Water Memory

by Daniel Pyne

  “I am a doctor. Nothing you’ve got I haven’t seen.”

  “You’re a man, you’re a junkie, you’re fucking an underage girl, and you may or may not have a medical degree.”

  “Your pulse is still racing. Do you feel dizzy?”

  “I need to go.”

  Morehouse shakes his head and assures her he sent Zoala back to the rooftop after the boy filled him in about what Sentro found in the deco building. “They’re not going anywhere,” he adds, meaning the passengers and crew. “The pirates will contact a broker; the broker will contact the insurer. And then they dance. I’ve seen this business get wrapped up inside of a day; I’ve seen them draw it out for several weeks. You never know.”

  “I’m not waiting for that. The men who did this won’t wait either.”

  “How do you know that?”

  How can Sentro explain her unshakable instincts to him when she still can’t quite remember why she has them?

  Morehouse frowns, steps back, and folds his arms. “What did you mean when you said you make your living doing this?”

  Sentro doesn’t want to get into it with him.

  “Doing what, exactly?”

  “Please. Give me my clothes; I’ll get out of your hair.”

  “Your clothes are ruined.”

  “There’s some things in the jeans I want.”

  “Dude.”

  “Listen to me carefully. I was in the US Army,” she tells him, impatient, itemizing the fragments that have come back to her. “And afterward have worked for government and NGOs that specialize in . . . security issues.”

  “Ah. Some kind of black-ops girl ninja?”

  “Woman. And no.”

  “Still your gig? Spook for hire?”

  It’s just a job, she wants to tell him. I’m pretty good at it. A set of skills she’s developed over a long and productive career. Like anyone, she gets satisfaction from a good result. The dead don’t haunt her.

  Or didn’t. “I need to go.”

  “You can’t remember who you work for.”

  She can’t. She feels a hollowing in her chest and looks away from his opioid eyes. “It’ll come back,” she says, hoping that’s true. “It’s like I’ve dropped a fancy plate in the spot I dropped one with the same pattern years ago. I’m picking up pieces, but they don’t always fit together.”

  “Short term, long term, jumbled up.”

  “I guess.”

  “They mention CTE? Last time they did a checkup from the neck up?” It’s as if Morehouse has opened her head like the hood of a car and looked in. “Me, I’m unconvinced.”

  “You’re stoned.”

  “Selective memory loss, no confusion. Attention drift, but you don’t have problems organizing your thoughts. Balance and motor skills obviously still there. Depression?”

  Sentro doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Can I please get some clothing?”

  “What kind of issues, specifically? Your job, I mean.”

  “Troubles like this.”

  “Kidnapping.”

  “Yes.” Phrases come back to her, rote: “Crisis management. Conflict resolution. Extortion and murder.”

  “You gonna take the bad guys on all by yourself?”

  “No. I’m not stupid. I thought I explained this.” Sentro slides off the examining table; her legs feel stable, and her head doesn’t hurt. She wraps the blanket around herself and stares her challenge at the junkie doctor. “You’re going to help me.”

  It occurs to her after she says it that she can’t be sure it was a statement and not a question.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull.

  Salt mist slicks the flat roof tar paper, and a muddled moonlight has fractured across the shine to where Zoala sits in the shadow of the balustrade, waiting and struggling to sound out and read aloud English words in the book he took from the American lady’s cabin.

  A translucent fog hangs curtained over the bay, throwing back the city lights with a gray foreboding.

  A water clerk need not pass an examination in anything under the sun, but he must have ability . . .

  Bored, he checks the watch again. Time crawls. Blood seeps through his faded Minecraft T-shirt where he’s scratched his skin raw. He’s hungry, the liter of Mountain Dew the doctor left with him having been rationed out and finished off.

  Most of the lights in the deco apartment building have been turned off. A single low lamp glows behind a curtain. A big round white man in a patio chair stirs on an unlit balcony and stares up at the shrouded stars.

  Black witch moths have discovered the single landscape light in the courtyard and dart back and forth through its beam.

