Thick as Thieves

by Peter Spiegelman

  Carr nods. “You’ll tell the Lenox PD I’m coming up?”

  “Sure, Mr. Carr,” he says. “Did you have any luck finding his cell phone, sir? Because if it’s turned on—”

  “It was in his sock drawer. The battery is dead.”

  The cop’s Adam’s apple leaps, and he shakes his head regretfully. “We’ll be in touch then,” he says, and he walks down the path to his cruiser.

  Carr rubs his palms over his face, which feels thick and numb. His eyes are sticky and he smells like airports and rental cars.

  Eleanor Calvin is inside, red-eyed, sniffling, smaller. “Tim Binney,” she says. “He’s a nice boy. I just wish he had more to tell us.”

  “Uh-huh,” Carr says. Even with the shades up and all the windows open, the house is gloomy, and it reeks of food and heat and mildew. Carr swallows hard, tries not to breathe too deeply or to look too closely at anything.

  He fishes his phone from his pocket and scans through a long list of missed calls. Mike, Bobby, Bobby, Mike, Valerie, Valerie, Valerie. He turns the ringer on, and as soon as he does the phone burrs. Valerie again. He turns the ringer off.

  “Your phone is always ringing.”

  “Work,” Carr says. He looks up at Eleanor Calvin. She’s crying again. “Mrs. Calvin, it’s not your fault.”

  “Yes, it is. I knew he was upset. I knew he was confused. I just never thought he would … I lost patience with him.”

  “He has that effect on people.”

  She shakes her head. “No. I was stupid. He was upset and confused and frustrated, and I shouldn’t have argued with him. I didn’t know that Volvo still ran. I didn’t think he had the key.”

  “I took it away last year, but he must’ve had a spare. He was upset even before he found out that you were moving?”

  She nods. “He’s been agitated for weeks, on and off.”

  “About anything in particular?”

  “He’s been talking about your mother.”

  “Why?”

  An embarrassed look crosses her face, and she looks away from Carr. “Her birthday is coming up, dear—next Tuesday. She’s always on his mind, this time of year.”

  “What does he say?”

  Eleanor Calvin’s cheeks redden. “He curses sometimes, the way he cursed at me—but I don’t think he means anything by it. Other times, I can tell he misses her. Just a few days ago he was talking about … I don’t know, I suppose it might’ve been a vacation the three of you took. And there was something about a fairy tale—King Midas, I think, and a maze. Honestly, I couldn’t follow most of it. Does it mean anything to you?”

  Carr looks at her and shakes his head.

  The Lenox Police Department is headquartered in a reassuring brick building with columns and dressed stone trim that dominates the south end of Main Street. But when Carr steps through the heavy doors, into the heat and glare of the afternoon, he is not reassured. The Lenox force is no larger than its Stockbridge counterpart, and its strengths run similarly to directing traffic and protecting weekend homes. Manpower is stretched thin in this high season of outdoor concerts, dance recitals, and outlet shopping, and though the stocky, gray sergeant promised they were doing all they could, Carr knows it’s not much.

  There’s a bench outside headquarters, in the shade of a wide oak and with a view of cars streaming toward a concert at Tanglewood. Carr takes a seat and sighs. His bones are leaden.

  The sergeant had led him out back, to where the Volvo had been towed, and let him look over the car. There wasn’t much to see. The doors had been unlocked when the Lenox cops found it, but there were no signs of a break-in. It was as mud-spattered and pollen-caked as it had been when Carr had seen it last, decomposing in his father’s driveway. Inside, it was bare and sour. No motel keys or gas receipts or maps with circled destinations. The sergeant had told him his patrols would keep an eye on the lot where the Volvo had been found, in the event Arthur Carr returned for it. Carr had nodded and thanked him.

  What had he expected them to do about a man who’d simply gotten in his car and driven away? Did he think they would organize a posse? Call out the bloodhounds? Dredge the Stockbridge Bowl? And really, what had he expected to accomplish up here himself? What the hell was he doing?

