The Orpheus Deception

by David Stone

  “They? Who the hell is they?”

  Naumann shook his head, shrugged.

  “The people running the . . . running wherever it is I am now.”

  “Okay. Let me get this straight. You don’t know where you are and you don’t know who’s running Hell or Heaven or . . .”

  “There’s no Hell, Micah.”

  “Great. Heaven either?”

  “So far, no sign.”

  “Jolly. John Lennon got one thing right, dipshit hippie moron. So you don’t know about all that afterworld stuff, but you do know I’m . . .”

  “Dying.”

  “Jeez.”

  “You’re bleeding to death. Inside. That’s what I’m here for. I’m here to explain this thing to you. To help you . . . adjust. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “No. I sure as hell don’t. This is just some nasty dream. A nightmare. Anyway, dammit, no offense, Porter, but you’re dead. Over a month dead, not to put too fine a point on it. Cashed in your chips. Bought the farm. Vertically deployed into the terrain. Deceased. You’re now ex-Porter. A goner. Like the parrot. You follow? That sort of impeaches your credibility.”

  In spite of the circumstances, Naumann smiled.

  “You’re starting to get on my nerves, kid. Here I am on a mission of fucking mercy, and you’re giving me these old Monty Python riffs.”

  “Well, Jesus, Porter. You’re the corpse and you’re telling me I’m dead! How do you know you’re not just dreaming that you’re alive?”

  This concept seemed to give Naumann something to think about.

  “Jesus. I see your point. Maybe a drink will help clarify the—”

  “Micah!”

  They both turned. Someone was calling Dalton’s name, a woman’s voice. It was Cora Vasari. She was standing a little way up the Via Santa Margherita, holding her wide black hat with a gloved hand, her hair blowing in the rising wind off the valley.

  “Micah,” she called. “Where are you going? They’re waiting for you.”

  “That’s Cora,” he said, turning to Naumann.

  “I know who she is,” said Porter. “I’ve seen her before, remember? Stunner. Reminds me of Isabella Rossellini. If I’d known about her when I was still alive, you wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

  “Look, Porter, setting aside the queasier aspects of you being both feet in the grave and still having a sex drive, I happen to have a life to go and live. I should go back.”

  Naumann’s face became solemn, unreadable.

  “Think about that. Do you really want to, Micah?”

  Cora’s voice carried down the hill, calling his name again.

  “Micah . . . ?”

  Dalton’s face became set, his expression conflicted. Naumann looked up the laneway at Cora for a time, his face marked with longing.

  “You know you can’t stay with her, don’t you?” he said, the wind plucking at his coattails. “Clandestine will send a team. Cather won’t back off until you’re dead. And if you’re with her when they find you, they’ll kill her too. That’s just policy. You might have told her. They can’t take a chance. Don’t pull her into this one. If you’re dead, it’s all over with. Let it end here.”

  Dalton hesitated. Naumann pressed the point.

  “Grief is coming, Micah. More than you know,” said Naumann, his eyes sharp and his face hard. “You could miss it all. Just let go. Come with me. We’ll go down to the piazza and have some wine. There are people there waiting for you.”

  Dalton looked down at the crowd in the piazza. He could hear music playing, a string quartet, and the soft murmur of voices.

  “People I know?”

  “A few. You’re kind of hard on friends.”

  “Any enemies?”

  “None invited. Too many of them to fit on the piazza. How about it, Micah? ‘Home is the hunter . . . home from the hill . . .’”

  “‘And the sailor home from the sea,’” Dalton finished. His throat was closing up. For a moment, he wondered what it would be like to just let go, not struggle for another breath, another pointless day.

  “I’d like to, Porter,” he said, after a time. “I really would. But . . .”

  “Not yet?”

  “Yes,” said Dalton, with a thin smile. “Not yet.”

  “Saint Augustine said that. They tell me it’s what everybody says.”

  “Do they? Well, if it was good enough for Saint Augustine . . .”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah,” said Dalton, with a sudden grin. “Dead sure.”

  Naumann’s hard face changed; he flashed the same lunatic grin, and then his expression became solemn again.

  “Then run along, kid. I’ll be seeing you.”

