I submissively step inside and pull the door shut. I don’t have any fight left to make things harder on myself.
The ugly, daisy-wallpapered room smells of previous occupants’ late-night nicotine orgies. It has a shadowy budget-vacation interior that practically assaults its inhabitants into enjoying the outside. An ascetic’s resolve would be required in order to stay here, and in Stefan it’s found its ideal boarder. A brown leather suitcase sits open on a chair with clothes folded in its cashmere casing. Files are stacked neatly on the nightstand on top of a silver laptop. The one item that offers a whiff of personality is a tennis racket by the door, zippered in a purple cover.
Stefan leans against the wallpaper, his foot toying with the spring of the doorstop. A constant ticking invades the room, which I first assume is a clock but must be the dripping of a leaky shower nozzle.
“Take a seat,” he says, pointing to the bed covered in a synthetic duvet. I follow his order and let myself sag into it. Stefan’s presence on the island feels like the delivery of bad news, but like all bad news it at least offers a sense of finality. It’s good news that blows the future open. If anyone has the means to locate Charlie, it’s Stefan.
“How long have you been on Patmos?” I ask. “You do realize there’s an empty room up in Charlie’s house with your name on it?”
“Charlie’s house,” he repeats caustically. He places his cap on the dresser, next to a small cache of orange medication vials. They match the one I saw on his bathroom counter up at the house. I wonder if the pills are for nerves or for pain. As Stefan stares down at the boinging doorstop, a halo of light shines on his nascent bald spot. All I can think of is how much Charlie must hate that bald spot on his older brother—a signpost of the destruction ahead.
“The point of my being here is to go about undetected. Why do you think I was running from you? Jesus, Ian, if I want to get to the bottom of how royally my brother’s been fucking up in the family name, I’m not dumb enough to announce myself. You think Charlie’s going to walk me down to that port he’s rented and show me the paperwork?”
“So you’ve been here a few days,” I reply sarcastically. Stefan nods, crosses the room to a minifridge, pulls out a bottle of water, and drinks it down. The fridge is stocked with several more bottles, but he doesn’t offer me one. He reaches for a vial on the dresser and swallows down two pills.
“Long enough to determine that you’ve been recruited as an accomplice in Charlie’s charter disaster.” Stefan shakes his head at the lunacy of it—or at the onset of a cold headache from guzzling water too quickly. He hunches over and touches his left eyeball, moving his fingertip in circles over the iris. “The fucking pollen on this island!” He blinks rapidly to reset his contact lens. “I know we’ve never been fond of each other, but I have to say I feel you’ve let my brother down.”
“I have? I’ve let him down?”
“You were always the sensible one, Ian. And my family was so good to you when you were young and having all of those problems with your parents.” He makes it sound like I was an orphan that the Konstantinous were forced to take in out of moral obligation. It stuns me that Stefan interpreted my entire childhood friendship with Charlie as some sort of charity project. “When I arrived a few days ago and found you among Charlie’s drinking party, I thought, well, at the very least, a friend has come who can talk sense into him. Then I learned you were simply taking advantage.”
“I think you’ve got the wrong idea.”
He smiles at me with the smugness of a meticulous researcher. How could I have ever considered meeting with Charlie’s brother to secure a job in the family business? Last week’s plans are moving past me as if they exist in a separate dimension, traveling god knows where at the blissful speed of ignorance.
“Did you or did you not come to Patmos to sponge off our money?” Of course it doesn’t matter how Stefan frames the past. It’s the embarrassing accuracy of the present that counts.
“I was in trouble. Charlie wanted to help me.”
A juvenile laugh erupts from his lips.
“Help you to help yourself? After what you did to your poor father in Panama—”
“Please don’t mention my father,” I say curtly. He’s not such an accomplished researcher that he’s studied recent obituaries. Or has he?
“My brother has particular weaknesses, and you know that. Among them, depravity, recklessness, and one too many soft spots for old friends.”
“Those aren’t all bad qualities.”
