A Shared Confidence

by William Topek

  “What’ll it be?” The neutral voice he saved for newcomers.

  “Scotch, neat if you please.” He stood for just a moment, then grabbed a bottle and glass and started to pour. I added casually: “And one for the barkeep if he’s having.”

  He hesitated again, then poured one for himself. I raised my glass and met his gaze head on.

  “To good friends who give it to you on the level. People with self-respect who demand others have some, too.” That part might have sounded rehearsed. It was.

  He nodded, picked up his glass, and clinked mine softly, and I waited for him to take a small sip before I did likewise. I put the rest of my drink down on the bar along with a dollar bill.

  “Got some work I have to finish tonight,” I said. “Hope to see you again soon.”

  His smile was slight, but even a slight smile from an Irishman carries its own warmth.

  “Welcome anytime, Mr. Caine.” I nodded and hit the door.

  And just like that we were friends again. I stop in when I feel like it, but I usually don’t stay too late and I damn sure don’t get sloppy. And the scotch still tastes as good, even if there’s a little less of it these days. Some nights I just come in for coffee and sit and talk with Lonnigan about sports, politics, and the old country that he grew up in but that I only know from my mother, rest her. Point being, there’s maybe a little more mercy in my soul these days for people in the kind of shape Ryland was in when he came to me. You don’t swim through the hard times so you can spit on someone else who’s still doing his laps.

  Just the same, I was surprised – and not pleasantly – to see Ryland sitting at the bar when I walked in that Friday night. I wandered over to him, nodding to Lonnigan for a scotch on the way. Ryland looked up from the bar and we said our hellos, and I noticed with relief that he looked a lot more cleaned up than he did two days ago. He was also reasonably sober.

  “Thought you were heading back to Lincoln,” I said, taking my drink from Lonnigan with another nod.

  “I have a ticket on the train tomorrow,” he informed me. “I’ve spent the past two days in my hotel room with a pad and pencil, making some important telephone calls.”

  “Oh?”

  He nodded, taking a sip from his drink. “It’ll be rough. I’ll have to sell most of the stores, haggle with a few bankers, try to keep what customers I can, but I think I can keep my doors open and stay out of the poorhouse.”

  “It sounds like a grand start, Mr. Ryland.”

  “It just occurred to me…what do I owe you, Mr. Caine?”

  I shrugged. “Pick up my tab tonight and we’ll call it even.”

  “You mean that?”

  “All I gave you was some advice, Mr. Ryland. That comes pretty cheap.”

  “It was good advice,” he admitted, then grinned. “Not so easy to stick to, though.”

  “Good advice usually isn’t. Unless it’s what you want to hear, which is rarely the case.”

  There’s an old saying that you can’t cheat an honest man. That’s baloney, of course – honest people get cheated all the time. It is, however, nearly impossible to con an honest man. An honest man knows he can’t get something for nothing, and if he stays honest, he’ll make it a habit to open any gift horse’s mouth, going over the teeth inside like an accountant checking his ledger. Ryland had started off as an honest business man, but he’d gotten greedy and let himself lapse (aided down this path by two expert confidence men). I didn’t say this last part to him, figuring he’d realized it on his own or he wouldn’t be going back to Lincoln. He had the right attitude now and I didn’t want to risk any tinkering. We chatted amiably for an hour or so and he paid for our drinks, shook my hand, thanked me again, and walked out the door. I signaled Lonnigan for a beer and he brought it over.

  “There’s a fella’s lookin’ a damn sight better than he did Tuesday last,” Lonnigan observed, nodding toward the door.

  “He’s in a fix, right enough,” I said, “but not nearly the fix he thought he was in.” There wasn’t anyone nearby and I threw Lonnigan a few details (he’d never be so crass as to pump me for them). I try to be discreet about the troubles of the people who come to see me, but Lonnigan works his bar like a professional: his ears have always been larger than his mouth. Besides, I knew he must have been genuinely concerned about Ryland to send him to me in the first place.

  “Hard luck,” he said at last.

