The Catch: A Novel

by Taylor Stevens

  She paused at the door. “I doubt it,” she said, and when she left him, she did so with the conviction that no matter how many other lines for information she might lay out, or whose path she crossed in this search, she had already found the man whose connections would lead her to what she needed.

  CHAPTER 13

  Munroe exited the hawaladar’s alley for the cluttered confusion of Nehru Road, for dodging cars and crowds as she walked the street to its beginning to trace her way back to Moi Avenue and begin again. The next destination came with a street name, and since she’d found pictures of nearby buildings posted to online street maps, it would hopefully be easier to find than the hawaladar had been.

  Munroe paused at the periphery of a crowded bus stop to glance at the map on her hand and in her slowing felt a tug on her pants leg. In violation of the natural inclination to look down, her head ticked up in the opposite direction of the pull, searching for a threat that, if it came, would come from elsewhere: a skill taught by a continent where safety was never taken for granted.

  The teenage boy who’d grabbed at her pants continued to follow her, reaching for her leg, pointing at her shoe, supposedly calling her attention to something at her feet. She refused to acknowledge him and in her peripheral vision spotted his partner coming up behind her on her left.

  She pivoted to face him slightly. Hand to his chest, she shoved him back, not hard enough to injure or cause a disturbance, just enough to keep him beyond arm’s length and allow her to get through the crowd unmolested.

  A woman inadvertently blocked Munroe’s path, and when Munroe stepped around her, the boys, unwilling to let go of their target, closed in again. If they continued to follow her, a pack of wild dogs on the hunt, they’d eventually draw others in, and Munroe didn’t want that fight.

  Not today.

  In a heartbeat she reversed a half pace. Right fist across her chest and under her arm, she punched the boy hard beneath his sternum. Felt his expulsion of breath. Spun fully around just long enough to glare at the one on her right, giving notice that she’d fight back and that they’d be better off with an easier target, then continued away from those thirty seconds of conflict and another part of what made Africa’s big cities what they were. At some point today, a tourist wouldn’t be so lucky.

  On Mombasa Road Munroe found the bright blue two-story building that marked the turnoff to a side street where, supposedly, she would find Kefesa, a local NGO whose mission statement claimed to advocate for Somali refugees within the Mombasa-area prison system. Not exactly the type of outfit she was looking for, but the organization had current connections to Somalia, and its blog contained pictures and stories less than two weeks old that made the office easier to find than any of the dozens of potentially outdated data-aggregated listings available for other Somali-centric NGOs. If nothing else, someone at Kefesa should be able to point her to a government branch or aid-oriented outfit better suited to her needs.

  Bars ran up the face of both fronting windows, but the grille that would have been pulled down over the entry was still up. Inside, peeling paint mixed with mildew and just enough cool to take the edge off the humidity.

  From the back a woman’s voice, pleasant and lilting, said, “A minute please,” and a moment later she rounded the corner. Munroe recognized her from the blog photographs, and she approached now, short and plump with a purse slung over her shoulder, keys and clipboard in her hand, and a welcome on her face.

  Munroe’s story wasn’t long: a journalistic interest in local xenophobia against Somalis and the desire to interview one of the directors, and this scored her an appointment for tomorrow afternoon, because they were already gone for the day.

  The woman reached into her purse and fished out a fat wallet stuffed with scraps of papers and clinking coins. She found a dog-eared business card and offered it to Munroe. “You call tomorrow, ask for Peter,” she said. “He can confirm.”

  Munroe accepted and for the sake of pretense took a moment to read the card. Courtesy of the blogs, she knew the name and the face, knew where to find the number printed on it. Counting on interoffice gossip to pave the way before she called, she said, “I’ll do that.”

  THE STREETS WERE less crowded now, most of the sidewalk merchants having packed up their cardboard and their goods, most office workers already on matatus and buses headed toward home. Munroe left Kefesa for the Aga Khan Hospital, her long stride picking up the pace the emptier the streets grew, thoughts matching speed as she plotted the lines for information she’d put out today against the one she would throw tomorrow.

  There was danger in working too many too fast: The more people asking questions, the greater the odds that word would leak that she was on the hunt, and those who might previously have been willing to talk would become suspicious and grow silent. After Peter Muthui at Kefesa, she would make the effort to ingratiate herself with someone inside the local office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and when that was finished, she’d return to the Somali market to converse again among the merchants, and then she would wait before beginning once more.

  This was always the way of learning what went unspoken, of listening for rumors and absorbing details from the undercurrents: a time-consuming cycle of pretenses and follow-up, of establishing trust and allaying defenses, of creating one ruse and then the next and so becoming whatever her mark needed to allow him to talk.

  MUNROE PASSED THROUGH the front doors of the Aga Khan Hospital, where the woman at the desk was distracted with a file. Bypassing her, Munroe continued on, made it across the foyer, up one flight of stairs, and all the way down the hall to the captain’s room without being noticed.

  She stepped inside the small private suite and shut the door behind her.

