“So you still don’t wanna unnerstand?”
That stung a little but Albin let it pass.
“Plus now there’s this nice kid Rita gettin’ involved,” Bert went on. “What if it’s somethin’ she shouldn’t oughta be involved in?”
“I have every confidence she’d figure that out for herself,” said Albin. “She’s heartbreakingly young but she’s pretty damn savvy.”
“Alla same,” said Bert, shifting his chihuahua to a football-style grip as he began the multi-phase process of rising from his chair, “I think I’ll do just a little askin’ around. Never hurts ta get a little information.”
7
F rom the outside, the Wreckers Rum Distillery was nothing much to look at; but then, neither was the Key where it was located.
Stock Island, next door neighbor and poor relation to Key West, was one of those places where things just never seemed to go quite right. Hurricanes went out of their way to hit the unlucky islet, raking trailers off their cinder-block foundations, scattering refrigerators and box springs onto flooded streets. When the streets weren’t flooded, they were dusty. The dust capered around in acrid gray-white swirls that dulled and weighed down foliage and made even the birds look grimy and somehow disreputable. Businesses failed all the time up there; in the few dreary strip-malls along the highway, the dark and vacant storefronts between the taquerias and the bait shops were like missing teeth in a deranged grin.
Then again, the place did have its advantages. Traffic was seldom an issue on Stock Island because hardly anybody wanted to be there. Space was relatively cheap and people minded their own business, as clandestine activity was a longstanding and respected local tradition. Along the main drags of Macdonald and Maloney Avenues, where a handful of industrial buildings were shimmed in among the trailer parks and boatyards, there were mysterious enterprises that offered the public no clues at all as to the nature of their services or products. Wreckers Rum actually stood out in that furtive precinct by being one of the few businesses with a sign out front, boldly suggesting that it had nothing to hide.
The distillery was housed in an undistinguished but substantial two-story building, white stucco over concrete, at the intersection of Maloney and Bay, and it backed onto a small canal that led to open water. There were two truck-loading docks, vacant now. The small gravel parking lot was dusty; swirls of fine grit floated up from the big tires of the Mercedes as Rocco stopped the car in front of a modest and unadorned front door.
Carlo Costanza used a handkerchief to wipe the dust from his expensive shoes before stepping inside.
If the exterior of the premises was ordinary, beyond the doorway it was first class all the way. The stills, some twelve feet high, had come from France and were made of hammered copper whose gleam was warmer and more beautiful than that of gold. An elaborate choreography of pipes and ducts connected one chamber to another, then soared up to the ceiling before snaking away in complex patterns among the beams. Here and there, gauges blossomed from the machinery like flowers from stems; stainless steel valves etched out their flawless perpendiculars. A couple of workers were scurrying around in brown rubber aprons and green boots, though it was difficult to imagine that anything would ever spill in such a tidy and well-gasketed set-up.
Costanza, flanked by Max and Rocco, strode through the place and waved hello, stopping for a man-hug and a brief chat with a tall, frizzy-haired fellow who seemed to be the chief distiller. The boss reached up to pat him on the cheek before continuing on past the tanks, past the aging room where oak barrels were stacked across either other’s backs like Chinese acrobats, and continued on to a small and windowless office where his accountant, Elliot Ginsberg, spent his days.
Ginsberg wore thick, smeared glasses and had a sagging face that seemed to lack bones and be built from cartilage alone. His hair was lifeless, with a texture like wilted parsley. On his desk was a laptop computer and an assortment of executive toys—rebounding steel balls, tops that spun for quarter-hours at a time, a maze through which a marble dropped at random. He stood up when Costanza and his guys swept into the tiny room. Costanza flashed him that ambush of a smile and gestured for him to sit down again.
It was a very brief meeting. Costanza said, “How’s things?”
“How’s things?” said the accountant. He always began his answers by repeating or rephrasing the question, a habit probably picked up in a math class forty years ago. “Things are fine.”
“How are sales?”
“Sales? Flat.”
“Cash flow?”
“Cash flow? Steady more or less. Still losing about a hundred fifty grand a month.”
“Available funds holding up okay?”
