Straits of Fortune Page 6

  By the time the tow truck dropped me off in front of my friend’s garage in Overtown, the afternoon, while still hot and bright, was all but gone, along with any hope of profit. And by the time the traffic started crawling the other way, I was sitting in the thrift-store clutter of the garage’s office, sipping a cup of coffee and talking to Paul March, the owner, who sat across from me cleaning one of his guns.

  March liked to clean his guns at his desk so his customers could see that he was a serious person. In the past he’d had trouble with some folks who wanted their cars back but couldn’t afford to pay for the repairs. It was Paul’s opinion that the timely appearance of a firearm in plain sight brought a new sense of reality to such negotiations and was worth a lot more than the sign on the wall that said NO CREDIT.

  “That car of yours needs a new transmission,” he said. “Whoever sold it to you must have seen you coming.”

  “I think his name was March.”

  “Never heard of him.” He had finished putting the gun back together and was reloading it. “Come on out back with me,” March said. “I got something you might like.”

  We went out to the lot behind the garage and walked toward a row of beaten-down-looking old cars parked near the fence. A tag team of Dobermans ran out from under a white truck and raced at me, their teeth bared, their small brains charged with inbred malice. Then they recognized Paul and started prancing around him as though he were a one-man party.

  Paul, who had the same manner with animals as he did with people, smiled and kicked the male in the ribs. The bitch sat on her haunches and looked bemused. Paul made a sweeping gesture with his arms, and the hellhounds slipped back under the truck, where they lay watching us from the shadows, the two of them as quiet as a pair of snipers.

  “What about this one?” Paul asked, patting the hood of a black 1977 Thunderbird with a bike rack bolted to the roof. “It’s only got a hundred thousand miles on it,” he said.

  “Was that before or after you turned back the odometer?”

  “After, of course. Hey, man, at least you can’t say I’m a liar.”

  “I like the bike rack,” I said. “With this ride I’ll probably need it.”

  At that instant a rat sprinted out in front of us and ran behind some stacks of retreads outside a rusted corrugated shed. We both saw it at the same time. Paul frowned at me and, with a stern expression on his face, placed his left index finger vertically across his lips.

  “Time for safari,” he whispered. “Be right back.”

  Paul crept behind the row of dilapidated cars and disappeared behind the shed, his gun barrel up and next to his ear. I was just thinking that I had to find a new mechanic when I heard the shot. The three men bent over the open hood of a car by the garage straightened up and looked in our direction. They stared for a moment, then went back to work. All of them knew their boss very well.

  Paul came back a minute later. The gun was stuck into the waistband of his blue jumpsuit. From the look on his face, I knew that the safari had not been a success.

  “Did you get him?” I asked.

  “How the hell should I know?” he retorted. “You think I got the time to look for the body of a dead rat?”

  It was six o’clock when I drove my “new” black Thunderbird out of March’s lot, and I hadn’t gone very far when I realized that, like the last car he’d sold me, this was one I probably wouldn’t be driving for too much longer. They had cleaned it up and given it a shiny new paint job, but it was nothing except war paint on a steel hag. The engine coughed at every stoplight, and I had a pretty good idea that there was something wrong with the carburetor. By the time I got home, I was glad just to have made it. When I shut off the ignition, the car kept making noises for the next thirty seconds, like loose bolts in a steel bucket.

  I took a shower and drank a beer, then turned on the news and sat in my black recliner with my feet up, listening to the day’s calamities and scandals, but if you had tested me on any of it ten minutes later, I wouldn’t have been able to recall a single thing. After a while I got tired of the anchorman’s handsome, self-assured expression and shut off the set. I was in a strange mood that is hard to describe, except to say it was as though there were a neon Vacant sign blinking over my heart like a permanent question I didn’t have an answer for. Maybe I’d been living alone too long. Maybe it was time to get a cat.

