by Daniel Pyne
Not true.
And now her mother is saying she needs Jenny’s help.
She explains that Elsayed will make all the arrangements, but she wants—she wants—Jenny to do the rest alone. “You’ll need to stop smoking pot.”
“Mom.”
“I’m serious.”
“Arrangements to go where?”
“I want you to take care of one last piece of unfinished business.”
For so many reasons, this thrills her. There is never any question in her mind that she will do it. Whatever it is. But she asks, a little worried and needing to know, “Why can’t you go?”
“I’m tired,” her mother admits.
“I’ll be in Texas,” her mother adds after a while. “I’m done.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Peckish shearwaters and petrels whirl and swoop under a searing midday Moroccan sun, shrieking up and strafing down into Casablanca’s commercial port, poaching the floating garbage while fish lie low in the cool quay shadows. Decrepit cranes twist between the docked ships and the vast fields of containers awaiting land transport.
Like a boned fish, the tramp cargo ship CMA CGM Jeddah, Singapore Shipping Company, flag of the Bahamas, having completed its rerouted four-week journey here only slightly overdue, is nearly unloaded, disemboweled to expose much of the lower hull’s crisscrossing steel superstructure. An old green Volvo Titan truck winds through quayside aisles of cargo to the side of the ship. Doors opening, tailgate dropped, a dozen day laborers jump out and follow the driver, a confident, striding redheaded woman whose Panamanian passport says she’s Astrid Loney, a name she’s always liked. Long legs tanned from a stint in Mykonos scissor under her billowing sundress. She leads them up the gangway to the Jeddah’s main deck, where the few remaining soybean containers have yet to be lifted out.
After two men open the watertight hatches, the Loney woman gestures for the others to go ahead and drop down; they disappear and after a while begin to pass up the aluminum Saab cases, as well as other crates and containers shedding beans and stamped with military markings. The contraband is carefully stacked and counted before she allows it to be hand trucked down to the dock.
“Your bad husband couldn’t make it?”
Startled, the redhead pushes her sunglasses up and turns to find herself facing an American whom, at first, she takes for Aubrey Sentro.
“Oh. No, sorry, I forgot that was your scheme from the get-go, right? Mea culpa.”
Hazel eyes, piercings, a tattoo sleeve—no, not Aubrey at all, the redhead realizes to her chagrin, but this girl does have Aubrey’s pluck, her sly bearing, and a quite confusing recycling of a few of Aubrey’s most pleasing features, only so much younger and less guarded.
“You’re her daughter,” Fontaine Fox says and thinks: What in the world is she doing here?
“Almost didn’t recognize you from the description I was given.” Tugging her own tangled, pulled-back hair: “Beauty tip. Red’s not a good color with your complexion. IMHO.”
“I’m Astrid,” Fontaine Fox says, extending a hand.
“No, you’re not.”
“What’s your name? Where is Aubrey?”
“It’s the reversal in the story, the twist you didn’t tell her,” the girl continues, stubborn, scanning the deck of the ship. “The part where you made it look as if your husband was double-crossing everybody, when, in fact . . . it was you.”
Her gaze comes back level. “Lies, lies, lies.”
Fontaine feels a shiver of discomfort and wants an answer to her questions.
“Mom couldn’t make it either. Sorry.”
“He was a dodgy piece of work, my husband,” Fontaine admits. “And for the record, I never lied to your mum.”
“You can tell yourself that, I guess.”
Studying her, Fontaine wonders how much this girl knows. About her mother, about what happened before what happened. “When—I’m curious—did she suss me out?”
“She didn’t. Not really. But she knew you’d ask that. She told me to tell you she’s not that smart. Just patient. Stubborn. As you probably know.”
“I should have, yes.”
“Made an educated guess and decided to send someone to catch the big climax and see if she was correct.
“She says stuff plays out,” the girl adds, “if you wait.”
Fontaine’s eyes dart around. To see if she brought police with her or any sort of backup.
