by Sean Rowe
“Of course, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is could this happen to a Festival Cruise Lines vessel, and the answer is yes. In fact, it could be the next logical step: bomb a recognizable, highly visible cruise ship with two thousand tourists on board.”
They were paying attention.
“If,” I said, “this was a Hezbollah or Qaeda hit, or some domestic antigovernment group. But there’s no reason yet to believe it was. Let’s assume for the moment the letter is real. OK. What we’re dealing with is a bunch of serious Castro haters, local Cubans. They’re not extortionists for money, they’re extortionists for glory. They want Washington to say, ‘Sí, señor. We will close down trade routes again.’ They want to make trouble, but they don’t want to completely alienate the authorities, and they certainly don’t want to piss off local right-wingers, because that’s where the glory is going to come from. In the end they want to be good Americans. They want to be good boys. They want Mama to pat them on the head. It’s a matriarchal culture.”
One of the staffers giggled. Earlier I had seen her staring at my hand the way I imagined she would stare at something unexpected and skittering in a damp bathtub or beneath the lid of a water-meter housing. The tension at the corners of her mouth was half fear and half fascination, and she had dropped her eyes as soon as I met her gaze. She was quite a looker, and I remembered hearing she was recently divorced, but even thinking about that seemed like a lot of trouble.
“So much for speculation,” I continued. “What we’re doing at the moment is tightening security with our shoreside suppliers because that’s the likeliest avenue for a bomb to get smuggled onto a cruise ship. We’re reviewing recent employment records. And a few other things.”
“Any more thoughts?” Tanel asked.
“That about gets it.”
“Well, Matt,” he said, two fingers thumping the rim of his rocks glass, “I think there’s a lot more you can do.”
Here it comes, I thought.
“I think it would be a good idea for you to initiate your own investigation,” he said.
“Of the freighter bombing.”
“Of the freighter bombing.” His hand was a claw clutching the glass, all blue veins and bone.
Mary poured some coffee in my cup. I caught the scent of jasmine as she moved away.
“Based on what I’ve heard here today, the local FBI field office seems to be handling that,” I said. “I think it’s a bad idea to parallel their efforts.”
“You have a distinct advantage. The FBI is looking out for the welfare of the nation. You’re only looking after the interests of the world’s largest cruise line. And you can afford to be”—he hesitated here, giving the Scotch a swirl—“a bit less formal in your approach. What do you say, Mary?”
Tanel reached behind him to grab her arm but missed. Mary stopped where she had been walking past and looped her arms around the chair to put her hands on his lapels, smiling out at the conference table.
“What do you say we give Mr. Shannon a little encouragement?” Tanel said.
She looked down at him, right on cue. She brushed her hair back behind one ear and cooed: “That sounds marvelous, darling.”
“I think I heard you call this the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Tanel said, looking up at Mary but talking to me. “Let’s say we’ll make that your bonus when you introduce Mr. Antonopoulos to the mad bomber.” Antonopoulos was the operations manager. Right now he was looking up from some papers trying to figure out if he was supposed to laugh. The port director was doing a good job of staring at nothing from behind his oversize, indoor-outdoor sunglasses. Tanel sat straight up in his chair, one hand palm down on the conference table. He was looking at me, eyes like stones in a mountain stream. “Of course,” he said, “a Polaroid of the body would suffice. The mad bomber could sink to the bottom of the Atlantic, and this corporation wouldn’t give a fiddler’s fuck.”
Then the smile came back, and he raised the glass to his lips.
This was something new. I had to say, it made things interesting.
3
THE DELANO stood on a narrow lot, but it was deep, all the way through from Collins to the beach. I paid the cabbie and got out. After I walked up the steps, and the doorman opened the door, I started to see what was what.
In front of me was a long, dim lobby, and it was crowded. Curtains billowed up to the ceiling. All the staff wore white.
I was early, so I decided to look around. The lobby turned into a restaurant that reminded me of New York, everyone wearing black or gray, the women with dark lipstick. Or that’s the way it seemed in the low light. Then I was outside, next to the swimming pool.
