by E. Z. Rinsky
Courtney shifts in his chair. Finally having made peace with his tea, he squeezes his lemon slice into it and takes a healthy slurp.
“I won’t lie to you Frank. I have no idea. I asked, obviously. He refuses to tell us until we’re there on his property, face-to-face. He’s—justifiably I suppose—rather paranoid these days. But of course” —a little fire flashes in Courtney’s eyes and for just a second I catch sight of the insatiable curiosity that is ultimately the only reason he’s in this line of work, instead of teaching at a university or writing long form journalism—“I’m sure we’d have the opportunity to find out what makes these among the most valuable books in the world.”
For a moment we just listen to the woman playing Chopin across the lobby, the clink and clatter of highballs and real silver, the thick soup of conversations in dozens of different languages.
“Why did you come here?” I ask. “Why not do the job yourself.”
Courtney sniffs a little too quickly.
“I need your help.”
“I thought it was an easy job.” I flash my nastiest grin.
“It will be easy for two of us.”
I smile to myself. It sounds like Courtney has finally discovered the gaping holes in his skill set, that have been obvious to me since we first met. He’s quite possibly the smartest person I’ve ever met—speaks like eight languages; once wrote a paper on game theory just for kicks that was picked up by some renowned mathematics blog; somehow managed to hunt down a ninety-year-old Nazi hiding out in New Zealand, based only on a water-damaged black-and-white photo of him from the war—his ability to complete clearly defined cognitive tasks is unparalleled. But being a successful private investigator requires much more than solving abstract logic puzzles; there is, of course, the human element. And poor Courtney must just now be realizing that humans don’t behave like the rational actors in his economics textbooks.
“Well, I’m flattered that you think I can help, Court.”
Courtney attempts to compose himself. He bites down on a piece of ice and sucks it down.
“We would fly to Colorado tomorrow.”
My stomach knots.
“Colorado?” I ask. “Shit. I hate that place.”
Courtney nods knowingly. I’m sure he’s thinking the same thing as me: Last time we were there five years ago we were looking at bloodstains on an altar, a woman who’d had her head bashed in, and sat in the front yard all day, mostly brain dead, tied to a post so she didn’t wander off. I wonder if she’s still alive. Don’t exactly have fond associations with that particular flyover state. Reading my mind, Courtney says:
“It’s nowhere close to Beulah really. He lives in Aspen. Very bougie. Plus we were there in winter last time. Colorado summers are supposed to be beautiful.”
I clench my teeth.
“If we go check it out, he fills us in on the details, and we don’t like it, can we still walk away? Realistically? I mean, where would I go from there? Back to Europe?”
“You could go visit Sadie in North Carolina,” suggests Courtney. “I’d drive down with you.”
I mull this.
Wait.
“When did I tell you she was in North Carolina?” I ask.
Courtney’s face freezes. He clears his throat.
“I suppose I misled you a bit when I asked how she’s doing,” he says, and then lowers his voice. “I’ve actually visited her a few times.”
“You what!?” I half shoot out of my seat.
“Frank, please. You emailed her school email address to yourself so you wouldn’t forget it. You might as well have posted her Social Security number on a billboard. Don’t worry, I deleted the email.”
“Why the fuck would you go see my daughter?”
“To make sure she’s okay. Figured she would be lonely without you. I was going to tell you, really.”
I’m feigning anger, but actually feel mostly gratitude: that he’s doing my job for me, that he cares enough about us to shlep all the way down there to check on her.
“And how long have you been checking my email?”
“Frank, you know I keep tabs on everyone I’ve ever worked with or for. It’s just smart business.”
I could milk this; twist the knife and earn some upper-hand morality points, but he’s just too pathetic. I can tell he’s in an even worse place than he’s letting on. He needs to work, needs some purpose and focus. Probably as badly as I do.
“I was just trying to help, Frank, I swear.”
I glare at him.
