Thick as Thieves (12 page)

Another jet passes, shaking the glass in the windows. Carr rubs a palm over his chin. “It’s not enough. We get only one shot at Bessemer, and we need to make it stick. We need to know all the strings there are to pull. I want to know why he’s doing it. Is it just money? Is it something else?”

“
Hijo de puta
!” Mike flicks his cigarette across the room and jumps to his feet. There’s a burst of red against the cinder block, and a smoldering ember on the carpet, and Mike’s chair tips back. He points at Carr. “The
fuck
is up with you? This thing is lined up like dominoes. What’s wrong with knocking it over?”

When he finally answers, Carr’s voice is quiet. “I said we don’t know enough yet.”

“I tell you what’s not enough,” Mike says, and he cups a hand around his crotch.

Bobby has stopped chewing, and Dennis is frozen at his keyboard. The room is silent but for the chugging of the air conditioner and the receding rumble of a jet. Blood rushes in Carr’s ears as he stands. “I don’t recall you ever making quite that argument to Declan, Mike.”

Mike smiles and steps forward. “That’s ’cause Deke had a pair.”

Carr nods. “And most of the time he managed not to confuse them with his brains.”

Mike steps forward until his chest is nearly touching Carr’s. He looks down at Carr and smiles wider. “That’s right,
pendejo
, I’m just a dumbass chicano. What the fuck do I know? What kinda dumbass thing will I do next?”

Carr forces his breathing down—
inhale, exhale, not too fast
. He can smell the cigarettes on Mike, and the coffee, and the cologne. He studies Mike’s throat—the pulse in his carotid artery, the soft spot below his Adam’s apple—and tenses his fingers. He nearly jumps at Dennis’s nervous cough.

“I … I know what Valerie would say if she were here.” Dennis’s voice is cracking. “Something like
put ’em back in your pants
. Don’t you think, Bobby?”

Bobby’s laugh is too loud. “Yeah, or maybe
sit the fuck down
. Right, Mike?”

Mike shrugs, but his gaze never leaves Carr. “She’s not here now. And
what the fuck does she care how long this takes? She’s not living in this shithole. She’s like Carr—got herself a nice apartment with a view of the water and everything.”

“But that’s what she’d say, Mike, and she’d be right.” Bobby tries to catch Carr’s eye and fails. “She’d be right, Carr,” Bobby says. “We got to keep our heads in the work.”

“She’s not here now,” Carr says quietly.

Dennis stands, still holding his sub. “For chrissakes, I didn’t sign up for this kind of thing,” he says, and backs away until he hits the wall. When he does a large meatball is ejected from the end of his sandwich. It lands with a wet thud on the carpet between his feet. All three men turn to look first at Dennis, and then the meatball.

Bobby’s voice is low and grave. “Look at that—you made the kid shit himself.”

And then, suddenly, air returns to the room and the four men are laughing. Carr’s shoulders relax, and Latin Mike rights his overturned chair. “You better clean that up, Denny,” Mike says. “I don’t want to be steppin’ in it.”

“I don’t know,” Dennis says, “I think it goes with the carpet.”

The men laugh again, and Latin Mike lights a cigarette. Carr moves to the door and turns the lock.

“I don’t want this to take longer than it has to,” he says, “but we need to know more. Give it a week—if we don’t turn up anything else, we’ll go with what we’ve got.”

Carr closes the door behind him and hears someone lock it. He walks down the cracked path, through the rusting gate, and it is only when he’s around the corner that he takes a breath.

His apartment is in North Palm Beach, on Ocean Drive, and even the parking lot has a water view. Carr locks the Saturn and stops to watch the flashes of lightning on the horizon. The sky is purple, going to pitch-black at the eastern edge. It’s the verge of something that might ripen to a hurricane, or amount to nothing more than rain. The forecast is muddled with conditionals—colliding zones of warm and cold seawater, churning air masses, equivocal fronts from Canada, butterfly wings over Africa—too many variables. Carr can empathize with the weathermen.

Too many variables. Why is Bessemer doing what he’s doing? Will his Russian friends care when he gets burned? Why is Mike such an unremitting asshole, and how does he know about the view from Valerie’s apartment? Carr pockets his keys and pushes through the briny air to the lobby.

