Gagliano,Anthony - Straits of Fortune.wps

by Unknown

  "Yes. Yes it is. I suppose it comes through no matter what." He studied my face for a moment. I had no idea what he was looking for. "Well, Jack, what do you say? Are you up for a bit of adventure?" "What did you have in mind?" "Despite what you said a moment ago, I understand that your business is rather slow in the summer." I didn't say anything to that. I took a swallow of orange juice and put the glass down on an orange coaster with a black dragon printed on it. "I thought that as a fellow mercenary you might be of a mind to make a lot of money in very little time." I took another sip of orange juice. It was freshly squeezed, with an inch of pulp floating on top, but it was a bit too sweet for my taste. "That's a reasonable thought," I said. "Can I ask you a personal question?" "Go ahead." "Why do you keep staring at that yacht?" The Colonel turned and looked at me. In profile his face was thinner than I had remembered it. "Whatever happened to you and Vivian?" he asked. "We came to a parting of the ways." "In other words, it's none of my business." "I wouldn't say that. It's just that there's not much to talk about." "You thought she had too much money for you to keep up with. Was that it?" "That was part of it, but there were other reasons." "Such as Mr. Matson, for instance." "Among others." "You're looking a bit edgy, Jack. I'm not offending you, am I?" "Not really. I just never thought you were all that inter- ested in the matter." 13

  "I understand it was you who introduced her to Matson. Is that correct?" "That's right." "Maybe in retrospect that turns out not to have been a smart move." "They call it networking." "She would have married you, you know." "We must be talking about two different people. Who told you that?" "The only person who would know for sure." "I never got that impression." "She was using Matson for leverage. You saw it happen- ing, and you let it continue. Then when the thing got to a certain point, you became indignant and walked away." "I introduced her to a client of mine at a party, Andy. That didn't mean she had to sleep with him." "That's the first time you ever called me `Andy.' Despite all the times I asked you to. It was always `Colonel' or `sir.' Now it's `Andy.' Are we friends now, Jack? Should I be flat- tered, you distant, hard-nosed son of a bitch?" "Why be flattered? It's a lot better than me calling you `Dad.' " He laughed. "Would that have been so bad? I always thought we got along rather well." "Why don't you tell me why it is you asked me out here today? I don't mean to be rude, but it's getting late, and I don't like to keep Elvis waiting. You never know. He might show up today." "Vivian got into a rough crowd after you left." "She was with a rough crowd when I met her. She was living in Tattoo City for quite some time before I came along." "You added Matson to the population, a cheap pornogra- pher." "There were a lot of people I introduced her to: doctors, a 14

  few politicians, some lawyers, even an anthropologist. She picked him out of a fairly large bunch. It was her choice, not mine, not yours." "You let him take her. You didn't even bother to fight. He had money and you didn't, and so you just surrendered Vivian to him. I would have expected at the very least that you would have kicked his ass. I was disappointed in you, Jack." "I guess that's why you got me out here today. So we could sit around and be disappointed together. Is that it?" I stood up. "I usually get paid for my time, Colonel. It's the only thing I have to sell that's worth anything. But that's okay. This one's on me." "How would you like to make a hundred thousand dol- lars?" I hesitated for a moment and studied the fault lines in his forehead. Then I sat down again. "I know you can't be bought," the Colonel said. "But I was hoping you might be for rent, at least for a few hours." "What's this got to do with Vivian?" "I suppose I played that card too early." "No. Not too early, but you did play it. And you played it hard. You can't put it back in the deck now." "You see that yacht out there?" he asked. "I see it." "There's a dead man on it." My heart leaped at the wall of my chest and fell back, ready to try again. I stared at the Colonel for a moment; then I lowered my shades and looked out at the yacht. "A dead man," I said. "And who might that be?" "Matson." "Matson?" I took a deep breath, not moving my eyes from the yacht. "Walk with me, Jack. I get stiff if I sit too long." 15

