Afterburn

215 East Fourth Street, Manhattan September 9, 1999

The Dep had lied, fluttering some cheap piece of paper like that. It was a trick; she hadn't been released, she had merely been transferred to Rikers Island-the same place she'd started her incarceration, the largest penal colony in the world, sitting upriver from Manhattan. A fortress of the lost, a vault of the doomed. A deck of criminal faces, shuffled every day. The women's facility, officially the Rose M. Singer Center, was known as Rosie's House or Lesbian Island. Many of the women, just arrested, were coming down off drugs or crying about their children. The ones who needed their hit vomited from time to time or sat rocking back and forth, sweating, weeping, chewing their bottom lips. She herself had uttered almost nothing to anybody, just let it be known in a dead voice that she'd put in four years in Bedford, where you go only for hard time. Think about that, girl, if you need to think about me. She had other things to worry about. The letter announcing her release was, upon reflection, the perfect ruse; after reading it, she hadn't protested her exit from Bedford Hills, or told anybody why she was going. But the Manhattan D.A.'s Office didn't just let people out of prison. Not unless something strange had happened. She had an idea why Tony Verducci might want her out, a very exact and particular and specific and singular idea, yes, but why the Manhattan D.A.? Not after they had interrogated her for two straight days, even threatening to involve her mother, and yet they'd gotten nothing out of her about Rick and Tony and the others, her refusal to cooperate prompting them to throw the book at her, sewing her into a conviction with professional dispatch. But if the Dep's letter had been a trick, why? What had she done? It couldn't be the business with Soft T, because the timing was wrong. The letter had been prepared before she'd even stalked into the Dep's office, and no one but Soft T knew what had happened prior to her arrival. The thing made no sense. She'd see if she could call her lawyer today, Mrs. Bertoli, her crooked and cheap and uninterested lawyer, to find out what was going on; the chances that she could get through, however, were slim to none. And if she did get through, Mrs. Bertoli would want to know how she was going to get paid, and that, of course, was a question with no answer.

The powdered eggs and watered orange juice that Rikers called breakfast would be served in an hour or so. Down the hallway women were talking, begging for cigarettes, arguing. She remembered the particular tone of their anxiety from her month-long stay the first time through. You were in prison, alone, and deeply freaked out. She herself had been a mess of headaches and urinary tract infections, grinding her teeth at night, suffering a bout of shingles. It wasn't until she reached Bedford Hills that she accepted the situation, actually believed it. With its settled population, its levels of prisoner status, Bedford Hills constituted a complete civilization compared to Rosie's House. Many women had lived there a decade or more. They had learned to make the best of it, to seek to improve themselves and the conditions of the prison. They exercised leadership and stability. It was not exactly a city on a hill, but it worked. You could live a bit while dying. It was hard to believe she was really back in Rikers, had fallen even lower. The thought was sickening. I am alone, she thought, I am alone and a prisoner of the great State of New York. I have to my name one garbage bag full of cheap clothes and three hundred and something dollars in an envelope that probably has been stolen by now. I am nowhere, I am nobody.

She lay in her bed going over who would want her out of prison and who would want her in. Rick wanted her out, of course. Her mother wanted her out. The Dep wanted her in. The detective who arrested her wanted her in. Tony Verducci? That was harder to figure. It depended what he knew about the last job. Had he figured out what had happened? Four long years had gone by, so perhaps not. He had once liked her a great deal, after word got around that she was doing Rick's planning for him. The message came to her a few months before her arrest that Tony Verducci wanted to meet with her, and Rick had said she didn't have any choice-when Tony wants to talk to you, you just show up. Of course, it was in Rick's interest to say this. So she'd spent the morning wondering what you wear to a job interview with a mobster, and finally had decided to look as young and stupid as possible. Make him think I'm just a dumb girl, she figured. She'd put on jeans and a tube top and slathered a high-school makeup job onto herself, hoping that Verducci would have second thoughts. His car had arrived for her in the Village and, not quite believing what she was doing, she'd darted out to the open door hoping no one had seen her. The driver's neck was covered with boils. She never saw his face, only heard him grunt an hour later when the car pulled through a gated driveway on Long Island. She was led inside by a tiny old Italian woman to a sun porch, where Tony Verducci sat in a floral shirt, wheezing quietly with an unlit cigar in his mouth and watching a cooking show with the sound turned off.

I just want you to listen to me, Christina, he'd said kindly, just listen to what I got to say before you answer. He stared at her, his jaw and bottom teeth pushed forward like the open drawer of a cash register. First of all, I know Rick is a fucking dope. I only keep him on because of his brother. We do a little business. But Rick ever bothers you, you let me know. If there's ever a problem, I want you to come to me. Okay? No? You don't know. All right, see, we like you. We think you could help us, could help us quite a bit. You don't look like you work for somebody like me. You look like somebody's girlfriend. Maybe that insults you, maybe it don't. That's not my problem. My problem is, I got a big operation to run. You with me so far? Now, as you know, I'm involved in a lot of different situations. Lot of-Wait, you want some iced tea? Get her some iced tea and some of those little cookies. The good ones. Okay, so Rick's older brother, Paul, does a little work for me, says he's met you, can tell you got special ability. Says you got a thing for numbers. Told me that trick you did on his boat. We need good people. We need smart people, not just goombahs who like to wear shiny shoes. We got plenty of those guys, big deal. I'm tired of those guys-they make mistakes it takes five years to fix. Also, lot of people talk too much. I notice you don't talk much. Like now. Okay, I want to explain a couple of our businesses. There's the tea, good. Get her a spoon. As you may know, we run a numbers operation. Betting. We compete with the lottery and casinos except we pay better odds. Instead of twenty million to one, maybe it's fifteen million. Also, you win with us, you get it in cash, don't have to tell nobody-the IRS, the husband, the church, heh, whatever. Casinos make you sign something. The basic deal in numbers betting is that a person bets on a three-digit number. This is a straight bet. Very simple. You can bet anywhere from a quarter to a dollar on up. Lot of people bet two, five, ten bucks. So that's a straight bet. You can also bet on one or two of the numbers. This is called single action and boleta.

The odds get a lot better with those simpler bets?

