Again to Carthage Read online

  “Well, uh, Roland …” John Kern looked back at Cassidy and shook his head. Cassidy gave him a little shrug.

  “I don’t need to have him mounted or anything. No trophies or any—”

  “Roland …”

  Just as he was starting another pull the line went slack so suddenly that Roland would have fallen right on his backside had John Kern not been standing there braced and ready to catch him.

  “What did I …”

  “It’s okay, he didn’t break off. You did good …” John Kern reassured him.

  “Wait, hold on, I think he’s still on!” Roland continued to reel, and was now feeling some resistance. Nothing like before, but he could tell something was still on his line.

  “No, Roland. We should have told you. There’s not anything you could have done about it. It happens a lot, particularly on the first fish.”

  Roland kept reeling, and looked back at Cassidy.

  “He’s right,” Cassidy said. “I’m sorry, Roland. A shark got him, is all. Sorry.”

  “A shark?”

  “Yeah. They hang out here. Blues, makos. They could never catch a barracuda normally, but one gets on a line and gets tired, it’s no contest really. I’m sorry, Roland.”

  “But are you sure? It still feels like I’ve got …”

  Then the tube lure showed on the surface and Roland pulled in a perfectly ferocious razor-toothed five-pound barracuda head.

  12

  Real World

  AS USUAL IT took several days back in the world to grind away all the mellow from the islands.

  He had caught himself idly studying the feral parakeets chattering away in the kumquat trees outside his office. When he came to he had no idea how much time had gone by.

  It was good to be back running again, which he couldn’t do when they were in the islands living on the boats, but that was the only good thing he could say for being back on dry land.

  He thought of how happy Roland had been, despite a very rough crossing coming back, and that made him happy too. They had dodged squalls and pounded hard over and through twenty-foot rollers for more than four hours before they saw the gray outlines of condos marching up the coast from Boca toward Vero. The trip took twice as long coming back and was a lot more uncomfortable. Scary too, crossing the Gulf Stream like that in small boats. Yet Roland hadn’t complained a single time. In fact, he seemed invigorated.

  “It always goes like this!” Cassidy had called, shouting over the wind. “Easy over, rough back. Or vice versa.” He pulled back on the throttles to avoid overshooting a big roller out into the void, then sped up again to keep from being overtaken by the following one.

  Roland, standing beside him at the center console holding fast to a rail, using his knees as shock absorbers as the little boat rose and plunged, looked over with a smile: “It’s a karma thing! Seems only fair!”

  Cassidy was surprised at the change in him. On their last evening in the islands Roland had begun talking about getting a boat, something Cassidy gently counseled against.

  “Why?” Roland asked, mixing drinks for the guests on their boat.

  “Because as a general rule people should not be taking up boats or motorcycles or skydiving for the first time during their prime earning years,” Cassidy said, getting a general affirmative murmur from the cocktail crowd. “It bespeaks bohemianism.”

  Roland regarded Cassidy curiously. “You usually don’t talk that way until three drinks,” he said.

  “Much better to have friends with boats than to have boats,” Joe Kern said, holding his drink up in a toast to Roland. “And you have lots of friends with boats!”

  “Here’s to them and those like them!” said Roland, holding up his own elegant goblet of sauvignon blanc. Where in the world he had come up with a crystal wineglass Cassidy had no idea. Everyone else was drinking from plastic tumblers.

  “Damn right,” said Joe Kern.

  “Damn right,” said Cassidy.

  “In fact, if no one has any objections, I’d like to sell mine and just go with one of you bastards,” said Joe Kern, holding his glass up again.

  “To us bastards!” cried Jim Branch. “Damn few left!”

  Back on the mainland Roland jumped into his daily routine with irritatingly good cheer. Cassidy slogged through a melancholy readjustment, lost in an ocean of daydreams, daydreams of oceans. There were occasional frenetic bursts of focus and coffee-fueled activity but he just found it more difficult than usual to take seriously the infernal residue of conflict, greed, hate, and willfulness that bubbled to the top of the fermenting tank of American jurisprudence. It was his job and sworn duty to man the pumps and skimmers that would process the acrid stuff into legally cognizable compromise, triumph, or regret that was only slightly more palatable to the contestants than armed combat. And occasionally not.

