Caravan of Thieves (6 page)

We fished and caught smallmouth bass all morning, enough to make me wonder how long I’d be there eating them, and that made me give in first. “Whose boat is this?”

“Well, I could claim it for my own, but what for, since I get to use it as much as I like without the burdens of ownership.” Taxes and licenses and permits. “I knew this guy, big guy, maybe six four, sprout of curly dark hair, beanpole of a guy, had a little wife, tiny, barely five feet, very attractive woman she was, but she ran him ragged. It was funny to watch, painful but funny. She’d want him to check with her for permission to swallow his food. And ‘Buy me this, buy me that, take me to Hawaii, take me to France, send the kids to this special school.’ There weren’t enough hours in the day for this guy to make money at the rate she spent it. His name was Simon, by the way. Simon needed to get away sometimes but could never figure out a good plan until he took the family on a houseboat vacation on the lake here. He went off fishing one morning and came along to the rapids near the river mouth, and it started bothering him what was on the other side and how if he were on the other side, his wife couldn’t get to him. So he explored on foot and he thought and he planned and he scouted. He realized that if he could float a boat down here from upriver, it would make the perfect getaway. The problem was that his wife kept a close watch on every penny he made. Every time I talked to him he turned the subject back to the boat. He just couldn’t get that vision out of his head, like we all get about a woman sometimes. And it happened at the time I was planning a business venture that could use his accounting skills and he could earn the side money he needed to
fulfill his dream and buy a little peace.… Now I’ve been talking and those fish stopped being hungry.”

He stopped. It was to check on me, I think. To see if I was going to play my part properly. If not, that meant I was too distracted. I said, “But how did you end up with it?”

“He owed me a little money at the end of things and said I could use the boat whenever I wanted to until he paid me back. I was the only other person in the world who knew he owned it or where it was. His wife never knew this boat existed. When he came up here, he told her he was visiting clients or going to a convention or whatever excuse he could sell her at the time. Over the years, I found it a pretty good place to relax. And he came up less and less until he stopped coming at all. I had moved on and lost touch with Simon. I asked around and found out he got sent to prison at Lompoc, so the next time I was nearby I went over to visit him. Terrible sight he was, too. Skinnier than ever and hair cut short. He shook his head and I could see that he just hated himself. It seems buying the boat wasn’t the only way he tried to find peace. His other try was with another woman, and he married her, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to divorce the first one first, and it wasn’t long before both wives found out and it turned out he had married the same type twice. They got together on his finances and found that he had been working quite a few side ventures, some of which were profitable but on which he could not pay taxes because then his wives would have known about the money. Both wives had divorced him, of course, so he was really looking forward to the day he got out, and he made me swear to take good care of the boat until he could use it again.”

“So you have it until he gets out?”

“Poor Simon won’t be getting out. He had a heart attack a few months later and died. I didn’t think there was any need to go pointing out the boat to the ex-wives; they had pretty much bled him dry. And the government, hell…no offense.”

People who just met Dan, people who didn’t know him, were really lucky because they could think they loved him when they heard him tell that story. For me, the part that stuck the most was the part he left out, the part of the conversation at Lompoc where Dan was checking to see if Simon had implicated him in any crimes.

I knew it was my turn next. Dan would want to know the whole story, and I must have been brooding about how to go about it. We were silent. Then he said, “Do you think that means I stole this boat?” His tone was startling; he was sincere. I looked at him. His face had grown dark and his eyes were sharp and hard, as if he were staring but seeing things that weren’t there. The contrast with his face made his eyes seem like they were emitting light. “Do you?” I looked up at the sky to see if there were clouds making the light change, but, no, the sky was still blue.

“No,” I said. “You didn’t steal it.”

“I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone else and never will. I never had anything in this life that I didn’t steal. Never, nothing.”

I laid out for him why I was there and how I got there: Shaw, Gladden, the whole thing, including the shooters who were after me. Dan brightened up considerably when I told him about being undercover in Afghanistan.

“You posed as an Afghan? That’s marvelous. And these American soldiers bought it. I always knew you had potential.”

