The Night Ferry (18 page)

Every object is significant. Why else would he carry them? These are the wordly possessions of a sixteen-year-old boy. They can’t possibly breathe life into his lungs or tel me his fears and desires. They aren’t enough. He deserves more.

The biscuit tin contains a tarnished military medal and a black-and-white photograph folded in half. It appears to show a group of workers standing in front of a factory with a corrugated-iron roof and wooden shutters on the windows. Packing crates are stacked against the wal , along with drums and pal ets.

There are two lines of workers. Those in the front row are sitting on stools. At the center is a patriarch or the factory owner in a high-backed chair. Ramrod straight, he has a stern countenance and a far-off stare. One hand is on his knee. The other is missing and the sleeve of his coat is tied off at the elbow.

Beside him is another man, physical y similar, perhaps his brother. He is wearing a smal fez and has a neatly trimmed beard. He also is missing a hand and his left eye appears to be an empty socket. I glance along the two rows of workers, many of who are maimed or crippled or incomplete. There are people on crutches, others with skin like melted plastic. A boy in the front row is kneeling on a skateboard. No, not kneeling. What I first imagine are his knees, poking out from beneath short trousers, are the amputated stumps of his thighs.

None of the workers is smiling. They are olive-skinned men with blurred features and no amount of magnifying wil make the image any clearer or the men appear any less stiff and glowering.

I put the photograph back in the tin and examine the rest of the curios and ornaments. The charcoal drawing is creased at the corners. The two children, a boy and a girl, are about six and eight. Her arm is around his shoulders. She has a high forehead and a straight part in her hair. He looks bored or restless, with a spark of light in his eyes from an open window. He wants to be outside.

The paper is soft in my fingers. A fixative has been sprayed on the charcoal to stop it smudging. In the bottom left-hand corner there is a signature. No, it’s a name. Two names. The drawing is of Hassan as a young boy and his sister, Samira.

Lying back, I stare at the ceiling and listen to the deep night. It is so quiet I can hear myself breathing. What a beautiful sound.

This is a story of parts. A chronicle of fictions. Cate faked her pregnancy. Brendan Pearl ran her and Felix down. Her doctor lied. Donavon lied. An adoption agency lied. People are being trafficked. Babies are being bought and sold.

I once read that people caught in avalanches can’t always tel which way is up or down and don’t know which direction to dig. Experienced skiers and climbers have a trick. They dribble. Gravity shows them the way.

I need a trick like that. I am submerged in something dark and dangerous and I don’t know if I’m escaping or burying myself deeper. I’m an accidental casualty. Col ateral damage.

My dreams are real. As real as dreams can be. I hear babies crying and mothers singing to them. I am being chased by people. It is the same dream as always but I never know who they are. And I wake at the same moment, as I’m fal ing.

I cal Ruiz again. He picks up on the second ring. The man never sleeps.

“Can you come and fetch me?”

He doesn’t ask why. He puts down the phone and I imagine him getting dressed and getting in his car and driving through the countryside.

He is thirty years older than me. He has been married three times and has a private life with more ordnance than a live firing range but I know and trust him more than anyone else.

I know what I’m going to do. Up until now I have been trying to imagine Cate’s situation—the places she went to, what she tried to hide—but there is no point in cal ing the same phone numbers or mental y piecing together her movements. I have to fol ow her footsteps, to catch up.

I am going to Amsterdam to find Samira. I look at the clock. Not tomorrow. Today.

Two hours later I open the door to Ruiz. Sometimes I wonder if he knows my thoughts or if he’s the one who puts them in my mind in the first place and then reads them like counting cards in a poker game.

“We should go to Amsterdam,” he says.

“Yes.”

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.

—HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

1

In our second year at university in London Cate missed a period and thought she was pregnant. We were synchronized—same time, same place, same moods. I can’t remember which of her bad boyfriends had breached her defenses, but I remember her reaction clearly enough. Panic.

We did a home pregnancy test and then another. I went with her to the family planning clinic, a horrible green building in Greenwich not far from the observatory. Where time began, life ended.

The nurse asked Cate some questions and told her to go home and wait another seven days. Apparently, the most common reason for a false negative is testing too early.

Her period arrived.

“I might have been pregnant and miscarried,” she said afterward. “Perhaps if I had wanted it more.”

Later, apropos of nothing, she asked, “What do they do with them?”

“With what?”

“With the aborted babies.”

“They don’t cal them babies. And I guess they get rid of them.”

“Get rid of them?”

“I don’t know, OK?”

I wonder if a scare such as this, a near miss, came back to haunt her during the years of trying to fal pregnant. Did she tel Felix? Did she wonder if God was punishing her for not loving the first one enough?

I
remember
the name of the bad boyfriend. We cal ed him Handsome Barry. He was a Canadian ski instructor with a year-round suntan and incredibly white teeth. What is it about male ski instructors? They take on this God-like aura in the mountains as if the rarefied air makes them look more handsome or (more likely) women less discerning.

We were working during the Christmas break at a ski lodge in the French Alps in the shadow of Mont Blanc (which didn’t ever throw a shadow since the clouds never lifted).

“Have you ever seen a Sikh ski?” I asked Cate.

“You can be the first,” she insisted.

We shared a room in Cel Block H, the nickname for the staff quarters. I worked as a chambermaid five days a week, from six in the morning until mid-afternoon. I rarely saw Cate who worked nights at a bar. She practiced her Russian accent by pretending to be Natalia Radzinsky, the daughter of a countess.

“Where on earth did you sleep with Barry?” I asked.

“I borrowed your house key. We used one of the guest suites.”

“You did what?”

“Oh, don’t worry. I put down a towel.”

She seemed more interested in my love life. “When are you going to lose your virginity?”

