Water Memory: A Thriller (Sentro)

by Daniel Pyne

  “Just.”

  Studying the broker warily, Castor waits.

  Robbens approximates a studious frown. “What are you really up to, Mr. Zeme?”

  “Up to?”

  “Forgive me; I’m slightly suspect at your sudden scale-up. Somebody put you up to this. Is that it?”

  Castor takes a moment to admire the Dutchman’s trimmed eyebrows and the spidered capillaries on his nose. Affecting his best white-man pomp: “Boat jacking, such a fussy fucking business. Izzat it?”

  Robbens roars with what sounds like uneasy laughter. “Touché.”

  Castor spots Audrey Sentro’s American passport among the others; he forgot to separate it and now reaches out and takes it. “I’ll keep this one. You can have the tote.” He tucks the passport away.

  Too smug and incurious to ask why that passport is so important to the twin, Robbens gathers the ledgers and documents and puts them back in the briefcase. “I should have an answer for you tomorrow.” He puts the briefcase on the floor by his chair, as if to seal the deal.

  Castor rises. His knee has grown stiff, and putting weight on it sends a slow shiver of ache down into his heel. “You should, yeah. Just ’cause I ain’t in the club, do not toy with me, Dutch boy.”

  “Technically, I’m Flemish,” Robbens says, and his deliberate, vacant stare confirms for Castor that the Dutchman has already decided that, after taking his cut, Robbens will talk with his Important Friends (like the colonel?) about a reckoning for the Zemes.

  But there’s only one Zeme now, isn’t there? And this one is way ahead of them.

  Castor pops his shades down to hide the grief that suddenly twists in him. He pushes away from the table and lumbers off, trying not to favor the leg.

  “Give your brother my best,” Robbens calls after him.

  I can’t, Castor thinks. But if things go right, maybe you’ll be getting mine.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  She’s never forgotten bursting out from under the warm water, gasping for air, eyes opening wide to an amber-and-green-tiled West Texas motel bathroom tub almost overflowing with silky bubbles. Or the armada of Polly Pocket shells that rode rough seas while the shower rained down on her gently, like a summer storm. She could hear her mom, through the closed doorway, arguing with her Texas Ranger father on the phone.

  She tried not to listen. She hummed her happy cowboy song and watched the clamshell boats take on water, then pretended they were scuttled and that all Polly’s friends were tossed into the angry bubble ocean, threatening to sink, one by one.

  With the cup of her hand, she’d saved them all.

  Her own pale, serious face stared back in the mirror when she scrubbed it clean of steam. Her mother had resorted to mostly single syllables on the landline in the other room: “Yeah, no. No. Sorry.” Hair slicked back, cut bluntly short. Her lips magenta from the water, the freckles she hated pronounced, like a spattering of brown ink. Not a princess, despite what her father claimed.

  Towel draped around her like a shroud, she came tentatively out of the bathroom after her mother hung up the phone. Sitting on the floor, legs splayed, she slumped back against the bed, something flaring on the terrible television, blown-out color making it impossible to comprehend; tears streamed down her mother’s face as she looked up at her little girl, inconsolable.

  And took her in trembling arms.

  Said she was sorry for the thousandth time, it seemed. Said she was “so, so sorry, honey,” with that kind, liquid Lubbock drawl that reeked of cigarettes and Altoids. Said that this wasn’t . . . she was just . . . hadn’t meant for their magnificent adventure—which was what she’d called it when they’d left Dallas—hadn’t meant for their magnificent adventure to end up . . . well, here.

  A crazy quilt of colored lights flashed and fluttered across the curtains like a carnival. Sentro kissed her mother’s hands and wriggled loose to cross the room, transfixed by the promise of the kaleidoscope outside. She climbed onto the cushioned chair and pulled the curtains to part them and look out at the motel parking lot, where there was gathered a harsh, hard-angled phalanx of gleaming police cars and emergency vehicles, all with their headlights bright and their bubble bars flashing, and men with rifles hunkered down behind them, grim and locked and loaded and staring back at the window and the little girl in it.

