“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 Pennsylvania 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 importers’ 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, yo
u 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 operation, 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 p
hone 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.”
Afterburn: A Novel Page 43