“Yeah, I liked him too.”
“This is incredible,” she said. “I suppose you ‘liked’ the roommate, and the girl.”
“The roommate was a smartass,” Lindbergh said. “Baton Rouge was different. She was good-looking and had nice manners, but there was no other way.”
McIntosh started to get up.
“Sit down.”
“What are you going to do, blow up the restaurant?”
“Sit down.” He waited until she settled back in her seat. “Freddy Song liked the Soubliks,” he said. “He kept talking about the sister, and coming clean. Offering them a settlement. Is that an option?”
“No.”
“Thank you. Same with Ann Arbor and Baton Rouge. You’ve seen the letters Soublik wrote. He was starting to wonder what was going on.”
“You know nothing about it.”
“Whatever it is, I have an investment to protect,” he said. “How much GENE 2 stock do you own?”
“None,” she said. “That would be insider trading.”
“I bought some on Freddy’s advice. I liked him. You’re right, he was a smart, loyal kid. But when you hire someone like me, you know what you’re buying. Otherwise, you wouldn’t do it, so don’t patronize me, or say you’re disgusted. Like Freddy, I learn fast and can take criticism. You can check that with Bernie Slatkin and half a dozen other references on my resume. I have one because the people in gaming require it. I don’t smoke, I drink only wine with meals. And you can test my urine any day of the week, because I don’t handle drugs well. They make me erratic. Which is bad for business, whatever kind you’re in.”
Lindbergh sipped his coffee, set it down and again looked at her.
“It’s pretty simple, Ms. McIntosh. The people in gaming, the work, it’s something you grow out of. I always wanted a straight-ahead type life. That’s why I went for Bureau training. When it didn’t happen, I needed work. Things for me more or less moved in steps. I’ve learned a lot, and I see this situation as an opportunity. I don’t know you, but I bet you act when you have to. That’s what I did with your problem.”
“What gave you the idea there was any place at Neff—”
“You did,” he said. “By hiring me. During this assignment I learned about fast tracks and mentoring. Benefits, retirement. When I got here this morning, I checked out the directory at Neff. I went up to level ten, Corporate Security. Your building safety is completely porous. Zero. None of you must be watching the news.”
He held her gaze a moment before continuing.
“You give me a shot in that department, you won’t be sorry. I’m not looking for breaks or special treatment. Holding the Brenda Contay report is just a lever. The way anyone uses contacts or friends. Useful information. You don’t know if anyone else is with me, so you can’t be sure a call to Reno would solve your problem. Reno would do what you want, because they need access to legitimate interests. As they say in the movies, nothing personal, just business. But what would follow you can’t be sure of.”
Hands splayed on the table, Lindbergh leaned back in his seat. “So, that’s my lever, the original report on Brenda Contay. But if you give me a fair chance with Neff, you won’t regret it. Call Bernie, he’ll verify what I’m saying. I have good work habits. I show up on time, and I don’t call in sick.”
Their salads came. When he offered her the butter, McIntosh shook her head. Lindbergh spread some on his roll. Before her death, his mother had managed an apartment complex in Bayonne. She hadn’t liked to cook, but had taught him table manners at the restaurants her boyfriends took them to. The super at the complex had also taught him useful lessons, mostly to do with electrical wiring in the units, plumbing. In Reno, he’d taken up golf and now shot in the low 80s.
“This Brenda Contay,” he said, forking salad. “She’ll give you trouble.”
“How can you know that?”
“I read Freddy’s report, and her press pack. Wherever she’s gone, it isn’t for kicks. I figure she and Soublik were an item in college. She had a lot of guys. She goes to dinner, learns he’s dead, and takes off. Freddy didn’t tell me, but I figure it’s where Soublik died. Some island called Pirim. GENE 2 must be involved there. I read the annual report, so I assume this Peace Corps Volunteer got in the way.”
McIntosh put her fork down. She drank her coffee, regarding him.