  Dalton looked at his dead friend’s face. There was friendship there, as well as a kind of affectionate envy. His eyes were calm and his skin was very pale. It seemed that a light was shining through him. Dalton looked back at Cora. She was standing there in the rain, her hat in her hands, her black coat blowing around her legs, her dark eyes fixed on him.

  Waiting.

  Dalton turned away from Cora to say good-bye to Porter but Porter Naumann was gone. Where he had been standing a few dry leaves fluttered up in a spiraling swirl, carried away on the back of the rising wind. Faint music was coming from the Piazza Garibaldi, and the sound of many voices. The wind out of the valley grew much stronger, carrying away the music and the voices, pulling at his coat— leaves flew into his eyes and he closed them.

  The sighing of the wind changed into the sound of cheering, thousands of people cheering. When he opened his eyes again, he was no longer in Cortona. He was still in Venice, lying on the steps of the Basilica in the Piazza San Marco, and the crowds were roaring like the sea as the marathon runners swept around the square. Cora was kneeling beside him, and, for some reason, a young Carabinieri trooper was holding a folded cloth against Dalton’s belly. Cora was saying his name, her voice low but urgent. He tried to get up but she pushed him down. He lifted his hand to touch her face and saw bright blood on his fingers.

  “You’ve been stabbed, Micah. We think the blade is still inside you, so you must not move. You must lie very still. Do you understand? The boat is coming. I can hear the siren. Don’t go away, Micah. Please stay.”

  The light grew stronger around her, and the low, charcoal-colored clouds beyond her shoulder changed to a fiery opal. He closed his eyes, and the sounds of the piazza faded away, and, for a timeless interlude, he was aware of nothing but the fluttering beat of his heart and Cora’s cool hand on his forehead. Then the feel of her hand faded, and there was only the hissing of his blood in his ears and the beating of his heart, like the half-heard murmur of a ship’s engine churning away in the darkness beyond the outer reef, and, soon afterward, there was nothing at all, and he was gone.

  1

  The Mingo Dubai, Strait of Malacca, the South China Sea

  Chiddy Monkut was a good-natured seventeen-year-old Thai kid with a lot of charm and a ton of potential and fifty-three minutes to live. Chiddy’s only failing, as Father Kevin Casey back at the Jesuit school in Chiang Mai saw it, was a poor work ethic. On Father Kevin Casey’s advice the skinny, henna-haired boy with the outrigger ears had taken a break from his studies at Loyola. “Go off to sea for a year. Learn something about life,” said the leathery old priest, “and think hard about your potential,” meaning it kindly, because Father Kevin Casey had a real affection for the boy. So young Chiddy Monkut went off to sea for a year to learn something about life and to think hard about his potential and it killed him.

  On this windy November evening on the far side of the world Chiddy was pulling watch duty on the stern deck of a five-hundred-foot-long tanker named the Mingo Dubai. The tanker had just cleared the southern end of the Malacca Strait and was entering the Java Sea off Sumatra’s north coast when the long gray shadow boat glided smoothly into her wake.

  It was Chiddy Monkut’s job to notice precisely this kind of thing. Unfo
rtunately, Chiddy was, at that moment, too busy getting himself outside a large jug of the Hindu cook’s potato-peel whiskey to notice the steel-gray cigarette boat that was now cruising along in the white V of the Mingo Dubai’s wake at a range of about six hundred yards.

  In his defense, the light was failing. A pomegranate sun was setting behind the jagged green crest of Sumatra, and the shadow of the big island was spreading out across the Java Sea, cloaking Singapore and Kuala Lumpur in the fast-falling tropical night. Chiddy waved at the tiny people lining the rail as the Mingo Dubai swept ponderously by the Kepulauan Lightship and cruised out into the broad reaches of the South China Sea. The heel and pitch of the big tanker increased dramatically, and Chiddy honored the transition to wide-open water with another pull at his plastic jug of pilfered screech. In short, and from his rather narrow point of view, Buddha was in his heaven, and all was right in Chiddy Monkut’s world.

