"So, boom, Christina is out, Tony gets to find her, and then he serves up some people to Peck. Pays him back?"
"That's the way it was explained to me."
"Who are these people?" Rick asked anxiously.
"I don't know. I couldn't get that."
"Why did Peck come visit me, then?"
"I don't know. I have theories."
"He wanted me to come back into the city, do something stupid, and then he could get me."
"Maybe," Paul agreed. "If that's true, then he would feel much better about letting Christina out. He gets her out, throws you in, then he's basically traded up."
"Or," Rick worried aloud, "he plans to fuck over Tony by getting me on something and then getting me to say everything I know about Tony. Give him all kinds of stuff."
"Maybe he thinks you'll be so grateful to him for giving you a chance to help Christina that you'll give up Tony."
Rick rubbed his eyes. A web of maybes. Most of them too complicated. He'd learned that if a plan had too many twists and turns it usually broke down.
"Or maybe you were one of the people that Tony promised to Peck," whispered Paul. "Ever think of that?"
"You're saying that Tony is going to give him old stuff on me? He's trading me into prison to get Christina out?"
"I think it's possible."
"Fuck that."
"But if he said that, then he was lying to Peck. He might tell Peck that he could arrest you and everything, but no way Tony is really going to let that happen, not if he's smart. If he's smart, then he gets ahold of Christina before Peck gets ahold of you, and then, once he has her helping him, he grabs you and sends you somewhere."
"Somewhere I won't come back from."
"It's just a theory. Maybe Tony has promised Peck other people. But I don't know why else you would have been pulled in."
"How did you get all of this?"
"I talked to some people who had different pieces, little bits of information. I hasten to add that I could be wrong, Rick, in part or in whole."
"No, I think you got it nailed down."
Paul was silent. "I've done all I can do here, I think."
"Yeah. I mean, hey."
Paul wasn't looking at him now. "Rick, I'm trying to say I don't have sufficient influence in this situation."
"I understand that, Paulie, I do. You did a hell of a lot."
Paul pulled an envelope out of his coat.
"No, no, Paulie, I got plenty of money."
"Open it."
Rick took the envelope. Inside was a new passport-his passport, with an old photo, a plane ticket to Vancouver, a reservation at a hotel there, an American Express gold card in Rick's name, and five thousand in blank traveler's checks.
"The card bills to me. Use it for anything you need."
"Oh, Paul, man."
His older brother turned to him. "I did everything I could, Rick. I had to be sure I did everything I could." His voice broke. "I can't go see Dad on Sunday and be thinking I didn't do enough."
Rick opened his door. The ferry would soon leave.
"Take the plane," said Paul. "I'm not just asking you."
"What do you know?"
"I told you everything."
Rick looked at his brother. "You know something that makes you scared."
"Yes! Of course I do, you asshole!" Paul pounded the steering wheel. "You!" he whispered savagely. "I know you, Rick."
Jim-Jack Bar amp; Restaurant Broadway and Bleecker, Manhattan September 15, 1999
Hiring, announced a sign on the glass door when Christina stepped out of the hot morning sunlight into the restaurant's smoky coolness to call her mother. She liked the way she could sit up at the end of the curved mahogany bar and lean against the wall while using the pay phone. The clever ease of it comforted her, and she could use a little comfort; that morning she'd woken to the sound of someone moaning down the hall, and not yet opening her eyes, she had despaired at what awaited her-the futile passage of the hours, Mazy talking too much, the unmopped floors of the nursery-a day dead before it was done. Then, rolling in her sweaty sheets, she'd seen the boxes of papers that Melissa Williams had left behind, the clothes hanging sparsely in the closet. Her new broom, a bag of apples. Was this real? The soft roar of the city seeped in through the open window. She rolled over. Below the window a shirtless man pinched up a cigarette from the gutter with the exactitude of a jeweler tweezering a diamond. If a dream, this was so ingenious as to be real, and if reality, it was yet so elusive as to be a dream. She was out of prison. She was in a bed in some room, just a crummy room, hers for now, a little creepy with the electric meter hanging from the ceiling, a room where people had probably died, or worse, whatever that was, and suddenly she wished to be somewhere that felt familiar, a place where people were around, if only strangers who knew nothing of her, and the Jim-Jack was the only spot she could think of, having stopped in there a few times already, each time having liked the joint for its ordinary coming-and goingness, its big window on Broadway. A rare smoking restaurant, and popular as such, it attracted a mix of locals, NYU students, European tourists, sailors on leave, small-time businessmen, retirees meeting for lunch, and solitary souls who ordered coffee and sat next to the windows dreaming impossible dreams while watching the action outside, which included tasty office girls (who were selling, but not for cheap), slick guys with new haircuts (who greased their eyes over the office girls), shell-game operators and their lookouts (who hoped to scam the slick guys good), and the dollar hot-dog place across the street (which, selling greasy, good-tasting food for cheap, scammed no one), the cabs meanwhile flowing and halting, then going and stopping, darting in front of the heavy trucks, which were themselves often gripped at the rear by a bicycle messenger catching a lift through the banners of sunlight that unfurled down the facades of the buildings along Broadway, turn-of-the-century structures of iron and brick, some ornate, others plain, but each having ingested and housed and expelled all manner of enterprise. She loved the repainted exhaustion of the buildings and wondered how long the Jim-Jack had existed. The long bar fit the room perfectly, which meant it probably had been built there from the first, and its ample depth and ridged lip suggested the time when men sat up on stools with their hats pushed back and ate lunch with a stein of beer, hard-boiled eggs in a dish, dill pickles served with everything you ordered. Cuffed pants, Rita Hayworth making eyes at America, the Germans are going to invade Poland, and FDR already has deep circles under his eyes. Now it was brain implants and Alaska is melting. She noticed the Jim-Jack used Mexican busboys. As for the waitresses, the management apparently hired only white women in their twenties-not men, not blacks, not older women. A further refinement was administered: The waitresses, though somewhat attractive, were never to be confused with the cheekbone girls modeling pumpkin soup and radicchio at other restaurants in the Village, which was to say that the Jim-Jack waitresses were not so attractive that they might soon be on their way elsewhere, so perky and lipsticky hot that the management had problems with the late-night crowd making endless drunken passes. No, she thought, watching from the bar, the owner of the Jim-Jack wanted to get the business in and then briskly out, and the girls slinging food to the tables looked like they'd learned much earlier to work dutifully for whatever money they could. No doubt the manager sometimes broke her own rule and hired a girl who was too pretty, who sooner or later ran into trouble; the businessmen floated cloud upon cloud of witty small talk and did not vacate their tables fast enough, feverish lovers showed up and made a scene, or drunken boys flirted with them-successfully. A smile, a phone number, a good time.
Maybe I could work here, Christina thought. But I might actually be too pretty. She took a napkin from the bar and wiped off her lipstick, flipped the napkin over, and smoothed away the eye shadow she'd so carefully put on an hour before. She found a rubber band in her bag and pulled her dark hair up, hiding it. That would probably do the trick. A regular girl, she thought, I look like some regular girl who just happened to walk in.