Straits of Fortune Read online

  Now here I was, sitting across from her ex-husband, calling her at the office of one of Miami’s biggest law firms, Balthazar, Epstein and Blake, with the offhanded hope that she might be of a mind to help me out. The receptionist passed me along to a secretary who passed me along to an assistant who put me on hold for so long my ear began to ache from the pressure of the receiver against it. All the while Cortez sat looking at me with a demented grin on his face, like an alligator that happened to close its jaws just as an unlucky sparrow flew by. I was nothing to him but a small snack sent by the devil to help ease him through the endless boredom of his day.

  Finally Susan came to the phone. Her voice was brisk, demanding, the voice of a woman with very little time to spare. There was a long pause when she realized that it was her old friend and former personal trainer calling her, a puzzled silence that told me she was surprised, though not particularly pleased, to hear from me. I got right into it, what had happened and where I was. She let me talk. The silence deepened when she found out I was sitting across from her ex-husband. After a moment she told me to put Cortez on the line.

  The inspector grinned when I handed him the phone. His first words were, “Hey, babe,” and I knew immediately that they were the wrong words to use with the new and improved Susan Andrews. His grin vanished, and he shifted uneasily in his chair, as though a splinter had found its way into his ass. His face grew tighter and less self-assured by degrees, until it became a mask first of doubt, then of quiet anger. I couldn’t hear her words, but I could guess their tone: cold and professional, filled with a steady refusal of all intimacy. I studied his face as he listened. I saw confidence replaced first by disbelief, then by acceptance. Cortez was nothing to her now, just the voice of a minor official with very few cards to play. At the end of their conversation, he handed the phone back to me. I hadn’t liked what I’d heard him say. Susan’s version wasn’t any better. I was going to be stuck at Krome for a while.

  “Listen to me, Jack,” she said. “They’re going to hold you there at Krome over the weekend. Then they’ll transfer you down to federal court. They want to charge you with smuggling illegal aliens. The charge is bullshit and won’t hold, but Ruben has to cover his ass on this one. Even so, under normal circumstances I could get you out on bail, but not till they send you downtown for arraignment. They’re not in any hurry to do that. I can make a few calls, but it will be Monday at the earliest. That means you have to sit tight and wait.”

  “I can’t stay here that long,” I said.

  “You don’t have a choice. I can’t do any better than Monday, and even that soon will require some maneuvering. By the way, do you have any idea how much I charge?”

  “I guess food stamps are out of the question, but don’t worry. I’ve come into a little money.”

  “Good,” she said. “Because I bill at three hundred an hour. Listen, Jack, I have to go now. Can you behave yourself for a few days?”

  “I doubt it. There’s a lot of shit happening.”

  “I’ll see you on Monday morning.”

  I didn’t say anything. My mind was on other matters.

  “I said I’ll see you on Monday,” Susan said.

  “All right,” I said. “Monday.”

  Susan hung up. I handed the phone to Cortez, who spoke into it for a moment before realizing she was gone. He looked disappointed, then set the phone back in its cradle.

  “I guess you’re going to be here for a while,” he said.

  “So it would seem.”

  “I see the bitch still holds a grudge,” he said.

  “What do you expect? You were screwing her friend. Women tend to take things like that personally.”

  “You’re right. I was an asshole. I’ll admit that.” He stared down at the desk for a moment, as though seeking either his own reflection in the scorched mahogany or else some revelation that eluded him. He shook his head and looked up at me.

  “Her voice—did you notice it? I don’t know. I mean, it didn’t sound quite right. Like there was something under it. You know what I mean? You used to be a cop, right? Up in New York. You tell me.”

  “She wasn’t to glad to hear from either of us. That’s for sure,” I told him.

  “That’s not what I’m talking about. It was something else.”

  “I know. I caught it, too. Sounded like stress to me. Of course, she’s a lawyer. That could be it.”

  “What could be more stressful than a hundred and fifty cases at a time as a prosecutor, and that on thirty-two five a year?”

  “Divorce.”

  “She’s past that now. I’m not even a blip on the radar screen anymore. You heard how she talked. I guess I knew it was over, but you never know how over it is until you hear it on the phone. I cremated the thing pretty good, didn’t I?”

  I nodded. “It sounded to me like even the ashes have blown away.”

  He looked at me for a moment. “Let’s get back to you. What were you doing so far out from shore, and don’t tell me you were swimming either, not that far out.”

  I told him about the kayak but omitted the sinking of The Carrousel. The omission was louder than the truth itself would have been. We both heard it.

  “What time did you head out? In the kayak, I mean,” he asked.

  “About five in the morning.”

  “Little early to be out in a kayak, wouldn’t you say? There’s something else. There’s always something else. You’re no smuggler. But you were up to something out there. What was it? Drugs?”

  “How much coke can you fit into a kayak? Come on. And where did I get it? You think maybe I paddled down to Colombia, loaded up a few kilos, then paddled back? That’s a long way, Ruben.”

