Thick as Thieves

by Peter Spiegelman

  “Is Chun in touch with her?”

  “Not that I can tell. No e-mail to or from Lessig—and Amy saves her e-mail since like the beginning of time. She never posts anything on Lessig’s Facebook page. Dennis found her Christmas card list on the laptop, and Lessig wasn’t on it.”

  “Okay, Chun is still carrying a torch for Lessig. What do you do with that?”

  “Use it to fine-tune Jill. So now she has red highlights in her hair, and her clothes are a little more crunchy-granola. Now she cooks, and wants to start a catering business. And she sings, and someday she wants to have kids.”

  “You cook and sing?”

  “I do a lot of things.”

  Sitting in his darkened living room, looking at a distant light on the black ocean, Carr had swallowed hard. “What about Jill’s backstory?” he asked eventually.

  “The same,” Valerie said. “She’s still been through the wringer; she’s still looking to change her life.”

  Carr shifts in the front seat and watches them. Her walk is new, he thinks—a bit less assertive, a bit more coltish—and her accessories are different too: dangly earrings, a looped necklace of colored glass beads, a row of thin gold bracelets. And there are tattoos now: a complicated henna braid around her right biceps and a narrower one around her left ankle. Carr slouches lower as they pass.

  There are other people in the park: other couples, off-season tourist families, people walking dogs, but it is Jill and Amy who draw the eye. It’s more than beauty, Carr thinks. Something about their attraction to each other, the simmering anticipation, the wisps of steam before a full boil. It’s in the air between them, like a magnetic field—invisible, but palpable nonetheless.

  Carr hears faint, intermittent music—a bossa nova spilling from one of the stores when its automatic doors slide open. It’s a familiar tune but the door slides shut before he can place it. He watches the women and struggles to recall the tune, and he’s taken suddenly by an aching loneliness—like the last student left at school at the start of a long holiday. The door opens, closes, opens again. The music seeps out, and Carr has it: Jobim playing “Lamento,” and he hears another version of that song.

  An infinitely worse version, the one he remembers—the scraping of a quintet that didn’t know half the notes, and didn’t care much for the rest. They were playing in a beachfront bar, and he and Declan were there with several bottles between them. They were two days gone from Bogotá, and the crew was $5.7 million richer for it—the take from the first job that Carr had planned end to end. Carr felt like he’d just graduated from something, and Declan—creased and unshaven—was beaming. The sky was six shades of violet and the first stars were lit, and all was right with the world.

  Declan lifted a glass. “Brilliant, lad—feckin’ brilliant. They never saw us—never even dreamed of us.” He’d said it before, but Carr didn’t mind the repetition. He lifted his glass in return.

  Declan laughed. “Those spreadsheets at Langley didn’t know what they had, did they? Couldn’t recognize a natural right there in their midst.”

  Carr never liked this subject, and he shrugged and looked away. “A natural what?”

  “A natural spy, lad—a fella bred for the secret life.”

  “They would’ve disagreed with you.”

  Declan shook his head disgustedly. “What the hell did they know? I’ve run across my share of company men, and they’re about as subtle as a dog humpin’ yer leg. They think it’s all about sales, fer chrissakes—that if you can charm Granny into buying an estate car, you can nick war plans from the North Koreans. Was that it, lad—you weren’t enough of a salesman for ’em?”

  Carr shrugged again. “They don’t explain much.”

  “They must’ve said something.”

  “They didn’t think I had the temperament for it. They said I had a problem with authority.”

  Declan smiled broadly. “And who doesn’t that’s worth a goddamn?” he said, and raised his glass in a toast. “And that was all? That was enough to shitcan you?”

  Carr took a long pull on his drink. “They didn’t think I’d be good with agents.”

  Declan squinted—indignant on his behalf—and refilled his glass. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “They didn’t think I’d be good at running them. They thought I had a tendency to see what I wanted to see and hear what I wanted to hear, and that when time came to squeeze them hard, or burn them, I wouldn’t have the stomach for it. Overly invested they called it.”

  “Sounds like feckin’ psychobabble to me.”

  “They were big on that,” Carr said.

