Water Memory

by Daniel Pyne

  It’s the struggle and the hunt and the chase she got addicted to—everything leading up to the end.

  When the possibility of a happy one is still very much in play.

  Gap.

  Here or there?

  The vacuum of space, time out of phase. No idea where she is or why.

  An apple-shaped man in a yellow three-piece suit. Leather eye patch tooled with a starburst.

  Farhid.

  Human trafficking in the sub-Sahara. He’d been chopping up the evidence (children) and scattering it across the city while the Arab Spring bloomed.

  Fled to the open arms of the Muslim Brotherhood and was disappeared. A long run for nothing.

  This fugue spits her out on the waterfront, where the Porto Pequeno Coaster Wheel whirls, gap toothed, on the end of the boardwalk, spitting colors across the bay waters, dozens of its carnival lights broken.

  Clarity.

  No sign of the scarred man, the madras coat, or the pastel Vespa. Out of breath, her pulse in her head, but no ache from it, Sentro slows to a walk.

  Now what?

  A crumbling concrete boat ramp leads to the damp, low-tide beach, scrubbed ruler flat for a small, rowdy crowd gathered around a makeshift ring in which two amateur ultimate fighters are kicking the hell out of each other. Sentro stays clear of the event. She walks the water’s edge and dips a hand in to brush cool salt water on her flushed cheeks and neck. She turns her back to the boardwalk and skirts the shallows. Local fishermen’s jangadas are pulled up in a cluster and tied fast to iron rings in the break wall, dark with the shadow of the working quay and its shabby warehouses and rusted cranes.

  Gap.

  Are they more frequent when she’s fatigued? Or is she breaking down?

  Another skip in time, then surfacing to the cool, hard embrace of sand against her back, the Milky Way canopy mocking her, and water lapping her heels.

  Sparks spit in the darkness and scatter on the sawtooth waves of the bay. An arc welder. Working on the doors of a red container lit by the spotlights of a wooden-sided icehouse. As the revolving klieg light at the end of the boardwalk flares across the water and then the dock, Sentro can see some of the logo on the side of the cargo container. Cartoon cat.

  She knows it from somewhere.

  She sits up and shakes the sand out of her hair, clouds clearing from her fragile sentience. A crude wooden ladder goes straight up the side of the quay from the beach. Some buried memory tells her to test the rungs before putting weight to them, before climbing, one at a time, to the concrete jetty.

  The cartoon cat came from Savannah, she remembers.

  A group of men stand, watching the welder work, a hundred feet from Sentro, bayside. It’s slow going, cutting the doors open, and the men smoke and laugh and shuffle their stiff legs. Their talk rattles, incoherent, indistinct.

  There are other steel shipping containers open and discarded like Christmas packages on the dock, some empty, some with pillaged merchandise spilling out of them like entrails. Sentro uses these for cover, weaves among them, trying to get a closer look.

  In an alley between two of them she finds the yellow Vespa, parked. Sentro slips into the deep shadows and edges along the container’s side until she has a better view of the welder’s efforts. Sand shedding inside her dress prickles her ankles as it falls. Sparks flare; watching, impatient, the man in the madras coat can’t seem to come to rest, his arms restless, his head jerking as if pulled by an invisible string. Talking with great animation to a man who, when he turns and the overhead spotlight sharpens the features of his sunburned face, Sentro recognizes as the counterfeit pirate king who plundered her ship.

  There’s a young, white-blonde woman standing next to him.

  Blinding blue light flares from the welder like a tiny blazar. The woman smiles, beautiful, and Sentro feels a tremble go through her.

  I know you.

  Hair bleached and chop cut, but no question about it; she’s alive.

  I saw you die.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Jeremy Troon and three special agents sit at a small maple table in a conference room of the Baltimore federal building. Jenny declined the invitation to come. “You’re better at this, Jemmy. They’re gonna say something assholey; I’ll lose my shit. It won’t be helpful,” she advised her brother. “Record it all on your phone,” she added, “so they can’t lie to us later,” but they took his phone away during the security check out front.

