Thick as Thieves

by Peter Spiegelman

  “Never.”

  “It doesn’t always have to be like that, you know—like my parents, and yours.”

  There’s more shifting, and a giggle. “No?” Amy Chun asks.

  “Maybe that’s what we should do, you and me,” she whispers. “Go away together and conduct a little research, to find some happy couples. We’ll be like archaeologists.”

  There’s more sighing and rustling, and the clip ends. Dennis lets out a long breath and pushes back from the table. “She is good,” he says. “Sincere. Believable. Like scary good.”

  Carr looks at the image frozen on the screen—two women, bare, clinging to each other in the wreckage of the bed. He nods but doesn’t speak.

  25

  All subtropical financial districts look alike, Carr thinks. The broad, divided boulevards; the lush foliage at street level; the towers soaring above; the German cars at curbside, each with tinted glass and a large, watchful driver; the overcaffeinated, expensively suited young men who stride along, mesmerized by their BlackBerrys and chattering maniacally into the ether; the young women—stylish, tanned, with impossible heels, impossible legs, impossible self-possession. It could be Avenida Paulista, Avenida Balboa, or a stretch of Reforma, but it’s not. It’s Brickell Avenue in Miami, and Carr is walking north, following Valerie.

  He’s kept his distance all the way down 95, but now she’s out of her car and he’s out of his, and he needs to be careful. The lunchtime rush helps and hurts: Carr hides in the crowd, but so does Valerie, and he’s nearly lost her twice since she gave her car to the valet at the Four Seasons and set out on foot. It’s clear today, and cooler than it has been, but that just means it feels like ninety-something. Carr’s shirt is stuck to his back, but Valerie, when he catches a glimpse, looks cool and crisp in a pale gray skirt and sleeveless white blouse. She crosses Brickell and heads west on Tenth Street.

  Bessemer’s call to Curtis Prager that morning was anticlimactic. Sitting in his dim office, Carr at his side, Bessemer had phoned Prager’s private number, only to learn that Prager is away until tomorrow, and please try again. And so an unexpected day off for Carr. He’d consigned Bessemer to Bobby’s care, driven down to Boca Raton, and phoned Valerie from a spot fifty yards from her apartment building. Where she’d lied to him.

  “I could drive down,” he’d said, “and take a room. We could have lunch at the beach.”

  Valerie had yawned loudly. “That sounds nice, baby—really nice—but I’ve got to get some rest. I’ve been up late every night this week, and I’m supposed to meet Amy again tonight. I’ve got the drapes closed, and I’m going back to sleep.”

  Carr wasn’t sure why he hadn’t believed her, why he’d waited in his parked car after she’d hung up, why he’d followed her little Audi, half an hour later, when it pulled out of the building lot and made its way to 95. Maybe it was because her yawn had been too elaborate, or because he could see from his parking space that her drapes were wide open. Maybe it was the memory of her conversation with Amy Chun, the night before, and what she’d said to him back in Portland. Maybe that’s what we should do, you and me—go away together and conduct a little research, to find some happy couples. We’ll be like archaeologists.

  She turns north again at First Avenue and passes beneath the elevated tracks of the light-rail. She crosses the street, to a compact shopping plaza in the shadow of the Metromover, and goes into a coffee bar. Carr keeps walking on Tenth Street, enters the plaza from Miami Avenue, and stands in the shade of a stunted, bushy palm tree. The coffee bar is busy, but through the wide front window Carr can see Valerie slipping through the crowd toward the back of the room. He edges closer and sees her settle on a bar stool at a narrow counter along the side wall, in front of a keyboard, a mouse, and a monitor.

  Carr can’t make out the screen from where he is, but Valerie reads for a while and then types. She’s at the computer for about three minutes, and then she pushes away from the counter and leaves through the back door.

  Carr jogs into the coffee bar, shouldering past customers and ignoring the angry looks. A twenty-something man in linen pants, a Daddy Yankee T-shirt, and lots of body ink has a hand on Valerie’s bar-stool when Carr steps in front of him.

  “Hey, I’m sitting here, man,” he says, and he puts his coffee cup on the counter.

  “You definitely are,” Carr says softly, “in about thirty seconds.” Carr finds the browser icon on the desktop and clicks on it.

