Half the Day Is Night

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  Henri said something in Creole.

  David shook his head. “No,” he said in English. “Listen to me, écoutez, if she does not go get money, there is no deal. If I am here she will come back.”

  Henri was breathing heavy, like a winded runner. He did not say anything.

  “So,” David said, “we all go get some breakfast, eh? And when it is time, she will go get the money. And we will finish the business.”

  She wasn’t even sure Henri was really listening, he seemed just to be watching David, just watching what he was doing. In a minute he would turn to the stocky man and say something and the stocky man would shoot them.

  Instead he turned and started walking.

  David beckoned to her to follow and they trailed him down the street, the stocky man behind them.

  Henri walked fast, long legs making her have to half-skip every few steps to keep up. She had a stitch in her side, she couldn’t even pay attention to where they were going.

  Henri stopped. “This is a good place,” he said.

  She jerked around, expecting to see the stocky man armed, and ready to kill them.

  But they were standing in front of a restaurant, and Henri meant that this was a good place for breakfast.

  * * *

  It took her almost three hours to get to the third level by taptap. The psychedelic bus was the cheapest way to go and she had to ask bus fare from Henri. He was amused. He put the money in her palm, fingers sweeping her skin in a caress. He seemed to have completely forgotten the argument, talked all through breakfast while the three of them listened to him and ate and waited until it was late enough that the place where she was going to get the money would be open.

  In the taptap she thought about going to her grandfather’s. David had said that if he was with Henri then she would come back. She was afraid. She couldn’t go to her grandfather’s, either. She wanted to go home, to her house that was gone.

  She got the money that they would need for the documents and a little extra, but no more. They could get it when they were leaving, it would be foolish to go back to Henri with extra money.

  Nothing to do but hope it would soon be over.

  When she got off the taptap, the stocky man was waiting for her.

  She would have to trust David. David was getting them through this. David was thinking.

  It was ten-thirty in the morning. She was so tired. Normally she would have been diving by now. She wondered what Luz was thinking. She hadn’t even given notice. Luz would think she had been wrong, that Mayla was the kind of person who would leave without giving notice. When she was in the States, she would write a note to Luz, explain that it was a life-or-death matter. That she had to escape. Her stomach hurt, hurt and hurt from no sleep and the aching, disoriented feeling of being too tired.

  Henri didn’t look tired at all. His eyes were still red around the midnight-blue slips, but he was laughing and gesturing. David looked tired. Like her.

  “Ah,” Henri said, “you have come home. You have your money?”

  “The half,” she said.

  He nodded, smiling, and she noticed for the first time that when he shook his head his braids didn’t move. “Okay sister, let’s go.”

  Maybe his hair was a wig?

  They walked again, but this time the streets were full of people. Children watched them when they knocked on the door of the man who made documents.

  “Hello, Leo,” the man said tiredly to Henri. Henri didn’t seem to care that the man had called him “Leo” and she wondered if that was his real name, or if they were all fake names.

  The young man was dressed now. He had a sheet on the wall and he put David in front of it and took an im. Then he dropped the im into a reader. “My contact can’t get a slip for the port reader until Saturday,” he said. “Stand there.”

  Mayla stood in front of the sheet and had an im taken. She hoped it was better than the last one. As if it mattered, she would use this im once.

  “What do you want the documents to say your names are?”

  David said Kim Park. She tried to think of a name. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I’ll put something down,” the man said. “Do you have an ID I could work from?”

  “Not with me,” David said.

  “I have my workcard,” Mayla said. “It’s a temporary though.” She carried it in a clear sleeve in the pocket of her tunic. She handed it to him. “Okay,” he said and glanced down at it. He frowned. “Mayla Ling?” he said.

  “Yeah?” she said. She shouldn’t have given it to him.

  “Okay,” he said, still frowning at it.

  It seemed to be all right. “Mayla” was an odd name. A lot of people had trouble with it.

  “Put the money there,” he said, meaning the table.

  She put it down. It was a lot of money, a lot of cash. He sat frowning at the reader and entering information. She waited for him to look up.

  “Okay,” he said, “see you Saturday.”

  “You want to count it?”

  “If you gave me too little, then you get a document that won’t get you out of the country,” he said, still not looking up.

  “Okay,” she said.

  On the street, Henri was waiting. She didn’t want to deal with Henri.

  But Henri looked right past them, as if they weren’t there.

  “We should find a place to stay,” David said.

  They walked down the street, towards the main street where Henri’s place was. “I know a place,” David said. “In Dedale. I’ve stayed there before.

  “We’ll be safe,” he said.

  15

  Hegira

  At night, with Mayla asleep in the other bed, David thought about Meph. Somebody would be taking care of the kitten, maybe Santos. A lot of the fish jocks had kept an eye on Meph and fed him scraps. But he had let Meph down; Meph had depended on him, and once more he hadn’t been responsible.

  During the day, he and Mayla watched the vid and waited until Saturday. The only time they left the room was to get cheap take-out food.