  “Well, fuck ’em, I say! Big outfits like that, they don’t appreciate the solitary man. Don’t understand him. A fellow like yerself makes ’em nervous. You don’t fit their molds—so they don’t know what moves you, what levers to pull.”

  Carr filled his own glass, and Declan’s too. “But you’ve got that figured out, have you?”

  Declan drank and nodded. “To lead men, you must know what they love.”

  Carr laughed. “And that would be what?”

  “For you, solitary Carr, I’d say it’s being a ghost. You love drifting through the drab workaday mess—all the tinkers and tailors and doctors and bankers; you love watching their monkeyshines without actually being a part of ’em. You’re in it, but you’re not—not really. You’re like a feckin’ specter.”

  Carr hid his surprise behind another drink, and slid the bottle to his side of the table. “Now who’s into the fucking psychobabble? You’re hammered.”

  “It doesn’t mean I’m wrong. You love flying above it all, looking down like yer on an airplane, or yer floating over a reef, watching the wee fishes. That was the appeal of Integral Risk, wasn’t it—your clients, their lives, the things they got up to—it was like an aquarium, and you on the other side of the glass.”

  Carr looked at him for a while and nodded slowly. “Tell me you don’t like that aspect of it—being apart from things.”

  “How else could I recognize it in you? ’Course I like it—I’m a solitary too, at heart, so I know the appeal. You feel invulnerable, somehow—you’ve no connections, no dependents, no hostages to be taken. Nobody can lay a finger on you, ’Cause yer just not there. It’s better than bulletproof. But some advice from an aged bastard: you want to watch you don’t get overly fond of it. You step out of the flesh and blood world long enough, it’s hard to step back in.”

  Carr held the bottle up, saw the moon turn amber in it. “That assumes you ever lived there in the first place.”

  Declan laughed. “Ah, Carr, save yer tragic tale for the ladies, and pass me that feckin’ bottle.”

  Sweat rolls down Carr’s ribs, and his head is bobbing in the heat. He shakes off sleep and memory, and gets out of his car. Jill and Amy are a block and a half away now, and he follows them down the arcade. They’re window-shopping—clothing, handbags, shoes, more jewelry—pointing, laughing. They pause outside a furniture store, and again at a real estate office.

  Carr trails them to an outdoor café. They take a table near a tiled fountain and order iced teas. The air is thick and the palms and bougainvillea hang in limp surrender, but Jill and Amy don’t seem to mind. Even in the shade, their arms and legs are shining. Jill reaches for the sugar, nearly tips her glass, just catches it, and laughs nervously. Carr shakes his head at the performance.

  It’s the seamlessness that impresses him most, the integration of elements small and large into her fabricated persona. The endearing clumsiness, the slightly funky clothing and accoutrements, the accent and the diction, the attitude, the wear and tear: all Jill, all of a piece. He wonders how she’s done up her apartment, what’s in the glove box of her car, and what’s on her iPod. Not a false note, he’s sure.

  The heat is a weight on his shoulders, and he finds a bench beneath a palm. He thinks back to Costa Alegre, to Valerie’s easy shifts between the three engineers. He recalls the other men and women he’s wat
ched her seduce over the years, and the characters she’s inhabited to do it—doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs … He watches her sip tea, and something about the dappled light on her legs reminds him of Port of Spain, the perpetual overcast of the two months they spent there, laying the groundwork for the Prager job.

  Declan installed them in one of the new glass towers on the waterfront, in seven apartments—Declan, Bobby, Ray-Ray, Dennis, and Mike on the seventh floor, Valerie and Carr on the ninth. After which Declan, Bobby, Ray-Ray, Dennis, and Mike developed a sudden fondness for cricket, and decamped most afternoons to Queen’s Park, leaving Carr and Valerie squinting into their laptops. Fucking Cinderella was Valerie’s grumbled gloss on the circumstances.

  At first they worked separately—digesting Boyce’s dossiers, ferreting out additional information, collecting technical data—and met in the evenings to compare notes and drink beer. Later they worked in Valerie’s apartment, assembling and disassembling the framework of a plan, again and again, until they had something that might float.

