Afterburn

'I'm old, believe me. Very old.'

The woman smiled. 'I think I've seen a girl using the phone. You want to leave a message?'

'No. But maybe you can tell me when she comes in, her usual time.'

She shook her head softly. 'I can't.'

'No?'

She smiled again. 'It's a policy. We make policy here in this restaurant.'

'Then just tell her a friend came by.'

She pretended to write on her order pad. 'I'll just put down 'Nameless Old Guy.' Something like that?'

'Sounds good.'

While he was waiting for his food, he called Paul. After the secretary put him through, he could hear his half brother switch from speakerphone to the regular line. 'Been a long time, Rick.' A weight of sadness passed through him; he missed his brother terribly, felt ashamed for falling out of contact. He'd never told Paul exactly where he lived out on Long Island. 'I know,' Rick said. 'It's my fault.' He'd always admired Paul. He was the successful one. Trained as an accountant, he owned the family heating-oil-delivery business, two policemen's bars that didn't make much money but kept him sewn in with the cops, a boatyard out on Long Island. He knew everybody, and everybody knew him, asked his advice. Nobody had a hook into him. Paul owed exactly no dollars and no cents to the world. His specialty was setting up legitimate operations that actually made money. If you wanted to wash some money through them, that was your business. The old men trusted him because he made his rules clear and had never been in trouble. The younger men trusted him because the older men did. If you asked him what stocks to buy, he didn't tell you; he gave you the name of a legitimate brokerage. If you wanted to buy a gasoline station on Long Island, he told you whom to call and ran the numbers for you. Of course, then you placed the accounting with his firm.

'Where are you?' Paul asked.

'Back in the city. I need to talk, get some thoughts on something.'

In the past, this had always meant that Rick was in trouble. Paul's reaction depended on the load of headaches he already carried, what his wife would say, what the actual trouble was, and, finally, whether Rick was asking for money.

'Lay it on me.'

Rick briefly explained the situation with Christina and Peck, including the conversation out on the dock in Greenport.

'Some of what he told you is probably horseshit,' Paul said. 'Some.'

'You know Peck?' asked Rick.

'I know people who know him. The usual setup.'

Rick watched the waitress bring his food to his table. She noticed that he was at the pay phone. 'This thing is moving pretty fast on me, Paulie.'

'Come over for dinner. I'm out of the office later in the afternoon, but I can pick you up.'

The ferry to Staten Island thrilled him, still. Once, as a boy, he rode it holding his father's hand. In the windy darkness the lighted castles of Manhattan receded rapidly, the water behind the tremoring deck oiled with shavings of light. He found a damp bench on the Jersey side. A containership with only three running lights glided past, then a buoy blinking green, then the Statue of Liberty, then another ship. He noticed a young woman with bobbed hair and beautiful eyes. She sat a few benches away, legs crossed, bouncing her black boot. She smiled mysteriously and he nodded. Every girl has a story, he thought, but you can ride only one at a time. Inside the ferry exhausted office workers sat traveling home, jackets over their shoulders, hunched sweating beneath the fluorescent lights, reading newspapers, eating hot dogs. Dependable people, bills paid, law-abiding. He would never be one.

The ferry bumped to a stop. Outside the terminal Paul stood waiting in a good sports coat and talking into a cell phone-never wasting a minute, always the man with unfinished business, rushing toward the next conversation, the next deal. Getting quite a bit of gray hair now, Rick could see. Paul looked up and gunned his finger at Rick in recognition. A classy guy, his brother. They both had their height from their father, but Paul had never gotten big, weight always steady. Refined in appearance and habit and temperament. Bought a new Town Car every three years and gave money to charities. Read The Wall Street Journal and played golf. Ten handicap, just right. He kept a finger in a lot of different pies, Paul did. Advised the Archdiocese. Jews liked him because he was as smart as they were. He had a lot of money and nobody but Paul knew how much. Wife happy. Kids doing fine in school. The big house in Todt Hill. Christmas lights on the bushes each December. Everything done the right way.

Paul grasped Rick's arm. 'You look good. What's your weight now?'

'Maybe two-thirty.'

'You look solid.'

'All that work on the boat.'

In the car, Paul flicked on the air conditioning. 'So you're really back in the city?'

'Just got in.'

Paul nodded. A certain tone in his silence. 'You staying long?' he said.

'I can't tell.'

'You have time to see Dad?'

'I don't know.'

'I can drive you out there.'

'It's not the right time, this week. Maybe in a little while.' Not a good start, Rick knew. 'How's he doing, anyway?'

Paul lifted his hands off the steering wheel in a gesture of resignation. 'The problem, at this stage, is bedsores. They keep moving him around in the bed. There are certain places-the heels, the buttocks. Places where the weight of the body rubs against the bed.'

'Okay.' He didn't want to hear it. It distracted him. Paul, eleven years older, had grown up in a different house, their father a happy man then-so Rick had been told. Paul's mother had been killed in a traffic accident, the middle of the day, a station wagon full of groceries. Another Staten Island housewife had been driving a car full of noisy kids. One of them had died. A tragedy, and nobody's fault, really-mothers just doing their jobs. Somehow Paul had been okay, but his father, later Rick's father, had been staved in by the death of his wife. In his grief, he quickly remarried. And maybe things had been all right for a few years. Rick remembered loving his mother like the sky itself, clung to her against his father's lack of interest. She'd taught him to catch and throw a baseball. Maybe things would have been different if she had not died. You could never say what would have happened. Paul was in his last year of high school when Rick's mother got sick. The breast cancer raced through her with no resistance. Also, she was late getting treatment, had hidden her condition from his father; why, Rick never did learn. Some problem in the marriage, something he would never understand, except that he blamed his father for not saving his mother. Perhaps she had feared he would withdraw further if he knew she was sick. That could be it. But there was no one to ask and never had been. After Rick's mother died, his father worked on the family business, never home much. Paul was away at college, in business school, in a big accounting firm in Manhattan. Everyone gone. By the time Rick was seventeen, he was running around pretty hard. By nineteen he was fucking four women on a regular basis, two of them local girls who didn't know which way the wind was blowing, the third the angry wife of a cop, and the last a woman who sold real estate in Manhattan. At thirty-three, she had already been divorced twice; her big trick was that she could touch the soles of her feet to the headboard while he was pounding her.

'Mary made a big dinner,' Paul said. 'I'll run you back afterward.'

'Great. So let's talk now, you mean?'

'Once we get inside, the boys are going to be all over me.'

He told Paul, this time in detail, about the visit from Peck out on Orient Point, Christina's release from prison. Paul nodded as he listened, a man accustomed to tortured narratives. The pinlights from the dash illuminated the surface of his glasses, the underside of his chin and nose. He seemed to recall the story even as Rick explained it- which was not so farfetched. People knew they were brothers. Tony Verducci was well acquainted with Paul. They knew the same people, they'd done business together.

'You have any idea why they want Christina?'

Paul gave him a long look, then shrugged. 'They know she can do the job.'

'But there are all kinds of smart-'