Yeah, it's really for the people who don't know anything. Think that seven is their lucky number, bet it every day. If they bet seven every day, then one out of every ten days, just about, they should win. But if they're putting in a dollar with every bet and getting only six back when they hit the number, then we're ahead four dollars. I mean, people are very stupid. They're born stupid and then they keep on living stupid. So you can also bet on all three numbers in any order. This is called the combination. The odds there are lower than the straight bet, too. Now then, we understand our profit margin as the difference between what we take in and what we pay out. We never pay true odds, would never make money that way. The other way we make money is, we will cut certain numbers. We lower the payoff on the numbers that everyone likes to bet. You get enough people betting, then you see large patterns, and for people in the numbers business, this is important. Let's say the Bulls are playing the Knicks, then we're going to get heavy betting on Michael Jordan's jersey number-that's number twenty-three-and if that number actually wins, then you're dead if you have to pay out. So we cut that number down. We got nervous about the number and so we cut it down. We limit the amount of a bet and the total wager. Over a certain amount, we just won't take the bet. Some guy wants to bet ten thousand bucks on number twenty-three, we won't take it, 'cause if he hits it, we're finished.

Now, we got two ways of betting. One is called New York, the other is called Brooklyn. The Brooklyn number is the last three digits, not including pennies, of the total handle of whichever thoroughbred racetrack is running that day. Aqueduct or Belmont. You get the handle from the newspaper. It's published the next day. If both tracks are closed, we use a Florida track. The New York number is more complicated. We have the New York number for people who want to get results the same day. They're addicted. They're used to casinos, the lottery, whatever, they want to know if they won. It's a sickness. They can't wait until the next day. So the New York number is for them. That number uses what we call the three-five-seven structure. It's really not very complicated. To get the first digit of the New York bet, you add all the win, place, and show payoffs for the first three races. The last digit, again forgetting about the pennies, is the first digit of the New York number. Get that? People will watch the television and see they got the first number on the New York right and then they go wild and start betting more. We used to close the betting before the first race, but now, with computers, we can keep the betting open until the end of the sixth race. So they see they got the first number right, they go wild. We murder them on the odds when they do that, too. Because the payoff goes up, so do the odds. So then we get the second digit by using the first five races. And then the third digit using the first seven races. People can follow that once they get used to it. They can listen to the radio and hear the numbers and add them up for themselves. They get to follow the action. They can also bet a single action or boleta on the New York number, too. We run these bets from a lot of places, grocery stores, pizza places, bodegas, hair parlors-we got a lot of spots. Even a hardware store in one case. We use a three-leaf slip of paper, so everyone has a copy. The guy who bets, the spot, and what we call a bank. It's just two guys in a little rented office with a computer and a secretary and a big basket of paper and a guard watching them both. We rotate the guards so nobody gets too friendly. All the paper is called the work. All the work comes to a bank. We run nine banks. Each is working maybe fifteen or twenty spots. We run a hundred and sixty-two spots, in fact. Maybe three thousand bucks a day from each spot. So the cash adds up fast. We're paying out about sixty-five percent of our handle. That leaves a very nice profit margin. We figure out the odds from all nine banks. We get good numbers that way. Some other operations, these fucking Russians maybe, run maybe one or two banks, but sooner or later they get creamed. Some guys hit them for a New York on a big number and they didn't have enough bets to keep the odds down. So we run nine banks. If we see a number is very heavily bet, we close betting on it. We used to edge off the bets to some of our friends in the business, see if they wanted to take the action away from us, but now we don't. It makes things too complicated, it puts you at their mercy. Maybe their office is fucking wired, maybe somebody figured the numbers out wrong, whatever. Little Gotti runs an operation, for example, always gets his numbers wrong. You used to be able to do it, but now you can't. Okay, so why's there a job open? We used to have a guy running the nine banks, but he had a little problem. His fingers got itchy and so they had to be cut off. I'm not joking. I don't joke about these things. I have children. I'm not going to go into it. We got all the money back, too, but it came out of his father's retirement. Fucking mongrel son. It's not my problem. We need someone smart enough to run the nine banks at the same time. Somebody who's got a feel for numbers, somebody who-

I'm not interested.

What?

I'm not interested.

You haven't heard the good part, how much it-

I really don't want it.

Bring her some more iced tea. Let me tell you about another job.

I doubt I'm interested in that, either.

Let me try it on you. For Christ's sake, we're talking opportunity here. See, we buy phone cards from the phone companies, using a little dummy company. We buy like nine million dollars' worth. That's what they will sell for. Maybe we pay eight million for them. Buy for eight, sell for nine. It's big money, and so we syndicate that across five or six investors. But selling the cards involves real costs. You got to advertise, you got to staff an office, all that. It's a competitive business. The actual profit margin is down around seven percent. Steady but not great. Takes a long time to make big money at seven percent. So we do that awhile, six, eight months, get our credit looking good with the phone company. Then we place a huge order for cards, maybe thirty million dollars' worth that we negotiate a price for. We negotiate hard, too. Let's say we agree we are going to pay twenty-five million for the cards. Okay, at the same time, we begin to advertise a special. We're going to sell those thirty million of cards for maybe twenty million. Sounds like we're going to lose money, I know. Word goes around that a certain card is a better deal. The customer is very price-sensitive. These are not wealthy people. You start the deal just a little bit early. You advertise, you get people excited. All those Cubans and Brazilians calling home. You have to build it up and then pop it at the right moment, usually maybe around Christmas, Thanksgiving, Mother's Day, sometime when everyone is calling. You try to collect in cash as much as possible. Then, just as demand is spiking up for the cheap cards, you take delivery of the big new order by the phone company. Your credit is good, they don't suspect anything. You get the thirty million worth of cards and you sell them fast for twenty million. At the same time you-

You don't pay anything to the phone company. You give them a bad check, pocket the twenty million, fire the whole staff, and declare bankruptcy.

Exactly. It takes about a year to pull it off, start to finish. What we do is, we set you up in an office in Florida. Your name is never on a piece of paper-

No. I'm sorry.

That's no good?

No.

We're talking easy money.

I don't care.

You know how cement contracts work?

I'm not interested, I'm really not.

This is a big opportunity. This is not these little jobs with Rick, bunch of fucking Jap motorcycles.

I know, but I don't want it.

