The Man Who Lied About Gloucester
At ten to six on the first Tuesday of November, Frankie Medeiros had the whole counter of the Ballast leaning toward him, and Pete Lacasse was turning the color of a boiled lobster.
“So the truck’s in neutral,” Frankie said, “and the harbormaster’s truck is a very old truck, and it has opinions. And Pete gets out to fix the trailer hitch, and the truck says, I’ve seen enough of this town. And it rolls.”
“It didn’t roll,” Pete said. “It drifted.”
“It drifted down the launch ramp at four miles an hour, which is a roll, Pete, that’s a classic roll. And Pete runs after it. In his good boots. He grabs the door handle like a man in a cowboy film, and the truck keeps going, and Pete keeps going, and at the bottom of the ramp there’s the Atlantic Ocean, which, as everybody here knows, does not stop for anybody.”
The two nurses at the end of the zinc were laughing into their cups. A fisherman in orange bibs had his forehead on the counter. Behind the register, Mags Ferreira was pretending not to listen, which meant she was listening harder than anyone.
“Up to the doors,” Frankie said. “Up to the doors in salt water. And the radio’s still on inside, and you know what’s playing?”
“Don’t,” Pete said.
“Sailing. That old song. Sailing, takes me away.” Frankie spread his hands. “I swear on my mother’s knees.”
The counter broke. Even Pete laughed in the end, a big loud laugh with his head thrown back, the kind of laugh a man uses to show the room he’s a good sport. Frankie noted it the way he noted everything. Pete Lacasse, assistant harbormaster, forty-one, a new boat trailer he couldn’t afford on his pay, laughing a little too loud. It went into the drawer in Frankie’s head where everything went. He never knew which things he’d need.
The Ballast at that hour was the warmest room on the harbor. The bread ovens had been going since four, and the long brick room smelled of crust and burnt sugar and wet wool drying on the backs of stools. The front window was steamed so thick that Water Street outside was only a gray shape with headlights in it. On the shelf above the coffee urns, Mags kept an old marine scanner with a cracked case, turned low, so the boats talked to each other under the noise of the room all morning long. Wives used to come in just to hear it. Some still did.
The kid behind the counter topped up Frankie’s coffee without being asked. Curly hair, gray hoodie under the black apron, a pencil behind one ear.
“That’s your fourth story before six,” the kid said. “I’m counting. You’re on pace for a record.”
“I’m a public service, Harley.”
“You’re a wire service.” The kid took a little orange notebook out of his back pocket and wrote something in it, fast. He wrote everything in that book. Frankie had once seen him write down a free roll, which was the strangest thing Frankie had ever seen anyone do with a free roll.
“What are you writing? Is it about me? Am I in the book?”
“Everybody’s in the book,” the kid said, and put it away, and went down the counter to the nurses with the pot.
Frankie turned on his stool to look for his next audience, and that was when he saw the new man.
He sat at the far end, by the door, with his back to the brick. Tall, even sitting down. A brown canvas jacket too new at the seams. Light brown hair grown long enough to curl at his collar, a week of beard, and a thin white scar that cut through his left eyebrow and made him look as if he were always about to ask a question. He had a coffee in front of him and he wasn’t drinking it. He was watching the room. Not staring. Just letting his eyes rest on one person and then the next, the way a man reads the names on a list.
Frankie knew every face on Old South Pier. He knew whose boat had a cracked block and whose wife had moved to her sister’s in Fall River and who owed what to whom. He did not know this face. That was not a thing that happened to him.
He picked up his cup and walked down the counter.
“You’re on Ray Dunning’s boat,” he said, and sat on the stool beside the stranger. “The Margaret D. You started last week. Skip Tolland tells people you can tie a bowline with your eyes shut.”
The man turned his head. His eyes were gray, or green, or the color of the harbor when it couldn’t decide. “Skip talks a lot.”
“Skip talks a little. I talk a lot. There’s a difference. I’m Frankie.”
“Cole.” A hand came out. Frankie shook it. The palm was hard across the top, newer calluses, and still soft in the middle where calluses hadn’t finished coming. The knuckles had been broken once and healed well. “Cole Rourke.”
