The Siege

by Stephen White

  Still, I was looking forward to seeing Dulce’s pretty face, congratu lating her on her engagement, and continuing my campaign to rehabilitate my image.

  In the shorter term, I was intent on locating the genteel waiter whom I planned to beg to bring me más cerveza. Or cerveza más.

  I could never remember which was correct.

  So far in life, that confusion had not interfered with me getting my next beer.

  A woman spoke to me from behind. I hadn’t heard her approach or sit down.

  “Feeling a little out of place?” she said.

  “You, too?” I asked, as I turned toward her. She was sitting so close to me I couldn’t make out her features without my Kmart reading glasses, which were tucked away in the bag that had been hijacked by the bearer of chilled towels in the tent on the dock.

  The woman had a pleasant voice. Her eyes were blue. The panoply of greens in the dress she was wearing made me think of parrots and jungles.

  “No, I’m . . . great. I was being . . . empathetic,” she said.

  “I’ll have to try that strategy with the next person I talk to. Empathy sounds like a potentially winning plan. Yeah,” I said, “I am from out of town.” I pointed to my name tag. “Samuel Purdy.”

  She extended her hand. I didn’t think she was wearing a name tag, but I would have had to indulge a glance at her chest to confirm my suspicion. Decorum told me to resist that urge.

  “Ann Summers Calderón,” she said. “Carmen never told me you were a Samuel. I tend to remember such things. I’m good with names. An acquired skill.”

  Busted, I thought, acknowledging to myself that I could probably have picked a better audience on whom to polish my wiseass routine.

  I, too, am good with names. For me, it’s a cop skill. I recognized her name, of course, though the fact that she had used all three of them during her introduction felt like the equivalent of slipping me a cheat sheet so I couldn’t possibly fail to identify her. On my scorecard that earned her a point for generosity.

  “This is your party,” I said. “It’s . . . a fine . . . fine affair.”

  She did an affectionate little eye roll. “This is my son Andrew’s do, actually. He can be . . . such a girl. I love him dearly, but . . .” She sighed. “This does make his father happy, too. His family is all here from Argentina. And, you must admit, it’s a gorgeous night for a sail,” she said. “So we’re blessed. We are blessed.”

  “A little warm, maybe,” I added.

  Ann Summers Calderón sighed another tiny sigh, which I read to be an editorial assessment of my glass-is-half-empty attitude about the weather.

  “I was so disappointed to hear about Carmen,” she said. “We’ve only met a couple of times, but I think she is just the nicest person. I was looking forward to getting to know her better this weekend. Now I guess I will—”

  “Have to settle for me?” I said.

  Carmen Reynosa is not only my girlfriend, but also the soon-to-be mother of my baby. Like me, Carmen is a police detective. Unlike me, Carmen isn’t on suspension from the job for professional misconduct.

  Unlike her, I’m not on obstetrician-ordered bed rest. Although if I could have traded places with her—I get to spend the long weekend in bed with magazines, a decent satellite package, a remote, and someone to deliver me food; she comes to Miami for her daughter’s seventy-two-hour engagement extravaganza with her wealthy future in-laws—I would have gladly done it.

  “Andrew is your . . . ?” I asked.

  She looked at me sideways. She figured I knew who Andrew was. And she was right. She’d caught me falling into the bad habit I have of conversing like a detective, which means asking questions even if I know the answer. I’ve learned the hard way that in most social situations people aren’t thrilled to be asked questions solely so that the asker—me—can make a determination about the veracity of their replies.

  “My son,” she said. “The soon-to-be betrothed.” She tilted an almost-empty champagne flute at a tall man twenty feet away with perfect teeth and the kind of body I’m accustomed to seeing only in the young and sexually ravenous, and in my firefighting colleagues in Boulder. The low sun reflected off the man’s sunglasses. “That is my husband. Ronaldo Angel Calderón.”

  I loved the way she said “Angel.” ON-hell.

