The Trade

by Chris Thrall

  “Thank you, Karen,” Hans whispered, wiping his eyes.

  “It’s nothing. You can thank Silvestre.”

  The driver turned off the road, headed up the Grande Verde’s palm-lined boulevard and pulled to a stop at the hotel’s entrance, fronted by a magnificent modern-art fountain in gray and tan stone.

  Branca, the Grande Verde’s concierge, waited to greet them.

  “Amiga! Good to see you again.” She threw her arms around Penny, drawing back to look her affectionately in the eye. “Anything I can do, you ask, okay?”

  Karen said good-bye and climbed into the car to return to the airport for her flight back to Praia, a hundred miles south. She handed Hans her business card.

  “Good luck tomorrow, and call me anytime day or night, you understand?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Hans pursed his lips and nodded.

  Then, casually gripping the neck of her T-shirt with two fingers, Karen said, “And give my regards to Innes when you speak to him. I owe that man.”

  Hans, thinking fondly of his handler, Muttley, scratched his eyebrow with two fingers. “I certainly will.”

  Branca showed them to their suite, a somewhat more modest affair than the penthouse but impressive nonetheless, with a stunning ocean view. The porter dropped off their bags, and Hans tipped him while Penny grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge.

  “Well, Karen was really nice.” She handed him a can.

  “And sympathetic to the Concern’s cause.”

  “Huh? How do you know that?”

  “Did you see the way she grabbed her shirt with two fingers?”

  “No, I didn’t notice it.”

  “You wouldn’t. No one on the outside would.”

  “Are you saying . . . ?”

  “It’s a hand sign – shows membership or affiliation.” Hans emptied his beer. “You didn’t notice me return the signal by scratching my eyebrow?”

  “But what if you hadn’t been a member?”

  “Like I said, I wouldn’t have noticed it.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  “I knew she was on our team anyway. Muttley mentioned it a while back.”

  “It’s still a cool little trick.” Penny wondered how many more surprises Hans would spring on her. His life was far from boring. “Another beer?”

  “Why not.”

  Penny got up to fetch the drinks, but when she returned to the bedroom, Hans was fast asleep, snoring on the bed.

  - 13 -

  Hans and Penny enjoyed an en suite breakfast, after which they entered the extravagant lobby to find an elderly man with white hair and stubble, deep tan lines etched into his olive skin, looking out of place on one of the burnished-leather couches surrounding the hotel’s koi carp pool. He stood up immediately, took off his well-worn green baseball cap and screwed it in his hands as he walked toward them. It was a moment of reckoning for Hans.

  “Silvestre.”

  He shook his firm hand.

  “Senhor Hans, it is my great pleasure,” he replied in a Portuguese accent. “And . . . ?”

  “This is Penny.”

  Silvestre took her hand. His smiling hazel eyes projected a kind and humble nature.

  They sat down, and Hans called the waiter over to order coffee. “So, Silvestre, how long have you been in the islands?”

  “Oh, a good ten years now. I grew up in Angola. My parents owned a cashew nut plantation there.”

  “Luanda?” Penny asked.

  “Ah, you know Angola, Miss Penny?”

  “Only the capital. I skipper yachts, and we’ve stopped there a couple of times on the way to the Cape.”

  “The Cape! That’s tough sailing. I am proud to have you on my crew.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We once had it good in our beautiful land, and then came the uprising. First we lost the colony, and then there was civil war – so many bombs, so much bloodshed. Our farm was destroyed, and my parents returned to the mother country. I stayed awhile, but it was not the same Angola.”

  “How did you get into treasure hunting?” Hans took his coffee from the waiter and set it down on an ornate ebony drinks table.

  “When I first learn to scuba dive, I know right away I love it – like a fish, huh?” Silvestre grinned and made a finning motion with his palm. “So I go to work for a salvage company off the Eastern Cape – so many commercial vessels sinking in those treacherous seas. Hans, you too are diver Miss Karen tells me.”

  “Ha, I’ve done some. But it’s Penny who’s the instructor.”

