Dead Water (33 page)

Ester wants to cry.

In the VIP lounge, Ester’s luggage is waiting for her. Tanya uses her phone. ‘Where the hell is the chopper?’ she says, pouring Ester an apple juice one-handed from a carton into a heavy crystal tumbler. ‘Here.’ She kicks the fridge door shut. ‘No point waiting for service in this hole.
Hello
?’

Ester has never flown in a helicopter before, let alone over the Empty Quarter. The clouds scattered below them cast shadows on the sand: regular pools of blue in a desert that’s as pink as a rose.

The airstrip is exactly that: a narrow corridor of dirt, surrounded by a camel fence. There are landing lights but no amenities. A four-by-four – one of those new, low-slung Land Rovers – is waiting for her. The driver’s door opens and out steps the most beautiful boy Ester has ever seen.‘Ester Brooks.’ He’s like a fawn.

‘Hello.’

‘How was the journey, Ester?’

Bambi’s name is Tim. Tim has been working in the A’Sharqiya region of Oman for four years and, up close, you can see the damage his skin has taken from the sun. The desert is not kind to white beauty. ‘Have you been to Oman before?’

Tim gives her his two-minute orientation. People call Oman a Gulf state, but most of the country faces east across the Indian Ocean. Its western border is drawn ruler-straight, gifting it a considerable chunk of Arabia’s Empty Quarter. For practical purposes the country is little more than a fertile strip sandwiched between a mountain range and the sea. Tim’s done this before, a lot. He might be an air steward describing the safety features of a plane.

Like Tanya, Tim thinks Ester’s here on business. Ester doesn’t want the embarrassment of having to explain what she’s really doing – that she’s here to receive condolences for her father’s death – so she keeps him talking.

It takes time to develop an eye for the beauties of this place, but Tim’s been here four years now and he has no plans to leave. He points out the sights as they drive. Patterns in the rocks strewn either side of the road suggest an ancient settlement. Heaps of stones gathered here and there are pre-Islamic grave mounds. This was a city, once.

There is a cliff, and a path, and at the bottom of the path there is a jetty, and a boat. After hours of airborne sedation, Ester finds the going slippy and difficult. Things here are as simple and crude and remote as she was warned they would be. There aren’t many billionaires invite you to their hideaway with advice to bring sensible footwear.

Their boat to the island is a spruce, speedy runabout of a sort very familiar to this Melbourne child. For some minutes they drive parallel to the cliff-face. The swell, as waves collide and redouble, is nauseating. It doesn’t help that Tim wants to show Ester a recent wreck. A trawler came to grief last year against these rocks and it’s still reasonably intact. It comes in and out of focus through the turquoise water as they rise and fall. An engine block. A funnel. Then they are away, round the bend and into open sea, following the waves south-east to the tiny island Havard – after much prickly negotiation with the Omani government – has made his own.

The island’s high rocks suggest a Hearst-scale gothic hideaway, but the back of the island is broken and crinkled and there are bays filled with sand imported from the interior.

The buildings are stone: traditional structures that blend comfortably into the stark landscape. The palms are fed desalinated water. A plastic liner surrounds each grove, keeping out the salt of the sea. ‘If you see a dying palm,’ Tim tells Ester, as they coast towards the beach, ‘it means seawater’s penetrated the water table. You won’t see that here but you will every place else.’ Before 1971, Tim tells her, there were no metalled roads outside the capital, Muscat. No schools. No hospitals. Oman’s coastal highway – the first – is hardly development gone mad, but it has wounded the landscape, and all along Oman’s seaboard the date palms are dying as aquifers are diverted to supply the hotels and resorts the new road has made possible.

Tim thinks Ester’s here to write about the island. Havard Moyse spends most of his year in Dubai and frequently lets out his island home to holidaymakers.

Tim uses a walkie-talkie to call ahead. Havard Moyse, sixty years old and looking forty, waits for them in a cove overlooking the ocean. The scene is photogenic to the point of parody. A lone, barefooted figure in cargo pants and a loose white shirt, Havard stares across the blue ocean as though posing for a book cover. Sunlight catches in hair bleached more by the desert sun than age. The effect, so kitsch, so religiose – so breathtaking – renders Ester speechless, and perhaps this is why Havard takes her for a newly arrived guest. ‘Do you kitesurf? No? Tim can give you a lesson. We have an hour or two before sundown, don’t we, Tim? You must stretch out after your journey. Where’ve you come from?’ His warmth is so unforced, his solicitude so flattering, Ester is tempted to play along.

