Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

“That doesn’t mean-”

“Dennis dug up a copy of the school’s student directory for their last year. The two of them lived at the same address off-campus. The same apartment number.”

“And you think Chun still has a thing for her?”

“She visits Lessig’s Facebook page every night, and the Radclyffe Hall Bread Company’s website too-the pages with Lessig’s pictures on them. Ditto the websites of the Piedmont Amateur Strings and the Shattuck Quartet. And it’s not like these pages change very much. She even cruises the website of the private school Lessig’s kids go to. It’s got a picture of Lessig on it, from when she came in for career day. On top of which, Amy Googles Lessig a couple of times a week. I don’t know how else to read all that.”

“Is Chun in touch with her?”

“Not that I can tell. No e-mail to or from Lessig-and Amy saves her e-mail since like the beginning of time. She never posts anything on Lessig’s Facebook page. Dennis found her Christmas card list on the laptop, and Lessig wasn’t on it.”

“Okay, Chun is still carrying a torch for Lessig. What do you do with that?”

“Use it to fine-tune Jill. So now she has red highlights in her hair, and her clothes are a little more crunchy-granola. Now she cooks, and wants to start a catering business. And she sings, and someday she wants to have kids.”

“You cook and sing?”

“I do a lot of things.”

Sitting in his darkened living room, looking at a distant light on the black ocean, Carr had swallowed hard. “What about Jill’s backstory?” he asked eventually.

“The same,” Valerie said. “She’s still been through the wringer; she’s still looking to change her life.”

Carr shifts in the front seat and watches them. Her walk is new, he thinks-a bit less assertive, a bit more coltish-and her accessories are different too: dangly earrings, a looped necklace of colored glass beads, a row of thin gold bracelets. And there are tattoos now: a complicated henna braid around her right biceps and a narrower one around her left ankle. Carr slouches lower as they pass.

There are other people in the park: other couples, off-season tourist families, people walking dogs, but it is Jill and Amy who draw the eye. It’s more than beauty, Carr thinks. Something about their attraction to each other, the simmering anticipation, the wisps of steam before a full boil. It’s in the air between them, like a magnetic field-invisible, but palpable nonetheless.

Carr hears faint, intermittent music-a bossa nova spilling from one of the stores when its automatic doors slide open. It’s a familiar tune but the door slides shut before he can place it. He watches the women and struggles to recall the tune, and he’s taken suddenly by an aching loneliness-like the last student left at school at the start of a long holiday. The door opens, closes, opens again. The music seeps out, and Carr has it: Jobim playing “Lamento,” and he hears another version of that song.

An infinitely worse version, the one he remembers-the scraping of a quintet that didn’t know half the notes, and didn’t care much for the rest. They were playing in a beachfront bar, and he and Declan were there with several bottles between them. They were two days gone from Bogota, and the crew was $5.7 million richer for it-the take from the first job that Carr had planned end to end. Carr felt like he’d just graduated from something, and Declan-creased and unshaven-was beaming. The sky was six shades of violet and the first stars were lit, and all was right with the world.

Declan lifted a glass. “Brilliant, lad-feckin’ brilliant. They never saw us-never even dreamed of us.” He’d said it before, but Carr didn’t mind the repetition. He lifted his glass in return.

Declan laughed. “Those spreadsheets at Langley didn’t know what they had, did they? Couldn’t recognize a natural right there in their midst.”

Carr never liked this subject, and he shrugged and looked away. “A natural what?”

“A natural spy, lad-a fella bred for the secret life.”

“They would’ve disagreed with you.”

Declan shook his head disgustedly. “What the hell did they know? I’ve run across my share of company men, and they’re about as subtle as a dog humpin’ yer leg. They think it’s all about sales, fer chrissakes-that if you can charm Granny into buying an estate car, you can nick war plans from the North Koreans. Was that it, lad-you weren’t enough of a salesman for ’em?”

Carr shrugged again. “They don’t explain much.”

“They must’ve said something.”

“They didn’t think I had the temperament for it. They said I had a problem with authority.”

Declan smiled broadly. “And who doesn’t that’s worth a goddamn?” he said, and raised his glass in a toast. “And that was all? That was enough to shitcan you?”

Carr took a long pull on his drink. “They didn’t think I’d be good with agents.”

Declan squinted-indignant on his behalf-and refilled his glass. “What the hell does that mean?”

“They didn’t think I’d be good at running them. They thought I had a tendency to see what I wanted to see and hear what I wanted to hear, and that when time came to squeeze them hard, or burn them, I wouldn’t have the stomach for it. Overly invested they called it.”

“Sounds like feckin’ psychobabble to me.”

“They were big on that,” Carr said.

“Well, fuck ’em, I say! Big outfits like that, they don’t appreciate the solitary man. Don’t understand him. A fellow like yerself makes ’em nervous. You don’t fit their molds-so they don’t know what moves you, what levers to pull.”

Carr filled his own glass, and Declan’s too. “But you’ve got that figured out, have you?”

Declan drank and nodded. “To lead men, you must know what they love.”

Carr laughed. “And that would be what?”

“For you, solitary Carr, I’d say it’s being a ghost. You love drifting through the drab workaday mess-all the tinkers and tailors and doctors and bankers; you love watching their monkeyshines without actually being a part of ’em. You’re in it, but you’re not-not really. You’re like a feckin’ specter.”

Carr hid his surprise behind another drink, and slid the bottle to his side of the table. “Now who’s into the fucking psychobabble? You’re hammered.”

“It doesn’t mean I’m wrong. You love flying above it all, looking down like yer on an airplane, or yer floating over a reef, watching the wee fishes. That was the appeal of Integral Risk, wasn’t it-your clients, their lives, the things they got up to-it was like an aquarium, and you on the other side of the glass.”

Carr looked at him for a while and nodded slowly. “Tell me you don’t like that aspect of it-being apart from things.”

“How else could I recognize it in you? ’Course I like it-I’m a solitary too, at heart, so I know the appeal. You feel invulnerable, somehow-you’ve no connections, no dependents, no hostages to be taken. Nobody can lay a finger on you, ’Cause yer just not there. It’s better than bulletproof. But some advice from an aged bastard: you want to watch you don’t get overly fond of it. You step out of the flesh and blood world long enough, it’s hard to step back in.”

Carr held the bottle up, saw the moon turn amber in it. “That assumes you ever lived there in the first place.”

Declan laughed. “Ah, Carr, save yer tragic tale for the ladies, and pass me that feckin’ bottle.”

Sweat rolls down Carr’s ribs, and his head is bobbing in the heat. He shakes off sleep and memory, and gets out of his car. Jill and Amy are a block and a half away now, and he follows them down the arcade. They’re window-shopping-clothing, handbags, shoes, more jewelry-pointing, laughing. They pause outside a furniture store, and again at a real estate office.