  Accommodations here were a far cry from where he’d been stashed in Lamu: This room had only one bed and its own attached bathroom, though he’d never have the opportunity to put it to use. The floor was tiled and the walls were painted white, and the room was climate-controlled and smelled faintly of antiseptic and medication. The captain’s sheets were clean, his port was recently bandaged, and the IV bag was half full; the filthy clothes had long since disappeared—hopefully had been destroyed.

  The air conditioner groaned on and the curtains rustled with its breeze. Munroe sat, watching the captain, studying the tranquillity on his face, waiting for a reaction and for his instinct to kick in—that uncanny ability of the human animal to sense, even during sleep, that it was being watched—waited for him to open his eyes. But either he was still trapped in his state of unconsciousness or the doctor had been true to his word and had put him under, because the only movement was the rise and fall of his chest.

  She returned to the front desk and paid for the next three days. Burning through cash as she was, the room and medical attention didn’t come cheap, but costs were a small fraction of what a similar stay would have been in the U.S. Pockets lighter, she stepped back out into the nighttime air and made the long walk back to where the matatu had left her earlier in the day.

  MUNROE EXITED THE matatu not far from the hotel beyond the pier and, in a pattern that had become familiar enough that now was the time to alter it, followed the dirt road down toward the beach. Knew something was wrong before she reached the sand.

  The menace came in spaced silences, gaps in conversation and laughter where the night should have been fully alive: the urban equivalent of the scattering of birds fleeing danger in the jungle canopy. The immediacy of death crawled up her spine, an animal instinct honed in her savage teenage years, and the uptick in awareness primed her for a fight and drowned out everything but the focus of the moment.

  Munroe slowed and scanned for clues to this thing that lurked. Slipped out of the beige tunic, which had been camouflage on Nehru Road during the day and which was now a neon light beneath the moon. Left the dirt path for the low stone wall that hedged in the hotel grounds, went up through a break and onto manicured grass, then balled up the tunic a
nd shoved it under a bush.

  CHAPTER 14

  Munroe’s breathing slowed and she took each step forward in measured calculation, followed the hotel grounds inward toward lampposts and the winding paved trails they illuminated, followed toward the pool and the thatched cabana with colorful lights strung about, to where hotel staff catered to drinking and partying guests oblivious to the possibilities that lay outside the boundaries of their perceived haven.

  She slipped past the edge of the pool and continued to the foremost retaining wall, beyond which was the beach under the moonlit sky, and on the beach a crowd where there should have been no crowd: shadows without gender, without race, without any purpose but to gawk and hover around a lump of something at the foot of the pier while at the far end of the dock the empty boat lifted and lowered with the rolling waves.

  Had this been in the heat of the day when Sami typically slept, Munroe would have found no oddity in the seemingly empty vessel, but in the evening, when the world came alive, the shape of Sami’s form should have been visible—on the boat itself, or the pier, or somewhere nearby as it had always been since the beginning—but she couldn’t pull his silhouette from the crowd.

  Munroe strained to see clearly. Had nothing but a history of violence and the roiling in her gut on which to draw, but that was enough to know that Sami had been stolen from her.

  She clenched and unclenched her fists. Turned from the scene and inhaled the night, a long deep breath in countermeasure to seething violence, hatred toward an invisible hand that had once more moved against her.

  Calculation turning against calculation, she walked beneath palm trees and around flower bushes, back to the lighted pathways. Found one of the hotel staff on his way to the pool, a stack of towels in his arms, and stopped him. Nodded toward the beach and said, “What’s going on with the crowd down there?”

  The man tensed with a hesitation that said he’d been told to keep what he knew to himself because worrying guests was always bad for business. Munroe relaxed into nonchalance, handed him a hundred shillings, and with her tone mellow to ease his tension, asked again, “What happened?”

  He pocketed the money and his focus drifted toward the ground. “A man die,” he said.

  “A white man?”

  His face jerked up. He shook his head and, as if the lifeless form still sprawled out on the sand meant nothing, said, “Everything finished now, you don’t worry. No problem for any guest only with men on the beach, everything okay.”

  Munroe would have asked him if such problems were a regular occurrence on this stretch of coast, but there was no point to that. He continued on and she listened to the noise of the night and, when the pathway emptied, returned to shadow to slip through the dark for the far edge of the periphery where stone retaining wall met sand, where the only light was that which came from the sky, and where it was possible to observe the pier without being seen.

  She would have preferred to be on the beach among the loiterers, where learning could come faster and she could place blame and find culprits, but fear and uncertainty infested the air, and as it was no secret that the owner of the boat had been a foreigner, she would draw suspicion and anger from the moment she stepped into their midst. Crowds were easy to incite, difficult to control—pack mentality turned rational individuals into an unthinking, brutal mass, and she didn’t want to wind up on the receiving end of that kind of mob justice.

  An argument erupted between several of the men near the pier: pushing, shoving, yelling in a language Munroe only partially understood and which brought on mental anxiety that amplified the inner tumult. The crowd parted slightly and among those shoving and being shoved were the two young men who’d helped carry the captain and whom Sami had later befriended and fed.

  The fight ebbed, and with the crowd still pushed back, Sami’s body was clearly visible, surrounded by the darkness that had bled from him, left behind and out in the open for show-and-tell. Permutations danced and collided inside her head, answers to questions she hadn’t thought to ask, and anger for never having asked them.