  “He’ll bounce back. My money says so, anyway. I’m pretty sure he learned his lesson.”

  Monday morning I was back in my office. A man wanted his wife followed, a lawyer I knew wanted me to deliver a court summons, a lawyer I didn’t know wanted my help in tracking down a possible heir to part of an inheritance (“As executor of the estate, Mr. Caine, I have to be able to show that I made a reasonable effort.”), and Gail wanted some time off next month for a vacation. I told her I didn’t see a problem. Minutes later, she came back into my office with a telegram. I reimbursed her for the quarter tip she’d given to the Western Union boy and opened the folded yellow paper.

  I rarely even blink at coincidences these days, but they still catch me now and then. Just last week I’d listened to Ethan Ryland’s tale of woe, his misadventure in Baltimore. Naturally, I’d thought of my brother who lives in that city. We’re not that close; I hadn’t really heard from him in years. Not until the telegram, that is.

  Chapter Four: The Ties That Bind

  I looked first at the sender’s name. Nathan Caine spent money on a telegram? Must be bad news. I quickly scanned the brief message:

  COULD USE YOUR HELP WITH PROBLEM STOP PLEASE TELEPHONE ME AT HOME THIS EVENING STOP NUMBER IS CASTLE 2247 STOP REVERSING CHARGES OKAY END

  I reread the telegram several times as I reached for a cigarette, trying to glean a bit more out of those four short sentences. A telegram and not a letter, so he didn’t have time to wait for the mail. Yet it wasn’t urgent enough for him to telephone (or had he tried?). What kind of problem? Nathan was an officer at a fairly large and very old bank in Baltimore, and what I knew about the banking business you could write in the margins of the yellow piece of paper I was holding. And he didn’t mind if I called him from Kansas City and reversed the charges? I wouldn’t say Nathan’s a cheapskate, but that’s only because he’s family. Obviously this was something important, but what? I know detectives are supposed to enjoy mysteries, but a great many of us don’t. Answers are where the money is.

  Gail came in again with a letter for me to sign. I put down the telegram and grabbed my pen.

  “So where are you going on your vacation?” I asked, checking to see that my signature had imprinted through the carbon.

  “Mom and I haven’t decided yet.” She walked over to the window and gazed out at the traffic. “Hopefully some place full of dark, exotic-looking foreign men.”

  “You want to be careful with the gigolo type, honey,” I advised her. “That kind can be hard on your pocketbook.”

  “I meant rich, foreign men,” she clarified. “Who knows? With a little luck I could be the next Princess of Persia.”

  “Iran.”

  She looked back at me. “Pardon me?”

  “The next Princess of Iran. They changed the name.”

  Gail turned her head slightly sideways, her golden-blonde hair settling on one shoulder.

  “When did they do that?”

  “Last week, I think. Take your nose out of those movie magazines and pick up a newspaper once in awhile.”

  “I read the news,” she pouted, then glanced over at the telegram on my desk. “Anything important?”

  “I don’t know yet. My brother wants me to call him.”

  “Your brother in Baltimore?”

  “That’s the only one I have.”

  “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  I had to think for a minute. “Been over five years now, I guess.” Five years, I thought. Had Mom and Dad been gone that long already?

  My father, Wi
lliam Caine, was born in the town of Edenbridge in Kent, England. His family was neither rich nor poor, but they saw to his education and he was set up to work as a draughtsman for a small architectural firm. He wasn’t there long, though. Whether it was the lure of a faraway land or just a case of itchy feet, Dad sailed for America when he was twenty-one years old. On the ship he met Bridget McKenna, a girl of eighteen from Wexford, Ireland, traveling with her two older sisters. The tall, reserved, properly-brought-up Englishman and the lively, outgoing Irish lass who was all of five-foot-one didn’t seem the likeliest of pairings, but Dad took one look at that vivacious young woman with the impossibly bright smile and knew he never wanted to be apart from her. Since he couldn’t figure out a way to disable the ship, he’d had to work out something else. The way Mom always told it, her heart welled up with mercy at the sight of this shy, gentle soul – wearing a fine suit of clothes but too lean by half. It near filled her with dread, it did, trying to imagine this poor wretch finding his way in a vast, barbarous land, and she decided it was her Christian duty not to abandon him.