  When Carmen pulled me off the far end of the bench to substitute for her on this trip, she had seen fit to caution me that Dulce’s future in-laws had some serious family money. Something about fasteners. I was thinking at the time that she meant screws and nails, but the details of the genesis of their fortune had not exactly piqued my curiosity. Now that I had seen the yacht and begun to guess how serious the money was, I was a little more curious about the hardware. We were talking a lot of screws and nails. Veritable shitloads.

  I said, “So this is home? Miami?”

  I had just about run through my small-talk repertoire. When that happened, I risked tripping from conversation to interrogation. It’s not a welcome transition at most parties. On yachts in Miami, or otherwise.

  “Ronnie’s home, yes, most of the time.” She leaned away from me far enough that I could see her face clearly for the first time. “I spend most of the year in Chapel Hill. Ronnie and I do best when we don’t reside simultaneously in the same city. We’ve made a brief exception in order to cohost Andrew’s little boum this weekend.”

  I didn’t know what a “boom” was. I let it go. “I’m divorced, too,” I said, going with the empathy thing. “I know what that’s like.”

  “Oh, Ronnie and I are not divorced, Sam. We still love each other—Ronnie is a sweet, sweet man with a generous heart as well as . . . some character . . . flaws no woman should have to tolerate. He and his family are way too Catholic for us to ever divorce. And . . . he and I are an incredible dance pair and we are—flat-out—the best cave-diving couple in Florida. We can’t just toss all that away, can we? We have come to an . . . arrangement about our marriage that works for us.” She winked at me. “We know when to be together and we know when to be apart. The custody issues have all been worked out.”

  “Us, too. Me and Sherry. We have a son. Simon. He’s with his mom this weekend, but he’s with me most of the time. During school, anyway. Sherry’s gone back to college.”

  Ann touched me on the arm. Her fingertips were cool from the champagne glass. “Our kids are both grown. I’m talking about the money. The Calderón money. We have joint custody of it.” She waited for me to figure out a response. When I failed, she said, “Come on, now. You can’t be planning to spend the whole weekend sitting by yourself drinking warm beer.”

  I was tempted to reveal that I had spent more than a few weekends in my adult life doing just that. And that I was much more comfortable with it than she might imagine. But I could tell she wanted none of it.

  “I’ll introduce you to some people. Oh‚ good, good. There’s the rest of your golf foursome tomorrow. You’ll love Franklin. Though I hear he cheats. Keep an eye on him in the rough.”

  Rough? Carmen didn’t say anything to me about golf. I definitely would have remembered that.

  I allowed Ann Summers Calderón to pull me to my feet. I meet a lot of people, from many walks of life, but I was having trouble finding a compartment in which to place Ms. Summers Calderón. She was unlike anyone I’d ever come across.

  She stopped and stood maybe ten inches from me. Ann had no trouble with close. She said, “Are you trustworthy, Sam Purdy? Carmen is trustworthy, I could tell right away the first time I met her in California.”

  My hostess seemed to want an answer. “Your instincts are good about Carmen. She is a rock,” I replied. “Me? I have my faults, but I do consider myself a trustworthy man.” I thought that what Ann was asking was whether I was at any risk of embarrassing her by fooling around with her female friends or, god forbid, relatives while my pregnant girlfriend’s feet were propped up on pillows three thousand miles away.

  “I thought so. Good,” sh
e said. I watched her facial expressions reveal mild concern, then resignation, and then return rapidly to perfect-hostess pleasant-tude. I didn’t know what the progression meant. She said, “My original plan was to run this by Carmen but . . .” She waggled her head from side to side.

  Indecision, I guessed.

  She said, “Read this, please. Then find me later on. Tell me what you think. It’s the most perplexing thing.” She raised herself on her toes and leaned in so that her lips were inches from my ear. “This is just between us.” She lifted the lapel on my sport coat and slipped something into the inside pocket.

  Carmen had picked out the jacket for me at Macy’s, on sale. It had been advertised as a “three-season” fabric. Later that night, when we talked, I planned to let her know that none of the three seasons was springtime in Miami.