  He stared out her living room window a lot, at the highway and the rush of cars, at the shipping containers stacked along the wharves, like the ruins of an ancient city, at the ocean like beaten lead. A pearly light filled her place, along with a perfume—something with lime and orange blossom and vanilla.

  Valerie went to buy lunch one afternoon, leaving him there alone. Carr walked through every room and thought about looking inside her medicine chest and her closets, but didn’t. He stared for a long time at the pile of books by her bedside. They were paperbacks, slim volumes by Borges, Fante, Akhmatova, Didion. He leafed through them, and when he heard her key in the lock he piled the books up again. He was standing at the living room window when the door opened.

  Was it then that things began to simmer, or had it started long before? Either way, she leaned in closer after that, touched him on the hand or the arm often, didn’t look away. Her apartment felt smaller, and Carr felt a surge of anger and disappointment whenever the cricket fans returned.

  The phone shudders in his pocket and it brings him back to his bench. He looks down the arcade and sees Amy Chun, alone at her table. He reaches for his phone, and Valerie is on the other end, whispering angrily.

  “I don’t know what you think you’re doing here,” she says, “but you’ve seen enough for one day. Now clear the fuck out before you queer my play.”

  16

  Monday noon is too early for Lamp. He grimaces at the sky, adjusts his sunglasses on his peeling nose, and fiddles with the visor on his open-top Jeep. Then he hoists up his iced coffee and takes another needy pull. He does it all very slowly, as if he’s half asleep, and the other half is in some pain.

  Carr watches from a wine bar across the street and decides that Lamp looks like his job. Not the pimp job, but the other one, which, according to Dennis, is owner and manager of Lampanelli’s Surf n’ Sport, in Riviera Beach. He’s fortyish and tall, with sandy hair, a tan, and a gut edging toward sloppy. He’s wearing a pink T-shirt and khaki shorts, and has a tattoo of a parrot on his left calf and a look of annoyance on his unshaved face.

  Lamp glances around the parking lot. The Grigoriev brothers’ Brazilian restaurant is closed today, and the lot is empty but for his Jeep. He checks his watch. Carr hopes that Lamp finds some patience, or is tired enough to stay put for a while. Bobby and Latin Mike have called to tell him that Howard Bessemer is en route, but moving slowly due to traffic and what seems to be a lethal hangover.

  “Looks like he’s been living on bad fish and toilet water,” Bobby said, laughing. “We’re about half a block back of him, and twenty-five seems to be his top speed today.”

  “Hungover or reluctant?” Carr asked.

  “Both,” Bobby said.

  Definitely reluctant, Carr thinks, and for several days now also reclusive. Bessemer didn’t leave his house for his usual weekend poker and whore festival, or for anything else. Lunch and dinner were delivered three days running, along with parcels from the local liquor store. And televisions were on around the clock in the kitchen, the living room, and the bedroom, though Bessemer watched none of them, but wandered from room to room drinking gin and smoking joints. When he did pause, it was to collapse wherever he was standing, and to sleep for a few hours. Then up again and back to work. The only other breaks in the action—besides his occasional puking—were when Bessemer tried calling Prager. None of his attempts was successful.

  The waitress brings Carr another soda water. He watches Lamp drain his iced coffee cup. On the street beyond the far side of the parking lot, Carr sees the van where he parked it, long before Lamp pulled in. Dennis is in back, with a couple of laptops and wireless broadband cards. He looks for Bobby and Mike, but doesn’t really expect to spot them. They’re good enough that he won’t see them climb into the van. There’s movement in the foreground and Bessemer’s BMW rolls into the lot.

  Despite the clear skies, Howie’s got the top up, and from Carr’s vantage he’s no more than a ghost at the wheel. He leaves a parking space between his car and the Jeep and kills the engine. And then he sits. And sits. Unmoving, with his white hands on the wheel, as if at any moment he might drive off again. Lamp is as puzzled as Carr, and after a while he holds his wristwatch out toward Howie’s car and taps the face with his finger. Howie gets the point.

  He opens the door slowly and cringes like a vampire in the midday sun. Lamp looks Howie up and down and shakes his head. Howie leans against the Jeep and starts talking, and Carr curses another conversation he isn’t going to hear.

