Afterburn

by Colin Harrison

  "So what was the error?" asked the judge.

  "The problem was that the people actually doing the job got away—we could never make them that one time," Peck recalled. "All we had was a truck full of stolen air conditioners. After Miss Welles was arrested, they broke up or disappeared. We knew Bocca was guilty, but he moved out to Long Island and, criminally, went inactive. Just worked on a fishing boat. But I saw the lost subject on a stakeout a month ago and realized that I had ID'd the wrong woman." Peck stopped for a breath. "I had to be honest with myself. I had to really ask myself if I was sure. So I came to Mr. Glass, who was not crazy to hear it, of course."

  The judge nodded to Mrs. Bertoli. "Go ahead, then."

  Mrs. Bertoli stood. "Due to new information coming to the attention of the New York City District Attorney's Office, and pursuant to Section 440.10 of the New York State Criminal Code, I request an order from the court vacating the conviction of Christina Welles and her sentence."

  The judge turned to Glass. "Any objection?"

  "None, Your Honor."

  The judge sighed. "Miss Welles, apparently the State of New York, and in particular the New York City District Attorney's Office, owes you an apology, as well as four years of your life. We can provide you the former but not the latter. Of course, the criminal justice system tries to do its best, but from time to time, very occasionally, there is a gross miscarriage of justice. This, I acknowledge, has happened to you. I am now"—he pulled out a pen—"signing this order vacating your conviction and sentence." He looked up from the paper. "Okay . . . you are free to go, Miss Welles." He nodded to the patrons, one of whom stepped forward and opened her handcuffs. Then she handed Christina the sealed envelope containing her identification and money.

  Glass collected his papers and walked out, without so much as looking at Christina.

  "Can I talk?" said Christina, checking that her money was still in the envelope.

  "By all means," said the judge, waving his hand.

  "I'm free?"

  "Yes. Right here, right now."

  She looked around. "That's it? That's the whole thing?"

  "Yes." The judge picked up his telephone.

  Christina turned to Mrs. Bertoli. "I can just walk out?"

  "Apparently."

  "How often does this happen?"

  "Never."

  "But they have the power to do it?"

  "Yes," said Mrs. Bertoli.

  "Nobody ever hears about that."

  "The D.A.'s Office doesn't tell people a lot of things."

  "Did you know this was going to happen?"

  "Not a clue."

  "They sent you a piece of paper?"

  "I highly doubt it," she said. "It's a very embarrassing matter. They kept this quick and quiet."

  Christina noticed Peck standing at the back of the room, rocking on his heels. He could be the one to worry about, she thought, but I'm not sure. "What if I think there are people following me?"

  The lawyer looked around. "Who?"

  "I don't know." Christina leaned close. "Well, I—" Better not to say it. "I'm just worried about people following me."

  Mrs. Bertoli nodded.

  "Would you walk out with me?" Christina asked.

  The lawyer looked at her watch. "I have a hearing in another courtroom."

  "You won't walk me out of the building?"

  The lawyer's eyes were dead, unconcerned. "Miss Welles, you're free to come and go as you please. I'm not going to charge you for this morning's work."

  Now the detective was gone. But someone else could be watching, any of the men and women outside the courtroom up and down the hall. She could, she supposed, tie her hair up or get a pair of sunglasses or put on a different sweater, but that was not going to work. Not really. Plus she had her ridiculous and humiliating garbage bag as an identifying characteristic. She sat down in the back of the courtroom, hunched over in self-protection. I'm going to think this out, she told herself, not move until I know what I'm doing. She assumed she would be followed right on out of the courthouse. Maybe she was crazy, but she had to believe something was going on. The detective had lied blatantly. Suppose someone working for Tony Verducci was watching, suppose he wanted to talk to her?

  She stood up and walked out of the courtroom, down the hall. Keep your feet moving, don't look around, don't look back. You're not free yet. She passed sullen black boys accompanied by their mothers, overweight and exhausted by it all; young blades who smoked too much and had seen the inside of three or four methadone clinics; shuffling court officers with stomachs so prodigious as to apparently require a concealed superstructure of support; private defense attorneys whose eyes were lost in folds of flesh, although their watches were very good indeed; policemen trying to remember testimony they swore they had memorized; families of the victims, moving in clusters of righteous solidarity, their faces suspicious of anyone who might deprive them of a chance to see justice done, and the more harshly, the better. Don't look at me, don't see me, she thought, hurrying with her head down.

