Thick as Thieves

by Peter Spiegelman

  A woman’s voice cuts across it all. “There a problem, mister? You need a hand?” It’s the waitress, calling from the diner door. She’s holding a telephone, scowling at Carr, and staring at his hand on his father’s arm.

  Arthur Carr waves with his other hand and smiles. “We’re fine, thanks. My son’s just driving me home.”

  On the way, Carr’s head is wrapped in cotton wool, and he can’t tear it loose. He pulls over just before Lee, when he realizes he’s not seeing the road. His father is unsurprised, and looks out the window at a crow picking at a flattened squirrel. The light is lengthening, tinted at the edges with orange, and a hum of insects rises from the woods. Carr draws a deep breath and his father turns toward him.

  “Hector Farias,” Carr says softly.

  His father nods. “He was one of her sources, one of the agents she ran. He was her prize.”

  “She … she knew he was Cuban intelligence?”

  “Of course—that’s what made him so valuable. He was one of their senior guys; he was connected everywhere in the region. He was a star, and she had turned him and was playing him back to Havana. In theory, at least.”

  “And in reality?”

  “He was playing her.”

  “The whole time?”

  “The whole time.”

  “It was years that she knew him … all those places we lived. She never suspected?”

  Arthur Carr sighs and turns to the window again. The crow draws a strand of gut from the dusty carcass. His beak is glossy, and so black it’s nearly blue. It’s an eternity before Arthur Carr speaks, and when he does, his voice is like dry leaves. “That’s what the record says.”

  Carr turns in his seat. “What does that mean?”

  Carr’s father runs a forefinger down his long nose, to his mouth, and to his chin, which has begun to quiver. “She wasn’t stupid. Your mother had her flaws, but that wasn’t one of them.”

  The rushing grows louder in Carr’s ears. “You’re saying she knew she was being played? The whole time?”

  “She sussed it out early on.”

  “She knew? She told you that?”

  Arthur Carr studies the crow, hopping around the squirrel. After a while, he nods.

  Carr can’t seem to fill his lungs, and he throws open the door of the rental car and stumbles out into the road. The driver of a passing truck leans on his horn and yells, and leaves a cloud of dust in his wake. The crow flies off. Carr walks slowly to the edge of the woods, and slowly back, the whole way watching the ground. When he returns, his father has the passenger door open and is sideways in his seat.

  Carr looks at him. “She knew, but she let it happen—she participated in it. She … she was a traitor.” The word sounds strange in his ears—something foreign or archaic.

  Arthur Carr makes a tiny, rueful smile. “Well, yes,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think?” his father says. “She loved that son of a bitch, and she thought that he loved her. Who knows, maybe he did.”

  Carr gazes at the treetops, the orange clouds, the coming twilight. “But that’s not in the record, you said. That’s not the official story.”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Why didn’t the Agency come after her? Why didn’t they prosecute? Put her in jail? Jesus Christ—why did they ever let me in the door?”

  “The counterespionage people wanted to come after her. They were embarrassed and angry, and they wanted a full investigation and someone they could burn at the stake.”

  “What stopped them?”

  Arthur Carr stretches his legs in front of him. He massages his right knee. “I did,” he says softly. “I vouched for her. I pulled what strings I had left at State. Finally I threatened to go public if they didn’t let her be. It wound up costing me every chit I’d ever collected over twenty-plus years, and my pension too, but eventually they decided to call it incompetence rather than treason. So that’s how the record reads.” He flexes his knee and looks up at his son. “The only thing the Agency hates worse than being embarrassed by the opposition is being embarrassed by them in public. You’d think they’d be used to it by now.”

  Carr watches him rub his bony thighs and flex his aching fingers. He looks thin and brittle—like a leaf the wind might carry off. Another truck passes, another dust cloud settles. The crow returns and curses at them.

  It is six a.m., and Carr is in Terminal A at Logan, waiting for his Miami flight, still waiting for the spinning to stop. He’s at the gate, watching but not following the highlights of a baseball game on the wall-mounted TV, when someone steps into his view. She’s wearing a black dress and dark glasses, and her bare arms are paper white. Her lips barely move when she speaks, and her voice is flat.

