The Sirena Quest (12 page)

Chapter Twenty-four

“Hello, chums.”

It was Reggie Pelham. Standing next to him in the aisle was Frank Burke.

They're here
, Lou said to himself as he looked up at them.
At last.

“Louis.” Reggie leaned over to shake Lou's hand. “I said to Frank, good God, man, isn't that Raymond and the other fellows over there?”

Frank nodded at them. “Boys.”

A beer man came by. Reggie stopped him. “Think I may wet the whistle. Anyone else?”

“Sure,” Lou said, reaching for his wallet.

“Frank?” Reggie said.

Frank shook his head.

Ray said nothing. He was sitting with his arms crossed over his chest, studying Frank.

“I'll take one,” Gordie said.

“Put away your money, fellas,” Reggie said. “This round's on me.”

Reginald Harrison Pelham was short and plump. He was dressed today for a round of golf: bright yellow Polo shirt (collar up), iridescent green slacks (pleated and cuffed), and cordovan loafers (with tassels). He'd grown up on Park Avenue, prepped at Choate, and returned to Manhattan after college to join Pelham Bros Ltd., the family merchant banking firm. He'd been a late-night poker player in college, Lou recalled, and a high roller today—comped at major casinos around the world, according to the Class of
'
74 ramblings of their goofy class secretary, Bryce Wharton.

After the beer man departed, Reggie kneeled in the aisle by Ray. “What brings you chaps to Chicago?”

“Gordie and Bronco Billy live here,” Ray answered. “I'm wending my way back to Barrett for the reunion. I stopped in St. Louis to spend a few days with Lou and his kids. Then it was on to the Chi-Town to catch the sights.”

Reggie nodded enthusiastically. “Excellent.”

Ray paused, the hint of a smile on his lips. “And what about you, Reg? What's a nice rich boy from New York doing out here?”

Reggie grinned and leaned toward Ray. “Frank and I are in the hunt for Sirena.”

“Really?” Gordie said, acting surprised. “You think she's in Chicago?”

Lou winced. Gordie was overdoing the naiveté bit.

Reggie shrugged. “Just might be. Afraid I can't reveal more than that, you know.” He gave them a wink. “The bleachers have ears, eh?”

Lou smiled. Even though Reggie was a consummate snob, there was a hale-fellow quality about him that Lou had always found endearing.

He remembered the time freshman year that Reggie had called out to him as he passed his open dormitory door. “Louis, old boy. Can I inveigle you to join me in a stogie and some hootch?”

They'd passed a pleasant half-hour puffing on Cuban cigars, sipping single malt whiskey, and searching with sporadic success for conversational common ground.

“Excellent fun,” Reggie had announced as Lou got up to leave. An amused chortle, a comradely pat on the back, and Lou was ushered out the door, his head still buzzing from the whiskey.

It was only much later that Lou wondered whether Reggie's bonhomie was just a practice session to sharpen his skills. After all, a merchant banker these days had to deal with all types, even Hebes from the sticks. Then again, Lou conceded, it was always possible that Reggie's performance wasn't a performance.

Lou took a sip of beer and asked Reggie, “Have you run into anyone else looking for her?”

“Not in Chicago, Louis. But there are most assuredly several searching parties out there. Indeed, do you fellows remember a chap named Dan Broussard?”

“Tall guy?” Gordie asked. “A year behind us?”

Reggie nodded. “That's the one.” He turned to Frank. “A fellow Blue, eh?”

Frank nodded.

Reggie turned to Gordie. “They both went to Hill School.”

Francis Ambrose Burke III had an equally snooty pedigree: born into Grosse Point society, prepped at the Hill School, summered at the family compound on Mackinac Island, returned home after Barrett to help manage the family investments, which included timber holdings in Oregon and rubber plantations in South America.

“As I was saying,” Reggie continued, “Dan called last night from Maine. Up near the Canadian border. He's there with a group of classmates. They thought they'd tracked Sirena down to an abandoned loggers' camp in northern Maine. Turned out a bust, but he's got a detective agency that thinks she might be in Gary, Indiana. Great stuff, eh? But we still think the real action might be right here in Chicago, don't we, Frank?”

Frank nodded.

