Epiphany Jones (18 page)

The hotel room is even nicer than the lobby. Only an American could afford this, Epiphany thinks. And as Nico and Momma and the man discuss things, from the room’s floor-to-ceiling windows, Epiphany admires the view of the ocean and the ships and the little cars driving on the long streets below. And Momma, she clears her throat and motions to Epiphany to come sit by them.

‘And how will you get her across?’ Nico asks.

‘My company’s Gulf Stream,’ the man says. He is American. And the American, he looks at Epiphany and takes in her features. She takes in his as well. He’s tall and in his late forties. Bushy eyebrows rest like caterpillars above tiny wrinkles around the eyes. His brown hair looks as if it has only recently begun to go grey. ‘What’s her name?’ the American asks.

Momma is about to answer, but Nico interrupts. ‘Anything you want it to be,’ he smiles.

‘Does she speak English?’

‘She understands it.’

‘Well,’ says the American, looking at Nico, ‘this is for you. Two hundred and fifty. Count it if you like.’ Nico nods and he does count it. ‘And this,’ says the American, ‘is for you.’ He hands a slender box to Epiphany. The box is covered in black felt. Epiphany opens it. A long string of white marbles connected by a silver chain lie inside.

Nico and the American shake hands, then he and Momma turn and walk out of the room without looking at Epiphany again. The American picks up a glass on the table and pours red wine into it. He turns to Epiphany. ‘This should make it easier for you,’ he says with a kindly smile. Epiphany takes a sip and is surprised to find it sweet and delicious. ‘Do you like movies?’ the man asks her. Epiphany nods, and the American smiles. ‘Well, I’m in the movie business and I think we are going to be very good friends.’

And that’s how Epiphany Jones came to America. And in America she was kept and raped for years. Then one day she got pregnant. But
the man who bought her was a good Christian. He insisted the baby be born. And when it was, the baby was taken from Epiphany before she could even hold it.

In the cabin, my mouth has gone dry. The Gulf Stream and the pearls; the good, Christian American; tall; wrinkles; grey hair; makes movies; hands over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars like it’s nothing: Matthew Mann.

If Epiphany realises I’ve connected the dots, she doesn’t let on. She tells me that, after she finally escaped, it took her twelve years to track Momma down. By that time the guilt was eating LaRouche alive and the fact that God was speaking to Epiphany was evidence of a chance of redemption. She told Epiphany that her daughter had been given to the traffickers to be kept until she would be old enough to be ‘useful’ to the client. The client got a discount on future purchases and the traffickers were guaranteed continued business from them.

Momma told Epiphany that the client has a storehouse of sorts in Spain, where he keeps the best girls he’s bought safely out of the way of prying eyes. It’s looked after by one of Nico’s grand madams. There the girls live a relatively ‘nice’ life compared to most trafficked women. They’re kept at this house until they’re transported to locations around Europe, where they’ll be treats for select guests at extravagant parties – orgies for the elite.

‘Why not just go to the police?’ I say. ‘Why not tell them what happened?’

But Epiphany says what LaRouche said when I asked her the same questions: because these people are just too powerful. Money and girls buy anything. ‘If the police ever did ask them questions about my daughter, they would simply kill her and dump her body somewhere, and it would be as if she never existed.’

Besides, who would believe a person of Matthew Mann’s standing would be capable of something like that, I think.

Outside the porthole the storm has lessened. Dawn will soon break through the early morning’s grey clouds. Only now, in the creeping light, do I notice just how much the retelling of her origin took out
of her. Epiphany winces as she tries to keep herself propped up against the wall.

I say, ‘Do you want me to help you into the bunk?’

‘Tomorrow, maybe,’ she says as she slides back to the floor. She closes her eyes and presses her lips together in an effort to suppress pain occurring somewhere in her body. If her pain had a name, it would be
Jerry Dresden
.

I watch her stir. She’s caused me pain. I’ve caused her pain. Where does this all end?

Then suddenly her eyes spring open and catch me staring.

‘I gave you to Nico,’ I blurt, an involuntary confession.

I say, ‘You’re like this because of me. Why aren’t you angry?’

And Epiphany, her eyes flutter, struggling with some new
Jerry Dresden
somewhere. ‘I’ve known you were going to betray me since I arrived in Veracruz,’ she says.

I shake my head, not so much in disagreement as in pity. ‘How could you possibly know? I didn’t even know.’

‘My voices told me your betrayal–’ she says, abruptly breaking off and squeezing her eyes shut, ‘– your betrayal, it was necessary.’ She breathes as the pain passes. ‘It was the only way to get you on the boat.’

It’s like I’m beside Emma’s hospital bed again, listening to sick people talk about how angels visit them. Only this time I’m Judas to Epiphany’s fucked-up Jesus.