  She entered an elevator, standing uncomfortably among three police officers and two attorneys, none of whom said anything. Another man stepped on, eyed her once. I don't like his haircut, she thought, he could be following me. The door opened at the seventh floor and she followed the attorneys out. The floor contained the District Attorney's offices. She lingered indecisively. The man with the bad haircut stepped out of the elevator and waited. Don't look at him, she told herself. She got back on the elevator and took it up to the thirteenth floor. The man had not followed her, but that didn't mean anything. The court building constituted an immense maze. She took the elevator down to the first floor. If Tony Verducci wanted something with her, he'd have to wait until she was outside the court building. She retreated to a bathroom, hoping to hide a moment.

  A fleshy woman in a tight white dress and pumps stood at the mirror, fixing her hair. She gave Christina a once-over, looked back at the mirror.

  Just then another woman poked her head in the bathroom. "Mona, Bobby's in the car!"

  "Did Jeanette get out yet?" answered the woman at the mirror.

  "Yeah, she did. That's why Bobby says hurry up." The woman disappeared.

  Hookers. Bail. Pimp. Christina watched the woman touch up her makeup. "Least your guy showed up," she said, standing at the other sink.

  "They're all assholes."

  "Yeah, but you got a ride."

  The woman turned around, frowned. "They picked you up with that bag?"

  "I had a bunch of stuff with me."

  "Oh, you was just getting off."

  The door opened again and the woman cried, "Mona, Bobby's pissed at us."

  "I'm coming in just a minute!" Mona turned to Christina. "Excuse me." She went into a stall with a small aerosol can and closed the door. "Never touch nothing in these places, girl, that's all I got to say. Don't touch the toilet, don't touch the handle, don't touch the sink." There was a rustle of paper. "I never touch nothing. Matter of fact, I'm just squatting right now. I don't even like using the toilet paper."

  "Your guy good?" Christina called toward the stall. Mona's shoes were set a foot apart.

  "He takes care of us. You need somebody? He's always looking for girls."

  Christina heard the spray can inside the stall. "He's not going to want to talk to me."

  "Why not?"

  "I'm not dressed."

  More spraying. "He can tell if you look good."

  "I don't know," Christina said, a sweetish perfume reaching her nose now.

  "He picks you up for some work, then you'll tip me out the first week, right?"

  "Of course."

  The shoes under the stall stepped forward. "I mean like two hundred bucks."

  "Okay."

  "Two hundred bucks exactly."

  "Sure."

  The shoes twisted left together, like a dance step. "No matter if you have a bad week."

  "Yes," Christina said.

&nb
sp; The toilet flushed, the shoes twisted right, and Mona emerged. "You come with me. We'll go talk to Bobby."

  They joined the third woman and walked like cheap movie stars right down the hall, ignoring the knowing looks from the cops and court-birds. Outside the doors a large Mercedes sedan sat at the curb with a fourth woman in the back. The front passenger window slid down and a white man with a soul-patch under his lip shook his head in disgust. "Hey, fucking keeping me waiting."

  "Yo, Bobby," said Mona, "we didn't ask to be picked up."

  He nodded tiredly, a businessman chasing imaginary profits. "All you get time served?"

  Mona and the other woman nodded. The driver, a fat man in sunglasses, paid no attention.

  "Who are you?" Bobby asked Christina.

  "She's with me," Mona said. "I like her."

  "I said who are you."

  "Bettina," Christina said. "What's your name?"

  "Bobby B Good. You want to work?"

  "First I want a ride uptown."

  He groaned and looked at Mona. "Oh, man, now I'm running a taxi service."

  "You going to give me a ride uptown?" Christina asked.

  "You going to give me a reason to give you a ride?"

  "Not that reason."

  "Why you in there?"

  She looked behind her anxiously. No one. "It's complicated."

  He waved his hand dispiritedly. "It always is."

  She got in, next to the other three women. The seat was tight with hips and thighs. If anyone was shadowing her on foot, they wouldn't be able to follow her now, but she knew that surveillance was done in teams. The police, Rick always said, had unmarked cars, unmarked motorcycles, taxis, vans, Con Edison trucks, livery cars, even city buses. She'd spent years trying to achieve his paranoia but had failed. He was always better at seeing the invisible, she better at hiding what was in plain sight.

