The Assistants

by Camille Perri

  “So what happened?” Dillinger asked.

  “What do you think happened?” This was the best part of the story. “Clooney got his ass over there and smoothed out the sand.”

  Dillinger shook his head, rosy with admiration. “I could totally see that happening.”

  “I know, it’s so Robert,” I said. “But obviously never repeat that.”

  “No, no, of course not.” Dillinger leaned back, silently deciding who would be the first person he’d relay it to.

  “You know,” he said, “I asked Robert yesterday, what should we do if it rains today, because the forecast was predicting a storm, and he answered, matter-of-factly, ‘It doesn’t rain when I have a barbecue.’ Then I remembered the last three times I came out were all beautiful days. And now look.”

  Dillinger pointed past disinterested Kathryn, through the sunny train window, to the clear cerulean sky. On top of everything else, he now accepted as fact that Robert could control the weather.

  When we arrived at the Poughkeepsie station, we took a ten-minute cab ride to the house—or the estate or whatever. To say it was vast would be an understatement along the lines of calling the Great Wall of China or Michael Fassbender’s penis “long.”

  The cab took us uphill along a gravel driveway, where the house—a white two-story colonial with dark trim—appeared to the left, upon another small hill. To the right there was a barn, and past that, a far stretch of grass that disappeared into a forest.

  We stepped out of the cab just off the house’s front porch, and there was Robert welcoming us, glass of bourbon in hand, wearing khaki shorts, loafers, and a striped polo. I’d never seen his knees before, and I was having serious trouble focusing on anything else. His wife (Avery, a former Texas Longhorns cheerleader) was at his side. She was the same age as Robert but didn’t look a day over fifty-five, dressed casually in white cotton shorts, sandals, and a sleeveless top. Her auburn hair looked like she’d just stepped out of the salon.

  “Y’all have a smooth ride getting here?” Avery Barlow had been to the office on a few occasions so this wasn’t my first time meeting her, but when I looked into her bright hazel eyes, I still couldn’t help but think: You are married to Robert. You knew him when he was nothing but a brassy college boy who read too much James Lee Burke. You married him before his first billion. What was he like back then? Did he always speak in commands? Was he even the natural leader of your friend group?

  “Getting here was a breeze,” Dillinger said in response to Avery’s question. “The train ride was a pleasure.”

  Already he was laying it on a little thick.

  Robert pointed toward the backyard with his drink. “Come on around back.”

  We did as we were told, and, reaching the backyard, the stunning swimming pool was the first thing to catch my eye—followed by red-faced Glen Wiles lounging poolside, smoking a cigar.

  Shit.

  Wiles struggled up from his chair and over to us. He was wearing a T-shirt, which he’d already mostly sweat through; cargo shorts; and no shoes. I thought Robert’s knees were bad. Glen Wiles’s feet were like two ham hocks past their sell-by date.

  I was beginning to wonder what the hell I was doing here.

  “Tina, you’re hanging with the big boys now, huh?” Wiles gave me a smack on the back with his big bear-paw hand. “That’s my wife, Carolena, over there, she’s catching some sun. Say hi, honey.”

  Carolena, in a gold lamé bikini that she absolutely had to have bought at a store for strippers, looked like a Real Housewives of New Jersey reject. Her skin was the blackened bronze of a tarnished penny, the kind of pennies I used to dunk in Taco Bell hot sauce to make them shiny again. She peeked at us over her enormous sunglasses, waved, and then turned over to sun her back.

  “She’s not a big talker, that’s why I like her,” Wiles said, before re-pacifying himself with his cigar.

  I followed Dillinger to the patio bar and poured myself a glass of white wine. Dillinger had bourbon because Robert was having bourbon. Kathryn, who’d finally stowed away her Kindle, disappeared into the house with Robert’s wife for a tour—because that’s what women did. They looked at house stuff. Though biologically I, too, was a woman, I had zero interest in oohing and aahing over period details and antique linens, so I stayed put and took a seat at the patio table.

