Afterburn: A Novel

by Colin Harrison

  Charlie sat next to Mr. Lo and accepted a cup of green tea. He looked around in disgust. The chairs were old and soiled, the room barely ventilated. Had Conroy been in the city, this never would have happened. The fact that he was even having the meeting at all testified to Tom Anderson’s youth and incompetence. This was a small company that had somehow ended up being the scaffolding subcontractor for the Teknetrix factory. For all he knew, they were in over their heads. Clearly they’d underestimated his status and he had overestimated theirs. Mr. Lo wore a suit, but also had rough hands; he was still out there on the job, his interaction with Western businessmen limited. I’m dealing with a low-level guy here, Charlie thought, the equivalent of a subcontractor from Queens. They’ve reverted to the traditional Chinese meeting because they don’t know how to do it any other way.

  A terrified young woman was introduced as the translator, and she sat next to Mr. Lo, who spoke in lengthy pronouncements at the far wall of the meeting room, where his three sons sat studying Charlie’s expression. Suddenly he was hearing more about the bamboo scaffolding business than he thought possible. How the bamboo was planted and grown and harvested, selected for its width and cut to ten-foot lengths and tied with thousands of little ribbons, the knots of which were secrets of the trade, passed from master to student. This won’t work, he thought to himself, it’s too decorous. I need a situation in which I can negotiate. They were feeling him out as much as he was them. The sons had prepared a slide-show presentation, and now Mr. Lo produced a laser-pointer from his pocket and made what were no doubt very interesting observations as the red pin light of the laser jerked across crisp color shots of Mr. Lo’s men erecting capacious scaffolding projects, Mr. Lo supervising same, Mr. Lo at the top of a twenty-story scaffold structure, Mr. Lo’s sons in hard hats conferring solemnly, the original Lo patriarch, bamboo wise man, a wizened figure in a traditional conical hat, Mr. Lo’s sons cutting lengths of plastic knotting twine …

  It was enough to make Charlie want to plunge Mr. Lo’s pointer into his eye. Tom Anderson squirmed unhappily, sensing Charlie’s irritation. He needed the expeditious solution, the move across the board, the air strike. I’ll be rude, Charlie thought. He looked at his watch. They didn’t notice. He bent his head, looked at his watch, and counted to fifteen slowly.

  Mr. Lo said something sharply. The slide show stopped.

  Charlie looked up. Mr. Lo smiled. The sons smiled. The tea-girl smiled.

  “Mr. Lo’s description,” Charlie announced authoritatively, filling the room with his voice, “of his family’s very distinguished … bamboo scaffolding company … has been most informative.” He nodded gravely at the translator. “Please tell him … I understand … what he is saying.”

  When Mr. Lo heard his name, his eyes creased with pleasure.

  “Please tell him … that I feel that my company … has not shown enough appreciation …” Charlie watched Mr. Lo blink. “For the history and importance … of his very distinguished company … and for the excellent management he provides.”

  The translator relayed the statement. Mr. Lo beamed.

  “Please tell Mr. Lo … that I would take it as a great and important honor … if he would be my private guest … for dinner tonight … at the Phoenix-Dragon restaurant … in the Peace Hotel.”

  The translator said, “Mr. Lo please to meet you. He say perhaps six o’clock is very good.”

  Charlie stood and shook hands.

  The translator added, “Mr. Lo asks if you are needing me to translate your dinner talking.”

  Charlie looked at Mr. Lo. “No,” he said softly, keeping his eyes on Lo. “Just the two of us.”

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK he was sitting on his hotel bed watching CNN’s football commentators hype the coming Sunday NFL games. How many touchdowns can a man watch? wondered Charlie. The phone rang. “Okay,” Towers began in a tired voice, “I’ve done what can be done in a day. No more, but certainly no less.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Melissa Williams is twenty-seven years old,” he began. “She lives on East Fourth Street. She works at Shark-ByteMediaNet, Inc. That’s what it’s called. This is a very successful design firm specializing in Internet Web sites. They have offices at Broadway and Prince. She has no criminal record, no outstanding liens or traffic tickets. Her New York driver’s license indicates that she wears corrective lenses. She has a perfect credit record.” Towers paused, presumably to consult his notes. “I estimate her income at thirty-eight thousand dollars a year, based on her credit record. People of her age and education tend to carry predictable percentages of income as consumer debt. Her social security number was issued in the State of Washington, and a national directory search for a name match suggests she once lived in Seattle. We ran an Internet search and found out that she graduated summa cum laude from Carleton College in Minnesota. That’s a good school.”

