Half the Day Is Night

by Maureen F. Mchugh

When he got off, she was so grateful she could have hugged him.

  “What took you?” David said, sharp.

  “We had to wait until after eight to make some transfers,” Tim said. “The money is in a bunch of accounts. But you have three accounts, two with 30,000cr, and the third with 45,000cr. So you’ll have a little money when you’re in the U.S.”

  “What did my grandfather say?” she asked.

  Tim shrugged. “We didn’t ask him. Jude just took the account numbers out of your grandfather’s files. The encryption key authorizations were right there with them.”

  It was too easy, it was all falling in place, it was too sweet. For a moment she thought it was a set-up, and she stared into Tim’s face looking for guile, looking for some sort of proof that the blue and whites had set him up to it. But it was Tim. It was just that the deal was sweet and she knew from banking, when the deal was sweet it just went and all the obstacles just fell away. You worked and worked on the ones that went sour and the sweet ones just fell into your lap.

  It was an omen, it was all going to happen.

  Tim recited the account codes, long meaningless strings of letters and numbers, and she wrote them down. It was one thing if Tim got picked up with them, but if she got picked up it didn’t matter if she had anything incriminating on her or not. She was with David, that was enough.

  “Okay,” she said, “give the first 12,000cr account to Saad, and tell him that’s for the cost of the documents. The second 12,000cr goes to him before we leave, and the rest gets paid to him in Miami.”

  Tim nodded. It wasn’t the agreement, but Saad would have to understand that it was the best she could do under the circumstances.

  “Are you going back tonight?” David asked.

  “Yeah,” Tim said.

  “Okay. We’ll meet you at the diner where we had lunch,” David said. “You know, I think you should leave Caribe. Before we do.”

  Tim nodded. “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “In case something goes wrong, you know. You might be, you know how this country is, what do you say, involved.”

  “You’re right.”

  Tim would be leaving. Scary, even though it didn’t really matter, since she would be leaving, too. All that time she had wanted him to leave.

  “I think I’ll try Belize,” Tim said.

  “Do you need any money?” Mayla asked. “I could give you some, I’d have to send it after I got to Miami—”

  Tim was embarrassed, “No, no, that’s okay, I’ve got some put back. You always paid pretty good, Mayla.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” Because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. She didn’t know if all the debts were paid up, she wasn’t even sure what all the debts were. “Okay.”

  It was an awkward way to say goodbye.

  “We should go with you to the sub,” she said.

  “No,” Tim said, gruff. “The less time you’re with me, the less likely something can go wrong.”

  “Okay,” she said again, feeling stupid. “Well, get in touch with Jude when you have an address, someplace I can get in touch with you, okay? So that once I get to Miami I can make sure you’re all right.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  In front of the restaurant they stood there, all four of them, and no one quite knew what to do. “I’ve got to get back to work,” Saad said. He stuck his hand out to Tim. “Good luck to you.”

  “Thanks,” Tim said.

  Watching Saad walk off gave them something to do for a moment.

  “You know,” Tim said, “it would have been better if I didn’t work for you.”

  Regrets? Maybe now he saw the mistake it had all been?

  “It killed our relationship,” Tim said. “Money does that. If I hadn’t taken the job from you, the relationship might have worked.”

  “It might have,” she said, smiling warmly through the lie.

  “Yeah,” Tim said.

  And then he walked away, too.

  * * *

  “Okay,” Saad said, “I’ve talked to somebody, he says he can do it. I’ve set it up so that he gets half the money when he gives us the documents, and the other half twenty-four hours after I leave the country. He can guarantee them but he can’t withdraw before that.”

  That was what she had needed to do all the time, but cut off from the banking system, she couldn’t do it.

  “When do we get the documents?” David asked.

  “Friday,” Saad said. “Traffic will be busiest Friday, there’ll be a bunch of people going out of the port. I’ve got three tickets reserved. We decompress on the Miami side. It’s more expensive then decompressing here, but I thought you wouldn’t mind.” He grinned.

  Nobody minded. Decompression, more days in a room. But it would be different, she could stand to be bored when she wasn’t so afraid.

  She would call her cousin in Hawaii, maybe go out there for awhile. She had never been to Hawaii, she had heard it was hot and bright. Then she would look for a job, maybe finance with a corporation.

  It was almost too much to think about. Maybe eventually she could come back? The government would change eventually, she would come back to Caribe.

  She couldn’t eat her enchilada this time.

  She couldn’t think what they would do for two days, either.

  “Thursday night you need to get ims taken and have some bio info put on the card, okay? We can do it at the loft.”

  “Is this through your partner?” Mayla said. Alarm bells, if the Argentine, Moustache, was involved, then she had to think.

  “No,” Saad said, “Galvez is in Del Sud for two weeks, making connections. I don’t want him to know I’m even doing this, he’ll kill me if he finds out.”

  Set-up. She looked at David.

  But David was nodding. David was agreeing to everything. He had been since they got in touch with Saad. Before he had always been worried, but now he just nodded, allowing events to take him.