  “And besides,” she always added in a whisper loud enough for my father to hear, “he was handsome as the very Devil!”

  And so, aborted thoughts of sabotage and Christian charity met every evening at the railing for hours, looking out over the moonlight on the ocean or up at the stars, talking about the entirety of their lives up to that point and what they wanted for those lives in the many years to come. It started as a teasing joke, the well-known fact that the captain of a ship at sea had the authority to join two people in holy matrimony. The joke was rehearsed often until it could be put to the captain as a serious request. The captain, a romantic at heart as many lifelong sailors are, performed a simple ceremony in his cabin, the bride attended by her sisters and the groom stood up for by the first passenger willing to shave and put on a necktie in exchange for a one-dollar gold piece.

  And so Mr. and Mrs. William Caine – traveling with the bride’s sisters – arrived in New York Harbor in May of 1891. My mother, of course, would never have married for any reason other than true love, but she allowed as how it did make the immigration procedure easier. In those days, arriving as the wife of a respectable (and eminently employable) Englishman was significantly preferable to showing up on the pier as one of three unmarried Irishwomen.

  “They’d have kept me in the dock for weeks, boy-oh,” she’d tell me. “Months. Years even. And what would have become of your poor father? He’d have wandered the streets and alleys like a ghost, wasting away to nothing, his fine suit in rags and holding out his begging bowl – pitifully asking passersby for toad-in-the-hole or some other revolting English muck – until a roving band of brigands cut his throat for the boots on his feet. Oh, I saved him, sure enough. I’m not ashamed to admit it and I have no regrets.”

  It was at this point that Dad would look up from his newspaper, nod toward Mom, and comment dryly: “Imagine if you can, lads, trying to get that through Customs.”

  The happy couple stayed in New York only a short while before moving to Boston. Dad managed to ply and hone his trade, drafting technical drawings for various manufacturers before landing a steady job with an architect. Mom took in sewing and tutored the neighbor children to help make ends meet. When Nathan came along two years into their marriage, Mom decided that a big city wasn’t the proper place to raise a child. Dad agreed, probably ready to see more of America himself by then. The family made their way to the more open areas of the Midwest, settling for awhile in the small town in southern Illinois where I was born.

  I remember a photograph in one of Mom’s albums, Nathan holding me on his lap, both of us dressed up in knickerbockers and bow ties in the middle of a small, very crowded living room. It’s nighttime and all the lamps are turned on. My brother and I are surrounded by a mismatched array of humanity. Family, friends, neighbors – many of them also immigrants – all in their finery and holding glasses of punch or wine or whiskey, toasting the camera (photography was one of Dad’s many intermittent hobbies). And beneath the photo, in Mom’s neat cursive script: “New Year’s Eve 1899 – Welcoming a new century!” Apparently, at one point during the evening Dad pointed out that, strictly speaking, the new century didn’t actually begin until 1901. Mom informed him that their guests had come to stand a glass, not sit a lecture, and my father was free to take his whiskey out to the backyard if he couldn’t remember that.

  To me, that photograph encapsulated growing up in my family. My parents moved around a lot and liked to travel when they could, but wherever we ended up, we were never short of friends. Mom’s warm Irish charm and Dad’s English, “old man” hospitality drew companions easily, and neither of my parents were hampered by any stuffy notions about the “right kind of people.” Their circle included a parade of lawyers and seamstresses, doctors and dock workers, bartenders, painters and poets, salesmen, ward heelers, amateur magicians and professional nightclub singers, staunch Catholics and stauncher atheists, the unemployed and the unemployable, and – what would have been the last straw for many people – even a few government workers. Friends for years or friends for moments, it was the quality of the company and not the duration. The Caines had that rare gift of being able to look upon people as individuals. They had no use for the full-of-himself snob or the truly antisocial derelict; character and courtesy were what mattered. Whether a fellow was heading off to college or returning from prison, if he knew his manners and Mom judged him a decent sort, he was welcome in the Caine household for a hot meal and, if such was his wont, a generous libation.