“Available funds? To be honest, Carlo, only so-so. We’re down to something like half a mil. So unless you want to top up the reserves again—”
“The prospect doesn’t thrill me.”
“Doesn’t? Understandable. Well, then it looks like we got three months left before we stop paying bills. Then probably two months after that before the vendors cut us off. Then I’m guessing another three before they get around to suing us.”
Costanza frowned but didn’t seem particularly upset. “So in other words, we’re right on schedule. Keep up the good work, Elliot. Mikel around?”
“Mikel? Course he’s around. He’s around even more than I am.”
The boss and his entourage piled out of the office, continued down the hallway, then branched off to the left. At the end of this next corridor was a big closed metal door. Rocco wrapped his meaty hand around the knob and tried to turn it. It was locked. He slapped at the door.
From the other side of it, a squeaky and suspicious voice said, “Who is it?”
“It’s me. Carlo.”
“What’s the password?”
“Come on, Mikel, cut the shit.”
There was a brief delay, then the tiny scrape of metal on metal as the man behind the door slid open his peephole to regard his visitors. Finally the door swung open.
“Christ, Mikel,” Costanza said. “Paranoid or what?” He bulled past his associate into a laboratory whose LED lighting was so white it was blue; the brightness ricocheted like a pinball from one hard surface to another. The walls were tiled, the floor was tiled, the ceiling was a maze of gleaming pipes and ducts. There were worktables and counters made of stainless steel. Beakers glinted, thermometers and gauges glared, there was no soft place for the eye to rest from the onslaught of reflections. Involuntarily, the new arrivals flinched and squinted.
“Not paranoid,” said Mikel Shintar. “Careful.” He was wearing a spotless white knee-length lab coat, under which he appeared to be naked, or at least no other clothing showed. His calves were hairy and he wore flip-flops on his feet. His body was big and rather cylindrical; it didn’t quite go with the squeaky and often slightly breathless voice. He had green distracted eyes and sandy hair cut in the kind of rigorous and waxy flat-top that you don’t see much anymore.
“Making any progress?” Costanza asked him.
“Incremental.”
For some reason this irked Max, the tough guy with the cratered face. “Come on, Mikel, talk normal so regular people can understand.”
“Baby steps. That work better for you? Another day, another molecule.”
Costanza said, “Can you give me a time frame when we might have product? A ball park?”
“Honestly? No. You never know when the breakthrough will come. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next year.”
“Three months, we’re out of cash again, Mikel. And I’m getting a little tired of subsidizing the Mr. Wizard bit.”
The chemist didn’t seem to care much about that. “Some days it seems so close,” he murmured. “If I could just break apart that last covalent bond, induce one more hydroxyl radical to hook up with the third carbon ring, substitute two potassium ions for the sodium—”
“All right, all right, enough with the professor bullshit. I’m duly impressed. Inna
meantime, just tell me, you got everything you need?”
“In the lab? Yeah, the lab is great. The lab is heaven.” His distracted eyes grew a notch more unfocused and he gestured as if in benediction around the glaring space with its alembics and Bunsen burners and racks of sparkling test-tubes. Then he heaved a sigh. “I have no idea why I ever gave up pure research.”
“You gave it up,” Costanza reminded him, “because you went to jail.”
“Oh, right. Right. But I mean before that, when I went over to the business side. It was never right for me, never a fit. I was tempted by money. By power. For a while, at least, I really liked seeing my name in the papers.”
“Your name gets in the paper this time,” Costanza pointed out, “it probably means we’re all royally fucked. But materials. You have enough materials?”
“Oh yeah, that’s all fine. As long as we keep cranking out the distillates, as long as I have the throwaways to work with. I mean, everything required, it’s all right there in the juice. Tiny quantities. Undetectable. But there. It’s a beautiful thing. Just a matter of breaking down and re-combining, tinkering, fine-tuning. Once I have the formula, the rest is pretty easy. We ramp it up, we can produce as much as we want.”
“As much as we want,” Carlo echoed, and he felt his mouth moistening at the thought of how much money that could lead to. “And we’re the only place in the world that people can get it from.” He allowed himself a damp smile at that, then dried his lips on his handkerchief. It was the same one he’d used to buff the Stock Island dust off his shoes, and it held a taste that was bitter and drying against the tip of his tongue.
