“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.
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
