by A. J. Reid
But no matter how much I drank, I could never get them to hear me.
‘Let’s you get you two on deck and over to this ferry,’ said the Captain, pushing me away from the table and out of the cabin. I was startled by the sound and sensation of the ripcord on my lifejacket being pulled.
‘It’s getting rough out here, lad. Hold on,’ the Captain said, as I clung to the mast for dear life.
I tied the loose ends of my lifejacket firmly to my body and looked round to see Graziano working away as if he had been at sea all his life. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing and moved without any awkwardness. Even the lopsidedness of his mouth had straightened, and he seemed oblivious to the danger of our imminent undertaking. The Captain shrugged and continued to instruct me.
After following the Captain’s orders, the sail caught the wind with a great rumble and crack, and we held on tight as the boat surged forward off its moorings. Within seconds, we seemed to be moving at great speed towards the lights of the ferry. The galaxies of each shoreline streamed past us and for a second it seemed as if we were sailing through space, past constellations more ancient than anyone could imagine, home to strange creatures. As we came to within twenty yards of the ship, it dawned on me that we were going to have to swim the remainder of the distance to avoid wrecking. I looked down at the churning black waves rising and crashing, convinced that they would swallow me whole and never spit me back out. The Captain pointed to a ladder on the side of the ferry.
‘Hypothermia,’ I said, shielding my eyes from the driving snow. ‘We’ll die of hypothermia before we even get a finger on that ladder!’
‘Nonsense. You’ll swim that before your coconuts freeze,’ said the Captain, shaking the snow out of his beard. ‘Easy.’
Graziano came over to join us in a bright orange lifejacket, clearly designed for someone much smaller.
‘Easy,’ he murmured, taking me by the arm and walking me over to the edge of the boat. Without another word, he threw me into the violent green and white water below.
The coldness bit, but the lifejacket bounced me to the surface, allowing my lungs to draw air. I saw Graziano already swimming towards the ferry, so I put my arms and legs into motion and tried to catch up. With the wind and tide in our favour, I had to plough hard through the water to avoid being swept beyond our target.
By the time Graziano and I reached the ferry’s ladder, I was losing consciousness. I felt my hands relinquishing their grip on the cold metal rungs until I felt a rising sensation, as if I was being lifted up to Heaven by the hand of God. Graziano’s great meat hook was clenched around my lifejacket as he hauled me on to the dark, abandoned deck, both of us landing in a heap. I remember the sight of my limp feet dragging backwards through the ice and snow on the deck of the ferry and a pulling feeling across my neck and shoulders.
I came to in the engine room, which was at least twenty degrees warmer than outside. The room was completely dark apart from the red glow provided by the furnace up ahead. I could hear Graziano breathing.
‘Take off your clothes,’ he said.
‘Oh right, yeah,’ I said, shivering as I watched him wring out his shirt.
Once I had removed and wrung out the last garment, Graziano hung them over a large pipe near the furnace next to his clothes. He sat opposite me in the darkness like a statue that had been attacked with Stanley knives.
‘What happened to you?’ I asked, looking at the shiny scar tissue all over his shoulders catching the light.
‘I don’t remember,’ he said.
The docks had a long and dark history of bareknuckle boxing, organized by the foremen of the shipyard and the underworld figures who never strayed far from the rich pickings inside the warehouses that lined the dockside. I suspected that Graziano might have fought more than a few rounds.
‘It hurts sometimes,’ Graziano said, turning one hand over in the other. Even with the roar of the furnace, the mechanical chugging of the engine and the distant howling of the snowstorm, his breathing was still audible.
‘Did you kill Tanner?’ I asked.
Graziano continued to fidget with his giant hands. His large, lopsided features crumpled for a moment as if he were about to cry, and he brought his hands to his giant head to hide his eyes and nodded.
I grabbed our clothes off the hot pipe. Separating my clothes from Graziano’s was not difficult, since his were almost twice the size. I handed them to him, but still he would not take his hands from his eyes.