  Then she and I would talk about golf.

  Yes, we would.

  One of the golf partners Ann introduced me to was a guy named Rick Lovett‚ who was a hardware buyer for Lowe’s. I assumed that Rick’s ticket to the soiree was that he purchased a lot of Mr. Calderón’s fasteners for his employer. It became clear to me after a couple of minutes of chitchat that Rick was almost as out of his element on the sunset cruise as I was.

  The segregation of crowds at bashes like the welcoming event occurs naturally. The young couple’s contemporaries—fashion-forward, ostentatious, fit, tan, and handsome all—mingled together on the deck above the band at the stern. They didn’t mind the late day sun. Guests the age of the couple’s parents clustered together in the shade on the deck we were sharing with the musicians.

  Rick was an in-betweener. I pegged him as mid-thirties. I could tell his id was urging him to hang with the cool, attractive kids and hope some girl got really, really drunk and he got really, really lucky. But his long-term life goals for a swelling wallet anchored him to the likes of me. He asked me twice what I did for a living. I was evasive both times. He asked me twice if I knew if the yacht we were on belonged to the Calderóns or was a charter. I told him twice that I didn’t know.

  Rick let it slip that his handicap was thirteen. My ignorance of all things golf other than the existence on the planet of Tiger Woods meant that I didn’t know whether his thirteen was something he was proud of or something he was apologizing for. Rick asked me about my game.

  I told him that I held my own with a putter.

  I didn’t tell him that I knew that only because my son and I liked to play miniature golf. Simon liked the golf. I liked being with my kid as dusk fell in the shadows of the Rockies.

  I could have also explained to Rick that I was almost always around par, but I was brought up not to boast so I kept that fact to myself.

  He nodded knowingly at my comment about putting. “My short game saves my ass, that’s for sure.”

  I said, “Amen to that.”

  I was having serious doubts that I could keep up my act for a long weekend.

  After doing about as much meaningless chatter with strangers as I’m genetically capable of enduring in one stint, I wandered around inside the ship—I’d discovered that the thing had its own fleet of lifeboats, so I was done calling it a boat—until I found an empty room that had a big flat screen TV and some cushy sofas. More to the point, the place was air-conditioned to a temperature that would keep my beer from boiling. I guessed that the room was called a “salon.” If I had a big yacht, I’d call this space the family room or the den. I figured that the Calderóns of the world would prefer “salon.” I fished around with the remote until I found a Stanley Cup play-off game on the satellite receiver.

  I slipped off my Macy’s jacket and settled in. The piece of paper Ann had stuck in my coat pocket was a note. The sheet had been folded into quarter size. The note was printed on standard office paper. It looked like generic Helvetica to me. Something close to twelve point.

  She had described it as “perplexing.” I didn’t disagree.

  The note was vaguely threatening. Maybe more like ominous.

  I was tempted to do exactly what the note warned not to do—discount the thing. Write it off as a provocation, or a prank.

  I wondered if Ann Summers Calderón had been smart enough to photocopy the original or if she had received the exact copy I was holding in my hands.

  I assumed she’d been careless with it because civilians usually are. Suspension or not, I treated it like I was a detective—I was cautious as I held it.

  I read the half page again.

  “Are you Canadian, Sam?” Ann said from the open door to the salon.

  The woman moved with the stealth of a Boulder mountain lion.

  “Minnesota,” I said. I allowed the “oh” sound to fill some extra space as I spoke the word. The exaggerated accent gave me unmistakable Iron Range cred. It also helped explain my obvious affection for hockey.

  “What do you think of the missive?” she asked.

  I looked directly at her for about ten seconds before I replied. She revealed nothing during the interlude.

  “If you’re taking this seriously, I think you’re displaying some cojones by showing it to me.”

  She grinned, just a little, at my description of her behavior. I noted the lack of offense. “Should I take it seriously?” she asked.

  “Do you?”

  “It concerns me. Obviously.”

  “Who else has seen it?”

  “No one.”

  “Your husband?”

