The Catch: A Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  The taxi driver muttered words that couldn’t have been polite in any language, and Munroe thumbed toward the van. “What is that?” she said.

  “Matatu,” the driver said, and for his tone might as well have lifted a shoe to reveal dog crap. “They are crazy.”

  There were more minivans at irregular intervals, packed beyond capacity, sometimes with the side door slid wide and a man or two hanging from the opening, sometimes at the edge of the road while people got on and off. Different name here, and maybe a bit more ostentatious than what she’d seen elsewhere, but the concept was the same all over Africa: Privately owned vehicles pumped the lifeblood of humanity within the cities, filling the gaps in public transportation, plying the routes without a schedule, departing only when full and, if they had space—and sometimes when they didn’t—picking up anyone who flagged them down along the way. The faster they drove, the more people they shoved into the seats, the more money they took in, which made safety the last priority.

  The taxi driver took Munroe all the way to Mombasa proper, past five-star establishments and hovels off the side of the road, while woodsmoke and diesel exhaust blew in through the open windows. They continued across the Nyali Bridge to the island itself, Kenya’s version of Manhattan, bypassing the thickest of downtown, traversing sections of the city that changed scenery one street to the next, single-story storefronts, restaurants and multistory office buildings, petrol stations and car showrooms, large private homes hidden behind compound walls and thatch-roofed shacks. With the exception of the poorest of the places, every compound, every store, every building had an askari or two or three. Some were in uniform, some not, but their role was unmistakable.

  If there were private medical facilities closer to where they’d started, the driver had bypassed them, taking her to the south center of the island to the Aga Khan Hospital, which from the street side of the compound appeared to be more of an oversize block-shaped house than anything medical and only grew to clinic proportions once they were inside the compound walls.

  An orderly and two nurses came to Munroe’s aid; quick questions were asked in the face of the emergency she presented, and they whisked the captain away. In the tacit agreement of the continent, the color of Munroe’s skin, of the captain’s skin, had allowed them entry before the talk of money.

  Racism in the West had nothing on racism within sub-Saharan Africa, where prejudice against color was perpetrated at every walk of life against those a shade darker. In the worst of times lighter skin created targets and victims, but in the routine of everyday life, through minute reactions and a million assumptions, it opened doors, brought better treatment, and accorded privilege for no other reason than a collective unconcealed prejudice that valued a person based on his or her melanin levels.

  Munroe filled out paperwork, paid a deposit for the captain’s first day of stay, and asked for help in locating a cell phone provider, and with the information scribbled on a piece of paper and stuffed in a pocket, she sat in the waiting area, eyes closed and dozing, until the doctor came to find her.

  His last name was Patel, probably early thirties—not much older than she—and in a lie that bordered the truth, Munroe explained the circumstances that had brought her here and added to them fabricated secondhand reports of the captain’s violence and volatility and the suggestion that if he should start to come around, for the safety of everyone, it would be better to sedate him and then call her. The doctor took notes and didn’t seem inclined to argue, and she could only hope that in her desire to keep the captain under control until she figured out what to do with him, she hadn’t gone overboard in her description of his mania.

  CHAPTER 11

  It was after eight by the time Munroe stepped back out into the coastal air and she breathed in the night with its musk of rotting verdure and the exhilaration of having at last rid herself of obligations.

  Sami was on the sand by the base of the pier, and with him were the two men who’d helped carry the captain earlier. Even though the conversation was in Swahili, they stopped talking when she approached. She nodded hello and asked Sami away, led him down the pier beyond prying eyes and paid him for his work for the day and, because she liked him, added an extra thousand shillings, then stayed with the boat so that he could find a hot meal.

  He returned some forty-five minutes later, same friends in tow, all of them a little louder, a little drunker—most likely courtesy of Sami’s newfound wealth—and with the boat back under watch, Munroe walked the return to the hotel, showered, and collapsed.

