Free Thick as Thieves by Peter Spiegelman

matter to commingle licit and illicit cash and hide dubious funds transfers in a forest of legitimate ones.
    Carr had looked up at Declan, who was grinning like a shot fox. “That back-office system of his is a fecking magic lamp,” Declan said. “The great Prager rubs away, wishing for some clean money, it spews a bit of smoke, and
poof
—out pops a wire transfer! Any given time, he can move a hundredmillion at least with that lamp, boyo. I say we do a bit of wishin’ of our own.”
    “You say something?” Tina asks him. She’s lifted her glasses off her nose, and her gray eyes are motionless. Carr shakes his head. “You sure you’re okay?” she asks. “ ’Cause you look like a fucking ghost.”
    “I’m fine,” Carr says. He flips past the profiles of Prager’s staff—his security chief, his tame accountants and auditors—and leafs through the technical section. Floor plans of Isla Privada’s offices on Grand Cayman and of Prager’s beachfront compound, the makes and models of alarm systems, registry listings for Prager’s sloop and his motor yacht, the tail number of his G650—Boyce’s people are good at this sort of thing, and it goes on for pages.
    Carr squints at a column of figures and rubs his head. He turns to the last tab and scans the latest updates.
    There are pictures of a party by a long swimming pool, at night—men in linen trousers, women in gauzy shifts, waiters in starched jackets, and in the background a line of luminous surf. Carr recognizes it as Prager’s Grand Cayman beachfront.
    “These are from his party last week?” he asks. Tina doesn’t look up from her magazine, but nods. “You bought yourself one of the caterer’s people?”
    “Rented,” she says.
    “Another fund-raiser?”
    Tina nods again. “For a local grade school.”
    “Prager schedule the next one?”
    “Just before Labor Day—right before he leaves on his prospecting trip.”
    “Still off to Europe?”
    “And Asia now. Lot of money to be washed out there. He’ll be gone about five weeks.”
    “So, Labor Day—that’s about eleven weeks.”
    “Ten,” Tina says, and turns another page of her magazine. Carr keeps studying the party photos.
    “I don’t see Eddie Silva here.”
    “Next picture,” Tina says.
    It’s a photo of a fifty-something man, thick, with a salt-and-pepper buzz cut. It’s a daytime shot, and he’s coming out of a bar. His eyes aresmeared and his face is like pitted pavement. “He’s off the wagon?” Carr asks.
    Tina nods. “Again.”
    “That’s what—the third time in five months?”
    “That’s what I make it.”
    “Hell of a thing for the head of security.”
    “Nice for you though.”
    There are more photos at the back of the folder, and the very last one stops Carr. It’s another shot of Curtis Prager, and like the first picture in the file it shows Prager climbing from a car, though this car is a Bentley, and the street, sunny and white, isn’t in New York, but in George Town, on Grand Cayman. Prager is wearing jeans and a guayabera. His hair is long, curling, bleached from the sun, and his mouth is open, as if he’s about to speak.
    Carr flips to the front of the file and then to the back again. There can’t be five years between this photo and the first one, but in the interim Prager’s face has aged fifteen years at least. His skin is hide brown, seamed, and pulled too tight over the fine bones. The cords of his neck are like rigging, and his eyes are adrift in a sea of lines and shadows. His mouth looks wider and hungrier—weathered, but avid too, Carr thinks. Prager’s thrown off the collar and found himself some appetites to indulge—found that indulgence agrees with him. So, more a pirate than ever; more Bacchus than Apollo now. Carr shakes his head. They hated this kind of thinking at the Farm, and his trainers dinged him for it more times than he could remember. Projection, they called it.
Don’t impose a narrative, for chrissakes—let them