Impulse

by Steven Gould

  Good.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Davy: “Janitorial”

  At night, when the Daarkon Group’s offices were fully lit so the janitorial staff could clean, the mirrored glass of Rhiarti Tower was no longer opaque. Davy used a telephoto lens from the opposite rooftop, both securing jump sites and getting shots of the custodial uniform the janitors were wearing.

  The next day Davy bought the uniform from a uniform supply store on Foulkrod Street in Philadelphia. “Oh, yeah. Want us to embroider the logo?” The clerk pointed at the emblem over the breast pocket in the photo. “Don’t recognize the company. Youse here in the city?”

  “West of town.” This was true since it covered everything from the suburbs to the Pacific ocean. “They have patches for the company logo.”

  The clerk snorted. “Patches. Cheapskates. Youse all right with shoes?”

  * * *

  Davy waited until the janitor vacuuming the corner office moved out into the hallway before he jumped. This was clearly the executive level, judging both by the furnishings and the number of offices. The two levels below had fifteen offices on this side of the building. This floor had six.

  He was wearing the custodial uniform and his dark goatee. The beard itched. The uniform didn’t. He’d run it twice through the wash to get rid of the “just manufactured” creases.

  He shook out the large plastic bag he was carrying and pulled the trash can out from under the credenza. It was heavier than he expected and he saw that it had a crosscut shredder built into the top.

  This must be the place.

  Certainly normal businesses had perfectly legitimate reasons to shred documents, but it warmed his heart nonetheless. He dumped the bin into his bag.

  There were no obvious motion detectors or cameras in the room, so he secured a jump site. The name on the door was Mark Liebowitz. Moving cautiously out into the hall, he saw the man with the vacuum moving down the hall away from him. Beyond the man, a woman with rags and a spray bottle walked into another office. Davy walked the other direction, down the hallway around the corner. As he had thought, there were cameras in the corners of the building, covering the hallways. He kept his head down and turned into the next office, which was labeled Todd Hostetler. He bent over to pull out Todd’s shredder and an alarm went off.

  He hadn’t touched the bin yet, so he doubted it was wired. He didn’t see any motion detectors.

  Bet it was the cameras in the hall.

  Davy walked back to the first office and saw all four custodians exiting into the stairwell at the end of the hall. A secondary alarm, on the door itself, was shrieking. He heard footsteps from behind and looked back around the corner. Two men in identical monogramed blazers were coming up the hallway, checking each office in turn, right hands inside their jackets in a way that made Davy want to jump immediately away. The one in the lead saw Davy but instead of pulling a gun from his jacket, he called out, “Fire alarm. Exit the building!”

  Davy blinked, then waved his hand in acknowledgement and walked away, toward the shrieking door.

  If it was the camera, they would know it was a guy in a janitor’s uniform.

  Once in the stairway the door alarm was painfully loud. There weren’t any cameras evident, so Davy jumped away.

  How did they know?

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Mastaans”

  I woke up two hours before my alarm was set to go off—4:30 in the morning. I looked at the clock and tried to close my eyes, but they popped right open again.

  The cabin was silent. I hadn’t shut my door last night and the light in Mom and Dad’s room was still on.

  I swung down from my bed and padded across the hall.

  Mom and Dad’s bed was empty. I jumped downstairs but they weren’t there, so I checked the house in New Prospect—also empty. I jumped back to the cabin and put on my school clothes, then the rain boots and gear.

  It had stopped raining in the little stand of trees south of the refugee shelter but the water had risen. I arrived standing in a foot and a half of water, and the temperature was warmer. The air felt heavy, warm and very humid. The sun was near the western horizon, shining through broken clouds. I jumped back to the mud room at the cabin and hung up the rain gear, but kept the boots.

  Good thing there was a drain in the floor. Several quarts of floodwater had splashed through when I’d jumped.

