by Grant Stone
His mouth watering, his fingers trembling, he tore open the wrapper. Then, with an effort of will, he brought himself under control. He sat down on the edge of the bed, broke off a square of the rich, dark chocolate, placed it carefully in his mouth, and chewed.
Flavour flooded his mouth, and as the sugar hit his bloodstream, he felt an intense, almost nauseating rush of energy. He had to be careful, or he would throw up every mouthful he ate. He forced himself to sit for five minutes. The dog looked up at him, whining. ‘Here you go, boy,’ he said: the dog did not recognise the words, but it recognised the meaning, and when he tossed it the second piece of chocolate it seized upon it with delight. One more piece for him, one more for the dog ... ‘You’ve had enough, dog,’ said Nasimul, and let himself have the unimaginable luxury of cramming four squares into his mouth at once. He was almost delirious with pleasure, though his stomach roiled warningly. And the great thing, the best thing of all, is that he still had most of the block left.
He felt good, so good, better than he had since the Jamalpur-2 began its long journey to the bottom of the globe. He was on land, and for the moment, he was safe and dry. In fact, now he had the block of chocolate, maybe he did not need to go out foraging in the rain. He decided to sit for a moment longer while he thought about what to do, and as he did, the spike in his blood sugar started its downhill slope and bone-deep tiredness rose up like the sea to claim him.
THE PROBLEM WASN’T that the guy wouldn’t talk. The problem was that the guy talked too fucking much. Even a couple more clips around the jaw hadn’t shut him up.
He was a good-looking guy if you liked older men, maybe in his thirties, dark curly hair, quite muscly. The muscles weren’t doing him a whole lot of good, because he was firmly tied to a chair in the interrogation room ... well, it was the tearoom, but they were short of space.
The interrogator was Staff Sergeant Anderson. She would never have made it onto a cop show. There were no gotcha moments, no revealing of new pieces of evidence with a dramatic flourish. She just repeated each question, sometimes with additional physical punctuation from Corporal Reweti, until the prisoner answered.
Donna and Mere were seated in the back of the room, observing. ‘You might learn something,’ Staff Sergeant Anderson had said. But it was late, the chair was hard, the overhead lights were bright, and although she kept telling herself to stop worrying about the damn dog, she couldn’t stop worrying about the damn dog. She had already asked once whether she could go back for him, and been told to shut up and stop interrupting.
‘I’m sick of this,’ whispered Donna.
‘Be quiet!’ Mere whispered back louder.
If the guy had had some beans to spill it might all have been more interesting. But all he’d given up was his name (Brian Strong), his place of residence (West Auckland, somewhere up in the Waitakeres), his occupation (schoolteacher! Donna had snorted at that, and Staff Sergeant Anderson had turned round and fixed her with an I’m-not-telling-you-again scowl), and the fact that he had been ‘visiting a friend’ when they had found him, and that the friend was indeed the small, frightened Asian woman who was sitting in one of the makeshift cells down the hall. She wasn’t talking because no one in this particular Shore Patrol HQ could speak her language, and they couldn’t find anyone in the local Bengali community prepared to put their neck in the noose and act as her translator. ‘They’re all in it together,’ Corporal Reweti had muttered darkly.
So the frightened woman would remain in her tiny cell until she was transferred to whichever of the detention camps could make room for her.
Staff Sergeant Anderson was starting to get to the interesting stuff – what exactly had a schoolteacher from the wild West been doing with a woman who was, let’s face it, an infiltrator, in a rundown house on the edge of a Waitakere Harbour?
‘I was giving her English lessons,’ said the defiant Mr Strong.
‘English lessons? Then how come she can’t speak English?’
‘We’d only just started.’
Corporal Reweti didn’t even need to be told. He fetched the prisoner a stinging backhander on the left temple. leaving him with a gash above his left eye and a trickle of blood running down his face – Corporal Reweti was a married man, and wore his wedding ring proudly.
‘What the fuck?’ said Brian Strong. This time, it was his right temple that started bleeding.
