Pleading Guilty (32 page)

"Look, Mack, I can't read Gold's mind. Obviously he prefers to keep his plan, whatever it is, to himself. But you've known this man for years. Years. Are you telling me you can't trust Martin Gold?" Wash and I, in this basement, snapping in whispers, posed close as lovers, both stood struck by that question. Wash was doing what he always did--what he did the other day when the Committee talked over Jake's proposal that we stay silent if Bert didn't return. Wash was posturing, shooting air-balls, taking the easy way out. He knew just what was happening. Not every detail; neither did I. I still found it impossible to calculate how Bert fit in, how Martin had been able to blame him confident that he would not reappear. But Wash nevertheless had the lowdown on this scene: it was grubby and evil. He knew that instinctively because it was exactly what Wash, with no reflection, would have done--swap Jake the money for the survival of the firm. And he was keeping himself from speaking that sooty truth by pretending that Martin might have been up to something better.

"You're a fool, Wash," I said suddenly. In the midst of everything else, the seething emotions, the basement gloom, I walked away feeling great. Pure primitive pleasure. I had needed to say that for years.

I had wrested the memo from Wash without resistance. I folded it into quarters again and jammed it in my pocket as I strode up the gray steel stairs that had led me down. It was al
l c
lear now. By the time I was back up in the grand surroundings, amid the wooden walls and the cut-crystal sconces, I felt motivated and strong, mean and myself. I was done being little boy disappointed. I was man among men. When I forged through the revolving doors to the winter street, I was starting to plan.

Sunday, January 29

Chapter
XXI. THE INVESTIGATION

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIR
A. International Flight

The TN Executive Travelers Lounge, where I waited for Lena Sunday morning, afforded a rare vantage on a world askew. The place looked terrific. The interior designer produced the kind of tasteful space-age effect I'd have strived for in my office if I ever decorated, lots of curved woods and big windows, sleek leather chairs and granite end tables upon which were perched those special telephones operated by credit cards with two or three jacks for your portable modem and fax. The elegant-looking ladies guarding the door examined the entrants, who, every one of them, flashed their membership cards with the same air, Hey, look at me, I'm in the front of the boat, I really made it. Nipponese businessmen flying for thirty hours dozed on the fancy furniture; well-turned-out executives cracked away at their laptops; wealthy couples conferred, one of them always looking anxious with the prospect of flight. A waiter in a white jacket wandered around with a tray to see if anybody wanted a drink, while voices from the Sunday-morning TV news shows emerged from the bar.

Here met is the Flying Class, a group ever expanding, whos
e r
eal workday is spent in the sky, whose true office is an aisle seat on a DC-so, folks who have so many million award miles they could fly to Jupiter free. These are the orphans of capital, the men and women who have given up their lives for the corporate version of manifest destiny, who are trying to fling far some company's empire in the name of economies of scale. I had an Uncle Michael who was a traveling salesman, a sad sack with an ugly brown valise, one of those lacquered boxes that seemed welded to his hand. His was regarded as the fate of a misfit. Now it's a badge of status to be away from home four nights a week. But on God's green planet is there anything more depressing than an empty hotel room at ten at night and the thought that work, privilege, economic need not only claim the daylight hours but have, however briefly, entitled you to these awesome lonesome instants in which you're remote from the people and the things, tiny, loved, and familiar, that sustain a life?

Listen to me. What was / missing but my easy chair and the TV set and bloviating moments interacting with Lyle? And I'd have Lena's youthful company. My briefcase and travel bag were between my knees. I'd packed light--underwear, a suit to do business, swimming trunks, and a few items I'd need: my passport, my Dictaphone, some TransNational Air stationery from the office, an old letter signed by Jake Eiger, and three copies of TN's annual report. Plus the memo I'd found in Martin's drawer, which was never going to leave my sight. Like Kam, I'd also taken a $2500 cash advance on my new golden credit card, which had been messengered to the office on Friday. I had been up most of the night scheming and I shut my eyes, imagining the wind on Pico, fragrant with sea salt and tanning oil as it rattled the palms.

