before it was done. Then, rolling in her sweaty sheets, she'd seen the boxes of papers that Melissa Williams had left behind, the clothes hanging sparsely in the closet. Her new broom, a bag of apples. Was this real? The soft roar of the city seeped in through the open window. She rolled over. Below the window a shirtless man pinched up a cigarette from the gutter with the exactitude of a jeweler tweezering a diamond. If a dream, this was so ingenious as to be real, and if reality, it was yet so elusive as to be a dream. She was out of prison. She was in a bed in some room, just a crummy room, hers for now, a little creepy with the electric meter hanging from the ceiling, a room where people had probably died, or worse, whatever that was, and suddenly she wished to be somewhere that felt familiar, a place where people were around, if only strangers who knew nothing of her, and the Jim-Jack was the only spot she could think of, having stopped in there a few times already, each time having liked the joint for its ordinary coming-and goingness, its big window on Broadway. A rare smoking restaurant, and popular as such, it attracted a mix of locals, NYU students, European tourists, sailors on leave, small-time businessmen, retirees meeting for lunch, and solitary souls who ordered coffee and sat next to the windows dreaming impossible dreams while watching the action outside, which included tasty office girls (who were selling, but not for cheap), slick guys with new haircuts (who greased their eyes over the office girls), shell-game operators and their lookouts (who hoped to scam the slick guys
good), and the dollar hot-dog place across the street (which, selling greasy, good-tasting food for cheap, scammed no one), the cabs meanwhile flowing and halting, then going and stopping, darting in front of the heavy trucks, which were themselves often gripped at the rear by a bicycle messenger catching a lift through the banners of sunlight that unfurled down the façades of the buildings along Broadway, turn-of-the-century structures of iron and brick, some ornate, others plain, but each having ingested and housed and expelled all manner of enterprise. She loved the repainted exhaustion of the buildings and wondered how long the Jim-Jack had existed. The long bar fit the room perfectly, which meant it probably had been built there from the first, and its ample depth and ridged lip suggested the time when men sat up on stools with their hats pushed back and ate lunch with a stein of beer, hard-boiled eggs in a dish, dill pickles served with everything you ordered. Cuffed pants, Rita Hayworth making eyes at America, the Germans are going to invade Poland, and FDR already has deep circles under his eyes. Now it was brain implants and Alaska is melting. She noticed the Jim-Jack used Mexican busboys. As for the waitresses, the management apparently hired only white women in their twenties—not men, not blacks, not older women. A further refinement was administered: The waitresses, though somewhat attractive, were never to be confused with the cheekbone girls modeling pumpkin soup and radicchio at other restaurants in the Village, which was to say that the Jim-Jack waitresses were not so attractive that they might soon be on their way elsewhere, so perky and lipsticky hot that the management had problems with the late-night crowd making endless drunken passes. No, she thought, watching from the bar, the owner of the Jim-Jack wanted to get the business in and then briskly out, and the girls slinging food to the tables looked like they'd learned much earlier to work dutifully for whatever money they could. No doubt the manager sometimes broke her own rule and hired a girl who was too pretty, who sooner or later ran into trouble; the businessmen floated cloud upon cloud of witty small talk and did not vacate their tables fast enough, feverish lovers showed up and made a scene, or drunken boys flirted with them—successfully. A smile, a phone number, a good time.

  Maybe I could work here, Christina thought. But I might actually be too pretty. She took a napkin from the bar and wiped off her lipstick, flipped the napkin over, and smoothed away the eye shadow she'd so carefully put on an hour before. She found a rubber band in her bag and pulled her dark hair up, hiding it. That would probably do the trick. A regular girl, she thought, I look like some regular girl who just happened to walk in.

  But first she needed to try her mother again. It was the only number she knew by heart, and even though she hadn't been to Florida for years, she imagined the two phones ringing in the little bungalow on the Gulf Coast, the one on the kitchen wall and the pink one in her mother's bedroom, where everything else was pink, too—the curtains, the carpeting, the flamingo-print bedspread, the soft sheets and satiny pillows—entering the room, one seemed to enter something else, too, which, knowing her mother's fondness for gentlemen callers, was a frequent and nearly simultaneous occurrence. But it makes her happy, decided Christina; it makes her happy and she's a widow and doesn't have much money and her only daughter is no help to her, so let her have her pink wallpaper and anything else the poor lonely woman wants. She probably wished to escape the old photos, the work boots, the hand tools. She loved Dad so much, Christina thought, I don't know how she can stand it. His clothes probably still hung in the closet. And in the garage, the old sky-blue Mustang sat on blocks, its backseat piled with boxes. She assumed. She'd worried the question every day for four years, since the moment she was arrested. Mom will leave the car there forever, she told herself, let the tires go flat, let mice eat up the bucket seats. The garage stood behind the bungalow, trumpet vine and bougainvillea overrunning both buildings and hiding the termite damage and dry rot. Her father had hit the trifecta with ten identical win tickets at Brandywine Raceway twenty years back and, in an infrequent moment of foresight, purchased the property but not really fixed it up over the years on trips south from Philadelphia. A week after Christina was arrested, her parents moved down there permanently, dragging the Mustang and her mother's antique doll collection and God knew what else with them, and her sweet father, who had labored thirty years fixing Philadelphia's subway cars, finally rising to chief assistant engineer, was supposed to rest there in the sun—supposed to sweat out the grease and solvents and carbon dust. It was in his hands and lungs and skin. Instead, he'd died, sickening so quickly that he had never taken the boxes and other junk out of the Mustang, her mother had written, and Christina had tried not to wonder if she'd killed him with her arrest.