And then lightning flashes and on the bunk I see Rachel looking at us, the light bulb swaying from its wire in front of her.

There’s silence in the room and I hear Epiphany say, ‘Are you seeing one of them now? Your figments?’ And when I look at her in the dark, despite her condition, she looks almost sorry
for me
.

‘Yeah,’ I say.

‘What is it like?’ she says, as if it’s obvious to everyone in the room that the voices she hears are real but the figments I see are just a delusion in my mind.

‘It’s a lot like watching TV,’ I say. ‘You see people in your living room but you know they’re not really there.’

Rachel, she grins at me in the dark. And, not wanting to talk about it, I say, ‘And you? What are yours like?’ And Epiphany, she’s quiet for a moment, then she tells me the conversations are one-sided. She can’t talk to them like I can talk to my figments. Sometimes, a painful headache or a ringing in her ears precedes them. Sometimes, even when she prays for weeks, begging them to contact her, they never do.

The voices, she says they’ll give her a warning sometimes, or they’ll tell her something will happen. But they’re rarely specific. ‘I would never neglect anything they told me. Everything has a purpose,’ she says and glances at her cut and bruised arms. ‘Even this.’

I shake my head. ‘You keep saying “they”,’ I say. ‘I’ve heard you mention “Michael” before–’

‘The archangel.’

Well, if you could talk to angels, he’d be the one you’d want.

‘But you said God talks to you–’

‘Angels are God’s voice.’

An answer for everything.

Epiphany clenches her teeth in response to another rush of
Jerry Dresden
, and I look for Rachel on the bunk again, but she’s gone.

There’s a moment’s silence when the only sounds are the rocking of the ship. And then Epiphany, she asks about it – the big pink elephant in the room. ‘What’s in your pocket?’

‘Just my pills.’ I reach into my pocket then pull them out instead of the tape. I rattle the bottle in front of her. ‘I got them from your bag when you were sleeping.’

‘Oh,’ she says and looks a little confused. Her eyes wince and she rubs her brow. ‘On the pier…’ she rubs the back of her head again. ‘On the pier, Nico … gave you the videotape…’

‘A lot of good it did me. I lost it when I was pushed into the water,’ I lie and give the best disappointed grin I can muster. ‘See what I get for helping you?’

And Epiphany, ever so briefly, she looks almost sad.

‘Jerry…’ she pauses.

‘Yeah?’

‘Jerry…’

‘Yeah?’ I say again.

She winces.

‘I still need you…’ she says, but suddenly her words become a deafening scream. She lurches back in the lower bunk, grabbing her skull as she cries out. Her screams, it sounds like she’s on fire. It sounds like she’s Joan of Arc being burned alive at the stake.

A
bdul’s cabin is packed full of the normal legal stuff all the other crew members are nicking from the ship’s inventory: digital cameras, iPods, toasters, DVDs, faux-leather shoes, Dust Busters, dress shirts still wrapped in plastic. But then there’s the other stuff. Samples of the illegal smuggling stuff: the AK-47, the Armalite AR-10, the six-pack of grenades, the big bricks of white stuff wrapped in plastic wrap. I’m looking around making sure there’re no girls tied up in here.

How I got here is Sarge had rushed into our cabin within moments of Epiphany screaming. He had heard her cries all the way down the hall. As soon as he entered, Epiphany collapsed and fell silent. Besides attending to Epiphany – giving her a shot of something, shining a flashlight into her eyes – he had his hands full when Abdul arrived, constantly translating what Abdul, who looked increasingly angry and concerned over Epiphany’s state, was saying and then translating what I told them about how Epiphany got into this condition.

Every answer I gave to Sarge – ‘We were just talking then she started screaming’ – caused Abdul’s glaring at me to deepen, as if I were full of shit and were holding a pillow over Epiphany’s face that very moment.

Sarge tried to explain to Abdul that the most likely scenario was a blood clot from the beating she took. One that had shifted in her head. He told Abdul the best thing anyone could do, now that it looked like she had stabilised, was to give her peace and quiet and get to Porto as soon as possible so we can get her to a hospital. And glaring at me, Abdul seemed to like that idea – keeping her safe from
me
– so he
ordered that I should stay in his cabin as he’s at the helm speeding us towards Porto as fast as possible.

So in Abdul’s cabin Sarge is sitting on the couch across from me, something that looks like a rocket-propelled grenade launcher resting right behind him, pretending he’s not seeing any of the illegal arms or drugs or stuff. I know if I would point them out he would say, ‘I don’t ask questions.’

So I say, ‘Um, what’s with Abdul?’

And Sarge, he says, ‘What do you mean?’ like Abdul is the most ordinary guy ever.

I say, ‘Why does he care about her so much?’

Sarge stifles a laugh. ‘He doesn’t. He cares about getting the freight he’s paid for safely from one location to the next. It’s just business for him.’

