Afterburn: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

  Not well enough, he thought bitterly, not well enough to know that after thirty-eight years of marriage I am erecting a gigantic lie that obliterates your tiny Vista del Muerte fib, I am resisting your kindly management of me, my dear wife, I will not be taken that way, I will not be shot out of the sky like that, not without my own secret consolation.

  AFTER ELLIE HAD TAKEN HER SLEEPING PILLS (how many? more than usual?), he tightened his tie and washed his face. Impossible to sleep; he wanted to be in Shanghai now, hollering at Anderson to get the factory started again. Ellie didn’t understand the urgency, or if she did, she didn’t care. Teknetrix was an ugly beast to her, a thing that ate at Charlie when he could be playing golf or traveling. It depressed her, in fact, that he still cared so much about the company. She’s trying to pull me out of it, he thought, watching her make soft humming noises to herself as she waited for the pills to plow her under. At times he found the sounds endearing, as if she were trying to keep up her side of a conversation while desperately tired, and other times her utterances seemed to represent her inability to retreat from the endless obsessive conversation with her set of friends. Talking, always talking, discussing each event and disaster and intrigue and tragedy, maintaining the soapless opera over the phone and tea and lunches at their favorite Japanese restaurant, weaving the talk in a relentlessly female way, the men in their lives—for he had overheard Ellie on the phone—reduced to gray-haired boys whose enthusiasms and preferences were indulged but of no interest compared to other topics, such as mothers, daughters, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, nieces, and babies. The older he became, the more convinced he was of the absolute, unresolvable differences between men and women. Yet how strange and frustrating that he understood Ellie better than ever, and she him. They knew each other so well that they no longer spoke really but communicated by the exchange of symbols, each dense with meaning. Teknetrix. Apartment. Bed. Pills. Friends. Office. Daughter. Air Force. Breakfast. House. Penis. Funerals.

  I’m tied up here, he thought, trapped in this apartment, in Ellie’s head, in Ming’s cleverness. He needed movement, action, he needed to escape to Shanghai, zap the factory back on schedule, get the R&D guys to hammer out a manufacturing protocol for the Q4, flash the company forward. Fire up the sales department, send out a bunch of press releases, talk up the sector analysts. Announce a new product line, pop up the stock price. He’d lay it all out in a meeting of the senior staff the next day, then boom off to China, boom home. Burn, baby, burn.

  In the kitchen he left Ellie a short note—Out for walk, couldn’t sleep, back soon, have the phone—on the odd chance that she woke up. She wouldn’t, though, not gobbling pills like that. He summoned the elevator in the foyer and listened to it grind softly upward. The door opened.

  “Evening, Mr. Ravich,” said Lionel, an old candle of a man, the shoulders of his uniform snowy with dandruff.

  “Evening,” Charlie answered. “Couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d take a walk.”

  Lionel nodded, the soul of discretion. Saw everybody—happy couples who argued, children who punched their mothers, afternoon visitors who left with wet hair, dowagers who forgot their teeth—but noticed no one. Was paid well for it, too. They descended in silence. In the lobby the night doorman, whom Charlie rarely saw, lifted two fingers and gave a soft nod as Charlie passed. On the case here, sir. They’d seen your exit. If the police came by and wanted to know if you were in or out, they could give an answer. Mr. Ravich—he left a few minutes after eleven, sir. If Mrs. Ravich called downstairs, they could give an answer. What happened after Charlie left was another matter. It wasn’t on their tab.

  I need a drink, he thought as he passed from the air conditioning into the warm night, a drink that will knock the top of my head off so that I can sleep. He turned left at the corner of Fifth Avenue, made his way south under the trees toward the Pierre. He’d just ease in there and see if the bartender who made the good gin and tonics was on duty. An old guy dressed like an admiral. Nice appetizers, too. Maybe a piece of cake. He’d taken his father there once, and the old man couldn’t quite handle a cup of potato soup, couldn’t keep from spilling on his shirt. The bar wasn’t usually very crowded. Not enough foot traffic, no restaurants nearby, younger people intimidated by the gold leaf and face-lifts. On a Monday night, the place would be quiet, and he could sit down with the phone and beat up Anderson.

