The Deadly Kiss-Off Read online

“I can do that. I’m not entirely helpless without you, you know.”

  I got back up off the couch. I had to get my head back in the game, put aside all thoughts of my personal life. “All right, then, let’s get our asses in gear. We’ve got to go sell a shitload of fake bomb sniffers for top dollar, or we might as well invest in two small plots out in Santo’s marshes.”

  Stan trotted off to get dressed, and I had one last question for Sandralene.

  “Sandy, sweetie, couldn’t you have waited just a day longer to break this upsetting news to me. You knew how important today was, didn’t you?”

  “But, gee, Glen, I really couldn’t! I almost told you a dozen times over the last week as it was! And when I left yesterday, Nellie said, ‘You tell that cabrão’—did I say that right? I think it means ‘bastard’—‘you tell that cabrão he is not the only man who can make me happy.’ And, gee, Glen, when a woman says that, well, you just know there’s no time to lose!”

  39

  Arriving at the dreary entrance of the Luckman Enterprises factory with Stan in tow, I fully expected to make the worst pitch yet of a long scamming career. All the wealthy widows I had fleeced in my lawyer days, the tremendously convoluted snow job I had pulled on Nancarrow, my moving spiel to Vin Santo that had launched this whole precarious enterprise—none of those past victories inspired confidence any longer. I felt off my game. My head was whirling with thoughts of Nellie and how to win her back. Why did Sandy have to lay that load on me today of all days? I was convinced I would blow the whole gaff.

  Stan, looking dapper in a decent suit, showed no hint of nerves, though I couldn’t say whether this was due to his unflappable self-assurance or sheer blockheadedness. I, by contrast, anticipated only the worst.

  The rental car driven by Les Qiao arrived as I was berating myself. (Chantal, weary of being at the mercy of Uber, insisted on this fresh expense.) Les climbed out first. The young guy was suitably spiffed up, wearing his luxury anorak over a loose gray knit pullover and some red-and-blue-checkered wool pants that only a brave or foolhardy fashion-defiant soul could carry off.

  The rear doors of the car opened, disgorging Pete Smalley and Derian Crespo. Smalley resembled the prosperous manager of a cattle feedlot, while Crespo struck me as the guy who, though he doesn’t actually kick the bound prisoner out of the airborne helicopter, gives the order to do so. But my attention was quickly riveted by Chantal Danssaert.

  Beneath her unbuttoned Burberry, her unadorned red wool dress defined simple elegance. It featured a wide black placket from neck to halfway down the front, giving her the unsullied suggestion of Madeline the French schoolgirl. Opaque black hose suitable for the chill contoured her slim but shapely legs, flexed into sexy lines by spectator pumps with five-inch heels. Setting off the whole outfit, her green newsboy hat lent a charming Carnaby Street retro vibe, as if she had stepped out of a much kindlier, more fun-loving era.

  As soon as I saw her, something clicked and turned over inside me. She seemed a goddess betokening success. It was not a matter of lust, but of epiphany. All my sweaty angst evaporated, my confidence flooded back, my focus on the task at hand narrowed to laser-like intensity, and I knew with uncanny certainty that I was going to pull off the smoothest con of my life. I couldn’t explain the instant phase change, like the moment a molecule of water flips to ice, but the effect was undeniable.

  I strode boldly and effusively over to the new arrivals and greeted them all heartily. Les was blithely cavalier as ever, not as if he were playing some video game, but rather as if he were simply watching someone else play it. Chantal accepted Euro-smooches on either cheek of her self-composed face. Pete Smalley radiated that grab-the-bull-by-the-balls zest he no doubt displayed in either boardroom or barroom. And Derian Crespo managed to convey the kind of politesse I imagined an Argentine knife fighter out of some gaucho romance would wear like a second skin.

  Stan duplicated all my welcomes in his own inimitable Gulch-savvy manner, and I said, “I expect Professor Luckman and our plant manager, Mr. Stinchcombe, are waiting inside for us already. Shall we go in?”

