The Stolen Coast: A Novel

PART I

1

Tommy Carvalho was featherweight champion in the Police Athletic League when he was fifteen years old. That might not sound like much of a title to you or me, but for Tommy it was a point of pride. He married young, straight out of high school, and developed an addiction to Vicodin that he managed to kick, possibly by reminding himself that for a span of time in his golden youth there wasn’t another boy on the South Coast of Massachusetts who could knock him down. The marriage ended after a year. He still saw his ex-wife regularly and liked to cook her dinner once or twice a week, without asking questions about how she spent the rest of her time or affections. We had never been very close growing up, but Tommy was part of my Thursday evening pickup basketball game. Most of the year we played at the Y, but in summer we went to the beach. It was five a side, full court, and Tommy was an able if slightly undersized wing who liked to run. He had a carelessness about him on the court that I always admired. Whenever I pulled a rebound, I looked for him streaking down the sidelines.

In the time since he cleaned up, Tommy had taken over as the head of Parks and Recreation. He was the one who had suggested laying the new blacktop on the public beach courts several years before, and whenever we wanted to play late, he carried a master key to turn on the lights. We would all throw in a dollar or two afterward, toward the electricity bill. It seemed to me he had settled into a nice, tranquil life, all things considered, and it surprised me that summer when he brought up the possibility of escape. At first, I took it for a joke, but after he kept finding ways of steering the conversation back in that direction, I decided there was probably more to it.

You should take a vacation, I suggested. Go somewhere warm. Have a cocktail.

I don’t want a vacation, he said. We’ve got beaches right here.

Then go somewhere cold. Fly to Iceland. It’s light out all night.

I’m not some goddamn tourist, he said.

That was the problem. When you got right down to it, Tommy had a lot of pride.

Well, I said. Tell me where you want to go.

Somewhere they won’t find me.

Who’s they?

The question only made him upset. In addition to the pride, Tommy had a temper. We were sitting at a table outside Alphonse’s café, across the street from the playground. The court lights were still on, and they cast a strange, sidelong glow over Tommy’s gaunt features.

Look, I said. Unless you’ve got a reason, there’s no point in dwelling on it. It’s not something you do for recreation. You’ve got to have a plan and a hell of a motivation.

I’ve got one, he said. You wouldn’t understand, but I’ve got a motivation all right.

What is it?

He leaned in close and lowered his voice. Before, he’d been bellowing.

Ever wake up in the morning and you don’t recognize yourself?

Sure. Everyone does.

Maybe, I don’t know about everyone. I know what I see: a fucking stranger.

You think you won’t see a stranger if you wake up in France?

Who said anything about France, for Chrissake?

It was true, nobody had. I pulled another beer out of the bucket, and we talked for a while about the game. Talking about pickup was never simple. Our weekly crew had twelve, but we usually brought out three or four irregulars. The losers would have to regroup and shoot for the right to play again, with an informal agreement that a man shouldn’t be left out more than a game at a time. The teams therefore disassembled and re-formed with new pieces and styles, and it was difficult to speak of a single game in any meaningful way, unless there had been a winning streak. Instead, you had to talk about feel and flow and other vague notions that brushed up against the spiritual. That night Tommy and I had played together twice. We lost one and came back to win the other. It was early in the summer and the ball rolled off your fingers differently outside.

I just want to know how it could be done, Tommy said later.

I was looking for a waiter to pay.

I think I’d feel better if I knew, he said. Like a mantra.

I thought your stint was in Old Colony.

It was. So what?

They don’t have mantras in Old Colony. That’s a stone-cold outfit.

The hell they don’t. You were never there, were you? That’s one place I’ve been.

He stuck his hand into the ice melt at the bottom of the bucket where the beer had been.

Old Colony was the prison where he once served two months on a criminal responsibility evaluation.

His mood had darkened over the course of the night. It was mean of me to tease him.

Look, I said, if you really want to know, come by the office. We’ll talk.

That perked him up and got his fist out of the water. You mean that? he asked.

Sure, anytime. Come by tomorrow.

I can’t tomorrow.

Sunday, then.

He shook his head. Sunday, I’m cooking for Mila.

For fuck’s sake, Tommy, come when you can. Whenever you’re motivated.

Before I had a chance to pay the check a fight broke out on the street beside the café. Somebody had said something to one of the waiters. Alphonse always kept a lot of tough waiters on staff. Most of them were his nephews, and they would come from around New England for a few months to make money with their uncle. His place stayed busy right up until closing at midnight. The waiter who was involved in the fight was a big kid of eighteen or nineteen who was holding on to some of his baby fat.

Tommy jumped into the middle of it. He was giving up five inches to one of the boys and forty pounds to the other, but Tommy was quick and moved well, even on the ground, where the fight was mostly happening. I wondered briefly if I had it wrong about him. Maybe he had wrestled or fought jujitsu. No, it was boxing. Featherweights. He had told me about it a few times.