  They talked about the deal. “How do we know that the documents will work?” Mayla said.

  David shrugged.

  “Why should they even bother to make them work?” she said. “All they have to do is give us something that makes us happy, and we go to the port and get arrested. They have their money, we are out of their hair.”

  It was something he didn’t want to think about. Being at the port, handing over the documents and having blue and whites everywhere because the documents were just bits of plastic, pieces of paper, just nothing, without the information to fool the systems. He remembered the man in the casino, remembered him saying, “It’s a mistake.” He didn’t want to be the one saying that.

  “What can we do?” David said.

  Mayla chewed on her thumbnail. “Arrange that they don’t get their money until we get out of the country.”

  “How?” he said.

  “Give the money to someone else. Then we call the person who has the money and they make the payment.”

  “And who will make this payment?” he pointed out. “Santos? Patel? Lemile? Henri?”

  “Tim Bennet,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “That is crazy.”

  “Yes,” she said. “We should get in touch with Henri. Tell him we have to renegotiate. If they refuse, we can tell if the documents were phony or not.”

  “You are risking Tim Bennet,” David pointed out. “Besides, maybe he is not even in the country, maybe he has left.”

  “Not Tim,” she said. “Tim won’t leave until he has to. Tim doesn’t act, he reacts.”

  David shook his head. “You cannot do that to someone. You cannot get him in trouble.”

  She wasn’t listening.

  “It is not responsible,” he said. Which sounded stupid. Besides, she had grown up exploiting people, her family had servants. She couldn’t help it, she thought of people as hired.


  She got up and looked out the window. The condensation on the outside of the glass made the world outside distorted. “We can ask Tim,” she said.

  Tim would probably love the idea. Tim would think it was macho, dangerous. All the more reason not to use Tim, he would get in trouble and it would be on their heads, on their hands. “How do we contact him?” David asked.

  “We call him,” she said.

  “What if the phone is, how do you say, they are listening?”

  “They weren’t listening when you called,” she said.

  “That was a mistake,” he said flatly.

  “We could call from a public place. Talk to him. I could tell from talking to him if someone was listening.”

  He didn’t even bother to answer.

  “Seriously,” she said. “Tim can’t hide anything, he’s like a big child.”

  “He is like a big child,” he said. “You are thinking of bringing a big child into this. It is foolish. It is wrong.”

  “If we don’t do something, we won’t get out,” she said. “Do you want to disappear?”

  He shook his head. It was still wrong.

  “Then I won’t go through with it,” she said. “And without my money, you can’t.”

  “You are using him,” David said.

  “Not if I ask him,” Mayla said. “Then it’s his own free will.”

  “You have always used him,” he said. “Until you didn’t want him anymore.”

  “I am trying to survive,” she said.

  “That is what every tyrant says.”

  Ugly words. But she just shrugged. “Too bad,” she said.

  * * *

  In the end she won. He had known she would, she had the money. They went out and called Tim.

  They took a taptap up a level and just wandered for a couple of streets until they found a place where they could make a call. As they walked he found himself thinking over and over, “this is not a spy vid.” The words fell in time with his footsteps, until he was marching along to “this-is-not-a-spy-vid.” It was stupid to play games. It was stupid to think they could get out of here, they had no friends and they didn’t know what they were doing.

  He watched her make the call. She flicked the monitor off and used the handset, her finger in her other ear to block out noise.

  When she spoke he almost jumped. “Eess Teem there?” she said, “this is Leesa.” She was talking in a hard Spanish accent and it sounded too artificial to be believed. He wanted to take the handset from her and hang it up. He could, too, just reach up and take it.

  He found himself curiously embarrassed.

  “No,” she said, her voice still stilted and hispanic, “I am a friend, he will remember me.” And she grinned, not at David but at whoever was on the other end, even though they couldn’t see her. Falling into her role. “Hello, Tim? This is Lisa, do you remember me? This monitor, it is broken, but this one is near my house.”

  He could not hear Tim’s answer over the handset.

  “Can we talk, you know, I mean, no one is listening, right?”

  Tim must have answered affirmatively, because she reached out and flicked on the monitor. “Hi Tim,” she said in her normal voice.

  Tim blinked in a moment of surprise. “Oh my God,” he said. “Where are you?”

  “Have the blue and whites been looking for me?” she asked.

  “We called them when you didn’t come home,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay,” she said.

  “What happened? Let me get Jude.”

  “No,” she said, “don’t. If you go get Jude I’ll cut the connect.”

  “Is someone there?” he asked.

  “David is here,” she said. Habit made him tense when she said his name. It was okay, he reminded himself. No one knew him as Kim.

  “David?” Tim said neutrally.

  “I found him,” Mayla said. “It’s too long to tell here. But I need to meet you somewhere.”

  Tim was silent.

  “I can’t talk to you like this,” she said, exasperated, “Jude or Santos or someone is going to walk in.”

  “Are you okay?” he said again.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But I applied for a visa to leave the country and they denied my application. You know what that means?”