  * * *

  Inside the factory, we arrowed straight to the conference room, where we found Caleb and Luckman. Both men looked trim and earnest, Caleb in his down-home manner and Luckman in his tweedy gravitas. I was relieved to find Luckman his usual self, with no evidence of any marital discord disturbing his professorial abstractedness. More introductions, then refreshments. The catered food that Chantal had arranged was superb. I was prepared to announce to the world that lobster breakfast tacos with scrambled eggs, goat cheese, and avocado cream would be my sole sustenance for the rest of my life. A steady infusion of mimosas did not detract from the delights of the food.

  After this minifeast, we ran the promotional video. Its slick, bright surfaces seemed even more convincing to me than on the first viewing. When the lights came up, I said, “Let’s take our factory tour now, if you would. And then Professor Luckman will put the LBAS through its paces for you.”

  All the workers seemed to my champagne-heightened vision to be exemplary models of the intelligent profit-sharing employee: utterly committed to their work. I ran my spiel nonstop but without, I thought, any overbearingness, just humble pride, extolling Luckman’s inventiveness, his long road to perfecting his invention, and the commitment of his financial backers. Caleb chimed in with nuts-and-bolts statistics. The random workers we stopped to question responded knowledgeably. I could feel with increasing certainty that both Smalley and Crespo were growing more and more impressed.

  Our last stop was the area where the finished units were stored on high shelving—all thousand of them in their bumblebee colors. It made an imposing display.

  Back in the conference room, Luckman eagerly went to the table that held the detectors—one functioning, one cutaway for inspection—and the explosive samples.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “you are now going to witness a miracle of technology, unparalleled by any earlier versions of such sensors.”

  He went, reliably, first to his favorite ANFO sample and got the desired result. Then he managed to make the LBAS respond to the other samples, but only after some elaborate twiddling of various controls, which he neatly glossed over.

  “Like any piece of sophisticated equipment, the operation of the LBAS requires a certain amount of technical expertise—skills that your users will rapidly acquire from their peers, whom we shall personally educate at no extra cost.”

  Luckman answered all the questions that Smalley and Crespo had, and I was able to contribute some convincing blather as well. Even Stan chimed in.

  “Man, I just know that if I had been lucky enough to have one of these gizmos when I was pulling my two tours in Kandahar, I woulda counted myself the luckiest GI in the field.”

  Of course, the closest Stan had ever come to serving in the military had been when he torched a building that housed an Army-surplus store.

  Finally, the pitch was over. Having run out of things to say or do or show, the six of us on the Luckman Enterprises team stood back, awaiting the reaction of our potential buyers.

  Smalley spoke first. “Well, y’all know I have to run this whole shebang by my compadres back at Steel Marquee. But I am pretty stoked about this device of yours, and I think there ain’t much doubt but what we will commit to, oh, maybe five hundred units to start. That is, if you could come down a tad on the price. I think you quoted twenty K per in your prospectus, am I right?”

  I got ready to bargain with Smalley when Crespo intervened.

  “La Sombra Negra needs these lifesaving machines badly, señor, to thwart those brutes who would destroy our nation. And also, we would not care for any of our enemies to possess them. Therefore, I am prepared and authorized at this very moment to bargain for exclusivity. I have no need to speak with any superiors. And, of course, we would offer a suitable bonus for the privilege of
being your sole client—at least for the first generation of machines, within a certain window of time.”

  “Bonus, huh?” Stan said. “And what might be the dimensions of that there sweetener?”

  “La Sombra Negra will pay thirty thousand dollars apiece, and take delivery of the first thousand units as soon as our funds transfer into your accounts.”

  The numbers crunched themselves instantly in my brain. Thirty million dollars. Half to Santo, three million for our brokers, and four million each for Stan, Luckman, and me. And that was just for starters.

  Smalley good-naturedly threw in the towel. “Too rich for us, hoss. Don’t need to talk to management to know that. It’s all yours, amigo.”

  He and Crespo shook hands, and Smalley wandered over to the remains of the buffet for a glass of champagne and a nosh.

  Crespo regarded us with his somber, intelligent, merciless eyes. “There is just one condition to my offer, gentlemen.”