  Hundreds of identical bushy-haired, sun-faded bobblehead dolls of an American ball player hang by fishing line from the rafters of a ceiling that towers overhead. The name printed on their bases is Pedro Martinez. In the foggy recesses of her memory, she recalls that this person was a pitcher for Boston, because shortly after he got cancer, her husband took her to an Orioles game in which Martinez played. Dennis kept shouting at the field, “Just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy.” He kept laughing, so delighted Sentro never bothered to ask what it meant.

  Big bell heads judder in a faint, swirling breeze.

  Sentro has been staring up at them and puzzling if this is a new part of the West Texas dream she was having: sitting in the darkened motel room with her back to the silent Scooby-Doo bleed of a color-shot pay television on top of a minibar, listening as her mother sings, small, desolate.

  And I come to town just to hear the band . . .

  The bullhorn booms again, “MRS. SENTRO?”

  Her mom rocks on the edge of the bed in her periwinkle pjs, ankles crossed, the pistol in her lap and both her hands on it, trembling, eyes dry, lipstick faded, singing:

  . . . I know all the songs that the cowboys know—

  Sentro asks, “Mom?”

  “Está acordada,” is the answer she receives.

  No, not dreaming anymore.

  Flat on her back on a sagging SpongeBob pool-float mattress, Sentro feels her head nestled in ice packs and discovers the girl with the rainbow braces leaning in to mop her face with a cloth. Colt-like and slender, the girl has a baby bump that brushes against Sentro’s arm.

  “I’m cold.” Sentro tries to sit up. The sudden movement causes the girl to jerk back, scared, but Sentro’s wrists are handcuffed to upended shopping carts on either side of her; she’s not going anywhere. The cuff chains clatter loudly in the quiet and bring scuttering from the shadows the scarred kid she wrestled on the skiff, his cricket bat poised high for a downswing.

  He barks: “Fique lá.”

  “What? Whoa.” A rush of vertigo blindsides Sentro again; nausea wrings her empty stomach.

  “Sit back. Take it slow.” A weedy, tropical-browned middle-aged Anglo man-child pulls the little cricketeer back behind him and looms over Sentro and the girl; he’s wearing a lurid Hawaiian-print shirt and filthy, threadbare bermuda shorts. “Your brain, on ice.”

  His eyes are almost colorless. His riot of bowl-cut hair wants to be blond.

  Worrying again that she’s still dreaming, Sentro scans her surroundings: some kind of Spanish baroque ballroom with institutional carpets and stacked hotel banquet chairs and bleak faux-ironwork fixtures replete with empty sockets and cobwebs and rust. Heavy velvet drapery bleeds bright daylight from massive lead glass windows that rattle when what must be truck traffic passes close outside. This makeshift residence, once perhaps the faded centerpiece of an abandoned grand hotel, has been sectioned with a maze of packing crates and muslin screens and upended water-stained plywood pallets, and it overflows with multiplying booty apparently plundered from hijacked cargo ships.

  The man-child kneels. He’s got doctor props—stethoscope and a penlight—which he uses as if randomly for Sentro’s pulse and pupils, doing a decent rendition of a physician while picking up where he left off: “It was either that or borrow a skill saw to pop your top until the swelling stopped. Entailing concomitant hazards of blood loss and tropical sepsis.” He pulls a can of beer out from under the ice packs, opens it, and drinks half. The girl hangs back, one arm absently cupping her baby bump. The scarred boy is shouting something in Portuguese and threatening her with the cricket bat as Sentro adjusts to her new
altitude. The kid wears a bleach-stained knockoff Arsenal jersey too big for him, which now has a couple of bullet-size holes in it and some stubborn stains.

  “You’re a medical doctor.”

  “Last I checked.” The man belches. “There was some talk of yanking my license before I left Portland, but yo, I think my disappearance made the point moot.” He yaps something in a dialect Sentro can’t identify, and the boy shuts up.

  “What happened to him?”

  The doctor looks at the kid as if seeing the scars for the first time. “We don’t know. And he’s not saying. Doesn’t care to talk about it at all.”

  “You can uncuff my hands.”

  “Dude.”

  “What.”