  Only one of the feds does the talking: polite and not unsympathetic. He introduced himself as Agent Warren, but he reminds Jeremy of his high school swim coach, Mr. Kalman, who had hair everywhere except the top of his head. He would come into the locker room with his hands in his sweatpants, scratching his balls and telling the boys that it would make them faster if they shaved all the hair off their bodies, but he couldn’t require them to do it because the principal, Ms. Belasco—a “friggin’ feminist,” Kalman would never forget to add—forbade it.

  “You called her employer.”

  Jeremy did. After Jenny reminded him that he should have. “They have a receptionless system. You had to give a name; I got her vacation voice mail.”

  “You don’t know anyone she works with?”

  “No.”

  “Odd,” the female fed says.

  “No shit,” Jeremy tells her, “but that’s Mom. I’ve never dialed the main number before, either, because we could call her cell.” He expects a follow-up and is prepared to explain to them that this is what life was always like with his often-absentee mother and her mystifying job, but the feds just trade looks and move on.

  “Solomon Systems,” Warren says.

  “Reinsurance.”

  Warren tilts an eyebrow. “That’s a real thing?”

  “Risk management,” Jeremy says.

  “How long has she been with them?”

  “I don’t know. Ten, fifteen years. Pretty sure she was with the government before that. And in the army. But it’s not like you pay a lot of attention,” he adds, self-conscious. “I was just a kid. My dad raised us; Mom worked.”

  “Sure.”

  In school, teachers always asked him what his dad did, not his mom. “Mom works in an office” seemed to be sufficient for the incurious. And his mother and father were so opaque about what she did, never talking shop around their kids, only the occasional souvenir from a strange place Jeremy had to look up in the world atlas. He and Jenny had lots of friends whose fathers worked in government or the military, traveled, extended absences. Their dad stayed home: the natural athlete, the crazy-good dancer; the one who could fix anything, cook paella, dog-whisper, explain binomials; the one who knew the best movies and the best books, told the best bedtime stories, got the Frisbee off the roof or the mood ring out of the sink trap. Their mom did little magic tricks and worked hard in a job that never seemed all that special but paid the bills. And that meant she was the one who was gone.

  “You’re sure you have the firm’s name right?”

  “Yes. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Okay. We’ll look into it,” Warren says. The two others are pretending to take notes. Idle doodles on long legal pads. “Could it be that your mother—Aubrey?—got off the boat before it was hijacked? In Savannah, maybe? Or Nassau?”

  “She would have called me. She would have called my sister.” This is a lie, of course, but Jeremy needs them to take this situation seriously. “Can’t you track her phone? Now that you have the number?”

  “We can try.” Agent Warren runs his hand over a hairless head. The femme fed stares at Jeremy, lost in thought. Her male counterpart—clean shaven, Republican haircut, and Men’s Wearhouse two-for-one suit—slouches back from his legal pad like a truculent senior in study hall.

  “Maybe she got off the boat with someone else and didn’t want you to know,” the female agent says.

  Jeremy tosses her a sharp look. “No. My mother doesn’t fuck around.”

  That you kno
w of, is what the male agent’s shrug seems to say, but instead he speculates, looking at Warren, “Okay. So what if one of the pirates got ahold of her cell and her passport as a consequence of the shakedown, and now he’s trying to make a little pocket money for himself on the side. The frontline grunts are notoriously underpaid.”

  Warren nods, as if considering it.

  Jeremy imagines this is about where Jenny would explode on them in frustration. He takes a breath, tells them how he was hoping there was an American consulate “down there” and that the FBI could help him negotiate his mother’s release. “We have the funds.”

  This seems to get them itchy. Uncomfortable. “We?”

  “Me and my sister.”

  “Where’s your father in all this?”

  “He passed. A while back.”

