Water Memory: A Thriller (Sentro)

by Daniel Pyne

  “You see it?”

  “What?”

  “Pirates’ Landing. The pier? I give you four and a half minutes.”

  Sentro was still struggling to catch her breath when the call cut short. “Wait—”

  Dial tone.

  Down the stairs again, as fast as she could manage, the strap of the duffel rubbing her shoulder raw, Sentro burst from the lighthouse front door and stumbled down the steps, across a parkway, toward the boardwalk.

  Unger, lo fi in her ear by wireless receiver, quipped: “Sending you on a little scavenger hunt to make sure you aren’t being followed.”

  No shit.

  She heard Falcone wondering aloud, Had they not heard about GPS?

  “It’s a formality. I think. He knows but wants us to think he doesn’t and get careless.”

  They told her only later about the local deputy texting on his cell phone—receiving and texting, rapid fire from inside the motel room with Falcone—as Sentro sprinted across the landing parking lot, past a clutter of souvenir kiosks, past a theme restaurant, and onto the long wooden pier. Tourists in bright-colored shirts and cargo shorts gaped at her; she was laboring, sweating, not dressed for the marathon she’d been running in the brutal heat of the day.

  Another phone ringing, distant; she searched for the source.

  A group of little kids were crowding the open mouth of a fiberglass shark mounted on a post halfway down the pier. One of them was reaching inside, where the throwaway phone was making noise.

  “WHOA! No—put that down—!”

  She shoved her way toward them through a Chinese tour group. The kids looked back at her vacantly, but the boy who’d found it couldn’t resist flipping the phone open to answer the call.

  “NO!”

  Startled by the madwoman running at him, the boy took a startled step back from the shark’s mouth, the open phone held out—

  “Put it down!”

  He did. In fact, he dropped the phone. Dropped it, and Sentro watched it bounce once on the wooden pier planks and cartwheel over the side into the water as she arrived.

  The kids screamed and scattered.

  She stared down beneath the pier, where the phone had disappeared. Now what?

  A vibrating hum. Sentro drew her personal phone from her pocket, flipped it open, answered, “What?”

  “Noreen.”

  Exhausted and disoriented, Sentro asked again: “What?”

  “His first girlfriend. Noreen. Correct?”

  Sentro said nothing, numb. The kidnapper’s high-pitched laughter broke the tension: “Tell me you weren’t about to have kittens there, if that phone go in the water.”

  Her eyes rose. She scanned the area, thinking: The guy must be close; he’s watching me.

  “Yeah. A whole cow, possibly.”

  “It’s all good now, my friend. Almost done.”

  Falcone described to her later his feeling of utter helplessness, back in the motel, listening along with the cops and feds as the kidnapper told Sentro about the black Corolla in the parking lot—“Key on the rear tire, like we was valets, amiright?”—and knowing she’d be going out of range without backup.

  The blue blip computer-screen cursor that was Sentro moved north along a Google map of a thin barrier island, out of communication range: “North, all the way, all the way to the end of Park Road, far as it goes.”

  And the local deputy kept texting.

  Falcone never formally reported what happened next in the motel room, but Unger confirmed later how he’d seen Falcone’s eyes narrow as he seemed to put something together and leaned back to ask the Brownsville deputy what the devil he was doing, and how the deputy just looked at Falcone, smug, which, Unger long afterward pointed out, Vic did not and still does not appreciate, ever. Cops and feds were in the room only as a courtesy, to observe the drop, but clearly this officer was communicating with someone on the outside, somewhere else.

  “It’s a free country,” Unger heard the deputy say.

  “Yeah,” was what Falcone purportedly replied. “Where you’re free to fuck this up? I don’t think so. No.”

  Though he’d deny it when asked to give his deposition, that was when Unger witnessed Falcone spring up out of his chair and drive the texting man, backpedaling, out of the video frame. Some almost-comical punching and heavy breathing ensued off screen, after which Unger saw the deputy reappear, wheeling rapidly headfirst into the wall behind Falcone’s laptop, leaving a half-moon crater in the plaster before he fell to the floor, out of sight again.