  “He wants to talk to you,” Tina says. “He wants to know if there’s some reason you don’t answer your phone.” She takes off her glasses and makes a tiny flick of her eyes. Carr looks over her shoulder, down the long row of gates. Even at a distance, Mr. Boyce looms like a cliff.

  39

  They’ve gone over it once. They’ve gone over it twice. Now, as darkness settles on the workhouse and wind sweeps through the palms in the front yard and bumps the boats against the metal dock out back, they go over it a sixth time. Carr makes Bobby walk it through: the sequence, the timing, the signals, the routes in and out, the alternate routes, the rendezvous, the alternate rendezvous, and the contingency plans—meager though they are.

  “And the minimum window is?” Carr asks when Bobby pauses.

  “Five minutes. Five fucking minutes. How many times do I have to repeat it?”

  “No less than five between the opening and the finale. Longer if you’ve got a receptive audience, but no less than five.”

  Latin Mike snorts from the sofa. “You don’t know how many guys they’re gonna have in the house, for chrissakes. You don’t know if this is gonna distract them.”

  Carr answers without looking at him. “Loud noises get attention.” Mike snorts again, and Carr ignores him. He turns to Dennis. “What’s the weather forecast?” he asks.

  Dennis is pale and skittish behind his laptop. He glances at the screen. “Mostly sunny and breezy tomorrow, with heavy surf from the storm. Weather service says it should hold off until after ten tomorrow night, and even then we should only get the edge of it.”

  “They downgraded it?” Carr asks.

  Dennis nods. “Tropical storm Cara now.”

  “Is it gonna fuck things up at the airport?” Bobby asks.

  “We get out before ten we should be okay,” Dennis says.

  “So let’s get out before ten,” Mike says, lighting a cigarette.

  “That’s the plan,” Carr says. Mike snorts again. Carr looks at Bobby. “The surf’s going to be rough. You okay with that?”

  “We’re good.”

  “Good,” Carr says. “Let’s go over it again.”

  It’s eleven when they stop. Dennis buries his head in a computer. Mike grabs a whiskey bottle, plugs a cigarette into his mouth, and goes outside.

  Bobby stretches and yawns. “Howie still sober?” he asks Carr.

  “He was when I left him this afternoon. You were good with him.”

  Bobby shrugs. “Babysitting gave me something to do. He was jumpy without you.”

  Carr rubs his grit-filled eyes. “Nice to feel wanted.”

  Bobby looks at him, laughs ruefully, and shakes his head. “Fuckin’ Carr,” he mutters.

  Mike is sitting on the front steps, drinking from the bottle, blowing smoke, looking at the sky. Carr walks around him.

  “Guess you’ve given up tryin’ to be like Deke,” Mike says. “No pregame party tonight, right? So I got to make my own.”

  “Make it a small one. It’s an early day tomorrow.”

  “I’ll try to fit you in—unless something else comes up. Maybe I got to get my teeth cleaned or something.”

  “Give it a rest, Mike. I was gone for, what, a few hours?”


  “It was more than a day.”

  “And now I’m back, so spare me.”

  Mike is fast—up and at Carr almost before the whiskey bottle hits the dirt. One hand goes to Carr’s neck, his thumb in the hollow of Carr’s throat. The other hand holds a knife. “If I didn’t need you whole, pendejo, you wouldn’t be,” he says. “¿Está claro?”

  “Very clear,” Carr says quietly. “You feel better now that you got that off your chest?”

  Bobby calls from the steps. “It’s nice you boys are so glad to see each other.”

  “Piss off, cabrón,” Mike says, but there’s not much to it. He doesn’t resist when Bobby hooks his arm and hauls him away.

  “You know the world is fucked when I’m the voice of reason,” Bobby says, turning Mike toward the house, “but maybe we should all just keep our minds on the job and save the rest of the bullshit for later.”

