The Finder

by Will Ferguson

  The undercurrent curled around her legs, tried to draw her farther out, dark and deep, pulling at her, but she slipped free and waded back to shore, slid into Rafferty’s shirt again, damp now with sand.

  He watched her return just as purposefully, her wet footprints, slightly pigeon-toed, plopping across the paved road. He could feel it stir like an atrophied muscle attempting to move: the urge to love. But then, in she came, tromping through his room, toweling off her hair, saying, “You lazy fuck, why didn’t you join me?” and the moment passed. She would always be easier to love from a distance.

  He had noticed the leather-cord, surfer-style necklace on the side table. An insect of some sort was suspended in amber. Where had she picked that up?

  “A weta beetle,” she said when she saw him looking at it. “Cool, right?” She was shoving a pan of hotel coffee into the tray. “Deinacrida mahoenui. The Maori God of Ugly Things. Reminded me of you.” It was all shell and swollen joints, this weta, as though made out of spare parts, and he had to admit, he could see the resemblance. “A lucky talisman,” she said, rescuing it from his grasp. She tied it around her neck. “Found this one in a shop. It’s on the small side, some weta beetles are regular giants, size of your fist.”

  Tamsin waited for the coffee to drip through. The sun had broken above the horizon and the palm trees were limned in gold.

  “There’s driftwood down there,” Rafferty said. “All along the shore. Did you notice? I was trying to figure out where it came from. It’s just open sea from here, right?”

  “Chile? Easter Island, maybe?”

  “No trees on Easter Island. I’ve been.”

  “That’s because it all washed up here. It’s driftwood, Raff. That’s what it does. Could’ve come from Oregon, for all we know. The ocean is one giant vortex. Send something out and eventually it comes back.”

  “I suppose.” The wind through the open window. “Ever have the feeling that we’ve been living in the Golden Age of Travel, and don’t realize it? That we never fully appreciated it, never really took advantage of it—not in any meaningful way. Just selfies and postcards. That we squandered it all? Ever think about that?”

  She handed him his coffee. “Here. It’s awful.”

  “Thanks. I think.”

  The curtains billowed and Tamsin asked, “Why do you do what you do?”

  “I heard you were easy.”

  “Fuck off, you know what I mean.”

  “The richly remunerative life of a freelance writer? What else can I do? I could hardly give up the glamour of it, the allure.”

  “You were there,” she said. “We both were. In Rwanda, on the front lines. Why didn’t you parlay that into a career as a journalist?”

  Panic and mud and eyes looking up, pleading for help, and Rafferty as scared as they were. I can’t. I can’t. I’m caught up in this too—but was that true? A million dead, and he couldn’t have rescued one? Not even one? “I can’t,” he had pleaded. “I’m not— I’m not anybody. I’m trapped as well.” But was he? Was he really?

  Why hadn’t he parlayed Rwanda into a career?

  “Because I’m not,” he said. “A journalist, that is. Didn’t even want to write, really. I just wanted to travel, wanted to keep moving. Robert Bateman, the wildlife painter? I interviewed him once. Asked him the secret of his long career, and he said, ‘Y’know how we all like to draw animals when we’re little? Well, I never stopped.’ Likewise. You remember those backpackers of our youth, the ones who hitchhiked, stayed in hostels? The ones who eventually grew up, stopped traveling? I never did.”

  Joggers and dogwalkers. The first of the day’s cars. A Napier interlude coming to an end.

  “Raff,” she said. “Why don’t we just keep going? We can take your car, keep driving. There’s a small bay, beyond the next headland. It’s where the sun first rises on the world. We’re so close to the end, Raff. Let’s keep going.”

  “I’m sated on scenery, glutted on it.”

  “Out there, at the end of the world, stingrays nuzzle up against you at low tide. We’ll find some hip waders, slosh out, into the shallows, and they will come to us. They’re curious. They move like liquid shiitakes. Sleek and elegant, but with these comically squished faces when you lift them up and look underneath.” The glide of the stingray, the slow turn of sharks. A world full of undertows. “There are these little blue penguins, as well, that come ashore every night in procession, like windup dolls, like commuters coming home. You almost expect them to be carrying little briefcases.” But she was confusing that with somewhere else. “Mahia,” she said. “That’s the name of the bay. It’s Maori, for ‘home.’ ”

  But she was wrong about that as well; it didn’t mean “home.” It meant “a sound from a distance.” Like an echo returning.