  “You were a cop once. If you still were, would you believe that story?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I rest my case. Whatever it was, maybe it will come out, but then again maybe not. But it’s there, and you know what I’m talking about. Personally, I don’t give a shit. It’s not in my domain. I’m just telling you man to man, cop to cop.”

  I sat quietly. We had a bit of a staring contest, but Cortez got bored and stood up. He turned his back to me and seemed to be reading his own commendations on the wall behind his desk. He stretched his arms above his head and turned to me again.

  “You say you went into the ocean at five. We got you at seven. We get a lot of people come out of the water down here, and I’ve been on patrols with the coast guard. After a while you get a feel for how long a man’s been in the ocean, and you were in the water for a lot longer than you say. I just want you to know that.”

  “All right. So now I know. Any chance I can make a phone call?”

  “You just made one.”

  “How about a little slack for a fellow cop?”

  “Ex-cop.” He looked annoyed for a moment. “Okay, fuck it.” He slid the phone across the desk.

  “How about a little privacy?”

  “Don’t push it.”

  I punched in Vivian’s cell-phone number. Everything had been screwed up, including, of course, our rendezvous. But she was out there somewhere, probably wondering what had happened to me. It was possible, however, that she already knew, that she along with her father had been part of the setup. That was something I didn’t like to think about, but I had to consider it all the same. I couldn’t ask very many questions with Cortez sitting across from me, but I would be able to get much from the tone of her voice, or so I believed.

  Williams’s voice said hello.

  I started to say something, then thought the better of it and hung up. Cortez sat watching me.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “You look a little pale—even for a guy from Nebraska.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It’s time for you to get out of here,” Cortez said. “Go and meet all your new friends. The food’s lousy and the weather is hot, but you’ll only be here for a little while, which is more than I can say for most of them down
there. Stand up.

  “It’s too bad I don’t like you,” he said. “Otherwise me and you could be friends.”

  He opened the door and called in Heckle and Jeckle. They came in looking skeptical, like a couple of nervous fathers let into the delivery room. They had no idea what was going on.

  Cortez put a hand on my shoulder. “Treat this guy right,” he said. “Vaughn here used to be a cop up in New York. This whole thing is just a fucked-up misunderstanding. He’s going to be here for a few days, so keep an eye on him.”

  Heckle and Jeckle were a lot friendlier to me as they escorted me out to the pen.

  “How come you stopped being a cop?” Ellis asked me.

  “I got tired of writing traffic tickets,” I told him.

  “That don’t sound like a very good reason to quit your job,” he said.

  “You’re right. Maybe I was too hasty.”

  The outdoor cage where they put me might have passed for a schoolyard, except for the razor wire spiraling along the top of the Cyclone fence that surrounded the compound. The sunlight pressed down on the concrete, and the dank air wriggled with the heat, but out to the west the clouds had begun to mass, collecting their strength for the late-afternoon storms that came with the summer months. It was the time of year when hurricanes are born above the coast of West Africa and speed across the ocean like demons made of wind. There was no malice in them, but they were full of destruction. Most died as soon as they were named or else wandered off and disappeared. Some, like Andrew, make it to land, where they changed history. Lay a thousand yards of sidewalk a day and the jungle rains would come again someday and try to take it all back.

  But I had a more personal storm to worry about.

  How had Williams gotten hold of Vivian’s cell phone?

  I walked through the gate and looked around and wished that a tempest would suddenly appear and scatter everything I saw to the four directions, including myself. There are places on this earth so full of distress and inertia that only chaos can set them free. Neither is it a mystery that all of those places are made by men and maintained by men, and such a place was the Krome Detention Center that day in late August. I heard the gate close behind me and felt the heat clamp down on my neck in the same instant.

  No way I can stay here until Monday, I thought. I had to know what had happened to Vivian.

  What was he doing with her cell phone, and why had he tried to kill me? Those thoughts kept circling in my mind like dust devils in a sandstorm, and the only way to stop their incessant whirling was clear though far-fetched. I had to get out of Krome. Two days was too long to wait for answers.

  I walked across the yard toward the shadows and the promise of shade. The asphalt threatened to burn through the thin soles of the worn-down sneakers they’d given me. There was a long, dented canopy of corrugated steel that ran the length of the fence and abutted a concrete shoe box of a building. Under the canopy were wooden benches and picnic tables with canisters of water on them. Thirty or forty people sat in the shadows, some of them playing dominoes and others reading quietly in the bad light. A few merely sat staring over the expanse of the yard, watching me come. I was just another stranger walking across the desert toward them, bearing no gifts and bringing no good news.

  At the west end of the yard where the clouds were closing fast, three men were playing basketball under a rim with a net made, appropriately enough, of chain. The ball refused to bounce more than a foot above the ground. The man dribbling was forced to run doubled over like a hunchback in order to stay with the ball. When he was twenty feet from the basket, he straightened up suddenly and launched the ball at the rusted rim. It sailed through the hoop and landed in a puddle without bouncing. The men came and looked down at the ball the way you look at a dead dog that belongs to somebody else. There was a brief discussion, and then the men turned and walked away, forfeiting the ball to the sun-cracked concrete.

