Afterburn (40 page)

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
old 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 level-headed. 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.

"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.

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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 peddling 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.

Doing nothing was taking a lot of that energy, however. Christina wasn't just visiting the Jim-Jack but working there, he'd discovered, and at noon on the last two days he'd strolled to the corner of Bleecker and Broadway and hungrily bought lunch at the dollar-hot-dog place, where, if the sun was not too bright, he could look across the Broadway traffic and see her waiting on customers. Just a glance. Carrying the food, the bean burrito plate, the stir-fry vegetables, the Coke-no-ice. How he wanted to walk right in. Sit up at the bar, wait for her to come over to him. Hey, babe. She'd look away. If she bothered to look back, he'd just fall into her eyes. But it was a bad idea. They wouldn't be able to talk. He'd get only silence and its accusations. No, he needed to find a way to let her know that he was around. That he was different now. Maybe meet for dinner. Very civilized, dinner. The streets at night were full of people peering at menus in windows and then stepping in for the candlelight and salmon grown in a bucket. That appealed to him, and he thought it would appeal to Christina, too. They could talk about who they'd been in those years past, how things had gone bad. He'd take responsibility for everything, he'd apologize, he'd tell her he'd help her out with money, he'd be a fucking prince. Talk about his time out on the East End, the ocean, the barn, his garden, his romantic windblown cottage. And let's go to the SoHo Grand Hotel tonight.

But not yet. Instead, he would eat his hot dog and force himself to turn away. Then he'd take an hour to get back to the truck, making sure no one followed him—which was the other reason he had not yet stepped across the street into the Jim-Jack. He
was
being followed. Definitely. Not all the time, not even regularly, and not by the same person. Somebody a block behind him, matching his stride. You turn around and they're looking into a window. A man staring at a drugstore window. What's in a fucking drugstore window? You turn around and it's a woman messing in her purse. Women in New York don't look through their purses on the street. Or a taxi repainted green passing too slowly. He felt presences, disturbances in the field, just as he'd felt them five years ago, one time on Crosby Street below Houston, when he'd gotten a bad feeling, kicked the van into reverse, flown against traffic a block, hit the avenue, then abandoned the van and its full load of CD players next to the Grand Street subway stop, where he'd cooled a D train to Brooklyn and from there hopped one of the casino buses to Atlantic City. Won money there, too.

He'd left the truck in the new garage the whole time, keeping it locked, wedging matches in the cracks of the doors. The cops could open any kind of vehicle if they felt like it, especially an old truck, and Tony Verducci had a guy who did that, too. Regular job as a mechanic, but ran a twenty-four-hour beeper service, would open any car anytime so long as the money smiled. When Rick returned to the truck after the gym, he'd circle it, seeing if any of the matches had fallen out. He needed every advantage. Patterns, Paul had warned. He was trying to get inside a pattern that protected him. What was he waiting for? A good question. He was killing time, waiting for the bell to go off, waiting to
know
.

Then, on the third day, a windy and warm afternoon that fluttered the shoe-sale fliers out of the overflowing Broadway trash cans, he noticed Christina step out of the Jim-Jack. She slipped on a pair of sunglasses and a baseball cap. Even across the traffic he could feel her attitude. Oh, baby, kill me now, he told himself, get it over with. You didn't score a smile too often from Christina, but when you did and she held your gaze, then all manner of indecencies were proposed, approved, and scheduled. Her eyes said, It's just a matter of time, boy. Until then, why don't you keep your hand out of your pants? She carried a paper shopping bag from one of the big bookstore chains. Head down, she crossed at the light on the other side of the street and stalked past him in her jeans and thick-heeled boots. He remembered the bite of hot dog in his mouth and swallowed. Did she always move her butt like that? He watched the other men notice her. But he could also tell she didn't want to be bothered. She'd been on her feet for hours, drunk too much coffee, smoked too many cigarettes, wanted to get at her books. He eased out to the street, began to follow her. Now is the time, he told himself,
now
.

She walked briskly, cutting north on the Bowery two blocks, then east again on East Fourth Street. He followed from half a block away, his neck and armpits getting sweaty, darting in and out of the shadowed awnings of the bodegas and hardware shops and other marginal businesses along the avenues, then up and down and behind the stoops on the streets. A couple of junkies enjoying the sun inquired as to his propensity to invest in a shopping cart full of copper cable stolen from the subways. He waved them off. Nice neighborhood she lived in. Half the buildings looked ready to collapse. He glanced back anxiously and saw no one following. No cars easing down the street, no one trailing down the block behind him on either side. He continued after her. He considered running up to her, surprising her.
Christina, it's me, Rick
. He could almost do it. But she was thinking about good things. It was in her shoulders, her neck, the way she was making the hot wind catch her hair. Maybe Paul's wife is right, maybe she met somebody already, some guy giving her beef injections. Don't get mad about it, he told himself, be cool. Do the cool thing. She stopped and fished into her bag, went inside a blue apartment building. She's doing okay, he thought, she's got a place. He eased up the other side of the block, staying at an acute angle to the building so that if she had windows onto the street she couldn't see him.

He'd check the mailboxes. He stepped up to the building and cupped his hand against the glass of the front door. Not much: a long tiled hallway, dim, littered with giveaway newspapers and takeout restaurant menus, the lip of a stairwell protruding past the plane of the hallway. On the intercom, the apartments were tagged 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D, 2A, 2B, 2C, and so on. He inspected the name tags. Christina's was not there. But five of the apartments had no identification on them; although it was possible that she was living under someone else's name, hers was probably one of these unknown ones: 3A, 4C, 5D, 6C, 6D. And, he noticed, these were generally higher apartments, perhaps toward the rear, if the front apartments were A and B. He stepped back across the street and examined the building. Six floors, four windows across each floor. From the differences in curtains and window plants, he guessed that the four windows were split between two apartments. Two apartments front, two back. The front apartments were the more desirable, which meant that it was less likely that Christina was in one of them. The pattern of the absence of name tags corroborated this. The less desirable apartments would have a higher turnover rate, and therefore be more likely to be either unoccupied or so recently occupied that no one had put a name on the intercom yet or, last, occupied by the type of people who did not want their presence announced on the front of the building. Perhaps.