She plunks back onto the bed, staring down at the triangle of space between her legs, as if it’s the only real estate she owns.
“I know I need to let it go,” she says. “Let Elise go. Accept her as gone. I spoke with Mikael’s parents in Oslo. It was so spooky, the flatness of their voices, like they just accepted it, almost like they had been waiting for that kind of news and now they could live the rest of their lives no longer worrying about receiving that call. It’s like Vic said, the worst news sets you free.” She rubs her eye with her wrist. “I’m taking the ferry to Athens tomorrow. Ironically, it’s the same ferry that Vic is using to send a huge shipment to the other side of Greece. At least I’ll get to see some of my friends one last time.”
A few minutes ago, Carrie tried to bash my head in with a coffeepot. Now I sit down next to her and put my arms around her to comfort her. Even if she did steal money from me, the world has stolen far more from her. Slowly she does the same to me. I know I won’t remember this feeling later, time will warp and distort it or dump a landfill of other memories on top of it, but in the moment, hugging a near stranger, I’m swept up in its delicate warmth.
“I’m sorry about your sister.”
“They say she wouldn’t have felt it. I hope so. If those are her last words, at least she was happy. At least she died looking out at the sea.”
When I walk to the door, I notice a plastic Ziploc bag on the table next to the box of biscuits. Although it doesn’t hold any cash, I know it’s my bag because the yellow bank bands are stuffed inside like snapped hospital bracelets. I’m going to let Carrie keep the nine thousand. But I can’t resist pulling out my wallet.
“Do you want me to pay for the coffeepot?”
“No,” she says, wiping her nose. “I will. It’s my fault. I have enough to get home.” She’s like an awkward teenager trying to coax an expression that matches the weather in her head. It takes a minute, but finally her lips release the short, crooked line. “Thanks for listening. I hope you find your friend.”
I PARK MY bike on the side of the road as the late afternoon sun tilts the island’s shadows toward the east. I’m a few feet from a cliff’s edge. Musk thistle and flowering weeds are harassed by black mosquitoes. Far below, bodies are stretched out on towels, the day’s last sun worshippers with their tans blurring into the pebbles. Two yachts drift in the cove of blue. On the back of the larger one with a green flag, a Saudi family dances. The teenage daughters are testing their seduction moves, rubbing their long hair in their own faces to arouse each other or some imaginary future admirer, while their chubby mother snaps her fingers in an energy-efficient version of a polka. At home, they can’t dance like this out in the open, but here on the water they are free. On the other side of the road, stone walls crisscross through fawn-brown fields, and sheep huddle in the shadow of a tree. A man turns his head, sitting among his sheep. I unlock the seat compartment and remove the black-leather log. I turn to the first page and tap the number into my phone.
Four rings. Then five. But before the sixth, the texture of the static changes, and I hear a voice on the line.
“Ela? Hello?”
“Hi, Gideon. It’s Ian.”
There’s a short, reluctant pause followed by an irritated sigh.
“What do you want?”
“Where are you?”
“Not where you are, mate.” I get the sense he’s purposely modifying his accent, sampling a range of possible new identities. He sounds less weasely as an Australian. “Halfway to Crete, if you need to know. How about not looking for me?”
“You heard about Stefan, then?”
Another pause. I imagine his stub finger prone over the disconnect button.
“Don’t even try to pin that on me. I had nothing to do with it. But I know when my run is over. I hitched a ride on the boat of a new friend, an older Scottish lady. She’s the widow of a Greek shipping magnate. Full staff and everything. Warhol did her portrait. I’m looking at the painting right now. The Warhol’s on the boat!”
“Congratulations.” Some people should come with a warning label.
“That Stefan situation is seriously messed up. He committed suicide, right?” A jolt of fear quickens his words. “So even if they look through his e-mails and find something I wrote him, it doesn’t matter, right? He took his own life. I’m not responsible! Look, tell Charlie or his family or whoever that I don’t want anything to do with them. All is forgiven. Ma’a salama. Send them my sympathies. Actually, you’d better not. Don’t say you talked to me. How the hell did you get my number?”
“I found it.”
“Un-find it. If you call me again I’m going to chuck this phone in the Med.” I had hoped Gideon would be more hospitable due to the fact that I’m partially responsible for the continued multitasking of his penis.
