Straits of Fortune Read online

  “I’ve never been good at maintaining relationships, Jack,” he said, again staring out to sea. “I’m sure my daughter informed you of that. The military is poor preparation for the demands of family life, and there are times, quite frankly, when even my own children seem like strangers to me. I can easily imagine not knowing them. Isn’t that a horrible thing for a father to say? But at least I’m being honest about it. I’m cursed with the mercenary’s mind, Jack. I tend to think of people in terms of their utility, and my children—Nick especially—seem to have damned little of it.”

  “Don’t give up on him,” I replied. “He may come around yet.”

  “Not as long as there’s a dollar left in his trust fund, he won’t.”

  He looked out at the yacht again and shook his head again.

  “I wish I had kept in touch with you, Jack,” he said after a moment. “I flatter myself to think that you and I were friends.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I don’t send out too many Christmas cards either.”

  “Still, if we had kept in touch, what I’m about to ask of you might be easier, or at least more appropriate.”

  “That’s a mercenary’s expression of regret, Colonel,” I told him.

  “Yes. Yes it is. I suppose it comes through no matter what.” He studied my face for a moment. I had no idea what he was looking for. “Well, Jack, what do you say? Are you up for a bit of adventure?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “Despite what you said a moment ago, I understand that your business is rather slow in the summer.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. I took a swallow of orange juice and put the glass down on an orange coaster with a black dragon printed on it.

  “I thought that as a fellow mercenary you might be of a mind to make a lot of money in very little time.”

  I took another sip of orange juice. It was freshly squeezed, with an inch of pulp floating on top, but it was a bit too sweet for my taste.

  “That’s a reasonable thought,” I said. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why do you keep staring at that yacht?”

  The Colonel turned and looked at me. In profile his face was thinner than I had remembered it.

  “Whatever happened to you and Vivian?” he asked.

  “We came to a parting of the ways.”

  “In other words, it’s none of my business.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. It’s just that there’s not much to talk about.”

  “You thought she had too much money for you to keep up with. Was that it?”

  “That was part of it, but there were other reasons.”

  “Such as Mr. Matson, for instance.”

  “Among others.”

  “You’re looking a bit edgy, Jack. I’m not offending you, am I?”

  “Not really. I just never thought you were all that interested in the matter.”

  “I understand it was you who introduced her to Matson. Is that correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Maybe in retrospect that turns out not to have been a smart move.”

  “They call it networking.”

  “She would have married you, you know.”

  “We must be talking about two different people. Who told you that?”

  “The only person who would know for sure.”

  “I never got that impression.”

  “She was using Matson for leverage. You saw it happening, and you let it continue. Then when the thing got to a certain point, you became indignant and walked away.”

  “I introduced her to a client of mine at a party, Andy. That didn’t mean she had to sleep with him.”

  “That’s the first time you ever called me ‘Andy.’ Despite all the times I asked you to. It was always ‘Colonel’ or ‘sir.’ Now it’s ‘Andy.’ Are we friends now, Jack? Should I be flattered, you distant, hard-nosed son of a bitch?”

  “Why be flattered? It’s a lot better than me calling you ‘Dad.’”

  He laughed. “Would that have been so bad? I always thought we got along rather well.”

  “Why don’t you tell me why it is you asked me out here today? I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s getting late, and I don’t like to keep Elvis waiting. You never know. He might show up today.”

  “Vivian got into a rough crowd after you left.”

  “She was with a rough crowd when I met her. She was living in Tattoo City for quite some time before I came along.”

  “You added Matson to the population, a cheap pornographer.”

  “There were a lot of people I introduced her to: doctors, a few politicians, some lawyers, even an anthropologist. She picked him out of a fairly large bunch. It was her choice, not mine, not yours.”

  “You let him take her. You didn’t even bother to fight. He had money and you didn’t, and so you just surrendered Vivian to him. I would have expected at the very least that you would have kicked his ass. I was disappointed in you, Jack.”

  “I guess that’s why you got me out here today. So we could sit around and be disappointed together. Is that it?” I stood up. “I usually get paid for my time, Colonel. It’s the only thing I have to sell that’s worth anything. But that’s okay. This one’s on me.”

  “How would you like to make a hundred thousand dollars?”

  I hesitated for a moment and studied the fault lines in his forehead. Then I sat down again.

  “I know you can’t be bought,” the Colonel said. “But I was hoping you might be for rent, at least for a few hours.”

  “What’s this got to do with Vivian?”

  “I suppose I played that card too early.”

  “No. Not too early, but you did play it. And you played it hard. You can’t put it back in the deck now.”

  “You see that yacht out there?” he asked.

  “I see it.”

  “There’s a dead man on it.”

  My heart leaped at the wall of my chest and fell back, ready to try again. I stared at the Colonel for a moment; then I lowered my shades and looked out at the yacht.

  “A dead man,” I said. “And who might that be?”

  “Matson.”

  “Matson?” I took a deep breath, not moving my eyes from the yacht.

