The Gentleman's Hour

by Don Winslow

  “Yeah,” Hang says, “but how long can he hold his breath?”

  “A long time,” Johnny says.

  They’ve actually had breath-holding contests, which Boone invariably won. Johnny has a dark suspicion that Boone is actually some kind of mutant, like his parents were really space aliens from an amphibian planet. Holding your breath is important to a serious surfer, because you might get held under a big wave and then you’d better be able to go without air for a couple of minutes because you’re not going to have a choice. So surfers train for that eventuality, which, in reality, is an inevitability. It’s going to happen.

  Johnny looks down into the water and waves.

  Boone waves back.

  “He’s good,” Johnny says.

  Which leads to a not very animated discussion of whether it’s possible for a person to intentionally drown himself, or whether the body would just take over and force you to breathe. On a cooler day, with more active surf, this is the sort of topic that would have engendered ferocious debate, but with the sun stinking hot and the surf a no-show, the argument falls as flat as the sea.

  August blows.

  When Boone finally pops back up, Johnny asks, “Did you figure out the meaning of life?”

  “Sort of,” Boone says, climbing back on his board. “We’re dying to hear,” Dave mutters.

  “The meaning of life,” Boone says, “is to stay underwater for as long as possible.”

  “That wouldn’t be the meaning of life,” Johnny observes, “that would be the secret of life.”

  “Okay,” Boone says.

  Secret, meaning, secret meaning, whatever.

  The secret meaning of life might be just as simple as the Dawn Patrol itself. Spending time with good, old friends. Doing something you love with people you love in a place you love, even when there’s no surf.

  A few minutes later they give up and paddle in. The Dawn Patrol—that early-morning, prework surf session—is over. They have places to go to: Johnny’s coming off the night shift but needs to get home because his doctor wife is on days, Hang has to open Pacific Surf, Tide is due at his gig as a supervisor in the Public Works Department, responsible for storm drains even when there are no storms to drain. Dave needs to man the lifeguard tower to protect swimmers from surf that doesn’t exist.

  The Dawn Patrol—Boone’s best friends in the world.

  He doesn’t go in with them, though.

  Having no work at the moment, there’s no point in going into the office to see if the red ink has gotten any redder.

  So he stays out there for the Gentlemen’s Hour.

  4

  The Gentlemen’s Hour is an old surfing institution.

  The second shift on the daily surfing clock, the Gentlemen’s Hour follows the Dawn Patrol in the rotation, as the hard-charging younger guys from the early-morning session go to their j-o-b-s, leaving the beach to the older veteranos—the retirees, doctors, lawyers, and successful entrepreneurs who have the nine-to-five in the rearview mirror.

  Now, young guys can stay for the Gentlemen’s Hour, but they’d better know and observe the unwritten rules:

  1. Never jump in on an old guy’s ride.

  2. Never hotdog by doing stuff your younger body can do that their older ones can’t.

  3. Never offer your opinion about anything.

  4. Never, ever say anything like, “You already told us that story.”

  Because the gentlemen of the Gentlemen’s Hour like to talk. Hell, half the time they don’t get into the water at all, just stand around their classic woodies and talk story. Share memories of waves out of the past, waves that get bigger, thicker, meaner, sweeter, longer with time. It’s only natural, it’s to be expected, and Boone, even when he was an obnoxious gremmie—and there were few more obnoxious—found out that if you hung around and kept your stupid mouth shut, you could learn something from these guys, that there really was a pony under all the horseshit.

  Everything you’re seeing for the first time, these guys have already seen. There are still old boys out on the Gentlemen’s Hour who invented the sport, who can tell you about paddling out into breaks that had never been ridden before, who can still give you a little vicarious glow from the Golden Age.

  But some of the guys on the Gentlemen’s Hour aren’t old, they’re just successful. They’re professionals, or they own their businesses, and everything is going so well they don’t have to show up anywhere except the beach.

  One of these fortunates is Dan Nichols.

  If you were going to make a television commercial featuring a forty-four-year-old California surfer, you’d cast Dan. Tall, rugged, with blond hair brushed straight back, tanned, brilliant white smile, green-eyed, and handsome, Dan is the male version of the California Dream. Given all that, you’d also think you’d hate the dude, but you don’t.

  Dan’s a cool guy.

  Now, Dan didn’t grow up anything like poor—his grandfather was in real estate and left him a tidy trust fund—but Dan took that nest egg and hatched a whole lot of chickens. What Dan did was marry his vocation and avocation, building a surf clothing line that just exploded. Started with a little warehouse in PB, and now has his own shiny big building in La Jolla. And you don’t have to be in San Diego to see Nichols’s “N” logo, you can see kids wearing Dan’s gear in Paris, London, and probably Ouagadougou.

  So Dan Nichols has many, many bucks.

