The Destroyers

by Christopher Bollen

  “Only if that’s the case.”

  He smirks.

  “Charlie wouldn’t do that,” Adrian swears. “What would you say about me if I went missing? Excuses like I deserved it?”

  Rasym ignores him. “Look, I promise you, we’re going to find him. I’m sorry if I don’t seem sympathetic. My cousin just died. I’m doing everything I can here.”

  To be fair, someone had to step in and be the pillar to the crumbling house. Someone had to arrange the transport of the body and keep the worry from ransacking the valuables and the floor from caving in. I feel I’ve been too harsh on Rasym. Underneath the fledgling beard, the bruised, obedient forehead, and the calculating eyes is a tired and frightened pallbearer unsure of the weight he’s expected to carry. Is it one body or two?

  I move toward the door. “How’s Charlie’s father?”

  “We’ll find out soon,” Rasym grumbles. “Please keep his surgery today between us. All we need is more hysteria.” He gestures toward the bundled occupant of the sitting room.

  Adrian lets his feet drop from the railing. He reaches down for the hose and pulls the trigger on the sprayer, rinsing his chest and legs. Someone screams at the rooftop party. An important guest has arrived.

  “How can a whole side of a family go at once?” Adrian asks. “That quickly? A week ago they had everything, and it all blows to—”

  I step inside. Duck and Miles are no longer keeping Sonny company. I close the door, thankful that the blasting music will drown our voices out. Sonny is staring at the tea in her cup like it’s a phone screen.

  “They’re having a party next door,” I tell her. “Where did everyone go?”

  “Miles took Duck to the store.” She exhales with resolve. “He’s been a good friend, even if I do blame him for punching Charlie. Because if there hadn’t been that fight, if Miles had just walked away. . . .” She kicks the coffee table with her bare foot. “I told them they should go to the beach. I’d go too, but I’m afraid to leave. Afraid if I come back, my bags will be by the door. Rasym’s holding up very nicely, don’t you think? A real rock, huh?”

  I kneel down in front of her. “Where’s Louise?”

  “She left about an hour ago. Sorry I stole her from you.” She again attempts a smile, but it only drags the corners of her eyes down. “Sleeping alone on Charlie’s boat would have been too much for me. I actually spent most of the night up on deck. I didn’t want to go down into that hole with all of his things.”

  “Sonny, I think you should consider going to the police station and talking to the inspector. I know Rasym’s promised a private team, but if you filed a missing-person’s report he could start the search right away.”

  “Rasym promised me they’re hiring the best people.”

  “I’m sure they are, but they won’t get here for another couple of days. If Charlie’s injured”—still alive—“or in trouble, he needs to be found right now. We’ve already wasted too much time.”

  Sonny could mention that I was complicit in the days that passed without alarm, and it’s decent of her not to bring it up. But I can tell that my pleading on my knees isn’t getting through to her.

  “You haven’t been here long enough to realize that the island police are useless. Utterly useless. It will be twenty questions for twenty days, and they’d still only find him if he walked through Skala on fire.”

  “Inspector Martis is different. I trust him. All you have to do is explain that he’s not away on business. We know he isn’t. You know that, right?”

  “Rasym promised me they’d find him,” she repeats. What she won’t say induces the hopeless refrain. If there’s any chance that Charlie had something to do with Stefan’s death, the police are the last party she wants involved. She catches her breath after a minute of holding it. Terry slinks across the arm of the sofa and stops to lick its paw. I reach over to pet its head, and it bats its claws at me. It’s more demoralizing to be snubbed by an animal than by a human. It implies the fault lies in you—a rot at the core that predators with more heightened instincts detect. Terry jumps onto Sonny’s lap, but she doesn’t take any notice. Her eyes are on the atlas on the coffee table, pinned under the green Bible.

  “Anyway, it’s not so simple as that,” she says quietly. “I have to do it their way now. They have me in a corner.”

  “Who has you?”

  She lets the blanket slide from her shoulders, as if unwillingly giving herself up to the room. She’s dressed in muted, anorexic gray.

