Page 33 of Exit Party

“Why did you come here,” I asked, “if you thought it might be a setup? Who takes that kind of risk for a stranger?”

“I do,” he said. “Depending on the stranger. I’m Bill Soriano, we met last night.”

“Ari Waker.” Giving him my actual name was a reckless move, but I had a sense that the name he was giving me was real. I was surprised to realize I was crying. I hadn’t cried in so long. I was thinking of the nights with the militias in the motel rooms, Felix’s grace as he moved through the cigarette smoke. Felix’s impeccable dives, his strength as a swimmer.

“You saw it happen?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “but he’s floating down there.”

He walked to the edge, looked down, and winced. “Not a good swimmer?”

“He was an excellent swimmer. I don’t know what happened.”

Soriano sighed. “Did he have enemies?”

“Not here. Back in Texas.”

“Then I’d bet a thousand dollars someone just wanted his wallet,” he said. “I’ll help you bring him to shore.”

Felix had been stabbed and his wallet was missing. I want to set this world on fire and burn it to the ground.

I had a cousin named Anton. We were close as children, less so as teenagers, in business together in our twenties, then I tried to have him killed and that was the end of our association. I’m not sure where he is now, if he returned eventually to New York or remained in Europe, what became of him after my attempt on his life. But whether alive or dead, he belongs in the past tense. When I knew him, in the vanishingly distant part of my life before I went to prison, he was a passably intelligent person who talked to himself. This habit was generally more annoying than interesting, but sometimes, and I very much enjoyed this, he would address an invisible jury: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” I once heard him say, toward the end of our time together in New York, “allow me to explain. Some things weren’t possible by normal channels. There were certain shortcuts I had to take.”

It turned out the imaginary jury was contagious. They followed me after that, a little congregation of invisible witnesses, and I addressed them too, on occasion: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, of course I knew that gunrunning was wrong, but I was out of money and everything was collapsing, and there were no jobs to be found in that disastrous time. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I no longer loved Felix, or I loved him but didn’t love him enough, or our love was on its way out and had entered a half-life stage—the particulars were confusing—but I didn’t want him to die.

I wasn’t sure at first where I wanted to go, and I’d been lingering at the hotel for another week before I noticed that Soriano was lingering too. After the initial shock, after the coroner was called twice and failed to arrive, after I helped two housemen bury Felix behind the hotel—a task they performed in an unnervingly bored way that I didn’t want to think about—and after a few days on my terrace staring out at the sea, I began to notice Soriano. He was drinking orange juice in the lobby. He was doing push-ups in the middle distance when I went for a walk. He was birdwatching when I passed him on the path to the village, where later, when I doubled back—I often walked for hours—I would see him leaning on an outdoor bar with a beer.

On the ninth or tenth evening, when I came down to the nightly party on the terrace for the first time since Felix’s death, Soriano was dancing. But not, I noticed, with any dedicated partner. One woman after another, and the women didn’t adhere to any particular type. They were tall, short, older, younger, larger, smaller, of different races, and I recognized that I was looking at a man who also knew about avoiding patterns. After a while he came to sit with me.

“Evening, Ari,” he said. “Beautiful night.”

“Can I ask what you’re doing here?”

“Dancing,” he said.

“I mean at the hotel.”

“Same thing as you, I suppose. Waiting for clarity on the next move.”

I nodded. This sounded right.

“What brought you here?” I asked.

“Business. A client was at the hotel a day or two ago.”

“What kind of business?”

“Sales.”

“Of what?”

“Discreet arrangements,” he said.

I laughed at him and we watched the dancers.

“It’s no good being alone,” he said.

“I wasn’t, Soriano.”