The Consignment (19 page)

He hesitated. “I got a bump.”

“A bump.”

“You deaf?”

“But you’re okay now.”

“I’m plenty okay enough to kick your ass when you get back here. Call me if anything changes. Otherwise, you’re on unpaid leave till I see you in my office.” He hung up.

Next, the communications officer placed a call to my home for me, but Fiona wasn’t in, so I left a message, telling her I was fine, saying that it was a long story, that I’d call again later. I didn’t mention where I was, or that my cabinmate was Rita Durranti.

Back down in the cabin, I recounted my conversation with Rossiter to Rita. She hit the roof.

“You told me Trevanian had no money,” she said in disbelief.

“That’s what I thought.”

“He stole the bill of lading. That’s what you said. God. If you hadn’t told me that, I wouldn’t have gone to the docks with you. I wouldn’t be here.”

“That’s what he did. He must have. That’s what Rossiter meant about getting a bump. Trevanian must have sapped him.”

“Then he paid Rossiter twelve million dollars?”

I went through it again. “Yesterday the materiel was aboard ship, set to go. But Trevanian knew Rossiter would unload it unless the money came through. Once it was unloaded, even if Trevanian produced the money later, he’d have been tied up with Customs paperwork for days. The stevedores might take weeks to find another carrier.” I pointed. “And if the stuff was unloaded, Customs would have seen the switched tags.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

“It does if Trevanian always intended to pay the money. If he knew the money was coming through, what risk was he taking stealing the bill, maybe holding on to Rossiter for a while? When the money came through, it was a safe bet Rossiter wouldn’t give a damn about the bill of lading.”

“But if Rossiter got sapped—”

“Twelve million bucks has cured his headache.”

“Rossiter never struck me as a forgive-and-forget kind of guy.”

We were still chewing it over when the communications officer came and called Rita away for her turn at the radio. When she was gone, I climbed onto the upper bunk and lay down and wondered about the money. I didn’t understand how Trevanian had gotten his hands on it so fast. If it was always available, why get involved with the diamonds? The Greenbaum side deal? Maybe. But would Trevanian really have risked the whole Haplon deal just for the sake of that? I decided that Rossiter was right. Either Lagundi had sold the diamonds and then given Trevanian the twelve million dollars, or the money had been stumped up by the real end user of the materiel, Trevanian and Lagundi’s client.

I studied the rusting rivets in the ceiling. I put the first possibility, the diamond sale, aside for the moment. The second possibility, money from the client, seemed more straightforward. The materiel was going to the Congo. The end user had to be either the Congolese government or one of the rebel groups opposed to the government. Either side could have been using diamonds to make the purchase, so that didn’t help me, but the money had been transferred extremely fast when Trevanian really needed it. That suggested some well-established chain of command, which in turn suggested a government. The Congolese? But then I recalled that the rebel groups were supported by other governments in the region, the likes of Zimbabwe and Rwanda, so I was back to square one. I was no further on when Rita returned fifteen minutes later.

She climbed into the lower bunk without saying a word. I hung my head over the side of my bunk.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“Can they get us off?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

She screwed up her face. “Let’s just say they weren’t feeling in much of a mood to help us out.”

I asked her if they understood how important it was to get word to Channon.

“They’re not stupid,” she said.

“Care to tell me what they said?”

“They didn’t say much. They know the line’s not secure.”

“You’re pissed off.”

She looked at me. “I have to report to the nearest U.S. consulate when we put in at the first port. Somebody mentioned disciplinary action.”

“Against you? That’s ridiculous.”

“My job is on the line now, Ned. And if you don’t mind, I don’t feel like discussing it just now. Not with you.”

She rolled over and faced the wall. When I said her name, she didn’t move and I watched her awhile, thought of speaking again, then checked myself. What could I say that was going to make her feel any better? Or me? It was as if the operation was cursed, blighting the lives of all who came too near. Dimitri was dead, my marriage was foundering, and now Rita’s career seemed to be holed beneath the waterline. It had been way too long since anything even partly connected with Hawkeye had come out right. At last I withdrew my head and rested it on the pillow and felt the ship’s engines thrumming steadily.

