by Daniel Pyne
When he pops up to look over the parapet and across the courtyard, past the inky-black pool water and the crazed canopy of palms, Zoala senses movement along the deco building in the shadows. He picks up his pilfered eyepiece and locates the American woman half-concealed by the thick tropical overgrowth abutting the first floor, already beginning to scale the wall using window trim and a downspout.
Zoala glances at his wristwatch. Big hand at eight, the little one nearly straight down.
He watches the woman climb.
Faint bleed of a sunrise sharpens the ocean horizon beyond the harbor, where the Jeddah is anchored, a silhouette, obdurate, black on lavender.
Twenty minutes until six o’clock.
Zoala slips into his laceless Nikes and hurries across the rooftop to the stairs.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Breaching the casement, pushing the third-floor bedroom window open, Sentro wriggles over the sill and through, cushioning her fall with her uninjured forearm, making not a sound. Her shoulder aches again, stressed from the climb. Her eyes are slow to adjust to the room’s darkness. She’s in the bedroom of a small suite, more a furnished boardinghouse than an apartment. A sprawling california king with a cushioned headboard, bureau, framed mirror that catches the interloper as she softens into shadows and sidesteps a small leather club chair. A slender shape is asleep atop the bedcovers in her underwear, sweltering, long pale legs glazed with sweat.
A faint bruising of perfume Sentro knows.
The blonde from the dock.
Sentro listens for a long time for any movement in the outer room, waits until she’s satisfied there’s no one else in the tiny two-room flat, then rises beside the bed and clamps her hand over the blonde woman’s mouth while using her own body weight to hold her down until she awakens with the expected start.
For a moment the blonde claws at Sentro’s hands. Her eyes flutter open, but when she recognizes who’s on top of her, she goes limp. Her breathing steadies; Sentro can feel the heat of the woman’s body through the fabric of her borrowed shirt.
“I’m having trouble with my memory,” Sentro whispers, “but I remember you being dead.”
They stare at each other, inches apart. Uncomfortably intimate. Tentatively, Sentro lifts her hand from the woman’s mouth.
The deep breath that follows Sentro can feel against her own chest. “I was. But it proved too inconvenient.”
“Do the others know you’re alive?”
“Others?”
“Passengers? Crew?”
The woman quakes and shakes her head and manages to make tears. Sentro wonders if they could even be real.
“I never meant to use you.” The undead blonde reaches up and lightly brushes stray hair off Sentro’s face to inspect the scabbing wound where she got clipped. Her fingers are warm. “You’re hurt.”
Sentro rolls off and tells her to get dressed. In doing so, she glimpses herself again in the mirror and even in the gloaming can see hollowed eyes looking back at her. The ugly bruises and cuts cause her to turn away and run a self-conscious hand over the riotous hair that hasn’t seen a comb in days.
“I’m sorry.”
Sentro has no response for this. Just waits.
Sitting up, the Englishwoman covers her breasts with one arm, as if modest. Part of the performance? “That husband I told you about?” Sentro pretends she remembers. “Well, he’s a skanky, wife-beating, two-timing sod bastard hoodlum who’s been shipping dodgy black-market arms and munitions to equally skanky sods in the Persian Gulf. Regional mayhem and skullduggery to ensue, I guess.”
Sentro dredges up an image of a rusty-red container with the cat logo on its side. The five men watching from the Savannah dock; the Balkan mafia; the hipster with a porkpie hat.
“But he’s mostly about the money,” the blonde admits. “I’m a bloody fool for marrying him.”
The blonde stood at the Jeddah main deck rail. Looking down at the hipster. Her expression so deliberately neutral.
Sentro blinks herself back to the present, to the same Englishwoman, who is rambling on, possibly nervous: “Have you ever noticed, in internet pornography—which is, I would argue, kind of our cultural mirror anymore—how the women are all fantastic-looking specimens, while the men are generally hairy little hedgehogs with joyless rodent eyes? Utterly devoid of tenderness or feeling. Yet we select them. And shag them. Resulting in more little evil bastards who—”
In a rush, the name comes back to Sentro: “Fontaine.”