Why?

Because it kept her involved with Rick. Because she would rather sit and read in the Columbia library. Because she was a girl. Because she was twenty-two years old. Because none of this was exciting to her anymore.

You love him?

What's that got to do with anything?

You're too good for him, you know.

I don't know about that.

What is it about Rick, the way the women love him? What is it, the muscles?

He's got a sad face.

What?

He's got a sad face. There's something about it.

I don't understand women. I fucking don't. I been married forty-two years and I got three sisters and two daughters and I don't know the first goddamn thing about how women think. All right, how about a restaurant? Want to run a restaurant?

How's it work?

Well, the whole idea is to run a restaurant that looks like it's making money when it's not.

Usually it's the other way around.

Usually, yes. Usually you want to hide your profits. In this case, we want a restaurant that is a good, decent place that makes almost no money. We got a couple in Little Italy and one up on Fifty-sixth Street. We found out that Mexicans can sound like Italians. You teach them a few words- buon appetito, whatever-and the tourists can't tell. The restaurant has a private room where it throws a lot of big parties. We make sure it gets used legit from time to time. We take payment in cash only for this room, that's the policy. This income is reported, incidentally. Except that the room isn't used much. The payment for the room is cash that is coming in from another part of the business, like the numbers operation. We take this money and we pretend we threw a big party at the restaurant. Two hundred people, music, food, expensive wine, the whole thing cost sixty, seventy thousand. Except it didn't. It never happened. But the cash came into the restaurant. The only record of the party is like Thursday, 6:00 p.m., private party, Mastrangello. Some name, any name. They paid in cash and the cash was reported. Looks very good. Then that cash gets spent buying legitimate stuff.

Except you don't really buy it.

Right. You pretend you're buying fish and olive oil and booze and whatever else. That cost is written off. We're washing the money here. See, Christina, one of my biggest problems, believe it or not, is handling the cash. I got to know where it is, where it isn't. The stuff takes up space. You put it in a box, then that is a goddamn heavy box. I got boxes and boxes of cash that I have to move around, get rid of, make disappear. You can't just put it in your checking account. I'm not crazy about sending it to the Cayman Islands, or one of those places… I'm old-fashioned, I don't trust that… So, anyway, the restaurant buys the food from other operations we run. Those operations are legitimate businesses. They're just selling olive oil or whatever. You keep the cash inside the operation this way, but it gets cleaned. You lose a percentage to overhead here, but that's your cost of washing that money. When it comes out, it's untraceable to its original source. The one hundred dollars from the numbers becomes an order for a bunch of fish and booze for a party that never was. You run twenty parties a month, maybe ten are real, ten never happen. You can make half a million or more disappear. The waiters don't know what's going on, because they don't see the paperwork. They may wonder why the room is empty. Well, okay. But you never explain. You also vary your pattern. We also got a couple of yuppie restaurants. You can do it there, too. The waiters and waitresses in these places don't pick up on it, because you only hire kids who are spending most of their time drinking and fucking and won't remember anything in a year anyway. It's unbelievable the way they fuck each other in restaurants. They do it in the restrooms and the kitchen. I mean, one of my managers once saw a girl getting popped as she was lying down on a frozen side of beef. The guy that was doing it still had his chef hat on. These are mongrel kids. They don't remember what's going on. They're doing drugs. You hire them and fire them after a few months. The turnover in the restaurant business is incredible. How you going to know how much bread got eaten here, how much there? We know because we're running it, but some cop, he can't. He don't know how much fish got eaten some night two years ago by thirty people. He can guess, but he don't really know. It's detail work. What do you think? That would keep you in Manhattan, be a nice quiet-

I can't. I'm sorry.

And then, sitting there in his floral shirt, Tony Verducci had sipped his iced tea and looked at her with confusion. He wasn't used to such disrespect. She'd wished he would just forget about her. And maybe he had, maybe not. He'd certainly never contacted her after she'd been arrested, or while she was in prison.

A wooden nightstick rattled between the cell bars.

"Welles!"

"Yes?" she called into the gloom, breathing fearfully.

She heard the guard's keys, and when she lifted her head, two immense prison system matrons stood over her, one black, one white. Big women, with bull necks and thick legs.

"Get up," the black matron announced. "Taking a trip."

"Where?" Christina asked. "What did I do?"

"You supposed to know that."

"Where am I going?"

"Just get dressed." The matron watched the blanket fall away from Christina's leg.

"People keep moving me around, not telling me where I'm going."

"You're making a trip this morning, missy. Get up." The matron sunk a meaty hand beneath Christina's armpit.

"Get your clothes," ordered the other matron. The guard held the plastic bag Christina had packed in Bedford.

"Green?" Christina pointed at her uniform.

"No," said the matron. "Free world."

"Can I just-"

"No! We in a hurry."

She got up and peed in the toilet; they watched dispassionately, familiar with the sight of women relieving themselves. She dressed in front of them, pulling on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Her nipples were hard in the cool air, and it bothered her that the matrons saw this. They shackled her hands behind her, then pushed her out of the cell. Some of the other women stood clutching their bars, curious about any activity along the hallway. Yo, they taking you to the electric chair, white bitch? Maybe the Dep was moving her to another prison, but that would not explain why she'd been told to dress in free-world clothes. It was hours before any courthouse would be open; perhaps she was being transferred upstate to another prison.

"Where am I going?" she asked again.

"You'll know soon."

They took her directly to a blue-and-white Department of Corrections van parked outside; before she got in, her feet were cuffed, and then she was helped up on the bench seat, where they ran a loose chain through her leg cuffs. She was the only prisoner being transported, which was strange, given that the prison system, so overcrowded and pressed for funding, usually crammed prisoners together.

"Where am I going?" she screamed at the window. No answer came back. The van pulled through the heavily fenced entrance, where a guard closed a gate behind the vehicle before opening the gate in front of it. Through the tiny caged window she could see the looming rise of Manhattan, a bright veil of glass and steel and stone. How forbidden and marvelous it looked! Maybe the D.A.'s Office really was releasing her. Either they had been fooled or possessed some reason to reverse her verdict-discovered some advantage in it. But she didn't like either scenario. It put her inside other people's plans, it was an if-then formula, and all branches of supposition arrived at people whom she didn't like having some reason to see her out of prison, especially Tony Verducci.

