Rembrandt's Ghost

by Paul Christopher

  ‘‘Cam Dao!’’ he called out to the Vietnamese girl whose face had been ruined by a knife-wielding patron at Cai Quin Ma’s Puki Rumah establishment in the big house behind the fish market. The girl was no use any more for clients, but she loved to cook and almost above all other things Lo Chang liked to eat. ‘‘Trung nguyen!’’ he called. The skinny, little creature made excellent iced coffee, which he loved. If it was dark and he’d been a long time from home, he’d occasionally use her as she’d been intended and she was quite satisfactory at that as well, not a small feat when the customer for her services weighed close to four hundred pounds.

  Lo Chang looked out through the port-side doorway. Over the railing he could see the coastline, a faint gray shadow several miles away. He usually steered closer to shore, navigating by well-known landmarks, but this was the area of the Torongohok Reefs and even with a draft of only seven and a half feet, going any closer to shore was a risky proposition.

  Cam Dao appeared on the bridge with his special silver-chased coffee glass. She gave a little bow and handed him the coffee. He took the glass, holding it in one meaty fist with the other hand gripping the wheel. He took a long draft of the rich coffee and sweet condensed milk mixture, then sighed with pleasure.

  ‘‘Bring me lunch,’’ he snapped. ‘‘Some pho and a dish of that muc xao thap cam you make so well.’’ His Vietnamese was curt and fluent. Although Lo Chang was ethnic Chinese, he was also Vietnamese by birth. A skinny orphan child in Hanoi during the war years, he had both prospered and fattened in the time since, becoming well known for his ability to procure anything from war surplus AK-47s and Russian RPGs for the northern bandits and drug runners to lady-boys and knockoff copies of guidebooks for the sex tourists.

  He had also become known for his easy willingness to commit violence and had spent a number of years as an enforcer for Truong Van Cam’s Fifth Orange Gang. After the gang boss’s arrest and execution in 2004, Lo Chang had fled the country, eventually settling in Kampong Sugut and beginning his flourishing prostitution and smuggling enterprises. In the Chinese way, he was very philosophical about these changes; life offered an assortment of tragedies and opportunities. The trick was to turn one into the other and to think about the past as rarely as possible.

  Jampongong Island appeared in the distance directly ahead and Lo Chang suddenly had to make a decision. He reached into the pocket of his vast white shirt, produced a tin of Neos Pacific Cigarillos, and lit one with the platinum Dunhill he’d taken from the unfortunate Canadian dentist. The steady bow wave curled up with a mustache of foam. In the distance Jampongong looked like everyone’s idea of a perfect tropical paradise. Coconut palms fringing startling white sand beaches, forest, hills, and dense jungle beyond, all rising to a sultry forested mountain peak, its summit almost always shrouded in mist. A classic island in the Sulu Sea. Very romantic on a travel brochure for idiots like the Canadian dentist.

  The problem was that off Jampongong was a large fringe of reef that swept in shoals a dozen miles out to sea. Inshore, however, between the island and Kinalubatan Point on the mainland was a channel three-quarters of a mile wide and a passage through the center with at least eight fathoms, or forty-eight feet, below the keel of the Pedang Emas. On either side of that middle passage were rocks and shoals that stood like razor fangs just below the surface, completely hidden from view on a day like this by the sun dazzle on the water and capable of ripping the little ship’s belly out like the knife that gutted the late dentist and his even later partner. Take the channel and he’d save half a day getting back to Kambong Sugut; don’t take the channel and he risked putting himself far out to sea in uncertain weather, losing a half day in the process.

  ‘‘Najis,’’ he said in Malay, swearing. The diesel thudded beneath his feet and the wheel felt slippery with sweat under his thick hand. The island was getting closer with every passing minute. He glanced out to port at the thick green line of the mangroves overhanging the water on the mainland. He took another swig of the cool brew that the little knife-scarred whore had fetched, then put the silver-handled glass down on the narrow ‘‘dashboard’’ shelf that ran along beneath the windscreen of the wheelhouse.

  ‘‘Puki mak dia,’’ he muttered, cursing again. He swung the wheel with both hands, turning the ship toward the shore and the channel that lay between it and the island.