It wasn’t the time to mention that I’d figured out the cause of Damienenko’s unexpected gesture, the access he’d given us to the ship’s radio. Basically, the public gesture of goodwill was raising a useful smoke screen between him and the U.S. authorities, or anyone else who came looking. It was an open signal of his honorable intentions toward Rita and me, something he could hide behind should the need arise to pitch us over the side.

CHAPTER 24

The voyage stretched our nerves tighter each day, both of us kept waiting for something to happen, the ax to fall. But Damienenko didn’t seem to be in any great hurry to deal with his stowaways. As we sailed southeast into the warmer weather, our faces and arms turned red and then tan. The crew generally ignored us. The only English speakers aboard, apart from Rita and me, were Captain Damienenko, the mate, Bosnitch, and the communications officer, whose name I never knew.

Each morning Rita and I had access to the communications room. After failing to raise Fiona at home two days running, I finally got through to her secretary at Geometrics. Fiona, the secretary told me, had left for Johannesburg. He gave me the Geometrics number down there, but when I called Johannesburg she hadn’t arrived yet, and when I called twenty-four hours later, they said she’d already left. Someone thought she’d gone with some geologists from Anglo-American out to a game park; someone else thought she’d hopped on a plane to Botswana. General confusion. Eventually I gave up and left a message on the answering machine back at Ellis Street, basically telling her that I was okay, that I was traveling, and that when we both got home I was going to give her an explanation for all the things that had been going wrong in our lives. Damienenko was listening in, so I left it at that.

I called Rossiter again too, but he made it very clear he had nothing to say to me until I got back, and when I asked him how I could contact Trevanian, he bawled me out, then hung up.

Rita’s superiors, meantime, weren’t even taking her calls. Four days into our voyage, we both started skipping our morning visits to the communications room and lingered over breakfast instead.

A day at sea can be a very long time. Damienenko gave us some old paperbacks he’d found in his trunk, and after the crew complained to Bosnitch that Rita was monopolizing the TV in the rec room, the communications officer dug up a shortwave radio that she could listen to back in our cabin. I took to spending a few hours at the stern rail each morning, fishing and watching, then retiring to our cabin during the heat of the day. Around 4:00
P.M.
I’d reemerge to put in some more time on deck, playing at fishing while watching the bridge and the crew.

I was badly unnerved by Damienenko’s manner toward us throughout, he was way too accommodating and polite. And Bosnitch, though he had the manners of a pig, was obviously under orders to put himself out for us. When my fishing chair broke the third day at sea, Bosnitch had a crewman repair it for me while he watched the whole operation in glowering silence from the bridge. There was a flagrant falseness about their whole attitude that kept me on edge, on my guard, and it wasn’t just me, Rita felt it too. One time she went up to the bridge uninvited and surprised Damienenko and Bosnitch in whispered conference. She said they acted like red-handed thieves when they saw her. Like they were planning something, she said. Something, apparently, that the rest of the crew weren’t in on.

Every night I bolted our cabin door. Our helpless vulnerability kept me awake, I found myself turning in late and rising early. But during the days, at least, we could escape the suffocating confines of the cabin. A week into the voyage, with the sun going down and Bosnitch keeping half an eye on me from the bridge, Rita came out and joined me at the stern. She leaned against the rail and watched me play out my fishing line. The white cotton shirt the cook had given her was miles too big, now it billowed out in front of her like a sail. When her hair whipped across her face, she took out a hair clip, coiled her hair, and clipped it back. Then she said suddenly, “Why’d you do that?”

I glanced from her to the bridge, then played out more line.

“You looked at your watch,” she said.

“Nearly packing-up time.”

She considered the other lines I had tied to the stern rail. Then looked at me and turned her head. I glanced over my shoulder. We were alone.

“I’ve notched the lines,” I told her.

She turned that over. “You’re working out our speed?”

“Eighteen knots.”

“That doesn’t tell us where we are.”

“He’s been holding a steady eighteen knots the whole time. We’re a week out of New York. Our latitude’s roughly two degrees south.” When Rita eyed me skeptically, I tapped my watch. “Noon yesterday, the sun was a touch south. Noon today, a shade north.”

She laughed. “You do card tricks?”

“Old-fashioned Army training.”

“So where are we?”

I told her I’d show her when we got back to the cabin.

