101 Detectives

by Ivan Vladislavic

  Nearly every coincidence has a dull explanation – the airline and hotel bookings had probably been packaged by some agency – and I was only mildly surprised to find that we were in the same hotel. I was curious though. On another day, I would have left them there alone, but I went closer. It was enough to hesitate on the edge of their privacy.

  ‘Would you like to sit?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Are you sure? That’s kind of you.’

  They made place for me at the table by shifting apart, separating into two distinct people.

  ‘I’m Martha from Rotterdam,’ she said, putting out her hand. ‘And this is my son Eckhart.’

  ‘Eckie,’ he said. The boy had a fierce handshake and a goofy smile. I imagine it matched the one I kept pasted to my face to cover my confusion. Mother and son? The possibility had not crossed my mind, but now the likeness seemed obvious. They had the same thick blond hair, the same full-lipped mouth. I introduced myself.

  ‘Are you enjoying your holidays?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve just arrived. On business rather than pleasure, I’m afraid, although you wouldn’t think so to look at me.’

  ‘You must have a bit of fun too.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to reward myself with a weekend of loafing when the work is done.’

  ‘What kind of work?’

  ‘I’m in the rag trade, as we call it. Accessories mainly. We have a factory in Johannesburg, but some of our ranges are manufactured here.’

  ‘Rag trade!’ he burst out.

  Almost everything I said made him laugh, a disconcerting high-pitched snort. I very soon began to wonder whether he wasn’t a bit, well, slow. He was too bright-eyed for a man of eighteen or twenty. Twenty-two? The fact that I couldn’t place his age seemed telling. He had a rough-and-ready masculinity, and he was drinking like an old pro and rolling his own cigarettes expertly from a packet of Drum. His chin was covered with stubble, his neck bulged from a white T-shirt – you could see he’d been working out – but his eyes were childishly innocent. He wouldn’t sit still. He kept squirming around on the bench like a child who wants to go out and play. When he knocked over his drink, a fat pineapple like my own, he looked distraught. His lip actually quivered. A bit slow, I thought, definitely. That would explain the easy physical warmth between them, the way he nuzzled at her neck and put his arm around her shoulders, left his hand to curl over her breast. And perhaps it also explained why she received these attentions with no sense of impropriety, of a boundary crossed or sanction violated.

  Eckie went in search of a refill.

  ‘And what do you do in real life?’ I asked.

  ‘Real life?’

  ‘What business are you in?’

  ‘Oh, we’re just on holidays,’ she said with a laugh that ran deeper than her son’s. ‘We travel together when we can.’

  ‘Is this your first time here?’

  ‘Yes, we found it on the internet. You’ve been before, I guess.’

  ‘Often. I like to stop off on my way to Europe. I’m lucky to have a good excuse.’

  ‘Then you must give us some advice about the beaches.’

  ‘There are great places to snorkel. Do you dive at all?’

  ‘She won’t go in the water,’ Eckie answered, coming up behind her.

  ‘And he won’t come out.’

  ‘A water baby,’ I said.

  ‘Water baby!’

  He put down a tub of Bombay mix and went back to the bar. I asked again what she did for a living, but she wanted to talk about the best places to snorkel, to eat crayfish, to buy presents. This is what holidaymakers do: they indulge themselves. They do not want to be reminded of home. When she asked how long I would be staying, I wondered if there was an invitation in the question. She had not mentioned a husband. I looked for a wedding ring and noticed that she wasn’t wearing one.

  The party grew as new arrivals checked in and guests came back from their outings. So many Germans, but also Scots, Italians, Swedes. The very pale blondes all seemed to be wearing red cotton pants. The small talk and flirtatious laughter grew louder and hotter until it was a roaring bonfire.

  Eckie scampered about, overexcited and glowing, talking to everyone, making a collection of new friends and swizzle sticks. But he could not keep away from her. Every few minutes, he would be back to lace his fingers into hers or lean against her. I liked her neck, the way the tendons showed under her skin as she turned her head, but when he rested his face in that brown curve I thought: impossible. She has a lover already. Metaphorically speaking. She loves the boy too much.