“They are when they’re on someone else’s dime! It’s not Charlie’s money!” I’m about to respond is it yours?, but Stefan lifts his hand in the sign of détente. “Look, I’m not here to argue with you. There’s no gain in that. I’m glad you’ve showed up, because I need your help. Living like an animal is one thing—the fucking and fighting and smoking and drinking and coasting and sailing. I’m not Charlie’s keeper, even if I do find it pathetic. But I’m sure as hell not going to let him destroy the family name.”
“So you’ve come to spy on him.”
He looks at me sadly, and for once the ruthless executive in him is replaced by the burden of the responsible sibling, the one who didn’t get to do any of the fucking and fighting and smoking and drinking and coasting and sailing because someone had to keep their head. If there had been no Stefan, there would be no Charlie.
“My parents let Charlie behave like a child for too long. Eventually everyone has to grow up and stop existing like an overindulged pet. A few years ago, I convinced our father to stop the incessant cash flow. It was only my naïve mother who was permitting it to go on for as long as it did. Charlie needed to build a career. It was for his benefit as well as ours. So, typical Charlie, his imagination extends only as far as his eyesight. He concocted his ridiculous boat business. Fine. Let him have his little break-even odyssey in Greece. Better that than him interfering in the family firm. As long as he showed some profit we wouldn’t intervene.”
“So what’s the problem?” I ask as if I don’t already see the problem, as if it isn’t sticking up like a tetanus-laced thumbtack on Stefan’s immaculate brass-plated desk.
“The problem is it’s not Charalambos Charters. It’s Konstantinou Charters!” He jabs at his chest, his anger redoubling. “It’s our name on those boats, those bright red K’s! Which means it’s tied to us. And my gullible father has been funding it as a subsidiary behind my back! Which means, Ian, if there is anything untoward about Charlie’s business, it jeopardizes Konstantinou Engineering! Do you get what I’m saying now?”
He clomps across the marsupial-brown rug, which is surprisingly sound absorbent, and grabs the files on his nightstand. “I don’t know if you are aware, I don’t know if Charlie’s bothered to tell you, but my father is extremely unwell. He doesn’t have much longer, and it’s fallen on me to take over as chief of the construction business. I have enough on my plate dealing with certain trumped-up violations that the ITUC and its proxy labor activism groups can’t wait to crack over my head as soon as my father dies. That way they can break the hold we have over our contracted clients. When a figurehead passes, that’s when they go right for a company’s knees.” He tosses the folders on the bed, three of which, due to the mattress’s inherent sag, immediately spill onto the floor. Stefan bends down stiffly, his mouth registering the pain in his legs, and begins collecting the papers. The type on them is so microscopic and consists of so many numerals and competing languages it appears like Babel run through a Manhattan taxi’s receipt printer. “I’m cleaning KE up, every part of it, so spotless it squeaks, so sanitary you can eat your breakfast on it. When those inspectors and journalists put on their sanctimonious white gloves and run their fingers along the edges”—he stands again and drops the fallen papers on the bed—“not one speck of dirt.”
Charlie isn’t a speck; he’s a spreading oil spill. “Charlie told me about your father,” I say gently. “I’m very sorry. How did his surgery go the other
day?”
This small act of compassion seems to bewilder Stefan. His eyes immediately scan the room as if searching for his cell phone.
“That’s nice of you,” he replies mildly. “It went okay. He’s a tough one. He hasn’t regained consciousness, but they moved him out of the ICU. The doctors are encouraging. They need to go back into his chest, when he’s stronger, to replace a valve.”
“Did you tell your father that you were coming here before he went under?”
“Of course not,” he whines. “He might have told Charlie, and that would have blown the whole purpose of my being on Patmos. To figure out what’s really going on with that charter outfit, which is the reason I’ve stayed out of sight. To make sure it isn’t a pile of dirt floating out in the middle of the Aegean that could be flung across the headlines to prove just how unethical the Konstantinous are!”