  When I returned and exited the trees, people were all over the hillock, including just outside the stand of trees. If it wasn’t for the high water, they’d probably have been in there, too. I wonder what they made of my splashing.

  Many stared at me, strange western girl in what they probably considered to be boy’s clothes, threading my way through the crowd. I nodded and smiled, weaving my way between people, repeating what Mom had said when moving through the crowd the night before, “Dekhi. Dekhi.”

  I hoped I was saying “excuse me.”

  There were more boats pulled up on the shore. Traditional short and narrow oar and pole boats, a few long, fat-waisted boats with woven rounded covers over their midships, a rigid hulled inflatable with army markings, and a forty-foot, flat-roofed passenger ferry with an inboard diesel.

  As I passed the trees with the tarps stretched among them I saw that there hadn’t been a huge increase in refugees. Most of them had just moved out onto the grass, trying to get out of the mud, I guess.

  I saw last night’s angry teacher from the flooded madrasa. He’d rinsed the worst of the mud out of his tunic, though it was still stained. He was sitting on a box surrounded by his students. I averted my eyes as I went by but I heard someone say something and several heads turned. I walked on, trying not to show any anxiety, but I could feel my head dropping down between my shoulders and my footsteps speeding up.

  The door side of my parents’ tent had been rolled up, and a row of boxes with a blanket thrown over them formed a counter across most of the open side.

  The chukri girls were still there, only now they seemed to be working the counter. I looked toward the back of the tent and saw Mom, cross-legged on the floor, leaning back against a pile of unopened blankets. Her eyes were shut.

  Seven refugees were standing in front of the counter while my friend from last night, the girl who reminded me of Tara, demonstrated how to use a water filter, pumping dirty river water from a pail, though the filter, and into a clear plastic bottle. When she finished the demonstration, she apparently asked if they had any questions. Then two of the other girls handed out packaged water filters, blankets, and ration bars to the audience.

  There was a chorus of “Bhalo achi!” and the girls answered, “Kichhu mone koro na!”

  I went around the end of the counter, nodding to the girls. They smiled back and bobbed their heads.

  Mom opened her eyes as I walked near, scuffing my feet deliberately. “I wasn’t sleeping, really.”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  “Was I snoring? I’ll bet I was snoring.”

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “He’s got some errands,” she said, vaguely.

  I gestured at the girls at the front desk. “I see you’ve got help.”

  Mom smiled. “Oh, yes.”

  “What will happen to them?”

  “Rama is working on it. He’s contacted a local Imam whose part of an antitrafficking network. Most of their activities are educational—prevention—but there are a few communities that help rescued trafficking victims. One of them is just downstream, but it’s on the other side of the floodwaters.”

  “So they’ll be okay?”

  Mom rocked her hand back and forth. “No promises. But a better chance than they had before they floated away from the brothel.” She shook her head. “They don’t swim, you know. Rama has been translating for me. They grabbed onto floating wreckage and pushed out into the storm. Pretty brave.”

  I thought, Or maybe drowning wasn’t as scary as what they had to face every day.

  “I’ve got a couple
of hours before I have to be at school. Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?”

  Mom blinked and her shoulders sagged. I could tell she’d been keeping herself going by willpower alone.

  “Well, okay. Your father should be back soon, anyway. They know what to do,” she jerked her chin toward the girls at the counter. “Be discreet, but don’t be stupid. If there’s any danger, jump away.”

  She stood up slowly, tilting and twisting her neck. She stepped up to the counter and looked around. “Not that there should be any danger.”

  “Right.”

  “If you need a translator there are several Ingreji speakers in the medical-clinic tent.” She gave me a sideways one-armed hug and left, ostensibly by the rear door, but really from the screened corner at the back of the tent.

  I smiled at the girls at the counter and pointed to myself, careful to do it with my right hand. “Cent.” I tapped my sternum. Then tilted my hand out toward them.

