by Merle Kröger
cheeks that makeup cannot quite conceal. He appears bloated beneath his designer shirt—not enough exercise. Either it is still puppy fat or the coke is already at work. Still, they giggle like teenagers, while the dealer pulls in their chips. Guests to Nike’s liking. They don’t cause trouble and have limitless cash at their disposal.
Nike takes off his sunglasses and looks around. He can’t help it; he has to check. Always. Everywhere. The corners. The mirrors on the wall. Nothing unusual. Good.
Move on.
He patrols the deserted rows of slot machines. Their noises compete for his attention, whistle at him like men catcalling a pretty lady. His thoughts keep churning. Problem: Illegal person on board, brain injury, emergency. Security level: Red. Imminent threat to Nikhil Mehta’s future. He runs through the possible consequences of this predicament. His thoughts whizz back and forth. Almería. Palma. Miami.
Sheila McGuire, corporate head of security, has been watching him since May. Professional, but markedly less friendly than before. “Solve the problem, Nikhil. I do my job, you do yours.” In the beginning, she had answered his emails: I’ll take care of it. With a period. Then an exclamation mark. Then nothing. For a few weeks now, there has been radio silence between Sheila and Nikhil. Solve the problem. You’re the head of security. That’s what we pay you for. Miami won’t get involved. There were two, maybe three attempts to get the higher-ups involved, if any.
The problem is getting the illegals off the boat once you have transported them from one country to another. In this case, Spain. The Syrian had wanted to leave the ship in Barcelona anyway; the Nigerian had not cared. So send both off with the Guardia Civil. But the Spaniards had said: “Nada. Take them to Malta where you picked them up.” The Maltese had more than enough on their hands and had not wanted them either. Neither had the Brits at the turnover in Southampton. And Miami is out of the question. To the Americans, it was better to keep these guys on board than to let them set foot on sacred US soil. Solve it, Mehta. Find a solution! A nice, shitty mess.
Nikhil reins in his thoughts. Slow down, go through your options. The Arab must leave the ship. Immediately.
The casino has large portholes with heavy velvet curtains pulled back at the middle. They keep it nicely dim here. Nike steps toward the round window that just barely clears the water line.
At eye level, very far away, the raft is dancing on the waves.
Disappears.
Reappears.
Disappears.
Move on.
AIRWAVES
Salvamento Marítimo:
Sir?
Spirit of Europe:
Yes, sir, go ahead for Spirit of Europe. This is the captain speaking.
Salvamento Marítimo:
Are these people requesting any help from your side?
Spirit of Europe:
Yes, sir. We are wondering: Will you be able to send a boat out and pick up the refugees at this current position or would you like us to pick them up?
Salvamento Marítimo:
There is an alternative, sir, that you wait in this area until we’re able to send a search-and-rescue unit to the area.
Spirit of Europe:
How long will that take, sir? How long will it take for the rescue unit to get to this area?
Salvamento Marítimo:
At this moment, we don’t have a clear picture of the situation, but it should be approximately one hour. We’ll send a high-speed boat.
Spirit of Europe:
Repeat please: When will you be able to deploy the fast boat?
Salvamento Marítimo:
We estimate about an hour or an hour and a half.
Spirit of Europe:
Is that one and a half hours to get to this position or to deploy from the land station?
Salvamento Marítimo:
No, to reach your current location.
Spirit of Europe:
Okay, sir, we will stay in this area and wait for the rescue team.
Salvamento Marítimo:
Okay, please keep visual contact with the small boat. We’ll keep you informed about the developments of the—of the ETA of the rescue unit to the area.
Spirit of Europe:
Okay, thank you very much. Standing by 27. We will keep visual contact with the refugees in the boat.
SIOBHAN OF IRELAND | ENGINE DECK
Oleksij Lewtschenko
Olek presses the green button. With a belch, the Siobhan wakes up from her nap.
“Come on, old girl.”
Another routine glance over the instruments.
