The Way of All Fish: A Novel (16 page)

“Cindy! Sure. How’s the fish?”

“Oh, just great.” She was speaking to Monty. “I was just wondering—do you have another one? A friend of mine, he lost his the other night when his aquarium broke.” Why all the explaining? “And I thought I’d get him another one, I mean—”

“A ghost clown fish?”

“Yes. Are they hard to find?” Was she making an unreasonable request?

There was a pause as Monty turned away, perhaps to check his fish tank but more likely to check with his Aquaria buddy, Molloy, to see if he could get him one. Either way, he said, “Yeah, no problem, sure.”

“Good. Same price?”

“Uh. I s’pose.”

“A hundred?”

In a brighter tone, he said, “Hey. Hundred’s good.”

“When can I come pick it up?”

Pause. “Hold on.” Another mumbled conference. “I can have it ready this afternoon, say, like sometime after three?”

“Okay. Three or four this afternoon?”

“Absitively. Hey, this time stay awhile, have a beer. Guys thought you were cool.”

Cool? Herself, Cindy Sella? When she’d done nothing but stand there and speak when spoken to? Cool?

She must have said the word aloud, for Monty said, “Yeah. You comin’ by yourself on the N train? All the way to get a fish? Fuck, yeah. Cool. See ya.”

Cindy stood there, dead receiver in hand, feeling cool.

As Cindy put down the receiver in the West Village, Paul Giverney was saying, in the East Village, “Maybe we should save the scare-him-shitless tactic for the end.”

It was the day following the evening meeting in Bobby Mackenzie’s office. Paul had invited Candy and Karl to lunch, or rather, Dean and Deluca had invited them. Super-sandwiches had been smilingly brought into the small office by Paul’s wife, who, for some reason all her own, got a big kick out of Paul’s acquaintance with two contract killers. He got on well with anyone Mob-related. Molly once told him he should have been a cat thief.

“You wouldn’t mean ‘cat burglar,’ would you?”

“Right. I can see you shimmying down a drainpipe with the swag.”

Swag. “You’ve been reading Hannah’s British comic books again.
Beano
.” Hannah had insisted upon getting a dog so she could name it Gnasher. They simply waited for Hannah to dissuade herself, which she did by saying she was much too busy with her book to take Gnasher for walks.

Karl was chewing his mahimahi sandwich. He frowned. “End of what?”

“Yeah,” said Candy, “of what?” Both of them were suspicious of, not to say intimidated by, Paul Giverney’s imagination.

“Whatever we come up with to drive Bass Hess either completely mad or out of our field of vision. Out of Cindy Sella’s, that is.”

Candy had a bite of his croque-monsieur with prosciutto and washed it down with a swig of ale. He said, “We didn’t come up with much last night, did we?”

“Of course we did. Weren’t you paying attention?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Candy defensively. “I was.”

Karl went on eating his grilled fish on sourdough contentedly.

“First thing,” said Paul as he balled up his paper napkin and shot it toward the wastebasket and missed, “would be Florida. I’ll find out if he’s going soon, and if he isn’t, we’ll see that he does.” He smiled. “This was a brilliant idea you guys had, that I take him on as an agent. We’ve got him in the crosshairs.”

“Wait, wait, Paulie,” said Candy. “Fuck, we do. We decided not to whack him.”

Paul laughed. “Sorry. All I meant is to keep me as a client, L. Bass Hess will do whatever I want.”

T
he Richard Geres were falling all over their tap-dancing feet offering chairs, coffee, a bowl of fruit, and imported biscuits to Lena bint Musah.

Not only was she herself as exotic as any Malaysian fish, there was something about her that oozed money. It wasn’t just the ring she wore, which on its own would have accounted for the rape of the Congo; it was that one felt one could delicately strip thousand-dollar bills from her person.

“My license, I believe you’ll find in order,” she said, wasting no time. From her slim black bag that served as a new mark in briefcase elegance, she drew a letter-sized folder, and from that a document with fancy writing on old crushed-looking paper that might have been the Magna Carta and supposedly was signed by some Malaysian official.