  He was grateful that at least his group rarely did family law, eschewing as it were the statistically significant possibility that a case might end in gunplay.

  But an island trip temporarily wrapped him in a cocoon of serenity that slowed and blurred life like a wonderful drug. Midmorning found him in a deposition on the ninth floor of an office building across the bridge in West Palm. Mentally, though, he was barefoot, on the deck of that bare-masted forty-foot trimaran about to motor under the Flagler Bridge. From the court reporter’s corner office he had a view of a good stretch of the Intracoastal and at this moment he was picking up the grainy tactile sense of the deck’s pebble-grain fiberglass surface on the soles of his feet. From a mile away in his air-conditioned glass box he could have sworn his ears had picked up the metallic clang of the halyard hardware on the hollow aluminum mast. Instead of the musty books and paper and copier fluid that made up eau de office, his nose was processing wind, salt, fish.

  Later in his own office he was leaning back in his leather Execucliner, hands behind his head, open transcript in his lap—mostly as a prop—still thinking about the trimaran when he realized that Roland had been standing in the doorway, for how long he didn’t know.

  “Sorry?” he said, looking over, still tapping the bridge of his nose with the pencil he had been making margin notes with.

  “Mission control to Major Tom. I was just inquiring …” said Roland. Sans jacket, his elegant suspenders perfectly matched the dominant colors of his floral necktie. He had a volume of ALR under his arm.

  “Something about fishing, sorry. Ah, you’ve been in the library researching the lawr,” he said, gesturing at the book.

  “Amazingly enough, a thing that might actually involve the Rule in Shelley’s Case. Tangentially, of course, but what are the chances? Not three people in my real property class understood it properly, including the professor. But I was asking what kinds of fish you are able to go after on your boat.”

  “Do you mean, do we have different kinds of tackle?”

  “No, I realize you have an enormous variety of equipment. But I’ve often noticed much larger craft out there pursuing the creatures.”

  “So what you’re asking is, are our boats capable of going after really big fish?”

  “Yes, your gallant sailfish, your noble blue marlin. Successfully, I mean. Or do you truly need the larger craft?” He pronounced it guh-lont.

  “Oh no, not at all. Our boats are perfectly capable. You realize that I’m more of a diver than a fisherman. But Joe and John Kern go all the time. Jim Branch, Frates, Bill Eaton, all those guys are excellent. They can catch just about anything from their boats. I don’t fish nearly as much as they do but mine is outfitted pretty much the same. You need outriggers, of course, a good fighting chair. And the right tackle, always. The rest is just know-how. Those guys have been doing it almost their whole lives. It’s second nature to them.”

  “But you abjure the sport?”

  “Lord, no! I grew up with it too. But given the choice, I’d rather be below the waterline, hunting instead of trapping. Harry’s the same. Don’t get me wrong, I love being on the water doing just about anything, and I’ve fished plenty, back with my dad when I was a kid and lots of times with those guys. But I just don’t get quite the same thrill from it they seem to. With me it’s diving. Hunting fish in deep water with no tanks. Lots of times there’ll be six or seven boats out and Harry and I will be the only ones diving. Everyone else will fish.”

  “Diving seems like more work,” Roland said.

  “Often, but not always, particularly with the ones you’re talking about, the big ones. They’ll wear you out pretty good. Funny thing, though.”

  “What?”

  “Lots of times a boat will come back blanked, even in the islands. Doesn’t happen often with those guys, but it does happen, even to the best. They’ll just turn up empty. Sunburned and tired, embarrassed as hell. But completely aced.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “But not Harry and me. We always seem to bring back something or the other.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Just the nature of things.” Cassidy laughed. “Other than their electronics, fishermen are blind. But Harry and me, if we go someplace to get fish or lobster, and there aren’t any there, we just go someplace else.”