He trusts his ears more than the devices. The control room is air-conditioned; however, the door to the engine room cracks just barely before the heat and noise assault him. No one, except Olek, lingers there longer than necessary. He loves the smell of diesel oil. His father had serviced the ship engines for the Black Sea Fleet.
The Black Sea Fleet: historically part of the Russian navy. Since the eighteenth century, the fleet’s center for operations in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean has been Sevastopol, Crimea.
In 1990, Olek joined the fleet as a sailor. His father, the old mechanical engineer, could not have been prouder. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in ′91, the Soviet fleet suddenly found itself floating in Ukrainian waters. Initially the two countries said fifty-fifty, but Yeltsin was too greedy to make do with that. The Russians wanted the whole fleet. So he threatened to cut off our gas supply, and voilà, it turned into eighty-twenty. Does this ring a bell? Don’t say it out loud, just think it. You are still allowed to do that.
Normally he enjoys the brutal heat down here, but today he is not feeling well. His head buzzes.
The stairs, shortness of breath.
Deck B: crew’s mess, officers’ mess.
Not hungry.
Deck C: crew quarters.
Deck D: master deck.
Out into the fresh air where Olek’s spot is located, way back here. It is his own tiny piece of the ship, perhaps two meters square, sheltered from the wind. White railing, green planks, and a bench painted blue. Blue was all that was left.
He sits down on the bench, pulls out his tobacco, and rolls a cigarette. He listens to the pistons chug evenly in strict time. It has a strong heart, the Siobhan.
Finally allowing his eyes to focus, he stands back up and looks down over the railing. Someone is hanging there on a rope, painting. They nod at each other. Olek lifts his gaze to the horizon. They are almost out of the bay, and in the distance hovers the panorama of the city between the hills.
Cartagena: the Spanish military harbor is known by a variation of its Phoenician name, Carthage. Hannibal. Later the Romans came, and soon followed their amphitheater. You really should take a look at it, instead of blowing half the morning once again on the computer…
Oh, shit. Olek has to go back in.
Rushes down the stairs. His quarters are on Deck A. In emergencies, he has to be able to reach his engine quickly. Dim twilight. Containers right in front of his window. Where is his phone?
Up the stairs. How many times has he run into something? He stopped counting at some point. His second engineer approaches—a talented boy, has a way with engines—and smiles. “Chief. How’s it going?” The Filipinos are always friendly.
Back outside now. Short of breath. What’s wrong today? Has to be the weather. Something’s coming.
He pulls out the prepaid card and punches the code into his phone. Dmitri brought him the card from the city earlier on. Spanish radio network. The sea network is too slow to upload his pictures, which are all high-res, only best quality.
His passions: Wikipedia. Facebook. VesselFinder Pro. ShipSpotting.com. Of course, most of the spotters are unemployed landlubbers with nothing better to do. They stand around the harbor with their telephoto lenses, pointing their cameras as you put to sea. The poor sods have to take whatever comes their way. Olek is an Elite Spotter. Username: Cosmochief. Two hundred forty-three ships, fr
om supertankers to sailing yachts. Excellent ratings. He clicks through his photo library.
There is his last picture: the Libyan freighter in Algiers Harbor, where it has been docked for months, good only for scrapping at this point. He caught it in full profile, the rust glowing nicely in the evening light. The crew has to be on the verge of starvation, waiting like Easter lambs for someone to come and release them. They simply don’t get it that their country is sinking, as they slaughter one another on both sides.
That is where we will all end up if things keep going this way.
Don’t think about it.
But still, images flash in his mind.
The steps of Odessa. Battleship Potemkin (Russian title: БpOHeHOCeц ПOTёMKиH). The world-famous silent film from Sergei Eisenstein premiered on December 21, 1925, at the Moscow Bolshoi Theatre as the official anniversary film for the celebration of the 1905 Russian Revolution. The plot was loosely based on actual events that took place the year of the revolution: the mutiny of the crew against the czarist officers on the Russian battleship Knjas Potjomkin Tawritscheski.
