The Moonlit Earth

by Christopher Rice

  The certainty that he had said too much turned his stomach cold. He should have taken the insult as he had so many others. Most of the time Ali was paternal; he usually sanded the edges of his jibes and was willing to receive a few in return. But today he was in a foul mood. Still, that was no excuse for Majed to speak so directly.

  “It gives you pleasure to imagine this?” Ali asked him.

  “You asked me if I had any other jokes for you. I just remembered that one.”

  “Perhaps you should say what it is you would actually like to say.”

  Another trap, Majed thought. Yes, Ali was acting like a wounded father but Majed knew full well the man was not offended on behalf of the young man who commanded them at sea. His powerful allegiance was to the family who had financed their journey; the same family who assembled a strange team of men to watch over their spoiled son, each of whom they believed could be trusted to keep his secret or easily dismissed should they give voice to it.

  “I believe that life is much easier for all of us when the Swan is around,” Majed said. “My job is to make sure our Prince is safe and happy. Anything that makes him happy makes our jobs easier. This is all I meant to say. If I have implied anything else, I apologize and request forgiveness.”

  “Forgiveness will be granted if you remain within five blocks of the hotel,” Ali answered. “That is actually his request and not mine. I only enjoy torturing you when I can see the look on your face.”

  “You will see my face again soon,” Majed said. Did his voice betray how relieved he was to hear humor in Ali’s tone once again? He hoped not.

  “What room is he in?”

  “Two-oh-one-six. Why do you ask?”

  “I think the Prince wants to send him a gift. Stay with him if he leaves the hotel. The Prince seems nervous tonight. He has spoken with his father. You know how that leaves him.”

  “Afraid of everything,” Majed said.

  “Yes. Afraid. Perhaps he has reason to fear more prying eyes than he usually does, but if so, he has not told me why. Just stay close.”

  “I always do.”

  “Five blocks instead of ten.”

  Ali hung up on him.

  For a while, Majed stood in the center of the plaza, beneath the Tsim Sha Tsui clock tower, watching the traffic on Salisbury Road surge past its wild distorted reflection in the glass façade of the Nordham Hotel. What he needed was a few minutes of stillness amid the rush of tourists and traffic, a few minutes to let the anxiety drain from him.

  As much time as he spent trying to please their boss, Majed could now feel in his bones that it was Ali who held the real power—the power to bring about an abrupt end to this beautiful journey he was on. In his own way, Ali could be as temperamental as the man they served.

  Majed knew he had been hired because of his background in the West, because he was fluent in English, because Ali had assumed these characteristics would make him less likely to judge the Prince for his strange behaviors. But that didn’t stop Ali from peppering Majed with constant, suspicious questions about his time in America. He was most curious about the hand-to-hand combat training Majed had undergone while living in Florida, so curious that his other men mocked him for asking Majed so many questions about the instructor, from what type of cigarettes the man smoked to whether or not he had served in any of the American wars Ali had seen glamorized in bad Hollywood movies. But this line of questioning always ended in the same place. Did they stain you? Or did you manage to remain as morbidly fascinated as I am when I ask you these questions?

  Now Majed was frightened by the prospect that he would never be able to come up with a satisfying answer to this final query. Would Ali banish him on that day? Would he be rendered homeless once again? These kinds of thoughts permitted a man only to maintain vigilant surveillance of the voices in his head. He had a more important job to do.

  Five blocks, not ten, he reminded himself. Then he began a leisurely walk down Salisbury Road, trying to appear as confident as a man who had traveled to Hong Kong on his own resources.

  5

  A few hours after sunset, Majed took up a post inside a Star-bucks he had visited that morning. After twenty minutes of weak, spitting rain, the low, fast-moving clouds that had delivered it began to part, revealing the glittering skyline across the water. As soon as the drizzle stopped, the tourists came out in full force and thronged the two-level walkways along the waterfront. Some of them boarded small touring yachts that were bobbing in the chop along the concrete shore, but more of them filed into the Star Ferry Terminal. The latter group was trying to time their trip across the water to coincide with the spectacle that was about to erupt on the far shore.

