Gagliano,Anthony - Straits of Fortune.wps (3 page)

Even on the second floor, the place was still more of a museum than a place where people lived. It lacked the warmth of occupation. There were no toys scattered in the hallway, no family dog or cat stretched out on the marble tiles, just a lot of style and no air of comfort. A computer program with the human touch deleted. There was a painting by Botero of a family of refugees from Weight Watchers and another by Modigliani of a boy inside a blue balloon float- ing over a bombed-out city. There was a statue of a woman carved from onyx lounging on a pedestal inside a recessed section of the wall. There was more, but even if there had been twice what there was, the hallway still would have felt empty. It was way too well lit for a corridor that led to rooms where people slept and dreamed and wore pajamas. I hesitated at the door, and for a moment it occurred to me that I could simply go quietly down the stairs, out the front door, and back to my car without saying good-bye. A man I had once thought of as a friend was dead on a yacht, and in my hand was a film he had made of a woman I didn't want to see. I had come here half hoping I'd run into Vivian again, though, in one of those strange, schizoid acts of self-denial, I hadn't allowed myself to think about what I would say to her if I had. Now I was going to get my wish. I was holding it in my right hand. I opened the door and closed it behind me. Nothing had changed, and yet to call it her room is misleading. She'd had her own place down on South Beach for years now, ever since dropping out of Smith College. But in a house with eighteen bedrooms, most of them empty, there had been no reason to change anything, and now, whenever it became necessary, she used this place as a refuge from her new life. It was the room of a woman in her late teens. In one corner sat the bronze Buddha I recalled, still wearing the Santa Claus hat she had stuck on its head and still sporting the cigarette she'd left dangling from the edge of its metallic 21

mouth. Around the statue she had built a miniature temple of flagstones stacked in a progression of shelves. The two incense holders on either side of the Buddha were empty now, the last stick burned to a nub at its base. She hadn't been here in quite a while. The stems of two dozen or more dead flowers leaned from their vases like bony fingers, and everywhere on the floor before the shrine lay the petals of red and yellow roses, all as dry as doilies. I stood there looking around like a voyeur stranded in his own memories. There was an enormous teakwood dresser imported from Cambodia that four strong men would have had trouble lift- ing, and on top of it, in front of the mirror, ran a row of old-fashioned atomizers, some of them still full of perfume. There were photographs of her family taken in Vietnam: one of Vivian and her mother, both in white dresses, and the Colonel, then a captain, much younger, with darker hair, in his uniform. They stood poised and smiling in front of a large white split-level chalet that looked like it belonged in a French suburb. In the driveway sat a battered army jeep that went with the Colonel's uniform but not with the house it stood before. They were like two disparate dreams merged by memory, war, and accident. None of this, of course, went with the Aerosmith poster on one powder blue wall or with that of Hendrix, Afro high and guitar in hand, on the other, any more than the plush, white teddy bear wearing a red ribbon around its neck went with the woman I recalled. Only a dead man or one not long for the living could have failed to remember at precisely that moment the first time I'd laid eyes on Mr. Bear. Why the first time had to be here with her father asleep and not at her apartment on South Beach, I never figured out, except for realizing I was about to enter a drama whose intricacies I didn't care to decipher. I had driven at midnight through a jungle rain, my com- 22

panion heart keeping time with the wipers swiping away at the falling flood of water on the windshield. I remembered the expression on the guard's face as I pulled up to the gate, how he emerged from his booth like a specter. The hood of his poncho covered all of his face except for the white of his teeth as he smiled and waved me through, not bothering this time or any future time to record on his clipboard the odd fact of my lucky arrival. The bastard's hit pay dirt, he must have told himself. I knew then that I was one of the chosen. It is a good feeling while it lasts--that is, until you find out what it is you've been chosen for. What I remember next of that night was opening her door without knocking, just as I had been told, and seeing Vivian sitting naked in her bed, casually smoking a cigarette and cradling the teddy bear between her legs as though it were a child, Edith Piaf crooning softly in the background like a sad ghost trying to exorcise her own memory, and the lin- gering flying carpet of marijuana exhaust floating over her head as I closed the door behind me. It was an opium den with a naked girl and a stuffed bear, both of them waiting just for me. A night, in short, for the record books, and when I drove out before dawn, the guard was asleep in the chair in his booth and a thick fog filled the space between earth and sky, but not nearly so thick as the fog in my mind. And now here I was again, not really believing it. Every- thing came back a little at a time, like the pages of a diary thrown into a fire, then retrieved from the ashes. I went over to the shelf with the stereo and television and slipped in the videotape. I was aware of the element of self-torture involved with what I was doing, aware that I was having my buttons pushed and pushed hard, aware of the yacht silent and white in the sunlight, aware of the money, aware that I was being foolish. I switched on the television and the VCR, then sat back in a yellow beanbag chair that absorbed me like a giant sponge. 23