  “I’m sorry. Look,” Warren says, a little more gravity in his voice, “believe me, we’ll do everything we can from our end, but you should know that—”

  “Or,” Jeremy interrupts, forceful, to finish his own previous thought, “maybe you could at least talk with the local police. Tell them I’m coming. Grease the wheels for me.” He offers up what he hopes is a brave smile but admits, “I don’t really know what I’m doing here.”

  After the three agents all share more knowing looks, Warren shakes his head. “The thing is, Jeremy, you’ve got a Chinese-owned company sailing under a Bahamian flag, and we don’t have any jurisdiction over how they choose to conduct their business, and—”

  “Business?” Now he’s bummed Jenny isn’t here, with all her unbridled outrage. They could have good-cop-bad-copped them. “This is an American citizen held for ransom.”

  “And the United States government does not and will not negotiate with hijackers. Officially.”

  “Yeah, thanks, somebody already told me that. I call bullshit. Isn’t kidnapping a crime?”

  “Sure. But again, jurisdiction. Territorial waters, we’re not allowed. And not to argue a fine point, but in fact, modern high sea piracy is capitalist enterprise, like it or not. Sometimes best left to play itself out. A variation on, well, the Wall Street hostile takeover. Shippers and their insurers routinely pay millions of dollars in ransom to get their boats and cargo back. Nothing we can do to stop them. There’s kickbacks and commissions, middlemen and brokers, support services, codes of conduct.”

  “The one who called me said they’d kill her.”

  “She’s not worth anything to them dead,” the female agent says.

  Jeremy blinks, his heart in his throat. “What?”

  “Yeah. That sounded wrong. Let me rephrase. What I mean is, it’s just an idle threat.”

  “You’re guessing.”

  “Risk assessment is a big part of our job,” Warren assures him.

  “Are we still talking about my mother’s life?” Agitation is creeping into Jeremy’s voice, pushing it to a higher register. His hands skip restlessly on the tabletop.

  “We are. And I’m confident telling you she’s most likely going to be fine as long as she and the other passengers and the crew cooperate with their captors. Which I’m sure she and they will.”

  “Most likely,” Jeremy echoes, hollow.

  “There’s no upside in harming her,” Warren says, more artfully.

  Jeremy feels his panic peak. His eyes must look crazy to these people. His palms are wet; his chest hurts. He wants to scream. “What would you do?” he asks them.

  Agent Warren takes a moment, probably deciding whether to tell the truth or the lie he thinks Jeremy wants to hear. “I’d let the shipping company do their thing. They’ve been through this before. Work with them; trust them. You’re right that you don’t know what you’re doing or what you’re getting into, so don’t try to be a hero.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  The windows in the bright room are all black with night. No stars, no cityscape. Jeremy wonders if they’re actually windows at all. The agents are quiet, respectful, useless.

  Part of an indifferent world that coils around him.

  “And in the meantime, what am I supposed to do?” He can’t go back to his sister with nothing; it will crush her. It’s already crushing him.

  Warren, as if this is the right question to be asking him, nods. “Wait. Pray. Let us know if they call again.” He raises his chin and seems to read Jeremy, darkly. “But Jeremy. I can’t stress this enough. Do not, under any circumstance, try to handle this on your own.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Lazarus blonde watches the welder work on the cat-cartoon container door, and Sentro watches the blonde.

  The woman’s name may be a blank. But the rest has come rushing back.

  Perfume, unlike anything she had smelled before, expensive and complicated, and she recalls intending to ask about it afterward.

  Afterward.

  The quicksilver of hot water guttering down.

  The shiver from her touch.

  Before the so-called pirates intervened.

  Still tucked away between two already empty and rusting cargo containers farther back on the quay, Sentro watches the blonde watch the welder and cut quick, worried sidelong glances at the boss pirate. The blonde’s body language is confusing. She leans into him now and then. Her hand on his arm, her smile clearly a ruse.

  Are they partners? Are they lovers?

  Sentro is surprised to feel herself blush.

