Caravan of Thieves (18 page)

I grabbed the keys to Scott’s Mercedes from the hook. The two Big Boys stood on guard at the stern as the last of the passengers left. Out the window I could see Kate among them. The two thugs pushed through them on their way to the boat, but they had not identified Kate. I waited in the galley for the fight to start. The Big Boys just told the thugs to go away and that was it. A shot went off. I caught a glimpse of a thug being thrown to the deck. The sounds were reduced to grunting and swearing. I moved forward. The space on the stern was tight, so the two fights kept bumping into each other. A thug and a Big Boy were wrestling and the other Big Boy recoiled from a punch and toppled them overboard into the water. As I came out, I grabbed the railing below the fly deck and, swinging up, kicked the remaining thug in the jaw. He fell backward and I jumped down, landing on his knee. The crunch was awful. I smiled at Big Boy and ran down the pier.

Scott had abandoned ship, too. “I’m taking your car,” I said. “Don’t tell anyone I have it.”

“It’s a crime to impersonate a federal agent.”

“Do you want to trade threats, Scott?” He didn’t. “If they ask
about Kate, say she was there but left with the other guests. You don’t know where she went. I need your car for a few days. I won’t hurt it. Kate, get in.”

She looked to him for instructions. “The full wrath of the law, Scott. That’s what you’re facing,” I said, in case he was starting to forget.

“Go with him. If he hurts you, I’ll have him killed. I’ll do it myself.” He was as gallant as he was honest. She could not hide the disgust from her face.

“I’ll fill it up,” I lied.

S
he remembered Dan with bitterness and anger. He had promised her the moon, but she ended up waiting tables and bagging groceries and drinking. No fond acknowledgment of his enveloping charm or wistful regret at not being able to reform him. I waited for the watchword of Dan’s victims,
I’d do it again; it was fun while it lasted,
but she had never reached that stage. Dan was an evil genie who had tricked her and stolen her golden locks, and she had spent the rest of her life dreaming of getting them back.

I drove north toward Ventura for no reason other than she had started talking and I wanted her to keep going. I was foolish to fear that she would clam up, though. Once the self-pity faucet turns on, you need a power tool to turn it off. She was crying recycled tears while I thanked Dan for sparing me this act. I would have had to run away.

“I was beautiful. That bastard, that bastard told me to have the baby and he’d take care of everything. I was eighteen. What did I know? I couldn’t take care of myself, how could I take care of a little
kid and he stuck me out in the middle of nowhere and brought around his business associates and then he disappeared for weeks at a time and what was I supposed to do?”

I was the wrong person to ask. “Where was that house in the middle of nowhere?”

“He told me he owned it,” she said. I made an effort not to tense up. “Ha! I found out it belonged to the damn monks and he didn’t even pay rent. They let him use it. That did it for me. I was out of there.”

“Monks,” I said.

“
Monks,
” whispered Dan. “
They’re honest
.”

At that moment, I knew the money was there. “Where is it? That house…”

“What’re you writing a book?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think I could find it if I wanted to, and believe me, I don’t. Near Ojai. Somewhere above Ojai. The monks own a big place and that house.”

“Big, sprawling place? Hacienda style? Front porch swing?”

“Yeah.”

“I remember it a little. You don’t have a photo of those days, all of us together, hanging outside the house?”

It was as if I had reminded her of a task left undone, a burner left on, a debt uncollected. Panic gathered behind her eyes. Her bad dream was accelerating. Dragged away from hope and pleasure, she felt the past squeezing her in a dreaded embrace: she could not remember her locker combination, she had to make a speech that she knew she should have prepared for.

“What else do you want to know? I gotta get back.”

At a red light, I asked for her cell phone. She did not want to hand it over.

“You can’t go back for a little while,” I said. “I have to take the battery out of your phone so no one can find us.” The light turned green. I went through and pulled off to the side of the highway and waited until she handed over the phone.

