The Vessel

by Taylor Stevens

  This was her persona now, her life—or at least seventy-five percent of it.

  She should have stayed another week in Rome. That had been the plan, another week to absorb and blend, to draw in and create the lie she would become in Viareggio, a role that left no room for error.

  She’d needed more of the culture, the idiosyncrasies of the undocumented, and the laborers who, if they could find work, gave away their lives for cents and bread. From among them she’d pulled in the subtle cues: how long hands were shaken; the depth of accepted personal space; postures and gestures both rude and polite; the volume and tics of speech and the patterns for hello and good-bye and for inviting a friend or stranger to a meal; the differences from one dialect to the next. All of it nuance, invisible to the uninitiated but screaming that one belonged, or didn’t—nuance that determined how quickly a newcomer was welcomed and aided as a long-lost brother, or rejected as an outsider.

  The evenings in the bar had been the final segue into full assimilation.

  The fight with the trio in the dark streets had put an early end to that.

  She hadn’t anticipated the attack, but then, neither was the confrontation a surprise. Life had patterns, and, as with the difficulty in sleeping, evil and darkness had a tendency to seek her out no matter where she went, even when she didn’t deliberately welcome death to find her.

  And last night, what the hell was that? There were ways to accomplish what she needed without lurking in the dark alleys and the troubled places, ways to avoid inviting violence when it called her to come out and play.

  Had she been anyone else, her body would have become a random crime statistic among the poor and downtrodden, ignored and written off. Instead, ten seconds and the euphoric release of violence had washed away her carefully constructed narrative and forced her on the go again, putting her ahead of schedule and behind in planning, unable to return to any place she’d frequented. All because her screaming subconscious and its fate-tempting, blatant desire to be put out of its misery just wouldn’t give her a rest.

  She’d scrubbed her room in the early morning hours. Wiped off any connecting trace and vanished into the dawn. That was the simplicity of belonging to the invisible class, living among the rats and cockroaches in the immigrant backstreets where cash was king, and silence queen.

  Munroe reached the front car, turned, and, with feet splayed against the rocking aisle that swayed her from side to side, started the trek back to her seat.

  A conductor stopped her. Nose turned up, lines and angles of his face full of mistrust, he demanded her ticket. She smiled an unwashed smile and handed over the paper.

  MUNROE STEPPED FROM train to platform where the smells of rubber and ozone, metal and hydraulic fluid filled the air only to be overridden by the cloying perfume of departing passengers. Head down, she allowed the flow to carry her along into Firenze Santa Maria Novella, Florence’s central station.

  She’d stolen another forty minutes of rest before arrival and would be forced to turn to sleeping aids if the insomnia kept up another night.

  Outside the main entrance she blinked against the sunlight, adjusted her bearings relative north to relative south, and breathed in the early afternoon warmth. This was Tuscany, birthplace of the Renaissance, setting for idyllic postcards and getaway honeymoons, but to her just another city where she could blend and disappear: one city closer to her goal.

  Turning from the taxis, from the suitcases and backpacks and bodies that moved in a clash of color and money, she began to walk. She’d brought no map, hadn’t bothered to look at the metropolitan layout posted within the station. Even if she had, it wouldn’t have made a difference.

  She wandered streets drenched in history, lined with old stone buildings with red clay rooftops; wandered in no particular direction, reading pedestrians by their reactions to her bearing and her clothes. To those who didn’t shy away, she made the same plea one after the next: “I need a place to sleep.”

  She used Ukrainian, the language of the immigrants in the bar in Rome, and then broken Italian. For every ten shrugs of indifference, one would point her toward the far distance, and so she walked and followed the pointers as the streets got narrower, dirtier, drunker, and the sky darker.

  By nightfall she’d found a bed for rent in a cordoned-off attic in a four-story walk-up: payment by the night and a small deposit for the sheets handed to her by the Roma woman who’d taken her money and given her a key.

  The mattress was stained with sweat, urine, and the black smudges of bedbug fecal matter, but the door locked and the water that left brown streaks down the cracked porcelain in the shared bathroom two floors below still ran, if but a trickle. This wasn’t intended as a place to rest so much as a way to reestablish the narrative she’d started in Rome, but perhaps she’d find sleep.

  Munroe left the sheets on the bed and carried her bag to the shower and sink room. With eyes cast downward and ears attuned to the whispers and voices that conversed out of sight, she waited for the occupant to finish.

  When the door opened and the bare feet stepped dripping into the hall, she slipped inside and locked the door. Pulled six small metal wedges from her bag and jammed them between door and frame, laid a handgun and a knife on the floor, and stripped out of her clothes. Anyone trying to kick the door in could break an ankle first and buy her time to get to the weapons.

  The shower, if it could be called a shower, was her first in three days, rushed and with socks still worn as a barrier against whatever disease infested the cracked and moldy tiles. She rubbed the filth off her body and scrubbed at the stain of blood on her hands—the permanent stain that would never go away, no matter how often she washed or how hard she scoured.

