Carcinus' Malediction

by Pablo Poveda

  “What was that noise?” someone said.

  The smell of fish was nauseating. In the room, there were traces of dried blood, broken wooden boxes, fishing nets, and other utensils. I took a harpoon gun and stood on guard.

  The men got on the boat, and she bobbed, the voices got louder.

  “We are all here,” said a raspy voice. It was the man I had spoken to at the bar.

  “Yes,” a second voice replied. It was Rojo. “We’re sticking to the plan, understood, Captain?”

  “All right,” the man said, “your father will be proud of you.”

  “He would’ve done the same,” Rojo responded.

  That was a Kodak moment.

  “Are your men trustworthy?” Rojo asked.

  “They sure are,” he stated. “But they’ve never been in such a situation.”

  “That man,” Rojo responded, “the short one. He is quite meddlesome.”

  “Ambrose?” the captain inquired. “He’s the newest of the crew, a bit secretive, and doesn’t talk much, but he’s a good worker. I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  “There shouldn’t be trouble,” Rojo said, “but I don’t want any surprises.”

  “You won’t have any,” the captain said. “What about your man?”

  “It’s his job, he knows what he’s doing.”

  “I hope the gun doesn’t make him jumpy,” the man said with a cautious voice. “You know what I mean, we are not used to being in skirmishes.”

  “That only happens in movies, Captain.”

  The man laughed.

  The voices got quiet.

  The engines were warming up.

  I felt the boat move.

  * * *

  It is said that after a storm, a calm comes. What none of us knew was that a storm was about to hit with a vengeance. The conversation implied that Rojo had a second man on board — who obviously was not me — and that Ambrose could be the very same man that Heikki Hämäläinen referred to. As usual, in that profession, one had to doubt the information from its source until it was confirmed. Rojo’s police sense may be wrong, and perhaps it was another person who would betray them. The whole responsibility lay on my shoulders. Telling Rojo everything or not. Blanca’s life, our lives were at risk. It was not the first time that I had seen myself in the face of such a stand-off. In American movies, it happened all the time. In the end, Bruce Willis, or an actor of his size, managed to save the rest, kill the villain, and rescue the girl. The big finale used to be a big explosion where they both survived with a soot-stained face. But this was not Hollywood but the Mediterranean.

  The smell of fish waned as I got used to it. The inactivity among those four walls was beginning to be soporific. Something hit the boat, which made me stumble into a metal toolbox. I grabbed a crowbar and proceeded to open three nailed boxes. When I opened the second one, I almost fell backwards. It was a homemade bomb wired to a mobile phone. That bastard was serious.

  Time was running against us, and I could not figure out the right moment to get out of my hideout. I ignored whether the traitor would be the one activating the bomb, or if it would be activated off the ship. We were in deep trouble.

  I set the harpoon gun aside and approached the bomb. At first glance, it did not look as sophisticated as those in movies. The explosive was held in place by brown insulating tape. Stuck in the explosive material, there were several short wires connected to two 4.5-volt batteries, and a Nokia 3210 without a case. One single call that made the phone vibrate would suffice to power the battery and turn us into fried sausages.

  I thought of Blanca — wherever she was — of one last dance, of one last kiss. There was no time for dramas even though the pressure was tough, and I was getting emotional. I had a sudden glimpse of hope when I deduced that someone should come in sooner or later to check on the artifact. I grabbed the harpoon gun and waited ten minutes when the door opened. Someone walked in visibly nervous. Damn it, I forgot to clean up the mess I had made.

  “What the fuck?” said the man. I could not see his face, just his back.

  “One more step,” I threatened him, “and I’ll skewer you in the chest. I’m warning you.”

  He raised his hands and, without turning around, began to laugh.

  “You’re a fool,” he said.

  “What?” I asked intrigued. “Repeat that.”

  “That you’re a fool,” he repeated. “What do you want?”

  “Turn around,” I ordered him.

  He did. I had never seen him in my life. He must have been around forty, short-haired, whitening, unshaved, and dark-eyed; he was thin, without muscle mass, he had a local accent and a scar on the right side of his face, under the eye.

  “If you kill me,” he said, “you’ll find yourself in a lot of trouble. Is it money what you want?”

  “Get away from the bomb,” I said and locked the door. “We’re going to die.”

  “No,” he said. “Not if you let me defuse it. It is a trap.”

  “Your boss is planning to betray you,” I told him.

  “Really? Tell me something I don’t know,” he said and lowered his arms. “I am the only one who can deactivate this.”

  For one moment, I hesitated. The man took a police badge out of his pocked and showed it to me. “We got a tip-off that the exchange was a sham. Relax, I am from the Bomb Brigade.

  As soon as I lowered the harpoon gun, the man charged at me, throwing me to the floor. The harpoon gun got out of my hands. Without giving me time to react, he turned around the floor of the room, grabbed the weapon again, and put it against my chest.

  “If you move or try something, I’ll drive it through your flank,” he said.

