Peter Spiegelman - Thick as Thieves

“Want with who?”

“Don’t screw with me, asshole. You’re fucking bird-dogging her, and I want to know why.”

The gun was a little S amp;W, and Carr didn’t like the way it jumped around in the otter’s hand. “You mean the redhead? Take a look at her, brother-what do you think I’m interested in?”

The otter almost spit. “Right-that’s why you duke the desk guy a hundred bucks to see all those registration cards.”

Carr nodded slowly. She’d set up trip wires. She’d had someone watching her back. Carr was impressed, even if her guard dog was a lightweight. She’d known someone was trailing her and still she hadn’t broken stride. Carr took a half-step closer. The otter didn’t notice. “I wondered what she saw in those geeks,” he said. “A girl like that-I couldn’t figure it. I still can’t.”

The otter swallowed hard. “Bullshit. What are you-NSI security? Something private?”

Carr took another step forward and put a quaver in his voice and a frightened look on his face. “Seriously, I’m not anybody,” he said, and he raised his hands in the air. “I’m just here on vacation from-”

Carr jabbed his thumb into the otter’s throat, then into his eye, and then he took the otter’s gun. The man gagged and put his hands to his face. Carr pushed him backward into a chair. He tried to get up and Carr pushed him down harder and flipped him over. The otter had a wallet in his hip pocket and Carr took it, and slapped the back of his head when he tried to resist.

According to his driver’s license, his name was Kenneth Kern, from Van Nuys, California, and according to his business card, he was a partner and senior investigator with Victory Security Services, Inc. Carr tossed the wallet at Kern’s feet.

“I don’t work for NSI,” Carr said. “And I could give a shit what you guys are up to. I just want five minutes of her time-a quick chat, and nothing else.” He emptied the S amp;W while he spoke, and put the bullets in his pocket. Then he popped the cylinder out of the gun and tossed what was left into Kern’s lap. He held up the cylinder. “She comes to see me, I’ll give this back.”

She showed up around midnight, wearing a gray linen shift and an expression of impatience and disdain. She looked years older than she had poolside, and even ignoring the little automatic in her hand, she was about as seductive as the taxman.

Valerie’s voice was flat and without accent. “Your five minutes started fifteen seconds ago, so if you’ve got a pitch, make it now.”

Carr handed her the S amp;W cylinder. “I promised your boss I’d give this back.”

She snorted. “Kenny’s barely the boss of his shoelaces,” she said, and dropped the cylinder into her purse. She looked at her watch again.

Carr nodded and said his piece. Two days later, after she’d e-mailed the specs for NSI’s next mobile phone chip to her client in Shanghai and shorted a thousand shares of NSI stock, Valerie arrived for lunch in Chamela. Her expression was wary when Carr greeted her at the door of his casita, and warmed only slightly when Declan offered her a drink.

His phone is jittering on the bedside table, and Valerie is shaking his arm. Carr wipes a hand across his face and gropes for the light. Seven people have his number: the three men he was at dinner with hours earlier; the woman he’s in bed with now; Mr. Boyce, who rarely calls; Declan, who’s dead; and Eleanor Calvin. The caller ID shows a 413 area code, and Carr calculates the time in Stockbridge-five twenty in the morning. He takes the phone into the bathroom, turns on the light, and shuts the door on Valerie’s curious gaze. He runs water in the sink, and when he speaks his voice is thick and distant.

“Mrs. Calvin, what’s the matter?”

She’s seventy, about the shape and size of a hockey stick, but despite the early hour her voice is blue jay bright. “It’s not a good night for him, dear. He’s been walking the floor for hours, and now he’s calling for you.”

“Calling me for what, Mrs. Calvin?”

“You know how hard he can be to follow. He’s talking about your summer break, and a job-an internship, I think-at the State Department. I’m missing part of it, I’m sure, but I think he’s angry because you’re supposed to call someone about it, but you haven’t.”

The light in the bathroom is harsh and broken, the surfaces too shiny, and it all feels like sand in his eyes. In the mirror, his features are pale and smudged-a lost boy look, Valerie would say. Emphasis on the lost, Carr thinks, and for an instant Declan’s voice flashes in his head: Neither sober nor quite drunk enough.

“That was a dozen years ago, Mrs. Calvin.”

“It’s not a good night for him.”

“Would it help if I spoke to him?”

“It would help if you came for a visit.”

“Soon, Mrs. Calvin. Did you tell him I’ll be back there soon?”

“I did, dear, but honestly I’m not sure the ambassador knows who I am right now.”

Carr lets out a long breath. “He wasn’t an ambassador, Mrs. Calvin.”

“Of course not, dear. Now wait just a minute and I’ll get your father.”

It is raining in the Berkshires, a warm patter from a low sky. The waxy leaves shudder, branches bow under the gray weight of water and humid air, and the odors of damp wood, moldering paper, and rodent piss rise from the clapboards and curling shingles of his father’s house. Carr stands on the front porch and feels the old lassitude creep over him like a fog. It’s been years since he’s spent more than a night or two in the sagging Victorian pile, but its musty gravity is insistent.

The reek of long neglect and decay is the perfume of Carr’s adolescence-of the year he spent here with his father and mother following their abrupt, chaotic decampment from Mexico City, and of the boarding school holidays he endured in the years after his mother’s death. The creeping torpor-the feeling of lead in his bones, cotton wool in his skull, and breath coagulating in his lungs, of life coagulating around him, even as it surges ahead in the world beyond the slumping stone wall-is what has kept him away, except for days here and there, since the morning he left for college. Part of what has kept him away.

Eleanor Calvin is at his side, her wiry, freckled hand on his arm. She wears paddock boots, pressed jeans, and a rain slicker-a bright yellow flame against the overcast. Carr eyes the knee-high stacks of newspapers and magazines that run the length of the porch. Calvin follows his gaze.

“It’s hard to keep up,” she says. “He has so many subscriptions, they accumulate faster than I can get to recycling.”

The piles of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy are yellowed and dissolving. To Carr they look no different from the ones he saw the last time he was here.

“I told him he can get them all online,” Carr says.

Eleanor Calvin nods sadly. “It’s difficult for him sometimes, remembering the passwords. And then he gets angry.”

“Nothing new there-angry is his usual state.”

Calvin frowns and shakes her head. “It’s because he’s scared of what’s happening to him.” She pats Carr’s arm. “It’s what the doctor said, dear-there’ll be good days and bad, and over time more of the bad ones. But today he’s good, and you should enjoy it. I told the ambassador you were coming, and he’s looking forward to it.”

Carr sighs, but doesn’t correct her.

Inside the light is gray, as it always is, regardless of weather, time of day, or season of the year. Arthur Carr is in the dining room, at the head of a long table that is layered in newspapers, folded laundry, and heaps of unopened mail. He looks up from his FT, blinks his gray eyes, and pushes half-glasses into a still dark hairline. His face is long, angular, and academic-looking, the skin of his cheeks pink from shaving, the fine nose veined from drink. It isn’t Carr’s nose, which is twice broken but otherwise unmarred, and the eyes are different too: Carr’s are hazel, like his mother’s, but still the resemblance is pronounced. Which always startles Carr and makes him uneasy.