“You’ll have to do better than that, buster.”
“Alexandra—”
“I’ve done a little checking on her. She graduated summa cum laude from MIT. She’s a genius in math and a recognized systems designer. So little Janelle was no hooker you’d picked up. You’ve had something going on the side. For some time. YOU BASTARD! After all I’ve done for you! After all we’re supposed to mean to each other!”
“Alexandra—”
“She’s younger than I am. She’s a certifiable genius.”
“Alexandra—”
Her eyes were hard and unforgiving. She walked into the bedroom and came back with a snub-nosed revolver.
“NO!”
“You bastard! I did every thing I could for you and this is how you thank me!”
He struggled up and hobbled toward the door. “ALEXANDRA!” He tripped over his cane and fell.
And that may have saved his life. She fired a shot that passed above him and punched through the door of the apartment. He crawled. She fired again and missed him. That slug shattered a picture window and sent shards of glass plummeting to the street. She fired still again, and the bullet grazed him, tearing through his clothes and ripping the skin from the ribs under his right arm.
When Alexandra saw his blood she was terrified. She supposed she had killed him. She dropped the pistol and ran to the bedroom to get her purse. She ran out of the apartment, leaving the door wide open.
II
NOVEMBER, 1992
Cole went to visit Alexandra at the Correction Center for Women on Rikers Island. He had contacted her lawyer and obtained his consent to have a conference with her.
She sat slumped behind the chain-link barrier that separated inmates from visitors. She wore a drab gray uniform dress, stenciled in black ink with the word PRISONER.
“He wouldn’t come himself,” she said dully.
“I’m not sure they’d let him,” said Cole.
“You know what’s going to happen to me?” she asked. “My lawyer tells me I’m going to Bedford Hills for ten to twenty years. That is, if I’m a nice girl and plead guilty.”
“Using an unlicensed handgun was an aggravating factor.”
She sighed heavily. “So I hear.”
“Dave wants you to know he’s sorry. Even though you tried to kill him, he’s sorry.”
“He’s not as sorry as he’s going to be,” she said. “When I tell the feds what I know about him, he’s going to wind up just like I’m winding up: in the slammer. Let him see how he likes living the way I’m living: in a fuckin’ cage.”
“Let’s talk about that, Alexandra. You’re forty years old, and you’re going up for ten to twenty. You’ll be out on parole in eight or nine years. Dave wants to make a deal. You keep the secrets, and he’ll pay you ten percent of his income every year for the rest of your joint lives.”
“Ten … Oh, how nice!”
“Think it through. Where you’re going, you’ll have no expenses. After taxes, you’ll have whatever it amounts to, to invest and accumulate. When you get out, you’ll be a wealthy woman, maybe fifty years old. If you destroy Dave, you’ll get out poor.”
Alexandra raised her chin high. “Twenty percent.”
“Fifteen. That’s all I’m authorized to do.”
“How can I audit him?”
“Easy enough. You know where the money is. I’ve been Dave’s friend since we were kids. I’m his lawyer. But I won’t let him cheat you. Anyway, if you get a million a year for the rest of your life, what the hell?”
She pressed her hands against the chain link. “He’s going to make that much?”
Cole shrugged. “You know Dave. Maybe more.”
Alexandra dropped her chin to her chest. “Oh, yes. He’ll be sitting in places like Sparks, where I met him, eating big thick steaks and drinking wine, with his little consultant chippy … while I sit in a prison cell.”
“You shouldn’t have tried to kill him, Alexandra. It could have been settled some other way.”
Her face turned rigid and distorted. “I’m only sorry I didn’t kill him,” she snarled. “I’m going in for ten years … whatever. If I’d killed him, it would have been for life … It would have been worth it. I’m Ukrainian. We don’t take these things easy.”
Cole nodded grimly. “Will you buy the deal?” he asked.
“If I don’t—?”
“You go to Bedford Hills for whatever and you come out with nothing to live on.” He shook his head. “Not employable, either. You gonna be a waitress?”
She smirked. “Whatever happens, he’s always got everybody by the short hairs. He makes enough money to buy God.”
“And me,” Cole conceded sorrowfully. “And you. What’s it gonna be? You can have your revenge, but it will be at a terrible cost to you.”
“How’s this deal get formalized?” she asked.
Cole sighed. “Well, that’s another thing. It will be a part of the court order incorporated in the divorce decree. I’ve discussed that with your lawyer.”
“Divorce … ?”
“It’s automatic. A person is entitled to a divorce from a person incarcerated as a felon. Without the circumstances we’ve talked about, he could take his divorce and walk away. As it is, he’s willing to give you the fifteen percent.”
“So he can marry his chippy.”
“He has not confided to me his plans about that.”
Alexandra grabbed the chain link with her fingers. A matron barked and shook her head.
“So … Janelle. They going to live in my apartment?”
“He’s already moved out.”
“I bet. Into a great place. While I sit in a little cell and do my time, he’s going to live like a prince.”
“If you hadn’t tried to kill him, it would be a very different deal.”
She blew a sigh. “Tell the bastard I buy his deal. I’ve got no choice. That’s the way he arranges things, isn’t it? So people have no choice.”