Here he is Gregory Frye, investor in distressed real estate, down from Boston for an indefinite stay. The doorman greets him by name and makes a joke about the Red Sox, and Carr smiles and nods and gets on the elevator.

He leaves the lights off in the apartment, pulls six beers from the refrigerator, and settles on the sofa, before the tall windows. He opens a bottle and drinks half in one pull, and he’s watching the distant lightning when his cell phone burrs. Eleanor Calvin’s number appears on the display,
and he tosses the phone to the other end of the sofa, where it glows like a ghost light in a theater.

“Shit.” He sighs.

He’s been trying, since he left Stockbridge, to dredge up some warmth for Arthur Carr—to find a happy memory of his father or, barring that, any memory that isn’t tainted by anger, disapproval, or disappointment. Maybe he’s been looking for that for most of his life. The best he’s done lately is La Plata, southeast of Buenos Aires, out in the Río de la Plata.

They were sailing then, just the two of them, in an eighteen-footer his father had rented for the day. The wind was from the east, the estuary was brown and choppy, and the sun was waning but still bright. Carr was twelve.

He remembers his father in a faded blue polo shirt, shorts, and bare feet, his arms ropy and brown, and his face shaded by a long-billed cap. They’d been running through man overboard drills for most of the afternoon, steering figure eights again and again to rescue an orange life vest that his father kept flinging over the side.

“There goes Oscar,” Arthur Carr would say, and toss the vest again.

His father did the spotting and fished out the vest when they came alongside; Carr was in the cockpit, one hand on the tiller, the other on the lines.

“Bring her around—
quickly
now—the man
is
drowning, after all. Now come to his windward side
—his
windward—that’s good. Now ease up on the sheets. Let them luff, for chrissakes—you don’t want to run by him!” Carr had gone through it too many times to count that afternoon.

For the last drill of the day, his father wanted Carr to do it all—spot, sail, and haul in the victim. “Pretend for a moment that you actually had a friend, and it was just the two of you out here. Now what would happen if your friend went in? What would you do—watch him drown? You can’t just sit there and watch.” And over the side the vest went once more.

“You’re on your own now,” Arthur Carr said.

Carr’s heart was pounding, but he kept his head on a swivel, kept his eyes on the bobbing patch of orange, and kept them off his father, who crouched in the companionway and stared at him like a baleful bird. He guided the boat away from the vest and, when he had enough room, tacked smartly. He panicked for an instant as the bow swept around and he lost the vest in the loping brown swells, but he found it again, and lined
up on its windward side. He came in on a close reach, and let his sails luff. As the boat slowed, he scrambled under the boom. He kept low, gripped a stanchion with one hand, and ducked under the lifeline. He leaned out, but the vest was just beyond his straining fingers. Carr slid his hand up the stanchion to the lifeline and leaned out farther. And then a big swell hit.

There was a forward pitch, a sickening drop, scrabbling fingers, rushing, flooding cold, and a blow to the head that ran through Carr’s whole body. There was bubbling and roaring, and no time to call out, and no breath to call with. The shadow of the boat rose above him and began to fall again, and then Arthur Carr had a fist through the front of his life vest—was dragging him up through the brown water, up into the air, and dropping him on the cockpit bench.

Carr coughed and sputtered, and his father wrapped a blanket around him and studied his face. He peered into one eye and then the other, and put alcohol and a bandage over the gash on his cheek, where he’d slammed into the hull. Then he took the tiller, turned the boat back toward the marina, and shook his head in disgust.

“Now you’re both dead,” his father said flatly, “you and your nonexistent friend.”

That’s the best he can do: an afternoon more than two decades back when his father hadn’t actually flown into a rage, had instead been only casually cruel, but had cared enough to pluck him from the river. Though he wasn’t sure about the caring part—saving him might simply have been easier than explaining his absence to Carr’s mother.

Carr takes another pull on his beer and empties the bottle—his third somehow. Blue light is rippling through the sky, and a red light is blinking on his phone in the corner of his sofa. Mrs. Calvin has left another message. He opens a fourth beer, takes a long swallow, and hears his father’s voice again:
You can’t just sit there and watch
.

