Thick as Thieves

40

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.

The hall is quiet and the air-conditioning sends a shiver down Carr’s arms. His footsteps echo on the polished stone floor. He has spent hours squinting at the floor plans of this house, and on them he’s found three places he might enter when the time comes. Today, after walking the grounds, counting and recounting the guards, watching the flow of guests and staff, and visiting several bathrooms, he has narrowed his list to one.

Down the hall, on the right, is a powder room. It’s small and windowless, and Carr has already been there once today. Just past the powder room, around a corner to the left, is a stairwell, with stairs climbing up. Past the stairs, across the hall, and three paces down is Carr’s way in.

It’s a rectangle labeled LAUNDRY-2 on the floor plans, but it’s not the room’s function that interests Carr, it’s the small window set in its wall. It’s in a casement-style frame, and because of its size and ground-floor location, and the dense hibiscus growing just outside, it has no view to speak of. What it does have, by Carr’s careful calculation, is a position outside the view of any of Prager’s security cameras.

As on Carr’s prior visit, one of Rink’s security crew cuts appears at the end of the corridor, to make sure he doesn’t wander too far afield. Carr raises his champagne glass.

“Toilet?” he asks the guard.

“Of course, sir,” the guard says. “Right here.” He points toward the powder room. Carr steps in and locks the door. He lifts the toilet lid and pours his champagne down in a thin, noisy stream. Then he sets his glass on the edge of the sink and starts unrolling toilet paper.

“A little help,” Carr calls, as he steps out of the bathroom.

The security guard comes down the stairs and around the corner, and almost slips on water that’s begun to flow across the powder room’s threshold. “Oh Christ,” the guard says.

Carr smiles sheepishly. “I think it’s clogged,” and he points his glass at the toilet and the water and bits of toilet paper flowing from the top of the bowl.

“You think?” the guard says impatiently, a look of disgust on his face.

“I tried jiggling it,” Carr says, and raises his hands helplessly. He looks down at the spreading water and moves out of the way, careful to keep his shoes dry. The guard steps gingerly into the bathroom, and Carr backs away.

The guard shakes his head. “Christ,” he mutters.

When the guard emerges from the powder room, his knuckles are skinned from wrestling with the jammed water valve under the toilet tank, and his trouser knees are soaked. The hallway is empty, and the patio door is just swinging shut.

Outside, crossing the lawn, Carr feels the sun’s warmth for what seems the first time. He takes a deep breath and at last there seems to be some oxygen in it. The music returns, coming to him on the warm, gusting breeze. His shirt, he realizes, is stuck to his back. He’s suddenly thirsty, and he heads for the bar set up at the edge of a terrace looking over the beach. He orders an ice water and checks his watch and his phone vibrates.

“We’re all right,” Bobby says. His words are indistinct against the background noise of water and wind. “We’re getting bounced around in the chop pretty good, but we’re ready to rock. And you?”

“So far, so good. It should be soon.”

“Soon would be aces.”

Carr pockets his phone and looks out at the ocean. The sea is boiling around the reefs offshore, and platoons of whitecaps stagger drunkenly this way and that across the bay, to fling themselves on the sand. To the east, the sky is painted with a milky wash. Carr shakes his head and wonders how long the weather will hold.

He walks along the terrace and scans the beach, looking for Prager and Rink. He spots Prager, surrounded by a knot of petitioners and making his way east from the guesthouse. He doesn’t see Kathy Rink immediately, but knows she can’t be far behind. Suddenly, Howard Bessemer is at his elbow.

“Are we almost done?” Bessemer asks. He’s pink from heat and from drink, and there are damp circles under the arms of his blue button-down shirt. His blazer hangs over his shoulder like a drowned thing.

“Soon, Howie.”

“We’re going to get some of that storm, you know. Sometime tonight they said on television, maybe sooner.”

Carr nods and looks again for Kathy Rink. “Thanks for the update. You should head back to the beach and get something to eat. And switch to soda water.”

Bessemer grimaces, unfastens another button on his shirt, and wanders off.

Carr picks out Prager again-smiling, nodding, drink in hand-walking up a shaded path. He sees no sign of Rink and checks his watch once more. It would be better, he thinks, if they were down by the water, but the thrashing surf and the sky and the tightening in his stomach tell him there’s no point in waiting. He pulls out his phone.

“I’m headed in,” he tells Bobby. “Put three minutes on the clock and go.”

“Three it is,” Bobby says over the wind. “Clock is running.”

Carr finishes his ice water, places his glass on the bar as he passes, and heads back toward the main house. He rounds a corner and there’s an orange blur to his right. Kathy Rink drops a thick, manicured hand on his arm.

She squints up at Carr. “Been lookin’ for you, Frye. What the hell have you been up to?”

Carr looks at her, at the security man at her side, and at Curtis Prager, approaching from the beach. Carr smiles and shrugs. “Enjoying the view, enjoying the hospitality, and wondering if that’s all I’m here for, or if somebody wants to do business.”

Rink’s squint turns into a scowl. “Jury’s still out when it comes to business, but we want to talk more. And now’s the time.”

“Great,” Carr says, smiling. The knot in his stomach tightens, and there’s a ticking sound in his head.