by Finn Óg
The man laughed.
“Two hundred euro,” the man said, which was heavy but Sam had no option.
“Can you do it now?”
The man nodded slowly. “Why?”
“Rope. Around the propeller shaft.”
“Ok,” said the man, understanding.
Sailing her into the harbour under jib had been manageable in the calm conditions behind a breakwater but Sam didn’t want to be without an engine for long.
“I tow you over. First drop this boat in sea.”
Sam shook his head. “I can sail her in.”
The man looked at him as if he needed his head felt, then shrugged. “You damage crane, you pay.”
Sam nodded.
“Money now, please.”
Sam dipped in his pocket and extracted a fold of notes. He peeled off four fifties.
The man nodded and he and Isla set off back to the boat. Isla stayed on the quay and began to unwind the warps while Sam unfurled the small genoa with one of the jib sheets.
“Ready?” he called to her.
“Ready,” she replied, and he flicked the sheet around a winch and backed the jib, spinning the wheel against the force to bring the boat directly astern. Then he skipped onto the side deck and held out his shovel of a paw for Isla to grab and whisked her aboard.
“Good job, wee love,” he said, and returned to the wheel.
Behind him he could hear the grunt of a diesel engine fire up and the grinding of steel wire as the barefoot man lowered the smaller boat back into the Mediterranean. Sam cleared the neighbouring fishing boats, then allowed Sian to come around into the gentle breeze as Isla readied the winch on the other side to gybe. She handed him the tail of the rope and as they passed through the eye of the breeze he drew it in armfuls and filled the sail on the new side.
“Tell me when the wee boat’s gone, Isla.”
“Not yet,” she called back from the foredeck. “I’ve got the bowline ready, Daddy.”
Sam furled the headsail again, allowing the way on the hull to propel her towards the dock.
“She’s gone, Daddy!” called Isla, but Sam could see that himself. He liked to give her jobs to keep her involved and invested. It helped her learn.
“Where’s the man?”
“He’s leaning out of the crane. He looks worried.”
I bet he does, thought Sam. If he got it wrong, the top of the travel hoist would be a write-off, as would their own mast. But then, Sam did enjoy a challenge no matter how trivial.
In the event the boat slid in gently and perfectly, and Isla threw the rope to the man as accurately as any deckhand might. The man shook his head in admiration at the little woman, then skipped around the wheel of the hoist to take a warp from Sam. Within minutes they were dangling out of the water being driven towards the hard-standing area. The man stopped the crane, found a rickety ladder and rattled it up against the hull. Sam and Isla climbed down and inspected the mess of the shaft. The man stood beside them shaking his head, fashioning an opportunity.
“You want me to fix?” he asked.
“No,” said Sam, producing the sharp knife from the life raft. “But if you can power-wash the hull, I will pay for that.” He scraped at the weed growth, like a damp, soft beard, and chipped a barnacle or two with the blade.
“Hundred euro,” said the man.
“Fifty,” said Sam.
“Eighty,” said the man.
“Sixty,” chirped Isla, and the man laughed. The child had it.
The barefoot Italian strolled off and Sam hacked at the bound rope for ten minutes until it fell free of the shaft and skeg, before climbing the ladder to replace the knife. Then he and Isla strolled off as if they hadn’t a care in the world, despite having a woman and her kid to rescue from a man who, for all Sam knew, had done away with them before they even reached the shore.
Habid’s eyes flicked open the moment the door latch was fingered. He was able to push himself a little more upright. Lying back made him feel vulnerable and given the propensity for violence in the police station, he was reluctant to place himself at even more of a disadvantage.
“Doctor,” he muttered with some relief.
“Habid,” said the doctor, urgency in his voice. He crouched beside the rat as if tinkering with the meds and whispered keeping his back to the door and its inspection flap. “Big Suit, as you call him, has disappeared. He’s not answering calls.”
“What does Tassels think has happened?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“Do you think Big Suit has deserted – gone AWOL?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe he thinks he killed me.”
“That would not bother him,” said the doctor. “They probably kill people all the time.”
“What then?”
“He may have crashed. He was very weak. He should not have been sent on a long journey – or any journey. We took a lot of blood from him.”
Habid ticked through his options.
“We must get the boat. It is true what I said – the supply chain will close down if we do not collect.”
“When is the next journey?” asked the doctor.
“It does not work like that,” said Habid, “but the boat must be retrieved regardless.”
“You are almost able to get out of bed but you cannot expect to drive or travel yet.”
“I have no intention of either,” said Habid.
“Well, I can assure you I am not going to Sinai,” said the doctor.
“No,” said Habid. “You are staying to care for me. To keep me alive. You must tell Tassels I have deteriorated and that if he wants a piece of my business, he must go and get the boat himself.”
“He will not do that.”
“Then he must find someone who will – and tell him that will come out of his cut.”
“He won’t like that.”
“It is a choice. Simple. Either he is greedy enough to go or he takes a risk and brings in another person. I know what I would do.”
“How much further?”
Isla was complaining. To be fair to her, for all the exercise she got through sailing the boat, walking wasn’t something she’d been used to for weeks.