“What?”
“Fontaine Fox. That’s you.”
“That’s me. Yes.” Her eyes narrow. “What’s wrong? Did you take a knock?”
“Repeatedly, as it turns out.” Sentro goes to the connecting door and cracks it open, confirming that the suite’s outer sitting room is vacant and offers only the hint of a hot plate kitchenette. Meanwhile Fontaine shimmies her lanky pale body into leggings and a black sleeveless T-shirt.
“Well, I had my fill of it, if you want to know the truth. I hired some local freebooters to hijack the Jeddah and pretend to kill me in order that I could get a redo on a life misplayed.”
“Twins.”
“Zemes.”
“Castor and . . . Pauly?”
“Exactly. And their merry men. Yes. They come quite cheap, actually. Or seemed to.” A crooked smile plays on her lips. “They’re very disturbed by you, love. Warrior woman.”
Having crossed the darkened sitting room, Sentro opens the hallway door and cautiously peers out into the corridor. Vacant. There’s the faint bleed of chatter and canned gunfire coming up the main staircase at the end that at first she thinks is a television movie but then recognizes as a video game. First-person shooter. Fontaine’s freebooters, possibly next floor down, killing more than time.
“What are you doing?”
“Listening.” Sentro glances back at Fontaine. “You hired them?”
“I did.”
“Had them storm the boat, pretend to kill you.”
“Is it to shame me that you’re repeating everything I say?”
“No, my head is in a fog. It’s a good story; you tell it well. I’m not sure I followed all of it, but—” She frowns. “Blanks in the gun that I saw you shot with.”
“Obviously.”
“And all that blood—”
“Your Halloween stores carry the most brilliant props. It was a good show, yeah?”
“Convincing. Very.”
“Thanks, I guess. You were the unexpected guest. Gunplay Kabuki was designed for the cameras in the safe room—odd bit of luck we were able to pull it off without a hitch.”
“I don’t think ‘luck’ is the word for it.”
“Last Twin Standing’s pretty gutted, you having punched his brother’s ticket,” the Englishwoman added.
“Pauly’s dead.”
“Yes.”
It’s how Sentro remembers it, but she wanted confirmation. “This is not playing out the way you planned.”
“No.” Fontaine goes quiet. “He must’ve figured out what I was up to,” she says finally.
“Who?”
“My guy. My husband. And fucked me. One last time. Literally and figuratively, go back far enough.”
“Cat logo.”
“What?”
“On the container that got loaded back in the last US port we stopped at. That was your husband on the docks back in . . .” Sentro can picture five men, can’t recall where.
“Savannah?”
Savannah, Georgia. Sentro says, “Empty, though.”
“I suppose, yes, he is. Poor judgment would be my only explanation.”
“No. The container. Was empty.”
“Ah. Right. Of course, you saw it. Double-crossed.”
“By your husband.”
“Who else? Sod’s law. But truly,” Fontaine pleads what she’s pled before, putting her heart into it, “I never meant to use you.”
“What do you mean?”
&
nbsp; Fontaine looks at her with what seems like real remorse. Does she want forgiveness? Does she need it?
“Would you have let them have their way with me?” Sentro asks.
“Have their what?”
“While you were on the floor, pretending to be dead.” Sidelong, Sentro watches Fontaine torture her way back through a decision she hadn’t had to make. “There were the makings of a negotiation. My suitability for the usual unspeakable violation before they then killed me for real.”
“Unspeakable violation? You’re quaint.”
“Not so much, no.”
Fontaine’s mouth slants down. “No. I guess not. But then you—”
“Yeah.” Sentro finds she wants to believe her. Some of it, anyway. It’s important that she does. She glances back into the corridor. Still vacant, no one coming. The faint gaming ruckus steady from the stairwell.
“I’m so sorry.”
Sentro shivers then and frowns, still remembering only fragments of what came prior to it, in fits and starts, but guessing: “Did we . . . ?”
“Yes.”
Oh.