‘Why don’t you get dressed and go and tell Ms. Doyle that everything’s fine, while I find Rachel?’
Graziano shook his head with his hands still attached. The blood had turned pink in the giant, churning washing machine of the estuary.
I put down his clothes down on the floor next to him. ‘I have to go and find Rachel.’
‘Can I just … stay here?’ he asked through his fingers.
I looked at the scars on his head and shoulders again. ‘Of course you can.’
My shoes were somewhere at the bottom of the salty, black washing machine, so my bare feet made very little sound as I crept away from Graziano. Just as I unlatched the door with a resonant clank, he grunted and waved with one of his huge hands.
‘Merry Christmas,’ he said as I closed the door behind me.
The Red Door
I tidied myself up in the reflection of a porthole before heading out into the party. I rested my head on the cold, white metal of a door, brushing my hand over a patch of rust on the handle. My hands still burned from the cold water, despite having sat by the furnace long enough to dry out. If the wrong person was to see me emerging from that doorway, I knew might well spend my last moments looking up through the surface of the river at Doyle and her henchmen, unable to reverse my watery fate.
The first thing to stun me as I opened the door was the noise. The music: bleak, hard techno pulsating and thudding through the darkness and the smoke. I could see shapes grinding and shaking to the beat, bathed in purple and white light by the luminescent shafts slicing through the dancefloor. I ventured out into the writhing crowd as a strobe came into effect, recognising one or two faces immobilized and illuminated for split seconds. I ploughed through the sweaty, gyrating bodies, searching for Rachel. The boat rocked violently in the storm, but this only seemed to inflame the party atmosphere as the dancers shrieked with laughter and picked themselves up off the sticky floor.
The strobe revealed Luke, dancing with a group of girls from the cafeteria. He looked up and recognized me, made his excuses and broke away from his dancing partners.
‘What happened to you?’ he asked, brushing a bit of seaweed off my jacket. ‘Tell me why you smell like a sewer.’
‘I was up on deck. Got caught by a wave,’ I replied.
‘Hmmm. Who were you with?’
‘On my own.’
‘With someone you shouldn’t have been?’
‘Where’s Rachel?’ I asked.
‘Haven’t seen her for about an hour. Doyle was all over her from the moment they arrived at the ferry terminal in the limousine,’ Luke said. ‘Is she after a promotion?’
‘She’s in danger.’
‘Find Doyle; find Rachel, I reckon, mate,’ Luke said. ‘Try Doyle’s room.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Listen, I only know because Michelle from …’
‘Just fucking tell me,’ I snapped.
‘Top deck. Take the spiral staircase at the end of the smaller bar, then follow the corridor until you reach a steel door.’
‘There must be a hundred steel doors on this ship.’
‘It’s the one painted red,’ Luke said.
‘Very funny.’
‘Spit down: I’m not lying.’
I grabbed Luke by the lapel of his brand new Armani blazer. ‘Are you in on this?’
‘In on what? I swear … all I know is that it’s the red door. Watch the jacket, lad.’
‘She told you to tell me, didn’t
she?’
I started making my way through the crowd, only to have Luke follow me. ‘I swear that’s all I know. She told me that if I wanted to keep my job, that I should pass on the message to you. Please don’t be angry with me.’
‘Don’t get involved,’ I said.
‘Wait,’ Luke said, before disappearing back into the tangled mass of dancers and persuading one of them to hand over her mobile.
‘Use this. I’ll be your lookout.’
‘Where is security?’ I asked, checking the exits.
Luke pointed towards the centre of the dance floor at several of the guards dancing up against the sunbed orange bodies of the Cosmetics girls.
‘The natural order,’ Luke shrugged.
I watched the steroid-inflated gorillas and the girls perform their mating rituals in ever more lurid fashion, all the time checking out their reflections in the giant mirror covering the far wall.
‘There’s nothing natural about that,’ I said.