  “Ah, so good.” Silvestre reached into his faded denim jacket and pulled out a hip flask. “Rum. It’s also good, no?”

  He passed the flask to Penny, who poured a shot into her and Hans’ cups.

  “Eventually I have enough money to buy a small boat and start searching in my own time. At first just small finds – broken porcelain from trading ships coming from China, wine bottles and musket shot, this kind of stuff – but then I discover coins, lots of coins – gold, silver – from a Dutch East Indiaman sunk off Port Elizabeth. Not enough to get rich but enough to buy a bigger boat and search full-time. Over the years I work my way up the coast, and Cape Verde – ahh! A Portuguese island, it’s like home for me, no? So I decide to stay a while.”

  - 14 -

  The Outcast’s twelve-liter diesel thundered beneath their feet, propelling the bouncing boat at breakneck speed across the choppy green swell, her turbocharged screw churning through the water to spew a raging white plume high into the air at the bow.

  As fresh salty air filled Hans’ nostrils, he experienced a cruel twist of emotion. It felt good to be back on the sea, particularly after a month spent festering in a hospital bed, but having to recover Jessica’s body after it had lain on the seabed for weeks, all manner of creatures gnawing away at her bloated decomposing flesh, was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do.

  Ever the bullish character, Hans asked Silvestre if he could descend onto the wreck of Future, but the treasure hunter and Penny wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Hans, you must remember her the way she was,” said Penny. “Silvestre will place her in the body bag, and that’s all you need to see.”

  Penny had serious concerns but hadn’t mentioned them to Hans. She could tell he was making an effort to stay strong in order to return his little girl’s body to the States for a proper good-bye – but what would happen after that? To lose his wife and son and now his remaining daughter – how much could the man take? She knew their relationship was not reason enough for him to go on living.

  A large orange buoy bobbed in the distance, and the crew made final preparations for the dive. Silvestre and a young mestizo named Marcos would drop the fifty meters down to the wreck, while Samson, a muscle-bound black African from the Ivory Coast, remained on board as surface cover. He would communicate with the divers via walkie-talkie and have a second set of equipment to hand should they require assistance.

  Being over forty meters meant it was a technical dive, so Silvestre and Marcos would breathe a trimix gas – a combination of oxygen, helium and nitrogen – to increase their bottom time and reduce the risk of nitrogen narcosis and decompression sickness. However, the narrowness of Future’s companionway made it impossible to enter the hull wearing the additional gas cylinders required for safety, which would hang off the men’s equipment harnesses like weights in a grandfather clock. It meant Silvestre had to swap to a fresh cylinder upon reaching the hull and unclip the others before proceeding inside, giving him approximately eight minutes to make his way through the saloon and into the sleeping quarters to retrieve Jessica’s body.

  “Are you sure?” Hans frowned.

  “Mais ou menos,” the Angolan said, shrugging, and the American knew not to press the issue.

  Samson dropped anchor over the wreck, while Silvestre and Marcos kitted up and did equipment checks. Then they stepped off the back of the boat and, after a final set of checks, gave each other the thumbs-down
and sank below the surface.

  Hans and Penny sat in silence listening to the communications exchanged over the radio in Creole. A tense twenty minutes passed. Then without warning a bright-yellow airbag burst to the surface. The two of them jumped up in anticipation of the moment of dread, but Samson waved a dismissive hand – “No, nothing” – and began fishing for the airbag with a boat hook.

  Hans helped lift the flotation device aboard, surprised to find his scuba gear, which he’d stored under a bunk, clipped beneath it.

  The divers ascended, making carefully calculated decompression stops. Hans and Penny watched bubbles from the men’s exhalations boiling on the surface, until two neoprene hoods broke through the swell.

  Samson lowered the step-on lifting platform at the stern and winched Silvestre on board. Then he steadied the skipper’s heavily laden self and walked him backwards in his clumsy fins to sit on one of the benches along the sides of the deck.

  As Samson lowered the lift’s aluminum footplate to collect Marco, Silvestre peeled off his mask and rubbed his face.

