Gagliano,Anthony - Straits of Fortune.wps

by Unknown

  some sign that I was still the same man she had known before. I wasn't. I felt a great coldness toward her. My mouth was clamped shut to the point that my jaw began to hurt, and I took a sip of Coke to ease the pressure, but it didn't ease the coldness that held me like a man frozen in an iceberg. "I know I hurt you," she said in a soft voice. "Don't worry about me. Worry about what you're going to tell the cops." "I'm not sure I'm going to the police." She hesitated. "What do you think would happen if we just left that boat out there?" I smiled. "Right in front of your father's mansion? Very convenient. Well, it would go something like this: They'll dust for prints, and they'll find yours because you didn't wipe the place down, and even if you did, they'll find some- thing somewhere. You don't have a record, so the cops will sit on things for a while. Then they'll ask a few questions. Your name will come up, then your father's. There will be a few wrong steps here and there, but eventually they'll get around to you. I give it a week after they board the boat. What's the matter?" "I was arrested once. Drunk driving, after a party. I went through a stop sign. I was seventeen." "Well," I said, "that does it. They'll be able to match your prints. That doesn't give you much time. Maybe you should leave the country, save yourself all the bullshit. You've got money. Go to Switzerland. You used to live there once. I may even visit you from time to time. Personally, I think you should talk to the cops. Just show them that film Matson made. Who knows, you might get off--or maybe they will." "I told my father not to show you that." "But you knew he would." "Why would you say that?" she asked. "Because I know you and I know him. You're both first- 47

  class manipulators, and even though you know I know it, you can't help yourself. Besides, he was trying to make a point, but it may have been a tactical error now that I think about it. Maybe he thought I'd get overheated and chew a hole in the boat like a shark. Anyway, whatever you do, you'd better do it fast. I'll even drive you to the airport--no charge, of course." She reared back and threw the can of soda at me. I waited to gauge the trajectory of her arm, then moved only slightly. The can went over my head, and I heard it hit the wall and then the floor. I took my Coke and placed it closer to her. "Here," I said. "Try again." She reached for the can, but I grabbed it first and threw it over her head. Like the first, it hit the wall just beneath the clock and fell and rolled and spilled itself across the brown tile. "Get out," I said. "We're all out of drinks here." She stood up. She wore a yellow sundress that clung to her hips and fell into the curve of her thigh and stayed there long enough for me to realize she wasn't wearing any underwear. Even through the coldness, I knew I was going to miss look- ing at her, so I took as long a look as I could, and I let her see me doing it. It was my last drink before the lifelong desert of not seeing her anymore, and I wanted to fill up my cup for the endless time ahead. I held the door for her. She seemed shocked. "You're just going to let me go. I know you won't sink the boat. You have . . . what, morals? Okay, but what about me? You don't have anything left for me at all?" "I have plenty left for you, but it isn't anything that's going to help you with Matson." "Oh," she said. "So it was just the sex?" "You're shallow; you're not very bright, and you're a liar of the first magnitude. What else could it have been?" 48

  That rocked her, and I had the morbid pleasure of seeing the hurt spread across her face until all her exquisite fea- tures seemed to be pulling away from each other. What was I doing but killing myself by saying things that I didn't be- lieve? It was only when I'd said them that I realized how long I'd been imagining just this moment, just this time. It was my big scene, and I'd played it the way I had dreamed of playing it. I'd gotten the knife in and twisted it big time, but what I couldn't understand was why it felt like I was the one who had been stabbed. Vivian turned, and I held the door and watched her walk past Sternfeld and out to her car. The birds were singing back and forth across the street to one another from out of the palm trees. She walked away slowly, holding her head a little to one side as though listening to something, and I re- membered that was the way she held her head when she was upset. There was something in my chest that wanted to come out, but I couldn't interpret it into any known language, and so it stayed there waiting like a blood clot until the Porsche let out a single, distinctive roar and drove away.