Cole nodded. “He’s a clever guy, Alexandra.”
“Yeah … Say good-bye to Emily for me. Maybe they’ll let us write.”
“I hope so. And we’ll pray for you to get out on your first parole hearing.”
“Yeah …”
Because her case was notorious, the media covered it in some detail. Alexandra refused to say why she had tried to kill Dave. She acknowledged that she did. Her lawyer arranged the best plea bargain he could get and she was sentenced to a term of ten to fifteen years. The media noted that she could hope for parole in about eight years.
Early in December she was transferred from Rikers Island to the state prison for women at Bedford Hills. Television cameras caught her stumbling in shackles to a prison van, her hands chained to her waist by a belly chain and handcuffs. They also caught her tears, and their microphones picked up her sobs.
III
FEBRUARY, 1993
Janelle handed Dave a letter. They were not yet married but were living together in an apartment he had leased overlooking the East River.
“Cole Jennings stopped by and dropped off this letter. It’s a letter to Emily. You can see who it’s from. Cole and Emily want you to read it.”
The envelope was imprinted “Bedford Hills Correctional Institution.” Alexandra had been allowed to use a typewriter, and her letter said:
Greetings from the crowbar hotel. My accommodations here are luxurious. I live in a little cell. I eat in the prison cafeteria. The woman Dave trusted to supervise investments now supervises a mop and broom and is part of a crew charged with keeping our accommodations spotless. I am gradually settling into the role of convict. I had better. I am going to be just that for a long time.
I would be grateful if you would tell Dave the following. I am paying what I suppose is an appropriate price for what I did, no matter how grim this is, no matter how bleak the future I face. I am not sure I wouldn’ t rather be dead. In any case, I want to apologize to Dave, deeply and sincerely.
He is not on my list of approved correspondents, so I can’t write to him directly. Maybe you can understand and maybe he can that when I found out about Janelle, I just went wild.
Tell her I don’t blame her for anything. In fact, I hope they are happy.
Incidentally, they cut off all my rings. They discovered them during my first strip search. They are not allowed here. Nothing much is allowed here. I am allowed to write to you and to receive letters from you. Please do write.
Alexandra
While Dave was reading the letter, Janelle had mixed him a martini, which he now accepted and sipped. She had stopped smoking—on which he had insisted.
She already had a Scotch for herself, and she sat with the glass in both hands, wearing just bikini panties and a sheer little bra—an outfit she knew he liked. She nodded at the letter, which he had put down on the coffee table, and said, “Pitiful.”
“If she’d been a better shot, it would be worse than pitiful.”
“You have to forgive her, Dave. I hope you’ll tell Emily to write that you do. It can’t hurt you to say you forgive her.”
“We’ll be seeing Emily and Cole Saturday evening. You can tell Emily to say that when she writes to Alexandra. As for me, I don’t want to think about her. I hope I never see her again.”
“You sure as hell won’t for the next eight or ten years.”
“Good,” he said coldly.
“Incidentally, what is she talking about when she says they cut off her rings?”
Dave lifted his chin and his eyebrows. “She had her nipples pierced and wore rings in them. She—”
“Ugh!”
“More than that. She had her inner labia pierced and wore weights attached to the rings to stretch them.”
“Did they stretch?”
“They looked like a rooster’s wattles hanging out of her crack.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ! She must have been some sexy babe.”
“She was. Smart as hell. Beautiful … And aggressive.”
“You took a chance, with me. She’d have found out one way or another, sooner or later.”
“You underestimate us.”
Janelle nodded. “So does Reitsch. I don’t think he realizes he has lost all control.”
Dave grinned. “Navigation Simulation, Incorporated. Next week a supertanker is going to come through the Verrazano Narrows under control of a harbor pilot who learned how to do it on a simulator. He’d brought in hundreds of other ships, but he’d never brought in a supertanker.”
“We ought to program the thing to dock the QE II,” she said.
“No. There’s only one QE II. No market there.”
“Think of the public-relations triumph,” said Janelle.
“Uh … I guess you’ve got a point. Right now Hermann is working on other approaches to New York docks. And … you know the next port he’s going to work on? Hong Kong. One of the busiest ports in the world. Then Rotterdam.”
“Then airports?”
“Kennedy first.”
“Okay. We going out?”
“Sparks,” he said. “I could use a nice thick, rare steak.”
Janelle nodded. “That’s where you met Alexandra. Gimme some, kid, before we go.”
He loved the taste of her cunt. He got on his knees and knelt before her as she pulled down her panties. Anyway, he had learned more about female anatomy than he had ever guessed: all the folds and flavors and the way the colors changed as he stimulated her. He had learned definitively, for once and all, just what a clit was and how sensitive it was to the touch of his tongue. Hers was prominent and stuck out like a tiny penis. She had taught him that the outer parts of her were where the sensitive nerves were, just as the most sensitive nerves of his penis were in the foreskin; and he learned that shoving his tongue in deep was not as good as licking the outer, visible parts. But he knew it did not mean that taking his oversized organ all the way in her wasn’t as satisfying, her real satisfaction came from the touch of his stiff shaft running in and out of her vestibule and hitting the exotic nerves that ran inside her.
