Undercurrents

by Pamela Beason

  A dark-skinned crew member entered the engine room through the door behind her and stopped in his tracks, startled to find her there. She had no idea what his name was. She opened her mouth to explain her presence, but when he mumbled “Buenas tardes,” she remembered that he probably didn’t speak English. After checking a gauge on a pipe, he slipped out again.

  She stood for a minute, staring at the exit door, chewing her thumbnail. Her head throbbed; her eyes burned with unshed tears. What the hell was she supposed to do now? What she wouldn’t give to have Chase here. Or her father. Or her housemate Blake. Any of her park ranger friends. Maya. Any friendly face. Anyone she could trust.

  She heard the second panga motor up outside, then heard Eduardo’s voice, along with another man’s. She pushed open the engine room door and stepped out onto the bright sunshine of the platform. Maxim’s dark head and Eduardo’s graying one were bent over the stern cleats as they secured the inflatable.

  Eduardo looked up. His dark eyes immediately filled with concern. “Sam—”

  Eduardo Duarte was a fellow conservationist. A friend. A conspirator. He knew about the trouble she and Dan had run into on their first day together. She blurted out her horrible news: “Dan is dead.”

  Maxim’s mouth fell open. “What?”

  An agonized expression took possession of Eduardo’s weathered face. “But how—” He held his hands out, his fingers open as if he might be able to catch a reason.

  She burst into tears and fell into his arms.

  * * * * *

  Three hours later, Sam sat cross-legged on the cold steel of the top deck, talking into her phone. “Call me as soon as you can,” she said for the tenth time on Chase’s voicemail. “I really need to talk to you.”

  She pressed End, pocketed the phone, and turned to concentrate on the fiery sphere of the sun sinking into the bronze waters of the Pacific. She was not yet drunk enough; she badly needed a distraction. She desperately hoped to see the green flash, that legendary instant when the sun shot out startling green rays in the last second before it disappeared below the waterline.

  The boat rocked in the slight swell. A metal cable clanged somewhere up near the bow. The pelican perched on the radar fixture overhead took off in a noisy whir of wings. Footsteps approached, and she reluctantly pulled her focus back to the horror of the day. She turned to face three somber men.

  “We can find no body,” Captain Quiroga told her. He explained that Tony, using Quiroga’s scuba gear, had gone under while other crew members snorkeled, but they’d found nothing. She stared at them, unbelieving, moving her gaze from Eduardo’s teary visage to Tony’s unreadable expression to Quiroga’s sympathetic eyes.

  Her mouth was dry; her tongue felt swollen. It was difficult to form words. “But I saw him. I touched him.” Oh God, she was going to have to go back to that bay and retrieve Dan’s corpse. She stood up unsteadily. “I’ll take you there; I’ll show you.”

  The captain nodded, and for a horrible second Sam thought he was agreeing, telling her to don her wetsuit and go in search of Dan’s body. But then he said, “Perhaps the current. Or animals.”

  She took two steps toward the stairs.

  Eduardo grabbed her arm, stopping her. “No.” His dark-eyed gaze held hers. “We search. We are careful. True, Sam, he is not there.”

  What did it mean? Had the current or the sea lions carried Dan’s body away? Oh Lord—sharks? She shouldn’t have moved him; she should have wedged his body back into that crevice. But she’d been out of air. The current and the kayak had tugged her away. And how could anyone be expected to grasp the corpse of a friend and jam it . . . Her hands trembled as if they were creatures separate from her body.

  Again, she searched the faces of the men before her, letting her eyes linger on Tony’s features. Did he know what happened to Dan? He hadn’t said a word in Spanish or English. Were the three men telling the truth? Did they believe that she was telling the truth? She couldn’t read anything beyond weariness and concern in their expressions.

  Captain Quiroga cleared his throat. “It is obvious, Dr. Kazaki is not on board. His dive equipment is gone also. For now, he is officially missing. We must wait for the police.” After a quick pat on her shoulder, he turned away and the other two followed, leaving her alone again with the sunset.