“Where are you from, Cole Rourke?”
“Up north. Maine, mostly. Then Gloucester, the last few years.”
He said it easily. The voice was low and a little flat at the ends of words, Maine at the edges, the way Maine people sound when they’ve been away a while. It was a good voice. Frankie liked it more than he wanted to.
“Gloucester,” Frankie said. “No kidding. You must know the Anchor House. On Rogers Street. Teddy Souza’s place.”
“Everybody knows Teddy.”
“Still making that terrible chowder?”
The corner of Cole’s mouth moved. “He’ll die making it.”
Frankie smiled into his coffee. There was no Anchor House on Rogers Street. There was no Teddy Souza. Frankie had made him up four seconds ago out of a cousin’s name and a bar he’d once been thrown out of in New Bedford.
“Huh,” Frankie said, and nothing else.
Down the counter, a tray of croissants slid off the end of the bread rack and hit the floor in a soft gold avalanche. Mags said a word in Portuguese that made the fisherman in orange bibs choke on his coffee. It was a very old word. Frankie’s grandmother had used it exactly twice in her life, both times about the Pope.
Beside him, Cole Rourke’s mouth twitched again. Hard. He looked down at his cup until it passed.
The back of Frankie’s neck went warm.
A man from Maine who’d lived in Gloucester and knew a bar that didn’t exist. And who had just understood, perfectly, a Portuguese curse that half the people born on this harbor couldn’t have translated.
On the scanner above the urns, one boat called another about fog at the harbor mouth. The kid with the orange book laughed at something a nurse said. Cole drank his coffee at last, in one long swallow, as if he’d decided something, and put two dollars on the zinc and stood.
“Nice to meet you, Frankie,” he said.
“Nice to meet you, Cole,” Frankie said, and watched him go out into the gray, and did not tell a single person in that room what he had just learned. He didn’t know why. That was new too.
By two that afternoon the fog had burned off and the harbor lay flat and bright as a tin plate. Frankie was on the deck of the Lucinda with his sleeves pushed up, replacing the rotten rope on a string of traps and listening to his engine not start.
He’d tried it four times. Four times it had coughed, caught, shaken the whole boat like a wet dog, and died. The Lucinda was thirty-one years old. She had been his father’s boat, and before that she had been a loan from a bank in New Bedford that his father had paid off by hand, one season at a time. She was named for Frankie’s mother, who had not stepped on her once in thirty-one years and was not about to start now, from her condo in Florida.
“You need a new engine,” said a voice from the pier.
Frankie looked up. Cole Rourke stood at the top of the ladder with a coil of line over one shoulder and the sun behind him.
“I need a new engine, a new back, and a rich husband,” Frankie said. “In that order. You offering any of those?”
“I can lift things.”
“So can a crane.”
Cole came down the ladder without being asked. He moved well on a boat. He’d learned somewhere. He set the line down and looked at the trap Frankie was working on, at the knots, and then at Frankie.
“You didn’t say anything this morning,” Cole said.
“About what?”
“The Anchor House.”
Frankie put down his knife. The water slapped quietly against the hull. Two slips over, old Benny Costa was hosing down his deck and singing, badly, to nobody.
“I’m going to tell you something for free,” Frankie said. “You’re a terrible liar for a man who does it so smoothly. You never even blinked. That’s the problem. Real people blink. Real people say, the Anchor House? Rogers Street? I don’t think so, Frankie, you’re thinking of the Crow’s Nest. Real people argue.”
“Most people don’t check.”
“I check. Everything. It’s a disease.”
Cole looked at him for a long moment. Then he did something Frankie didn’t expect. He smiled, a real one, small and crooked, and it changed his whole face. It made him look younger and much more tired.
“Then I’d like to ask you a favor,” he said. “Please don’t tell the Ballast I’m a liar.”
“I tell the Ballast everything. My whole life is telling the Ballast everything.”
“Then tell them I’m boring.”
“You’re not boring.” It came out before Frankie could stop it. Heat climbed his throat. “I mean. Nobody with that eyebrow is boring. It’s a very suspicious eyebrow. It’s an eyebrow with a past.”