Luke threw his arms around me and hugged me. I could smell the vodka Martinis seeping through his skin.
‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘Doyle’s lost the plot.’
I hugged him back before weaving my way across the dance floor towards the spiral staircase.
In the corridor, I used the phone’s screen as a torch to examine each door as I passed it. The swell caused me to stagger as the ship was dumped by another wave and the music from the dance floor faded in the steel gullet that was swallowing me, forcing me deeper into the belly of the vessel. As I went further, the music was reduced to a tame repetitive thud. Only when I could no longer even hear the strains of the bass drum did I find the red door.
I turned the phone to look farther along the white metal throat; sure enough, every door was painted white except for the one I was standing in front of, which stood out like blood in snow.
I didn’t even want to touch it.
Star of Bethlehem
The room was plush with wood, leather and velvet, and from the ceiling swung half a crystal chandelier. Beneath it on the hardwood floor, scattered shards of the other half. I looked around the room at various expensive trinkets from Glassware and China, most of which lay on the floor in pieces. The storm outside was still raging, making the chandelier swing like a hurricane lantern, the remaining lights on it casting weird, animated shadows all over the walls. On the table lay a large, elegantly detailed mirror, covered in white lines of powder, some of which had broken its ranks and made its way on to the table and floor. Amongst the smashed pile of green glass beneath the table, I could see the label of a Krug champagne bottle.
I walked by the doorway to another room, from which came the sounds of female pleasure and the creaking of a bed. I looked down into the mirror to see that my reflection was as white as the powder scattered around it.
I peered round the doorjamb to see moonlight being cast into the room through a large porthole in the ceiling, illuminating the undulating sheets and the shiny, satin waves rolling and crashing in time with the gasps and the murmurs of pleasure coming from beneath them. Every now and then, bare flesh would poke out through the surface of the black tide. I walked over to the bed and tore the sheet from it.
Emma leapt up and away, screaming and grabbing the sheets to cover herself while Doyle lay there, exposed and smiling.
I removed the oil lamp from its hook on the wall and held it up to the figure cowering in the corner of the room. ‘Emma?’ I said, tugging on the sheet she was using to cover her face.
She refused to look at me, snatching the sheets back to hide herself.
I turned back to Doyle to find the bed empty.
‘Where’s Rachel?’ I spoke into the darkness. ‘This has gone far enough. Show yourself.’
Emma’s eyes were fixed on the doorway to the adjoining room.
‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked, creeping towards the doorway. ‘What do you want?’
The answer came softly from shadows. ‘You know.’
Doyle appeared in the doorway wearing just a fur coat, her bare legs drawing shadows on the floor. ‘And so does Rachel,’ she said, lighting a cigarette.
‘Where is she?’
‘She’s in the galley, fetching up another bottle. Feel free,’ she said, spreading her claws in the direction of the cocaine mirror.
I stayed put.
‘Ah, I see. You think that I’m a terrible person. Evil,’ she said, taking a long drag on her cigarette.
‘What have you done with her?’
‘Nothing … yet,’ Doyle said. ‘She’ll be back any minute; ask her yourself.’
‘I know about Tanner. I know what Graziano did.’
‘Terrible business,’ she replied, breathing out a plume of smoke. ‘Albert wasn’t supposed to come home early that day. I’m not sure what he was thinking, going for Graziano like that. And with a Ming vase, of all things.’
‘Vase?
‘Graziano was in bed with me when Albert hit him with the vase,’ she said, tapping her ash straight on to the wooden floorboards. ‘He snapped Albert’s neck like a twig, then collapsed with a brain haemorrhage.’
‘And you were the sole heir?’
‘Let’s call it a happy accident,’ she said. ‘Is Graziano hurt?’
‘Rachel knows about her father. She knows that you sent him away.’
The ferry rolled, initiating a symphony of metallic groans while Doyle pulled deeply on her cigarette, her sparkling, feline eyes never leaving mine.
‘We’ve all made mistakes,’ she said. ‘Some of us feel the need to atone.’