  Robert pulled up a chair beside me, slid my wineglass aside, and placed a tumbler of bourbon in front of me. “You want this,” he said.

  I looked at him with owl eyes.

  “That’s twenty-three-year-old Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve.” Robert urged the glass to my hand. “Best bourbon you’ll ever drink.”

  I took a sip. He was right; it was good. And I wondered how he got it.

  During the workday, Robert would often shoot me an e-mail along the lines of: Can you run down to the liquor store and get me a bottle of Famous Grouse forty-year-old blended malt . . . And I would then spend the next four hours calling every liquor store in New York trying to locate the rare bottle, which I’d go pick up myself or have rush-messengered. He had no idea how much effort went into fetching such things, or how much money it ended up costing. All he knew was by six p.m. the bottle was on his desk.

  So it blew my mind when Robert stood and fired up his own barbecue grill. He planned to do all the grilling himself, just like a regular person. And his wife started bringing out side dishes—carrying them herself—from the kitchen. Avery Barlow was serving us? I was expecting maids and butlers, white gloves. Maybe even someone on standby to chew the bigger pieces of food for us, I don’t know. Instead, Robert ordered Dillinger and me over to the grill to show us exactly how he buttered the steak.

  “You have to do it this way,” he said, dipping a brush in a bowl. “This here is a mixture of butter and oil.” He painted each slab of thick meat on both sides, while Dillinger snapped photo after photo of the process with his phone.

  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why now, after six years, I’d finally been invited here to be fawned over and schooled in the essentials of barbecue grilling. And why I thought it was okay to come given the present (criminal) circumstances.

  Robert turned each steak over with a pair of tongs. “You flip once,” he said. “That’s it. You flip too much and you won’t get a well-seared crust.”

  What if Robert brought me here to soften me? To knead me with kindness, leaving me no choice but to come clean? He was such a brilliant manipulator, anything was possible. Then again, it was entirely plausible that it simply hadn’t occurred to Robert until now to invite me out here. Like most powerful people with a lot on their mind, that’s how he worked. The world around him functioned according to his whims.

  “Now, you paying attention?” Robert removed all the steaks from the grill and set them on a cutting board. “You let them rest for about five minutes, it gives the juices time to circulate. And in the meantime you can refresh your drink.”

  He stepped past me to the bar cart. “Another bourbon for you, Tina?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I said.

  When the five minutes of juice circulating were up, we all sat around the patio table to eat. I was seated between Robert and Dillinger, and across from Glen Wiles. It was difficult having to look at Wiles while I ate, but the steak was so unbelievably delicious that—

  “This steak is unbelievably delicious,” Dillinger said.

  Robert nodded, pleased with himself. He was so much more relaxed here than at the office. Some of the wrinkles in his forehead had taken the day off, and his face had a glow about it. He told the story of how he and Avery first met. She was the prettiest cheerleader on the fifty-yard line, pretty as a pie supper, and I knew right then we’d get married. It’ll be forty-nine years in October.

  Then he told another story, and another, and another.

  Let me tell you something about c
rawfish . . .

  We had a ranch hand once who . . .

  My daddy back in his wildcattin’ days . . .

  And like Aesop’s fables and the oeuvre of Eminem, many of these stories concluded with a moral.

  There ain’t no such thing as the wrong bait.

  And that’s why you never insult another man’s wife.

  Just because a chicken has wings don’t mean it can fly.

  I wiped the juice dripping down my chin with my cloth napkin. This was better than NPR’s Story of the Day podcast.

  “See that barn over there . . .” Robert gestured in the general direction of the barn, which was actually too far away for any of us to see from where we were seated. “You know who painted that barn? Billy from the office, the mail carrier.”

  Dillinger halted midbite. “Are you talking about Patchouli? The guy who skateboards down the building’s handicap ramps?”

  Robert laughed. “He told me he used to paint houses, so I hired him. I paid him well, and I gave him a bottle of vodka. It was a three-hundred-dollar bottle of vodka, and he drank half the bottle before he left. That boy got drunk as a skunk, couldn’t see straight.”