“Just one question and then I won’t bother you anymore.”
“All right. Be quick.”
“You were at Nikos the morning the bomb went off.”
“Is that a question?” he snaps. “Yeah. I was fucking there. You know what saved me? Smoking. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s a killer. If I hadn’t run out of cigarettes and walked over to the tobacco stand, I would have been one of the casualties. Disgusting how they targeted the nicest taverna on the richest island. Of course they did. And what did it matter in the end? Did you read the papers? Greece made a deal. They’re staying in the Eurozone. All those dead tourists for nothing. As usual, politicians make a joke of our lives.”
“Why were you there?” I ask. “To meet Charlie? That was his spot.”
“Well, he had just fired me. As you know, I wanted my job back, and he wouldn’t talk to me. I’d made a bunch of dumb threats I didn’t mean. I told you the corner I was in. So I had someone arrange a meeting. I didn’t speak with Charlie myself. Anyway, what difference does it make now?”
“Gideon, who arranged the meeting?”
He goes silent, and I hear a lilting Scottish voice in the background demanding a game of backgammon. The voice fades—play me, play me. Gideon must be moving to a more private area on deck.
“Was it Vic?” I ask. “You can stop the charade. I know she and Charlie have been working together.”
He laughs. “God damn, how did you figure that one out? Impressive. I underestimated you, Ian. Even Ugur didn’t know. Best to keep the network as buried as possible. That way one hand can’t slap the other. Two enemies, no connections. It was civil in its hostility. Yeah, I asked Vic to talk to Charlie for me. She and I always had an understanding. She told me to meet him at Nikos that morning. Of course, I was suspicious about the timing of the bomb, but when I confronted Vic afterward, she admitted that the meeting wasn’t nearly as arranged as she let on. Charlie refused to see me—that’s why he wasn’t there that morning. He said I had to go home. Vic offered to let me stay at her camp, but that whole hippie death-wish thing isn’t my scene, even if they do have a steady supply. It’s a good thing Charlie didn’t show up. I swear, he’s a wizard at dodging bullets. It’s all win win for him, isn’t it? Look at him now.”
“How do you mean?”
“With Stefan out of the picture, he stands to inherit, what, a billion dollars. There’s no need to bother with the Charters outfit anymore. Sucks for you to come all this way for nothing.” I hear the tick of a spark wheel, the hard suck, and the long exhale. “Honestly, I’m better off. In a way, he did me a favor by firing me. That stuff was plowing me under. You thought he canned me for stealing money, but it wasn’t that. I’m clean now.”
“Eventually, you have to choose a better way of living.”
He laughs again, like I’ve told a good joke. “Nice talking to you. Maybe I’ll see you at a Buckland reunion. Maybe when we’re seventy. We can sit on the gym bleachers and cry. I often wonder what happened to—” The call drops. It’s just as well. I didn’t want to go back to the place he was visiting.
I toss the leather book in the compartment, climb back o
n the bike, and head north toward the cabins. Maybe Charlie didn’t know what Vic was planning. Maybe one hand can cock the gun while the other is typing a text message, wiping sleep from the eyes, or opening imperial doors and reaching for a pouch of tobacco. If Vic understands anything, it’s the horror of the hour. Take out one potential threat to her camp’s survival by detonating a terrorist bomb; remove two others in the manner of a bike accident, but leave a few stray items at the scene to implicate fleeing refugees. I have no proof of her involvement, but I’m certain her henchman, Noah, or a few of her most devoted executed her holy orders. The messier the better. Her world needs more nightmares. Otherwise, who would bother to believe?
Yet, like all seemingly random acts of violence, what it offers in atrocity, it lacks in aim.
BY THE TIME I return home, the skies are different colors. The eastern sky has already darkened to blue, the western sky is sprawling with translucent-yellow spirals. I carry the tote bag of money up the cabin steps. Inside, through the open connecting door, I hear the shower running and Louise sing-humming a country song. A half-full bottle of vodka sits on the outdoor counter. I want a drink, the mind’s teat-seeking fingers already wrapped around the bottle. But I decide, for the foreseeable future, I’m going to let the anxiety and self-doubt have their way with me. Who knows, if Charlie hadn’t gone missing and I’d become his number two, I might have ended up like Gideon, sampling the merchandise.
