So they’re sitting at a Fighting Kangaroo spool table, her checkmate of the afternoon spread on the chessboard between them. Empty cans lie on the stacked plates from lunch: somehow they haven’t faced the task of clearing them away. It’s late, and the sun wanes, gentle on the sea.
She’s watching the queue of tourists at the restaurant shack, frowning as if their beer orders absorb her. Among the usual tanned beach kids is an older man, a myopic geek in unbecoming shorts. Paunchy and dead-white, he stoops and shambles miserably, looking as if he’s stopped here on his lunch break from a software firm. Deesey is captivated, and does not turn or seem to register Eddie’s sally:
“So, about this you and Dad scenario.”
It’s something he’s brought up several times: it now has an air of playful ritual. Her previous non-answers have varied from the nondescript (“Perhaps they were office picnics, where I would have met him”) to a detailed recollection of Jack Moffat visiting her childhood home (“It was when we lived in Arizona. I know he came to the house once, he brought us a lobster. He had it in a pail, I do remember, and I was awfully surprised the lobster was green. It had rubberbands around its paws, you know. I think I cried”). This particular episode haunts Eddie because it convinces him on a visceral level that Denise really knew Jack Moffat. His dad was exactly the kind of guy who brought you lobsters in a pail. The little girl would definitely cry and his dad would tell her he was going to set the lobster free in the ocean, or some bullshit, whatever it took. Then God knew what became of the lobster, something frightening.
Now he’s not after answers, but just fishing for her attention. The prod flops, however: she delivers a Deeseyesque non sequitur:
“Do you think we could leave?”
“Leave?” A chill blows through him.
“I mean, the beach.” She smiles at him, sardonic.
“No . . . yeah, I mean, I thought you meant . . .”
“I didn’t mean town.” She adds, “I think I know that man, you see?”
“Which one?” He turns to look at the bar queue.
“No, don’t. Don’t stare.”
“You were staring totally.” He forces himself to look away. “A nerdy guy or a beachy guy?”
She laughs as if that’s funny, and admits, “Nerdy.”
“Wow. Is he, like, a goblin? He’s after your liver?”
“Let’s just say, one of those things where I’d rather not see someone.”
He thinks about it for a minute, inspecting her expression. That per usual tells nothing. She’s smiling and he almost smiles back, joins her conspiracy, when it hits him with a jolt: the nerdy guy knows her. Ask the nerdy guy, the nerdy maybe-CIA guy knows all about her.
He has what he’s come to think of as a Benelia Moment, flashing on a spy-movie shoot-out at The Kangaroo. The CIA nerd doesn’t take kindly to detection; draws a gun from his sandal holster. Dashing from spool to spool for cover, Eddie knocks Denise down, takes her bullet, and et cetera. He lets it subside.
“Why don’t you want to see him?” he says, stalling.
“Oh, maybe we should just sit tight, after all.”
“No, honestly, you got to at least tell me that. Or, I’m supposed to cover for you?”
“Oh, the hell with it.”
“I mean, maybe I want to meet this gentleman.”
“Yes,” she says, all tight-lipped, “Yes, I do mean, hell with it.” Then she stands up with such a brisk unequivocal anger Eddie reaches instinctively to stop her, but misses, and she waves and calls: “Michael!”
Eddie turns sharply, in time to see the pot-bellied geek stagger in the act of opening his beer. He peers first to either side, for other possible Michaels. Then he sees Denise. His face goes strange. He shakes his head and sets out at a precarious trot, making big bug eyes to show his wonderment.
Denise says to Eddie: “There: you get your wish.”
Approaching, the geek smirks and holds his beer can up in a clumsy mock-toast. Deesey meets him and squires him back to the spool table, gushing: “I was just saying to my friend, what a coincidence. Of all the places.”
Michael nods, squinting at the chessboard. “It’s such a surprise.”
His accent is Germanic: he is pasty and narrow-headed. His Las Vegas T-shirt is blotched with sweat. Although he frowns, there is an underlying blankness to his expression. He carries his body, too, with pointed awkwardness, like an embarrassing item entrusted to him by a stranger.
“This is Jack,” says Deesey. Eddie gets up, but the geek just blinks at him in pained confusion and looks back at Deesey. She carries on, releasing Michael’s arm with a coy shove: “Michael – I didn’t know you took vacations.”
“Of course I take vacations. But you’re here. It’s strange. Where’s your father?”
“I don’t know.”
“You mean . . . you don’t know?”
She shakes her head. There is a complicated moment in which she glances at Eddie and back at Michael, and her face changes more times than that. Then she says, “Dad’s dead, Michael. He was killed.”
“Oh, my God. No.”
“We were playing in Istanbul,” she adds, as if this follows logically. Then her face crumples and at last she begins to cry.
As soon as she does, Eddie feels the release of some spring in her, all this time tightly compressed. He reaches for her and she lets herself be taken, leans back, slack in his arms. She repeats: “He was killed.”
“No. How can that happen?” Michael looks down at his feet, in such distress he squeezes his beer can in both hands. “Killed?”
“Oh . . . muggers, you know. Someone who saw he had a lot of cash. Just like . . .”
“He was always so paranoid. Yes.”
“He was right.” Then she begins to shake with laughter. “I was out, and of course I shouldn’t have been out.”
“Denise, sit down, sit –”
“Mmm, he used to say, will you be laughing when I’m dead, and I actually, I’m gutted, but – I don’t know what’s so funny.”
Then Michael too begins to shake with laughter. His eyes remain stubbornly blank, as he jerks and barks, and the sum of this performance is one of such defenceless ugliness that Eddie is chilled. And he feels this somehow justifies him, is a last straw that permits the inapposite question, “Playing in Istanbul?”
Deesey catches her breath deeply. Michael too falls still and sniffs, looking quizzically at the chessboard. Deesey says, “We’re blackjack players.”