Charlie’s voice, a whimpering child: We built the highways in the Middle East. Haven’t the Konstantinous always been unethical? Isn’t that the secret of their success? I wonder how clean Stefan can make an empire constructed on the backs of slave migrant labor to build up the infrastructure of precarious midnight regimes. How many unscrupulous deals must the Konstantinous have forged with decades of conflicting powers to secure their own survival in the Middle East, and still soldiers bleed out daily along those roads to claim that ground, and refugees are spilling across them to escape it. I can’t even begin to understand the politics of that region, but I suspect that Stefan, for all of his years inside Dubai’s KE corporate headquarters, doesn’t understand it either. Prince Phillip might. You can’t scrub old ghosts away so easily; all you can do is try to make peace with them. Stefan strikes me as dangerous, not because his intentions are nefarious but because they aren’t. He believes he can perform quick conversions. I don’t suppose Konstantinou Engineering will last long under his watch. It’s more likely he won’t last long as he is under its terms.
I lift my head and try for direct eye contact. His allergy-damp eyes meet mine in the form of a challenge.
“So what have you found?” I ask.
“Not enough. Charlie’s created a tight little barrier around himself, people unwilling, and, I assume, paid not to talk. But I know his charter company is a front for something.”
“How?”
“You think I’m here on a whim?” He snorts. “Do I seem like I have unlimited quantities of free time? I’ve got better things to do than spend my vacation days checking up on my brother. I should be on Mallorca right now at the tennis clinic!” His right hand clenches an invisible racket. “I received an e-mail on August first from one of Charlie’s former employees informing me that I might be interested in what’s really going on with those refurbished boats. This employee asked for compensation in exchange for his information, which, naturally, I refused. But I can’t let that sort of accusation slide.” Gideon. He must have made contact with Stefan after he saw me in Athens and knew he wouldn’t be getting his job back. And now he’s hoping to squeeze two hundred K out of Charlie so as not to rat him out to his brother. “I canceled Mallorca and flew directly to Patmos.”
“You flew? There’s no airport.”
“Helicopter,” he clucks. “The point is, Ian, I haven’t gotten very far on those I’ve approached. And I can’t approach too many without Charlie catching wind. I’ve always been close to Therese, she’s a blessing, but she’d likely tell Christos, and that old man is Charlie’s captain. He might as well be sitting in my brother’s pocket. Thankfully, there has been someone, a trustworthy source, who’s shed a little bit of light. But he could only tell me what Konstantinou Charters isn’t—a venture taking vacationers around the islands.” I want to ask Stefan the identity of his source but I already know he won’t provide it. “I got so fed up I cornered that bizarre little man, Ugur, down at the port yesterday. He was useless. Charlie’s thumb might as well have been pressing on his tongue.”
Stefan does something unexpected: he grins. He rests one of his legs on the dresser, leaning his weight into it in the way a salesman tries for a casual demeanor right before he presents his best offer.
“So that’s where you come in,” he says. “What you said through the door about knowing the truth of his company.” He waits expectantly for a response.
If the hairy, twill curtains weren’t closed, I might search for a distraction out the window. All I can do is stare at the slick purple cover of the tennis racket. Stefan is still frozen in an awkward half-stand on the dresser, not so much like a salesman now as a county prosecutor waiting for the first jolt of the electric chair to pronounce his problem officially contained.
“Tell me what you know, Ian,” he orders. “I realize you’re working for Charlie and you might think it’s in your best interest to protect him, but that business of his isn’t going to make it to the end of the year. I’m going to see to that.”
It doesn’t occur to Stefan that I might want to protect Charlie out of loyalty to whatever friendship we have left, that it isn’t only my interest I’m looking out for. I could tell him about Bodrum, about some vague smuggling operation and the shells welded to the hulls. But how will Stefan’s knowing help Charlie? And won’t he be more likely to hunt Charlie down if he remains in the dark?
Stefan lifts his foot from the dresser and marches to the nightstand. He pulls out a checkbook, smacking it twice against his palm. He reaches for a pen, jots a number in the box, and signs his autograph.
“I know you need money. My source told me that. He said you’ve dug yourself into a hole and that your father cut you out of your inheritance. I’m willing to provide remuneration for your help.” He rips the check along its perforated seam.
“Why don’t you just pay the former employee? Wouldn’t that be simpler?”