  The car started to move. Bobby looked over his seat. "Hey, Bettina, why you need a ride, anyway?"

  "Somebody bothering her," Mona answered protectively.

  Bobby nodded. "Gerry, pop a couple of lights, let this chick relax."

  "You got it, bro."

  The driver eased the car into a yellow light, stopped, then just after the light switched red, jammed it across the intersection as the traffic began to cross behind them. He cut west two blocks, gunned his way through oncoming traffic, lurched right on a one-way going left, made the next left a block up, cut right uptown from the wrong lane, and anyone following him would have to be in a helicopter.

  "The man is an expert," Bobby exclaimed. "'Course, I have to pay him."

  "Bobby is rich," exclaimed Mona.

  "How rich?" Christina asked.

  "Oh, I am very, very rich."

  "How rich is that?"

  "He gives all his girls pearls."

  "Real ones?" Christina asked.

  "Of course!" Bobby answered. "I get them from a guy who sells only the best. Very special deal, just for me."

  "Look at these." Mona pulled a strand out of her tiny pocketbook.

  Christina held them. They looked pretty good. But her mother, nobody's fool, had taught her about pearls. "You know," she said, "there's a way to tell if they're real."

  "Yeah, by how much you paid." Mona giggled.

  "No."

  "You mean like did they find it in a oyster?"

  "Real pearls come from oysters," Christina answered, "but they don't find them in oysters accidentally anymore, they stick in a piece of sand and make the pearl on purpose. That's called a cultured pearl."

  "That's not a fake pearl, you mean," said Mona, eyeing her strand suspiciously.

  The car sailed north toward Canal Street. "Right, I'm talking about the difference between cultured pearls and synthetic pearls."

  "Synthetic means fake," said Bobby. "Like my teeth."

  "It looks real."

  "But it's not," Christina said. "Not even close."

  "You can tell by the color?" asked Mona.

  "No," Christina said, "but it's an easy way."

  "I fucking don't need to hear all this shit," Bobby said suddenly. "I give all my girls real pearls, and that's it."

  "Then you don't mind if I show her mine," said Mona. "For the test."

  "How 'bout mine?" one of the other women squealed, reaching up to her earrings. "Bobby, you gave me these."

  "Now, hold on here."

  "Here you go, honey," said Mona, handing Christina her necklace.

  "Don't touch that!" Bobby slapped the driver on the shoulder. "Gerry, stop the car. I don't want this chick in my car anymore. She's fucking me up here."

  The car pulled over next to a Chinese man cutting off the heads of fish.

  "Get the fuck out," Bobby said to Christina.

  "Wait!" yelled Mona, "I want to know—"

  "Out, get your fucking ass outta my car!"

  Christina opened the door and jumped out with her plastic bag but held on to the door.

  "Let go of the door!" Bobby roared.

  She bent down and stared him in the eye. He blinked. Rick had taught her how to recognize a punk. Generally they yelled more than anything else. "I think," Christina said in a low voice, "that you should come out here and speak with me just for a moment. It's actually in your own interests."

  "What the fuck you want?"

  "I'm going to help you out of a jam that you know you are in, Bobby."

  He sighed his great irritation and pushed his way out of the car. He was shorter than he had first appeared. "What is it, woman?"

  He didn't scare her. He was just some pimp. A punk pimp. The world was full of guys like him. "You want to know the difference between a real and a fake pearl? I think you need to know."

  "Why's that?"

  "Because"—she glanced at the car, then back at him, as if she knew his conspiratorial tendencies—"I think you've been giving real pearls to some of the girls and not-so-real pearls to others. I just got a feeling about that."

  Bobby grimaced in the sunlight. Stared a moment at the Chinese man chopping up fish. "Why the fuck is that your business?"

  "It's not. But I thought you might just want to know how to tell the difference yourself, so that"—she leaned closer to him—"you can keep your stories straight."

  He nodded in contemplation. "Avoid unnecessary problems and whatnot."

  "Right."

  He pulled out his wallet. "Five?"

  "No."

  "Ten, tops."

  She shook her head. "Fifty."

  "You're crazy."

  Christina shrugged. "This is valuable information for a man like you, Bobby. You're a businessman, you have these people working for you, you need their loyalty, you need to control their perceptions of you. You can't have them figuring out which pearls are real and which are not, right? Makes you look bad, makes you look cheap, too. Right? Makes you look unfair, and we all know how women don't like that. Also, you need to know if your man is selling you the good stuff or putting it over on you."