  Latin Mike had asked a similar question, in a call Carr had made the mistake of answering in the Miami airport, while he waited for a flight to Boston. “Forty-eight hours to game time, and you fucking disappear on us? The fuck’s the matter with you, cabrón? This job’s not hard enough as is—you got to walk off in the middle of the night?”

  “I told Bobby that I’d be back in time.”

  “I don’t give a shit what you told him—I want to hear it for myself, pendejo. I want to hear about this personal business—or maybe you just lost whatever balls you pretended to have.”

  “I’ll be back before the party, Mike.”

  “That’s all you got to say? I got money sunk in this thing, asshole—I got plans—and if you fuck them up—”

  Carr had hung up then, and had answered only one call since, from Valerie. He was about to board the Boston flight, and her voice was soft and worried. He could barely make it out over the announcements.

  “Bobby said you had an emergency. Are you okay, baby? Can I do anything?”

  “Just keep people calm,” Carr had said. “I’ll be back soon.” If Valerie had said anything in reply, he hadn’t heard, and he couldn’t bring himself to talk anymore. Bobby, undaunted, had turned to texting. His last message summed it up nicely: “4 q s hole.”

  A bus rolls by, leaving behind a cloud of diesel and an impression of wrinkled faces and wispy white hair at the windows. Carr hoists himself from the bench, rubs his eyes, and drives to his mother’s grave.

  The cemetery is two miles outside of town, off a pitted road and behind a leaning wrought-iron fence. There’s a chapel by the gate, with black shutters, peeling white clapboards, and a steeple with no bell. Carr doesn’t come here often, and when he does, his heart pounds. It’s pounding now, as he follows the path that climbs the hillside, and his face is warm, though not from exertion.

  Her grave is near the top, by a stand of maples and a white stone bench, and with a view of distant woods and a nameless blue pond. It is not a family plot—no relatives lie to rest nearby—it is simply a place his mother picked out when she learned that she was dying. He wasn’t sure what about the site appealed to her. Maybe it was the pond, or maybe it was the company of strangers.

  Her stone is granite—Dark Barre, from Vermont, Carr recalls from a corner of his exhausted brain. The chiseled inscription is simple: Andrea de Soto Carr. No dates; no epitaph; no embellishments of any kind. Carr rests a hand on the curved top. He doesn’t fight the hammering in his chest or the burning in his eyes, doesn’t resist the vertigo. It’s a much diluted version of the feeling he’d had, at age fourteen, when his father told him she was gone. The rushing in his ears, the ground opening beneath him, the free fall, the sense that there was no bottom. There’s something consoling in the memory of that initial terror. He’d survived it once; he could do it again.

  The time between her diagnosis and her death was short—a matter of months—and Carr spent it sleepwalking. His vision, it seemed, worked only on things very close—his hands, his feet, a book—or very far away, but not in the middle distances, no place other people might occupy. Other people were an abstraction—like shadow puppets. Most of what they said seemed irrelevant or garbled, and he himself said very little in response.

  What he remembers best of his mother from that time are her hands, white and narrow, strong until the end. She took up knitting again, something she said she’d done when she was younger. He remembers the white hands working, the skeins of dark wool, the click of the needles, the pieces she made that were neither scarves nor hats, but simply long, dark panels. He remembers too the streaks of gray that appeared, overnight, in her jet-black hair, and how her collarbones became so pronounced—the bones of
a ship, laid bare by a storm. Denial was not a word he knew in this context, but later someone explained.

  He can’t look for too long at the stone, and so he focuses on the flowers placed beneath it—a wilting bouquet of gladiolas in yellow, pink, and white. Her favorite flowers, in her favorite colors—the same as the bunch he’s holding now. He guesses that the older ones have been here for a day.

  38

  It’s the white stone bench that does it. He sits on it, in the shade, for some time, looking at the flowers on her grave—the ones he brought and the ones his father left there. He runs his hand over the smooth stone, lets the coolness seep into his fingers. He studies the veins and seams—like threads—in the marble. He remembers her knitting, the coiled wool. He lets his eyes close and listens to the patrolling bees. He lets Eleanor Calvin’s voice echo. Something about a vacation, about a fairy tale—King Midas and a maze. And then his eyes are open again, and he’s up from the bench, trotting down the hill toward his rental car.