  The sun winked out, but Sam could still see an image of the last bright sliver burned into her retinas. No green flash. On the backs of her eyelids, the warm blurry horizon jelled into a cold, still face. Staring hazel eyes. Blue-tinged lips. She hurriedly opened her eyes.

  The first stars glinted against the darkening skies. The shrill cries of the gulls had died away, replaced by lapping water and the incessant barking of sea lions near shore, and the rumble of a distant motor. From the dining room below, she caught an occasional phrase of conversation, a clink of silverware or thump of a glass against the wooden tables. How could the tour group eat? What had they been told?

  A strand of hair blew across her cheek. She brushed it away from her face, felt for the bottle at her side, and raised it to her lips. As Dan had warned, the Ecuadorian red wine had a harsh bite, but it seemed more appropriate for this occasion than the Chilean Chardonnay that Constantino had offered.

  Someone laughed below, a hearty guffaw. Jerry Roberson or Jon Sanders, she couldn’t tell which. How could they enjoy themselves? Of course, to them Dan was a stranger: the marine biologist with an Asian face, one of the two mysterious divers who were not part of their tour group.

  She stared at the black liquid expanse of sea between the ship and the island. If Dan had slipped into the water from the stern platform of Papagayo, someone on board had to have seen him, hadn’t they? Maybe not, if he’d suited up in the engine room and simply stepped outside. But a rocky peninsula divided the ocean between the bay she’d found him in and the last position of Papagayo; how could he have swum around that? It had taken her fifty minutes to paddle that distance; it was a lot farther than a diver would swim on one tank of air. But then, he hadn’t had air, at least not at the last. A sea lion or a shark might have carried him to those rocks. But then there was the missing regulator mouthpiece and the cut on his neck and face; that hadn’t looked like the work of sea lion teeth. And if it had been a shark . . . she shook her head, unwilling to let her imagination visualize the results of a shark attack.

  The bad air. The boat pilot. The hotel owner. All warnings? What the hell had she stumbled into? She crossed her arms and leaned forward, trying to loosen the knot of muscles constricting her shoulder blades. Had she and Dan traded the nebulous dangers of Puerto Ayora to move onto a boat where their enemies could spy on them at every moment?

  Was Tony an enemy? He looked like Ricardo, the hostile boat owner. Captain Quiroga owned fish canneries. Would he want to kill a scientist who was trying to stop illegal fishing?

  Would she be next? A hard crack on the head and a quick toss over the railing were all it would take for her to join Dan in the depths. She could almost feel the rush of cool water against her face. At the moment, it didn’t seem like such a bad fate.

  She thought about phoning her father in Kansas, but then remembered that he was in Europe on a long-awaited honeymoon with his old-friend-now-new-bride Zola. Sam rarely called him anyway, and certainly never when someone died, because she knew that if he said one word about God’s will or being at peace in heaven, she’d start yelling about religion being BS. They’d both end up miserable.

  Her father believed that she lived a dangerous crazy life, and if this wasn’t perfect proof of that, what was? She set the phone down beside her on the deck, reached for the railing, and pulled herself toward the dark sea. Thrusting her feet out over the deck edge, she let them dangle into space and rested her throbbing forehead against the cool metal railing.

  Soft footsteps approached. A gentle hand settled on the top of her head, light as a bird. Abigail Birsky, the preacher’s wife. The lecture was coming, any second now. Mysterious w
ays of the Almighty, angels singing, gone to a better place.

  “The captain just told us. I’m here, dear,” the soft Southern voice murmured. “If you want to talk. Or for any way I could help.”

  “Me, too.”

  Sam looked up, startled at the male voice. Ken swiped nervously at his mustache, then said, “You okay?” He seemed to be evaluating her position at the deck edge. Behind them hovered Jon Sanders, holding hands with his wife Paige.

  “I’m not jumping,” Sam reassured them. She had no urge to die. “I just need to be alone.”

  “Sure you don’t want company?” Ken asked.

  “I’m sure.” She wanted to get the hell off this ship, fly back to her home in the woods, sit in front of her fireplace with her cat Simon purring in her lap. She’d make a reservation first thing tomorrow.