  And he can really surf, so he’s a member in good standing of the PB Gentlemen’s Hour. Now he paddles out behind the barely discernible break and finds Boone sunbathing on his longboard.

  “Boone, what’s up?”

  “Not the surf,” Boone says. “Hey, Dan.”

  “Hey, yourself. What keeps you out past the Dawn Patrol?”

  “Sloth,” Boone admits. “Sloth and underemployment.”

  If Boone weren’t self-employed he’d be unemployed, and very often it amounts to the same thing anyway.

  “Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Dan says.

  Boone opens his eyes. Dan looks serious, which is unusual. He’s normally jovial and ultra-laid-back, and why not? You would be too if you had double-digit millions in the bank. “What’s up, Dan?”

  “Could we paddle out a little farther?” Dan asks. “It’s kind of personal.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  He lets Dan take the lead and paddles behind him another fifty yards out, where the only eavesdroppers might be a flock of brown pelicans flying past. Brown pelicans are sort of the avian mascots of Pacific Beach. There’s a statue of one by the new lifeguard building, which, even now, Dave is climbing to begin another day scoping turistas.

  Dan smiles ruefully. “This is hard—”

  “Take your time,” Boone says.

  Probably Dan suspects that an employee is embezzling, or selling secrets to a competitor or something, which would seriously bum him out, because he prides himself on running a happy, loyal ship. People who go to work at Nichols tend to stay, want to spend their whole careers there. Dan has offered Boone a job any time he wants it, and there have been times when Boone’s been almost tempted. If you’re going to have a (shudder) nine-to-five, Nichols would be a cool place to work.

  “I think Donna’s cheating on me,” Dan says.

  “No way.”

  Dan shrugs. “I dunno, Boone.”

  He lays out the usual scenario: She’s out at odd hours with murky explanations, she’s spending a lot of time with girlfriends who don’t seem to know anything about it; she’s distant, distracted, less affectionate than she used to be.

  Donna Nichols is a looker. Tall, blond, stacked, leggy—an eleven on a California scale of ten. A definite MILF if she and Dan had children, which they don’t. The two of them are like the poster couple for the SoCal Division of the Beautiful People, San Diego Chapter.

  Except they’re nice, Boone thinks. He doesn’t know Donna, but the Nicholses have always struck him as genuinely nice people—d
own-to-earth, amazingly unpretentious, low-key, generous, good community people. So it’s a real shame that this is happening—if it’s happening.

  Which is what Dan wants Boone to find out. “Could you look into this for me, Boone?”

  “I don’t know,” Boone says.

  Matrimonial cases suck.

  Megasleazy, sheet-sniffing, low-rent, depressing work that usually ends badly. And you’re always left feeling like some leering, Peeping Tom pervert who then gets to present the client with proof of his or her betrayal or, on the other hand, confirmation of the paranoia and mistrust that will destroy the marriage anyway.

  It’s a bad deal all around.

  Only creeps enjoy doing it.

  Boone hates matrimonial cases, and rarely if ever takes them.

  “I’d consider it a personal favor,” Dan says. “I don’t know where else to turn. I’m going crazy. I love her, Boone. I really love her.”

  Which makes it worse, of course. There are a few thousand deeply cynical relationships on the Southern California marital merry-go-round—men acquire trophy wives until the sell-by date does them part; women marry rich men to achieve financial independence via the alimony route; young guys wed older women for room, board, and credit-card rights while they bang waitresses and models. If you absolutely, positively have to do matrimonial, these are the cases you want, because there’s very little genuine emotion involved.

  But “love”?

  Ouch.

  As has been overly documented, love hurts.

  It’s sure laying a beat-down on Dan Nichols. He looks like he might actually cry, which would violate an important addendum to the rules of the Gentlemen’s Hour: there’s no crying, ever. These guys are old school—they think Oprah’s a mispronunciation of music they’d never listen to. It’s okay to have feelings—like if you’re looking at photos of your grandchildren—but you can never acknowledge them, and showing them is way over the line.

  Boone says, “I’ll look into it.”

  “Money is no object,” Dan says, then adds, “Jesus, did I really say that?”

  “Stress,” Boone says. “Listen, this is awkward, but do you have . . . I mean, is there anyone . . . a guy . . . you suspect?”

  “Nobody,” Dan says. “I thought you might tail her. You know, put her under surveillance. Is that the way to go?”

  “That’s one way to go,” Boone says. “Let’s go an easier way first. I assume she has a cell phone.”

  “iPhone.”

  “iPhone, sure,” Boone says. “Can you access the records without her knowing it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do that,” Boone says. “We’ll see if any unexplained number keeps coming up.”

  It’s kooky, but cheaters are amazingly careless about calling their lovers on the cellies, like they can’t stay off them. They call them, text them, and then there’s e-mail. Modern techno has made adulterers stupid. “Check her computer, too.”