"Yoo-hoo." The voice was sweetly familiar, but I still jumped a little when I opened my eyes.

"Brushy Bruccia, as I live and die."

"So," she said, seeming perky and young. She looked happ
y a
nd pleased with herself. Her bag was slung over her shoulder and she carried her coat. She wore jeans.

"Where you going?" I asked.

"With you."

"Really and truly? What happened to Lena?"

"Emergency assignment. She'll be in the library all night." I got it then. I told Brushy I didn't need to ask from who. "That girl has a lean and hungry look."

"She's got a look," I said, "I'll give you that."

Brushy punched me solidly in the arm, but I was too embarrassed to carry on in front of all these men. We walked over to the leather chairs. Neither of us said anything.

"You're supposed to be pleased," she told me eventually. "How could I not be?" I was feeling impinged upon. I had my plans for Pico, which depended on a traveling companion who was more credulous than Brushy.

"Let's try this again."

She walked away and came around a handsome rosewood divider that sported CRTs listing arriving and departing flights. "Mack! Guess where I'm going."

"With me, I hope."

"Now you've got it."

I told her she was odd.

"By the way," she said, "what are we doing down there?" `By the way' nothing," I said. "Forget 'we.' Remember our deal? No askee, no tellee. You're not on the team."

A gal with a radio voice announced our flight, while Brush absorbed my rebuff lightly. She hung her head sideways; she fluttered her eyes.

"Oh dear," asked she, "whatever will you do with me?"

B. That Old Dance Step

This, the high season, was not my favorite time in Pico Luan. I had last been here years ago during the summer, when the capital, Ciudad Luan, was almost a ghost town, but in this season the homebound travelers, grownups and kids in their bright clothes, were crowded in the airport like the huddled masses from a steerage vessel. Their tanned faces were as surprising as the sweet breath of heat that greeted us as we descended the TN airliner staircase. Even in the long light, the tropical sun was compelling, so vital that winter at once was only a sad memory.

-God," said Brushy, shaking her hands free in the mild air. There was a rental car waiting. TN, as usual, had coughed up great accommodations right on the Regent's Beach, a nine-mile stripe of sand, white and uncluttered, that polishes the toes of the Mayan Mountains. Enormous and green, the foothills loom above the coast. In this season, with all the high-flyers and snowbirds down here, the narrow roads were crowded, and I found a back way out of the airport. Brushy opened the windows and took off her hat and let her short dark hair rise in the breeze. We whizzed along past the little lean-to houses with their metal roofs, the hand-lettered signs of occasional stores and stands offering local foods. Huge plants with leaves the size of elephant's ears grew in clumps at the roadside. The eternal Luanders strolled unmolested in the middle of the narrow roads, yielding for the car and then returning, pacing along down the center stripe, frequently barefoot.

The Luanders are pleasant people. They know they have it made, having mastered the white man through his greed. They have been bankers since the Barataria Bay pirates began storing their gold in the caves above Ciudad Luan--C. Luan to the locals--and the Luanders today remain as casually indiscriminate about clientele. International narcotics magnates, tax cheat
s f
rom many lands, and upper-crust bankers mingle congenially in this land of little restraint, sharing the tiny nation with its polyglot people in whose blood is mingled the DNA of Amerindians, African slaves, and a variety of runaway Europeans--Portuguese, English, Dutch, Spanish, and French. Pico has survived despots, Indian conquerors, and two centuries of Spanish rule, which ended in 1821, when Luan chose to become a British protectorate rather than be subsumed by the sovereignty claims of nearby Guatemala. In 1961, when Pico achieved independence, its parliament adopted the strict bank-secrecy laws of Switzerland and some of the B
. W. I
. islands.