Lou shifted his gaze to Frank Burke. Nothing soft focus about him, and never any effort to ingratiate himself with the pubes, which was his prep school's shorthand for public school grads. Back freshman year, he'd seemed to possess all the advantages that wealth and breeding could supply: tall, chiseled good looks, thick brown hair that he wore long and brushed straight back, like a Viking warrior. He'd installed a small refrigerator in his dorm room, and kept it stocked with gourmet cheeses and sausage and bottles of French wine. He and Gordie used to watch in envious disbelief as Frank returned from mixers, from the library, from fraternity parties, from seemingly anywhere, and always escorting a delectable coed into his dorm room.

“So it's just you and Frank?” Ray asked.

“Just the two of us.” Reggie leaned forward and smiled at Gordie. “Sure you're not just a bit in the hunt yourself, Gordon?”

“Nope,” Ray said before Gordie could respond. “But if we hear anything promising, Reg, I can sure promise one thing: you and Frank will be the very last to know.”

Reggie chuckled and looked up at Frank. “There's some pluck, eh?”

Frank didn't reply.

Lou studied Frank's face. Something was slightly off, as if the man standing in the bleacher aisle was someone else wearing a Frank Burke latex mask. And then Lou remembered. Several years ago, according to the Class of
'
74 grapevine, Frank had undergone massive plastic surgery after being launched, face first, through the windshield of his Jaguar, which had rammed into a tree late one night on his way home from a topless club in Windsor, Canada. His “restored” features were just a bit too rigid. It gave him an eerie otherworldly aura, as if, in the privacy of his room, Frank might reach beneath his chin and pull back the skin, revealing the head of a space alien.

Reggie stood. “Well, see you chums around.”

When they were out of earshot, Ray grunted. “Good.”

“What?” Lou asked.

“They're worried.”

“Why do you say that?” Gordie asked.

“For starters,” Ray said, “what the hell are those two preppies doing in the bleachers? They're following us.”

“You think so?” Gordie said.

“I know so.” Ray scratched his neck pensively. “We have to assume they've seen Marshall's will. But if they'd figured it out, they wouldn't have given us the time of day, which means we're still a step or two in front of them. For now, at least. But we're going to have to move fast.”

“And,” Gordie added, “we're going to have to start watching our butts.”

Ray leaned back, took a sip of his beer, and shook his head. “What a miserable piece of shit.”

“Reggie?” Gordie asked.

“Reggie?” Ray shook his head. “Reggie's harmless. You see Frank watching us while Reggie talked. Like a fucking predator. You can be sure it was his idea to come over and pump us for information. He told Reggie exactly what to say, how to play it. Frank's the dangerous one. Motherfucker's got ice in his veins.”

“I never liked him,” Gordie said.

Ray took another sip of beer. “You ever hear what he did to those girls senior year?”

“What girls?” Lou asked.

“Two local high school girls. He and one of his pals from Williams picked them up. Took 'em to a motel in New Hampshire, along with plenty of reefer and beer and Quaaludes. Had themselves a twenty-four-hour fuckathon. Next afternoon Frank's pal is antsy to get back to campus. Problem is, the girls are still stretched out on the bed—'luded up and totally zonked. Frank tells his buddy to get in the car. Ten minutes later, he comes out of the motel, hops in the car, and drives off. Tells his buddy that the girls decided to sleep it off and go home later.”

Ray finished his beer. The others waited for him to continue.

“Cops have a different story,” Ray said. “According to them, Frank went back in the motel room, tried to wake them up, got angry, pulled out his dick, and took a whiz on one of them.

“Oh, Christ,” Gordie said.

Ray said, “Turns out Frank pissed on the wrong goddamned girl. Her dad was a Belchertown cop. He raised holy hell. Frank's father had to hire F. Lee Bailey to get him out of the jam. Ended up dropping a wad of dough on the girl's family to settle. Believe me, Frank is a nasty son of a bitch.”

Ray turned to stare up at the scoreboard, squinting and shading his eyes. After a moment, he glanced over at Lou.

“Tonight,” Ray said.

Lou nodded. “Tonight.”

SCENE 64: FRONT-END, PART IV {Draft 3}:

INT. FRATERNITY BASEMENT BAR - NIGHT

Ray, Lou, and Buzz are on barstools, each with a beer.

BUZZ

Dudes, you're on your own tomorrow night.

LOU

How so?

BUZZ

This was my last night.

RAY

Who's front-end tomorrow?

BUZZ

Draw straws, you poor bastards.