  “This bay, you’ve been?”

  “Years ago. There was this dolphin that loved humans, it wouldn’t leave, kept turning up, swimming with the locals. Frolicking, really. National Geographic sent me in. I don’t only shoot wars, you know. When I was there, I meant this Japanese girl, Tomoka. She worked as a chef in a French restaurant in Gisborne, spent the rest of her day surfing. She swam with the dolphin and I photographed it. Won an award, the silhouetted images I captured of Tomoka from below, her body mirroring the dolphin’s.” Tamsin’s best work was always with silhouettes—or extreme close-ups of crying faces. “We could go there, to Mahia, find Tomoka, crash on her couch. Last time I was there, she cooked me steamed mussels in white wine. It was excellent. You’d like her, Raff. A Japanese girl, surfing alone at the end of the world. There might be a story in that. You traffic in stories, right?”

  “Not anymore. Nowadays, I just live word count to word count.”

  “Let’s find her.”

  “If she’s still there.”

  If.

  That’s how it always went in their line of work. Intense memories, but when you returned—if you returned—the buildings would still be standing, but the people you knew were gone. It was like navigating the fallout of a neutron bomb. The past was a neutron bomb.

  He put out his cigarette. “What happened to her? The dolphin, I mean.”

  “Died. Why, was a mystery. Washed up in a different bay, not long after I left.”

  “Things tend to die after you take their picture. Ever noticed that?”

  He was thinking of the small man with the reptilian eyes, caught in a camera flash only to be crushed moments later under a loose-tooth slab of wall. But Rafferty should have been thinking of himself, of his own image, captured by Tamsin as he dug through the rubble in the falling rain, rescuing no one.

  He hadn’t told her about the dead man, wasn’t sure if it really happened. Perhaps he had only dreamed it.

  “You realize that Tomoka is probably gone by now,” he said. “Back to Japan, or Norway or wherever.” Memories of Okinawa pushing in. “Have you ever been?” he asked. “To Japan, the southern area?”

  “Nagasaki, does that count?”

  “Farther south. Islands at the very end.”

  They had camped on the beach by the ferry dock, staking their claim on the sand, Rebecca complaining and Rafferty fuming. It was the muscle-twitch spasm of a dying something. Rafferty, staying up all night to write down his feelings, page after page, as the wind pulled at the paper. Or was that in Hanoi? The memories were beginning to blur. Rafferty had placed a pewter locket next to her sleeping bag, a heart-shaped pendant meant to be funny, but taken as romantic, and her hugging him, holding him with her tears, whispering in his ear, “I don’t want this to be over.” But it was. It was, it was and no pewter heart could change that.

  “We should go to Okinawa,” he said. “Someday. Those islands. That beach.”

  “We? Since when am I included in your plans? I thought our entire rapport was based on happenstance.” That, and fucking.

  Was he trying to slide Rebecca’s photo out of the frame, slip Tamsin’s in instead? Overwrite a memory? Even he wasn’t sure
.

  “And anyway,” she said. “There’s still another offer on the table. Mahia, remember?”

  “Can’t,” he said. “I’m heading out.”

  He had considered slipping away while Tamsin lay sleeping, leaving a line of text as farewell, the modern equivalent of a pen-and-ink note laid gently across a pillow by a paramour departing. “My dearest Tamsin, there has been a change of plans. I leave in the morrow for Australia.” His Gone to Patagonia moment.

  “I have an assignment,” he said, and she knew he was lying. He was usually lying, so that was generally a safe bet, but in this case, he couldn’t bring himself to look her in the eye when he said it. A hell of a tell. Should’ve played poker with the fucker. I would have cleaned up.

  “An assignment?” said Tamsin. “Where?”

  “Alice Springs. There’s a train that runs across the Outback. Might be a story in it.”

  “Might? So, you don’t have an assignment?”

  “Not yet,” he said, not realizing he’d been caught out, or perhaps not caring.

  She laughed, and her laughter contained traces of tears. “She’s there, isn’t she?”

