The Zero: A Novel

by Jess Walter

  Remy waved his cigar off, but Markham happily took one. “Can I have yours?” he yelled over the rumble of the motor and the blasts of wind.

  Remy nodded, and then closed his eyes and let the wind buffet his face. He imagined that he deserved this, whatever this punishment was. Cigar smoke wafted in the salt air. “Hey!” He yelled to Markham. “Am I an air marshal?”

  Markham and the pilot both burst into laughter. “See what I mean?” Markham asked the pilot, who nodded furiously. “Guy’s a pro. Every once in a while he just pops off with that deadpan material.”

  The boat’s pilot shook his head in appreciation. “So what do you guys do, back in the world, before all this?”

  “Remy here used to be a cop,” Markham said. Then he glanced over, to see if Remy was listening and said, quietly. “And actually, I was an executive chef at a resort in Idaho.”

  “No shit?” the pilot asked.

  Remy closed his eyes again and held them shut for a long time, and when he opened them it was noticeably darker; the sun had fallen behind the thin, faint line of shore. He wondered if a normal amount of time had passed or…

  Ahead of the cabin cruiser, a larger ship, a small freighter, bobbed on the water. It may have been an old fishing boat, or maybe a ship used for canning, the hull rusted and lightly pocked with barnacles, its profile growing as they approached it, a ketchup-red stripe just at the waterline.

  They came abreast of the bigger ship, and in the dusky light Remy could see a rope ladder hanging off its inky black side. The pilot of the cruiser cut his motor and they drifted up against the freighter, their boat maybe an eighth its height, the hulls slapping together like someone smacking his lips. “Thanks, Chuck,” Markham said. “We should be right back. Wait here.” Markham hoisted a small pack on his shoulder, then grabbed the rope ladder and started up. Remy followed him, hands gripping the wet ladder, and swung over the railing onto the abandoned deck of the larger ship, which was about eighty feet in length, with a two-story cabin and stairs leading below. There was no one up top, although Remy could see in the bridge where a coffee cup sat next to the wheel.

  The deck lilted back and forth on the light swells as they made their way toward the stairs. Remy peered below into the narrow staircase leading to a hallway, lit by bare bulbs strung along the wall. At the top of the stairs, Markham turned. “Okay. We all set?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but grabbed the railings and began lowering himself down the stairs. After a moment, Remy followed.

  The hallway was too narrow for both of them to fit, so Remy followed Markham’s back as he made his way the length of the ship, past the closed, rounded doors of cabins. Remy couldn’t place the smell down here, or rather he couldn’t separate the blend of smells: sweat and salt and cigarette smoke and strong coffee. Finally, Markham paused in front of a white metal door, turned the handle, and stepped inside. Remy followed and they entered a long, narrow compartment, with chipped paint on the walls and a low, flaking ceiling, all of it illuminated by a bright, bare bulb in the center. There was no furniture, just a metal pole parallel to the ground, like a banister, or a high ballet bar, stretching the width of the room, about five feet off the ground. Remy gasped.

  There, on the bar, a man was perched like a trophy, hanging forward, his arms tied behind his back and slung on the bar so that it held him by the armpits, his feet against the wall dangling a few inches from the floor. The man was wearing nothing but a pair of tight red briefs and one white sock. It was cold and clammy in the room and his thick chest hair was wet and matted. A bucket of water sat below his feet. His shoulders and clavicles rose to points well above his head, which hung limply, bushy black hair dripping wet. Two other men were leaning against the opposite wall, bored-looking young men in jeans and plain sweatshirts, with short haircuts, standing guard, laughing at a private joke.

  “Hey, fellas. You takin’ a break?”

  “We thought we should save you some. Guy’s an hour from being jerky.” One of the big guys walked over, got a tin cup out of the bucket, and threw water on the man’s face. His head rose slowly. Remy could see cuts on his cheeks and forehead and his lips, and guessed it was salt water they’d thrown on him. The man looked around wildly, his eyes finally settling on Remy, who had to look down at the ground. Markham nodded to the two men in the room and they backed out, leaving just Remy, Markham, and the young Middle Eastern man hanging by his arms. Remy could hear steps in the hallway, then on the stairs leading back up top.

  Markham stepped up to the man. “Hey there, Assan. My name’s Doolittle.” He pointed at Remy. “And this is Poppins. Do you know why we’re here?”

  Assan just stared.

  “Because your name showed up on some checks, Assan. Some big checks.”

  “My brother asked me to write those checks. Years ago. I told the other guys—” Assan began.

  “The other guys? Those other guys are pansies, Assan. They can’t close the deal. Have you been in America long enough to know what happens when a used car dealer goes to get the manager to close the deal? Well, that’s us. We’re the closers. So what’s it gonna take to get you to drive off the lot today, huh?”

  “What?” Assan looked around wildly.

  “What’s it gonna take for me to get you down and pitch you overboard?”

  Assan shook his head no.

  “See, those other guys, Assan? They’re just interns. We’re the partners at the firm. They’re the JV. We’re the varsity.”