“We should get out of here. I stole that car in Vegas and it’ll be found at the landing. These guys have the means to put it all together,” I said.

“And you think the general put the shooters onto you?”

“He’s after me. There was an incident, a bad one.”

“Don’t be so sure the general is behind it. Doesn’t sound right to me.”

“Okay.” I didn’t care about that right now. Those shooters weren’t likely to be the first to show up on that river. “Where can we go?”

“Wait,” he said. “I want to know…You set these guys up in Afghanistan, you got them to trust you.”

Was this the moment to say “I learned it all from you. You deserve all the credit”? His flickering eyes and pleased smile seemed to offer warmth and refuge. Inclusion. But I knew the trap: warm yourself at that fire and you’ll freeze to death. For a moment, I thought he could not help it: those were his eyes and his smile, all he had. Dan was looking at me with something resembling pride. I felt vaguely ashamed.

“So you had to fool Afghans, too. Who was tougher to fool, us or them?”

“Dan, I’ll tell you all about it when we’re on the road.”

“Three days ago, I had driven out to New River City to try to collect on a job we did at a new development. The boss wasn’t in. The secretary looked kinda cute and pretty soon we were on the boss’s couch together. It was easy. Real easy. I’m not bragging, I’m telling you this for a reason. She got up to go into the bathroom to freshen up. Took her purse and took her time. I wandered over to the desk where she had
USA Today
. They have a page with news
from every state. I always check Oklahoma. It said the graves of three veterans of Iraq had been dug up. Two of the bodies were left alone, but the third was missing. The secretary had to be pretty fresh by then, but she was getting fresher still. I stood by the door and heard a few words and then she hung up her phone. They’d gotten to her. They had contacted her before I got there and were paying her to keep me there. These guys have resources. I don’t think there’s a better place than where we are now.”

Father and son with fish, beer, cigars, sunshine, and water. A borrowed boat and borrowed time, unless McColl conveniently had a heart attack. And Shaw, too. I spent the time listening unless he asked and prodded for war stories. My reluctance must have come off as youthful sullenness, but I was struggling to isolate each of my resentments and squash them. I wanted to make sure I had Dan right. Filling in that picture had been a lifetime quest, with all the gathered evidence and clues snatched from fleeting moments together or observations of Dan with his women, his cronies, his victims. Now it was uninterrupted access and I couldn’t stop staring into the fire, even though I knew I should run.

I even watched him sleep. He was still a handsome man, rugged and strong. I tried to guess how old he was, but it was just a guess and the thought of asking made me laugh out loud. Questions weren’t paths to the truth or even to facts; they were cues to start the entertainment, or to change the channel and be captivated for a few more moments. No story ever came off as a rerun. Every moment was fresh; his smile would form and his eyes twinkle a bit and he’d ease in: “I was fishing on the Salmon River up in Oregon when a bear…” “Once, at a party in New York, a woman I’d never met before, very beautiful, came up and asked me to walk her home…” “
They deputized me once in Santa Fe to help them catch a bank robber…”

I was on deck, Dan was inside finishing his lunch on the second day, when a raft came around the upstream bend. The rifle was leaning against the rail about three feet from my left hand. The sun was directly overhead. A young man about my age was guiding the raft and a young woman sat in front of him. I yelled out to them as a warning to Dan to stay inside. They waved back. When they came close, the man yelled, “Hey, man, you been down those rapids?”

“Not bad. Between a two and a three. Fun.”

“Thanks. See ya.”

And the woman waved her thanks, too.

I pretended to fiddle with our motor until they were out of sight. I called to Dan. He came out. “It happens,” he said.

“There’s the rifle. Where did you hide when I came down the cliff?”

“There’s a cave just ’round the bend upriver.”

“Wait there. Take the rifle.”

I took off immediately up the path toward the top of the cliff. For the first couple of hundred yards or so, it was a smooth, steep wash, mostly in the shade of the cliff. But I couldn’t squeeze through the spout where the runoff had created the wash. It had been easy to drop onto the ledge on the way down, but lifting my way up took time. The limestone was gritty and flaky, and I kept falling back onto the wash. I felt like if I didn’t see them go over the rapids, I had to assume they were coming back toward us, maybe from on top. At last I wedged myself through and made it smoothly to the plateau. I cut across the bulge where the cliff juts out and the river bends and reached a spot above the rapids.
A moment later, they came into view. The man guided the raft out of the current near to the rocks across the river from where I watched. They stayed there talking for a couple of minutes.

