“The only way to be sure is to find him,” I say. “Don’t you have people?”
“People? What kind?”
What’s the term for those who look after the rich and do their bidding and perform the various dirty work that keep them out of trouble? I recall the team of black-clothed servants in the Konstantinou’s Fifth Avenue duplex, nameless, interchangeable, efficient—the ones who never seemed to have headaches or hangovers or birthdays or children. “Staff. People who could track him down and make sure he’s okay.”
Stefan winces at my childish understanding of wealth. He actually seems to feel sorry for me.
“You mean nannies? I’m afraid even Charlie aged out of them. No, Ian, I’m not going to hire people to track him down and then sob when I discover he’s still breathing and tell him all is forgiven.” He pauses before shouting, “I’m not, I’m not!” as if for a split second the wadded-up possibility hovered on the rim of the garbage can.
“Then you need to go up to the house and tell Sonny he’s missing and the family isn’t going to get involved.”
“Now why would I do that? You aren’t willing to help me, fine, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t give me ultimatums.”
“Well, there is one thing you have to do.” Stefan’s curiosity is only moderately disguised by his anger. He opens the cap on a vial and swallows down another pill. “Charlie owes fifty thousand euros to the monastery. It’s for his port, and he’s late on the payment. Stefan, it’s urgent. You have to pay them.”
He laughs. “Why on Earth would I pay Charlie’s bills?”
“Because they’re threatening those around him.” I can’t mention myself. Stefan would exploit that fact to his advantage. I bend the truth to help the cause. “Like Therese and her family. You know that the monastery runs this island and they’re capable of hurting the people who live on it. Do it for her, at least.”
Stefan cocks his head and sucks on the lozenge of his tongue. He doesn’t speak, but his unwillingness to pull the trigger on a deeply satisfying NO means I’ve finally managed to reach him.
“You have to give the money to a guy named Petros. He’s the priest at Saint Sofia in Chora. It’s a white-domed church with a tin—”
“I know where Saint Sofia is,” he snaps. “Don’t forget, I have been coming to this island since I was a child too.”
“So you’ll do it.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You should be careful. Petros means business.”
Stefan refolds his arms and smirks at me, as if to broadcast, I run a billion-dollar construction firm with military dictators and emirs as my main customer base. I can handle a solitary priest of a moribund parish on a minor island in the Aegean. Part of me enjoys the idea of Stefan strolling into Petros’s church and trying to argue with him over his brother’s expenses. How soon before Argus and the other goon collect their favorite convincing instruments to demonstrate how little an expensive last name intimidates them?
Stefan opens the door and brings the sunlight into the room, recasting it as even smaller and more crooked. The ticking of the shower stops, like the room’s heartbeat has finally surrendered.
“I’m sure we’ll talk again soon,” he says.
I pause in front of him.
“I care about your brother.”
No wince, no smirk, no condescending reply.
“So do I. Very much. And that’s why, ultimately, this will be good for him. Charlie’s adept at treading up to his neck, but he’s never learned how to pull himself out. If Charlie could, he might not have ended up like you.”
“Like me?”
“Disinherited. Some people need to be in order to take responsibility for their lives.”
As I pass down the walkway, I stop at the neighboring window. The man in the wifebeater is standing in the center of the room, a barbell frozen in his hand, his body glazed by the light of the television set. On the screen, refugees in tattered, bloodstained clothes are scrambling off a boat, tripping over the waves and over each other, pulling the dead bodies of two children onto the shore. It’s news footage that would have been banned in America for graphic content, but here it keeps playing, the drowned, swollen faces with water-swollen legs and water-swollen shoes. It rips your heart out, and the man keeps watching, never lifting the weight into the curl of his bicep. There are more boats behind the first and more scrambling, and the body of an old man who is not dragged free of the water as if the sea might take him back.