  Four minutes in, the door handle jiggled. A heavy hand pounded on the wood, and in response Munroe deepened her voice and bellowed a drunken Russian garble that echoed in the small space into something twice her size. The shadow beneath the door faded, and Munroe waited another minute, then shut off the water. She toweled dry with a washcloth from her bag. Changed undergarments and the binding that kept her gender hidden—though that had never been a difficult thing. Nature, in making her taller than many men, hadn’t been generous with other gifts.

  She re-dressed in the same grimy clothes: same costume for another night, in another city, in another run-down quadrant, in another hole-in-the-wall bar where strangers were never welcome and where cheap alcohol flowed to stanch the depression of poverty, and where she could begin again.

  CHAPTER 4

  In the wild, trackers followed game from downwind, and hunters used blinds, camouflage, and traps to take their quarry unaware.

  Pursuing a man was no different.

  But unlike the lesser animals, humans had a propensity to regroup and retaliate. A wrong move, an inadequate disguise, an improperly masked scent, and questions asked of the wrong person or at the wrong time handed the prey an opportunity to take the upper hand, allowed him to create traps for the trapper.

  The choices, when hunting men, were patience or death.

  DOWN THE STREET from the shipyard, Munroe sat on a barstool, face cast toward the half-empty glass in front of her, eyes smarting through the haze of smoke.

  Like the watering holes she’d frequented in Rome and Florence, this haunt in Viareggio was small, fragranced by stale beer, wood wax, and the stink of unwashed bodies, and patronized by regulars who trudged in with weary expressions day after day. She was one of them: a new face, but common blood. They’d read the belonging in her posture when she first stepped inside, felt it in her mannerisms and behavioral tics, and, for now, they mostly ignored her as she pretended to ignore them.

  She’d come to pick up the trail again; had detoured for a month, building credibility and authenticity along the way: a hunter in the forest avoiding direct pursuit of the prey in order to keep downwind and remain undetected.

  Munroe glanced toward the television, took another sip, and in stolen glimpses pulled in
shape and form from around a room that continued to fill as the evening drew on, gathering chew toys to throw at her mind: calculation, ratiocination, scheming. She listened in on conversations, gauging each man, searching for her mark. For three days, this had been her pattern.

  The shipyard, like most manufacturing and heavy industry, hired workers of varying skills. Masters of craft sat at the top of the production line, perfecting and finishing hundreds of touches that only the ultrarich would ever see. At the bottom, the uneducated procured, carried, and manipulated the raw materials. Lower still were the undocumented underclass, who, for slave wages, toiled at dangerous and exhausting work that required no skill, no proof of ability: work that no self-respecting local would touch.

  Munroe had come for that work; she wanted that work.

  She was two days from going hungry, had no papers and no other way to pay for food and shelter. Her funds were inaccessible without her first shedding the immigrant persona, and that couldn’t happen until she’d secured what she’d come for. This was the way things had to be. Fear and desperation had fragrances familiar to those who wore them, and their absence would have marked her as a fraud.

  A baritone voice in a booth behind and to the right drew her into the moment, and she caught the last half of a complaint about age and joint aches and the difficulty of carrying material up and down scaffolds.

  Munroe draped an arm over the back of her chair, opening up her peripheral vision. She studied the man until she’d seen all that she could see, and then she stood and, with her head down and her eyes seeking him out for one last look, she left the bar.

  HER MARK WAS already two beers in when Munroe found him the next night. She ordered from the barmaid and, with the nod of a newcomer asking without asking, took the seat opposite him.

  They sat in silence, and she kept focus on the TV, same as he, and followed the game, gleaning glimpses of the man through the half sentences and throwaway comments he handed out under the hypnosis of sport. She intruded on his monologue slowly, adding to his opinions of the teams on screen until at last advertising forced a break.

  The volume in the room went up, drowning out the television, and the man across the table turned his focus to her.

  “I’ve seen you around,” he said. “You’re new.”

  “So obvious?” she said.

  He chuffed.

  “I had hope for work in Florence,” she said, “but hope had a big mouth and no hands.”

  The man took a swig of beer. “You’re young, you look strong, there’s always work.”

  Munroe replied with silence, glancing away, avoiding eye contact and conversation by returning to the television.

  “I see,” he said and swiped the back of his hand against his face to brush away flecks of foam that had collected along the edges of an overgrown mustache. He rested beefy forearms on the table, hands around the base of his glass, and eventually said, “How long have you tried?”

  “In Viareggio?” she said, and then stretched the truth impossibly thin because he’d have no way to prove her a liar. “Two weeks already.”

  The man harrumphed, and it was difficult to know if this was approval or disapproval. “You’ve tried the waterfront?” he said. “A lot of industry there.”

  “There is,” she said. “I’m cautious.”

  “You’ve been caught before?”

  Her cheeks burned a dark shade of red with the blush of humiliation.

  “There is no shame,” the man said. “Come with me to the shipyard in the morning and we find what we can find.”

  She turned from the television slowly and locked direct eye contact. “You would do this?”

  He shrugged. “I know people, and we are brothers, are we not?”

  “Brothers,” she said and tipped her glass in his direction.

  “I’m Dmytro,” he said.

  “Mykhailo.”