“It’s only me; don’t worry,” the girl says, as if reading her concern. “According to Mom, even if someone could, you know, prove a causality between what she calls your sleight of hand with the”—the girl frowns, apparently uncertain—“Gustos?”
“Gustafs.”
“Right. And all the rest.”
On the quay, Fontaine has spotted a man in a fine panama hat who has found refuge in the cool shadows of a high stack, smoking. Chiseled Middle Eastern features, but an easy deportment that could only ever be American, even at rest. His sunglasses are canted up toward the two women, as if he’s watching.
This girl’s shadow?
“Your husband. Is he dead?” Sentro’s daughter tilts her head, trying to parse Fontaine’s nonresponse. “’Cause Mom was fairly emphatic about how that was what would happen. She had a whole scene worked out: big white mansion in the Deep South, your hipster husband kinda Vince Vaughn–ish and hauling his hairy ass out the back door, fleeing through some gothic antediluvian garden.” Girl can talk, Fontaine marvels. “Chased by those same mooks Mom says she saw you trade supersecret looks with at the dock in Savannah. Over the cat container—whatever that means. Mooks who, when they heard that their shipment was missing, decided to take their pound of flesh from Vince.”
“Your mother has an active imagination.”
“Maybe, maybe not. There was a story in the papers, I think. Or on the news?” the girl says, making both a question. “Or . . . no, maybe it was one of her work friends saw some kind of eyes-only report about it.” She smiles faintly. “Eyes only. Kinda retro cool.”
Fontaine has fallen quiet. Her breathing shallow, thoughts churning.
“Anyway, Mom claims they caught him and dragged him back to the house, where—this part, pretty sure she was spitballing—some kind of professional Balkan hit person stepped out onto the porch and blew a hole in your spouse with a short-stock shotgun.”
Fontaine stares, then looks away.
“It makes a terrible mess, Mom said. I wouldn’t know.”
For a moment nothing more is said. Fontaine watches as, down on the quay, the bed of her truck begins to fill with her black-market weapons.
“But anyway, it’s all good. For you. There’s no extradition here.” Sentro’s daughter takes a pack of Egyptian cigarettes from her shoulder bag. “You mind if I . . . ?”
Fontaine shakes her head. The man in the panama hat is gone. Maybe she has this all wrong. “Why isn’t your mother here?”
The girl just looks at her blankly, taking a lungful and exhaling. The cigarette dangles between her fingers so loosely it might fall.
“She survived. Surely.” Fontaine tries not to sound shaken.
Sentro’s daughter doesn’t answer the question. “These Cleopatra cancer sticks are vile, but I can’t stop sucking on them. Super Luxe. You think they’ve got more than nicotine?”
What happened after I left? Fontaine studies this girl, looking for clues. “Tell me your name.”
“Jennifer. Well, Jenny.”
“Following in her footsteps, Jen?”
“Oh God, no. I work in franchise coffee. I’ve been considering studying to be a shiatsu masseuse, but . . . no. Beans are my life.”
“Your mother—”
“I know, right?” Jenny Troon doesn’t wait for Fontaine to finish her thought. “We always believed she was some cubicle mouse at an insurance company. Can you fucking believe that?” Jenny does a french inhale.
“Surely you suspected.”
“She was a
shitty mom, most of the time.” Exhale.
“Looking at you, I don’t think so.” Fontaine finds that she likes this girl, despite everything. But why did Sentro send her all this way?
Now Jenny has gone quiet. An actor who has been distracted and lost her place in the play, Fontaine thinks. Jenny looks up at the seabirds. As if she’s read the Englishwoman’s thoughts, she says, “We’re still, you know . . .” She lets the thought go, restarts: “The way my mom finally explained it to us, or tried to—she said she’s that guy, the one that does the stuff no one else will.”
Tried. Past tense? “Guy—not girl.”
“Well, technically ‘woman,’ yeah. But what she meant by saying it that way is when you say a ‘girl’ does stuff—or even a woman, for that matter—when you say a girl ‘does stuff nobody else will do,’ Mom said it kinda connotes only one thing.”
“Ah. Sex.”