The fight lasted ten or twenty seconds that seemed to stretch out much longer. Tommy got the boys separated, and one of them said something in Portuguese and the other wiped down his jeans, which were torn at the knee and had mud streaks up to the belt.

When he got back to the table, I asked Tommy if he felt better.

Go to hell, he said. They’re just kids, for Chrissake. What are they angry about?

What were you?

Go to hell, he said again. I got my reasons.

I put down an extra twenty on top of the bill for the kid who had been in the fight, the one who still had his baby fat, and walked home along the marina, counting the boats.

2

Onset is a small community in the southeastern corner of Massachusetts, next to Cape Cod. If the canal had been built a few miles to the west, the town’s fate might have been different. Things as they were, it was a way station. On Cranberry Highway the water park drew a crowd in summer. There were gas stations that charged less than you would find across the bridge and motels that would take cash and let you check in without showing an ID. The harbor was shaped like a teardrop, with the public beach running half a mile around it. Along the waterfront were restaurants, cafés, and a few bars that served one or two modest dishes, usually something simple the bartenders had prepared themselves. Near the village center there were more motels, and in the river neighborhoods you could rent a two-room cottage by the month, week, or night.

It was a run-down place and fairly picturesque for those who had a romantic streak. Over the years Onset had gained a reputation as a place you could go to live anonymously for a while, no matter who you were or what you had done. There were always towns like that in out-of-the-way places. The experience in Onset, however, was somewhat more deliberate. A lot of careful work went into it. Sometimes it seemed like just about everyone you saw there was on the run from something. In other moments, stasis hung over the town like a cloud of gas and you would see the same faces night after night, and it felt like low tide would go on forever and the wind would always die in the flats.

I was renting a small cottage on Shore Drive that year, across from the beach. It was only a five-minute drive from the house where I’d grown up, but it felt to me like progress. In the mornings I could go for a swim before breakfast, then walk to the office.

Work was busy during the summer, and it kept me often outdoors. My father, who had built the business and was largely responsible for the town’s status as an organized haven, believed in the old tradecraft and had infected me with a certain fetish for it too. I made daily rounds on foot, clearing out the dead drops and checking on proverbial curtains and fence posts for the signals that meant one of our clients was looking to talk.

Logistics and transport was how the business was described in our tax filings. The corporate charter was out of Delaware and belonged to a holding company in the Grand Caymans. I had gone there once to look at the post office boxes. The bank accounts were in Panama by way of Miami. All the same, it was a profession that required a personal touch. That was one of the things I liked about it. Walking down High Street and around the harbor in the mornings, I always had people to say hello to.

I went by the office a few times that week to see if Tommy had come but there was no word from him. He didn’t show up at the pickup run that Thursday either, and I wondered vaguely if he had finally decided to take that vacation. We played until eight, and when it started getting dark a few of the guys turned on the lights of their cars because Tommy wasn’t there to open up the electricity box. That was when I decided to go.

Once you thought about leaving pickup you had to do it, or else in the next moments or the next game you would pull a hamstring or knock somebody to the blacktop and split their skull. Or nothing would happen but you would know you were on borrowed time. It was all superstition, playground mythology, but everyone believed in it, so I left.

Find fucking Tommy, somebody called after me, and I said that I would.

Maybe they thought because I helped people disappear, I could find them too. Or else they were only annoyed about playing in the dark. Headlights never gave you enough.

•   •   •

I still had a few stops to make that night and took them in order, moving through the neighborhoods in erratic circles and occasionally pulling into driveways where nobody lived. In all those years I had never been followed in Onset. It was the ritual that was important, more than the caution. There was always a chance law enforcement might be around, but it was only a small chance. We had a long-standing arrangement with the local force. The nearest state trooper barracks was thirty miles away in Yarmouth. There was a federal task force in New Bedford. My cousin worked for it. Mostly they were focused on harassing fishermen and what was left of the old dock unions. In exchange for a monthly stipend, Camila, my cousin, fed us tips. The tips were hardly ever relevant to anything we were doing, but I knew that was the point: evidence of absence.

It occurred to me now and again that I would never perform the basic functions of the work so well as my father had. He had been properly trained, for starters. My apprenticeship was more haphazard. He always told me that the tradecraft was illusory, or even insignificant, like all sacred things. That was the way he liked to conduct a lesson: in the murky ground between sophistry and aphorism. It was the kind of job you had to learn by experience, he maintained, and by talking to people. Always talking, then letting them have a turn, and in the silences and patterns, you were meant to learn something that was true. More than the particulars of the job, it was the atmosphere. The technology around surveillance and espionage changed all the time. There would only ever be more cameras in the world. We leave traces of ourselves behind; nothing’s erased. In my father’s day, a person could well and truly vanish. That would soon be over, if it wasn’t already.