Cole touched the scar with one knuckle, as if he’d forgotten it was there. “Winch handle.”
“Liar,” Frankie said, softly.
“Yes,” Cole said. “That one was a lie.”
They looked at each other across a trap full of bad rope. The sun was warm on the back of Frankie’s neck and the gulls were loud, and there was a strange tight feeling under his ribs, like the moment before a wave lifts the bow.
“What’s the truth, then?”
“A man who didn’t like a question I asked him.” Cole picked up the coil of line and went back up the ladder. At the top he looked down. “Your fuel filter’s clogged. That’s half of what’s wrong with her. The other half is that she’s old.”
“So am I,” Frankie said.
“No,” said Cole Rourke. “You’re not.”
Frankie had not slept a full night since the January his father went out in a northeast wind and didn’t come back. Four years. He’d tried pills, and beer, and running, and a doctor in Boston who told him grief was a room you had to walk through. Frankie had told the doctor that was a beautiful line and asked if he could use it. Then he’d stopped going.
Most nights he walked. He’d leave the apartment over the net loft at the land end of Old South Pier and go down the planks to the end and back, past the bait shed and the ice house and the dark shapes of the boats breathing on their lines. Some nights he stopped at Augie Rocha’s window, at the far end of the loft building, because Augie didn’t sleep either, and Augie’s scanner was always on, and Augie always had something to say about it.
Augie had run the dispatch desk at Dock Nine for thirty-eight years. He was eighty-one now, small and bent as a fishhook, and he still kept a logbook every night in pencil, though nobody had asked him to in fifteen years. When Frankie was nine, Augie had taught him to read the old harbormaster’s marks, which Augie had copied into the margins of his own logbooks for thirty-eight years. A circle with a line through it meant a man was paid up for the season. A small circle with a hooked tail meant call back on the turn of the tide. Augie had drawn that one on his daughter’s lunch bags, on days he knew he’d be late, so she’d know he was coming.
Tonight Augie’s light was off. Frankie kept walking.
It was ten past three. The fog had come back in over the water, low and thick, and the lamps on the pier wore halos. At the end of the planks Frankie stopped and leaned on the rail and looked south, toward the working docks, toward the long black finger of Dock Nine that nobody used anymore since the ice had taken half its pilings in a bad winter long ago.
There were lights on Dock Nine.
Not the dock lamps. Those had been dead for years. Two flashlights, moving, and the low red glow of a truck’s tail lights backed down to the edge. And beside the dock, rising and falling on the black water, a boat with her deck lights off and her engine running so quietly that Frankie felt it in the rail before he heard it.
He knew that boat. He’d know her in his sleep. The Margaret D., Ray Dunning’s best, white hull and a blue stripe.
Men were carrying something from her deck to the truck. Crates. Heavy ones, by the way they walked, two men to a crate, slow on the wet boards. One of them was big, with a shaved head that caught the flashlight, and Frankie knew that walk too. Skip Tolland, who did whatever Ray Dunning told him to do and liked it.
Frankie’s mouth went dry.
Ray Dunning bought half the catch on this harbor. He owned three boats and the biggest wharf on the south end, and he lent money to men the banks wouldn’t look at, and when they couldn’t pay he was very patient and very soft-spoken until suddenly he wasn’t. Frankie’s father had borrowed from Ray Dunning once. Frankie had spent three years after the funeral paying it back. Every dollar. He still had the receipts in a coffee can.
Nobody unloaded lobster at three in the morning at a dead dock with no lights.
He should go. He knew he should go. He leaned on the rail and watched instead, because he had never in his life been able to look away from a story.
That was when he saw the third man.
He wasn’t carrying anything. He stood a little apart, at the edge of the red light, with his hands in the pockets of a brown canvas jacket. Very still. Watching the crates the way he’d watched the Ballast that morning, one thing and then the next, as if he were reading a list and learning it by heart.
Cole Rourke turned his head.
Across a hundred yards of fog and black water, he looked straight at the end of Old South Pier, where Frankie stood under the only working lamp for half a mile like a fool on a stage.
Frankie stopped breathing.
One of the flashlights swung. It swept across the water toward the pier, slow, and the beam came on through the fog like a hand feeling for a door.