  Or maybe the deal was really this sweet, maybe he felt it, too. She was being paranoid, they either trusted Saad or they didn’t.

  She needed to be clearheaded. She hadn’t suspected Polly Navarro, and she’d thought that Henri’s political could be guaranteed.

  “Thursday night,” Saad said. “At seven.”

  On the street again she said to David, “I wish I could go to sleep and wake up on Thursday.”

  As soon as she said it she wanted to take it back—it sounded as if she wanted to spend the next two days in bed. And she didn’t, not at all.

  “Better than that,” David said, “how about waking up in the U.S.?”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. Relieved. Still not sure what he would expect, but relieved.

  “Do you want to go do something?” he asked. “Go to see a show or something?”

  “Sure,” she said. Meaning, she supposed, instead of going to bed together. So he had felt it, too, that it was a one-time thing. Unless, she thought he felt that he ought to take her on a “date.” Which given the present situation was ludicrous. But he had said that they should stay in the room, so why change his mind?

  But if she said they should stay in the room, would he see that as an invitation?

  “Look,” she said, “why don’t we just go back to the room and watch the vid or something?” She thought of the “or something” and it flustered her. “I mean, watch the vid. I mean, I don’t regret last night, but it was a onetime thing, okay? I mean, it’s not you, it’s just that this is all so awful—”

  “Okay,” he said, “I understand.”

  She had insulted him.

  “Really, it’s not you,” she said. “It’s just wrong, like what Tim said about hiring him. Anything we do now is just craziness, we don’t know what we’re doing.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “It is okay, Mayla. I thought it was for one time, also. I did enjoy it, but it is what happens when people are afraid. Yes?”

  Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

&nbs
p; “We will go back. We will wait for Thursday.”

  * * *

  By Thursday she was glad to be doing something, no matter how afraid of Saad’s partner she was. She could not get the fear that it was a set-up out of her head.

  “Maybe,” David said. “We will just have to see.”

  “How can you be so calm?” she asked.

  He laughed a little. “I am not so calm. But there is nothing I can do. We just have to see.”

  She stood up and looked around the room. Now that the time had come she was afraid to leave it.

  It had all gone so wrong before, with Henri and the political.

  “Do you think it will be okay?” she asked.

  “I hope,” he said.

  “You do the talking,” she said.

  “You do better than me,” he said. “You convinced Saad.”

  She shook her head. “Saad wanted to be convinced. I make too many mistakes, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “No one knows what we’re doing,” David said. “Come on, this is just talk. We have to go.”

  “I talk too much,” she said.

  “Some people talk when they are afraid,” he said. “Some people can’t say anything.”

  They walked down to their chute station. “Their” chute station, she thought. Two days in a room and this was “their” neighborhood. The human capacity to make alien places “home.”

  She wondered if Tim had left Caribe yet.

  Her thoughts flitted and she tried to be calm. Only one more night, she thought. Only one more night in the room lying there wanting it all to be over, wanting to be able to sleep without being afraid.

  It would not go wrong. That was the only sensible way to think.

  The chute ride was longer than she remembered, so long that she wondered if they had missed their stop.

  The chute station was full, but Saad wasn’t on the platform when they got there. That scared her. A set-up, she kept thinking. Saad had betrayed them, to Polly Navarro maybe. Not to his partner the Argentine, the Argentine wouldn’t call the Uncles. Although he was paying the Uncles, so maybe he had.

  So why weren’t the Uncles here?

  The station cleared leaving them alone on their platform.

  “This is crazy,” she whispered to David, to keep her voice from echoing. She hated standing here, it would have been better to have told Saad to meet them on the street. At least on the street she and David would have had some place to go if they saw someone.

  “It’s like the parking, all concrete,” David said. So she knew he was afraid, too.

  Every time the chute came in she tensed, thinking Saad would be on it. The chute would come in, rumbling the concrete under her feet, and people would get off. Rush-hour traffic, for a moment the station would be full of feet and voices. The chute would rumble out and she would scan the crowd frantically, looking for Saad. Beside her, David rose on the balls of his feet, trying to look. No Saad, unless she had missed him. And in a couple of moments, the platform would clear.

  There were four more chutes before she finally saw Saad get off, but when she saw him, she wondered how she thought she could have missed him.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I couldn’t get out of work.”

  He couldn’t get out of work? He didn’t sound like someone who was leaving the country the next day. What were they going to do, fire him?

  She looked at David, wondering if they should run now. But after Saad, what did they have left to try?

  It was not good to be desperate.

  The streets were full of people coming from work. Lots of women with string bags. Never men, why don’t men ever shop, she wondered.

  Saad was nervous, he chattered about work, about someone named Septiem who had wanted him to stay and help with something even though he kept saying he had an appointment. She found it hard to follow so she didn’t try.

  She remembered the way to the loft this time. Saad pulled on the door. She wanted to say, “Wait.” She wanted to talk to David.

  “It’s early,” Saad said. “The night people aren’t here yet.”

  “What about your partner?” she said, hanging at the door. “What if he’s here?”

  “Galvez is in Del Sud,” Saad said. “You think I’m crazy? I wouldn’t bring you here if Galvez was here, he’d kill me.”

