Curds and Whey Box Set

by G M Eppers

  Butte hesitated. I pulled myself away from the view and looked at him, trying to exude confidence and trustworthiness. “What he did or didn’t do isn’t the issue,” he said.

  “At the hotel, you said he was innocent. Are you saying falsifying documents shouldn’t be a crime?”

  He licked his lips while he searched for the right words. “I’m saying they had no business boarding that ship at all, let alone arresting a dock worker because of a paper snafu.” I honestly didn’t know how to respond to that. It was as if he had never heard of International Law. “They shouldn’t even be trying,” he added as an afterthought. “They don’t have the resources to deal with it. The Chembassador is working out of the back of a Taco Bell, for Pete’s sake.”

  I stopped breathing. He knew. “Taco Bell?”

  The plane suddenly seemed very small. The air seemed thin. And I felt trapped. If WHEY knew about the trail of burned out Chembassies it could mean they were directly responsible, or at the very least that they were in on the scheme somehow. It could mean that WHEY, and therefore Butte, actually was capable of such atrocities. The situation had been suppressed everywhere else. He couldn’t have gleaned it even from a news report. I glanced out the window just as the plane lifted above the cloud cover with my stomach and heart left somewhere down below. Until now, the idea that this would end badly had been no more than a ‘cover your butt’ supposition. But it had just become very real. This was not the time to confront him, however. This was not the time to expose my mission and to tell him he was under arrest, like an old-fashioned western hero “arresting” a bad guy as the hero is being tied to a chair by the bad guy and about to be left for dead. There may never be a time for that. That’s why I had come unarmed. It was a fact-finding mission, but I was supposed to be the one collecting facts, not him. I wanted more facts about WHEY, not a list of questionable intelligence that they possessed. He could easily have weapons on this plane. Weapons that only he might have access to, and I had nothing aside from my hand-to-hand training. Not much to go on in a confined space with 100-to-1 odds and nowhere to go but 35,000 feet straight down. I waited, barely breathing, for him to respond.

  “I mean,” he stumbled on the explanation. “It’s a very small Chembassy for such a large bust.”

  “Belgium is a very small country.”

  “I guess it is.” The seatbelt sign turned off and Butte unbuckled. “Would you like something to drink?”

  I kept my seatbelt the way it was. It may seem less safe, being tied down, but it FELT more safe being unable to get up and knock Butte’s lights out before he could get his hands on a weapon. I didn’t want him to leave the cabin, either, but there was no way to stop him without arousing suspicion. I shook my head. “I’ll be right back,” he said. As he left the private cabin, there was a burst of unintelligible conversation from the other protesters before the door closed behind him, and I was alone in the room. I was tempted to pull out my phone and report to Miss Chiff, but it was still too early. I didn’t have a smoking gun. Knowledge of the previous bombings, especially unadmitted, was not enough to call out the authorities to meet us at Ostend-Bruges International. It didn’t mean he was or knew the Meatball Bomber. It might only mean he had a friend in the press corps.

  He came back about five minutes later with two cans of Diet Pepsi. He handed me one. It was ice cold. I popped it open and took a sip, then put it in the cup holder on the arm of my chair. Butte put his unopened can in his holder and sat down. “So.”

  “So.” I fingered the cold rim of the soda can, thinking. “Do I need to stay on the plane when we get to Belgium?”

  “You’re a free woman. Stay. Leave. Come with or wander away. It doesn’t matter to me.” His eyes weren’t meeting mine, just like his son. It did matter to him what I did, but in what way I couldn’t be sure. I suddenly really missed T.B. and Backwash and Harelip. I guess I associated a plane ride with feline company now and it seemed like they should be here. Being with WHEY, it kind of felt like the opposite, too, like they should have dogs on the plane instead. The thought made me smile a little as I imagined a cocker spaniel or Irish setter hanging his head out the window. But I wiped the thought and the smile away quickly. Stay. Leave. Come with or wander away.

