"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."