  To the white men in the waterside business and to the captains of the ships he was just Jim . . .

  Zoala has long ago grown oblivious to the night sounds of the Porto Pequeno hills: the frogs, the bugs, the broken air conditioners, the frightened dogs, the all-night televisions, the distant thrum of downtown traffic, the thump of a strip club, the lonely whoop of a car alarm. What he hears is his own heart beating, a hiss of blood racing through his ears. Since his ordeal on the island, the noise of his body refuses to quiet.

  . . . he was just Jim—nothing more.

  Just Jim. He doesn’t understand her book. Restless, he digs in his pocket for a crushed pack of Kools, pulls out another cigarette, and is going fishing again for his lighter when a white hand snatches the fag away from him.

  “Don’t smoke.”

  He does understand a little English. The American woman has crept up on him like some kind of duppy, which unsettles him, and now she stares at him without emotion, her eyes a liquid wall. Something about her calms him, though. The only woman he has ever been close to is his sister, but this one is nothing like her.

  “Someone can see it; someone can smell it,” she says. “Plus it’s bad for you.” Only some of this makes sense to him; he can read a little English but gets lost hearing it spoken. The American turns the cigarette between her fingers, and somehow it disappears. Gone. Shows both hands to him. Gone. Zoala looks down for it, then back up at her, mesmerized.

  “That’s my book,” the woman says, but she holds her hand out like a schoolteacher, not for the novel but for the pack of Kools.

  Zoala stuffs it back in his pocket, aping her blank stare. She’s unfazed.

  “Keep reading.”

  Zoala puts the book down, folding the page corner to mark his place. She’s not the boss of him.

  The American smiles faintly. It’s the first smile he’s seen from her. She rocks back on the heels of her running shoes and proceeds to empty from a plastic shopping bag a familiar pocketknife, plus a soda can and scrap of wire. She’s wearing black leggings and a collared shirt his sister wore regularly until her stomach got so big with the baby.

  “You really want to help me get these guys? Vous voulez vraiment m’aider à attraper ces gars?” she translates for him, in a flat accent.

  Zoala nods.

  “Say it in English.”

  He won’t. She lets it go.

  “Puis-je te croire? You’ll need to do exactly what I say.”

  Zoala understands, nods again. He watches as the American flips a pair of tiny scissors out of the pocketknife he knows belongs to Morehouse, and she begins to cut into the aluminum can.

  “O que você está fazendo?”

  She nods to his question but hesitates responding; he can see she’s not exactly sure what he asked and that her nod came reflexively, automatic, because she needs him to help her, and it helps him feel strong.

  Making tools, she tells him in schoolbook French.

  Zoala frowns. Tools? From a can and some wire?

  She struggles to explain what she wants from him, and he mostly understands. He fills in the bl
anks when he doesn’t and hopes that it’s right.

  She’s very clever, Zoala decides, as she talks and cuts the can into strips, but she’s not a man.

  He’s decided that he will want to have that knife when Zeme and his hired men kill her, so, of course, he should stay close.

  “We can put you on the red-eye tonight to Miami.”

  The cute airline rep Jeremy has estimated to be about his own age works her keyboard behind the counter and scowls at the screen. He feels clearheaded and resolute about his decision. He’ll just go and check things out. As he told Jenny, if the feds are right, he can be there when their mom gets released; if they’re wrong, he’ll do the money swap and bring her home. Boom.

  The threat of real danger, of course, hangs over him like the blade of a guillotine, but he’ll try not to think about it. Right? He’ll try like hell not to think about it.

  “From there we can find you a connection to Venezuela,” the girl behind the desk is explaining. “In Caracas, there are several commuter flights to Guyana, but they tend to arrive and depart without a firm schedule. And once you’ve arrived at Cheddi Jagan, you’ll need to charter a plane to take you the rest of the way.”

  “Cheddi what?”

  “O nome do aeroporto. That’s Portuguese; Cheddi Jagan is the name of the airport.”