  A MINUTE LATER, he nodded at the doorman in top hat and white gloves and stepped inside, back into coolness. A bank of pillowy chairs led inexorably to the bar itself. Sleepy businessmen and a couple of racquet-club types with their Greenwich wives sat listening to the singer at the piano moan of love lost. A few unattached women with shiny little purses sat at the bar. The piano player turned a page of music. The hour was late, the lighting subdued, the mood narcotic. Nothing happening, Charlie muttered to himself, safest place in the world.

  BAR, PIERRE HOTEL

  SIXTY-FIRST STREET AND FIFTH AVENUE, MANHATTAN

  SEPTEMBER 20, 1999

  THE NIGHT WAS STILL TOO WARM and she heard piano music outside the hotel bar and the doorman in the maroon uniform and gray top hat smiled at her, and this seemed reason enough to drift in through the doorway, as she had drifted into two or three places already that evening, the Carlyle, the Mark, the Plaza, a bit of chat with whoever was there, accepting a drink and a cigarette and a business card but soon to move on, letting the cards flutter out of her hand, soon to slip into the next place, that place, this place, the Pierre. The men looked affable and distracted, the women appeared to be wives or trouble. A couple of tall blondes floated through, dressed rather too well. Several of the men studied her as if she might be someone they didn’t yet know. She shimmied down into an overstuffed chair and asked the waiter to bring her a Campari, and while she sat listening to the piano, she overheard the dignified older businessman next to her talking into his phone.

  “You just fucking point out,” he was saying in a soft, graveled voice, “that we are contracted to pay one hundred and seventy thousand a month for the factory, sixty thousand a month for the dormitory and related structures, plus a municipal tax of eight dollars per employee per month, which at six thousand employees is forty-eight thousand a month. That’s before I’ve pulled a dime of profit out of there. I’m already on the hook for ninety thousand a month in ferrite cores from Hong Kong.” He was tall and rather slender for a man his age, face scissored narrow by time, his nose large and sharp. He shifted the phone to his left hand, which, she saw, was notable not just for its wedding ring but for the large navel-like scar stretched across it, as if it had been punctured by a spike. “When I was there a few weeks ago, everyone was very happy to see me, too, full of promises. Now this?” He sipped his drink while listening irritably, she saw, unhappy with the answer in his ear. “I know the municipal authority can speed this up. They just need to order the scaffolding company to put more men on—What? No? It’s China! It’s still a police state! They can do anything they want! This is just the kind of foreign plant the Chinese need right now. They need jobs, they need foreign currency … No, Mr. Anderson, you are the expediter here. Take them out to—set up the meeting so that … No, no, goddammit!” The man glanced up, ferocious blue eyes passing over her. He blinked in frustration. “The Hong Kong—Chinese will not get drunk with you but the Chinese-Chinese will … I am very upset about this. You need to hit this one out of the … I’ll be there Friday afternoon. Yes, call me then. Fine. Right.”

  He hung up and signaled to the waiter for another. Then he noticed Christina. “Excuse me. I guess I was speaking rather loudly.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a problem.”

  “Trying to get a factory built in China.” He eased back into his chair. “And somebody is screwing things up.”

  “You know who?”

  “It could be a lot of people.” He thought a moment further. “It involves money. Somebody wants more.”

  He could be talking about Tony Verducci, she tho
ught. “And in this case?”

  “In this case, well—I might bore you.”

  She lit a cigarette, blew the first puff high. “Not a bit.”

  He looked at her, didn’t smile. “I’m Charlie,” he said, “Charlie Ravich.” He gave her his right hand. It felt large and dry and strong.

  “Melissa,” Christina responded. “Melissa Williams.” Don’t ask about his hand, she thought. “You were going to tell me about this factory that is costing you three hundred and sixty-eight thousand a month.”

  His eyes widened. “Is that what it is? Adding it up?”

  “I overheard your numbers,” she explained.

  “We’re building it in Shanghai. Big project. Six thousand workers.”

  “What will it make?”

  “Electrical components. Tiny, the size of a quarter. About four hundred thousand a day, once we get production rolling. We ship them directly to telecommunications manufacturers all over the world. AT&T, Lucent, Dallas Semiconductor, IBM.”

  “Do you use raw materials from China?”

  “No. None. We’ll ship in raw materials from all over the world. Ferrite cores, circuit boards, wire, solder, everything from outside. You have to do that to get good quality.”

  “Containerized loads?”

