As I did so, as I walked to the door and turned the bolt, there was a single, muffled pop. It was quickly followed by the sound of something large and heavy dropping onto the floor — a former amateur bodybuilder — then something small and light. That would be the cheap, untraceable resin single-shot, loaded with a handmade subsonic round Kel would’ve put into the top of Raffie’s skull, though I never once actually saw Kel commit the act, which was by design. And he always left the weapon behind, to tell investigators to not even bother.
Kel came back out to the front shortly, saying “Jesus, there’s nothing I like more than removing another figot from this world.”
That was Kel’s shorthand for “fucking bigot.” He hated people who hated for irrational reasons.
He made up many words like this.
I’m glad real life isn’t like the movies, otherwise there would’ve been this whole stupid, pointless scene of being met, at gunpoint, by a man who would tell me nothing except to follow him. Then there would be the boarding of a private jet, to be whisked away with no one saying anything about where we were going, arriving at some tiny little airfield where I would be thrown into the back of a car and driven off. It would head out to a mysterious location, where I would be led inside and then abandoned, left alone to wait for…Fella Dumbass, my old chum from CIAKGBIBM, showing up and offering apologies for all the secrecy, but you know how it is, old friend. We’d then have a good laugh over the poor bastard I karate-chopped and threw out of the moving vehicle on the way there. The poor bastard who was on Fella’s payroll, just doing his damned job. He probably had a wife and kids, too, and I just fucked up the rest of their lives pretty good.
I mean, what kind of shit is that? Only a guy would think that behavior’s okay. No woman would stand for it. Families are involved, people who depend on one another. It’s not nice, it’s not cool, it’s not fun. It’s sad. Very, very sad and pathetic.
The reality isn’t much less bizarre, though, because who the hell ever expects to find themselves in a situation like this anyway? I’m still wondering why I’m in Keflavík, on Iceland, in their airport, when I’m approached. (It’s because I’m flying on Icelandair. I was told Dad was being transported from Montreal to Dana-Farber and they had the quickest flight back to Boston Mia could find. They always stop on Iceland, to get people to visit, I guess.)
A man is wandering about. Many people are, as we wait for them to call for boarding, but this guy is focusing on the people waiting, not the gate where we’ll be boarding. When he stops in front of me, I suddenly worry that he’s Immigration — they’ve flagged my passport and now I’m going to be dragged off somewhere and miss seeing my Dad.
“Ms. McNeil.”
Oh, shit.
“My name is Brian Tifft and I would like a few moments with you somewhere private so we can talk.”
The man is tall, in a Brooks Brothers suit, standing in front of me. I’m looking at his wool-covered knees and I keep my eyes fixed there, as if I expect him to give up and walk away because I’m so sullen. I guess teenagers have the same expectation.
“First,” he then says with a lowered voice so that I can barely hear him over the surrounding mash of different languages, “your father is okay. He’s fine. There’s no emergency. He’s not in the hospital. We just had to get you away from your situation.”
Now I look up, but I don’t know how I appear to him because I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel. How are you supposed to feel when someone tells you something like this? Am I supposed to be pissed? Or giddy? It’s stupid.
“Bouchard?” is all I can think to ask.
“No,” the man says, a very slight shake of the head. His voice is still lowered and he glances to either side to see if anyone is listening. It looks like he’s feeling weird about the whole thing, too. “If you could come with me, please, I can explain most of it.”
So instead of being led away to a jet at gunpoint, I’m led to a full-sized plane after being handed a business card. The business card of David Getting.
David Getting? Who the hell is David Getting? And what am I going to do with his card? Call him? There isn’t even a number on it, so why even have such a thing?
The plane is, in fact, a private jet, except it can fit a couple of dozen people comfortably. There’s only me, Tifft, and a guy who tells me to call him “Rob” who seems thrilled to make me anything I want, food or drink-wise. During the flight, Tifft explains to me that Bouchard has been moved off the operation, that he’s working on other things for Mr. Getting.