  “They speak Portuguese in Venezuela?”

  “They speak everything in South America. French, Spanish, English, Dutch, German, so many local dialects. And Brazil is close.”

  “You’ve been down there?”

  “I wish. I’m, like, a virtual traveler.” She looks up at him. Her eyes are blue. “But I am learning Portuguese.”

  “Never would have guessed.”

  “Cheddi Jagan is in Timehri. Outside Georgetown.” She offers him a wary, polite, professional smile. “Might be a little warm for that leather jacket.”

  “You think?”

  “Nice look, though. Indiana Jones?”

  “Not exactly.” Is she flirting with him?

  “Business trip, Mr. Troon?”

  Jeremy adjusts the travel bag strapped over his shoulder. Maybe she’s expecting a glib retort, but he stammers, exposed. “Um. No. My mother . . .”

  He lets that thought float, unsure how to finish it. She studies him with a curious expression and, flashing a more sympathetic smile, slides back his credit card and passport.

  “All set. I’ll light a candle for her at Mass.”

  “Oh. No. It’s not like—I mean, she’s—”

  “Still. Couldn’t hurt, could it?”

  Jeremy stares, dazed by her unexpected kindness. “My mom isn’t Catholic.”

  “I don’t think it matters. Thanks for flying with us, Mr. Troon.”

  He hesitates, then takes both items from the counter, rotates them between his fingers, and makes the passport disappear. Slots the credit card in his wallet.

  The airline rep giggles, charmed. “That was pretty slick.”

  Something she taught me. “Just something I picked up.”

  Another deliberate sleight of hand, Jeremy produces a business card and flips it down on the counter in front of her.

  “Very cool. I love magic.”

  Humblebrag: “Parlor trick, really.” His mother’s simple magic routines awed and delighted him when he was little.

  The airline rep cocks her head and looks intrigued. Not the millennial asshole she first assumed, Jeremy guesses.

  “Agora estou curioso,” she says, “That means ‘now I’m curious.’”

  He grips his carry-on and feels brave for the first time. “Maybe I can tell you all about it when I get back.”

  Shivering in the tropical chill, Sentro scratches a fifth bus arrival time on the parapet wall, beneath Zoala’s previous notations. One hour between each. Down on the street corner, the idling rainbow bus has no passengers and waits about as long as it can. The driver climbs down, stretches, looks up and down the empty road, then reboards, shuts the doors, grinds into first gear, and resumes his route, taillights dying as the brakes ease.

  A sleepy Zoala fusses with a scrap of the cut-up soda can. Trying to make it disappear, it seems, like Sentro did, but having little luck. He’s looking very vulnerable, Sentro thinks, and all of his age. He yawns and fidgets and fights fatigue.

  Sentro checks Zoala’s watch. Three hours until dawn.

  No sense in rushing this.

  Sentro gathers from the roof’s weathered tar paper all the other key-shaped aluminum strips she’s cut from the can and puts them into her shirt pocket along with the knife, not unaware that the boy can’t take his eyes off it.

  “Dorme,” she whispers, hoping that’s the right word.

  “Estou sem sono,” he argues, and of course she doesn’t believe him because she knows little boys and how they will fight sleep until the bitter end.

  He flicks the last scrap of can at her and turns his head away. In a moment, he’s breathing steadily, dead to the world. Both her children, she remembers, were the same way with sleep. Down and peaced out, Dennis would say.

  She settles down beside him and closes her eyes.

  Jennifer Troon dozes on the cat-shredded sofa bed in her cramped Federal Hill studio. The love seat is a shabby piece of bargain-store furniture her mother has offered to replace, but Jenny rescued it from her father’s so-called home office and won’t give it up until it falls to pieces.

  Soundless late-night TV casts its pale colors across her. A pair of tiny, unblinking, luminous yellow spheroids leer from the dark shadows of hell beneath the breakfront. The upholstery-offending cat. She and Jeremy gave their mom a kitten to keep her company after Jenny moved out, but then Jenny became the de facto cat sitter when her mother went off on assignments, and eventually, the cat became hers.

