Afterburn (18 page)

Death, always tracking you. Took his mother and father, took his son, took all of Julia's embryos. Took Larry, his backseater. And Harold Cole, too. Perhaps no grandchildren was his punishment for all the killing he'd done. How many? Don't ask, don't tell. He knew the number. Added it up once, only once. They told you not to do it, but he'd looked back at all his post-flight reports and made a guess. A terrible thing to do—he was condemned to know the number forever. You could put that big number on the left and the number one on the right. One. One child. One more child. One more child, God. Forgive me. Ellie's right, I'm going to be old soon. Give me one more child. Correct the flow of time, God. Let me roll the dice again.

He drifted disconsolately through the dark apartment and glanced at the irregular mosaic of lighted windows in the other apartment buildings, rows of yellow rectangles, people inside them—sort of like airplanes at night, he thought—and, there, as he stood in the dark, that thought was what brought the lost dream rushing back to him, except that it had
not
been a dream, it had actually happened the previous night on the flight from Hong Kong. He had put his inflatable pillow around his neck when the cabin lights dimmed, slipped on his sleeping mask, kicked off his shoes, taken his little blue capsule, pushed the seat back, and fallen into a deep sleep. But then, a few hours later, he had woken suddenly, his pillow hot against his neck like a giant finger curling around it menacingly, the sleep mask a veil pressing against his open eyes. He had leaned forward in his seat, coldly aware, frightened even. Around him the other passengers slept. He stood, not quite knowing why, and in his socks walked slowly back along the plane, a wide-body 767, his back aching a bit, his hands skimming each seat rest, passing row upon row of sleeping passengers. Businessmen, teenagers, young wives and husbands, babies, retired couples, slouched and fallen and slumped against one another with unknowing intimacy, heavy, unmoving, as if—
dead
, they all looked dead, he'd thought, gliding silently along the aisle, the soft, open-mouth faces illuminated by the emergency exit signs. He slipped toward the galley at the back of the plane, expecting to see the stewardesses talking or doing their chores, or perhaps a few passengers waiting to use the bathrooms, but no one was there. The stewardesses had fallen asleep in their seats, heads tilted backward, faces still bright with makeup like mannequins, cheeks pink, lips red, hair pinned neatly back, but eyes closed and the cheeriness of them gone. He glanced up at the computer graphic on all the screens that cycled through indications of the plane's global position, the tailwind, the ground speed—609 mph, he remembered—and the estimated time of arrival. They would all get to New York the next day, having all been dead together if only a moment, which, of course, was a reversal of the true nature of things—that they were alive together only a moment, all time prior never possessed and all time following forever lost. Six hundred and nine mph, tailwind 58 mph, didn't seem that fast to Charlie, not fast at all, really, and not because he had flown more than twice as fast on many occasions. No, such a speed was nothing when you saw how fast time itself was flashing forward—mockingly, tauntingly, a piece of trick-mirror light jumping discontinuously in front of him, uncatchable. Six hundred miles an hour, by contrast, was
nothing
, a pitiful speed, standstill, virtually flowing
backward
; it could get you from Hong Kong to New York City in seventeen hours, but nowhere beyond that.

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215 East Fourth Street, Manhattan
September 9, 1999

THE DEP HAD LIED,
fluttering some cheap piece of paper like that. It was a trick; she hadn't been
released
, she had merely been
transferred
to Rikers Island—the same place she'd started her incarceration, the largest penal colony in the world, sitting upriver from Manhattan. A fortress of the lost, a vault of the doomed. A deck of criminal faces, shuffled every day. The women's facility, officially the Rose M. Singer Center, was known as Rosie's House or Lesbian Island. Many of the women, just arrested, were coming down off drugs or crying about their children. The ones who needed their hit vomited from time to time or sat rocking back and forth, sweating, weeping, chewing their bottom lips. She herself had uttered almost nothing to anybody, just let it be known in a dead voice that she'd put in four years in Bedford, where you go only for hard time. Think about that, girl, if you need to think about me. She had other things to worry about. The letter announcing her release was, upon reflection, the perfect ruse; after reading it, she hadn't protested her exit from Bedford Hills, or told anybody why she was going. But the Manhattan D.A.'s Office didn't just let people out of prison. Not unless something strange had happened. She had an idea why Tony Verducci might want her out, a very exact and particular and specific and singular idea, yes, but why the Manhattan D.A.? Not after they had interrogated her for two straight days, even threatening to involve her mother, and yet they'd gotten nothing out of her about Rick and Tony and the others, her refusal to cooperate prompting them to throw the book at her, sewing her into a conviction with professional dispatch. But if the Dep's letter had been a trick, why? What had she done? It couldn't be the business with Soft T, because the timing was wrong. The letter had been prepared before she'd even stalked into the Dep's office, and no one but Soft T knew what had happened prior to her arrival. The thing made no sense. She'd see if she could call her lawyer today, Mrs. Bertoli, her crooked and cheap and uninterested lawyer, to find out what was going on; the chances that she could get through, however, were slim to none. And if she did get through, Mrs. Bertoli would want to know how she was going to get paid, and that, of course, was a question with no answer.