  “Rasym says, no matter what happens, I can still keep our house in Nicosia. And more than that, he’s agreed to front the money I need for Duck. Money for her father, really. Money so I can bring her back to Cyprus with me. So, you see, they have me. I don’t have a choice.” It’s one thing to be had on your terms, and quite another to be had on theirs. But I can’t blame Sonny for putting her daughter first. We both seem to be mourning the woman a few days ago who prided herself on being willing to lose it all.

  “But what about Charlie?” I need her to believe in his return in order for me to go on doubting it. Otherwise, the loss is too complete.

  “Rasym promised me they’re hiring the best people!” She tosses Terry onto the floor and sweeps her palms over her eyes. “You trust he’s going to do that, don’t you?” I set my face to twelve o’clock. Midnight. Noon.

  “Can you keep a secret?” she asks, reaching to clasp my hands. “Can you?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is something they don’t know. No one does. Remember the ring I was looking for, that diamond I left on Domitian? Charlie and I had a secret ceremony in Cairo last December. I’m honestly not even sure it would hold up legally. It probably wouldn’t. We did it on the spur of the moment, wore these white djellabas we bought at the market, and Charlie dredged up some Egyptian judge who recited an Arabic blessing. Charlie didn’t want his family to know. He was sure there’d be a big blowup. I never wore the ring in Cyprus. In fact, I never wore it off this island, which is why I didn’t take it with me to Paris. It wasn’t even supposed to count, except between us. Mostly, I was the one who said it didn’t count. But I swear, if it comes to it, if Rasym demands one more sacrifice or doesn’t follow through on his promises—” She clears her throat. “They’re going to find him. They’re sending professionals. He’s got to be somewhere. No one disappears forever. You can’t be deleted off the planet.”

  I can’t imagine even Charlie would be reckless enough to marry without a prenup, although back in December he probably didn’t have that much in his name. Still, if the ceremony is legal, Sonny stands to inherit far more than she did a day ago, and certainly more than what was in store if Stefan had his chance to speak. It flashes through me that Sonny might have tried to talk to Stefan, that she might have gone to see him to smooth things over or invited him up to the house. Stefan would have come willingly to anyone with information on his brother.

  “Sonny, you didn’t—”

  Her mouth widens, and her eyebrows arch. She lets go of my hand. She must have guessed what I’m thinking by the gravel in my voice.

  “Oh, not you too. Not the worst from you, along with all the others.”

  I reach for her, but she knocks my arm away, and marches to the staircase.

  “I’m on your side,” I tell her. “It might be smart for you to contact a lawyer.”

  She stares at me, with her mouth frozen in a circle of disdain. She’s seen herself as others see her. She’s watched people watch her—on screens, in photographs, in life. She’s an expert in gauging the reaction she makes. She puts her foot on the first step and pauses.

  “I haven’t known you long,” she says, “but it’s funny. You were on Charlie’s side until a few days ago. This morning Rasym said you were on his. Now you’re on mine. You always seem to end up on the side with the nicest view.”

  THE CHARTERS PORT is barren, except for a wandering donkey that stands by one of the iron-cradled boats, chewing the grasses that
spike around the unfinished hull. The grates are still pulled down and padlocked on the hangar, but a white yacht painted with a red K is moored against the dock. Pink vinyl buoys bob around it. There isn’t a soul on board. It must have been returned by one of the young captains, who promptly abandoned it along with the island. I have no doubt Ugur warned the crew that the game was up. I step onto its flybridge, examining the inert navigational equipment underneath a dry, water-stained windshield. One of the console buttons must release the trapdoor shell. The cabin contains no beach towels or guidebooks or any other indication of seafaring vacationers. It is one of Charlie’s Trojan horses.