CUT TO:

INT. BARRETT COLLEGE DINING HALL - THE NEXT NIGHT

There's a line of bussing carts near the front of the dining hall waiting to unload. Busboys hang around, growing impatient. One of them peers through the pass-through window and shakes his head in disgust.

INT. DISHWASHER AREA
—
VIEW THROUGH THE PASS-THROUGH WINDOW

Total chaos. Ray is on front-end. Dirty dishes and glasses and pails of garbage are piled everywhere. Broken plates and stray pieces of silverware are scattered on the ground.

ANGLE ON LOU

at the back-end, waiting. He pushes aside the canvas flaps to peer inside to see if anything is coming. Nothing.

ANGLE ON RAY

as he attempts to stack a set of dirty dishes in a rack. Two dishes slip out of his hands and CRASH to the ground.

RAY

Shit!

ANGLE ON LOU

Steam is coming out of the back-end. Lou raises his eyebrows in surprise. A loaded rack is actually coming out of the dishwasher. As soon as the edge of the rack pushes against the flaps, Lou grabs it and pulls it out. Hot water sloshes all over the place.

LOU

What the—? Jesus, Ray—

CLOSE ON THE RACK

Ray has sent a pail of garbage through the dishwasher.

RAY turns to look. He's overwhelmed, on the verge of panic.

LOU smiles. RAY gives him a quizzical look. LOU starts to laugh.

RAY
(starting to grin)

I sent garbage?

LOU

You know what they say? Garbage in—

RAY

—garbage out.

LOU
(in a bad Mexican accent)

Garbage? We don't need no stinking garbage.

The two of them collapse in laughter.

INT. DINING HALL

The line of busboys is still out there waiting. Several of them frown at the HOOTS and HOWLS of laughter from the dishwasher area.

Chapter Twenty-five

Evanston, Illinois.

Six hours later.

They were squeezed around the kitchen table in Bronco Billy's brick bungalow.

Billy turned toward Lou. “Really? Tonight?”

Lou nodded.

Billy looked at Gordie, and then at Ray.

“Yep,” Ray said.

Billy's eyes blinked rapidly behind his wire-rim glasses. “Why so fast?”

“No other option,” Ray said. “Reggie and Frank are sniffing around like dogs in heat. Others might be, too. I'm feeling—feeling—”

He turned to Gordie. “What's that Yiddish word of yours?”

“
Shpilkes
.”

“That's me.
Shpilkes
out the wazoo.”

“But how are you going to get in there?” Billy asked.

“
We
, Kemosabe.” Ray grinned.

“Okay.” Billy forced a smile. “We. How?”

Ray shrugged. “We may not have the key to the front door, but we got the next best thing.”

“What's that?” Billy asked.

“Heavy-duty bolt-cutters.”

Billy looked at Lou.

Lou nodded. “Ray and I went by Home Depot after the game.”

“We stocked up,” Ray said. “Bolt-cutters, rope, tarp, duct tape, other shit. They're all in the back of Lou's van.”

“Whoa.” Gordie made a time-out signal with his hands. “Bolt-cutters? Are you seriously thinking about using them?”

“If we have to,” Ray said.

Gordie turned to Lou. “Counselor, am I correct to assume that breaking-and-entering is still against the law in the State of Illinois?”

“My heavens.” Ray put his hand over his heart in feigned shock. “Really?”

Gordie shook his head in exasperation. “I'm serious, Ray. We're not in college anymore. We get caught, and we're in deep shit, man.” He turned to Billy. “You think your principal would like that?”

Ray said, “Chill out, Gordie. If we have to actually use the damn bolt-cutters, you two Girl Scouts can sit on your thumbs in the van and wait.”

“Ssshhh,” Dorothy said as she entered the kitchen buttoning the top button of her peasant blouse. “You'll wake up Santino. Anyone for more coffee?”

They told her no.

Lou said. “Dinner was great, Dorothy.”

She pulled up a chair and smiled. “My pleasure.”

Lou reflected again on the unlikelihood of her marriage to Billy—which was just part of the unlikelihood of Billy's bizarre career in Nicaragua. The U.S. Embassy in Managua had been his first overseas posting. During those initial months he lived the life of an embassy functionary—sending cables to Washington during the day, donning a tuxedo for an evening cocktail party up at Tiscapa with Somoza's Guardia Nacional henchmen.

