Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

The vertigo that had come on in the diner, along with the news about his mother, was back again, and as he moved about the living room he had to reach for things-a doorknob, a windowsill, the dusty furniture-to keep from falling or floating away. Eventually he fetched up beside the piano.

The photographs were still there, in their tarnished frames, and Carr stared at them while his head swam and his father snored gently. His father at the lake; his father in cap and gown; his mother in a garden, or at a party, or at a dance. He’d spent his life looking at these pictures, and now it was as if he’d never seen them before. The people behind the dirty glass were strangers to him, and what he thought he’d known about them was less than smoke.

Carr switched on a lamp and gazed at the photo of his father at the lake, and suddenly the small, pale face seemed to wear not a smirk, but a shy grin. And in the commencement picture, Arthur Carr’s smile didn’t look bitter-it looked nervous, but excited and even hopeful. Carr shook his head and picked up the photo of his mother.

The dark hair, blurred by movement, the luminous skin, the graceful neck and white teeth, the finger of smoke between lips that were just beginning to smile, or to speak to someone out of frame-he knew the pieces, but he couldn’t make them whole. Carr closed his eyes and tried in vain to retrieve another image of her, to hear the sound of her voice again, and the words she’d whispered as they peered from the windows, to feel her hand around his again. He breathed in deeply, straining to catch a trace of gardenias and tobacco, but found only the musty smells of his father’s house and of the humid night. An ache burrowed deep in his chest-deeper than bone-a wound where something had been excised badly, and with a dull blade. It was like losing her again. It was worse. His throat closed up and his eyes burned.

He looked up to see his father, watching him from the sofa.

“What are you doing?” Arthur Carr asked.

“Looking at pictures,” Carr whispered.

“What pictures?” Carr held up the photo in its frame. His father squinted at it. “I didn’t know that was up there.”

Carr rubbed his eyes. “Where’s it from?”

His father shrugged. “That picture? Someone’s wedding, I think. I don’t remember whose. It was before you were born.”

Carr cleared his throat. “You saved her. You said that you saved her from… from a full-blown investigation.”

“That’s what I said.”

“But you didn’t say why-why you did it. After everything she did-all those years-why did you protect her?”

Arthur Carr shook his head. “Why did I… She was my wife, for chrissakes-your mother. What was I supposed to do? I wasn’t going to let them…” He shook his head some more, and then he sighed and closed his eyes. “I told you-don’t be thick.”

Sitting in the hotel parking lot, Carr reaches for his wallet. The photographs are inside, creased and antique-looking alongside Gregory Frye’s fabricated identifications. His father by the lake and at commencement, his mother at some forgotten wedding. They are part of a narrative-the story of his parents, his father the embittered bully, his mother the brave, long-suffering victim-that is undone now: unraveled and debunked, like Santa or the Tooth Fairy, but even more ridiculous. Carr lays the pictures on the dashboard, smooths them out, and looks at them for a while. Then he folds them up again and tucks them away with the rest of his false papers.

Despite the sun and the honeyed breeze, Carr’s fingers are cold and white. His elbows are stiff and his legs heavy, and when he moves them they feel clumsy. His chest is too small for his lungs, and too brittle for his hammering heart. It’s fear, he knows, and adrenaline. He takes a slow breath in and lets it slowly out again, then shifts the champagne flute to his other hand. He flexes his fingers until the blood comes back, and he watches Curtis Prager grab a waiter by the arm.

Prager points at the carpaccio on the silver platter. “That’s wagyu beef,” Prager tells a banker from Panama City, “and what those bastards in Miami charge for it makes me think we’re in the wrong business. Clearly, the real margins are in cows.” The Panama City banker laughs as if it’s funny, and so does everyone else within earshot, and Prager moves on through his guests. Carr hangs back, pretends to sip his champagne, and looks at the crowd.

It’s an off-season party-not as large, Carr knows, as some of Isla Privada’s charity events, but still a good-size turnout of local dignitaries, favor-seekers, would-be business associates, and other sycophants. It’s a handsome crowd too, expensively dressed in regatta casual: the men in variations of Prager’s outfit-white ducks, linen blazer, and deck shoes-the women in gossamer, bare arms, and sandals with intricate straps. Like birds, Carr thinks, all plumage and bright chirping. All appetite too. They flock around the white-jacketed waiters as they emerge from the caterer’s base camp in the guesthouse, swooping on trays of sushi, sashimi, oysters, and high-margin carpaccio.

Except for its lawns and patios and first-floor bathrooms, the main house isn’t open to unescorted guests, so the crowd has flowed mostly to the beach. Carr is at the east end of the beach, near the boathouse pier, leaning against the red Zodiac that has been pulled up on the sand. He watches as his host makes his way slowly, convivially, westward. Handshake, peck, nod, chuckle. Shoulder squeeze, smile, nod, move on. There’s a quartet set up on the guesthouse patio. They’re laboring over a samba, and it seems to Carr that Prager has matched his movements to their rhythms. Peck, nod, chuckle.

Kathy Rink prowls in Prager’s wake, like a pilot fish in an orange muumuu. Her eyes scan restlessly over guests and staff, her head pivots left and right, and her cell phone is constantly at her ear. Carr can understand Kathy Rink’s nerves: this is the first of Prager’s periodic soirees to take place on her watch. She wants it to be a smooth afternoon, as seamless and unblemished as the breezy blue sky. Carr allows himself a tiny smile and hopes it will be the worst day of her life.

He takes another pretend sip and scans the crowd for Howard Bessemer. He spots him at a bar set up in the shade of a palm. His jacket is hung over his arm, and he’s laughing at something a heavyset redhead has said. Given the sweating and fretting of the morning, Carr thinks he looks improbably relaxed.

“I don’t feel like going to a party,” Bessemer had whined from beneath his blankets. “I feel clammy. I think I’m coming down with something.”

“That’s a hangover, Howie,” Carr called to him. “Have some coffee, and it’ll go away.”

“I don’t see why I have to go anyway. What do you expect me to do there?”

“I expect you to eat and drink, and when I tell you, to ask Prager to do that favor.”

“But I don’t feel-”

“You do it, Howie, and we’re headed home tonight.”

Bessemer leans against the bar and laughs some more. Carr shakes his head and checks his watch. He checks the empty ocean north, and the jagged peninsula to the west. He can’t see them, but he knows Bobby and Mike are out there now, beyond the rocks. They’ll call when they’re ready, and then they’ll wait for his say-so. He checks his watch again. Time to lift the latch.

Champagne flute in hand, Carr crosses the beach and climbs one of the stone stairways. He cuts across the croquet lawn toward a fieldstone patio and the main house. His heart pounds harder as he walks, and his legs are reluctant. He passes two women headed for the beach. They smile at him and giggle as they teeter by. The taller one reminds him of Valerie, though she’s not as arresting, and for a moment he wonders where Valerie is and what she’s doing and if he’ll see her tonight. He touches his ear, but there’s no earpiece there, no whispering voice, no breath that he can almost feel. Then his mind comes back as he approaches a pair of glass doors. Laughter, music, the chatter of the crowd, all fade behind him. He takes a deep breath and doesn’t look at the camera mounted above. He pulls at a handle and hears Declan’s brogue in his head. Nothin’ like a house in the dark, lad. Nothing like one in broad daylight, either, and filled with security guards.