“When I’m ready.”

“Who are you waiting for?”

I told her “Mr. Right,” when real y I meant “Mr. Considerate” or “Mr. Worthy” or any “mister” who
wanted
me enough.

Maybe I was my mother’s daughter after al . She was already trying to find me a husband—my cousin Anwar, who was reading philosophy at Bristol University. Tal and thin with large brown eyes and little wire spectacles, Anwar had great taste in clothes and liked Judy Garland records. He ran off with a boy from the university bookshop, although my mother stil won’t accept that he’s gay.

Ruiz has scarcely said a word since our flight left Heathrow. His silences can be so eloquent.

I told him that he didn’t have to come. “You’re retired.”

“True, but I’m not dead,” he replied. The faintest of smiles wrinkled the corners of his eyes.

It’s amazing how little I know about him after six years. He has children—twins—but doesn’t talk about them. His mother is in a retirement home. His stepfather is dead. I don’t know about his real father, who’s never come up in conversation.

I have never met anyone as self-sufficient as Ruiz. He doesn’t appear to hunger for human contact or
need
anyone. You take those survivor shows on TV where people are separated into competing tribes and try to win “immunity.” Ruiz would be a tribe of one—al on his own. And the grumpy old bugger would come out on top every time.

Amsterdam. It makes me think of soft drugs, sanctioned prostitution and wooden shoes. This wil be my first visit. Ruiz is also a “Dutch virgin” (his term, not mine). He has already given me his thumbnail appraisal of the Dutch. “Excel ent lager, a few half-decent footbal ers and the cheese with the red wax.”

“The Dutch are very polite,” I offered.

“They’re probably the nicest people in the world,” he agreed. “They’re so amenable that they legalized prostitution and marijuana rather than say no to anyone.” For al his Gypsy blood Ruiz has never been a wanderer. His only foreign holiday was to Italy. He is a creature of habit—warm beer, stodgy food and rugby—and his xenophobia is always worse the farther he gets from home.

We managed to get bulkhead seats which means I can take off my shoes and prop my feet against the wal , showing off my pink-and-white-striped socks. The seat between us is empty. I’ve claimed it with my book, my bottle of water and my headphones. Possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Outside the window the Dutch landscape is like an old snooker table, patched with different squares of felt. There are cute farmhouses, cute windmil s and occasional vil ages. This whole below-sea-level thing is quite strange. Even the bridges would be underwater if the dikes ever failed. But the Dutch are so good at reclaiming land that they’l probably fil in the North Sea one day and the M11 wil stretch al the way to Moscow.

On the journey from the airport our taxi driver seems to get lost and drives us in circles, crossing the same canals and the same bridges. The only clue we have to Cate’s movements is the tourist map of central Amsterdam and a circle drawn around the Red Tulip Hotel.

The desk clerk greets us with a wide smile. She is in her mid-twenties, big boned and a pound or two away from being overweight. Behind her is a notice board with brochures advertising canal boat cruises, bicycle tours, and day trips to a tulip farm.

I slide a photograph of Cate across the check-in counter. “Have you seen her?”

She looks hard. Cate is worth a long look. The woman doesn’t recognize her.

“You could ask some of the other staff,” she says.

A porter is loading our cases onto a trol ey. In his fifties, he’s wearing a red waistcoat stretched tight over a white shirt and a paunch, putting the buttons under pressure.

I show him the photograph. His eyes narrow as he concentrates. I wonder what he remembers about guests—their faces, their cases, the tips they leave?

“Room 12,” he announces, nodding vigorously. His English is poor.

Ruiz turns back to the desk clerk. “You must have a record. She might have stayed here during the second week of February.” She glances over her shoulder, worried about the manager, and then taps at the keyboard. The screen refreshes and I glance down the list. Cate isn’t there. Wait! There’s another name I recognize: “Natalia Radzinsky.”

The porter claps his hands together. “Yes, the countess. She had one blue bag.” He measures the dimensions in the air. “And a smal er one. Very heavy. Made of metal.”

“Was she with anyone?”

He shakes his head.

“You have a very good memory.”

He beams.

I look at the computer screen again. I feel as though Cate has left me a clue that nobody else could recognize. It’s a sil y notion, of course, to imagine the dead leaving messages for the living. The arrogance of archaeologists.

The Red Tulip Hotel has sixteen rooms, half of them overlooking the canal. Mine is on the first floor and Ruiz’s room is above me. Sunlight bounces off the curved windows of a canal boat as it passes, taking tourists around the city. Bel s jangle and bike riders weave between pedestrians.

Ruiz knocks on my door and we make a plan. He wil talk to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND), which deals with asylum seekers in the Netherlands. I wil visit Hassan Khan’s last known address.

I take a taxi to Gerard Doustraat in a quarter known as de Pijp, or “the Pipe” as my driver explains. He cal s it the “real Amsterdam.” Ten years ago it had a seedy reputation but is now ful of restaurants, cafés and bakeries.

The Flaming Wok is a Chinese restaurant with bamboo blinds and fake bonsai trees. The place is empty. Two waiters are hovering near the kitchen door. Asian. Neat, wearing black trousers and white shirts.

From the front door I can see right through to the kitchen where pots and steamers hang from the ceiling. An older man, dressed in white, is preparing food. A knife stutters in his hand.

The waiters speak menu English. They keep directing me to a table. I ask to see the owner.

Mr. Weng leaves his kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel. He bows to me.

“I want to know about the people who were living upstairs.”

“They gone now.”

“Yes.”

“You want to rent frat? One bedroom. Very crean.”

“No.”

He shrugs ambivalently and points to a table, motioning me to sit, before he orders tea. The waiters, his sons, compete to carry out the instructions.