  “Yes?”

  “There must be a field test, conducted in your city within the next few days. Our conditions, our location, our samples. ¿Está bien?”

  40

  This time, I wasn’t driving the airport run. Not wanting to leave my precious Lexus in their garage, I had bummed a ride from Stan and Sandy to catch my flight to Cape Verde. Stan’s Uncle Sam Jeep, unlike any other member of its species, handled poorly in the icy slush that had come to our city’s roads overnight. Or maybe it was just Stan’s distracted driving and the Jeep’s balding tires.

  I sought to reassure both him and myself that everything would turn out fine, though privately I didn’t expect that outcome with 100 percent certainty. But I couldn’t be arsed to worry about it. We had made a solid sale to the El Salvador sucker—a bargain that would leave us all rich. There was just one last little seemingly impossible hurdle: getting the LBAS to perform as advertised under objective conditions beyond Luckman’s sly control. And surely, if we had come this far on nothing more than a truckload of counterfeit semiconductors and a dream of fleecing the whole wide world to line our pockets, we could somehow find the ingenuity and resourcefulness to take us the last mile.

  But at the moment, I could only concentrate on what I had to do to win back the affections of Nélida Firmino. Even the prospect of all those millions of dollars that were rightfully mine but that lay just beyond my immediate grasp failed to dominate my mind. I was content to let the others wrestle with the problem, at least for the next few days.

  I emerged from my ruminations to ask Stan, “Are you sure you can handle Crespo and his demands while I’m gone? I can’t imagine this mission of mine will take more than a couple of days, and that’s within the window he mandated for the testing.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Stan. “Don’t sweat it. I’ll stall him somehow if I hafta. And we’ll come up with some workaround for that lame-ass detector. Jeez, you’d think that brainiac Luckman coulda made his frigging invention work perfect by now, all those years he spent out in that damn garage of his, ignoring his wife.”

  His reference to Rosa Luckman in front of Sandy, oblique though it was, startled me. I guess I hadn’t really believed Stan when he told me Sandy was okay with his tomcatting, but her lack of visible agitation or ire seemed to validate his assertion. Extraordinary, their relationship. It struck me as perhaps an object lesson in how I had to approach Nellie. I realized I wasn’t really so upset that she had enjoyed—was enjoying—a fling with smarmy pudding maven Onésimo Dambara as I was angry and worried that she no longer loved me and wouldn’t come back. And after all, what, exactly, were my horrible sins? Just trying to secure a nest egg for our future together, albeit through illicit means I had solemnly forsworn in her presence. If loving Nellie and money and criminal kicks was wrong, then I didn’t want to be right.

  Sandy suddenly turned around, interrupting my thoughts.

  “And maybe the horse will learn to talk.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I thought everybody knew that story.”

  “I do know it. I just didn’t know that you knew it.”

  “I am not a dummy, Glen. I know a lot. I knew I had to come home and wake you up, for starters.”

  “Please forgive me, Sandy. I am very grateful for all your wisdom.”

  “She’s got a fuckton of brains,” Stan offered. “And at least half of them are in her pants.”

  Sandy punched his right shoulder hard, causing him to swerve the car just as we were approaching the drop-off at my airline’s terminal, nearly running down a security guard.

  “Oh, great, get us all arrested for terrorism just when we most need to keep a low profile.”

  But there seemed to be no consequences to Stan’s erratic driving, and soon I was climbing out of the Jeep and securing my single carry-on bag.

  I shook Stan’s hand and he said, “Vaya con dios, amigo.”

  “Portuguese, Stan, kriolu. Bai ku deus, amigu.”

  “Whatever.”

  “We’ll be thinking of you, Glen. Good luck.”

  I turned to Sandy for one of her awesome pillowy anaconda hugs, but my experience was spoiled in midecstasy by the pinging of Stan’s phone.

  “It’s a text from Chantal,” he said. “She’s got an idea on how to flimflam Crespo.”

  “Excellent! Work it all out. She should be plenty motivated since she and Les don’t get their money unless we get ours.”

