“I don’t want you expecting a squeaky clean business,” Charlie says flatly. “It’s brutal and ugly and at times dishonest and it’s wearing me thin because it’s the fucking Old World out here. None of your idealism, okay?”
“Idealism hasn’t gotten me very far.”
He smiles. “Be honest. It won’t kill you to be less idealistic?” I shake my head. “And who knows, you come back with me to Cyprus in the off-season and maybe we can talk about art schools. You’ll be glad to know there’s poverty everywhere. Every ten feet on this planet someone has a hand out.”
Charlie shifts his leg on the desk, still scooping for his lighter in the bag. One of his testicles drops from the opening of his shorts, a prune-purple egg enveloped in a sweaty thatch of hair. It looks like the vulnerable head of a newborn. Growing up, I saw Charlie naked on an average of twice a week in the locker room after gym class. But for some reason I can’t stop staring at this single oblong ball peeking from yellow fabric. It feels as intimate as entering the house of a stranger. I force my eyes back to Charlie’s face, but that brief glimpse of nudity makes me love him more; he seems approachable now, his money and handsomeness and authority to offer me a job brought down to lopsided, pubic-blazing earth.
Charlie grows irritated by his lighter-finding mission and dumps the entire contents of the tote bag on the desk. An address book tumbles out, three pens, his car keys, and a turquoise earring as gaudy as a Venetian doorknocker. He grunts as he picks up the earring, clutching it in his hand.
“Sonny,” he hisses. “She’s still at it.”
“I’m sure she’s only trying to be funny. Are you two not doing well?”
He slides open a drawer and fingers a book of matches. He draws a match across the strike strip and lights his cigarette.
“You could say that,” he replies as he exhales. The smoke clouds the trapped office air like clapped chalk erasers. “We’ve been arguing all morning.” I now wonder if it was Sonny who gave him the black eye. Their fights might have reached a level of theatrics where physical violence felt like the only way to outdo their previous efforts. “Sonny wants to take Duck with us to Nicosia come November. One month is no longer enough. She says she’s ready to be a full-time mom again.”
“You don’t seem so bad with Duck.”
Charlie moves his cigarette an inch from his mouth and gives me a death stare. Stray stars would implode in the gravitational field of those eyes. But I sense loneliness in those eyes as well, like the most valuable accomplishment on my résumé might be “friend.”
“Duck’s great. But I’m not ready to be a dad. And Duck already happens to have a father in Los Angeles. Sonny thinks I can throw lawyers at him, dish out more money, get her a private tutor, a horse, a miniature replica of her ranch house in Topanga so she won’t get homesick.” He shakes his head and fastens the clasp of the earring onto his shirt. It jokingly hangs over his heart like a mock war medal. “I don’t know. I sometimes wonder if we should take a break. You give someone keys to your house, your checkbook becomes as communal as the medicine cabinet. I told you, every ten feet there’s an open hand.”
I smile queasily, conscious of the fact that I could be counted among the leeches. But Charlie doesn’t seem to view me that way. He looks at me tenderly over a smoke-smeared mouth gritted in an uneven lock. There is an advantage in getting to someone young, the memory of the ten-year-old never quite expunged.
“Maybe it will just be you and me going back to Cyprus in November. If you’re taking the job. Are you?” His stare transforms from black hole to sunshine. “I thought you’d be jumping at the offer. Come on, you want me to beg? Let me do this for you, all right? You’ve passed out enough free sandwiches. Why don’t you take one for once? I know you’re hungry. Take the sandwich, Ian.”
I have no choice. And I’m not sure I even want one. “Of course I’m taking it. When do I start?”
He jumps from the desk, the smoke swirling from his fingers, and his grin is a streamer flapping in warm trade winds. “You just did,” he exclaims, reaching both arms out. “Come here. No handshakes for us.” My chair slams against the wall, and I knock over the pieces on the chessboard as I round the table to put my arms around him. The skin of his neck is still hot from the day, and I almost believe that we were destined to end up hugging in a metal trailer on the other side of the world. I feel the sneeze-like strain of tears about to break.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Don’t thank me. It’s not going to be easy. But it will be ours.”