‘Got a girlfriend, Brian?’ asked Staff Sergeant Anderson. ‘Boyfriend? Husband? Wife?’
‘Leave her the fuck out of this.’
‘If she hasn’t broken the law she’s got nothing to fear from us. But what you need to decide is, when is she going to see you again, and what are you going to look like when she does? Right now, you’re a good-looking man who’s a bit the worse for wear. Nothing a little bit of medical attention won’t fix. But Corporal Reweti and I, we’re just amateurs at this interrogation business, and we prefer to keep it that way. As long as people tell us what we need to know, we fall over ourselves to be helpful to them. Wounds dressed, food, water, uninterrupted sleep, that sort of thing. But when we get tough nuts – people who don’t tell us what we need to know – amateurs like Corporal Reweti and I can’t hope to crack them. That’s when we have to hand them over to the professionals. And then we can forget about them, because we never see them again. Or if we do, we don’t recognise them anymore.’
Staff Sergeant Anderson sat in silence as she let that sink in. For almost five minutes, she sat in silence, and the prisoner sat, his face downcast, dried blood clotting on his cheek. Donna shifted in her chair and wondered when the fuck she was even going to be able to get out of here, and how hungry she was getting, and how hungry Rufus must be getting too, and whether he was scared, and—
Five silent minutes, and then the prisoner looked up and said ‘All right,’ and said he’d tell them what he knew. It wasn’t a hell of a lot. He’d been contacted anonymously online, and told they’d heard he was against the detention camps, and told how he could help the people he insisted on calling ‘the refugees’: it involved going to houses for which he was given the address, and finding people there, and taking them to other houses. Besides the people he was helping, there was never anyone at the pickup house or the dropoff house.
‘And how did you transport them?’
‘In my car. White guy driving, no one’s looking twice at me.’
‘So where was your car tonight?’
‘I didn’t want to park it right outside – too conspicuous. So I parked it a couple of streets back, and when we went to get in it, some fucker had stolen it. We went back to the house while I tried to figure out what to do. I was still trying to figure out what to do when your goons burst through the door.’
‘So what’s the address of the other house you were planning to drive to?’
He gave it to them. ‘But you won’t find anyone there,’ he said.
‘Well, we’ll check it out. Hey, Brian, just because I want to know: why did you let yourself get involved in all this? Why get yourself tied up with the Shepherds?’
‘Why? Because everyone on these boats is a human being in desperate need of help, yet our government sinks the boats, shoots the survivors, and sticks anyone who manages to make it ashore into concentrations camps.’
‘So you’d like our country to be flooded with millions of starving, illiterate peasants, would you? How are we going to feed them? Where are we going to put them? Are you going to give up your house for them?’
‘They’re human beings,’ said Brian firmly. ‘And they have just as much right to life as we have.’
Staff Sergeant Anderson stood up. ‘Brian, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you. Corporal Reweti, call our specialist colleagues and tell them we have a prisoner for interrogation, would you? I’m sure they can get a lot more out of Mr Strong than we’ve been able to.’
The man was still shouting and raving at Anderson and Reweti when the closing door cut off the sound of his voice. Donna thought
it served the bastard right. He should have kept his Westie nose out of other people’s business.
‘Right,’ said Staff Sergeant Anderson. ‘It’s time to check out that address in Pakuranga he gave us, although I don’t believe we’re going to find anybody there.’
‘Maybe it was a trap,’ said Mere.
‘I don’t think so. He was real anxious to please us when he gave us that address. But we’ll make sure we’re fully armed, just in case, and I’ll come with you. Five should be enough. Scott, you can go and fetch that dog you left behind.’
‘By myself?’ squawked Donna.
‘Yes, by yourself.’
‘But I’ll be late for work! I won’t get any sleep!’
‘You should have thought of that before you left the dog behind.’
‘But—’
‘And you should have thought of that before you interrupted my interrogation with your stupid questions and silly noises. Reflect on that while you’re walking. And if picking up the dog makes you late for work, take the damn dog to work. Dismissed.’