  “What else?” he asked. None of Tower’s information seemed very specific.

  “She’s never been married—in New York State, at least. She has an inactive bank account in Seattle, and an old car loan there co-signed by a John J. Williams. A professional directory search of the Seattle area reveals that there’s a fifty-two-year-old corporate lawyer named John J. Williams, who is probably her father. He’s locally prominent, owns a house on Bainbridge Island he bought three years ago for eight hundred and twenty thousand dollars. A family member, John Jr., probably a younger brother, has a record of minor drug and traffic offenses.” Towers took a breath. This is more like it, Charlie thought. “We have a confidential source in the Red Cross who says that Melissa Williams successfully donated blood earlier this year, which means she passed all of their screening tests for HIV, hepatitis, and so on. Our contact in the medical insurance information company that we consult with says she’s had routine medical check-ups and care for the last few years in New York. That’s what we’ve been able to find today.”

  “Pretty damn good,” Charlie said, standing to test his back. It felt warm, loose. “Reading between the lines?”

  “A good kid, I’d say. Clean-living, works, pays her bills, gets regular check-ups, comes from a stable family in a good part of the country. The younger brother is the screwup, not her. That’s my gut on this.”

  THE FUCKERS ALWAYS spoke more English than they let on. Mr. Lo’s blink at the word appreciation. He and Mr. Lo drank and ate silently, the sweat creeping down Charlie’s back as he considered how to do this. Not in the room, not in the restaurant, not next to the river walking along the Bund, where they could be followed or observed.

  “Let’s go outside,” Charlie suggested after he had signed the check. He checked his watch. Seven p.m., which meant Ellie was just waking up in Julia’s apartment.

  They took the elevator down without speaking, then passed through the revolving door. Charlie turned to Lo. “A taxi?”

  “No, no,” answered Lo. “You see.”

  They walked a block away from the hotel through the carbon-choked dusk. Motorcycle rickshaws puttered by. Lo looked at Charlie and he nodded. Lo signaled one of the rickshaws and said something to the driver. Then they got in, Charlie first, his greater weight sinking the threewheeled vehicle on his side. The rickshaw clattered forward through the bicycles and other traffic; exhaust fumes filled Charlie’s lungs. But, amazingly enough, sitting in the noisy, cramped space didn’t hurt his back. Mr. Lo pulled the curtain shut, and so it was just the two of them.

  “Okay,” Charlie said. “How much?”

  Lo pulled out a calculator. No one could overhear, no one could see. Nothing was on paper. Lo punched in the number 70,000.

  “Dollars?” Charlie said.

  Lo nodded.

  Charlie took the calculator and punched in 30,000.

  “No, no, no.” Lo waved his hand. “Much appreciation, okay?” He punched in 55,000.

  Charlie took the calculator, stared at the sum. Against what was being leveraged here—Teknetrix’s market capitalization, Ming’s $52 mi
llion, Ellie’s mental condition—the amount was infinitesimal. Gumball money. The rickshaw lurched back and forth. Lo’s face watched impassively. “I want the job done fast,” Charlie said finally. “You understand?”

  “Yes, number one.”

  “No fuck-ups.”

  “Yes.”

  “You understand the word fuck-ups?”

  “Fuck-ups. Fuck-ups.” Lo smiled. “Very bad.”

  “Yes. You are a strong man,” Charlie said.

  “I think you are very strong. Too much strong for me.”

  “No, no.” Give him face, Charlie thought. This is what he wants from the gweilo, along with the cash. “I pay you thirty thousand now and twenty-five thousand when the job is done. Six weeks.”

  “No, no.”

  “What, then?”

  Lo punched in 40,000. “Now. So we can do very number-one job.” Then he cleared the calculator and punched in 15,000. “Six weeks. U.S. dollar.”

  Charlie looked at Lo’s face. Old enough to have been a soldier thirty years prior. The Chinese military had helped North Vietnam with almost everything. Much scaffolding required, of course, ha-ha. He held out his hand. “Forty thousand U.S. now. Fifteen thousand in six weeks, when the job is done.”

  Lo shook his hand vigorously. “Yes, good.”