  She has secretly renamed it Aubrey. Mercurial, inscrutable, affectionate and aloof, gentle when it chooses to be, but a fierce hunter of mice and roaches in the night; sometimes Jenny will awaken to find the cat sitting impossibly high (how did it get there?) on the bookshelf, staring down at her with those electric eyes.

  Protecting her or plotting her demise?

  Cats. Mothers. Complicated coffee drinks she inexplicably can’t remember how to make. A shallow dream carries Jenny Troon lucid along a horizon of her consciousness: she’s flying, soaring, and her mother is just beyond the gathering clouds, if only Jenny can get to her.

  Her phone vibrates, rouses her. She sits up, blinking. Text message from Jeremy:

  k i’m going

  Jennifer stares at the screen for a while, wondering if they made the right decision, and starts to text him back with a confidence she doesn’t exactly feel.

  Although his conversation with Jeremy Troon was discouraging, because there really is nothing constructive he can do to find the man’s missing mother, Special Agent Warren is on his office computer terminal, searching for information about Aubrey Sentro.

  He’s reasonably surprised when nothing comes up.

  Nothing.

  Which is, well, weird, considering the array of public and private databases to which he has access.

  There’s a simple explanation, but the special agent’s mind hasn’t wrapped around it.

  The better half of Warren’s watchful team of wingmen enters the office bullpen, carrying flat whites in a cardboard tray with one hand and a printout in the other. She offers a fancy coffee to Warren and pops the plastic sipper lid off the other so she can empty two packs of Splenda into the nimbus of steamed milk.

  Warren stares at the computer screen. “How is this individual so completely off the grid, Cassie?”

  “How do you think?” The female agent flops the printout on Warren’s desk. “Solomon is an NGO outside contractor. I thought I recognized the name. That idjit from COINTEL, what’s-his-name, used to work there.”

  Warren tilts his head to study what his agent has brought him while he samples his lukewarm beverage. Then he types a URL into his browser window, acc
esses a secure NSA database, and goes through the ritual encryption and two-step verification, whereupon Aubrey Sentro’s passport photo pops up, followed by a full dossier: military records, honors, citations, assorted civilian contract operations, and a detailed eyes-only précis on Solomon Systems, its federal entanglements, recent contracts, and so on. There are over a thousand official government entities and almost twice that many outside contractors doing intelligence work for the United States government. Paranoia is a booming business. A million people hold top-secret clearances. But not many like this.

  “Hey, look—that private-contract clusterfuck in Cyprus. Minneapolis software guy.”

  “Scott Chang?” Warren remembers hearing about it.

  “Yep.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “I know, right?”

  Pages and pages of more of this he could scroll through, but Warren has found what he needs.

  “Old gal’s an ex-spook.”

  “Duh. And a half.” Eyes still glued to the screen, the female fed nods, pretending she saw this coming all along, which Warren knows she didn’t, but then, lowering her flat white, Cassie asks the smart and unanswerable next question: “Does that help us or hurt us here?”

  Zoala, awakened by the faint alarm chime of his wristwatch, discovers his peeling skin cooled and slick with condensation and the American woman gone. Moment of mild panic, and then he sees the scrap of endpaper torn from the book about Jim, held down by the telescope eyepiece he liberated from the Jeddah.

  Sentro has drawn him a three-panel picture note. First, a crude stick figure waves down a cartoon bus, while a group of other stick figures hurries toward it from a big rectangular box with smaller boxes arranged inside it. Next panel has a crude cartoon SUV with comically flattened tires—the Range Rover, Zoala decides. Big darkened arrows point to the tires. Exclamation points. A knife sticks out of one of the tires.

  Zoala digs in his pocket and discovers that Morehouse’s folding knife has been stowed there. Sweet.

  In the drawing’s final panel, the American has drawn a clock with its hands frozen at twelve and six.