  She wants to walk out and say something. The part of her that is not fine tuned, the raggedy wreck of a woman that she’s always feared emerging, the shitty mother, the jealous wife, the bitter, helpless, motherless, hollowed-out child that she buried but that her fraught condition threatens to exhume, wants to walk out of the shadows and call out to this beautiful, treacherous woman, What the fuck?

  And see where that takes them.

  The machine-milled woman she has become remains in this distant quay’s darkness. Watching. Waiting. For what?

  Cut free, finally, the container door falls away, edge smoking, glowing red hot, clattering to the wharf deck as flashlights strobe the inside.

  It’s empty.

  The pirate goes inside, disappears for a moment, whatever he’s saying lost in a lo-fi booming, then comes out, staring daggers at the blonde, clearly furious.

  Empty.

  “. . . kind of joke?”

  Sentro can barely hear them.

  The blonde is saying, “No.”

  “. . . is the shit?”

  “I don’t know.” British accent.

  “WHERE IS THE SHIT!”

  The blonde flinches, expecting, Sentro guesses, a blow. “I don’t know,” she pleads, and a sudden breeze off the bay carries away the rest of what she tells him.

  The pirate does hit her. She staggers. After he hits her again, the blonde cries out. Sentro feels her fists clench, her nails digging into her palms.

  “What is your game, eh? Is this a game? ’Cause you’ll find that I DON’T PLAY.”

  He pulls the Englishwoman into him and taps a gun against her temple. Sentro gauges the odds of sprinting out and getting there before the man sees her, puts a bullet in the woman, and empties the rest of his clip at Sentro.

  But the blonde has already jerked her head back and is talking, fast, low, defiant, and some of it carries. “Why would I be here if I knew the container was empty? Think . . . my husband . . . double-crossed us both . . .”

  Sentro loses the rest of what she says.

  There’s a fragment of the man’s deeper voice: “Gonna go call him and—”

  The rest gets buried in the clatter and rattle of equipment the welder is packing up, his part done. The pirate lowers his gun, and Sentro remembers that he’s not a pirate. That his twin is dead. Pauly. That she killed him. This twin is Castor.

  The scarred man in the madras coat helps carry welding things to a compact pickup truck that looks scavenged together speculatively from several American brands.

  “I can’t!” The blonde’s voi
ce surges up again. “He thinks I’m dead! Please . . .”

  Dragging her to a dusty Range Rover, Castor murmurs inaudible instructions back to the madras coat and the welder. Sentro watches as doors slam shut. The headlights blaze. The Rover powers away.

  Hidden, Sentro runs swiftly through the containers, tracking the Rover as it goes. She’ll never catch it. She looks back to see the madras coat strolling back to where he parked his Vespa. Passing the place where Sentro was hidden only to discover, where he parked it, that his scooter is gone.

  She can see the man’s frown in the quay lights as he must be puzzling this, wondering: Where could it be?

  Sentro turns away and, from the shaded cover of other containers, watches the taillights of the Rover disappear into the urban jumble of the waterfront city.

  A soft squeak behind her causes her to jump, but it’s only Zoala, his cricket bat strapped to his back like a samurai, pushing the madras man’s Vespa as fast as he can and calling out softly to Sentro in Portuguese.

  He hops on the scooter, wobbles, his bare feet unable to touch the ground at the same time. Kicks the starter, fires it up, and veers crazily toward Sentro, shouting what he was whispering, something she takes to be Hop on.

  So she does, behind him, tucking her dress under and holding on as they accelerate out of the docks in pursuit of the Rover. The scarred man, madras coat flapping behind him like a cape, comes hurrying out of the containers to see only a pair of shadows stealing his Vespa.

  “HEY!”

  They’ve left him behind before he can even start running.

  Zoala, Sentro swiftly comes to understand, has never been on a Vespa before, much less driven one. His familiarity must be from having watched them go by him; he knows to twist the throttle but does it in uncertain pulses, rocketing them herky jerky through narrow cavern streets between checkerboard tenement apartments, veering up on sidewalks and down alleyways, paying no attention to any laws or common courtesy.