  I had another drink, in a glass. The sun slid to the bottom of the sky like a sodden cherry. I was about to excuse myself, when a gust of music and laughter reached us from across the water. A catamaran was coming in, a beautiful white craft with sails furled, running on its engines. The coloured lights strung along the deck were luminous in the dusk, and in that charmed web small figures could be seen dancing. I recognised the Parakeet. I’d done this cruise once before, and I planned to do it again this time, when the work was out of the way. It was touristy, of course, a packaged day trip to one of the islets off the coast, but delightful too. They would moor the cat off a beach strewn with dead coral – it was like walking on bones – and the crew made a barbecue while you snorkelled and sunbathed, and then they fed you fruit and grilled fish and poured rum punch under jury-rigged canvas. Castaways with catering. Perfect.

  When the Parakeet drew closer, the dancing became wilder, as if the day trippers wished to show the landlubbers how much fun they’d been having. The captain, a dreadlocked kid in a piratical headscarf, brought them close to the beach, almost in among the swimmers, and then swept out in a wide circle, extending the trip by five minutes, marketing his services. Even before they’d cast anchor, some of the more boisterous dancers plunged into the water and swam for the shore. The others milled around on the deck, showing off their sea legs, waiting to be ferried in on the dinghy bobbing at the stern.

  A strange tension crackled between the new arrivals on the terrace and the old hands on the boat. The tourist’s timescale is finely calibrated: a single day is the difference between innocence and experience. The people on the boat seemed browner, saltier, happier. We watched them with envy as the party at the Sandbar faltered. The catamaran had reminded a few among us that there were meals to eat and brochures to read, and they began drifting off. My thoughts turned to my plans for the next day. I said goodnight to Martha and Eckie and went to my room.

  I saw them again sooner than I expected: in the morning they were on the shuttle bus to Port Louis. They were heading down to Black River so that Eckie could go parasailing. Tomorrow, he said, they might do the catamaran cruise, and the day after that snorkelling. And then there was walking on the ocean floor in a diver’s helmet. She caught my eye while he prattled on and quirked the corner of her mouth as if to say: humour him, he’s young.

  Nearly every seat was taken – tourists on the way to one attraction or another, I discovered as they swapped notes. In Triolet we picked up a housekeeper carrying a bucket full of brushes and a feather duster, and I felt a twinge of solidarity with this woman who also had a job to do. I was going to the factory in Floréal.

  I sat behind Martha and Eckie on the bus. Something about the heat and the closeness, the sense of being confined among strangers, made me overly aware of their presence. It was almost as if I were seeing some magnified version of them. I remember looking at the sea chart of her freckled shoulders and the bite marks on the earpieces of her sunglasses. He was wearing a cap, and a tuft of hair like a shaving brush stuck out through the hole at the back. I imagined that the passenger behind me, a German woman who couldn’t stop taking photographs, was paying the same exacting attention to the back of my head, watching an enlarged bead of sweat run down inside my collar.

  Before long we fell into a drowsy silence. Even the German’s shutter blinked and closed. On the long, straight road out of Triolet, Eckie�
��s head dropped and jerked a couple of times, and then he leant over and laid his head on his mother’s shoulder. She put her arm around him and drew him close. She let him sleep that way for half an hour, scarcely moving so as not to wake him.

  When the bus stopped on the outskirts of Port Louis to let off the housekeeper, Eckie awoke with a start. Sleep had wiped the features of the man from him entirely: his face was as soft and round as a boy’s. He stretched and yawned. Then we saw it. Perhaps he noticed it first or perhaps I drew his attention to it by leaning over the seat for a closer view. In any event, we looked at it together. On the soft, freckled flesh of his mother’s shoulder, where his head had been resting, was a perfect impression of his ear. He cried out in amazed delight. She dipped her shoulder to see what was causing the excitement. It was strange. The shape of his ear, perfect in every ridge and whorl, seemed to have been carved on her body. She rubbed at it, as if she could smooth it into her skin like a dab of suntan lotion, but it persisted in clear relief. Soon everyone was admiring it and laughing, amused or intrigued. The blood rose in Martha’s neck. I cannot say why, but this odd, displaced organ embarrassed her. I cannot explain my response either: my stomach heaved.