Several times I was forced to turn away from what I saw. There were no trailers to sit through, certainly no cartoons, only a brief, ragged fence of static that morphed into the view of the room. Matson and Vivian sitting at a table in what looked like a hotel room, judging by the generic furniture. They were talking, smoking cigarettes, and there were glasses and two bottles of red wine. I turned down the volume. For some reason hearing her voice was worse than seeing her face. Then a second man entered the frame, and I jumped as though he had burst in on me. I didn't know him. He was well tanned, well groomed, dark-haired, handsome in that perfect way. He seemed to be in his late thirties, a medium- size man in a beige sports jacket and black slacks. He had a military-style crew cut. He walked over to the camera and leaned down and placed his face close to its lens and grinned like an idiot. Then he went over to the table and poured him- self a glass of wine and sat down across from Vivian and Matson. Matson held up a hundred-dollar bill to the camera and winked devilishly; then he rolled it into a tube. Each of them did a line of coke off a mirror laid flat on the table. After a while they got into it. Vivian slipped off a periwin- kle-colored silk dress, and the men began taking off their clothing. Vivian and Matson kept up their chatter as she re- moved her bra and panties, but the other man looked nervous and uncertain. The cameraman, whoever he was, panned in on his face so that I could see him sweating. Vivian's eyes looked glazed, and I gave in to the merciful thought that she had to be on something. Matson went first. He was tall, rangy, with a hawk nose and a shock of straight black hair that made him look like a rock star. I remembered the times I had trained him, taught him a little tai chi and tried to get him off the coke. He had the arms I had given him, but also the puffed-out gut of a skinny, full-time drinker he had given himself. I watched him and tried to understand that he was dead. 24

He was very thorough with her, as was she with him. Then the other man came over, looking shy and tentative and trying to hide it with the fake smile of a man who would rather be elsewhere. Matson went and sat down and drank his wine while his pal took his turn. The other man was trying extra hard to look lustful, but all he managed to do was look sad and pitiful, like a man who has reached some previously unexplored limit in himself and does not like very much the new territory he's discovered there. Matson drank his wine and watched them like a man at a movie, like me watching him. But only one of us was a masochist, as far as I could tell. I watched far more than I should have. I fast-forwarded until I came to the part where Matson and the blond man dragged the couch away from the wall and bent her over it. The quality of the film and lighting were both very good, but I would have paid money for a few shadows to hide the obvious pleasure I saw on her face. It was ugly and degrading and enthralling, and by the time I shut it off and was standing by the window looking out at the yacht, I was feeling like a man who's roasted himself over a fire while turning the spit himself. I went back to the night when I had walked into a bar after a long drive back from Gainesville, where I'd gone to see an old friend who was dying from cancer. It was an out-of-the-way place, and I was in an out-of-the-way mood. I had gone there for the specific reason of having a solitary drink without having to talk to anybody I knew. The chances of my being there at all on that or any other particular night were so slim as not to be calculable, but I was only there a short while when I saw her and Matson swapping spit in a booth. It was just a month or so after I'd introduced them. I don't remember how I got over to Matson. Possibly I levitated or passed through the ether like a ghost. But I re- 25

