Half the Day Is Night

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  “Excuse me,” a man said.

  David came around, wary. The man was dressed like an exec, a gabacho, what the Marincite people called a blanc, North American looking with his black suit and his pale face and wavy brown hair. “I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said. “Were you a friend of Danny’s?”

  “A business associate,” she said. “I’m Mayla Ling, from First Hawaiian of Caribe.”

  “Polly Navarro,” he said, putting out his hand. “I didn’t think I recognized you from the family.”

  The name sounded half-familiar and she thought she might be supposed to remember who he was. “I’m sure it must be a shock.”

  “I’ve been to too many funerals this year,” he said. “Makes me wonder if one of these days I’m going to be the guest of honor.” A self-deprecating smile, as if it was really in bad taste to say anything so blunt.

  And then she connected the name. Not Polly, Polito. Polito Navarro. Chief Financial Officer for Marincite Corp. A man who had good reason to wonder if he was going to be the next corpse. Her mind went completely blank. Say something, she thought, anything.

  “You were good friends with Danny?” she managed.

  He shrugged. “I’ve known Danny for almost twenty years.”

  The paper had said Tumipamba was shot leaving for work in the morning. “They’re saying it was La Mano de Diós,” she said. “Does that mean that they’ve made some progress towards an arrest?”

  “There will be an arrest,” he said.

  She knew what he meant, that there would be an arrest even if all the evidence was fabricated.

  What was Polito Navarro doing wandering around out here by himself? Then again, the place was crawling with security, he could hardly be said to be by himself.

  “They’re saying the usual,” he said, “that it was dissident elements, but Danny might have had some large debts. It may have been his gambling.”

  Tumipamba was a gambler? Quite a scandal if the CFO of a Marincite subsidiary was killed over gambling debts—not that it would ever come out. Why was Navarro telling her all this? “I’m sure Marine Security will get to the bottom of it,” she said. Trite and pious.

  “They should have known before it got to this,” he said. And told him, he meant. Like a Medici prince, he was part of the ruling family, he should know. There might be a shakedown among the Uncles before this was all over. “Wasn’t Danny working on the MaTE division business with you?”

  She and Danny Tumipamba had been talking about First Hawaiian providing the funds to allow Marincite Technical Exchange to buy itself from Marincite Corp. Then as an independent company it would turn around and continue to provide services for the parent corporation. It was a complicated deal because in order to amass the capital to buy itself off, Danny had intended MaTE to purchase another company and then strip mine those assets to fund its own independence. MaTE was nowhere near the size of Marincite—Marincite was as big as a small country—but the amount of capital it intended to borrow from First Hawaiian was more by far than any other deal First Hawaiian had ever funded.

  It was more money than First Hawaiian was worth. If the buyout didn’t succeed, then technically the debt would swallow First Hawaiian whole. It would be bigger than all of First Hawaiian’s assets combined, including not only its capital reserves but even the building the bank was in.

  But it was not much money at all to Marincite Corp. If Marincite Corp. would guarantee MaTE’s assets, then if the buyout didn’t succeed, Marincite Corp. would assume the loan.

  “I’d like to talk about the MaTE division,” Polly Navarro said. “At a more convenient time,” he added.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. She had a card, although it took her a long embarrassing moment to dig it out. “I’d like that very much.”

  “I’d like to work with First Hawaiian.”

  “Mr. Navarro,” she said, “First Hawaiian would like very much to work with you.”

  “It would get my good friend Enrique Chavez off my back,” he said and laughed. “He’s always telling me that Marincite has a duty to return capital to Caribe.”

  Enrique Chavez was the Government Minister of Finance. “Well, I think you should take the Minister’s advice,” she said.

  He was amused.

  “At a better time, then,” she said and offered her hand.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  He walked back towards the church. One of the big wooden doors was closed and St. Ulrique clutched his fish and looked down at them while St. Patrick thrust his hand out and snakes writhed down the center of the door. Both St. Patrick and St. Ulrique had distinctly Caribbean features.

  “We are in the way,” David said.

  They were standing close to the escalator and people had to cut around them. Riding the escalator up, she watched for Navarro to come back out of the church. Maybe he was going back to the house with the family.

  What luck. It proved she was right to have come. Not that anyone had said she shouldn’t but before she had run into Navarro she had felt as if she had wasted the bank’s time and money.

  Milagroso. Miraculous.

  At the top of the escalator David headed towards the checkpoint.

  “We don’t—” she started until she saw him hold out his wrist. The telltale. She had forgotten. She had been about to say that they didn’t need to check out. Where was her mind?

  She wished she could tell her Gram about meeting with Polly Navarro. It was an accident, she would have said, Gram, it was just luck.

  You make your own luck, her Gram would have said.

  Not really. When her Gram was alive she probably wouldn’t have told her about it. It was bank business and she never told Gram much about bank business. Church made her sentimental. You can take the girl out of the church.…

  If they hurried they could catch the sub that left ten minutes after the hour and be back in Julia in about three hours.

  David was still standing at the checkpoint, talking to the woman officer. Hadn’t the officer been a man before? Don’t walk over, she thought, let David handle it. But he looked around for her and then she had to go see what was wrong.