  As I leap back onto the dock, I catch sight of a man and woman weaving along the shoreline. Their long, wet clothes are licorice black from the water. The man holds a toddler at his hip, and the woman has an orange life vest dangling from her arm. Their raft must be farther down the beach, or maybe they swam in from a boat at sea. They stop when they spot me, but their eyes are still running, scanning me and the hills and the long road inland. I wave with my arms raised high, making broad U’s and X’s. The man gathers the back of his child’s head, as if to indicate that whatever I want, I will not be taking their boy.

  I run toward them. I have nothing to offer, nothing but welcome, on an island that isn’t even mine.

  “Hello,” I say. “Welcome to Patmos.”

  The woman is heaving, her breasts expanding in her heavy cotton tunic. But she pulls a phone from a plastic bag, lifts it out in front of her, and takes a picture of herself. She turns around to document her husband and son.

  “I can take one of the three of you,” I say. The husband shakes his head, but the woman with deep eye sockets smiles and hands me her phone. She steps back to join her family, but the boy isn’t looking at the camera.

  “What’s your son’s name?”

  “Ibrahim,” the woman shouts.

  “Ibrahim, over here, over here. Look!”

  His plump face is examining the new geography with a detached expression, like a brain too busy recording to be recorded, carbon paper for eyes.

  I take five shots of them, trying to get more land behind them than sea.

  “Thank you,” the woman says as she grabs her phone. “We will send to our family so they know we made it.” Belatedly, the tears come, from the shock of survival or the family they’ve left behind. “They would rather us drown than save us. Five boats went by while we were in the water. They wouldn’t have cared if we died.”

  Her husband begins taking small, hesitant side steps, as if now that they’re onshore, time is even more of a necessity.

  “Sir,” he says. “Which way to the central port?” They both speak faultless English.

  I point up the road and fin my hand right.

  “It’s a few miles to Skala. A few kilometers.”

  “And police?” he asks. “Do you know if they are taking us in?” I’m not sure if he means asylum or arrest and perhaps neither does he. The woman reels out a few sentences in Arabic and yanks her son onto her shoulder. The man checks a plastic pouch hidden underneath his shirt.

  “There’s a station,” I tell him. “They’ve been processing refugees. I believe they’re being sent to a camp in Lesbos. I could drive your wife and child on my bike. I don’t know if I can hold all three of you.”

  “No, we prefer to walk,” he answers. “We stay together.”

  I wish I had euros to give them. Automatically, I make my pocket-patting poverty gesture.

  “We have money,” the woman replies breathlessly. “We need crossing to the north. But Europe. This is Europe.” And with a last smile and the toss of her life vest, they begin to hurry along the dirt road. When you say welcome, you cannot say good-bye. I watch their retreat, the boy’s face bouncing against his mother’s shoulder, until the dust and distance claim them. I picture Charlie bobbing out in the water, miles from land in every direction, boats passing another dark head caught in the waves, and if he went under how many of the newly dead would he join? I squat down and press my fingers in the dry, royal earth.

  The office door is locked, and its bank of windows is latched from the inside. The purpose for my visit lies inside the trailer. I’m prodded by the loss of nine thousand in cash and Rasym’s promise of the private team stripping the place of any lingering material. Checking that no one’s around, I grab a heavy, sharp-sided rock and strike it against the door’s window until the glass shatters. Reaching my hand over the shards, I turn the knob.

  Ugur has indeed swept the office clean. Even the garbage bin under the desk is empty. All that’s left is the chess set and the box of caps and tote bags. I unhook the photograph of Domitian from the wall. A series of dents runs along the safe’s edges. Ugur or Gideon or someone else must have tried to pry it open. But I watched Charlie work the combination. I spin the dial through the numbers of his last birthday backward, 15, 29, 6, and feel the shackle’s release. The iron door is heavier than I expected, and a black leather-bound book drops to the floor. It’s a log listing dock times and shipments, from last week all the way to the first of May. There’s no indication of the contraband being transported, but the cell phone number of G. FROST is penciled at the top of the first page. From the look of the registry, the fleet of yachts must have been moving nonstop between Turkey and Greece all summer, from Bodrum to Athens and a town called Thessaloniki. I place the book on the desk and reach my hands inside the safe.