  Chiddy stood and stretched out a cramp in his left thigh. As he did so, he heard the big prop change its rhythm, begin to drive deeper, harder. He reached out to brace himself on the stern rail as, sixty feet above him on the towering bridge, the captain gave orders and the wheelman increased the speed of the Mingo Dubai to twenty knots. The deck began to heave as the ship butted hard into a broad, big-shouldered ocean that was running very high, with a jagged, white surface chop that looked like shark’s teeth, tips wind-whipped and streaming with yellow foam. Seabirds—mollymawks, terns, and frigate birds—shrieked and wheeled over the waves, riding the gusts like surfers carving a run out of the Pipeline.

  Underneath the chop, there was a rolling groundswell that lifted the Mingo Dubai’s bow, and the tanker began to heave slowly from port to starboard, her hull plates audibly groaning with the strain. Thirty thousand tons of liquid caustic soda and Bunker C oil began to roll in their holding tanks. Sixty feet above her waterline, the Malay seaman on the rusty bridge fought the wheel to hold his course.

  The captain, a sixty-three-year-old mainland Chinese named Anson Wang, stood in a wide-legged brace behind the elderly Malay at the wheel with one hand on the binnacle and watched the Mingo Dubai’s high-flaring bow as it lifted up to meet the oncoming swells. The steel decking rose and fell ponderously under his feet. As the bow slammed into a wall of glassy green water, a torrent of white spray rolled over the starboard rail and spread out across the forepeak, foaming and churning around the rectangular steel hatches lined up along her deck.

  Bracing a hip on the back of the pilot chair, Wang turned his binoculars onto the shining spires of Singapore City nine miles off his port side, thought briefly of his ex-wife and his ex-children who lived there and whom he had not seen in six years.

  Then, as always, he put them out of his mind. When he looked eastward again, he could see the darkness rising up out of Borneo, the leading edge of a large tropical storm coming in out of the South Pacific. He glanced at the weather radar long enough to watch the luminous green line sweep through three hundred and sixty degrees, filling ninety degrees of the screen dead ahead of the ship with a shapeless mass of red light. The Malay at the helm gave him a nervous glance.

  Wang put a prematurely arthritic hand on the old man’s bony shoulder, patted him gently—they were longtime shipmates—and turned on the intercom. Three decks down, in the cluttered wardroom, the eleven men of the evening watch—a mixed crew of Malays, Dyaks, Filipinos, Thais, and a few rookie Serbians making their first passage—were watching a bootleg DVD of The Poseidon Adventure remake for the twelfth time and sipping tin mugs of tepid green tea when the intercom buzzer cut through the floating blue clouds of clove cigarette smoke. The third mate, Vigo Majiic, a tall, rail-thin, and rather gloomy Serbian with a skimpy black goatee that failed to strengthen an underslung jaw, picked up the receiver.

  “Vigo, Captain.”

  “Let me talk to Mr. Fitch.”

  “He isn’t here, sir.”

  “Where is he?”

  Vigo didn’t want to answer that question. Brendan Fitch, the first mate and the current front-runner in the Mingo Dubai’s informal competition for the Most Dangerous Drunk of the Voyage award, had put away a fifth of lukewarm sake and gone staggering down the companionway toward the sleeping cabins a half an hour ago. He was now snoring in the dim red light of a barracks with the other nine stateless men who made up the ship’s off-duty watch, and it was Vigo Majiic’s devout wish that the very large and very unpredictable British expat would stay snugly abed until very late into the next century.

  Vigo looked around the steel-walled wardroom at his shipmates as if he might find some sort of inspiration in the scruffy figures slouched listlessly on tattered sofas in front of the ancient television or grouped around the card table, cigarettes hanging limply from their mouths. The narrow room was filled with smoke and the hot-house smell of unwashed and sweaty men in a steamy climate.

  Captain Wang knew what Vigo’s hesitation was all about. By now, he was almost comfortable with it, the way he was resigned to the way the ship’s hull groaned and moaned like a cart horse whenever the seas set up ugly. He sighed to himself, watching the storm rising up and the rollers marching in.

  “Go wake him up, Vigo. Pour some hot black coffee in him, clean him up, and have him on my bridge in fifteen minutes.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Vigo, into a dead phone.