  The rate of crime near the big cities and the cheapness of life on the continent said Sami’s death was a statistical inevitability, a coincidence, bad luck and timing: He was new to the area; he’d had money and had flashed it around. Instinct, and the confusion and fear written within the actions of Sami’s new friends, said otherwise.

  This death had followed from the Favorita, had finally caught up with her because she’d stayed in one place long enough, but it was a statistical improbability that someone hunting for the boat would have found it by chance among the thousands along the entire Kenyan coast. Munroe closed her eyes and filled in the gaps with what had no words, breathed in the tenor and again watched the crowd, the young men.

  If his killers had wanted the boat, they would have taken it already and gone, and she understood that these boys had not been the ones to commit this atrocity, understood that they, like her, would never know if Sami’s killer or killers now hovered together with the curious.

  Munroe studied the beach and counted those who came and went, mentally retraced each step since her arrival in Kenya: the Internet searches and hotel stays, merchants and hospital visits, the few precautions she’d taken out of habit, not out of concern that she would have been tracked or targeted.

  If it was the captain they were after, they should have just asked her nicely. She’d wanted him off her hands, would gladly have traded him for Victor—for the whole of Leo’s team if he was worth that much—and then walked away, but now this was personal, now she had her own dog in the fight. Now she wanted blood.

  The mood on the beach shifted, whispers upticked on the wind, and glances turned toward the dirt road. Several of the bystanders walked away, some of them passing close enough that Munroe could clearly see their faces, though none of them were familiar. By the time the two local policemen reached the base of the pier, the entire crowd had bled off, no one wanting to be hauled in for questioning and, regardless of guilt or innocence, forced to bribe his way to freedom.

  The men stood over Sami’s body. One knelt and poked him, as if to confirm he was dead. They spoke for several minutes, conversation carried away on the wind, and at last one of them left for the dirt road. When he had gone, his partner sat on the pier and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He showed no interest in the boat moored at the far end of the dock—perhaps hadn’t even noticed it—struck a match and casually smoked a cigarette.

  The wait dragged out longer than an hour and one cigarette turned into six, while the man kept watch over the body. What would have been a crime scene elsewhere left nothing for him to investigate. Even if someone better qualified had arrived to handle the case, or there had been technicians trained to collect the evidence, even if the city had forensic equipment to lead the investigators to culprits, there were still no databases through which said evidence could be compared, no hair samples or fiber samples or DNA or fingerprints, nothing at all but eyewitness testimony to sort out what had happened tonight, and the eyes had all long since vanished.

  Detectives might return tomorrow, knocking on doors, asking questions, might even make arrests based on hearsay, but the investigation would be limited to first- or secondhand accounts, and because Sami was a stranger without family making demands for justice, the truth had likely died with him.

  The first man returned carrying a sheet or cloth or possibly burlap, and was accompanied by two others not in uniform. The two new men wrapped the body and the four carried it away, and Munroe was left to face the empty beach with nothing but rage to keep her company. Sami was lost to the night, lost to her, lost to life: a man who’d gone to sea and would never return, a vanished soul whose family would ever be waiting, hoping for him to come home. If she’d had any inkling of how to contact them, she would have made a point of finding them before she left the country, but that was something for another night, perhaps another lifetime.

  The hours deepened and
quiet settled. The pool emptied. The cabana closed and the lights turned off, and in the long darkness she was left alone, watching the boat, the pier, the surf. And when the tide had come in fully and began to ebb out, Munroe finally moved again.

  According to the clock on her phone it was after three in the morning, that time when those who slept, slept deepest, and it was more easily possible for someone waiting on shore for her to return to have fallen asleep on watch. She removed her boots and socks, stuffed the socks inside her pockets, tied the laces of the boots together, slung them over a shoulder, and then, big cat on the prowl, left the safety of her shadow to slink from one hotel to the next between pauses and silences until she was far enough away from the pier that there was no way she could be seen from it, and there she slipped from hiding out onto the open beach and into the ocean.

  The water was warm and the waves rolled gently up the sloping shore. With the cell phone gripped between her teeth and the boots draped around her neck, she waded out far enough that she could move among the currents without being seen from the seaboard and, using the cover of the water, reversed the half kilometer that she’d come.

  As a precaution against the possibility that the trap that had not been sprung earlier might be laid for her here, she waited when she reached the pilings. Listened for any sign of life from within the boat and, hearing nothing, thumped the hull to see if noise might rouse the unexpected.

  No response and so she thumped again, harder, louder, and then, as sure as she could be that she wouldn’t be climbing to her death, swam aft and stretched for the ladder.

  The metal groaned loud against metal. She climbed from the water and tipped over the side of the boat. Knelt and waited. Dumped the waterlogged boots onto the bench, and shielding the phone with her hand, guided its low light as a flashlight of sorts to check the fuel tank, which was half full, and the fuel lines, which were intact. The rifle was missing and she couldn’t know if Sami had sold the gun or if whoever had killed him had taken it and left the rest of her supplies.