  We took a narrow path that followed a break wall until it curved around toward the gazebo where I used to sit with Vivian and then on past the long-neglected tennis courts with their nets hanging limp and exhausted in the flagrant heat of midday. Beyond that was the Japanese garden the Colonel had had installed at great cost when he purchased the property. But not even the Green Giant could have made the project a success. The climate was too humid, the soil too salty, the sun too relentless. The gardeners, imported like the bonsais they had planted, had been forced to use native species for the project. All but one of them had returned home, broken, bitter, but a lot richer for their troubles. The Colonel stopped suddenly and looked at me. I was thinking about Matson dead on the boat. I stooped, picked up a small stone, and absentmindedly tossed it into a fish pond where bright orange Japanese koi were swimming around frantically, looking for a way out. "You never told me why you quit the police force up in New York," the Colonel said, apropos of nothing. "I never told you because I knew you already knew. What difference does it make now? Let's get back to Matson." "You know," he said thoughtfully, "it's a sorry fact that at least fifty percent of men engaged in combat never fire their weapons, even when they're being shot at, even when people are trying to kill them. Hard to believe, isn't it?" "History proves I'm not one of them." "No, I suppose not. But sometimes when a man makes a mistake--let's say he shoots the wrong man--it can make him timid. He doubts himself. The next time around, he hes- itates, and that's the end of him. I've seen it. I know." "He wasn't just the wrong man, Colonel," I said. "He was a cop. He was a cop just like me." "We call it friendly fire, Jack. It can't be avoided." I started to say something, but instead I turned and looked 16

  out at the water. What's that the kids say? Shit happens. It occurred to me that I'd been in Miami too long. Too many people knew who I was. I had lost the sacred one-time-only gift of anonymity. "That scar on your cheek," the Colonel said. "He fired, too. Would you have preferred that it was you who were killed--or worse, crippled? Is that why you insist on slum- ming as a personal trainer, Jack? Is that your idea of repen- tance? Wasting your mind teaching old bastards like me how to do push-ups?" Now I turned to face him. "What's this got to do with Matson?" The Colonel stooped and picked up a pebble of his own and tossed it underhand back into the fish pond. "Why did you come out here, Jack?" "You invited me, remember? You're not getting senile on me now, are you?" "You were hoping to see my daughter, weren't you?" "Stop playing me, Colonel. You think I don't get what you're doing?" He smiled. We kept walking. I had given him the satis- faction of knowing just how badly I wanted to ask about Matson. I was as hooked as the two fish lying frozen in my freezer, and the Colonel knew it. A winding, stone-lined brook gurgled alongside us as we walked. The lizards danced and flirted with our feet, and the wind carried the smell of the ocean from beyond the dunes. Neither of us spoke for what seemed a long time. I was thinking of Matson. I was thinking of Matson and Vivian. The Colonel walked beside me with his hands in the pockets of his black silk bathrobe. A gardener carry- ing a hoe and a bucket of dead plants stood up from behind some weather-beaten bushes. The Colonel spoke to him in Japanese for a few moments as the lizards skittered through 17

  the ferns like little fugitives. While they talked, I thought about Matson some more and tried to work myself around to caring that he was dead, but I couldn't seem to find the right frequency. The gardener took one last forlorn look at his work and shook his head like a doctor who's just seen a bad set of X-rays. We watched him shuffle away. "He says everything is dying," the Colonel told me. "Too much salt." "What did you expect out here by the ocean?" "Expect? It was more a gesture I felt inclined to make. Something you do. I didn't expect anything. Let's go back by the pool." Soon we were sitting by the pool again. "Can I assume Matson didn't die from natural causes?" I asked. "He was shot." "By whom?" "I think you already know the answer to that question." "Let me have the short version." "There is no short vers
ion." "Be creative." "After your abdication, Matson used to come around here a lot. I never much liked him. He was all money and no class. That's not a particularly original phenomenon in this city, of course, but it's also not one I cared to indulge now, at a time in my life when I'm no longer forced to by business pressures. Even so, I was always polite." The Colonel looked at me. "He was a sorry replacement for you, Jack." "Too bad Vivian didn't think so. Why'd she shoot him, and, better yet, why are you telling me all this and not the police? I work with the living, not with the dead." "She did it to protect me." "From Matson?" "From Matson and the people he worked for." "He made porn movies. What does the director of Hitch- 18