  He looked puzzled. “How do you know about container shipping?”

  “I don’t, really.” Well, yes, she knew quite a bit about container shipping, because much of what Rick used to steal from trucks arrived in containers being transshipped through the ports of Newark and Baltimore. Sometimes, if he was sure what was inside the sealed container, he took it right off the docks, using phony bills of lading. But she wasn’t about to explain this to Charlie. “So do you use air freight?” she said.

  He nodded. “We’ll ship it to a freight consolidator in Hong Kong, where they’ll send one load in a week and take one load of finished product out on the return trip.” He sipped his fresh drink, clearly finished with the description. “What do you do, Melissa?”

  “I work at a Web site design company,” Christina answered, wishing she were not lying yet feeling unable to tell him the truth. “But I’m mostly interested in history.”

  “Oh?” Charlie said. “What period?”

  “The turn of the century.”

  “The last turn of the century.” His eyes were thoughtful. “The next one will be here any minute.”

  “Very disorienting, too.”

  “Why do you say that?” he asked.

  “Things keep changing.” She shrugged at the selfapparent truth of this. “We don’t live in the same country we think we live in.”

  “Most young people don’t know that yet. I certainly didn’t when I was your age.”

  “I think there are four countries,” she told him.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You are born in one place and time, and then there’s the place you think you live, the place you do live, and then the future place, the place we always sort of imagine.”

  “Always receding, the future.”

  She nodded, watching him sip his drink. His face was sharp yet elegant.

  “When you get to be my age, Melissa, you think about the past at least as much as the future.”

  “When did the switch come?” she asked.

  Charlie seemed puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean what was the exact point—if there was one—that you began thinking more about the past than the future?”

  She saw him look down, his face dark. He exhaled, inspected his drink as if it had tricked him, and said, “When I saw my son die.” He bent his forehead into his big bony hand, and it was everything she could do not to reach out and put her arms around him. “Anyway,” he said, recovering himself, “it’s a rather good question.”

  “I’ m sorry.”

  “No, no. It was a useful question, in fact.”

  They sat awkwardly a moment. Don’t ask about the hand, she reminded herself.

  “This is a nice place,” she offered.

  “I like it,” Charlie said. “We keep a corporate account here.”

  “People come here for meetings?”

  “It gives us a place that’s more comfortable.” But he glanced around uncomfortably, as if someone might be watching him talk with her.

  “What happened?” she finally asked. She leaned over and touched his hand.

  “That?” Charlie said, letting her hold his finger. “Old story.”

  “I love stories.”

  He pressed the scar with his thumb. “I got shot by a guy with a machine gun. Went right through.”

  “Who?”

  “A United States Marine.”

  “Was he trying to kill you?”

  A laugh slipped from him, perhaps a long time coming. “He was trying to kill anyone he could find.”

  Don’t ask anything more, she told herself. This man Charlie had secrets, but he didn’t need to tell them to her. Ran smoothly, and at high speed. You could hear it in his voice. See it in his gold-and-onyx cuff links, the sexy wrinkles around his eyes. An executive. Crises and problems all the time. He dealt with things; he was functional and levelheaded. He didn’t blow hot and cold. Not a freak who took pictures of Q-tips. She liked him; she liked his scar and his thick gray hair and suit and blue eyes. And his nose like a knife. So what if he was married? Clearly he had a wife who did all the wife things. He hadn’t mentioned her and he never would. A man like this is not reckless, she told herself. He can act quickly, seize a situation, but he is not reckless.

  “Well, I’ve got a long day tomorrow, Melissa.”

  She held his eyes. “I’ve enjoyed talking with you, Charlie.”

  “My pleasure, too.” He settled the bill.

  “Do you come here sometimes?” she asked.

  He shook his head, laughed. “About once a year.”

  “So I need to wait a year to talk to you again?”

  He stared at her, then understood it. “Maybe you’ve got the wrong guy, Melissa.”

  She held his look. “Oh, I doubt it,” she said softly.

  “I’m”—he smiled—“old and married.”

  “I know,” she said, disappointed that he had to say it.

  “I just hoped we could talk sometime. Chat about the weather, maybe, or who’s in, who’s out.” She paused. “We could discuss the deep trends of the culture.”

  “The deep trends.”

  “I think it’s an interesting topic, don’t you?”

