by Finn Óg
“It will be a while before he wakes but before he does there are things you haven’t thought through, obviously.”
“Like what?” Tassels rounded, offended.
“Like how you can possibly take over this operation. You can’t very well tramp into Libya, find these wealthy ex-oligarchs and turn them into exiles, can you? You’re going to need the rat for that.”
“Ex-oligarchs?” Tassels’ interest piqued.
“So he says.”
“So they really are filthy rich?”
“According to him.”
“Like those super-rich Russians?”
“Who knows, probably. Same resources – oil, energy – possibly. So how are you going to get that sort of clientele?” The doctor gently kneaded his cousin that he might rise later.
Tassels was thinking. “You leave the planning to me, medicine man. You just get the information and I’ll decide what to do with it,” he said, but he knew his cousin was right. He had no idea how he could get his hands on the money without the rat.
Eleven
“That’s not her daddy,” Isla said with confidence – and confusion.
“Course he is,” Sam replied.
Isla wasn’t for arguing but she was convinced. “He’s not.”
“How do you know?” He was curious as to her reasoning rather than persuaded by her conviction.
“He’s not nice to her,” she said.
Sam considered for a moment and decided a little cultural education would do no harm.
“Just because a man has rules for his family doesn’t mean he isn’t being nice,” he began, looking into the dismissive countenance of his daughter. “People from different countries have different rules, wee love. Like, where these people are from, sometimes the women walk behind the men. It’s like, their … way.” Sam realised he was struggling to understand this let alone explain it to a six-year-old.
“I know that,” she said. “Some women have to cover their faces except when they’re at home. Girls don’t have to – just adults. That’s not what I’m talking about.”
Sam gazed at his daughter wondering where she picked up such things. She’d had very little contact with other people in months. Aside from the iPad, his brutal mug was about all the company she’d enjoyed.
“How do you know all that?” he asked.
Isla just shrugged.
“What really makes you think he’s not her daddy?”
“Because she told me.”
Waleed had often opened his rations tins with a pair of pliers. It made an awful mess – shards of metal, twisted, nicked, cut and torn apart, the uneven openings oozing the contents all over the place. That exact imagery came to his mind as he gazed at the stationary bus during rush hour in a sleepy Sinai city.
Arish: coastal, cosmopolitan, confused, dangerous. In any other environment it would have been a resort for the rich and famous, but it was close to Gaza – host to skirmishes, ripe for mad militants.
Sitting with his face to the sun was an older man who must have dozed off on his way to work. He looked peaceful, his feet outstretched beneath the seat in front, his belly clasped by the intertwined fingers of both hands through which his intestines were currently leaking. The press had turned up and were snapping furiously, arguing and jostling for position, as dust-suited men with blue gloves lifted fragments of flesh from the tarmac and surrounding shrubbery. Nobody on the bus had survived. Many had died from glass or metal shrapnel from the vehicle itself, others from whatever the beards had packed into the teenager’s death vest. And the old man, probably not far from retirement, had known nothing about it. Waleed took a little comfort from the thought that he’d died in his sleep and not known the horror of the blast or the indignity of being turned inside out as the world gazed at his breakfast oozing between his fingers.
Of course it meant nothing but trouble for Waleed. Bollockings from Cairo, lectures on the importance of the tourism industry and the need to prevent such attacks. Lessons screamed down the line about how twitchy the Israelis were getting, how he’d failed to get on top of the insurgents. He’d heard it all before. He would be stuck in Arish for weeks now as his investigators tried to identify the dead by literally piecing together the parts of the bomber’s story. All a waste of time, in Waleed’s view. They knew it had been a teenage girl. Probably some poor, misguided volunteer or someone Islamic State had picked up on its travels who had opted for suicide over endless gang rape. Waleed would learn little from her, assuming they could jigsaw her body and background back together.
Yet this was his station, and it meant that his fat former friend had to remain confined to barracks back at Waleed’s desert base where he’d be fed, but probably not well enough to maintain his girth. Waleed called his custody officer and ordered the prisoner be kept in isolation, that no record be made of his detention and no information offered should anyone come asking. That was one of the benefits of his unit – it outranked everyone else when it came to sharing or withholding information. Right now Waleed had bigger problems to deal with whether Big Suit knew his secret or not.
Sam tried hard to compute what his little girl had just told him.
“But they don’t speak our language.”
“Yes, they do,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Did you hear them?” Sam struggled to understand how he could have missed what his six-year-old had picked up.
“Just Sadiqah,” she said.
“Sadiqah?” Sam repeated, stunned.
“That’s her name. My friend.”
“Did her mammy hear her talking to you?”
“No,” said Isla.
“Is the woman her mammy?” It suddenly occurred to him to ask, struggling to measure all of this in one gulp.
“Yes.”
“Does her mammy speak our language?” Sam hadn’t heard evidence of it but Isla was surprising him at every turn.
“I think she does but I didn’t hear her speak,” said Isla. “But the man knows what we are saying,” she said with absolute certainty.