  It took five minutes to fade away, slowly losing definition like a waxwork in the sun. Once the commotion had passed, Martha and Eckie began to joke and giggle quietly, both of them flushed and radiant. He kept running his fingertips over the carved skin, discovering his own flesh in hers, again and again. When the image was almost gone, he bent down to it and whispered a secret into her body.

  Soon afterwards, they got out. I was relieved. I put aside the briefcase I’d been holding on my lap, stretched my legs into the empty space, and tried to think about other things.

  You know that I saw them again. We haven’t had the unhappy ending yet.

  The following afternoon, I was reading on the verandah when I saw the Parakeet coming in. It was earlier than usual, but that only occurred to me afterwards. What struck me at the time was the silence. No reggae or chatter, just the chug of the engines and the passengers hunched on the deck. The simple explanations – bad weather, spoilt food – did not cross my mind. A dark stain in the air made me go to the railing and watch the boat come closer. It seemed to me to be lying heavily in the water. There were no showy zigzags or loops; it nosed straight in among the swimmers, the captain cut the engines, and his mate threw the anchor overboard.

  Then a sound rose from the deep and flayed the skin from the backs of my hands. It was coming from a woman in the bow, and I saw that it was Martha, slumped over a bright, shrouded shape. Her cries broke into the sunlight one by one, ragged and raw, like creatures torn out of her on a hook.

  All along the beach, people splashed out of the water, knees up, as if a fin had been spotted in the shallows. I saw Harry the barman running down to the boat.

  The passengers came ashore. Some of them went away at once, others clung together on the beach, talking among themselves and then to the people getting up from their deckchairs and towels. Martha still sat in the bow with the captain beside her, weeping quietly now, while the sun clanged on every surface.

  I should go and speak to her, I thought, comfort her. We’ve made a connection. But I couldn’t face it.

  When Harry came up to the hotel, I followed him to the Sandbar and found him pouring rum into a dozen glasses on a plastic tray. He told me the story. The Parakeet had anchored off Coral Point as usual. While the crew prepared lunch, the snorkellers did as they always do, floating out into the water at the end of the beach and letting themselves be carried back on the current. I remembered it myself: you hardly needed to swim, you just lay on the tide, drifting, suspended between two worlds, with the sun on your back and your face pressed through the surface of the water into another dimension. No one knew whether a sudden current had turned Eckie in under the boat or whether he’d decided to swim beneath it. He’d been caught in a tangle of lines between the hulls and drowned. By the time his absence was noticed, it was too late. The captain dived in and cut him loose, and they hauled him onto the beach and pumped his chest for an hour. Even after they’d gone on board and turned the boat towards home, they went on trying to make him breathe.

  But what about Martha? I asked. Didn’t she see that he was in trouble?

  She was sleeping, Harry said. She had sat down in the shade against the dunes, watching Eckie in the water. I imagined him floating on the current, rolling over now and then to find her on the shore. ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ She stretched out with her head in the shade for a moment, she said, just for a moment, and she must have dozed off. When she awoke, the captain was already in the water with the knife in his hand and the boy’s body dragging. She thought her son had been murdered.

  The boy’s body. I could not picture it. It was easier to imagine that this was a prank, that he would cast off the shroud of beach towels and jump up, squealing with laughter.

  An ambulance came. Two men in floral shirts waited on the grass, while another in a white suit went down to the water’s edge, stepping carefully so that sand did not get in his shoes. The captain and his mate brought Eckie’s body ashore on a board and the other men put it in the ambulance. The captain carried Martha ashore in his arms like a child. Her silence was more appalling than her weeping. Everything fell into it.

