I was scrambling to get things done on Monday morning. Namely, I was trying to figure out my lead for the boat cop story. Of course, there was the book project and sociological research of the sand bar left to do. But in the meantime, I still had to justify my ride-along with the boat cops by writing a straight news feature on the boat patrol and boating safety.
I was also trying to figure out how I was going to be able to place enough calls, collect enough quotes and information and then write a newspaper’s worth of copy for Tuesday’s afternoon’s deadline. I was in the middle matching story ideas up with the people I was going to have to talk to in order to get these stories, when the receptionist up front paged me and told me there was a Mr. Kessler on line one.
I hadn’t heard from Kessler since the day before, when I had been out on the boat. Not even a day had passed and here he was already calling.
“Hello,” I answered the line.
“Some people like to call me Maurice, cuz I’m right here, right here at your side,” he sung into the receiver.
“Has any one ever told you that you were a creepy bastard?” I asked him, half serious.
“Yeah, and I cut his hands off and mailed them to the Korean embassy in Moscow,” he said giggling.
“There is no Korean embassy in Moscow, you dimwit,” I said to him.
“Not officially at least,” he agreed ominously. “But enough of that. I’m calling because it’s time to go to work.”
“I am working,” I said to him. “I’ve already been here for two hours.”
“What are they running down there a sweat shop?” he asked. “I guess I’ll find out
soon enough won’t I.”
“Where are you Kessler?” I asked him.
“Oh, I’m close,” he said.
“How close?” I asked, half expecting him to materialize from the walls of my office with a machete clinched between his teeth.
“Just you never you mind,” he said. “That information’s on a need to know basis only and right now you don’t need to know. Anyway, like I was saying, it’s time to get to work, on the book. I think we’re going to have to move out to the sand bar.”
“People don’t actually live there,” I said. “At least I don’t think they do.”
“Yeah, but people live on their boats in the marina. And I bet people crash on the sand bar on weekend nights. Ten to one odds that sandbar is jumping on a Saturday night.”
“I’ll tell you what then,” I said. “You go sleep on the sand bar and record everything and I’ll write about it later.”
Just then Elaine, my publisher knocked on my door. I told her to please hold.
“I gotta go,” I told Kessler.
“I’ll see you soon,” he said.
“No you won’t,” I said to him. “I’m warning you Kessler, stay clear of me right now because I’ve got things to do. Like my job.”
I hung up and walked out to meet Elaine.
“I’ve got someone here for you to meet,” she said. “Remember the intern program I was telling you about?”
“Yeah, wow,” I said. “They already sent somebody.”
“They did,” she said. “He’s a graduate student from LSU. He’s a little bit older but he seems serious about wanting to be a journalist.”
“Free labor and a little relief is always a good thing,” I told her, adding, “I hope he can write a simple news story. I guess it’s better than being a door greeter at Wal-Mart.”
“Don’t be so crass, he’s not that old,” Elaine told me as she led me around a comer and through her office door.
Sitting in a seat facing Elaine’s desk, with his back turned to us, was a thin and balding man wearing a dark suit jacket. He rose as he heard us approaching and turned to look at us.
I nearly jumped. It was Kessler.
He winked at me as Elaine began to introduce us. Only his jacket was dark, navy actually. He also wore dress khaki pants, a button-down oxford, penny loafers and a paisley tie.
“Ashton this is Ryan Kessler, he’s going to be an intern here as part of his masters program for journalism,” Elaine told me.
I was trying not to look shocked as I leaned over and shook hands with him. Surprisingly, he didn’t assault me with his GI Joe Kung Fu action grip like he usually does. Instead, his handshake was firm and businesslike.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you Ashton,” he said to me, a mocking glint in his eye.
“Pleasure to meet you too sir,” I said, with heavy emphasis on the word sir.
“Please,” he said. “Just call me Kessler. Everyone else does; even my fiancee.”
