4

NOBODY COULD BE this unlucky, Nick Dolan told himself. He had taken his wife and daughters and son with him to their vacation house on the Comal River, outside New Braunfels, hoping to buy time so he could figure out a way to get both Hugo Cistranos and Artie Rooney off his back-in particular Hugo, whom Nick had stiffed for the thousands he claimed Nick owed him.

His vacation home was built of white stucco and had a blue-tile roof and a courtyard with a wishing well and lime and orange trees, and terraced gardens and stone steps that descended to the riverbank. The river had a soap-rock bottom that was free of silt and was green and cold and fed by springs even in August, and pooled with shadows from the giant trees that grew along the bank. Maybe he could enjoy a few days away from problems he did not create, that no one could blame him for, and this trouble would just blow over. Why shouldn’t it? Nick Dolan had never deliberately hurt anybody.

But when he looked out his window and saw a man with a shaved, waxed head stepping out of a government car, he knew the cosmic plot to make his life miserable was still in full-throttle, turbo-prop overdrive and the Fates were about to special-deliver another fuck-you message to Nick no matter where he went.

The government man must have been at least six-four, his shoulders like concrete inside his white shirt, his forehead knurled, his eyes luminous pools behind octagon-shaped rimless glasses, eyes that Nick could only associate with space aliens.

The government man was already holding up his ID when Nick opened the door. “Isaac Clawson, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. You Nick Dolan?” he said.

“No, I just look like him and happen to live at this address,” Nick answered.

“I need a few minutes of your time.”

“For what?”

The sun was hot and bright on the St. Augustine grass, the air glistening with humidity. Isaac Clawson touched at the sweat on his forehead with the back of his wrist. In his other hand he clutched a flat, zippered portfolio, the fingers of his huge hand spread on it like banana peels. “You want to do something for your country, sir? Or would you like me to ratchet up the procedure a couple of notches, maybe introduce you to our grand-jury subpoena process?”

“What, I didn’t pay into workman’s comp for the guy who cuts my lawn?”

Clawson’s eyes stayed riveted on Nick’s. The man’s physicality seemed to exude heat and repressed violence, a whiff of testosterone, an astringent tinge of deodorant. The formality and tie and white shirt and big octagon-shaped glasses seemed to Nick a poor disguise for a man who was probably at heart a bone breaker.

“My kids are playing Ping-Pong in the game room. My wife is making lunch. We talk in my office, right?” Nick said.

There was a beat. “That’s fine,” Clawson said.

They walked through a foyer into an attached cottage that served as Nick’s office. Down on the river, Nick could see a chain of floaters on inflated inner tubes headed toward a rapids. Nick sat in a deep leather swivel chair behind his desk, gazing abstractedly at the sets of mail-order books he had bought in order to fill the wall shelves. Clawson sat down in front of him, his elongated torso as straight as a broomstick. Nick could feel the tension in his chest rising into his throat.

“You know Arthur Rooney?” Clawson asked.

“Everybody in New Orleans knew Artie Rooney. He used to run a detective agency. People in the graveyard knew Artie Rooney. That’s ’cause he put them there.”

“Does Rooney use Thai whores?”

“How would I know?”

“Because you’re in the same business.”

“I own a nightclub. I’m a partner in some escort services. If the government doesn’t like that, change the law.”

“I got a short wick with people like you, Mr. Dolan,” Clawson said, unzipping the portfolio. “Take a look at these. They really don’t do justice to the subject, though. You can’t put the smell of decomposition in a photograph.”

“I don’t want to look at them.”

“Yeah, you do,” Clawson said, rising from his chair, placing eight eight-by-ten black-and-white blowups in two rows across Nick’s desktop. “The shooter or shooters used forty-five-caliber ammunition. This girl here looks like she’s about fifteen. Check out the girl who caught one in the mouth. How old are your daughters?”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“Maybe. Or maybe it does. But you’re a pimp, Mr. Dolan, just like Arthur Rooney. You sell disease, and you promote drug addiction and pornography. You’re a parasite that should be scrubbed off the planet with steel wool.”

“You can’t talk to me like that.”

“The hell I can’t.”

Nick wiped the photos off his desk onto the floor. “Get out. Take your pictures with you.”

“They’re yours. We have plenty more. The FBI is interviewing your strippers. I’d better not hear a story that doesn’t coincide with what you’ve told me.”

“They’re doing what? You’re ICE. What are you doing here? I don’t smuggle people into the country. I’m not a terrorist. What’s with you?”

Clawson zipped up his empty portfolio and looked around him. “You got you a nice place here. It reminds me of a Mexican restaurant in Santa Fe where I used to eat.”

After Clawson was gone, Nick sat numbly in his swivel chair, his ears booming like kettledrums. Then he went into his wife’s bathroom and ate one of her nitroglycerin pills, sure that his heart was about to fail.

WHEN HIS WIFE called him to lunch, he scooped up the photos the ICE agent had left, stuffed them into a manila envelope, and buried them in a desk drawer. At the table in the sunroom, he picked at his food and tried not to let his worry and fear and gloom show in his face.

His wife’s grandparents had been Russian Jews from the southern Siberian plain, and she and their son and the fifteen-year-old twins still had the beautiful black hair and dark skin and hint of Asian features that had defined the grandmother even in her seventies. Nick kept looking at his daughters, seeing not their faces but the faces of the exhumed women and girls in the photos, smeared lipstick on one girl’s mouth, grains of dirt still in her hair.

“You don’t like the tuna?” Esther, his wife, said.

“The what?” he replied stupidly.

“The food you’re chewing like it’s wet cardboard,” she said.

“It’s good. I got a toothache is all.”

“Who was that guy?” Jesse, his son, asked. He was a skinny, pale boy, his arms flaccid, his ribs as visible as corset stays. His IQ was 160. In the high school yearbook, the only entries under his picture were “Planning Committee, Senior Prom” and “President of the Chess Club.” There had been three other members of the chess club.

“Which guy?” Nick said.

“The one who looks like an upended penis,” Jesse said.

“You’re not too old for a smack,” Esther said.

“He’s a gentleman from Immigration. He wanted to know about some of my Hispanic employees at the restaurant,” Nick said.

“Did you pick up the inner tubes?” Ruth, one of the twins, asked.

Nick stared blankly into space. “I forgot.”

“You promised you’d go down the rapids with us,” Kate, the other twin, said.

“The water is still high. There’s a whirlpool on the far end. I’ve seen it. It’s deep right where there’s that big cut under the bank. I think we should wait.”

Both girls looked dourly at their food. His could feel his wife’s eyes on the side of his face. But his daughters’ disappointment and his wife’s implicit disapproval were not what bothered him. He knew his broken promise would result in only one conclusion: The twins would go down the rapids anyway, with high school boys who were too old for them and would gladly provide the inner tubes and the hands-on guidance. In his mind, he already saw the whirlpool waiting for his girls, white froth spinning atop its dark vortex.