  “She’s not there,” he said, looking into the American’s eyes as seawater poured from the pockets in his equipment.

  “But . . . did . . . you . . . ?” Hans was lost for words, shaking his head in a daze.

  “Yes, Hans, I check everywhere. I check the bunk rail like you said, but nothing. No safety line clipping on to it, and only the one set of scuba gear, not two like you thought.”

  Hans put his head in his hands, racking his brain as he tried to take in the information. How could she not be there? There was no way the safety line could snap or unclip itself, nor could the locker under the bunk containing her dive kit open on its own accord – it was fastened by a bolt that clamped shut.

  “She . . . must have gotten out,” he muttered. “She must have gone for the scuba gear.”

  The thought of his brave little girl staying calm, as he had always taught her, only to swim free of the sinking yacht and find herself clinging to the equipment, adrift in the dark on the ocean, was too much to take. As he began to sob, Penny put her arm around him, and Silvestre nodded to Samson to fetch the rum.

  - 15 -

  One month earlier

  Jessica awoke from a deep sleep following the night spent drifting on the ocean. She’d dreamt a bizarre repeating dream in which bad men were trying to capture her and Papa was too busy sailing the yacht to stop them. When she opened her eyes, the horror of the last twenty-four hours brought reality crashing home.

  In the feeble glow from a flickering bulb, she ripped off the coarse gray blanket covering her and shook it, hoping and expecting to see Bear drop out so she wouldn’t be alone. Since the death of Mom and JJ, Bear had been her faithful companion, and to have him here now would have lessened the fear and homesickness she felt.

  Bear was gone, and Jessica remembered the last time she saw him was when the seawater flooded into Future’s cabin and washed him away. As her eyes welled up, she took a deep breath and shook herself.

  “Get a grip, funny face!” she said, echoing her father’s favorite reprimand. “Sobs are for slobs!”

  Jessica’s thinking helped, spurring her into action. She scanned her surroundings but could only vaguely remember having been in such a place before, when she was much younger.

  Where is it?

  It reminded her a little of the cellar beneath their home in Maine – only the walls were built from large, crumbling yellow blocks covered in damp mold and smelled like their kitchen did when Papa juiced vegetables after his morning run.

  The door was a modern internal type, smaller than whatever had been the original and hemmed in with a rough-shorn timber surround. Jessica wasted no time trying the handle, easing it downwards and pulling the door toward her – Damn! It only opened an inch. Someone had bolted it from the outside.

  There were no windows in the room, and the same aging yellow stonework formed the ceiling, so old that stalactites had formed. She sat back down on the lumpy white mattress, its black pinstripes barely visible beneath unsightly stains and grime.

  Barefoot and wearing shorts and the T-shirt she had draped over her head when the men plucked her from the sea, Jessica shivered in her miserable dank prison. She wrapped herself in the blanket just as someone started to undo the padlock.

  Jessica stared at the door, fearful and confused, hoping it was her father, who would pick her up in a bear hug, and everything would come good.

  The man entering the room had a bald head and goatee beard and was definitely not her father.

  “Ah, Maria,” he announced in an accent that wasn’t American.

  “I’m not Maria,” she snapped with a slight tremble.

  “Yes, you are,” said the man. “Sweet little Maria is going to behave and make us a lot of money.”

  “I’m not,” she spat, her eyes throwing daggers.

  “Ha! Why not?”

  “Because my papa’s gonna come and get me.”

  “Is he?”

  “Yeah, and he’s gonna kick your ass!”

  “So your father is a fighter?” the man grunted.

  “My papa is a detective and he was a Navy SEAL and he’s not afraid of anything.”

  “Your father is dead, Maria. He died when your boat sank, so we will find you a new family.”

  He gave her a twisted smile and turned to leave.

  Jessica leapt off the bed and kicked him as hard as she could in the back of his leg.

  “Ouch!”

  The man spun around with a look of shock in his docile eyes, then backhanded her across the face.