I asked a few more questions to make it seem like I gave a damn about her life after Dan left and up to today and so she wouldn’t suspect my only interest was in the location of that house. The parts she told me went like this: community college, dropped out; modeling, burned out; men, still trying. I was pretty sure those were the highlights. As we entered Ventura, she relaxed a bit. She asked about Dan, sheepishly. “What’s he doing now?”

“He died,” I said.

“I’m sure someone killed him.” Her one moment of insight.

“It was in New York. A woman dropped her bag on the subway tracks. Dan jumped down to get it for her. He threw the bag back but slipped climbing up and the train crushed him.”

“Are you really writing a book?”

“Yes. About Dan.”

“You’ll probably be good at it.” She said it with a pout and meant it as an insult. She was the same young girl Dan fell for, clueless and skeptical at once. I could understand why he married her; he thought the cluelessness would go away, that he would have a partner who saw through him but still loved him and still craved his charm. Somehow it made me want to lean over and kiss her on the forehead and hug her. “I suppose you look a little bit like him. He was handsome, I’ll give him that,” she said. I had planned to park her at a motel somewhere up the coast, but she would be back
at the boat in a flash no matter what warnings I gave. I realized I would have to take her along.

I used the computer at the public library in Ventura. The only place near Ojai with monks was a Buddhist monastery on the northwest side of Ojai, bordering the Los Padres National Forest.

Kate’s lament that Dan did not pay rent might have been true and it might have been a fantasy she had and it might have been a Dan story. My favorite was the no-rent version because it meant Dan had charmed them and a proper coating of Dan charm could last a lifetime. My least-favorite version involved rent. I struggled to concoct a solid lie for the monks, one that would get me access to the house and time to search it alone.

A
small shrine near the road marked the entrance to the Veruvana Retreat. “Oh, damn, this is it,” Kate said. “This is the place.” I turned up a long paved driveway flanked by sycamore trees. After a few hundred yards, a parking lot opened on the left. I stayed on the drive until I came to a large mission-style building. A small sign near the door said “Veruvana.” Ahead of us, across the drive and up an unpaved path, stood a two-story building that looked like a chapel. Scattered among the trees were small shrines and prayer spots. On the other side of the drive were two large greenhouses. Everything was well kept and neat, but the silence made it seem as if the place were abandoned. Wind chimes added to the effect.

The terrain was right, the trees and bushes, even the sky; it all meshed with my vision. Beyond the main building, the driveway continued up a hill and around a corner. I looked back toward the entrance and could see the parking lot below me. Two shiny white SUVs, three green vans. But the architecture was wrong, all mission style. I was looking for a wood farmhouse.

“Everyone is in the dining hall. Can I help you find it?”

I spun, startled out of my own meditation. His right shoulder was bare and his head was, too; the rest was covered in a saffron robe. He wore sandals which did not look like they would help him creep up silently.

“I was hoping you had rooms for my mother and me.”

“Do you have a reservation?”

“It doesn’t seem too crowded. Do I need one?”

“Everyone is in the dining hall. But I’ll check.”

We followed him into the main building. He disappeared for a little while, and when he came back he told me we could have two singles in the Samoner retreat, which sounded okay to me. Cash confused him and made him disappear again. At last he took the money and an extra hundred as a deposit. I parked my car in the empty lot and hiked back up, and he showed Kate her room first and told us dinner was still on if we were hungry. Kate decided to skip dinner.

The dining hall held four long tables with benches for seats. At the head of the room, near a stage, a buffet was set up. The ceiling was high, with arched beams of dark wood running from the floor all the way up. I looked around for the statues of Jesus, but they had all been taken down. This place used to belong to the Catholic Church.

I never went to summer camp or to prison, but I imagined it would be something like this setup. Instead of gangs with their different colors, you have teams with their different colors, and you all eat the same slop and do what the guards or counselors tell you to. Instead of punishment, you call it fun. Or in this case, instead of drudgery, you call it enlightenment.

