The Hermit

  Simao gazes across the harbour. – Has gettin’ beat up made that poof stupid? I told him that so that he wouldn’t feel bad about… About…

  Erhard ignores this. – I’m not a policeman, and I’m not a government official. Nothing like that. I won’t tell anyone that I’ve spoken to you.

  They’re standing in the shade between a line of containers. Simao lights a second fag even as he holds the first. He flicks the smoking butt over the railing and into the water, then pats his shirt pocket for the 100-euro note.

  – It’s been weeks now. I was fucking stuck in Casablanca. Waiting for my buddy Ramón, who had promised me he’d be there, innit. But he doesn’t show up. I’m at some bar, and I run into a ship’s mate I know. He’s pissed and high, you know. We have a few shots, and we discuss how to find him a woman. But he’s not really into it, tells me his wife will skin him alive if he cheats on her, and so we end up at some local guy’s. Smoking, innit. All of a sudden he tells me he’d been part of the crew that had sailed out to empty that Canary ship that everyone was talking about. Everyone’s looking for that ship’s crew who had all sailed on to West Africa, but no one knows this guy was on board that other ship and he’s totally whacked wondering if he should tell somebody. But I tell him he shouldn’t, cause then he’d be mixed up in some serious shit.

  Erhard’s not surprised. – Why did you believe him? What if he was just making it up?

  Simao looks at Erhard as if he’s an idiot. – You just know. When a sailor’s pissed enough, he don’t lie.

  – What if he was just trying to be entertaining?

  – Entertaining? Simao tilts his head back as if deeply offended. – Are you implying something?

  Erhard doesn’t know what the man means. – No, I’m just saying he might have lied to you.

  – He wasn’t lying, old man.

  – What did you say his name was?

  – I haven’t told you his name. How should I know?

  – You were drinking together, and you’ve sailed with him before, but you don’t know his name?

  – Shit, what’s it matter what his name is?

  – Is he Spanish?

  – Yeah, for fuck’s sake.

  – Did he meet others there? Was he alone?

  – We had some shots with a few locals, a few blacks, but otherwise no.

  – And you say the pirates abandoned them in West Africa?

  – The pirates, yeah.

  – What?

  – Yeah, the pirates abandoned them in Casablanca.

  Erhard suddenly understands the man’s slightly off-kilter body language. The way his middle finger rubs his right-hand thumb. He’s not talking about a drinking buddy, he’s talking about himself. He was the one on board the ship. But Erhard decides not to press too hard yet. – There weren’t any pirates, were there?

  – Yeah, bloody hell. I’m telling you’re there were lots of pirates.

  Erhard sizes up Simao. He’s still a young man. A boy, really. Thirty-something. That could work to Erhard’s advantage – that Erhard seems like a strict father figure. He stares directly into the boy’s eyes.

  Simao covers his face. – Stop that. I don’t know fuck all about what happened to Chris. I swear I don’t know who beat him up or who pushed the fake Chris overboard.

  He seems to be telling the truth, but Erhard is sceptical. – But there were no pirates?

  – Fuck me. No, there were no pirates. Never was.

  – Only the crew?

  – It was supposed to seem like the ship had been seized by pirates. Some of the Hestia’s crewmembers punched each other to make it seem like the pirates had done it. We laughed about it at first. Until Señor P decked one crew member so hard that he lost a tooth.

  – What about your buddy? Did he punch someone too?

  – No, he didn’t. There were four on board. They would’ve been offed if not for the ship.

  – What do you mean?

  – The ship they were on was a different kind of ship, and none of the crew were familiar with it.

  – So what happened to the cargo?

  – Most of it ended up here. The crew was dropped off in Casablanca.

  – The crew went to port in Casablanca, but the cargo came back to Tenerife?

  The man nods, then inhales so that the cherry on his cigarette turns bright red. – Except for Señor P. He went back to wherever he was from.

  – Is it even possible to transfer cargo when not in port?

  Simao chuckles. – You’ve sure got plenty of questions, old man.

  – I told you as much. Remember my contribution to the dog track.

  Simao eyes Erhard distrustfully. – If you’re not Chris’s good friend then he owes me a fucking apology. He tamps out his fag and lights a new one. This time he takes a normal breath before raising the cigarette to his mouth. – You can move cargo, sure, but it’s not easy. It’s dangerous, innit.