I watched them and tried to force myself to consider just walking away. What was the mission? Dan left me often enough, usually in much this way: I’ll be back soon. He had come here believing it was safe, never thinking I’d show up. He wasn’t asking for my help. Yet by the Rules of Dan, he wanted me to stay: that is, he never asked me to stay or went on about how glad he was that I was going to help him; no blather about us sticking together forever; and, especially, no rosy future scenarios, which were always a reliable precursor to his disappearance. He hadn’t offered me any of the money. If he had, I’d have run, accelerating with each additional percentage point. By the Rules of Dan, we were still in the early stages of the enterprise. Betrayal would come in its own good time.

The man pushed off and the current caught the raft and they hit the rapids. I walked back toward the path down the cliff. As I knew I would. The boat was empty. The cave was upriver around a slight bend. Before I got there, I called out to Dan. No answer. “They’re gone. Over the rapids.” No answer. I moved faster toward the cave opening. It wasn’t deep and Dan wasn’t there. I hit the cliff face with my fist and cursed myself for a fool.

“Hey…up here.” I had to step back into the water to try to see him at the top of the cliff. The sun was behind him from that angle. I could see his shape but not his face. “I’ll head down. Take me a little while.”

On the boat he said, “Ever think about your mother?”

I did not think about her and certainly not there on that river. “I don’t remember her.”

“I’m trying to figure out who you take after.”

“How’s that?”

“Not everybody would have come back today.”

“She would have?”

“No chance.” He did not laugh, though.

Dan reflective was worse than Dan naked. I stared shamefully. But Dan had the charm and the ability to carry the moment as if nothing were odd. “Also, she was nasty and thought the worst of people. Beer. Want one? There’s a landing a few miles up the river where we can get more tomorrow or the next day.” He returned with two beers.

“We should leave here,” I said.

He sat down and scrutinized the cliffs for a while. He started to laugh. Just kept on. Then, “If we die from this, it’s due to cigarettes.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Neither do I. But plenty of Iraqis do. I was over there working as a paving supervisor at the airport. Repairing the runways. Made a lot of friends, soldiers and civilians. One day, I’m talking things over with a young Iraqi, Tarik, about your age, very enterprising guy. He tells me he can make ‘tausands, tausands’ selling electronics. Cell phones, iPods, that kind of stuff. I wasn’t sure I could help him out with any of that, but then he mentioned cigarettes. The main fighting had stopped and the insurgency wasn’t in full force yet, but there were casualties all the time. Caskets flown in empty, flown out occupied. Ugly. But I suppose you’ve seen worse than I did.”

“It’s ugly.”

“One night I took a truckload of cigarettes to the central morgue where Tarik worked. Rough part of town it was, but Tarik
told us how to get through. I left my partners watching the truck and went inside. Place was overwhelmed. No vacancies. Standing room only. And the stench as thick as fog on a swamp. I’m waiting for Tarik and I can’t help looking at the bodies. There’s so many that they’re stacked. Horrible and captivating at the same time. And it takes me a couple of minutes to realize that I recognize the second body from the top of the first stack in front of me. And he’s an American soldier. He had been anyway. He was in his thirties, dark-complected guy from Oklahoma. Santoro was his name. He’d died the day before from an IED on his way back to the airport. And I’m positive it’s Santoro because he thought I owed him money from a little deal we’d done. I’d been avoiding him for a couple of weeks. Tarik came out and we concluded our business. Unloaded those cigarettes in a garage just across from the morgue.

“He paid up, no problems. Twenty thousand in very crisp green dollars. All good, best of friends, looking forward to doing more business, you know how it goes. And before I leave, I tell him he’s got an American body there in the Iraqi morgue. Suddenly, we’re not friends anymore. Tells me to take my money and forget about dead bodies.”