  “I don’t want to be a dick about this, but not so long ago you didn’t know if you were animal or vegetable. And you were like some kinda she-wolf when we were getting the clothes off you.” He points to a bruise alongside his eyes. “Who do you think did this? When the girl come to get me—”

  “The girl?”

  Indicating, with a tilt of head: “Eccola. And this mouse is her brother.”

  “Where am I?”

  A shrug and a half turn away to dig through a scuffed old-fashioned black leather medical bag.

  “Little fucker hit me with that cricket bat and sent me to the moon,” Sentro tells him.

  “Zoala takes a good cut, for sure. But his sister—take my word for it. Swings like A-Rod. So. Lucky that.”

  “No clue what an a-rod is. Do you have a name?”

  The doctor locates a syringe and a clear vial. The blistered boy circles Sentro, cautious. His legs and arms are raw and peeling, and he moves gingerly, with a mechanical caution. She meets his eyes and holds them until he looks away.

  She can’t remember: “Say the boy’s name again?”

  “Zoala.”

  “Those look like burns.”

  The doctor doesn’t hear her or doesn’t want to answer; instead he turns back to her with, “You’ve been in and out. Pupillary reflex, I’m guessing concussion. More than one. Which, you know—or maybe you don’t—is not good.”

  “Serial.”

  “Yes.” His eyes narrow, waiting for more information that she’s not going to give him. “As your doctor I’d also advise you never to suture yourself.”

  Sentro absently touches a fresh bandage covering the cut on her hairline and asks again what his name is.

  “Oh—whoa, shit. Thanks for reminding me. That’s what I should be asking you. Again.” He can read her reluctance. “D’oh. It’s okay, Lady Secrecy. I have your debit card, man. To cover my expenses. So I already know who you are, but see, the Double Jeopardy question is, Do you? ’Cause you didn’t a couple of hours ago.”

  “Aubrey.”

  “That’s a name?”

  “Yes. Mine.”

  “And?”

  “Sentro. Aubrey Sentro.”

  “Good. Fantastic. Where you hail from, Aubrey?”

  “Baltimore. I was born in Texas. I have two children.” She hopes sheer momentum will carry her. “My husband died of cancer. I’m not having trouble remembering things. I’m fine. Can you just . . .” She stops short, watching the doctor plunge the syringe needle into the vial and draw out the clear liquid.

  As he flicks the air out, he asks her: “What’s the name of the vessel you were—”

  “We were boarded by an armed crew. They hijacked the ship and killed a female hostage, and I need to call—”

  “What was her name?”

  “Who?”

  “This dead femme.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  The doctor just waits, holding the syringe upright and poised like a mad scientist. Sentro opens her mouth to tell him. Stops. Can’t remember. A flood of anxiety washes over her; she feels like she’s tumbling backward into a bottomless pit.

  “You called her name out, I think, in your dreaming,” he says, pulling her out of the free fall. “So I’ll know when it comes back to you.”

  “Who undressed me?”

  “Name of the ship you were on?”

  Sentro tries to get her legs underneath her, but they aren’t cooperating. The doctor puts one hand lightly on her shoulder, and a dull electric pain courses down through her, and she discovers that she’s too weak to rise any farther.

  “No. C’mon, dude. You’re still concussed. Give it some more time. Heal. Your whole body is one big ow.”

  “I need to find the people I was traveling with.”

  “On what ship?”

  Nothing.

  “Your dead friend? Either-or?”

  Nothing.

  “What day is it?”

  “How long have I been sleeping?”

  “In and out, like I said.”

  “Okay.”

  “What if I told you thirty-six hours?”

  Sentro hesitates, stunned. She also lost time after the explosion in the cargo. She’s suddenly frightened at having lost so much control of things.

  “Month? Year? C’mon, you can do it.”

  Sentro closes her eyes. She has no idea. The helplessness she feels is overwhelming. Her head has begun throbbing. “The people I work with can help me.”

  “If only you could remember who the fuck they were.” The doctor looks like he’s enjoying this.