  They left, but she didn’t feel alone. Looking up at the bridge above her, she spotted the crew member she’d met in the engine room this afternoon. The poor guy was probably assigned to keep an eye on her. She returned her gaze to the dark mass of the island in the distance and the surrounding black water. The muffled voices of passengers and mechanical clanks and clinks gradually gave way to the lapping of waves and the occasional wail of a gull. All she could think of was Dan floating, endlessly floating, through all that dark water.

  The throb of a powerful engine finally broke her trance, and a deep voice pierced the darkness. “Oye, Papagayo!” A splash signaled the departure of the sea lion resting on the rear platform. Then a thump shuddered throughout the ship as another boat joined them.

  Male voices, speaking Spanish, rose from the stern. Sam caught the words desaparecido and muerto. Disappeared, perhaps? And muerto—dead, she knew that word. Heavy footsteps clanged up the metal steps onto the main deck below her, and then faded away on entering the lounge.

  Thanks to the bottle of wine Constantino had given her, she was working her way toward numbness, but right now her entire body still ached. Headache. Backache. Heartache.

  In their three-day acquaintance, Daniel Kazaki had become a friend. Kindred spirits didn’t show up often in her life. During their first dinner together in the Galápagos, she and Dan had discussed the wonder of reef creatures extracting minerals from seawater to build their intricate shells.

  “Imagine,” he’d said, his eyes shining, “if people could synthesize building materials out of air and soil with their own bodies, everyone could have their own shell.”

  “The big shells would shove the little shells off their reef.” She was more than a little cynical about the human species.

  He chuckled. “Or society would be divided by different colors of shells.” Yep, definitely a kindred spirit. The conversations she shared with Dan were the same ones that made her relatives question her sanity.

  The conversations she had shared. Dan was past tense now. She raised the wine bottle to her lips again.

  Thudding footsteps on the metal stairs preceded the two men. Captain Quiroga now wore dress whites, no doubt in deference to the men who stood to his right, a tall thin blond and a fat balding officer in khaki uniforms and caps with official-looking tricolor insignias on them. The blond crooked a long index finger in a come-here gesture. “Señorita. Por favor.”

  Instead of policía, the captain introduced the officers as fiscalia, which seemed to be the Ecuadorian word for “police.” This was not an interrogation, they told her. Just a few questions.

  It sure felt like an interrogation, as she sat in the captain’s office in a molded plastic chair that dated from the sixties. Her head throbbed from the rumble of the generator and the diesel fumes. Drinking so much cheap red wine probably didn’t help.

  “He was Japanese?” The question came from Eduardo, who was serving as interpreter.

  Sam glared at him. He knew the answer to that question. Eduardo shrugged and tilted his head toward the two officers. Just translating. They’d been over this ground before. Were the officers hoping to trip her up a second time around? She knew no lies to trip over. “I said Irish-Japanese-American. Daniel Kazaki was American. You have his passport.” She inclined her head toward the captain’s desk, where her passport lay alongside Dan’s.

  The potbellied cop—Aguirre, according to his nameplate—put his fingers to the corners of his eyes and pulled his eyelids into slits. The blond officer laughed. Eduardo’s cheeks turned scarlet.

  Sam wondered if many cops were so mean-spirited. Chase was a cop of sorts; she didn’t want to believe he’d laugh at a victim. She wished he were here to make sense of the situation. She sure could use a Spanish-speaking FBI agent now. Why couldn’t the men she hooked up with ever be supportive? Or even available?

  Aguirre spoke to her. “What was Kazaki doing here in the Galápagos?” Eduardo repeated in English. His expression remained disinterested, as though he had never met Dan, had never shared a glass of wine with him.

  One more time. “Dr. Kazaki was conducting a marine survey. A count.” She found herself speaking loudly, slowly enunciating every word as though that would make the two officers suddenly comprehend English.

  “Counting what?”

  She shrugged. “Fish. And everything else.”

  “Sea cucumbers?” Eduardo pronounced the word ko-kombers.