So while the rest of them piled into the runabout to head over to Pakuranga, Donna had to walk, by herself, back down the hill to the edge of the water. The sky was growing lighter, she had her gun, and she was so furious about the unfairness of it all that she had no room to be nervous. All she’d done was snorted when the prisoner had said he was a teacher! Mere had talked, actually talked, and that bitch Anderson hadn’t said a thing to her.
But all the same, it was kind of crisp to be out this early in the morning with the harbour emerging from darkness and the streets silent except for the sound of her footfalls. The city was hers, to do with as she wished – and she had certainly never felt the city was hers before. Pick up Rufus, take him back to the depot, grab a quick feed, and tell Mrs Alberts she had been held up on unavoidable Shore Patrol business, and it probably wouldn’t be the last time, either. She could handle that. She increased her pace, swinging down the street under a brightening sky.
NASIMUL WAS ROUSED from dreams of deep water by the dog whimpering to be set free. He woke disoriented, aching, everything wrong from the light to the place he was lying, his clothes hot upon him. He sneezed.
A face appeared over the edge of the bed: a hopeful, trusting face. It came back to him: the dog, the rich, dark chocolate, the thought that he must sit for a few moments longer to gather his energy...
And now it was morning, or becoming so: too late to go out looking for food, too late to move around the streets. What was he going to do?
The dog whined at him. What did the dog want? He led it to the back door, opened the door cautiously, and soon found out as it lavishly and messily relieved itself a foot beyond the doorstep. Was it sick? It certainly wasn’t sick of his company, because when he tried to shoo it away in fierce and insistent whispers, it whined at the door until he let it back in. The dog licked at its empty bowl, then looked up at him. It wanted water. So did he.
The day grew brighter. Here he was, in a strange house in a strange city in a strange country. A country where they shot people like him, and a house where someone had been shot. But he could not think how to get away, or where he could get away to.
Food, water. He needed both. He had been stupid last night. He should have left a few sips in the water bottle, but the water bottle was empty. And as for the chocolate ... it was gone. He must have dropped it when he fell asleep. Now all that was left was a few scraps of foil and paper, and a dog with a bloated stomach.
‘You are a very bad dog,’ he told the dog. But the dog no longer appeared to care very much, and Nasimul didn’t have the energy to argue with fate. It was settled – he would have to leave the shelter of the house, and soon.
He went to use the toilet, and in finding the toilet, found a solution to his most immediate need: the cistern still had water in it. Not much, and it was rusty and for all he knew poisonous, but in that moment it was sweeter than nectar. He drank all he could, poured the rest out for the dog, then returned to the cistern to refill the bottle. He was returning to the bedroom with the second bottle when he heard the sound of a footstep behind him and turned to find a gun levelled at his face.
IT HAD BEEN EASY ENOUGH to retrace her steps to the house, the last house before the sea. The houses to either side of it had fallen apart or been cannibalised for their wood, but the house in which poor Rufus had spent the night had not quite fallen into ruin, though last night’s twin assault on the front and back doors had certainly helped it in that direction.
She felt too exposed at the front of the house, visible from anywhere: the sea, the sky. She trod the narrow, muddy path from front to back door, and almost stepped straight in a messy pile of dog shit. God! But if that was Rufus’s little welcome to her, how the hell had he got out? And if another dog was around, a feral dog, might it have squeezed through the big jagged hole in the door and gone after poor Rufus, who would have been tied up and completely unable to defend himself?
So she drew her gun and, with visions of finding Rufus menaced by some snarling beast or dead on the floor in a pile of blood and fur, pushed the door open as quietly as she could and entered the house.
She was so keyed up with the expectation of confronting a wild dog, or a pack of wild dogs, that she was taken completely by surprise when she saw a short, skinny brown man, wearing only a shirt many sizes too big for him, leave the toilet carrying something in his hand. She took one more step forward, a floorboard creaked, and he whirled around, saw the gun, and stopped still. From beyond him, in the bedroom, she heard Rufus whine in pain.