Charlie drops back against the desk, and a minute of quiet intrudes. He twists his cigarette into an ashtray.
“So walk me through the procedure. Tourists call up and book a boat for a week and one of your captains takes them out to see the islands?”
He laughs faintly. “Something like that,” he says. “Only a little more complicated. We’ll get into it. Deep into it. But I have a meeting in five minutes so we’ll have to wait. Why don’t you go back to the cabins and unpack. I’m guessing your clothes are still in your suitcase.”
“I didn’t know how long I was staying.”
He nods. “The cabin’s your home now. Use the closets. I paid extra for cedar. We’ll go over everything when I get back in a few days.”
I look at him puzzled. “Where are you going?”
Charlie sighs and reaches for his tobacco pouch but reconsiders adding another link to his habit’s chain.
“I need you to do something for me, a personal favor, and I promise the rest is on the level from here out.”
“What?”
Charlie cocks his head. “I have some business in Turkey. There are people I need to meet in the port of Bodrum. It’s urgent, a problem with the registration of some of the boats. It’s a convenience-state loophole, nothing to worry about, but it’s causing difficulties for our customers.”
“Convenience state?”
Charlie nods. “Yeah, the reason the boats have Cypriot flags on their sterns. You’ll learn. I’ll teach you. But I need to skip out for a couple days—two, three at the most. The thing is, I don’t want Sonny to know I’m gone.”
“She must understand you have a company to run.”
“Does she? I’m afraid Sonny thinks she’s my full-time job.” He wipes his hairline, the sweat slicking the curls straight. “Sonny will freak out if I leave her for a few days. She’s paranoid. It’ll become major warfare, and I just can’t deal with it. So I want her to think I’m still on the island, just taking a little time out of the house.”
“Why is Sonny paranoid?”
With a sharp tug, his hair turns tousled again, and his eyes sliver, as if simply mentioning a disease causes it to spread. Or maybe it’s the frustration of someone unaccustomed to explaining himself. “It’s that bomb that went off in Skala last month, okay? It scared her to the point she won’t let me out of her sight for more than an afternoon. Two days away and she’s likely to phone the police or hunt me down in Bodrum herself.” Charlie stretches his neck and rotates his head like he’s following a speeding clock. “Because of where that bomb went off.”
“On this island.”
“At that taverna, that particular taverna. I used to go there every morning at eleven on the dot. Nikos had been my ritual for years. Sonny was in Paris that day, and I got caught up in a phone call from my father. He never calls, but he did that morning because he’d just received bad news from his doctor, so for once I didn’t go. The bomb exploded just a few minutes after eleven, right there at the tables where I always sit. I was fucking lucky, Ian, so lucky, because I should have been there. Any other day and I would have been.”
I imagine the roar of that bomb in our past, a human-eating wound opening up in the world just a month behind us, and the small miracle of his being here, fighting the urge for another cigarette, dressed in too-tight, yellow shorts.
“Thank god for your father. Jesus, Charlie.”
“Yeah.” He wheezes.
“His bad news saved my life. But Sonny has gotten it in her head that the bomb was meant for me. She won’t listen. She’s convinced of it, and I’ve had to do everything in my power to stop her from packing our bags and running back behind the gates of our house in Nicosia. Or worse, New York. I promised her if she stayed, I would too, so you see, my leaving will just bring all the fears back into her mind.”
I picture Sonny at her psychic, an old Greek woman tracing her carcinogenic nail along Sonny’s palm for a forecast of explosions and carnage. Bomb? Do you see a bomb in my hand? What does it look like? Where will it explode?
“What a minute,” I say. “Why would Sonny think that bomb was for you? Charlie, what’s going on?” For a second, I consider retracting my acceptance of employment. The rectangular metal office with its shut door has the ominous feeling of a trap.