  Half an hour later, his prodigious belly full of Cam Dao’s succulent sautéed squid chased with a big bottle of Halida beer, Lo Chang was confidently swinging Pedang Emas around the lee side of the high volcanic island, keeping an eye out for any distinct variations in the color of the water that would signal shoals or shallows. He also made sure that the island’s main landmarks, the high northern bluffs and the jutting shape of Bankoka Hill, were well away on his right; the currents at the foot of the clifflike bluffs that ran directly down into the water could spin his little ship like a top and smash him against the rough stone walls in an instant.

  Even from a mile off he could hear the pounding of the sea against the rock and he shivered slightly. The thought of being crushed against the cliffs was one thing, but being thrown into the sea was something else. Lo Chang, for all his balloonlike size, could not swim a stroke. He’d tossed enough men into the ocean to know exactly the sort of predators that lurked just below the water in great abundance. Better to put a bullet in his brain than drown in the sea.

  The little inlet that ran back into the center of the island appeared to starboard, and if he hadn’t been watching so carefully he would have missed the prize within. A good-sized schooner stood at anchor just off the pebbled foreshore that marked the entrance to a narrow river. Lo Chang picked up the dentist’s pretty blue and yellow Pro Mariner binoculars and took a look.

  He focused the glasses and the boat came into view. Neatly anchored. Thirty-eight, maybe forty feet. Dark hull, bright white superstructure. A woman was sunbathing on the foredeck, topless, her big breasts lolling, her arms spread out against the cockpit to catch the sun, a big floppy sun hat shielding her eyes. She was dark-haired, tanned, and reasonably young.

  Barely hesitating, Lo Chang reached out and eased back the throttles, the sound of the engines dropping. He swung the wheel, guiding the Pedang Emas into the inlet. He’d stopped here for fresh water in the past and knew there would be more than enough sea beneath his keel, even at low tide.

  He swung the binoculars around, checking the beach and the jungle behind it, looking for anyone else. Nothing. Just the white sand, the lush jungle, and the shaded entrance to the river. He smiled, his heavy lips spreading apart to reveal a gleaming mouthful of gold teeth. In addition to the woman there might be one or two more aboard the boat. Easy to deal with. He pulled up the tail of the saillike white shirt covering his belly and took out the old Nagant revolver he’d preferred since his days in Vietnam. Its seven-round cylinderwould be more than enough for the job at hand.

  He throttled back to dead slow and coasted forward through the flat calm, coming up on the sailboat almost silently. The girl on the cockpit cover was obviously asleep. She hadn’t moved since he’d first spotted her. Lo Chang’s smile broadened; there would probably be a supply of liquor on board and some money as well. Maybe even more cocaine. He’d grown a taste for it since the dentist. There might even be a weapon, perhaps a shotgun. Most small boats carried them in the pirate-infested waters in the area.

  Lo Chang liked the idea of being part of an infestation. When he imagined himself in such a way he usually saw himself as a powerful snake, a constrictor perhaps, one who used brute strength to kill its prey rather than stinging venom. He hefted the World War Two-vintage pistol in his hand. Venom, on the other hand, had its place. He leaned forward and blew into the voice pipe.

  ‘‘Cam Dao!’’ he called. ‘‘Di voi toi!’’ Within a few seconds, the young woman appeared on the narrow bridge, coming up from the galley directly below. ‘‘Take the wheel,’’ he said in Vietnamese. ‘‘Bring her in slowly.’’


  ‘‘Co,’’ said the woman with a nod, her expression blank. She knew exactly what her master intended to do, but nothing she could say or do would stop him. The fate of the half-naked woman on the sailboat was sealed. The Vietnamese woman stepped forward and took the wheel. Lo Chang went out on deck and lumbered forward to the bow. Lo Chang kept the pistol half hidden behind his back. As the ship slid forward he tried to put on a pleasant expression and dredged up the small amount of English he’d learned over the years.

  ‘‘Hello, you!’’ he called out. They were a hundred yards off now. Too late for the sailboat to start whatever auxiliary engine it carried in an attempt to escape. Not that it would have done any good. The monster diesels installed by the Germans all those years ago still gave the old ship an easy eighteen knots, enough to run down any sailboat afloat.