It’s clear by his smile that I’m a novice across the net. “Blackmailers never stop blackmailing. Pay once, you’ll pay for life. And how can I trust his information? With you, I know it’s legit. We go back. You’d be doing the family that was kind to you a favor. And I feel it matters to help a friend.” He holds out the green paper between his fingers as if tipping a maître d’. $50,000 is written in the box. “This is what you came for, isn’t it? Don’t be proud. Proud people don’t sleep well.”
I should take the money. I should deposit it and send the 9K to Lex and leave the island as soon as possible with Louise. What’s one more rotten transaction between adults in the history of rented rooms? Charlie thought he could buy me too, but in his case I was asking to be sold.
“I get it,” Stefan says when I don’t reach for the check. “You think Charlie might give you more. Well, he can’t. When my father does regain consciousness, I’m going to report what I’ve learned and Charlie won’t have the resources to buy you a drink. It’s going to be hard times ahead for him. My father doesn’t like to be duped. As soon as he’s conscious and strong enough to talk, Charlie will be lucky if he can scrounge together the price of an airline ticket back to New York.” Stefan waves the check between his yellow fingers. “I’m going to find out the truth. If you don’t talk, someone else will for much less. Do the smart thing here. I hope I spelled Bledsoe correctly. Oh ee, right?”
It’s as if a meteorite has fallen from the sky and landed a few inches from my feet. You can get stuck on the impossible statistics of being crushed to death by astral debris or you can obsess over all the exchanges in time—the pause for the elevator, the speed of boiling water—that allowed you to stand mere inches away from that particular square meter of landing space. In either case, you walk away lighter, a survivor of the near miss. A swell of warmth spreads through me as I commit to my decision. It’s like tasting myself again, the Ian-ness, a bland, earthy flavor of Michigan cornmeal. Without meaning to, Stefan has given me the rare opportunity to become the person I’ve wanted to be—someone who doesn’t always cave to the highest bidder.
“No. I’m not taking it. You’re right. I am broke. But I’m not betraying him.
”
Stefan’s only weapon is money. When it fails, so does he. His mouth approximates an aerial photograph I once saw of an L.A. mansion caught in a mudslide. Half the mansion remained pristine, but the lower half sagged down the hillside, the swimming pool buckling free of its perfect ellipsoid. Stefan folds the check and shoves it in his pocket.
“But if you’re interested at all in Charlie’s well-being,” I continue, “you can do something to help him.”
The juvenile laugh returns as Stefan moves to the door to pull it open for me.
“He’s in trouble. He’s missing. And the worst part is, everyone only thinks he’s safe because Sonny’s daughter saw you in Skala and made the same mistake I did.”
“That loud little girl?” Stefan asks. “I figured that was her kid. I’ve heard a lot about Sonny Towsend, about the kind of woman she is, but I haven’t had the pleasure. Has Charlie dressed her up to match the house?”
I ignore the insult. “He’s been missing for four days. No one has seen him. I’m not even sure he’s on the island. But he wouldn’t have just left everything the way it is. He wouldn’t have just left—” I stop short of adding me.
Stefan stands watching me, clenching and unclenching his jaw in a series of physiognomic calisthenics.
“Did you hear me?” I yell. “Your brother is missing. The business you’re so worried about is basically obsolete.”
“Exactly!” he hisses. “Exactly the kind of thing Charlie would do to avoid a confrontation.” Stefan notices the doubt creeping over my face. “Don’t you think it’s a bit of a coincidence that my brother goes missing at the exact moment I’m on the island? He’s probably learned I’m here. Much easier for him to disappear rather than face the consequences. And what better way to hide the truth of that charter operation than to fold up shop. I bet you if I left today he’d be hosting a cocktail party up in Chora by sunset.”
There is no doubt that Charlie would have panicked if he had discovered that his brother was snooping around the island. His tears and violent mood that night in Skala jibe with someone whose luck was in danger of running out. I remember his words about New York not being the place he’d go if Greece collapsed, and maybe his Greece was collapsing right then, his little kingdom expiring as we sat drinking vodka and expected him to pick up the tab. Was he hunting for places to run? Louise asked if Charlie was still playing Destroyers: use every tool available to buy time and search for an escape.
The Destroyers Page 36