by Chris Knopf
“A lot of effort to tell me two words,” I said.
“He didn’t trust any other approach. He believes there are no secure communications these days, so he wanted to go old-fashioned.”
“Sending a priest is a nice touch,” I said.
“He didn’t send me. I volunteered. Not a bad place to come to in the summer, though you need to do something about the traffic.”
“I’m working on it. Should we stipulate that’s all the information you plan to share?”
“That was the deal, though we can play twenty questions.”
“Love that game,” I said.
“First ask me if I think his intentions are benevolent.”
“Are they?”
“Yes. It won’t solve his moral dilemma, but I convinced him doing something was better than doing nothing. He knows something is wrong, but not exactly what. What’s frightening is he doesn’t know what others think he knows.”
I told him he had to give me a bit more than that, to honor the rules of twenty questions.
Jerry sighed, and said, “The day before he resigned, he was contacted by the domestic partner of the man who fell from the window. The partner said he had disturbing things to share about the Loventeers, and wanted management to be aware. He said he’d also reached out to members of the board. My friend decided to quit the organization rather than become complicit in any way, but then the partner is murdered. It’s complicated, but the net is a conscience in pain competing with a lot of fear.”
“A big night of soul-searching?” I asked.
“A pair of nights, though searching souls is sort of my regular day job.”
Finished with his dinner, Eddie bounded down the companionway. He greeted Jerry as if hoping to be rescued from his desperate captivity. I didn’t have the heart to tell the priest this is how he greeted everybody.
“I used to have a dog who looked just like you,” he told Eddie. “Only not as gallant.”
“I’m glad you added that.”
When Eddie grew tired of his own obsequiousness, I asked Jerry, “Just how bad is it? For the sender of the message?”
“Bad. Living in fear is no life at all. Especially fear for one’s soul.”
“Anything else you can tell me, without making me guess?”
“Sadly, no. I’ve already stretched my mandate to the breaking point. It must have been the vodka.”
He downed the rest of his drink and got up to leave.
“Though I do have an opinion about vacation travel,” he said. “Even in the summer, the heat is bearable in the Caribbean, and the deals, especially after Maria, are fantastic.”
I stood in the cockpit and watched him climb in his car and drive away. I looked over at Hodges, who was busy grilling his vegetables.
“I’m not even gonna ask,” he said.
“Bless you.”
I WENT and got my laptop computer from the cottage and dragged it over to the boat, noting in the process that Amanda’s Audi was still gone from the driveway, not that it shouldn’t have been. Wi-Fi at the marina wasn’t great, but good enough to move as fast as I was on the computer, which wasn’t very fast. This was the sort of chore I depended on Amanda to help me with, having come late to the digital party and still getting used to making everything work, however poorly.
On the other hand, I once used a bank of mainframes at the company to engineer advanced hydrocarbon processing, so how hard could it be?
According to their official website, Worldwide Loventeers was founded by an English botanist and his wife, whose frequent research trips to remote, undeveloped regions of the world had ignited their compassion for people in daily need of nutrition, medical care, and basic education. A familiar story. Their twist on allaying these ills was to establish an all-volunteer organization made up of like-minded altruists, willing to give freely of their time and fund their own expenses, as a sort of tithing, presumably cementing their commitment to good works.
Volunteering With Love was the organization’s original name, streamlined sometime in the 1980s, probably by a guy in the marketing department hoping to give a modern kick to their fund-raising, another element of the group’s model. You didn’t have to actually suffer the inconvenience and discomfort of a Third World posting if you just wanted to write a tax-deductible check. Consequently, about 80 percent of their volunteers were now manning phone banks in offices like the one in Manhattan, soliciting the guilt-ridden and taking in contributions.
Since field workers supported themselves, this money was dedicated to other general expenses, like food, water, and medical supplies. The idea was that the built-in subsidy of the organization’s operations meant a far greater percentage of your contribution would be dedicated to essential supplies, a bigger bang for the giver’s buck.
I moved off the official website and friendly commentary and down through layers of Google hits, going several pages in before uncovering complaints, though most of these involved logistical hiccups, illnesses contracted on the job, or easily countered gripes from the field, like, “I really didn’t think I should have to pay for everything. Why not a small stipend?”
I did come across a news article noting one of a halfdozen missionaries murdered by a gang of insurgents in the Congo had originally come to Africa by way of the Loventeers. Another article from a few months before reported that the director of the Loventeers’ campus in Puerto Rico had died of an apparent suicide.
Other than that, the cyber sphere was remarkably free of bad news about the Worldwide Loventeers.
I left the search and booked a plane ticket for San Juan, Puerto Rico.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Permission to come aboard,” Amanda called from the dock the next morning.
Eddie jumped off the quarter berth and leaped up the stairs to the cockpit, effectively granting her request. She was in her regular work clothes—boots, jeans, and white T-shirt covered by a light baseball jacket against the moderately cool morning, the sun still getting ready to break through the horizon.
“You’re up early,” I said, helping her down the dock ladder.
“Implying I was up late.”
“Assuming.”
