Chasing the Storm (10 page)

“
Petaloudes
,” he nodded.

“
Petaloudes
. Is that ‘butterfly’ in Greek?”

The waiter nodded.

“Petal!” Ann exclaimed.

The waiter looked blank. “I can a taxi arrange,” he said. “But to get to
petaloudes
, you must then ride
gaidaros
.”

“
Gaidaros
?”

“
Gaidaros
. Is like horse, but—” he patted the air to indicate that it was smaller.

Rygg looked at Ann. “Well, I guess we’ll find out what that is,” he said.

A
gaidaros
turned out to be a mule. The taxi dropped them by the edge of the road and the driver said he’d be back in a couple hours. From a boy sprawled beneath a tree, they hired a pair of mules. Rygg helped Ann onto her steed with cupped hands under her heel, and she shrieked as the mule started trotting off. Rygg mounted his mule, praying that its spindly ankles would support his bulk, and clicked his tongue to start it after her. The mules seemed to know exactly where they were going. They wound down a narrow track, through olive groves, past twisted fences. Ann’s quivering rump engulfed her mule’s spine.

The Valley of the Butterflies turned out to be a bit of a misnomer. For one thing, it wasn’t exactly a valley, more of a brownish clearing at the base of a hill. And the lone occupant of the valley, an ancient man in a marvelous waistcoat, informed them, once he’d laid down his wooden flute that the butterflies were, in fact, moths. Rygg had imagined a flower-spangled dell filled with rainbow-colored, flitting fragments, but there were no moths in sight. Only when they moved into the clearing did they see that the brown on the leaves and branches was in fact thousands of winged creatures, clustered so densely that they looked like textured bark. As they moved among them, they wafted up here and there, revealing orange undersides to their wings, so they looked like drifting sparks.

“Oh, lovely, lovely,” Ann whispered, turning her face to him, and he knew he could have kissed her right there.
Not yet
, he thought. Not just yet. The old man had started playing his flute again, a breathy, wispy, meandering music that seemed to emerge from the landscape.

The flute player dipped them up some water from the well. He served it to them in a metal ladle. It was cold and tasted metallic, and faintly of the sea. Rygg tried to give him money, but the man waved him away.

Once back at the hotel, she commented that she would be having a drink at the pool bar after she’d freshened up. He nodded. “Might see you around, then, Ann. Thanks for the afternoon,” and he swaggered off. His ass ached from the mule ride.

After he’d showered, he spied on her through the gap in his curtains. She was sitting primly in her chair by the bar, and she seemed to have done something to her hair. It was down around her cheeks and the tips were curled. During the two minutes he watched her, she looked up from her book eleven times, glancing over the pool toward the doors of the hotel. He smiled. He had her on the hook.

At dinner, he walked in his usual forty-five minutes late. Ann was at the round table, and caught his eye as he walked in. He nodded and raised his book in her direction, then took a table at the opposite end of the room. He told the waiter he wanted to eat “genuine Greek food, the real deal,” and the waiter brought him a collection of little platters, filled with stuffed grape leaves and hummus and baba ghanouj and ringlets of marinated squid and other nameless delicacies. Rygg ordered a bottle of retsina. As he ate, he didn’t look once in Ann’s direction, immersing himself in
Anna Karenina
and the sour wine. When he got up to leave, she was still sitting there, forlorn, pretending to read.

As he walked down the hallway back to his room, a door suddenly opened in front of him, and a hand dragged him into darkness.

April 28

The days dawned blue and spotless, the sun bleaching the color out of the sky by eight in the morning. The sea lay dormant, and the
Alpensturm
seemed to have ceased moving, so that when Dmitri was escorted to and from the galley, he felt that they were stuck in glass – a flaw in the midst of a colossal mirror that stretched to the ends of the earth. He’d started developing headaches. They would come on at noon and get worse as the day wore on, so by evening it hurt to shift his eyes in their sockets. He wondered if it was due to the lack of water – they were rationed to a glass a day – or the paucity of their diet. Every day the headaches started a little earlier, so that he took to preparing supper with his eyes closed.

“Are you all right?” Ilya whispered to him, and he shook his head, but there was nothing he could do about it. He’d tried asking the commando for medicine, but was threatened with the machine gun, so he just steadied himself against the refrigerator and kept peeling potatoes mechanically. His hands trembled, and he worked slowly so he wouldn’t cut himself.

And then one morning he couldn’t get up. The kitchen commando banged into the room at dawn as usual and kicked his ribs, but he just groaned and turned over on the soaked mattress. He had a pain in his groin. His eyes were gummed together, and he was shivering. The commando shouted and kicked him again, and he tried to say something, but his tongue was a stake of parched driftwood in his throat. The sound that emerged was a ghastly rattling croak that seemed to come from someone else.