  I had two clients scheduled for that afternoon, the Sheik and a singer from Germany named Tamara who lived down in South Miami. I didn't feel much like training either of them, but it was too late to cancel. I picked up the Sheik around noon at his house on Pine Tree and drove him over to the beach, where we ran along the boardwalk in the very hottest part of the day. The heat was, for him at least, part of the challenge. Where the boardwalk ended, we pounded down the wooden stairs and out onto the hard-packed sand and ran south toward Government Cut, where the big plea- sure ships entered the ocean. After the run we went back to his house and spent another hour or so practicing kendo, in which he was an expert and 49

  I was not. It wasn't the first time that I'd found myself play- ing the student rather than the teacher with a client. In fact, I sometimes wondered whether I hadn't learned as much from my clients as they had learned from me. His name was Anwar, and he was by right of birth a prince in a country I won't name, but he had spent almost all his life in American schools, including Johns Hopkins, where he had received his degree in restorative plastic surgery. When I met him, he was thirty-five and had already prac- ticed medicine in Somalia and Cambodia under the auspices of Doctors Without Borders. As far as I could see, he had responded to the challenge of nearly incalculable wealth as well as anyone I'd ever met. It was our ritual after we put away our staffs and padding to sit in the Sheik's Jacuzzi and drink a patient glass of his thousand-year-old scotch. His wife, Rhonda, was not there that afternoon, and so my pensive mood was less easy to camouflage once the sweat had dried and I was boiling my feet in the bubbles of chlorinated water. "Something's not quite right with you today," he said. "I saw Vivian today." "I guess that means you'll be losing your mind again shortly. Too bad I won't be around to witness your madness." "Where are you going now?" I asked. "My family is having a party at our hotel in the Baha- mas--a reunion, you might say. Would you care to come?" "I'm not family." "Not technically. My father would like to see you, though. Why don't you come? He's not so well, you know." "I have some business here to take care of." "With the woman?" "And her father. Possibly. They made me an offer that I re- fused. But now I'm wondering if I did the right thing. Seeing her kind of rearranged my brain." 50

  "Her father? You mean the scientist?" "That's him." The Sheik said nothing. He was looking down into the bubbling froth of the hot tub with a thoughtful expression on his face. "You know," he said, "I met him once at a party down at the Biltmore. I think I told you. Some kind of char- ity function, I forget which. There was something about him I didn't like. I never quite put my finger on it." "I know what you mean." "Have you ever found yourself playing a game of chess with someone--even though at the time you thought you were only having a friendly chat about the weather?" "It was that way every time I trained him," I said. "I always got the feeling he was looking for an opening, prob- ing. I think it was almost a habit with him." "Do you think he found your weakness?" the Sheik asked, smiling. "Probably." "Have you ever thought about my offer at all?" he asked. "Not recently." The offer had been to get rid of all my other clients and become his personal assistant, duties to include some body- guarding, personal training, and whatever else came up. In any case, I had never taken him up on his job offer. I didn't like the idea of having only one big, rich boss. The money he offered me would shock you, so I won't even men- tion it, lest you think I'm nuts for turning it down. But look at it this way: You have multiple clients, you have multiple options. That means you can always tell at least one person who gets on your nerves to kiss your ass, without going bankrupt. Anyway, there's more to life than a great dental plan and a 401(k)--at least until you get old and your teeth start falling out. Later, after I got dressed again, Anwar walked with me 51

>   to my car. Neither of us said very much, but I could feel his concern. He had a depth of presence that came through most strongly in his silences. They were like the atmosphere inside an empty church. He was my age, and yet he seemed much older. Sometimes it seemed to me that I had known him forever. We shook hands in front of my ride. His dark eyes were solemn. I slapped him on the shoulder, hoping to bring on a lighter mood, but he wasn't buying it. "I'll see you when you get back," I said. "Tell your father I said hey." We embraced, and I got into the van with a completely different mood from the one I wanted. I wanted to be breezy, cavalier, but there was no changing the climate in Anwar's expression. He stood back listening as the engine of the Ford sputtered, then caught. "You should know when something is over, Jack," he said. "Sometimes it's dangerous to go back once the dance is done. Even if only five minutes have passed, it will not be the same." "Yes, I know," I said. "But what if the music is still play- ing?" "Then it will be a different music from the one you heard before." As I drove away, I glanced at the rearview mirror. The Sheik was standing there, watching, just as Williams had.