  Jessica flew across the room and cracked her head on the bed’s wooden frame, flopping onto the cold stone floor. She lay there paralyzed by shock as the coppery taste of blood filled her mouth and she passed into unconsciousness.

  - 16 -

  Back at the marina, Hans thanked Silvestre and his crew for their efforts. Muttley had insisted the Concern would pay for the Angolan’s services, but after exchanging business cards, Hans pressed a fat envelope into the old man’s hand. With Penny’s help, he carried the scuba gear along the floating pontoon, passing the variety of craft nosing up against it, which ranged from aging wooden yachts to the latest million-dollar cruisers. Sitting in the cockpit enjoying a late lunch in the sunshine, the German crew of Edelweiss threw smiles and hellos and gave thumbs-ups upon seeing the dive gear, the scene and sentiment far removed from Hans and Penny’s living nightmare.

  At the marina office they stopped to say hello to Baba, the larger-than-life Senegalese manager who had helped Penny when Future went missing. Upon hearing the result of the search, he grasped their hands as tears welled in his kind brown eyes.

  “Anything I can do, Miss Penny, Mr. Hans, please let me know.”

  The street outside the marina was typical of Cape Verde, flanked by two-story colonial builds painted in vivid pastel colors, most with spindly wooden balconies, giving the impression of a frontier town. In this quiet part of Mindelo, São Vicente’s port city, pickup trucks carrying trade goods and people-packed Toyota minibuses cruised by. There were surprisingly few cars, though, and those they saw were mostly Japanese models, their bodywork faring well in the dry climate.

  Hans was lost in thought in the afternoon heat, and as Penny hailed a cab he found himself staring at a Fulani woman sitting at a table in an open-fronted restaurant across the street.

  The Fulani were Africa’s largest ethnic group. Centuries of conquest and migration had resulted in them occupying vast expanses of land in a longitudinal belt south of the Sahara. In keeping with the nomadic tribe’s tradition, the woman wore a flowing yellow-and-lime-patterned robe and head scarf, a mesh of colorful coral necklaces, gold hoop earrings, a nose ring and brass anklets, with cowrie shells and silver coins attached to her long braided hair. She had blackened her lips with indigo ink, sported henna tattoo sleeves on her hands, wrists, feet and ankles, and had tribal scarification around her eyes and mouth. Even
at a distance she projected a palpable aura of grace, strength and unadulterated femininity.

  But it wasn’t the Fulani’s appearance capturing Hans’ attention. Something seemed odd. Perhaps that she sat on her own or appeared to be aware of his gaze, glancing at him several times, nervousness or shyness evident in her dark-brown eyes. Hans was about to say something to Penny when a cab pulled up and his attention switched to helping the driver load the dive gear into the trunk.

  On the drive to the hotel, Penny made polite but subdued conversation with the cabbie, who’d immediately sensed the couple’s anguish and ceased with the tourist banter. After a time “São os pais da menina?” he whispered, asking if they were the parents of the little girl.

  Penny said yes to keep it simple and asked how he knew.

  The driver explained that the islanders had followed the search for Future’s crew on the news and felt terrible about the tragedy. The TV station had run a bulletin following Hans’ rescue by the Kimberley II and another announcing his return to Cape Verde to recover Jessica’s body with the help of Silvestre, the islands’ very own treasure hunter.

  “But the senhor, he look different to the one on the televisão,” the driver queried.

  “Oh.” Penny shrugged but chose not to elucidate, for coordinating the media around the search, the team from the Concern purposely concealed Hans’ and Jessica’s identities. “We don’t want our special operative’s picture flashed around the world,” Muttley had said. “It’s a life raft or a drifting yacht we want to draw attention to, not the faces of the people inside.”

  “And . . . no is lucky today?” the driver asked softly.

  “No, no luck,” Penny muttered, gazing out over the ocean she had spent a lifetime upon but not feeling the usual longing to return.

  She wished there was something she could do to relieve Hans’ agony, compartmentalizing her own grief for his sake. With Jessica’s body still missing, closure was impossible, and even if they had recovered her today, Hans’ mental state was a serious worry.