When the third series of kicks had failed to rouse him, the commando switched on a powerful flashlight and shone it in his eyes. He touched Dmitri’s forehead with the back of his hand, then went out. Dmitri sank into darkness again.

He vaguely remembered being jostled out of the room and down some stairs. There was a prick in his arm, and then blessed sleep.

Eventually he woke into darkness so complete he thought his eyes were still gummed shut. He felt a little better, but his mouth was like sandpaper. His joints ached. For a long time he lay with his eyes open. Then he tried to sit up. The pain in his groin made him gasp and lie back down. And there was something else: his leg was immobile. Cautiously, he bent his knee and felt resistance. They must have tethered his ankle somehow to the bedpost.

A long time later, a gibbering wail that seemed to come from just beside his left ear made him jerk away involuntarily. He gasped from the pain.

From the other side of him, a voice shouted: “Shut up, you bastard!” But the wail continued for a full minute before subsiding into fast panting.

Dmitri’s first effort at speech produced just a sigh, but finally he was able to croak, “Who’s that?”

“Oh, another one,” said the voice to his right, and he knew immediately that it was one of the Siberians. “Who are you?”

“Dmitri. The kitchen boy.”

“You’re sick too?”

“I think so.”

“Welcome to the
Alpensturm
emergency ward. I’m Vaslav. That’s Jonas over there. He’s having one of his bad days, I think.”

“What – what happened to him?” Dmitri asked.

“Nutcase. He doesn’t even know his name anymore.”

“And what about you?”

“My wound got infected. I got hit on the cheek. I can’t even open my eye, man.”

“Are they giving you medicine?”

“All they’ve got is one crappy antibiotic and some aspirin. They give those to anyone who comes in here. What about you? What have you got?”

“I don’t know. My groin hurts.”

“Shit. Probably appendicitis. You’re going to die here, man.”

That, Dmitri felt, was probably the truth. He found the prospect mildly comforting. At least it would get him off the ship, he thought and smiled thinly into the darkness.

Chapter 9

Miss Devonshire’s Story

May 2

Rygg stumbled into
the darkened room and barked his shins on something. A silhouette shut the door and then they were in darkness. Arms up, hands beside your face, he thought, his heart pounding. He punched, and struck some sort of plastic surface.

“Quiet, Torgrim.” It was Marin.

Rygg started laughing.

“Shh, shh, shh.”

“
Helvette!
Where the fuck are we?”

“It is a small closet for cleaning supplies. I think you punched a container for bleach.”

“So what’s this all about?”

“Nothing. Nothing, don’t worry. I wanted an update. How is it going?”

“Fine.”

“But you were not sitting with her at supper this evening.”

“No. Part of the plan. All part of the plan, don’t you worry.”

“We don’t have much time.” Marin put a hand on his arm.

“Marko.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve got this thing under control, trust me. But it has to take its own pace. You know what I’m saying? I can’t just shout, ‘Give me the fucking information, bitch!’”

“Yes, of course. I apologize. I am a little under pressure. There has been an interesting new development. Have you watched the television?”

“Not at all.”

“The Russian government has sent out a massive mission to rescue the ship. Two nuclear submarines, four warships, airplanes.”

Rygg was silent a moment. “That’s too big,” he said. “Too big, too much advertisement, for just one ship.”

“My thought as well. Why so much advertisement? We must discover who is behind all this. As quickly as possible.”

Back in his room, Rygg once again spied on Ann as she sat by the pool. At first she looked up from her book every minute or so, but then seemed to resign herself to her loneliness, and slumped back in her chair. She ordered another glass of wine. After an hour and a half, she slipped her bookmark into the pages and walked slowly back into the hotel, with her head down. Listening at his door, Rygg heard her key in the lock.

He gave her fifteen minutes, enough time to get into something comfortable. Then he called room service.

She answered his knock within seconds: she must have been standing beside the door. The aftermath of tears lay in her eyes. She looked bewildered to see him, and put her hands to her cheeks.

“Hi there, Ann,” he said. He held up the Scrabble set. “I could use a game before bed, what do you think?”

She opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it and stood aside to let him enter. She was wearing a lacy nightgown with nothing on underneath, and she smelled like coconut and lilacs.

They set up the game on the bed and sprawled on either side of it. She had just laid down the first word – ‘virulent’, for 32 points – when there was a soft knock at the door.

“Who could that be?” she said, frankly astonished. When two waiters entered, one bearing a pair of glasses and a bucket of ice containing a magnum of champagne, and the other with a silver bowl of grapes and strawberries, she could say nothing at all. She just lay there gaping as the waiters uncorked the wine and cleared a space on the desk for the glasses and fruit. They bowed as they accepted Rygg’s inordinate tips.