  N othing went right after that. The Ford died as I was going southbound on the Don Shula, and I had to push it off to the side of the road in the middle of a rainstorm that lasted just long enough to soak me to the bone. I used my cell phone to call Tamara, the German singer, to tell her that I wouldn't be making it that afternoon. Then, as I was call- ing for a tow truck, the battery in the phone died, too, and 52

  the spare in the van didn't work either. It was lucky for me that the rain had stopped, because I had to walk half a mile to the nearest call box. By the time the tow truck dropped me off in front of my friend's garage in Overtown, the afternoon, while still hot and bright, was all but gone, along with any hope of profit. And by the time the traffic started crawling the other way, I was sitting in the thrift-store clutter of the garage's office, sipping a cup of coffee and talking to Paul March, the owner, who sat across from me cleaning one of his guns. March liked to clean his guns at his desk so his custom- ers could see that he was a serious person. In the past he'd had trouble with some folks who wanted their cars back but couldn't afford to pay for the repairs. It was Paul's opinion that the timely appearance of a firearm in plain sight brought a new sense of reality to such negotiations and was worth a lot more than the sign on the wall that said no credit. "That car of yours needs a new transmission," he said. "Whoever sold it to you must have seen you coming." "I think his name was March." "Never heard of him." He had finished putting the gun back together and was reloading it. "Come on out back with me," March said. "I got something you might like." We went out to the lot behind the garage and walked toward a row of beaten-down-looking old cars parked near the fence. A tag team of Dobermans ran out from under a white truck and raced at me, their teeth bared, their small brains charged with inbred malice. Then they recognized Paul and started prancing around him as though he were a one-man party. Paul, who had the same manner with animals as he did with people, smiled and kicked the male in the ribs. The bitch sat on her haunches and looked bemused. Paul made a sweeping gesture with his arms, and the hellhounds slipped 53

  back under the truck, where they lay watching us from the shadows, the two of them as quiet as a pair of snipers. "What about this one?" Paul asked, patting the hood of a black 1977 Thunderbird with a bike rack bolted to the roof. "It's only got a hundred thousand miles on it," he said. "Was that before or after you turned back the odometer?" "After, of course. Hey, man, at least you can't say I'm a liar." "I like the bike rack," I said. "With this ride I'll probably need it." At that instant a rat sprinted out in front of us and ran behind some stacks of retreads outside a rusted corrugated shed. We both saw it at the same time. Paul frowned at me and, with a stern expression on his face, placed his left index finger vertically across his lips. "Time for safari," he whispered. "Be right back." Paul crept behind the row of dilapidated cars and disap- peared behind the shed, his gun barrel up and next to his ear. I was just thinking that I had to find a new mechanic when I heard the shot. The three men bent over the open hood of a car by the garage straightened up and looked in our direc- tion. They stared for a moment, then went back to work. All of them knew their boss very well. Paul came back a minute later. The gun was stuck into the waistband of his blue jumpsuit. From the look on his face, I knew that the safari had not been a success. "Did you get him?" I asked. "How the hell should I know?" he retorted. "You think I got the time to look for the body of a dead rat?" It was six o'clock when I drove my "new" black Thun- derbird out of March's lot, and I hadn't gone very far when I realized that, like the last car he'd sold me, this was one I probably wouldn't be driving for too much longer. They had cleaned it up and given it a shiny new paint job, but it was 54

