by John Yunker
He did as instructed.
“Now, see how I’m holding her. First put your left hand over my right, just like that. Now your right. Hold firm but not too tight. Do not let go.”
The bird between his knees was stronger than he expected, and the feathers were not smooth but finely knit, like the exterior of his synthetic jacket. Angela held the caliper to the penguin’s beak and feet, and Robert felt a sudden childlike excitement come over him. The penguin raised its head with an almost human look of indignation, and he couldn’t help but feel sorry for it.
“You can let go now,” Angela said.
Robert released his hands, widened his knees, and the penguin scampered back into its nest. Robert stood, brushed the dirt off his pants, then slowly circled one of the bushes, looking at birds crowded underneath, in distinctly separate cubbyholes, like some thin-walled tenement, so many eyes and beaks following his movements.
“I had no idea there were so many penguins here,” he said.
“There used to be more.”
“Why do they move their heads back and forth like that?” he asked.
“They’re trying to frighten you away.”
“They think I’m a predator?”
“Worse. They think you’re a tourist.”
Robert looked up at Angela, with her backpack on, notepad in one hand, staring at him impatiently. He suddenly remembered why he was there.
“Actually, I’m an FBI agent.”
“Looking for a missing bird?”
“I’m looking for the man involved in the altercation this morning. I believe you know him.”
Angela began scribbling something into her notebook as she spoke. “As you can plainly see, I spend too much time with penguins to notice every tourist who passes through.”
“That’s not what Doug tells me.”
She stopped writing and looked up at him—just the response he’d hoped for.
“So what has Doug been telling you?”
“That you recently adopted a fugitive, someone who looks strikingly similar to a man we’re pursuing.”
“Doug can’t tell the difference between a Magellanic and a Humboldt, so I wouldn’t put much faith in his ability to identify anything.”
“Where is this fugitive he mentioned?”
“Gone,” she said sharply. “He left a few hours ago.”
“On a ship?”
“I couldn’t say. I didn’t follow him.”
Robert studied her eyes more closely, the redness around the edges, perhaps not the result of the wind after all.
“Was his name Aeneas?”
“Yes, his name was Aeneas. And as I just told you, you’re too late. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got penguins to count.”
She turned and started off down the hill, toward the research station. Robert considered chasing her. But what would that accomplish? If Aeneas were still here, he would be in the opposite direction, along the coastline. The sun was already behind the hills, turning the sky orange. Robert needed more time—time to watch Angela from a distance, time to gather more resources. He walked to the water’s edge and scanned the length of the beach, as if he might find Aeneas. He saw only penguins.
Lynda approached. Her dour expression matched how Robert felt. “He’s gone,” Robert said.
“So’s our ship.”
“The Tern?”
“What other ship is there?”
“When?”
“A few minutes after we left.”
“Why didn’t the harbormaster call us?”
“He’s been trying. That crap phone is acting up again.”
“The chains should have slowed them down.”
“He told me the chains had already been sliced through, or he would have tried to stop them himself. They must have accomplished that little task when we weren’t looking. I’d love to know how we missed that one.”
Robert thought back to the night he nodded off, how the cover of a cruise ship would have given them the time they needed to torch through the chains, at least enough to easily break free when the opportunity arose. Aeneas was one step ahead even then. Or, more accurately, Robert was one step behind.
“That’s it then,” Lynda said. “He’s gone. Headed south.” She pulled a camera out of her shoulder bag, crouched, and focused on a pair of penguins under a bush.
“You don’t seem all that disappointed.”
“Sure, I’m disappointed. I’m spending my Christmas vacation standing around here with you instead of being at home with my old man. But I’m going to make the best of it.” Her camera flashed.
“Don’t you think it’s odd how they always seem to know what we’re doing before we do it?” Robert asked.
“Maybe they’re just good,” Lynda said, now taking a picture of Robert.
He held a hand in front of her lens. “A little too good.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You tell me,” Robert said. “I’m not the one who suggested there was someone working on the inside.”
Lynda lowered the camera and studied him. Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, I see. I’m the mole, is that what you’re implying? I let Aeneas slip out of Miami. I tipped him off before we boarded the ship. Maybe I even helped out with the chains during my shift yesterday. And let’s not forget that flat tire I engineered. You know, Bobby, I wasn’t going to do this to you, but you leave me no choice.”
Lynda moved toward him then, quickly, as if preparing to strike, and Robert took a step backward. But instead of punching him, she held a photograph up to his face. It was badly faded and creased down the middle, but Robert recognized the two people standing in the frame. A woman and a man, both in their twenties, sunburnt and smiling, standing on the rear deck of a ship, holding the tattered remnants of a fishing net.
“Care to tell me what this is about?”
“Where’d you get that?” Robert grabbed the photo.
“Where do you think? On the bulletin board in the bridge of the Arctic Tern. Back when we boarded her. Now, I may not be smart enough for the D.C. office, but I know when I smell a mole.”
“I was undercover.”