From what Karl could squint up, the name was Tim-Tan X-something, and it was clear the Richard Geres didn’t make much more of it than he could. But they looked at it and nodded as if they’d just had a beer with Tim-Tan.

Wally, wanting to appear one step ahead but was a league behind, said, “This gives you the right to import, but not to import a fish that’s protected by either the FWS, the ESA, or the DOE.”

Karl noticed he glanced at the cuff of his shirt with each new set of initials. It was the way guys in his American lit class used to claw out the answers to multiple-choice questions.

Lena nodded. “The fish in question is the wild Asian arowana. There are breeding facilities whose fish CITES has allowed can be exported. But the exportation of the wild arowana is illegal.”

Wally pasted his palms together and leaned his chin on his fingertips. Rod tried to do the same thing, but as he was standing, he had no surface on which to rest his elbows, so he washed his hands over his cheeks and made his fingers meet behind his neck as if this were the gesture he’d intended from the outset. He lost his balance and had to sit down clumsily on the deep sill of the window. Candy wondered how he ever made it into the cast of
Chicago
.

“The Asian arowana . . .”

Lena and Wally said it more or less simultaneously, but the pronunciation varied.

“I was met,” Lena went on, “at Chelsea Piers, Pier 61—”

Christ, thought Candy, but that place was busy.

“—by a supposed aquarist calling himself Miles Mutton, obviously not his real name.”

Candy could tell “how did you know it wasn’t?” was on the tip of Wally’s tongue, but Wally outwitted himself for once and kept quiet.

Accepting a light from Wally for her brown cigarette, Lena went on, “He had done everything he could to disguise himself short of sending someone else. He’d chosen Pier 61 because it was the darkest. He wore a black Burberry and hat pulled down so I couldn’t see his face. And he was armed, possibly with a Uzi—”

“Same shit-ass gun used at the Clown—” Candy burst out before Karl gave his ankle a kick that could have broken every little bone in it, at the same time giving him a look that a great horned owl might turn on a field mouse.

“Sorry, sorry,” said Candy, who had pulled out his handkerchief and was doing a little drama of wiping his brow. “Thing is, I had two uncles gunned down on Mott Street with one of them—those—bastards, and every time I hear—”

Another kick from Karl, but Lena placed a delicate hand over Candy’s knee and patted it, saying something that no one understood and everyone assumed to be Malaysian. At this point, they had forgotten where they were, that is, everyone except Lena. “His collection, he said, included the rarest of fish from every country in Europe and the East, including the
P. boylei,
the peppermint angelfish—which I seriously
doubt because there are only one or two in captivity. It’s a deep-water fish, as you may know.”

(The lawyers’ expressions, or at least Wally’s—since he did what thinking was done—were fashioned to tell them that, yes, they did know.)

“But for some reason, the arowana escaped him. He’s been trying to find one for years—surprising, since, although they are illegally traded, they are still traded. He would pay any price I required, he said, but were I to attempt to discover his true identity . . . I asked him why on earth I’d want to do that. I believe he was offended. He made a few casual threats, such as putting me on ice, to which I said my veins were full of it. I then told him I would be in touch through Mr. Zito. That the price would be between fifteen and twenty thousand.” She stopped and smoked her cigarette.

Wally frowned. Rod selected a pear from the fruit bowl. Wally said, “Lena, what is it you want us to do?”

Her artfully plucked eyebrows rose fractionally. “I beg your pardon? I assumed, as you are the attorneys who handle environmental issues, you would not be asking me . . .” She sighed deeply and stubbed out her cigarette in the blue Murano ashtray. “I understand you have a client who happens to be an authority on the illegal trade in exotic fish.”

From Wally came a sharp intake of breath. Rod ate his pear. Again, the eyebrows rose as Lena said, “You mean this is not true? It was my—our”—here a nod toward Candy and Karl—“reason for choosing you.”

“Cindy Sella, you mean. Yes. We’ve been advising her every step of the way.”

“Ah. Good. I would suggest we all meet.”

