Pressure Drop (7 page)

“Hi,” said Danny. He didn't remove the orange-tinted sunglasses and he didn't say “Dad.”

“We went ahead without you,” Marilyn said.

“I was delayed.”

Marilyn studied her lips in a small oval mirror, snapped it shut and said, “I've got to run.” She turned to Danny. “Please be at Howie's office no later than six, Daniel. We're going to the Biermeyers'.” Marilyn signed the bill, picked up her Gold Card and was gone.

Matthias looked at Danny. “Had enough to eat?”

“Yeah.”

“Then let's go.”

“Where?”

Where. On these paternal afternoons, he and Danny had been everywhere in South Florida, from Lake Okeechobee to Marathon. “We could shoot some hoops at the Y,” Matthias said.

“The Y?”

“Anything wrong with the Y?”

“I'm not into hoops.”

“You used to like it.”

Danny shrugged.

“We could go to a batting cage.”

Danny made a face.

“Not interested in sports anymore?” Matthias asked, trying to peer through Danny's lenses, the way he had with Dicky Dumaurier. He saw only his own broad, dark face, wearing the same baffled expression Dicky must have witnessed; except now it was orange.

“Yeah, I am.”

“Like what?”

“Golf.”

“You like golfing?”

Danny made another face, different from the first. This was a face Matthias had seen many times before on Marilyn, but never on his son. “Not golfing,” Danny said. “Playing golf.”

“Is there a big difference?”

Danny said nothing. He flicked a pea off the table with his middle finger.

“All right,” said Matthias. “Let's go.” He smiled. “I'll golf and you play golf.” It wasn't much of a joke, and Danny couldn't be blamed for not smiling too. “Do you have any course in mind?”

“I play at Turnberry Island.”

“Good enough,” said Matthias, rising.

Danny remained seated. “You have to be a member.”

“Are you?”

“Howie is. He arranges everything.” The orange lenses were directed at Matthias's face. He thought of the chain gang boss from
Cool Hand Luke
. “Maybe I'll call him and see if it's okay,” Danny said.

Matthias sat down. “Who's Howie?”

“Howie? You know. Howie.”

“I don't.”

“He's Mom's …”

Matthias watched his orange face react to this information, in duplicate. “Dessert?” a waiter said.

Matthias shook his head.

They found a driving range near the airport. Matthias hadn't held a club in thirty years, not since his last summer as a caddy. Now, standing on a pad next to Danny's, Matthias felt his hands take the driver in the right grip all by themselves. He watched Danny tee up. The boy took no practice swings, stood over his ball, hit it. His swing wasn't bad, but he took the club back a little too fast, and his head came up a little too soon. The ball, topped, but not by much, whistled off on low trajectory, dove to the ground and rolled to the 100-yard marker.

“Fuck,” Danny said.

He quickly teed up another ball, took less time, hooked it low and left across the range. “Fuck,” he said, reaching for another ball. This time his head came up right away and he squibbed the ball a few yards to the right. “Fuck.” He reached into the ball basket, teed up. Matthias saw that the ball was even with the wrong heel, his right one, and that he was standing too close to it.

“Why don't you take a few practice swings?” he said.

But Danny was already into a jerky backswing; this time he barely touched the ball. It fell off the tee, rolled to the edge of the rubber pad, hesitated for a long second, then dropped on the burnt grass. Danny rounded on him: “Don't you know enough to shut up while a golfer's addressing the ball?”

Matthias looked down on him. If this were my kid, he started to think, I'd pull him off the course. But Danny was his kid. Matthias turned away.

A few pads beyond him, a well-dressed old woman was watching. She quickly bent over her ball and stroked it smooth and straight beyond the 150-yard marker.

On the other side, Danny took another furious swing and whiffed. “Fucking shit.”

“Relax, Danny, it's not—”

“Don't talk while I'm playing,” the boy yelled. He swung a few more times, missed, banged the club hard on the rubber pad, kicked the ball basket and stomped away. Balls fanned out slowly across the grass.