Thirty minutes later the van bounced up in front of the massive Criminal Courts Building at 10 °Centre Street, and the matrons took her into the north tower, the Tombs. On the twelfth floor prisoners were segregated into a series of holding pens; most had been arrested recently and were awaiting their arraignments. The bridge connecting the twelfth floor to the rest of the court building was known as the Bridge of Sighs, and she was taken across it with a couple of prostitutes, who clattered awkwardly in their high heels and handcuffs, to a small holding cell next to a courtroom on the thirteenth floor. Two new matrons flanked her, one of them clutching her plastic bag. A wall phone rang and the matron picked it up.

"Let's go," she told Christina.

It was the same courtroom in which she'd been convicted four years earlier-same high ceilings and deep bank of benches, same green walls. And the same assistant district attorney who had prosecuted her sat at a table. The judge, a middle-aged man with half-glasses, appeared through an open door, dropped into his chair, and picked up a telephone. He noticed Christina.

"You may sit."

A few minutes passed. Another man came in and whispered to the assistant district attorney. The detective, she thought, the guy who testified at my trial.

"Your Honor," said the young prosecutor, "Detective Peck has been told that Miss Welles's lawyer is somewhere else in the building."

The judge did not look up from his paperwork. "Fifteen minutes, or I'm adjourning."

Detective Peck disappeared from the room.

"Miss Welles," said the judge, "we're trying to find your attorney."

"Oh," she said. "Why?"

"This is a formal proceeding, and you need representation."

"Okay."

"Your attorney is not an 18-B lawyer?"

"What's that?"

"The state pays their fees."

"No. I don't think so."

"It's Mrs. Bertoli?"

"It was."

"Did Mrs. Bertoli contact you?"

"No."

"Well, perhaps the district attorney's notice was mislaid amongst Mrs. Bertoli's voluminous paperwork," the judge concluded wearily. "Perhaps that is plausible. Then again"-he raised his eyebrows, his hairline lifting upward-"she may have seen said notice and not perceived its import." The judge looked at Christina. "Its importance to you, I mean."

"Yes," agreed Christina uncertainly.

"Mrs. Bertoli is well known to this court," the judge continued. "Her professional demeanor is well known and her habits are well known. That she has not contacted you is inexcusable. Yet she has been and no doubt will continue to be excused. She is a pack mule of excuses working in a pit mine of societal disinterest. We release unaccountability and irresponsibility from its natural ore, and we carry it to the surface and smelt it into the coin of chaos." The judge sighed. "I will stop there. The court officers have all heard my speeches. I will let that be my day's protestation. The court should not characterize the quality of defense counsel, it is true, but-"

"But we're among friends," piped in the assistant district attorney.

The door opened and Mrs. Bertoli entered, followed by the detective. She flicked a cell phone shut and dropped it into her briefcase and walked officiously up to the front of the courtroom. "Is this really a 440.10?"

"Yes, Mrs. Bertoli," answered the judge. "Let's go now." He picked up his phone and muttered a word or two, and a court reporter entered and sat down at her steno machine. "All right, then, Mr. Glass, I've read your statement. Your detective, Mr. Peck, is sure that he made a mistake with the identification?"

"Yes, Your Honor," said the prosecutor.

"After more than four years he mystically realizes he made a mistake?"

"He was involved in ongoing police work," answered Glass, "and realized that there were several lost subjects in the undercover case involving Miss Welles. By that I mean unnamed targets of surveillance, and he realized that it was one of them in the truck on the day in question, and not Miss Welles."

Christina cut her eyes at Peck. This was bullshit. Of course she'd been in the truck-that's where she'd been arrested. Peck blinked but did not change his expression.

"Miss Welles never confessed?" the judge asked, flipping over a sheet of paper.

"That is correct," said Glass.

"There was no plea bargain, in fact?"

"That is also correct."

"Has the lost subject from the original case been arrested?"

"Detective Peck informs me that an arrest is expected shortly."

"What was Miss Welles's role, then?"

Glass looked directly at the judge. "She was the girlfriend of one of the principals. That's all."

"Your summary referred to some confusion over the method of communication used by the gang."

"We thought she had something to do with it."

The judge paused, then winced at some private thought. "There was no confession, no familiarity with the line of questioning?"

"This was more than four years ago, Your Honor, but the answer is no. She never confessed to anything the whole time."

"There was no prior record?"

"No."

"No arrests at all?"

"Nothing."

"Prison record was what?"

"Exemplary."

"Is Detective Peck ready to answer a few questions?"

"Yes."

The detective was sworn in. He had spent some time with his hair and necktie that morning.

"All right, explain this to me," barked the judge. "I'm surprised the newspapers aren't here. It's a good story."

"That's because they never sent me any notice," protested Mrs. Bertoli hoarsely. "If they did, then I would have raised holy hell."

The judge ignored her. "Go ahead, Detective."

"It's simple, Your Honor. We made a mistake in the identification. There was another woman involved in the smuggling-same weight, same coloring, height a little shorter. We didn't get much of a close look at her. We never heard her name. When we arrested Miss Welles, we thought that was the same woman. Miss Welles admitted she was the girlfriend of Rick Bocca, whom we suspected of masterminding the whole operation, but that was it."

"Just the girlfriend?" the judge asked.

"Yes."

"How much did she know?"

"She may have known a few things in a passive way, Your Honor, but she was not part of the planning. These were very professional people. Experienced, tough people. Bocca was well known to us. She was a young girl at the time, not a principal."

I'm actually insulted, Christina thought, but she said nothing.

"Sort of a hanger-on-er, a girlfriend, something like that?" the judge summarized.

"Bocca had a lot of"-the detective hesitated-"bimbos, you could call them, I guess."

"One of those appellations that are demeaning by their accuracy," noted the judge. "And though your terminology is vulgar, it is useful for its clarity. I believe I understand."

I never got less than an A-minus in any of my courses at Columbia, Christina thought angrily, but then she remembered that Peck knew this, had even taunted her with it during the interrogation. Girl like you gets perfect grades, how'd you end up with Bocca? He was smart, this Peck, looking at the judge with a face full of contrition.

"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.

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.

