by Paul Moomaw
The thought crept into Lydia’s mind the way the fingers of air stole into her sister’s bedroom. The wind came from the north, a chill, damp gale that slipped through cracks in the walls and tugged at her ankles, but could not blow away the sickroom smell.
Pain creased Irene’s forehead, and she moaned in her sleep, her sallow face rocking from side to side on the pillow. Lydia grasped her sister’s wrist to comfort her. It was damp, like the wind.
The doctors in Sitia had shaken their heads and passed Irene on to the university medical school at Iraklion. There they had poked and prodded, drawn huge amounts of blood, and drilled a hole in her thigh bone to take marrow—a procedure that made Lydia sick to think about it, and left Irene in such pain that now, almost two weeks later, she still cried out if the leg was touched.
“They say she is poisoned.”
Lydia started. She had not heard Milos come in.
“They say it is metals,” he went on, padding silently to the bed and staring at his wife. “Arsenic, lead, something called cadmium. From where? I asked them. We have a gift shop, not a chemical plant. They only shrugged, and gave me a look like if I didn’t know, who would?”
“But she will be better now,” Lydia said, not sure she believed it. Irene seemed to have shrunk; certainly she had lost enough weight that the cast hung loose around her broken leg.
“They cleaned her blood,” Nikos said. “They took it all out and ran it through some machine. The doctor kept laughing about it, said it was like changing the oil in your car, and all the time she was lying on his table, staring at me like a trapped animal. I wanted to knock him down to make him shut up.”
“But Irene will get better,” Lydia said again.
Nikos wrung his hands and sighed. “Maybe,” he said. “If she doesn’t get poisoned again. But her kidneys are damaged. They say they may have to cut one out. They will decide that in a month or so. And the bones are bad, and she may never see well. The poisons damaged the nerves in her eyes, they said.”
Irene moaned again. She opened and closed her mouth with a small, smacking sound, and her hand plucked fitfully at her lips, as if she were dreaming of something that tasted bad, and wanted to get rid of it. Then the hand slid to her swollen belly and rested there. As Lydia watched, the hand lifted slightly from the movement of the baby beneath the skin.
“What about the child?” Lydia said.
“I asked them about that, too. They only shrugged again, and that time they didn’t look at me at all.” He leaned over the bed and placed his own hairy hand over his wife’s, then straightened and reached out to Lydia.
“Come and eat,” he said. “Old Veronika down the street has brought some chicken and a loaf of fresh baked bread.”
Lydia took the extended hand, and they left the room, Milos clinging to her like an unhappy child.
Chapter 31
Adam Pray woke up scared, heart racing, staring into blackness. He sat bolt upright, and something smashed him in the forehead, knocking him back down again. He lay there, dazed, his eyes still wide and blind in the dark, and remembered, as his breathing slowed, where he was. He lifted a hand until it pressed against the hard overhang above the bunk on the Broken Wing, then gently massaged the spot where skull and bulkhead had met. It had begun to swell, and he hoped Julian was well supplied with aspirin.
There had been a dream, of something trying to hurt him, something unknown but awful. He lay very still, trying to remember, and in the stillness he heard a small scraping and scratching that came from somewhere inside the cabin. He tensed involuntarily, then willed his body to relax. He remembered—a vague image from the night before, when he had come into the cabin after an evening of Scotch and uneasy talk with his brother—that he had seen a lamp, a small brass affair fastened to the bulkhead above the bunk. He groped for it, holding his breath and listening for the sound. It came again and, as his fingers found a switch, changed to a rapid scratching and thumping. Then the lamp came on, flooding the cabin with a harsh, white light.
He sat up, more carefully this time. The cabin was empty, but he was sure he had not imagined the sound. The dream was another thing, perhaps a product of too much alcohol, fatigue, and the unease that had filled the space between him and Julian.