  And now Rafferty did look her in the eye. “No.” And that part was true. She wasn’t in Alice Springs, she was elsewhere, out in the field but still nearby. He didn’t know where exactly, not yet. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I have to.”

  “Who cares?” said Tamsin. “We are ugly, but we have the music.”

  “Tammy—”

  “It’s that stupid necklace, isn’t it? That cheap little heart you bought her. Airport gift shop, am I right? A cheap little heart made of tin. Big spender.” She had seen the pendant. Brittle Becky had been wearing it the one time they’d met, had shown it to Tamsin with a breezy laugh. “That’s what we call her,” said Tamsin. “You know that, right? We call her Brittle Becky.”

  “No one calls her that. And it wasn’t tin. It was pewter. And it wasn’t an airport gift shop, it was on a ferry.” Like it mattered.

  “But that is what you’re trying to get? Right?”

  “No,” he said. “Not that.”

  THE DARKNESS ITSELF

  FAYTHER WAS SNORING. A SCIENTIFIC treatise lay open on his belly, rising and falling with every wheeze, every seagull snork, his hair uncombed and reading glasses askew.

  They were taking forever. It had been ages since they’d asked her to leave so that they could sort out the details of the fee, and still Dr. Rowley hadn’t reappeared. Catherine was in the kitchen, looking out. I will wait another three-and-a-half minutes—that was the length of the song that was playing on the radio—and then I’ll go out. I’ll ask them if they want some biscuits. That’ll be my excuse.

  And then she saw him, on his feet, striding across the yard, and Dr. Rowley nowhere in sight. He had passed her dad’s hand-painted sign, EREWHON FARMS, S. BUTLER ESQ., and was making a beeline for the house. She hurried out to stop him.

  “Wait,” she said, running across the yard. “My dad’s inside. He’s sleeping.”

  But the small man didn’t stop. Glared. “You failed to keep your side of the bargain,” he said.

  He moved with a predatory gait, more prison guard than panther, and she hurried alongside him, struggling to keep up. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “If Fayther sees you, I’ll get in so much trouble.” At that age, it was the worst you could imagine: getting in so much trouble.

  The striding man stopped short, stared at the modest stucco of their family bungalow. It could have been a house on Falls Road. Small lives, a doily-laden world. “Asleep, you say?”

  “Don’t wake him up, please don’t, please. He doesn’t know you were ever in our barn.” And then: “Is that Dr. Rowley’s sweater you’re wearing?”

  The small man snapped his gaze onto her. “Bring me the satchel. You don’t deserve it anymore.”

  There was a blind rage behind his eyes; any trace of kindness gone. This wasn’t the same man she’d nursed back to life. This was someone else entirely.

  “Dr. Rowley lent you his sweater?”

  “My satchel. Now.”

  “But—”

  “Now.”

  She scrambled to get it.

  Dr. Rowley’s body would surface three days later in the same cove from which Catherine had sent out her messages in a bottle when she was young. Like her bottles, Dr. Rowley had washed back in. The current down there turned everything in on itself, and the sweaterless body was floating facedown, limbs splayed, turning on a slow eddy, out of reach of poles, so they had to send a tinny out, battling undertows all the way. Catherine watched the entire operation from above, the aluminum boat nudging closer as her father stood at her side, clucking about safety measures and village ordinances. Dr. Rowley had fallen, broken his neck, apparently, on the way down—the coroner’s report would find no water in his lungs—but Catherine knew otherwise, and she was left with a tremor of fear, of terror, and with it, the feeling of having brushed up against something cold in the dark. Perhaps the darkness itself.

  OUR LADY OF THE CUBICLES

  GADDY RHODES, HUNGRY AND UNHAPPY.

  She’d forgotten to eat, was going through a stack of binders that had arrived that morning. As the agency slowly transferred its backlog of cases over to electronic files, encrypted and cross-referenced, she found herself tied more and more to her desk. Which is why, when a notice to renew her handgun certification popped up in her inbox she almost laughed—or whatever the Gaddy Rhodes equivalent of laughter was. She hadn’t been to a gun range in ages, not since Okinawa, and what would be the point of it now? She hated the sanitized abstract nature of it, the earphones and muffled recoil, the outlined target pully-rolling in for her to inspect after each session. Center mass. Two to the core, one to the head. Easier said than done. She was never a great shot, tended to go wide, and anyway, it wasn’t like she would ever be threatened by an outline. Nor did she anticipate getting attacked by a silhouette, not anytime soon, not when there were files to consolidate, memos to attend to. Gaddy Rhodes, license to collate! Our Lady of the Cubicles.