“You mean with Miss Sella?”

Rod made a choking noise.

“Of course. She would be your expert witness regarding the trade.”

Wally had resteepled his hands but now dropped them. “Witness? For what?”

Candy wondered, could this firm produce any dumber lawyers? Didn’t these guys know how to fake anything?

Lena looked a tad surprised. “Against the U.S. government. The EPA. The Fish and Wildlife Service. For harassment. Entrapment. The usual laundry list of offenses.” She put her hand to her shoulder and disengaged
the silver brooch there. She clicked a tiny button, and a thin switchblade sprang forth. It was hardly bigger than one of the plastic dental picks one buys by the dozen.

Candy loved the musical little click that released the switchblade. With the other hand, she picked an apple out of the bowl and proceeded to cut a paper-thin slice, which she offered with her knife hand to Wally.

Rod tap-danced backward to the window. “Where’d you get that?”

Lena smiled slightly. “A silversmith. I had it made. Security in most places is rather sloppy.” Holding the apple, she went on: “You do understand that this Miles Mutton was some sort of government agent? One does sue the government in this country, doesn’t one? One sues everyone else.”

Karl made a throaty noise that Candy recognized as trying to hold the laughs in.

T
his time when she knocked on the door, Cindy was armed with a six-pack of cold Amstel. There seemed to be a liquor store on every street corner.

This time Monty opened the door without the chain on and without his eyeballs showing in the crack between frame and door.

“Cindy!” He flung the door back and arm-waved her in. “Yes! Is this a fuckin’ pack of beer I see? Guys! You can leave off the Ouija. Beer’s been delivered.”

Bunched over the board, Molloy and Graeme looked up and smiled. So did Bub, lying prone on the sofa with a striped blanket tucked around him.

“Thank God we don’t have to go out!” said Molloy.

Cindy felt like the heroine of her own story—or was that the way David Copperfield had started out? They all looked grateful as Monty started tossing out the big cans, which they caught with the agility of outfielders. He handed one to Cindy, who said, “Just half, okay? They’re so big.”

Monty went for a glass and returned with one less than spotless, so he gave it a rub with the tail of his T-shirt.

“Thanks,” she said after he’d frothed the Amstel into a glass. She moved over to the Ouija board. “Who was going to have to get the beer?”

Seated now on the other sofa, Graeme and Molloy pointed gun fingers at each other. The air was fogged the way London must have been in the days when they called it the Smoke. Cindy sighed.

Graeme raised his beer. “Real nice of you, girl.”

“Saved the day,” said Monty. His Adam’s apple moved feverishly as he drank what looked like half the can. “Man.” He wiped his hand over his mouth and shook a cigarette out of a pack of Camels and lit it. The others weren’t smoking Camels, for sure. Graeme rose and pulled over an old wooden rocking chair for her, and she thanked him and sat down.

Cindy said to Molloy (the only one she knew had an actual job), “But you go out to work.”

“It’s different,” he said.

Graeme wiped a few droplets from his T-shirt, the one that said
Now You See It
on the front. “Me, I work at home.”

“Like, some people wish he didn’t,” said Monty. “Me. For example. We almost had a Chernobyl moment yesterday.”

“Oh, come on. It wasn’t hardly anything.”

“I just don’t like the sound of bang.”

“You’re such a pussy,” said Molloy. “You wouldn’t go one round with an alligator.”

“You got that right, buddy. Can I have that joint?” He stubbed out his Camel, took the clip Molloy passed.

Suddenly, Monty was outlined in what looked like flame but obviously wasn’t. “What the fuck?” He spurted up and beat at his chest and upper arms, or rather, at the zigzagging lights, which, in another five seconds, stopped. He glared at Graeme. “Asshole.”

Graeme smiled his overtaxed face and shrugged.

“How did you do that?” asked Cindy.

Graeme slid down so that his chest was nearly in the seat. “Just fiber-optic crap.”

Molloy said, “He worked in Vegas, if you can believe that.”

“You did?” Cindy was delighted. “Doing what?”