  hiking Bitches and Lesbian Gymnasium have to do with you? " "On the face of it, nothing. But things aren't always what they seem, and neither was Matson." "You're being mysterious, Colonel." "Matson was a blackmailer. Did you know that?" "He had money. Why would he want to waste time getting yours?" He waved the question away with the back of his hand as though it were irrelevant. "He managed to talk my rather delinquent daughter into helping him steal some very im- portant research from my files. Work I had done years ago while employed by the government. He was going to sell it." The Colonel cracked his knuckles and flexed his palms out and away from him, his fingers locked. Then he cracked each knuckle individually using the thumb of either hand. "You are wondering what he stole, perhaps." "No, I was still wondering why you called me out here." "I need your help." "As in?" "I want you to take that bastard's yacht out there and sink it down to the bottom of the sea." I thought about it for a moment. "And for that I get a hun- dred grand. Is that what you're telling me?" "Well?" "Let me think about it." "There's no time to think about it, Jack. That yacht has been anchored there in the same spot for over a day now. It's only a matter of time before the coast guard takes notice. Then it will be too late. It's not just a question of Matson. There are certain sensitive items belonging to me on board that I do not wish to be found. The sooner the boat disap- pears, the less chance of that there will be. So the time for thinking is rapidly fading, Jack. This is a time for action." STRAITS OF FORTUNE 19

  "What did Matson have on your daughter?" The Colonel glared at me with an expression that was an ugly mixture of disgust and rage long contained. "It would appear she inadvertently starred in one of his films when she wasn't thinking straight. When she went out to his boat, he took the ransom and my research, but he reneged on the film. He taunted her. Told her he'd made copies. That turned out to be a mistake." "So she shot him over a film?" "There was a bit of passion involved. She felt betrayed." He lifted a copy of the Wall Street Journal from the table. Beneath it was a blue videocassette. He picked it up and held it out to me. Then he reached into the pocket of his robe, brought out a key, and tossed it at me. The key took a bounce on the table, but I caught it on the rebound as it came off the glass. "That's the key to Vivian's room. I assume you still know the way. Why don't you go upstairs and make use of the VCR and watch the film? It might fuel your ambition." "I don't have any ambition. Not as far as your daughter's concerned." "You did once." "Once is over." "Think about the money, then." I looked at the film cassette and put it down. Then I thought about Matson and looked out at the yacht, so white it could have been a shape carved from ivory. It had lost all its innocence, like the Trojan horse on the morning after. The Colonel sat watching me. After a few moments, I took the cassette and stood up. "This orange juice is too sweet," I said. Before he could answer, I had turned and gone back through the French doors and was bounding up the winding stairway that led to the bedrooms. 20

  Even on the second floor, the place was still more of a museum than a place where people lived. It lacked the warmth of occupation. There were no toys scattered in the hallway, no family dog or cat stretched out on the marble tiles, just a lot of style and no air of comfort. A computer program with the human touch deleted. There was a painting by Botero of a family of refugees from Weight Watchers and another by Modigliani of a boy inside a blue balloon float- ing over a bombed-out city. There was a statue of a woman carved from onyx lounging on a pedestal inside a recessed section of the wall. There was more, but even if there had been twice what there was, the hallway still would have felt empty. It was way too well lit for a corridor that led to rooms where people slept and dreamed and wore pajamas. I hesitated at the door, and for a moment it occurred to me that I could simply go quietly down the stairs, out the front door, and back to my car without saying good-bye. A man I had once thought of as a friend was dead on a yacht, and in my hand was a film he had made of a woman I didn't want to see. I had come here half hoping I'd run into Vivian again, though, in one of those strange, schizoid acts of self-denial, I hadn't allowed myself to think about what I would say to her if I had. Now I was going to get my wish. I was holding it in my right hand. I opened the door and closed it behind me. Nothing had changed, and yet to call it her room is misleading. She'd had her own place down on South Beach for years now, ever since dropping out of Smith College. But in a house with eighteen bedrooms, most of them empty, there had been no reason to change anything, and now, whenever it became necessary, she used this place as a refuge from her new life. It was the room of a woman in her late teens. In one corner sat the bronze Buddha I recalled, still wearing the Santa Claus hat she had stuck on its head and still sporting the cigarette she'd left dangling from the edge of its metallic 21