  Tim shook his head.

  “They think I’m involved. They were going to arrest me.”

  “Arrest you,” Tim said. “You haven’t done anything.”

  “This is Caribe,” she said. “You don’t have to do anything, you just have to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Don’t tell anybody, just meet me somewhere, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said. “Where?”

  “I don’t care, someplace you know. In the Warrens or something.”

  He named a place. “Sure,” she said, “where is it?”

  * * *

  The place was in the Warrens, a little bar/sandwich place. It was long and narrow, with a bar running the length of it and dark-green plastic booths, like a fast-food place, down the other side. The benches were nicked and scarred, and the plastic tables were graffitied, but the place was clean. David expected blue and whites waiting when they got there but there was only Tim. Tim looked bigger than David remembered. And … neutral. Not friendly.

  “What’s going on?” he growled as Mayla slid into the seat across the table.

  “You want something to eat?” Mayla asked. “A beer?”

  “A beer,” Tim said.

  “I’ll get it,” David said. While he stood at the bar, they waited, silent. He felt them waiting. The bartender was a bronze-colored man with skin so dry it looked dusty. David felt itchy.

  He brought the beer back, the glasses already condensing, the water running down like tears.

  “I’m really scared, Tim,” Mayla said.

  Tim kept his face still, but David felt a shift in tension. A little sympathy, maybe?

  “I think that the government is going to use me, as a scapegoat.”

  “Mayla,” Tim said, “they blew your house up. How can the government use you?”

  She shrugged. “Then why did they deny my visa to leave? They set me up that night, at the police station, when I signed that statement I perjured myself. They can use that anytime they want because they’ve got me on record saying I couldn’t identify who was in the car. And I don’t have the bank to protect me anymore.”

  “That’s paranoid,” Tim said. “Why didn’t you tell someone you were leaving?” Meaning, David thought, why didn’t she tell Tim? He didn’t understand Tim and Mayla.

  “I’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “David has got to get out of here.”

  “How did you find him?” Tim asked.

  “It was my mistake,” David said. “I gave her a call, you know? I was working at a fish farm, so she tracked me down, from the call.”

  “You traced the call?” Tim asked. As if she had some sort of secret equipment built into her console and she could do that.

  Mayla shook her head. “Somebody asked him a question about salmon trays, so I just started calling fish farms and telling them I had lost the name but the guy I wanted to speak to was oriental. There aren’t a whole lot of oriental fish jocks.”

  Tim grinned, and Mayla smiled, too, relieved.

  “I need a favor,” she said, and she outlined the deal they had made.

  She left out Henri, and all names.

  “Wait a minute,” Tim said, “you met this guy at a fish farm?”

  David shook his head. “This guy, he sells pyroxin, he knew of someone, who knew someone, you know, like that.”

  “No,” Tim said. “No goddamn way. It’s crazy. You don’t know these people. Politicals? Half the time they’re blowing themselves up and getting themselves caught, and you think they can get you out of the country? No.”

  “What else can we do?” Mayla said.

  “Come home,” Tim said. “Nobody can believe you’re guilty,
they blew up your fucking house.”

  “Then why did they deny my visa?” she asked.

  “They don’t want you to leave until the investigation is finished.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “I tried to leave. In their eyes that means I have to be guilty of something.”

  “How do you know,” Tim said.

  “Because I’ve lived here all my life, and I know how this place works!” she said, too loud. David glanced at the bartender who was ignoring them.

  More quietly she said, “And what about David? They’re looking for someone to pin this whole thing on. Anna Eminike was Anzanian, David served in Anzania, ergo, there’s a connection.”

  Tim shook his head.

  “That’s the way it works,” she said. “A connection, so they can arrest someone, so they can say they’ve done something.”

  “Then you come home and I’ll help with David getting the documents,” Tim said.

  “You already reported me missing to the blue and whites,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Tell them you couldn’t handle the stress and you went to stay with a friend.”

  “They’ll want to call the friend, or the hotel, or wherever. And if I tell them I found David, they’ll arrest him.”

  “I’ve gotta think about this,” Tim said.

  “We don’t have time,” Mayla said.

  “When do you have to have an answer?”

  “We’re supposed to get the documents on Saturday.”

  So they sat and drank their beers.

  “You didn’t even ask,” Tim said after a minute. He waited, but when Mayla didn’t say anything he went on. “About your grandfather, you didn’t even ask.”

  “Okay,” she said. “You’re right, I’m sorry. Is he all right?”

  “Well two days ago he was terribly confused all day, and Santos finally took him to the doctor. They said he had like a mini-stroke, and that it could be the first of a lot of strokes or that he might never have another. But he’s okay. They just sent him home.”

  “He’s okay?” she said in a small voice.

  “Yeah,” Tim said.

  “He’s mad at me?” she said.

  “He was worried,” Tim said, “but since the stroke thing, I don’t know if he always remembers that you are gone. I think he forgets that you live there.”