CHAPTER 13
Louise’s text wakes me. It’s almost two-thirty in the afternoon, the white daylight flavorless compared to a dream I was having of being in a castle without exits. Louise and Sonny are at Petra Beach not far from the village of Grikos. WHY DON’T YOU COME? As I struggle into my black swim trunks, I try to decide if my conversation with Stefan has neutralized the threat of Petros. Is Louise still at risk? Should I be taking a taxi instead of the motorbike? I check my wallet. The last of the euros from Charlie’s advance total up to seven and change. I still have a few hundred dollars in my bank account, and that’s my net worth aside from the Ziploc bag. I feel a brief pang at refusing Stefan’s $50,000, but I wait for it to pass as I scroll through the messages on my phone.
Lex sent an e-mail last night entitled, A LETTER FROM THE LAWYER, PLEASE READ. I don’t read it. I double click on her e-mail address and write:
Yes, I took the money. Jesus Christ, Lex, does it really matter that much to you? If you’re so bent on leaving me with nothing just to prove how little I mean to the family, I will send it back. Happy now?
But I press DELETE, and the words fly from the screen as if they have been written on water. Even I know an e-mail like that would be an admission of guilt forwarded on to her lawyer. I start again:
Hi Lex, I’m out of the country and for some reason all of your messages keep coming up blank. I hope nothing’s the matter. I’m sorry I wasn’t at the funeral. Maybe one day you, Ross, and Lily will forgive me. Question, assuming your next message will come through: what’s your mailing address? I want to send you something. Love, I.
I have searched my brain for the moment when my half-siblings and I declared war on each other. What point was it when these two doe-eyed, raven-haired children formed their axis of evil in the West Village compound, resisting my every-other-weekend settlement in their lavish dominion? Did my mere presence disrupt their otherwise undisputed claims to kitchen seat arrangements, the hierarchy of drinking cups, and bathroom schedules? Or was it simply that I had beaten them to Earth, and that slight, considering the limited territory of my father’s heart, induced their joint crusade against me? Lex and Ross are both younger, but when their combined ages overtook mine, they became an indomitable anti-firstborn front. Maybe their loathing of me is the glue that’s kept them close. Or maybe they saw me for what I am, the redheaded monster that would ruin the family if allotted the opportunity and space.
On the drive across the island, I’m on high alert for the white Mercedes slithering into my rearview mirror. By the time I cruise the dirt trail by Petra Beach, the afternoon shadows are collecting like tide pools along the pebbled shore. The overgrown fields, not far from the roadside accident, are peppered with red anemones. A giant rock formation swells from the sea, which snorklers attempt and fail to climb. Behind the boulder and a swirl of cormorants, Domitian is anchored, a black dart with Christos on deck dropping its sails. The pebbles on Petra are fatter than they are on the northern beaches, the size of charcoal briquettes licked white by fire. Here and there, the pebbles give way to chalky strips of sand.
I find Louise, Sonny, and Miles sitting on a pale green sheet with blue diamonds batiked across it. Black Domitian towels are stretched along its sides like caravan buffet tables, and white china dishes are arranged on them, filled with the residue of figs, tomatoes, and anchovies. A bottle of champagne smokestacks from a silver ice bucket, and plastic cups are secured in the pebbles at their feet. The wind flips the
pages of a rococo art book. Miles shuffles a deck of cards while Louise leans into Sonny, laughing. Louise wears a yellow bikini, and Sonny a red one, their skin oiled and catching the sun. It’s an ordinary day at the beach, as if nothing has happened, as if one of us isn’t missing. Duck paddles in the shallows, pretending to drown.
“Ian, you made it,” Louise yells with an exaggerated wave. I see the tender dents of her expanding rib cage. “I was beginning to think you hated the beach.”
Miles grins, his whole clumsy face squinting at me as I drop onto the sheet. He seems less anxious and despondent than he did yesterday locked up in his house, as if the hours with Sonny have reminded him that there’s still life to be hopeful about, that the nervous system isn’t the body’s only governing force. Sonny looks over at me coolly. After a few seconds, she manually overrides her initial reaction and offers a frail smile.