“And I’m Mary fucking Poppins.”
“I’m serious. How do you think I know what Aeneas looks like? I was working undercover as a deckhand.”
“Why were you there?”
“We were looking for someone who had been torching animal testing labs and mink farms. Someone on Aeneas’ crew. Went by the name of Darwin.”
“But you let Aeneas get away,” she said.
“I wasn’t after Aeneas. I was after Darwin.”
“So I take it, by the stunning lack of documentation in your report, that things didn’t end so well?”
“You could take it that way.”
Robert looked out over the water. A row of five penguins stood on the hill below, single file, looking up at him. He must have been standing in their path, and they appeared content to wait him out. In that moment, he was a tourist, another human just passing through.
“I wasn’t accusing you,” he said to Lynda. “I’m just frustrated. Thinking aloud.”
“Careful. Think too loudly, and you might offend someone.”
Robert nodded. He was being too hard on himself—a recurring theme of his life—and too hard on Lynda, too. But he felt as though he were caught on one of those long fishing lines, that he was being pulled along slowly, inevitably, to some horrible conclusion.
“Look, Bobby, don’t sweat it so much. I know you want to catch Aeneas, and so do I. But it’s not as if we’re getting a hell of a lot of support from the mother ship, you know?”
Robert glanced at the photo again before folding it into his pocket.
“By the way, who’s the girl?” Lynda asked.
“I d
on’t remember,” he said.
Angela
Six hours had passed since Aeneas left.
That night in her trailer, Angela imagined that she had said yes. That she had followed Aeneas to sea, that she was now high up on a deck, looking back at Punta Verde as penguins porpoised around her. The researchers would have their theories for why she left suddenly. People who did not know her would say she’d been kidnapped. People who did would say she was in love. But she was neither. Aeneas had been right. She was tired. Tired of watching trawlers pass at night, their multitude of nets and longlines and vacuum hoses sucking the life from the ocean with GPS-enabled precision, with her penguins as bycatch. Tired of days spent holding onto the ends of ropes, walking in circles. Tired of counting survivors.
In the morning, she woke earlier than usual. She went to Aeneas’ empty camp, broke down the tent, packed up the trash and wine bottles. Later she asked Doug to help her carry the bags back to the station. He seemed happy to be in her good graces again. That evening, he offered to show her Neptune, but she declined.
The next day, Shelly returned, and they all settled back into their old routines. The chicks were fledging. The breeding season would be over in a few weeks, and the penguins would waddle their starved bodies back to sea to drink deeply, to follow the fish, to elude the predators that waited just below the water line.
Tourist buses gridlocked the parking lot and dirt road, a convoy of idling engines and exhaust. Angela skipped dinner that evening, knowing that Shelly would be there, that by then she’d know about everything that had happened while she was away. Angela knew she had to apologize, but she didn’t have the strength for it yet. She retired to her trailer alone.
Later that night, a noise woke her, and she rushed outside, hoping it was him. Instead she found a pair of dueling male penguins. As she watched them, she cursed Aeneas for ruining her home. For half her life, this had been the only land that mattered, the only place she truly called home. Now the entire landscape felt barren and lonely.
The next morning, a penguin was run over as it tried to scurry between two buses. Angela pleaded again with the guardafauna to shut down the road and make the tourists walk the last half-mile uphill to the trail. He said he would ask the provincial administrator when the man arrived in two months. But that was too late, she tried to tell him; by then, a dozen more penguins could get hit.
No one seemed to understand that the penguins had a tight schedule to adhere to and could not wait patiently for buses to pass. That penguins weren’t comfortable walking through throngs of people to get to the water, to their food source. That these human obstacles could mean life or death for their chicks. Once, Angela remembered, a penguin had died of heat stroke waiting for tourists to let it pass. He’d died right there in front of them, surrounded by flashing cameras. For the birds, the tourist trail was a gantlet, one that grew more dangerous every year.
The tourists are loving them to death, Shelly once said. But Angela didn’t detect much in the way of love. Tourists didn’t come to sit and observe. They didn’t come to learn and appreciate. They came to turn their backs to the penguins, to pose for photographs, to prove that they’d been here. The penguins were nothing but a backdrop to them.
Angela wandered off toward the water, aimless. She stared at the ocean until the sunlight faded, watching penguins fall into the crashing waves, drink deeply, shake the land from their feathers, and finally disappear below. It was so much easier, she realized, to be the one who left than the one left behind.
Angela walked to Diesel’s nest, now empty. She got on her knees and lifted out the bodies of the chicks. She buried them behind her trailer.
Robert
With Aeneas gone, Robert and Lynda retreated to Trelew, the flat inland town they’d flown to from Buenos Aires just a week ago. Robert drove around the town square looking for a place to stay overnight. Lynda pointed to the Hotel San Martin, which had a faded sign that read “historic,” and they checked in. His room was stiflingly hot, with an AC unit that was apparently only good for white noise. Fortunately, the bar downstairs was air conditioned, and he met Lynda there later that evening.
