Matala

by Craig Holden

  That first full afternoon with Darcy in Venice we sat on a quay that was nothing more than a raised concrete slab, a utilitarian place where I imagined supply boats tied up to load or unload in the white December sun, in the glorious glorious heat of that reflected Venetian light. We had a hard loaf of bread, a brick of some strong cheese, and three bottles of cheap vino da tavola. I was riding on my bennies, Justine was quivering on her meth, and Darcy was just tripping on the whole world that was not the world she was supposed to be in—hanging out, unknown, unseen, unrecorded, on some hot concrete alongside a canal.

  “Dang,” she said, “this is amazing. This is amazing, Will.”

  I nodded at her and smiled but could not raise the gumption to make words.

  “I mean what? Two days ago you’re standing on a bridge, I’m on an art tour, and now here we sit.”

  Justine was watching her, almost smiling. “You grooving on it, little girl?”

  “Totally,” she said.

  “It’s all cool.”

  Justine talked about Crete then. At first I didn’t understand why she was going on about it, but it dawned on me that we were going there. She’d seen Maurice, and something had come of that. I didn’t know exactly what Maurice’s business was, nor did I really want to. I knew that Justine had been involved in it once upon a time but hadn’t been at least since I’d known her.

  “It’s warm. There are long beaches, and it’s so cheap you can’t believe it. Huge seafood dinners for a quid or two. Get yourself drunk as a lord for change. Rooms cost nothing. And plenty of others show up there as well—Americans, English, Aussies. It’ll be a big Christmas bash, the whole place. And you’ve never seen a sky like that.”

  I’d never been, though we’d talked about it. It was a long way to Greece, and longer still out to the middle of the ocean. It would cost some money to get there, so we were surely not going just for the sun or the beaches or the Christmas parties. But, still, we were going. It warmed me simply thinking about it, and it warmed me more that Justine somehow had come back, in these past couple of days, from the edge of the abyss over which she’d been perched. She had not thrown herself off but had rallied, had responded to my good work, my bringing in of the girl, and had made it work for us, had made herself work on the work she did, which was to use other people for her own gain. And now we were off to Crete.

  WE TOOK A NAP IN the afternoon, the three of us again lined up front to back on the smallish bed, as we had slept the night before—Justine facing me and me facing Darcy. But it was different now. Justine was wired for one thing and couldn’t really sleep. She kind of dozed, but it was so shallow that she shifted constantly, talking to herself, making noises in her throat, moving her feet so that you knew she was in a running dream somewhere. Her hands played against my back. The first couple of times I looked at her, but she lay with her eyes closed, apparently unaware as she had seemed unaware of so much that happened between us.

  She was a sadist by nature, Justine was. What she enjoyed in sex was being in control, whether that meant inflicting pain or bondage or just giving orders. I was not then particularly inclined to submissiveness, nor am I now, but I had learned to play that role with her. I did not find that it enhanced the experience, as I imagine true subs or masochists do, but it did change it and perhaps intensified it in some ways. For Justine, though, without playing the role of the controller, the inflictor, the web spinner, sex was flat. Enjoyable, perhaps, but in the way, say, a back rub is enjoyable. It held no spark for her.

  The nap was different with Darcy, too, not because of how she slept but because of how we had awakened that morning. Justine was gone; she had been gone for some time, I thought, though her early rising hadn’t awakened me. When I opened my eyes, I found Darcy awake already and lying with her face near mine, looking at me.

  “Hi,” she said.

  She touched my face and then turned over and pressed her back into me. We’d started out the night clothed and on top of the bed covers but at some point crawled underneath, and when she did, she took off her jeans so that all I felt when I touched her was the skin of her legs and the thin strap of her panties. Now she moved against me so earnestly that for a moment, as I was still coming awake, I was certain it was a dream. I put a hand on her hip and pressed back into her, moving now with her rhythm.