But one day he failed to report for duty. And by that night he was huddled in back of a 1949 Ford truck with six other recruits bouncing along dirt roads to the outskirts of Matagalpa, where they began a three-day trek through the mountain jungles to the guerrilla training camp of Carlos Aguero Echeverria of the
Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional
, known in the States as the Sandinista National Liberation Front. Carlos himself—in green fatigues and carrying an M-15—greeted the bewildered recruits. One year later, on July 20, 1979, Bronco Billy was among that crowd of 250,000 that jammed into the Playa de la Revolución in downtown Managua in celebration of the overthrow of Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

Lou was the first to learn. He'd stayed in touch with Billy after college and knew about his Nicaragua posting with the State Department. Indeed, he'd called him in D.C. a few weeks before his departure to wish him good luck. But when he received the long letter from Billy describing his Sandinista conversion, Lou initially thought it was a spoof. But by page seven of the eighteen-page handwritten epistle, he realized his college roommate was telling him the truth.

Bronco Billy a Sandinista guerilla? Lou had been stunned.

He wrote back, though, and they stayed in touch. Billy joined the Literacy Crusade, a massive Sandinista operation in which seventy thousand volunteers (known as
brigadistas
) headed into the countryside to teach reading and writing in remote rural villages. Billy had led a group of thirty-two Managuan teenage
brigadistas
on a six-month tour of duty in a remote area of the Neuva Segovia province where they eventually brought literacy to hundreds of peasants.

As Lou could tell from the letters, it was a time of fierce passions and emotions, exhilaration and anguish. Billy had been in the village the day Jaime Cordova, a coffee farmer who once couldn't even recognize his own name in writing, proudly presented the
brigadistas
with a wood plaque on which he had carved the words of the revolutionary hero Augusto César Sandino, who'd been killed by Somoza's father in 1934:
Death is no more than a moment of annoyance, and it's not worth taking seriously
. But he was also there in May of 1980 when ex-National Guardsmen slipped across the border from Honduras and murdered his comrade and fellow teacher, Georgina Andrade.

Alas, things change. Especially revolutions. Six years ago, Billy returned to the States. That was when the catalyst of his mysterious life detour was revealed: Dorothy Becker. She'd been a University of Chicago graduate student in urban anthropology who'd dropped out of her doctoral program while on her field placement in Nicaragua. By the time she and Billy met at a fruit vendor's stall in Managua, she was a paramedic in a ramshackle clinic in a Miskito barrio near the rancid waters of Lake Managua. Billy saw her across the aisle at the banana bin—a tall woman, twenty pounds overweight, dark curly hair, thick glasses, Earth-mother breasts. She looked up, and it was love at first sight. Literally. For both. Within a month, Billy's unswerving internal gyroscope had jumped its base.

It was Dorothy who introduced Billy to Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, the courtly editor of
La Pensa
and a leading opposition figure. It was Dorothy who showed her naïve embassy boyfriend the canned food in the supermarket bearing the Red Cross stamp—the same food that had been donated by international relief organizations in the aftermath of the 1972 earthquake and then intercepted by Somoza's accomplices to sell in supermarkets Somoza owned. And it was Dorothy who took Billy to visit the three stark white buildings in the center of Managua, officially named
Centro
Plasmaferesis
but unofficially were known as
La Casa de Vampiros
—or the House of Vampires. It was there that the poor of Managua, at the rate of 1,500 a day, came to sell their blood plasma for five dollars a pint, which was then marked up three hundred percent and sold on the U.S. market for millions of dollars in profits a year. Who owned
La Casa de Vampiros
? The ultimate vampire, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, bleeding his people to death. Chamorro's newspaper first exposed Somoza's involvement in the House of Vampires, and Chamorro's assassination in early 1978 was the catalyst that caused Billy to make his first, tentative contacts with the Sandinistas.

Dorothy was, Lou believed, a good soul, albeit in her own tie-dyed, vegan, unshaved-underarm, hippie-commune-matriarch sort of way. Passionate about causes for which Lou could either muster no passion—such as the importance of breast feeding beyond the child's second birthday—or for which he mustered guilt over not sharing her passion—such as the need to improve mental health care for prisoners. A serious person, and, as far as Lou could tell, without an ounce of frivolity in her. The world needed more people like Dorothy. Just so long as he didn't have to marry one.

Dorothy poured herself a cup of herbal tea. “Are you still talking about that statue?”

Billy said, “Ray wants to go for it tonight.”

She glanced her watch and gave her husband a puzzled look. “They'll let you in to look for it at this hour?”