  At eight o’clock, slender bars of light pierced the night sky high above the harbor. They emanated from the roofs of the skyscrapers in Central Hong Kong. Majed watched them as they rotated in time to the synthesized music that came from speakers hidden throughout the plaza. Now the shafts of the buildings were joining in the display; the façade of the HSBC Building glowed turquoise and the crossbars of the Bank of China building became a maze through which zygote-shaped pulses of light chased one another.

  The display happened every night, and Majed had seen it several times before. Still, he was so distracted, he almost missed it when the Swan went striding past the windows of Starbucks and entered the crowded square. In his race to get up from his stool, he knocked his espresso over onto the copy of the South China Morning Post he had been leafing through.

  The Swan had crossed Salisbury Road. It looked like he was headed for the ferry station. Majed pulled the sat phone from its holster. No, he had not missed a call, so either the Swan was simply sick of following instructions, or he had decided to play games with him on purpose. Both scenarios left Majed struggling for patience.

  The Swan entered the crowd beneath the overhang of the ferry terminal but bypassed the entrance to the dock. He was just steps away from entering the corona of light around a newsstand when a short, brawny figure knocked him off his feet. Majed broke out into a run that frightened everyone around him out of his way. As Majed closed in on the tangle of limbs, the stocking-cap-clad figure crawled across the Swan’s back, keeping him pinned facedown to the pavement as he made his escape. With several quick pumps of his short, powerful legs, the assailant got to his feet and took off into the crowd. The tourists were too riveted by the light show across the water to notice when they were jostled by the fleeing man, who had used them for cover like a lion escaping through tall grass.

  When he was met by a wall of tourists, Majed stopped. He couldn’t leave the Swan. Those were his orders no matter what happened.

  The Swan was being comforted by several white people. Majed approached them like an innocent bystander, then he seized the Swan’s right shoulder and pulled him away from his would-be nurses.

  Just as Majed had intended, they began moving through the crowd with the easy gait of two people who had not just been subjected to a sudden burst of violence. Then the Swan pulled his cell phone from his pocket.

  “Who are you calling?” Majed asked him.

  “I’m calling my friend Amy so she can call the police. I think she’s still in her room.” Majed yanked the phone from his hand. “They got my wallet, Majed. My room key is in there. My driver’s license. All kinds of—”

  “And when they ask who I am?”

  “If you’re not here when they show up, they won’t.”

  “Who will you tell them you’re visiting later tonight?”

  “My wallet was stolen. Will you relax? This is not an international incident.”

  “That man had you on the ground in ten seconds and was out of sight within a minute. Do you honestly believe he was just a thief?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he whispered. But there didn’t seem to be a great deal of resistance in him. He rotated one shoulder and stretched his jaw, and Majed wondered if he was taking stock of the man’s strength as a way of assessing Majed’s
sudden conclusion.

  Do I tell him of Ali’s warning? He couldn’t do that. Ali would be furious if he shared any kind of information about how their team operated.

  “Why didn’t you call?” Majed asked.

  “I was going to get a magazine, all right? Last time the ride out took, like, two hours. I thought I would get something to read and then go back to my room. That’s it.”

  “I will call them and we will leave early,” Majed said. “This is not right.”

  “Fine, but I’m not going anywhere without my passport and it’s in my room.”

  “Let us go get your passport, then.”

  “And I have to get a new room key because that guy took it. It’ll take some time because I don’t have any ID on me.”

  “Ridiculous. Then we go. There’s no time for this.”

  “Then leave, Majed. If you’re so afraid for your boss, then get out of here. You’re the only real connection to him in Hong Kong anyway. I’m just a flight attendant on a layover who had his wallet stolen.”