She walked into an electronics shop and asked for the biggest bag they could give her. She switched her belongings into it and discarded the garbage bag. In SoHo, walking north on Broadway, she saw the Guggenheim's downtown museum, went inside, and procured a big paper bag with the museum's logo on it. That was better. Just north of Houston she stopped in a little pizza joint. She ordered two slices with everything on them and a Coke-a cold, beautiful Coca-Cola-and carried the greasy paper plate to a table in the back and looked around at the other patrons-delivery boys and secretaries and construction workers. She put her mouth against the warm crust, her nose filling with the oregano and basil, and suddenly began to weep. It was all so stupid. Stupid and sad! Four years gone. Everything had been torn away-her apartment, her books, her cat, the people she used to know. And she'd spent four years learning the routine of the prison, which, though hateful for its regularity, was at least something, a pattern, a dailiness she understood, and she had gotten to know the women and love some of them, Mazy especially. Now that was gone. She knew how hard it was going to be to get started again. She would do what was necessary, and find a job, find a place to live, try not to let Tony Verducci find her, but in this moment, with the warm pizza so sadly delicious, its intense desirability indicating the utter desolation of her life, she felt grief cut through her. She was, she knew, entirely alone.

A half hour later, she found what she was looking for, a secondhand clothing shop in the East Village, the late-morning sun bright against its front window. The bell tinkled as she stepped inside, and an old man in a purple T-shirt looked up from his magazine and stubbed out his cigarette.

"Hi, dear." He eyed her Guggenheim bag.

"I used to come into this place, long time ago." She looked around. "I once bought the most beautiful kimono here."

The man lifted a pair of half-frames to his nose. "I remember you! It's been a long time. Been away, darling?"

"I have."

His eyes brightened. "Was it a man on a train? Some fellow with a nice hat?"

She smiled. "Not exactly."

He came out from around the counter and sized her up. "Oh well, then, let me guess again."

"Please."

He took the challenge seriously. "Well, I'll say it was a-a calamity, a storm, that just took you, dear, and you had no power over it!"

"That's about right."

"And you came here, you came back, because you were happy here, right here, in my little old shop."

"That's true." She smiled. "And now I need a dress, sort of nice, not cheap-looking."

He nodded. "I have it."

He flipped through a rack of dresses, pulled out a red cotton one.

"No."

"No?"

"That'll make me look too flat."

"But, honey, you are definitely not."

"I know, that's the point." She tipped up her chin. "Don't you know how boys think?"

"Yes, I do. They're all nasty." He smiled wickedly. "One way or the other."

"I need something sort of nice, but not-something that is, you know, a little-"

"Something that says, Here I am."

"Right."

He went to another rack. While he flipped through dresses, she picked up a copy of The Village Voice from the stack on the glass counter.

"This is free now?" she said.

"Yes." The man nodded. "Free as love."

"Why?"

"They were losing against the free weeklies. They're all the same, anyway. Sex this, sex that. It's the only reason people read them."

"Only reason people do a lot of things."

He pulled out a black sleeveless dress buttoned up the front with cunning little buttons. Everything about it said, Cigarettes, table for two, and please bring me a martini. "I mean, honey, this is practically illegal!"

She had her black mail-order bra and underwear in her bag. "How about shoes?" she asked.

"How about them? I've got those, too."

"Does that lady across the street still rent out rooms by the week?" she called after the shopkeeper.

"If I say you're okay," he answered over his back, "she will."

"Will you say I'm okay?"

His face hardened. "I always ask a few questions for her. She's a nice old lady who can't hear too well anymore."

"Okay." She nodded quickly.

"Just don't fib to me, either, because I do her evictions for her. I mean, I get someone who does it for her, someone who, you know, likes to do evictions."

"Right." He's cruel, she thought, so don't beg.

He looked her over, first hanging up a dress. "Now then, you're back in the city?"

"And need a cheap place to live."

"What was your last place of residence?"

"Prison, actually."

"Oh well, forget it!" He waved his hands in frantic dismissal.

"What do you mean, forget it?"

"Forget it means forget it. You're a criminal."

"Not really."

"What's that mean?"

"I broke the law, but I'm not a criminal."

"What did you do?"

She took a breath. In the future she would not mention prison. People couldn't handle it. "My boyfriend worked in a ring that stole shipments out of cargo warehouses and then resold the stuff. Most of the time I just went to college. But then I dropped out and read a lot. Then I helped him a little bit with his scheduling. I got caught. The others didn't. I didn't talk, which made the D.A.'s Office pretty mad. They had, shall we say, very little compassion."

"What happened to the rest of the baddies?" said the shopkeeper, arms folded in front of him.

"I have no idea."

"Was it drugs?"

"The stuff in the trucks? No."

"Are you a junkie?" he asked Christina.

"You already looked at my arms, I saw you."

He peered at her through his half-frames. Then, as if losing interest in the conversation, he held up a heavy silvered hand mirror.

"That's very nice."

"London, turn-of-the-century. I keep it to remember what style those Victorians had." His eyes, however, narrowed again. "You have some kind of regular income?"

"Soon."

"Kids coming to live with you?"

"No."

He set the mirror down. "Do you have kids?"

"No."

Then he sighed, shaking his head. "Tell me something that lets me understand you, honey, that makes you a person to me, something that lets me see your mind."

"It's a question of whether or not I'm presentable?"

"You could put it that way."

She nodded silently and gazed around, as if for a topic of conversation. Then she picked up the old silver mirror and held it close to the shopkeeper's face so that he could see himself, peer at his own whiskers and saggy eyes. "Victorian England," she began, "in addition to the ornately mannered upper-class style that you find so attractive, was notable for its return to the use of flogging minor criminals, a practice that had ceased years before. Under the Vagrancy Act of 1898, those who were convicted of deviant male behavior-including exhibitionism, solicitation of homosexual acts, and masquerading in female attire-were flogged with a lash, often quite brutally."

He glanced from the mirror into her eyes. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I think I see. Is that your period? The Victorian era?"

She shrugged.

"Tell me something more."

"Because you don't believe me?"

"No, just for the pleasure of it. Flog me with another fact or two."

