The Finder

by Will Ferguson

  A dry swallow. “You shouldn’t have done that.” First, do no harm. Did the Hippocratic Oath apply to veterinarians?

  He tried to move, felt the pain shoot through him anew. Standing behind Catherine, Dr. Rowley came slowly into focus as though in an optometrist’s office, lenses clicking into place. His hair was combed across in a barcode pattern. Eyes protuberant. He spoke with that peculiar Kiwi twang, voice rising at the end of each sentence, asking a question even when he wasn’t. A strange island, this, where everything was uncertain, even the intonations.

  “Katie said y’wished to avoid hospitals.” Hesspituls. “I reckon it’s a police report you’re wanting to dodge, rather than proper medical care.” And then: “She said something about a satchel.”

  Rumors abound in the aftermath of any disaster. Of safety deposit boxes springing open like the graves at Christ’s death, of looters and mountebanks, of voluminous amounts of cash gone missing in the chaos. He was not a criminal by inclination, our Dr. Rowley. But there was an overdue bank loan and a Volvo with a faltering transmission. There was a failing practice and wife whose frown lines seemed to grow deeper by the day. She was always tired, his wife. Tired of the wind, of the lambs, the smell of silage. It seemed never to abate, the daily defeats and small setbacks. Forever gaining summits, then losing them. But here, falling practically into his lap, was an act of providence: a fugitive with a satchel, furtive and trapped. All those prayer-like wishes, answered. Dr. Rowley leaned in closer. “We need to talk, you and I. We need to discuss my fee.”

  The wounded man stared back. These were the conventional threats of a conventional man. “You may want to reconsider what you are about to do, doctor.”

  The veterinarian did his best not to smirk. “You don’t seem to be in much of a position to negotiate.” There was glee in the doctor’s eyes, a man whittled down by life. Up until this very moment, his existence had been a series of diminished returns, of colicky calves and soup-stained sweaters, a wife eroded by the wind. (He was wearing one such sweater now, a charcoal cardigan with mismatched buttons.) It haunted men, some men, this sense—not of having fallen, but having never made it up the hill to start with, not a has-been but a never-was.

  Catherine was confused. “If it’s a fee, I can pay it. My dad has some money in a jar.”

  The finder rolled his head to one side, considered this young woman who, by any rights, would eventually have to be killed. It was the only way to ensure silence. Something unfamiliar was tapping on the window. Tenderness? Mercy? Or was it just Irish sentimentality? Whatever it was, it flickered and died, a ghost of a breath on the glass. “Catherine,” he said, voice barely audible. “You should go.”

  “But I can pay. I don’t mind.”

  Dr. Rowley chuckled in his best avuncular manner; it was the practiced condescension of the professional class. “That won’t be necessary, Katie.” He handed his patient a pen and pad. “If you fill in your bank information, I can arrange a transfer.” At the back of his mind, like a muffled alarm duly ignored, Dr. Rowley understood—from his own experiences—that it was probably best not to prod a cornered animal, but when he felt his uneasiness begin to rise, he thought of his wife, of the lines in her face, and this quelled any doubts he might have had. “What price discretion?” he asked. “I propose a one-time payment.”

  The wounded man continued to stare at the doctor. Stared with lidless eyes. This doctor, so-called, was a fidgety man with a facial twitch and a sniff which never quite lined up, never quite fell into sync, the way a bus driver’s wipers never do, set at different tempos, clearing the rain at two different speeds. Annoying and compelling, such syncopations, whether in buses or in faces. When they do line up, his tic and his sniff, I shall plunge this pen into his neck, stab a hole in his carotid artery, watch his arrogance bleed out into the straw. But no. Not that. Too messy. “All this paperwork,” he said, voice weak but gathering strength. “So unnecessary. Why don’t I just pay in cash instead?”

  A smile.

  The finder knew that smile. It was a smile saturated in greed. He had seen it over the years, had seen it in Okinawa, on the Russian steppes, in the humid heat of the Congo. Greed is a terminal condition, and such men die with a disconcerting regularity. To Catherine, again, forcefully, he said, “You need to go. I wish to speak with this gentleman, alone.”

  Dr. Rowley concurred. “He’s right, Katie. Run along. We have business to discuss.”