“Who’s out there?” Skip Tolland’s voice, carrying the way voices carry over water at night. “Hey. Who’s that?”
The beam was ten yards from the end of the pier. Five. Frankie couldn’t make his feet move.
“It’s me.” Cole’s voice, loud and bored, Maine at the edges. “Relax, Skip. I’m taking a leak. You want to hold the light for me, or what?”
Somebody laughed. The beam swung back toward the dock.
Frankie stood in the halo of the lamp with his heart slamming against the rail and understood two things at once. The first was that Cole Rourke had just lied for him, smoothly, without a blink, to a man who would not have been patient about it.
The second was that Cole was still looking at him. And very slowly, where only Frankie could see, he lifted one finger to his lips.
Lights on Dock Nine
Nobody had said his first name out loud in nine weeks.
Nico Barros sat on the edge of the narrow bed in the room he rented over the hardware store on Front Street and listened to the radiator tick. It was half past five in the morning. His hands smelled of diesel and cold rope no matter how often he scrubbed them, and the blisters across his palms had finally broken and started to harden. Nine weeks ago he had been a detective in a pressed shirt at a desk in Boston. Now he was Cole Rourke from Maine, by way of Gloucester. Eight of those weeks he had spent on Ray Dunning’s truck yard in New Bedford, loading fish and listening. Last week Dunning had moved him onto the Margaret D., and Cole Rourke’s hands were still catching up with his story.
The laptop on his knees showed the weekly report he had to send by six. He had typed the date. He had typed the crates: eleven of them off the Margaret D. at Dock Nine, ten past three, a white box truck with no plates. Outboard engines, by the shape of them. Stolen from marinas up and down the coast, filed down where the serial numbers used to be, and sold again through Ray Dunning’s wharf as if they’d never belonged to anyone. He had typed the names. Skip Tolland. Two men he knew only as Gus and the Kid.
He had not typed the man at the end of Old South Pier.
His phone buzzed on the blanket. Not Cole’s phone. The other one, the small black one he kept taped under the drawer.
“You’re late,” said Lieutenant Dana Keough.
“It’s five thirty-four. It’s due at six.”
“I’m reading your draft on the shared file, Barros. I can see you typing.” Keough had a voice like a stapler. “Where are we on the talker?”
Nico closed his eyes. “I made contact yesterday.”
“And?”
“And he talks.”
“That’s the point. That’s why I gave him to you.” Paper moved on her end. “Francisco Medeiros. Everybody on that harbor tells him everything, and he tells everybody else. He’s the best source of information on Old South Pier and he doesn’t even know he’s a source. Make friends. Buy him coffee. Let him run his mouth. Write it down.”
On the screen, the cursor blinked at the end of the line about the truck.
Nico thought of Frankie Medeiros on the deck of an old boat in the sun, sleeves pushed up, a knife in one hand and a trap full of rotten rope. You’re a terrible liar for a man who does it so smoothly. He thought of him at three in the morning under the only working lamp on the pier, not running, not hiding, just watching, as if he could not have looked away if the dock had been on fire.
He thought about how close that flashlight had come.
“He’s not a good source,” Nico said. “He makes things up. Half of what he says is a story.”
“Then write down the other half.”
“Lieutenant—”
“Six o’clock,” Keough said, and hung up.
Nico sat with the phone in his hand. Then he finished the report, and read it over twice, and sent it at five fifty-eight. The man at the end of the pier was not in it.
Skip Tolland found him on the wharf at seven, coiling line on the Margaret D.
“Last night,” Skip said. He was a big man, bigger than Nico, with a shaved head and a menthol cigarette that never seemed to get shorter. “When you went for a leak. There was somebody on the end of Old South. I saw a shape.”
“There was fog,” Nico said. “I saw fog.”
“You were looking right at it.”
“I was looking at where I was aiming.” Nico didn’t stop coiling. Slow, even loops, the way the old man in Gloucester had taught him, the real old man, the one in the real bar. “You want me to go back and check if the fog’s still there?”
Skip watched him for a while. The menthol smoke blew sideways in the wind. Then he laughed and slapped Nico on the shoulder, hard enough to rock him.