Matthias picked one up. He set it on the tee, stood over it and took the club head back. All at once he saw the ball with great clarity: a moon with sharp-edged dimples in its northern hemisphere and shadow-filled ones in the southern. He hadn't intended to hit it very hard, but somewhere on the downswing he changed his mind. The ball landed beyond the 300-yard marker and bounced over the metal fence at the end of the driving range. He felt better for a moment.

“Bravo,” said the old woman. And the moment was over.

Danny was talking on a pay phone. He hung up as Matthias approached. Sweat was running down his face, but he seemed calmer. “What would you like to do, Danny?” Matthias asked.

“When I grow up, you mean?”

“I meant right now. But when you grow up will do.”

“Investment banking,” Danny said. “Or maybe commercial real estate.”

There was a multiscreen cinema across the highway. Alone in a little screening room, Matthias and Danny watched a comedy in which Dabney Coleman played twins separated at birth. One becomes an encyclopedia salesman, the other head of the KGB. The CIA finds out and sends Encyclopedia Dabney on a mission to Moscow. There are complications. KGB Dabney has a wife and a mistress who, et cetera et cetera. It was funny when Dabney Coleman was on the screen. The rest of the time, Matthias stole glances at Danny, who had taken off his orange glasses. By the flickering light from the screen, Danny looked much older than he had on Matthias's last visit. Perhaps it was just the way he watched the movie, and the jokes he laughed at. His childhood was almost over. Matthias tried to picture him as an investment banker and easily could.

After the movie they took a taxi downtown. “Any plans for a visit before school?” Matthias said. “Rafer's always asking about you.”

“Who's Rafer?”

“Moxie's son.”

“Oh yeah.” Silence. Danny's head turned to follow a big limo going the other way.

“How about it?”

“I don't know,” Danny said. “We might be going to Greece for a few weeks.”

“That'll be fun.”

“You've been there?”

“No. But it sounds like fun.”

“Yeah.” The taxi stopped in front of a tall glass building. Danny opened the door. “Do you know where to go?” Matthias asked.

“The penthouse,” Danny said. “I've been here lots of times.” He paused with his hand on the door, about to say something. For a second Matthias let himself think that Danny was reconsidering Greece. “How's your case going?” Danny said.

“We're still in there pitching,” Matthias said. “Nothing's going to happen for a while, if you were thinking of coming down.”

“It's not that. It's—it's just that they say you haven't got a chance.”

“Who says?”

“Mom. And Howie.”

“What does Howie do?”

“He's a shrink.”

Matthias wondered if Marilyn's relationship with him had begun on a professional basis. He kept the thought to himself. “I'm not sure that qualifies him as an expert on Bahamian law.”

“Howie's an expert on everything. He's got a mind like a computer.”

“That's nice.” Danny put one foot on the ground. Matthias held out his hand. “Call me when you get back from Greece.” They shook hands goodbye. For a moment, Matthias felt the man-boy hand in his. Then it was gone.

“There's his car,” Danny said. A red Porsche emerged from the parking garage beside the tall building. The attendant hopped out and held the door. A man walked swiftly out of the building and got into the car. Danny ran over to it, jumped in the other side. The man didn't look at him.

Matthias stepped out of the taxi and found himself walking over to the Porsche. He heard Danny saying, “Sorry if I'm late.”

“‘Sorry' won't get us there any faster,” said the man in the driver's seat.

Matthias put his hands on the roof and leaned into Danny's window. “He's not late. It's five minutes to six.”

The man looked at him. He wore orange glasses identical to Danny's. “Who's this?” he said.

“My father,” Danny answered.

“Dr. Howie Nero,” said the man. “Pleased to meet you, but we've got to run.”

Matthias kept his hands off the car. He took in Dr. Howie Nero's diamond ring, tan suit, lime green open-collared shirt. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the necktie and tossed it in Howie's lap.

“What the hell is this?” Howie said.

7

“Let's get polluted,” yelled someone in the back of the plane. The flight from Miami to Nassau lasts forty-seven minutes but it was long enough, as Matthias had often observed, for tourists to get the pollution process well under way. They were itching to check into the hotels of Paradise Island or West Bay Street, where a getaway world of booze, smoke and sex with partners whose names they didn't always get straight was waiting just for them: the sheets were being changed at that very moment. There were no raised voices on the return flights.