“It explains a lot. If you think about it.”
“About Aubrey?” Fontaine still can’t quite process this girl’s presence here, what the point of it is, this new twist in the story. “Your mom?”
“Who else?” Jenny looks blankly at Fontaine. “Sorry if I’ve gotten it all tangled.”
“Not sure you have; could be me.”
“Mom said the world is inclined to think a woman can’t do anything else. And that it somehow informs what she did do. My mom. And what she didn’t or couldn’t.”
“Ah.” After a beat, Fontaine smiles again, fondly. “I think she’s selling herself short. I think you’re selling her short,” she adds. “On the mothering front, I mean. You are exhibit A.”
Jenny drops and crushes her half-smoked cigarette. “Whatever.”
“What did she tell you about me?” Fontaine asks.
Jenny seems to want to talk about something else. “For a couple of years, Mom was getting these . . . headaches? And after her last work trip, they got worse. She had other symptoms, I guess. We noticed she didn’t want to talk about them. My brother claims her hands had been getting a little shaky. I wouldn’t know. I hadn’t seen her in a while. Anyway, before she took her cruise, she made an appointment and went to this doctor, and he told her she has some kind of long-term memory trouble. A cumulative thing, from work, you know. So this—you—it’s one of those loose ends she was anxious to wrap up in case, you know, she forgot.”
“We had something,” Fontaine says softly.
One eyebrow arching, Jenny cuts curious eyes to her. “I don’t think so.”
“Why’s that?”
“You probably thought you did. But . . .” Again Jenny doesn’t finish; she looks as if she isn’t sure anymore that she’s right about whatever she was going to say.
“But what?”
Shrug of the shoulders; Sentro’s daughter seems anxious to wrap this meeting up. “Mom,” she says finally, as if that answers everything.
“You never really knew her, though,” Fontaine says. “I mean. At all. Did you?”
“That’s what my brother says. Mom said it wasn’t so simple as that.”
“And you?”
The last of Fontaine’s cargo is being wheeled past them. The daughter dissembles: “I’ve never been to this part of the world before. What I’d like to do is stay for a month and score some righteous hash and get all fucked up. But”—she sighs—“my brilliant coffee career won’t wait.”
Irritated suddenly by all the cryptic ellipses and impatient to get on with her business, Fontaine says, “Fine. You’ve found me; you’ve scolded me. Awfully sorry; boo-hoo. Now be honest, love, because I have to shove off: Has she really sent you all this way out of mere curiosity that her supposition was right? Or has she sent you with some other message for me?”
“Both.” The girl avoids making eye contact; she looks past Fontaine, down at the dock, evidently seeing something there she’s been expecting. Fontaine is suddenly afraid to know what it is.
“Mom’s message is this: she’s extremely curious what your Casablanca client will say when he discovers that all those fancy gun cases you’ve sold him are empty.”
Fontaine’s head whips around. She scans the dock, sees a few dark birds fly upward from among the stacked containers, chased by the two black Mercedes SUVs slowly snaking toward Fontaine’s drab green Titan.
Jenny adds: “She sent me here to witness it. I don’t think she trusted you to tell her.”
Fontaine looks at Jenny again, numb, feeling a flood of pure panic. “What has she done?”
The day laborers have finished loading their cargo into the truck bed; they wait, smoking, draining water bottles, looking up at the main deck of the Jeddah, as if impatient.
“Oh, what have you done?”
“La Sûreté nationale appreciates your donation,” Jenny tells her.
Sprinting down the gangway, Fontaine shouts at her men to pull one of the stainless-steel cases off the truck. By the time she arrives, out of breath, they have it opened. Just foam and broken bricks inside.
They crack another one. Same.
Her fingers tingle; her scalp winds tight. Too late to put the cases away. Too late to run. Fontaine hears the rumble of the black Mercedes duo pulling up and turns toward them, smiling. Whatever sham needs to be cast she will have to make up on the fly. Heavy doors wing open, big well-fed guys in white shirts, silk suits, dark glasses, and kaffiyeh.