A line of royal palms rose from either side of the water. Hammocks swayed between some of them, and a full-length mirror in a wooden frame twinkled in the shadows. The mirror stood on the grass the way it would stand in a bedroom. A drunk guy was posing and puckering in front of it.
“Look at me!” he said, falsetto. “Look at me!” He stuck his ass out and wiggled it. A woman was with him, and she laughed. He was pretending to be a fashion model, and I could understand why. Coming through the lobby, I’d noticed quite a few of them.
I saw a tiki bar at the far end of the pool; a café table and two wrought-iron chairs stood in the water, an artistic touch. The pool was very shallow at that end, maybe three inches deep, and I wondered if any of the hotel guests ever waded out and actually sat at the table.
I got a beer from the kid at the tiki bar and started walking toward the other side of the pool. Two guys in their fifties and a young woman were up ahead, the men pushing the girl on a swing that hung from a gumbo-limbo tree. I could see she was something special. The men wore double-breasted suits, but the young woman looked like she had just stepped off a yacht. She was laughing. She wore a sort of silk skirt wrapped around her waist and tied on one side, and a bikini top. It was hard not to look at the bikini, so I slowed down and pretended to take a new interest in the swimming pool.
One of the men grabbed the ropes holding the swing and made it stop. He said something I couldn’t hear, and the three of them moved off to one of the cabanas that lined that side of the pool. When they were inside, the white canvas curtain was pulled across the doorway.
I got close and heard the woman, and then I heard a slap. One of the men laughed. Then the other’s voice said, “That’s it, baby. Yes.” There was nothing for a while. Then came a low moan, the girl. I moved under the shadow of a tree near the big mirror, catching a glimpse of myself. Because of the light, I almost didn’t recognize the image. It could have been anybody.
The curtain pulled back, and the girl came out. She started walking down the path before she noticed me.
“Getting a thrill?” she asked.
“Whatever,” I said. I didn’t know what to say. I put my hand in my pocket to warm it up.
She walked past, and I watched her go to the bar. Soon she headed back with two glasses in her hands. I had lit a cigarette.
She came off the path and moved right up in front of me. She bent down, put the drinks on one of the flagstones, and stood up, reaching behind her back to untie her top.
Her top fell to the ground. She looked at me while she massaged her breasts for a time; then she just stood there, arms at her sides. It was cold. Everyone was inside the hotel.
She put her top back on and said: “You’re wondering what it costs.”
“Yes,” I answered. She was right. It was exactly what I had been thinking.
“That guy, the one with the beard. He owns a sugar mill in Belle Glade. He’s worth seventeen million dollars. He pays me thirty thousand at the beginning of each fiscal quarter, and I suck his cock until the next installment.”
I heard some low laughter from inside the cabana.
“Whereupon,” she said, “I decide if I’m interested in doing it again.”
“You could make the same thing modeling.”
“No, I couldn’t. They wa
nt anorexic children these days.”
I really looked at her then. I put her at about twenty-five. She was beautiful.
“Twenty-eight,” she said, reading me.
“Who’s the other guy?”
“That’s Tim,” she said. “An out-of-town guest. We’re entertaining. Any other questions?”
What the hell. It was what I really wanted to know. “What happens if a higher bidder shows up?”
“That’s up to me. Entirely.” She picked up the drinks. She ran the tip of her tongue very slowly across her top lip. Then she turned back toward the white canvas.
IT WAS JUST FONTANA’S style: the biggest suite in the hotel. I got off the elevator on the fifteenth floor and walked down the hall and knocked.
He pulled the door open, and everything was white. The walls were white. The carpet was white. There was a minibar, and it was white too. A sconce stuck out from the wall like you see in old paintings, but instead of a candlestick or a vase, it held a green apple.
Fontana was wearing Armani: black jacket, white trousers, no tie, but the pearl-gray shirt buttoned up to the neck. He had an unlit cigar in his left hand. I could hear voices coming from another room. “Matthew,” he said, stepping back so I could walk in.