And, looking at all the guns and explosives and stuff that Sarge doesn’t see, I suddenly get the feeling Abdul is another Nico, but with a Rambo complex. It’s all just business and anyone who gets in the way of it needs to be taken care of. And I think about the last thing Epiphany said before she started screaming like she was on fire. She said she still needs me.

And suddenly the plan in my mind, the one where Epiphany just stays all unconscious and I walk off the boat when we get to Portugal and fly home with the videotape proving my innocence, doesn’t seem as cut and dry as it did a few hours ago. I get the feeling that, if Epiphany wakes up, she could tell Abdul to walk behind me with the rocket launcher pointed at my back until I do everything she wants, and he would. And if she doesn’t wake up he’ll make sure I stay on this boat until she does.

The boat rocks a bit and a Russian-made anti-tank mortar rolls out from under Abdul’s bed. And on the floor by it I see a Braun Citromatic Juicer, new in its box. I see a Sony DVD player. I see a Panasonic NV-DS27 MiniDV camcorder. The boat rocks again and the mortar returns to where it came from.

‘She thinks she hears voices from God,’ I say, not wanting to think about the free-moving explosives. ‘That’s schizophrenia, right?’

‘Could be,’ Sarge says.

‘What else could they be? The voices, I mean.’

Sarge shrugs. ‘Trauma. A way for the mind to deal with horrible things. Trauma victims sometimes hear voices. It gives them a sense of power in a situation where they’re otherwise helpless.’

I say, ‘Is that common?’

‘Common? No. But it does happen. Usually to victims of extreme abuse.’

Abuse
. And as if on cue Abdul comes in and says something in Russian to Sarge.

To me, Sarge says, ‘Excuse me. I’m needed elsewhere.’

Abdul follows him out the door, but before he closes it he turns around and looks me in the eyes, then motions around to all the explosives in the room and, interlocking his fingers together like he’s praying, he violently separates his hands, saying, ‘BOOM!’

I get it.

As the night goes on Sarge is back and forth between the cabin I’m in and Epiphany’s. He says no news is good news when I ask if her condition has changed. While he is out I take some more 486s. Until now, until all this happened, I never realised how they do more than help me stop seeing figments. They’ve helped calm the swirling mass of fear and emotions rocking around inside me. And though I’m not quite there yet, I can feel that merciful apathy returning. The pills, they help me sleep through the night, despite the explosives rattling all around.

In the morning Sarge comes in and tells me that Abdul is going to be at the helm all day; that we’ve made good time and we’re arriving in Porto tonight, where we’ll wait off coast for the evening before it’s our turn to dock. He says, ‘Abdul asks that you stay in this room for just a little longer.’

And I think, well, I’m sure he asked nicely, so OK.

Sarge leaves, but even knowing Abdul won’t be stopping by, it’s still not until the afternoon that I get enough courage to open up the Panasonic camcorder under his bed. And, as I put the tape in, part of me doesn’t want to see it – Roland being murdered – but part of me needs
to. But when I put the tape in, the camera doesn’t turn on. Its battery hasn’t been charged. That’s when I look at Abdul’s laptop with its satellite internet dongle sitting on his small desk. That’s when I find the FireWire cable in the box.

So, against my best possible judgment, I find I’m not only opening the arms smuggler’s new camcorder, I’m using his laptop too. I plug in the camcorder with the FireWire cable. And being at a computer again, it feels like I’ve found a long-lost friend. I’d almost enjoy it if my heart weren’t beating so fast.

I click the QuickTime icon on the desktop and wait for the feed to open. It’s like waiting for porn to download – it never happens fast enough. Then the lights on the camcorder’s buttons blink on and suddenly the QuickTime window on the computer jumps from black to blue, then to a fuzzy peach. On the screen the fuzzy peach becomes the hand that’s just turned the camera on…

And from down the hall, I hear a voice. I hear footsteps coming this way.

I hide the camcorder behind a three-pack of dress shirts still sealed in plastic and hit QuickTime’s pause button, then open Firefox to hide the player’s window.

Sarge comes in and frowns when he sees I’m browsing
Chicago Tribune
’s website. He gives me a look that says,
I think we both know it’s not a good idea to be using Abdul’s laptop
. But instead of saying that, he says, ‘That can wait. Believe it or not, because I can’t, your girlfriend’s up and she’s asking for you.’

M
y heart sinks when Epiphany says, ‘Hello.’ When Sarge said she was up, I thought he meant barely lucid, laying-under-the-covers ‘up’, not sitting-in-her-bunk, legs-crossed-Indian-style, lightly-sipping-soup-from-a-bowl ‘up’. Now it’s going to be harder to slip away when we dock. Between us the light bulb sways, illuminating her green eyes.