  “Pretty quick and slick” was how Unger described it. After Falcone picked up the deputy’s phone, saw then who he’d been SMSing, and said something along the lines of, Oh shit, no, both men realized they would never get to Sentro in time to warn her that her race to pay the ransom was doomed.

  Rocky emerald atolls dot translucent seas overhung by quicksilver romance-novel mist. Black checkmark terns wheel over photoshopped sampans with dragon sails; shredded cotton clouds ride the far horizon.

  Everything so hyperreal, Instagram colors and lively promotional prose; Sentro clicks mesmerized through postcards of paradise on a travel agency website. And when she finally looks up, bleary eyed, at the big framed vanity mirror opposite, she can see, on Jenny’s bed, the faint ghost of her face looking back at itself over her laptop screen.

  White text from the website header reflects off her reading lenses: FREIGHTER CRUISES. THE ULTIMATE EXPERIENCE. GET OUTSIDE THE BOX!

  She can read it backward.

  Don’t drift, Aubrey.

  Get outside? Sentro hasn’t even been in the box for such a very long time.

  Marta has suggested a voyage on a cargo ship; Marta with the three perfect children and ex-husband, Jumbo, a coal-industry lobbyist who lives with his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend and their love child; kind, earnest neighbor Marta, who has blithely believed for years the lie that Sentro works middle management for an insurance company and who stayed beside her like a saint through the endless, bleak first days after Dennis died. Might they have been best friends, in another life?

  The photographs on the travel website do look beautiful; the cruise sounds restful and restorative, or so Sentro says to the voice of Marta from her cell phone speaker, which is flat on Jenny’s old counterpane.

  “It’s not like a cruise cruise, the ol’ floating petri dish, with a gajillion people milling around, screaming kids and poolside Zumba and so much sensory overload you feel like you’re going crazy—those are stressful,” Marta notes, because she’s been on more than a few of them. “After a couple of weeks you need a vacation from the vacation.”

  The placid freighter sounds perfect. Isn’t rest and restoration what the doctor said she needs?

  Sentro’s Guilford Avenue row house is unchanged from when she and her husband and children all lived there together, its painted lady facade chipping and sun faded, perhaps, but everything perfectly maintained inside by a service that comes twice a week. Big, bright, spotless, cold, and empty now. As if someone left and took all the life with him. But then, she always thought of it as his place. She grew up in a world where the woman makes the home; Dennis made this one.

  Which begs the question: Where is hers?

  She sleeps in Jenny’s old room, uses the hall bathroom the kids shared, the small study for her home office, and the kitchen only occasionally. It’s hard to cook for one; she never really got the hang of cooking, anyway. Dennis perfected the fast-food takeaway buffet (Clark burgers and Abbey Burger Bistro fries, Charmery chocolate shakes, Verde pizza, Kiku sushi, and Shun Lee’s Chinese), and the kids loved it, growing up. Their master bedroom has become a dusty memorial to a life interrupted; the living room looks staged, like a furniture-store display. She has no attachment to the house except for the memories it holds, many of which she only heard about later from Dennis and her children, when she came back from a caper.

  Will the house help her hold on to them?

  “It’s j
ust, like, seven or eight other passengers. There’s private cabins and a library of movies and pulp novels and a chef that cooks for you and the crew. And there’s mostly the sea and the sky and the roll of the ocean for however many days,” Marta is saying. “I could go with you.” Her voice is thin and strained on the tiny cell speaker.

  “I think I just want some time alone.”

  “Why? What’s going on?” For a moment Sentro thinks she might tell her. But Marta doesn’t wait long enough. “Oh, Aubrey. You’re always alone.”

  “At work, no. We have teams.”

  “Work.” Marta’s judgmental inflection recalls Jeremy’s.

  “Maybe you could fly down and meet me somewhere along the line during a layover,” Sentro suggests, but she’s already chosen from the website offerings a trip that offers little in the way of glamorous ports of call and includes a special place in hell, where Marta is concerned.