  I thought of calling Barbara, my ex-wife, but she lived up in New York, and I couldn’t afford very much long-distance. I liked to tell people that we were on good terms, except that it always sounded as though we’d had some kind of business relationship rather than a romance that had petered out like a flower that needed more watering than either of us could agree to. She was a stockbroker and I was a cop, and never the twain did meet, and even now, after five years, I had yet to figure out how it was that the longer we were together, the more like strangers we became.

  But I didn’t call Barbara, and it wasn’t just the long-distance charges either. We were both too far gone from one another, and I didn’t feel like hearing about the Dow Jones or about her new boyfriend, whoever he was this time around. There were times when she dropped hints to the effect that she wanted kids and I might still be in the running for sperm donor. It seemed that in that overheated Barnard brain of hers the baby clock had begun to go tick-tock, and I suppose it was to be taken as a compliment that she still thought I had good genes.

  But it was clear from the way she put it that what she had in mind was in no way to be mistaken for a possible reunion. I got the impression that her idea was for me to fly up, then make like the Lone Ranger, leaving behind a silver bullet. It was not the worst offer I’d ever gotten, yet there was a certain chill to it just the same that failed to move me. But maybe that was just me being old-fashioned again.

  I took off my shirt and lay on my bed and looked up at the ceiling fan for a while. That didn’t help much either, though. An egg of an idea was trying to hatch itself in my brain, but it needed a little nudging along, so I got up, went over to my desk, opened the bottom drawer, and took out the last letter Vivian had sent me. I popped another beer and sat down at my table with its two undersize chairs and read it again for at least the hundredth time since she’d sent it to me. I knew it by heart—right down to the freaky line breaks, but I read it again anyway; it was like sipping from an empty glass.

  The letter was written in plain English, but as usual I went over it slowly, lingering on each word like a sun-dazed archaeologist deciphering obscure hieroglyphics. She was right. I had backed down, or rather I had backed away, and it wasn’t because Vivian hadn’t been worth fighting for. I had fought harder for much less. At the time I had seen Matson’s incursion as a test of loyalty on her part, and when all the signs made it clear that she had failed that test, I jettisoned them both, girlfriend and client, in a flash of pride. To hell with the both of them, I’d thought.

  The part about the money was also true, though I had refused to think about it. America might be a classless society, but there was a hierarchy of cash that could be overlooked only until the first time the waiter handed you the wine list. The economics of the romance started dawning on me after the first couple of dates, when I began to realize that I was going to have to train half of Coral Gables in order to keep up with her. I came clean with her on the subject, and she laughed and said it didn’t matter. But it does matter. And while her father treated me like an equal, most of her friends thought that she was slumming, that she would come around once the shine wore off my charm.

  My self-esteem had never been based on the gold standard, but Fitzgerald was right: The rich are different. Their feet touch the ground only when they want them to, but mine were there all the time. In the culture of money, I was a definite outsider with little chance of conversion this side of winning the lottery. It was all right for a while, but I couldn’t see the thing working for the long haul. I just didn’t want to go through life feeling like one of Elizabeth Taylor�
�s poorer husbands.

  Over the course of our affair, I gradually talked myself out of being in love with Vivian. I was like a man trying to rescue himself from a cult he had started. I told myself I was being realistic, noble, that I was doing her a favor, but I couldn’t deny the hurt I saw in her eyes when she realized I was pulling away. I went from being too available to being too invisible, and when she pressed me on it, I gave her that old bullshit answer that I was too busy. I knew exactly what I was doing, and when Matson came along, he became part of the exit strategy. Judging from my reaction in the bar that night, however, it had worked a lot better than I thought it would.

  And now Matson was dead, but nothing was finished. In fact, things seemed less finished now than when he was alive. If I closed my eyes, I could see the white yacht with its perilous cargo sitting quietly in the water as the sky darkened, the sun now far to the west and set on setting. Then something that had been trying to surface finally did, and all of a sudden none of it made sense. Matson had money, but the boat I’d seen would have cost at least $3 million, and that much he didn’t have. Sometimes people become more mysterious in death than they were in life, and that seemed to be the case with Matson.