She considered that. “It doesn’t really help us any, does it.”

“It will if Damienenko drops us in a lifeboat mid ocean. Or if we have to get in one ourselves.”

She looked at me. She seemed to decide not to ask if I was joking. She leaned on the stern rail again and looked back at the wake. It was a minute before she spoke. “Do you know how many times I’ve dreamed about taking a cruise? Even when I was in college. I used to think about it, you know, like a fantasy. All my friends kept on about trips to Europe, I’d sit on my bed studying brochures for cruises in the Caribbean or up to Alaska.”

“Beware what you wish for.”

“This?” She turned and clasped the rail behind her. “It was meant to be days by the pool and nights on the dance floor. Exotic locations. Shore excursions. A Latin lover buying me heaps of trashy souvenirs.” She gestured around. “This ain’t it.”

“Trashy souvenirs?”

“Don’t be a wet blanket. It was a dream.”

I remarked that she must have had plenty of opportunities since college.

“Either I’ve had a vacation but no man, or vice versa. My timing’s lousy.” She looked astern to where clouds were banking on the horizon, the sun’s rays slanting up through the clouds like splayed fingers. When I started reeling in a line, she said, “What will you do when Hawkeye’s over?”

“Haven’t thought.”

“Liar.”

I concentrated on the line. “Okay. I don’t want to think about it.”

“Would your wife really leave you?”

I hauled in the last of the line and corked the hook. Then I leaned forward and grabbed the next line.

“I shouldn’t have asked that,” she said.

“No reason why not.” I put my feet on the rail and wound the line around a plastic reel. “The truth is, I honestly don’t know.”

“What would you do?”

“If she left me?”

“Yeah.”

I shrugged. It wasn’t something I had the courage to face directly. The possibility that the past two years had screwed up my marriage was something I really couldn’t bring myself to look at. So I made a joke of it. “Go fishing?” I said, but Rita didn’t smile. She looked astern again.

“If you needed me to explain to her,” she said. “You know. Grant’s Tomb. Whatever.”

I nodded, my lips clamped tight.

“One thing I never figured myself for,” she said. “A marriage breaker.”

I looked at her, but she kept her gaze fixed astern. The light was going fast now, the clouds on the horizon turning purple, then red. At that moment I longed for Fiona. Too late, but I needed to explain everything that had happened. I wanted to get Brad back from the Congo, bring him home where the three of us could be a family again. I wanted what I could not have. Everything I’d destroyed.

Bosnitch came out from the bridge and called out, ordering us back belowdecks. I hauled in the lines. Rita stood waiting for me, her back turned on Bosnitch. When he shouted something in Ukrainian at her, she muttered in Italian beneath her breath. The sun set in a bright slick of gold.

“We’re still here, then,” said Rita when she woke in her bunk and saw me unbolting our cabin door. I asked what she was expecting, a port? “Either that,” she said, “or forty fathoms under.”

I let myself out. I went and dropped my lines over the stern, then played them out and timed them. Eighteen knots. After tying the lines to the rail, I took a turn around the deck. It was good to feel the cool morning air on my face. I nodded to the few crewmen I saw, they acknowledged me with neutral grunts, they always kept their distance from me and Rita, like those were their orders. Then I went belowdecks, where I found our cabin empty. Rita had gone to the showers and left the radio on. We’d gotten into the routine of listening to the news on BBC World Service before going along to the mess for breakfast, now I fiddled with the tuner till the buttoned-down English voices came in clearly. Then I pulled a school atlas from under my mattress and opened it on my bunk. I’d found the atlas among some old 78 records in the rec room. No one was going to miss it. It was an out-of-date French publication, but the place names were mostly recognizable.

I lined up a ruler on the course I’d been plotting—the daily inch of movement across the map as the ship plowed at a steady eighteen knots across the Atlantic—then I sketched the night’s movement in with pencil. The weather had been kind, we’d made good time, and now we were closing in fast on the West African coast. According to my rudimentary navigational calculations, we were somewhere just north of the Congo.

Hearing a sound in the passage, I shoved the atlas under the mattress.

