'Oh hell, Ted, you're going to think I'm crazy.' He tried to sound jovial. 'I got a great price on a load of… caviar. It's a distressed situation. The mark-up is huge and I've already got a buyer.'
Ted chuckled. 'You're always a gambler there, Charlie. We'll get the letter delivered and then wire the funds after they call.'
'Great,' he breathed, barely able to keep energy in his voice. 'Thanks, Ted. Thanks a bunch. She'll-Sally-will call. Thanks.'
Tony was shaking his head. 'No way is that girl going to show up with a bill of lading here that's worth five million dollars. All she has to do is have them change the name to her and then she's got it and then she can sell it to someone else. I been down there in those freight warehouses. They can do some funny stuff down there.'
'So?' asked Morris.
'So we find out from Charles what the hell she just told him. We watch the place and get her right as she comes out.'
Charlie's phone rang again. Tony answered it. 'Yes, sweetheart, he's still here. He's fine. Now, when you get the bill of lading, I don't want you to call this number, I want you to call this other one.' He read from a piece of paper. 'That one. Then we'll work out the pickup. Don't try any of your little tricks, either.' He hung up. 'This is my backup. She calls that number, Peck's guys have her location in under ten seconds, even if it's a cell phone. Then they call us, and we go and they try to keep her on the line.' He leaned forward and put his hand on the epidural drip, pinching the tube experimentally. 'That's our backup if Charles here doesn't do something nice for us now.'
Morris turned to Charlie. 'You going to tell us?'
'What?'
'The name of the guy that's selling the cameras.'
'I don't know it.' They wanted the location, he understood. 'She just gave me the phone number.'
'What's the number, then?'
He looked at his scribbled piece of paper and stiffened. 'She told me to cross it out.'
Tony and Morris looked at each other in silence. Then Morris shook his head in disgust. 'This girl is slick.'
Now I'm expendable, Charlie realized. They can kill me right now and they lose nothing.
'No disrespect, Tony,' said Morris, 'but your backup plan won't work if she doesn't call that other number.'
'She'll call it,' Tony said. 'If she wants her mother to be-'
'Wait,' Morris said.
'What?' asked Tony.
'He remembers the fucking number!' said Morris, eager now, pointing at Charlie. 'Look at him!'
He didn't-not for the life of him did he remember the number. But if he pretended to remember it, he realized with sudden clarity, then they'd torture him for it, they'd keep him alive. Maybe long enough to get out of this, go kiss Ellie.
'He knows the number,' Morris yelled, lips wet. 'I can see it in his face!'
'He's protecting her,' said Tommy.
'You shouldn't do that,' warned Morris. 'Why would you do that?'
'Why anything?' Charlie said.
'Is that your explanation?' screamed Morris. 'Is that all you can say?'
He took a deep breath. What could they do to him in a few hours? He'd lasted three months in the hands of the North Vietnamese.
'You going to tell us?'
'No.'
Morris looked disbelievingly at the other men, happy to be insulted, then back at Charlie. 'You understand that I have exposed your spinal nerve back here?'
'I understand that,' Charlie answered. 'I understand the whole situation.'
Now Tony rose out of his chair slowly, like a man being called to dinner, and stepped forward, concern in his eyes. 'Tell us the phone number, Mr. Ravich. It'd be better, you know?'
'I can't,' Charlie said.
'You're saying we have to torture it out of you?' asked Tony.
Every minute longer that I live, Charlie thought, gives me a chance for another. He turned his head as far as he could and looked Morris in the eye, confident of his hatred for the man. 'I'm saying that, yes.'
Morris nodded coldly. 'Then it's showtime,' he said.
He yanked the needle out of Charlie's back.
He felt nothing. No one spoke. Morris checked his watch. Still nothing. I'm okay, thought Charlie.
Then, flaming up his spine, came a red ganglion of pain that frayed outward in searing, incomprehensible complexity-and when he arched his back in shocked torment, the pulsing hot bud at the base of his spine bloomed again while simultaneously reappearing within itself, detonation within florid detonation. 'Oh, God,' he screamed, 'God, God, God.'
The men held him down and Morris took a pair of pliers from the toolbox. He ripped something from Charlie's spinal column. The pain became hallucinatory-icy worms writhed in one foot, his anus spasmed. 'Jesus,' he screamed. 'Jesus, please!'
Someone grabbed his hand. He opened his eyes.
Morris, smiling at the great good humor of life, pressed a bloody steel screw into Charlie's quivering palm. 'Bone atrophy,' he explained. 'This was getting loose.'
'Oh, please,' Charlie cried hoarsely. 'Just let me call my wife.' He dropped the screw and fell flat upon the table, the pain sparking and crackling brightly. 'Just give me the phone… and let me-' But the pain rode up his back again, like the wheel of a freight car, and he had to tuck into himself, let it go past. I can ride this, he thought, I know I can. He noticed Morris examining a steel clamp. I'm stronger than they are, Ellie, don't worry. I've done this before. Now his back jerked in convulsions, the nerves and muscles confused, red lights popping before his eyes. They can't kill me, sweetie, I promise. He was going to hold and hold and hold. Stay conscious. It's fine, Ellie! Tell Julia. Tell Ben.
Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, Brooklyn September 28, 1999
If he was the coward he suspected himself to be, he'd get the truck and drive back out to Orient Point, using his right hand for the steering as well as the shifting. Stay in the slow lane. Not so hard. Then bump along past the farms and the pumpkin stands, past the ice cream shops and gas stations and public beaches, until he found his hidden dirt lane. He'd get out and with one arm patiently cut the scrub oak he'd dropped before he'd left, then park the truck next to the cottage. And look at the tomatoes and the corn. Look at the purple honeysuckle on the near side of the barn. He'd feel good. The grass would be tall and wet. He'd pick up his key under the oyster shell and poke around the cottage, then get hungry and drive out on the main road, avoiding the farm tractors, to the diner with the school bus in back full of firewood. He could go in, coward that he was, and sit down and of course they'd stare at his stump and maybe ask what happened and maybe they wouldn't and he wouldn't care either way. Just give me the chicken dinner, please. After a few days no one would care anymore and he could be alone. He'd sit by the window of the cottage and watch the day and the night move over the ocean, and conclude that, as a coward, he'd left the thing unfinished. He'd decided to come back into the city because of Christina, and so far as he understood, she was in more trouble than ever now-a problem with some money-and here he had not yet talked to her, not yet helped her. He could argue to himself that he'd had his goddamn arm cut off and one foot almost ruined and lost a tooth, and that meant he didn't have to help her. That he'd made a valiant attempt and failed. Lost all his cash but gotten out before it'd cost him too much. Gotten out with enough to go on. He could tell all these nice things to himself and they would be lies.
An hour later, at seven in the morning, he looked at the stump while the nurse changed the dressing. They'd