“Hi, Ian.” Like the whetting of a blade. She tops up her champagne. Louise grabs the bottle, pours the topaz liquid into a fresh cup, and hands it to me.
“We were on the boat all day or I would have invited you earlier,” Louise says. “Miles almost went into the water.”
“Not by choice!” he howls. “Christos wasn’t so smooth today. He lacked his usual finesse. To be honest, I think he was trying to knock me overboard.”
“Honey, it’s the only way you’re going to learn,” Sonny chides him. She looks at Miles and Louise—and not at me—and laughs. The thick tube of Miles’s spinal cord stretches as he reaches to slap her lightly on the knee. “Prince Phillip agrees,” she swears. “He told me to push you in. He told me you’re being deprived of one of the last pleasures that humanity hasn’t figured out how to ruin. And he’s right.” She brushes a piece of towel lint off Louise’s shoulder. “It’s too bad you couldn’t come to dinner last night. And now he’s left, and you’ll never get to meet him.”
“He’s gone to comfort ghosts,” I add in a lame attempt to join the conversation.
“What?” Sonny’s expression wilts as she looks in my direction.
“Prince Phillip. He went to Vienna to sort out a haunting. He’s a mystic.”
Sonny turns her head away, examining the winding helix of the beach where a group of lithe, Italian teenagers are rolling on top of each other, their waists as narrow as saplings and their skin as dark as redwood bark.
“How did your meeting go last night?” Louise asks me.
Sonny whips her head around. “What meeting?”
“For the charter company,” Louise explains. “Ian’s been working.”
“You’ve been working. Who were you meeting?” Sonny’s voice is prosecutorial, but her trembling lips are those of the victim on the stand.
I decide to be honest. “Gideon Frost. You know him, don’t you? He and Charlie were old friends from school.”
Sonny gets to her feet, her slender body advancing toward the blue shelf of water.
“Duckie, come in. Enough drowning,” she calls.
“I don’t wanna,” the girl whines, slapping up sea spray. “I’m not done yet.”
“I don’t care if you don’t wanna.” Something catches Sonny’s eye in the surf. She bends down and collects a piece of ringed plastic. She brandishes it at us as Duck crawls from the water on all fours.
“Look at this!” she says angrily. “Tourist litter washing up. I swear, there’s no respect for the environment.” Her expression is so distressed it’s alarming. “I really think this is it. The world is dying. The seas are warming, the glaciers are melting, there are new droughts and extinctions every day. And we just keep polluting. We just keep attacking the mother ship. I really think it’s over.” So much for the woman who swore the world wasn’t ending over drinks in Skala. Sonny seizes her daughter around the waist and hugs her tightly, pulling the girl’s chubby shoulders against her breasts, as if trying to melt her back into her body. She kisses her on the many water-warped cowlicks of her head. “I’m sorry, Duck. I’m sorry about the world you’re inheriting. I’m sorry we didn’t do better and you’ll be the one to pay for our mistakes.”
Duck’s face blanches in confusion. “Huh?”
“Soon you won’t even be able to swim here. We failed you. We didn’t leave you anything to hope for.”
“It’s okay, Mommy. I don’t mind.”
Sonny releases her daughter and covers her face with her hands, her glistening back quivering like the sun on the sea. Miles eyes me knowingly, I told you this would happen sooner or later, before he drops his pack of cards and hurries over to comfort her.
“She was doing so well today,” Louise whispers as she squeezes my ankle. “All she said was how much Charlie would love to be here and what an idiot he was for missing out on such a gorgeous afternoon.”
“Until I showed up,” I conclude. I should have seen this coming. And yet a part of me is jealous of Charlie. He disappears for four days, and everyone’s life falls apart. When I disappear indefinitely, my relatives want their money back.
