"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 . . .
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