“How do you know?”
Infuriatingly, Isla just shrugged again.
“Listen, darlin’, this is so important, how do you know he understood what we were saying?”
“After you were on the radio to the rescuers he got very cross with Sadiqah’s mam, and when you went up to steer the boat he grabbed her and shaked her and said cross things to her.”
“In English? In our language?”
“No, in Arabic,” Isla said.
“How do you know what Arabic is?” Sam was utterly perplexed.
“I told you, Daddy, Sadiqah told me lots of things.”
“Where did she tell you? This is a small boat, Isla!” It crossed his mind that the story might be a ruse to punish him for casting the family adrift. Then he felt guilty for doubting his daughter.
“She told me in my cabin when we were colouring. She’s very good at colouring. I wish I was good at colouring like her.” Isla’s attention was shifting.
“And did her daddy hear you talking?”
“No, I told you! He’s not her daddy. She whispers to me. And she draws pictures for words she doesn’t know in our language.”
“Right,” he said. “Right. But … but that doesn’t explain how you know he speaks our language, Isla.”
“Yes, it does,” she said.
“How?”
“Because he knew what you were saying to that ship that you screamed bad words at on the radio, and it made him cross until the ship went away. I was watching him,” she said.
Sam found all this hard to argue with despite knowing he’d been hoodwinked where his six-year-old hadn’t.
She was still a little cross with him and felt justified in hammering home the point. “That’s how he knows how to drive the boat. He understanded you the whole time.”
Sam thought for a moment. “Why didn’t you tell me he could speak our language?”
“I thought you knew,�
�� she shrugged. “You kept talking to him in our language.”
The flaws were hard to find. “So who is he if he’s not her daddy? Is he the woman’s husband?”
“No. Sadiqah never met him before.”
“Before what?”
“Before they went into the boat, in the sea.”
“The woman didn’t know him at all?”
“No.”
“Shit.”
“Daddy!”
“We’ve got to get them back, Isla.”
Tassels paced, trying for the fourth time to call Big Suit. There was a connection every time, so he wasn’t out of range, but there was no answer.
The doctor watched his cousin march back and forth down the dusty corridor and imagined a plan of his own. “Has he vanished?” he asked.
“He can’t vanish,” said Tassels wearily. “I’ll order a trace.”
The cop picked up a landline extension and barked orders at some tech, reading the rat’s number from his own screen.
The doctor pressed the advantage that was forming in his mind. “What if he misses the pickup? Will you be able to get another boat?”
“Probably,” said Tassels, but he didn’t understand enough about what was involved.
“So you could miss the next trip and the income from it?” said the doctor, with no small measure of concealed self-interest.
“Not if you do your job and find out what exactly the delivery process for the boat and engine is. Why don’t you just concentrate on that and we can move on from there.” Tassels gestured to the door.
The doctor was happy to take his leave. He had an experiment to conduct on a rat.
The wind backed and eased through the night, making the going painfully slow. Sam was forced to tack back and forth to get ashore. When eventually they made land he discovered that the harbour didn’t shield a marina after all, but the quay Sam tied up at was as robust as it was jammed. All sorts of fishing boats were laced to the eyes on the concrete walkway, yet the whole village looked redundant. It didn’t make sense to Sam. From the sea it could be a potential paradise – ocean-facing, great climate, the fishing presumably plentiful and the views stunning. Why then, he thought, did the place feel so tired?
He’d kept an eye out for their small tender all the way to the quay, the rigid inflatable on which Sadiqah, her mother and the man had raced ashore. Isla had stood above the spray hood with the binoculars. Her little neck had strained with the weight, and Sam had watched and admired her determination as she periodically rested her arms and allowed the heavy glasses to swing on the lanyard around her neck. To her disappointment she’d spotted nothing, nor had Sam.
He made the boat fast and then reached up a mighty forearm to swing his little girl off the deck and onto the harbour. It was the first time their feet had hit dry land in almost two months and he was craving real milk for her. First things first, though, he thought, as they made their way to a little boatyard where a modern travel hoist stood, like everything else, motionless. It crossed Sam’s mind that there may have been some sort of nuclear evacuation, such was the silence and apparent abandonment of the place. Granted, it was only six twenty in the morning, but he’d never been in a fishing port where there was zero movement at such an hour.
There was a host of perfectly serviceable sailing and motorboats in the yard, as well as some that had suffered neglect. After a thorough hammering on an office door, a bulky, unshaven Italian emerged.
“Ciao,” Sam started, referring to his phone and Google for translation, using up valuable data, and hoping to give a reasonable account of himself.
“Che cazzo vuoi?” growled the man, which Sam took to be impatient at best.
Sam typed ‘can you help’, waited and then began. “Potete aiutarci?”
The man shrugged.
“Battello,” Sam tried, miming a lifting motion as if he had a television under each arm.
“You look like a monkey, Daddy,” Isla remarked helpfully.
Sam chose to point at the travel hoist, in which a small boat was already hung, like everything else, motionless.