  THREE HOURS OF sleep, just after midnight, and she woke to the noise of her neighbors in the hallway either returning from or heading off to something that required far more cheer and laughter than the hour warranted, noise echoing off tiled floors and high flat ceilings. Music and the party atmosphere of the tropics also seeped in from beyond the glass porch door, making it pointless to try to sleep again, so Munroe left her room for the front, where she could use the international line in the business center to make another call to Amber Marie.

  The phone rang only once before Amber picked up, and her voice had a disjointed breathless quality to it, as if she’d jolted out of hard-earned rest only to plunge back into the nightmare she wished were a dream.

  “Have you found out anything about K&R on the Favorita?” Munroe said.

  “I’ve spent so much time trying to get answers and I’m still not sure, but from everything I’ve gathered, I think there’s no policy.” Amber’s voice caught and she took a few slow breaths. “I’ve been to the port several times to talk to the agent,” she said, “had to pay him to give me the name of the charterer, and finally tracked them down in Germany, but the ship seems to be owned by a shell company and if anybody at the charterer knows who the principals are, they’re not telling. I can’t dig any further from where I am and that’s where the trail to the owners ends.”

  “Have you been watching for Internet news?”

  “Yes,” Amber whispered. “Haven’t found anything, and I’ve got feelers out with some of the other maritime protection agencies, but nothing yet. I’m going to keep bugging. Eventually someone, somewhere, is going to know something and at least we’ll find out where the ship ended up and we can start from there.”

  “Have you checked into the AIS?”

  “I can’t find anything there either. It’s like the ship has disappeared.”

  The AIS was puzzling. Large vessels were equipped with the Maritime Automatic Identification System, transponders that transmitted position, and although it was primarily used as a way to avoid collisions, it was also a tool anyone could use to track any particular ship’s speed and course and coordinates at any given time. For the sake of ship security, most interactive maps didn’t display vessels in pirate waters, but that the ship couldn’t be located at all was something different—and it was hard to imagine that a ship the size of the Favorita hadn’t been fitted with a transponder.

  Although Amber hid them well, Munroe could hear the tears, the agony, the nightmare of having been cut off from someone she loved with no way to know where he was, if he was alive, or what would happen to him if he was ever found. She had lived it herself less than a year back.

  Compassion swirled in a beaker of conflict.

  Paraphrased words from the Book tumbled inside Munroe’s head, scripture committed to memory as a child to please a father who could never be pleased: If a sister be destitute of daily food and you say be warmed and filled, but give not those things which are needful, what does it profit?

  Leo’s betrayal and stupidity still stung, and time away from him only hardened her anger. After what he’d done it was not a small thing to offer a little assistance, but this wasn’t for Leo. “I’ll see if I can find anything from down here,” Munroe said. “Give me a day or two.”

  “Thank you,” Amber said, though the words were rote and tinged with hopelessness. Unwilling to drag the conversation out, Munroe hung up and then stared at
the phone. Clenched and unclenched her fists, squeezing away death and responsibility.

  Indeed. What did it profit?

  Depending on how hard and how long she tracked this path, she would inevitably pick up clues to the mystery of the Favorita, and then what? Given that Amber Marie would never be able to ransom the crew, to find the Favorita and do nothing more was, perhaps, worse than never looking in the first place.

  Now was not too late to walk away. Munroe had the captain off her hands. The Aga Khan Hospital had a charity arm and so was possibly the best place she could have brought him to abandon him. She could give Sami the boat and catch a plane out of Kenya tomorrow. To where, though? Back to Dallas? To do what? Pick up where she’d left off—as if that were even possible?

  Purposelessness was madness.

  The pictures tucked away in her vest pocket returned, those images together with Miles Bradford during happier times. Had the roles been reversed, if he had been trapped on the Favorita right now, she would move heaven and hell to find him and wouldn’t stop until every person responsible for his capture was dead.

  Munroe picked up the phone to dial again and her finger, trembling slightly, rested above the touchpad. She replaced the handset. Drew in air to calm her heartbeat and then, in a movement quick enough that she didn’t have time to think it through and change her mind, punched in the numbers for Capstone Security. It was 1:00 A.M. Mombasa time, 5:00 P.M. Dallas time, just on the outer edge of business hours, assuming someone was in the office to man the phones.