  Then I started thinking about the money the Colonel had offered me; five zeros after a one, and don’t forget the comma. I kept thinking about the yacht out there, inert off the coast with a dead man on board like a thing waiting to be done. I began to feel a strange tension come over me, as though I were being held back, and I knew then that I would do it. I knew in my gut that I had a rendezvous with that boat that I would keep for better or for worse. It was only then that the tension eased and I could relax.

  It was seven o’clock when I picked up the phone and called the Colonel’s house. I was half hoping that it was too late. The maid answered, and a moment later the Colonel picked up the phone. It annoyed me that he didn’t sound at all surprised to hear my voice.

  “Did you call to say you’ve changed your mind?” he asked.

  “No, I called to ask what your sign was.”

  “A dollar sign,” he said, laughing heartily at his own joke. We were good friends now, fellow conspirators. “I knew you were a mercenary at heart, Jack. You were starting to worry me.”

  “Send your daughter over with half the money, and send her soon.”

  He didn’t laugh at that one. “You think I keep that kind of cash around the house?”

  “I don’t care where you keep it,” I said. “I get the other half when I get back.” I listened to the sound of my own voice as I said this, and I didn’t particularly like what I heard.

  The Colonel must not have liked my tone either. I listened to him breathe for a few seconds. “What time?” he asked. “What time should I send her?”

  I thought for a moment. “Make it midnight.”

  “She’ll be there.”

  “Groovy.”

  “I’d like to ask you a question.”

  “Ask.”

  “Are you doing it for Vivian or for the money?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Mercenaries often lack heart, Jack. But love and money aren’t mutually exclusive.”

  “So long, Colonel,” I said. “You’ll be seeing me soon.” Then I thought of something. “Oh, and one last thing while I’ve got you on the phone.”

  “Yes?”

  “How did Vivian get out to the boat, and how did she get back? Don’t tell me she swam.”

  There was only a brief hesitation. “She went out on her Jet Ski, and that’s the way she got back.” There was another pause. Nothing in his tone indicated that he might be lying, but it’s harder to judge a thing like that over the phone. With the Colonel, though, it would have been difficult even if I’d been staring him in the eye.

  “Anything else, Jack?”

  “If there is, it’ll have to wait.”

  I hung up and sat for a while staring at the phone as though it were a crystal ball, but it wasn’t. I stood up and looked around the room. Something about it seemed foreign all of a sudden, like I was standing in a house that belonged to a man I knew only vaguely, someone you meet once at a party and never see again. Eventually I got restless, so I went down to the Cuban place on the corner and had a double shot of espresso.

  The first thing I did when I got back to the apartment was get my gear ready for the trip. I got the kayak out of the storage room and waxed it so it would slide through the water like a greased-down barracuda. Then I loaded the compartments inside the hull with the things I would need. It was not going to be a particularly long excursion, but I made sure I packed two bottles of water, a flashlight, four flares, a dive knife, my spare cell phone, and two protein bars. I took my life vest out of the closet, dusted it off, and laid it across the kayak where it rested, very much out of place, on the living room floor.

  Then a sudden thought darted into my mind with the urgency of an unexpected warning I couldn’t ignore, and I went to the desk and got out the Glock 9-millimeter. I didn’t much like the look of it for some reason, and I had that feeling you get when you meet an old friend you’re not quite sure you want to see again. I put in a full clip, felt it click into the handle. A sensation of dread rippled through me and passed on. I put the gun in a plastic bag, sealed it, and stuck it in a pocket inside the kayak. I was glad when I didn’t have to look at it anymore.

  I was watching the Tonight show when I heard the Porsche pull up. I peeked through the slats in the venetian blinds in time to see Vivian crossing the street. I listened for her footsteps, and when they got loud, I opened the door before she could ring. I didn’t want to wake Sternfeld. It was a little late for kayaking, and I didn’t need any questions.

