Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

“No.”

“Why not? Why didn’t the Agency come after her? Why didn’t they prosecute? Put her in jail? Jesus Christ-why did they ever let me in the door?”

“The counterespionage people wanted to come after her. They were embarrassed and angry, and they wanted a full investigation and someone they could burn at the stake.”

“What stopped them?”

Arthur Carr stretches his legs in front of him. He massages his right knee. “I did,” he says softly. “I vouched for her. I pulled what strings I had left at State. Finally I threatened to go public if they didn’t let her be. It wound up costing me every chit I’d ever collected over twenty-plus years, and my pension too, but eventually they decided to call it incompetence rather than treason. So that’s how the record reads.” He flexes his knee and looks up at his son. “The only thing the Agency hates worse than being embarrassed by the opposition is being embarrassed by them in public. You’d think they’d be used to it by now.”

Carr watches him rub his bony thighs and flex his aching fingers. He looks thin and brittle-like a leaf the wind might carry off. Another truck passes, another dust cloud settles. The crow returns and curses at them.

It is six a.m., and Carr is in Terminal A at Logan, waiting for his Miami flight, still waiting for the spinning to stop. He’s at the gate, watching but not following the highlights of a baseball game on the wall-mounted TV, when someone steps into his view. She’s wearing a black dress and dark glasses, and her bare arms are paper white. Her lips barely move when she speaks, and her voice is flat.

“He wants to talk to you,” Tina says. “He wants to know if there’s some reason you don’t answer your phone.” She takes off her glasses and makes a tiny flick of her eyes. Carr looks over her shoulder, down the long row of gates. Even at a distance, Mr. Boyce looms like a cliff.

They’ve gone over it once. They’ve gone over it twice. Now, as darkness settles on the workhouse and wind sweeps through the palms in the front yard and bumps the boats against the metal dock out back, they go over it a sixth time. Carr makes Bobby walk it through: the sequence, the timing, the signals, the routes in and out, the alternate routes, the rendezvous, the alternate rendezvous, and the contingency plans-meager though they are.

“And the minimum window is?” Carr asks when Bobby pauses.

“Five minutes. Five fucking minutes. How many times do I have to repeat it?”

“No less than five between the opening and the finale. Longer if you’ve got a receptive audience, but no less than five.”

Latin Mike snorts from the sofa. “You don’t know how many guys they’re gonna have in the house, for chrissakes. You don’t know if this is gonna distract them.”

Carr answers without looking at him. “Loud noises get attention.” Mike snorts again, and Carr ignores him. He turns to Dennis. “What’s the weather forecast?” he asks.

Dennis is pale and skittish behind his laptop. He glances at the screen. “Mostly sunny and breezy tomorrow, with heavy surf from the storm. Weather service says it should hold off until after ten tomorrow night, and even then we should only get the edge of it.”

“They downgraded it?” Carr asks.

Dennis nods. “Tropical storm Cara now.”

“Is it gonna fuck things up at the airport?” Bobby asks.

“We get out before ten we should be okay,” Dennis says.

“So let’s get out before ten,” Mike says, lighting a cigarette.

“That’s the plan,” Carr says. Mike snorts again. Carr looks at Bobby. “The surf’s going to be rough. You okay with that?”

“We’re good.”

“Good,” Carr says. “Let’s go over it again.”

It’s eleven when they stop. Dennis buries his head in a computer. Mike grabs a whiskey bottle, plugs a cigarette into his mouth, and goes outside.

Bobby stretches and yawns. “Howie still sober?” he asks Carr.

“He was when I left him this afternoon. You were good with him.”

Bobby shrugs. “Babysitting gave me something to do. He was jumpy without you.”

Carr rubs his grit-filled eyes. “Nice to feel wanted.”

Bobby looks at him, laughs ruefully, and shakes his head. “Fuckin’ Carr,” he mutters.

Mike is sitting on the front steps, drinking from the bottle, blowing smoke, looking at the sky. Carr walks around him.

“Guess you’ve given up tryin’ to be like Deke,” Mike says. “No pregame party tonight, right? So I got to make my own.”

“Make it a small one. It’s an early day tomorrow.”

“I’ll try to fit you in-unless something else comes up. Maybe I got to get my teeth cleaned or something.”

“Give it a rest, Mike. I was gone for, what, a few hours?”

“It was more than a day.”

“And now I’m back, so spare me.”

Mike is fast-up and at Carr almost before the whiskey bottle hits the dirt. One hand goes to Carr’s neck, his thumb in the hollow of Carr’s throat. The other hand holds a knife. “If I didn’t need you whole, pendejo, you wouldn’t be,” he says. “?Esta claro? ”

“Very clear,” Carr says quietly. “You feel better now that you got that off your chest?”

Bobby calls from the steps. “It’s nice you boys are so glad to see each other.”

“Piss off, cabron,” Mike says, but there’s not much to it. He doesn’t resist when Bobby hooks his arm and hauls him away.

“You know the world is fucked when I’m the voice of reason,” Bobby says, turning Mike toward the house, “but maybe we should all just keep our minds on the job and save the rest of the bullshit for later.”

It was, Carr thinks, driving back to his hotel, the same advice Mr. Boyce had given him in Boston.

Tina had stayed at the gate while Carr followed Boyce into the first-class lounge. It was empty, the attendants conveniently on a break. Carr was too tired to speculate on the coincidence. Even off the golf course Boyce was dressed in black, and he seemed much larger.

“Family,” Boyce said, as he settled into an armchair. “What are you going to do with them?” Carr had no answer, and Mr. Boyce shook his head. “But that’s no excuse. Pros don’t make excuses. You have problems, I have problems-everyone has problems. But so what? You do your job, and then you deal with your problems. Get it the other way around, and you’re no good to anyone. You want to look after your father, you’ll keep your goddamn head in the game.”

Boyce’s words and rumbling voice had filled the room, and Carr had nodded in the right places. He kept nodding later, back at the gate, where Tina had reported in a low voice that Kathy Rink had called her man in Singapore.

“She was on the line for nearly an hour, listening to him talk about Greg Frye. Our guy thinks she went away satisfied.”

Carr nodded. Tina had looked at him and hadn’t liked what she’d seen. Before she left, she’d gripped him hard by the arm. “You better get a coffee or a searchlight or something, and get your head out of whatever fog bank it’s in. You go sleepwalking into Prager’s place, you won’t walk out again.”

Even now he can feel her fingers on his wrist.

Carr pulls through the gates of his hotel, and into a parking space. He shuts off the engine and sits in the dark and silence.

You want to look after your father? Look after him-it turned out he didn’t even know him, didn’t know either of them, and never had. All that watching and you never saw anything. What was it he had seen for all those years? What he’d wanted to see? What he’d needed to see?

Carr had driven back to Stockbridge on autopilot, and Arthur Carr had dozed the whole way. Carr helped him up the porch steps; he weighed no more than a handful of straw. His father stretched his legs on the sofa as soon as they got inside and closed his eyes, and Carr had walked around the room. Though maybe walked wasn’t quite right. Wandered might be closer; staggered closer still.