She looked about the shop for inspiration, spied a man's long wool coat with heavy buttons. "When Charles Dickens died, the momentousness of his death was such that his grave at Westminster Abbey was left open for two days. During that time thousands of people passed by, gazing down into the earth at his open coffin. Hundreds dropped in bouquets. He was a genius buried in flowers."

"Yes." The shopkeeper picked up the phone. "Yes!"

Twenty minutes later, she had been admitted into the lobby of the blue six-story apartment house across the street and was shaking the gnarled paw of a Mrs. Sanders, who appeared to be about eighty. The woman had been interrupted in her daily practice of chopping up pieces of beef heart for her four cats, who lounged fatly in her dilapidated living room, quite unworried about where their next meal was coming from, while she shuffled across the floor in a stained housecoat and set down a tiny china bowl before each. "Now then," Mrs. Sanders said to Christina. "You want to rent a room and Donald sent you over? Well, that's very good. What's your name?"

"Bettina, Bettina Bedford."

"Glad to meet you, Bettina. You can pay by the week to start. Cash is fine. Better, in fact. I only have one room, and the girl may come back. Maybe soon, maybe not. That's why I can let it go very cheaply, because if she comes back, then you're out right away, with no complaint. I don't know when, but it's going to waste. She said she would come back sometime this fall, and I suppose I- Now, wait a minute." Mrs. Sanders probed her leathery right ear with a finger, which still had quite a bit of beef heart adhered to it, and extracted a waxy brown pill, which Christina understood was a hearing aid, and fiddled with a button. She frowned in frustration. "I can't get it! They make these things too small! Miss, please-" Mrs. Sanders held out the hearing aid in her gnarled hand; it appeared to be nothing so much as the shell of an insect, furry with cat hair. She pointed at a tiny button. "Please push that twice."

Christina ventured a finger-a fingernail, really-against the tiny button and pushed twice, each time producing a tiny click. Mrs. Sanders plugged the little brown pill back into her ear. "Yes, yes, I think that will-Ooh!" She widened her eyes, as if that helped with the fit, frowned, blinked, then smiled at Christina. "Much better. Let me get my book, just a moment…" She shuffled off to a desk overflowing with cat literature. "I keep it all- Now, just a moment, yes. Here." She came back with a thick ledger that she clutched with two hands and sat down on a sofa. "Here we are in nineteen eighty-"

"Ninety-nine," Christina said.

"Yes, of course. This is the new one." Mrs. Sanders pushed open the front cover, which had been repaired with heavy tape. "This one started in nineteen seventy-seven. But I've been here since fifty-one."

"Seen all types, I guess."

"Seen? I've seen them, I've heard them, I've carried out their bodies. One fellow died in the bathtub. We had one of the Black Panthers living here once, we had Woody Allen visiting some friends, we had Janis Joplin sleeping here for three weeks, that fellow Allen Ginsberg left his pants here once-oh, we had quite a bit of it go through this place, let me tell you. We had a man who tried to raise chickens in his apartment, we've had four or five transvestites, we had a man who slept inside a broken refrigerator, we've had everything."

"I don't have very much money."

The old woman had heard this before. "Nobody here does."

"I don't know if-"

"You see, I'm a socialist. You don't get that too much anymore. People don't remember what it meant to be a socialist. I don't charge too much. I charge what I can get and I charge what I need to get." Mrs. Sanders flipped pages absentmindedly. "They tried to buy me out a few years ago, they said I could get more. I don't care. I'm an old woman, I have my cats, I have everything I need. We all thought it was going to get better, that's what we were working for. Well, it didn't happen and a lot of us died. I just got older-so far." She smiled to herself, then switched thoughts, her eyes fiercely upon Christina's. "Now then, I've seen your type. I know something about you that you don't know yourself. I'm going to put you in one of my quiet top rooms, where I put girls like you. Fifth floor, front. It's got nice light. You almost won't hear the garbagemen, you just sit up there and think whatever you need to think about. The last girl, she moved out so fast, she left a pile of boxes in the closet and maybe she'll pick them up and maybe she won't. I can't be worried about it. Now, just follow me…" Mrs. Sanders stood up and shuffled to the back of the apartment. "Come on, follow me, bring your bag. Yes, this is the elevator, my elevator, not for the tenants. I'm too old to climb the stairs." They squeezed into a tiny caged box, and Mrs. Sanders creaked the door shut and pushed her finger against a panel of buttons. It's a city of elevators, Christina thought, as the box slowly rose. "They said the building was worth almost a million dollars. What do I care? Where am I going to go? I've been here since Eisenhower got elected. I raised four children in this building, two and a half husbands."

"How do you get two and a half husbands?"

"Oh, the first two were just fine in the romance department, but the last, well, he gets a half. He died of liver cancer. He drank and drank and I never asked him not to." Her old cheeks lifted with the memory. "He used to drink and play the trumpet for me, the saddest thing in the world. That would make me cry and love him all over again. When he played the trumpet, he was my king." The elevator bumped to a stop. "This is the fifth floor. Get a few groceries every time you go out-that's my advice." The hallway led gloomily past one door after another, walls streaked with obsolete vitality, yearning unanswered. "Now then, I have a few rules. I want to get paid every Sunday. Go two days without paying and I put you on my list. Don't get on my list. It's not worth it. People say to me, You can't get me out of here. I always tell them I got the best landlord lawyer in the city, I know all the judges and all the inspectors, I've got fifty years of smarts to get you out. My other rules are no violence, no stealing, no guns, no dealing. A boy here and there, okay, but just keep it quiet. I have liberal attitudes. I think people should enjoy themselves. God gives us more trouble than pleasure. Trouble erases the pleasure, but pleasure also erases trouble-at least for a little while. But no noise."

They reached a blue door marked 5A, marred with old tape and thumbtack holes. Mrs. Sanders pulled a key from her housecoat. Inside was a plain room, ten by twelve feet, with a small bathroom connected to it. In one alcove of the bathroom stood a tiny stove and refrigerator. Above the sink hung the electric meter.

"Why is the meter there?"

"Only place it would go," said Mrs. Sanders. "If you cook a lot, open the bathroom window, even in winter. It ventilates and keeps the smells down. The fire extinguisher is under the sink, and as you can see, there's a fire escape. If there is a fire, please escape. That's what I always say. We had a fire years ago and a Dominican boy died from the smoke. They carried him out naked, like a fallen angel." She dug into her apron. "Here're your keys. This building is my building. I want people to be happy. If you can't be happy, Miss Bedford, go live with the unhappy people. Somewhere else."