  It made for an interesting upbringing. The favors exchanged within such a group certainly augmented our standard of living, as much as the company itself enriched our lives. Conversations around the dinner table were as fascinating as they were unpredictable, the after-dinner entertainment even more so. I had as good a chance of hearing a first-rate Italian tenor sing opera next to the piano as I did of learning how to pick a lock (I can still see “Uncle” Teddy’s craggy face and smiling eyes, feel his gnarled, safecracker’s hand on my shoulder. “For fun and games, lad, and that’s all. I’ve seen firsthand where they send the sort who uses this skill to help himself to another man’s share, and upon me oath, ye want no part of it.”).

  Mom and Dad quarreled often, but never very seriously and never for very long. Apart from the inevitable clashes resulting from their different upbringings, Dad couldn’t resist baiting her sometimes, making some dry comment that he knew would get the old Irish up. I’d always thought this was kind of mean of him, and finally got up the nerve to ask him about it once. We were at a train depot. I was heading off for military service and Mom had refused to come along, knowing she’d make a fool of herself. Dad and I were making idle chit-chat as we waited for the conductor’s call.

  “Oh that,” he drawled offhandedly, smiling into the distance. “There’s just something about your mother when she gets that fire in her belly, those dark eyes of hers coming alight the way they do. And to tell you a bit of a secret, old man, calming her down afterward is half the fun.” It was pretty bawdy, coming from my typically reserved English father, and we laughed together over it.

  I drove south along Main Street, slowing for the lights instead of racing them, in no particular hurry as I let the various memories unspool. My mind drifted back to a rainy autumn afternoon five and a half years ago.

  The Caines were living in Michigan that year. They’d taken a motor trip to California – Mom wanted to see the redwoods and San Francisco’s magnificent Golden Gate. During the drive back, they were hit by a truck driver who’d been on the road over eighteen hours and nodded off at the wheel. The truck crossed over into the oncoming lane of traffic and struck Dad’s car head on. He and mom were killed instantly. Dad was fifty-nine years old; mom was fifty-six.

  Nathan was contacted by a neighbor of theirs and telephoned me in Chicago. It wasn’t good news for either of us, but Nathan was devastated. He’d always been th
e conscientious one, writing to his mother at least once a week and coming out to visit with his wife and kids whenever he could. I made it out for visits far less often, a fact Nathan rarely missed an opportunity to point out. When he insisted that our parents be buried in Baltimore where he’d been living the past few years, I didn’t argue. I knew he wanted to feel they were still close and I knew Mom and Dad wouldn’t care. Always more concerned with life than with death, they’d never bothered to pick out burial plots.

  The funeral took place on a gray, drizzly afternoon. Nathan was there with his wife, son, and baby girl, along with a few of our parents’ friends who lived close enough to make the trip. The priest from Nathan’s church gave the eulogy, then stood at the graveside where he threw the dirt and said a prayer, leaving the newly-orphaned sons standing together awkwardly.

  “What do we do now?” Nathan asked as we walked back to the cars.

  I shrugged, hands in my pockets and the collar of my black suit turned up against the drizzle.

  “Go on with our lives, like Mom and Dad would have wanted. Concentrate on the good things.” I don’t pretend that was any deep piece of wisdom, but Nathan stopped and turned toward me like I’d spit on the headstone.

  “Perhaps you could point out to me the good in what’s happened,” he said.

  I took a breath, not wanting to get into anything but wanting to offer something.

  “They were happily married for nearly forty years, Nathan. They genuinely loved each other, which is more than a lot of people have. They raised two sons whom they also loved. They lived to see their first grandchildren. So far as I know, they were happy all the days of their lives. When their time came, they went together and they didn’t suffer. That may not seem like much and I’ll grant it’s less than they deserved, but right now I’ll take that over nothing.”