  “Touch me,” she said. I fumbled with her panties. She said, “Hurry.”

  I slipped my fingers under the thin fabric and into her, and she said, “Ah!” and proceeded, apparently, to have the most immediate female orgasm I’d ever been privy to.

  She had just turned back toward me and unbuttoned my jeans when I heard the door and pushed myself away, far enough that we weren’t touching, and lay still. Justine came in, and after a moment Darcy seemed to wake. She stretched and yawned and greeted Justine, and greeted me, too—“Good morning, Will”—as if nothing had gone on. And later, as I waited for some sign of what had transpired between us, a hint even, a touch, a look, a certain smile, I saw none.

  Now, lying against her again, with Justine pressing into me from behind, sandwiched between these two women, one of whom I’d been with many times and the other whom I had just begun with, I felt that aching again of desire and frustration. I was certain I could never sleep like this, but the pills and the wine and the fatigue that always came with the road won over at last.

  THE AMERICAN CAFÉ WAS A re-creation of an idealized U.S. diner complete with bottles of French’s mustard and Heinz catsup on every table, Miller High Life in tapered clear-glass bottles, waitresses in short skirts and bobby socks, and a menu heavy with Ham Burgers and Shakes of Milk. I found it laughable that the people who came here were nearly all Americans, an odd mixture of tourists and those who’d been around Venice long enough to recognize one another. What did it mean? Were they homesick? Was this really like any place they ate at home? (It was rather startling, I have to admit, to see those neon yellow bottles of homogenized mustard we grew up with.) Did they come to Italy not wanting to eat the fabulous food, or did they find on arriving that, although its reputation preceded it, they just didn’t like it? Couldn’t they stomach it? Or did they need a break from it? Was it too good for their systems, and they had to pollute themselves to feel whole again? Was it akin to dropping into a McDonald’s in Paris just to compare? And, by extension, did Italian visitors to the United States go out for pizza?

  I didn’t know. I just laughed at the diners around me in their logo-T-shirt-clad bellies and jeans and tennis shoes. Then I thought: Here I was, too. One of them.

  Except not. Justine and I came here when we were in Venice for one reason, and it wasn’t burgers. It was to see the man, Maurice, the one person to whom I had ever seen Justine pay anything resembling homage, though no one else who saw it would call it that. But he clearly held something over her, which I assumed at first was just about chemicals, about his being our supplier—until I found out they’d been married. I realized you could see it still between them, that uncuttable tie, that ghost of fealty, a vestige of which must always be there between former spouses—some remnant of the crazy love or whatever else it was that had drawn them together in that way. She looked up to him, that’s what it was, and it was just plain weird to see, because she was a woman who looked up to no one.

  We sat at a corner table, me and Justine on one side, Darcy across from us, watching the Americans and drinking Miller drafts and smoking what remained of Darcy’s Dunhills. And then, as if he had simply materialized, Maurice pulled out the empty chair and sat.

  “Heya,” he said. He was wearing a loose-fitting lime-colored sport coat, black T-shirt and jeans, and high-tops, and he carried a gym bag in his right hand. His left was wrapped in a gauze bandage. He let his gaze rest for a particularly long moment on Darcy but said nothing.

  “What’d you do?” I asked, nodding at the bandage, but got only a kick from Justine as an answer.

  Maurice was quiet, then said, “So here we are.” He was
looking at me when he said this, but I wasn’t the one being spoken to.

  “We are indeed,” Justine said.

  “Well, I think things look fine. Just fine.”

  “Good.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m well,” Justine said.

  “Bloody fantastic then,” he said. “I knew you would be. I always know.”

  “You think you do,” Justine said, and she seemed to drag rather vehemently at her Dunhill.

  Maurice shook his head at me. “How d’you put up with her, Will?”

  I shrugged and felt my face warm.

  “You must be getting something good, or else she’s just too flippin’ much trouble.”

  “This is Darcy,” Justine said.