  Bobby glanced down the street, the mannerism of a man who wants to know who is nearby. He looked back at Christina. "You're right."

  "So fifty is a bargain."

  He pulled a wallet on a chain out of his jacket pocket and handed her the bills.

  "You put the pearl in your mouth and you scrape it with the edge of your front tooth. If it feels rough, it's real. Smooth, then it's synthetic. "

  Bobby glared at her. "That's it?"

  "Yes."

  He looked at her. "You scrape it against your teeth."

  "Smooth, it's fake. Rough, it's real."

  He nodded. "Like people."

  "Like some people," she warned him. "Some of the rough people are fake and some of the smooth people are real."

  He lifted his jaw aggressively. "What are you?"

  She could tease him now. "Oh, Bobby, I'm just like you."

  "What's that?"

  "Both."

  He shook his head. "You tear me up. Why don't you
come spend a night with Bobby? Bobby will show you some times." His hand brushed his crotch. "I mean, we're talking very high quality, you know?" He looked at her, his street intelligence concentrated now, as if he had suddenly sensed something about her. "You want my card? Case you ever want to call, whatever?"

  "That's okay."

  But already he had it in his hand. Red, with white lettering. bobby b good—business opportunities sought. She took the card, if only to get rid of him. Bobby smiled at her, slyness in his eyes. "Yo, Bettina, I think you're going be all right out here. I ain't going be worrying about you, you know?" He slammed his door and the car lurched away.

  WAS SHE FREE? Certainly felt like it. She looked behind her. No one. Maybe. She threw the cheap business card to the street and walked straight into the sunlit flow of people, straight into a city of eight million or ten million or whatever the number, so big you can't find me, whoever it was she should be worrying about. She felt slow and a little lost, but with each minute the city came back to her, like language. She saw everything—the ever-sleeker cars, the new ad campaigns on the sides of buses, the sidewalks thick with faces. People looked tired and sweaty and fed up. Overworked and barely paid. Underworked and stuffed with money. Chinese cops. Russian housewives from Brooklyn. White kids trying to look like black kids and black kids parodying themselves. Men who wanted to be women, and girls who liked girls. Everyone had attitude but no one looked political. The city had the same beat, the same insistency. She hadn't walked one hundred yards in a straight line for four years, and now block after block lay in front of her. Space, she was understanding space again.

  And the women. Here they were in their lipstick and cute little skirts and fat-heeled shoes, shopping and walking and going to work or eating with one another in the restaurants or walking along with guys in suits, the men paying special attention or not, depending, and she looked into the women's faces and saw none who would ever be going to prison. You could tell. They were never going to be in a position in which they might have to do something really stupid. They were safe. They didn't know how safe! She wanted to have the same big bags with the lip gloss and brush and Filofax and credit cards, all the things. But as she walked, switching her garbage bag from one hand to the other, she saw younger women, too, strolling with their boyfriends, floating through the shoe emporiums, past the sidewalk merchants, sauntering along, going nowhere, girls who were getting into a bad way; their skin looked dull, and they had all kinds of shit tied up into their greasy hair or had cut it too short or dyed it green. Or too many tattoos or nose rings. Something that said, too loudly, This definitely is who I am. Maybe I'm looking for my old self, Christina thought. But she was never going to find that girl, because that girl was dead and gone and forgotten, that girl was the girl who had trusted and believed in love. Yes, I used to wish for those things, she thought, but not now. She didn't expect she was going to love anybody for quite some time, and that was fine. She was going to get back into the world. But she didn't want to get to know anybody right now, not yet. She needed to get to know herself again. And she didn't want to call anybody up. Well, maybe her mother. Try from a pay phone. Maybe that was okay. The rest of the family was mostly dead. She'd lost so many people, and some of them she could take up with again, but they would want to know all about prison. Their eagerness would tire her. And if she started to call up some of the old people, then eventually they'd ask about Rick—at least in passing—and she didn't want to think about him, not at all. The news might reach him that she was out and he would try to find her. He'd come looking for her with his heart on a plate, begging for forgiveness, and she'd hate herself either way—for forgiving him or for not forgiving him. He was out on Long Island working on a fishing boat; let him stay there. She never wanted to see him again. He could rot in hell, as a matter of fact.