  There are still lawn tickets available for the Boston Symphony Orchestra concert, and Carr buys one, but declines a program. The music will not start for hours, but the manicured lawns of Tanglewood are already busy with concertgoers spreading blankets on the grass, laying out picnics, pursuing their wandering toddlers. Carr sticks to the gravel paths and makes his way south and west, toward the formal gardens. It’s been nearly thirty years since he was last here, but somehow he remembers the way.

  The gardens are bordered by boxwood hedges, as high and thick and dark as they are in Carr’s memory: looming green walls; gnarled, intricate roots; and, cut at intervals in the hedge, portals so narrow that even children must stoop to pass. Carr turns sideways and ducks low, but branches catch at his shirt.

  It is quiet on the other side of the hedge, and the air is still. The boxwoods are shorter inside the garden, but high enough that the aisles between them seem narrow and clutching. Certainly Carr remembers them that way, remembers running headlong down those corridors in the fading light, remembers the thrill and fear, the sensation of walls closing in, the blind curves, sharp turns, dead ends. Remembers it as a maze—a labyrinth, his father called it.

  Mrs. Calvin heard it wrong: not Midas, but Minos—King Minos, of Crete. Not a fairy tale, but a myth. He remembers his father’s voice, chasing behind him, calling, in a bad imitation of Boris Karloff: “Beware the labyrinth. Beware the Minotaur.” Carr was six. His father had been thinking about leaving the Foreign Service and was interviewing with the Economics Departments of several colleges in New England. They’d made a family trip of it. He’d never seen his parents so relaxed before, or ever again.

  He’s moving at a run when he comes to the white marble bench. It’s at the far side of the garden, where two boxwood lanes empty into a clearing. It’s broad and smooth, with a high curved back and a worn inscription, and it’s cracked and stained by weather and much use. His father sits at one end, one leg crossed over the other, arms folded in his lap. He’s studying the lawn, and he’s so still and pale he might be made of marble himself.

  Arthur Carr looks at his son without surprise, and with a faint, wry smile. “Minotaur chasing you again?”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Carr says, catching his breath. “Where the hell have you been?”

  His father scratches his head and narrows his gray eyes. “Have you eaten lunch? I could use a sandwich.”

  At the diner, his father orders a roast beef on rye. He tries to order a scotch with it, and has some trouble with the waitress’s explanation that beer is the best she can do. In the end he has a Heineken. Carr orders tuna fish, and goes outside to make phone calls.

  He watches his father through the window while he talks to the local police and to Mrs. Calvin, and makes arrangements for the Volvo to be towed to a garage. Carr glances at his missed calls list, and sees more messages from Valerie and Mike, and one—an hour earlier—from Tina. He goes back inside.

  Arthur Carr’s reading glasses are perched on the end of his nose, and he’s scanning the ads and the children’s games printed on the paper place mat. “Calling the office?” he asks, as his son slides into the booth. “I expect you’ll be getting back soon.”

  “It wasn’t work. It was about you.”

  “Not a particularly compelling subject,” his father says, chuckling. “Who’s interested in that?”

  “Mrs. Calvin, for one. She was worried sick.”

  “Damned dramatic. Doesn’t she have anything better to do? Shouldn’t she be packing?”

  “For chrissakes, you can’t just take off like that.”

  “Nonsense—people do it all the time. They’re here, and then—poof—they’re gone, just like that.” There’s a connect-the-dots picture on the place mat, and his father moves his finger from number to number. “Christ, some people can vanish while they’re standing right in front of you. They’re in the very same room, but it’s like they’re not there at all. She had that trick down cold.”

  “Mrs. Calvin?”

  His father looks up and scowls. “Don’t be thick—you know who I’m talking about. You’re just like her, for chrissakes—playing dumb when you want to, but taking it all in. She was a hell of a poker player, you know.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  His father squints at him behind his glasses. “So, maybe not taking it all in,” he says, and a sly smile—as at a private joke—crosses his face. “It’s her birthday coming up. Did you remember?”

  “On Tuesday.”

