by David Logan
‘La Liga de los Tiburones!’ he shouted.
It took Junk a moment to translate: ‘The League of the Sharks?’ he said.
‘Sí, the League of Sharks,’ said Salvador. ‘This is their symbol.’
Junk couldn’t believe it. After all this time, at last, a lead. Something. He looked at the old man. ‘What is it? What is the League of Sharks?’
Salvador shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What d’you mean you don’t know?’ asked Junk petulantly.
‘La Liga de los Tiburones is older than me. Is ancient. My grandfather told me about it when I was a child. His grandfather told him.’
‘So it’s Chilean?’
‘No.’ The old man shook his head.
Junk sighed with frustration and forced a level tone into his voice. ‘So where does it come from?’
‘I don’t know. Nobody knows.’
‘Somebody must know.’
‘No,’ said Salvador. ‘It’s a legend as old as the sea. A myth lost in time.’
Junk sighed. He didn’t understand.
The old man went on. ‘The stories my grandfather would tell me were about sharks who walked like men … who stepped out from the sea and walked on land.’ The old man stuck out his lower lip apologetic-ally and shrugged. ‘But they are just stories. Nothing more.’
‘Where would I go to find out more about La Liga de los Tiburones?’
The old man shook his head. He didn’t have an answer.
*
As Junk walked away from the waterfront bar that night he was filled with a bleak sense of failure. After all this time he finally had a lead, but one that led nowhere.
No!
Junk rejected his negativity. He had a lead. Slight as it was, it was more than he had when he woke up that morning. More than he’d had for a thousand mornings. He had something. He had La Liga de los Tiburones.
*
In each country he visited from then on he would find a bar or a cafe or any place where people congregated and he would find an old-timer like Salvador, who loved to talk for the price of a bottle of aquavit in Göteborg, cheap wine in Marseilles or Metaxa in Kerkyra. He would let them do the drinking and the talking. He would refill their glass and listen. He would ask about La Liga de los Tiburones and legends of the sea. Especially ones that involved strange creatures. Most times he would get nothing, but every now and again he would hear a story about fish who could walk on land like men, talk like men. He would hear stories about whale-men who were thirty metres tall or women with tentacles instead of legs. The majority of these stories were embellished half-truths, their genesis lost to time and imagination.
But eventually Junk realized there were elements that kept being repeated, whether the story was told in Valparaíso or Saint Petersburg or Bangkok.
He met an old British merchant navy man called Ian in Tampico on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. Ian had heard of La Liga de los Tiburones. He said it had many names: De Bond van de Haaien in Dutch; sha yu tuan dui in Mandarin; O Adelfóthta tou Karcarión in Greek; Shaark Ki Sangha in Hindi, but all of them meant the same thing: the League of Sharks.
Junk sighed. He had heard these before. ‘I know what I’m looking for now,’ he said. ‘But I’m no closer to finding it. Every country seems to have some connection to the League of Sharks. They don’t seem to come from anywhere in particular.’
‘Which is odd, if you stop to think about it,’ observed Ian. ‘Lots of countries or religions share myths. Jesus and Mohammed are basically the same person, but they all adapt the stories to suit their own proclivities.’ It wasn’t quite the right word but Junk chose not to correct him and Ian carried on. ‘But the stories about the shark league are all the same, whether you hear them from a Turk or a Chinaman.’
Junk thought about this for a moment and it was true, though he wasn’t sure if that meant anything.
‘There’s one place you could try, if you haven’t already,’ said Ian.
Junk listened eagerly.
‘Ionian Sea … south of Corfu. I’ve never stopped to count them up, but if you poked me with a stick and made me, I’d guess I’ve heard more stories connected to that part of the world than anywhere else.’
Junk frowned. Could that be true?
That night when he got back to his bunk on the cargo ship he was currently crewing on, he took out a small leather-bound notebook from his hurling bag. He had made a note of all the stories he had heard in connection with the League of Sharks. Close to a hundred by now. He was angry with himself that he had never thought to do this before. It was so simple. He went through all the stories, one by one, to see which part of the world they mentioned. The result wasn’t overwhelming, but Ian was right. The Ionian Sea cropped up more than anywhere else.