  Twenty envelopes rested in his coat pockets, each with five thousand dollars inside. The manager at the Peace Hotel had nodded at Charlie’s request for cash, and merely added the funds and a small fee to the hotel bill. Charlie pulled out eight of the envelopes and handed them to Lo. In the dimness, Lo glanced into each, counting the hundred-dollar bills with a brisk flicking of his fingers that suggested he’d handled quite a bit of yuan in his time. No one on the street could see, and the driver was busy in the noise of the traffic. “Good,” exclaimed Lo. “Six weeks. Job finished very good.”

  Charlie nodded.

  Lo slipped the envelopes into his coat and hollered at the driver, who pulled over. Without a backward look at Charlie, Lo leapt into the street, disappearing quickly into the crowds. A Chinese among Chinese. Impossible to follow, gone. The motorcycle rickshaw jolted forward into the chaos of traffic, and already it was so dark that the men squatting in the street repairing bicycle tires next to the filth that ran in the gutters did not see the American businessman jangling through Shanghai’s gloom. Okay, Ellie, he thought, I’m coming home, fast as I can.

  PIONEER HOTEL

  341 BROOME STREET, CHINATOWN, MANHATTAN

  SEPTEMBER 27, 1999

  SHE’D TOLD THEM her name was Bettina Bedford, but they didn’t care. They took her cash through the bulletproof Plexiglas and slid a key back to her. For five days she’d waited for a knock on the door, for Tony Verducci’s people to find her. Meanwhile, she’d studied her new cell.

  Every surface of the room was painted battleship gray. No windows, the smell of insecticide. The kind of place where the next place might be nowhere. Outside her door, ruined old men glided past, alert to her presence, uncertain of their opportunity. One poured a handful of pennies from palm to palm, another whistled a broken piece of a forgotten tune. Lingering footfalls and inappropriate smiles. Don’t talk to anyone, she reminded herself. Just lay low. She did some sit-ups out of boredom, she read the framed fire escape instructions on the back of the door. She looked for a broom in the closet, found only an empty red bucket with FIRE stenciled on the side. She made her bed, she listened to a man weeping in the next room, she flossed her teeth, she got her period, a relief to her, then washed her underwear in the tiny sink with a bar of soap. Killing time so they can’t kill me. Mostly she slept, and the more she slept, the more tired she felt. Once or twice she ventured outside long enough to buy a bag of food and the newspaper. She tried being interested in the editorials but felt too anxious to concentrate. I am nobody, she told herself, I am alone.

  After finding the photo of Rick, she’d hurriedly packed a bag, including the black dress, peeked out the front of her apartment building, seen no one, which meant nothing, since she’d seen no one before. At three in the morning it was hard to see who was sitting in the cars along the block. She’d needed to chance it and she had, running along the street until she came to the avenue and hailed a cab. She’d had the driver drop her at the Jim-Jack, where she knocked frantically on the door until the night porter heard her. She bribed him with twenty dollars to let her spend the rest of the night in the storeroom, where she fashioned a bed out of four fifty-pound bags of sugar and lay down, unable to sleep. The next morning, she quit, collected her back pay in cash, $93.56, and took another cab downtown.

  She had enough money to live three more days. Her other valuables included Rahul the Freak’s cell phone, which she hadn’t yet used, and Charlie’s business card. What’s my goal here? she asked herself. To reach my mother. But she didn’t know when her mother would be home. She needed money, soon. How safe was it to get another waitressing job? She hadn’t used her real name since leaving prison, and still Tony Verducci’s people had found her. She didn’t even have enough money for a one-way bus ticket to Florida. Plus, she didn’t know if her mother was home. And anyway, her mother’s bungalow would now be the first place Tony’s guys would look for her. They could be there already.

  I’m going crazy here, she thought. I can’t just sit around until I have no money. She found the photo of Rick in her bag and examined it again. He looked terrible, but there may have been a flicker of defiance in his face. That was the thing about Rick—he never gave up, never quit, even when he should have. But maybe they’d killed him. Maybe they thought he knew about the boxes she’d taken off the truck on the last job. But of course he didn’t: She’d never told him, she’d never told anyone. She looked at the photo one more time and shuddered at the wetness of the wound, at what it would feel like. If they did that to Rick, what would they do to her?