‘What happened to you?’

‘I’ve never spoken of my voices in detail to anyone before,’ Epiphany says. ‘I think I was punished.’

‘Sarge thinks you had a blood clot.’

Epiphany just shrugs like that’s obviously ridiculous and takes another sip of her soup. She doesn’t beat around the bush. From Portugal we go to Spain, she tells me. Thirty miles south of Seville is the storehouse Nico owns. It’s there where Epiphany thinks her daughter was taken twelve years ago. It’s there where she thinks her daughter is being kept now.

I think, going from Portugal to Spain – what could possibly go wrong? We’ll probably just meet more of her friends. You know, more totally safe, laid-back, non-dangerous psychopaths like Nico and Abdul.

She notices the dissent on my face but doesn’t give me a chance to speak. ‘Before – before I was punished,’ she says, ‘you told me the videotape was lost. When we get my daughter I promise–’

And look, I no longer care about turning Epiphany in to the cops. Everything we’ve done to each other over the last few weeks – you can’t find two other people who’ve fucked each other over more. And it’s not that I feel completely sorry for her, but I mean, how badly do you need to be beaten to forget your own name? What length wouldn’t even a sane person – someone who hasn’t been abused their whole life like Epiphany has been – what length wouldn’t
anyone
go to to get their child back? I’ve lost my simple assumptions of right and wrong after everything that’s happened since going to Mexico.

Besides, I’ve got the videotape. It will exonerate me; it’ll be enough. I don’t need Epiphany. After I show it to the cops, if Epiphany can get to her daughter and disappear before they find her – if they even try to – that’s fine with me. Just so long as she never interferes with my life again. But I’m getting out now while I’m still alive. I’m not going to be bullied or threatened or manipulated into going on any more fucked-up road trips with her.

So I shake my head and say, ‘You don’t need me. You never have.’

‘I do, Jerry. My voices, they’ve never been wrong.’

The light bulb hanging from its wire sways. I take a breath. ‘But what can
I
possibly do?’

And maybe this is the first time it registers with her:
What can this loser possibly do for me?
She looks at me almost pleadingly. ‘They didn’t tell me
why
I need you, only that I
do
.’ She sees the disbelief in my eyes. She believes the videotape is lost, and without it, she knows there’s no reason for me to help her. She says, ‘Jerry, please, if this were your sister…’

‘She’s dead,’ I say, losing my temper. ‘She doesn’t exist anymore. I still do! But if I keep following you, I’ll end up just like her; or maybe I’ll end up killing someone else.’ And when I say that, my eyes sting. ‘I can’t do that again.’

‘But they told me,’ Epiphany stutters, desperation showing on her face. ‘They told me I need you, Jerry.
They told me
.’

And I break my rule. The one about not arguing with people who think they talk to God. I foolishly believe reason will overcome faith. ‘
They
told you you need me?’ I mock. ‘But
why
would they tell you
I
could help? You must have some idea? I can barely show up to work on time – when I had a job, that is. I’m not a guy who gets things done. I’m a guy who goes to a shrink and has to take abortion pills just to get through the day because he sees people who aren’t there, for God’s sake. I’m not someone who is clever or strong or dependable. So why would they tell you I can help? The
only
connection I even have to the man who bought you is that my dead dad worked for him years ago.’

Epiphany’s eyes furrow when I say this. It’s the first time I’ve mentioned knowing that Matthew Mann was the person who bought her in that hotel room in Mexico.

I say, ‘I met Matthew less than half-a-dozen times. I haven’t seen him in over a decade. He wouldn’t even know who I am anymore. I don’t know where he is and I wouldn’t know how to get a hold of him if I did.’

Epiphany, she opens her mouth to speak, to lie, to manipulate.

‘No!’ I yell and swing my hand in anger. It hits the light bulb hanging from its wire, which spins away in pain. Shadows dance back and forth across the cabin. ‘I
killed
a man for you. I didn’t mean to, but I did. And I’ve got to live with that.’ The tears in my eyes feel like they’re about to pop. ‘I’m messed up enough as it is. I can’t do this anymore.’

Epiphany, again she tries to talk, to confuse me with more lies, but I don’t give her the chance.

I say, ‘I understand how horrible it must have been all those years, but I didn’t do anything to you. I didn’t abduct you. I didn’t beat you. I didn’t spend two hundred fifty grand on you, Matthew did. So give me one good,
logical
reason why your damn voices would say
I’m
the one who can help you?’

There’s silence between us as the swaying light throws shadows around the room. Long shadows. Thin shadows. Demon shadows. And as the light sways and the demons grow, shrink and grow again, Epiphany’s emerald eyes flash. Her voice is cold and unforgiving.

‘Because the American who purchased me for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in Mexico wasn’t Matthew Mann. He was your father.’