Across the front of a large manila envelope I bought at the stationery store in Skala, I write Alexis Bledsoe’s name and address on Central Park West. I count out nine thousand euros from the bag and stuff it inside the envelope (the remainder in conversion to dollars should more than cover two weeks of interest). I print my name in the upper corner. Tomorrow morning I’ll send it by certified mail. Maybe it will reach New York on the same day that Louise touches down in Washington. Back to her life of law school and quiet, cough-averse libraries congested with graduate students memorizing legal precedents to restrict freedom in order to secure it. And back to her brother Luke not smoking meth and to the tall, bearded guy in the cowboy shirt worthy of a digital heart.
How can the future be foreseeable when the present is as fuzzy as the sun seen through shut eyelids?
Quietly, I step through the doorway of our connecting cabins. In all of my days on Patmos, I haven’t once ventured into Louise’s room. She always came into mine and retreated here every night to sleep. Her bed is smaller. A circle of light glows on her nightstand from a nickel-plated lamp that wasn’t smuggled in from Israel inside Sonny’s suitcase. There’s a rattan chair under the window and a flat-screen television on which a pair of damp jeans hang. The air smells of lilac perfume and sugary chewing gum. Country music is for people who can’t sing, and Louise can’t sing really well. Her scrubbing shadow bleeds across the bathroom wall.
Two suitcases rest on the floor by the bed, and her phone snakes between them on its charging cord. The phone is a half-full bottle of vodka; it wants me to drink its contents. The man who merited the heart emoji could be Luke. I could go on believing that, and we could have dinner tonight on the beach and sex afterward before we sleep in separate beds, and I could see her down to the ferry on her last day of vacation, and we could say things to each other about staying in touch, and I could remember her for months after she’s gone, strolling the edges of the Ganges one day, still wondering how our lives might intersect.
I press the power button on her phone. I hate myself for invading her privacy, but my hatred does not extend to my fingers.
The most recent text is to Sonny, the one before that to an unidentified number in Greece, and the third to a man named Grant. I click on Grant’s name and read in reverse order.
DON’T WORRY. BE HOME IN NO TIME. MORE TOMORROW.
BE CAREFUL. PLEASE!
I HAVEN’T REALLY HAD THE TIME TO GIVE ANYTHING A THOUGHT. ESPECIALLY COHABITATION. YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE THE SHIT HERE. BUT IT’S ALMOST COME TO NOTHING. I WANT TO NAIL THE FUCKER BEFORE HE GETS AWAY WITH IT. SEEMS LIKE HE WILL.
HA. HA. JUST GET BACK HERE. I HOPE YOU’VE GIVEN SOME THOUGHT TO MOVING IN. GREAT ¹BR IN ADAMS MORGAN, SEPT 1.
I BET I KNOW WHERE IT HURTS.
SURE THING, BABE. I’LL BRING BALLOONS TO THE GATE. MISSING YOU SO MUCH IT HURTS.
I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU. WILL YOU PICK ME UP FROM THE AIRPORT?
My fingers are trembling. I click on the unidentified Greek number. There are no responses from the recipient, only Louise’s green message bubbles forming a list of names and photo attachments. There’s the photo of Charlie and me on the night he went missing, his face turned away at the table in Skala and mine staring warmly at the lens. Farther up, backward in time, I find a still life of a business card, BENCE ARPAD, INVESTOR with a note “call him, mentioned buying into KC at dinner in Chora tonight.” I thumb through the series of pictures Louise took of the charter port on the afternoon we went sailing—the Greek boys scouring the hull, multiple angles of the open hangar, Domitian floating at the dock with Christos on deck. I scroll up the screen and land on the shot from the day I arrived. Charlie and I stand side by side on the balcony in the crystal-bright sun, our heads tilted together to form a steeple, our grins broad and contagious, two outlaws who escaped into paradise. “Ian Bledsoe on left, Google Panama.”
“Did you find what you’re looking for?”