  It was an untenable option, returning without the Swan, and the young man knew it, which only made Majed want to slug him. He pointed a trigger finger at him instead. “Do not pretend not to know that there are risks to what you are doing.”

  “I have no secrets so I’m not taking any risks. Your boss is taking a risk by trusting you.”

  “He trusts me to keep you safe.”

  “He trusts you with a lot more than that and you know it.” He brushed past Majed and started for the entrance to the hotel. “I’m getting my passport. I’ll meet you down here or I’ll—” When he saw Majed following him, he fell silent. Then, once they fell into step together, he said, “Just for the record, I think you’re overreacting.”

  “I did not know you were keeping a record.”

  “A record of bruises, apparently.”

  “That is not funny.”

  “I’m the one whose head hit the pavement, pal. I get to make whatever kind of jokes I want.”

  Inside the lobby of the Nordham Hotel, the atrium was as high as the glass wall on the building’s façade. No one was playing the silver piano, which sat in the serpentine curve of the grand staircase that spilled out in front of the reception desk. Clusters of modern-looking furniture upholstered in silver and gray were scattered across the expansive, carpeted floor. It was a respectable hotel, designed to look severe and modern so it would appear more expensive and upscale than it actually was. The candlelit bar off to one side was crowded with casually dressed tourists, and not the suit-clad businessmen Majed had seen in the bar of the Mandarin Oriental on the other side of the harbor, where the Prince occasionally took a suite.

  “Are you coming to the desk with me or are you afraid they’ll ask who you are?”

  “You have fifteen minutes.”

  “What are you going to do then? Break-dance?”

  Majed was silent.

  “Relax. I’m just giving you shit.”

  “Then may I respectfully request something besides shit?”

  Instead of answering this question, the Swan barked with laughter. Majed moved to one of the gray sofas and took a seat where he could see the entire reception area. The flight attendant had almost reached his destination when a tall, slender, red-haired woman grabbed him by his right arm. She seemed excited to see him and didn’t notice when he cast a nervous look in Majed’s direction.

  Was this Amy, the friend he had almost called to tell the police about his stolen wallet? Was she a fellow flight attendant? The handsome man hovering behind her had salt-and-pepper hair, a prominent chin, and an apparent eagerness to leave the hotel; he was bouncing on his heels and buttoning his trench coat over his suit and tie. It looked like the woman was about to introduce the Swan to her companion when the Swan said something brusque that cut her off. But he said it with a big smile, which his redheaded friend returned and then there were more nods all around and a bunch of good-byes Majed couldn’t quite make out. Then the flight attendant started for the front desk and the redhead and her handsome companion started for the entrance.

  Majed watched them closely. Just as he expected, the redhead threw a look back over her shoulder and whispered something to her date about her coworker’s behavior. Majed would have to say something, and he would rather not say it to Ali. Could he find a gentle way to tell the Swan he needed to come up with a good explanation for why he was no longer socializing with his colleagues?

  He checked the desk and saw the Swan in deep discussion with the woman behind the counter. The woman was shaking her head and the Swan was talking with his hands. Not good signs. And fifteen minutes had come and gone. What is break dancing? It was an expression he had not heard during his time in the States.

  After another few minutes of this haggling, a bald man appeared behind the desk. The Swan pointed at him and some sort of negotiation took place. The bald man started nodding at his coworker, who rolled her eyes and began tapping keys on her computer. After another few minutes, she handed the Swan a new key card and gave him a small strained smile.

  Majed got to his feet and started for the elevators, which were halfway between him and the front desk. Once they met up, the Swan said, “I couldn’t tell them my wallet had been stolen because they would probably call the police. So I sounded like someone trying to scam my way into someone else’s room. If the other guy hadn’t checked me in this morning, it probably wouldn’t have worked out.”

  “Where is your passport?”

  “The nightstand. Why?”

  “I’ll get it for you,” Majed said.