  “You’re a dead man.”

  Suddenly, voices were heard from the outside.

  “Move, let’s get out of here,” he ordered.

  I raised my hands and walked to the door. We left the room and went back to the deck.

  There was Rojo with the rest of the crew.

  “You!” said the captain. “What is he doing here?”

  “Goddamn it!” Rojo shouted.

  “I found him in the cargo hold,” he explained. “He tried to attack me.”

  “What the hell?” Rojo said. “Put the weapon down, he’s harmless.”

  The man pushed me toward Rojo. I walked a few meters to him, afraid that the man behind me would shoot me behind my back, calculating every step I took. The wood under my shoes creaked.

  “He’s lying,” I whispered at Rojo as quietly as I could at the time, I held my hands up. “You have to believe me, there is a bomb aboard. They have Blanca, and I tried to warn you. Heikki Hämäläinen wants your head, otherwise he’ll blow the boat.

  “Is that true?” said the captain when he heard my words.

  “Watch it!” Rojo shouted.

  The police shot the harpoon that hit the wall on the corridor.

  A shot was heard.

  “To the floor!” the captain shouted, his order was obeyed at once. In a matter of seconds, I saw that man on the floor, his gaze contemplating the void, and a hole in his chest spurting blood.

  Another shot was heard, coming from the stairs to the hatch. I saw Rojo leaning against one of the doors to the cabin. Another man from the crew was shooting to the inside with a revolver. The fray lasted about a minute, the longest of my life.

  Blanca, again, was burning in my mind.

  Rojo gained ground from the gunman, approaching the stairs that took him outside. I approached the dead policeman and looked for a gun among his belonging, but he was unarmed.

  The shooting on the outside continued. Much like a chess game, slow and analytical, sooner or later, one of the two men would end up cornered.

  “We are reaching the gathering point,” said a sailor. “Mother of God, I wasn’t counting on this.”

  The silence on the outside blended with the night.

  I walked outside.

  Trembling, I found myself in the middle of t
he night darkness; a lantern was hanging from the ship’s mast. The sea was calm but moved the boat nonstop. I could not see anything or anyone until a flashlight blinded me.

  “Don’t shoot! Please!” I screamed, shuddering. I opened my eyes, it was Officer Rojo pointing at me with the flashlight. “Is he dead?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “He must have fallen into the ocean, now take me to the bomb.”

  We ran down the stairs toward the cargo hold, and there it was, with the screen of the phone displaying the current time.

  Rojo walked away from the rest of the crew, analyzing the explosive device closely. The four sailors and I waited eagerly for his verdict.

  “We are screwed,” said Rojo at last. “I don’t know much about these things. Did you find a phone in his clothes?”

  “Yes,” said the captain. “What is going on Ximo?”

  Rojo grabbed the phone, placed it on the floor and crushed it with three stomps against the surface.

  “A lot, captain,” he said, “Unfortunately, this makes us all suspects.”

  “Oh, Gosh, what a shame of people,” he replied. “What do we do now?”

  “First of all, leave your mobile phones on the table,” the police ordered. “It’s for security.”

  The captain looked at his men, who seemed offended for doubting their honor.

  “Do it.”

  In unison, they all put their belongings on the table.

  Except me, for I was not carrying a cell phone on. Rojo had commandeered mine and put it in his pocket.

  “What if we toss the bomb into the sea?” said one of the crew members.

  “Not without defusing it first,” the police answered. “It could blow up if we move it.”

  “This doesn’t look good at all,” I mentioned.

  “Next time, if you are to open your mouth, make sure it is to contribute something,” Rojo reprimanded me. “What else did Heikki Hämäläinen say?”

  “He wants you,” I replied. “Apparently, one of the men who will meet us on the other boat has access to the number that will detonate the bomb.”

  “Who is this one?”

  “We could make the exchange and jump onto their boat,” suggested one of the sailors.

  “We would still blow ourselves,” said Rojo. “We wouldn’t have enough time to escape.”

  “I’m not leaving this ship,” the old man replied.

  “We don’t have enough weapons to think of reaching them at a distance,” another one said.

  “Then, I’ll turn myself in,” Rojo concluded.

  “Cut the bullshit!” the old captain sentenced. “We’ll get killed. Those people want to delete evidence and witnesses. We are trapped.”

  “We have seen worse,” I commented. Everybody looked at me, expecting me to say something meaningful. “Do we have a lifeboat?”

  “Yes,” said the captain. “There is a small inflatable motorboat... why?”

  “I think I’ve figured out the way to corner those bastards.”

  13

  We started the boat engine. The sailors got onto the lifeboat one by one. The last one left on the Agatha was her captain.

  “I’m not leaving my boat,” he said. “This is my home.”

  “Captain, do us all a favor, I’m asking you as a policeman, not as a friend.”

  “Here, young man,” said the old captain, “the one who gives orders is me.”

