Сэм Истлэнд - The Elegant Lie

‘I think they’re trying to get me killed,’ said Carter.

His father shrugged. ‘The work we’re in, it seems like they are always doing that. “Was”, I should say.’ With a gurgling cough, he cleared his throat. ‘The work that I used to be in.’

Before Carter left, he strolled with his father down to the boardwalk. It took a long time, since his father often had to stop and catch his breath, hand resting on the dappled bark of the sycamore trees. On the boardwalk, they sat on a bench and looked out over the ocean. The beach, which in summer would be almost too crowded to see the sand, was almost empty now, except for a few people walking their dogs and some fishermen casting for striped bass.

For a while, they just sat there in silence.

It was his father who spoke first. ‘You know why I picked you for undercover work?’

‘You told me you thought I’d be good at it.’

‘But do you know why I thought that?’

He had never asked his father, not because he wasn’t curious but because it seemed like the kind of question his father wouldn’t have wanted to answer.

‘We’re all part of one tribe or another,’ said his father, ‘and, for a lot of people, everything they think and say and do depends on fitting in with the tribe. They’re terrified of getting out of line. Their whole sense of who they are depends on staying in the ranks. They’ll do anything for that, suffer any indignity, betray their closest friends, whatever it takes to belong. But not everybody in the tribe is like that. Some of them know who they are without having to be told. People like that can survive on their own if they want to. And I always knew you could do that. It’s why I knew you could handle undercover work, but I didn’t think enough about the price you’d have to pay.’

It unnerved Carter to hear his father talking this way. He never spoke in these terms. Anything beneath the surface of emotions was taboo. ‘What price is that?’ he asked.

‘By the time I was your age, I’d already been married for a while. We already had you, for Christ’s sake! I had a normal life, as normal as it could have been until your mother died. I just don’t know how you are ever going to have that.’

This, too, came as a shock. His father almost never spoke of her. She had died when Carter was six and these days he had trouble recalling what her voice sounded like, or the precise colour of her hair, or the smell of her; a mixture of coal tar soap, perfume and freshly folded laundry, which had lingered in the house for a while after she was gone. Sometimes, just before he fell asleep, she would appear suddenly in his thoughts. In those moments he would see her again as a whole person, but if he tried to focus on her, she would vanish and he would be left to assemble her from the jumble of remembered senses, like a bucket full of broken glass spilled out inside his brain.

His father looked across and smiled, then reached out an arm and gently patted his son on the back. ‘I was thinking I owed you an apology, for getting you into this line of work.’

‘Are you saying I should quit?’ asked Carter.

The old man shook his head. ‘You don’t quit the job. The job quits you when you’ve got nothing left to give. I’m not talking about the years you spend punching the clock. I mean in here.’ He tapped one finger against his temple. ‘How deep it gets inside your head. And when you finally make peace with all the things you did and didn’t do, what’s left is only fit for sitting on a bench and staring out to sea. Unless.’

‘Unless what?’ asked Carter.

‘Unless you find that precise moment in time when you can leave on your own terms, before you’re broken, inside and outside.’ His father stared at him hard, as if to show his words meant more than he was saying. ‘And when that moment arrives, you cannot hesitate.’

‘How would I recognise it?’ asked Carter.

‘When the time comes, you will know.’

‘Have you ever seen it done?’

His father breathed out. ‘No,’ he answered, ‘but I sure wish I could have given it a try.’

‘I guess I’ll keep a look out,’ said Carter.

‘Until then,’ said the old man, ‘just stick to the third rule.’

He did not need to explain what that meant. In that moment, the old man had switched from talking as father to son and was now speaking as one policeman to another. In addition to the duties of protection and service, there was a third, unspoken, unofficial rule: survival. This was not as straightforward as it seemed. To put oneself in harm’s way was a part of the job, and anyone who did not have the instinctive ability to do that needed to find another line of work. The third rule meant knowing the difference between willingly going into harm’s way and being put there by the ill-considered orders of someone who had not grasped the danger of the situation. There was sometimes a very fine line between those two things, but life itself could depend on knowing when that line was crossed.

The old man had turned his gaze towards some distant point on the horizon. Now he raised one arm and pointed out to sea. ‘I heard that German submarines come up at night, not half a mile from shore, just so they can see the lights of the Ferris wheel in Asbury Park.’

‘Why would they do that?’ asked Carter.

‘Maybe it helps them remember what their country used to look like before they got it in their heads to rule the world.’

Two days later, Carter showed up at his new office on Cranston Street. There, in the middle of a space that had once been the salesroom of a fish wholesaler, he found a man standing with his hands on his hips and a gun in a shoulder holster tucked under his left armpit.

‘You must be Nathan Carter,’ said the man. He was short and bald, with a head like a battering ram and a massive barrel chest. His name was Salvatore Palladino and he explained that, until the war had brought him back out of retirement, he had spent twenty-five years as a uniformed police officer.

‘I didn’t know they were sending me a partner,’ said Carter.

‘You used to work undercover, didn’t you?’

‘I did.’

‘Well, you’re in broad daylight now, son, and this is no place to find yourself alone.’

Once Carter had got over the surprise of working with a partner, he and Palladino quickly settled down to the business of tracking stolen shipments of fuel, as well as uncovering false-bottomed fuel tanks where hundreds of gallons could be secreted away.

At first, Carter had worried constantly that he would be spotted by one of the longshoremen with whom he had worked in his days as an undercover detective. He took the same precautions as he had done when he was working undercover, renting out three different rooms in town and never sleeping at the same one more than three nights in a row. Other times, he slept on a canvas cot in the office, a loaded pistol lying on the floor beside him. He took most of his meals at a little diner called Pavel’s. It was wedged between a laundry and a cobbler’s down on 12th Street, only a short walk from the docks. Pavel, an old Russian with watery blue eyes whose wrinkled forehead made him look as if he were always just about to sneeze, made pastrami and sauerkraut sandwiches, matzo ball soup and gravlax salmon marinated in lemon juice, pepper and dill, which he sliced paper-thin and served on pumpernickel bread.

As time passed, Carter slowly began to relax. His new work rarely brought him into direct contact with the longshoremen. This, combined with the shifting nature of the crews, many of whom had been drafted or enlisted, and others who were constantly being shuttled around to different dock sites, allowed him to avoid being recognised.

They made very few actual arrests, since those whose task it had been to transport the stolen fuel usually bolted, leaving both trucks and fuel behind. It was Palladino who taught Carter not to bother chasing down the runners.