  “Walk with me, Jack. I get stiff if I sit too long.”

  We took a narrow path that followed a break wall until it curved around toward the gazebo where I used to sit with Vivian and then on past the long-neglected tennis courts with their nets hanging limp and exhausted in the flagrant heat of midday. Beyond that was the Japanese garden the Colonel had had installed at great cost when he purchased the property. But not even the Green Giant could have made the project a success. The climate was too humid, the soil too salty, the sun too relentless. The gardeners, imported like the bonsais they had planted, had been forced to use native species for the project. All but one of them had returned home, broken, bitter, but a lot richer for their troubles.

  The Colonel stopped suddenly and looked at me. I was thinking about Matson dead on the boat. I stooped, picked up a small stone, and absentmindedly tossed it into a fish pond where bright orange Japanese koi were swimming around frantically, looking for a way out.

  “You never told me why you quit the police force up in New York,” the Colonel said, apropos of nothing.

  “I never told you because I knew you already knew. What difference does it make now? Let’s get back to Matson.”

  “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “it’s a sorry fact that at least fifty percent of men engaged in combat never fire their weapons, even when they’re being shot at, even when people are trying to kill them. Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

  “History proves I’m not one of them.”

  “No, I suppose not. But sometimes when a man makes a mistake—let’s say he shoots the wrong man—it can make him timid. He doubts himself. The next time around, he hesitates, and that’s the end of him. I’ve seen
it. I know.”

  “He wasn’t just the wrong man, Colonel,” I said. “He was a cop. He was a cop just like me.”

  “We call it friendly fire, Jack. It can’t be avoided.”

  I started to say something, but instead I turned and looked out at the water. What’s that the kids say? Shit happens. It occurred to me that I’d been in Miami too long. Too many people knew who I was. I had lost the sacred one-time-only gift of anonymity.

  “That scar on your cheek,” the Colonel said. “He fired, too. Would you have preferred that it was you who were killed—or worse, crippled? Is that why you insist on slumming as a personal trainer, Jack? Is that your idea of repentance? Wasting your mind teaching old bastards like me how to do push-ups?”

  Now I turned to face him. “What’s this got to do with Matson?”

  The Colonel stooped and picked up a pebble of his own and tossed it underhand back into the fish pond.

  “Why did you come out here, Jack?”

  “You invited me, remember? You’re not getting senile on me now, are you?”

  “You were hoping to see my daughter, weren’t you?”

  “Stop playing me, Colonel. You think I don’t get what you’re doing?”

  He smiled. We kept walking. I had given him the satisfaction of knowing just how badly I wanted to ask about Matson. I was as hooked as the two fish lying frozen in my freezer, and the Colonel knew it.

  A winding, stone-lined brook gurgled alongside us as we walked. The lizards danced and flirted with our feet, and the wind carried the smell of the ocean from beyond the dunes. Neither of us spoke for what seemed a long time. I was thinking of Matson. I was thinking of Matson and Vivian. The Colonel walked beside me with his hands in the pockets of his black silk bathrobe. A gardener carrying a hoe and a bucket of dead plants stood up from behind some weather-beaten bushes. The Colonel spoke to him in Japanese for a few moments as the lizards skittered through the ferns like little fugitives. While they talked, I thought about Matson some more and tried to work myself around to caring that he was dead, but I couldn’t seem to find the right frequency. The gardener took one last forlorn look at his work and shook his head like a doctor who’s just seen a bad set of X-rays. We watched him shuffle away.

  “He says everything is dying,” the Colonel told me. “Too much salt.”

  “What did you expect out here by the ocean?”

  “Expect? It was more a gesture I felt inclined to make. Something you do. I didn’t expect anything. Let’s go back by the pool.”

  Soon we were sitting by the pool again. “Can I assume Matson didn’t die from natural causes?” I asked.

  “He was shot.”

  “By whom?”

  “I think you already know the answer to that question.”

  “Let me have the short version.”

  “There is no short version.”

  “Be creative.”

  “After your abdication, Matson used to come around here a lot. I never much liked him. He was all money and no class. That’s not a particularly original phenomenon in this city, of course, but it’s also not one I cared to indulge now, at a time in my life when I’m no longer forced to by business pressures. Even so, I was always polite.” The Colonel looked at me. “He was a sorry replacement for you, Jack.”

  “Too bad Vivian didn’t think so. Why’d she shoot him, and, better yet, why are you telling me all this and not the police? I work with the living, not with the dead.”

  “She did it to protect me.”

  “From Matson?”

  “From Matson and the people he worked for.”

  “He made porn movies. What does the director of Hitch-hiking Bitches and Lesbian Gymnasium have to do with you?”

  “On the face of it, nothing. But things aren’t always what they seem, and neither was Matson.”

  “You’re being mysterious, Colonel.”

  “Matson was a blackmailer. Did you know that?”

  “He had money. Why would he want to waste time getting yours?”