“You’re all right, Rourke,” he said. “You’re a funny guy.”
He walked off toward the office, where Ray Dunning sat behind a window with a white mustache and a cup of tea, watching the wharf like a man watching fish in a tank. Nico finished the line. His hands were steady. They were always steady. That was the one thing he had never had to fake.
The thing that worried him was the quiet.
He went to the Ballast that morning on his way to the wharf, and again the morning after, because Cole Rourke went to the Ballast and because Keough would ask. Both mornings Frankie Medeiros was on his stool in the middle of the zinc. Both mornings he drank his coffee and ate his eggs on a roll and said almost nothing.
The room didn’t know what to do with it. A fisherman told a joke and looked at Frankie to finish it, and Frankie only smiled. One of the nurses asked if he was sick. Mags Ferreira put her hand on his forehead across the counter, like a mother, and said something in Portuguese about men who don’t talk, and Frankie said, “I’m thinking, Mags. People are allowed to think,” and the kid with the curls said, “Not you. You signed a contract.”
It was meant to be funny. Nobody laughed very hard.
Frankie didn’t look at Nico once. Not once, in two mornings. Nico had spent nine weeks learning to feel when someone was looking at him, and he felt it now, the way you feel a draft from a door you can’t see. Frankie wasn’t looking at him so hard that it was its own kind of looking.
He hadn’t told anyone. The loudest man on the harbor had seen a crime at three in the morning, and seen a man he barely knew standing in the middle of it, and he had kept his mouth shut for two days. For Nico. For a stranger who had lied to his face.
Nico didn’t know what to do with that either.
He found him on the Thursday, in the last of the light.
The Lucinda sat low at her slip with her engine cover off and Frankie half inside it, swearing at something in a steady, friendly voice. A work lamp hung from the cabin roof on a hook. The harbor had gone the color of slate, and out past the breakwater the lighthouse had begun to turn.
“Permission to come aboard,” Nico said.
Frankie pulled his head out of the engine. There was a smear of black grease across his cheekbone and his dark hair was sticking up on one side. He had a broken nose, Nico saw in the lamplight, an old break that leaned a little left, and a small gap between his front teeth, and the kind of brown eyes that had been laughing for so long they had lines at the corners even when he wasn’t.
“You’re asking now?” Frankie said. “Tuesday you just climbed down.”
“Tuesday I didn’t know you.”
“You still don’t know me.”
“No,” Nico said. “I’d like to.”
Frankie looked at him for a long moment. Then he wiped his hands on a rag and jerked his head at the cabin. “There’s coffee in the thermos. It’s terrible. Sit down before you fall in, you’re making me nervous.”
They sat on the engine box with the thermos between them. The coffee was terrible. It was also hot, and Nico’s hands had been cold since September. Frankie poured himself a cup and held it without drinking, and for a while neither of them said anything, which Nico was beginning to understand was the hardest thing in the world for Frankie Medeiros to do.
“I didn’t tell anybody,” Frankie said at last.
“I know. I’ve been watching you not tell anybody for two days. It’s very loud.”
Frankie laughed, a short surprised sound. “That’s a terrible thing to say to a man.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Not for you.” Frankie turned the cup in his hands. “Don’t flatter yourself. I didn’t do it for you.” He was quiet a moment. “My father borrowed eight thousand dollars from Ray Dunning the winter before he died. For a new hauler. Ray’s very nice about money. He sends you a card at Christmas. He asks about your mother. And every month the number gets bigger, and he asks about your mother a little more.” His thumb moved on the rim of the cup. “My father went out in weather he shouldn’t have gone out in. Because of that number. And after the funeral Ray came to the house with flowers and a piece of paper, and I paid that paper for three years.”
“Frankie.”
“So no. I didn’t tell anybody what I saw on Dock Nine.” He looked up. His eyes were very steady. “Because before I open my mouth, I want to know what you are. If you’re one of Ray’s, I’ll know it. And if you’re not.” He stopped.
“If I’m not?”
“Then I want to know what you’re doing standing on his dock at three in the morning learning his crates by heart.”
The lamp swung a little on its hook. Out on the water a bell buoy rang, slow, like something counting.