Of course, I have to ask him, Who the fuckin’ hell is David Getting? (I’m still pissed about scaring me with my Dad, so I have the right.)
David Getting is probably the wealthiest person whose name you don’t know. He made his fortune with money — financing, hedge funds, all that shit that helps the wealthiest people become even wealthier. He’s a secretive man, as many in that field are. Look him up on the internet sometime and see. He’s the kind of client that a company like CSRMi is tailor-made for. There’s nothing but a single mention in a Forbes article titled The Silent Sentinels of the World Economy. No photo of him but photos of others, which is why I expect an old man in a suit.
Funny — one of the richest people in the world and I don’t know who he is, but he knows me.
We land at Hanscom Field, outside I-95, and after a cursory check of my passport by Immigration, I climb into the back of a large SUV and am driven away from the airport into the shithour of Boston metro traffic. I’m taken down to New Bedford, where I board a boat that skips and skims out over the Bay, and by the time we arrive at the island, the coastal towns are nothing more than a jagged line of lights in the distance.
There’s a light knock on the door. So light that I first think it’s something hitting the side of the cottage because a strong wind has kicked up off the water. I’m lying on a large, overstuffed couch in front of a fire someone had come and started while I was upstairs in the shower. The only person I had seen since arriving was Seo, a Canadian woman, Vietnamese by birth, who came to prepare my supper. She’s a chef, a very good one, very sweet and meticulous, and her job on staff is to take care of guests. She also made the most amazing cup of coffee, with a little bit of Jameson’s, to help me relax. She filled one of those tall pump thermoses and left it with me before she was gone.
When the knock comes again, it’s too even, too measured, to be caused by anything natural. I hesitate going to the door, though, because I’m dressed only in my pajamas and it might be Getting waiting outside. How would it look, bringing me all the way here by private jet, treating me like a guest at the best damned resort in the world, and I open the door wearing pajamas? I don’t know what to do, until the knock comes a third time and it’s insistent. Then I grab the scarf I left in the entryway, wrap it around my neck, and pull the heavy door open.
The woman waiting on the other side is in her thirties, somewhere between my and Mia’s height, with dark hair, dark brows, and dark eyes that squint as she smiles at me. She looks as though she’s thrilled to see me, as if she wants to come in immediately but she holds herself back, her hands clasped in front of her. She’s dressed rather casually in jeans and a t-shirt, a thick cardigan thrown on against the damp chill of the evening. She’s wearing slippers, so she’s definitely not one of the staff.
“Hi. I am Marie,” she says, her English heavily accented. Her voice is somewhat high in pitch. She’s nervous, trembling as she tries to get the words out. “David is my father. And you are Mme. McNeil?” She pauses, to see whether this will have any effect on me, but, really, it only makes me more confused. No one had said anything about Getting having a daughter, or that she will be coming to visit me.
She looks over her shoulder, back up the manicured path that leads to the main house, then steps in a little closer so she can speak in a lowered voice.
“I’ve heard…. You know Mia?”
Really? Truly? At this point I’m pretty much conf
used about everything.
She sits on the front edge of the couch, her hands in her lap, looking somewhat forlorn.
“Has she ever mentioned me?”
The way she says it, the hopeful tone to her voice; it breaks my heart when all I can do is shrug and shake my head.
“Sorry.”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t expect that she would. It was a long time ago, and she travels so much, so…”
She lets the words fade away, looking into the fire as she pushes her hair back behind her ear.
“Well, she doesn’t know anything about my being here,” I say in consolation. “I mean, I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’ve never met your father before. Never even spoke with him.”
Marie had told me that she had learned of Getting herself only this past winter. She didn’t know of his existence, though she had heard whispers growing up about “someone else,” but never really caught the meaning behind it. She knew, in her head, that she had been adopted by her father, but it never really mattered until both of her parents died in the tsunami that hit Indonesia back in 2004. Marie was in Gothenburg, celebrating the holidays with her friends, and was scheduled to fly out and meet them that following Thursday so she would be there for the New Year. She was in her twenties, recently graduated university, so she was an adult at the time, but the way that she talks about it — she felt as lost as I did after I found my Ma.
