Beauty: A Novel (14 page)

The St. Peter’s
Club
was at the bottom of Main Street, and Carol walked down the street to get to the club by seven, a half hour early. It was not yet dark but the streetlights were on. The buildings were two and three stories, brick and stone. At the top of the street were three or four local banks, all closed, and then shabby antiques and wedding photography and secondhand clothing stores, also closed. Then a couple of small restaurants—Mexican?—that didn’t seem to have many customers yet, though Carol’s sense was that people here would eat early. The lower end of Main Street was the Italian side of town, and there was a sporting goods store with an Italian name she’d seen on the walls in Town Hall and a tiny cappuccino place and an Italian pizza place. The sports shop and the cappuccino place were closed, but the pizza place was open, and nobody was in there either. Carol realized that she had been the only person on the street all the way down.

Then she saw the crowd ahead, at the very bottom of the street. It looked like everyone who otherwise would have been on the street or in the restaurants, or anywhere else in Elizabeth, had gathered.

But even after seeing the sign for the St. Peter’s Club, Carol couldn’t make sense of it. She wondered if there had been a terrible accident. She couldn’t help but wonder if that would affect the meeting and the fund-raising.

Somebody said, “Here she is,” and the crowd turned as one to look at her.

And then there was Easy taking her hand and leading her through to the door of the club. People said, “Hi.” They said, “Thank you” and “I was at Town Hall” and “We put from our savings into the checking” and “We brought the checkbook” and “You better believe it.” And Carol smiled in a way she imagined a CEO ought to smile at a moment like this, but all she could feel was her hand in Easy’s hand and his patient force bringing her through.

They would have let her through anyway, but Easy made it easy, and even so it was a crowd, and even so she held his hand tighter than she needed to. People patted her timidly and solidly on her shoulders. At the very first she avoided eye contact, and then looked into every eye she passed, and that made people happy. It made her happy. She remembered to smile. It wasn’t that giant a crowd and didn’t take all that long to get through, and still it seemed long. A hand patted her ass, more of a grab actually, and she turned around and laughed at a drunk as a couple other guys collared him.

When they got in the door, the crowd was still thick, all the way up the stairs. Easy looked back at her to see how she was doing and to make a pleased face that said, “How-do-you-like-this-it’s-all-your-fault.”

In the club’s big meeting room, the crowd was still thin but fast getting thicker. Anna Rose and Annette and Ben Garcia were behind a card table facing people and handing out pens and taking checks. Parks stood behind them, and when he saw Carol, he spread his arms and looked at her as if he was baffled and there was nothing anyone could do.

Anna Rose was too busy to look up and said loudly to a hand writing a check in front of her, “Every check is a good amount and already we have some very good amounts and a few big ones.”

The woman in front of Anna Rose put down the pen and looked up at Carol and smiled and nodded like Carol should know everything was going to be fine now, and another man took that woman’s place and looked at Carol the same way and said, “You bet,” and Anna Rose said, “Elizabeth Island’s Best.”

Easy leaned his forehead against the side of her temple. The crowd was thicker around them again, and before she could turn to him, he whispered into her ear, “I’ve got men coming on board. Will you have dinner with me when we get back? Isn’t that how I ask for a date?” He was already backing away, and she shrugged like she couldn’t care less, and he laughed and was off, and she put her hand up to hold his breath in her ear.

Toothfish

I
n two weeks, Carol had a company called Elizabeth Island’s Best. They weren’t running yet, but they weren’t far from it. Easy had gone into Boston to off-load his catch at that auction and had gone right back out again, and back to Boston, and had called to say he would be in late last night.

Ben Garcia made space for more alcove offices around the whole perimeter of the plant floor except along the harbor wall where the water line set up. Walking down the hall to talk to someone now would mean walking around or through the plant floor, which Carol thought was great. Let the line workers see management up close day to day. Let management get face-to-face with who turned out the product and how. It was corny, and Baxter wouldn’t do it, and of course her father always said that management was “the upstairs,” but Carol wanted to be around the life of a plant floor.

Office windows looked onto the floor. There was soundproofing, and the alcoves were capped, but nobody got paneling. The build-in went fast, and it turned out that a good deal of what they needed for office equipment was still in the old offices upstairs. Carol wasn’t surprised the fat boys had made side money on the new equipment in their new offices, and if they had gotten the plant, they could have sold the old office equipment along with everything else before flipping the property. As it was, with that old equipment and what Carol wheedled out of Remy, the new offices in the old plant had everything they needed, except, as Annette kept pointing out, the missing electricity.

The upstairs office space itself wasn’t in bad shape, and it looked over the harbor. Carol rented it to two small law firms and a title company. She had their spaces white-boxed, their entrance polished, and a bit of parking resurfaced for them.

The whole thing, offices upstairs and downstairs, cleaning and painting the plant interior, laying in a stock of frozen pollock and cod on top of what she’d gotten at cost from Remy—none of it was unduly expensive. A significant plus was the refurbishment of the lines that Mathews had paid for.

Despite the economies, the company’s cash reserves were all but gone.