“If I say yes, there will be absolutely no more deceptions. Even if you think it’s for my own good.”
“Yeah.” Courtney nods seriously. “Of course.”
I take a few deep breaths.
“Bottom line Court: What does your gut tell you about Sampson? What are the odds this is some kind of a ruse?”
Courtney chews his lip. He feels awful about his minor betrayal of my trust.
“Nil,” he says. “Seriously, Frank. He’s a Senator who knows what bad press is like. He wouldn’t risk getting a fake passport made unless he desperately needed help. I’ll show you these emails where he’s pleading for me to consider the job. And it’s just a swap, Frank.” He bites a few fingernails. “I’d be shocked if it takes more than a weekend.”
“If you believe that, I know a Nigerian prince who needs some help making a bank transfer. Senators don’t get passports forged for easy jobs.”
I stand up and snatch the passport off the table, glaring at Courtney as he chugs the rest of his second tea.
“But, as you surely anticipated,” I sigh, “I can’t say no to this.”
A wide, genuine grin spreads over Courtney’s normally dour face. It’s like watching the sun rising over the tundra.
“We’ll fly tomorrow morning,” Courtney says, instantly energized, rising to his feet, limbs unfolding like a spindly marionette being gently pulled from above. He stretches his thin arms toward the ceiling, pulling up his polo shirt to momentarily reveal his pale midriff—could belong to a teeny bopper were it not for the tufts of dark black hair emanating from his belly button. This guy—this spindly goblin—is the closest thing I have to either a work colleague, friend or, hell, spouse for that matter.
Now that’s depressing.
“In the spirit of full disclosure, I think Sadie might have a boyfriend,” Courtney says absently as we talk over marble floor, toward the front entrance. “I could smell aftershave.”
“Appreciate your honesty, Court, but please don’t—”
“Of course I have no reason to believe it was serious. Guess it could have just been a one time kind of thing . . .”
I spend the entirety of the trans-Atlantic flight white-knuckled, waiting for a grinning sky marshal to pistol-whip me. It’s only on the second leg of our trip, after passing through passport control at JFK without incident, that I settle down enough to get to work.
We spend the flight from New York to Aspen poring over news clippings about Sampson, as well as reviewing the insane nondisclosure agreement he emailed Courtney.
Sampson ran the family dairy business uneventfully, until about twenty years ago he started getting contracts with some big groceries—scaled up dramatically and within a year or two he was a multimillionaire running an enormous dairy operation. Ran for mayor of a nearby town, won handily, then sold the business to run for Senate. A few months into the campaign, his opponent uncovers a history of some serious floozing around; he’s got a very bad habit of screwing girls young enough to be his daughter, visiting erotic massage parlors, posting lewd Craigslist personals and following through on them . . . This is political death, especially with a conservative constituency like his. His wife is too ashamed to be seen in public. He drops out of the race, a laughingstock.
But then the interesting part—after disappearing from the public eye for a year or so, he reemerges, claiming he’s a “changed man.” Well, maybe that’s not so surprising. What’s so surpris
ing is that it works. He runs again and this time, he kills it. And now he’s totally beloved—polls through the roof. When the sex scandals are occasionally mentioned, everyone talks about them like they were a sickness which infected poor James Henry Sampson, and now he’s recovered, all the stronger for overcoming.
So I guess the contract he wants us to sign makes sense. He’s been burned by his secrets getting out before. But some of these nonstandard terms seem a bit overboard, considering that the job could conceivably take us only a few days: For twenty years we basically can’t mention his name to anyone in any context, zero photos of his property, he wants us to work without documenting anything in writing or taking any photos.
Hard to imagine what this guy is hiding . . . Has he fallen back onto the canoodling wagon? But Courtney and I finish poring over the contract and by the time we deplane, decide to just sign without fussing over any terms.