  The doorway at the top of the stairwell was dark, as if no one was there, but still she hung back, unwilling to climb the stairs.

  “What?” David asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. So she climbed the stairs, listening, straining to hear the sound of people.

  The loft was dark, and when Saad palmed the lights, the lines of benches were empty.

  “Where are the people with the documents?” she asked.

  “They’re coming at seven,” Saad said.

  Now it was coming. Now the Uncles would come up the stairs, that was why Saad had been late, some sort of last-minute procedural nonsense.

  She thought David would react, the way he had when he saw the crucifix in the political’s bedroom. David would put it all together, get them out of here.

  David sat down at a workbench.

  Saad said, “I’ll make coffee.”

  It sounded exaggeratedly normal. Everything was extraordinarily normal. Saad went into the office and she held her breath, but after a moment he came out with the carafe from the coffee maker and ran water in it.

  The sound of the water was loud.

  They drank coffee and waited for the people with the documents to arrive. The coffee was sweet and bitter. Tim had always said that coffee in Caribe tasted funny. Assuming she did leave tomorrow, the coffee would never taste this way again. How could she already be homesick and she hadn’t even left?

  At seven minutes after according to her chron, someone beat on the heavy door at the street. Saad got up too fast.

  It would be so strange to be sitting here drinking coffee when the Uncles came in. But on the other hand, it would be over.

  She heard Saad say hello, waited for the Uncles to rush up the stairs, but instead she heard the sharp sound of voices. They came up slowly, someone walking heavily.

  But it wasn’t the Uncles, it was a stocky Indian woman and an old hispanic man. The old man was leaning heavily on the bannister, his body bent forward and his arm ahead of him as he pulled himself up the steps. The woman had a camera bag around her neck and a big briefcase in one hand.

  The woman looked hostile, she would not look at any of them. The old man was too busy recovering from the stairs to look up from the floor.

  It was her luck that Saad’s document forgers were bargain basement. She found it hard to believe that these people could hack the security system at the port and create the necessary authorization to get them through. Hackers were usually kids, soft feral boys who looked as if they never got any exercise.

  “Stand against the wall,” the woman said to David. There were no introductions. How nice it would be to be back in the world where people said, “hi, I’m—”

  David didn’t look comfortable standing against the wall. The command had an ominous ring to it. But all she did was take some ims.

  “Now you,” she said to Mayla.

  Mayla brushed her hair with her fingers, trying to get it to lie flat. Who cares, she thought, but she did it anyway.

  “Okay,” the woman said. She heaved the briefcase onto one of the benches and took out what looked like a printer. She found a power source. While she was scuttling around, the old man slowly lowered himself into a chair.

  “Here,” she said suddenly, turning back to the camera which had been steadily spitting out ims. She dug into the briefcase again and pulled out a reader. “Pick out an im.”

  They were all awful, but document ims always looked awful. In the light from the loft she looked flat-faced and kind of Chinese, which was a surprise. She picked one out, handed the reader to David. He put one of his in the reader and—she was pleased to see�
�grimaced.

  “I look ghastly, too,” she said.

  “I hate my ims,” he said.

  The Indian woman looked irritated. “You do not want too good a picture,” she said. “Pictures look a little different from the cardbearer, because time has passed.”

  The Indian woman took the im and slipped it into a fold in a blank ID card. She fed the card into the printer.

  For a moment they all stood looking at the printer. Mayla was holding her breath. Then the card fed out. The Indian woman glanced at it and handed it to Mayla. It was still warm.

  The card looked like a regular card but the name on the card was Constanza Rodriguez. The Indian woman did the same for David and his card said Luis Chen.

  “Now,” said the Indian woman to Mayla, “I cut your hair.”

  “Pardon me?” Mayla said.

  “Women never look the same as their card, always a bit different, because their hair is longer or shorter. At the port, they will be looking for things like that. So I will trim your hair so it will be different.” The woman smiled maliciously, “Don’t worry, I am not expensive.”

  Okay, so she could get another haircut in Miami. “Not too short,” she said, feeling foolish.

  “Okay,” the woman said.

  The old man started to get up.

  “Baba,” the woman said, “stay quiet.” He blinked at her but sat back down.

  “Would he like some coffee?” Saad asked.

  She shook her head. “It isn’t good for his heart.”

  “Coffee?” the old man said, his voice a rasp.

  “No, Baba,” she said loudly. “There’s no coffee.” She took scissors out of her briefcase. “He cannot be left alone anymore,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  He wasn’t Indian, maybe her father-in-law? She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, and Mayla thought Indian women did wear wedding rings but she wasn’t sure.

  The woman cut her hair briskly, with practiced movements. It was strange to have her hair cut without a mirror to look in. She wondered what she was doing. Mayla wanted to say not too much again, but she didn’t dare, so she sat, listening to the snip of scissors.

  “What about David?” she finally asked.

  “Men do not change so much,” the woman said. “Just do not wear the same clothes that you wore in the im.” The scissors snicked. She seemed to be taking off a lot around the ears.