  Anson Wang put the intercom back on the hook and stared out at the oncoming rollers, bracing himself as they crashed over the plungingbow of the tanker. He could feel her hull working, feel the grinding of her plates in his own belly. He turned to look out the stern portholes at the receding mouth of the Malacca Strait. The mile-long, arrow-straight wake of the Mingo Dubai looked like a highway paved with broken glass, as the last of the twilight glimmered along it. He thought for a moment that he saw a long dark object in that pale field of light, possibly a small craft. He stared out into the falling night, trying to find it again. No, there was nothing there.

  If anything, it was a whale surfacing. Or, more likely, a deadhead hardwood log, broken loose from a forestry boom somewhere along the Java coastline. He looked up at the sky.

  The last of the light was slipping into the west, and the ship was steaming at twenty-two knots into the Java Sea, with Borneo three hundred and eighty miles to the east, and the reef-filled archipelagoes of Indonesia to thread through before they reached their destination port of Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, almost two thousand miles away. If this storm building out in the southern Pacific turned into a hurricane, they’d have the ironbound coasts of Flores and Timor as a lee shore. There isn’t a captain alive who doesn’t wake up at night sweating from a dream of a lee shore in a tropical storm, the booming of the surf on the shoals and the wind screaming in the rigging, the breakers flashing white in the blackness, the sickening wrench as the hull strikes the reef and her steel plates start to crack. He thought about changing course to the northwest and making a dash for Singapore. There were moorings there, and a good holding ground.

  They could batten down the ship and ride out whatever was coming. But his owners—whoever they really were, back in Belize and safe in their beds—had zero tolerance for what they called spineless, stick-by-shore skippers, knee-deep navy slackers with four eyes for the weather and no balls at all. He’d already been docked six months’ pay for a storm-delayed arrival in Bombay last year. Since his divorce six years ago, money was a pressing issue for him. He was looking at the compass and waiting for the next weather fax to print out when the cabin door flew inward on a gust of wet wind and all six foot three, two hundred-odd pounds of Brendan Fitch developed unsteadily into the pilothouse.

  Wang looked at Fitch with a mixture of resignation and affection, assessing the red-faced and slowly weaving tower of bone and muscle that was smiling back at him through a five-day growth of black beard, his wide-set green eyes vivid against his sunburned face. Wang took in Fitch’s stained and wrinkled summer whites, the missing epaulette, his bare feet, his sausage toes splayed out,
and sighed again, this time more heavily.

  “We are sorry to wake you, Mr. Fitch.”

  “Not at all, sir,” said Fitch, grinning back at him. “I find a wee nap midwatch keeps me at the top of my form.”

  Wang caught the scent of mint toothpaste and, under that, a strong whiff of sake.

  “A nap or a nip? I hope you are sober?”

  Fitch straightened his spine and attempted a crisp salute.

  “Painfully, sir.”

  Wang shook his head and raised an arm, pointing to the east.

  “You see this?”

  Fitch looked out the forward windshield and then down at the weather radar. His weathered, roast-beef face hardened, and he looked at Wang carefully, sobering visibly.

  “I do, sir. Have we a warning?”

  “Gales only. But I am concerned. I am considering turning around and making for Singapore to ride it out.”

  Fitch’s grim expression changed to one of polite interest.

  “Are you, sir?”

  “I am. Would you support such a decision?”

  “You mean, sir, will I cheerfully partake of the traditional shot glass of potassium cyanide the owners will require us to chug down if we get to Moresby even one day late?”

  Wang nodded briefly, smiling a weary smile.

  “Serve it up, sir. If that’s your call, I’ll back you all the way.”

  Wang studied Fitch for a time, weighing him. He’d keep his word; that much Wang knew. But how much weight would the word of a twice-cashiered professional inebriate carry with the owners?

  Fitch, the soft-focus lens of his attention wandering a bit, had turned to look back at their wake. He stiffened, and stepped over to the windshield, staring out into the darkness. He tapped the glass.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  Wang stepped up beside him.

  “Where?”

  “In the wake. I thought I saw something.”

  “So did I,” said Wang, peering out into the darkness. The lights of Singapore were now little more than a dim glow on the far horizon, but there was enough of an afterglow to make out what might be a low black shape in the phosphorescent wake. A second later, it was gone.