East of Suez (6 page)

So far, I had kept the moral question at bay. It had been nibbling on my conscience since Vicky What’s-her-name left my office. She’d hired me to wade in very murky waters. She and her husband had been involved in things that might end up in court back home. As their agent, I might share in their guilt. But this
wasn’t
home. Out the window, even the trees were different. What standing did Grantham morality have in this place? From what I’d heard, Vicky and Jake were dealing for high stakes. Maybe my sort of scruples were for lowercourt offenses. This was the big time, where “Never Indicted” may be the best thing to put on the tombstone of a successful businessman. Maybe the world back home and here on the other side of the planet is divided into wise guys and suckers. I don’t know. It had me worried. Of that much I was sure.

The shower, which I found down the hall, turned out to be a one-room all-purpose convenience center: a white-and-blue tiled stall with a tap in the wall just a few inches above floor level and a hole in the floor for the rest of the bathroom’s functions. That was
it
! There was no flushing mechanism, just a bright plastic pail, with the face of Donald Duck on it. This stood ready to swab out the latrine when required. The fact that the whole of the stall would be involved in purging the vent in the floor, with its two ceramic footprints, I could tell, was not worth mentioning to the management. There was a Japanese-looking wooden stool for sitting on in one corner. A duckboard of white wood offered a means to stay above water. I wasn’t going to become attached to the plumbing.

Dried off and with fresh clothes laid out on the bed, I looked out my window to see how much closer the forest had grown while I was asleep. It had the cunning to look disheveled and benign. For a few minutes I watched the birds flitting about from frond to frond, making a great racket. They were, of course, tropical birds, not like the ones at home. I couldn’t warm to them, and they seemed indifferent to the towel-wrapped figure staring at them through the slats in the blind.

A knock at the door rescued me from this unprofitable reverie. It was a little brown man in white carrying a tray, which he put down on the small table beside my bed. Like St Nicholas in the Christmas poem, he spoke not a word and left me with steaming coffee and a crescent-shaped bun. A
croissant
, of course, although I’d never had one. The coffee came in a large grandfather cup. The milk was hot. All of this, along with a bit of jam, went down very well. It gave me a lift. I was relaxed and ready to meet the challenges of the day.

When I came downstairs, there was a new man on the desk, but he smiled and called me by name as he first helped me adjust my watch, then handed me a note I wasn’t expecting. My watch didn’t convince me that the setting was serious. The numbers seemed to isolate me more than ever. I didn’t
believe
in Takot time. It didn’t feel right. At least, it didn’t worry me. The note was different. Who could be sending me notes? In fact, if it was known that I was here, I might as well catch the next plane home. My coming here was a secret. If the secret was common knowledge, my cover was well and truly blown.

It proved to be from my recent fellow passenger and guide, Father O’Mahannay. My cover was still intact. Slowly I worked out what the words said. My nose didn’t quite touch the paper.

Dear Mr Cooperman,

I hope my old friend Costas hasn’t shocked you with lurid stories about my private life. He is a good man, if a bit of a gossip.

I generally have a drink across from the Royal Botanical Gardens, near the palace, beginning around 4:30. Ask for Ex-Berlioz Square. If you would care to join me today, or, indeed, any day, please do. The bun-shop is called—you must excuse the naiveté of these colonials—Les Trois Magots.

Until our next meeting, I am yours

James O’Mahannay, SJ

P.S. I hope to catch up with my friend in the rickshaw later today, although, frankly, it would be better for my poor head and liver if I had never met Thomas Lanier.

J. O’M

It was still some hours until the priest would be at the Trois Magots, and I felt restless to begin my inquiries, as the British television policemen say. The more I learned about this place, the more I could quiz the good father about.

I asked the man on the desk where I might rent scubadiving gear and catch a boat to the coral reefs. He had enough English so that I was encouraged to abandon my high school French. It took a bit of mime from both of us to reach a full understanding. I got the idea that the harbor was some distance below this part of town. In the end, he wrote something on the back of a book of matches, which he passed to me.