It was an odd thing to say and suddenly Elaine stiffened a little with nervous apprehension.
“So when do we ride,” he said, clapping his hands together enthusiastically.
“Come again?” I asked.
“Yes,” Elaine cut in, beginning to explain. “Ryan is here from us on loan from LSU for what is it, six months?”
“Eight months actually,” Kessler added. “Possibly even a year if I do applied curriculum.”
I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about, much less how he’d managed to penetrate my inner sanctum and violate it in a mere matter of around ten minutes since his initial call to me.
Elaine continued. “I think just for the first week or two that you should basically follow Ashton around and see what he does.”
“I bet he does a lot,” Kessler said with a slight smirk. “It must take a lot of writing to fill up a newspaper every week.”
He was obviously mocking me. However, he was doing it in such a subtle way that Elaine had no clue as to what was really going on. Come to think of it, I didn’t either at that point. But the picture was becoming clearer.
“You’d be surprised,” Elaine told him. “In fact, I might even be able to get an extra computer moved into your office so Ryan could work with you. The office is big enough. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I think, today, that you guys should take an early lunch and then take some time visiting some of our branches of local government, so he can start meeting people.”
“I think that’s a great idea,” I said, suddenly thinking it was a good idea to get him out of the building before he started acting more creepy than he already was.
Once we got outside the building I looked at him and shook my head.
“Surprised to see me weren’t you,’ he said with a laugh. “You should have seen the look in your eyes. It was classic.”
“Kessler, you’ve infiltrated my place of employment,” I began.
“It was an easy op, as far as ops are concerned,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “But most civilian operations are. It’s the black ops that can really fuck you,” he added, snickering as he did.
He knows this type of talk makes me uneasy, and as a result, he uses every opportunity he can to try to spook me.
Kessler is one of those rare individuals who always manages to elicit a strong emotional response in people - for good or ill. Just as easy as he can scare the shit out of you by grabbing the steering wheel of the car while you’re driving, or ramble about assassination attempts in South America, I’ve seen him use it to charm the pants off both women and men.
He is a master of his art. He can usually does it by with mannerisms alone, sometimes as subtle as a slight raise of an eyebrow. I’ve seen him make grown men shifty and nervous merely by standing up straight. Kessler has the uncanny ability to blend right into crowd and totally vanish, and then, as if he has flipped a switch, come to life as the most prominent and vibrant personality in the room.
I know he had used his reasonably good looks and uncanny charm to weave some sort of plausible explanation for Elaine.
“God only knows what sort of lies you had to tell Elaine to get your foot in the door,” I said to him, almost in the same tone of voice I use to scold my five-year-old son. “I know when you do shit like this, you’re thorough, so God also only knows what you told the people from intern placement services.”
Then something ugly and dim dawned on me.
“What the fuck have you done to the real intern?” I asked him.
By this point was laughing hysterically.
“Oh, she’s okay,” he said. “I have her tied up back at my hotel room. I shot her up full of coke and smack last night and fucked her in every orifice until she called me daddy.”
I couldn’t even get words out, but my face was inflated and swollen with over-burdened red corpuscles full of stress, and I flailed my arms wildly. I tried to scream out but the sounds got caught in my throat in a strange gurgle.
“Relax,” he said. “There is no intern, but it was easy enough to get myself enrolled in the program, I wonder if we could order another one; maybe a cute little red-haired girl with big tits and an ass that can take a licking but keep on ticking. We’d fit in better on the sandbar if we had hot little intern at our sides.”
“I have a wife Kessler. And you have a fiancé,” I told him.
“Pilar left me,” Kessler said with a sigh.
“You told Elaine you had a fiancée just now,” I said.
“Of course I did,” he replied. “A man never, ever admits to another woman that he’s recently been dumped; unless he’s specifically aiming for sympathy sex.”
Kessler led me to his car, a dark green Mustang Cobra. It was sleek and menacing looking. In short, it matched Kessler’s personality to a tee.