  The vastness of the ocean that got lost in the darkness on the horizon was both engrossing and terrifying. I felt lost in the middle of nowhere. I found it revealing that for many, life was there in the middle of the ocean.

  “The boat will be safe,” Rojo guaranteed. “Trust us.”

  “Haha! You’re just as stubborn as your father, young man,” he said. He wasn’t easy to convince. “Besides, you wouldn’t know how to navigate her. You need me.”

  Rojo looked me in the eye, and I shrugged my shoulders with uncertainty.

  “All right,” the policeman said, “but from now on, she’ll be under my command. Understood?”

  “He loves to say that,” I told the old man.

  “We’ll see about that,” the captain replied, turning around.

  We bid the crew farewell, who got away on that boat toward the lighthouse on the bay, that was still visible in the distance.

  “Let’s get on with the journey,” the officer said. “Let us know when we’re getting to the point of rendezvous.”

  “So be it,” said the sea wolf.

  “You are coming with us,” Rojo ordered me. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to make a little modification to your plan.”

  “What?”

  “Caballero, you know me already, don’t you?” he said with irony. “By now, you don’t think I am going to risk my life so that you can get the girl back, do you?”

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Follow me,” said the policeman. We went down the hatch to the cargo hold, where the explosive charge was located. “I know this was not part of your plan, but we’ll have to defuse it.”

  I felt pressure in the throat.

  “Don’t count on me,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m going to need at least one of your hands.”

  “What if I refuse?”

  “I’ll have to do it myself,” he said calmly, “which will drastically reduce our chances of survival.”

  I inhaled.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  I kept silence.

  “I hope you know what you are doing.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  We approached the bomb. The boat swung to both sides.

  The tide had risen, the waves broke against the keel.

  “It’s a homemade bomb,” Rojo explained. “That is all I know. And, although it’s not my professional field, I’ve always been curious. There isn’t much to this kind of artifacts.”

  “Well...”

  “The explosive charge has a detonator which is connected to a power supply, and the latter to a timer.”

  “Sure.”

  “If we find the wire that connects the charge to the detonator and defuse it, we’ll have fixed the problem.”

  “Sure.”

  “That, in the understanding that there is only one detonator in the charge, instead of two, or an activator, in case someone defuses the main detonator.”

  “It doesn’t sound that simple anymore.”

  “There is a chance that there is a power supply inside the charge itself, besides the main one, you know... just in case.”

  “I don’t like this, Rojo.”

  “You don’t? So,” Rojo continued. “Here is the mobile phone that works as a timer. Just that instead of a timer, what will detonate the bomb is a phone call.”

  “From any phone number.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “The problem is that we don’t know its number.”

  “Therefore, the only way out is to turn off the timer.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but this is not ‘Die Hard’ nor are there two color wires. Anything can happen, Gabriel.”

  Rojo was worried, he had just called me by my name.

  “What if we throw the box into the sea?”

  “Are you stupid or what?” he asked.

  Rojo kept studying the explosive charge. I left the room and approached the captain.

  “What happened?” I asked the man in the cap. His countenance reflected tension.

  “I have a bad feeling about this all,” he said in his accent. “I only hope to get to the port alive.”

  The ship began to slow down until we almost completely halted.

  “Don’t worry, you will,” I said. “Why are we stopping?”

  “This is the rendezvous point,” he said, “but there doesn’t seem to be anyone here. Grab a rifle from the cabin, we’d better be prepared.”

  From afar, a light navigating the surface of the ocean approached at high speed. />
  I went down the stairs, grabbed the gun the captain had indicated me, and I shouted the officer’s name.

  “Rojo!” I shouted for the third time.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  We both went outside. The captain of the boat turned off the lights. Rojo pulled out a suitcase from the inside of the cabin. We had to do things calmly. The operation had undergone some out-of-plan changes in its execution that had reduced our current reinforcements to an old sailor and a provincial journalist. The traffickers were probably armed and may be escorted by a fleet that, in case something went wrong, would not hesitate to fire. On our side, Rojo had to give the coastal patrols of Santa Pola and Alicante a signal to intervene in the operation.

  “It is time for you to make that call,” I told him.

  Rojo pulled out his phone and dialed the number.

  “This is strange,” he murmured with concern.

  “What now?” I inquired. My hands were trembling so that I could barely hold the rifle.

  “There is no sign,” he said. “Someone has scrambled the repeating towers.”

  “That’s good news, isn’t it?” said the captain in a trembling voice.

  “As far as it goes,” I said.

  “If they have scrambled the signal,” said Rojo, “they can also unscramble it at any time. This doesn’t change anything. They may be making sure we are not setting them up.”

  “This could be a good moment to drop the bomb into the ocean,” I suggested.

  “The fact that the signal is deactivated,” Rojo explained, “doesn’t mean that it has stopped working.”

  “This is a fucking nightmare,” I replied.

  The sound of the engines got louder as they got closer. The calm of the sea was altered by their presence.