  mouth. Around the statue she had built a miniature temple of flagstones stacked in a progression of shelves. The two incense holders on either side of the Buddha were empty now, the last stick burned to a nub at its base. She hadn't been here in quite a while. The stems of two dozen or more dead flowers leaned from their vases like bony fingers, and everywhere on the floor before the shrine lay the petals of red and yellow roses, all as dry as doilies. I stood there looking around like a voyeur stranded in his own memories. There was an enormous teakwood dresser imported from Cambodia that four strong men would have had trouble lift- ing, and on top of it, in front of the mirror, ran a row of old-fashioned atomizers, some of them still full of perfume. There were photographs of her family taken in Vietnam: one of Vivian and her mother, both in white dresses, and the Colonel, then a captain, much younger, with darker hair, in his uniform. They stood poised and smiling in front of a large white split-level chalet that looked like it belonged in a French suburb. In the driveway sat a battered army jeep that went with the Colonel's uniform but not with the house it stood before. They were like two disparate dreams merged by memory, war, and accident. None of this, of course, went with the Aerosmith poster on one powder blue wall or with that of Hendrix, Afro high and guitar in hand, on the other, any more than the plush, white teddy bear wearing a red ribbon around its neck went with the woman I recalled. Only a dead man or one not long for the living could have failed to remember at precisely that moment the first time I'd laid eyes on Mr. Bear. Why the first time had to be here with her father asleep and not at her apartment on South Beach, I never figured out, except for realizing I was about to enter a drama whose intricacies I didn't care to decipher. I had driven at midnight through a jungle rain, my com- 22

  panion heart keeping time with the wipers swiping away at the falling flood of water on the windshield. I remembered the expression on the guard's face as I pulled up to the gate, how he emerged from his booth like a specter. The hood of his poncho covered all of his face except for the white of his teeth as he smiled and waved me through, not bothering this time or any future time to record on his clipboard the odd fact of my lucky arrival. The bastard's hit pay dirt, he must have told himself. I knew then that I was one of the chosen. It is a good feeling while it lasts--that is, until you find out what it is you've been chosen for. What I remember next of that night was opening her door without knocking, just as I had been told, and seeing Vivian sitting naked in her bed, casually smoking a cigarette and cradling the teddy bear between her legs as though it were a child, Edith Piaf crooning softly in the background like a sad ghost t
rying to exorcise her own memory, and the lin- gering flying carpet of marijuana exhaust floating over her head as I closed the door behind me. It was an opium den with a naked girl and a stuffed bear, both of them waiting just for me. A night, in short, for the record books, and when I drove out before dawn, the guard was asleep in the chair in his booth and a thick fog filled the space between earth and sky, but not nearly so thick as the fog in my mind. And now here I was again, not really believing it. Every- thing came back a little at a time, like the pages of a diary thrown into a fire, then retrieved from the ashes. I went over to the shelf with the stereo and television and slipped in the videotape. I was aware of the element of self-torture involved with what I was doing, aware that I was having my buttons pushed and pushed hard, aware of the yacht silent and white in the sunlight, aware of the money, aware that I was being foolish. I switched on the television and the VCR, then sat back in a yellow beanbag chair that absorbed me like a giant sponge. 23

  Several times I was forced to turn away from what I saw. There were no trailers to sit through, certainly no cartoons, only a brief, ragged fence of static that morphed into the view of the room. Matson and Vivian sitting at a table in what looked like a hotel room, judging by the generic furniture. They were talking, smoking cigarettes, and there were glasses and two bottles of red wine. I turned down the volume. For some reason hearing her voice was worse than seeing her face. Then a second man entered the frame, and I jumped as though he had burst in on me. I didn't know him. He was well tanned, well groomed, dark-haired, handsome in that perfect way. He seemed to be in his late thirties, a medium- size man in a beige sports jacket and black slacks. He had a military-style crew cut. He walked over to the camera and leaned down and placed his face close to its lens and grinned like an idiot. Then he went over to the table and poured him- self a glass of wine and sat down across from Vivian and Matson. Matson held up a hundred-dollar bill to the camera and winked devilishly; then he rolled it into a tube. Each of them did a line of coke off a mirror laid flat on the table. After a while they got into it. Vivian slipped off a periwin- kle-colored silk dress, and the men began taking off their clothing. Vivian and Matson kept up their chatter as she re- moved her bra and panties, but the other man looked nervous and uncertain. The cameraman, whoever he was, panned in on his face so that I could see him sweating. Vivian's eyes looked glazed, and I gave in to the merciful thought that she had to be on something. Matson went first. He was tall, rangy, with a hawk nose and a shock of straight black hair that made him look like a rock star. I remembered the times I had trained him, taught him a little tai chi and tried to get him off the coke. He had the arms I had given him, but also the puffed-out gut of a skinny, full-time drinker he had given himself. I watched him and tried to understand that he was dead. 24