“As much as I’d like to, I don’t have time to go gallivanting all over town with you this morning Kessler,” I told him.
“Relax man,” he said, turning the dial of the radio and sliding a tape into the cassette deck.
It was a gorgeous day out and even though I did need to get work done, a quick ride down to Madisonville would help me clear my head. Weird music was coming from the tape Kessler slid into the deck.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m your intern now. We can knock that shit out easy. I used to be a journalist you know.”
Meanwhile the music was still playing, “well we’re big rock singers, we got golden finger and we’re loved everywhere we go, we sing about beauty and we sing about truth at $10,000 a show, we take all kind of pills that give us all kinds of thrills, but the thrill we’ve never known, is the thrill that will getcha when you get your picture on the cover of the rolling stone.”
“When were you ever a journalist?” I asked him “You never told me about that.”
“You never asked,” he said. “I was the editor of our base newspaper when I was in the service. Now quiet. I told you we had work to do.”
The main task at hand, he said, would be for us to set up a base of operations somewhere. I reminded him again about my family and he just shrugged and muttered something about conjugal visits. He also told me he’d spoken to his publisher friend and that she seemed interested in the book, but that we had to move on it now, before someone else jumped on the story.
“With all this Survivor stuff and other reality tv crap still going strong, she thinks this could be big,” he said, jabbering as he reached into the back seat, opened a small ice chest and removed a beer.
I cringed a little because as he did all this, he managed to pass a small BMW while headed up Louisiana 21, toward Interstate 12. Kessler was in a frenzy, of sorts, which was odd, because he usually is also a master of composure. His chatter was all over the map, but eventually we came full circle, back to the idea of setting up a base of operations.
“What I need is a boat,” he said. “Then we could just set up shop smack dab in the middle of the marina and shuttle out to the sandbar whenever we needed to get out there.”
“Well don’t look at me,” I said. “They don’t pay that sort of salary for weekly newspaper editors.”
“Ahha,” he exclaimed. “This is exactly why you need to write this book. Consider it an investment in your family’s future.”
“There won’t be a family left to invest in if I move to the sand bar and go on an all-out crusade to write a book,” I told him.
“Oh I don’t know about that,” he countered. “Andrea is very supportive of you and your efforts.”
This was true. But she also gets edgy when I’m putting in 50 hour weeks for a job that barely pays the rent. There was a wide array of reasons why she wouldn’t be down with the idea of me moving to the sand bar.
It just wasn’t an option for me. I didn’t really see why it was necessary to move to the sand bar. Regardless of what Kessler thought he knew, I seriously doubted that anyone actually really lived out there.
“Hell,” I reasoned, high tides usually covered the thing for almost half the year, especially during hurricane season, which was once again breathing down our necks.
It was around this point that he winked at me again and said, “Oh by the way, she told me to tell you to have a nice day and for us to be home early tonight because she was marinading the Polynesian drumettes.”
Christ.
Kessler was relentless. I’d never seen this side of himbefore. Usually, in the past, when he came into town, I was lucky to get an afternoon with him, as he was always running around cutting deals and visiting with associates.
Now in a matter of less than 48 hours, he was well on his way to becoming a permanent fixture in my life. He came to visit us last summer for a barbecue at the house, and ended up cutting the visit short when he got a page from an arms dealer m Soho.
Andrea liked Kessler, which was cool. Things always flow a little smoother when your wife actually likes your friends.
But I also know how weird and age inappropriate he can be too. I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of him catching Andrea at home alone. It’s not that I don’t trust her, or him for that matter, but he was definitely acting fucking weird and I knew Pilar’s departure from his life had something to do with it.
I’d only met her once before, a year or so ago, right after Kessler had informed me he had retired from all life-threatening activities.
