Mom: BORN AND IT MADE THOSE YEARS WORTH IT. YOU WERE A BIG, BEAUTIFUL NOISE. I DON’T KNOW WHY I’M TELLING YOU THIS. MAYBE SOME WISH TO TALK ABOUT YOUR FATHER AND HERE IN INDIA THERE IS NO ONE WITH ANY CONNECTION TO MY PAST. I USUALLY FIND THAT A GIFT. AT ANY RATE, PLEASE CALL ALEXIS. SHE SOUNDED VERY ANGRY. ANSWERING HER QUESTIONS MIGHT PUT THE MATTER TO REST. REMEMBER, I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU SO MUCH. AND IF I DO MANAGE TO OPEN THIS
Mom: ORPHANAGE—THE POLITICS OF SUCH AN ENDEAVOR IS NOT EASY IN BACKWARD DELHI WHERE, AS I’VE TOLD YOU, THEY BELIEVE NOT THAT YOU MAKE YOUR DESTINY BUT THAT YOUR DESTINY MAKES YOU SO GOD WANTS YOU TO DIE OF HUNGER IN THE STREET—PERHAPS YOU COULD GIVE A SMALL CONTRIBUTION FROM YOUR INHERITANCE. YOU ARE MY GOOD HEART. I LOVE
Mom: YOU. PLEASE SEND A SIGN YOU ARE FINE. I WORRY. LOVE, HELEN
The vote is unanimous. I cover my hand over my mouth as I fly toward the bathroom, the heaving so perfectly choreographed that I reach the porcelain mouth at the exact moment a flood of yellow syrup shoots from my throat. I don’t even kneel, just bend my head like a professional as five retching doses fill the bowl, the pain migrating from my stomach to my temples.
I wipe my chin with a towel, avoiding the quicksand of the mirror, and attempt to insert the prodding finger of the toothbrush in my mouth. Stumbling back into the bedroom, I check that the money is still in the nightstand as I tap a text to my mother: I’M IN GREECE. I’LL HANDLE IT. JUST A MISUNDERSTANDING. AND NO, THERE IS NO INHERITANCE FOR ME. I DIDN’T MAKE THE CUT. As I’m trying to figure out a better hiding spot for the money, another text beeps.
GOOD MORNING, IAN. IT’S MILES. DO YOU WANT TO GET THAT COFFEE? I’D REALLY LIKE TO EXPLAIN.
I respond: HAS CHARLIE COME HOME?
NO.
I wish my stomach had something left to oust. A different, far heavier queasiness descends, irremediable by sips of water or whiling hours from the final intake: the fact that Miles was one of the last to see Charlie, and he ended it with a punch. If Charlie’s disappearance is in any way involuntary, could it be that Miles’s conscience is inducing a need to explain? But I don’t want to think what “in any way involuntary” might begin to mean. My hangover won’t let me. A hangover is not so much an unwanted by-product of last night’s drinking as a destination in itself. It’s a safe room from overthinking, the outside world so full of excruciating, bomb-blasting sights and sounds, the worst thoughts merely blend into the scenery.
I’LL COME TO YOU, I write him. WHERE’S YOUR HOUSE?
I’M WATCHING DUCK. LET’S MEET AT A TAVERNA IN CHORA?
I HAVE TO DO SOMETHING FIRST. BEST IF I JUST COME TO YOUR PLACE. I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I’LL BE. OKAY, MILES?
I open the empty cedar closets, searching for a hiding spot for the money as I await his answer. After five minutes, he finally responds: UH, OKAY, HOUSE RIGHT BY ROAD IN CHORA, OVERLOOKING TAXI STAND. GREEN DOOR WITH WHITE AWNING.
There is no better hiding spot than the nightstand. My clothes are still piled in my suitcase. Against Charlie’s advice, I haven’t unpacked, haven’t hung my shirts on the hangers or arranged my toiletries like a toy train along the medicine-cabinet shelves. At some point in adulthood, I’ve learned that the sanest way of existing is never to feel at home. Today should be the first day of my new job at Konstantinou Charters. Instead, I’m going to visit Domitian, searching for the man who was supposed to rescue me.