  “P-please…” Assan’s lips were caked with white scum. He spoke with a faint accent, falling a bit heavily on the consonants. “Please…I have done nothing wrong.” He struggled against the bar and fell back.

  “You hear that?” Markham turned to Remy. “Assan’s done nothing wrong.” He turned back to the man. “So what. You always tip fifteen percent, never cheat on your taxes, always pick up your litter? Is that what you mean, Assan?”

  Assan’s bottom lip quivered as he looked from one man to the other.

  “Are you some kind of police?”

  “No. We’re no kind of police.”

  Assan’s voice cracked. “This is wrong. I was taken…from my home. At night. I have not been charged. This is…not right. It is illegal. I demand to speak to a lawyer.”

  “I’m a lawyer,” Markham said. “He’s a lawyer. The guys you were playin’ with before? Lawyers. Captain of the ship is a lawyer. Hell, everyone in America is a lawyer, Assan. I’d have thought you’d know that by now.”

  He struggled on the bar.

  “I’ll tell you what, Assan. The next civil rights lawyer I see on this boat I’m going to send in here. Okay? Now…why don’t you tell me why your name shows up on checks to Bishir Madain?”

  “I have…” Assan’s cracked lips slid back over bright teeth, his head fell forward and he began crying, like a child. “…explained…my brother is in Saudi Arabia. He used to raise money for Islamic studies. He worked with Bishir on a program with exchange students.”

  “I don’t care about that, Assan.” Markham got closer, until his voice was hardly more than a whisper. “I care about one question. Answer one question and it gets better. Where is Bishir?”

  “I told them…I do not know where Bishir is.”

  “You haven’t told me, Assan.”

  He looked up, took short, shallow breaths, and said: “I have no idea where Bishir is. I promise you! He is my brother’s friend. I have not seen him in more than a year. I swear it. Now, please!”

  Markham turned to Remy. “Wow. That’s pretty convincing. What do you think, pardner? Is Assan telling the truth?”

  Remy felt the boat lurch and then fall back. His mouth tasted like salt and bile. He tried to say something, but there was nothing.

  Suddenly Assan struggled against the bar, his feet running in place, his head swinging back and forth. After this burst, he roared at the ceiling: “There are laws!”

  “True enough.” Markham nodded to the stern of the ship. “Two hundre
d yards west of here, anyway. But out here—”

  Assan’s head fell again.

  There was a knock on the door. Markham stepped away from the prisoner and listened as one of the guys whispered something in his ear. Then Markham approached Remy, walking like John Wayne. “What do you think, pardner?”

  “I don’t believe this,” Remy said. “We can’t do this…”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s sloppy. My apologies. I’m gonna go up deck and find out if this asshole said anything useful before. I’ll be right back. You watch him.”

  Remy watched Markham open the white metal door and listened to his footfalls in the hallway outside and on the steps leading back above deck. The walls seemed to leach salt. Finally, Remy moved.

  Assan’s skin was cold and clammy. “Come on,” Remy whispered. He lifted the man off the bar and lowered him to the ground, removed his own jacket and put it around Assan’s shoulders. “You’re going to be okay.” The man stunk like urine and sweat.

  Assan lay in a pile on the floor, his back shuddering as he cried. His hands were bound with a zip-tie. Remy found a pocketknife in his front pants pocket and cut the plastic off his wrists. Assan opened and closed his fists.

  “Thank you—” Assan began.

  “We have to go fast,” Remy said. “Come on.”

  He draped Assan’s arm over his shoulder and pulled the smaller man through the door, edging sideways down the hallway. When they reached the stairs Remy peered up, but he didn’t see Markham or the other two. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do once they got above deck. He didn’t think he had a weapon. He patted himself down—nothing but the pocketknife. “Wait here,” he whispered to Assan.

  It was dark now, the night sky lit with stars and a three-quarter moon. Remy emerged from below deck and looked around. He counted four silhouetted heads in the pilothouse, and guessed they wouldn’t be able to see out into the dark. He reached back and grabbed Assan by the armpits. He winced again as Remy lifted him through the opening. The air was cool and briny. They crept along the deck, with the creak of the tight, wet planks beneath them and the smack of small waves against the side, until they reached the rope ladder, still slung over the stern of the ship. Remy looked down. Chuck, the pilot of the cabin cruiser, was sitting on the back of his chair, working another cigar. “Follow me!” Remy whispered to Assan, and began lowering himself over the edge of the freighter.

  “Where’s Shawn?” the pilot of the cabin cruiser asked Remy when he’d dropped down into the smaller boat.

  “He’s gonna stay a while. He wants us to take this guy back to shore.”

  “Doesn’t the guy have any clothes?”

  “He fell overboard,” Remy said. “They’re all wet.”

  If the pilot registered the strangeness of this he didn’t show it. “Am I supposed to come back for Markham?” he asked.

  “First thing tomorrow morning,” Remy said. “They’re having a party.”

  The pilot stared at Remy for a long time before shrugging. “Okay.”

  Remy helped Assan down the last steps of the rope ladder and then pushed him down onto the floor of the boat and covered him with the jacket.

