Thick as Thieves

39

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.

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.