“Was that part of the plan? Distract me?”
“Decidedly not. A, I had no idea you had these otherworldly talents, did I? And B, I wasn’t expecting the boys for another day at least.”
Oh.
“Freak you out, does it?”
“I don’t know. I have no memory of it right now.”
Fontaine frowns, looking less sure of herself. For once, she has no glib riposte.
“Only the feeling of not being alone,” Sentro adds. Taking a deep breath, she narrows the door, leaving only a slot through which to keep monitoring the hallway, and turns around to face the bedroom and Fontaine Fox, while trying to gauge what she—Sentro—is feeling now.
And why.
“Sorry,” Fontaine says, her refrain, this time making it sound simple, plaintive, as if she’s sensed a need to really sell the idea.
“You keep saying that.”
“All I got left, really.”
Sentro shakes her head to clear it, not from brain fog but from an overload of—what, exactly? What is this? What was it? Not love, surely, but a longing, an aching, for connection. For something she hadn’t felt for a long, long time.
Which is, bottom line, just weakness, isn’t it?
“Not part of the plan, though, you,” Fontaine confesses. It’s convincing. “I mean, the plan was for me to disappear and for my piratey hired help’s remuneration to be whatever they could get from ransoming the Jeddah and its cargo and—”
“Passengers. Crew.”
“—including the contents of my husband’s container.”
“You only wanted your freedom,” Sentro says, not believing it.
“Yes.”
“But now you’ve come up short, payroll-wise. On your end.”
“Yes. No buried treasure for the boys.”
“That’s why you called him.” Fontaine approximates an unconvincing look of bewilderment, so Sentro specifies, playing along. “Your husband. I saw you, through the window, just a while ago, talking.”
“He made me.”
“Castor.”
“Him. Castor Zeme.”
“What did your husband say?”
“He claims he doesn’t know why the container is empty and that he was told by a shipping-company representative that I was dead.”
“The official story. Do you believe him?”
Fontaine says, “No. He’s set me up. I just told you . . .” She doesn’t finish.
“Right. Double-crossed. Do the mercenaries you hired believe him?”
“I don’t know.”
Sentro puzzles over it. Something isn’t settling for her: pirates who aren’t really pirates, cargo that doesn’t seem to exist. Games within games. It doesn’t alter the objective, but it may impact how she achieves it. Sentro says, “I’m taking the hostages and crew back to the ship tonight.”
“Why?”
All of a sudden it’s a question that stumps her, one that everyone keeps asking, and maybe she just didn’t hear it the way it comes at her now and—and what? What can she say?
This whole violent charade offends me?
Sentro walks back to watch the corridor through the gapped suite door, unable, suddenly, to come up with a clear answer.
But Fontaine doesn’t seem to be expecting one and, rushing ahead, as if to a child, explains, “Everyone, everything—crew, passengers, ship, cargo—will be released when the money comes. That’s how it works. You don’t need to do this.”
“So I’m told.”
“By whom?”
“Almost everyone who has had an opinion about it during the past thirty-odd hours.” Or in the abstract, she thinks, for most of her adult life. “They’re all so certain.”
Fontaine says she doesn’t understand why Sentro doesn’t find this persuasive. “You’re stubborn.”
“I’m skeptical.” Changing subjects: “You know, he might actually kill you now. Given how his field of play has changed. Your pirate partner.”
“He might. But there’s still a profit to be made from the crew and the cargo. Plus, I think he fancies me for a rousing shag or four, even from the depths of his fraternal grief, so . . .” Fontaine makes a dismissive gesture. “Anyhoo, he’s not thinking so much about me, is he? You’re the one who topped his twin. And some others. Went off like a berserker on the boat, I’m told. ‘The bloody she-wolf,’ he calls you. Among other less polite epithets.”
“Where were you, while it was happening?”
“Roll over, play dead.” Fontaine shrugs, as if helpless.