  “I’m sitting here now, man,” the twenty-something says, “so get the hell out of my way.”

  “Yep, absolutely,” Carr says, watching the browser open, “I’m out of here.”

  “You talk, but you don’t move your ass.” The twenty-something puts a hand on Carr’s arm and pulls, and his face seizes up in a grimace. Carr has his hand around the man’s wrist and fingers and has bent them back at impossible angles. The twenty-something’s face is pale and his knees begin to buckle, and Carr eases up on the finger lock.

  “Another second,” Carr whispers, and he opens the browser history. The screen is empty and Carr stares at it a moment and says: “Fuck.” Then he hits the back door at a run, leaving the twenty-something rubbing his wrist and gasping and the few patrons who’ve noticed anything shaking their heads.

  She’s a block and a half down First Avenue, walking in the shade of the Metromover tracks, and Carr is just in time to see her turn east on Eighth Street, back toward Brickell Avenue. He sprints to close the gap.

  She walks briskly down Eighth Street and crosses Brickell as the light changes. Carr waits on the other side of the street and watches Valerie disappear into a tower of white stone and green glass.

  When Carr steps into the building, Valerie is nowhere in sight, and security is already eyeing him. And why not—no one else in the lobby is as rumpled as he is, or as damp with sweat. He walks over to the building directory and scans the list of tenants. Software companies, law firms, management consultants, but more than anything else banks and brokerages. And, Carr notices, mostly foreign firms.

  “Can I help you, sir?” the guard asks. He’s big and uniformed, and so is his hovering partner.

  “Think I got the wrong address,” Carr says, and he exits into the midday heat.

  There’s a Starbucks next door to the building, and a wine bar on the opposite corner. Carr likes the sight lines from the wine bar better, though neither are perfect: there are too many ways out of the green tower. Still, he takes a window seat and orders a bottle of soda water and a ham sandwich on a baguette.

  The traffic churns past on Brickell while Carr eats and watches and wonders. What was Valerie doing in the coffee bar, where she had no time to drink coffee, but time enough to delete her browsing history? Surfing? Sending? And if sending, then sending to whom? And why do it there, when she has Internet access back in Boca Raton?

  Privacy and anonymity are the obvious answers, and both worry Carr. He and his crew are the only people in a position to eavesdrop on Valerie’s laptop. What might she be doing online that she’d want to hide from them? And who might she be doing it with?

  After an hour, the lunch crowd has thinned on the street and in the wine bar, and the air-conditioning has dried him off, but Carr has seen no sign of Valerie. He worries that he’s missed her in the wash of people, or that she’s left another way, and he pays the check and steps outside. The humidity is like a wet hammer, and Carr is sweating before the light changes. There’s a shaded plaza beside the green tower, with white pergolas, razor-straight rows of palm trees, tables with umbrellas, and a view through the lobby glass of the elevator banks. Carr heads for one of the tables, and when he stops in his tracks he’s not sure at first what it is that’s stopped him.

  Something in the corner of his eye. Something he knows. Broad shoulders held just so, a thrusting gut, an aggressive, pumping gait—a familiar bulk. In the lobby, in the shuffling clutch of people at the elevator doors. When Carr picks him out, there’s a rush of noise in his he
ad—gears grinding on one another—and he’s frozen, flat-footed, in the plaza. He might as well be waving a flag. It’s sheer luck that Nando doesn’t look over.

  “What the fuck?” Carr says to no one, and he steps behind one of the manicured palms.

  Nando crosses the lobby and pushes through the doors. He’s wearing a tan suit and an open-collared French blue shirt, and he’s carrying a tan briefcase. He’s thicker and darker than when Carr last saw him, years ago in Costa Alegre, and more prosperous-looking than ever. He’s on his cell as he crosses Brickell and heads south. He’s still talking when he enters another office tower, this one clad in brushed metal and gray glass. He’s alone in the elevator when the doors slide shut, and Carr watches the numbers climb to eight.

  Security in the gray building is lazy, and no guards brace Carr as he scans the lobby directory. The assortment of firms is only slightly different here—more lawyers, fewer consultants—but there are still plenty of foreign banks. The eighth floor, in fact, is nothing but banks.