  I didn’t feel that staying on the plane was safe—I didn’t even want to be on the plane now--but I wasn’t sure I would be any safer at the protest. If I wanted safety, the best thing would be to deplane at Ostend-Bruges International and start wandering around Belgium, forget about CURDS and WHEY, and just start over. Maybe get a job at a textile factory or something. What did it matter that I only knew enough French to find a restroom and enough German to get someone’s attention. What Dutch I knew would probably get me arrested. I’d learned a few choice curse words to needle Badger with when we were in Amsterdam, but that was it. Staying on the plane left me out of the very thing I was sent to investigate and if my mission somehow got exposed, and WHEY did have a connection to terrorist activities, I’d never get off the plane alive. It wasn’t supposed to have gotten this complicated. The only real choice, of course, was to join the protest. But would Butte allow it? Would his slip make him extra cautious? “If it’s okay with you, I guess I’ll come with. It’s open mind time. Maybe all this time I’ve just been stubborn.” I didn’t meet his eyes either. I couldn’t. A Pepsi can had never been so fascinating.

  “I’ve been waiting to hear you say that for years,” said Butte. “Besides, you don’t want to miss Belgium. Finest chocolate in the world. Helena the Ready for Chocolate.” He said the words absent-mindedly, like it was an afterthought or something he’d learned by rote years and years ago.

  When we landed at the airport, Butte and I got into a waiting limousine, and there were two charter buses for the rest. We rode silently, as far apart on the seat as we could get. We led the odd motorcade all the way to the Port of Ostend, where the Baten Ting sat at anchor, moored with thick red ropes. It was a large merchant containership, more than a thousand feet long and almost two hundred feet wide. Empty now, it rode high in the water and I felt like an insect as we approached. The expanse of the North Sea stretched westward beyond the horizon.

  The limo stopped several yards from the harbor, with the buses right behind. The driver opened the limo door and Butte and I got out. Uniformed authorities paced the dock, rifles slung over their shoulders. Gentle waves lapped at the dock supports and the sides of the merchant ship, seagulls swooped overhead calling to each other, and the smell of fish, both living and dead, permeated the air. The port authority guards lined up in front of the Baten Ting’s gangplank making it clear that we would not be allowed to board. Butte waved at them. They didn’t wave back. He walked to where the protesters were gathering just alongside of the buses. Some were high-fiving each other on the success of reaching the harbor. Several were unrolling vinyl signs and clipping the ends to sticks, others were already pumping their own signs up and down, including one that said “Keep Calm and Eat Cheese,” and still others were unzipping their jackets to reveal t-shirts imprinted with similar sentiments. It was too cold to take the jackets off, so I guess that was a reasonable compromise. “Okay, people!” Butte said loudly. “You know the routine. Keep it peaceful, no matter what. Don’t block foot traffic and no one, repeat, no one tries to board that ship. Everyone clear on this?” There were nods and shouts of agreement and solidarity.

  A cold wind was blowing in from the North Sea and I hugged my arms. Some of the protesters had worn long sleeves, or pullover sweaters. I had on a plain short-sleeve navy blue t-shirt. Butte ducked into the center seats of the limo—we’d sat in the back—and produced two yellow WHEY jackets. He handed me one. “Here you go.” I took it and he shrugged into his while I stood looking at the logo. “Sorry. It’s all we’ve got on hand. One size fits all.” He was wrong about that. I put it on to find it was about three sizes too big. The sleeves hung nearly to my knees and the waist wrapped me at mid-thigh. Butte tried unsuccessfully to
hide his grin. “We only have the adult size!” he said with a shrug. I gave him an annoyed look, but jokes about my height had ceased to bother me. Or had, until Nitro had told me about losing a quarter of an inch. But it was warm enough. At least the logo was on the back and I didn’t have to see it.

  “You don’t have a sign?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “So, what do you do to earn a limousine, and a private jet, and that fancy hotel room?”

  He went around to the back of the limo and opened the trunk. “I’m kind of head of HR,” he said, pulling out a palm-sized handheld camcorder. Turning, he leaned against the side of the limo and began filming the group as they marched in a circle on the dock, chanting “Free the Baten Ting,” and “Free trade is the law.” The port authority guards eyed them warily. One made a brief phone call, then spoke to the rest in a guttural, militaristic fashion. They hefted their weapons, armed the mechanisms, and marched with new enthusiasm back and forth across the end of the gangplank.