  Nine thousand is all I had to save me from oblivion. Now that it’s stolen, I don’t have enough to buy a plane ticket home. I’m hoping for a few thousand, a few hundred, whatever petty cash of a doomed boat business might remain. Part of me also hopes that the safe is empty. If Charlie did make a last-minute escape, he might have collected whatever available money he had on hand. A bare safe could signal his survival. But my fingers hit upon the paper stacks, ten of them piled together like unmortared bricks.

  I pull out one of the thick, rubber-banded stacks and flip my thumb along the pink, five-hundred-euro bills. My heart skips. The mere physical weight of so much money in my hand induces fear, like coming across lions mating or a bag of knives on a playground. There must be two hundred bills tied in the rubber band. Ten times five hundred times two hundred—I’m incapable of arithmetic just as I’m incapable of speech. But there’s got to be upward of one million euros in cash. No wonder Charlie fired Gideon for getting anywhere near it. People have been hacked to pieces for so much less.

  I transfer the stacks onto the desk, a flock of ten flamingo-colored squares, fluid and redeemable anywhere on the planet. This is my future lying on the table, the rescue I wanted, the reason I came to Patmos in the first place. From here on out, each step is like putting my foot on the gas. Why, then, does it feel like I’ve already been thrown through the windshield?

  The office is too quiet, except for the chatter of dry teeth. I grab a tote bag from the box and load the stacks into it. I add the shipping log to the top of the cache. Am I saving this money or stealing it, preserving it in case of Charlie’s return or giving myself an accidental motive for wishing him gone? I’m too poor to leave it. I reach back into the safe and root around for any last bills. In the corner are two more bricks, not paper, but gummy rock wrapped in plastic. The bricks are feces brown, the plastic sliced open, and an Arabic word is written across them in black marker. They smell of spoiled vinegar.

  I would have preferred not to know what Charlie was smuggling in his underwater shells, taking the mystery of it to bed with me along with the visions of places I never traveled and people I never got to love. The not knowing would have kept some hope alive of good. It could have been ammunition or medical supplies. But the sad, obvious truth is two brown bricks of heroin, discards on the dope route from East to West. Would Charlie have been forgiven if Stefan had learned the truth? If he’s alive now, does he even want forgiveness? I stare out the window where the sun whitens the sea like pavement.

  His father built the highways in
the Middle East.

  CHAPTER 16

  One motorbike parked among thirty along the port-side road of Skala attracts no particular interest. Its black-and-yellow frame is dented and streaked in mud. Its metal license plate hangs by a piece of wire at the tail. Its front fender is slightly askew. A helmet dangles by its strap from the handgrip. In high season, the island is a blur and buzz of identical machines swarming through the towns and beaches like summer locusts. It would be impossible to guess that stuffed inside the seat compartment of this bike is a substantial fortune. Anyone with a screwdriver could bust the seat open and run off with its contents in five seconds.

  I have nowhere else to hide the money. Even the cabin is no longer safe from thieves. I wonder if Vesna or her brother, sensing their family’s dire situation in light of the vanishing Konstantinous, decided it might be wise to pilfer a spare bag of cash that practically begged to be stolen in the first place. Or maybe Gideon used his key. I hesitate a few feet from my bike, my senses heightened, now less free for having so much to lose. But I pick up my pace and head toward the center of town. God giveth, god taketh . . . in other words, God doesn’t care.

  Martis said that Carrie Dorr had rented a room above the grocery store. There’s still a chance she hasn’t left the island. The supermarket’s narrow aisles are crowded with loud voices and quiet, sunburned children and Greek boys mopping during peak hours. Green plastic baskets are overflowing American-style with food. I slide up to the woman at the register.

  “Excuse me,” I say, ignoring the line of customers. “I’m looking for my friend. She rented a room upstairs. An American. Carrie Dorr.”

  The clerk stops scanning a jug of milk to the irritation of the man she’s helping. His yellow hair and blue complexion under the fluorescent lights precisely match the Swedish flag.