  I did not go to Blue Bay or anywhere else. I finished my work and in the evenings I sat on the verandah with a book on my knees. The Parakeet was anchored nearby. The newly arrived holidaymakers, unaware of its freight, and some of the old ones, eager to make the most of the time left to them, swam out to the boat and splashed around it. Behind the counter at the Sandbar, Harry went on cracking ice and slicing limes.

  The overnight flight to Frankfurt was packed and I wished I was flying business class. The penny-pinching would have to stop. Watching the backpackers stuff their bags into the overhead bins, I wondered what Martha had made of Eckie’s rucksack. Could she figure out where everything went? Perhaps the travel agent had sent someone to help her, a guide or counsellor. They must have trained professionals for a situation like this. Or a sister might have come to support her. Did she fly home with the body? What do they do with the coffin? It must go in the hold with the luggage.

  The safety film unnerved me. ‘In the unlikely event of a loss of pressure in the cabin, oxygen masks will drop down automatically from the panel above you.’ I imagined what it would be like to face death here, the suffocating terror of it. The cartoon figures on the screen, mincing stiff-legged towards the emergency exits or reaching calmly for the dangling oxygen masks – ‘Make sure your own mask is properly secured before you help children and others in need of assistance’ – were meant to reassure. These beige dummies should be less alarming than actors, who were real people after all, but they had the opposite effect on me. They looked like zombies. Flight of the living dead.

  I ate the little helping of Moroccan chicken with the little knife and fork. I drank two little bottles of chardonnay.

  There was an empty seat a few rows back, and after the trays had been cleared away, I thought of moving for the elbow room, the chance to put my head down for an hour or two. I remembered those stories about passengers on doomed flights who swapped seats with a stranger and were miraculously saved when the plane went down. But what about the others who were saved by staying where they were? There was no story in that. And there was no lesson in it either. You lived or died. Luck could not save you, and neither could love.

  As soon as the lights were dimmed, I covered myself with the baby blanket and tried to sleep, but I was too near the galley. People looking for water or whisky kept pushing through the curtain, bumping against my shoulder.

  In the small hours, when I had begun to despair of sleeping at all, a voice reached me. It was a young mother in the row in front of me. She had an infant in a bassinet secured to the bulkhead. I’d noticed her earlier because she kept getting up to look into the crib, to adjust a blanket o
r run a hand over the child’s head. Now she was singing a lullaby. I did not recognise the language, but I understood it well enough.

  The cabin was quiet. Under the lit signs that said ‘Do not smoke’ and ‘Keep your seatbelt fastened’ nearly everyone was asleep. The baby was sleeping, but its mother went on singing. Just as she needed to reach out and stroke the edge of the crib with her fingers, she needed to reach out with words into the soft shell of his ear. For a moment, I saw an aeroplane full of little children asleep in their adult bodies, under youthful muscle and middle-aged fat, behind beards and breasts. Babies. The long, grey nursery droned into the dark. I pulled the blanket up to my chin and the consoling babble washed through me.

  ‌Industrial Theatre

  I

  I don’t know much about industrial theatre. To tell the truth, I didn’t even know it existed until my friend Natalie invited me to the launch of the new Ford Kafka. In her younger days, Natalie was a cabaret artist, but lately she has made a name for herself on the industrial stage. She thought this particular performance would appeal to me, because I am interested in both reading and motoring.

  As a special guest of Natalie, entering through the stage door so to speak, I would not be receiving an official invitation. But she showed me the one she had saved for her portfolio: a key ring with an ignition key and an immobiliser jack dangling from it. It was very much like the real thing, except that the immobiliser was embossed with a K. The details of the launch – venue, time, dress code (‘black tie or traditional’) – were printed on the plastic tag. I learnt afterwards that messengers dressed as racing drivers had delivered the invitations by hand to each of the invited guests. The trend in these things, says Natalie, is towards the extreme. Even the habitués of industrial theatre grow weary of cheese and wine and complimentary gifts, and something out of the ordinary must be proffered to reawaken their appetites. Then the hope is always that these custom-made playthings will lie about on desks and coffee tables long after the event and become talking points.