  Now, for the fourth time in as many days, her mother's answering machine came on: "If you're calling at a decent hour, then I am somewhere else and will call you back. If you are calling at an indecent hour, then I may be indecently busy, sugar." Christina hung up. Maybe she could be amused by the message. Maybe, but actually not. Who was this message for? No one as good as her father. Florida was full of old tomato cans, men with a dent in them, a lot of rust, the label long worn off. Long-distance truck drivers, retired guys sneaking around. She hoped that they didn't start poking too close to the Mustang. Where was her mother? Sometimes she went next door, to Mrs. Mehta's, an Indian woman who kept bonsai trees, just to chat. Tea and cookies and the mailman is late today. But it wasn't even ten in the morning yet. Her mother could be anywhere, anywhere and nowhere. She liked to take trips with men who had the time but not the explanation. Who knew the major highways of the West. Who'd smoked disastrous mountains of cigarettes, whose clothes were as wrinkled as their necks. Who didn't read newspapers anymore and kept their money in a wallet on a chain. Her mother could be away with them for a week or two at a time. Even a month—fishing, driving, rodeos, more driving. Sex in the motel room, love me tender, love me true. Her mother, she bet, knew how to pick them.

  She caught the eye of the bartender, a blond woman with eight or nine rings in each ear, and asked for change. The bartender returned with a handful of quarters. "This place really hiring?" asked Christina.

  The bartender nodded. "We lost two girls yesterday."

  "I'd like to apply."

  "I'll get the manager when you're done."

  She called her mother back and after the message said, "Mom, it's me. I've been trying to call you, but haven't left a message. Things have changed. I'm out. I got out." Why did she want to cry? "I'll tell you about it when I talk to you. I just wanted you to know that I miss you, Mom. Been thinking about you."

  As she hung up, the manager came out of the swinging kitchen doors, wiping her hand on a cloth, shirt damp from oven heat, eyes tired. "You ever work as a waitress?" she asked.

  Christina nodded. "Upstate."

  The woman looked skeptical. "Where upstate?"

  "About an hour north of the city, big place."

  The woman watched a busboy clear a table. "What was the place called?"

  "Dep's."

  "Dep's?" A name strange enough to be true. "Can you bartend?"

  People always answered yes, to get the higher tips and steal from the register. "No," Christina said.

  "Ice," the woman instructed one of the busboys. She turned back to Christina. "How are you with adding up numbers?"

  "Try me."

  The woman started to write down a series of numbers.

  "No, I mean just say some."

  The woman pulled out a completed tab from her ordering pad. "Just say them?"

  "Yes."

  "Six dollars, $2.75, $4.75, and $3.75."

  Her eyes went unfocused; she saw numbers in a column, including the answer. Her father had discovered this ability in her when she was seven. "With the sales tax that's $18.72."

  The woman frowned, as if Christina had read the numbers upside down, and flipped over a sheet. "Six-forty, $8.80, two times one dollar, $3.15."

  "Okay—with tax, $22.08."

  The manager looked at her. "I'v
e seen girls who have all the taxes memorized, but never anybody who could add like that."

  "I always liked numbers. I get it from my dad."

  "Right." The manager watched a waitress refill the Bunn-o-Matic coffee machine. "Ever steal, do drugs?"

  "No."

  "Ever arrested? Mental illness problems?"

  "No."

  The manager silently inspected Christina, her face and hair and eyes and hands. Not too pretty. "Okay, we'll try you out for three days. If you do okay, you can stay. If you screw up, then that's it, you're gone. Now tell me your name so I can put it on the schedule."

  "Melissa," Christina said, "Melissa Williams."

  "Tips are split each shift, checks are every other Friday," said the manager. "Okay?"

  "Sure." She'd sign the bogus paycheck over to herself, then cash it at one of the check-cashing operations.

  "You start tomorrow, Melissa, lunch shift. We'll see how you do."

  SHE STILL NEEDED ANY MONEY SHE COULD GET—the five hundred she'd taken from the pretty boy was going fast. The secondhand clothing shop opened at noon, and she guessed the owner would like the shirts she'd stolen. With five or six shifts at the Jim-Jack, a few fresh vegetables, and a couple of books from the Strand every week, she could cope. I'm going to lay low, she told herself. Be the girl with no name. If I run, they'll know I did it. If I stay put a couple of months, then maybe I didn't. I can maintain that discipline. If anybody is watching, they'll see I'm living on quarters and dimes here. My room is cheap, my clothes are cheap, my job is cheap. My men will probably be cheap.

  She floated home through drifts of street vendors' incense, past the Pakistani cabbies pulled up on Bond Street for an off-duty smoke, the black guys peddling dance tapes, the man leaning against the layers of movie posters selling stolen smoke detectors, past the young, first-time lesbians with hiked-up men's underwear, and all the other moodsters, self-talkers, and never-did-never-wills, each mere smudges of light and flesh and color against the city geologic, the marble and copper and brick, the cornices and doorways, windows and steps. A hundred thousand people have lived on my street, she thought as she slipped her key into the door to her blue apartment building, thousands have walked up these exact stairs, maybe a hundred have stayed in my room, a few dozen slept in my bed. Talked and dreamed, remembered and forgotten. When I die, my space will be filled right away, others will sit in the subway seat, wear the shoes I would have worn, bite the apple I would have bitten. Like I was never there. It does not matter that I've gone to prison, or that my mother was a shitty mother and I love her anyway, or that Rick should have gone to prison, too, it simply does not matter.