“It wasn’t for me!” he shouts, saliva cobwebbing his teeth. He says it so definitively I know he’s spent nights weighing the possibility of another conclusion. “Not for me at all. Why would anyone try to kill me? If I could even conceive of a reason, do you think I’d be dumb enough to stay? My god, I wish I were that important. No, it’s exactly what your taxi driver said, an antigovernment group trying to raise a bit of hysteria. And it worked. I’ve had Sonny asking Therese every morning if there are packages left in front of our door. She’s finally gotten beyond it, and I don’t want her starting up again. Greece is already as shaky as a roller coaster these days with its economy in the toilet and refugees washing up on all the islands. I go to Bodrum for three days and I know she won’t be here when I get back.”
“I thought you wouldn’t mind a break.”
Charlie looks down at his hands, where dry, yellow calluses line each joint. They’re workman’s hands, the kind scored from handling hard material, the kind that Buckland was meant to protect its students from earning. “I love her,” he murmurs in the tone of an uneasy confession. “I do love her. I don’t want her leaving me.” This is honest Charlie. I remember the punctured-balloon sound from when we were kids, the pliant voice snagged on a sharp-metal emotion. Charlie could always handle being the leaver. He dropped out of college, split on his family and friends, waved good-bye to New York—his entire biography has hinged on him escaping first. When he died in our game of Destroyers, he’d actually get angry at me—“Come on, I can still get away, that’s not fair, not fair, there’s got to be a last way out”—on the verge of punching me for what he considered an act of betrayal. There are some people who have never been abandoned, and I get the sense that Sonny’s departure would spiral him headfirst toward despair.
Charlie closes his hands and stares up at me. “Look, I know I haven’t been a saint in relationships. And I’m not going to lie and tell you I’ve always been fair to Sonny either. We’ve had our low moments. But if any good came out of that bomb, it’s that it taught me not to take her for granted. No more cheating. Never again. My new virtues are faithful and boring.” I purse my lips, calling bullshit, and Charlie recoils with a laugh. “I swear. Almost getting caught in that explosion woke me up. You’re looking at a changed man.”
I want to ask why his newfound fidelity doesn’t extend to lying about his whereabouts. But the bomb is back in my mind, and I hold on to my elbows as if my bones could shield the force of a blast.
“Be honest with me. Is this place safe? Could there be more bombs? Charlie, how are you sure it wasn’t meant for you? I don’t think I can—”
“Ian,” he barks. “Bad shit happens. Real shit, even on vacation islands. Larger forces are at work than our own lives. You don’t run every time there’s a siren. New York happened, and everyone stayed, didn’t they?” He’s referring to a far bigger horror, but for a second I assume he means my father’s death. I didn’t stay. I did run. “I’ve made a life here, my company, my house. This is where I belong. Some lunatic group purposely planted a bomb at a smaller, local taverna. Enough fatalities to get the world’s attention for five minutes, but they didn’t pick the crowded cafés because killing twenty or thirty tourists would have meant an international incident. That’s all it was.” He brings two fingers to his mouth but finds they don’t hold a cigarette. It’s like he’s kissing his fingertips. “You’ve got to learn not to take everything so personally. That’s Sonny’s problem. Don’t let it be yours.”
Charlie reaches out and latches onto my forearm.
“Don’t let fear grow feet and walk all over you. You’re with me, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I’m with you.” Five minutes into my job I don’t want to be cast as a coward. I can’t help thinking that this cooked-up chicanery with Sonny is a test of my loyalty. If I can’t even smoke screen his girlfriend for two days, how can I be counted upon to handle the stickier operations of his boats? “So you need me to be your alibi.”
