'We just know. We have advantages.'
Such as the knowledge that Rick was calling from a restaurant on Thompson Street. The police used all kinds of computers now, could match phone numbers with locations instantly. He hung up. So they were watching for her. All he had wanted was to talk to her again. You make a mistake, you want maybe to redeem yourself. He'd thought that she was in Tony Verducci's game, but now he saw that he was in Peck's game. Paul always said that if you play the game, the game plays you. He needed to call Mrs. Welles back. But if he called from where he was, they'd know he'd called her after talking to Peck. Maybe Paul could figure this out for him; he'd call him, too. He walked north, then east on Bleecker until he came to the Jim-Jack. A greasy-spoon place on Broadway with big windows, cheap food, Mexican busboys. The Mexicans were everywhere in the city; it was getting to be like Los Angeles. The pay phone hung on the wall next to the bar. If Christina had called her mother from here, then his call might be mistaken for one of hers, assuming the police were not actually bugging the line. That was pretty smart. But it had only been ten minutes since he'd talked to Peck-too soon, they'd figure it out.
He noticed a barbershop on the other side of Bleecker and stepped inside. Look civilized, you have to start dealing with people. The hair-wash girl beckoned him toward her chair.
'Been a long time, I guess,' she said.
'Yeah.' He sat down.
'Lean back.' He did, feeling the hot water, and her hands. Her hip pressed his shoulder. He couldn't remember the last time a woman had washed his hair.
'Hey, guy,' the girl said, smiling down at him, her face upside down.
He glanced up. She had green eyes, and a sweet tattoo on her neck.
'You a sea monster?'
He didn't understand. 'No. Why?'
She bent close to his ear. 'You got seaweed in your hair, mister, so I thought you was a big sea monster.'
He closed his eyes. You had to avoid this kind of conversation. That's not why he was here. Being out of the city had changed him. In the old days he'd be getting the girl's number.
He stood up and got in the barber chair.
'What'll it be?'
'Short.'
'Above the ears?' The barber clipped his white towel around Rick's neck.
'Yes.'
'Trim the beard?'
'Trim everything.'
'If I cut the hair short, I have to take the beard way back, make it short, too.'
'Do anything, make everything short. Civilized.'
'Yeah, civilize him,' the hair-wash girl called.
The barber clipped his hair, shaved his neck to the shoulders, trimmed the beard to half an inch, even shaved his ears. Hair fell all over the floor around his barber chair. In the mirror, Rick could see his face again, wrinkles around his eyes from squinting on the boat.
From there he went to a one-hour eyeglasses place. The clerk put Rick's broken glasses into some kind of machine that told you the prescription. 'You can't see worth a damn with these things, you know that?'
He chose some cheap Clark Kent glasses, not the designer kind. Maybe Christina would like them. He sat waiting, reading a magazine. The glasses came and he put them on.
'That probably makes a big difference.'
It did. He could see everything-pigeons on the building cornices, shoes in the window across the street. But it was time to call Mrs. Welles back. He slipped into the Jim-Jack and pulled out his coffee cup of quarters, ready to make a mother worry.
'Mrs. Welles, it's Rick Bocca again.'
'What is it? Tina?'
'What I didn't tell you is that she's out of prison now. They let her out, Mrs. Welles. I don't know where she is. But the police up here might be interested in your phone. They're probably not tapping it, because that takes a court order. Probably they're using what's called a dial number recorder, which records all the phone numbers of people who call you, and then the police check who the number belongs to.'
'Oh.'
'You know anybody in New York City, Mrs. Welles?'
'I don't think so. Nobody who calls.'
'Right. I think Christina's been trying to call you, Mrs. Welles.'
'I had some hang-ups on my answering machine.'
'If Christina calls, you have to tell her this. They can figure out where she is very quickly if they have the number. Like in a minute, okay? I'm sorry to worry you, but you've got to tell her this.'
'I'm always worried, sugar, that's how I stay thin.' She pushed out the ropy cough of a smoker. 'You see Tina, tell her I'm leaving on a trip today, will be back in a few weeks.'
'No problem,' he said before hanging up.
Now he had to think like Christina. The two of them had rented a place over on Thompson Street, then in the East Village. Without much money, she'd need to be in a part of the city she understood. She'd spend a few days finding things for herself, her apartment or room. Drift around, window-shopping. She'd walk down to Chinatown to buy things. This was a woman he'd lived with for three years; he knew how she walked and dressed and how she liked to have sex and what books she considered important and what music she preferred and what places in the city made her feel good. She'd pick up The Village Voice. She'd buy fruit and juice and bread and vegetables and cigarettes. She'd paint her toenails and hang her feet out the window to let them dry. She'd think about getting her hair cut short. She'd buy a broom. She'd read the sports page. She'd go to bars by herself and look for trouble. He knew her. It had taken some time, too. She was one of those women who showed you nothing on the street, gave away nada. You saw her go by, maybe you didn't even notice. You threw her a line, she didn't even bother making sure you knew you were being ignored. She just moved in her own bubble of thought; she was here but elsewhere entirely. That didn't sound sexy unless you knew her, and once you knew her sexually, then you had a problem. He'd had a problem a long time and thought that he could get rid of it by not thinking about her, not thinking about the sex. It didn't help anything to remember it. She could wear him out easily, back when he was in shape. He'd routinely fucked her for ninety minutes straight, like running ten miles, the sweat pouring off his face and chest, rivering down his arms, soaking the bed. He'd been thirty-one, thirty-two, and known that in the future he'd never again have such stamina. Take it now, while you still have it. And she could take it, she could take anything he did, any position, any degree of force. If you remembered that, it kept getting more mysterious. Most particularly he did not wish to remember the night they drank half a bottle of Averna, a thick brownish Italian liqueur with a lot of mysterious herbs in it, and ended up in the SoHo Grand Hotel, Rick just flipping a credit card onto the counter, telling the clerk to give them any room he had, a single, a suite, he didn't care, and the hell with the cost. Once inside the room they turned on some salsa station and fucked, off and on, every which way, for a few hours, with Rick not coming, just stringing himself along in happy torture, the skin of his cock getting raw, pulling out of her before the pleasure became too intense, then pushing back in. She told him she wanted him to come and he refused. It's sort of a war, then, isn't it? she whispered. They kept going. Then, while he was working on her from behind, her butt up, her arms spread across the bed, she'd stopped moaning and gone limp. Passed out? Her hips sagged and so he held them up with both hands. The idea that he had fucked her into unconsciousness was so exciting that he just blasted himself away into her. And when he was done, and pulled out, and looked at Christina limp on the bed, he saw the smile flash into her face. You sneaky girl, you faker. I fooled you, she'd said with mischievous pride, and then she flipped over and took him against her tongue and absolutely chewed him into having a slow and excruciatingly sore orgasm, and at that point he was cold-cocked. A dead man. He'd already gone at her with his mouth five or six times as well. But she was still writhing around on top of him, and so he'd slipped two, then three, fingers into her and vibrated his hand, first in and out and then in circles and progressively harder for ten minutes, waiting for her to tell him it was too much, listening to her breath riding up and down, over and beyond, not stopping even as she sunk her teeth into his ear, keeping his other hand pressed on her ass, one finger inside back there, too, not stopping for the screaming, not stopping for anything until his right arm went dead.