Men and women sat in groups, filling most of the spots at the tables in bunches with matching colored T-shirts. Where one color ended and another began, an empty seat marked the territory. Their ages ranged from the mid-twenties to a few who looked in their sixties. A few monks were salted into each group. For conversational purposes? I hoped not. I did not see any interaction between the groups while I ate, silently, at the edge. At last an old monk stood and everyone seemed to understand that meant dinner was over and they filed out in a very orderly fashion. I followed.

We trooped into a meditation hall, where the teams deployed onto mats with admirable fluidity, which I assumed was due to the competitive natures they had come here to shrink. I found a mat in the back. When I looked up, I saw the old monk who had led the procession staring at me. I had to act as if this was what I came for, so I joined right in with the puja. Maybe the old guy watched me the whole time. I didn’t open my eyes to find out, but it felt like he was right there. My vision was sharp. I could have counted the leaves on the cottonwood tree in front of the house, drawn the pattern on the lace curtains, kicked stones along the dirt driveway which matched that drive leading above the main lodge. The monk watching me did not matter. At the end of the chanting, a monk rose and walked to the front of the room and began to give a talk, a little dharma lesson.

“When we are not at ease, we are diseased. When we are not possessed, we are dispossessed. When our minds are not able, we are disabled. When we are not at rest, we are distressed.…”

This guy had the accent and inflection of a native English speaker but used the language like someone relying on a guidebook
for translation. He droned on for thirty minutes at least, or, as I came to think of it, eternity.

As I walked back to my room, a monk joined me. “I’m Mark.”

“Rollie.”

“I saw you chant. You’ve done this before.”

“So?”

He flustered easily. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I—”

“You meant who am I, why did I come here?”

“No.”

“I’m a guy who has chanted puja before and wanted to do it again so he came here. Good night.” Maybe from the inside he was a devout young man, pure of heart and intent. From the outside he was a snoop who was fooling only himself.

I went to Kate’s room. She was already under the covers. I pulled the chair a bit closer to the bed. “I’m sorry about Scott,” I said.

“There’s a million Scotts. You probably did me a favor. He’s so coked up lately even the Viagra doesn’t work.”

“Lucky you.”

She laughed. “He’s lucky to have me anyway.” She yawned and closed her eyes for a few seconds. “I’m sorry. I took some pills.”

The scent of sandalwood filled the room, though no candles were burning. The windows were closed and shades pulled down. I felt like I was supposed to say something sentimental, something about always looking forward to this day, but she hadn’t done anything lousy to me. She didn’t deserve that lie.

“Are you really a Marine?”

“Don’t you believe me?”

She rolled her eyes with mock impatience, the way a teenager would. “Oh, yes, every word.” I laughed and she smiled.

“I am a Marine.”

“My father was, too.” I waited for the next line: and one, and two, and three…“He loved Dan.” She yawned a bit and sipped some water from a plastic bottle. “Did you find what you’re looking for?”

“I’m just hiding out.”

“It’s okay with me. There’s nothing I want in this place, no matter what it is. I knew that the second we got here. It even smells the same. And I know he didn’t leave anything worthwhile because he never had anything.” She stopped to yawn. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to tell you, your real name is Jake.”

“Jake.” I realized that was only half an answer. She read my thoughts.

“Reynolds. At least it was. Jake Reynolds.”

“What’s yours?”

“Kate. Kate then, Kate now. I’ve been married a few times.” She yawned again. “I did come looking for you once.” She paused. “Not really. I came looking for money, but I did want to see you. Don’t blame me, okay. Please. I just…I’m not made for it.”

“I don’t blame you. Not at all. It all worked out.”

“Really?”

“Really.” Maybe I had an odd look on my face because I couldn’t think of anything to blame her for.

“Maybe we can talk more tomorrow. You can take me back. I won’t tell them anything.” Her eyes were closed.

“Tomorrow.”