Straits of Fortune Page 5

  The boom hadn’t reached as far as Surfside, and the rents there were still reasonable. The place I lived in was a twin-level apartment building on Byron Avenue, called the Lancaster Arms. The neon sign out front didn’t work, and the blue-and-white building looked faded against the relentlessness of the sun. An octogenarian named Sternfeld owned and managed the place, and he was nearly as surly as Cal. He liked to stand on the stoop of his building behind his walker like an old admiral at the prow of his ship, and he had the crazy, wispy, white hair of a conductor in search of a symphony.

  The day I came by to see the apartment, Sternfeld looked me over with the expression of a man attempting to calculate just how much trouble you were going to be to him. He was delighted when I told him I had a job, as though I’d accomplished something remarkable. He was even happier when I told him I was single, without even so much as a goldfish for company. In the end he promised to chop a hundred dollars off the rent if I would walk with him three evenings a week.

  So for four hundred a month, I got a one-bedroom apartment with two entrances, and if you left both doors open on a hot day, a nice breeze would blow through. You had to be careful when you did that, however. The neighborhood was not all that safe and secure. One day I came out of the shower and caught a sun-fried crackhead with a glass eye trying to download my laptop out the back door. The lesson there was that while the rents were reasonable, the people around you might not be, and after that I was more vigilant.

  A quiet man who minds his own business and who doesn’t own a stereo with too large a set of speakers will, in general, get along with his neighbors, and so I did. On my left was a family from Ecuador. They had a twenty-year-old son whom the police came for one night because he had decided that parking people’s cars wasn’t quite as profitable as selling them. His parents knew I had been a cop, and so they asked me to counsel him. I did what I could. After that he decided to raise pit bulls for the dogfights over in Hialeah, but the police hadn’t liked that idea very much either, and so now he was back in community college, trying to find another way into the economy.

  Billy Shuster lived in the studio on my right. He was a transvestite who worked as a postman by day. It sounds clichéd, but he really did like show tunes, particularly Ethel Merman’s rendition of “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” which for some reason he never played all the way through to the end. It was very anticlimactic in an annoying way. It got so that I could even predict to the second when he would lift the stylus only to set it down at the beginning again.

  Sometimes, when Billy left his door open, I’d see him standing at the ironing board in his bra and panties, ironing the clothes he was going to wear that night, his sand-colored Twiggy wig perched on the end of the board like a depressed cat. Billy told me once that he liked me because I brought stability to the building. In his own way, so did he. He had been a tenant there for fifteen years. Sometimes, on cooler evenings, he and Sternfeld played chess on a little tiled table they’d set up in the shade on the small patio behind the hedges. It didn’t seem to matter much to Sternfeld whether Billy was dressed like a man or a woman, though he didn’t curse nearly as much when Billy was in drag. He just didn’t like the fact that his partner usually won their matches.

  Later that afternoon, when I pulled up in front of the apartment, Vivian’s red Porsche was parked at the curb, just past the spray of purple bougainvillea that was overwhelming the hedges in front of the building. Sternfeld was sitting in a lawn chair under the eaves, his aluminum walker off to one side. He shielded his eyes from the sun as I came up the three steps that led to the first landing. I looked down the walkway at the closed door of my apartment.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “I’ll give you two guesses,” Sternfeld said. “And it’s not my place.”

  “You let her in?”

  “She had the key, asshole.”

  “You’re right. I forgot about that.”

  “You told me she was history,” Sternfeld said.

  “She is.”

  “Well, I guess history just got reincarnated.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “When are we going back to the Rascal House?” Sternfeld asked. “I’m overdue for a corned beef on rye.”

  “Soon,” I said.

  “That’s what you said last week.”

  When I opened the door, Vivian was sitting at the small table in the alcove next to the kitchen. She stood up and walked into my arms, and I held her to me. She was trembling with fear and relief, as though in great distress she had arrived at a place of possible deliverance, and I knew that I had been waiting a long time for exactly this moment, when every absence and betrayal would be canceled out by a simple embrace—at least temporarily.

  I took her chin in my hand and turned her head. There were tears in her dark eyes. Despite myself, I was glad to see her.

  “You cut your hair,” I said.

  “I hate it,” she said petulantly. “They took too much off.”

  “No,” I said. “It looks good.”

  I asked her if she wanted anything to drink, then went to the fridge and brought out two Diet Cokes and poured hers into a clean glass. When I came back, she was smoking a Marlboro. I went into the kitchen again and found a lid from an empty jar of mayonnaise and set it down in front of her to use as an ashtray.

  “I thought you quit those,” I said.

  “I started again this morning.”

  “A killing will do that to you.”

  Her face lost its tan, and for a second she reminded me of one of those scared, desperate people you see sitting in a holding room at the police station who are at the beginning of a new kind of trouble. Her dark eyes quivered, then stared straight through me.

  “It seems like a nightmare,” she said.

  “It is a nightmare. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. My father said you were out to see him this morning.”