He lay down again, remembering the previous day. The tension had begun as he had reached the bottom of the Samaria Gorge and seen the blue-and-white ketch at anchor in the bay. He had stood on the rocky beach and wondered how to get his brother’s attention, wondered if his brother were even aboard. Then Julian had emerged from below deck, climbed into the small skiff at the stern of the ketch, and begun to row shoreward, all without giving any indication of having seen Pray. And when he beached the boat he had sat silently, head cocked to one side, holding the flat-bottomed little craft against the gravel as Pray swung first his lone suitcase and then himself into the boat.
“Long time,” Julian had said, finally, as he pushed away from the beach and began to row.
“Long time,” Pray had agreed. “It’s good to see you.”
“Is it?” Julian had replied, and neither had spoken again all the way to the boat.
Aboard the ketch, standing on the deck next to his brother, Pray had realized that he was taller than Julian, an awareness that clashed with his memories—all of which involved looking up at Julian in one situation or the other—and left him with an odd, unsettled feeling.
Julian had shown him the cabin he lay in now, then offered him vodka, and sandwiches of canned tuna laced with chunks of fresh garlic and feta cheese. Later they had switched from vodka to Scotch, and sat under a darkening sky, talking about safe things—air flights, autumn weather in the Mediterranean, Cretan tourist traps while Pray got a little drunk and wondered if it felt as absurd to Julian as it did to him, to be sitting with a brother you hadn’t seen in three decades, and not talk about it.
The scratching sound came again. Pray tilted his head slowly, and stared across the cabin. Something moved, behind a small stool that rested against the far bulkhead. A gray shape appeared. It was a rat, not particularly large, and a little gaunt, as if it did not feed well aboard the Broken Wing. The rat groomed a whisker, then pivoted and faced Pray. It crouched there, and the two stared at each other for a long moment. Then the animal spun around again and vanished.
Pray allowed himself a deep, noisy breath, then settled into the bunk to try to sleep. He reached for the lamp, and realized that he wasn’t eager to turn it off. He smiled at his own timidity.
“Wee sleekit, cow’ring, tim’rous beastie, oh what a panic’s in thy breastie,” he murmured. Burns, he thought, but didn’t remember for certain. As he raised his hand to the lamp again, voices reached him through the bulkhead.
“Why did you ask him?” it was a woman’s voice, and for a moment Pray wondered if he might not be dreaming after all.
“It seemed the right thing to do at the time.” The answering voice belonged to Julian.
“What will you do now?” The woman again. His brother’s response was unintelligible.
The voices did not come again. Pray turned off the lamp and lay in the darkness, wondering what was going on. Eventually he slept.
Chapter 32
Emile Gotard had never expected to die in bed. But the thought of what the man in the green-and-white striped caftan might do before he killed him—that terrified the Frenchman. The man was called Rashid Something-or-other. Gotard had forgotten the last name, and anyhow all of these kinky-haired Lybian niggers were alike. But two things made this one memorable—he stood at his ease above Gotard, who lay bound hand and foot with smelly, oil-soaked rags, and nudged him in the balls with the pointed toe of a fancy Italian shoe; and he was the owner of the cocaine the Frenchman had stolen.
“I owned the boat, too,” the Arab said. “You can see that you have caused me great harm.”
“So kill me,” Gotard said. Quickly, please, he added silently.
Rashid shook his head. “I wish you t
o live, so you can repay me for my loss.”
“I have nothing to repay you with.”
“Then am I simply to forget my boat? And my poor employees, who trusted me to protect them?” The Lybian shook his head, and his dark eyes grew even larger. “In justice, even your death would make only a small repayment on the debt. But there is something you can do for me, and I promise that if you do, you will be a free man.”
“Why should I trust that?”
The Lybian smiled and spread his hands.
“For that matter,” Gotard went on, “why would you trust me not to drop out of sight as soon as you let me go?” He began to feel the smallest bit of hope, which, perversely, wrestled with the resignation he had partially achieved.