  “Got it, that’s good.”

  No, it’s not good, Boone thinks, it reeks. But it’s better than putting her under surveillance. And with any luck, the phone records and e-mails will come up clean and he can pull Dan off this nasty wave.

  “I’m going out of town on business in a couple of days,” Dan says. “I think that’s when she . . .”

  He lets it trail off.

  They paddle in.

  The Gentlemen’s Hour is about over anyway.

  5

  In the middle of August, on a ferociously hot day, the man wears a seersucker suit, white shirt, and tie. His one concession to the potentially harmful effects of the strong sun on his pale skin is a straw hat.

  Jones just believes that is how a gentleman dresses.

  He strolls the boardwalk along Pacific Beach and watches as two surfers walk in, their boards tucked under their arms alongside their hips.

  But Jones’s mind is not on them, it is on pleasure.

  He’s reveling in a memory from the previous day, of gently, slowly, and repeatedly swinging a bamboo stick into a man’s shins. The man was suspended by the wrists from a ceiling pipe, and he swayed slightly with each blow.

  A less subtle interrogator might have swung the stick harder, shattering bone, but Jones prides himself on his subtlety, patience, and creativity. A broken shin is agonizing but hurts only once, albeit for quite some time. The repetitive taps grew increasingly painful and the anticipation of the ensuing tap was mentally excruciating.

  The man, an accountant, told Jones everything that he knew after a mere twenty strokes.

  The next three hundred blows were for pleasure—Jones’s, not the accountant’s—and to express their common employer’s displeasure at the state of business. Don Iglesias, patron of the Baja Cartel, does not like to lose money, especially on foolishness, and he hired Jones to find out the real cause of said loss and to punish those responsible.

  It will be many months before the accountant walks without a wince. And Don Iglesias now knows that the origin of his losses is not in Tijuana, where the beating took place, but here in sunny San Diego.

  Jones goes in search of an ice cream, which sounds very pleasant.

  6

  AK-47 rounds shatter the window.

  Cruz Iglesias dives for the floor. Shards of glass and hunks of plaster cover him as he reaches back for his 9mm and starts to fire onto the street. He might as well not bother; the machine-gun fire from his own gunmen dwarfs his efforts.

  One of his men throws himself on top of his boss.

  “Get off me, pendejo,” Iglesias snaps. “You’re too late anyway. Dios mío, if my life depended on you . . .”

  He rolls out from under the sweaty sicario and makes a mental note to require the use of deodorant for all his employees. It’s disgusting.

  Within the hour he’s concluded that Tijuana is just too dangerous during his turf war with the Ortegas over the lucrative drug market. Times are hard—the pie is shrinking, and there’s no room for compromise, especially with his recent losses. Three hours later he’s in a car crossing into the U.S.A. at San Ysidro. It’s not a problem; Iglesias has dual citizenship.

  The car takes him to one of his safe houses.

  Actually, it’s not too bad a thing to be in San Diego—if you can tolerate the inferior cuisine. He has business there that needs his attention.

  7

  Boone walks to the office, upstairs from the Pacific Surf Shop where Hang Twelve is pretty busy renting boogie boards and fins to tourists. Hang has a family of five on his hands, the kids arguing about which color board they’re going to get. Hang looks real happy, not. Speaking of unhappiness, he warns, “Cheerful’s up there.”

  Ben Carruthers, aka Cheerful, is Boone’s friend, a miserable, saturnine millionaire who would qualify for the Gentlemen’s Hour if he didn’t actually loathe the water. He’s lived in Pacific Beach for thirty years and has never actually been to the beach or the Pacific.

  “What do you have against the beach?” Boone asked him once.

  “It’s sandy.”

  “The beach is sand.”

  “Exactly,” Cheerful answered. “And I don’t like water either.”

  Which pretty much does it, beachwise.

  Cheerful is, to say the least, eccentric, and one of his weirder things is a quixotic crusade to stabilize Boone’s finances. The utter futility of this exercise makes him blissfully unhappy, hence the sobriquet. Right now he has his tall frame slouched over an old-style adding machine. His slate-gray hair, styled in a high crew cut, looks like brushed steel.

  “Nice of you to make an appearance,” he says, pointedly looking at his watch as Boone comes upstairs.

  “Things are slow,” Boone says. He steps out of his boardshorts, kicks off his sandals, and goes into the little bathroom that adjoins the office.

  “You think you’re going to speed them up by not coming in till eleven?” Cheerful asks. “You think work just floats around on the water?”

  “As a matte
r of fact . . .” Boone says, turning on the shower. He tells Cheerful about his conversation with Dan, adding with a certain sadistic satisfaction that Nichols is FedExing a substantial retainer.

  “You demanded a retainer?” Cheerful asks.

  “It was his idea.”