8
B y the time Rita had worked her first full week in the tasting room, she’d gone through the complete rotation of the few outfits she’d packed for her move to Key West, and was at the stage of mixing and matching and accessorizing to make them look like different clothes. As someone who traveled radically light and never wanted it otherwise, she was good at this. A belt transformed a dress; a scarf made an old top new. Besides, she mostly saw a different batch of people every day, so how much did it really matter? As Blake had warned or promised her, she’d been meeting all kinds in the tasting room.
On this particular day, at a slack time in mid-afternoon, a middle-aged woman came in alone. She was a touched-up blonde, neither pretty nor unpretty, neither stylish nor unstylish. Somebody’s neighbor. Someone you’d see in the checkout line at Publix. She sat down on a stool and said hello.
“Welcome to Wreckers,” Rita said sunnily. “How are you?”
“My life is shit,” the woman said.
Rita wasn’t sure she’d heard right, so took the safe course and simply said, “Would you like to taste some rum?”
“Sure, why not? Sounds like fun. My husband hates me.”
She put a snifter in front of the woman, poured a generous splash, and started the spiel about the Hurri-Cane. Then empathy and curiosity kicked in and she said, “Had an argument?”
“No, not really. He just hates me. Has for years.” She sipped the rum and murmured approvingly. “Not bad. He only married me ‘cause I have big tits.”
Rita couldn’t help looking at the woman’s chest. “But you don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Have big tits. Not exceptionally big, I mean.”
“Honey, trust me, they’re big. I strap them down. Know why? I don’t want that asshole to have the satisfaction of strutting around like the whole world knows his wife has big boobs. Like he deserves big boobs. Like the boobs are a compliment to him.”
“Ah…Well...Well, anyway, this rum can only be made at harvest time.”
“Plus, my kids are all fucked up,” the woman said and she began weeping. Not sobbing, not sniffling, not even seeming to notice she was crying, just shedding slow and silent tears that flowed partway down her cheeks and then bogged down in tiny orange deltas in her make-up.
Rita said, “Hey, kids come around.”
“Not mine. Junkies. Alcoholics. I tried to be a good mother. I think my daughter’s a bisexual nymphomaniac. My son, the youngest, moved back home and stays in the basement. Doesn’t talk to me, of course. Stays down there and smokes pot all day. Like I can’t smell it? Watches porn. Lives like a pig.” She broke off and sipped some rum. “You got kids?”
“Not so far, no.”
“Want any?”
“You don’t make it sound that tempting.”
“Don’t do it, hon. Little fuckers wreck your life.”
“I can see where they might. Um, this next rum is aged four years in wood.”
“Wreck your life. Wreck your marriage. I had a nice marriage for a while. Least I think I did.” She broke off and reached into her purse. Rita assumed she was fishing around for a Kleenex, but, instead, she brought out her phone and checked the time. “Crap, didn’t realize how late it was already. Gotta go. Meeting hubby for a sunset cruise and dinner. It’s our anniversary, ya know.”
“Oh. Nice. Happy anniversary.”
“Twenty-seven blissful years. Well, good talking with you.”
She left. Rita washed her glass and wiped down the bar. She thought about the unhappy woman but ended up being more curious about the son down in the basement. Why the hell had he gone back home? Did he imagine even for an instant that he could fix his warring, screwed-up parents, fix himself, fix anything, just by showing up and sitting there, reminding his family how they’d failed? Why didn’t he just take off and keep on going? Like Rita was doing. Not that taking off fixed anything, but wasn’t it a whole lot better than sitting in a stupor in the basement?
Around five o’clock the tasting room got busy. There were a pair of businessmen who fancied themselves connoisseurs, some sunburned tourists who’d stayed too long on the beach and now were looking for something, anything, indoors and free. There was a group of barely-legals who she’d had to card; she got a kick out of this, vividly remembering the effort it took to keep her own hand from trembling when she used to pull out fake proof not very many years before.