  He pushed off and they drifted away. The smaller boat started with a lurch, and soon they were speeding off. Remy looked over his shoulder. He could see the men still in the wheelhouse of the bigger ship, apparently looking the other way. Only now did Remy notice how quickly his heart was beating, how short were his breaths.

  Remy crouched down on the floor of boat. Assan was sobbing. He rearranged his jacket on the shaking man.

  “It’s okay,” Remy said. “You’re gonna be okay.”

  Assan grabbed his wrist. “Listen to me. I don’t know where Bishir is. I swear. You’ve got to tell them. I barely knew him…in his dress and speech, he is very…American.” Assan shrugged. “I hadn’t heard from Bishir until maybe two years ago, when he suddenly contacted me.”

  Remy’s voice was hoarse over the churn of the boat motor. “What did he want?”

  “He had gotten my name from Kamal. He was raising money for charity from American Muslims. He wanted me to donate.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. A little. I told the men on the boat this. But I have not spoken to Bishir since that day. I swear it.” The boat jumped against the edge of some bigger swells and the pilot turned to angle across the chop. Remy stood and looked back over his shoulder, but he could see nothing in the dark. Not even the lights from the larger ship. He lowered himself to the deck to talk to Assan again. He caught the man’s imploring black eyes.

  “The thing about Bishir—” Assan chewed his bottom lip.

  “What?” Remy asked.

  “I don’t want to get my brother in trouble…he and Bishir shared a fondness…for American women. Especially Bishir. More than his family, more than anything, I think sometimes, he liked these women. Kamal said he had a name for them…”

  “What?” Remy asked.

  “Vines.”

  “Vines?”

  Assan looked embarrassed. “Tarzan, yes? You know the movies? Bishir said that a man in America could swing from vine to vine here without ever touching earth.”

  “Is that where you think he is…with one of these vines?”

  Assan rubbed his temple. “I remember my brother once stayed with one of Bishir’s women. In Virginia. Near Charlottesville. A divorced woman. Very wealthy. Bishir considered marrying her at one point. He would stray with other women and then come back to her. He was seeing a young woman in New York—”

  “March Selios,” Remy muttered.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Kamal told me that Bishir genuinely cared for this woman, but that the woman in Virginia had a great deal of money, and when he got bored he would always return to her.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  “Herote.” Assan spelled it. “I don’t know her first name.” Remy put his hand in his coat pocket. There was a pen right next to the pocketknife; he tried not to dwell on the significance. He pulled out the pen and wrote on his hand: “Herote. Virginia.”

  The air was cold now and Assan was shaking harder. Remy put his hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.” He lifted his head to look forward through the windshield of the cabin cruiser, to see if he could spot the shoreline. Instead, bobbing three hundred feet away, he saw the cabin lights of a ship.

  As the cabin cruiser slowed, Assan lifted his head and cried out when he saw what Remy was staring at: the ship they had just left. Markham was standing halfway down the rope ladder, his arm hooked in it, smiling. The other two men were leaning over the side of the boat, holding bottles of beer.

  Assan slumped back to the floor and began crying.

  The cabin cruiser slowed and pulled up next to the ship. Markham lowered himself the rest of the way and plopped down on the floor of the smaller boat. “How was your ride, Assan? Did you get some fresh air?”

  Markham fastened another pair of plastic zip-ties on Assan’s wrists, pulling them tight and cuffing the man’s hands in front of himself. A rope was lowered from the ship and Markham looped it around the cuffs, tied it, and then tugged on the rope. Assan was jerked from the boat, his arms above him, dangling like he was being hanged.

  Remy rubbed his eyes. He would have liked to be more surprised. He watched as Assan was pulled up, banging against the ship, and then finally slipped over its side onto the deck like a huge fish.

  “You’re right,” the driver said to Markham. “This guy is good.” He looked at Remy with something between respect and fear. “Scary good. He had me convinced.”

  “So…you get anything?” Markham asked.

  Remy felt sick. He showed Markham the writing on his hand: Herote. Virginia.

  “So Assan was holding out on us.” Markham bowed in front of him in worship. “I was dubious, but damn if that didn’t go just like you said it would.”

  “Is he gonna be okay?” Remy asked.
>
  “Oh, sure,” Markham said.

  “I’m serious. You need to let him go.”

  “Of course,” said Markham. Then he smiled and turned back for the rope ladder. Remy slumped down in the seat on the cabin cruiser. The pilot offered him another Cuban cigar, and this time Remy took it. He leaned back, closed his eyes and listened to the waves lapping against the side of the boat, and even though he wished as hard as he could, for once, time was still.

  PART TWO

  Everything Fades

  APRIL STARED DOWN AT HIM, eyes flitting over his forehead, and then drifting down to his chin, back up to his eyes and down again, as if she were measuring each feature of his face, comparing it to some face in her memory. But there was an expectant look in her eyes, too, and he saw that she was waiting for the answer to a question. This happened sometimes now—people waited for answers to questions he didn’t recall them asking—and he struck his contemplative pose. “Hmm,” Remy said.