“Don’t know, darlin’,” Sam said.
“Well, check your phone,” she suggested, exasperated.
“I’m trying to save data, Isla, so that you can watch films and Scooby-Doo. Just keep an eye out.”
“We’ll never find them,” she said.
Isla was still cross he’d let them go in the first place. Sam could understand that, but he wasn’t about to concede.
“Just keep your eyes peeled. We won’t find them if we give up before we’ve even started. What do we say?”
Isla huffed and puffed like a teenager but said what he wanted regardless. “We never roll over, never, never, never.”
“Never, never, never,” Sam repeated.
It was important to him that she believed that. It had got him through so many tight spots. No matter how many times his life expectancy appeared to have expired, he had muttered that simple phrase, taken something from it and fought his way out. No matter how tight the corner, how stacked the odds, it had served him, and it would serve his daughter too.
“There’s Mary,” he heard her say, drawing him from his drift.
He looked up to see a shrine, right there by the sea. He wondered how three Muslims walking around the area might be greeted, given that one of them was a man dressed as a woman.
“People here must be Catholic,” Isla said, but Sam didn’t have the energy to inquire how she knew the difference.
He had spent considerable time avoiding any talk of denominations or differing religious beliefs. He had told her that God was God and loved everyone and had left it at that. Religion had played an enormous role in Sam’s life, the wars he had fought, the operations he had been sent on, the surveillance jobs he had carried out. All of them had some genesis in opposing view
s on faith. He was happy to believe what he believed and not get involved beyond that. Shannon had modified that slightly when she’d been around. She had faith beyond his own, a belief that drove her every day. Not that she went to church much, or lit candles or believed in what some black-clad pontificator preached. But she had an inner peace and an absolute sense of what was right and wrong, and there was never any hope of persuading her otherwise. It was hard to be around someone like that without some of it rubbing off.
They covered four miles before Sam was persuaded that they had turned the wrong way. The terrain was getting flatter, the roads smoother, the buildings better tended. The area grew more in keeping with what he expected from a coastal Mediterranean town: commoditisation of the spectacular scenery, restaurants, shops, stuff to be sold. That’s why he felt sure three Muslims would have avoided it. Too many folk, too many questions, too many people in positions of authority. That’s what Sam would have done anyway. His rule of thumb when arriving somewhere unannounced was to keep as low a profile as possible and move around only at night.
“Darlin’, I’m sorry. We’ve come the wrong way. We’re going to have to walk back.”
“Oh-wuh, I told you to use your phone,” she said.
“Isla, quit giving out. You want to find them, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Then give over and come on.”
“Use your phone map,” she insisted, the stubborn little tyke.
Sam made a rigmarole of producing the phone and switching on the data. He then lectured her on how she couldn’t complain in days to come that she was fed up with the old TV shows downloaded on her tablet.
“Ok,” she said and, as usual, she was right. As soon as Sam consulted the map, he knew where they would be.
Big Suit was starving. He began to kick the door of his room. It wasn’t a cell – Big Suit doubted they had one – but it was basic: dirt floor, block walls with reclaimed windows at a height well above his head. The roof was flat but there were no air gaps. Attention during construction mostly appeared to have gone into the placing of a steel cross member that spanned the block walls. Red paint had flecked and fallen from a foot-long section in the middle. Big Suit knew what that meant: it had been used to tie something – or someone – up. It was above head height, so the pain endured by its victims must have been considerable. Big Suit had no intention of trying out the attraction, and if it came to it during interrogation, he would sing – it was the least painful journey. Not that he knew a great deal. Emptying his mind of information wouldn’t take long.
He heard a faint sound and pressed forward to listen. A doorbell. A doorbell he’d heard before. Back at the station. The rat’s phone – he’d heard it when his boss had tested the number. It was dinging quietly away in whatever room lay beyond the door. They must have charged it, he thought. At least someone is looking for me, he thought, and imagined his boss and the toxic atmosphere at the station. Big Suit grinned. There was hope. He leaned against the wall rubbing his back against the concrete blocks in a shuffling scratch as cattle might at a standing stone. He had barely quelled his sweat-induced itch when the sound came again, broadening his smile. He crouched against the wall by the doorframe willing the phone to ring again. His immediate concern wasn’t torture, but dinner. He wanted food and water.
Eventually the chime restarted and was followed by impatient footsteps. The sound of the phone momentarily grew louder and was then cut-off. Big Suit strained to hear what was happening. There was silence for a moment and then a man’s voice.
“Sir, the prisoner from the highway? That other phone he had, it keeps ringing.”
There was a pause that Waleed was presumably filling on the other end of the phone call.
“Possibly, it was left just feet from the interrogation suite.”
Big Suit worked out that Waleed wasn’t in the barracks. He longed to hear what was being said at the other end of the connection.
“I was wondering whether I should switch it off?” There was a pause and then, “Nuweiba, sir? Ok, I could send it with a patrol headed east, but do I leave it switched on?”