GRIKOS IS A vanishing village, the white gulls scattering off the stucco rooftops like exploding stone. Even in the August high season, Grikos’s condos stare vacantly at the sea, its balconies rarely flash a swimsuit drying across a railing, and its gunmetal shop grates are pulled shut to serve as peeling announcement boards for summer concerts a month out of date. The tourists who drift along the port have the disappointed expressions of failed explorers, and the liveliest spot along the water is a restaurant offering pizza, and in newer signage sushi, and, in a final gastronomic gamble, a cartoon drawing of a taco, as if to tempt vacationers island-ed out on feta and squid. Still the village manages to appear overcrowded simply because of the compact houses packed tightly against the meager sliver of sand. I stop in a pharmacy, its neon-green plus sign blinking like an American dollar. Two hippies congregate in an aisle gathering rolls of cloth bandages, the kind to wrap around sore ankles and knees. I study the two young men with horsey German faces, one with a silver piercing in his cheek. The smell of pot and cloves drifts from their tourist shirts. They must belong to Vic’s camp.
“Do you have more bandages like these?” the taller, cheek-pierced guy asks the woman at the counter.
I buy a bottle of aspirin, cherry-flavored for children. A slice of lemon sits on the cash register, which the clerk dabs with her fingertips before counting out my change. I only have about seventy euros left from the advance Charlie gave me. Back outside, in the breezy blur of the bay, I curse myself for not saving more of it. When Charlie returns . . . But that thought echoes without resolution, when Charlie returns, when Charlie returns . . .
I’m chewing on two aspirin tablets as I approach Domitian. Christos stands on the pier, hosing down a pile of life vests and corralling one with the side of his flip-flop. His shirt is off, and from the back his body appears younger, a caramel hide over lean, taut muscles. He shuts off the spray, and turning, he becomes his age. There’s an apprehension to his darting, missing-teeth smile. Vesna said that he’s hard on his children, demanding too much. For some reason, strictness in a Greek father who makes his money tending boats seems more forgivable to me than in a wealthy New York businessman who managed to limit all contact with his son. And yet I wouldn’t want to be the recipient of Christos’s abbreviated gestures and barking commands. Charlie brought out the occasional warmth in the captain, but, of course, Charlie was paying him.
“Christos,” I say. He wipes the water on his shorts before extending his hand. “Have you spoken to Charlie? Have you seen him in the past day?”
He blinks at me in confusion. “No,” he bellows. “I hear nothing. I not know if he want Domitian today. No word.” He motions to the boat, as if it’s someone’s pet he’s forced to care for, which is exactly what it is. He grooms it, he cleans up after it, he knows its tricks and shortcomings better than its owners do. But there’s no sense of usufruct with Domitian; yesterday Helios told me that his father took a rowboat out to fish, as if borrowing the Konstantinou trophy for his own enjoyment would be a breach of conduct or of personal pride. “I leave here. I wait for him call.” Christos grabs his phone from his pocket and waves it. “He no call. Not for days. Want boat today or no want? I must move Domitian to Skala. He not tell me.”
I pray that Christos is better at understanding English than at speaking it.
“I have to ask you an important question. Three nights ago, did Charlie say anything to you about staying on Domitian for the night? Or about anchoring it out at sea for a few days until he got back from where he was going?”
Christos watches my lips carefully, his own lips cracked, lined with silver stubble, miming syllables.
“Charlie tell me leave Domitian here in Grikos. Leave galley unlocked. He say he sleep here and we speak early in morning about putting boat at sea. But I come next day, very early, he not here. He leave me no word. No call. No instruction. I keep boat here, but not hear anything from him.” He looks uneasy without a check-in from his employer, no doubt in his decades as the captain for the Konstantinous a trustworthy operative in whatever bizarre requests a billionaire family has asked of him. I imagine there have been many over the decades. He must be the caretaker of a zillion secrets that have flourished and faded in their summers on the island. A boat is a house with no neighbors, a mobile playground.
“You did the right thing,” I say. He seems indifferent to my attempt at assurance.
“You work at company now for Charlie?” he asks gruffly, tightening his eyes on me. In those eyes, we are now both employees.
“I haven’t started yet. What do you know about that busine
ss?”
“Not my business,” he hammers, poking his chest. “I no part. I do family boat only, for Mr. Konstantinou. I no interest in tourists.” A gold medallion hangs in the tinseled fauna of his chest hair. On the medallion is the engraving of an older, straining man, his back bent, with a child mounted on his shoulders like a beleaguered father carrying his son. I recognize the figure from taxi dashboards and from the necks of superstitious vacationers and from my childhood memorizing saints in church. It’s St. Christopher, Christos’s namesake, the patron saint of travelers. I remember the story: Christopher, by occupation, presumably before the invention of boats, carried voyagers across a river. One day a little boy stood waiting to cross. Christopher took him on his back, and as the water deepened and turned treacherous, the boy grew heavier and heavier until he was the weight of lead. But the soon-to-be saint prevailed to save the boy, and once onshore he realized the child was Christ. It seems less a case study in voyage miracles than it does in a fervent work ethic. But I can’t help wishing that Helios was worth the burden of his muling father, or that Edward Bledsoe had taken me as something more valuable than stubborn weight: to keep my mouth above the water even as his slipped under. The real lesson, when stripped of its Christian pieties, seems to be that serving the future means putting a weaker body before your own, a future of defenseless boys riding their drowning fathers in the waves.