Louise stands at the door to the bathroom. She’s wearing her Hard Rock Café T-shirt and a pair of white underwear. Her hair falls in wet tangles across her cheeks. Every person with a phone is a spy, but Louise is a double operative. I never should have left my door unbolted. Not for a night or a minute.
“Yeah, unfortunately I did.”
She walks over, squats down, and pulls the phone by its cord from my hands. My first instinct is to hit her, and I bundle my fist on the mattress.
“How much did you read?” she asks matter-of-factly. A drip of water runs down her forehead, and she wipes it away before it nears her eye.
“I don’t know. How much information on Charlie have you been supplying to nail the fucker? I read enough. Ian Bledsoe on left, Google Panama.”
“Ian.” She reaches for my hand, but I keep it balled in a fist. “It doesn’t make any difference now.”
The feeling is like an ice shelf breaking off into the ocean, the weird serenity of a fast and irreversible end. Louise was never anything more than the girl in the computer room of Stearns Hall, draining water from her ear. I’m mourning a person who never existed, and my hope for that person’s spontaneous return only makes the mourning more humiliating.
“You are an awful human being.” I want my voice to sound cold and remote, but it doesn’t.
“No. Charlie is the awful human being. He’s the one smuggling drugs while taking advantage of a humanitarian crisis. I can forgive the petty dealer who doesn’t have a choice. But I can’t forgive Charlie. I’m sorry. I can’t.”
“Is Sonny aware that you’re narc-ing on her husband?”
Her expression doesn’t crack, not even a flinch. It might hurt one degree less if Louise were crying. Her face is a steady, deliberate blank, as if she’s being compared to her passport photo.
“I care about Sonny. I care about you too, very much. But—”
“But what?”
She accepts the dare, raising her chin. “But some principles are more important than friendship.”
“Would my arrest for drug trafficking have been worth your principles? Fuck you, Louise.” She reaches for my hand again but decides against it, coiling her fingers at her chest. All the days and nights we were alone, Louise kept asking about the nature of Charlie’s business, prodding me with alcohol and sex for any information that could be used against him. It was Charlie, all along, who interested her. “Is cheating on Grant worth your principles? Jesus, what exactly are your principles? You could have at least told me you have a boyfriend back in D.C.”
“Grant’s a friend,” she corrects.<
br />
“And we’ve learned how much you value your friends.”
She squeezes her lips together and then releases them. “He’s someone I’m seeing, that’s all. I didn’t make him any promises. I didn’t make you any, either. Grant has nothing to do with you and me.” Louise is more like Charlie than she realizes. They don’t seem to view the people they ensnare as inhabitants of the same planet. Each collision is a separate incident.
“So this is why you came to Europe. How hard did you have to work to become Sonny’s friend in Paris?”
“It wasn’t like that,” she says, shaking her head. “Will you let me explain? I didn’t ask to be put in this position. A few days after I got to Patmos, a man approached me. He saw me with Charlie, and he did his research. He found out I was in law school at Georgetown. He’s an agent with the DEA who caught wind of Charlie’s operation. Just so you know, I didn’t rat anyone out. Charlie was already being investigated.”
“That’s one weight off your conscience.”
“Please, listen. I was only trying—”
“What’s a DEA agent even doing on this side of the world? Greece isn’t Mexico.”
Louise nods, as if thankful for the change in subject. It’s much easier for us to discuss politics than what we’ve done to each other.
“It’s because of the whole mess with the Eurozone and the fact that Greece is too broke to patrol its own coast. The U.S. government stepped in to interdict criminal contraband. That war in Syria isn’t an isolated massacre. It also disrupted the usual narcotics flow from the Middle East to Europe by land. Borders tightened. Just like with the refugees, new routes had to be improvised across the water. That’s where your best friend stepped in with his fleet of flailing vacation yachts. He took advantage, Ian. And he was smart. The agent was having trouble gathering information on exactly how Charlie was managing it. He’s restricted on how much he can do on foreign soil.”
Louise speaks like she’s defending her dissertation. I want to shake the cold integrity right out of her, but touching is no longer an option for us. She already has someone in Washington to touch. It’s that betrayal over all the others that revives my hatred for her. I remember her yesterday, ahead of me on a footpath in Chora, knocking on the door of a strange house, back when I still thought we belonged together.
The Destroyers Page 48