  “Sounds reasonable enough. But frankly this business about spearing things seems ghastly to me. The battle of wills with hook and line, that’s something else!”

  “So you’re really interested in sportfishing? Billfish, or wahoo, cobia, things like that?”

  “I was just wondering what the process was like. An overview, I mean.” He placed the big green volume down on a corner of Cassidy’s desk and sat down in one of the client chairs. Cassidy didn’t see any bookmarks and wondered if the library trip might well have been a ruse. Rule in Shelley’s Case indeed.

  Cassidy looked at
his watch.

  “Look, it’s almost lunch and I’m spinning wheels here. Let’s go over to the Ocean Grille and get an outside table where we can see the water and I’ll tell you about it.”

  Roland sprang to his feet. “Let me drop this off and I’ll meet you in the courtyard.”

  It was a perfect fall day for outdoor dining. Still warm, with a gentle ocean breeze rocking the green-and-ecru-striped canvas umbrella over their table, bringing the familiar heady salt-fish-Coppertone fragrance that to Cassidy always seemed unnatural in the middle of the week when you were wearing a suit.

  It was early but the patio was already half full, mostly men, some in business attire, some ready for golf or boating, lots of Guccis and Topsiders with no socks. The rich and the trying-to-be-rich, Cassidy thought. But looks could be deceiving. Some of the “golfers” were in fact Palm Beach attorneys who dressed like their clients on days when they didn’t have to go to court, which was most of the time. On occasion you might see a Kennedy or a former governor or ambassador casually working the tables. Cassidy waved to the elegant, gangly Earl E. T. Smith, semiretired from investment banking and the current mayor of Palm Beach. He had been the last American ambassador to Cuba before the unpleasantness. A client of Joe Kern’s, he smiled and waved back, on his way to dine inside. He was with people, so to Cassidy’s relief he made an apologetic gesture to Cassidy and Roland and didn’t come over. Roland acknowledged with a sympathetic smile and shrug. The mayor was getting on in years and on his bad days conversations with him could be comically repetitive.

  “Imagine it!” Roland said. “The man was appointed to the War Production Board by Roosevelt!”

  “He occasionally comes up with the damnedest things,” Cassidy said. “If you didn’t know better, you’d think he was just a loony old guy. Once I was having dinner at Joe’s and the mayor and his wife were there. We were talking politics and I said something about the Kennedys—I can’t recall what—and the old gent looked me in the eye and said, ‘Well, I’m a Republican, of course. Eisenhower was my guy. Golfed together and all that. You’re probably more of a Kennedy type. I don’t know them well. Well, I knew John quite well, but not the rest.’” Cassidy tried to do that lockjaw Exeter–Beacon Hill–Harvard thing with his voice.

  “So much for dropping over to Rose’s place to borrow a cup of sugar,” said Roland.

  “Well, you know, their cottages are next to each other on North Ocean Boulevard.”

  “Yes, cottages indeed. What else did he say?”

  “He said, ‘They wanted my scalp over Castro. They held hearings. Oh, they came at me hammer and tong.’”

  “What happened?”

  “He basically skated. A good friend of his had told him to keep copies of all his cables. Said it would be good insurance. Earl said it was the best advice he ever got. After the revolution when all the jackasses in Congress started looking around for scapegoats, he pulled out a fistful of cables showing where he had been warning the weenies in the State Department about Castro for years. Said it was the career people, the fourth floor they call it, that bollixed the whole thing. He said, ‘They adored Fidel, thought he was a romantic figure. They live in their own little world up there. But they weren’t alone. At first everyone thought he was wonderful. They sent me over personally to tell Batista it was time to go.’”

  “My God! He’s telling you American history at dinner!”

  “But then Lesly goes, ‘Earl! Leave Quenton alone about politics!’ And I’ve noticed that those old guys with young wives always do what they say,” said Cassidy.

  “Assuredly.”