Tim is there to lever them back on track.

Havard’s face falls. ‘Ester, I’m so sorry. It’s the desert. It does things to the mind.’

Havard’s patter sees them from the cove, along a sandy path and a few concrete steps, to a pavilion made of palm wattle. There are sofas and, on a carved sandalwood table, a plate of Turkish delight and a silver bucket full of crushed ice and cans of Mountain Dew. ‘I hope you’ve got a sweet tooth,’ says Havard, casting a critical eye over this minimal hospitality.

They sit. They talk about the tsunami. How can they not? Moyse Line lost dozens in facilities along the coast of Tamil Nadu, plus a handful at sea. It is strange to hear Havard talk about ‘his people’ in this way: as though a shipping line were like any other kind of business. The truth, the great open secret, is that global shipping concerns like Moyse Line boast barely any physical reality at all. Moyse Line occupies two floors above a private art gallery on East 72nd Street in Manhattan. Less than twenty people inhabit its shabby white rooms, and most of them are in public relations. Havard Moyse’s ships, sailing under the convenient dayglo flags of one landlocked tuppenny nation or another, are chartered from companies registered in islands in the Caribbean. Their crews are hired by agents in Jakarta and São Paulo. The seamen who carry his containers around the earth are effectively stateless and spend their lives in steel cabinets. Shore leave is a thing of myth: since 9/11 most countries will not even let them off their boat. The truckers work for a thousand and one small-time companies.

Havard leans forward, hands clasped. ‘Not to know what happened. Not to know where. To not have a body to mourn. I’m sorry, it’s not my place to talk about these things.’

Of course it is. It is why she is here: Havard knew her father.

‘It was after the coup.’ Havard reminisces. ‘In London. We were staying at the same hotel. The Dorchester, on Park Lane. He was minding the old Sultan there.’

The little David told Ester about his work with Moyse Line – Dhofar, the coup, bin Taimur, Tony Ashworth to dinner – has convinced Ester that the line is embroiled in Oman’s shadowy, if benign, government apparatus. It’s not the only company in this position. Sultan Qaboos famously mortgaged his country to British oil interests to pay for his roads and hospitals and schools. There are worse ways to pull a country out of poverty. ‘I never got to know David that well,’ Havard concedes. ‘He ran interference for me in Singapore. Counter-piracy, I mean. Until MALSINDO cleaned the Strait.’

It’s so much Dutch to her, but she can see that Havard means well.

‘He helped look for Eric Moyse, my father, when he disappeared.’

Ester hides her surprise behind her drinks can. She swallows hard. ‘Dad didn’t tell me that.’

Havard smiles, trying to put her at ease. ‘He wasn’t supposed to. Anyway, we didn’t find him. You did.’

Ester stares into her soda, remembering.

The container has cracked, letting in the heat and stink of the beach. But the corpse’s eyes have sunk long since. Light pools uselessly in the empty, leather-lined sockets. Seated there, upright yet settled, a deathly misshape, his head erect, his tongue black fabric chewed half-off by dusty, tombstone teeth, Eric Moyse, missing these thirty years, confronts her: the robber of his tomb –

‘You can imagine the speculation there’s been in the press.’

Is this why she is here? To be briefed? To be cautioned to silence?

Havard says: ‘Eric’s container was adapted so that it could be opened from the inside. It wasn’t his tomb. I wish the papers wouldn’t call it that. He lived in it. Hid out in it. It does happen. Traffickers use cans all the time, and not everyone travels steerage.’

‘What was he doing in there?’

‘I think he was hiding.’

‘Who from?’

Havard shrugs. If he’s afraid of her speaking to the press, he shows no sign of it. ‘Us. Me. Who else is there? The line.’

Havard’s seen his dad. It was on the news. He’s travelled to Phuket. Was driven through its splintered streets, to the Vachira Phuket Hospital. Saw his father mummified: rictal, drawn, but still his dad, his flesh turned to reddish leather, his hair to wool, his fingers into sticks. A doll, in other words. Time’s plaything, unwrapped after thirty years of faceless, nameless circling. Eric Moyse, founder of Moyse Line. Impossible to imagine the character of his son’s dreams now.

Come nightfall, Havard phones London. Lyndon Ferry, Moyse Line’s director of public affairs, is still at his desk. Havard says: ‘I don’t think she knows.’

A silence as Lyndon thinks this through. ‘Is this a good thing or a bad thing?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘So we think her father really died in the tsunami?’