  “But—”

  “Run along.”

  She wasn’t wanted. Catherine knew this feeling well, and she gathered her things and she left.

  Inside the barn, the sheep were restless. Anxious, with fearful bleats. The darkness was stirring, taking shape.

  “Well, then,” said Dr. Rowley. “Here we are, the two of us. A doctor and his patient, discussing fees.” The veterinarian waited for a response.

  The other man looked down at the blood-encrusted shirt he was wearing, then at the doctor’s own cardigan, tilted his head. “We’re about the same size, wouldn’t you say?”

  THE GOD OF UGLY THINGS

  DAWN.

  Darkness, shedding itself in layers, giving way to the dull gray light of morning. On the beach, waves were folding over, collapsing, rolling, sliding up along the shore, leaving wet contour lines on the sand. Seabirds weeping like professional mourners. They always seemed so unnecessarily histrionic to Rafferty. You can fly, what more do you want?

  The sea on one side, art deco facades of hotels lined up on the other. It was the Great Gatsby made manifest, a glittering Jazz Age promenade.

  New Zealand is a land of contrasts, and nowhere is this more evident than in its magnificent North Island, which boasts rich forests and secluded coastlines, attractive villages and eclectic cities. Consider Napier on the eastern coast, an architectural treasure house of 1920s aesthetics.

  Thomas Rafferty, still at it.

  He’d come all this way to the end of New Zealand because of a single text. A single word, really. It was from Tamsin. Just a place-name and a preposition: In Napier. And he had driven across the North Island in his rent-a-car, from the purgatory pools of Hell’s Gate, through towns small and unprepossessing. This improbable nation, this Kingdom of Bungalows.

  He thought about the way light alters a place: the tie-dyed sunsets of tropical climes, the splintered ice of Scandinavian skies, the Sunday glow of concrete in an urban industrial park, blushing pink for no one. In Napier, it was a palette of pastels, of greens and blues, of goldenrod and cinnamon. A city slumbering by the sea. Napier’s creamy marble facades—painted, not real—were stippled in the sort of light that makes Impressionists look like plagiarists. In Napier, the seasons were turned upside down. The end of February, and the parks were flooded with flowers still.

  Tamsin had sent him an address: a grand hotel located in a former Masonic lodge on Tennyson Street, an architectural art deco sampler with vintage cars parked out front. One of them was a 1937 Pontiac Indian Chief, if he wasn’t mistaken, polished red, like lacquer. But even here, amid these elegant streets, the scent of the sea permeated. There was no escaping the sea in New Zealand, not for long. It was always near at hand, even here.

  Inside the Masonic Hotel, a matronly hostess was pouring tea for the guests, spout bowing in turn. Wisps of steam, and women in sun hats. Men in fedoras, rakishly angled. Rafferty stood for a moment on parquet floors under tortoiseshell light, and a clerk approached from the side, like an adder. “Just missed her,” he whisper-hissed.

  “Who?”

  “Your lady friend.” It was a term only ever used sarcastically. “A tall woman. American, I believe.”

  Tall? Tamsin was short, squat even.

  “You are Mr. Rafferty, yeass?”

  “How did you—”

  “She told me. She said, ‘Watch for a large man who looks permanently out of place. Let me know when he arrives.’ Her words, not mine.”

  Messages from Tamsin were always vague. He sat in the lobby,
feeling self-conscious after Tamsin’s gratuitous “permanently out of place” comment, and anyway, wasn’t that the job description of a travel writer, to be permanently out of place? Across from him, a husband and his wife on some dismal leg of a journey were fast reaching a stalemate, the husband attempting to convince his wife that they were, in fact, having a Good Time, and the wife refusing to acknowledge such a possibility. Rafferty felt for him. There is no company more dreary than that of a woman who is determined—absolutely determined—not to have a good time. Rebecca in Okinawa, complaining about the sand. “Well, we are on a fuckin’ beach,” he’d snapped, and that had been the beginning of the end, though of course no collapse is ever caused by a single pelt of rain, no avalanche by a single flake of cold; avalanches and heartbreaks are always cumulative.

  Harried by memories, he retreated to the bar, and it was there that Tamsin found him. She arrived, full of grins. “Figured I’d find you here. You’d be an easy man to assassinate, Tom Rafferty.” The thin scar down the side of her face made every smile sardonic.