  “But then he whispered to me, ‘It’s all in my book. I’ll send you a copy.’ Sure enough, The Fourth Floor by Earl E. T. Smith arrived at the office the next day by courier. It’s pretty good too,” said Cassidy.

  From their perch on the patio of the Ocean Grille, the growing throng seemed something like a living socioanthropological diorama. There were a handful from families who’d had so much money for so long that the last several generations didn’t know what anything cost and didn’t really understand the difference between a hundred-dollar bill and a quarter. Their great-great-grandfathers had started a railroad or a coal mine or an insurance company, or their great-grandfathers had invented the flow-through tea bag or the cornflake, or their grandfathers had mastered the engineering of the aerosol spray valve or the sanitary napkin. Some of the snootiest owed their status to ancestors who had smuggled booze or sold patent medicines. Some not-so-uppity nouveaus had made millions in the burger wars, starting rabid HMOs, or selling shrunken heads by direct mail. They came to Palm Beach seeking high society, only to find they couldn’t draw flies at a goat dipping.

  But a common denominator of the true old-money crowd was simply that some perceptive soul along the way—an early generation before all the fear and ambition had been bred out of the gene pool—had set up the kind of corporations, trusts, leases, and foundations that would prevent any single particularly flagitious generation from pissing it all away.

  Many of the smiling gray heads on the patio had been raised by servants and retainers of various kinds and during their childhoods thought of their parents as some kind of visiting international dignitaries, and now though they listed their occupations as investment banking or “finance,” when they had anything to do with business at all it was only through trustees and lawyers.

  The ones with some brains or spunk might have gotten into an Ivy League school and done politics or philanthropy. The others knew that even as legacies they couldn’t compete with the turbocharged and outrageously ambitious scions of the professional classes and so were caught in a soul-draining no-man’s-land. They went to Rollins or College of the Atlantic where they dressed like Copenhagen drug dealers, and would later champion some variety of sea mammal or an obscure species of bat. In Palm Beach some of the women would occasionally attach themselves to fashionable charities or causes that seemed to require elaborate balls. These were among the more admirable ones.

  The Ocean Grille crowd contained some of the strangest and most miserable and most useless people Cassidy knew of, but there were others on the island much worse: ghouls and psychopaths who would have been locked up anywhere else in the world. Many would not even be up at this hour. Others were just lost souls who would disappear on occasion into rehab, go off chasing swamis, or suddenly discover Scientology or herbal tea. The alky-druggie-sex fetishists and vampires were often the much-prized clients of Cassidy and Roland’s brethren in the local criminal and family law bar, unless the really big guns from Miami were imported.

  The raree-show on the patio was entertaining as always, but to Cassidy the important thing was that he was near the ocean and there was a pleasant breeze. He hung his jacket on the back of the chair and loosened his tie and enjoyed the salty air and the gulls cawing and Roland’s infectious happiness, this little guilty slice of wind and sun stolen in the middle of a weekday.

  The waitress brought iced tea, unsweetened, and a basket of rolls, which they fell to hungrily.

  “So, the boats are big enough?” Roland asked, buttering a roll, trying to get back on subject.

  “Sure. That chair in the back, there’s a reason they call it a fighting chair. You use it when you go after really big fish. The boats themselves are called open fishermen. They’re made for doing just that. The other stuff we put on them, the front canopies, the sleeping cushions, the diving platforms, that’s all just housekeeping stuff to make them comfortable for island-hopping and diving. When they come from the factory all they really have are live wells and space to fish.”

  They had finished all the rolls when the waitress brought Cassidy’s broiled red snapper and Roland’s shrimp scampi. The sea air had made them both ravenous.

  “So you said the process was more involved,” Roland said. “Do you use those tube things or do you have to make other kinds of lures?”

  “No. Mostly you use live bait, which is much preferred. If you can’t get live, you might use frozen ones, which also work pretty well. To get live ones we go out just beyond the mouth of the inlet and putter along by the rocks of the jetty. Did you notice those smaller rods on the boat, the ones with the open-faced reels and really thin line?”