  ‘‘Hello, you!’’ he called again. The woman hadn’t moved an inch. If there was anyone else on board they were asleep. Fifty yards. Still the woman hadn’t moved. Lo Chang squinted. The large pillowy breasts were bright red. Sunburned. She’d been sunbathing too long, it seemed. Being something of an expert when it came to nipples and their sensitivity, Lo Chang was sure she would be in great pain. Why didn’t she go below?

  Twenty-five yards now and still no movement. He took a small apprehensive step back from the gunwale. The woman should have moved by now. He could almost see it, coming up on her elbows, pushing back the big hat, maybe with sunglasses underneath. The sudden look of surprise. The fear.

  Cam Dao swung the wheel, bringing the ship broadside to the sailboat. The bow wave reached out and smacked against the side of the other vessel. The sailboat began to rock quite violently. The big breasts flopped back and forth like balloons filled with water, her legs slapping together and tangling with each other.

  Ten yards away and Lo Chang’s apprehension turned to full-blown anxiety. The woman didn’t just have her arms spread across the cockpit—they were nailed there. There was no blood because the nails had been struck into the flesh earlier, shortly after she’d attacked Fu Sheng with a carving knife from the galley. He’d struck her across the face with the butt of his weapon, but she’d turned to the side at the last second and the blow had struck her temple instead of her face as he intended. It hadn’t taken her very long to die, but even dead she had her uses. She could still be a decoy for a fat pig like Lo Chang.

  Too late Lo Chang realized that the boat and the woman were a trap. He moved heavily back toward the bridge. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement in the overhanging bushes shading the mouth of the little river. He took the Nagant out from under his shirt, but he knew now it was far too late for that kind of thing.

  The bushes weren’t bushes at all, but camouflaging brush piled up on the bow of some sort of old-fashioned, sharp-prowed torpedo boat almost as big as Pedang Emas. The boat came nosing out of the river mouth, powerful engines burbling. He could see the bell-shaped muzzle of a heavy machine gun mounted forward and a Malay in a vague jungle uniform standing behind it, grinning. The Pedang Emas was less than three hundred feet away from the hidden torpedo boat. At that range they could chew him to ribbons and sink him without even reloading the big-box magazine.

  Lo Chang felt his stomach gurgle with fear and he belched, tasting Cam Dao’s squid in his mouth again along with the sour tang of bile. He had a sudden, terrible suspicion that the tables were about to be turned and that soon he would be lunch for the squid rather than the other way around. He turned and saw the woman crucified on the deck. He found himself thinking about the dentist and his fate.

  A gust of wind blew across the deck of the sailboat and the big floppy hat came off the bare-breasted woman’s face and was whisked over the gunwale and into the water. Her whole head was crushed on one side, her right eye like a white blotch in a lump of ruined, overcooked meat. The people on the torpedo boat had done that. He knew they could do, would do even worse to him and he knew why, because now he remembered the sailboat and where he’d seen it before, although the hull had been red, not blue as it was now, and he remembered the girl too and her blond boyfriend, the one with the scar who thought bringing her to a brothel was a good joke.

  Most of all he remembered the old man on the raft and the gold wafers wrapped in yellowed pages from the old military edition of Yomiuri-Hochi from sometime during the war. The gold wafers that were still in the strongbox in his cabin.

  They would question him and when they were done they’d drop what remained of him over the side. The torpedo boat was almost alongside now, rumbling between him and the sailboat. He was looking right down at the dead woman. He could hear the buzzing of flies.

  Lo Chang tilted his head back and closed his eyes. His mind wandered for a moment, searching, and then he remembered sitting in the small park beside Hoan Kiem Lake on a clear, bright day, close to Tortoise Tower. He was combing Quyen’s waist-length hair, using the brush with one hand and his other hand to smooth it as he brushed, letting it fall through his fingers like jet-black, shining mercury, but really, secretly caressing it, feeling her curved neck through the thick fall of it, bent to his brushing suffering agonies of young passion, knowing that it would never be more than a precocious fat boy brushing the hair of a pretty girl.

  Later his friend Trung told him that she didn’t really like him at all, but only liked what effect she had on him. It didn’t matter. He breathed in and smelled the faint scent of the dao phai, the pale peach flower of his birthplace that grew everywhere around the Tortoise Tower. The smell of the girl, Quyen. So long ago. But nobody lives forever. At least he wouldn’t drown. Lo Chang opened his eyes and saw the man standing in the bow of the boat, the two-foot-long bolo machete in his hand.