  “He asked me to get rid of your boyfriend’s boat, but I had to turn him down.”

  “I know.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I’m not sure. I suppose it’s because you’re my friend.”

  “It’s strange you picked today to remember that. I haven’t seen you in more than a year.”

  “You didn’t want to see me.”

  “Why do you think I want to see you now?”

  “Should I leave?”

  “So you shot Matson. I guess things didn’t work out between you two.”

  Mentioning Matson’s name had summoned up all the bitterness I had felt toward both of them. I watched her impassively, as though her weeping were an accompaniment to the dark, righteous mood I was sealed so tightly into. But it was no fun being in command of a shit situation.

  Her cigarette burned down, and the ash tipped backward onto the scarred surface of the table. I picked it up and snubbed it out, flicked the butt over her head and into the sink.

  “Do you have a tissue?” she asked.

  “No. You should have called ahead.”

  “You’re not going to help me, are you?”

  “I’ll help you call the police. I’ll even go down there with you, but that’s about all I can do.”

  Vivian looked at me as though she were searching for some sign that I was still the same man she had known before. I wasn’t. I felt a great coldness toward her. My mouth was clamped shut to the point that my jaw began to hurt, and I took a sip of Coke to ease the pressure, but it didn’t ease the coldness that held me like a man frozen in an iceberg.

  “I know I hurt you,” she said in a soft voice.

  “Don’t worry about me. Worry about what you’re going to tell the cops.”

  “I’m not sure I’m going to the police.” She hesitated. “What do you think would happen if we just left that boat out there?”

  I smiled. “Right in front of your father’s mansion? Very convenient. Well, it would go something like this: They�
�ll dust for prints, and they’ll find yours because you didn’t wipe the place down, and even if you did, they’ll find something somewhere. You don’t have a record, so the cops will sit on things for a while. Then they’ll ask a few questions. Your name will come up, then your father’s. There will be a few wrong steps here and there, but eventually they’ll get around to you. I give it a week after they board the boat. What’s the matter?”

  “I was arrested once. Drunk driving, after a party. I went through a stop sign. I was seventeen.”

  “Well,” I said, “that does it. They’ll be able to match your prints. That doesn’t give you much time. Maybe you should leave the country, save yourself all the bullshit. You’ve got money. Go to Switzerland. You used to live there once. I may even visit you from time to time. Personally, I think you should talk to the cops. Just show them that film Matson made. Who knows, you might get off—or maybe they will.”

  “I told my father not to show you that.”

  “But you knew he would.”

  “Why would you say that?” she asked.

  “Because I know you and I know him. You’re both first-class manipulators, and even though you know I know it, you can’t help yourself. Besides, he was trying to make a point, but it may have been a tactical error now that I think about it. Maybe he thought I’d get overheated and chew a hole in the boat like a shark. Anyway, whatever you do, you’d better do it fast. I’ll even drive you to the airport—no charge, of course.”

  She reared back and threw the can of soda at me. I waited to gauge the trajectory of her arm, then moved only slightly. The can went over my head, and I heard it hit the wall and then the floor. I took my Coke and placed it closer to her.

  “Here,” I said. “Try again.”

  She reached for the can, but I grabbed it first and threw it over her head. Like the first, it hit the wall just beneath the clock and fell and rolled and spilled itself across the brown tile.

  “Get out,” I said. “We’re all out of drinks here.”

  She stood up. She wore a yellow sundress that clung to her hips and fell into the curve of her thigh and stayed there long enough for me to realize she wasn’t wearing any underwear. Even through the coldness, I knew I was going to miss looking at her, so I took as long a look as I could, and I let her see me doing it. It was my last drink before the lifelong desert of not seeing her anymore, and I wanted to fill up my cup for the endless time ahead.

  I held the door for her. She seemed shocked. “You’re just going to let me go. I know you won’t sink the boat. You have…what, morals? Okay, but what about me? You don’t have anything left for me at all?”

  “I have plenty left for you, but it isn’t anything that’s going to help you with Matson.”

  “Oh,” she said. “So it was just the sex?”

  “You’re shallow; you’re not very bright, and you’re a liar of the first magnitude. What else could it have been?”

  That rocked her, and I had the morbid pleasure of seeing the hurt spread across her face until all her exquisite features seemed to be pulling away from each other. What was I doing but killing myself by saying things that I didn’t believe? It was only when I’d said them that I realized how long I’d been imagining just this moment, just this time. It was my big scene, and I’d played it the way I had dreamed of playing it. I’d gotten the knife in and twisted it big time, but what I couldn’t understand was why it felt like I was the one who had been stabbed.

  Vivian turned, and I held the door and watched her walk past Sternfeld and out to her car. The birds were singing back and forth across the street to one another from out of the palm trees. She walked away slowly, holding her head a little to one side as though listening to something, and I remembered that was the way she held her head when she was upset. There was something in my chest that wanted to come out, but I couldn’t interpret it into any known language, and so it stayed there waiting like a blood clot until the Porsche let out a single, distinctive roar and drove away.