  “Am I really that predictable?”

  “It was either here or the nearest used bookstore.”

  They ate dinner, Tamsin’s treat. She always had more money than he did, not a major feat, granted, but something he’d long since come to accept. They ordered the seafood bisque, layers of flavor and heat, followed by goat cheese tartlet and braised lamb, with crème brûlée and raspberry chocolate at the end. Wine as dry as a mouthful of crackers. So dry, you became thirsty even as you drank it.

  “I’ve been here before,” he said. He had just realized. “This town. This city. A magazine feature on New Zealand wines, ten years ago, maybe? They sent me here on a wine tour. Bon Appétit, I think.”

  “What the hell do you know about wine?”

  “Not much.” Rafferty tended to treat wine tasting like a liquid buffet, which didn’t always endear him to the more refined vintners. “Mainly chardonnays and pinot gris out here, I think. But I remember—I remember this one late-harvest viognier, it was described as ‘mist infused.’ That’s stayed with me ever since. ‘Mist infused.’ ” It might well have applied to New Zealand as a whole.

  “Wine is weather,” said Tamsin. “It’s what they always say.” She finished hers in one extended gulp. “I like it here,” she replied, as though it were a verdict everyone had been waiting for. “Entire city is like a theme park. Very photogenic when the light hits the facades. It has a Miami Beach sort of vibe.” When every place reminds you of someplace else.

  “It was an earthquake that did it,” he said. “Back in the thirties, leveled the town. They had to rebuild the entire community quickly. They did it in the same architectural style, one recently popular, but not overly complicated. Largest collection of art deco buildings in the world, I think, outside of Miami Beach.”

  But any mention of earthquakes only drew the cloud of Christchurch over them. It had been two weeks and still the taste of plaster was in their mouths. Tamsin was waiting for the coroner’s inquest to begin. “Some anguish shots, families crying, collapsing into each other’s arms. That sort of thing. Could be a while, though. They’re still cleaning things up down there. It’s a mess.” But not a photogenic mess. No one wanted images of a cleanup. “Libya is boiling over, and I’m stuck down here.”

  “You’re like the Devil’s paparazzi.”

  “Get fucked,” she said, her voice too loud for their surroundings. You can take the girl out of Wisconsin… Other patrons were looking at them, but Tamsin didn’t care. “Lissen, lissen”—they were both a little drunk—“a single image from me, one fuckin’ frame, conveys more pain and reality than a thousand words from you.”

  “That is the going rate.”

  She snorted, that braying laugh of hers that he always found so annoying. And then, under her breath as the candle on their table guttered and died, “I don’t shoot death.” Kali with a light meter, he’d once called her, and it had stung, though she never quite knew why until in India she saw a sculpture of Kali, multi-armed and dancing merrily on the skulls of the dead. “I shoot life,” she said. “Life, reasserting itself even in the darkest moments. If I just wanted dead bodies, I would hang around traffic accidents and lower-tier amusement parks.”

  Onward they went, cartwheeling through another round of drinks, immune to the tutted stares of disapproval they received from the other tables. They must have looked like those souls whose very wanderings are a form of punishment, Dantean figures whose torments suited their sins. Or had Rafferty only imagined that, the looks, the Greek chorus of opprobrium that greeted them?

  He staggered onto his feet. “Show’s over!” he declared; to whom exactly wasn’t clear. And then, mangling the Italian, “La comedio il finite.”

  He’d taken a room at the Beach Front Motel on Marine Parade, where the curved balconies would catch first light perfectly, and even though her own hotel was paid for, Tamsin joined him there. He always had a knack for finding a view. When she woke, it was still dark. She was being pulled from a vehicle. In her dreams, she was always being pulled from a vehicle, and she woke up, not in Beirut or Baghdad, but back in Napier, where the most exciting thing to happen was a single earthquake eighty years ago.

  Rafferty was already up, had pulled a chair to the open balcony, curtains moving like the aurora australis, on a wind more seen than felt. He’d lit a cigarette, was carefully blowing the smoke outside. Not that it made a difference; the smoke was blowing right back in. It had infiltrated her dreams; it was the smell of smoke that had stirred her from her sleep.

