Cape Cod Noir - By David L Ulin Page 0,33
an attractive markdown.
Timothy does not move among the exceedingly wealthy, especially not the kind of rich people likely to drop fifty thousand dollars (Timothy’s steep-discount appraisal of the bale’s market value) on reefer. But the exceedingly wealthy are certainly within shouting distance, here on Martha’s Vineyard in glorious mid-August, and they are full of surprises. Why wouldn’t one of them want to lay in a supply of cannabis? The thing to do, Timothy decides, is to proceed as he would were it a barrel of Chateau Mouton Rothschild 1945 he’d pulled out of the surf. Only with greater discretion.
Timothy waits a couple of days, then begins making quiet, theoretically phrased inquiries at the cocktail parties he and his wife attend at the rate of two per night. On consecutive evenings, multiple interlocutors invoke the same man as a potential buyer, and here the story trifurcates.
The enthusiast is either a foreign-born energy magnate who owns a palatial spread in Chilmark, a best-selling novelist with harbor-front property in Vineyard Haven, or a glaucomastricken movie star retired to a hundred-acre farm in West Tisbury.
No telling of the story specifies how Timothy manages to secure entrée to the tycoon, writer, or actor—although presumably, as an enthusiastic and pedigreed cocktail party–goer on a miniscule and rarefied island, he is separated from these distinguished personages by no more than one or two degrees.
Trundling his product in a pair of smart new suitcases, Timothy is shown into the Chilmark, Vineyard Haven, or West Tisbury estate sometime around eleven at night, by a servant. A large dinner party seems to have recently adjourned. Timothy is unsure what to do, but the servant—assistant is probably a better word—makes it all very easy. He relieves Timothy of the bags, hands him a personal check for fifty thousand dollars, and asks if he has time to stay for a drink. Timothy says he does, and is shown to a screened porch or den in which half a dozen men are sipping bourbon and smoking cigars.
The actor or writer or tycoon greets Timothy warmly, fixes him a drink, and insists that he tell the story of his windfall. But Timothy finds himself tongue-tied, because among the men who break off talking and turn toward him with an air of inquiry is Frank Sinatra.
Timothy is not starstruck. He is terrified. He has read about Sinatra. He knows the Chairman of the Board is a Mafioso, mixed up with the gangsters who got Kennedy killed. He does not belong in a room with this man—this man and his muscle. For that is what the others are, Timothy realizes at once: the singer’s portable amen corner of New Jersey paisanos, every last one decked out in a gorgeous handmade suit slightly inferior to Il Padrone’s.
A few beats of silence is all it takes for Sinatra to lose interest in Timothy, and when his attention flags, so does that of every other man in the room. Timothy is merely an observer now, and by the time his panic subsides, Sinatra is holding forth on cigars, waving his in the air so that the ember draws a streak of light and telling the star or writer or businessman that what he needs instead of this second-rate crap are some authentic hand-rolled Cubans.
Sinatra drains his glass. It is instantly refilled. He takes it down to half-mast, then calls for a telephone, announcing that he’s going to procure some decent shit.
“Who you gonna call, Frank?” the host asks, chuckling.
“Who the hell do you think?”
A phone is placed on the low table before him.
Sinatra lifts the receiver, dials a zero.
“Hello, sweetheart. I’d like to place a long-distance call.
“Havana, Cuba.
“Mr. Fidel Castro.
“Tell him it’s Frank. Sinatra.”
Nothing else of Timothy’s evening survives to be retold. Sometime the following week, he buys a house in Oak Bluffs, paying forty thousand dollars in cash and taking occupancy the same day. By some accounts, he and his wife have been summering quietly there ever since. By others, the man whose marijuana Timothy brought ashore turns up that weekend. Let’s call him Blackbeard.
Blackbeard is a grizzled old cutthroat from Nova Scotia, a commercial fisherman who’s spent a lifetime trawling the corridors of the Atlantic, the Caribbean—hell, it’s all one ocean when you come down to it, he says, grinning at Timothy and turning to share the sunshine with the towering, snaggle-toothed colleague standing by his side, forearms crossed over a whiskey-barrel chest.
With no further preamble, Blackbeard comes to his point. There was some inclement weather on