  “The officer who put it on,” he said, “he has left.”

  “He must have taken the deactivator with him,” the woman said. The checkpoint was small, a little booth only chest high in front. “Titon must have had it on his clip, I’ll call him.” She tugged the mic on her headset up and stuck her finger in her ear. She spoke softly, half-turning away from them so they couldn’t hear.

  “The officer is in Castle,” she said. “It’ll take him awhile to get here.”

  David was waiting to see what she wanted to do. “Do you suggest we wait?” she asked. Damn it, why was it that when she hired people to take care of things for her she still ended up taking care of them herself?

  The officer thought it would probably be about thirty minutes. Which meant they would miss the next sub. “Okay,” Mayla said. There weren’t any benches around.

  “Maybe,” David said, “we should get a cup of coffee?” To the officer, “Is there some place? To get coffee?”

  The officer thought that there might be a place at the hub. David looked at her to see if she approved. Fine with her, she was delighted to see him take the initiative. “Lead on,” she said.

  “If I go past, there is no, how do you say,” he held out his wrist, “it will not make it go off?”

  The officer shook her head, there was no sensor in the booth.

  “What trips it off?” Mayla asked again.

  Places like banks, jewelry stores, shops that would have a security system.

  “As long as we avoid banks we’re basically okay?” Mayla said.

  “Pretty much,” the officer said.

  * * *

  Wallace was a pretty neighborhood. The fronts of the flats were clean and bright: blues or corals to about halfway up and clean whitewashed white above. The windows were covered with ornate g
rilleworks, metal lattices of roses and leaves or curling vines with butterflies.

  They found a café with pseudo-wooden tables and yellow walls with fantastic clocks painted on them. Mayla sat down and found she was worn out. Traveling made her tired. Maybe she wouldn’t go back to work, it was going to be late. But she’d call Alex, her boss, and let him know about the meeting with Polly Navarro.

  A burro made her feel better. David seemed a little taken aback by the waitress. She wore a peasant skirt and blouse but her hair was bright red and she had ocher and green stripes that ran not just across her eyelids but from temple to temple. War paint. She didn’t look very much like a peasant girl in a cantina unless perhaps the cantina was in the infamous neon district in São Paulo.

  Still in all, she thought as they walked back to the checkpoint, a little lunch made all the difference in the world.

  Riding the pedestrian mover she couldn’t see the checkpoint. She checked the time, it was just about thirty minutes, just the time they’d been told to be back. Then she saw that it was lying on its side, folded flat. A crew of three in coveralls was getting ready to load it on a skid. There wasn’t any sign of Marine Security.

  “They are gone?” David said.

  “I don’t know,” she said and started to walk down the moving sidewalk. The flats fled past them, and then she was stepping off, feeling the strain in her knees as she changed from the speed of the ped mover to solid floor. Two women in maroon coveralls were strapping the folded checkpoint to the skid and a third, wearing a headset, was supervising.

  “Excuse me,” Mayla said to the stocky woman in the headset. “We were supposed to meet an officer here?”

  The woman looked at her. “No officer here now. We are all closed up now.”

  “No,” Mayla said, “they told us to be here now. My security man has a telltale on and someone was going to be here to take it off.”

  The woman looked at David. “I don’t know nothing about that,” she said.

  “Can you call and check?” Mayla said. She didn’t want to get irritated. If she got irritated they’d never get anything done.

  “The officer,” David told the woman, “his name is Titon.”

  She looked at David as if she wasn’t sure about him, then pulled her headset mic up. “This is Lupe at Sant Nic,” she said. “I got two people here say they are waiting on an officer named Titon.” She listened, eyes on nothing. Her hair was cornrowed, with little silver fish at the end of each short braid.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, not sounding particularly concerned. “We are just maintenance, my dispatcher does not know about the uniforms.”

  David looked at Mayla, sighed. “Maybe there is someplace we should go. Nearby is there a post, for police?”

  “You mean a police station? On Tarrou.”

  “Where is Tarrou?” Mayla asked.

  The woman waved vaguely back in the direction they came. “Down three levels at the hub,” she said. To the other woman she said, “Is it secure?”

  Streets radiated off hub in all directions. “Are you going that way?” Mayla asked.

  “No,” the woman said and turned her back on them.

  David looked at the woman, looked at Mayla and shrugged. He pulled out his map and started pulling off overlays to find Tarrou. “Not this hub,” he said after a moment, “I don’t think. Excuse me,” he said to the woman. “Tarrou, it is not from this hub, is that right?”

  The woman did not even look at the map. “I have to work,” she said. The checkpoint was secured and one of the women sat down on it. The woman with the headset got in front and the third woman sat down next to her.

  David said something in French which did not sound polite.

  “I agree,” Mayla said.

  The woman with the headset started the skid and turned it in a tight circle.

  There was no evidence that the checkpoint had ever been there.

  “So, we wait,” David said, watching the skid putter off. “How long, do you think?”