  It was, Carr thinks, driving back to his hotel, the same advice Mr. Boyce had given him in Boston.

  Tina had stayed at the gate while Carr followed Boyce into the first-class lounge. It was empty, the attendants conveniently on a break. Carr was too tired to speculate on the coincidence. Even off the golf course Boyce was dressed in black, and he seemed much larger.

  “Family,” Boyce said, as he settled into an armchair. “What are you going to do with them?” Carr had no answer, and Mr. Boyce shook his head. “But that’s no excuse. Pros don’t make excuses. You have problems, I have problems—everyone has problems. But so what? You do your job, and then you deal with your problems. Get it the other way around, and you’re no good to anyone. You want to look after your father, you’ll keep your goddamn head in the game.”

  Boyce’s words and rumbling voice had filled the room, and Carr had nodded in the right places. He kept nodding later, back at the gate, where Tina had reported in a low voice that Kathy Rink had called her man in Singapore.

  “She was on the line for nearly an hour, listening to him talk about Greg Frye. Our guy thinks she went away satisfied.”

  Carr nodded. Tina had looked at him and hadn’t liked what she’d seen. Before she left, she’d gripped him hard by the arm. “You better get a coffee or a searchlight or something, and get your head out of whatever fog bank it’s in. You go sleepwalking into Prager’s place, you won’t walk out again.”

  Even now he can feel her fingers on his wrist.

  Carr pulls through the gates of his hotel, and into a parking space. He shuts off the engine and sits in the dark and silence.

  You want to look after your father? Look after him—it turned out he didn’t even know him, didn’t know either of them, and never had. All that watching and you never saw anything. What was it he had seen for all those years? What he’d wanted to see? What he’d needed to see?

  Carr had driven back to Stockbridge on autopilot, and Arthur Carr had dozed the whole way. Carr helped him up the porch steps; he weighed no more than a handful of straw. His father stretched his legs on the sofa as soon as they got inside and closed his eyes, and Carr had walked around the room. Though maybe walked wasn’t quite right. Wandered might be closer; staggered closer still.

  The vertigo that had come on in the diner, along with the news about his mother, was back again, and as he moved about the living room he had to reach for things—a doorknob, a windowsill, the dusty furniture—to keep from falling or floating away. Eventually he fetched up beside the piano.

  The photographs were still there, in their tarnished frames, and Carr stared at them while his head swam and his father snored gently. His father at the lake; his father in cap and gown; his mother in a garden, or at a party, or at a dance. He’d spent his life looking at these pictures, and now it was as if he’d never seen them before. The people behind the dirty glass were strangers to him, and what he thought he’d known about them was less than smoke.

  Carr switched on a lamp and gazed at the photo of his father at the lake, and suddenly the small, pale face seemed to wear not a smirk, but a shy grin. And in the commencement picture, Arthur Carr’s smile didn’t look bitter—it looked nervous, but excited and even hopeful. Carr shook his head and picked up the photo of his mother.

  The dark hair, blurred by movement, the luminous skin, the graceful neck and white teeth, the finger of smoke between lips that were just beginning to smile, or to speak to someone out of frame—he knew the pieces, but he couldn’t make them whole. Carr closed his eyes and tried in vain to retrieve another image of her, to hear the sound of her voice again, and the words she’d whispered as they peered from the windows, to feel her hand around his again. He breathed in deeply, straining to catch a trace of gardenias and tobacco, but found only the musty smells of his father’s house and of the humid night. An ache burrowed deep in his chest—deeper than bone—a wound where something had been excised badly, and with a dull blade. It was like losing her again. It was worse. His throat closed up and his eyes burned.

  He looked up to see his father, watching him from the sofa.

  “What are you doing?” Arthur Carr asked.

  “Looking at pictures,” Carr whispered.

  “What pictures?” Carr held up the photo in its frame. His father squinted at it. “I didn’t know that was up there.”

  Carr rubbed his eyes. “Where’s it from?”

  His father shrugged. “That picture? Someone’s wedding, I think. I don’t remember whose. It was before you were born.”