  As I entered the terminal, Stan and Sandy were already speeding away.

  * * *

  The flight on TAP Air Portugal was long, moderately relaxing, and generally uneventful. I watched a bad heist movie, read a book about the future of the Supreme Court that I had picked up on a whim at the airport, and caught up partially on all the sleep I had missed lately. I guess I got my eighteen hundred dollars’ worth—or the first half of the open-ended ticket, anyway. If I returned with Nellie, or at least with the feeling that we were back on an even keel, I’d count the money well spent.

  It was around two o’clock by the time I checked into the Hotel Pestana Trópico, where Nellie and I had spent that idyllic working vacation. The place seemed an improbable oasis compared to all the chaos of my life back home—an oasis at once familiar and strange after all that had happened in the intervening weeks. Also, being here alone felt weird.

  The desk clerk, a colorfully dressed, handsome young fellow with impeccable manners, remembered me with a smile and volunteered the information that Nellie was not on the premises at the moment.

  “I believe she was planning to visit her factory again today, sinhór. Her enterprise requires much attention. She is bringing great acclaim to our island, I believe. Soon, all of your country will know the virtues of our doce de café.”

  I chose not to shatter his dream of Caboverdean fame and glory via coffee-pudding export. “Can I get a car and driver to take me out there?”

  “But of course!”

  The car was an ancient barn-red Ford Ranger whose lacy undercarriage seemed more air than steel. Valdo, the driver, appeared to be about twice as old as his vehicle, which would put him in his sixties. His salt-and-pepper mustache was evidently his pride and joy, so fondly and regularly did he stroke it. I recalled that my rival, Dambara, had the same mannerism, and I vowed then and there never to grow any such brush. Valdo spoke little English, and my stock of kriolu, I suddenly realized, was made up largely of words I would have little occasion to use outside the bedroom. But the written address sufficed to get us on the road.

  The daytime temps were still in the eighties on Santiago, and after the November chill back home, I relished the hot air blowing over me through the opened hand-crank windows. Once we got out of the city, exotic fragrances exuded from the lush vegetation. I took the Edenic ambience as a good omen.

  Valdo understood he was to wait for me outside the factory. After all, I couldn’t count on winning b
ack Nellie immediately and riding home with her. The road back to our loving reunion might be a long one.

  Inside the factory, I made a beeline for the manager’s office. I figured that while Nellie might be elsewhere with Dambara—screwing their brains out in dappled sunlight atop a burlap sack full of coffee beans?—they would have to return to the office eventually.

  Convinced of this situation, I opened the office door without knocking first.

  Dambara and Nellie stood intimately abreast beside his desk. Their heads were lowered over something and in close enough proximity for a kiss.

  I was inside the office and had the door shut just as they looked up. I wanted to say something nonchallenging and dignified and conciliatory, but all my good intentions flew out the window when I saw them, and I defaulted to wounded snark, even mixing all my hopefully pointed metaphors.

  “Sorry to bust in like a third wheel on this cozy little tête-à-tête, but I thought I could introduce some sanity to this madhouse.”

  Dambara and Nellie both straightened from their studious pose, and I could see on the desktop a heap of green coffee beans blotched with disease. I recognized the beans and their troubling condition—a vital concern for pudding plant operations—from our previous time here.

  Dambara regarded me with a certain stern and regal disregard. But Nellie’s expression dominated my concern. With her hair pulled back, the youthful planes of her face stood out all the more vividly. Her look managed to mingle surprise, anger, contrition, defiance, and longing. I weighed all the factors together and judged the blend to be ever so slightly in my favor.

  Dambara’s English was accurate and pleasantly accented. “Sinhór McClinton, I would please like you to meet my wife.”

  My brain blanked out. Had Nellie married this gigolo? Sandy never hinted that things were that bad.

  A polite cough caused me to turn around.

  Seated in a tatty armchair that had been concealed behind the open door when I entered was a very large and merry woman, clad in sandals and a flowing dress of many bright colors. She seemed to be enjoying the situation immensely. She stood and held forth her plump hand.