  He waved the question away with the back of his hand as though it were irrelevant. “He managed to talk my rather delinquent daughter into helping him steal some very important research from my files. Work I had done years ago while employed by the government. He was going to sell it.” The Colonel cracked his knuckles and flexed his palms out and away from him, his fingers locked. Then he cracked each knuckle individually using the thumb of either hand.

  “You are wondering what he stole, perhaps.”

  “No, I was still wondering why you called me out here.”

  “I need your help.”

  “As in?”

  “I want you to take that bastard’s yacht out there and sink it down to the bottom of the sea.”

  I thought about it for a moment. “And for that I get a hundred grand. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Well?”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “There’s no time to think about it, Jack. That yacht has been anchored there in the same spot for over a day now. It’s only a matter of time before the coast guard takes notice. Then it will be too late. It’s not just a question of Matson. There are certain sensitive items belonging to me on board that I do not wish to be found. The sooner the boat disappears, the less chance of that there will be. So the time for thinking is rapidly fading, Jack. This is a time for action.”

  “What did Matson have on your daughter?”

  The Colonel glared at me with an expression that was an ugly mixture of disgust and rage long contained. “It would appear she inadvertently starred in one of his films when she wasn’t thinking straight. When she went out to his boat, he took the ransom and my research, but he reneged on the film. He taunted her. Told her he’d made copies. That turned out to be a mistake.”

  “So she shot him over a film?”

  “There was a bit of passion involved. She felt betrayed.” He lifted a copy of the Wall Street Journal from the table. Beneath it was a blue videocassette. He picked it up and held it out to me. Then he reached into the pocket of his robe, brought out a key, and tossed it at me. The key took a bounce on the table, but I caught it on the rebound as it came off the glass.

  “That’s the key to Vivian’s room. I assume you still know the way. Why don’t you go upstairs and make use of the VCR and watch the film? It might fuel your ambition.”

  “I don’t have any ambition. Not as far as your daughter’s concerned.”

  “You did once.”

  “Once is over.”

  “Think about the money, then.”

  I looked at the film cassette and put it down. Then I thought about Matson and looked out at the yacht, so white it could have been a shape carved from ivory. It had lost all its innocence, like the Trojan horse on the morning after. The Colonel sat watching me. After a few moments, I took the cassette and stood up.

  “This orange juice is too sweet,” I said. Before he could answer, I had turned and gone back through the French doors and was bounding up the winding stairway that led to the bedrooms.

  Even on the second floor, the place was still more of a museum than a place where people lived. It lacked the warmth of occupation. There were no toys scattered in the hallway, no family dog or cat stretched out on the marble tiles, just a lot of style and no air of comfort. A computer program with the human touch deleted. There was a painting by Botero of a family of refugees from Weight Watchers and another by Modigliani of a boy inside a blue balloon floating over a bombed-out city. There was a statue of a woman carved from onyx lounging on a pedestal inside a recessed section of the wall. There was more, but even if there had been twice what there was, the hallway still would have felt empty. It was way too well lit for a corridor that led to rooms where people slept and dreamed and wore pajamas.

  I hesitated at the door, and for a moment it occurred to me that I could simply go quietly down the stairs, out the front door, and back to my car without saying good-bye. A man I had once thought
of as a friend was dead on a yacht, and in my hand was a film he had made of a woman I didn’t want to see. I had come here half hoping I’d run into Vivian again, though, in one of those strange, schizoid acts of self-denial, I hadn’t allowed myself to think about what I would say to her if I had. Now I was going to get my wish. I was holding it in my right hand.

  I opened the door and closed it behind me. Nothing had changed, and yet to call it her room is misleading. She’d had her own place down on South Beach for years now, ever since dropping out of Smith College. But in a house with eighteen bedrooms, most of them empty, there had been no reason to change anything, and now, whenever it became necessary, she used this place as a refuge from her new life.

  It was the room of a woman in her late teens. In one corner sat the bronze Buddha I recalled, still wearing the Santa Claus hat she had stuck on its head and still sporting the cigarette she’d left dangling from the edge of its metallic mouth. Around the statue she had built a miniature temple of flagstones stacked in a progression of shelves. The two incense holders on either side of the Buddha were empty now, the last stick burned to a nub at its base.

  She hadn’t been here in quite a while. The stems of two dozen or more dead flowers leaned from their vases like bony fingers, and everywhere on the floor before the shrine lay the petals of red and yellow roses, all as dry as doilies. I stood there looking around like a voyeur stranded in his own memories.

  There was an enormous teakwood dresser imported from Cambodia that four strong men would have had trouble lifting, and on top of it, in front of the mirror, ran a row of old-fashioned atomizers, some of them still full of perfume. There were photographs of her family taken in Vietnam: one of Vivian and her mother, both in white dresses, and the Colonel, then a captain, much younger, with darker hair, in his uniform. They stood poised and smiling in front of a large white split-level chalet that looked like it belonged in a French suburb. In the driveway sat a battered army jeep that went with the Colonel’s uniform but not with the house it stood before. They were like two disparate dreams merged by memory, war, and accident.