“That’s fair, but look at my eyes. Are these the eyes of a sleep-deprived woman?”
Nothing about her looked sleep-deprived, though I wasn’t sure I’d know how to determine that.
“I didn’t go,” she said, following me down into the galley to get the coffee-making underway.
“To the play?”
“To anywhere. I called him on the way in and said I was heading back to Oak Point.”
“Okay.”
She banged around the cabinets above the range, pulling out the plastic coffee preseur, ground beans, and a tea kettle to boil up the water. She looked up at me where I was sitting inside the companionway.
“It was a foolish thing to do,” she said.
“Agreeing to go or canceling?”
“Don’t get all rhetorical with me, Mr. Acquillo. You know what I mean.”
“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” I said.
“I know, but I will anyway. You don’t have any cream around here, do you? I don’t understand how an otherwise cultured person can drink coffee without cream.”
“Not that cultured. For example, I hate musicals.”
“You have greater deficiencies than that, but we won’t go into it at the moment. Not when I’m trying to apologize.”
“You are?”
I went below and took out a sweatshirt to put on above my boxer shorts. I stared at the tea kettle, hoping to force it into a fast boil.
“The neurologist said I might have to deal with excess impulsivity,” she said.
“Is that what it was?”
“I choose to think so. If you can’t blame bad behavior on your brain tumors, what good are they?”
We left it at that until we each had our coffee, with Amanda grousing over the necessity of emergency powdered
cream.
“Didn’t you used to make that stuff in one of those petrochemical plants?” she asked.
“Sure. A byproduct of the distillation process. We got asphalt the same way.”
Her jacket was made of silk, though long given over to rough service on her job sites. Scuffed up and nearly shapeless, on her it looked like it belonged in a designer’s fall collection.
“I try too hard to protect you,” I said. “It’s smothering.”
She wasn’t the kind of woman who pretended to be independent, but actually hoped someone would swoop in to look after her. What she actually hated was being looked after.
She put her hand up to my cheek.
“Enough of that,” she said. “Tell me why your computer’s on the boat.”
I told her about the visit by the Reverend Jerry Swanson, the message, and who and what I figured was behind it.
“So, of course, you’re going,” she said.
“I’ll leave Eddie with you. Isabella will just make him fat.”
“Please be sure to come back,” she said. “I’m not sure you’re entirely replaceable.”
“Don’t try too hard to find out.”
WHEN I called Jackie, she was swimming a quarter mile out in the ocean.
“How is that possible?” I asked.
“Waterproof phone and headset,” she said.
“That’s nuts.”
“Would you feel that way if you couldn’t reach me?”
I asked if she could tread water for a few minutes so I could brief her on my meeting on the boat with Jerry Swanson.
“Not a problem. I float like a cork.”
I shared the story Milton Flowers told me about his 9/11 epiphany while drinking sacramental wine with the Episcopal priest, which had seemed irrelevant before. She agreed it was a worthy lead to pursue.
“I gave you a credit card for expenses that you never use,” she said. “Use it this time, just keep the receipts.”
I reminded her that she was going to track down Mikolaj Galecki.
“So far, nada,” she said. “Either that’s not his real name, or he’s not in any of my domestic data bases. Nothing on Google that fits the description. Does your detective friend Fenton have access to Interpol?”
“He’s already checking with them. Meanwhile I want to chat with Ross Semple. If that’s okay.”
“Since when do you ask permission?”
“This is your rodeo. I’m just one of the cowboys.”
“Right. It’s okay with me. Just get him to tell you everything he knows and don’t tell him anything.”
“Okay,” I said. “I think I can remember that.”
“If we’re done here, I’ve got to swim back to shore. Just stay in touch.”
“I promise.”
“Vaya con Dios.”
I DROVE back to the cottage so I could leave Eddie and pack a bag. I had some time to kill, but I wasn’t in the mood to go down to the shop and work on my drawings. Instead, I went out to the Adirondack chairs above the breakwater. Eddie lay at my feet, not bothering to provoke me into tossing golf balls, or gnawed-up chunks of driftwood. As usual, he knew my mood.
Before I’d blown up my corporate job, left Abby, and spent a few months of blacked-out rest and relaxation, I hadn’t been a very good student of my own mind. Setting and achieving goals had been an adequate stand-in for contemplation. It was only after I’d given myself a life sentence served at my dead parents’ cottage on the Little Peconic Bay, that I took the trouble to study why my emotional condition had become such a shredded mess, a toxic waste dump of blunders and regret.
I never really came up with an answer, but at least I developed a process for self-examination, which involved important props, in particular those Adirondack chairs above the breakwater and medicinal overdosing on Absolut vodka. That day I left the booze in the house and relied solely on a view of the bay, which expressed an irregular pattern of calm water, interrupted here and there by patches of tiny herring-bone waves. The signs of light and variable winds, common that time of year. With the breeze so unevenly dispersed, the sails on one sailboat stood upright, while another, blessed with a freshening puff, heeled slightly. A motorboat, uninfluenced by the whims of the wind, struck a straight white line across the blue water.