Five years of tension melts away as we make our way out of the terminal. I’m on the same continent as my daughter, and I can speak to the locals. Aspen-Pitkin County airport is a particularly welcoming environment. Unlike JFK, there are no drug dogs, or cops with machine guns. Seems to be an understanding between all the smiling travelers and airport staff: We’re all rich, and nothing bad ever happens here.
I convince Courtney to split the cost of an iPhone and burner SIM card at a Verizon kiosk—we’ll need a phone for the job, and it’s not exactly professional to ask Sampson to borrow his. We snap pictures of every page of the contract and email it to Courtney’s account.
Someone’s at baggage claim holding a sign that says Courtney.
The woman waiting for us is probably early thirties, and looks like she just rolled out of bed. Her brown hair—interspersed with strands of premature grey—is strewn like a pile of spilled spaghetti. Thick-rimmed black glasses, loose white wifebeater and red corduroy pants. Despite her best efforts, she’s pretty. Has a cute kind of squirrely look.
“Hi, I’m Mindy Craxton,” she says. She forces a smile, like introducing herself is some awful chore. She has an accent I can’t place and a dead look in her almond eyes. She seems so exhausted, you’d think she’s the one who just finished a double-legged transatlantic flight. “You two have bags?”
“This is it.” I gesture to the duffel bag that I carried on. Courtney has only a black attaché that looks like it’s been through a world war.
“Alright.” Mindy throws the scribbled sign in the recycling bin, and plucks two bottles of water from a plastic bag.
“James asked me to give these to you. It’s always important at this altitude, but the air is especially dry now—the whole state has been in borderline drought for months. This happens here every couple years. Make sure you drink copious amounts of water. James doesn’t want you getting sick, yeah?”
“Thanks.” I smile, taking the two bottles from her. We stand there for an awkward beat. She doesn’t move.
“Well?” she says, agitated. I think her accent is blended British and South African. “Drink them.”
Courtney and exchange a look, then open our bottles and chug while Mindy watches impatiently.
When we finish drinking she wordlessly turns, and we follow her out of the sliding glass doors, into the slightly brisk Colorado morning. She walks fast, with the frantic strides of a musical theater major who forgot her anxiety meds.
Courtney’s eyes scan the panoramic view as we cross the parking lot, as if scoping out escape routes. He’s frowning, perhaps wary of the foothills rising on either side of us; some primordial instincts telling him that the low ground is where you’re vulnerable.
“The air is thin,” he says to her corduroy-clad backside. “What exactly is the altitude here?”
She pretends not to hear the question. I try to decipher the frown of almost comic proportions creeping down Courtney’s face as we follow Mindy in silence, her purposeful pace like she wants to get this over as soon as possible.
Who the hell is she? Sampson’s employee?
I do already feel the thin air. I’m out of breath after our short walk to the car. A black Humvee. Mindy climbs into the front, and it seems implied that neither of us is meant to sit shotgun. The back seats are spotless, and the interior smells of leather and freshly printed money.
“So you work for the Senator?” I ask. The words feel dumb as soon as they leave my mouth. In fact, just being around her makes me feel dumb.
“Not really,” Mindy responds.
“So . . . girlfriend?” I ask.
She doesn’t respond.
“Mistress?” I joke.
She turns to glare at me from the driver’s seat. I see that the hand she’s perched on the upholstery is splotched with white eczema. “Cute. But don’t say anything like that around James. He doesn’t have much of a sense of humor.”
Courtney fidgets, his tiny butt struggling to find a groove in the spacious seat.
“So you’re just like his chauffeur?” I press.
The silence before she answers indicates that she’s really losing her patience.
“I’m a postdoctoral student in linguistics,” Mindy says slowly, the timbre of her voice shifted down an octave. I notice that her lips are badly chapped.
This stirs Courtney to speak.
“Linguistics? What’s your area of specialization?”
She doesn’t reply, turns back to start up the car.
I shoot Courtney a wide-eyed look: She’s a little loopy, eh? He shrugs: I’ve seen worse.