  “It was always hard to shop for her. Who knew what she wanted? Nothing I had to offer.” The smirk again, angrier this time. “For example, I never knew her taste in cigarette lighters. And I was never much of a tennis player, either. Always hated doubles.”

  Carr takes a deep breath. His father mentions Hector Farias only rarely, and when he does the reference is always oblique. And always he baits his son to respond—to ask about his mother and Farias, to offer some comment—but Carr never does. He’s relieved when the waitress brings their food.

  Arthur Carr is hungry, and in short order half his sandwich is gone, and so is half his beer. He pats his mouth with a napkin and sighs. “Her cooking isn’t so remarkable,” he says. “I’ll take a few meals here every week and be just fine, and the hell with her.”

  “Don’t start again,” Carr says. “She won’t be around for much longer, but for the time being, you’ve got to make this work. You’ve got to be civil, at least.”

  “Silence is the best I can manage,” Arthur Carr says, and drains his beer. He turns his attention to the connect-the-dots picture again.

  Carr shakes his head. “She does a lot for you.”

  His father looks up. His eyes are unfocused and confused for a moment, and then they sharpen. He crumples the place mat into a small white ball. “What exactly did she do for me, besides end my career and turn me into a cuckold and a laughingstock? Am I supposed to be grateful for that?”

  Carr’s jaw tightens. “I was talking about Mrs. Calvin,” he says softly.

  “I told you not to do that—pretend to be stupid. You know damn well who I’m talking about.”

  Carr looks around the diner. It’s nearly empty, and he takes a deep, unsteady breath. His voice is a raspy whisper. “You want to have a conversation about her? Fine—let’s have at it. You want to know what she did for you? For one thing, she put up with your crap for all those years. She put up with your absences and your anger and moving house every other year, and she still managed not to kill you. I’d say that was a fair amount. So she had a lapse in judgment—can you really blame her? She tried to find some happiness, and didn’t think it through. She’s not the first one.”

  Arthur Carr lifts his half-glasses off and pinches his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Some happiness—is that what you tell yourself? Is that what you really believe?” His words are slow and his voice is quiet, and his expression is like a flickering candle, shifting from surprise
to triumph to regret. “All that watching, and you never saw anything.”

  “I saw you red in the face, and heard the endless griping about your career—as if your failings were somehow her fault. You and your goddamn career.”

  “My career … Jesus.” His father shakes his head. “You are an idiot.”

  “So much for conversation,” Carr says, and he picks up his tuna sandwich.

  “All that watching …,” Arthur Carr says, and he lowers his voice. “Don’t you understand? If it wasn’t for my career, she wouldn’t have had one.”

  “Had one what? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about her career.”

  “Her career? She didn’t have a career—she never even had a job.”

  Arthur Carr’s laugh is bitter. “She always had a job,” he says. “My job enabled her job, for chrissakes. It was her cover. I was her cover. You were her cover. Her cover—do you understand it now?”

  There’s a rushing in Carr’s ears, a step he missed. “What? What are you talking about?”

  “You insist on being dense. She was Agency, your mother—in the Directorate of Operations. You understand what I’m saying?”

  There’s vertigo, a feeling of the ground opening beneath him, and it’s hard to get the breath out of his lungs. His fingers are splayed on the table. “What the hell …? What are you saying?”

  His father looks suddenly tired. His voice is a dry whisper. “Your mother was with the Agency, for chrissakes. She was a CIA officer.”

  Carr doesn’t remember getting the check, or paying it, or leaving the diner, but somehow they’re in the parking lot and he’s grabbing his father’s arm. It’s thin and light—a bird’s bone. Carr hears his own voice, but it’s far away and attenuated—a radio in a distant room. “I don’t know who you think you’re talking about, but it’s not … You’re confused, Dad—you’re seriously confused.”

  Carr stares into his father’s face, into those gray eyes, but try as he might, he can’t find confusion there—can’t find anything but exhaustion and regret. He tells himself his father can’t keep a thought straight any longer—can’t find the thread, much less hold on to it. He doesn’t know the difference between Mrs. Calvin and his own wife half the time. He tells himself these things, but his voice is tinny and remote and in his heart he knows it’s full of shit.