  Vivian walked past me, and I closed the door behind her.

  She was wearing a black, sleeveless, leather dress that showed, I thought, a bit too much leg for the neighborhood—not to mention for my better judgment. She went over and looked down at the kayak. Her body was as hard and as dark-bright as a candied apple, and I caught her scent as she went by me, brushing my chest with her shoulder. She leaned over the kayak and caressed the smoothness of the fiberglass hull as though it were the flank of a racehorse.

  Both her dress and the kayak had the same shine, like ripe fruit stained by the light.

  “Did you bring the money?” I asked.

  “Nick’s bringing it. He should be here in a moment.” She had seated herself in one of the wicker chairs and was lighting a cigarette.

  “Why’d you bother to come?” I asked “Your brother’s the one with the cash.”

  “Why do you think I came?”

  “To wish me bon voyage, I suppose.”

  Vivian looked up at me and shook her head. “You’re taking a chance for me. I thought I should be here.”

  “You’re forgetting there’s a little money involved.”

  The doorbell rang, and I let Nick in. The first thing I noticed was that he had dyed his closely cropped hair platinum blond, but the darker roots had already begun to appear at the scalp like a row of fresh quills coming in. He wore a black T-shirt over a pair of black Levi’s encircled by a black belt with silver studs, like a gunslinger’s livery. He was very tall and thin to the point of emaciation, with the wary face of a fox for whom the hounds will always be just around the last bend and closing fast. There was a Louis Vuitton knapsack on his back. He gave me his usual condescending smile, as though I were a fool for reasons beyond my philistine powers of comprehension. Considering the night’s main activity, he may have been onto something.

  In the beginning, when we first met, I’d tried hard to be his friend, but from the start he’d never missed a chance to let me know he considered himself my superior in every realm except the physical. He had attended Columbia, the University of Chicago, and the Sorbonne and had managed to escape from each of those august institutions without a degree, but it wasn’t because he lacked smarts. On the contrary, he spoke Spanish, French, a little Italian, and was e
xtremely well read and knowledgeable about art. He just thought that everybody in the world except for himself and a few of his friends was ineffably crass and stupid, including his professors.

  Nick stripped off his backpack as though it were on fire and threw it on the floor at Vivian’s feet.

  “Do you have any idea how hard it is to get fifty thousand dollars in cash at this time of night?” he demanded furiously, turning first to me, then Vivian.

  “Relax, Nick,” I said. “It’s for a good cause. You want a beer?”

  He looked at me as though I had offered him a turd. “No, you idiot, I do not want a beer. I don’t suppose you have any white wine. That would be too much to expect.” He looked around the apartment. “How can you live like this?” he asked.

  “I keep my eyes closed,” I said.

  I picked up the backpack and opened it. There was a lot of money inside. I closed the bag and held it in the palm of my hand. It was heavy. “That seems about the right weight. You done good, Nick,” I said. “Real good. I’m proud of you.”

  I carried the bag into the kitchen and put it in the cabinet under the sink, burying it beneath a hoard of plastic bags from the supermarket. Then I went into the fridge and found half a bottle of white wine. It took me a while, but I managed to dig up a mismatched pair of wineglasses with a layer of dust on them. I knew Nick wouldn’t appreciate that, so I rinsed them off in the sink. I went back into the living room and poured each of my guests a glass. Nick took a very suspicious sip, held the glass away from him, then set it down.

  “I hope you like it,” I said. “It cost three bucks.”

  I watched him take another cautious sip.

  “You were overcharged,” he said.

  Vivian drank her wine down in one gulp. “Nick,” she said. “Maybe you should go now. I’ll meet you back at the house.”

  “Why can’t you go with me?” her half brother asked. “I’m not about to leave you here. Look at this place!”

  “I want to talk to Jack.”

  “You don’t need to talk to him. Talk to him when he gets back.”