The sun was hot enough to force me to raise the big market umbrella that Amanda had added to the setting, a complement to the three chairs, two side tables, and wicker basket filled with tossable objects in various states of disintegration.
The tide was low, revealing a band of rotting shellfish and seaweed, the aroma from which failed to deter a scattering of families and solo sunbathers from setting up along the pebble beach in front of the breakwater. A tall, skinny old guy was passing by on a paddleboard, taking advantage of the relatively calm waters. He caught me looking at him and waved, a sailors’ custom, so I waved back. It meant we were both fine and in no imminent danger, which was a comfort considering my state of mind.
You’ve heard it noted that time is a river, though what is overlooked is all the sediment the river leaves behind, diverting the path, obscuring recollection. Experience emboldens when it’s not taxing resolve, eroding vitality.
I’d learned that illusions were handy for motivating action without the inconvenience of accepting reality. If I’d ever had any of those illusional helpers, they were lost in the muddy river. I’d been driven by some indeterminate fury, propelled by an eagerness for combat, with correspondents aplenty. No need to go looking for a fight, they were always there at the ready.
Maybe that was good enough. Let externalities control the process. Keep cause and effect in close harmony. Leave solipsism to people who need to create their own conflicts to make up for the absence of involuntary penalty.
I went back to the cottage to pack my bag, determination and ambivalence picking up the rear.
THERE’S SOMETHING about the weather out on the East End of Long Island and what it does to the light. You hear about it in art galleries back in the city, and in real estate brochures trying to sell houses worth more than a small country’s GDP, but the hype insults the reality. It really is different, and if you live out here, you know that. But you don’t talk about it, for fear it will jinx the experience, and God will take it all away from us.
It was one of those mornings as I drove off Oak Point, heading west toward JFK airport and parts south.
Still late summer, the sun was hot on the windshield of my old Jeep, but the air coming in through the partly lowered windows was dry and riding the torrents of a northeasterly breeze. They were playing jazz on some college station up in Connecticut that my radio struggled to pull in, but it was clear enough for me. I didn’t want to hear anything else. I just wanted to drink my third round of coffee and dream of unfiltered Camels, something I’d forsworn, hoping abstention wouldn’t wreck the perfection of mornings like this.
My muscles were vaguely sore from the work I’d been doing for Frank Entwhistle lately, something I was trying to get used to. It was just age, which I was grateful I’d lived long enough to experience. I didn’t deserve it, having been spendthrift with my natural gifts, profligate in exhausting my reserve of inherent vitality. Though I could still heave four-by-eight sheets of plywood around like graham crackers and outpace any of the eager Latino guys on the job sites, causing them to yell, “Viejo loco. Hey, old man. You making us look bad!”
It didn’t come easy, but I wasn’t ready to let down for anybody, in any language, of any age or recognizable ethnicity.
I just had to collect the aftereffects the next day, shake them off, and go back to work.
Though I was grateful to just sit and drive and feel the wind from the open windows batter the inside of the Jeep, competing with the crying alto saxophone on the radio.
I already missed Eddie, left behind on Oak Point with secret access to the cottage, where he’d wait for Amanda to show up with an evening meal and inappropriate treats. But of course I wor
ried about him, just like I worried about everything I’d grown to love. This was the ultimate penalty for living past my expected time stamp, this tendency to horde precious beings, as if my wanting would absolve them of injury or need.
No delusion there, no introspection necessary.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I used to relax on airplanes until a night in Omaha, Nebraska, when the pilot was forced to land in a whiteout, a weather phenomenon involving snowfall of such ferocity that visibility goes to zero. He didn’t mean for this to happen, thinking the blustery snow had moved away from the airfield, but there it was, a surprise appearance minutes before we were supposed to land.
The pilot was about to abort, and was in the process of doing so, when the ground came up and met the landing gear, deciding the issue for him.
It was a while ago, so training and technology have likely made this a remote hazard, but in those days the result was essentially a crash landing, complete with oxygen masks and luggage disgorged from overhead and flight attendants screaming only a little less earnestly than the passengers.
I bit halfway through my tongue and it felt like my lumbar had popped up into my brain stem. After the initial thud, the plane, thrown into reverse under excess throttle, shuddered and oscillated down the runway, eventually skidding off into the snow drifts, where we were greeted by a fleet of emergency vehicles rushing up with spinning lights and square-jawed first responders eager to catch us at the bottom of the inflatable escape slides.
Flying never had the same allure again.
None of this would likely come into play on the flight from JFK to San Juan, but that was immaterial to the part of my brain that had been on high alert ever since that single formative event, ever-present after nearly a million miles of air travel.
Fortunately the trip to San Juan was a night flight, and Burton’s expense account included a bottomless liquor tab.
I ordered the first round in Spanish, which caused the flight attendant to ask what part of Mexico I was from. I told her I was all American, though I’d started out in Quebec. After that, she said everything in beautiful Parisian French. Everyone’s a showoff. She also sold me a ham sandwich in a cardboard box with a little tub of medicinally flavored mayonnaise.