The mosaic at Katerynyns’ka Square, high up under crumbling stucco. Catherine II, known as Catherine the Great (Russian: EKaTepиHa AлkceeBHa), became empress of Russia in 1762—the only female monarch to be awarded the epithet “the Great” by the history books. Representative of enlightened absolutism, she founded Odessa in 1794 as a military outpost on the Black Sea.
Olek the boy often plays in front of that house; they live right around the corner. A sailor shuffles by, looks up at the mosaic, and crosses himself quickly. Once the old man rounds the corner, the boy makes the same gesture. She sends a tingle down his spine, this woman in the mosaic. Blessed Virgin Mary, protect our homeland and loved ones. Looking exhausted but determined, sitting in the midst of rubble and tank chains, she holds the trumpet in her left hand and the royal scepter in her right. She is like Odessa, which embodies the spirit of Catherine the Great: powerful, destructive, provocative. A city like a high. Back in the day, it was the soft, beguiling high of opium; today, it is shirka, the heroin knockoff cooked up from poppy straw, extremely addictive. Quick high with a hard crash, its popularity soared in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Brutal stuff. Odessa, Saint Catherine, you have broken me, all this back and forth with the fleet. Which fatherland am I actually serving?
Once again, he is standing in front of the house on Katerynyns’ka Square; now he is twenty-one. Irina is forcing him to choose between her and the shirka. He is standing under the chestnut tree, freezing. There is now a Mexican food place where there used to be a bakery. Behind him, a souped-up BMW thunders past. Odessa’s wealthy are living high in this new age, while the unemployed and the drug-addicted are crashing and burning. Olek prays to the woman in the mosaic; nothing else comes to him.
She is the protectress of sailors. Olek signs up, seeking refuge in the warm cave of an engine room. He trains to be a mechanic and enrolls in the academy three years later.
He catalogs every ship with its name and IMO code, now uploading the picture of the Spirit of Europe from last night, emerging from the fog like the Titanic in front of the iceberg. It was downright eerie, but the photo will get him five stars, guaranteed. Damn it! The internet has crashed again. Where is the coast? They are now out on open ocean, the Escombreras Refinery to portside. He had recently read about it on Wikipedia. It is huge.
He holds his phone over the railing. Just don’t let it fall. All right, upload complete. The painter down below waves again.
Olek pockets his phone, tosses a final glance over the railing. Out of the corner of his eye: something was just there. Plastic? The entire sea is going under in that stuff. He read in Science that eight million tons of it land in the oceans each year, microplastic and other degraded material collecting into ocean gyres. In mid-2014, off the coast of Hawaii’s Big Island, geologists discovered formations comprising melted synthetic material, volcanic stone, coral fragments, and grains of sand. Because of its solidity, they described it as a form of rock, calling it a plastiglomerate. The world is drowning in plastic. Anyone traveling over open ocean can see that we’re all heading down the drain, one way or the other.
Olek moves toward the stern. Is that a piece from a boat? Keeps walking. No, not a boat. Hair. Black hair in dreadlocks
He throws his arms up.
“Dmitri, stop! Stop!”
Dashing back, he takes the exterior stairs up to Deck E, heaving open the heavy iron door to the bridge. “A person!” Wheezing. “Dmitri, stop!” A corpse, a man or woman. Olek crosses himself. Another one already.
The first mate is playing container dominoes on the computer. Jumping up, he glances at the captain, grabs the binoculars, and rushes out. A good lad, Sergei. Meanwhile Olek and Dmitri stand, frozen in place. Neither moves. Neither says a word.
Sergei comes back in. “Couldn’t see anything, Captain. Stop the engines?”
Dmitri ignores him, steps closer and grasps Olek by the shoulders. “Chief!”
Olek inhales. “Dmitri, we have to stop!”
“Calm down, Olek.” Dmitri does not drop his arms as he studies him. “Are you sure he is still alive? Olek? Are you sure?”