  Dan had filled in her sketchy knowledge of the sea cucumber—pepino—“war” that had erupted more than a decade ago. Lured by fantastic prices paid by Japan and Hong Kong, local fishermen had risked the bends and even death to collect the slug-like creatures. For years, the corpses of drying pepinos hung from every roof in the Galápagos towns. Then the real battle started: international conservation groups versus local fishermen, with the Ecuadorian government alternately enforcing or ignoring quotas, depending on who wielded the most power at the moment.

  Where did the poachers hang the pepino corpses to dry now? The new constitution promised protection, but those were only words on paper. She couldn’t get yesterday’s vision of mangled sharks out of her head. “Dan was counting cucumbers, fish, turtles, sharks, rays—everything,” she said.

  “The porpoise?”

  She remembered the porpoise surfacing outside her cabin porthole the night before last. When this still seemed like her dream assignment. “Of course,” she told them. “He would include porpoises, too.”

  Eduardo shook his head. “No, the porpoise of the count! They want to know the why.”

  She took a breath. Surely they knew why an organization would want a fish count. Was it dangerous to say it? “He was hired to make a report to the Natural Planet Foundation.”

  The two officers exchanged a scowl. What was going through their heads? If the report showed a continuing loss of sea life inside the marine sanctuary, would that provide the fiscalia with evidence they needed to pursue poachers? Or would they worry the report would make local law enforcement look inept?

  “Why are you on this boat?” Aguirre asked. “You are not among the list of passengers.”

  She told them about the bad air fill in Puerto Ayora, about how Dan had nearly died on their first dive. She choked as the reality hit her again. Dan had died in the water today.

  The officers listened to Eduardo’s translation, their faces impassive. When she could continue, she explained how she and Dan had abruptly been forced to leave the hotel, and how they’d moved to Papagayo. At that point Eduardo stumbled in his translation and seemed to search for words. A rapid exchange ensued between him and the officers. Eduardo appeared increasingly uncomfortable. Was the back-and-forth about the arrangement that Eduardo had made with Dan to get them onto the boat? But why would that would be an issue? She and Dan had occupied empty cabins.

  Abruptly the conversation ceased. She waited for a translation from Eduardo, but he studied the floor while the police studied her.

  “Who will call Dr. Kazaki’s wife?” she finally asked. Please don’t tell me it’s my job.

  The blond policeman rose. His uniform nameplate identified him as Schwartz. S
am half expected German to come out of his mouth each time he opened it. But of course he spoke in Spanish, and Eduardo translated. “For now, Dr. Kazaki is officially missing. We will inform the American Consulate. They will deal with his family and with NPF.”

  Had Schwartz sounded hostile when he mentioned NPF? To her ears, everything the officers said sounded harsh. With a sweep of his hand, Schwartz gathered Dan’s passport as well as her own from the desktop in front of him. He tapped them into a neat packet and buttoned them into his shirt pocket.

  “Hey!” She jumped up from her seat. The room briefly wavered around her, and she grabbed the back of the chair to steady herself. How much wine had she swallowed?

  Schwartz rattled off a long string of words in Spanish.

  “They will keep your papers for a few days,” Eduardo explained.

  “Until when?” She intended to catch the first plane back to the States. She glared at the officers. “I’m a U.S. citizen!”

  Officer Aguirre snorted and crossed his arms over his wide chest. He’d probably heard that line more than once.

  Eduardo shook his head, a barely perceptible motion. His eyes begged her not to make a scene.

  “Can I go?” she asked.

  “You are dismissed,” Eduardo confirmed.

  Officer Schwartz added a few more words.

  “For now,” Eduardo translated, his eyes somber with warning.

  10

  Sam stood on the stained carpet of the narrow hallway, staring at the door to 4, Dan’s cabin, as she clenched and unclenched her fists.

  The door was not even fully closed; the police had neglected to latch it. What had she expected? Yellow crime scene tape? She pushed the cabin door open.

  Dan’s porthole was shadowed now by the dark gray hull of the official boat, which bore an emblem that read, armada de ecuador. The police had arrived on a military boat. According to Eduardo, that was the norm down here.