I followed him through an arched doorway into a sitting room, where he flopped on a white couch. I stopped, and the talk did too.
A little dark guy in a brown suit sat on a chair in the corner. I looked at the couch across from Fontana, and I was looking at Kip Purvis, half a lifetime later but almost exactly the same: same electric-blue eyes, same deepwater tan. The big difference was that his hair had turned completely white. He was pumped up from weight lifting, stretch marks around his neck and shoulders. A woman sat next to him. Kip jumped up and came at me, grinning.
“Holy shit!” he said, “I can’t fucking believe this, man!” When he said it, the saliva made me flinch.
He gave me a bear hug, lifting me off the floor. He started shaking my hand and forgot to let go. He was shaking my hand, but he was also shaking.
“Krystal! This is Matthew Shannon!”
The woman stood up and did what’s left of a curtsy in some parts of the South. She stuck out her hand, but I couldn’t get to it across the coffee table, so she gave up and sat down, smiling. Krystal turned out to be Kip’s sister.
“That’s Rodríguez,” Kip said. He pointed his thumb at the dark guy in the suit. “Fuck him.”
Kip pounded me on the back for a while, then went to a countertop jammed with bottles and glasses. He fetched me a Negra Modelo and one for himself.
“Old times,” he said, clicking his beer against mine.
Fontana was looking at me and smiling. I looked at Kip because anyone would. He had put the beer on the coffee table and started flexing his biceps like the Incredible Hulk, standing there in a red muscle shirt, blue jeans, and ostrich-skin Tony Lamas. The last time I’d seen him was in a safe house outside Thien Pao. One of the SEAL teams had fed him some acid, and after he took off his clothes and wouldn’t stop screaming, we duct taped his mouth shut and handcuffed him to a water pipe. Later on he got court-martialed, I couldn’t remember what for. I’d heard he was working in Guatemala, Africa before that.
“He’s training for Mister Over Forty,” Krystal explained. “The regional pose-off.”
Fontana burst out laughing, and the dark guy went so far as to smile and hoist one ankle across his knee.
“Sit down, Matthew,” Fontana suggested.
Kip winked at me and quit his strut. “Gotta water the weasel,” he said and disappeared through the doorway.
Fontana lit his cigar. “Adam was walking through the Garden of Eden,” he said, exhaling. “The clouds rolled back, and God looked down and said, ‘How you liking it down there, Adam my boy?’”
I sat on the sofa next to Krystal. She was working on some needlepoint that involved ducklings and kittens.
“‘Oh, I love it,’ Adam answered. ‘All the animals are so cuddly and friendly. The grass is so nice and green.’ ‘That’s fine, Adam,’ God says. ‘But I’ll make you a deal. I’m going to send you a new animal. This one’s called a woman.’”
Fontana gazed through a cloud of blue smoke, a look where you couldn’t tell how far he was looking. He found something wrong with his cigar and started working on it with a little clipper he fished out of his pocket.
“‘She’ll be your pal, help you out with any projects you got going,’” he said. “‘She’ll smooth down the grass for you at night and make a nice warm bed, and she’ll fulfill every one of your sexual fantasies. Not only that, she’ll invent sexual fantasies you couldn’t have dreamed up on your own.’”
“This is some joke?” It was the first peep out of the dark guy. He looked nervous, and I didn’t blame him.
“Of course it’s a joke, you fucking monkey,” Kip said, coming back into the room and zipping his fly. “Shut up.”
Fontana cleared his throat. He was ignoring them both, looking out the open doors to a balcony where the night breeze blew the curtains around.
“Adam scratches his head and says, ‘Well, that’s fine, God. But you said this was a deal. What’s it going to cost me?’ God says, ‘An arm and a leg. Your left arm and your right leg.’ Adam scratches his head again. Then he says: ‘What could I get for a rib?’”
Dead silence. Then Krystal laughed and said, “I don’t get it.”