  “Okay, so you’re a recruiter. Like you tried to do with Billings.”

  “Among other things, yes.” He looked at his watch, then up at the sky. “Here they come.”

  “They” were news helicopters. Four of them began circling above us, their reporters hanging partly out of open doorways with cameras and headset mics. I didn’t recognize any of the call letters on the sides of the copters. “Got it. Recruiter, HR and PR. Anything else?” I asked, taking my eyes off the copters only after I’d finished talking.

  Butte had disappeared when I finished the question. I found him inside the group of protesters yanking on the hoods of two jackets. The camera was on the roof of the limo, still facing the protest. “He stepped on my foot!” yelled a guy with a beard.

  “You’re lucky I didn’t step on your face, you klutz!” replied the other man who had so much bushy hair on the top of his head the hood would not have fit over it. And it made Bushy just, if you’ll pardon the pun, a hair taller than Beard. “Try learning to walk straight.”

  The two were close to coming to blows, but Butte stood between them holding them apart. “Knock it off! Before I throw the two of you off this pier!” yelled Butte in his sternest voice. “You know the rules. Now, you going to protest nice or you want to wait in the bus? Smithson? Addams? Which is it?”

  The two men calmed themselves down and went silently to opposite ends of the dock, each throwing an irritated look at the other. Butte trudged back to the limo and picked up the camera. “You can add glorified babysitter to the list. I think that’s worth more than all my other duties combined.” He was still panting a little from the anger he’d built up separating the combatants.

  “What’s the film for?”

  “Documentation. Sometimes it’s used to settle a dispute between people, sometimes we can sell footage to the news outlets if they weren’t able to get their own, and sometimes a gag reel for the Christmas party.”

  “Do they get paid?” The idea of paid protesters was about what I would expect from WHEY. It had been done before by other groups, though naturally they didn’t advertise. It was a shady practice, though not illegal.

  “They get room and board and a yellow jacket,” he said. “They can leave at any time and WHEY will send them home, too. But most of them are just enjoying the free ride. They usually get bored eventually and call it quits, but WHEY can always find more. A lot of people are on the waiting list.” He panned the camera. “We don’t need thousands of people to get our point across.” Good, I thought, because they weren’t going to get thousands of people. From the way Butte talked, it sounded like WHEY was a popular pastime, but clearly that was only what they liked to tell themselves. These people obviously had trouble finding employment and were simply surviving. As I studied the group, I began to notice that the enthusiasm was wearing off quickly, but there were a few who helped encourage the others when they began to look fondly at the dock’s benches. One woman was already sitting down on top of a dock piling, although she continued to pump her sign up and down. After a while, Bushy talked to her, in a far more civil tone than he had used for Beard, and she took his hand when he offered to help her to her feet.

  The protest continued peacefully for a few hours, then Butte whispered to the limo driver, who left for about 45 minutes and came back with a dozen pizzas. Naturally, people in WHEY didn’t worry about cheese products. They just ate them, leaving the government they were protesting to protect them. I declined, naturally, and out of respect for me (imagine that) so did Butte. Instead, I retrieved my bag from the limo and slung it over my shoulder, and he and I walked the boardwalk and found a place for American style burgers, which weren’t exactly American style but pretty close. They were at least as close to a hamburger as what McDonald’s serves. As we were finishing up, Butte took out his phone and called his driver. “Keep them protesting until about five, then take them all back to the hotel. I’ll be in touch.” He paused, then added, “Don’t wait up,” and slipped the phone back to his shirt pocket.

  “What, you don’t have to babysit, anymore?”

  “Once they’ve been fed, they calm down.” He dropped our trash into a large, boxy container near the bench we had sat on. “Walk with me.”

  I got up and fell into stride next to him. “Why are you letting me do this?” I asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Hang with you. I’m ex-CURDS.” I wasn’t admitting to my mission. Just trying to move it along a little faster. I was learning more about WHEY every minute I spent with Butte.