“Alibi.” He groans. “Why is everyone around me so dramatic?” He slips from the desk and sidesteps around the table. He unhooks the frame holding the picture of Domitian, and behind it is an iron safe with a combination lock protruding from its center. Charlie pinches it. When he turns the dial to the number 15, I know instantly the rest of the combination. It’s the date of his last birthday backward—15–29–6. That was always his locker code at Buckland. Passwords, like habits, are hard to break. He pulls out a thin stack of aquamarine bills and shuts the door. “I don’t need your help if one tiny lie is going to weigh like a fat man on your conscience. I just thought a bit of corroboration would put her at ease. Believe me, Sonny appreciates feeling at ease.”
He offers me the money, and I take it, five one-hundred euro bills with an arch bridge stretching across each rubbery note.
“That should hold you until I get back.”
“So what do I tell her?”
The sound of a car lumbers up the dirt road. An emergency brake is wrenched on the other side of the trailer.
“She’ll think I’m staying on Domitian,” Charlie says. “It’ll be docked off the coast. Christos has me covered. All you need to do is pretend we hung out once or twice. Say you checked in on me and I’m still upset. I’m going to take one of the charter boats to Bodrum and be back before she realizes I’m gone.”
Charlie bends down and rifles through a cardboard box. He resurfaces with a powder-blue baseball cap. A tilted ship’s wheel is emblazoned on its crown under KONSTANTINOU CHARTERS in a breezy dark-blue font. He shoves the cap on my head, its band constricting against my temples.
“There’s your uniform,” he says. “If you lose it, the replacement fee is fifteen euros.”
“I’ll try to keep it clean,” I joke. Charlie flicks the brim. “And I’ll tell Sonny I visited you, but how are you going to get her to accept that you’re spending a few days on your yacht in the first place?”
“Leave that to me. We’re all meeting for drinks tonight in Skala. Ten P.M. Bring Louise.” He slides in front of me, his eyes finding mine, darting from one eye to the other, as if to test their resemblance. “Thank you for the favor. You’ll do it?”
“Yes.”
He juts his head an inch from mine. “I can’t tell you how much it means having you here. I’m serious, Ian. It’s like we’re both home.”
“I hope I don’t disappoint you.”
“You could only if you tried.”
He opens the door and clasps my shoulder as we step out into the thermonuclear heat. It is a day for avoiding the shine of metal, and the station wagon parked by the office isn’t so much a color as a radiant star. But when the priest with the trimmed beard climbs out of the front seat, I identify the car as the white Mercedes that ran me off the road.
“Petros,” Charlie chants and extends his hand. The priest steps forward in his long black robe, fitted tightly like the petticoats of a French bohemian. He cups Charlie’s hand, a gold Rolex dangling from his wrist. His smile matches his automobile, and like the car, it has an element of speed to it, the purring grille hiding a mean motor.
“Petros is the prie
st of the St. Sofia church in Chora,” Charlie tells me. “But he also manages some of the monastery’s financial holdings. He’s the landlord of my dock. Petros, this is Ian Bledsoe.”
The priest’s hands move from Charlie and offer themselves to me in their cupped arrangement. I have to slide my fingers between his palms, hot and soft, and he exerts a gentle pressure, like a nurse’s on a child’s forehead.
“Very nice to meet you,” he says in a Greek soprano, like the unspooling reel on a fishing pole when a line is cast. He first takes in my Charters cap and then my face. There’s no visible sign that he recognizes me as the motorbiking tourist he nearly killed yesterday with his car. “Do you work here?”
“Yes, he does,” Charlie intervenes. “Ian’s just come from New York. He’s my number two.” I wish Charlie would stop calling me that. It now conjures the little man in the bathroom with a specialty in fecal analysis.
“Welcome,” Petros says, dropping his hands away. “It is not a simple business, running boats. The water and transport are very difficult for the unacquainted. You’re expected to know every island and port.”
“Oh, Ian’s a pro,” Charlie says blithely. “He knows what he’s doing. He’s been working for me for a few months in the States, learning the operation on the business end.” Charlie winks at me. Our new venture is joisted by little lies. “He’s up to speed, very dependable. He’s going to be an excellent fit. Customers will love him. He even speaks Spanish.”
The Destroyers Page 17