“Thought we might have a little something to ease the game along,” he told her, pouring the champagne. “Cheers!”

“It’s too much, Torgrim,” she murmured, but her cheeks were pink with delight.

“There’s no such thing as too much,” he scoffed. “There’s only not enough. You have to
live
!” He clashed his glass against hers and returned to the game. “Now, let’s see here. ‘Virulent’, huh?”

It took her less than an hour to thrash him, even more thoroughly this time. Toward the end of the game, when he laid down ‘me’ in response to her ‘abjure’, she had a fit of giggling, and he figured she was ready.

He closed the board and moved it aside, then held a strawberry up between them. “Can I say something, Ann?” he asked.

She nodded.

“You know what I noticed the moment I stepped into that dining room yesterday?”

She shook her head, gesturing no.

“Your lips. You have the most amazing mouth. Did anyone ever tell you that?” And before she could say a word, he leaned forward and kissed her. Her lips floundered under his for a moment, but then relaxed. The kiss lingered and lingered, and he could feel her melt completely. He moved across the bed and lay looking into her eyes. “Oh Torgrim,” she said. He reached up and turned off the lamp.

She wasn’t his type at all, and he’d been worried that it wouldn’t go well. But it had been a long time, and somehow the pent desire for Lena transferred, so that he was able to give complete attention to Ann’s body. He explored her gigantic breasts, licking her puckered pink nipples, lightly nibbling at them, seizing great handfuls of her ass while she moaned. Then he moved his tongue into the crevices of her belly, still redolent of suntan lotion, and down to the wispy triangle of hair below. She seemed uncertain what he intended to do, and kept her thighs squeezed together, but he gently nuzzled his tongue between them and eased them apart. It had been a while since he’d tasted a woman. “Oh Torgrim,” she said. “Oh my goodness! Oh Torgrim!”

When they were done, she was still panting, with a tender little moan at the end of each breath. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?” he asked, and she grabbed his hair and tugged it, still moaning.

He fetched the bowl of fruit and, leaning on his elbow, fed her a strawberry. She made a move to cover her body with the sheet, but he stopped her. “Don’t,” he said. “I want to look at you.” Her body, in the moonlight from the window, was a vast blue-and-silver landscape. “How long are you here for, Ann?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. She took another strawberry.

“How’s that?”

“Oh, it’s such a strange situation, Torgrim. I don’t know if I can really explain it.”

“A situation? How do you mean? With your work?”

“No. Well, yes, I suppose. I’m not really supposed to talk about it.”

“Even with your lover?” He leaned forward and kissed her. She tasted of strawberry.

“I suppose there’s no harm. Though they
were
very strict.”

“Who’s
they
?” He lay back and looked at the ceiling, at the loose nets of moonlight reflected off the pool. He examined a grape, then popped it into his mouth.

“Well, it really was the strangest thing, Torgrim.” The words came out in a rush, as though a cork had been pulled. “The most unusual thing that’s ever happened in my job, actually. What happened is that precisely nine days ago, I was in my living room – I have a little house in Dover. More of a cottage, really. I was drinking my afternoon cuppa, and a car drove up. Well, I don’t get many visitors, just Mary comes over some evenings to play Scrabble. I got up to see who it was. It was two men. I’d never seen them before. They were quite ordinary looking, in suits. The first thing I thought was that somebody had died, and they were policemen – they had that sort of somber look. Not military, but, you know … official. Anyway, they asked if they could come in. I gave them some tea, but they didn’t drink it. They sat there looking at me. And then one of them said that they were from the Ministry of Defense. Well, I couldn’t understand
what
they were doing in my house, and they had to actually point out that the Coast Guard falls under the Ministry of Defense. I’d never thought about it before.

Anyway, they sat there for a few minutes, and then they told me that they were very pleased with my work, and they handed me a nice little certificate – I have it here somewhere – saying that I had performed superior service for the nation. All very lovely. And then they said that they were offering me a free holiday in Greece for, now how did they put it? – ‘in appreciation of my outstanding service’.” She blushed as she said this, the moonlit silver of her cheeks tarnishing.

“So they handed me a ticket and said they’d put some spending money in my account. I was to leave the next day! The next morning, in fact. I was so thoroughly astonished, I nearly fell off my chair. I mean, I do try at my work, and I’m, you know, I’m always punctual, which Robby Gastineau isn’t sometimes, I’m afraid, but this seemed so … Anyway, of
course
I accepted. And then they got in their car and drove off.”

“What kind of car?” Rygg asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry,” he grinned at her. “I’m into cars. What do Ministry of Defense folks drive in England?”

“I have no idea, I’m afraid. But I did remember the license: BD5I SMR. I’ve got a head for figures. That’s why I’m good at my job.”