  I had two clients scheduled for that afternoon, the Sheik and a singer from Germany named Tamara who lived down in South Miami. I didn’t feel much like training either of them, but it was too late to cancel. I picked up the Sheik around noon at his house on Pine Tree and drove him over to the beach, where we ran along the boardwalk in the very hottest part of the day. The heat was, for him at least, part of the challenge. Where the boardwalk ended, we pounded down the wooden stairs and out onto the hard-packed sand and ran south toward Government Cut, where the big pleasure ships entered the ocean.

  After the run we went back to his house and spent another hour or so practicing kendo, in which he was an expert and I was not. It wasn’t the first time that I’d found myself playing the student rather than the teacher with a client. In fact, I sometimes wondered whether I hadn’t learned as much from my clients as they had learned from me.

  His name was Anwar, and he was by right of birth a prince in a country I won’t name, but he had spent almost all his life in American schools, including Johns Hopkins, where he had received his degree in restorative plastic surgery. When I met him, he was thirty-five and had already practiced medicine in Somalia and Cambodia under the auspices of Doctors Without Borders. As far as I could see, he had responded to the challenge of nearly incalculable wealth as well as anyone I’d ever met.

  It was our ritual after we put away our staffs and padding to sit in the Sheik’s Jacuzzi and drink a patient glass of his thousand-year-old scotch. His wife, Rhonda, was not there that afternoon, and so my pensive mood was less easy to camouflage once the sweat had dried and I was boiling my feet in the bubbles of chlorinated water.

  “Something’s not quite right with you today,” he said.

  “I saw Vivian today.”

  “I guess that means you’ll be losing your mind again shortly. Too bad I won’t be around to witness your madness.”

  “Where are you going now?” I asked.

  “My family is having a party at our hotel in the Bahamas—a reunion, you might say. Would you care to come?”

  “I’m not family.”

  “Not technically. My father would like to see you, though. Why don’t you come? He’s not so well, you know.”

  “I have some business here to take care of.”

  “With the woman?”

  “And her father. Possibly. They made me an offer that I refused. But now I’m wondering if I did the right thing. Seeing her kind of rearranged my brain.”

  “Her father? You mean the scientist?”

  “That’s him.”

  The Sheik said nothing. He was looking down into the bubbling froth of the hot tub with a thoughtful expression on his face. “You know,” he said, “I met him once at a party down at the Biltmore. I think I told you. Some kind of charity function, I forget which. There was something about him I didn’t like. I never quite put my finger on it.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Have you ever found yourself playing a game of chess with someone—even though at the time you thought you were only having a friendly chat about the weather?”

  “It was that way every time I trained him,” I said. “I always got the feeling he was looking for an opening, probing. I think it was almost a habit with him.”

  “Do you think he found your weakness?” the Sheik asked, smiling.

  “Probably.”

  “Have you ever thought about my offer at all?” he asked.

  “Not recently.”

  The offer had been to get rid of all my other clients and become his personal assistant, duties to include some body-guarding, personal training, and whatever else came up.

  In any case, I had never taken him up on his job offer. I didn’t like the idea of having only one big, rich boss. The money he offered me would shock you, so I won’t even mention it, lest you think I’m nuts for turning it down. But look at it this way: You have multiple clients, you have multiple options. That means you can always tell at least one perso
n who gets on your nerves to kiss your ass, without going bankrupt. Anyway, there’s more to life than a great dental plan and a 401(k)—at least until you get old and your teeth start falling out.

  Later, after I got dressed again, Anwar walked with me to my car. Neither of us said very much, but I could feel his concern. He had a depth of presence that came through most strongly in his silences. They were like the atmosphere inside an empty church. He was my age, and yet he seemed much older. Sometimes it seemed to me that I had known him forever.

  We shook hands in front of my ride. His dark eyes were solemn. I slapped him on the shoulder, hoping to bring on a lighter mood, but he wasn’t buying it.

  “I’ll see you when you get back,” I said. “Tell your father I said hey.”

  We embraced, and I got into the van with a completely different mood from the one I wanted. I wanted to be breezy, cavalier, but there was no changing the climate in Anwar’s expression. He stood back listening as the engine of the Ford sputtered, then caught.

  “You should know when something is over, Jack,” he said. “Sometimes it’s dangerous to go back once the dance is done. Even if only five minutes have passed, it will not be the same.”

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “But what if the music is still playing?”

  “Then it will be a different music from the one you heard before.”

  As I drove away, I glanced at the rearview mirror. The Sheik was standing there, watching, just as Williams had.

  Nothing went right after that. The Ford died as I was going southbound on the Don Shula, and I had to push it off to the side of the road in the middle of a rainstorm that lasted just long enough to soak me to the bone. I used my cell phone to call Tamara, the German singer, to tell her that I wouldn’t be making it that afternoon. Then, as I was calling for a tow truck, the battery in the phone died, too, and the spare in the van didn’t work either. It was lucky for me that the rain had stopped, because I had to walk half a mile to the nearest call box.