The Catch: A Novel (11 page)

She balled up the soiled sheet and threw it onto the sand. Someone
would find it. Wash it. Use it. Not even disposable containers meant for single use in the West would go to waste here. Munroe paid Mohamed and sent him off. She attached the flag that Sami had brought, and without any fanfare they began the slow journey down the channel, back to the open ocean, back to the full throttle of the engine’s cry, where time and monotony would allow her mind to wander freely and the puzzle of the captain and the
Favorita
to become the chew toy that would keep the demons quiet and the memories at bay.

T
HIS CLOSE TO
the equator daylight began and ended at nearly the same time year-round, making it possible to pace and predict by the shades on the horizon, and so the rise of the sun in its arc across the sky marked the progression of time and the concept of distance and brought, with its rising, the heat.

In between the long spells of silence Sami pointed out markings on shore and narrated a travelogue that tied in with his own history, and after he’d interrupted her thoughts for the fifth or sixth time, Munroe said, “How many languages do you speak?”

“I have five.”

“Perfectly?”

“Three perfect,” he said. “I have Swahili, my mother Kikuyu, my father Kalenjin all perfect. And I have English, Arab, and some words here there for more.”

“Good,” she said, and scooted slightly on the bench. Patted it to indicate he should move in closer. “Come talk to me in Swahili.”

“Then you cannot understand,” he said.

“You can interpret,” she said. “Tell me the story twice.”

He smiled again, his cocky smile, and she liked him all the more for it. He sat next to her and throughout the hours recounted one tall tale after the next, first in Swahili and then with equal animation and flourish in English, each story growing longer, larger, and more animated as his audience prompted and questioned. Through snippets and flashes, between water and food and the occasional reapplication of sunscreen she’d picked up in a tourist shop in Lamu, Munroe
learned his family’s history, of his many siblings and half siblings, his education—or lack thereof—and his adventures on the water as a fisherman that had started when he was ten.

By the time they passed Malindi in the early-afternoon hours, Munroe could feel the syntax, the grammar, the resonance of patterns of the country’s lingua franca beginning to form, could feel the tension relaxing now that the key to the aural lock had been handed over, and soon enough, over time and of its own accord, her ability to speak would grow and she would rapidly become more and more fluent.

This same poisonous gift—this savantlike ability to visualize the way the words configured into shapes—had defined her life and turned her into what she was now. Without language, there would have been no gunrunning, without the gunrunning no nights in the jungle fighting off the worst of human predators, without the nights, no instinct of self-preservation and the speed and the need to kill that had marked her every moment, waking and sleeping, since.

T
HEY REACHED THE
outer stretches of Mombasa in the late afternoon. Beach houses and large hotels spread out between palm trees and lush manicured greenery, and the rate of sea traffic seemed fast-paced and hectic after the idyllic slow quiet of Lamu.

The beach shallows sloped out far into the ocean, and jetties and docks were plentiful. Munroe chose one at random, tied off, and then utilized the easier and less attention-garnering option of sending Sami on ahead to discover whom the pier belonged to and if space could be rented. In his absence, she knelt to untape the captain from the pillow, was overwhelmed by the strength of his stench, and held back the gag reflex.

Sour body odor and perpetual decay were part of the pungent bouquet that made up the sub-Saharan landscape, but the body fluid and days without bathing, amplified by the humidity and the hours in the sun, had turned his stink into something else altogether. With only one IV pack left she needed to get him to a hospital soon, and there was no way to take him into a city like this.

Munroe emptied a plastic container, dipped it over the side, and dumped the water over the captain, and when he didn’t react, she did it again and again until he was thoroughly soaked and the runoff took with it the harshest of the smell.

Sami returned to the pier with a local watchman, an
askari
as Sami called him, a man Munroe pegged as in his early fifties, who wore a worn-out button-down shirt, pants two sizes too large, and shoes made from tire rubber, and carried a handmade baton as a symbol of authority. The
askari
negotiated with Munroe for the price of berthing, money that would go directly into his own pockets—or more likely a beer bottle—but as long as it kept the boat from being disturbed for a night or two she was fine with that. She paid the few hundred shillings he wanted and then, with business settled, pulled her pack and vest off the boat and left Sami to stand guard over the captain and her supplies.

On Mombasa’s North Shore, the hotels were larger, more spread out, covered far more length of beach apiece than they had in Shela, and in the search for a place that suited her purpose, Munroe walked a kilometer or two.

She settled finally on a hotel that was a cross between one of the larger block-style monstrosities and the smaller boutique locations and, in a repeat of what had happened in Lamu when she’d come strolling in after the hard journey at sea, hotel patrons stopped and gawked. She passed through to the front desk and languages started up behind her.

H
ER ROOM WAS
on the first floor of a three-story building, one of five in the complex, at the far end of a wide tiled hallway and with a porch that opened to the manicured gardens and the ocean. Munroe drew the curtains, though they didn’t close completely. Turned the air conditioner down a notch. Eventually she’d shut it off altogether because the cool air would only make it harder to stay adjusted to the climate.

She dumped her belongings on the bed and pulled the irreplaceables from the vest and the backpack. The toilet tank, a ziplock bag,
and duct tape became her storage for the handgun, and the bottom pockets of the legs on the bamboo bedframe safekeeping for the money and documents that she didn’t want to carry. Munroe stayed long enough to rinse off the ocean spray and change her clothes, and then with the help of the front desk staff called for a taxi, and the driver took her to the hotel that fronted the pier where she’d docked. She instructed him to wait and then walked through the hotel grounds back to the boat.

Until she knew the area better, had gotten friendly with the eyes of the beach—the
askaris
and the beach boys who spent each day hawking wares and attempting to separate tourists from their money, those who felt the pulse of their own strip of sand—she couldn’t leave the boat alone. Not unless she was willing to return to a stripped-down empty shell. So she waited with the boat and sent Sami to find a boy who’d be willing, for a small fee, to help carry the captain.