Christos frowns as he lassos the hose. “Mr. Konstantinou, he has operation yesterday. Is he better? Awake soon? Out of hospital?”
I had forgotten about Mr. K’s surgery. “I don’t know,” I tell him. “I’ll ask Sonny when I see her.” He nods and tucks his chin against his neck, as if praying for a quick recovery. Tears glaze his brown eyes.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“My daughter, Vesna. I not find today. Gone. And Helios I not find also.” I consider informing him of Vesna’s protest rally in Athens, the one I surreptitiously financed, but I’m not interested in implicating myself in a Stamatis family crisis. I have Charlie to worry about.
I ask Christos if I can check out Domitian. After we both hop aboard, the captain unsnaps the canvas cover from the galley hatch.
“My daughter clean,” he tells me as he slides open the rosewood door. “I coffee.” He points to the shoreline restaurant as I steady my feet on the ladder rungs.
The galley is dark, the chrome glowing green, and the carpet soft on the barely rocking floor. My hand slides along the recessed wood until it finds the dimmer switch. The silent, sunken room, under the constellation of track lighting, is a headachy gleam. While I’ve always appreciated Charlie’s taste, there’s something garish about Domitian’s interior, like a lavish midtown condo that an oligarch bought predecorated but never visited. Fashion and boating magazines are stacked on the table. Two glass tumblers have been washed and left to dry upside down in the kitchen’s dish rack. Vesna has straightened and cleaned, at least in her mildly incompetent manner; on a low shelf next to the opal-inlaid chessboard sits a dirty ashtray she’s missed. I walk over and peer into it. Six hand-rolled butts fill the dish. The chessboard is frozen midgame, white winning, cornering the black king, although both sides have suffered heavy casualties. But now I know for certain that Charlie is the one who’s been sitting here. A castle lies on the side of the board, his signature forfeit to ensure an even match.
Two glass tumblers in the dish rack, a chessboard halted one move from victory—Charlie’s been here and he wasn’t alone. I try to recall if he mentioned visiting Domitian between the afternoon we sailed around the island and the night we met for drinks in Skala. Or is this evidence that he did come back to the yacht that night to sleep, just as Christos confirmed was his plan? If so, he had company. Someone must have visited, someone he knew well enough to offer a drink. And maybe that someone had a serious matter to discuss, prompting the second offer of chess. Chess is how Charlie swore he did his best thinking—how he wanted me, jammed in the corner of his office, strung over a board, to prove he could beat me as I was begging for his help. Even in charity, the game was still to win. The memory infuriates me now as much as his disappearance. Did he want me to understand which one of us was the loser? He could have at least chosen a game in which I had a fighting chance. Three gunmen in black balaclavas burst into the room. What do you do? Was it ever one gunman? One would be enough.
I move into the bedroom. The king-size bed hasn’t been slept in since Vesna made it up. Only a slight pond’s ripple is frozen across the purple wool. I scan the shelves of trophies, old Roman coins encased in plastic, a few bottles of cologne, and paperback novels warped by their home on the sea. At the end of a shelf is a small, yellowed book with a Polaroid sticking out. I pull the book out, and it falls open to a blue-lined page.
The crude handwriting is unsteady, the e’s backward, the g’s fattened into hourglasses, the P’s hovering like streetlamps. It’s a childhood diary dated 1993, when Charlie was seven:
the winters are cold. The sun sets arond 5:30 but rises before I wake up. When it isn’t cloudy, the sun is warm and it feels good to stand under but your not alowed to look up at it or else it hurts your eyes. The churches are old. The shops are loud and angry. The food is just okay, but you should not order the same thing all the time because its boring. Most people are nice. A few are not. But people like you if you tell a funny joke. Old people walk to slow under umbrelas. I like night the best because its dark but you can see farther in the sky. Mom says we wont stay long.
Maybe it was a trip with his family that Charlie was recording, or maybe it was a winter in New York. But it reads like practical advice for living, a Yelp review of planet Earth.