“I’m just curious why the Senator would send a linguistics student to pick us up from the airport,” Courtney says.
It’s immediately clear Mindy’s a terrible driver—the kind that’s so bad she doesn’t even realize she’s bad, and probably wouldn’t believe me if I mentioned it.
“I’m sure James will want to explain everything to you himself,” she finally answers. “He’s a tad anal sometimes. Especially when it comes to anything related to the books.” There’s an obvious twinge of resentment in her voice. Decide to follow it—I can tell she’s a natural talker; wants to talk. Shouldn’t be hard to coax a little more info out of her.
“Anal eh?”
“Yes . . . well I mean. It’s an honor that he chose me to show them to. It’s absolutely the opportunity of a lifetime, really—” She’s suddenly speaking very rapidly, words gushing out before she can judge their prudence. “But now I have hundreds of pages of research that I can’t show anyone—let alone publish—until James is out of office. Not to mention we could have had them back years ago if he wasn’t so bloody terrified. Hardly leaves his property unless he absolutely has to fly to DC.”
I kick Courtney in the shin, like to make sure he’s getting all of this.
“Terrified?” I ask “Of Rico?”
“Among others.”
“What do you mean?”
Mindy takes an exasperated breath, then jerks the Humvee over to the shoulder and puts the hazards on. Turns around and gives us an exhausted look—like a burned-out librarian who’s about to confess that the Dewey Decimal system is all a scam.
“Listen, I know you two are curious. You seem like nice blokes, so I’ll just tell you now. You’re wasting your time here. There’s not going to be a swap, yeah?”
Courtney chews on his pinky. Mindy continues:
“It’s too much money. James has gotten close before, but couldn’t pull the trigger. He couldn’t bring himself to pay forty million three years ago, he’ll back out of it again this time. James will cancel at the last minute, and that will be that. What’s more, Rico is doing just fine as is. Every couple months he calls up James and demands a couple hundred thousand immediately, or he’ll burn the books. And of course James pays. Rico is in no hurry. James has horribly mishandled this from the start.”
“But—” I start.
“It’s better that way, trust me,” she sighs. It’s like she used up all her energy with her little rant about James, and the world is now just a ser
ies of obstacles preventing her from taking a nap. “You don’t want to get involved in this. It’s not worth whatever he’s offered to pay you. And you certainly don’t want to spend time in that house. I refuse to even go in there anymore.”
I’m about to ask her to clarify, when she turns back around and revs the Hummer back onto the highway and turns the radio on loudly, precluding any follow-up questions.
I glance over at Courtney, whose brow is furrowed in deep concentration, as he stares at the back of the seat in front of him.
I close my eyes and try to sleep. But the jerky driving and excitement of being back in the States, having a job, prevents me from shutting off my brain. Not to mention the jam-band type music Mindy is blasting over the car’s sound system.
I open my eyes as the car pulls to a stop, at the entrance to a driveway, blocked by a tall white gate. Mindy rolls down the window and buzzes in.
“It’s me, James. I have them.”
After a moment a baritone voice crackles back.
“Did they sign everything?”
Mindy looks back at us like Told you he’s anal.
“Tell him we signed them.”
She does, and the gate creaks open. Mindy eagerly gives us some gas, nearly clipping the retracting gate with the side mirror.
The estate is unbelievable. Set on some kind of plateau, above the valleys but below mountain peaks . . . I wonder if this whole property was terraformed in order to create a flat parcel of land. Granite statues of nude figures adorn the perfectly trimmed green grass on either side of the driveway.
Once a perv . . .
The lushness of the property seems especially decadent given what Mindy said about there being a drought. He must spend a fortune watering all of this.
She jerks the car forward, and then slams to a halt right at the front door.
I was so enraptured with the rows of flowers, rock sculptures and pine trees that I hadn’t noticed the house. But when I first take it in through the tinted window I’m physically jarred.
