Keeper of the Keys

“I’ll make it up to him.”

“Good. Because he wants you to meet him on his boat this evening. He has a yacht he keeps at Newport Harbor, right off Balboa Island. Near a place called Blackie’s.”

“Oh, no,” Ray said, wondering how he could ever do this.

Martin consulted his watch. “You can just make it by six. He needs to show you he’s the boss, make you meet him on his territory. He’s difficult, Ray.”

“I’ll grab the drawings and get going.”

Denise said, “I have some old Dramamine pills. Let me get them for you.”

“I have a baseball cap in my office,” Martin said.

“I have a Windbreaker,” Denise offered.

He packed up the portfolio with Denise’s drawings. Glancing at the calendar, he saw that it had been six days since that last fight with Leigh, and four days since he had punched Martin.

But all this disarray had been decades in the making, starting with his mother’s journeys. He was quite sure of that, but he couldn’t say why.

14

A ntoniou awaited him at one of the Newport Harbor docks, wearing a captain’s hat that covered his bald pate and probably made his kids giggle. In his sixties, he had blinding white teeth under a gray mustache and a handshake that would make a weaker man cry. Ray made sure not to grimace. The bright summer evening was windless, the sea calm.

The client didn’t seem angry, about to pull the job. He put his arm around Ray, gesturing and talking about the harbor and the fish catch.

They walked a long way up the dock, passing dozens of boats, small, large, metal, multi- and single-hulled. While Antoniou talked about a race around the world won by a giant catamaran in sixty-two days, Ray steamed.

Martin was the schmoozer. Martin went out with clients to odd ethnic food places, sailed on their crummy boats, danced with the wives or cracked jokes with the husbands. Ray shouldn’t have to do this stuff. He was the artist.

Near the end of the dock, they stopped at one of the largest boats Ray had ever seen. White-painted double hulls lifted huge decks and a central saloon. Aisles along each side led to a wide wooden deck, where a green nylon net drape hung over the water.

“That’s the place to be when we get going,” Antoniou said, pointing forward. “It stays cool. Meanwhile, what can I get you to drink?” He led Ray into the cabin, which held leather plush seating in a luxurious booth arrangement, a stainless-steel long bar on one side, and a chef banging away behind it.

Antoniou saw Ray looking and smiled and rubbed the tips of the fingers of his right hand together. Yeah, I have plenty, the fingers boasted.

They set off, motoring slowly out of the harbor toward the open sea. Apparently, such large catamarans could have motors and did not necessarily teeter on one hull. Antoniou assured him that it had a high stability quotient, that he wanted a boat where he could play with the kids and not worry that one of them might take an unexpected plunge. “Someday I’ll go for one that’s suitable for racing. Maybe when the grandkids are teenagers, and all this starts to look stodgy.”

The crew, at least two additional people, took care of the work. One steered, another scurried around doing whatever needed doing, including serving a platter of shrimp in cocktail sauce, crab cakes, and crunchy bits of toast. He left Antoniou and Ray the heavy task of popping a champagne bottle.

“Now then,” he said. “No distraction. We talk. No, don’t pull out your drawings. We don’t need them. Relax. We are on the sea, on a glorious evening.”

“Denise said you had some problems with the drawings.”

“Problems. Yes, problems. Ray, you are a brilliant designer. Everybody says so. But-you bring me this house that looks like some science-fiction movie. Angles and concrete. Walls that appear and disappear. Don’t you know me better than this yet?”

“When you talked about it-my design-with Martin I thought he said-”

“It’s a beautiful design. But not for me. I want white columns, my friend. Through which I glimpse the infinite sea. A portico. A row of olives. A turquoise pool. You put in this long black ski

“ Mediterranean,” Ray said, looking down. Boredom filled him. How many Mediterraneans had he designed in the last five years? They were all Mediterraneans. Every last jack one of them wanted a Mediterranean, and he was sick of designing them.

“You can redo the design? Along those lines?”

“Why not?” Ray said. “White columns, right?”

Antoniou’s face broke into a broad smile. “That’s a boy,” he said. “And one other important thing I didn’t mention to Martin. It just came to me, in fact. It makes me feel excited about building this home, Ray.”

Ray raised his eyebrows, smiled, looked accommodating.

“A man like me has needs beyond ordinary, you understand? I need a place where I can be myself. I never had one as a child. I’d like you to build me a secret room. A basement. An adult playroom. Stone walls, like a dungeon. A good lock on the door.”

“A dungeon?”

“For the ambiance. You know what I mean, Ray. I will tell you how to finish it later. Nothing illegal will happen there, I swear. Just personal play.”

“I know just the lock and key,” Ray said. “A big, ornate, medieval-looking key.”

“Only one key. And Ray-”

“Yes?” Ray, eager, at the ready to serve his master, listened carefully.

“I don’t want Martin to know.”

“Then I can’t put it on the official design, the plans. I can prepare you a private set of plans. I can help you get it built privately, yes.”

Antoniou smiled. “It’s fun, this idea, eh? I was hoping you were not the squeamish type.”

“You need two places to hang people upside down or one?”

“Ha, ha. That’s a boy. That’s a boy!” Then Antoniou leaned in with a serious expression and said, “Can you put a metal-you know, a hook sort of thing-in the mortar between the stones?”

“Sure,” Ray said. Consider it done, Saddam, he said to himself.

“And a safe for valuables?”

“No problem.” Now Ray thought of Esmé’s hidey-holes.

“I’m going to be grateful, Ray. You’ll see.” He sat back and had a drink, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. “You know we meet again tomorrow, with Martin?”

“Okay.”

“Be ready for that.”

Ray removed himself, with the excuse that he needed to take a whiz in the boat’s tiny marbled head. When he came back, Antoniou was stuffing himself on canapés, bouzouki music playing softly in the background. His face in repose was sullen, the lines coming down from his nose to his mouth etched from decades exercising power. How had he ever mistaken this Marquis de Sade for someone who would allow him really to use his talents? Ray looked into the mirror above the sink, holding its sides, feeling trapped.

By now, the boat skimmed along the Palos Verdes Peninsula. The verdant hills displayed hundreds of Mediterraneans Ray automatically hated.

“Sit down by me.”

Ray obeyed. Water foamed alongside, making a rushing sound. Even through his sunglasses, reflections blazed like shots of lightning, so much so that he had to close his eyes.

Antoniou placed his hand on Ray’s thigh. He squinted up at Ray, who chewed on an olive.

Somehow, Ray had been expecting this. He didn’t flinch at the touch. Instead he took Antoniou’s hand in his own and held it. “Antoniou, if it was any guy, it’d be you, I swear. I’d be a lucky man. However.” He gave the hand a kiss, squeezed it again, and put it neatly back to rest on Antoniou’s own leg.

Antoniou, at first startled, began to laugh. “Lotta men like both, you know.”

“It never hurts to ask,” Ray agreed.

“At least I got a kiss out of you.”