  I need Charlie. She just said it. She didn’t want to need him, or anybody, but there it was. He was kind and decent and she’d slept with him once and maybe that counted for something. He’d said he wanted to see her when he returned. If she could hold out until then, perhaps she could explain the situation, or part of it, enough so that he would feel for her. She’d ask him for a little money—a loan—so that she could get out of town for a while. He had more than enough. If it was a matter of sleeping with him again, she’d do it and not think anything of it. I like him, she told herself, I really do.

  In the meantime, perhaps she could sell Rahul the Freak’s cell phone. She’d thrown it in her bag, forgotten about it. She clicked it open, pushed a button. It worked, it was on. Maybe Rahul had not noticed that the phone was missing. Or he really had gone to Germany. Or didn’t care that she had it. Or was hoping she’d call him. It was much more difficult to trace a call from a cell phone than from a regular one, she knew. All you could get was the general location of the last call. She lay on the bed and listened to the dial tone. She called the weather. She called information. She called her mother. Again, no answer—but when the machine beeped, she had an idea and said, “Mom, I’m sorry to miss you again. I met a fantastic guy I want to talk to you about. I’m meeting him for lunch at one o’clock today at the restaurant in the SoHo Grand. That’s this really cool hotel downtown. I bought this great green dress. I’m kind of nervous and excited. I’ll call back after lunch and tell you how it went.”

  TWO HOURS LATER, wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap but not a green dress, she stood at the corner of West Broadway and Grand. The hotel was across the street and down the block. This is just a test, she narrated to herself, a test of the emergency phone-tapping system. If somebody was listening in to her mother’s line, maybe this would tell her. It didn’t have to be the police; probably wasn’t, even. Tony had a way of finding phone repairmen who liked to gamble. A big loan, a bad bet, and they lived in his pocket, performing favors.

  She pulled her cap down. If she knew Tony’s men, they would arrive ahead of time and lurk near the entrance. At a
quarter to one a rather nice Lincoln pulled up and two big guys in suits got out. She watched as one of them slipped the doorman some money and jerked his head toward the car. That could be them. Probably. The two men went inside.

  She strolled down the street, walked past the car, memorized its license number, picked up a pay phone on the corner, and dialed 911. When the emergency operator answered, she said, “There’s a blue Lincoln sedan parked in front of the SoHo Grand Hotel and some guys got something out of the trunk, and I happened to be standing there and I saw a bunch of automatic rifles.” She repeated the license number and heard the operator keying in her report. “Automatic weapons in a late-model blue Lincoln Town Car,” said Christina. “You should check it out.”

  She retreated to the café across the street and ordered lunch. In a few minutes a police car nudged up and parked next to the Lincoln, trapping it. Two cops got out, started to examine the car. The doorman, no doubt reconsidering his loyalties, jumped forward, motioned to the hotel. One of the cops said something into his radio. Christina stepped out of the café and drifted south, back to her hotel.

  HER TRICK with Tony intrigued her, and back in the crummy room she locked the door and wondered what she might do next. I assume he’s looking for me, she thought. I need time to maneuver. Even just a day or two, to figure something out. Perhaps there was a way to frustrate Tony or distract him. Put him off balance. She stood at the mirror, brushing her hair and thinking, and when she was done thinking, she picked up Rahul the Freak’s phone.

  Tony was unlisted on Long Island, which was no surprise. She called the Archdiocese of New York, said she was a long-lost cousin of Mrs. Tony Verducci and their aunt was dying, did the church office have a number? Needed to reach her urgently. They looked up Mrs. Verducci. No number, but here’s the address. She called up the local fire department, gave Tony’s address, and said she smelled gas, please come immediately. Next she dialed the main office of the region’s top three cement companies and asked the president’s name, saying she represented a new golf club in Locust Valley seeking to recruit members: May we send him an invitation? Got the three names. Next she called up one of the mob restaurants a few blocks away in Little Italy and made a reservation for each man. Said, Please bill it to Tony Verducci, and hung up. She didn’t know who was whose enemy but the restaurant’s manager would. Next she called the Staten Island offices of Paul Bocca, CPA. She was relaying a message from Tony, she said. The photos of your brother, Rick, came out great. Very sharp. Please call back right away. Wait, which number should we use? asked the secretary. Do you have the right home number? asked Christina. I don’t know, let me check. The secretary consulted her records and repeated a number, which Christina wrote down. One of Tony’s “public” numbers, probably. Yes, that’s right, she said.