For a while they study each other like strangers. Sentro knows Fontaine is right about Castor Zeme. But it’s never been men who worry her; their unfortunate mash-up of testosterone and entitlement makes them easy to read. Only their evolutionary edge in size and strength needs to be accounted for. Women are where the danger, for Sentro, always lurks, like the naked terrorist in the Cyprus hotel hallway: sudden, unexpected Gordian riddles of emotion, intention, and contradiction.
Fontaine Fox is still playing her. The question is: Why? What game?
Sentro says, “You can come with me or stay here. Up to you. But I’d appreciate it, should you decide to stay, if you’d give me a good head start.”
The Englishwoman says nothing.
Sentro slips out the door, into the corridor, leaving it open.
Vacant except for the tattered sofa facing a monstrous flat-screen TV, the second-floor single room, into which Sentro can surreptitiously peer from the third-floor landing, guards all access to where Fontaine has said the crew and passengers are being held. A sprung floral sofa is presently occupied by two mercenaries plus the scar-faced tweaker; all three, facing away from the open doorway, are fully engrossed in a firefight video campaign. Sentro knows about first-person shooter games from the homeless boys she tutors. This one, she’s fairly certain, is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare with the surround sound cranked up all the way. She decides to descend via a fire escape on the other end of the third-floor hallway, trusting that the alarm won’t be functional and that the mercenaries will remain insensate in their virtual adventures. It’s a wise decision. Not only are the fire doors disarmed, they’re propped open for any cooling breeze that might kick up off the bay and provide the apartment building some relief from the heat.
Voices murmur behind a doorway midway down the second floor. The door is indeed locked, an old-world keyhole mechanism that can be done from either side.
Keeping a wary eye on the game room down the hallway, she takes the aluminum can cutouts from her shirt pocket and inserts them in sequence into the keyhole and between the door and the jamb, along with the bent length of wire from the Jeddah deck that she’s recovered from her jeans. She fiddles with and jimmies her makeshift tool the way she learned at Quantico years ago and is pleased when (she can’t recall ever having had the opportunity to try it before) the door clicks o
pen and she finds herself looking into a large, mostly unlit suite where Captain Montez and a few of his crew are at a table playing poker, while Bruce and the Tagalog are just awakening, astonished to see Sentro slip inside.
Montez sees her last, but he’s first to say something. “You.”
First Mate Mulligan is a mess. Improvised bath towel bandages on his arm and leg, a sheen of flop sweat, and his jaw set hard against pain.
“Where are the others?”
The captain gestures across the hallway to a closed door opposite. For a moment, there’s just the male gaze, the unmistakable disbelief, that look of How did she survive? But Sentro gets right down to it.
“There’s a city bus that stops on the corner in ten minutes. We’ll take the fire exit to the street, catch the bus to the harbor and a skiff to the ship.” She locks eyes with Montez. “You can be in open sea within the hour. They won’t follow.”
“You don’t know that.”
Sentro is growing weary of the serial resistance to what she thinks is common sense. “I’ll make sure they don’t.” She’s not sure that’s true but says it with conviction. She checks the hallway, then crosses quietly and begins to work on unlocking the facing door there, anxious eyes on the open room, where the game play continues.
Summoning all the withering continental conceit he can seem to manage, Montez gets up, stretches, comes to the open doorway of his room, and lectures Sentro’s back in an angry whisper. “They shot the woman who resisted. You saw it. Ms. Fox. We must stay here and do as they say.”
Sentro mouths her question: Which is?
“Wait for a resolution.”
The door Sentro’s been working on cracks open. Another bachelor flat, no furniture. The women passengers are in here, on the bare floor, dozing. They blink away the darkness in sleepy confusion. The Swedish woman and the newlywed sit up. Their names will come back to her.
Sentro ducks inside with them, then turns to murmur back to the captain, low, hard, “The resolution of this is everyone dies.” She allows this harsh truth to settle on him. “Where are they keeping the rest of your crew?”
The captain offers only worried hesitation, because, as Sentro has correctly guessed, he doesn’t know; there’s been no communication between the pirates and their hostages because, as Sentro has also surmised, they’re not really pirates in the conventional sense, and this is anything but business as usual.