Janelle was an education.
IV
MARCH, 1993
Alexandra sat on the narrow cot in her cell, reading for the fifth or sixth time a letter she had received from Emily Jennings. She read aloud—“Dave told me to say that he forgives you entirely. He understands why, and he is sorry you are where you are. He really wishes it could be some other way.” Alexandra sobbed quietly.
Her confinement was hell. The walls of the cell were concrete block, smeared repeatedly over the years with institutional greenish paint. The door was steel, solid except for a tiny window at face level. She had been in lockup since six o’clock, which was the time when the women were sent into their cells for the night. They would open the doors, and the women would march to the cafeteria for breakfast at seven in the morning.
She had taken off her uniform and hung it in the little cubby where her several uniforms hung. Coveralls with short sleeves. Today had been green. Tomorrow would be blue. Another day would be yellow. Alexandra sat on her cot in her cheap cotton underwear. All the women did. They did not wear the demeaning uniforms more hours than they had to. It was chilly, though, and she had her wool blanket wrapped over her shoulders.
She was tired. She had spent her five work hours mopping floors. It was not the kind of thing she had been accustomed to. Nothing was anything like what she had been accustomed to.
The routine was GO THERE, DO THIS, DO THAT, DON’T DO SOMETHING ELSE, SNAP TO AND OBEY, LADIES. Many of the rules were petty and irrational. That made no difference. Violations were punished. She had been punished once already, for speaking up sharply to an officer. That had cost her two days in a disciplinary cell. Disciplinary cells were like other cells, except they had barred doors, and no books, magazines, newspapers, or writing materials were allowed. The disciplined prisoner simply sat there, twenty-four hours a day, with nothing to do but stare at the walls.
In her regular cell she had a few paperback books, weekly and monthly magazines, some watercolors and a pad of paper, and a battery-powered shortwave radio with earplug. These things were life.
She had made a few friends. Some of them were serving life sentences, some only a year or two for some petty offense against the peace and dignity of the State of New York. She had met one upscale society lady who was serving a long sentence for the murder of her husband. She had been there long enough that she was allowed to wear civilian clothes, even with a string of pearls. Even so, she was locked in a cell just like this one at six.
A bell sounded. It was the signal for a count. Alexandra sighed and rose. She stood at the door and pressed her palm against the glass of the little window. A matron passed by and tapped on the door with her baton. Alexandra had been counted and could sit down.
She sat down, glanced over Emily’s letter once more, and wiped away tears. The goddamned door was locked. Even if it were not, the barred gate down the corridor was locked and guarded. This was no reformatory. This was a prison. She could not believe she had wound up this way. Eight years, or nine, or ten—conceivably even fifteen—living like this. She had written she might better be dead. Maybe she should be.
The newspaper said that tomorrow a supertanker would berth at the Jersey docks, having been steered by a harbor pilot who had learned the technique from a Reitsch simulator. She supposed the Reitsches knew where she was, and why. Everyone did.
V
Dave and Janelle, with Hermann and Sara Reitsch, stood on the bridge of the immense tanker as it passed under the Verrazano Bridge, under the control of a harbor pilot who had learned how to maneuver the huge ship by working with the Reitsch simulator. The pilot had steered hundreds of ships into New York Harbor, but this was his first experience with a supertanker. Like Dave, he had maneuvered badly at first, but he had learned. He had learned by steering a highly realistic simulated ship on a screen, not by risking a real ship.
The trial was a triu
mph. There were television cameras on the bridge, television cameras in helicopters, and television cameras in small boats running alongside the ship. The news coverage was everything they could have asked for.
Cameras were not present for the meeting of the stockholders of Navigation Simulation, Incorporated.
Hermann Reitsch presided over the meeting. He learned in minutes that he had no control over the company and none over his invention. Cole Jennings held proxies for a substantial majority of the shares of stock. He voted them as Dave had specified. The board of directors, which would control the business, included Reitsch himself, Janelle Griffith, and three others whom Reitsch had never met.
In the subsequent directors meeting, the board elected Hermann Reitsch president, Cole Jennings vice president and general counsel, and Dave’s nominees as secretary and treasurer.
Dave was not present.
SEVENTEEN
I
JUNE, 1993
On Janelle’s twenty-fifth birthday, a Saturday, Dave drove her to Wyckoff to meet his parents and his brother. He had arranged a gala party at the Four Seasons for that evening, but for lunch they would sit down with his family, whom she had not met.
They weren’t married, but they planned to be, before the month was over. It was as if he were bringing his intended to gain his family’s approval.
“We will have to be married in a church here,” he said to Janelle as they drove into the little town. “They never quite accepted Alexandra because we were not church-married. I suppose they think she is where she belongs and should stay there.”
“It would be hard to forgive a woman who tried to kill their son.”
Janelle had dressed modestly for the occasion, in an off-white pantsuit. Having given up smoking at his insistence, she chewed gum, which she now took out and tossed through the window as they drove up the street toward his childhood home.
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