To this day, I still don’t really know what is Kessler does, or did, for a living. Arms dealing was a pretty legitimate business endeavor of his, along with real estate, but I get the feeling both of those ventures are hobbies more than anything. He jokes too much, and knows too much to have not been involved with some sort of intelligence work but on the times I have just asked him point blank what it is he did, he’s told me he’d have to kill me if he told me.
He seemed distracted and I asked him again if he d stopped by the house.
“No,” he said, downing his beer. “I called this morning from my hotel room. She sounded surprised to hear from me. You didn’t tell her I was coming to town,” he asked, almost sounding hurt.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t think about it. So you said you have a hotel room.
“Yeah, for now I do,” he said. “I’ve got to buy a boat though.”
“How are you going to buy a boat on intern wages?” I asked him, with a laugh.
“I actually sold off two ten-acre lots this morning, probably while you were still putting your underwear on,” he said. “So now, we need to find a boat. Where is the closest convenience store? I need to find one of those News on Wheels magazines. Don’t they have boats in them too?”
“I’m sure they do,” I said. I then ventured, “So you’re like planning to be spending a lot of time here or is this just a phase. Because I’ve never known you to stay in any one
“You know, there comes a point in time in every man’s life where he knows the beginning of the end is near,” Kessler said. “You sit back, take stock of your life and realize yeah, sure there were adventures, but what did it all mean? Garden variety existential angst I suppose. But you mix it up with a couple broken marriages, no children, no time for them, and a biological clock that seems to be bordering on the edge of extinction…it’s enough to make a man stop and take a long pause.”
He looked at me and added, “I’m depressed chief. I never had much of a world in the first place. But the world I did have lost it’s shiny core when Pilar left me. I’ve burned all my bridges. I’ve called in all my favors bud. You’re all that I have left.”
“Christ,” I muttered. “That is depressing.”
“Fucking tell me about it,” he said. “I figure this book project will be good for me, maybe even therapeutic.
Although I was semi-touched by his alarming ability to cut through the macho-man bullshit that is so much a part of the Kessler mystique, and open up to me like he had, I was also a little annoyed that I was like the fall-back plan.
My own life was far from in order. I didn’t have the resources, compassion or the patience to deal with Kessler’s problems too.
“I know this puts you in an awkward position,” he said. “But how the hell do you think I feel? I’ve been a lot of things over the past 45 years, but one of them has never been homeless. I’ve always had a place to lay my head.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What happened to your condo in Key West?”
“It was Key Biscayne,” he said, and then added, “I signed it all over to Pilar. It’s all hers now - along with my heart.”
“No need to be mellow dramatic about it,” I said.
“You insensitive jerk-off,” he replied. “Here I am, pouring my heart out to you and this is what I get?”
“What do you mean you signed it over to her?” I asked, still unable to get past this minute detail.
“Just what I said,” he muttered, tossing the empty beer bottle into the back seat, reaching behind him, grasping for another.
“Never mind that,” I told him, slapping his hand. “You fucking keep your eyes on the road.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “What’s the matter? Did my little maneuver around the beemer scare you?”
He conceded though and I reached behind the seat and removed two beers, Heinekens, from the cooler on the back floor.
“Damn Kessler, it’s not even ten yet,” I told him. “You could have at least packed light beers. Heinekens are a little extreme for this time of the morning.”
“Yes mom, I’ll remember that next time,” he muttered.
“So let me get this straight,” I said. “Pilar dumped you and you just gave her the condo? The way I see it, you’re the victim. You should have at least gotten the condo.”
“Believe me,” he said warily. “I thought about that too. I don’t know though. Signing it over seemed like the right thing to do.”
“Hello,” I said. “Now you’re homeless.”
“Kind of sucks doesn’t it?” he admitted.
“I’d say. What the hell happened? You guys were like together for what, three, four years?”
“We actually met twelve years ago,” he said. “We dated on and off for around three years. Somewhere around that time, I went overseas and then Guetemala and Haiti. I came back stateside in 2000 after that clown Bush took office. I looked her up and the next thing you know, we’d fallen in love all over again.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“It’s an ugly tale,” he said. “Lets put it this way. I think she had a few wild oats still left to sow.”