  Casually, he let his arm twine around mine and took my hand. I didn’t resist. Partly because the coat sleeve would have gotten in the way, but mostly because I didn’t want to. “Is there some reason I shouldn’t trust you?”

  “Being ex-CURDS isn’t enough?” His nearness also made me feel warmer. With the sun sinking, it was welcome against the increasingly cold sea breeze.

  “This isn’t the CIA, Helena. We aren’t doing anything illegal. We have nothing to hide. I, for one, am not keeping any secrets. When you’re ready to go home, you can go home. I won’t stop you, and I’ll help you get wherever you need to be. Until then, I could do a lot worse for company.” He stopped and pointed. “Look, a fudge shop. Let’s get dessert.”

  Helena the Ready for Chocolate couldn’t turn that down. He bought us each half a dozen pieces of rich fudge with sea salt. I could only eat a couple, they were so thick and cloying, and I put the rest in my bag. I’d be sucking luscious chocolate from my teeth for days. Butte and I were comfortable together on the boardwalk. It felt right. It felt normal, even though, as a couple, we’d never done any such thing. We were slipping into the roles of man and wife like well-worn sneakers that were never untied. “This is nice,” he said as we walked. A seagull swooped down and flew next to us for several feet before shooting up into the sky again. “Don’t you think this is nice? Are you having a good time?”

  I found my head leaning against his upper arm. “I guess so.”

  “Okay. Not the response I was expecting.”

  I put my head up. “Well, I forgot about being fired for a while. I’m going to miss traveling through Europe.”

  “Stay with me. That’s all I do.”

  I looked up at him. “Really?”

  “My actual title is European Liaison for WHEY’s Protest and Demonstration Division. It’s a huge job.”

  I had to agree with him there, but hearing his title made me realize something. If I decided yet again that I wanted to avoid Butte, all I’d have to do is stay out of Europe. No problem. There’s hardly any cheese there!

  “Well, since you might not get to be in Europe again, what would you like to see? Where would you like to go?”

  “You mean, anywhere? In all of Europe?”

  “AirWHEY will go anywhere I tell it to,” he said.

  So I told him. I needed to see what he was capable of, and why shouldn’t I get what I wanted out of it? It was nearly the ultimate test o
f how far his access went.

  “No problem.” He looked at his watch and made a call to his driver. The protest still had a couple of hours to go, putting the limo at our disposal. It pulled up to the curb where we were walking. “Get in,” Butte said. “We’re going for a ride.”

  “That’s what the Mafia says right before they whack you,” I said, getting in and sliding over to sit behind the driver’s seat.

  “If I wanted you whacked, you’d already be whacked,” Butte said with a grin. “Plus, I don’t whack people. We’re not CIA and we’re not the Mafia, either. Jeez. When did you get so paranoid?” On the way to the airport, Butte explained that the protest at the dock was scheduled to go on at least a week unless the dock worker and the Baten Ting were released and he wasn’t expecting that to happen anytime soon, putting the AirWHEY at his disposal. He was probably right. Since there really was no legal basis for the protest, the odds of them getting results were very small.

  Before I got back on a plane with him, however, I needed a little reassurance. As the limo pulled onto the tarmac and came to a stop about a hundred yards from the AirWHEY, I said, “Wait.” I made sure the partitions between us and the driver were closed and that the windows were both rolled up. “I have to ask you something, Butte.” The driver had come to stand beside Butte’s door, but was apparently waiting for a signal.

  “Go ahead. You’ve been on edge about something all day. Like you expect me to push you off the plane without a parachute or something. Like you’re afraid of me.” His tone expressed some personal hurt, but not anger. “I’m not used to that vibe from you. From Billings, sure. But not from you.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just all this . . .” I couldn’t come up with the right word for it. “I’m not used to waltzing around the world with a billionaire. I thought CURDS was well-funded, but we’re an outhouse compared to all this. I mean, THEY are an outhouse.” I corrected myself. “It’s about your little slip on the plane before. You knew about the Belgian Chembassy. How?” I didn’t mention how I knew about it, or that there were others. It wasn’t a good idea to give more information than you were getting.