“Si,” said the man, becoming more accommodating, no doubt at the prospect of receiving some euros. “Inglesi?”
“No,” said Sam. “Irlandese.”
“Ok,” said the Italian. “What boat?”
Sam beckoned him over and the man, seemingly oblivious to the nails and metal shavings on the ground, strode out into the yard in his bare feet and shorts. Sam pointed at Sian.
“Big boat,” said the man. “How heavy?”
“Sixteen tonnes,” Sam replied. “Fifty-four foot.”
“When?”
He was a man of few words. Sam quite liked him.
“Now?” he ventured.
The man laughed.
“Two hundred euro,” the man said, which was heavy but Sam had no option.
“Can you do it now?”
The man nodded slowly. “Why?”
“Rope. Around the propeller shaft.”
“Ok,” said the man, understanding.
Sailing her into the harbour under jib had been manageable in the calm conditions behind a breakwater but Sam didn’t want to be without an engine for long.
“I tow you over. First drop this boat in sea.”
Sam shook his head. “I can sail her in.”
The man looked at him as if he needed his head felt, then shrugged. “You damage crane, you pay.”
Sam nodded.
“Money now, please.”
Sam dipped in his pocket and extracted a fold of notes. He peeled off four fifties.
The man nodded and he and Isla set off back to the boat. Isla stayed on the quay and began to unwind the warps while Sam unfurled the small genoa with one of the jib sheets.
“Ready?” he called to her.
“Ready,” she replied, and he flicked the sheet around a winch and backed the jib, spinning the wheel against the force to bring the boat directly astern. Then he skipped onto the side deck and held out his shovel of a paw for Isla to grab and whisked her aboard.
“Good job, wee love,” he said, and returned to the wheel.
Behind him he could hear the grunt of a diesel engine fire up and the grinding of steel wire as the barefoot man lowered the smaller boat back into the Mediterranean. Sam cleared the neighbouring fishing boats, then allowed Sian to come around into the gentle breeze as Isla readied the winch on the other side to gybe. She handed him the tail of the rope and as they passed through the eye of the breeze he drew it in armfuls and filled the sail on the new side.
“Tell me when the wee boat’s gone, Isla.”
“Not yet,” she called back from the foredeck. “I’ve got the bowline ready, Daddy.”
Sam furled the headsail again, allowing the way on the hull to propel her towards the dock.
“She’s gone, Daddy!” called Isla, but Sam could see that himself. He liked to give her jobs to keep her involved and invested. It helped her learn.
“Where’s the man?”
“He’s leaning out of the crane. He looks worried.”
I bet he does, thought Sam. If he got it wrong, the top of the travel hoist would be a write-off, as would their own mast. But then, Sam did enjoy a challenge no matter how trivial.
In the event the boat slid in gently and perfectly, and Isla threw the rope to the man as accurately as any deckhand might. The man shook his head in admiration at the little woman, then skipped around the wheel of the hoist to take a warp from Sam. Within minutes they were dangling out of the water being driven towards the hard-standing area. The man stopped the crane, found a rickety ladder and rattled it up against the hull. Sam and Isla climbed down and inspected the mess of the shaft. The man stood beside them shaking his head, fashioning an opportunity.
“You want me to fix?” he asked.
“No,” said Sam, producing the sharp knife from the life raft. “But if you can power-wash the hull, I will pay for that.” He scraped at the weed gr
owth, like a damp, soft beard, and chipped a barnacle or two with the blade.
“Hundred euro,” said the man.
“Fifty,” said Sam.
“Eighty,” said the man.
“Sixty,” chirped Isla, and the man laughed. The child had it.
The barefoot Italian strolled off and Sam hacked at the bound rope for ten minutes until it fell free of the shaft and skeg, before climbing the ladder to replace the knife. Then he and Isla strolled off as if they hadn’t a care in the world, despite having a woman and her kid to rescue from a man who, for all Sam knew, had done away with them before they even reached the shore.
Habid’s eyes flicked open the moment the door latch was fingered. He was able to push himself a little more upright. Lying back made him feel vulnerable and given the propensity for violence in the police station, he was reluctant to place himself at even more of a disadvantage.
“Doctor,” he muttered with some relief.
“Habid,” said the doctor, urgency in his voice. He crouched beside the rat as if tinkering with the meds and whispered keeping his back to the door and its inspection flap. “Big Suit, as you call him, has disappeared. He’s not answering calls.”
“What does Tassels think has happened?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“Do you think Big Suit has deserted – gone AWOL?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe he thinks he killed me.”
“That would not bother him,” said the doctor. “They probably kill people all the time.”
“What then?”
“He may have crashed. He was very weak. He should not have been sent on a long journey – or any journey. We took a lot of blood from him.”
Habid ticked through his options.
“We must get the boat. It is true what I said – the supply chain will close down if we do not collect.”
“When is the next journey?” asked the doctor.
“It does not work like that,” said Habid, “but the boat must be retrieved regardless.”