Still, you tried following protocol. It was meant to help. You checked mirrors and looked out for watchers. You tightened the circles, then let the slack back into them.

I was alone; nobody following, nobody interested. The streets were dark and clear.

Driving into the village center, I made a note of vacant houses and their addresses. The town seemed so quiet on the outskirts, but as you got closer to the shore, you heard a hum off the water. It was sheltered coast and there was hardly any surf, but the water was never completely quiet; it was always moving, and it sounded like a body heaving.

When I was young my father told me stories about the town’s past as a smuggler’s cove. They turned out to be untrue. The truth was stranger, and I had never asked him whether he knew it and had decided not to tell me or if there was some other reason why he’d invented the pirates. The first Europeans to settle in Onset were wreckers. There was a clan or a tribe or a group of them living in a cluster of lean-tos about a hundred yards up one of the inlets off Buzzards Bay. They would lie in wait for shipwrecks and salvage what they could. They would move buoys in the boating channels and distort the beams from the Wickham lighthouse in order to confuse the ships and encourage them into the rocks. Captains were sometimes bribed or paid off. This carried on right until the turn of the century, when the governor cleared them out.

At one point, the town was used as a retreat for Boston Spiritualists. They believed the land had been sacred to the Wampanoag who fished there. Séances were held during the summer solstice and then again in September, when the breeze was good and it tended not to rain. A few of the Spiritualists built homes, sprawling manors situated with a mind toward communing with the dead, but mostly the old Boston families, even the very eccentric ones, set down seasonal roots on the other side of the tributaries: on Cape Cod.

Onset was for fishermen. Mainly Portuguese, Cape Verdean, and Azorean, though there were Pacific Islanders, too, and a good number of Sicilians. The Irish came from Boston and New York after World War II and tried to take over the docks and the police force but didn’t have much luck with it. Onset was a free port at heart. The bars and cafés were always well run, and you could get a good, cheap meal so long as you ate fish or clams.

A lot of drugs passed through as well. I didn’t move any myself. It was a matter of pragmatism, not principle. There was too much competition in drugs. Only a few people could get you across a border safely with a new name, professional credentials, and reliable residency status. Traffickers never interfered with our work. On the contrary, they mostly approached it with a deference that bordered on the absurd. They wanted to know that there was a way out for them too. Everybody wanted that.

For a long time, I subscribed to the wisdom that it was necessary work, and there was a profound, if fleeting, satisfaction to be found in its inevitability. That was the sort of thing your mind got onto while you were driving in circles. Lately, I had begun to wonder how much of the wisdom I had received naively. The truth is, I had hardly traveled anywhere myself. I had only crossed a lot of borders and driven into towns and cities, then turned back. It was a parochial life, even if it didn’t always feel that way.

3

The tables outside Alphonse’s were crowded and I didn’t feel like seeing anyone, so I drove to Marianne’s. Marianne was a petite Malaysian woman who had ridden the highs and lows of the tiki lounge business for years and would carry on serving drinks in a choice of hurricane or coconut glass long after the rest of us were gone. The main room was quiet and cool, and there were two screens above the bar, one for keno and one for the Red Sox, neither with any sound. Marianne was sitting at one end of the bar.

Four innings, she said. Four innings and they’re already using up the bullpen.

Marianne had several Pedro Martínez jerseys hanging above the bar and judged the current pitching staff against that impossible standard. It was a down year for the Red Sox. She used to walk around the village late at night, after games, looking forlorn. That summer she had hired a DJ to play, starting at 10:30 p.m. Whether she had a permit to do it, and how she kept her neighbors on the bluffs from complaining, I didn’t know. The DJ was a Brazilian kid from Hyannis who played reggaeton from a computer and would sometimes post flyers around town on telephone poles and in public bathrooms.

The Red Sox had no middle or long relief to speak of that year. The game was as good as lost. Marianne thought so too. To pass the time, she was telling a woman three stools down a story that hung together loosely but was related with a lot of verve. It had some interesting locales, starting in Marianne’s hometown, Klang, part of the old maritime Silk Road, and somehow ending up in Casablanca, in Morocco, another port town. What she was really talking about was the Red Sox, though it took her some time to come back around to the subject.

"Casablanca built that team, she said, pointing at a pennant above the bar, commemorating the World Series win in 2004. Bet you didn’t know that, did you?"

It was a story I had heard her telling before, only I hadn’t realized it until just then.

Casablanca, the movie, was written by Julius and Philip Epstein along with Howard Koch, who was later blacklisted. Philip was the grandfather of Theo Epstein, the Red Sox general manager, whom Marianne held in very high regard, almost as high as the regard she held for Pedro Martínez, though she didn’t keep any of his portraits around the bar. Pedro had a very inviting smile. It was the kind you wanted to see in a convivial setting.

The story kept on going and listening to it was a strange kind of balm. I was watching the game, too, which carried on with or without our attention. The Sox kept falling further back, thanks to their bullpen. You