  – How so?

  – Out on the open sea the ships sway and might ram into each other, the cranes too, and you might drop your cargo into the water. It’s not good.

  – Sounds difficult. Does it take a long time?

  – Yeah, if there’s a lot that needs to be transferred.

  – If there weren’t any pirates, what happened to the engineer they thought was Chris Jones? The guy the fishermen found? The newspaper wrote that he resisted the pirates.

  – They wrote Chris was the one who’d been thrown overboard, and I believed it. But I hadn’t even seen Chris on board. I mean, I, uh, my friend said it was total chaos. It was New Year’s Eve. Fireworks were going off along the coast, and you could hear the explosions above the wind. The water over there was fucked up. That’s why Señor P was called in. He knows the sea better than anyone, innit.

  – So Señor P was the one who pushed the engineer overboard? The fake Chris Jones?

  – That’s what they said. He arrived on the ship right before it happened. He was drunk as a skunk, muttering strange things.

  – Strange how?

  – Lad was angry. He kept saying lad was angry. That the money was burning a hole in his pockets. Crazy shit.

  – Lad? His own son?

  Simao laughs. – What does I know? I talked to him only once.

  – Why haven’t you mentioned any of this to the police? They’re looking for the crew, and believe they’re holed up in some basement with a bunch of Moroccan pirates. Families are missing their fathers.

  – I’m sorry about Chris and that chap that fell overboard. But I’m not getting mixed up in any of this.

  Erhard decides the time is now to press him. – They paid you, didn’t they?

  – I haven’t done anything illegal.

  – Withholding information is illegal.

  – In what country? I’m sailing under the Cuban flag.

  The lie is much larger than Erhard had thought. – You were on board the other ship, and you transferred the cargo.

  Simao squirms as if he’s been asked to chug vinegar.

  Erhard presses on. – Say yes. I won’t tell anyone, and you’ll get another 100 euros for your little dog.

  – He’s not a little dog, Simao says sharply. – He’s an Azawakh.

  Erhard hands him a 100-euro note. – How did you move the goods?

  Simao looks down the row of containers. – We were supposed to meet north of Alegranza, but ended up sailing very far south, just to the west of Lanzarote. The Hestia was delayed. It was bad enough to begin with, but it just got worse.

  – How?

  – Apparently, the plan had been to find the same-size ship, but our captain hadn’t found one like the Hestia. He’d just hired ours, the La Brugia, because there were only four of us on board. But our ship wasn’t a container ship – it was a general cargo ship, like this one. So the two ships were unequal, and moving the cargo was fucking difficult.

  – And then what happened?

  – We sailed directly towards Casablanca, while the Gh
anaian man steered the Hestia towards Agadir, innit.

  – Was anything brought to Fuerteventura?

  – No. Well, the Hestia sailed that way. It went north around Isla de Lobos after we separated. But the Ghanaian man didn’t go into port. His ship was empty. I saw it with my own eyes.

  – So you transferred everything?

  – Yeah. It was hard as hell. There was lots of shouting, and some of the containers were smashed.

  – Smashed?

  – Yeah, when they were lifted over the ships. They’re just like egg shells if you hit them in the right place.

  – On the Hestia or on your ship?

  – I didn’t see it. I was below deck. Down in the cargo hold. They were arguing about where we should drop anchor, with the wind and the current, innit. It took a long time. The Ghanaian guy talked to someone over the radio. An hour later, Señor P came on board. Pissed and vicious, he was, but he was familiar with the waters. He was from Fuerteventura. Knew the sea like the back of his hand, he said. Then they began to transfer the cargo. Shortly after that Chris Jones, or whoever the hell he was, fell overboard.

  – What did you do when you found out?

  – Not a damn thing. What could we do? We were busy. I sure as hell didn’t want the same fate. I did my job. But I was real glad it wasn’t Chris but some other guy. Though I didn’t know that until I’d returned to Tenerife, innit.

  – What’s the P for in Señor P?

  – Easy now, Gramps, I don’t know any more than that. If you keep asking me questions like that, I’ll have to ask you for a bridge.

  – Bridge?

  – A 500 note.

  Erhard decides it must be some kind of dog-racing term. – I don’t have any more, he says. – Just tell me what the P is for?

  – Fuck off, Gramps.