Sonny battles free of Miles’s arms. “He didn’t go missing!” she shrieks. The Italian teens stop dry humping down the beach. I notice Adrian farther out in the water, submerged up to his shoulders, sparkling like an albino seal. I search for Rasym in the waves but don’t find him. “What does go missing even mean? That’s how the inspector phrased it to me this morning. You don’t go missing. You’re either missing or you’re not. You leave or someone’s taken you.” Stomping across the pebbles, she steams toward us. She leans down an inch from my face, and I see that her blue eyes are blurry with tears, like rain on airplane windows. “Where is he?” she shouts. “You talked to him last! Why isn’t he home? For Christ’s sake, tell me what you know!”
I scoot backward, dragging the plates along with the sheet and knocking over the champagne bottle.
“Sonny,” Louise says. “Don’t. Calm down.”
Sonny jerks up and uses the heel of her palm to wipe her eyes. Miles stands behind her with his arms open, as if waiting for her to return to them.
“Miles, let’s go into the water,” Louise proposes. She jumps to her feet and readjusts the yellow fabric over her ass. “Come on. I’m teaching you to swim, no arguing. Duck will help me, won’t you?”
“No.”
“Well, you can swim next to us and show him how it’s done.”
Duck bolts into the waves.
“Oh, good luck with that,” Sonny says, laughing through her slowing breath. She no longer looks at me, cordoning off her line of vision to the slosh of champagne foam on the rocks.
“I can only go in to my waist,” Miles gripes playfully.
“Then we’ll see how you do an inch above your waist and take it from there.”
“The trick,” Sonny says tiredly. “The trick—” But she gives up explaining what the trick is.
Louise holds Miles’s elbow and steers him like a ward nurse toward the sea. I nervously pinch the sheet with my toes as Sonny continues to watch the champagne bubbles dissolve and two flies land on the sweetened pebbles. She slumps onto the towels as if someone has kicked her legs out, but she doesn’t take her eyes off the flies. Their hairy, gilded bodies are phosphorescent green, rivaling the opal ring she wears. Sonny positions her middle finger against her thumb, but keeps her hand frozen in that position without flicking them away. Her cuticles are pushed so impeccably against the nail bed they are perfect white seams. She takes more care with each cuticle than I do with my hair. And yet the scaffolding of her face is hollow.
“We had a fight that night, before we all met up,” she mumbles. “Before Miles punched him. It was about Duck. He wanted to wait a year before bringing her back to Cyprus. He said everything had suddenly gotten too crazy, and it was no time to be making rash decisions. I’d never seen him so angry. I did send flowers by the way.” She realizes that I’m not following. “To his father in the hospital. Yesterday, I sent a huge bouquet and signed both of our names on the card. So when he wakes up . . .”
&nbs
p; “That was good of you.” She either doesn’t hear me or isn’t interested in my approval.
“I thought maybe Charlie was getting some space because of our argument. Now I know that can’t be the reason.” The flies spin from the rocks. Sonny moves her hand to the sheet, not far from my toes, and her finger finally flicks away nothing. “Do you remember that weird thing he said to me in Skala? That he loved me and would always make sure I’m safe. Safe from what? Why would he bother to say that and then vanish? He wouldn’t just leave like this, Ian. He’s a lot of things, but absent isn’t one of them. I wish you’d tell me the truth.”
So I do. I recount my conversation with Charlie in his office that morning, about his needing to go to Bodrum for work and my promise to provide an alibi to keep her from freaking out. Sonny blushes at the mention of her paranoia, and her blush deepens at the orchestration of lies to put her at ease. People want to be lied to; it’s the failure of a lie to smother the truth entirely that angers us. Her tongue travels around her mouth, lingering at each tooth like they’re stations of the cross.
“I would have understood,” she says in an offended tone that suggests she wouldn’t have. “I’m not a child. I understand he has his business to look after. And, all things considered, a bomb is a pretty decent reason to be paranoid. Is that how he makes sure I’m safe? By feeding me a bunch of garbage?” She burrows her hand in the pebbles. “So you lied for him. How do I know you’re not lying to me now?”
“You don’t have to believe me. If that doesn’t sound like something Charlie would cook up, you have every right to doubt me. You know him better than I do.”
The Destroyers Page 37