  He felt the weight of Quyen’s hair in his hand again and he brought the Nagant up to his temple and pulled the trigger quickly, never hesitating for a second.

  18

  In the simplest terms a typhoon is a violent tropical storm with cyclonic, or circulating, winds that usually have their origins in the western Pacific or the Indian Ocean. Above the equator these winds circulate in a counterclockwise direction, and below the equator they turn clockwise. Basically typhoons are caused by a coincidental conjunction of several basic factors, including substantially higher than normal water temperature, an upper layer of moist air, and inwardly spiraling winds caused by an area of low pressure.

  As these areas begin to revolve, usually in pairs, they quickly cool the water beneath them, both by simply blocking out the sun and by drawing the heat upward to the colder masses of air in the form of evaporation. The result of all this is a rotating heat engine that begins to feed on itself, moving across the surface of the ocean, seeking and expending more and more energy, which, expressed in human scientific terms, means that a tropical cyclone can release heat energy at the rate of fifty to two hundred trillion joules per day.

  For comparison, this rate of energy release is equivalent to exploding a ten-megaton nuclear bomb every twenty minutes, or two hundred times the worldwide electrical-generating capacity per day. This is no Perfect Storm, no majestic sweep of enormous rolling waves and perfectly digitized little ships upon a perfectly digitized ocean; this is hell on earth, where shattered water hammers against itself, battering to pieces everything that happens to cross its erratic and ever changing course, its ‘‘eye’’ or center as wide as two hundred miles across with an ‘‘eyewall’’ where winds can move up to two hundred miles an hour. Within the eye a lenslike uplift in the ocean itself can be created, sometimes rising in a huge dome up to forty feet high, the waters beneath it spiraling faster and faster, the giant unseen vortex as deep as three hundred feet, sometimes scouring the seabed itself. It is this ‘‘lens’’ or ‘‘storm surge’’ as it is called that holds the potential for the typhoon’s greatest cruelty.

  Moving toward land the storm surge follows the upward slope of the seabed, growing higher and higher and traveling at over a hundred miles an hour, scouring the land and destroy
ing, inundating and drowning everything within its wrathfulpath with catastrophic effect that can utterly destroy entire coastal plains and sometimes whole countries. Thousands and sometimes tens of thousands can die within a single day.

  Briney Hanson knew they were in trouble less than two hours after turning the corner at the top of Borneo’s Sabah Peninsula and heading through the Malawali Strait. The barometer continued to drop and the steady chop of the sea heading up the coast had become a long oily swell moving under them like the undulations of some enormous, sluggishly moving sea monster. There was no wind, a deadly oppressive heat, and a heavy, dark line on the horizon that seemed to snatch what few clouds there were and breathe them into its maw.

  ‘‘Trouble?’’ Billy Pilgrim asked, standing beside Hanson on the bridge with Eli at the wheel. Even within the bridge the sound of the rising wind was a sharp, electrical whistling as the rushing air thrummed over the ship’s wire rigging.

  ‘‘Yes,’’ said Hanson. ‘‘North-northeast,’’ he called out to Santoro. The young man nodded and turned the wheel. A few seconds later the helm answered and the Batavia Queen turned heavily across the swell and moved away from the distant coast, putting them farther out to sea. The seas broke harder against her bows and she began to heave and plunge in long steady rolls.

  ‘‘Isn’t this dangerous, putting farther out to sea like this?’’

  ‘‘Yes,’’ said Hanson again. ‘‘But if we’re running into heavy weather, I’d rather have some distance between me and the reefs. The way we’re standing doesn’t give us much room to maneuver.’’ Hanson’s original intention had been to slip down the coast ahead of the typhoon and put into some safe anchorage to ride it out, maybe even making it to Kampong Sugut and the wide mouth of the river there, but that was impossible now. Both the radar and his own eyes were showing him the typhoon almost dead ahead and moving too quickly to avoid. The best thing to do was meet it head-on as far out to sea as he could get. A typhoon over the ocean was bad, but a typhoon sweeping toward the land was a monster.