  Wiles forked at what was left of Carolena’s steak, which was all of it. “If that kid had any clue how much that vodka cost, he probably would have sold it.”

  Yeah, to pay his rent, I thought, but everyone was having such a good time, I kept my mouth shut.

  Robert refilled my glass again. “Tina, I have to say, I’m impressed by your tolerance. You can drink just like one of the boys.”

  Wiles reached across the table and lifted the side of my empty plate, bloody with the memory of a buttery steak. “She eats like one of the boys, too.”

  “I’m sorry, Glen,” I shot back without thinking. “Were you hoping to finish my leftovers?”

  The table roared. Maybe the bourbon was having an effect after all.

  Wiles was stunned to momentary silence, but Robert was clapping his hands. “Thatta girl,” he said. “You tell him!”

  Robert’s overjoyed reaction kept Wiles quiet, but you could see in his eyes that he was seething. He didn’t have the self-confidence to take a joke.

  I didn’t either, obviously, but whatever.

  “All right now. That’s enough fraternizing.” Robert stood up. “We’ve got to get shooting while the light’s still good. Tina, Jason, you ready? Glen, you coming?”

  I’d forgotten about the forthcoming guns-and-ammo element to this visit.

  “Nah.” Wiles lumbered toward the pool. “I might be too tempted to teach Tina a lesson for mouthing off to me that way.”

  Okay. Was that his way of, like, saying he wanted to shoot me?

  “Leave her alone, Glen,” Robert said. “You had it coming.” He turned to Dillinger and me. “It’s just the three of us then. The truck’s already loaded up; come on.”

  I admired that it didn’t even cross Robert’s mind to invite Dillinger’s wife along as we made our way across the property to the truck. Probably because she didn’t eat or drink or insult Glen Wiles like one of the boys. And because as far as I could tell she was mute.

  I so wanted Robert’s truck to be a dusty old pickup, but it was just a regular shiny SUV, the kind that may have had bulletproof glass. Which could surely come in handy considering my deftness at sharpshooting.

  Dillinger sat up front with Robert, who was driving. Driving. Robert. It was so insane seeing him perform such a normal, mundane activity. And he didn’t even drive like a grandpa. He drove like he gave orders, with precision, and not so much patience.

  We sped around the side of the house, along a path to another field that wasn’t visible from the driveway. It, too, was ringed in forest. Robert and Dillinger conversed about work, while I silently tried to gauge on a scale of one to ten just how drunk I was. One being too drunk to hold a gun straight, ten being way too drunk to hold a gun straight.

  We arrived in the middle of nowhere, stepped out onto the grass, and Robert opened the tailgate. Inside it looked like something out of the movie Goodfellas.

  Robert tossed a rifle to Dillinger but strapped the one intended for me over his own shoulder. Then we walked a good distance away from the truck.

  “Now, Jason, you just hang back,” Robert said. “Because I know you know what you’re doing, but Tina here needs a lesson.”

  Dillinger sulked off to the side and kicked a rock, jealous that I was the recipient of all of Robert’s attention.

  “Now.” Robert got organized. He demonstrated how to load the rifle, how to hold it. He showed me how to aim it, toward the forest. Then he held it out to me like an offering. “Go ahead now, give it a try, I’m right here, don’t be scared.”

  I took the gun into my hands and tried to mimic his exact position, gripping it just as he’d gripped it, holding my body just as he’d held his.

  “Good.” He arranged my arms and shoulders, reminded me to keep my feet planted. “Now, when you pull the trigger, you’ve got to be strong. Not weak, you understand? You’re like a sturdy oak tree.”

  I swallowed hard. I could hear my own heartbeat.

  “Firing a gun is all about power. You’ve got to acknowledge the power and harness it. You control it. You’re in charge. You can’t be a chickenshit with a gun in your hand,” he said. “Can you feel it, Tina? Can you feel the power?”