  When the line connected, a woman answered, and Munroe recognized the voice though she hadn’t expected to hear it.

  “Sam?” she said. “This is Michael.”

  Samantha Walker had once been a vivacious bombshell of a sniper, had been one of Miles Bradford’s closest allies, and had nearly been killed in an attack on Capstone’s facility. Shrapnel had taken her spleen, part of her liver, twenty feet of intestines, and forced her into months of physical therapy. Bradford’s best friend had died in the same blast, and Samantha was lucky that the worst of her damage was the scars and permanent limp. That explosion had taken lives, changed lives, changed everything, really, and were it not for Munroe, it never would have happened.

  “It’s been a long time,” Sam said, tone friendly enough, but there was an undercurrent that cut like knife to skin and told Munroe what the blogs and Internet breadcrumbs never could. “We weren’t sure if you were still alive.”

  “Still alive and swimming hard,” Munroe said. “Is Miles around?”

  “He’s on assignment,” Sam said, and left it at that. Didn’t offer any indication of where, though Munroe already knew, and made no suggestion to patch him in, though Munroe knew she could.

  “Would you tell him I called?”

  “Sure,” Sam said, “I’ll tell him.” But where she normally would have asked if Munroe wanted to leave a message or if there was a number where Bradford could get back to her, there was only empty silence.

  Munroe put down the receiver, nausea mixing with heartache. At least in Samantha, Bradford would find someone stable, someone whose nightmares didn’t make her try to kill him in her sleep, who didn’t feel the driving urge to take off for developing countries every time things got quiet. She was happy for him. For them. And she had her answer now, even if it wasn’t the one she wanted.

  What did it profit?

  Better to start work tomorrow cutting the trail that would lead her to the Favorita and give Amber the gift of possibly saving Leo, if he was still alive to be saved, than to wander aimless and homeless while turmoil devoured her from the inside. There was peace in the compartmentalization of shutting down, in switching off emotion, and for the first time in a long time Munroe slept beyond sunrise.

  MUNROE REACHED SAMI at noon; found him sleeping beneath the tarp and let him be. Headed back up between the hotel and the bordering houses, up the same dirt alley they’d used to carry the captain to the ocean highway, and at the weed-eaten and eroded edge of the road she approached the first woman she came upon and in childish and broken Swahili asked where to wait for a matatu to the city.

  The woman beamed a smile at Munroe’s botched attempt to communicate. She raised a hand to steady the overladen pot nestled upon a rag rolled atop her head and shifted the baby carried in a sling on her back. Motioned up the road to a bright red building with a high thatched rooftop, a restaurant it seemed, and in English replied, “You stay there, he come.”

  The wait wasn’t long, and with two others who lingered at the spot, Munroe climbed into a lime green van named SPHINX EYES. She scooted bent-over and sideways along a narrow walking space and squeezed into the second bench from the rear as the others squished in behind her. There was no air, albeit plenty of smell. The matatu operated on a pay-as-you-go system, in which everyone seemed to know the price and clunked change into the tout’s hand as bodies, bowed, climbing over laps and belongings, squeezed in and out of the van at irregular intervals.

  Munroe watched. Counted. And when the van came to a final stop in the midst of a potholed and mud-spattered lot somewhere still on the outskirts of town, she got off with the remaining passengers and handed the tout her coins.

  Another woman pointed her to a second ride, and Munroe climbed into a nearly full van with a tumult of words and voices trailing behind her. Mzungu was the one most often repeated, one she would have understood even without the patterns and comprehension picking up faster now; the same mocking whisper that followed her any time she submerged into local cultures on the continent: white person.

  MUNROE STEPPED OFF the matatu somewhere along the north end of Moi Avenue, a main artery that ran through the center of Mombasa. Far up and down both sides of the multilane thoroughfare, cars, trucks, bicycles, hand-drawn carts, city buses, and matatus juggled for road share in the clog of diesel fume and dust, all part of the vibrant chaos that made Africa’s big cities what they were.