  Nando is inside for about an hour, after which Carr follows him down Brickell to another building—gold glass this time. Carr can’t tell which floor he’s headed to—there are too many people on the elevator with him—but there is no shortage of banks here either. Nando reappears fifty minutes later. Carr is buying gum at a lobby kiosk and readying himself for another walk in the heat when Nando turns not to the Brickell Avenue doors, but toward the back of the lobby and the enclosed passage that leads to the building’s parking structure.

  Carr comes down the passage in time to see Nando board an elevator. It stops on the third parking level and Carr jogs up the stairs. He comes out of the stairwell and hears footsteps echoing, a car door closing, and an engine turning over.

  “Shit,” he whispers, and he waits at the stairs as Nando drives by in a white rental.

  Back on the sidewalk, Carr looks up and down Brickell Avenue, but sees no sign of Nando’s car, or of Valerie. He walks up the street to the gray tower with the lax security. Around the corner he finds the tower’s four-level parking structure and, on its lowest level, the loading dock. There’s security there—two guys in rumpled uniform shirts and sneakers—but they seem only semiconscious. Carr checks the block and climbs a low wall into the parking structure. He bounces hard on the fenders of three parked cars—Lexus, BMW, Rover—and their lights flash and their horns blare. He steps behind a wide pillar, and when the security slackers wander over to investigate the alarms, Carr slips into the loading dock and into the service elevator and rides to eight.

  Three banks—all foreign—have offices on the eighth floor, but only one has a reception desk. The blonde behind it looks barely out of middle school, and she has a fizzy voice and a manic smile.

  “How can I help you today?” she says.

  Carr puts on a beaten look. “I’m hoping you can help me out with my boss,” he says. “He’s was in here a while ago, and he thinks he left his BlackBerry. Now he is rip-roarin’ pissed—like it’s my fault he can’t keep track of his stuff.”

  The girl nods in solidarity and sympathetic understanding of irrational bosses. “I haven’t seen anything lying around.”

  “He was in about two hours ago. Black-haired guy, big, dark, in a tan suit and a blue shirt.”

  The blonde nods. “New accounts,” she says, and she picks up the phone. “Britty, you find a BlackBerry over there? That new client, Mr. Reyes—he thinks he might’ve left his here.” She listens and nods and smiles at Carr. “She’s checking,” she tells him. Then she listens again and frowns. “Thanks anyway, babe,” she says into the phone, and she shakes her head.

  He is barely aware of the walk back to the Four Seasons, and surprised to find himself there. More surprised to find that Valerie’s car is still in the lot. He gets into his own car and finds a spot with a view of the hotel entrance and waits.

  The afternoon rush washes about him, and so do the questions. Mr. Reyes? New accounts? What is Nando doing in Miami? And what the fuck is he doing with Valerie? The questions spin around like water in a drain, and there’s orange in the sky when he realizes he hasn’t been watching the hotel, or anyway that he hasn’t been seeing it.

  A dinner crowd is arriving, and the valets cast long shadows as they dart among the idling cars. Carr watches them run, and watches the pretty crowd disappear inside, through the revolving doors. And then he sees a couple step out. The woman is first, and Carr recognizes Valerie right away, though her blouse is untucked now, and her hair is damp, as if from a bath. It takes him a moment longer to recognize the man, who pauses in the doorway and then walks forward, slips a thick arm around Valerie’s waist, and rests a large hand on her hip. Mike.

  26

  “You’re not yourself this morning, Greg,” Bessemer says to Carr. “Need some more coffee?” He reaches across the kitchen counter and fills his mug.

  Latin Mike looks at Carr with no expression, and Carr looks back. “I’m going now,” Mike says, and Carr nods.

  Bessemer squints at him, curiosity plain on his round face. “Rough night?”

  And it hasn’t ended yet, Carr thinks. The rum brought him no sleep, and even now there’s a blur around the borders of things, and a hollow echo to every sound. His thoughts want to wander, to drift sideways, to skid. They steer the wrong way and then hit the gas until the skid becomes a dizzying spin.

  They left the hotel separately—Mike first, then Valerie. Carr followed Valerie back to Boca, back to her apartment, then out again to Amy Chun’s place. After an hour of watching dark windows, he left her there. Then he drove back to North Palm Beach and started to pace. Sometime past midnight the drinking began.