  I did. And in that moment I wanted to turn it on myself.

  “Now go on,” Robert said. “Fire.”

  10

  THE WEEK FOLLOWING the trip to Robert’s ranch, I felt like I was being wrung out and twisted dry every time Robert’s eyes met mine, every time he pointed at me with his fingers shaped like a pistol and called me shooter. If only he hadn’t been so welcoming and so protective of me during that visit. It made delivering this week’s envelope of cash to Margie Fischer worse than ever, not because of the cameras—I decided there weren’t enough security guards in the world to actually watch all the footage those Titan cameras recorded—but because all I could see when I looked at that envelope of money was Robert with his hand on my back, pouring me another bourbon and saying thatta girl in his unguarded twang when I swallowed it down in a single gulp.

  I needed to be done with this. I needed to get Margie’s blackmail debt settled and have this be over, because after the bonding we’d done at the ranch, I would literally die—from shame more than guilt—if Robert found out what was going on.

  Midweek, Kevin and I met for lunch at the chopped-salad station in the Titan cafeteria and he drilled me with questions: How many acres is the ranch? Were there horses? What did you think of Wiles’s wife? She used to be a stripper, that’s how they met, can you believe that?

  “I can totally believe that,” I said. In fact, the first thing I’d reported back to Emily upon returning from the ranch was: “Glen Wiles’s wife looks like a former stripper; I bet that’s how they met.”

  Kevin shook a bottle of balsamic over his spinach salad. “Come on, Tina, give me something, some gory detail. Were the toilet seats made of gold? Was the main course an endangered species?”

  I took comfort in the fact that Kevin’s tone was more curious than snooping, which calmed my paranoia somewhat. This was no official investigation.

  He passed me the Russian dressing. “Did Robert make you slice the limes for everyone, or did he have a servant to do that?”

  “Screw you.” I slammed the bottle of Russian dressing down too hard, causing it to spurt orangey-pink nastiness into the air. I looked down to find the front of my navy-blue sweater speckled with the stuff, but I ignored it. “Robert is really good to me. Slicing the office limes is just part of my job.”

  Kevin was taken aback by this sudden turnaround. In the past I’d always been glad to rag on Robert for an easy laugh.

  “Sorry,” he said, after the longest twenty se
conds of all time. “I didn’t mean to . . .”

  “It’s fine.” The chopped salad attendant offered me a napkin and I addressed my sweater. “It’s just that Robert was a model host and—”

  “I get it,” Kevin said. “He’s your boss, you’re right, I was out of line.”

  He didn’t get it at all. But it was better that way.

  We made our way back to the elevator bank, awkwardly silent.

  “We still on for Saturday night?” he asked, sheepish, like this one flub might have blown it between us forever.

  I nodded. “Let’s go to the movies.”

  “Great idea,” he said.

  And it was: the less talking I had to do, the better.

  —

  KEVIN AND I were set to meet at the Chelsea Bow Tie cinema on Saturday night for a seven fifteen p.m. showing of the new Jennifer Lawrence movie. The Chelsea Bow Tie was my favorite theater in the city because it was often filled with peacocking gay men wearing bow ties, and I just couldn’t resist the obviousness of that. Plus, in the case of a film starring a diva icon—Cher, Barbra Streisand, Sarah Jessica Parker, James Franco—full tuxedos or outlandish costumes were never out of the question.

  I got to the movie theater a solid half hour too early and panicked about whether I should buy the tickets, so I decided to circle the block in the humid, ninety-degree heat, walking slowly (to the chagrin of all the fast-paced, pathologically tardy New Yorkers behind me) so as not to whip up a sweat. This was the first of my and Kevin’s dates to which I wore jeans and sneakers, and my trusty Converse One Stars were coming in handy now.

  On the third lap, I spotted Kevin standing in front of the theater. He was wearing a short-sleeve collared shirt, jeans, and sneakers.

  Yes. No dress shoes. We were outfit-synced. (I was equally thankful he had not chosen to wear a bow tie.)