The plane banked between two thunderheads, descended over water that changed abruptly from deep indigo to translucent green, glided over a narrow stretch of scrubland and jack pine and landed at the airport. The door opened. Hot, moist air came in. Hot, moist four-day-three-nighters went out. They filed unknowingly past the empty corner in the terminal where Blind Blake had played his banjo for so many years and into the long lines at the immigration booths. Matthias went to the booth with no lines, marked
RETURNING RESIDENTS
. “Nice trip, Mr. Matthias?” asked the immigration officer, waving him through.

In the parking lot, two shirtless boys, ten or eleven, were eyeing his Yamaha 535. “You boys don't want this old thing,” he said, climbing on and starting the engine. “Too slow.” They giggled. Matthias drove off.

The bottom of the sun was just touching the horizon when Matthias leaned into the turn at Love Beach and rode through the feathery shadows of the casuarinas. The sun wobbled at the impact, as though it had really been made of Jell-O all the time, and quickly slipped away. A minute later the sea, which had been a caldron of red and gold, went black. By the time Matthias reached the downtown part of Bay Street, the sky, which had been a pastel version of the sea, had blackened too, and a round white moon had risen over the low roofs of the shops and office buildings.

The shops were closed, the office workers had gone home, the street was quiet. The air felt hot and wet and thick, more like a low density ocean than a mixture of gases. Matthias parked his bike in front of Island Cameras and approached the adjoining door. There were half a dozen bronze name plaques on the wall—Island Imports, Inc., The Bank of Zurich and the Bahamas, the Nassau Panamanian Bank, RR Group, RR Investments Ltd., Ravoukian and Ravoukian, Barristers and Solicitors—but only one buzzer. As Matthias reached for it, he heard a husky whisper from the shadows: “Smoke?”

Matthias didn't reply.

The whisper came again, more insistent. “Hey, mahn. You wan' some smoke?”

“Nope,” said Matthias. Soft footsteps padded away.

Matthias pressed the buzzer. A voice crackled from a speaker above the door. “Yes?”

“Matthias,” Matthias said. The door clicked open.

Matthias stepped inside, closed the door behind him and climbed a worn wooden staircase. At the top were another set of name plaques and a single door, partly open. As he went inside, through the simply furnished waiting room, with its mildewing copies of
People
and
Ebony
, he smelled burning tobacco, strong and European, the same smell released on opening a book by Eric Ambler.

Ravoukian sat behind his desk in the inner office. He was writing rapidly on a legal pad; blue smoke curled slowly up from his cigarette until the ceiling fan sucked it in and whirled it away. Ravoukian looked up. He was a short, round man with big dark eyes, made bigger by the thick lenses of his glasses. “Not good?” he said.

“Not good.”

Ravoukian leaned back in his chair and sighed, blowing a smoke cone across the room. “You look tired, Mr. Matthias. Sit down.”

Matthias sat. Smoke rose. The ceiling fan turned. Through the walls came the faint chordings of a guitar. The Bahamian beat: like reggae, but a little faster and less pronounced. Ravoukian stubbed out his cigarette in a styrofoam coffee cup. He peered for a while at the ashes inside as though reading tea leaves. “It's too bad,” he said. “Too, too bad. I think you have—would have had—better than a fifty-fifty chance on appeal.”

“On what grounds?”

Ravoukian waved his plump hand. “Various. There were procedural errors. Some of the medical evidence might be shown to have been tainted. A few other things.” Somewhere behind the wall, the guitarist stopped playing. The room was silent.

Matthias said: “Do you ever work on a contingency basis?”

“What are you suggesting, Mr. Matthias?”

Matthias forced the words out; perhaps he was only able to speak them because he knew what the response would be. “Take the appeal and I'll give you half of Zombie Bay.”

Ravoukian smiled. He had a mouthful of crooked teeth that he'd never bothered to fix. Ravoukian didn't have to waste money on front: his reputation was all the front he needed. “And what if we lose? What happens to my share then?”

“You said I had a better than fifty-fifty chance.”