But watching is what he’s best at—what he’s always been best at, from when he was very small: the comings and goings of neighbors; the shopkeepers in their storefronts, sweeping, chatting with customers, hectoring clerks; the deliverymen; the embassy drivers; the maids and cooks and gardeners; and his parents most closely of all. His father didn’t like it—it made him edgy, he said—but his mother didn’t mind. In fact, she encouraged it, nurtured it, made a virtue of it, and a game.

He remembers sitting on her lap, in the tall windows of one of their houses, looking out on a tree-lined avenue. Was he even five years old? She would place a pale finger on the glass and point, and he would follow her gaze. Then she would put her hand over his eyes.
¿Qué ves, mijo? What do you see
?

And he would tell her. A man with a dog. A lady in a hat. A blue truck. A green taxi. A grandpa at a café table. He remembers the softness of her palm across his brow, the smell of her hand—gardenias and tobacco.
And what is the old man doing
? Reading a newspaper. Smoking. Drinking from a cup.
What kind of cup? What color hat? How large a dog
? They would go on and on, in English, in Spanish, as afternoon went down to dusk. He would lean against her, sleepy, her voice warm and husky in his ear.
¿Qué color es el coche, mijo? And how many men are in it
?

When his father returned from work—always furrowed and simmering, his tie askew—the game would stop, and it was as if his mother had left the room. As if she’d left the house altogether. She took him from her lap, and her arms were stiff and cool. Her hazel eyes were narrow. She spoke quietly, and only in English, and she said very little. Mostly she listened to Arthur Carr’s litany of irritations and slights, nodding without ever conveying agreement.

Carr remembers his father’s voice—droning at first, and growing louder as the cocktails took hold. He remembers his father’s rumpled shirts, damp spots under the arms, and his father’s broad, sloppy gestures. He remembers his mother’s rigid shoulders, a vein thrumming in her neck, her stillness otherwise. He would try to catch her eye sometimes—offer up a grimace or a conspiratorial smirk—but it was as if he wasn’t there. Or she wasn’t. Other times, he would perch in the window and continue their game on his own, but inevitably his father grew irritated.

“It’s like living with a goddamn cat,” Arthur Carr would mutter, pulling him from the sill. “Nobody likes a cat.”

More lightning, another beer, and Carr thinks about his father’s anger and his mother’s distance, and he remembers the maps.

His mother was a great one for them. Maps and guidebooks and histories and almanacs—but especially maps. When word of a new posting would come, despite Arthur Carr’s grumblings—or perhaps because of them—she would smile, haul out the maps, and study them.

“Should we just stumble around like tourists?” she would say to Carr.
“Get lost on our way to buy ice cream? No—we must know something about this place. We can’t have people think you are
un hombre inculto.
”

Carr remembers her at the dining table, half-glasses balanced on her nose, a cigarette burning in an ashtray, a cord of smoke twisting to the ceiling. The books were open in an arc in front of her, and the maps were unfurled. Her hair was pulled back and tied with a black ribbon.

“Here’s where we will live,
mijo
,” she said, pointing with a sharp red pencil. “And here is Daddy’s office, and the new school.” She made neat red check marks as she spoke. “Here is the museum, and the
fútbol
stadium, and the port, right here, and three train stations, and the main post office. Here is the airport, and the television studio, and the radio station, and the power plant. And see—here is the park,
mijo
, and the carousel.”

And he remembers wandering the cities with her, remembers the narrow streets and the squares—cobbled, noisy, sometimes with a fountain, a dark arcade, or a looming church. His mother would hold his hand through the crowds, and buy him a lemon ice, a slice of melon, or a skewer off the grill. Then she would find a bench or little table and smoke and watch the people while Carr ate. They would sit for what seemed like hours to Carr, but he didn’t mind. She would run her fingers through his hair, and sometimes, after he’d eaten, he would lean against her and doze.

Often, he recalls, she would meet someone she knew. Or they would meet her. And why not: the whole world seemed to stroll through those squares. Carr recognized some of the men and women, from embassy parties he thought, but most of them were strangers to him. They spoke mainly in Spanish to his mother, though some spoke in English and some in Portuguese. They would stop long enough to say hello, to talk about the weather, to shake hands and offer a cigarette or a book of matches. They all stared at him.