  Drunken questions from Rafferty as she put him to bed the night before. “Why the army base?” he’d asked. “Why’d I meet you coming out’a that army base that one time?” He was referring to Seoul.

  “Are you still going on about that?” She swung one of his deadened legs onto the bed. It was like trying to move an uncooperative mattress. “The base had a bar, is all,” she said. “I’m not with the CIA. C’mon, your other leg too. There y’go. I’m not with anyone.”

  “You’re not who you say you are, that’s for sure.”

  “No one is. If they were, the world would be filled with saints and poets.”

  “You speak Farsi,” he said. “Who the hell speaks Farsi?”

  “Farsi? Hardly.” She pulled the blanket over him. The agreement was that the least drunk of the two of them would put the other one to bed. More and more, that was Raff. “I only know the basics,” she said. “‘Sniper!’ ‘Don’t shoot. I’m unarmed.’ ‘Don’t shoot! I’m a journalist.’ ‘The world is watching.’” That last one was a lie. The world may have been watching, but it didn’t care.

  “You speak Russian, too. I’ve heard you. Who th’ hell speaks Russian? Other than Russians, I mean.”

  “Again. I speak Russian—badly. I also speak Swahili—badly. And a bit of Arabic. It makes me semi-multilingual. I speak languages the way a bear dances. No one is impressed that the bear dances well, just that he dances at all.”

  By this point, Rafferty was half-gone, eyes closed. “Who are you?” he asked, though it wasn’t clear who the question was addressed to.

  She knew he would always resent the kindness that he’d been shown. There were times Tamsin felt sorry for men. They were always so weak, at the core, where it counts.

  And now, here he was, awake again and filling the room with secondhand smoke, lost in a view. She joined him at the balcony, shared a drag off his cigarette. Three floors up and still they could hear the sea.

  “I was having trouble sleeping,” he said.

  “Back?”

  “Ribs. All around, like someone squeezing an accordion—badly.”

  “Is there any other way to squeeze an accordion?”

  Outside, early dawn, with waves folding in. A boulevard lined with palm trees. A curve of sand. The roll and sigh, all night but still not soothing.

  “You should see someone about that,” she said.

  “I’m just
showing my age. There’s no treatment for that.”

  This profoundly imperfect man with a penchant for woe and a predilection toward self-pity. How on earth had she ended up with him?

  Tamsin pulled on one of Rafferty’s oversize shirts, went for an early-morning skinny-dip. He watched her as she crossed the empty boulevard below, legs flashing purposefully. There is so much beauty in this world, he thought. It breaks your heart. The sea, as familiar and strange as always, like staring at your face in a mirror. Sand as soft as talcum powder. Restless whitecaps rolling in. Salt water and soft winds, like a breath on the skin. Tamsin shed the shirt, waded in, felt the current reach out for her.

  Memories of Mosul, of Bosnia and Sierra Leone, of Darfur and bloody Basra. The fall of Tikrit, a point of pride. She had been the first journalist—the first photojournalist—on the ground, and she remembered the exhilaration of that moment, the unalloyed joy of it. Saddam has fallen! The tyrant is gone! But tyrants are interchangeable and no sooner does one fall than another rises. It’s what kept her in business. They were looting the palaces, and Tamsin, shoulders bare, had sat in one of Saddam’s opulent tubs, mimicking Lee Miller’s iconic photo in Hitler’s bath, boots heavy with the dirt of Dachau, in the frame and intentionally so.

  Tamsin Greene in Baghdad, looking for low light and long shadows. Tamsin Greene, amid the chaos and ruin of yet another failed state, crossing into southern Sudan, clothes still smelling of Persia and woodsmoke from the last assignment. Afghanistan and its fields of poppies. Sweat-sheened men with varnished skin and Kalashnikovs, loose necklaces of ammunition—the warlord equivalent of Mardi Gras beads.

  Tamsin Greene, beneath a burka, photographing women held captive under Taliban rule. Mortar fire. An interpreter who died in her arms. A Kentucky pilot laughing through the earphones just before they were hit. “If they bombed Kandahar, how would you ever know?” Tamsin Greene, running for cover. Lens raised, under fire. A life lived as a defiant fuck you to fear.