  “What are you thinking? French Riviera? Mediterranean?”

  “No. South America.”

  “Ugh. Rio.” Sentro knows that Marta went there with her beloved Jumbo to try to save their marriage and wound up flying back in tears, five pounds heavier, sunburned, and alone.

  “I’ve never been.” This is another outright lie, but Sentro is so used to lying about her life she’s almost come to believe the fictions.

  “It’s beautiful, of course,” Marta adds sadly.

  Lush green, lumpy islets punch through glassine azure seas.

  Haloed by a silvery romance-novel mist.

  The burned boy, Zoala, lies curled in the cool shadows of the coconut palms. They grow thick along the black sand beach of this unnamed scrap of land to which he somehow swam and floated after he was blown free of the pleasure yacht the Zemes had set ablaze. The acrylic cricket jersey having been incinerated, he shivers with fever, and his throat is raw. Uncovered, the flash-broiled skin of his back, arms, legs, shoulders, and one long starboard swath of neck and face course with the exquisite pain of a hundred thousand slender needles being slowly shoved into him.

  He drifts in and out of fractured dreams: international test matches against teams of fantastical, delirium-spun creatures he won’t be able to remember.

  When the sun sets, the beetles find him and feast on the burn blisters, a shimmering sweater of undulating iridescence that shelters him from hypothermia and keeps the wounds from festering. Their shells clatter and click as the bugs settle and stir, settle and stir. Shore birds circle and descend on the bugs, and a strange triage ensues, bugs eating bacteria, birds eating bugs, and Zoala is able to survive for three days by sucking morning moisture from the salt grasses and remaining very still.

  Shrimpers in long boats find him at twilight after sailing past the charred wreckage of a luxury yacht hung up half-submerged on the reef. They observe an apparition wandering, armored in beetles, along the dusk-misty shoreline like a creature in a monster movie.

  At first, no one is willing to go closer.

  One of the men, the son of an Obeah woman, is convinced the creature is some kind of douen. His fellow fishermen are not so sure. For many generations, long before the priests and the missionaries came with promises of salvation and their son of God and saints’ bone relics and mystifying incantations, it’s been common knowledge among the coastal people that water remembers whatever has been lost in it. And since water touches everything, this provides a limitless source of malevolent trouble loosed back onto the land in the mist or the rain or the steam from a boiling pot. Like this small evil spirit on the beach.

  Dip a hand into the ocean, the old ones say, and you have at your fingertips everything you’ve ever done, dreamed, everyone you’ve ever known, and everything every man or woman who has ever lived has thought or cared to remember. Water is ancient, here since the beginning of time. The difficulty is in knowing how to gather the memories you want; they’re swift and elusive, cruel and capricious, happy to be free of you.

  Sometimes it’s wise to just let the current carry them away.

  After a short deliberation, this brave man strips his shirt off, murmurs as much of his mother’s protective spell as he can remember, then angles his boat through the surf, runs it aground on the beach, and climbs out. His small pistol gripped in his pocket, he’s ready; he intends to kill with it if he needs to. But after a cautious creep up onto the sloping black sand, the shrimper sees that the creature’s feet face forward, and this suggests, as his mother has taught him, that this is no simple child’s lost soul. This is a jumbee who has been cleverly distracted by a demand that it count all the sand on the beach. It’s how you get rid of them: Make them tally every grain and start over each time they make a mistake. When sunrise comes and they haven’t completed their task, they die.

  But who could have made such a demand here, on this empty atoll?

  The creature makes a mournful sound. Doubting his bullets will kill an evil demon, the shrimper is about to plunge back into the foaming surf when the bug-shrouded monster sees him and calls out to him in a language he understands.

  Wise to the spirit’s tricky, shape-shifting reputation, the Obeah man sloshes out backward into the shallow water anyway, knowing a jumbee can’t follow him there.

  The other shrimpers, safe in their boats beyond the break, exhort their colleague to use his gun.

  The shrimper fumbles for it in his pocket.