It was going well, and Lindbergh looked straight at her. “You do a lot of biotech research,” he said. “Drugs, veterinary medicine, pest management. The annual report mentions ‘offshore sites.’ My guess is, she went to one of those. Unless you have a lot of control there, she stands a good chance of learning something you don’t need press on. Look at the crap she does for her station. This is her bag. You may be covered legally, but that’s not going to cut it. Not with her.”
“What would you do?” McIntosh used her napkin. “Or is that a pointless question?”
“Don’t insult me,” he said. “It’s bad for communication. How’s your information?”
“Poor. Our last contact was last week. We have people and control. We know where she is, but not what she knows or is doing. Our contact hasn’t reported in since last Thursday.”
“Is this person reliable?”
“Very.”
“Male?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“You have her press pack, she’s good-looking. She might take your guy on her motorcycle.”
“Believe me, the person in question is very loyal. His career is on the line, no chippy from some local affiliate is going to compromise—” McIntosh took a breath and sat back, staring at him without seeing. Her face was red, pale cheeks mottled. After a moment, she refocused and took up her fork.
“Fine,” he said. “That’s good. Gamblers are different, very susceptible.”
“What’s at stake is global,” she said. “Crucial. It has medical implications of enormous scope. Not to mention political dimensions this country cannot afford to see damaged.”
“Okay.”
“I would do anything to prevent that happening.”
Lindbergh nodded and buttered the other half of his roll. You’re in, he thought. He waved to the waitress, and pointed to his coffee cup.
The ship was rudderless, but its fuel and water tanks had been filled in Pohnpei. On the second night, Ehrlich turned on the running lights. “Not to worry,” he said. “Moser radioed, by now they’re looking for us.” He brought up the working lights from the engine room, and strung them amidships from the winch. He and Brenda drank lots of water and took salt tablets.
She remembered travelogues about Arab nomads—Bedouins—dressing in layers to keep from drying out. She tried to do this with Vince’s now-filthy white shirt and the sweater. Ehrlich was more careless, and kept rinsing off in the shower room. Brenda was sure he was trying to wash his conscience.
Within twenty-four hours of eating the raw fish, she could not think of anything but food. Every waking thought concerned eating. Jets passed several times a day, silver slivers six miles up. As the engines crumbled and died at the horizon, she imagined the passengers eating and turned inward. For stretches she forgot about Ehrlich, even where she was.
She dreamed about her family. They were all on Cape Cod, where they’d vacationed each summer. She was ten or eleven, and kept going over to eat boiled shrimp off her smiling father’s paper plate. As he had in life, he let her sip his wonderfully cold beer and steal the shrimp spiced with sauce.
◆◆◆◆◆
After the second day, they fell into a routine. Ehrlich stayed in the wheelhouse or sat on the roof. Brenda lay under the deck tarp or in her cabin.
She became convinced too much time had passed. Moser was dead—or, he and the islanders had decided to say nothing. She was always dizzy now, gasping every time she came up from having the shits. Ehrlich had them, too, but he kept climbing back up on the wheelhouse roof, turning himself at intervals, looking out under his cap unti
l it blew away. He burned the palms of his hands.
There were periods of swells when the trawler pitched and rolled, but mostly the sea lay flat. The rain came in solid sheets. Several times during short squalls, the ship wasn’t on the water to her, but falling with the rain. The worst periods came when the sky cleared, pure blue and cloudless, making every surface burn. At such times Brenda considered jumping into all that cold water, being done with it.
On the fourth day, she saw Ehrlich coming up from the toilet, boat shoes scuffing, breathing hard. His arms were shredded, blistered from all that macho staring out from the roof.
“You’re being stupid,” she called. “Stay out of the sun. Tell me about your love life.” Anything to not think of food.
Ehrlich held onto the stair railing, considering her request, then lurched over.
“We have to talk about something,” she said. “What is she, a CPA? Lady lawyer?”
He bent down and crawled into the tarp’s shade, breathing hard. It had just rained, and steam rose off the deck behind him. Brenda had brought up saucepans of water from the galley. He drank from one.