‘Tell me where she is.’
‘And some of us don’t,’ she smiled. Her eyes were huge: the deathly black pupils dilated by the cocaine. It was as if the darkness inside her was seeping out through her eye sockets and into the room. She put her cigarette out under her bare foot and stooped to the mirror to inhale another line.
‘What’s life without a little fun?’
‘You did all this for your own amusement?’
‘I’m not a big fan of television,’ Doyle said, tossing her hair and licking her lips. ‘And I had to know.’
‘Know what?’
‘If it wasn’t for you, none of this would be necessary in the first place,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to go out with a bang, Mr. Black. Shame we never got around to it.’
‘Emma, how can you be here?’ I asked, hoping for an answer that might pull me out of the rabbit-hole.
‘Emma has been compensated for her troubles, don’t you worry about that,’ Doyle said.
The ship rolled hard, hurling me to the floor. When I stood up, all of the cocaine on the mirror was gone and there was a bloody trail of footprints from the pile of shattered glass to the door. Doyle was nowhere to be seen.
‘Stay here and lock the door behind me,’ I told Emma.
Statues
My footfalls clanged as I followed the footprints to the galley. The first thing I saw when I entered the room was a small metal crucifix hanging on the tiled wall above the sink. It made me wonder whether the God I had read about when I was at school would come and make Himself known; whether any of those songs I had sung, bathed in the colours of those stained-glass windows, would work in my favour right now.
I stood alone in the galley, leaning against a humming fridge, being watched by the various utensils hanging on the walls like portraits. When the ship rolled, they swung on their hooks, reflecting the moonlight around the galley. Continuing to follow the bloody prints, I drew the edge of my shoe through one of the smudges to find that it was still wet. The trail led to a knife block with a blade missing, then out of the galley and up the spiral staircase to the deck. I took the knife next to the empty slot and continued to follow the trail, more anxious to find Rachel than ever.
I spilled from the staircase into what was now a fierce blizzard on deck. My vision obscured by the ice and snow, I staggered forwards towards the bow, aiming for the light of a lantern and the sound
of voices from beyond the wall of weather. Shielding my eyes with one hand, I kept the knife folded backwards towards my elbow in the other, using my feet to feel my way through the maze of benches.
When I reached the bow of the ship, I found Doyle leaning against the railings, her feet black with blood in the moonlight; her legs as white as the fur she was wearing. She had the huge carving knife pointed at her chest, embedded in the fur, while Rachel yelled for help. Doyle smiled as the ship rolled and the waves crashed up against the sides, covering the top deck with an icy spray. I lost my footing and clattered over a bench, alerting the two of them to my presence.
Rachel ran to me, shouting above the wind, ‘She’s going to kill herself!’
‘Let’s get out of here. We’ll send help.’
‘I think that you should hear what she has to say.’
‘She’s lying to you. Whatever it is, she’s lying.’
‘If she dies, I might never find my father.’
Doyle sniffed and smiled, tilting her head backwards over the railings, exposing her sinewy neck and collarbones beneath the fur as the ship lurched. Having rammed the knife into the wood of the railing, she then began to climb over it, so I ran across the slimy deck to pull her back. As soon as I laid my hands on the fur, she pulled away violently, knocking over the oil lamp, which smashed on the deck creating a flaming puddle. Having yanked the knife from the wood, she retreated to the stern, her bare feet splatting along the full length of the ship as Rachel and I followed. We came to a halt at starboard stern, just beneath the red warning light. She turned around to face us, clutching the knife in a small, shivering hand.
‘I’ll cut you if you touch me again,’ she said, sticking the knife in the railing’s handle again.
The ferry rolled and a wave, bright green against the lights of the docks, came crashing down onto the deck. We all lost our footing and slammed into the port safety railing. The three of us clung to the metal bars while the white froth receded across the old wooden boards of the deck. Doyle grabbed my shirt and pulled herself closer to me as we floundered about on the slimy surface.