*
Junk left the cargo ship when they docked in Miami and found work below decks on the Adventuress, a bargain-basement cruise ship crossing the Atlantic to North Africa. The passengers were mostly retired Americans who had saved for decades to be able to afford this once-in-a-lifetime trip, but when it came to it all their years of thriftiness didn’t amount to quite enough and they were stuck on an old ship that should have been decommissioned long ago and where the headline entertainment on board was someone who had come second on the Armenian version of The X Factor.
On arriving in Casablanca, Junk left the Adventuress and worked his way north up Morocco’s western coast to Tangier. From there he was able to find employment on a salvage ship, the Pandora, with a Russian diver called Timur, whose crew consisted of himself and his small, permanently angry Chinese wife, Kit-Yee, who was supposed to be the ship’s cook but couldn’t cook anything edible if her life depended on it. By the end of Junk’s second day on board, he had taken over galley duties as well as assisting Timur when he would dive down to wrecked ships looking for anything remotely valuable.
For the next few months, the Pandora sailed around the Mediterranean and the Ionian Sea. Junk used all his spare time to look for traces of the League of Sharks, but disappointingly found nothing.
Timur turned out to be a hopeless drunk. He was as useless a diver as his wife was a cook. With a hangover would come debilitating claustrophobia, which would mean he couldn’t dive without bringing on a panic attack. Within a relatively short space of time, Timur had trained Junk to dive for him. Timur was supposed to stay on board and monitor Junk’s progress, but usually he would get drunk and sing along to ABBA songs of which he was a fanatic.
*
Junk woke to the sounds of Timur’s heavy Vladivostok brogue strangling the lyrics of ‘The Winner Takes It All’ and knew that Timur and Kit-Yee had been arguing.
‘Vinner take it all, Loser standing small, Beside victory, That’s HIS destiny … !’
Then Junk heard Kit-Yee throwing pans in the galley and knew the row was a bad one. Junk just hoped Timur hadn’t called Kit-Yee by the wrong name again. Timur had been married five times, each time to a small, fiery Chinese woman, and he wasn’t very good at remembering their names. Especially when drunk. It didn’t help that they all had quite similar names. Timur had a very specific type, it seemed. His fourth wife, Ming-Yee, had duct-taped him to his bed and set the Pandora heading out to sea with no one at the helm. Timur travelled across the Indian Ocean for three days until the fuel ran out and then drifted for another four until he was miraculously rescued by a Chinese fishing boat. He married the skipper’s daughter, Kit-Yee, after she nursed him back to health. When Timur had told Junk this story it was never clear if Timur was still married to Ming-Yee or in fact to any other of his previous wives.
*
Junk lay in his bunk, listening to the end of the song. It restarted almost immediately. Again not a good sign. Junk knew he should get up and get the day started but he wanted to postpone his involvement in Timur and Kit-Yee’s domestics for just a little longer. He turned his eyes to the wall next to him. It was papered with drawings, mostly his own amateurish doodles of the tattoo, i
nterspersed with a few more professional offerings he had picked up on his travels from people with an artistic flair, whose imaginations had been ignited by Junk’s description of the man (creature?) who had killed his sister. Junk had taken to calling his quarry the ‘Sharlem’. He had met an elderly Jew in Buenos Aires, who told him stories from Hebrew myth about golems: monsters made from clay and brought to life to avenge wrongs. Junk decided that whatever had taken Ambeline was not of this world. It was a monster, like a golem but from the shark side of the family. Hence Sharlem. Though that didn’t quite work as a moniker, not nearly scary enough, it was better than Golark, which sounded quite sweet.
‘The Winner Takes It All’ came to an end again and Junk lay and listened. After a few moments of silence, ‘Lay All Your Love on Me’ started to play. That was promising. Not as good as ‘Honey, Honey’, but better than ‘The Name of the Game’. It meant Timur was calming down.
Junk got up and threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and left his cabin.