“I could let you go right now,” Rashid said. “I could do it with my eyes tightly closed, and keep them closed, like a child playing hide and seek. I could shut them for a week, like this.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “And without even opening them, I could pluck you from wherever you ran, as easily as this.” He extended a hand to a bowl of cut flowers on the table next to him, and pulled a marigold out. “I always find what I look for.” Eyes still closed, he drew back the pointed toe and snapped it into Gotard’s crotch. Then he opened his eyes and stared at the Frenchman again as Gotard writhed in pain.
“Do you believe me?” Rashid said.
Gotard nodded, keeping his mouth tightly shut because he did not wish to disgrace himself by screaming.
The Arab smiled like a pleased child. “I am happy we understand each other,” he said, and pulled a large folding knife from his pocket. He opened it and demonstrated its sharpness by slicing the rags around Gotard’s ankles. He repeated the process with the wrists, and put the knife away.
“Be comfortable,” he said, and waved toward a pile of large, brightly colored pillows that nestled in one corner of the room. Gotard half crouched, half scuttled across the floor and sank into the cushions, thankful he had not needed to stand erect, not sure his numb feet would have allowed it. He rubbed his wrists and ankles as Rashid pulled a stuffed ottoman across the room, placed it in front of Gotard, and sat down.
“I offer you the opportunity to become an instrument of God.”
Gotard stared at the Arab and wondered what weirdness this was.
“I don’t much care for God,” he said, continuing to rub his ankles. They hurt, but that was good; the numbness had left, and he would be able to run if he got the chance.
“In this case, God pays well.”
“How much?”
“One hundred kilos of pure gold bullion, neatly arranged in twenty little bricks, waiting for you in a safety deposit box anywhere you name. At the present market rate, that amounts to several million French francs.”
“To pay so much, you must want me to do something that maybe I’m not crazy enough to do.”
The Arab shook his head. “Not crazy, just vicious, and you are vicious enough. You have shown that, haven’t you?”
I hope to show you personally, some day, Gotard thought. “What does God want?” he asked.
“A weapons delivery system. A large, floating bomb.”
“Fugger’s ship?”
“You are not as stupid as you look.”
Not as stupid as you think I am, either, Gotard thought. And maybe not as easy to handle. “Go on,” he said.
“In his effort to be humble before the face of Allah, our gracious leader Muammar Khadafi has stayed his hand, turned the other cheek, while the Jewish-American clique has tried all in its power to destroy Libya. Our cities are bombed, and we do not retaliate. Our wells are poisoned, and we do not retaliate. The factory to make medicine for our poor people is set ablaze, and we do nothing. But now Allah has given our leader the wisdom to see that turning the other cheek has limits. The time has come to strike back, to avenge the innocent and punish the wicked.” Rashid rose to his feet. “This will be,” he said, shaking a raised fist in time to the words. “This will be. Allah wills it.”
“Spare me the sermon,” Gotard said. “Get down to business. I don’t give a shit about your Allah.”
The Arab let his hands drop and smiled. “But He has given you to me, despite your contempt. You will be his tool.” He settled onto the ottoman again. “It is simple,” he said. “We have acquired a nuclear device.”
“Shit,” Gotard said. Everybody knew Khadafi was crazy. “From where?”
“From India. They would sell their souls for money, if Hindus had souls.”
“And you want me to carry this bomb around for you,” Gotard said. He stretched back into the cushions and grinned. The idea appealed to him.
“I would be quite easy,” the Arab said. “Your garbage scow receives almost daily shipments. The device itself is not so big. It would fit nicely into one of those barrels you carry, and the arming module and trigger are even smaller. Your task is simplicity itself. Take the bomb aboard, get the ship to Port Said, at the mouth of the Suez Canal, arm the weapon, and push the little button. Actually, it is a little switch.” He held up a thumb and forefinger, a half inch separating them. “About that big.”
“What good does all that gold do me after I have blown myself to hell?”
“I am assured you will have precisely two hours to get away after the device is armed. Even on foot, that would give you time to leave the area of danger. It is not a very powerful bomb.” The Arab laughed. “You would want to walk upwind, of course.”
“What’s the point? What have you got against Port Said?”