  Drinking, pacing, replaying how many moments, again and again, in his head. Poolside at Chamela. Her apartment in Port of Spain. More workhouses and hotel rooms than he could count. And more questions. When did his suspicions begin? What set them off? When did she meet Nando, and how? Why, along with the sensation of having missed a stair, does he feel something equally jarring—something a lot like relief?

  Round and round he went, unable or unwilling to get to the middle of it, to get a purchase on the central problem: the dimensions of her betrayal. What has she done? What is she in the midst of doing? Who is she doing it with? Who can he trust, and what the hell should he do?

  Howard Bessemer is still holding the coffeepot, still squinting at him. “Are we going to make that call today, Greg?”

  Carr looks at him but says nothing.

  Drinking, pacing, staring at the ocean. What the hell should he do? His options are limited to exactly two: finish the Prager job, or cut and run—and the second choice is more or less a nonstarter. Mr. Boyce has fronted a lot of cash on this job, and if Carr decides to fold, he’s going to want it back—and with a nice return. Yes, Boyce is currently holding the diamonds the crew picked up in Houston, and they’ll go some way to paying off the debt, but Carr has no intention of being stuck with the balance. Neither does he want to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, waiting for Tina to appear.

  Sometime before dawn, he decided he couldn’t stand his apartment any longer, and he walked across the road to the beach, leaving his shoes at the edge of the sand but bringing the rum. The sand was cold, and in the moonlight the breakers looked like white smoke rolling toward him.

  He thought of Tina and looked over his shoulder and laughed out loud at the notion of telling Boyce what was going on. Or rather telling him that something was going on, but that Carr didn’t know exactly what it was. Not much of a thought, really—not much of an option. At best, Boyce would pull the plug on the job himself, and still want his money back. More likely, he’d decide the whole shit storm was an unacceptable breach of operational security—a terminal breach. And there, over Carr’s shoulder, would be Tina again.

  Walking down the beach, he stepped on something slippery and colder than the sand. A jellyfish. He braced for the sting, but felt nothing and kept walking.

 
The bottom line is, he needs Prager’s money, needs what it can buy. A few months back he’d calculated that he had enough put away to do what he wanted for as long as he wanted, but that calculation is out of date. His father’s situation and Mrs. Calvin’s impending departure have thrown his cash flow assumptions to the wind. He needs the money.

  Bessemer clears his throat once … twice. “I’m thinking that maybe you’re not into this today, Greg—that your mind is elsewhere. Greg?”

  So, finish the job. Easy enough to say, but it begs the question of who he can trust while he’s doing it. He’s been asking himself that since Declan’s death, or maybe even before, but now it’s acquired a particular urgency.

  Working the paranoid calculus—that’s what his instructor at the Farm had called it, an atypically neat turn of phrase from an otherwise lumpish fellow. Tracing the lattice of connections, mapping the shifting landscape of who-owes-who and who-owns-who, of loyalty, grudge, and pressure. Who’s in bed with whom? Who’s working what angle? Who benefits? Nando and Valerie. Valerie and Mike. If Mike, then Bobby as well? They were both in Mendoza, after all. And what about Dennis?

  The answer—the short answer—is to trust none of them, not for a second, not as far as he can throw them, not even half that far. But nothing is ever so straightforward. The practical truth is, if he’s going to finish the Prager job, then he needs them—all of them. And they need him. They have to trust one another to carry out their assigned work—to watch one another’s backs. Like birds of a feather and bugs in a rug, arms linked in a chorus of “Kumbaya.” Thick as fucking thieves—right up until the moment they transfer the money out of Isla Privada’s accounts. Then the question becomes how to survive their success.

  Dawn found him standing frozen at the shoreline, surrounded—as if in a minefield—by acres of clumped seaweed and the glistening bodies of jellyfish. His ankles ached with cold, and his head was filled with shuffling images of burned and broken metal, Declan’s skewed grin and blackened limbs, and Valerie in the dark. He could almost summon her smell and the feel of her skin, but the rising light and the ocean breeze swept his conjuring away. Surprise? Sadness? Anger? Relief? Like the seaweed, they’re tangled too thoroughly for Carr to pick apart.