*
The Pandora was a fifteen-metre former albacore jig boat. As it was no longer a fishing boat it had been modified for a new exciting life as a diving support vessel. Gone were the six-metre outriggers to which two dozen fishing lines would have been attached to troll for tuna, though part of the support for these was still visible on the port side because Timur had never got round to dismantling it properly.
The Pandora was anchored off the north-east coast of Corfu. The green and rocky island sat to the starboard and across the Notio Steno Kerkyras sea channel sat Albania, all dusty brown and uninviting.
Junk came up from below and found Timur stretched out on the Pandora’s foredeck wearing a pair of crusty boxer shorts and a tatty silk dressing gown that hung open, revealing his unnaturally hairy torso. Timur Nikolayev was a slovenly, bearded man who farted and belched more than anyone else Junk had ever met. His personal hygiene habits were abysmal. He rarely washed. He preferred to stand naked on deck during a wild storm and let the angry spray clean him.
Timur was resting his head on the capstan, a bottle in one hand and a remote control for the stereo, stored up in the deckhouse, in the other. ‘Lay All Your Love On Me’ finished and Timur held up the remote. He pressed the pause button as he looked up at Junk. His eyes were red from crying and there were crumbs of cheese and a glob of taramasalata sitting in his bushy salt-and-pepper beard.
‘She’s goin’ to leave me, Junk!’ He pronounced Junk’s name as Yunk.
Junk nodded. ‘Probably. What did you do wrong this time?’
‘NOTHING! Nothing … nothing … nothing did I do wrong!’
‘Did you call her by the wrong name again?’
Timur growled and stuck his little finger in his ear, wiggled it violently and pulled out a small ball of wax, which he proceeded to smell and then wipe on his robe. ‘I might have done.’
‘Well, that does tend to annoy her.’
‘I say to her, call me any …’ He paused momentarily and belched loudly. ‘Any name you want – I don’t care. A name is unimportant.’
‘And what did she say to that?’
‘She threw bottle at my head!’ Timur lifted his shaggy fringe to reveal a bloody welt. Junk made an ambiguous sound and set about organizing the diving equipment. ‘And look what she does when I’m a-sleeping.’ Timur rose to his feet unsteadily and pulled off the silk robe, twisting at the waist to show Junk his back. Like his front, it was covered in a thick, bushy layer of black hair. Three Chinese symbols had been shaved into it.
‘What does it say?’ asked Junk.
‘I don’t know. She won’t tell me,’ said Timur. Five Chinese wives and he had never bothered to learn the language. ‘But I think she is insulting my mother. In my back hair! Have you ever heard anything like it?’
‘It’s original,’ said Junk, and turned back to the equipment.
‘If she leave me, I will kill myself.’ Junk was not concerned. Timur threatened to kill himself with some regularity. The wind was too strong or not strong enough; he would threaten to kill himself. They were out of the crackers he liked; he would threaten to kill himself. A seagull looked at him funny and he would threaten to kill himself. ‘When I’m gone, I want you to have the Pandora. Continue my legacy, like son I never have.’
‘You have eight sons, Timur, and six daughters. That you know of.’
‘But not one is Russian.’
‘More Russian than me.’
‘You are Russian in your heart. Plus you have Russian thumbs.’
Junk stopped what he was doing and looked at him, frowning. ‘Russian thumbs?’
‘Strong. Russian thumbs are strong.’ Junk looked at his thumbs. His hands were rough and weathered from three years of hard physical work, from pulling coarse ropes and tying knots.
‘Are you diving today?’ Junk looked at Timur, already knowing what the answer would be.
Timur screwed up his face and shifted uncomfortably. ‘I have pain behind my eye.’
‘Do you want me to go?’ asked Junk, already pulling on a wetsuit.
Timur clamped a big hand on Junk’s shoulder and smiled paternally. ‘You are good boy, Junk.’
*
Junk tipped off the side of the Pandora and entered the water. He liked to dive. He found the silence soothing, like the first morning after heavy snow. Everything was muffled and calm, his own breath the only clear sound. He got his bearings quickly and started to descend, following a guide rope he had set up on his first dive at this particular site three days earlier. It led him down thirty metres to a sunken wreck. It was a forty-metre Dutch three-mast schooner called the Pegasus. It had been down here since the 1920s, when it belonged to friends of the Rothschild family who owned a villa on the island.