“Aww man, I’m sorry,” I said. “She had an affair?”
“Several actually,” Kessler admitted. “We took a trip to Aruba and things got out of control.”
“You mean she cheated on you while you were on a vacation?’ I asked incredulously. “More than once?”
“We were fighting on the way over,” he said. “From the minute we touched down it was like she had some kind of point to prove. It started with the pool boy; then the spa boy; then the parking attendant. It was awful.”
“You caught her in the act?” I asked.
“Oh God no,” he said. “It would have ended up in a blood frenzy and heads would have been rolling all over that godforsaken, piece of shit little island. As it is, I set fire to a canoe stand.”
“She fucked the guy at the canoe stand?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “She was fucking all the hired help. It was shameless. I was like a walking joke. All the help would snicker when they saw me walking by. The canoe boy was just the most arrogant one of the bunch. I didn’t have to go to Aruba to get treated like a jerk. Hell, I could have done that down in the keys.”
“What the hell was she so pissed off about?” I asked.
“The standard stuff,” he said. “She called me insensitive, self-centered, even hateful.”
“But those are your good qualities,” I said, trying to lighten the brevity of the conversation some.
“Those were the nicest things she said,” Kessler admitted. “She went on to blame me for everything wrong and horrible that had ever happened in her life, not to mention a few things on the global scale, like terrorism, war and a few other social ills.”
“That seems just a little drastic,” I said.
“Well to people like me and you, yes, it does,” Kessler began to explain. “The fact of the matter is, is that most people don’t understand the business I’m in. Not even you, fully at least. But you have the intelligence not to want to know and not to ask questions that might bring answers that would keep you awake at night with nightmares. I mean think about it, it’s not like I could ever tell Pilar I was just in Peru, training an army to carry out an assassination attempt. From the get-go with Pilar, there was always….dishonesty, on my part; because I couldn’t tell her the truth. It was more like dishonesty by default.”
“Sounds to me like you’re treading a little moral tightrope there,” I said.
“I never lied to her outright about what I did,” he said. “I didn’t want to have to lie to her. So I never did. And when she pressed to know what I did, I would tell her that I couldn’t tell her, for security reasons and that would just scare the mortal shit out her. And then there were all the different bugs I’d pick up from different places and a large machete scar across my chest. She knew she was dealing with a heavy and it upset her that I would never tell her what I did.”
He paused.
“Relationships are a liability for a man like me,” he said. “I learned that back in Cambodia after Sonlei got killed. I swore to myself after that it could never happen again. Pilar just flew in right under the radar and for a while, at least it really worked out well.” “What happened?” I asked.
“She lost a brother during the September 11th attacks,” Kessler replied. “He was working in the Pentagon. After that it all went downhill. I was kind of re-activated, as a consultant of course. She didn’t understand it”
“Fuck,” I said. “Who here does?”
“You for one, I think,” he said. “You’ve been trying for a long time to support a family on journalist wages. People can only take so much. When you fully realize you have absolutely nothing to lose, and all the glory is in the afterlife like these middle easterners do, you don’t think twice about strapping a bomb to your chest and taking out a church.”
“I can see that to a degree,” I admitted. “We’ve been through some hard times. But I have never thought once about taking part in a suicide bombing.”
“That’s the difference between them and us,” Kessler said. “They take this afterlife business and Allah seriously. We pretend to take the afterlife seriously, but our culture is mainly hedonistic. We’re all about the here and now and what we can do in this life. We go to church on Sundays, hell we might even really be deeply spiritual, but when you get right down to it, our focus is on this life.”
“It’s called responsibility,” I said.
“Maybe so, maybe not,” Kessler laughed lightly. “We’re all savages at heart chief. Don’t ever forget that for a minute. We should all be dancing naked in the moonlight. That’s why this sand bar interests me so much.”