  “No promises, no guarantee, my young friend,” he said. “They don’t pay even so much as to the lowest Italian, but it is cash and—”

  “I know how it is,” she mumbled and, still bearing the flush of being considered lesser-than, “I’m grateful.”

  A shout went up from around the room, and together their faces turned back toward the game and they said no more of the matter.

  The deed had been done.

  CHAPTER 5

  Five in the morning arrived far too early. Munroe swung her feet from bed to floor. Sleep had come as an unexpected gift, and those four hours were enough to keep the medication away for another night.

  She found Dmytro on the steps of the bar, waiting for her as he’d promised, his face puffy and tired, his curly hair disheveled, and his clothes appearing to have been slept in—basically, aside from the gray in his hair and three days’ stubble, he looked like her.

  He spotted her long before she reached him, and he stood from the doorstep, stuck thumbs into his pockets, and stretched and yawned, then stepped out into the narrow street.

  They walked together, boots crunching against the stone, down the slight hill in the direction of the ocean. Comfortable in the silence, Munroe offered no conversation, but, like many people, Dmytro would say anything to ease the discomfort of quiet in the presence of a stranger.

  “Tell me of things back home,” he said.

  Munroe walked on, hands hung loosely by her sides. “Does anything ever change?” she said, and her lips turned up slightly with shy humor.

  “No,” he said, and they walked on again, the quiet less uncomfortable now than it had been.

  This was always this way with lies and disguises, where the least said the better and the more questions answered with questions, the fewer woven webs there were to remember. With rare exceptions, people were easy like that.

  The human condition was such that people believed what they wanted to believe. Vague answers, filled with faux substance, allowed them to interpret meaning as they chose. When that failed and the listener prodded for more, she was from the capital or a city larger than the capital, where recent news was easy to be had from anywhere in the world. On her way home to Germany? She was from Frankfurt. Recently arrived from Poland? Warsaw, of course. Never a town, unless she’d been there in person and knew it well, never anything small enough to allow fate the irony of pairing her with the one person capable of quizzing her on long-lost relatives and the state of the family farm.

  THEY REACHED THE gates of the shipyard and joined the press of the dozens of other men at the compound’s single entrance. They were the cattle that powered the engine of the yard, indistinguishable to the keepers who manned the gates.

  Dmytro crunched on through the access point without a passing glance. Munroe, hands in pockets, did likewise while her gaze tracked up and down the buildings and then passed over to the dry docks. The compound was small as shipyards went, but large for a yacht builder.

  The Omicron II had led her here.

  Every water vessel had an origin, and within that origin was the beginning of provenance—the trailhead that led from the yacht’s construction to its first owner, and eventually to the next.

  The builder had been easy to find, and it was no surprise that the company specialized in custom-built, metal-hulled luxury. What other than customization could service the Dog Man’s particular lusts?

  She’d tried shortcuts before leaving Monaco. Had run through charter services hoping that the yacht, like many yachts this size, had been put on the market for weekly or monthly rental: a way for the owners to mitigate the enormous expense of maintaining ship and full-time crew during the times when the owners were away—and, for her, a far simpler way to gain access to the layout and structure than diagrams and schematics.

  And she’d tried tracking.

  Yachts this size, state-of-the-art and expensive as they were, carried AIS, maritime transponders that helped to avoid collisions and allowed rescue missions to locate vessels in distress—information easily located online if one knew where to look. Certainl
y the yacht used AIS, but she hadn’t found the Omicron II and would have been suspicious if she had.

  He knew she was coming, after all. He had to know.

  They reached the open lot. Dmytro led Munroe to a simple two-story building, and then up an outside stairwell. Their boots plodded against metal rungs that led to a second-story landing.

  Dmytro said, “You let me do the talking.”

  Munroe nodded and, glancing away in ostensible deference, she studied the compound’s perimeter. The dockyard was surrounded by a ten-foot stone wall with a few security lights and motion sensors posted at intervals: a setup that indicated petty-theft prevention, not espionage detection, but none of it mattered anyway. She wouldn’t be going over the walls at night.

  They stepped into the office, and the yard boss glanced up from a desk buried in paper, stopped reading just long enough to acknowledge their presence.

  Dmytro took off his hat and held it while they stood waiting.

  The yard boss finally looked up again and said, “What do you want this time?” The man was rail-thin and wiry, but his voice had a booming quality that mismatched his size, and a twitch on his lips belied his brusqueness.

  Dmytro started in broken Italian, and the yard boss held up a hand before he’d gotten ten words in. He turned to Munroe.

  “Can you handle a broom? A mop? Buckets?”

  She glanced toward Dmytro for an interpretation, and, when he’d finished repeating what she’d already understood, she nodded.

  The yard boss scribbled on a piece of paper, tore it off, and handed it to her. She glanced at the name. Dmytro looked down at the paper and, jubilant, fatherly, he clapped a heavy hand on her shoulder.

  She bristled at the uninvited touch and resisted the urge to strike.

  “Thank you,” Dmytro said to the yard boss.

  The rail-thin man, sly smile tucked beneath his mustache, didn’t bother looking up. He motioned them out with a wave.

  On the landing, oblivious to how closely he approached death, Dmytro said, “What did I tell you? Come, I’ll show you.”