“Takes time,” he said. “They check quadrants. Very systematic. Check an area, cross it off, check another.”
Why tell him he was wrong? “Your girl. What’s her name?”
“Laura.”
“Italian?”
He rolled onto his back, still breathing hard. “I must’ve told you.”
“A guess. From your clothes.”
He didn’t understand.
“Your new look,” she tried again. “Italian. The suit. The silk shirts.”
Against his will, Robert Ehrlich smiled.
“She told you to get with it,” Brenda said. “‘Loosen up’, she told you. ‘Forget Ralph Lauren and all those polos. You’re an uptight guy, I’ll teach you to dance.’”
Face cracked and peeling, Erhlich’s smile broadened. He stared up at the canvas, remembering some moment. “Good guess,” he said.
“How’d you meet?”
“Washington. A company party. Everyone working on the FDA approval plan. Her family’s in catering. They did the party.”
“Restaurant people? Please, Bob, don’t talk—”
“The best stuffed shells. Veal like I never tasted. She was really good. Efficient. Planned the whole thing. In the ballroom at the Willard. They make their own wine. Her family has contacts in Sonoma Valley.”
“Engaged?” She had to get him off food.
He shook his head, staring into the memory. “After this.”
His wistful face made her feel sorry for him. A young, humorless company man who had found someone. It was too bad. The girl would never be able to finish fattening up his undernourished soul.
“Tell me about your family. Where are you from?”
“Flagstaff.”
“Brothers or sisters?”
“One sister.”
She waited, eyes closed, and heard him moving. She peeked and watched him shuffle to the stairs and up to his roof perch. Something must have set him off. In those seconds, Ehrlich had changed and needed to get away.
◆◆◆◆◆
Soon after, the order of things began to go.
When the salt tablets were gone, Brenda began forgetting to drink water. Terrible waves of depression swept over her, and she started vomiting—racking, painful dry heaves. She was eating herself alive; first fat, then muscle, and last the inner organs. It was just like Moser’s wasps. He had told her that when wasps hatched inside the belly of a worm, they fed off the host, but saved the vital organs for last, to keep their food supply alive. She felt herself shrinking, and knew she was now dying. Not of starvation, but dehydration. Exposure.
The acid-base balance in her body shifted. With the loss of potassium, she recognized an irregular heartbeat, her body’s attempt to correct the chemical imbalance. Her urine changed, the little there was a heavy, dark yellow. She was conserving water. Then she stopped peeing.
Ehrlich grew too weak to climb up to the wheelhouse roof and stayed in the chart room. She wondered if he had cast himself in a play. His part seemed to require him to memorize meaningless data and destroy the documents. On the breeze, she would hear mumbling, then see yellow legal sheets floating off the stern. Having a mission seemed to help him.
At dusk on the seventh day, when she came on deck for the cooler night air, Brenda noticed more pages floating. The bilge pump turned on, water splashed. Spreading slowly from the stern as the sun’s fireball neared the horizon, the leaking diesel fuel now fanned out behind the drifting ship. She blinked through crusted eyes, shivering as the trawler’s plates creaked.
This is not the way to go, she thought. Not like this.
She pushed off the railing and shuffled to the wheelhouse stairs. “Ehrlich!” she called. “Get down here! I need help!”
More than a minute passed before he appeared in the opening. He leaned against the open door and stared a moment, then turned away.
“Don’t quit on me, get down here!”
He stopped and turned back.
“Come on, I want to try something.”
After a moment he edged to the stairs, gripped the handrail and began working his way down. He moved like a cripple. Halfway down he sat heavily and hung his head, panting. Gripping the handrail, Brenda dragged herself up stair by stair, then sat on the step below him, panting.
“The leak,” she said, catching her breath. “The fuel tank. There’s a runoff valve. We can open it. Empty fuel in the bilge. The pump dumps it. We drift downwind and light it.”
“Never work.”
She had to do something. “Worth a try.”
He shook his head.
She looked at him—defeated, exhausted. “Yeah? Well, here’s the deal, Bob. Look at me.”
