Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

“I don’t know. Bertolli might’ve gotten wind of something.”

Valerie shakes her head. “Are you for real with this? What was Bertolli going to get wind of? The only guy as insane about operational security as you are was Declan. You really think he got sloppy with that?”

“Maybe somebody got sloppy for him.”

“You’re not serious with this paranoid shit, are you? You think Bobby or Mike dimed him out? Or maybe you think it was me?” She slides her palm up his arm, over his shoulder, to his neck. The smell of honeysuckle is strong. Her voice softens. “Guilt does that, you know-it makes you paranoid. You feel bad, you feel responsible, so you feel like there’s a bill coming due. Then you’re looking over your shoulder every other minute, waiting for it to arrive. Paranoid.”

Carr rolls away from her, out of bed, and goes into the bathroom. He turns the water tap, drinks from a cupped hand, and looks in the mirror. The angular face, the cropped black hair, disheveled now, his mother’s hazel eyes, smudged with fatigue, the wiry frame, the white sketch marks of scars here and there, are somehow unfamiliar to him-pieces he can’t assemble into a working whole. He stands in the bathroom doorway. Valerie is sitting cross-legged, the sheet down around her waist.

“Our being down there wouldn’t have changed anything,” she says, “except maybe we’d be dead on the side of a road too. So we were someplace else-so what?”

“I know where we were,” Carr says, his voice rising suddenly above the drone of the air conditioner. “I know what we were doing.”

Valerie laughs, and there’s a note of satisfaction in it-a long-held theory finally confirmed. Jill’s twang reappears in her voice. “So you feel bad about that too-that we were in St. Barts, fucking, while it was going on. You sure you weren’t raised Catholic, or maybe Jewish? ’Cause, baby boy, you got the guilt down cold.”

“You and Bobby can talk it out in your next session. Compare notes.”

“That might be deep water for Bobby,” Valerie says, and throws off her sheet. She pushes past Carr into the bathroom and runs the shower.

Carr watches as she steps in-the muscles in her back, her brown ass, her skin flawless but for the ragged-edged dime on her scapula. “Why the hell are you talking to Bobby about this anyway?” he says.

Valerie works her fingers through her water-darkened hair. “I thought you wanted me to-that you wanted my help with these guys. To take their temperature-make sure their heads were on right. I thought we both wanted this job over and done with, and done right. Then, if you want, we can work out that guilt and whatever other little bugs are crawling around your head. We could have ourselves some fun afterward.”

Valerie builds a creamy lather on her arms and breasts and belly. She beckons to Carr, and through the scrim of water and curling steam her smile is bright.

The sky above the hotel parking lot is gray, and it’s heavy with car exhaust and the metal heat of the fading day. An erratic breeze sends a paper cup back and forth across a patch of cracked cement. Sitting in the Saturn, Carr is similarly restless. He doesn’t know why he started talking to Valerie about what happened in Mendoza, or why he stopped. Maybe he was fishing for something-for her to tell him to forget his suspicions, call them paranoid shit, and remind him to keep his mind on the job. He thinks about the game she tried to play-retirement geography, and all those stories of afterward. He hears his own voice- I haven’t given much thought to afterward -and wonders if maybe he should.

Certainly, afterward is easier for him to think about. Easier than thinking about how Bertolli’s men came to be waiting for Deke in the dead of night. Or why Bobby always tells the story just the same way. Easier than dealing with Mike’s snide comments and hostile silences. Or finding a useful handle on Howard Bessemer. Or thinking about Valerie and Amy Chun. Easier by far than thinking about his father, and the tar pit of brochures, applications, and FAQ pages Carr has drowned in every night for nearly three weeks. Assisted living facilities, nursing homes, dementia units-the nomenclature sticks to his arms and legs, and fills his ears with static. Eleanor Calvin has left messages-six, eight, Carr has lost count-but he hasn’t returned a one.

So afterward. The problem is, Carr doesn’t know much about afterward -with Valerie, or with anyone else.

His relationships with women haven’t lasted long-a few weeks, a month or two-no longer than the gaps between his jobs with Declan. But there was a sameness to them all, a sense of melancholy that suffused them from the start-the feel of a beach in midwinter.

The women themselves were not much alike, not at first glance anyway. Hannah was from Seattle, a filmmaker shooting a documentary on the Costa Rican rainforests and staying in the same hotel as Carr, in Puerto Viejo. Ann was from Zurich, a geologist with ABB, analyzing core samples taken off the Belize coast and drinking at night in a bar in San Pedro that Carr also favored. Brooke was a UNICEF pediatrician from Toronto, on vacation in Antigua between a stint in Haiti and a posting in Phnom Penh, and she and Carr dove the same reefs.

The list went on-different ages, different nationalities, different professions and appearances, but still, a sameness. They were all nominally married, but they were solitaries by nature-self-sufficient, emotionally reticent, even prickly. They were all obsessive about their jobs, and chronically exhausted by them. And they all possessed a certain brand of low-key intellectual charisma-a smart-girl glamour-that pulled at Carr like the moon pulled the seas.

The other thing they had in common, of course, was Carr himself. He understood something of his own appeal. Yes, he was attractive enough, enthusiastic and inventive enough, articulate and reasonably amusing when he had something to say, and smart enough to keep quiet otherwise. But his main draws, he knew, lay elsewhere. He was convenient. He was unburdened by backstory. And he was, without question, impermanent. It made him the perfect time-out from the rest of their lives-ephemeral, essentially anonymous, as disposable as the aliases they knew him by. And it left Carr entirely ignorant of afterward.

His thoughts find no forward traction with Valerie, and inevitably they slide back, to St. Barts. The vast, glassy plain of Flamands Bay, the crescent of bone-white sand, the white umbrellas, like a line of portly nuns, and their rooms overlooking it all. Their rooms that they never left. All that time working together, and St. Barts was their first time. And there, amid the ravaged bedding and the ruins of room service trays, was the first time it occurred to Carr that perhaps things didn’t have to be quite so temporary.

Then the calls came in. The first was at five a.m., local time. Bobby’s voice was low and flat and affectless, difficult for Carr to understand. It wasn’t until after he’d hung up that Carr realized Bobby was in shock. The next calls, hours later, were from Mike, and they were confused and angry and scared. By then Carr had packed his bag and arranged his transit to B.A.

The heat has put him nearly to sleep, but there’s movement across the lot, a flash of orange and short blond hair, and Carr wakes himself. He sees Valerie get into her Audi and drive off. He counts off thirty seconds and starts up the Saturn.

She takes Military Trail south and Palmetto Park east, to a stretch of stores and low apartment buildings. Valerie’s building is glass and concrete, and as generic as she described. She pulls into the residents’ lot, and Carr parks across the street. He doesn’t see her enter, but in a while he sees a row of lights in some third-floor windows, and a slender orange figure crossing a room. In another minute he sees Valerie on a balcony, a glass in her hand, her face turned east, looking perhaps at a slice of the Intracoastal.