  The girl who reminded me of Tara was called Anika. And there was Rupa, Megh, Kanta, and Sathia. We amused ourselves for several minutes by testing my retention of each name. All of them had black hair and amazingly beautiful brown eyes, but fortunately their saris were of different colors and their nose ornaments differed.

  More refugees came for water filters and rations and I stepped outside, watching the river, while the girls did their spiel and demonstration.

  There was commerce happening. Several boats were selling vegetables and fruit to those refugees with money. And some boats were taking money to ferry refugees away, possibly to family in unflooded areas, since most of these people’s homes were still inundated.

  I heard the whine of a powerboat and saw a white-and-green fiberglass police launch come in from upriver, planing, way out in the regular channel. It turned toward us and slowed, coasting on its own bow wave for a moment, then came in slowly, occasionally detouring around flooded structures and trees.

  As it got closer I saw one uniformed policeman driving with an older women in elaborate dress standing beside him. Four other men wearing tube sarongs—the lungi—and starched white shirts, sat in the bow.

  I wondered if they were more aid workers, when one of the girls behind me gasped.

  I looked back at them, but the front of the tent was empty. I went to the counter and looked over. They were on the floor, huddled into the corner where the tent wall met the counter.

  They looked terrified.

  I looked back at the police boat as it gunned its engines to push the bow up onto the grass at the shoreline. The men in the white shirts were helping the woman over the bow. She shrugged their arms off and jumped down, looking around, then waved her hand at them, flapping it toward the crowd. They moved off while the policeman tied the boat’s bowline to a stunted shrub.

  I reached up and began releasing the ties that held the rolled-up tent wall. The girls saw what I was doing and leaped, up to the other ties, quickly freeing the panel. It dropped down onto the counter and I tugged it outward, letting it fall all the way to the ground, then ducked into the tent at the corner. There was still a battery-powered fluorescent light on at the back of the tent. I held my finger to my lips, stepped back to the light, and turned it off.

  I went out the back door and tied the flap shut, then went looking for Rama.

  “Anyone speak English?” I asked at the clinic tent next door.

  A man wearing a Bangladeshi army uniform, with a stethoscope slung over his neck said, “Yes?”

  “I’m looking for Ramachandra, one of the aid workers.”

  He nodded. “Rama, yes. I saw him this morning, but not lately. Have you looked at their supply tent?”

  “Sorry. Don’t know where that is.”

  He pointed out the door toward the trees and tarps. “In the middle.”

  “Thanks. Uh, bhalo achi.”

  He grinned, a flash of white, and said, “I wish you luck.” But it came out like one word. “Iwishyouluck.”

  It was a lot easier to walk through the trees than it had been eight hours earlier, but the mud was still bad and I was grateful for the boots.

  I found Rama outside another army tent set up in the middle of the trees. I hadn’t noticed it the night before. The rain had made everything dark and the tent’s dark green fabric had faded into the murk. Rama was lying in a string hammock, reading.

  “Rama,” I called.

  He turned his head and his eyebrows went up.

  “Where did you go all day, little one?”

  I shrugged. “Slept. Not adjusted to this time zone. Can you translate for me?”

  “The chukri girls?”

  “Yes.”

  He groaned. “I’ve been talking to Shahjahan off and on all day. I thought he was going to leave them alone?”

  “I don’t know who you mean.”

  “The teacher from the madrasa. The one who fell in the mud?”

  “Oh. No. It’s not him. A police boat just pulled up with a policeman, a woman, and several other men. When the girls saw them, they hid. They looked terrified. I need to ask them what’s going on.”

  Rama swung out of the hammock. “No idea. Let’s go see.”

  He led me out of the trees on the river side, near the madrasa students and teachers. The policeman was there, talking with Shahjahan, the headmaster. Rama threaded his way to the outer ring of seated students and asked one of them something in Bengali. I moved closer as the student answered. Rama turned to me and said, “They’re looking for the girls. The policeman says they’re thieves—that they stole valuable property under cover of the flooding.”