Poseidon Outfitters

Quay de la Reine Blanche, 24

The name tallied with the one my client back home had given me. It seemed like a good omen. I keep probing reality with my thumb, hoping for what? That it would save my hide one day, I suppose. Maybe I’d been hoping that the name and address wouldn’t match. Then I could go home.

The room clerk phoned for a taxi and I sat down to wait, passing the time with a selection of postcards of the neighborhood. To my surprise, I was able to write to several members of my family without thinking of my difficulty in reading what I had written. Reading and writing are related skills, but not the same, as I had been learning these past months. I had just licked the last stamp when a scooter-like thing screeched to a stop in front of the hotel’s large front door. When the room clerk called my name, I got up to see how lethal this contraption was. I showed the driver the name of the outfitter and he showed me how to get inside the plastic-wrapped parcel on wheels. The buckle of the seat belt was in good working order, but the strap was attached on one side only, six safety pins having given their all in the service of health and welfare. I had two wheels, the driver only one, but our fates were the same. Quickly I began to overlook the safety factor once the noise factor intervened. The din was like a boilerworks in the middle of a war zone. The driver wore a World War I leather helmet with dangling side straps. When he had given a brave grin, we were off.

The driver took the flattened intersections with a bounce whenever the steeply descending road crossed a side street. Occasionally, he readjusted the dark goggles that gave him the look of a robot. He treated all of the mechanical stop signs as though they were only suggestions, but obeyed the whiteuniformed traffic wardens with an impatient courtesy. As soon as we were out of their sight, we were off again on this reckless ride through streets sometimes crowded and sometimes deserted. I noticed the smell of garbage only when we stopped for another vehicle. We must have been traveling faster than the speed of smell. I tried to recall the name I’d heard for the three-wheel taxis:
Yuk-yuks? Ton-tons? Luk-luks?
What did it matter? I was a newcomer; relax and enjoy it.

I could feel our descent down to water level long before I glimpsed the docks.

Then suddenly there it was: the sea. A cool scimitar slice of blue against the mountains and the sky. Now I began to comprehend this place. Now I could understand people like my clerical friend from the taxi. It put Grantham, Ontario, Canada, into a context I never could have imagined without this glimpse of sun reflected in the marvelous horseshoe harbor.

It was a straight, unbroken, downhill run now, and the vista opened up as we descended to it. Then, almost in the middle of the road, half blocking our way, was a derelict ship, an old freighter by the look of it. It was just lying there in the street. Black and white, with rust-red stains above the keel. It was an easy two hundred meters from the jetties and about thirty or more meters above tidewater. I thought of the beached ship in the poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” That one was called the
Alice May
; this one was the something-or-other
Maru
. As we rounded it, I tapped the driver on his shoulder and pointed to the wreck. He looked at me for a moment, then at the wreck, now in his rearview mirror, and said one word: “Tsunami.” As we drove on, I looked around to see the rest of the ship. It was like a beached whale, being chipped at by acetylene torches on the ocean side. Somebody was trying to break up this monster. Blue light from cutting torches drove slanted shadows up the sides of the hulk, even under this burning sun. It was like watching men scoop away at a modestsized mountain with spoons. I scribbled the word “tsunami” in my Memory Book, with my own version of the spelling.

The harbor was fretted with jetties, sticking out into the water. The docks were black breaks, giving dock space to several craft each. Patches of fresh, light-colored wood showed on some of the darker-colored planks. There were several signs of recent building. Along both sides of each of the piers, small boats, fishing and sports craft by the look of them, were moored to stanchions with ropes, some of them colorful nylon in yellow, red, and blue. This was tidewater, so there were various contrivances for keeping the boats secure as the water came and went at the whim of the moon, twice a day. Signs of lazy activity appeared along the length of the jetty in front of me: a few figures moved back and forth, but with no committed determination as far as I could see. One man was feeding nylon rope into a greedy plastic barrel, another hosing down some nets spread out on the tar-surface of the dock. The boats themselves were a jumbled lot, but a few trim yachts were tied up looking
yar
, their masts jingling as they bobbed in the water that dimpled with reflected sunlight.