  nothing except war paint on a steel hag. The engine coughed at every stoplight, and I had a pretty good idea that there was something wrong with the carburetor. By the time I got home, I was glad just to have made it. When I shut off the ignition, the car kept making noises for the next thirty sec- onds, like loose bolts in a steel bucket. I took a shower and drank a beer, then turned on the news and sat in my black recliner with my feet up, listening to the day's calamities and scandals, but if you had tested me on any of it ten minutes later, I wouldn't have been able to recall a single thing. After a while I got tired of the anchorman's handsome, self-assured expression and shut off the set. I was in a strange mood that is hard to describe, except to say it was as though there were a neon Vacant sign blinking over my heart like a permanent question I didn't have an answer for. Maybe I'd been living alone too long. Maybe it was time to get a cat. I thought of calling Barbara, my ex-wife, but she lived up in New York, and I couldn't afford very much long-distance. I liked to tell people that we were on good terms, except that it always sounded as though we'd had some kind of business relationship rather than a romance that had petered out like a flower that needed more watering than either of us could agree to. She was a stockbroker and I was a cop, and never the twain did meet, and even now, after five years, I had yet to figure out how it was that the longer we were together, the more like strangers we became. But I didn't call Barbara, and it wasn't just the long-dis- tance charges either. We were both too far gone from one an- other, and I didn't feel like hearing about the Dow Jones or about her new boyfriend, whoever he was this time around. There were times when she dropped hints to the effect that she wanted kids and I might still be in the running for sperm donor. It seemed that in that overheated Barnard brain of 55

  hers the baby clock had begun to go tick-tock, and I suppose it was to be taken as a compliment that she still thought I had good genes. But it was clear from the way she put it that what she had in mind was in no way to be mistaken for a possible reunion. I got the impression that her idea was for me to fly up, then make like the Lone Ranger, leaving behind a silver bullet. It was not the worst offer I'd ever gotten, yet there was a certain chill to it just the same that failed to move me. But maybe that was just me being old-fashioned again. I took off my shirt and lay on my bed and looked up at the ceiling fan for a while. That didn't help much either, though. An egg of an idea was trying to hatch itself in my brain, but it needed a little nudging along, so I got up, went over to my desk, opened the bottom drawer, and took out the last letter Vivian had sent me. I popped another beer and sat down at my table with its two undersize chairs and read it again for at least the hundredth time since she'd sent it to me. I knew it by heart--right down to the freaky line breaks, but I read it again anyway; it was like sipping from an empty glass. The letter was written in plain English, but as usual I went over it slowly, lingering on each word like a sun-dazed ar- chaeologist deciphering obscure hieroglyphics. She was right. I had backed down, or rather I had backed away, and it wasn't because Vivian hadn't been worth fighting for. I had fought harder for much less. At the time I had seen Matson's incursion as a test of loyalty on her part, and when all the signs made it clear that she had failed that test, I jett
isoned them both, girlfriend and client, in a flash of pride. To hell with the both of them, I'd thought. The part about the money was also true, though I had re- fused to think about it. America might be a classless society, but there was a hierarchy of cash that could be overlooked only until the first time the waiter handed you the wine list. 56

  The economics of the romance started dawning on me after the first couple of dates, when I began to realize that I was going to have to train half of Coral Gables in order to keep up with her. I came clean with her on the subject, and she laughed and said it didn't matter. But it does matter. And while her father treated me like an equal, most of her friends thought that she was slumming, that she would come around once the shine wore off my charm. My self-esteem had never been based on the gold stan- dard, but Fitzgerald was right: The rich are different. Their feet touch the ground only when they want them to, but mine were there all the time. In the culture of money, I was a definite outsider with little chance of conversion this side of winning the lottery. It was all right for a while, but I couldn't see the thing working for the long haul. I just didn't want to go through life feeling like one of Elizabeth Taylor's poorer husbands. Over the course of our affair, I gradually talked myself out of being in love with Vivian. I was like a man trying to rescue himself from a cult he had started. I told myself I was being realistic, noble, that I was doing her a favor, but I couldn't deny the hurt I saw in her eyes when she realized I was pull- ing away. I went from being too available to being too in- visible, and when she pressed me on it, I gave her that old bullshit answer that I was too busy. I knew exactly what I was doing, and when Matson came along, he became part of the exit strategy. Judging from my reaction in the bar that night, however, it had worked a lot better than I thought it would. And now Matson was dead, but nothing was finished. In fact, things seemed less finished now than when he was alive. If I closed my eyes, I could see the white yacht with its perilous cargo sitting quietly in the water as the sky dark- ened, the sun now far to the west and set on setting. Then something that had been trying to surface finally did, and 57