He returned fifteen minutes later with two men about his age.

They got the still damp and stinking captain from the boat and to the pier, carried him up the beach to a dirt track that ran between houses and hotels, and finally to the coast highway—if it could be called a highway—where the taxi waited.

She didn’t need to know the city to understand that the viable options for medical facilities narrowed into two choices. Easiest and cheapest would be a government hospital, which, for whatever modern medical equipment it might boast, was still the place to take the captain when she was ready for him to die. In a city this size there would have to be private facilities, smaller and more expensive, that catered to expatriates and tourists and the local population of rich: The doctors would treat first and bill later and save her the hassle of making a daily visit to a pharmacy to replace stolen items or to buy whatever the captain might need next, and this is what she asked for.

T
HE HIGHWAY TOWARD
the city was a two-lane patchwork of asphalt, potholes, and worn-off edges, and in both directions cars, dilapidated trucks, and brightly painted vans blew by in a treacherous dance
of road share with overladen bicycles, pedestrians, and animals. An orange spray-painted van with metallic stickers on the rear window spelling
TOTAL INSANITY
crossed into oncoming traffic, cut off the taxi, then rushed to the side of the road to let off passengers.

The taxi driver muttered words that couldn’t have been polite in any language, and Munroe thumbed toward the van. “What is that?” she said.

“
Matatu
,” the driver said, and for his tone might as well have lifted a shoe to reveal dog crap. “They are crazy.”

There were more minivans at irregular intervals, packed beyond capacity, sometimes with the side door slid wide and a man or two hanging from the opening, sometimes at the edge of the road while people got on and off. Different name here, and maybe a bit more ostentatious than what she’d seen elsewhere, but the concept was the same all over Africa: Privately owned vehicles pumped the lifeblood of humanity within the cities, filling the gaps in public transportation, plying the routes without a schedule, departing only when full and, if they had space—and sometimes when they didn’t—picking up anyone who flagged them down along the way. The faster they drove, the more people they shoved into the seats, the more money they took in, which made safety the last priority.

The taxi driver took Munroe all the way to Mombasa proper, past five-star establishments and hovels off the side of the road, while woodsmoke and diesel exhaust blew in through the open windows. They continued across the Nyali Bridge to the island itself, Kenya’s version of Manhattan, bypassing the thickest of downtown, traversing sections of the city that changed scenery one street to the next, single-story storefronts, restaurants and multistory office buildings, petrol stations and car showrooms, large private homes hidden behind compound walls and thatch-roofed shacks. With the exception of the poorest of the places, every compound, every store, every building had an
askari
or two or three. Some were in uniform, some not, but their role was unmistakable.

If there were private medical facilities closer to where they’d
started, the driver had bypassed them, taking her to the south center of the island to the Aga Khan Hospital, which from the street side of the compound appeared to be more of an oversize block-shaped house than anything medical and only grew to clinic proportions once they were inside the compound walls.

An orderly and two nurses came to Munroe’s aid; quick questions were asked in the face of the emergency she presented, and they whisked the captain away. In the tacit agreement of the continent, the color of Munroe’s skin, of the captain’s skin, had allowed them entry before the talk of money.

Racism in the West had nothing on racism within sub-Saharan Africa, where prejudice against color was perpetrated at every walk of life against those a shade darker. In the worst of times lighter skin created targets and victims, but in the routine of everyday life, through minute reactions and a million assumptions, it opened doors, brought better treatment, and accorded privilege for no other reason than a collective unconcealed prejudice that valued a person based on his or her melanin levels.

Munroe filled out paperwork, paid a deposit for the captain’s first day of stay, and asked for help in locating a cell phone provider, and with the information scribbled on a piece of paper and stuffed in a pocket, she sat in the waiting area, eyes closed and dozing, until the doctor came to find her.

His last name was Patel, probably early thirties—not much older than she—and in a lie that bordered the truth, Munroe explained the circumstances that had brought her here and added to them fabricated secondhand reports of the captain’s violence and volatility and the suggestion that if he should start to come around, for the safety of everyone, it would be better to sedate him and then call her. The doctor took notes and didn’t seem inclined to argue, and she could only hope that in her desire to keep the captain under control until she figured out what to do with him, she hadn’t gone overboard in her description of his mania.

It was after eight by the time Munroe stepped back out into the coastal air and she breathed in the night with its musk of rotting verdure and the exhilaration of having at last rid herself of obligations.

Sami was on the sand by the base of the pier, and with him were the two men who’d helped carry the captain earlier. Even though the conversation was in Swahili, they stopped talking when she approached. She nodded hello and asked Sami away, led him down the pier beyond prying eyes and paid him for his work for the day and, because she liked him, added an extra thousand shillings, then stayed with the boat so that he could find a hot meal.

He returned some forty-five minutes later, same friends in tow, all of them a little louder, a little drunker—most likely courtesy of Sami’s newfound wealth—and with the boat back under watch, Munroe walked the return to the hotel, showered, and collapsed.

T
HREE HOURS OF
sleep, just after midnight, and she woke to the noise of her neighbors in the hallway either returning from or heading off to something that required far more cheer and laughter than the hour warranted, noise echoing off tiled floors and high flat ceilings. Music and the party atmosphere of the tropics also seeped in
from beyond the glass porch door, making it pointless to try to sleep again, so Munroe left her room for the front, where she could use the international line in the business center to make another call to Amber Marie.

The phone rang only once before Amber picked up, and her voice had a disjointed breathless quality to it, as if she’d jolted out of hard-earned rest only to plunge back into the nightmare she wished were a dream.