  I frowned. “What? Did you see them bring anything?”

  Rama shook his head. “Only themselves.”

  The madrasa headmaster apparently had the same point. He said something back to the policeman and Rama translated. “What property did they steal? They arrived here with only their clothes.”

  I winced. I guess we’d gotten beyond the point of claiming they’d never arrived here.

  Rama exhaled. “You said he came with a woman? A police woman?”

  “No uniform. She wore a fancy sari.” I swiveled my head around. “There she is.”

  The woman was up at the north end of the crowd, walking through the refugees, peering at faces, occasionally asking questions.

  “I bet she’s their shordani. And they brought mastaans.” Rama said. At my blank look he translated. “Musclemen. Gangsters.”

  “Why the policeman, then?”

  “Oh, he’s their cop, probably. The local police on the take. The brothels have to pay off the police to operate.”

  The policeman was shouting at Shahjahan now, but his students didn’t like it, apparently, for several of them stood up abruptly. The policeman’s voice dropped in volume, suddenly, and he stepped back.

  I heard a scream and then another from the north, from the tents. I said, “They’ve found the girls!”

  Rama yelled something in Bengali and ran toward the tent. I ran back into the trees and jumped to the screened back corner of the tent.

  It wasn’t as dark as it was before. The front flap at the corner had been pulled up onto the counter and there was a gap. I heard a man yelling and saw movement between me and the light.

  I moved forward and saw a silhouetted man struggling with two of the girls, pulling them along by their upper arms. I jumped in place and added thirty feet per second toward him. My left shoulder hit his back. He flew into the counter and flipped over it, ripping the wall of the tent away and tumbling out into the sunlight, wrapped in the heavy fabric. I fell to the floor of the tent, my shoulder numb, the wind knocked out of me.

  With the light flooding in I saw that the girls he’d been manhandling were Rupa and Kanta, now staring at me and rubbing their arms where the man’s grip had torn free. The other girls were not in sight. Gasping, I struggled to my feet and leaned over the counter. Two men were pulling Megh and Sathia toward the boat. The woman, the shordani, was already step
ping up onto the bow, pulling Anika after her by the hair.

  The students from the madrasa were following Rama up the shoreline, hampered by the other refugees scattered across the grass. The refugees had jumped to their feet and were looking around, trying to figure what danger the crowd of students was running from.

  Rama was shouting, the students were shouting, the policeman, trying to catch up with the students from behind, was shouting. I wished I understood Bengali.

  The policeman went straight to the boat, pushing though the crowd until he reached the water’s edge and then splashing up the shallows.

  The students stopped, forming a barrier between the two men with Megh and Sathia, and the boat.

  The mastaans tried to push forward, pulling the girls behind, and the students shoved the men back, some of them also pulling at the girls, trying to get them away from the mastaans.

  The mastaans yanked the girls back and one of them reached under his shirt to the waistline of his lungi, coming out with a blocky automatic. He fired a single shot into the air and the crowd shrank back.

  Oh, no.

  I was breathing again but the numbness in my shoulder was changing to a sharp ache. I thought about jumping to the man with the gun, but I saw him duck suddenly, as a rock flew overhead. He pointed his gun toward the thrower, and three more rocks hit him from different directions. He clutched at his head and dropped to the ground. Sathia, released, turned to Megh and pulled her away from the remaining mastaan, who dropped his hands to his sides and eyed the crowd.

  The motor on the police launch roared to life, and it backed away from the shore even as the crowd lunged toward it. I could see the shordani, one hand still gripping Anika’s hair, yelling at the policeman as she gestured back toward the shore with her free hand. The policeman gestured at the crowd and yelled back.

  The fourth mastaan, who’d been at the south end of the camp and not part of the struggle, came running up the shoreline before plunging into the water, to swim out to the boat. The mastaan who’d released Megh shoved his way through the crowd and followed, leaving the man who’d been struck with stones and the man I’d shoulder-checked back at the tent.