Nico had a hundred answers ready. He had a whole life ready, Maine and Gloucester and a father who fished out of Stonington and a mother who left. He could have told it all, right there.
He didn’t want to tell it. That was the problem. For the first time in nine weeks he looked at a face and didn’t want to lie to it.
“I can’t,” he said.
“Can’t what?”
“Can’t answer that. Not yet.” He held Frankie’s eyes. “That’s the truest thing I’ve said to anybody since September.”
Frankie opened his mouth. Shut it again. A strange expression crossed his face, half anger, half something softer and more dangerous.
Footsteps came down the pier.
Heavy ones, more than one man, and the swinging white circle of a flashlight on the planks. Voices. Nico knew one of them before he could make out the words. Skip. And Gus with him, by the laugh.
“—said he’s always on his boat this time of night,” Skip was saying. “Ray just wants a word. A friendly word. Medeiros! You down here?”
Frankie went very still. In the lamplight his face had lost its color.
Nico stood up and switched off the work lamp. The deck went dark. The footsteps were thirty yards off and coming, the flashlight bobbing, and the Lucinda’s slip was at the end of a row with nowhere to go but the water or the ladder.
“Ladder,” Nico said. “Now. Quiet.”
They went up it together. At the top, between the bait shed and the ice house, there was a gap where the pier lamps didn’t reach, a narrow dark space smelling of salt and old herring and cold tar. Nico pulled Frankie into it by the sleeve. The flashlight was twenty yards away and swinging toward the boats.
“They’ll check the shed,” Nico said, very low. “They’ll see two shapes. If they see two men hiding, they’ll want to know why. If they see two men doing something else, they’ll laugh and look away. Men like Skip always look away from that.”
Frankie stared at him in the dark. “Doing something else.”
“I need to kiss you.” Nico kept his voice steady. “Only if you want it. Say yes or say no. No is fine. We’ll find another way.”
The flashlight beam slid along the edge of the ice house, ten feet from them.
“Yes,” Frankie said. “God. Yes.”
Nico kissed him.
He’d meant it to be a cover. A show for a flashlight. He’d meant to count to ten and keep one ear on the footsteps. But Frankie’s mouth was warm and tasted of bad coffee, and Frankie made a small rough sound against his lips and grabbed two fistfuls of his jacket and kissed him back as if he’d been waiting to do it since Tuesday, and Nico forgot to count. He forgot the footsteps. He put one hand along Frankie’s jaw, over the grease and the stubble, and Frankie’s back met the shingles of the bait shed and pulled him in, and the whole cold harbor went away.
Light washed over them. Nico turned his shoulder into it, so that all the beam could find was the back of a brown canvas jacket and a hand in dark hair. It held.
“Oh, for— Rourke?” Skip’s voice, disgusted and delighted. “Is that Rourke?”
Nico lifted his head an inch. He didn’t let go. “Do you mind?”
“Get a room,” Skip said, and Gus laughed, and the light swung away down the pier. “Unbelievable. Come on. Medeiros isn’t on his boat. Ray can wait till morning.”
The footsteps went back up toward the road. A truck door slammed. An engine started and faded.
Neither of them moved.
Frankie’s hands were still knotted in his jacket. His breath came fast and warm against Nico’s mouth, and in the dark his eyes were enormous. Nico could feel Frankie’s heart going under his own palm, which had somehow slid down to rest on Frankie’s chest, and he could feel his own going just as hard, and that was not a thing he could fake either.
“They’re gone,” Nico said. His voice came out rough.
“I know.”
“You can let go.”
“I know.” Frankie didn’t. He swallowed. “That wasn’t a cover. Don’t tell me that was a cover.”
“It started as one.”
“And then?”
“And then it wasn’t.”
Frankie let out a long shaky breath and leaned his head back against the shingles. For a moment he only looked at him. Then he said, very quietly, like a thing he’d been holding all week:
“Tell me your name. Your real one.”
Nico opened his mouth.
Up on the road, the truck engine came back. Headlights swung across the end of the pier, white and sudden, and a door opened, and Skip Tolland’s voice called down the dark planks:
“Rourke! Ray says you come too.”