Even after some ninety years sitting in its watery grave and covered with a thick husk of barnacles, the Pegasus was still a magnificent-looking vessel. Junk could easily imagine how it would have appeared in its heyday: its ebony hull cutting through the cerulean water, brass railings glinting in the blinding afternoon sun. The deck had been walnut, inlaid with ivory and mother-of-pearl. To this day, no one knows how the Pegasus sank. There was a dirty great hole in its hull, but whatever caused the fissure came from within rather than from something colliding with the boat.
Still, Junk wasn’t down here to find out what had happened. He was here for salvage. Of course, after this long there was unlikely to be anything of value remaining, but sometimes you’d get lucky.
Junk approached the Pegasus from the stern and swam three-quarters of its length to an open hatch. The beam of his torch cut through the turbid water. Crabs scuttled away to hide and small fish darted in and out of rusty holes peppering the bulkhead. Junk swam inside.
A long corridor stretched ahead. The Pegasus had come to rest at a forty-five-degree angle, bow down, so it felt to Junk like he was descending further into pitch-blackness. He passed five bloated wooden doors, each marked with a cross scratched into the grain: Junk’s marks to tell himself which cabins he had investigated already. He entered the sixth.
It was a small state room. He stopped in the doorway and shone the torch around. Its light picked out a large ebonized chest of twelve drawers. He swam over to it and tried each drawer in turn. Most were empty. One held the remnants of a pair of gloves, now more holes than fabric and worthless. Timur wasn’t an archaeologist. Junk’s remit was not to preserve the past but to profit from it.
Junk opened the eighth drawer and something small and metallic fell out and sank quickly. He trained the torch on the floor and crouched down. He found an old key. He glanced around looking for a lock it might fit but saw nothing. Frowning, he checked his watch. His air was getting low. He’d have to think about surfacing.
Just then something caught his attention. Thin fingers of green light were seeping in through a rusty hole in the hull. Junk frowned and lowered himself for a closer look. Through a hole about the size of a tennis ball, he could see a bright rectangle o
f green luminescence some twenty metres away from the boat, just sitting there on the dark, silty seabed. It was taller than it was wide and shimmering as if beams of emerald light were criss-crossing. The centre was brightest and solid, the light becoming more translucent at the unnaturally straight edges. Suddenly something large swam past his viewing hole. Junk pulled back, startled. He steadied his nerves and looked again.
At first he didn’t see anything. Then he saw a shadow approaching the green light. As it drew closer, Junk gasped. It stopped a few feet away and then walked on two legs. Junk could tell straight away that it wasn’t the creature that took Ambeline, but it was one of his kind. He was shorter, skinnier. Maybe a little more than two metres tall. He had a tattoo of a fish on the top of his hairless head. He stopped in front of the green rectangle of light and glanced back over his shoulder at the Pegasus, looking straight at Junk. On his left bicep he sported another tattoo: five stars and a shark’s fin. The symbol of The League of Sharks. Junk froze and held his breath. Then the shark-man walked into the light and vanished. The light was a portal, a door. Slightly ajar. It started to fade. Junk realized the door was closing. What to do? No time to decide. He looked at his watch. He only had a few minutes of air left. He had to go up, but after three years he knew he couldn’t.
He turned and swam as fast as he could out of the stateroom and back into the corridor beyond. He kicked his legs, powering through the water. In seconds he was out of the hatch. The green light was almost gone, and he was still several metres away. He didn’t see how he could make it before it vanished completely, but he had to try. His legs kicked and his arms pumped. His chest burned with the exertion and the dwindling air supply. Moving like this was wrong. It was using up precious oxygen. It was now touch-and-go if he could get back to the surface at all, but Junk wasn’t thinking about that. He wasn’t thinking about anything except getting to the green light before it was gone.
Three metres. Two. The light kept reducing. It was possibly now too small for him to pass through, but he kicked harder. No time to hesitate. With one last surge of effort, he went through. He could feel the opening constrict around him like a solid aperture closing.