Still alive? How should he know? It was so fast, a moment, then over. Olek shakes his head. No, he is not sure.
“Do you know what it costs to stop the engines? To go back? Do you know what that costs?” Dmitri shakes him, just slightly. Olek exhales, and Dmitri lets him go but keeps his hands raised just in case. “Was anyone else on deck?”
Olek shakes his head. The Filipino painter had been looking in the other direction.
“Maybe you just saw a piece of plastic tarp. Olek?”
Dmitri looks at him. Sergei looks at him.
Olek nods.
Crosses himself again.
First, the corpse in Oran, and now a drowning victim.
A second omen.
Olek has goose bumps.
And Dmitri? Dmitri takes the binoculars from the first officer and looks out ahead, the containers forming a pattern of rectangles against the sea.
Sergei sits back down at the computer.
“A storm’s coming,” Dmitri says, carefully placing the binoculars on the ledge next to the coffee canister, before going to the table in the back that holds the sea maps.
Olek does not move. Dmitri walks back over. “Everything all right, chief engineer?” He hands him an envelope. “This should take your mind off things. There was mail from home waiting for you in Cartagena.”
The radio crackles. “Sea Rescue Cartagena. Sea Rescue Cartagena to Spirit of Europe. Can you hear me? Copy.”
SANTA FLORENTINA
Diego Martínez
The purse seine forms an almost perfect circle in the water. The round area contrasts strongly with the surrounding water, its blue duller and more sluggish than the powerful azure of the rest of the sea. It can’t be real, though, since a fishing net is actually porous, with the same water in as well as out. And yet… It must have something to do with the refraction of the light.
Diego chokes the motor at the very moment the circle fills out. In that same instant, his father flips the switch and begins to haul in the net. They wait as the noonday heat burns down on them. Diego’s gaze sweeps across the coast: Cabo de Agua and, beyond it, the Bay of El Gorguel. He spent endless summer afternoons clambering around up there. With the rest of his family down on the beach, grilling, Diego would find a sunny spot among the rocks, book in hand.
He would have hardly opened the pages when he saw them: the British frigates Minerve and Blanche, under the command of the later Lord Nelson, engaged in a bitter sea battle against the Spanish frigates San Sabina, Ceres, Perla, and Matilda. The San Sabina would have already fallen into English hands. The cannon thunder and smoke hung over the Bay of Cartagena. Then out of the haze, a frigate materialized. At the last second, General Juan Contreras with the Numancia came to the rescue. The artillery from th
e batteries at Cabo Tiñoso roared from the coastline. And the tide turned…
In his cozy spot between the boulders, little Diego could not have cared less about the fact that Contreras wasn’t even alive in 1799, the year Nelson was floating off the coast of Cartagena, and that the powerful cannons on the hill were first placed there over a century later. “Kaboom!” he bellows as he hurls a stone toward the sea. “Hasta luego, Señor Nelson!”
The reel hauling in the net locks in place with a snap. Still smiling at the thought of the numerous battles he fought as boy, Diego turns toward his father. Together they wrest their catch on board. Shimmering mackerel flop around on the floor of the Santa Florentina. It is not all that many. His father works quickly and focused, while Diego grabs for a fish, but it slithers between his fingers. He curses under his breath. The hand movements he learned as a boy, before he could even write, seem to be gradually fading from his memory. He is suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of irretrievability.
His father had stubbornly insisted that there were schools of mackerel at Cabo de Agua. Perhaps they had been there a day or two ago. An old fisherman can sense such things. But the large fishing fleets use helicopters to locate the schools, and by the time the inshore fishermen arrive, everything’s gone.
“Can you take the wheel?” The old man heaves the box of fish into the cabin. He flees from the view of what lies beyond Isla de Escombreras, even after all the many years. Diego stands at the doorway and adjusts the tiller with his foot. That is how the fishermen in the Martínez family do it. They couldn’t care less about the safety uproar. The Virgen de la Caridad of Escombreras is the only one watching out for them.