The powdered eggs and watered orange juice that Rikers called breakfast would be served in an hour or so. Down the hallway women were talking, begging for cigarettes, arguing. She remembered the particular tone of their anxiety from her month-long stay the first time through. You were in prison, alone, and deeply freaked out. She herself had been a mess of headaches and urinary tract infections, grinding her teeth at night, suffering a bout of shingles. It wasn't until she reached Bedford Hills that she accepted the situation, actually believed it. With its settled population, its levels of prisoner status, Bedford Hills constituted a complete civilization compared to Rosie's House. Many women had lived there a decade or more. They had learned to make the best of it, to seek to improve themselves and the conditions of the prison. They exercised leadership and stability. It was not exactly a city on a hill, but it worked. You could live a bit while dying. It was hard to believe she was really back in Rikers, had fallen even lower. The thought was sickening. I am alone, she thought, I am alone and a prisoner of the great State of New York. I have to my name one garbage bag full of cheap clothes and three hundred and something dollars in an envelope that probably has been stolen by now. I am nowhere, I am nobody.

She lay in her bed going over who would want her out of prison and who would want her in. Rick wanted her out, of course. Her mother wanted her out. The Dep wanted her in. The detective who arrested her wanted her in. Tony Verducci? That was harder to figure. It depended what he knew about the last job. Had he figured out what had happened? Four long years had gone by, so perhaps not. He had once liked her a great deal, after word got around that she was doing Rick's planning for him. The message came to her a few months before her arrest that Tony Verducci wanted to meet with her, and Rick had said she didn't have any choice—when Tony wants to talk to you, you just show up. Of course, it was in Rick's interest to say this. So she'd spent the morning wondering what you wear to a job interview with a mobster, and finally had decided to look as young and stupid as possible. Make him think I'm just a dumb girl, she figured. She'd put on jeans and a tube top and slathered a high-school makeup job onto herself, hoping that Verducci would have second thoughts. His car had arrived for her in the Village and, not quite believing what she was doing, she'd darted out to the open door hoping no one had seen her. The driver's neck was covered with boils. She never saw his face, only heard him grunt an hour later when the car pulled through a gated driveway on Long Island. She was led inside by a tiny old Italian woman to a sun porch, where Tony Verducci sat in a floral shirt, wheezing quietly with an unlit cigar in his mouth and watching a cooking show with the sound turned off.

I just want you to listen to me, Christina, he'd said kindly, just listen to what I got to say before you answer. He stared at her, his jaw and bottom teeth pushed forward like the open drawer of a cash register. First of all, I know Rick is a fucking dope. I only keep him on because of his brother. We do a little business. But Rick ever bothers you, you let me know. If there's ever a problem, I want you to come to me. Okay? No? You don't know. All right, see, we like you. We think you could help us, could help us quite a bit. You don't look like you work for somebody like me. You look like somebody's girlfriend. Maybe that insults you, maybe it don't. That's not my problem. My problem is, I got a big operation to run. You with me so far? Now, as you know, I'm involved in a lot of different situations. Lot of—Wait, you want some iced tea? Get her some iced tea and some of those little cookies. The good ones. Okay, so Rick's older brother, Paul, does a little work for me, says he's met you, can tell you got special ability. Says you got a thing for numbers. Told me that trick you did on his boat. We need good people. We need
smart
people, not just goombahs who like to wear shiny shoes. We got plenty of those guys, big deal. I'm tired of those guys—they make mistakes it takes five years to fix. Also, lot of people talk too much. I notice you don't talk much. Like now. Okay, I want to explain a couple of our businesses. There's the tea, good. Get her a spoon. As you may know, we run a numbers operation. Betting. We compete with the lottery and casinos except we pay better odds. Instead of twenty million to one, maybe it's fifteen million. Also, you win with us, you get it in cash, don't have to tell nobody—the IRS, the husband, the church, heh, whatever. Casinos make you sign something. The basic deal in numbers betting is that a person bets on a three-digit number. This is a straight bet. Very simple. You can bet anywhere from a quarter to a dollar on up. Lot of people bet two, five, ten bucks. So that's a straight bet. You can also bet on one or two of the numbers. This is called single action and boleta.