  Maurice looked at the girl again. He reached over and put his hand on her head, as if she were a small child, petted her hair, and said, “Lovely.”

  “We picked her up in Rome. Sort of an accident. She’s supposed to be off to Florence tomorrow.”

  “Florence? What the fuck’s there?”

  “Art,” Darcy said and looked away, out the window.

  “Art?” Maurice said. “Coo, there’s art everywhere over here. It’s like litter. Justine said she thought you rather enjoyed her company and Will’s.”

  “I do.”

  “Want my advice? Then keep it. It’s the bloody Continent, you know? Do what the fuck you like. Be happy.” He looked at Justine and said, “That’s what I do, in’it?”

  Darcy smiled at him rather genuinely. Maurice just laid it out there. Said what was on everyone’s mind.

  “Well,” said Maurice, “listen, got others to see. Business hours, you know. There’s a bag under the table, Justine, with a package in it. Whatever you do, don’t leave without it.”

  “Is that what we’re doing?” I said. “Transporting?”

  Maurice looked at me, and I could feel Justine looking as well.

  “Get to Galini,” Maurice said. “You have enough folding?”

  Justine said, “We’re fine.”

  “Fuck, Justine.” He took a leather currency file from his jacket, pulled a thick stack of bills from it, and laid them on the table. “Various shit,” he said. “Liras, drachmas, and some other stuff mixed in. Six or seven hundred quid worth. Against your end of it.”

  “I said we have enough.”

  “A train to Athens for three.” He looked at Darcy. “Two or three. A ship to the island. Buses, taxis. You’ll have to stay in Galini at least a couple days, so a room or two.”

  “We have enough,” she said.

  He scooped up the paper and stuffed it back in the file, which he dropped in the side pocket of his jacket. “You bloody well better,” he said. “And you make fucking sure you have the package when you get there.”

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “Just get there. Then wait. It’s not a big place. Someone’ll find you.”

  FOR SOME TIME AFTER HE’D gone, Justine dragged on her cigarette while staring at the table. I sipped at my beer and watched Darcy watch Maurice making his way around the room, sitting at a table here and there or hanging at the bar.

  “He was serious about this being business hours,” Darcy said. “I don’t suppose you can tell me what that was all about.”

  “To be perfectly truthful,” Justine said, “I don’t really know.”

  “What’s in the pack?”

  She shrugged.

  “But you’re taking it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Just like that. You could get sent away forever where you’re going if it’s anything like it sounds.”

  Justine lit a new cigarette, the last one, from the ember of the one she was finishing.

  “For what?” Darcy asked. “How much are you getting?”

  Now Justine’s face changed. For the first time around the girl, she started to look pissed off. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could, Darcy cut in.

  “How much? A few thousand? For that kind of risk?”

  Justine said, “What do you care?”

  “I don’t. Not at all. It just makes my stomach hurt to see such pathetic losers getting pushed around and used.”

  “Who—” Justine said, then looked at me as if to say she didn’t know what to say. She was struck dumb.

  “—do I think I am?” said Darcy. “I’m somebody at least—which is to say I’m not nobody, unlike some of the people at this table.”

  “Holy shit,” Justine said. “Don’t you have a train to catch, little girl? Back to your nanny and your little chums?”

  “I’m not the one with little friends,” she said.

  “Are you referring to Maurice? Little? Hardly, dear. Not someone you want to mess about with.”

  “Really? Is he in the same league as you two big-timers? Or does he at least make enough to get by? I’ll tell you, I’m impressed. Con artist central, here we are.”

  It was then, of course, that I began to see how badly we’d misjudged. I didn’t know the full extent of it yet, but I felt it. It made me cold at first, chilly. My stomach knotted and unknotted. Not that there was anything really dangerous about it; it was just that we’d misread things so badly. It hadn’t happened before.

  Justine, on the other hand, couldn’t stop the act. She put on a shocked expression and said, “What?”