“Well, not exactly,” Billy said. “We'd have to, uh, sneak in.”

She studied Billy.

The rest of them waited.

“I do not understand,” she finally said. “Why would you do that?”

Billy pursed his lips but said nothing.

Ray leaned forward and put his arm around Billy.

“That statue is an important part of our school's heritage, Dorothy,” Ray said. “It vanished thirty-five years. No one's seen it since. If we can find it and bring it back, the school gets twenty-three million dollars, and we get famous and divide up three million dollars. Not exactly chump change.”

Dorothy took off her steel-rimmed glasses and wiped them on a cloth napkin. She held them up to the light, squinting at the lenses, and then put them back on.

She gave Ray a severe look. “Breaking in? Doesn't that seem—well—irresponsible?”

Ray smiled. “What if it was Michelangelo's David? What if it had been missing for decades? Would it seem irresponsible if we were going in there to recover Michelangelo's David?”

“Of course not,” she said.

“And why not?” Ray asked.

Dorothy gave him a tolerant smile. “Because Michelangelo's David is a great work of art.”

“And you've concluded that Sirena is not?”

“Raymond, Michelangelo's David is one of the most significant works of art in the world.”

“Says who?” Ray was grinning. “A bunch of snooty art critics? Who says they're right? What if Michelangelo's David is just Renaissance kitsch? Just the sixteenth-century equivalent of one of those Norman Rockwell figurines they hawk in the back of
Parade
magazine?”

Dorothy sighed. “I am not going to let you bait me, Raymond. You know that your statue is not a significant piece of art.”

“Actually,” Ray said, “I don't know that. All I know for sure is that it's a pretty significant piece of art to graduates of Barrett College. It's part of the college's history.”

“But in the grand scheme of things, Raymond, that statue is not significant.”

“All a matter of perspective, Dorothy,” Ray said. “To some guy in Tunisia, the Magna Carta is an insignificant scrap of paper. But if the
original
document, signed by old King John himself, had been stolen and hidden inside that scoreboard, well, you'd think it was pretty noble for Billy to go up there and rescue it.”

Dorothy sighed again. “Raymond, Sirena is not the Magna Carta, and it is not Michelangelo's David, and it is not the Mona Lisa. And it certainly is not worth the risk of getting arrested over.”

The other watched the back and forth, captivated.

“Not worth the risk?” Ray rubbed his chin. “Who has the right to decide that? Let me ask you this. Was Charles Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic Ocean worth the risk? Did he save anybody, or cure any disease, or make the world safer for democracy by flying across the ocean? Same with Neil Armstrong. And Sir Edmund Hillary. And Hank Aaron. And all the crazy bozos that run the Boston Marathon each year. What's the point of training six months to run twenty-six miles in three hours when you can drive the same goddamned distance in thirty minutes? But you know what? My opinion doesn't count. I got no speaking privileges. You wanna run the fucking Marathon or climb Mount Everest or explore the Titanic or seek the goddamned Fountain of Youth or play golf on the fucking moon, I say go for it. It's your quest, not mine.”

He glanced at Lou and winked. “Same with a bunch of dudes from the Middle Ages who decided to devote their lives to the search for the wine cup that Jesus used at the Last Supper. Talk about irresponsible.” He shook his head, grinning. “Shit.”

“Raymond,” Dorothy said, smiling despite herself, “that last one is just a story.”

“Hey, maybe someone will write our story some day.” Ray was grinning. “Sirena may not be the Holy Grail, Dorothy, but she's the closest the four of us will ever get.”

He leaned back in his chair and looked around the kitchen table, his eyes suddenly widening.

“Check out the shape of this table, Dorothy. Milady, we're your knights of the round table.”

Lou was grinning. Ray had done it. He'd charmed Dorothy and, in the process, he'd charmed the rest of them, too. A few moments ago they were four guys in their early forties scrunched around a little table in a cramped room in a brick bungalow on the outskirts of Chicago. Now they were a band of brothers in a magic circle.

Ray stood, gestured toward the others around the table, and gave her a sweeping bow. “How do we look, Lady Guinevere?”

She bowed toward him. “Most noble, Sir Lancelot.”

Ray turned to Billy. “Hear that, Sir Bronco? Get your skinny ass upstairs and pack an overnight bag.” Ray checked his watch. “We're departing Camelot at zero one-hundred hours.”