  The Haitians sat with the Haitians, and the Cubans sat with the Cubans. There was a blond man who looked like a sun-drunk German, and a small group of Central Americans with straight black hair and Mayan faces. It was like being at the United Nations, except we were all in jail, a fact that tends to kill much of the joy of the multicultural experience. Everyone was speaking either in Creole or in Spanish. The beleaguered-looking man with the blond hair stood alone by the fence, talking to himself. In his natty, beige, well-tailored if rumpled linen suit and blue bow tie, he was the best-dressed man in the compound. No one paid him any attention. His was a private club, at least until they took him off to the rubber room.

  Two men, whom I assumed to be Chinese, sat with themselves. They sat so close together I thought they would merge. I could not imagine the length of their journey, and the dejection concentrated in their faces matched the storms over the swamps in the west. It is a long way back to Haiti when you’ve nearly died trying to escape from it, but it was not so far that you couldn’t try again. The Cubans were, for the most part, home free. But China was another planet. It may have taken them months to get here, and now they were going back. They had the tired faces of men without hope and whose only luck is to endure, yet despite all this, when I smiled at them, they smiled back. Their eyes were unexpectedly kind. I gave them the thumbs-up and went past them into the shade.

  There didn’t seem to be an American section, so I sat with my back against the corrugated wall of a Quonset hut. A man with muscles like wrought iron dipped in black enamel walked over and asked me for a cigarette by forming a peace sign with his index and middle fingers and moving it back and forth in front of his lips. I patted my empty pockets, and he left me, looking only mildly disappointed. After all, he was in a place where disappointment was as chronic as the sunlight. I sat there and watched as six of the men marched out from under the canopy and began playing soccer with the defeated husk of a basketball.

  I have to get the hell out of here, I thought. I’ll go nuts if I have to sit here much longer. I glanced around, but all I saw was razor wire, low clouds, and unhappy people. Then, quite suddenly, the fatigue I had been holding at bay with fear and adrenaline swept over me, and I decided not to fight it any longer, so I tilted my head back, closed my eyes, and tried not to think.

  I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew, a guard was shaking my shoulder and telling me that my lawyer was there to see me. There was a crack of thunder in the west, and the wind picked up speed. I got quickly to my feet and followed the guard as he walked toward the main building. We had all but made it to the gate when the first heavy drops of rain began to hit the ground.

  I was led into a large, rectangular room with rows of benches and tables and bars on the windows as a reminder of how things were. The guard at the door patted me down before I went in and told me I would be patted down again on my way out. His voice was devoid of inflection; it was the voice of an automaton who had repeated the same words so many times that he was no longer capable of hearing his own boredom. I would not have traded his life for my own despite the alternative. Even the prisoners were better off. They could at least go home, and home, regardless of how much a hell it may turn out to be, still possesses certain latent possibilities. The guard was just waiting for a pension to set him free; his was a life sentence, and time was a conveyor belt heading a day at a time toward the pit.

  The room, which smelled of cigarettes and sweat, was nearly empty, and I saw Susan Andrews almost as soon as I walked in. She was seated at a table, her head down, reading what looked to be a brief. There was a bulging leather valise sitting on the table beside her like a mascot, and a can of soda was cupped absentmindedly in her hand. I walked over and sat on the bench across from her.

  She didn’t look up immediately the way most people would have in a place like Krome, and I was reminded of how fierce her concentration could be. She made one violent slash with her pen, then lifted her head and smiled at me. She had a beautiful face, but the smile ruined it, at least temporarily. The smile she fla
shed was thoroughly impersonal, a practiced gesture, a concession to civility, a bright coin tossed without consequence to the beggars of the world. There was nothing for Jack Vaughn in that smile, but perhaps I was hoping for too much under the circumstances.

  Then the smile vanished and something human came into her expression, and I thought she looked sad and drawn out, though her beauty was still vibrant enough to hide it, except if you had met her back when I had. She smiled for real this time and shook her head as she studied me.

  “You look like hell,” she said.

  “I didn’t expect you to make it down here until Monday.”

  “I almost didn’t. The prosecutor asked for a postponement in the case I’m trying. Seems someone down at the property room misplaced a few kilos of evidence. So here I am.” She lifted the valise off the table and set it down beside her.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “You’re asking me that?”

  I looked her over. She looked like money. Her days as a prosecutor were way behind her, and the drug money of her former adversaries was making her rich, one overpriced hour at a time.

  “How does it feel to be making decent money for a change?” I asked.

  She thought that over for a moment. “You may have trouble believing it, but in a lot of ways I liked being a prosecutor better.”

  “No, I’m not surprised. You’re the type that likes to get her hands dirty. Money can’t change that, though that is a pretty nice suit you’re wearing.”

  “It’s starting to come back to me now,” she said, frowning.

  “What is?”

  “What it was I liked about you. Now, before we get too comfortable, tell me again how you wound up in the drink this morning with a man in a speedboat shooting at you.”