  She shook her head. “Ronnie’s most definitely someone. Don’t underestimate him because he’s handsome and gracious and Latin. If he read that note, he’d be itching for a fight. He’d get his people on it. Make noise. In life’s arena, Ronnie is usually either the matador or the bull. Neither seemed helpful here. It didn’t feel prudent to me to have him dashing his red cape or going wild attempting to gore someone. By nature, I’m lighter on my feet. If it becomes necessary, I will tell Ronnie about this, but in my own way.”

  She closed the door behind her before she kicked off her heels with an unaffected grace. I wondered if she’d once been a dancer.

  She took the chair across from me. Ann Summers Calderón sat with her knees well over a foot apart, allowing her parrot green dress to drape modestly between her spread legs. My ex-wife had insisted that it was nothing more than typical male misjudgment on my part, but I always considered that particular posture in a woman to be a sign of confidence.

  Sherry’s alternate interpretation had more to do with the offending woman’s bad breeding.

  “Why is that? Why wouldn’t that be prudent?” I asked. I could guess the answer, but my guessing the answer wouldn’t tell me anything about the confident woman across from me.

  “It was in my purse, Sam. Sitting on top, in plain sight. I found it when I was in North Carolina, not here. At work. Three days ago. The note wasn’t left for Ronnie. It was left for me.”

  “What do you make of that?”

  “That it isn’t about money.”

  “Leaving it there, in your purse? Someone found you, got close to you,” I said, stating the obvious.

  “Yes,” she said. “They did.”

  My comment hadn’t upset her balance. Ann had some steel reinforcement in her. Emotional rebar. I said, “If it’s not about money, what is it about?”

  “I don’t know. Some threat . . . to me. Mine.”

  “What threat?”

  She shrugged.

  Not good enough. “Guess,” I said.

  She was way ahead of me, of course. “If it’s not money, it’s family,” she replied. “That’s where we’re vulnerable. All of us.”

  She was right. “Anything like this ever happened before?”

  “No.”

  “No blackmail? Extortion?”

  “No.”

  I believed her.

  “I thought I spotted a couple of guys on board who might be . . . muscle.”

  “More than a couple. Ronnie employs security, of course, as a precaution. Here, for
us, and for his family in Buenos Aires.”

  “You guys have secrets? You and your husband?” I asked.

  “Of course we have secrets. Don’t you?”

  I thought about it. I had one doozy. The rest? Merely embarrassing or borderline humiliating. I said, “Fewer and fewer as I get older, but yeah, sure. What’s your thing, Ann? What do you do?”

  “I’m a proud, proud mother, Sam. A good daughter. A middling wife. Professionally, I’m a geophysicist, doing mostly research, but I love to teach. Top of my field? No, but I don’t embarrass myself, either. I take my work seriously. I am teaching one class this semester in North Carolina. I have grad students.”

  I allowed my eyebrows to float. “Geophysics? Translation?”

  “Earth science. Think geology and physics. The intersection.”

  I was hoping that she didn’t feel compelled to give me a longer explanation. “If the note isn’t about money, you got anything the sender might want? Monet? Van Gogh? Honus Wagner baseball card? Kick-ass comic book collection?”

  She smiled. “Ronnie’s tastes run more toward de Kooning and Rothko.” She shrugged, shook her head. “We have nothing the man who wrote the note couldn’t buy from someone else if he had enough of our money.” For a moment, the wrinkles around her eyes took on definition and she appeared to be her true age, not ten years younger. The image was fleeting.

  “Business secrets?”

  “Us? Only of interest to a competitor. If this were about business, they would approach Ronnie, not me. Screws are screws, Sam. We’re where we are today because Ronnie had vision. Years ago he was the first manufacturer to recognize the advantages of producing product in Asia, one of the first to see the coming dominance of nail guns. His head start has given him significant strategic advantages in this hemisphere. Our competitors are still playing catch-up.” She paused. Her eyes descended to the note I held. “I don’t have any choices yet, do I? I just wait for the next shoe to drop? Am I right?”