“I read that Butch and Sundance stayed here,” she said.
“And they haven’t renovated since.”
Robert looked around the dark but expansive room. The crowd was a mix of well-dressed locals and tourists in jeans and baseball caps. A Christmas tree in the corner gave the room a festive air. Robert tried to imagine this place in older days, when there were no cars and no roads and the only tourists in town were a couple of young Americans on the run from the law. He could see why characters like Butch and Sundance would end up in these parts—Aeneas, too. The desolate prairies of Patagonia remained one of the last frontiers on a shrinking planet, and it didn’t seem like such a bad refuge.
“So what did Gordon say?” Lynda asked, gesturing at the satellite phone on the bar. Robert, ignoring her, waved the bartender over.
“You haven’t called him yet, have you?” she said.
“What am I going to say, Lynda? ‘Mistakes were made’?”
“Of course. Isn’t that what we always say when we screw up?”
Robert turned away to order a drink. When he turned back, Lynda had left her barstool, and he could see her through the window—she’d grabbed the phone and stepped outside into the burnt orange light of sunset, her shadow stretching out of view. Robert watched her grimace at the phone and hold it away from her ear. He was glad Lynda was the one telling Gordon that Aeneas had escaped yet again.
Now, he just wanted to go home, and maybe they would. There wasn’t anything more they could do without a ship of their own, and even if they found one, they would be a good day or two behind. Robert should have been relieved; Aeneas getting away meant he took with him Robert’s past. And there was so much in his past that he did not want to revisit.
Lynda returned and dropped the phone back on the bar. “Coward,” she said.
“I saw him yelling at you.”
“No, it’s the damn volume control. It went into speaker mode right in my ear. Nothing like sharing government secrets with half the town.”
“So what’s the verdict?”
“We’re heading home. First thing tomorrow.” Lynda finished her bottle of Quilmes and stood. “Gotta call the hubby. Tell him Santa’s coming to town.”
Robert watched her leave, then emptied his glass. He had no one to call. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve. If they were lucky, they would be home Christmas Day. For Robert, this meant only that the stores were closed and he’d have a hard time finding someplace to eat.
Robert was trying to catch the bartender’s attention when he locked eyes with an Argentine woman seated by the glowing fireplace. She held his gaze dangerously long before looking back at the couple seated across from her. She was dark skinned and wore a black skirt and white blouse that hung open when she leaned over for her martini.
He ordered another glass of whiskey and held it to his nose. The smell of hard liquor alone was often enough to put his shoulders at rest, erase the lines from his forehead. Foreplay for his nerves. His mind returned to the woman near the fireplace, and he glanced back in her direction, as if meaning to watch the bodies passing outside on the sidewalk.
Robert didn’t want to spend the night in his cave of a room. He thought back to college, when he and two buddies drove to Padre Island for spring break without any money or anyplace to stay. The rules had been simple—if you wanted a hotel room, you needed to find a girl. That week, Robert hadn’t spent one night in the car and became a celebrity back at college.
A tap on the shoulder brought him back into the present, the bar, the empty glass in front of him. The Argentine woman was now standing next to him.
“Do you speak English?” Robert asked.
“Sí,” she said. She turned to him and smiled. “Habla Español?”<
br />
“Yes,” he said.
Her room was on the top floor. The sheets were clean. And the room was air-conditioned.
* * *
The clock read 3:27 when Robert stumbled through the dark to retrieve the nagging phone. It was Gordon, with a new assignment.
Robert had the front desk wake Lynda, and he waited for her out front, in their still-sloping car whose tire they hadn’t bothered to fix. She was quiet as he drove through the dark to Puerto Madryn, half an hour away.
They arrived at the harbor to find the cruise ship fully loaded, glowing from every orifice, idling loudly as anxious officers and security guards paced about under the lights. It was not the first time Robert had been sucked into a maritime missing persons case. This was one of the higher-profile responsibilities of the Bureau, and also the most frustrating and fruitless. If a person fell off a ship at sea, or jumped, or was pushed, that was that. Without evidence of foul play, which there rarely was, the ship continued on, and the widow or widower returned home. Bodies were rarely found, questions rarely answered. About half a dozen people went missing each year from cruise ships, which wasn’t many compared with the millions of passengers who returned home safely. But this was of little solace to those left behind, who would plead with him to make it all better, to bring back the past.
Robert had mentally rehearsed his lines: The ship is bigger than a city, and how many people get lost in cities every day? More people get temporary amnesia each year than fall off boats. Don’t worry. Don’t worry.
Three Argentine cops were talking to their ship-bound equivalents, and a half-dozen crew members with name tags gathered around as well. But there was no crying spouse, no significant other. The purser, a portly American in khakis and blue polo shirt, filled him in: A male passenger in his late twenties had taken a day trip to see the penguins, then returned to the ship. The man’s I.D. card affirmed him getting off the ship that morning and back on after the field trip. But then the man had left the ship again, less than two hours before it was due to depart.