‘Ester certainly thinks so. For God’s sake, Lyndon, a quarter of a million people perished. What are the chances David walked away?’

‘Don’t talk to me about probabilities. We’ve got David’s daughter stumbling upon Eric Moyse’s container.’

This is ungainsayable. ‘I still think we’re looking at a simple coincidence. Think about it, Lyndon. I gave David the assignment to Phuket. So what if he made a holiday out of it? So what if he took his daughter with him? He wasn’t the only one.’

Lyndon laughs, without humour. ‘You’re right there. It was quite a circus, from what I hear.’

‘So Ester’s finding the container – yes, that’s a coincidence. A big one. But it’s a coincidence that was waiting to happen. If it hadn’t been her it could have been any one of a number of people. That South African wasn’t far behind.’

‘What about this daughter of his? What’s her name? Ester?’

‘What about her?’

‘Do you think she took anything out of the can? Any keepsakes?’

‘Lyndon, she’s twenty years old. What she saw, it scared her half to death.’

‘There must be something has been lifted from the can,’ Lyndon says. ‘Otherwise...’ He trails off.

‘Otherwise what?’ Havard’s never really bought into the idea that Eric Moyse would have spent the years of his hermitage writing out, in fair hand, all his lifetime’s secrets. ‘Eric kept Dead Water in his head for thirty years and when the pressure finally became too much he ran away to sea where nobody could find him. God knows how many years he lived hidden in that can. Why would he ever choose to write his secrets down?’

‘Even Eric can’t have thought that he would live forever. He knew he would have to hand Dead Water over to somebody at some stage.’

This is an old argument; the same argument they’ve been having since Peder Halstad retired and Lyndon Ferry stepped up as Havard’s chief of staff. Without Eric Moyse, nobody knows how Dead Water operates. Selfsustaining, apparently secure, and under nobody’s control: it’s a liability to stagger the mind.

‘I’m going to do what I can for David’s daughter.’

‘Will she talk to the cameras, do you think?’

‘And say what? We’ve had journalists and camera crews crawling over the can for days.’

There’s been no sense in trying to conceal the story. Better to let it burn bright and burn out quickly. Eric Moyse is not a household name, not a Randolph Hearst, not a Howard Hughes, not even a Donald Crowhurst. Still, his odyssey carries a hint of each of those great stories and there’s nothing to be gained by pretending that it hasn’t happened: Eric Moyse, missing since 1975, makes a grand, posthumous entrance on the back of a killer wave.

The puzzle – what was Eric doing in one of his own containers? – has been overshadowed by the tsunami itself. This much is public knowledge: that the box was rigged to sustain Eric Moyse through a lengthy incarceration. A portable air-conditioning system. Car batteries. Cooking facilities. A chemical toilet. Books. Russian literature. (A row of uncracked spines: sooner death than to have to trace, over seven hundred indifferently translated pages, the sorry events behind Anna Karenina’s inconsiderate passenger action.) A chest of clothes. A table and a chair. No notebooks, no papers, no personal revelations. No dying obsession, no madness, no grand delusion. No hint of Dead Water.

‘So what are you going to do for her?’

‘What?’

‘Ester. What are you going to do for her?’

‘Oh.’ Havard hesitates. He remembers his school in Narvik, and Peder Halstad’s visit. It is vanity, of course – pure narcissism – to be trying to rescue Ester the way Peder rescued him. Rescue her from what? For all he knows, Ester’s already leading a perfectly good life. Still, he has to do something, for her father’s sake. ‘I thought I might offer her a job.’

Muscat shows off its little wealth by wasting its water. Petunias stretch in an unbroken line for the fifty kilometres between the airport and the city. Behind the flowerbeds lush hedges rise to a man’s height, topiaried to resemble waves. Guest workers are everywhere: yellow boiler suits, palm-frond brushes, hoses.

Navigation is difficult because Muscat is four old towns run together. All roads lead to a centre – but which centre? After a while you learn to steer by the topology: each district has its distinctive nook in the hills. Havard and Ester arrive at the Intercontinental as the sun, hidden behind the Jebel range, begins lighting the dust clouds from below: an eerie, neon-pink glow. Palm trees ring the swimming pool. Their fronds are dry and broken, jointed like fingers. As they weave they make a sound like knives being sharpened. A mechanical whining from behind the hotel heralds the arrival of the evening bug men, keeping the mosquitos at bay with petrol-driven DDT sprayers.