  Whatever Howie’s saying, he’s saying it fast, and Lamp holds up a hand and looks irritated. Howie pauses, rubs a hand over his face, and starts again, more slowly this time. Lamp listens and begins to shake his head, and the look of irritation is replaced by one of vague disgust. Carr’s phone vibrates.

  “Me and Mike are in the van,” Bobby says. “You see this?”

  “I see it,” Carr answers, “but I have no idea what he’s saying.”

  “Whatever it is, Lamp’s not crazy for it. You’d figure a guy like him has heard it all before.”

  Lamp is still shaking his head, and Bessemer is still talking, leaning more heavily now against the Jeep. Finally Lamp holds up a hand and points at Howie’s car. Howie begins to speak again, but Lamp points once more and pulls a cell phone from the pocket of his shorts. He waits until Howie is back in his car, and then he makes his call.

  “Who do you think he’s calling?” Bobby asks.

  “Wish I knew,” Carr says.

  Lamp talks for a while, glancing now and then at Bessemer. Then he nods his head and punches off. He rubs a hand across the back of his neck, rolls his shoulders, and punches in another number.

  This conversation is longer, and Lamp walks around while he has it. He circles his Jeep slowly, inspecting bumpers and kicking tires. Finally Lamp pockets his phone and walks over to Bessemer’s car. He raps on the window and Bessemer runs it down. Lamp leans over, props his forearms on the sill, and starts talking.

  “Put this on speaker,” Carr says into his phone.

  And Bobby does. Lamp’s voice comes on, hollow, choppy, but the New Orleans accent clear.

  “You on for Friday night,” Lamp says, “but don’t let’s make this a regular thing. This kinda product’s not for me—too many problems. Too much fucking risk. Your pal want something like this again, you gotta go elsewhere, you get me, bro?”

  Howie nods.

  “And the folks that bring her, you pay them up front—in cash—or she don’t get out of the car.”

  Howie nods again.

  “And best not to fuck with these folks, Howie, you know? Or even talk to them too much.”

  Lamp doesn’t wait for another nod, but climbs into his Jeep and drives away. A cloud of dust hangs over the asphalt, and Bessemer rests his forehead on his steering wheel. He sits this way for five minutes, and then he too leaves.

  17

  Bobby and Mike follow Be
ssemer from the Brazilian restaurant, and when it’s clear he’s headed home, they call Carr, who drives with Dennis to the workhouse. They open one of Dennis’s laptops and bring up the mics and cameras in Bessemer’s cottage. They watch Bessemer fumble ice into a glass, hold a bottle above the tumbler, and pour for a long time. Then they watch him wander to his office and drop heavily into a chair.

  They both start when Bessemer’s landline rings. Howie doesn’t move, but lets the machine answer. It’s Willis Stearn, nervous but excited.

  “Just calling to see if you’d worked things out—if we’re on for Friday, and if she’s … if everything is per our discussion. Call me back.”

  Howie mutters to himself after Stearn hangs up, and finally he speaks out loud. “Fuck!”

  Then he hauls himself from his chair, digs in a desk drawer, and comes out with a cell phone. He finds a number in its memory, presses a key, and sets the phone on the desk. A woman answers, her voice thin through the phone speaker, and Bessemer asks for Curtis Prager. And gets him.

  It is the first time Carr has heard Prager’s voice, and it’s deeper than he expects, and calmer. It’s an oddly denatured voice too, lacking any regional accent or twang—an anchorman’s voice, but without the practiced affability. His pleasantries are mechanical and distracted, lacking any actual warmth—a sociable shell over an icy core.

  “What can I do you for, Bess? I understand you’ve been burning up the phone lines.”

  Bessemer hems and haws for a while, and Carr hears him swallow hard. Finally, he comes out with it. “It’s my money, Curt—I need my money back.”

  There is a long pause from Prager. “Where are you calling from?” he asks.

  “Don’t worry, I follow the rules—I’m on a prepaid cell, just like you said. It’s been a very long time, Curt—years, for chrissakes—and I really need my money.”