The old woman pulled the door shut and Christina set down her bag. The walls had not been patched or painted in ten or twenty or thirty years; the floor was scraped rough and uneven; two of the windows were cracked. It was perfect. The bed sagged in one corner, and a dresser with three drawers sat against the opposite wall. She pulled open the drawers one at a time, inspecting the minute detritus of others' lives: paper clips, a few pennies, something from the inside of a computer, a bead to costume jewelry, a flier from a neighborhood acupuncturist, three pencils with broken points, a fingernail, an obsolete subway token. I like this, Christina thought. She lifted the worn, gray sheets from the bed and examined the mattress. Overlapping stains of different size and origin ringed the parallel ridges; she could identify piss, blood, house paint, crayon, wine, candle wax, cigarette burns, and what appeared to be motor oil. In the closet she found a white pump with the heel broken off; whoever had once owned it had carefully applied white polish over the worn toe. The pump suggested not just the sloppy movement of souls through space but defeat. I need to make this room mine, she thought. She hung her new dress in the closet, set the copy of the Voice on the dresser, re-folded her clothes, and laid them in the top drawer. In the closet she found three large boxes taped shut, each marked property of melissa williams. She lifted one down, smelling its papery mustiness, and set it on the bed. The tape was the cheap kind that is wetted, then stuck on; dried, it had curled and lifted from the cardboard, easy enough for her to peel up. Jumbled inside were letters, photographs, movie ticket stubs, bank statements, a packet of condoms, magazine clippings, several paperback books-seemingly every piece of paper that Melissa Williams had ever touched. Christina put the photos in a pile, then the letters, then the documents. The photos revealed a young brown-haired woman in eyeglasses and baseball cap. Not so pretty, maybe, but fun, willing to drink a beer or two. Up for whatever it was. Alert, yet not sophisticated. Legs a little heavy, didn't wear much makeup. Industrious, needed approval. Melissa, the documents showed, was twenty-seven years old and until two months prior had been working at a company on Prince Street that designed Web sites. She was a graduate of Carleton College and had taken classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her mother had written to say that she was very worried about Melissa's brother, who was found in Seattle unconscious with a needle hanging out of his arm. The letters became increasingly desperate. "Your brother will kill himself one of these days," said the last, "and there is nothing (!) I can do. Only God knows what it took to bring him into the world and now he is going to throw away his life with a needle. Melissa, I know that I have not been the mother you would have wished for yourself. Sweetheart, I know that all of your orderly habits and responsible behavior have been in direct reaction (!!) to me, and that I have forfeited any last favors (!!) I might request of you. But your brother needs you, he needs someone who will take him away from there and bring him home. He will listen to you. I am beseeching you. I am begging you to save your brother's life. From what you tell me, they are very happy (!) with your work at your company and I trust that if you explain the situation they will let you leave for a while and then come back. In any case you are so talented that I know you will have very little difficulty in reestablishing yourself in New York City."

Christina wished her own mother had been as kind-not a chance. It appeared, in fact, that Melissa, dutiful and concerned, had heeded her mother's wishes. Slitting open one of Melissa's bank statements, Christina could see that Melissa had withdrawn three thousand dollars from her checking account six weeks prior, at the end of July, and that the checking account had registered no activity after then. The account still had eight thousand dollars in it-clearly Melissa W. was as level-headed as her mother said she was. It occurred to Christina that she could walk into a bank with the bank account number and attempt a withdrawal, even without identification as Melissa. But she didn't want to take money from another woman. Besides, men were happy to leak money on women. It was a form of urination or even ejaculation, depending on the amount involved. No, she had no desire to swindle Melissa's money from her, but she did suddenly and happily wish-as if having found a secret friend-to ingest all the stuff in the three musty boxes.

Let's see what Melissa was doing while I was in prison, she thought. Melissa W. had frequented the Angelika Theater on Houston Street; she had received an abortion with no complications in April of 1997; she had subscribed to The New York Times for five months; she had served as a juror for a civil trial; she had registered as a Democrat; she had given money to the National Coalition for the Homeless; she put little Xs on her calendar when she got her period, which was utterly regular until and after the month of the abortion; she had read through the works of Marguerite Duras; according to a sequence of photos, she'd had her hair permed; she had enjoyed a lengthy affair with a divorced filmmaker who ate lunch every day at the Union Square Cafe; she had subsequently received an AIDS test, which was negative; she had witnessed a bicycle messenger be killed by a city bus and composed a notarized summary of what she had seen for a city agency; she had donated blood three times; she had written her company's president and received a raise; in short, Melissa Williams was a hardworking, independent, and reasonably happy young woman who had left town precipitously and who planned, sooner or later, to come back. Her time in New York City, thought Christina, was probably no better or worse than the years I would have experienced if-if what? If she had not spent the night before a big high-school swim meet drinking with her girlfriends. If she had, the next day, finished second and not third in the one-hundred-meter backstroke of Pennsylvania's regional championships, thus missing a swimming scholarship to Stanford, her first choice. If she had not picked Columbia instead. If she had not slept with her religion professor in the fall of her junior year and, having suddenly been dumped by him, gone out one night and seen Rick at the bar of the Pierre Hotel (he'd been wearing a suit and a great tie, and after three drinks, she was more or less ready to climb the Empire State Building). And if she hadn't found Rick so alien and fascinating and the best lover a girl could ever dream of, then she would not have put up with his bullshit machismo or started helping him with his stolen-goods operation. If she had not realized that Tony Verducci was using Rick and her for his own ends on the last job. If she had not figured out how to outsmart Tony Verducci-if, if a lot of things.