The odds get a lot better with those simpler bets?

Yeah, it's really for the people who don't know anything. Think that seven is their lucky number, bet it every day. If they bet seven every day, then one out of every ten days, just about, they should win. But if they're putting in a dollar with every bet and getting only six back when they hit the number, then we're ahead four dollars. I mean, people are very stupid. They're born stupid and then they keep on living stupid. So you can also bet on all three numbers in any order. This is called the combination. The odds there are lower than the straight bet, too. Now then, we understand our profit margin as the difference between what we take in and what we pay out. We never pay true odds, would never make money that way. The other way we make money is, we will cut certain numbers. We lower the payoff on the numbers that everyone likes to bet. You get enough people betting, then you see large patterns, and for people in the numbers business, this is important. Let's say the Bulls are playing the Knicks, then we're going to get heavy betting on Michael Jordan's jersey number—that's number twenty-three—and if that number actually wins, then you're dead if you have to pay out. So we cut that number down. We got nervous about the number and so we cut it down. We limit the amount of a bet and the total wager. Over a certain amount, we just won't take the bet. Some guy wants to bet ten thousand bucks on number twenty-three, we won't take it, 'cause if he hits it, we're finished.

Now, we got two ways of betting. One is called New York, the other is called Brooklyn. The Brooklyn number is the last three digits, not including pennies, of the total handle of whichever thoroughbred racetrack is running that day. Aqueduct or Belmont. You get the handle from the newspaper. It's published the next day. If both tracks are closed, we use a Florida track. The New York number is more complicated. We have the New York number for people who want to get results the same day. They're addicted. They're used to casinos, the lottery, whatever, they want to know if they won. It's a sickness. They can't wait until the next day. So the New York number is for them. That number uses what we call the three-five-seven structure. It's really not very complicated. To get the first digit of the New York bet, you add all the win, place, and show payoffs for the first three races. The last digit, again forgetting about the pennies, is the first digit of the New York number. Get that? People will watch the television and see they got the first number on the New York right and then they go wild and start betting more. We used to close the betting before the first race, but now, with computers, we can keep the betting open until the end of the sixth race. So they see they got the first number right, they go wild. We murder them on the odds when they do that, too. Because the payoff goes up, so do the odds. So then we get the second digit by using the first five races. And then the third digit using the first seven races. People can follow that once they get used to it. They can listen to the radio and hear the numbers and add them up for themselves. They get to follow the action. They can also bet a single action or boleta on the New York number, too. We run these bets from a lot of places, grocery stores, pizza places, bodegas, hair parlors—we got a lot of spots. Even a hardware store in one case. We use a three-leaf slip of paper, so everyone has a copy. The guy who bets, the spot, and what we call a bank. It's just two guys in a little rented office with a computer and a secretary and a big basket of paper and a guard watching them both. We rotate the guards so nobody gets too friendly. All the paper is called the work. All the work comes to a bank. We run nine banks. Each is working maybe fifteen or twenty spots. We run a hundred and sixty-two spots, in fact. Maybe three thousand bucks a day from each spot. So the cash adds up fast. We're paying out about sixty-five percent of our handle. That leaves a very nice profit margin. We figure out the odds from all nine banks. We get good numbers that way. Some other operations, these fucking Russians maybe, run maybe one or two banks, but sooner or later they get creamed. Some guys hit them for a New York on a big number and they didn't have enough bets to keep the odds down. So we run nine banks. If we see a number is very heavily bet, we close betting on it. We used to edge off the bets to some of our friends in the business, see if they wanted to take the action away from us, but now we don't. It makes things too complicated, it puts you at their mercy. Maybe their office is fucking wired, maybe somebody figured the numbers out wrong, whatever. Little Gotti runs an operation, for example, always gets his numbers wrong. You used to be able to do it, but now you can't. Okay, so why's there a job open? We used to have a guy running the nine banks, but he had a little problem. His fingers got itchy and so they had to be cut off. I'm not joking. I don't joke about these things. I have children. I'm not going to go into it. We got all the money back, too, but it came out of his father's retirement. Fucking mongrel son. It's not my problem. We need someone smart enough to run the nine banks at the same time. Somebody who's got a feel for numbers, somebody who—