The taxi driver pointed out a building that faced this view from behind the spot where we had stopped. It was a weathered wooden structure, two stories running for most of a block, backing into the hill that rose sharply from the water, giving the outfitters an apparently precarious purchase on the edge of the water. The bottom floor disappeared into the hill; the floor above ran another few meters into the slope. Directly across the street, on the water, a sign announced that the building on this side of the road was a continuation of the bigger place across the street.

My driver was watching as I took all this in and grinned like he’d done it all himself. I shuffled the money I took from my wallet and fanned the bills out so he could make a selection. When I added another to the ones he had taken, he gave it back, his conscience already stretched to breaking. He gave me a card and pointed to the number on the back. The original printed number had been crossed out. I didn’t attempt to read it, but pocketed it for further study in private.

A wooden veranda ran along the length of the front of the building, which looked as though it was still at least partly a warehouse. Several doors opened on to it, each with a sign that was no great advertisement for local arts and crafts. When I found the sign I was looking for, I pulled a rope that rang a bell inside. When nothing happened after my second try, I opened the door and walked in. Inside, it was dark, dusty, and cluttered, but maybe a degree cooler than outside. I could make out some shipping posters on the wall, as well as a naughty calendar showing a leggy young woman’s skirt being pulled by her badly cast fishing line. It looked at least fifty years old, and shiny with grease from a camp stove set on a wooden crate. Chinese dishes and a jar of chopsticks stood on a shelf nearby. The showpieces of this anteroom were a pair of mounted diving suits dating from the 1930s. They could have come right out of
Trader Tom of the South Seas
, an old Saturday matinée serial I saw as a kid. But this was more than a few blocks away from the old Granada Theatre at home. The diving suits were dusty and looked like they hadn’t been moved in decades. Nearby was an air-pumping unit, again right out of the movies and comic books of my youth. I suppose that in a strange place like this, a newcomer makes friends with the things he recognizes from his earlier life. These old diving suits were helping me smooth the way into an unnerving and, I admit it, scary place.

A slim man was standing behind a glass counter littered with papers and what looked like boxes of well-known brands of American soap. He gave me a half-bow, showed an arpeggio of white teeth, and said: “May I help you with something?” His English was hard to place. It could have been American or British, but overlaid with the speaking of local languages and cleaned up so as to remove most of the signs of origin. There was no Scottish or Irish about it, no more could I detect either New England or the American South. A mid-Seven-Seas accent. He looked about thirty-five or forty, but I could be wrong.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t see you standing there. The bright light outside makes this room very dark. I’m looking for a trip out to the reef to do some scuba diving. I was given your name, this address, I mean, at my hotel.”

“And which hotel might that be?” he asked, still smiling. I’d no recollection of the name, but I had it written down in my pocket. Fishing out the card, I read off the name as quickly as I could.

“Ah, yes. I know it well. When were you wishing to go? How many people might be in your party?”

Of course, I had considered none of these questions and felt as stupid as I looked standing there. “I haven’t made any solid plans. I just wanted to see if you still did this sort of thing.”

“Oh yes. We have been taking tourists out there for many years. There is a seven-thirty morning boat and one at two in the afternoon. The divers go to two different locations at the reef: there’s the naturalist dive and then the wreck, an old ship that broke up on the reef. This is still in the season, but you should have no trouble getting on a boat as soon as the day after tomorrow, Wednesday, if that would be quite convenient.”

“Good! Better than I could have hoped. I’m traveling alone. I’m a party of one. How long is the dive?”

“The trip to and from the reef takes half an hour each way. You will need to have at least forty-five minutes of air in each of your tanks. There will be a compressor on the landing stage for refilling. If you go at seven-thirty, you won’t be back here until about ten-thirty or eleven. There is a canteen for light refreshments.”