I pluck the Polaroid from its pages. It’s a photo of Charlie, undated, but he’s at least ten years younger than he is now. He’s midsway on a rope swing, night the only background, a yellow flannel shirt open to reveal his hairless chest. His legs are splayed, with the white blob of a sneaker kicking out toward the camera and catching most of the flash. But it’s his face that fascinates me, pitched back but staring directly at the lens, somewhere between startled and self-possessed. It’s like some phantom point on a horizon, beautiful and untouchable, for once free of all context, even of its arrogant smile. Whether it’s the past I’m thinking of or the present, I find myself missing him and worried for him and wanting him back, as if I could reach out and still the ropes and hold him by the neck. Where are you, Charlie? What happened? It doesn’t have to turn out this way. We can still be whatever we want. But I realize I’m talking to a boy ten years gone in a photograph. The white blob did meet the ground. The swing stopped. We are both too old to be whatever we want.
I slip the Polaroid between the pages. Time is too often gauged by what could have been prevented. History is a palace of mistakes.
First it’s just a sound, distant but subterranean. I stop to listen. The sound rises again, rustling, scraping. There’s something down in the boat with me. I pass back into the main room where the pale sunlight catches the frame of Charlie and his father. Skk, skk. The sound is beckoning from behind the closed bathroom door by the kitchen. I imagine Charlie on the other side, his legs and mouth and wrists taped, rubbing a torn fingernail across the wood. As crazy as it might be, I consider this scenario the most optimistic one—or at least the easiest scenario to explain why he never made it to his meeting in Bodrum.
The scratching is low to the floor, as patient as a branch against the side of a house. I grab the knob and wrench it open. Terry, the gray boat cat, sits on the marble bathroom tiles.
“You scared the shit out of me,” I yell, picking him up and bringing him to my chest. I feel his thin bones under the unkempt fur. My feet crunch the spilled litter around the tray under the sink, the marble tiles streaked with Vesna’s mopping. I stand for a minute in the bright quadrilateral, where a large portal window frames the seamless confluence of sky and sea. It’s so perfect, that fine, hazy blue, I almost want to punch a hole through it, press some butto
n to make the unbearable beauty stop.
“Are you hungry?” I ask the green eyes and white whiskers, lifting the cat in front of the mirror. In the reflection, a tiny blotch of brown covers the fur of his front paw. It’s the color of dried blood. I grab at Terry’s paw, but the cat turns feral, clawing at me, digging into my wrist, drawing more blood. As I let go, he races into the kitchen. Dried blood on his paw, and now on the bathroom floor I notice two brown splotches missed by Vesna’s mop. Fear switches the heart’s motor to its emergency-fuel reserve—Charlie’s blood, Charlie bleeding in this bathroom, Charlie never finishing the last move on the chessboard. Vesna’s own words yesterday ring in my ears, a passing observation that I stupidly didn’t stop to question. But when I went to clean, there was only an awful mess. No Charlie. What kind of awful mess? The mess of a scuffle, a fight? Or the mess of someone who never learned to pick up after himself? If only I could ask her, but right now Vesna is thrusting an anti-Eurozone sign toward the sky in Syntagma Square, chanting along with her compatriots for the rights of a free and independent nation. Fucking good that does when she might have mopped up a crime scene. Where does Vesna dispose of the garbage she collects from Domitian? Is there a trash bag on a barge floating out at sea with all of the evidence of something I can’t force myself to imagine?
I’m about to sound an alarm—in my mind, I’m already hurtling down the dock screaming for the police—when I remember my injured toe on the day we sailed around the island. Relief floods through me as fast as fear. The blood is probably mine. I hobbled down here after Sonny bandaged it.
The fresh scratch marks on my wrist are leaking red, and a drip falls onto the floor, further contaminating a contaminated scene. I run the cut under the faucet and apply pressure. You’re paranoid, I say to myself in the mirror. Paranoid, definitely. But Charlie has still been missing for more than two days.
I return to the chessboard and pull out the chair that Charlie sat in with the ashtray by my right hand. I inspect the wood and opal inlay, pinching my fingers along the surface and checking them for specks of red. The table is clean. My fingertips trace the groove of a small drawer on the side of the table. I slide it open. Resting on the padded velvet is the gaudy turquoise earring that Charlie had pinned to his shirt that night in Skala. I lift the earring by its hook. He was here, has been here, on Domitian. He did come back. But then what? I can’t be absolutely sure the blood is mine.
The Destroyers Page 29