  She had the news streaming on her monitor while she worked: BBC World, because the American networks were too parochial. Working with Interpol, even here on the periphery, meant keeping your gaze turned ever outward. It had been fifteen days since the earthquake in New Zealand and already the story was being shuffled to the back of the pile, fading from view, replaced by newer disasters, fresher headlines. A tropical storm was throwing a wrecking ball through the Amazon. Chinese roadworkers had uncovered the remains of a seven-hundred-year-old mummy by accident. The sea-encrusted cannon from a ship that had once belonged to the privateer Henry Morgan had been recovered off the coast of Panama. Gaddy kept her eye on that last item, but so far nothing strange or suspicious. The recovery had been going on for years, the salvage company was well known and the project was fully documented, but still… She tagged it just in case.

  When it did appear, she almost missed it: a news item on her muted screen. Lost Hitchcock reel discovered. Gaddy shoved the plinth of binders to one side, turned up the volume, but she’d missed it. On to the next story. A two-minute vigil of silence was being held in New Zealand, so she switched to print instead, pulled up the item online:

  LOST HITCHCOCK REEL

  MGM studio head and famed film aficionado Cameron Berg today announced that the lost reel of Alfred Hitchcock’s debut 1923 movie, The White Shadow, long thought lost forever, has been recovered. A story of twin sisters, one evil, one good, The White Shadow was written and directed by Hitchcock as a young unknown, before he was famous, and although a single copy of the film has been preserved, the final reel itself has been missing for nearly ninety years. “This is a great day for cinema!” said Mr. Berg, who paid an undisclosed sum for the reel. “I’m thrilled!” The studio plans a remastered rerelease in the New Year.

  A wealthy buyer, an anonymous provider with provenance unclear and value undisclosed, but clearly in the millions by the rumors th
at were already flying about. It had all the hallmarks. But the deeper she dug, the murkier it got. Vague tales, contradictory versions of events, a Hollywood mogul hogging the limelight while the origins of the lost reel itself remained shadowy and unclear. How would one even know where to look for such a film? She began to search “lost movies,” came upon the story of an even larger cache that had been unearthed in Alaska years earlier, a wealth of old black-and-white films: a newsreel of the 1919 Black Sox, some early Chaplin, Mack Sennett.

  How had they ended up in Alaska, of all places? The answer: Alaska was the end of the line. Movies back then were expensive to ship and dangerous to transport. The nitrates that were used to produce the film stock were incredibly flammable. Instead, the movie reels were passed, baton-like, along a circuit of cinemas until, eventually, they reached the final stop, after which they were simply disposed of. It might take a year or two for that to happen, and no studio bothered to pay for their return, so they were discarded. The cinema in Fairbanks was one such final post, where, over the years, reels of film had piled up in the basement. The building changed hands several times, became a butcher’s, a hardware store, a storeroom, and was eventually marked for demolition. That was when the cache was discovered.

  Had this lost Hitchcock reel surfaced in Alaska as well? Was he now plying his trade along the edge of the Arctic Circle?

  Down the rabbit hole she went, pulling up more articles, more leads, tracing the northern routes of these old films, each ending in some dismal location: Vladivostok, northern Finland, Reykjavík, Dawson City. It was a wide net. Too wide. But then—archived in a film history site—mention was made of an obvious fact: if there were northern termini, there were also southern. The article read: “Films from the Golden Age of Hollywood were shipped as far north as the Yukon, and as far south as Christchurch, New Zealand.” Her heart stuttered, a single skipped beat; low blood sugar and an overinjection of caffeine at play, perhaps, but something more as well. She began clicking with renewed purpose, bringing up images and historic sites: blueprints of Christchurch, an overlay of city planning spanning the years, and soon came upon references to the Empire Cinema, the southernmost movie theater in the world at one time, now only an outline traced on an architectural map, just one layer in a palimpsest that had been drawn over, rebuilt, and erased many times. The earthquake had stripped this away, had revealed the underlying strata, had left a gaping basement where the Empire once stood.