  Carr cleared his throat. “You saved her. You said that you saved her from … from a full-blown investigation.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “But you didn’t say why—why you did it. After everything she did—all those years—why did you protect her?”

  Arthur Carr shook his head. “Why did I … She was my wife, for chrissakes—your mother. What was I supposed to do? I wasn’t going to let them …” He shook his head some more, and then he sighed and closed his eyes. “I told you—don’t be thick.”

  Sitting in the hotel parking lot, Carr reaches for his wallet. The photographs are inside, creased and antique-looking alongside Gregory Frye’s fabricated identifications. His father by the lake and at commencement, his mother at some forgotten wedding. They are part of a narrative—the story of his parents, his father the embittered bully, his mother the brave, long-suffering victim—that is undone now: unraveled and debunked, like Santa or the Tooth Fairy, but even more ridiculous. Carr lays the pictures on the dashboard, smooths them out, and looks at them for a while. Then he folds them up again and tucks them away with the rest of his false papers.

  40

  Despite the sun and the honeyed breeze, Carr’s fingers are cold and white. His elbows are stiff and his legs heavy, and when he moves them they feel clumsy. His chest is too small for his lungs, and too brittle for his hammering heart. It’s fear, he knows, and adrenaline. He takes a slow breath in and lets it slowly out again, then shifts the champagne flute to his other hand. He flexes his fingers until the blood comes back, and he watches Curtis Prager grab a waiter by the arm.

  Prager points at the carpaccio on the silver platter. “That’s wagyu beef,” Prager tells a banker from Panama City, “and what those bastards in Miami charge for it makes me think we’re in the wrong business. Clearly, the real margins are in cows.” The Panama City banker laughs as if it’s funny, and so does everyone else within earshot, and Prager moves on through his guests. Carr hangs back, pretends to sip his champagne, and looks at the crowd.

  It’s an off-season party—not as large, Carr knows, as some of Isla Privada’s charity events, but still a good-size turnout of local dignitaries, favor-seekers, would-be business associates, and other sycophants. It’s a handsome crowd too, expensively dressed in regatta casual: the men in variations of Prager’s outfit—white ducks, linen blazer, and deck shoes—the women in gossamer, bare arms, and sandals with intricate straps. Like birds, Carr thinks, all plumage and bright chirping. All appetite too. They flock around the white-jacketed waiters as
they emerge from the caterer’s base camp in the guesthouse, swooping on trays of sushi, sashimi, oysters, and high-margin carpaccio.

  Except for its lawns and patios and first-floor bathrooms, the main house isn’t open to unescorted guests, so the crowd has flowed mostly to the beach. Carr is at the east end of the beach, near the boathouse pier, leaning against the red Zodiac that has been pulled up on the sand. He watches as his host makes his way slowly, convivially, westward. Handshake, peck, nod, chuckle. Shoulder squeeze, smile, nod, move on. There’s a quartet set up on the guesthouse patio. They’re laboring over a samba, and it seems to Carr that Prager has matched his movements to their rhythms. Peck, nod, chuckle.

  Kathy Rink prowls in Prager’s wake, like a pilot fish in an orange muumuu. Her eyes scan restlessly over guests and staff, her head pivots left and right, and her cell phone is constantly at her ear. Carr can understand Kathy Rink’s nerves: this is the first of Prager’s periodic soirees to take place on her watch. She wants it to be a smooth afternoon, as seamless and unblemished as the breezy blue sky. Carr allows himself a tiny smile and hopes it will be the worst day of her life.

  He takes another pretend sip and scans the crowd for Howard Bessemer. He spots him at a bar set up in the shade of a palm. His jacket is hung over his arm, and he’s laughing at something a heavyset redhead has said. Given the sweating and fretting of the morning, Carr thinks he looks improbably relaxed.

  “I don’t feel like going to a party,” Bessemer had whined from beneath his blankets. “I feel clammy. I think I’m coming down with something.”

  “That’s a hangover, Howie,” Carr called to him. “Have some coffee, and it’ll go away.”