Breathing through his mouth, Ehrlich slowly raised his head until their eyes met. Brenda slapped him hard.
He jerked back, blinked and frowned. “Crazy,” he said. “You’re crazy.”
“Maybe. For sure I’m dying. So are you. So you’re going to help me. If you don’t, I’m going down to the galley and setting this thing on fire.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“No, that’s the deal. Come on, you aren’t busy.” She waited for him to stand, then led the way down.
In the engine room, they found the crowbar. Brenda angled it through one of the slots in the starboard fuel tank’s runoff valve. Ehrlich stepped next to her and the two hung from the steel bar until she felt it give. Re-slotting it, they turned the rusty valve. First a trickle, then a gush of diesel fuel flowed down through the steel grate, into the ship’s bilge.
When the bilge pump turned on, Brenda found a greasy rag and saturated it with fuel before they levered the valve shut. She dropped the rag in a bucket and ducked through the entry. Breathing hard, light-headed from the fumes, she lurched down the narrow passage to the galley. Inside, an old rag mop rested in the corner. She handed the bucket to Ehrlich.
“Are the lights on up there?”
He looked more focused now. “They’re on.”
“We need to see the fuel. Take the bucket up. When you see we’re clear of the slick, call down. Probably the diesel won’t light. But the water’s warm. That might make a difference.”
Brenda listened to him fumble along the passage and scuff up the stairs. She might be crazy, but wasn’t dead. Not yet. She turned on one of the stove’s burners and waited until Ehrlich yelled. She raised the mop over the burner and got it going, then worked her way back to the stairs with the torch. In the last twenty minutes, the sun had set.
“Hurry up, we’re drifting.”
Ehrlich was at the stern with the bucket, pointing. The string of bulbs rigged on the winch threw light about forty feet out into the dark ocean. “See it?”
She saw it and put the mop in the bucket. The fuel ignited, heavy smoke roiling up. Gingerly, she tipped the bucket over the mop, and the flaming rag fell out. All of it
afire, Brenda moved to the railing. She braced with the mop handle the way her father had taught her to cast for bluefish, and threw the torch.
The rag sailed into the dark, landing with a slap. For several seconds, only the rag burned. Then the thicker, floating diesel fuel caught. Like a giant manta ray, fire slowly flapped and crawled over the ocean’s surface. Thick smoke billowed, great mounds of it. Within minutes, a crescent-shaped blaze covered something like the area of a baseball infield. Soundless, orange and yellow, it undulated slowly as the ship drifted away.
“Look at the smoke,” she said. “We can do this during the day.”
Staring out, face cracked and blistered in the glow, Ehrlich said nothing.
The fuel burned steadily for twenty minutes before breaking into small patches. Like camp fires, the patches shrank from view as the ship drifted further away. Around midnight, Brenda repeated the process. The following morning, she dragged Ehrlich from the wheelhouse to gather towels for wrapping the mop handle.
Trips to and from the engine room left them gasping for air. They choked on smoke when the breeze shifted. It rained at midday. By late afternoon, Brenda knew Ehrlich would soon be too weak to help. The valve on the first tank she could now work by herself. She made him help her loosen the second.
Night came and went. Gathering strength under the tarp or in her cabin, she lost track of time, draining and lighting fuel before exhaustion took over. By the ninth day she was working alone. The string of lights had stopped functioning.
Up in the wheelhouse, Ehrlich had again turned on the tape deck. A loop of Japanese songs blared continuously from speakers fitted to the winch. He must hope someone would hear. Knowing he wanted to live gave Brenda strength to light more fuel.
The last thing she remembered was Ehrlich crying.
It was the tenth or eleventh day. She was in the cabin and heard him sobbing topside, asking his mother to forgive him for something. Brenda crawled off her bunk into the passageway. Heaving for breath, she sat on the bottom step, looked up and saw him at the top of the stairs. His shirt was gone, back covered with sores. He was hallucinating, about a sister in some institution.
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