The last item she found in the box was a tube of lipstick. She pulled off the cap and discovered to her delight that the wine-red color was absolutely perfect, and she went into the bathroom and put it on. Thank you, Melissa W., she whispered into the mirror, for you know not what you have given me. Now she had lipstick, a dress, the pumps. In the dresser lay her one decent pair of pantyhose, the black mail-order bra that fit well enough, a pair of matching black panties, a cheap little handbag with the inside lining torn, and some of Mazy's prison perfume. She would look-well, she wouldn't look great, but she also wouldn't look like someone who'd woken up in Rikers that morning. In the handbag she put her hairbrush, two of Melissa Williams's condoms, the perfume, the lipstick, forty-three of her remaining sixty-three dollars (wedging the last twenty-dollar bill under the wooden slat of her bed in case anyone came in while she was gone), and her new keys. Then she went downstairs and stepped out into the street, as free as she had ever been.

Six hours later she lay in darkness seventy blocks uptown and thirty stories above the street, and having endured all manner of comments, solicitations, come-ons, gestures, jokes, offhand remarks, earnest questions, unasked-for confessions, and, finally, a sequence of stiff drinks that became a rather nice swordfish dinner, she remembered an old trick and slipped her fingers down between her legs, felt the guy's penis, and made a tight circle around it.

"Oh, wow," he moaned, his breath full of vodka and nachos and some kind of hazelnut liqueur they had shared that was just about the best thing she had ever tasted. He was a boy, really. Twenty-five, maybe. The bars of the Upper West Side were full of boys, boys in suits. He didn't know anything about fucking, that was sure-or what she remembered of it. He had climbed and clawed and writhed around on top of her, never settling into the kind of long hypnotic driving that she remembered-remembered Rick for, unfortunately. As far as this guy was concerned, the sex was about him, not about her. But that didn't matter now-it was time to finish. She squeezed her fingers and whispered the absolutely dirtiest thing she could think of into his ear-it was a little exciting-and he grunted in fervor and came dramatically, banging at her in self-congratulatory frenzy, the stubble of his chin brushing her forehead. Then, as if gored by an ax-swinging assailant, he toppled off her and fell onto the sheets. She rubbed the guy's head. He wasn't so bad, just too young, really, didn't know anything. Too young to protect her from Tony Verducci.

"I'm going to pee," she whispered.

"Yass, 'kay."

She stood in the bathroom examining her breasts in the mirror. They might have fallen a little while she was in prison. Just a tiny bit. Her nipples were swollen from the guy's mouth, her neck blotchy where he'd snuffled Mazy's perfume. She opened his medicine cabinet, didn't see anything in there interesting, except some kind of toothpaste that made your teeth whiter. I started the day in prison and now I'm naked in some guy's bathroom, she thought. That was something. What exactly, she wasn't sure. She sat on the toilet. The next part was not good, but she had to do it. The guy had bragged to her that he had earned three hundred thousand dollars last year, including his bonus, so, from a Marxian perspective, her crime was merely going to be a redistribution of capital to one who didn't have it.

She flushed the toilet and tiptoed back into the bedroom. He was on his back, Melissa Williams's condom still on him, a droopy hat. A good thing, too-her mother always said the two of them, mother and daughter, were "built the same," which meant Christina could get pregnant if a boy "went by in his underwear." Amazing that she'd never gotten pregnant with Rick, considering. Now she watched the guy roll over. He was good-looking, like an underwear ad, but she'd felt nothing, despite grinding herself against him while straddling on top. Not even close to an orgasm. Why? She used to have jillions of them. But now she was out of practice and had been a little nervous. Also, he had been clumsy, too slow sometimes, too fast others. The whole thing was like a bad ride at the amusement park-looked fun beforehand, but you were glad when it was over. He had no clue who she was. Thought she was a graduate student in history.

"Hey, urban professional guy."

"Yeah-ahh?"

"You okay?"

He flopped around, loose-armed, drunk. "Thas was-I'm telling you, I jus' am fucking kinda knocked out here…"

She knelt on the floor and found his pants. He'd used a credit card at the bar, but she was sure she'd glimpsed some cash in the wallet.

"Roll over, I'll give you a back rub."

He did. He was a guy. Not so bad, really. He'd tried his best. If they screwed a few more times, she could train him to do a few things right. She pressed a hand into his shoulders and then along the spine. A great smooth back, wide as a door. No woman had shoulders like this. A good butt, too. Mazy had been right. Christina would go back to men; she might just go attack them, in fact. She moved a hand across the guy's shoulder blades, listening to the deepening of his breath. Her other hand found its way into his wallet. Not much. She slipped four or five bills into the front of her panties.

"You had kind of a long day." She kept her hand moving.

"Yass, I did, yassir," he gurgled. "Very big day. Many things happened. How about you? You have a big day?"

"Not much, except for you."

He smiled into the sheet. "You had a good time? I'm a okay guy?"

"Yes." She gave him a meaningless little kiss on the back of his neck. "But I have to go."

"Oh, no."

"Oh, yes."

"Girls-they always want to stay."

"Which girls?"

"All the girls I ever knew."

She rubbed his neck, kissed it. He was all right. "Maybe you never knew anybody like me."

"That's right, hey. Goddamn fuck like a pony." He threw a sleepy arm at her, pressed his hand as artlessly against her breasts as a man applying stucco to a wall. "Can I call you?" he breathed. "Gotta call you."

"I wrote my number down." For believing this lie, he deserved just one more kiss, maybe three or four, right along the backbone. She wanted to fall asleep on top of him. Don't, she told herself. Go now.

"I'll get up, call a cab," he said.

"No, you're tired. I'll just slip out. Give me a call in the late morning, if you want."

He sighed into the pillow. "Oh, I want. You can take that to the absolute bank."

I'll be taking something else, she thought, but you'll find that out soon enough. Five minutes later, with her little black dress back on, each clever button in its clever little place, and with his bills in her handbag, she stepped out to the street, holding a cardboard laundry box. The bills, she discovered in the cab, were hundreds, five of them, which the taxi driver might not take. But she had her own remaining cash for the fare. She pulled open the stapled laundry box as the taxi flew downtown. The box contained exactly what she had hoped for, ten tailored shirts, freshly starched and pressed-and no monogram. She'd get at least ten bucks each for them from the guy in the clothing store. Six hundred bucks-and dinner. Not bad. She reminded herself to have the taxi stop a block from her apartment house, in case someone asked the driver where he'd taken her. Stealing was something she hated herself for, probably, or at least usually, but it was also what she needed to do, to get a start-and without a start, she told herself, especially on a day like today, you don't get anywhere.