  The jumbee stumbles and falls to its knees, shedding some of its luminescent skin. A storm cloud of sooty terns explodes from the date palms and swoops down in a commotion of gray white to attack the pus-drunk beetles, gobbling them up, circling on beach thermals around and around a fallen human boy who has been revealed to all, like a magic spell lifted.

  The shrimpers watch, transfixed.

  Now they see the raw wounds on the boy’s back and limbs. His soft features, half-scorched, a riot of red, turn skyward, eyes rolled back white, tears streaming; he’s reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

  And now the Obeah man recognizes Zoala, a troubled orphan they all know well, and whose sister many of them know too well back on the mainland.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Sentro has never much liked boats. She grew up in a place with little water; what she knows about them derives from the better part of two winter months spent belowdecks in a scuttled trawler that was taking on freezing water in Kastela basin C, Port of Split, back when she was cashing a federal check. The situation was this: war criminal and self-proclaimed warrior prince Željko “Arkan” Ražnatović had decided to take time out from his cake-shop clubhouse and the Serbo-Croatian conflict to woo his anorexic girlfriend, a pan-Baltic pop singer, on a Red Star Belgrade professional footballer’s yacht. Their ensuing hijinks, conversations, and assignations, vigorous, loud, but stultifyingly dull, were nonetheless of interest to the various intelligence services of several NATO countries worried about resurgent ethnic troubles in the region, so Sentro and two colleagues from other eurozone agencies were dispatched to the leaking, listing listening station, where they were mostly bored to distraction.

  And drank rakija.

  Raw sewage; fuel oil; salt mold; cold, damp blankets; the walls closing in.

  Or was that Odessa?

  No. Christmas in Split. She’s sure of it. Sentro lost $200 playing Yahtzee marathons with the foreign spooks.

  Then again, Split is beautiful.

  Odessa. And it wasn’t Ražnatović; it was the Ukrainian chemist who was fooling with early CRISPR and tubercular genetics.

  But a trawler for sure, rotting and dock bound.

  A watery coffin—isn’t that what they say?

  Watery grave?

  As was often the case, nothing geopolitically useful was accomplished, and she missed the kindergarten holiday pageant; Jeremy was a wise man. Jenny took her first steps the next day. On a DARPA secure network, Dennis emailed her some pictures of her happy family from his first digital camera, which they pretended she gave him for Christmas. Sentro only heard, years later, after De
nnis had passed away, about the bitter tears both children had cried when Sentro hadn’t appeared on Christmas morning.

  Rectilinear acres and acres of shipping containers on the banks of the Patapsco River wait to be loaded on huge ships or driven away. Gulls slip and weave between loading cranes that lift their heads like giant horses and rotate cargo, deck to shore. A curtain of heavy clouds sheds a wispy rain. The contract carrier cargo ship CMA CGM Jeddah, Singapore Shipping Company, Bahamian flag, dwarfs the black Uber sedan that snakes through the containers and stops abreast of the gangway. Sentro climbs out—blue jeans, white blouse, a wool old-style Orioles warm-up jacket she found in Jenny’s closet, and her black leather backpack bag.

  At the last moment, she ran back into the house for a book to read on the trip, scoured the dusty shelves in Jeremy’s room, and pulled out a hardbound copy of Lord Jim. She faintly remembered Dennis telling her once that their son had to read it for high school. Conrad. Involving oceans.

  Right?

  Nothing like a good high sea adventure to help pass the time.

  Containers tower above her in rainbow colors, scrambled together like unsolved Rubik’s Cubes; the ship is bigger than she imagined. Whatever second thoughts she might have had are overshadowed by a spark of anticipation of the adventure ahead—even if it’s as quiet and uneventful as Marta has insisted it will be. Sentro isn’t unfamiliar with having downtime between assignments, but it has been a long time since she took a real vacation alone; in the past she would greedily fill the days with family. Even packing for this was something of a challenge. She worries she might have brought too much.

  Seabirds whirl white like blown scraps of paper around and through the skeletal quayside cranes. A square-jawed Irish first mate wearing work gloves jogs down to greet her with an umbrella: “Ms. Aubrey Sentro?”