Fontana looked like he’d gone to sleep. After a minute he opened his eyes and got up and poured something complicated at the bar. Kip shrugged. The dark guy, Rodríguez, lit a cigarette, and he and I looked at each other.
I decided to have a smoke, too. I had pretty much figured out we were waiting for someone else to show up when a loud knock struck the door. Fontana disappeared into the next room and came back with a slim black guy. The guy was wearing a guayabera and a beret, looking like a tropical Black Panther.
Fontana sat down, and the black guy glared around the room.
“Billy Bryant,” said Fontana.
It took me a minute, and then I remembered: Pan Am, 1978, Kennedy to Heathrow. And an armored car out West somewhere. Maybe more than one.
The guy went over to the far side of the room and sat on one of the chairs. He took off the beret and hung it on his knee. He put his arms behind his head, but he looked even stiffer than Rodríguez.
“Now that we’re all here, Kip,” Fontana said, “why don’t you explain to your old army buddy what the plan is.”
Kip giggled. Krystal looked up from her needlepoint and smiled.
“Matthew, ol’ buddy ol’ pal, we’re gonna hijack a cruise ship,” Kip said. “And not just any cruise ship. The Norwegian Empress, pride of the Festival Cruise Lines fleet. One of yours.”
“I’m outta here.” It was the black guy, Bryant. He jumped up and took some steps past the couch and then stopped near the doorway. He wheeled around and whipped his arms out wide to make a point, flinging his beret by accident. It hit the wall, and Rodríguez jumped.
“Listen,” Bryant said, going to get his hat, “I walk in here and here’s this cat I never seen before, and next thing I know you’re putting our business in the street? This guy could be anyone. He could be wired!” He looked me in the face for the first time. “I’m checking this man for a wire right now, or I’m outta here.”
I was about to say don’t bother, we’ll leave together.
Fontana blew another cloud. “I’ve got an even better idea,” he said. “Why don’t we go for a ride?”
4
IT WAS ALL SIX of us in a Chevy Astro going across the causeway and down U.S. 1 until Kip pulled over and got out and refused to get back in until Fontana ditched the cigar. Fontana said he’d consider it and sat there in the front passenger seat of the minivan trying different stations on the radio, smoking. Kip stomped off across the parking lot.
I went into the Dixie Creme next door to get some coffee. Rodríguez came with me. I looked out the window an
d saw Kip with Krystal on his shoulders doing squats.
Rodríguez got his coffee and sat down at a booth. I sat in the booth across from his, facing the same way, toward the highway. It was very bright in the donut shop. When I glanced at him, the little guy had his head in his hands, and his shoulders were shaking. Something made me look down at his shoes on the tile floor, and I thought, Jesus, they’re just like mine. Which was to say: the last lace-up shoes in Miami. Come to think of it, the guy looked like a shoe salesman.
He was really sobbing. I could see Bryant sitting in the minivan’s slid-open doorway with ten thousand cars going by on U.S. 1, smoking a joint. He was laughing at something Fontana said. Kip was doing push-ups.
Rodríguez was drying up a bit, poking at his eyes with a paper napkin. I waited a minute, then stuck out my hand, careful to keep looking straight ahead. You never knew how these Latins were going to react.
“Matthew Shannon,” I said.
He coughed, and I felt him take my hand. He had a nice grip, like maybe he’d done some real work when he was younger.
“My name is Manuel Rodríguez Colón,” he said. “Here you would call it Manny.”
“Nice to meet you, Manny.” I blew on my coffee. I couldn’t think of the next thing to say. “I was thinking you looked like a shoe salesman.”
“Eh?”
“Luces como un vendedor de zapato,” I said.
“Ah.”
“Where are you from?”
He thought that was funny.
“Colombia. Near Cali,” he said. “I am sure you have heard of Cali.”
“Yeah,” I answered. “What’s going on here, Manny?”
“Whadyou mean?”
“For instance, where are we going?”
I could feel him looking at me, so I glanced over.
“To the miniature warehouse,” he said.
“OK. Well, let me ask you this. What’s going on with you? How come you’re so upset?”