The Arab’s eyes widened and he smiled broadly. “There you see our leader’s genius. A careful campaign of disinformation will precede your arrival at Port Said, culminating in an ‘ultimatum’ from a group of fundamentalist Israeli extremists.”
Gotard snorted. “Who would believe that?”
“Everyone. This group exists, in the Gaza. Its members have been carefully selected, and are heavily armed. They already have a history of violent activities. And, they are very well funded. We know. We pay the bills.” The Arab clapped his hands loudly and grinned. “We get the money, in fact, from the cocaine operation you interrupted. We split it fifty-fifty with the American Central Intelligence Agency, no questions asked. Our Jewish crazies don’t know that, of course. They think the money comes from some television evangelist in America.” He slapped his hands together again, more softly, then held them before his face and bowed, his eyes closed.
“When the device goes off,” he said, opening his eyes again, “it will be understood that the Israelis have done the deed, which will give the Arab nations, led by Libya, of course, the excuse to saturate the Jewish homeland with chemical weapons in retaliation. At the same time, we will have struck a crippling blow at the Egyptians, who are a constant thorn in our side, kissing the asses of the Americans and the Jews.”
“You fucking Arabs are as devious as snakes,” Gotard said.
“We only seem that way to primitive minds such as yours.”
“The whole thing is crazy. You may as well kill me now.”
Rashid shook his head. “No.” He stood up and nudged the gold bar closer to Gotard. “Sleep on it before you decide. And..” He pulled out the knife again, opened it, and lay it atop the block of bullion. “Consider the alternative.” He stepped toward the door, then paused, hands on hips, and looked over his shoulder at Gotard.
Play the scene for all it’s worth, nigger faggot, the Frenchman thought.
“Actually,” Rashid said, “if you decide not to cooperate, you might want to use that blade on yourself, before I come back with my friends.” He walked out, and Gotard shivered in spite of himself.
Chapter 33
The morning wind blew out of the north, skipping and popping across the lead-colored sea. It found every gap and seam in the wool pea coat Julian had provided, along with a heavy, stoneware mug of steaming coffee. Adam Pray squatted as low as possible in the cockpit of the Broken Wing, hugging the hot drink close. Julian stood with o
ne foot wedged under a deck cleat, stretching out as he finished the task of shortening the mainsail. He tied a final knot and dropped into the cockpit next to his brother.
“That should do for now,” he said. He filled a second mug from the metal thermos tucked into a bracket at the stern. From his pocket he pulled a silver flask. It looked well used, and had a deep dent on one side. He opened it, and poured amber liquid into the mug. The skittering wind carried the pungent smell of bourbon to Pray’s nose. Julian held the flask out to his brother with a questioning look. Pray shook his head.
“Early for me,” he said, He wondered how much Julian drank. The evening before had seen the near-death of one newly opened bottle.
“Pre-breakfast appetizer,” Julian said. He tucked the flask away and raised the mug toward Pray. “Here’s to unexpected visitors.” He took a swallow.
Pray grinned and shook his head. “You invited me, remember?”
“I didn’t really think you’d come.” Julian took a deeper swallow of coffee, cocked his head and stared into space for a moment, then pulled out the silver flask and more bourbon. “Now you’re here, I’m not sure it was a good idea.”
“Why did you ask me?”
“Good question.” Julian stared into his hands, cupped around the mug, and sipped at the coffee. A gust of wind rocked the Broken Wing slightly, and made the waves slap at her hull. Hot coffee sloshed across Pray’s knuckles. Julian grinned. “You’ll have to learn to move with the water,” he said.” It’s like this a lot this time of year.”
“And why the mystery? Invisible ink, all that stuff?”
“Actually, I do some of my best work in the fall. The summer sailors have left the water. No prying eyes.”
Pray took an impatient swallow of coffee. It had cooled enough that he could taste it, and wasn’t very good.
“You win,” he said. Some things didn’t change. As a boy, when Julian didn’t want to talk about something, he switched the subject. “Still as stubborn as a barnacle.”