“Wa’alaykum al-salaam.”
“Bonjour, mademoiselle.”
“Hello.”
Trapped, undone, Fontaine Fox glances one last time up at the deck of the cargo ship Jeddah, but Aubrey Sentro’s daughter is gone.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The mournful two-week brume has finally lifted from the harbor, washed away by torrential, sweet-smelling rains. Sunshine bores a hole through and dazzles the crenellated bay, and all the whitewashed clapboard houses pop like broken teeth from the dark-green maw of the Pequeno hills.
Racing through the downtown streets, brand-new cricket bat slung over his shoulder, a thin computer case swinging from his hand, Zoala darts across a traffic gridlock on Avenida Segunda and ducks into the bruised gloaming of ByteMe. He throws money his sister gave him on the counter and hurries to a corner desk to plug into the World Wide Web and power up a black laptop with a Solomon Systems logo on it.
Rápido. Rápido. He’s been working on his English but falls back easily into old habits.
The burns have healed, but his uncovered arms and legs below his board shorts still bear the ruddy, scalloped tessellation of the island beetles that Dr. Morehouse says saved him, and his dreams are often scaly, crawling, clicking journeys through jungled worlds that, upon waking, dissipate like sea mist from a heavy surf.
Eccola has taken to calling her brother Jumbee. He’s not amused.
Earbuds in, software launched, and windows opened and clicked through, all the requisite artifacts of WhatsApp connecting over balky third world Mbps cause half a badly framed boy’s face to materialize, herky jerky, on the laptop screen. The unsteady link catching and pixelating, an attractive adult woman in a sea-green airline uniform leans in front of the boy and in halting schoolbook Portuguese asks, “Você pode me ouvir? Você consegue me ver?”
Zoala has been practicing his English. “Yes. Okay. Both.”
Another figure edges into view behind the uniformed woman: the son who came to rescue his mother and wound up getting saved himself. Zoala wishes it were Aubrey Sentro, but the son is not so bad. Jeremy set this all up; he knows a lot about money, and Zoala thinks there could be useful things to learn from him. Not now, though.
“Zoala, this is Damien,” Sentro’s son says. “Damien, Zoala.”
Sentro’s son steps back again, drawing the pretty woman with him. Behind them, Zoala can just make out the bookshelves of what he guesses could be a library behind them, more books than he’s ever seen in one place before; then the boy his age centers himself on the screen, leans forward, his serious face getting big.
“Wha
ssup, Z.?” Damien says.
Zoala doesn’t understand, panics. “O quê?” They’ve been trading texts for a couple of days, but seeing him, hearing American spoken, this is so much different.
Damien frowns, equally confused. “Okay?”
“Ele disse olá,” the woman with the uniform tries to explain to Zoala, her pronunciation actually halfway decent.
“Oh. Olá. Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
There is the awkward silence of boys.
“Onde está você?”
Baffled, Damien looks to the adults.
“He’s asking where you are,” the woman translates.
“Johns Hopkins,” Sentro’s son, Jeremy, says.
Zoala wonders fleetingly if a Hopkins and a library are the same thing, how this John came to own either, and how much money it took, before Damien translates with the requisite tween eye roll, “Some big-ass liberry.”
This Zoala understands, and also that his guess was right. He lets the mystery of the Hopkins go.
“Cool,” Zoala says.
“I guess,” Damien allows.
Another not-so-awkward pause.
“Welp.”
Zoala has memorized the question his sister’s junkie doctor taught him: “You wanna play Fortnite?”
“Dude,” this American boy says, which in the doctor’s language, Zoala remembers, has so many different meanings but in this case must mean yes. He watches Damien slip fire-engine-red wireless headphones over his ears. Beats. The ones Zoala covets.
They look at each other from two separate continents, almost two thousand miles and a vast gulf between them, but actually nothing at all, when it comes down to it. A fast connection that needs no mediation.
Sentro’s son and his uniformed woman will watch for only a little while before they get bored looking and leave Zoala and his new American friend to build and shoot and floss their way to a better world.