You had reserves for when you needed them, but they’d spent theirs too soon. Carol was tempted to use more of her own money and buy the upstairs from her own company as an independent real estate venture. But the company would need the continuing income stream from those offices.

So she sold her Manhattan time-share and pulled out her six months’ emergency money. With that and what she borrowed on her bonds, she committed another seven hundred thousand dollars to the plant. She welcomed the risk. This was her company, period. Yes, there was the matter of where she was going to live. She liked it here. She’d left New York. None of which had to do entirely with Easy Parsons, but she wanted that, too, to be where he was.

So then it was a financial relief for her that Remy split off the remodeled barn she was living in and sold it to a real estate investor in town who was also invested in the company and who could make sense of keeping Carol’s rent low. She liked her little house, and she liked the graveyard behind the house. She’d toured the stones and now spoke nightly to Emily Ingersol, who’d outlived her husband, Jared, by forty years. Emily was a survivor. A lot of wives in the graveyard were survivors. Carol believed she was a survivor, and thinking that, she remembered again the names up the Town Hall stairwell. She reassured herself that times and boats had changed, and that everyone said Easy was a good fisherman. Somehow this was the first time that she’d thought of Easy being in danger. She’d begun to watch the weather. She started to understand how fortunate it would be to have Easy come here with his catches instead of to Boston. She felt his absences just in these two weeks and in all his trips out in the weeks and weeks to come.

Another piece of the puzzle, aside from keeping Easy alive and coming to her dock, was the setup for investors. Carol continued to have a back-and-forth with the redheaded numbers kid from Baxter Blume as he worked out the details of their stock plan, building it back from commitments by herself and Dave Parks and the rest as well as the meeting in the St. Peter’s Club. When she told him she’d dumped some more money in, and how much it was, the kid asked Carol why she was doing it. Most people around Baxter Blume wouldn’t imagine her relatively small investment, even now, could put anybody at the edge, but the redhead seemed to understand.

She wasn’t going to talk to the kid about liking this town, much less about liking a man who fished out of the harbor. She told him she was committed to making her company go.

“Yeah, but why this company? You could have found a growth opportunity and leveraged it. You must be all in here, and what kind of return can you hope for?”

“I’m past fifty. I’m not looking to grow. I haven’t got time for that. I want a company to run, and I want it now.”

“But this company?”

“I like this company. I like this town. And as it happens there’s a man here I like.” She was ready to be sorry to have said all of that, except the kid was deaf to it.

“But you’re risking like a twenty-five-year-old. And even I wouldn’t do it.”

She said, “I’m going to take that as a compliment. If we go belly-up, say nice things about me.”

With the carelessness that smart kids can’t hide, he said, “I’ll always say nice things about the Beast.”

When he wanted to pass judgment, Baxter wore nonprescription half-glasses so he could look over the tops of them at the offender. Carol didn’t have half-glasses, but she was in her own plywood office, inside her own plant, in a town she was making her own, and she was old enough to be this boy’s mother. She stood up, put her hands on her hips, and stared at him.

His chalk face flushed, and he said, “I’m sorry, Carol. Ms. MacLean. I will never call you that again.”

She believed him, and she wondered if the name, if the Beast, really was done for good. She wondered if she would miss it. It had been useful once in a while. She hoped Beauty would become a name Easy might use sometimes, but she didn’t want it to be more than that.

As soon as the company offices were complete, and the final sanitizing of the lines done, there were operational materials to lay in and staff shifts to schedule and low-hanging markets for their product to nail down.

The final task that had to be addressed on the property was the big backup cold-storage unit. It was a last priority, because inside the plant itself was a relatively new, relatively efficient, and relatively small cold storage with which they could run close to just-in-time and still have a measure of safety against a missed delivery on the blocks of frozen fish that fed the lines. This storage also had room to handle any surplus of catch or fillet from the new fresh business.

The old cold-storage building was a wild card they hadn’t decided what to do with. It had been out of service for years, and no one had recently opened the door. Carol thought they might be able to gut it and put in another suite of offices to lease, but it wasn’t clear how that would fly with the zoning board. They’d gotten away with leasing the floor above the plant because those offices were already in place.

Nobody could find the key to the old building, so Carol and Annette had the lock cut. There was a tight little entry office in which they could hear a hum, then a weighted insulation door, the large levered handle of which was cool. They pulled the door open to a wall of cold.

The backup, out-of-service cold storage was in service, and Annette and Carol said at the same time, “Here’s the missing electricity.”

Inside the cold storage was a mass of individually frozen fish, not blocks, carefully packed and layered on pallets. The storage space was filled wall to wall and nearly to the ceiling.

Carol was shy to bother him when he’d just gotten back, but she called Easy and told him about the fish and asked if he’d take a look. She hadn’t seen him for a full two weeks while he was out on the water. Tonight was their official first dinner date, the one Easy had asked her for that evening at the St. Peter’s Club. On the phone today, he said the boat was already clear and tight and the crew gone. He was glad he had a reason to come right over.