“I’m sure you’re the best, Ann. And that is a crazy tale.”

“But that’s not even the strangest part, you see.”

“Tell me the strangest part, then.” He lay back again.

“Well, before they drove off, actually while we were standing in the doorway, they told me not to tell anybody. They said, and they were right, of course, that the others might become jealous. So it was to be a secret. They were very serious, if you know what I mean. I said all right, but I was in such a tizzy, you know, that the first thing I did, as soon as they left, was to call up Millie.”

“Who’s Millie?” Rygg asked.

“Millie. Millie Fisher. Oh, now she’s a friend from way back, and she’s actually the one who got me the job in the first place. She’s in London now, of course, one of the managers. Anyway, I told Millie that I had this holiday given me, and she said nothing. For a long time, there was just silence on the phone. And then she asked who had given me the holiday and I said these two men and she asked me to describe them. Then she was silent again. I said, Millie, what is it? Why aren’t you saying anything? Normally she’s a chatterbox, you know. And she told me – well, she said she wasn’t supposed to be saying it, she’d promised – but she told me that two days before, two men had visited
her
. And it sounded like the same two men!”

“What did they want?” Rygg asked, keeping his voice dull, still watching the moonlight on the ceiling.

“They wanted to know all about
me
!” She lifted her arms and let them fall back on the mattress.

“Maybe they just wanted to make sure you didn’t have any skeletons in the closet, you know?”

“Well, that’s what I thought. And that’s what Millie thought. You know, just a background check. But something was odd, she told me. Just a little thing, and at first she thought it might be nothing at all, but listen to this, Torgrim – are you listening?”

He turned to her. “Oh, sure, sure. So, something odd, you said?”

“Yes. While they were at her house, she went into the loo for a moment, and when she came out, she heard one of the men say something to the other in a foreign language. She stopped behind the wall, and she was sure one of them said a word in – she said it sounded like
Ger
man!”

“How strange.” His voice was as flat as he could make it.

“I
know
. Well, but Millie is a bit, you know, prone to hearing odd things. She always thinks people are chasing her in the street, for one thing, when they’re not. Anyway, so what she did is, she got the men’s names and as soon as they left, she called up the Ministry of Defense. And no one had ever heard of them!”

“What were their names?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think they actually gave them to me. Anyway, she thought that was suspicious. But then as soon as she hung up, someone called back from the Ministry and said that there had been a mistake, and they were something, I forget. Oh yes – extra-official agents, I think they said.”

“So does she …”

“
Millie
thinks the men are foreign terrorists!” She giggled, and her breasts wobbled about like an earth tremor.

“And you’re being, what … kidnapped? On the island of Paros?”

“I know. There could be worse fates, couldn’t there?”

“Maybe you could ask these terrorists to kidnap me as well.”

She couldn’t stop giggling.

“So did the men look foreign?” he asked.
Details, details, details
, Marin had insisted.

“Oh, they looked quite ordinary to me. One had very green eyes, that’s the only thing I noticed. You don’t often see really
green
eyes. They’re usually sort of a light brown or blue.”

“Tall, short?”

“Medium, I’d say. Shorter than you, certainly. The green-eyed one was hairy.”

The words sent a shiver down his spine, but Torgrim kept cool.

“Like me?” He brushed the mat on his chest.

She giggled and laid a hand on his stomach. “I didn’t see his chest. But his
hands
were very hairy. And he had these eyebrows.” She drew a line over her eyes.

“So assuming you’ve been abducted by terrorists and packed off to Paradise Island to serve your punishment – any idea why?”

“None at all.”

“You didn’t spot an extra-big ship the day before or something?”

“I don’t even
see
the ships, most of the time. I just write down the information.”

“Well, I suppose it’s time to confess,” Rygg said.

“What?” She turned to him, her giggles fading.

“It was me,” he said. “I hired them, to get you to Paros, so I could seduce you.”

“Oh, Torgrim,” she murmured. “Honestly …” She reached over and patted his cheek with a tender, almost maternal gesture, and to his surprise he felt an erection stir again.
Time to leave
, he told himself.

But when he was at the door, he turned into the room. A thought had struck him. “Ann?” he said.

“Yes,” she answered sleepily.

“Do you watch TV?”

“I don’t even have a telly in the house,” she said. “I prefer to read novels.”

“Well, goodnight, then.”

“Goodnight, Torgrim.”

May 3

By eight the next morning, Rygg, Marin, and Lena were on a ferry to Piraeus. Rygg had rushed into Ann’s room before breakfast, told her he’d received an urgent email and had to get back to Hamburg immediately. Before she could say a word, he kissed her astonished mouth and dashed out of the room. She sputtered something just before he closed the door.