After receiving a curt answer to that question, the conversation was finished. Waleed was evidently busy, or very firmly the boss. Or both. Big Suit listened with a plummeting resignation as the guard, or whoever he was, passed his frustration down the chain of command.
“Get a patrol together. They’re going east, probably some distance. And tell the driver to come to me before they leave. I have something they’ve got to take with them.”
From the road the roof of the building reminded Sam of a skateboard track – all swoops and jumps, or a Viking longboat designed to bend and roll with the waves. He and Isla looked down at it from a height as it faced the ocean, Egypt and Libya. Sam couldn’t say what had brought him here but he knew he was right. If the woman and child weren’t close by, they’d been here. Such notions seldom took him, but on the occasions they presented he had learned to trust them.
“What is that?”
“See that sign?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What do you think that is?”
“A house with a big chimbly.”
“Chimney.”
“A house with a big chimney.”
“No, it’s not, it’s a church.” Sam began to wish he hadn’t got all educational and had just answered Isla in the first place. “Chiesa,” he read. “I think that means church. Madonna di Eleusa, that’s what the sign says.”
“What does that mean?”
“Dunno, darlin’, but Madonna is Mary.”
“Madonna is a singer,” Isla said.
“How do you know that?”
“Mammy.”
Sam smiled at the thought of Shannon’s endless playlists and her dancing round the kitchen with their daughter. He packed in the explanation. “I think they were here.”
“Why?” said Isla, suddenly interested.
“I’m not sure. I think it may be lit up at night – the cross I mean. The picture shows a cross at the front facing the sea. I think the man might have aimed the boat at the light. He probably got the lights mixed up.”
“Good thinking, Daddy-o,” said Isla in an American accent robbed straight out of Scooby-Doo.
“The church kind of faces Libya, where they maybe came from.”
“They came from Egypt,” Isla chirped.
Sam rounded on her. “Is that true, Isla? I need you to tell me the truth now, how do you know they came from Egypt?”
Isla reeled back a little, startled at her father’s intensity. “Sadiqah,” was all she said.
“She definitely said Egypt, not Libya?”
“She did say Libya,” said Isla, getting confused. “Libya and Egypt.”
Sam realised he’d startled her and crouched to give her a hug. “I’m sorry, wee love, I got excited. I just need you to tell me everything Sadiqah said to you, ok?”
“Now?”
“No. Now we’ve got to break into this church.”
“Daddy!” she hissed in a stage whisper. “You’re not allowed to break into a church – that’s where holy God lives.”
“Isla, you’re not allowed to break into anything, never mind a church, but we have people to rescue from that man, so it’s justified.”
“Justified?”
“It’s just … it’s allowed, that’s all.”
“Doesn’t look like a church,” she said, staring down at the funky roof.
“No,” said Sam, distractedly. He gripped the galvanised gate and hauled up and rolled over it, landing on his feet. He put an arm through the bars and hoisted Isla as high as he could, allowing her to grab the top, then he caught her on the other side.
“The police are going to get us,” she said.
“No, they won’t,” he replied.
“Yes, they will,” she said, and pointed. “Look, Daddy.”
“He won’t go,” said the doctor, fresh from a screaming match.
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br /> “Then my supplier will terminate the arrangement – no more boats.”
“There must be another way.”
“It took months to set up. Months. There are people in Libya waiting to be collected. If we do not move soon, someone else will move in. End of business.”
“He wants to know how you normally get the boats from Nuweiba and why we cannot use that supply chain.”
“Because the person who saw to that left on the last journey.”
“So how did you plan to get it?”
“I was going myself but I can’t do that now, can I? Tell him that. Tell him if he hadn’t cut my fucking toe off, he might have been able to sit on his ass and count his money. But now he will have to work for it, and it is his own fault!”
The doctor didn’t need to relay the message. Tassels could hear it being screamed from his office.
There had been an accident. That much was plain. Sam turned to see the tail end of a dark blue car with a red stripe and writing up the side. As they walked down the slope he realised that, as usual, Isla had been quite right. There was rack of strobe lights on its roof. Aside from the carabinieri, which Sam vaguely recollected as being part military, part police, a coastguard van came into view and his heart plummeted. Had he sent the woman and child to their deaths? He half crouched to speak to Isla.
“You’re going to have to stay outside until I see what’s happening.”
“Has there been an emergency?” Her face was shaken with alarm.
“Well, there’s no ambulance, so that’s good,” he said, which truthfully could be good or bad – ambulances didn’t come for dead bodies. But if they were already dead and laid out in the church, he didn’t want Isla seeing them. “You sit on that bench and I’ll be out in a minute.”
Sam placed his hand on the door handle under the sheltered pointed alcove, its prow aimed towards the sea and Africa. He lowered his head, said a prayer and pushed inside.
Nautical, he thought, as his gaze rose to the beams in the roof. It’s a boat, a church boat. Made sense. How many from this fishing village had died at sea? It seemed as much a memorial as a place of worship; like the dozens of monuments scattered around the harbours of Ireland, names etched against the brutal winds, indelible carvings that only the weather could take, just as it had taken the humans who owned them.