“I didn’t think David became involved in things like this.”
She does not call Getting “Dad” or “Father”
“I was surprised to hear him talking about Mia, talking to some people who work for him. He was saying that she’s after his money.” She then looks at me directly. “That’s not true, is it?”
Again, all I can do is shake my head and shrug.
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about any of this. I’m just following her around, watching what she does.”
Marie smiles at the words.
“She’s pretty special, isn’t she.” This is a woman consumed with an infatuation. “There’s something about her that…” Her words fall away again, as though she doesn’t know how to put it in a language I can understand. It’s charming, even if it’s a little bit disturbing.
Mia and Marie met about two years after Marie lost her parents, as she was struggling to bring her life together. She had moved to Denmark for a while, to Aarhus, hoping to escape the longing for her childhood, her family, and to begin a career in Environmental Social Science, which no longer seemed to interest her. She tells me that she lapsed into heavy drinking, drugs, and living a meaningless life of parties and casual sex. It’s hard to picture, coming from a woman who now seems so poised and self-conscious.
“Mia helped me out of it, the destructive behavior. She found me at a bar one night and we started talking, and then she took me to her hotel. You should have seen the place. Very private, very romantic. I thought she wanted me to sleep with her.”
She then becomes embarrassed, her pale skin flushing at the words. She tries to act as though it’s the fire making her too warm, cooling her brow with her fingers as she pushes her hair back and smiles demurely.
She’s finished with her story and I want to grab her and shake her because I want to know what happened next.
Dammit!
I ask her if Getting knows about her connection with Mia.
“Oh, no. Never. It would upset him.” She pauses a moment in thought, then adds, “I don’t know why he feels so hostile towards her.”
I can’t clarify anything. I haven’t even met the man at this point.
11
Elizabeth Islands
I don’t know why it even bothers me. I mean, who’d care? The damned thing is embedded into the floor, so it must be intended to be stepped on, walked over. Still, I’ve always had an issue, a superstition, with stepping on symbolic things embedded, etched, or even drawn on the ground. It’s always felt…unlucky to me. Disrespectful, I guess — like standing on someone’s grave. But then thinking about it, after spending years buried under the ground, I’m pretty sure I’ll rather appreciate the personal contact of someone standing on my face. It’s not sex, but you take what you can get.
That’s the slogan for the rest of my life.
It’ll never be sex, so take what you can get.
I glance around, as if anyone could possibly sneak into the room without my knowing. It’s at least thirty feet in both directions, and there’s nothing but clear stone floor between the doorway and me. What a waste of space, it seems, unless the owner has a particular fondness for ballroom dancing.
There’s a large desk — massive. I could lie down on top of it and do laps across its surface, like I used to do across the floor when I was little. Our apartment in Die Baai was small, only a single room, but there was a stretch of open planks that reached from the entrance door to the back wall — maybe ten feet, which is a considerable distance when you’re four. I would pretend that I was out on a ship, on die Kaap during one of its terrific winter storms. (I knew as little of the Cape of Good Hope as probably any American at the time. To me, it was a place of terrible tragedy and huge loss of life. PE was on Algoa Bay, which wasn’t so interesting.) Of course, things would go horribly wrong, the Captain sending the ship up onto the rocks, and it was up to me to swim, repeatedly, from ship to shore and back, carrying my mother and child animals to safety. They would sit on my back, hanging on to one another, crying with anguish, but I always seemed to pull through.
That stretch of floor was the cleanest place in the apartment.