  “Maybe we should call,” Mayla said. She didn’t see a callbox but they could probably call from the café where they’d gotten the burro. Of course, if they went back there, Titon or whatever his name was could show up and leave. David could go with her and she could call. Or they could use the map and try to find Tarrou.

  “There’s a police station in the port,” she said. “Why don’t we just go there and have them take it off?”

  He shrugged again.

  “If we wait we could be here for hours,” she added.

  He shook his head. “They are always this efficient?”

  “A lot of things are like this,” she said.

  He checked the map to see how they got back to the port and she let him lead.

  Better than Tim, she thought on the ped mover as the flats slipped by. Tim would be blustering.

  David looked surreptitiously at the telltale and then pulled his sleeve over it to hide it.

  The way back to the municipal shuttle seemed shorter than when they had come in the morning. The waiting area wasn’t crowded but the shuttle wasn’t in, either. She fumbled through her purse until she found change for the turnstiles. Just beyond they triggered a VR ad and the air was suddenly full of electric blue butterflies. The shimmer was irritating and the focus was off because the butterfly flock was without depth. She ignored them and as soon as she passed out of range they disappeared.

  She glanced over her shoulder in time to see David walk into them. He started, raising his hands against the empty air.

  “They are allowed?” he said when he had gotten through. “In France, they are not allowed in a public place.”

  A good idea, she thought. She didn’t like them and every so often she read where a tracking laser had burned someone’s eyes. The walls were covered with advertisements. There were butterflies in a lot of them: women in carnival costumes with yellow gauze wings, women’s faces painted with wings so their eyes became eyespots, the electric blue butterflies, this time alighting on a flash unit, wings scintillating as they settled and then flickered off, the advertisement tirelessly repeating. Why so many butterflies, were they this year’s gimmick?

  David sat down next to her, slouched on the bench studying his shoes. He looked very foreign in the suit. Of course he looked pretty foreign anyway. He really needed some new clothes. She should say something but she didn’t want to insult him.

  The people in the waiting room were the flotsam of midday. There were women who worked the evening shift, old women with their shopping bags, old men in old sweaters and tights that bagged under their knees and around their ankles. A group of boys who should have been in school stood by the door talking and laughing. They wore divers’ vests that bared their long ropey arms. A crew. One had a leather demon mask hanging from a seal by a leather thong. The mask was supposed to mean something, it was some kind of rank. At least according to the vid.

  David was watching the boys, too. “Why aren’t they cold?”

  “Pyroxin, probably.”

  He looked at her sideways, he didn’t understand.

  “It’s a drug. Makes your metabolism burn higher. Divers take it.”

  He sort of sat up. “You don’t get cold?” Interested. Surface people were always cold.

  She shook her head, grinning. “It’s illegal. Don’t even think about it.”

  He gave an exaggerated sigh and she laughed. She liked him. He could be funny when he wanted to. Once his English got a little better he’d do fine.

  The metal door was the size of the door on her garage. As it pulled up, the boys ducked under, but everybody else waited until it was all the way up. The embarcadero was lined with advertisements and she could smell seawater from the surfacing pool.

  They walked through the door and there was a sharp crack and David shouted, a hoarse startled shout.

  “What—” Something red, bright arterial red, spattered the floor and her side. She shrieked. David crouched, one arm across
his eyes and his whole front and left side was covered in red. She thought, Diós mio, he’s hurt. He’s been hurt, there was so much red, so much blood, all over him.

  This is bad, she thought.

  There was an acrid, eye-watering smell.

  Astoundingly he was crouching there, not fallen, but there was so much blood she didn’t want him to turn around. There had to be something bad if there was that much hurt and she didn’t want to see it, and she stepped back a bit more and her back was against the wall.

  She started coughing, David was coughing, still holding one arm over his eyes. Her eyes were watering furiously, tears blinding her.

  Pinche tear gas. It was the telltale. He had his right arm held straight out away and behind him. The telltale had gone off. It wasn’t a bomb.

  People in maroon were running towards them shouting at them in English and Creole. She saw a gun drawn. Mother of God don’t let them shoot, she thought, it wasn’t her fault. “It’s a mistake!” she wheezed. Her throat hurt and she kept coughing. David was shouting in French, still holding his right arm over his eyes, and three Marine Security officers had their guns drawn on him. But he was all right, she thought, as long as they didn’t shoot him he was all right.

  “It’s a mistake,” she said and coughed again.

  “Shut the fuck up!” an officer yelled, wheeling on her with gun drawn. Just like the vid, she thought, and shut up.

  * * *

  David’s wrist was burned where the telltale had gone off, and his eyes were bloody red from the gas. His suit was completely ruined. The Uncles gave him a pair of maroon overalls to wear and gave him his suit in a sealed plastic bag. He came out to the waiting room with his hair slicked down from the shower and his eyes on the floor.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  He looked up at her with his red eyes, furious, but didn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, thinking, it wasn’t really her fault. What could she have done? The Uncles had just lectured her for an hour on how they should have waited for the officer to come to the checkpoint. Her dress was ruined. She’d buy him a new goddamn suit.

  “They said we can go now,” she said, her voice small.