NASIMUL FROZE. THE woman was young, dark-haired, and scared. But though she was scared, she held the gun impressively steady on him.
‘What the fuck have you done to Rufus?’ she said.
Though her accent was strange to his ears, he could understand her. But who was Rufus?
‘No Rufus,’ he said.
‘The dog, you fucking arsehole!’
‘The dog! I give it water.’
From behind them came a series of retching noises. Rufus was throwing up. Donna stood still a moment longer, the gun now trembling slightly in her hand. If he had tried to run when he saw her, or if he had tried to attack her, she would have shot him without feeling a moment’s remorse. But now, despite how much she hated and feared him, she could not bring herself to do it.
‘Move,’ she said. ‘Move!’
She had to prod him with the gun before he moved ahead of her into the bedroom. Rufus was standing unsteadily, looking white around the muzzle, trembling and whining. He saw her and started to wag his tail, but it was a feeble effort. Where was his lead...?
‘What the fuck have you done with his lead!’
More incomprehension. She had to mime taking a dog on a walk before he understood and, moving cautiously, picked up the lead from where he had left it, beside the bed. She used it to tie the thin man’s hands together, uncomfortably aware as she did so of how easy it would be for him to knock the gun from her free hand, or push it away and leap on her. He was slim, but he was wiry. She was not sure she could take him in a fight.
‘Sit!’ she said, and he sat on the bed, looking at her with an expression she could not fathom. Fucking foreigners, she thought. Why did there have to be so many of them?
It was hard to check out Rufus and keep an eye on the infiltrator at the same time. But she didn’t need a vet degree to tell that the poor dog was very sick. He quivered against her, then heaved up again so quickly that she couldn’t get her left shoe out of the way in time. What the hell was wrong with him? He had been fine when she left him last night – a little sad, but otherwise fine. God, what if this guy had some weird disease? Maybe she was infected even now.
She told herself not to be silly. She told herself to think.
‘Did you feed him anything?’ she asked.
‘I – no, no. Some chocolate. He found it in the night.’
She stood up, walked over and backhanded him
across the face with the gun before she realised what she was doing. They were both very lucky, because the gun discharged as she hit him, and the bullet punched a hole in the rotting wall behind his right ear and spanged off harmlessly. He fell back, dazed and bleeding, and toppled off the bed. She stood over him, screaming.
‘You stupid fuck! Never give a dog chocolate! It kills them!’
He came to and stared up at her. Again her finger tightened on the trigger. She tried to think of him as just another infiltrator, a nameless brown figure escaping from the teeming, broiling North, floating south to overwhelm New Zealand and its way of life. Let in one, they said, and you may as well let them all in. Now she had her first chance to do her duty. Was she going to fail her country?
Yes. Yes, she was going to fail her country. All she could see before her was a man, cowering in fear of death. He was a stationary target, and she was good at shooting stationary targets, but she could not bring herself to shoot this one. She hit him across the forehead again, and he collapsed, unconscious. After making sure he was still breathing, she turned to deal with the dog.
‘OH, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE,’ said the dispatcher. ‘You want me to do what?’
‘Send a driver out to pick me up. I’ve got Rufus, and he’s sick. Really sick. He needs to see a vet as soon as possible.’
‘Rufus? Are you talking about that red-haired dipshit of a dog?’
‘Yeah, that red-haired dipshit that led us straight to an infiltrator and the prick who was helping her last night. And now he’s sick. That bastard left a block of chocolate behind, and Rufus ate it, and now he’s sick.’
‘Well, that’s shitty luck. Where are you?’
She told him, and then she waited in the alley beside the decaying house. She hoped she had hit the brown-skinned man hard enough to keep him unconscious till well after she, the driver and Rufus had left the area. She had considered tying the man up, but then he wouldn’t have been able to free himself and would presumably starve to death – it would have been kinder to shoot him.