  Darcy sat back in her chair and laughed, and I had to suppress a smile lest Justine see it.

  “What do you call it? Grifting? Scamming? How much of an idiot—Is anyone really as stupid as you’ve taken me to be?”

  Now Justine just sat, saying nothing. Waiting for it. I didn’t know if what I was feeling was excitement or illness.

  “You think I went out to that toilet you call a hostel because I wanted a glass of bad wine? Because I was swept off my feet? I have to admit I didn’t see the spike coming. That was good. That was surprising. Weirdly vicious, I have to say. Way over the top. Sick, even, but effective. I’ll give you that. What was it?”

  Justine flicked off an ash and said, “GHB.”

  “Nobody ever taught you how to pick a stupid pocketbook? You’ve got to knock someone out to steal their money? Jesus. What else did you do to me?”

  Justine shook her head and said, “Nothing, dear. We made sure you were safe.”

  “Well, thank you. So was there a plan? Milk the rich bitch as long as she lets you? Let her buy your tickets and your meals and your hotel room until she gets tired of it and goes back where she belongs?”

  I nodded without realizing I was doing it. Justine didn’t move.

  “You’re kidding, really, right? I was kidding. That’s even more pathetic than I thought. I mean I was waiting for something. Some idea. You know, you call Daddy Warbucks and tell him you’re holding Annie, and if he doesn’t cough up a hundred grand, you’ll snuff her. Something. I mean, God, all this for a train ticket and a room? Who are you people?”

  “All right,” Justine said. “Shut up, okay?”

  Darcy looked out the window again.

  “Who are you?” Justine asked her then.

  “I’m only who I said I was: a girl from Ohio who’s on a tour of the great art and architecture of Europe. And bored of it and wanting some distraction.”

  “Well, I guess you got some.”

  “I guess I did. Can I ask you something? Why didn’t you take that money he put down here?”

  “Because I’d owe him even more than I do now. And I hate owing him anything.”

  “Then why don’t you do something about it? For starters, get your hands on as much of his cash as you can.”

  “Who—What do you know about any of this?”

  “More than you’d guess, Madre. I know he’s as much of a chump as you are. He’s just got you scared for some reason.”

  “Oh, stop, will you?”

  “I could get money out of him tonight before we leave here—lots of it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  �
�Then do it.”

  Darcy pulled her hands from beneath the table and laid the leather file on it.

  “Oh,” Justine said, “fucking hell. Are you insane?”

  “I might be,” Darcy said. “But there’s a lot of cash here, and now it’s mine. See how it works? I don’t owe him anything because he doesn’t know I took it.”

  “Christ. You are mad.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “You should be.” But I knew who was the frightened one. Justine had on a face I’d never seen. Darcy pulled the wallet back off the table. “Do you have any idea what he’ll do to you?”

  “Nothing if I give it back to him and tell him you stole it—minus, of course, what you took from me. But he’ll understand that. It’s your rear he’ll take it out on, not mine.”

  Justine stuck a finger into the empty cigarette pack, fished around, and said, “Fuck, I need a smoke.”

  “On the other hand, we can clean the cash out and leave the wallet someplace where he won’t suspect it was us.”

  “We?” Justine said.

  “There’s more in there than he was going to give you—maybe a couple of thousand dollars’ worth.”

  “What game are you playing?”

  “Game?” said Darcy. “You mean what do I do besides travel around looking at ancient merde.” Darcy pulled her big purse onto her lap, dug into it, and removed another pack of cigarettes, Marlboro Reds.

  “Where do you get all these?” said Justine.

  “Around,” she said. Then she took out something else and laid it on the table. It was a wristwatch, a Clerc just like the one I’d stolen from the German and then lost.

  I said, “Shit.”

  “Is it the same one?” asked Justine.

  I picked it up, inspected it, slipped it on my wrist, and said, “Yeah.” Then I took it off and set it down.