“And Bessemer works for them?”
“He’s a middleman,” Bobby says. “A freelancer. He’s buying the dope from the Grigorievs’ people, marking up the price, and selling to his buddies.”
“He’s fronting the money?” Carr asks, and Dennis nods. “For the whores too?”
Another nod. “Yeah-with a markup. He relays the where, when, and how many to the Grigorievs’ man, and the whores show up.”
“He making much money?”
Bobby shrugs. “His margins look pretty thin. The Russkies aren’t giving him any breaks on price. Play the one with Sasha, Denny-from Howie’s car.”
Dennis fiddles at the keyboard until another voice comes on. This one is deep and impatient, with a trace of an accent.
“ You have a problem, you talk to Willy, not me, right?”
“ But this stuff isn’t for me, Sash-you know that. It’s for my friends, and the price- ”
“ I don’t know about any stuff, and I don’t want to know, Howard. You don’t talk to me about this crap, you understand? What Willy says is what goes, okay? He don’t know who this is for, and he don’t care, right? All he knows is you, and shit costs what he says it costs, and that’s it, right? What you do after that is your thing. ”
Bobby hits STOP. “He’s whining about the price of coke. They charge Howie one-ten a gram, which is full retail and then some for around here.”
Carr draws a hand along his jaw. “This is a lot of risk he’s taking,” he says, “especially for a guy with a record. What the hell’s he doing it for?”
Latin Mike blows out smoke in a disgusted blast. “ Cabron, who gives a shit why he’s doing it? It’s enough we know what he’s doing. Like you said, it’s a big risk for a guy like him, and that makes it a good handle. A handle like this, we pick him up and carry him anywhere we want.”
Another jet passes, shaking the glass in the windows. Carr rubs a palm over his chin. “It’s not enough. We get only one shot at Bessemer, and we need to make it stick. We need to know all the strings there are to pull. I want to know why he’s doing it. Is it just money? Is it something else?”
“ Hijo de puta!” Mike flicks his cigarette across the room and jumps to his feet. There’s a burst of red against the cinder block, and a smoldering ember on the carpet, and Mike’s chair tips back. He points at Carr. “The fuck is up with you? This thing is lined up like dominoes. What’s wrong with knocking it over?”
When he finally answers, Carr’s voice is quiet. “I said we don’t know enough yet.”
“I tell you what’s not enough,” Mike says, and he cups a hand around his crotch.
Bobby has stopped chewing, and Dennis is frozen at his keyboard. The room is silent but for the chugging of the air conditioner and the receding rumble of a jet. Blood rushes in Carr’s ears as he stands. “I don’t recall you ever making quite that argument to Declan, Mike.”
Mike smiles and steps forward. “That’s ’cause Deke had a pair.”
Carr nods. “And most of the time he managed not to confuse them with his brains.”
Mike steps forward until his chest is nearly touching Carr’s. He looks down at Carr and smiles wider. “That’s right, pendejo, I’m just a dumbass chicano. What the fuck do I know? What kinda dumbass thing will I do next?”
Carr forces his breathing down- inhale, exhale, not too fast. He can smell the cigarettes on Mike, and the coffee, and the cologne. He studies Mike’s throat-the pulse in his carotid artery, the soft spot below his Adam’s apple-and tenses his fingers. He nearly jumps at Dennis’s nervous cough.
“I… I know what Valerie would say if she were here.” Dennis’s voice is cracking. “Something like put ’em back in your pants. Don’t you think, Bobby?”
Bobby’s laugh is too loud. “Yeah, or maybe sit the fuck down. Right, Mike?”
Mike shrugs, but his gaze never leaves Carr. “She’s not here now. And what the fuck does she care how long this takes? She’s not living in this shithole. She’s like Carr-got herself a nice apartment with a view of the water and everything.”
“But that’s what she’d say, Mike, and she’d be right.” Bobby tries to catch Carr’s eye and fails. “She’d be right, Carr,” Bobby says. “We got to keep our heads in the work.”
“She’s not here now,” Carr says quietly.
Dennis stands, still holding his sub. “For chrissakes, I didn’t sign up for this kind of thing,” he says, and backs away until he hits the wall. When he does a large meatball is ejected from the end of his sandwich. It lands with a wet thud on the carpet between his feet. All three men turn to look first at Dennis, and then the meatball.
Bobby’s voice is low and grave. “Look at that-you made the kid shit himself.”
And then, suddenly, air returns to the room and the four men are laughing. Carr’s shoulders relax, and Latin Mike rights his overturned chair. “You better clean that up, Denny,” Mike says. “I don’t want to be steppin’ in it.”
“I don’t know,” Dennis says, “I think it goes with the carpet.”
The men laugh again, and Latin Mike lights a cigarette. Carr moves to the door and turns the lock.
“I don’t want this to take longer than it has to,” he says, “but we need to know more. Give it a week-if we don’t turn up anything else, we’ll go with what we’ve got.”
Carr closes the door behind him and hears someone lock it. He walks down the cracked path, through the rusting gate, and it is only when he’s around the corner that he takes a breath.
11
His apartment is in North Palm Beach, on Ocean Drive, and even the parking lot has a water view. Carr locks the Saturn and stops to watch the flashes of lightning on the horizon. The sky is purple, going to pitch-black at the eastern edge. It’s the verge of something that might ripen to a hurricane, or amount to nothing more than rain. The forecast is muddled with conditionals-colliding zones of warm and cold seawater, churning air masses, equivocal fronts from Canada, butterfly wings over Africa-too many variables. Carr can empathize with the weathermen.
Too many variables. Why is Bessemer doing what he’s doing? Will his Russian friends care when he gets burned? Why is Mike such an unremitting asshole, and how does he know about the view from Valerie’s apartment? Carr pockets his keys and pushes through the briny air to the lobby.
Here he is Gregory Frye, investor in distressed real estate, down from Boston for an indefinite stay. The doorman greets him by name and makes a joke about the Red Sox, and Carr smiles and nods and gets on the elevator.
He leaves the lights off in the apartment, pulls six beers from the refrigerator, and settles on the sofa, before the tall windows. He opens a bottle and drinks half in one pull, and he’s watching the distant lightning when his cell phone burrs. Eleanor Calvin’s number appears on the display, and he tosses the phone to the other end of the sofa, where it glows like a ghost light in a theater.
“Shit.” He sighs.
He’s been trying, since he left Stockbridge, to dredge up some warmth for Arthur Carr-to find a happy memory of his father or, barring that, any memory that isn’t tainted by anger, disapproval, or disappointment. Maybe he’s been looking for that for most of his life. The best he’s done lately is La Plata, southeast of Buenos Aires, out in the Rio de la Plata.
They were sailing then, just the two of them, in an eighteen-footer his father had rented for the day. The wind was from the east, the estuary was brown and choppy, and the sun was waning but still bright. Carr was twelve.
He remembers his father in a faded blue polo shirt, shorts, and bare feet, his arms ropy and brown, and his face shaded by a long-billed cap. They’d been running through man overboard drills for most of the afternoon, steering figure eights again and again to rescue an orange life vest that his father kept flinging over the side.
“There goes Oscar,” Arthur Carr would say, and toss the vest again.
His father did the spotting and fished out the vest when they came alongside; Carr was in the cockpit, one hand on the tiller, the other on the lines.
“Bring her around- quickly now-the man is drowning, after all. Now come to his windward side -his
