The sky above the hotel parking lot is gray, and it’s heavy with car exhaust and the metal heat of the fading day. An erratic breeze sends a paper cup back and forth across a patch of cracked cement. Sitting in the Saturn, Carr is similarly restless. He doesn’t know why he started talking to Valerie about what happened in Mendoza, or why he stopped. Maybe he was fishing for something-for her to tell him to forget his suspicions, call them paranoid shit, and remind him to keep his mind on the job. He thinks about the game she tried to play-retirement geography, and all those stories of afterward. He hears his own voice- I haven’t given much thought to afterward -and wonders if maybe he should.
Certainly, afterward is easier for him to think about. Easier than thinking about how Bertolli’s men came to be waiting for Deke in the dead of night. Or why Bobby always tells the story just the same way. Easier than dealing with Mike’s snide comments and hostile silences. Or finding a useful handle on Howard Bessemer. Or thinking about Valerie and Amy Chun. Easier by far than thinking about his father, and the tar pit of brochures, applications, and FAQ pages Carr has drowned in every night for nearly three weeks. Assisted living facilities, nursing homes, dementia units-the nomenclature sticks to his arms and legs, and fills his ears with static. Eleanor Calvin has left messages-six, eight, Carr has lost count-but he hasn’t returned a one.
So afterward. The problem is, Carr doesn’t know much about afterward -with Valerie, or with anyone else.
His relationships with women haven’t lasted long-a few weeks, a month or two-no longer than the gaps between his jobs with Declan. But there was a sameness to them all, a sense of melancholy that suffused them from the start-the feel of a beach in midwinter.
The women themselves were not much alike, not at first glance anyway. Hannah was from Seattle, a filmmaker shooting a documentary on the Costa Rican rainforests and staying in the same hotel as Carr, in Puerto Viejo. Ann was from Zurich, a geologist with ABB, analyzing core samples taken off the Belize coast and drinking at night in a bar in San Pedro that Carr also favored. Brooke was a UNICEF pediatrician from Toronto, on vacation in Antigua between a stint in Haiti and a posting in Phnom Penh, and she and Carr dove the same reefs.
The list went on-different ages, different nationalities, different professions and appearances, but still, a sameness. They were all nominally married, but they were solitaries by nature-self-sufficient, emotionally reticent, even prickly. They were all obsessive about their jobs, and chronically exhausted by them. And they all possessed a certain brand of low-key intellectual charisma-a smart-girl glamour-that pulled at Carr like the moon pulled the seas.
The other thing they had in common, of course, was Carr himself. He understood something of his own appeal. Yes, he was attractive enough, enthusiastic and inventive enough, articulate and reasonably amusing when he had something to say, and smart enough to keep quiet otherwise. But his main draws, he knew, lay elsewhere. He was convenient. He was unburdened by backstory. And he was, without question, impermanent. It made him the perfect time-out from the rest of their lives-ephemeral, essentially anonymous, as disposable as the aliases they knew him by. And it left Carr entirely ignorant of afterward.
His thoughts find no forward traction with Valerie, and inevitably they slide back, to St. Barts. The vast, glassy plain of Flamands Bay, the crescent of bone-white sand, the white umbrellas, like a line of portly nuns, and their rooms overlooking it all. Their rooms that they never left. All that time working together, and St. Barts was their first time. And there, amid the ravaged bedding and the ruins of room service trays, was the first time it occurred to Carr that perhaps things didn’t have to be quite so temporary.
Then the calls came in. The first was at five a.m., local time. Bobby’s voice was low and flat and affectless, difficult for Carr to understand. It wasn’t until after he’d hung up that Carr realized Bobby was in shock. The next calls, hours later, were from Mike, and they were confused and angry and scared. By then Carr had packed his bag and arranged his transit to B.A.
The heat has put him nearly to sleep, but there’s movement across the lot, a flash of orange and short blond hair, and Carr wakes himself. He sees Valerie get into her Audi and drive off. He counts off thirty seconds and starts up the Saturn.
She takes Military Trail south and Palmetto Park east, to a stretch of stores and low apartment buildings. Valerie’s building is glass and concrete, and as generic as she described. She pulls into the residents’ lot, and Carr parks across the street. He doesn’t see her enter, but in a while he sees a row of lights in some third-floor windows, and a slender orange figure crossing a room. In another minute he sees Valerie on a balcony, a glass in her hand, her face turned east, looking perhaps at a slice of the Intracoastal.
It is full dark when she goes inside again and draws the curtains. Carr watches her blank windows for an hour afterward, and then gets on 95 and drives back to Palm Beach.
10
No palms on this street-barely any green at all besides a runty saw palmetto, and its fronds are mostly gray. Bobby was right about the house; it’s crap: a low concrete bunker the color of dishwater, with barred windows, a tin-roofed carport, and a sagging school yard fence. In a neighborhood where chipped breeze block and auto parts on the lawn make up an architectural school, it’s still the worst house on the street. But the locals don’t worry much about how the hedge next door is clipped, or if they do, they know better than to say. Which makes the house crap but also ideal. A jet passes low, directly overhead. It casts a broad shadow and shakes Carr’s stomach, and leaves behind the tang of spent kerosene.
Carr has been here only twice before, but still it’s more than familiar to him, a cousin to every workhouse they’ve ever used, in more bleak neighborhoods, by more airports, harbors, and rail yards than he can count. He knocks twice and waits. His head aches, the midday glare makes his eyes water, and, though he had nothing stronger than soda water the night before, he feels hungover. The kerosene smell settles in his hair and clothing. He can feel it on his skin. Dennis opens the door.
The lights are on in the living room, and all the shades are drawn. There’s music playing, propulsive Colombian hip-hop, but it’s fighting a losing battle with the air conditioner rattling in the wall. The living room furniture-a spavined sofa, a lumpy recliner, some battered kitchen chairs, a side table pitted with burn marks-is pushed up against the walls, and the center of the space is dominated by two long tables with plastic tops and folding legs. Bobby and Latin Mike sit at one, peering into the same laptop screen. Dennis folds himself at the other, behind an uneven berm of equipment-laptops, printers, routers, modems, a laminating machine, and a tangle of cabling. Like every other workhouse.
Carr winces at the music and the odor-of cigarettes and burned coffee-and locks the door behind him. He places the white paper bag he’s carrying on Bobby’s table and tears it open. The smells of tomato sauce and grease waft up to mix with the entrenched aromas.
“Two meatball and two sausage and pepper,” Carr says.
“Just in time,” Bobby says. “Denny was starting to look like a plate of wings to me.” Bobby reaches across, takes two of the foil-wrapped torpedoes, and passes one to Dennis. Latin Mike sighs and takes a long pull on his cigarette.
Bobby tears the wrapping off his sandwich and takes a bite. He makes small grunts as he chews, and red sauce runs down his chin. Latin Mike shakes his head. “You never heard of a napkin?” He reaches across Carr for a sandwich and carefully peels the foil away.