the CIA.” Kate lowered her voice, having fun. “Supposedly he’s an accountant for the State Department. But then he up and disappears for weeks at a time. She also thought she saw him on CNN, in the background of a shot taken in, like, Turkey or someplace. He was wearing sunglasses and a turban.”
“Sounds pretty fishy.”
“That’s what I thought. Does the CIA have accountants?”
“Somebody has to do their books, I guess. Kats?”
“Yeah, Dad?”
“Remember that summer when you were growing the beans? I think they were beans.” My mind was wandering, doing surprising things. “That science project for school.”
“Peas, Dad. Sure, I remember. What about it?”
“No reason, I guess. I was just thinking about it. You sure were all fired up about it. How old were you, thirteen?”
“Well, it was eighth-grade science, with Mr. Weld. So I guess that would be about right. We used to call him Fartface Weld.”
“That’s right, Phil Weld.” I was thinking of my thirteen-year-old Kats, dressed in shorts and a bathing suit top and her mother’s straw hat, working away in the Maine dirt. The memory was so vivid I could practically smell it. “You know, I think I thought it right then—that girl is going to be a scientist.”
“You sure this isn’t one of those calls, Daddy? You don’t have, like, a brain tumor or anything?”
“Positive, Kats. Your mother’s at home. Give her a call so she can tell you herself.”
“Nah. What do they say on that show? Fuggetaboutit. A girl can talk to her dad about peas if she wants to.”
“And vice versa.” While we’d talked, evening had come on, the sky above and all around purpling with the day’s last light. “You get back to your studying, okay? We’ll see you in a month.”
“You too. And Daddy? Please don’t forget this time.”
“Forget?”
Another sigh, and too late I remembered. “Daddy, the tickets. God, you’re hopeless. Don’t make me go over your head and call Mom.”
“Roger wilco,” I said. “Two airline tickets for one hopeless Dad.”
It is not necessarily the best thing in the world to be friends with a man like Harry Wainwright. There’s his money, for starters, which is so much more than the kind of money most people have that there’s simply no comparison—a pile so enormous it’s like a force of nature, and not a little dangerous to be near, like a mountain that could fall on you at any minute. In a business like mine, you deal with wealthy people constantly—odd, in a way, because fishing isn’t what you would call a naturally upscale activity, what with all the blood and bad smells—and one thing you learn is that people with serious money didn’t get that way by always being nice. Someone threatens to sue me just about every year; usually it’s all just bluster, some trivial complaint that boils down to I-didn’t-have-enough-fun, and I tell myself it’s a small price to pay for a life that’s arguably better than anybody else’s. Even so, a man like Harry Wainwright is one to take seriously; right or wrong, he can do you some major damage. I don’t mean they’d find you in the trunk of your car somewhere in the eelgrass (though I have dealt with some guys like that—my friend from Providence being exhibit A, I suppose). What I mean is a man like Harry Wainwright can buy whatever he wishes, and if he wanted to buy me, he had the dough to make this happen.
I flew to New York on the last Wednesday in April, just me and the pilot and, thanks to Hal, an industrial-size box of individually wrapped packages of honey peanuts. Attached was a note: “Enjoy the flight; best taken with Scotch.” I didn’t know how many of them I had to eat to look thankful, so I worked my way through two packets with the help of a glass of thirty-year-old single malt from the plane’s well-stocked bar, then flushed a bunch more down the toilet before we landed—not at one of the big New York airports but a smaller field in New Jersey. Hal had sent a limo—another first for me, though after the Learjet, the limo felt like nothing at all—and I put on my necktie as we crossed the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan and headed downtown.
In all the years I had known Harry Wainwright, I had never once set foot into anything you might call his world. I’d been to New York, of course, though not for years—my parents had brought me