member well enough how the bouncers there pulled me off him. I remember the shock on Vivian's face, the livid embar- rassment that held for a moment, then collapsed into tears. The bouncers were only doing their jobs. I didn't want to fight them, but one of them hit me in the side of the head and drew blood, and from that moment on, as far as I was concerned, they were on Matson's side. Then the cops came, as cops will. One of them smacked me over the head with a nightstick and took me away. I had to call the Sheik, another client of mine, to spring me from jail. The only good thing that came out of it was the com- munity service I had to do. I spent the better part of a month showing some retarded kids how to throw a Frisbee at a Jewish recreation center. Those kids were all right, even if their parents were a little leery of me at first. When the ad- ministrators realized I wasn't a complete maniac, they even offered me a part-time job. The pressures of the marketplace didn't allow me to take it, however, but I still went back once or twice a week or when business was slow, even after I was done with my atonement. I was standing by the window staring at the yacht and thinking about all this when I heard the door open behind me. Williams was standing there. I would have known it was him without having to turn around. He was easily the tens- est man I'd ever met, and the steroids weren't helping much either. His eyes had the jaundiced tint of someone who'd been on the juice for way too long, and he was retaining so little subcutaneous water that the muscles of his massive forearms had that telltale snakeskin tautness I'd noticed a lot of down on South Beach. "I see you've been at the movies," he said, glancing over at the television screen, now filled with jittery horizontal lines of static. I reached over, shut off the set, and popped out the cassette. 26

We stared at one another. I am six feet one and weigh two hundred pounds, but Williams had me by three inches and enough muscle to make a difference, plus he'd been trained to fight by the best. Even with the age difference--I was thirty- four--common sense told me I should have been afraid of him, but I wasn't. At that moment, staring into his grinning face, all I wanted to do was hit him, hit him hard. He knew it, too. He smiled, turned sideways, tugged at the legs of his trou- sers, bent his knees, and assumed a fighting stance. He cocked his head to one side and then the other. There was a cracking sound you don't hear much outside a chiropractor's office. "You in the mood for a wee bit of a workout, Jack?" he asked in a fake Scottish accent. "When I am," I said, "you won't have to ask." I wondered if, like me, Williams realized how stupid we were being. Then he threw a punch that stopped an inch from my nose. He smiled when I didn't flinch. He looked offended, disap- pointed, as though I had refused a gift. I shook my head and walked past him out the door. I had nothing to prove to him. Williams tensed when I passed by him. He followed me as I went down the stairs, but not too closely. The bad vibes followed us both. The Colonel was swimming laps in the pool when I walked out onto the patio. Williams trailed me, a few feet back, still not getting too close, as though he sensed my mood. I wasn't the same man who had arrived here a short while ago. I had switched tracks halfway through the film, and I wasn't so sure I wanted to switch back. Still, despite my frame of mind, something didn't jibe about the black- mail angle, at least not as it pertained to the video I'd just watched. My gut feeling was that it was just a ploy to distract me. Unfortunately, it had worked. The Colonel saw me out of the corner of his eye, swam past me to the shallow end, and walked briskly out of the 27

blue chemistry of the water. I waited off to the side for him. Williams handed his boss a black silk robe, which the old man promptly wrapped himself in, tying off the sash at the middle. He said a few words to Williams, who glanced over at me with a grin, then turned and headed off toward the garden. The old man went and sat down again at the table, and I went and sat across from him. A bottle of Johnnie Walker Black had appeared on the table, and he poured a bit of it into a glass and drank it straight down in one shot. "Williams doesn't like you very much, does he?" the Col- onel asked, looking at his empty glass. "No," I said. "I don't suppose he does." "I wonder why." "You should ask him," I said. "What did you think of the film?" "That's a stupid question." He thought that over for a moment. "It's been a very long time since anyone referred to me as stupid." "You'll need to get used to it if you think I believe that your daughter killed someone over a film, even one like that. I suppose you've seen it." He shook his head. "I've seen enough ugliness in my life, Jack. I took her word for what was on it, hers and Williams's. I told you. She did it to protect me." "If she really did shoot Matson," I said, "then protecting you was probably only part of it. I'm betting she just lost her temper and popped a cap into him. I'm not buying this loving-daughter crap." "He was going to send copies of his little masterpiece to everyone I know, people in Washington, people who matter. She didn't want that to happen, and she took the matter into her own hands before I could stop her." He looked across at me. "Do you want her to go to prison for killing that scumbag?" 28