Buddy was in port, and he came along with Easy, and when the two of them arrived, Carol shook Buddy’s hand so she’d get to shake Easy’s, which he figured out and grinned about; they were both too shy for hugs.

Before going in the building, Buddy and Easy were casual about whatever the fish would turn out to be.

When they got out of the building, they were not casual.

Buddy said, “Patagonian toothfish.”

Carol needed more than that.

Easy said, “Chilean sea bass.”

Easy and Buddy went back in, and the next time out, they were prepared to guess it could be two million dollars’ worth of Patagonian toothfish.

Carol thought they were putting her on.

“Illegal, toothfish,” Easy said. “Illegal and going on extinct—that’s why it’s valuable.”

The toothfish, Carol learned, was so near extinct that fishing for it was extraordinarily restricted around the world. Which made it profitable for pirate boats to run the restrictions, poach the fish, and sell it under the table wherever and to whomever they could.

It didn’t take long for her to figure out what had happened. Mathews and his fat boys had bought a shitload of toothfish, almost certainly illegal, with money skimmed from the company. There were no records of any purchases in any books Annette had seen. But it turned out the fat boys had made their toothfish legal in separate books kept in the antechamber of the storage building. Carol and Annette ran through the books in a couple minutes. Elizabeth Island’s Best, which had bought all plant assets, owned two million dollars’ worth of laundered toothfish. That two million had not been enough to persuade Mathews to buy the plant under harbor zoning, but it would have paid plenty of greens fees if he had been able to flip the site to a developer. For Carol, two million dollars meant more than greens fees. It didn’t mean she could relax, but it did mean she wasn’t completely naked in the storm. Her company was going to make it, and she had decided on that without a clue about toothfish. With an extra two million dollars, she would not have to be holding her breath for the years it was going to take the company to prove out. She took a breath, and she relaxed, and as soon as she did those things, she toughened back up. In the neighborhood where Carol was raised, you learned that if you got something extra, you were going to need it, and you’d better pay attention.

Easy said, “How do we do the right thing?”

His voice had an edge that surprised Carol. She let that go and focused on managing what she could. She said to Annette, “The electricity is billing through the new plant, isn’t it?”

Annette said, “Yes, Remy might shut it off. I’ll call him.”

“And would you ask Parks to come over?”

Annette took Carol’s cell and turned away, and Carol and Easy and Buddy stood facing the cold storage.

“It doesn’t belong to Mathews anymore,” Easy said. “But I wish we could put him in prison for it.”

It was early in the day and they all stood in shadow, but the sun was enough above the main plant to light the corrugations at the top of the storage unit. The fat boys’ industrial padlock hung on its open hasp beside the outer door. Carol could smell harbor, and the sunlight began to glare as it levered down the wall. She wouldn’t have minded helping Mathews to jail, but toothfish wasn’t the ticket; that would mean the fish was announced as officially illegal, and lost to Elizabeth Island’s Best. No, Carol thought, the company needed the value of that fish. She could have laughed about two million dollars in free money.

Buddy said, for Carol’s benefit, “We all caught too many fish, and if we could have, we’d have caught every one. But now most of us are trying to do it right. Because this is how we live, not just how we make a living.”

Carol wasn’t sure what that meant, but Buddy seemed to need to say it. She said, “Okay.”

“Twenty years ago,” Easy said, “people were buying boats for us.”

He said that with his edge again. Carol thought she was falling in love with Easy, and she didn’t understand how he could be so sharp with her. She said, “What’s that have to do with us?”

Buddy said, “It’s the background for that meeting in the gym at the high school. You wouldn’t have known, but everybody there did, whether they admitted it or not. When the government pushed territorial fishing limits out to two hundred miles and gave the best grounds to Canada, then the government started big-time discount loaning on big boats for us, as good as telling us to go catch the last fish. So we did. We tried. And we made money. We did the fishing. We also paid the price. The fish and the money dried up, and most of the captains who didn’t sink their boats for insurance, or bring in drugs, they ate their loans and left the water. Fifteen years ago, I’d let a lumper carry a haddock off over his shoulder when we were done unloading. Today, I watch every ounce comes out of my hold, and so does Easy.”

Easy said, but without the edge now, “The question is, who’s buying? And I don’t mean at the supermarket.”

Carol zeroed in on getting the history they were giving her, and what it meant to them—and to her, which was what seemed to be their point.

Buddy said, “Who’s making the real money off of us? Who goes lobbying the government to loan on the bigger boats so they can make extra money off us? I caught the fish, and I’m paying the price. I ain’t happy about it, but I’m living with it. We’re all of us, the ones left, living with it.”

“And we’re bringing the fish stocks back,” Easy said slowly, calm, no edge, but Carol could sense him not happy. “I didn’t say it at the meeting in the gym, because we’d gotten what we needed and why fool with it, but if we could get the government to put observers on our boats and see what we see, they’d know for sure that we are bringing the stocks back. They send out research vessels to count fish, and the scientists don’t know how to fish and don’t know where to look. They’re counting in the dark, and the guy driving the boat couldn’t make it as a fisherman when fish were jumping into the ice.”