What with the rush, she fell behind in the glass-washing and tidying up, and when Blake arrived ten minutes early for the evening shift—disheveled and tired-looking as always, with a seemingly endless array of explanations for why he’d hardly slept—he helped her get caught up. He was nice about that. He was nice about a lot of things. He never pulled rank and he tried his best not to let it show that he had a crush on Rita. It showed anyway, of course.
The place had emptied out while the two of them were working side by side. At some point they reached up at the same moment to put snifters back in racks, and their pinkies rubbed together for an instant. They dropped their arms, got back to work, and Blake said, “Did you feel that?”
“Feel what?”
“When our pinkies touched.”
“Yeah. What?”
“Electricity. You didn’t feel electricity?”
“No. I didn’t.”
“No little spark or anything?”
“No. No spark.”
He was wiping down what had become his half of the counter. Without looking up, he said, “I guess you don’t find me sexy, do you?”
She didn’t know what to say, so she kept quiet.
“It’s just a question,” he went on. “Really. Whatever you say is fine. I promise.”
“Well, okay then. No offense. No, I don’t find you sexy. I like you and I don’t find you sexy.”
“Hardly anybody does,” he said with a shrug. “I wish I knew more about why.”
She said nothing.
“Any way you can help me figure out why? Just totally as a friend, I mean.”
She steeled herself and said, “Well, if you really wanna know, for one thing, you move a little stiff.”
“Stiffly.”
“And for another thing, you keep correcting people’s grammar.”
“Right. Sorry. I guess that isn’t sexy. Anything else?”
“Blake, liste
n, I’m not gonna stand here analyzing all the reasons I don’t find you sexy, because, human nature being what it is, if I do that long enough, I might even start talking myself into thinking that you are sexy, but I don’t, so that isn’t gonna happen. So I think it’s better if we just move on.”
“Well, okay. Sure. Sorry.”
“And by the way, all this apologizing for nothing isn’t sexy either.”
“Sorry. I mean duly noted. Okay, moving on. How was your shift?”
“Mostly fine. Got into a sort of longish chat with a woman who pretty much reminded me of my mother.”
“That must have been nice for you.”
“Not really.”
“Oh, sor—. I mean, why not?”
“Let’s not even go there.” She finished wiping down her end of the bar and carefully draped the washrag over a faucet. “But I have a question for you. It’s been bugging me for a couple days now.”
“Fire away.”
“Okay. This place has a pretty prime location, right? I mean, rent’s gotta be expensive.”
“True.”
“They pay us decent—and don’t say decently.”
“True again.”
“We give away the booze. Every now and then someone actually buys a bottle. I’ve sold exactly three all week.”
“About average. So what’s your question?”
“My question is, how the hell can this place stay in business?”
9
O ne of the things about being a dog—a pet dog, I mean—is that you almost never get to decide where you want to go. It’s decided for you. Say you’re out for a walk with your Master. You come to a corner. He wants to go left, you want to go right. Who wins? I mean, sure, you can strain at the leash if there’s something over there that you’re really dying to sniff, and sometimes he’ll cut you a little slack and let you sniff it for a couple seconds. But where does it get you, really? It probably gets you a yank on the neck and in the end you go the way he wants to anyway.
This, of course, is when you’re on the leash. But the weird thing is it usually goes the same way even when you aren’t. You’re unleashed, sort of, but still you go where Master wants you to. It just gets to be a habit, not to mention way less trouble than doing otherwise. When I was younger, and on the rare occasions when I had the opportunity, I used to run off now and then. On an impulse. On a whim. Sometimes I had no idea why I was even doing it. I’d just take off. Felt great for those first few carefree strides, that first burst of speed, the wind humming in my ears, dandelions tickling my belly. But after fifteen, thirty seconds, if I’m really being honest here, I have to admit that the thrill would be gone, or going at least, and a bunch of bad things would be creeping into its place. Doubt. Fear. Where the hell was I headed? What if I got lost? Would I miss dinner? Would I get the old newspaper on the snout routine? But you know what I felt way more than any of those things? Guilt. I was causing Master worry. I was letting him down. That feeling pulled me home like a bungee wrapped around my heart, and I’d skulk back with my head held low and my tail between my legs, bowing my head, almost begging to have the leash put on again.
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