  Erhard knows that he’s just trying to reassert his self-respect, and he can’t really blame him for that.

  – Thanks for the chat, Erhard says, and starts towards the gangway. Remembering something, he walks back to the containers. Simao is about to light his tenth cigarette. Erhard hands him his business card. – If you feel the urge to help a little boy who’s gone missing, call me. But don’t leave a message.

  – What. A boy? What does that have to do with this?

  – There was a 3-month-old boy on board the Hestia. And his mother.

  Erhard is gambling now. He still doesn’t know whether or not they were on board.

  – There’s was no boy. Or mother. I know that much.

  – Call me if you think of anything else. I won’t give you any more money. The next thing you tell me is free.

  Erhard leaves. He hopes that Simao will run after him and tell him the name of ship’s mate, but he crosses the gangway and is back on the dock before he turns to see that no one has followed him.

  ‌

  61

  He walks down a broad boulevard towards the city, but grows tired and hops into a taxi that’s parked in front of a hotel. He gives the driver one of the few addresses he remembers in Santa Cruz: 49 Calle Centauro. With a little more than three hours before his return flight, there’s too much time to wait at the airport, and too little time to take a ferry. He might as well sit at a cafe, doing nothing. He pays the driver, who promptly thrusts the bills into his wallet as if he’s afraid Erhard will snatch them from him. Maybe there are more robberies here; it’s a bigger island, with more tourists.

  Although he doesn’t recognize the street, he decides to stroll around the area. He skirts the fence that encloses the container park. There’s quite a bit of traffic in there. Huge lorries, fork lifts, and tow trucks that spit brown smoke out of long exhaust pipes. Another forest of containers. In a flash he pictures the containers being raised onto lorries and ships and into cargo hulls and then onto new lorries and new container parks. A flurry of traffic and goods exchanging places, units shifting around in a vast chain of supply and demand, need and desire, habits. A toothpick from China jammed into an olive from Gran Canaria and set in a martini from Italy, and a vodka from Poland in a champagne flute from Thailand in the hand of an Englishwoman from Portsmouth. The invisible underbrush of infrastructure. Like going to the loo, it’s not something people discuss. It’s simply there. But sometimes, you have to study the poop to determine the diet.

  When he reaches the guardhouse, he stops a moment to watch the big lorries exit the park. An African man sits inside the guardhouse.

  – Would it be possible for me to meet the supervisor here?

  – Supervisor?

  – Palalo, Erhard says, quickly showing the man his business card. – I’m here to inspect our containers.

  – Where did you say you’re from again?

  – Palalo.

  He stares at a little computer that’s affixed to the inside of a cabinet. – There’s no supervisor. But you can talk to Binau, our manager. He’s out there somewhere, in the park. I can call him.

  – Don’t worry about it. I’ll find him myself. Where are our containers?

  The man checks his computer again. Then he points down one of the corridors between the containers and the rows of storage units which resemble enormous shelves. Erhard nods, then goes through the gate into the park, passing the lorries and the cranes. Noise fills the air, men shouting all around him. The soil is hard clay. Every now and then, a forklift pulls up in front of him and hoists a pallet from one of the shelves six metres above the ground, then drives over to a waiting lorry. He heads in the direction the man had pointed, but he doesn’t know what he’s looking for, or when he’ll know he’s found it. When he sees a short man wearing ear muffs, he stands beside him until the man notices him.

  – Palalo, Erhard calls out to the man, who hasn’t removed his ear muffs.

  – Over there, the man says, glancing down at his mobile phone.

  – Those? Erhard points at four red containers standing side by side.

  – From there all the way down, the man says, his eyes still trained on his mobile. His gloved hand indicates a point right behind Erhard, down a corridor the length of two or three football pitches.

  He heads that way, as much as anything to get a sense of the containers, to immerse himself in their dizzying quantity, and to try to disappear in them. He hopes to run into one of the workers, but there’s no one around. He spots a number of new containers with built-in locks, but most of the containers are the old kind, with a bar fastened by a padlock. Some of the containers are stacked, while others are lined up in rows. Some are divided by a clearing between the red and blue containers, a space ready to be filled.