  No one else joined them in the elevator. Once the doors closed, Majed extended his hand, but when the Swan dug his right hand into his pants pocket, he removed not the room key but a small purple velvet pouch. Majed closed his hand around it, felt the hard lump inside, and pulled out a small glass figurine of a swan between his thumb and forefinger. He was speechless.

  “Relax. I’m not hitting on you. Like I’d need to. It seems like men are knocking each other down to get to me tonight.”

  “I can’t accept this.”

  “Why? Because you would have to admit that it’s a lame nickname? Swans don’t fly.”

  “They do fly.”

  “Do not.”

  “They migrate during winter. You believe that they walk?”

  “Just take the gift, Majed. And see if you can find it in your heart to call me Cameron.”

  “Give me your room key, please.”

  He dug into his other pocket and removed the key card. “Have I said I think you’re overreacting?”

  Majed took the key card, but when he tried to hand the purple velvet pouch back to the flight attendant, the man refused to take it. “My sister taught me that it’s rude not to accept a gift.”

  “Perhaps you should buy your sister some toilet paper for her birthday and see what she teaches you then.”

  The Swan sputtered with laughter but made no move to take the gift back. Majed tucked the pouch with the small glass figurine into his pants pocket.

  “Do you have siblings?” Cameron asked him.

  “Several.”

  “I only have one.”

  “And she teaches you things.”

  “She taught me everything,” he said. Majed gave him a sideways look to see if there was any trace of sarcasm in the man’s expression. There was none. He had the same faraway look he had worn that morning on the Airport Express after he had hung up his mobile phone.

  “You love your sister very much,” Majed said. He found so much about the Swan—Cameron, he corrected himself—to be unserious and unfocused that he felt a compelling urge to draw out this quiet, reverent part of him.

  Cameron looked him right in the eye. “Some people you just can’t imagine the world without, you know?”

  “Yes. But they are not always family.”

  “So that makes me lucky, right?”

  “That is not for me to say,” Majed answered.
>
  The elevator doors opened onto the twentieth floor, and they both fell silent. The L-shaped corridor had gray carpeting. The doors to each room were solid black with silver doorknobs and key-card readers. It sounded like the hotel was relatively empty at this hour; most of the guests were out to dinner or watching the Symphony of Lights.

  On his first trip to meet the Swan in Hong Kong, Majed went on an unsupervised tour of the hotel and made a mental map of each floor. Room 2016 was several doors past the housekeeping room for the floor, which housed all of the cleaning supplies and an opening to the laundry chute.

  Cameron slowed his steps when they were several yards away from his door. Majed did a quick check in both directions, and then he drew his SIG Sauer and aimed it at the bottom half of the door. He closed the door behind him and leveled the gun on the tiny room.

  The sheer curtains were half open but the view was of Kowloon’s drab high-rises and not the sparkling harbor. There was no space between the bottom of the bed and floor, so Majed spun and kicked open the bathroom door. Empty save for a damp towel curled on the floor around the bottom of the toilet like a snake, and condensation on the mirror, evidence of a recent shower.

  He pulled Cameron’s passport from the nightstand drawer and shoved it in his back pocket. There was a tall mirror covering the wall above the nightstand and when he righted himself, he caught something in it that stopped him. The air-conditioning vent was crooked. When he went to it, he saw it wasn’t just crooked; the bottom right screw was missing and the remaining three were only a quarter of the way in. He tugged out the top screw on the right side and pushed the vent cover up ninety degrees.

  Inside the vent were several plastic bags of white powder, which had been bound together with duct tape. As his pulse turned into a steady throb in his ears that drowned out the other small sounds in the room, he found himself reaching for the holster at his back, as if the gun could protect him from the narcotics that seemed to have been shoved inside the vent just moments earlier.

  Planted. The word ricocheted through his consciousness, the echo of a thousand cop shows he had watched during his time in America. The vent had been left so crooked, anyone would have noticed it. And that meant someone was supposed to notice it. Someone who might already be on the way.