Besides the desk and the chair behind it, there’s a pair of leather armchairs and a couch off to one side, around a low soapstone table, all sitting on an ornate rug that defines its space. The wall behind the desk is all books, floor-to-ceiling. Will there be a time, a couple of generations from now, when there’ll no longer be such walls because you can fit that entire collection of books onto one of those electronic things I’ve seen people carrying on the T?
I look again at the arrow, embedded into the floor. It’s strange. It appears three-dimensional, as if it’s floating within the stone. I want to touch it with my foot to see if it is, what it feels like. It points to the wall of glass, which is remarkable in itself because there’s not any columns along its entire length to help support it. Twelve…fifteen feet high, floor-to-ceiling, about fifty feet across, and it looks like all one sheet of glass. It’s impressive, but what a pain it must be to change it out if it gets cracked by one of those dumb gulls floating in the distance, laying on the steady headwind coming off the bay.
The arrow has the words Remember where you come from at its tail and I follow it up off the floor, out past the wall of glass, and all I can see is water and what may be a hazy shoreline on the horizon. Massachusetts, I’m pretty sure, but I don’t know what part. Buzzards Bay. I boarded the small boat in New Bedford and that’s on Buzzards Bay, I think.
I so badly want to step on the arrow.
“Good morning.”
Okay, I’ve always imagined that there’s this kind of man who can take your breath away simply by the way he walks, but I never imagined I would actually have the chance to watch one walking. I also imagined David Getting was going to be someone in his nineties, all shrunken and twisted, but he most definitely is not. Black jeans and an untucked, oversized grey t-shirt that falls off his broad shoulders, gathered up around his trim waist by hands casually slipped into his pockets. His shoulders roll as he walks, his bare feet slapping the floor in a lazy rhythm better suited for walking on the beach. He has peppered black hair and dark eyes shaded by dark brows, permanently squinting as though he’s out on the sea. He was probably considered a heartthrob when he was half my age. Women half my age probably consider him a heartthrob today. Fucking unfair.
He smiles courteously but walks right past me so that he can stand near the arrow. He looks down at it for a second, then touches it with his foot.
Bastard. Oh yea
h, I hate this guy.
“My architect’s idea,” he says. His voice is gruff, commanding and not unpleasant. Sexy gruff. “She was something of a romantic.”
“Where’s it pointing to?”
He steps to the arrow’s tail, closes one eye, and stretches out his arm as he points in the same direction, his other hand still dangling easily from a pocket.
“New Bedford. A dumpy little shithole of a town when I was growing up. My folks were Portugee. Came over on a crowded steamer. I least, I like to think they did.” He looks back at me. “How disappointing it’d be, to find out that they just bought a couple of plane tickets and hopped on over on a flight.”
“So you built this place so you can stay close to your roots.”
How fucking predictable.
He scoffs.
“Jesus H. Christ, no! I built this place so I can stand here every day and say ‘Fuck you. I made it out of there.’ I’m not a romantic.”
He says this but one corner of the desk is a scatter of framed photos. Old Kodak 110s, scanned and cleaned up, but the clothing and hairstyles still give them away. They’re of a woman, and a child — a girl, maybe two years old. The woman is in a few of the pictures, never without the child, the child is in all of them. This is a small, personal memorial to a pretty little girl. A memory. That’s the work of a romantic.
He points to the wall of books.
“I know it’s early, but would you like a drink?”
We spend nearly an hour talking about me though it’s not so much a personal history than an evaluation — Getting is trying to decide if Bouchard made the right choice when he brought me on, if Bouchard himself was the right man for the job. I say all of the right things (not so much about the things I fucked up) and I get the idea that Getting is duly impressed and we take a short break when Marie comes into the room carrying a tray of cheeses, breads, and pastries. It’s warm this morning, predicted to get warmer throughout the day, so she’s wandering around in a summer floral romper and her feet are bare, like Getting’s. It makes her look younger than she looked last night. When Getting introduces us, Marie offers me her hand without familiarity and I immediately understand that he has no knowledge of our meeting.
Zwerfster Chic Page 10