  He reaches the corner where the fence bends, then continues up the hill and down to the harbour. He sees, on the other side of the fence, rocks and a stone marker. From the hilltop he catches sight of some houses and a tennis court, two players dashing back and forth. There’s a small shed on his side of the fence, four posts with a tin roof and a back wall. Inside is a chair and a wooden box. Some equipment hangs on the back wall: ear muffs, a torch, a hammer, bolt cutters, a saw, a roll of cable, a pair of coal-black work gloves no one would ever wish to stick his fingers into. Well, Erhard wouldn’t anyway. He looks around. Although he can still hear the lorries, there’s no one about. He grabs the bolt cutters and proceeds to the containers, then snips the locks one at a time. Once he’s cut fifteen, he returns to the shed, hangs up the bolt cutters, and glances around again. Still no one. Then he opens the first container. And the next. And then another. Each is filled to the brim with lamps and blankets and boxes, bicycles and bags of clothes and electrical cords. Some items rest on pallets, others simply lie on the floor; some are strapped down, others jammed in.

  But in the twelfth and thirteenth containers he finds what he’s looking for: a car, a Seat Leon. It’s parked on a set of springs and held in place by thick straps that crisscross the container. He retrieves the bolt cutters and clips the locks on the next twenty containers.

  In all, he finds fourteen vehicles. Seat
s, Skodas, and Volkswagens.

  When he opens a container and finds a black Volkswagen, his breath catches. Though it’s a different model, the make and colour assure him that he’s heading in the right direction. He crawls through the straps and over to the driver’s-side door, and he’s just able to squeeze into the front seat. The car smells strongly of nylon or leather, like it would at a car dealership. It’s dark inside and almost feels cosy. The key is in the ignition. He peers down at the odometer, but it’s one of the new digital kinds that doesn’t work unless the motor is running. He turns the key, but nothing happens. So he slides out again and exits the container as if he has been inside the belly of a whale, tired but proud.

  He closes all the containers and collects the locks, then tosses them over the fence, where they disappear among the rocks. He walks along the fence to gaze down at an empty corridor between the containers, so he can get back without being noticed by too many. He reaches the construction site and suddenly recognizes the place, even though it was dark the last time he was here. To his left is a gaping hole in the fence and the entrance to Café Rústica’s kitchen. This is where the dishwasher helped him. He crawls through the hole and walks down the alley.

  He orders a Mai Tai to see whether or not they’ve followed his advice, but it still tastes too sweet. The girl who serves it to him is friendly, but she doesn’t flirt.

  – It was all I could find, she says, dropping two postcards on the table. The postcards are ads for the cafe. DJ Sundays and happy hour, or what they call Rústica hour. Mai Tais for one euro. No fucking wonder.

  He jots down a note: He knows where the car came from. He knows which ship it was on. He knows, perhaps, how it got to Fuerteventura. He knows where the newspapers came from. He knows, perhaps, where the girl – it must’ve been a girl, not a woman – who abandoned her baby was from.

  Because he’s so lost in thought about her, he stares at the girls in the cafe, as if he expects to find her among them. As if he can see who among them gave birth then starved her baby. He thinks of Mónica. For some reason he thinks about her as a young woman, with Aaz as a boy, a tiny child at his mother’s breast, suckling, feeding like a sick kitten. Or maybe he’s thinking of Annette with Lene, the youngest, sitting on a faded-blue sofa on the first floor of Bispebjerg Hospital, showing her off to anyone who stopped in, while he stood behind the glass attempting to place a call at a payphone that kept spitting out his coins. A mother is so beautiful he could cry right on the spot. He thinks of the young mother laying her child inside the cardboard box: her trembling nervous hands fumbling as they swaddle the squirming child in newspapers; she’s putting her child into the box knowing that it will die. A mother is so beautiful. It all begins with her, her words that raise the child, and her hands that hold the child. A mother is so beautiful and yet so dangerous. She decides whether the child will live and for how long. One day, a month, a decade. He looks at one of the girls, the kind whose belly will one day, maybe soon, expand and she will become a mother; she’s balancing rubbish bags and cardboard that have to be taken out back. In truth she’s a little too small for this kind of work, frighteningly pale and thin, sickly. With red hair like a German. She pauses. One of the bags is filled with bottles and is too heavy. Erhard gets to his feet to help her. She tells him no thanks but smiles gratefully. He grabs the larger bag and follows her down the bar, through the kitchen, and out back. After he’s thrown the bag into a container with other bottles, she thanks him again.