  He pulled his wallet from the breast pocket of his jacket and slipped out a business card.

  CHARLES RAVICH

  Chief Executive Officer

  TEKNETRIX

  NEW YORK CHICAGO SAN DIEGO

  SINGAPORE HONG KONG SHANGHAI PARIS

  “I’m going out of the country in a few days,” Charlie said.

  “Away awhile?” she asked, rubbing her glass.

  “Not long.”

  She examined the card. The reverse had several phone and fax numbers on it. She tucked the card in her purse. “China?”

  “Yes.” His blue eyes studied her, perhaps coldly.

  “You’re sizing me up.”

  “Yes.”

  She tilted her head, eyed him defiantly. “Well? How did I do?”

  He smiled broadly now. Wrinkles on a boy’s face. Handsome his whole life, she could see.

  “Come on, Charlie, tell me,” she teased. “I can take it.”

  He contemplated her, she saw, or maybe himself, blinking, pressing his lips tight, blinking again, an idea caught inside him. “Why don’t we meet here tomorrow for another drink?” he finally said. “Seven?”

  “You’re sure?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Sure.”

  “I’m not receiving charity—”

  “No.” He grinned.

  “—not trying your patience, Mr. Charlie, or treading on your good graces or taking unfair advantage or—”

  “No, no, and no.”
/>
  Her head felt light. “You see I can be a sassy bitch.”

  “It’s okay.”

  She chewed her drink straw. “You can handle it.”

  “Maybe I can’t.”

  “Probably you can.”

  He stood for the first time next to her and she was surprised at how tall he was. She liked this. They moved toward the door. He walked more slowly than she’d have expected, favoring a leg perhaps. Out on Fifth Avenue, under the shadows of the trees, he turned to say good night and she could see that he was a little confused about what to do or say, which she also liked. She leaned forward on her toes and kissed his cheek. I’m going to have to be aggressive, she thought.

  NEAR THIRTEENTH STREET AND TENTH AVENUE, MANHATTAN

  SEPTEMBER 21, 1999

  TO DO NOTHING is to do something. So say the Colombians, had said Tony Verducci, and now Rick was using the Colombians against Tony himself. He was doing nothing, and doing it very carefully, thank you. The truck sat in the garage across the street from his gym on Lafayette, parked not in the grease-pocked basement but on the grease-pocked second floor, all arrangements there made with a Russian guy who’d left a few teeth back in Moscow and just nodded when Rick explained his deal. Russian guys in New York saw the world in a certain way; they believed that the true path was the corrupt one. He parked parallel to the pigeon-smeared windows fronting the avenue so he could watch the street below or, alternatively, use the StairMaster in the front of the gym and check out who might be up on the second floor of the garage looking at his truck. Moreover, the gym—blending and synergizing its functions like any respectable up-to-date capitalistic enterprise—sold workout clothes, juices, protein-rich sandwiches, muscle-building candy bars, and powdered supplements with labels that said THESE STATEMENTS NOT EVALUATED BY THE FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION; Rick could exercise, watch the truck, shower, use a toilet, and buy lunch all in the same place. He didn’t really blend in with the yuppie kickboxers and the black guys with Chinese symbols tattooed down their arms, and the women in their sports bras huffing importantly on the chrome-plated treadmills, trying to pretend that they weren’t checking anyone out, especially black guys with Chinese symbols on their arms. He spoke with no one, instead pacing his way from one machine to the next, the towel around his neck, stepping past the worthies pedaling away on their exercise bicycles while touch-screening through the Internet. Overhead hung dozens of television screens, and nearly every day the gym hosted either a photo shoot or a movie scene. No one cared, not in New York. Entertainment merely provided a creation-consumption loop that hurried doom forward, and people earnestly wished to escape their awareness of the ironic nature of things. Sweating away their media saturation even as they watched the Dow flicker up and down, while outside summer finally gave way to fall. He missed his garden, his sunflowers bowing toward the earth, their season’s performance done, fat seeds dropping like tears. But that’s not where I am right now, Rick told himself as he curled a hundred-pound barbell in the mirror, I’m here, I’m getting myself ready. I’m pumping. Already the three or four hours a day were cutting the old edges back onto him. The swollen arms, the flaring back, the armored chest. He was eating with metabolic aggressiveness, too. Protein for muscle mass, stacked carbs for energy.