“Only me.” Rita came in and closed the door. She was dressed in baggy khaki pants and matching shirt, another outfit salvaged from the laundry by the cook. She opened the porthole and toweled off her wet hair. “Tell me we’re nearly there. Another plate of fatty mince for breakfast, they won’t have to kill me, I’ll die.”

“Nearly there.”

She let the towel fall on her shoulders. I pulled the atlas from beneath my mattress, and she came over to see. I placed a finger on our estimated position.

“How many days to go?” she asked me. When I said I’d be guessing, she told me to go ahead and guess.

“A night and a day.” I shrugged. “Maybe two days, one night.”

She beamed, and then in an instant of relief and delight, she kissed me. It happened suddenly, she aimed for my cheek, but when I turned in surprise she caught the corner of my mouth. Her lips were warm and soft, and she let them stay on mine a little too long, then she drew away and looked at me. I dropped my eyes before it could get worse, then I turned away and closed the atlas and slipped it under the mattress.

“I could be way off,” I told her. “And don’t assume Damienenko’s just going to let us disembark.”

“If he was going to do anything to us, he would have done it by now.”

I didn’t say anything. I climbed onto my bunk and stretched out and took care not to catch her eye. I wasn’t sure what had just happened. I knew I didn’t want it to happen again. She moved back to the porthole. She dried her hair with the towel, then set to work combing, a procedure that took at least five minutes. It got us past the moment.

“He has to let us off,” she said at last.

“He doesn’t have to do anything.”

The time beeps sounded on the radio. Rita reached over and cranked up the volume for the news. She grabbed another strand of hair and raked fiercely.

Seven
A.M.
Greenwich Mean Time. The BBC guy read us the headlines. Big move to the right in some European parliamentary elections. The U.S. President and Congress deadlocked in budgetary negotiations. Unconfirmed reports of a coup in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Rita swung around, openmouthed. I signaled for her to be quiet, and the announcer finished the headlines, then read the news in full. When he reached the item on the Congo, it was clear that there wasn’t much more information than what we’d already heard. Within the last hour the BBC had picked up reports of fighting in Kinshasa. They were seeking corroboration, the announcer said, and further updates would be broadcast in later bulletins.

He moved on to the next item. I got down and flicked through the radio channels, searching for more news.

“This is not good,” said Rita, alarmed. “This is so not good.”

“Unconfirmed reports.”

“From the BBC? If they say it’s happening, Ned, it’s happening.”

Failing to find another English-language service, I switched back to the BBC. The news was over. I turned off the radio.

“They have an hourly bulletin?” Rita wondered.

I stood up. “If the BBC has heard, so has Trevanian. And Trevanian’s first thought’s going to be those Haplon containers.”

“You think he’ll contact Damienenko?”

“He’ll try.” I thought a moment. “Your people definitely got word to Channon.”

“Sure.”

“Definitely? They actually told you that?”

“Of course not, the line’s not secure. But they know I’m here and you’re here. I told them everyone should be informed.”

I couldn’t speak for a second. Until this point we’d been aboard a ship that was about to break an international arms embargo. Now, suddenly, we were aboard a vessel that was running guns into a war zone. Not only that, but U.S. Customs and the DIA had been complicit in the shipment. When Channon heard what was happening in the Congo, his duty would be absolutely clear.

“Get up to the communications room,” I told Rita. “Call your people. Don’t worry about the insecure line, just say it straight out. Get word to Channon. Make sure one hundred percent he knows we’re on this goddamn ship.”

“I’m sure he knows.”

“You’re assuming he knows. Do you want to risk him launching an air strike on the Haplon weapons, or do you want to get up to the bridge and make sure your people have told him we’re here?”

Someone came hurrying along the passage, the door opened, and Bosnitch thrust his head in. He looked angry. He demanded to know if we’d seen the communications officer. When we said no, he withdrew and hurried away.

“They’ve heard,” she said.

“Get moving.” I slipped the radio into the pocket of my baggy pants. I told Rita that once she’d finished in the communications room, I’d meet her down at the stern.

There was a row of unused tool lockers beneath the stern lifeboat. I went back there and pulled at a locker door. The handle was jammed so I tried the next one, and when it opened I put the radio inside. Someone shouted at me. When I turned, I saw one of the crewmen, he shouted again and waved me over. I stood, pushed the locker door closed with my foot, and stepped away.