  But he’s right. Sentro is falling again, legs flailing, searching for some solid ground. “If you have a cell phone—”

  “Who would you call?” Point made, the doctor is digging in his bag again with one hand, keeping the needle up with the other. “What’s the number?”

  Sentro opens her mouth again. Can’t remember. White noise.

  “Here’s a hint: the international code is zero one.”

  Can’t remember who she works for or what she does there, but she knows that it has importance, that she matters, that people count on her to do things that others can’t or won’t. What happened on the boat is something she needs to correct.

  Ring on her finger; she’s married.

  No. He died. Dennis.

  But for a moment she can’t remember her children’s names. A wave of hollow desperation overtakes her. Tears blur her vision. “I need to go,” she says but doesn’t move.

  “Dude, you are not fine. So just chill. Literally. Head back in the ice. Hijacking is the cash crop here. If that’s what happened, your friends are okay; let the market work its magic and give your body time to heal, and everything will work itself out. ’Kay?”

  “Market.”

  “Free market. Capitalism. Heard of it?”

  “You think that’s what this is?” Something tells her it isn’t. She wipes away the tears gathering. Fierce. Not done yet.

  “Yeah.”

  “You haven’t told me your name.”

  “I have several. Morehouse will do.” He pulls out a strap of surgical tubing and wraps it around his arm. Sentro sees track marks. Ugly sores.

  “Where are we?”

  “We’re a boil on the forehead of South America. Some say Guyana; some say Venezuela. It’s unclear whether this is because each country claims Porto Pequeno or wishes it on the other. Meanwhile . . .” Morehouse injects himself. “WHOA nelly nelly nelly . . .” His gray eyes pin; he sits back on his heels, riding the rush. The needle trembles as if electric, stuck in his arm. “I am. I am. Fine, me. I am.”

  Losing balance, he topples heavily back against a box—“Oh boy”—legs splayed, arms spread, and nods off, mouth slack. A tendril of blood pools in the crook of his elbow from the puncture just below it, and a single drop falls to the ballroom’s worn carpet.

  Exhausted, wrung out, Sentro looks at the girl and her brother. Eccola and Zoala. Will she know their names when she wakes up again? They crouch, keeping their distance, eyes dark, expressions grim.

  “I’m hungry,” she says.

  The girl and her brother just watch her.

  A breeze makes the bobbleheads shake and chatter again like
the dentures of a thousand baseball fans. Dennis loved Fenway, hated the Red Sox.

  Why does she remember that?

  Sentro lets her head slip back into the icy compress and closes her eyes again, helpless.

  Yippee-ai-oh-kai-yay.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “Andrew? It’s Leo Robbens. Yes. Hello.”

  In his office kingdom, midcentury modern and climate controlled, Robbens rules with a wireless headset from his leather Eames swivel chair throne.

  “To you too. I see where your Cottagers have been relegated again—yet somehow made it to the EFL Cup.” Laughs. “I know, I know they changed the name, but Carabao sounds so silly. Carabao is a water buffalo, if you care to know. Appropriate.” He laughs again. “You’re welcome. Now. Reason I’m calling, Andrew—the Jeddah, yes. Has your client—no, no, I’ve had contact, and I’m happy to report that there shouldn’t be any difficulty negotiating this. The vendor appears quite professional.”

  Are they? The Zemes? Or even rational?

  Not fucking likely, but where money is concerned, Robbens feels confident he can keep them in line.

  “Although I should mention that—full transparency—tragically, one of the passengers has suffered an accident. Yes. Mortal, I’m afraid.”

  The underwriter he’s calling is someone Robbens has done maritime insurance business with many times before. A humorless actuary, a grammar school product, Fulham man through and through, whose subsequent moody silence Robbens is expecting.

  “They know, they know, Andrew. And they’re willing to suffer a reasonable penalty discount, although they insist it was utterly out of their control. As I said, an accident, unrelated to their acquisition of the ship. They were beside themselves. Yes.”

  Through the tall latticed window, he can see the Jeddah, cargo ship in question, listing slightly starboard in the argent bay waters, its cartoon stacks of containers bowing out over its beam. While the actuary rambles away, Robbens puzzles over where the Zemes might be stowing their human collateral.