With the acceleration of the offshore economy and the vast riches of today's pirates in neighboring Latin nations, who trade in powder rather than pieces of eight, Pico has gone through startling development in the last three decades. All the dough that's stashed here goes untaxed, and for that reason is not apt to leave. There's a $100 airport tax, a $10 tariff for every wire transfer, and a flat ro percent VAT on everything that's bought or sold. Burgers for the family in a restaurant in C. Luan can cost one hundred bucks. But the combination of no income tax and financial privacy means there is steady commerce and plenty of jobs. The Luanders remain remote, cordial, even, as British discipline made them, correct, but confident about the native way of wanting less. Fast-paced and ham-fisted, white people are regarded with whatever good nature as freaks.

Our hotel, at the far end of the beach, three or four miles outside C. Luan, was terrific. We had two little thatch-roofed cabanas side by side, self-contained units, each with a kitchen, a bar, and a bedroom that looked out on the water. Brushy had to reach her secretary at home to rearrange tomorrow's appointments, and I stepped outside on the small terrace of my unit as her voice rose in occasional frustration over the difficulty of getting a U
. S
. connection.

The sun was heading down now, a great rosy ball burning away in the clear sky. We'd been traveling all day most cornpanionably, doing crosswords on the plane, holding hands, gossiping about our partners and items in the Sunday Times. Out on the beach, various mothers, weary at the end of the day, called for their kids with fading humor. Pico, originally the haven either to guys who stepped off planes with wraparound shades and a firm grip on their valise, or a few archaeologists drawn by the enormous shrines the Mayas had built high in the mountains in sight of the ocean, is, after decades of promotion by TN, taking hold as a family vacation spot. By air, it's an hour farther than the islands, but it's less overrun and sports more notable sights. I watched kids scramble around between the legs of their parents, the little ones flirting with the waves and running screaming up the beach. One boy was lugging coconuts, still in their smooth brown husks, so that it looked a little like he was mounting a collection of heads. The sailboats were still out, but the water was losing its color. In the blazing sunlight it was a radiant blue, the result perhaps of copper deposits on the coral floor, a hue you thought existed solely in ads for color film. "All done." Brush was off the phone. She'd put on a kind of sundress and we walked up to the hotel and had dinner on the veranda, watching the pink fingers take hold of the sky, the water licking down on the beach. With my blessing she had a couple of drinks while I knocked down iced teas. She was looking happy and loose. Halfway through dinner a native band started playing a few rooms away in the bar inside, and the music and laughter came through the open french windows. The rhythm and themes were haunting, that Central American sound, pipes and flutes, sweet melodies like an echo out of the mountains. "What a place." Brushy looked with yearning at the sea. "I kind of think this is charming," I said. "Your following me." "Somebody had to do something," she told me.

I was as ever dishonorable, and pretended to have no idea what she might mean. She peered into her drink.

"I thought a lot about that conversation. In your office yesterday? People are entitled to change, you know." When sh
e r
aised her eyes, she had that look again, all pluck and daring. "Naturally."

"And you're right about me. But I don't have to apologize for that. It's a natural thing. The older you get, the more you wonder about things that are--" She faltered.

"What?"

"Enduring."

I flinched. She saw me.

She put a hand to her eyes.

"What am I doing?" she asked. Even with the candle guttering on the table, I could see she had flushed suddenly, maybe the liquor, maybe the heat adding to the effect of the strong emotion. "God, what do I see in you?"

"I'm honest," I told her.

"No, you're not. You're self-deprecating," she said. "There's a difference."

I gave her the point. "You deserve better," I told her. "You're not kidding."

"I mean it." I was as resolute as I could be. It was not, I swear, easy for me. But I was having one of those lucid moments when I could tell just how it would go. Brushy would always blame me for not being better and herself for not wanting more. "Don't tell me what's good for me, okay? I hate when you do that, like you're Lazarus, who crawled out of his cave just to do Ann Landers's column for a week."