  The sidewalks, cracked and littered, were a slow rush of pedestrian bustle, and Munroe oriented herself to the rough map she’d drawn on her palm, followed the lines and got lost several times, which she expected and which was part of the process of breathing in the ambience, the sounds, the heartbeat, of a new location.

  She paused on a corner to get her bearings and a young girl, three or four years old, held her hands up, begging for coins, saying jambo, jambo in the high-pitched voice of toddlerhood. Munroe shook her head and the little one pestered her for a block at least and Munroe fought the urge to look back, to see which adult kept track of the child; it would only make her angry. Street children were endemic Africa-wide, the young ones often put out to beg by their parents or relatives though a few were orphans, all of them drawn to the tourists, easy marks in their softheartedness and unwitting propagators of the blight in their giving.

  There were nonprofits that worked exhaustively to get kids off the streets, housed them, educated them, clothed them, but the street was an addiction hard to shake with its easy money, glue sniffing, and freedom from rules. Most returned to begging, and eventually as they grew older and their cuteness wore off, to lives of hard crime, prostitution, and early death: Like everything else in Africa, there were no easy answers and no easy fixes.

  On Digo Road Munroe found the Safaricom shop, a branch of one of Kenya’s largest telecom carriers. She purchased the cheapest phone available and set up and paid for a noncontract account. First call was to the Aga Khan Hospital and Dr. Patel for an update on the captain.

  “He’s showing signs of responsiveness,” the doctor said.

  “He’s lucid?”

  “Not with words, but his eyes follow movement and he responds to voice prompts.”

  “You think he’ll pull out of it completely?”

  “It’s highly likely.”

  Munroe lingered over the answer, strategized over the possibilities and the dilemma they forced her into. There were things the captain could tell her, answers she wanted for Amber Marie, and she
needed him conversational to get them. Problem was, she could only get answers if he didn’t take off first, and there weren’t a lot of options to ensure that one didn’t happen before the other. She said, “I told you, he needs to be sedated.”

  “At this stage, I don’t feel the need,” the doctor said. “There are signs of agitation, but that’s normal in his condition. There’s nothing of the violence you mentioned.”

  “Put it this way,” she said. Paused, and chose her words for highest impact. “As long as your patient remains sedated, I’ll continue to pay for his bed and medical expenses. If you choose not to keep him sleeping, then chances are when he is fully awake and when no one is watching, he’ll get up and walk out of your clinic. If he does that, I refuse to foot the bill for his stay. What’s more, if he doesn’t fully recover, it will fall on your shoulders to turn him out of your clinic. It’s your decision, but it seems to me sedation would be the simplest for everyone.”

  There was a long hesitation, then he said, “You are blackmailing me?” and in the gaps between his syllables she could hear the bewilderment and frustration.

  “Just making a request.”

  “This is not a request you make.”

  “It’s very much a request,” she said. “Let me know what you decide.”

  The doctor was silent for another space and then there followed a discussion in the background, something between him and the front desk that lasted a minute or two. “All right,” he said finally. “I will keep the patient under mild sedation for the next seventy-two hours while he continues to recover, but you need to pay the fee for his entire stay in advance.”

  “I’ll be there this evening,” she said, and flipped the phone closed.

  Seventy-two hours to sort out the next step.

  THE SOMALI MARKET was on Nehru Road, a potholed street in which stagnant muddy water filled what asphalt didn’t, a street vibrant with color and chaos, where cars came and went at an impatient crawl, and people and porters crossed between them at will and without regard for the rules of the road, slowing traffic down further. In both directions tailors and merchant shops hid behind glass doors and windows that could barely be seen for the collection of wares displayed on the sidewalks in front of them, mixed among and sandwiched between open-front bodega-style stores, with products stacked up the walls, each establishment brandishing a specialty of sorts: expensively priced cheap electronics, used and new clothing in bright, almost neon colors, piles of hats or handbags or trinkets in cheap plastic sheaths, all inevitably imported from China, laid out on make-do wooden tables or under umbrellas, or draped over vehicle hoods and sometimes spread out on burlap between parked cars on the street itself.