Mermaids in Paradise: A Novel (29 page)

“They
never
mentioned that,” went on Nancy.

“Why would they,” said Thompson. “No advantage in it. A female; possible hysterics.”

“I don’t get this,” said Simonoff. “Why do that? Why tell everyone she—she had drowned? Good God! I mean! It almost gave her poor mother a myocardial infarction!”

“Probably thought it would shut us up,” said Chip. “Shut us down, right? Keep us from going after the mermaids. Plus we’d stop asking annoying questions about her whereabouts sooner or later, if we thought she was done for. Right?”

“They took my cell records, my email, contact info, the signed paperwork from the excursion,” said Nancy. “And Riley’s digital video? Listen to this. See, Riley was my only visitor, other than the food guys. He felt a little guilty so he asked to see me, but his conscience didn’t go too deep. He talked to me, though,
so I do know what happened. He
sold
it to them. Just outright sold it.”

“He had a contract with us!” said Chip. “With you!”

Nancy shrugged. “He sold it.”

“I thought they stole it,” I said.

“First,” said Nancy. “But then they actually watched it. And decided they needed to own it. So they just made him an offer.”

“We still don’t know who they even
are
,” said Rick slowly. “Do we, Nancy?”

She shook her head.

“We know who
some
of them are,” added Raleigh. “But we don’t know how far up the chain it goes.”

“They just arrested two of them,” I said. “We saw it! On the ship. The woman and the guy with the really dark tan. Arrested. The cops came in a police cutter and arrested them.”

“Scapegoats,” said Thompson solemnly.

“Sacrificial lambs,” agreed Rick.

“Thrown under the bus,” said Chip.

I thought how much I disliked the non-Mormon and the Mike Chance guy: I felt an instinctive distaste for both of them, and had from the get-go. Still, distaste or not, they hadn’t seemed like criminal masterminds. They seemed more like consultants, maybe sales reps.

“Were they acting alone?” I asked no one in particular. “Or was management pulling the strings?”

“I think the point is we can’t know,” said Rick. “Kidnapping Nancy—and you too, Deb, for sure—
that
, for one, they’re going to want to pin on the PR people. At least, that’s what I’m suspecting.”

“Our orders, which they called a ‘request for emergency assistance,’ came from the suit on the beach,” said Raleigh. “He’s the GM who runs the resort. Reports to the regional veep. I’m gonna make a call, find out what’s going down.”

As he turned away the rest of us fell upon Nancy like a flock of chattering parakeets, trying to pull out strings of explanation with our curved little beaks. How could it even
be
that Annette had just walked up and unlocked the door, patrolling on her fifteen-minute break, using a ring of keys from the pegboard in the staff break room? (Ronnie.) Why didn’t the company guard its prisoners? (Rick.) Especially when I’d escaped, too? (Me.) Wasn’t she pissed that Riley had turned out to be a Judas? (Thompson.) He’d seemed so cool at first, hadn’t he? (Chip.) And (closely related) how much had they paid him? (Ellis.) Was she starving? (Janeane.) Didn’t she need a shower? (Janeane.) Where were her belongings? (Janeane.) Did she want to go back to her cabana and try to get them? (Janeane.)

Wait. Very important. Did she have legal counsel yet? (Gina.)

Prof. Simonoff, the doctor and Thompson announced their intention to make a sortie to Paradise Bay to reclaim Nancy’s personal items. Thompson, I could tell, was spoiling for a fight, even if it had to be over nothing more epic than a biologist’s toiletries. The three of them, all men of a certain age, went out to the Hummer and roar/chugged away. Gina wanted to debrief her brother on the litigation possibilities, and Ellis wanted to cloyingly massage her shoulders while she did so. Miyoko assented to yet another video interview, Janeane made a midnight snack, etc.

But Nancy had only one objective, amid the hustle and bustle. Grass didn’t grow beneath her feet, the solid feet of that kidnapped parrotfish expert; she waved away the questions, she splashed cold water on her face, she shoved handfuls of salted peanuts into her mouth without even taking a seat. Then she ushered a bunch of us outside, so she could breathe the trade-wind breeze in more limited company. The rooms had gotten claustrophobic.

Once out there, standing beneath some rustling fronds beside the pool, she asked Raleigh for a full report on the status of the Venture of Marvels.

“Here’s what I’m being told,” said Raleigh. “The general manager’s claiming he had no knowledge of your kidnapping. He says he, too, was told you’d drowned. That he wasn’t in on that bullshit. He’s helming up the Venture, of course, that much he’s copped to—he’s taking ownership of that part of it. But where the backstory’s concerned, his version is: Mike and Liza brought him the mermaid video. He had no idea they’d taken it from Riley, he thought you’d just drowned and the tape and other mermaid-related texts, excursion records, and all that shit was in your personal effects. In a nutshell, he’s doing his best to avoid criminal liability over what happened to you, Nancy.”

“Why’d they bother with that meeting? Where we first met, uh, Liza?” I asked.

“That was to get everyone’s contact info,” said Raleigh. “That was part of our briefing a couple days ago. They had a manifest from the boat trip, that’s how they knew some of the people to invite, but they needed
everyone’s names
, emails, and cells. Hadda make sure
everyone
came under their umbrella, ideally came
over to work for them. At that point they only had Riley on board.”

“Sleazebags,” said Chip.

“But they never got you guys signed up, so the plan was, instead, to round you up, lock you up, and shut you up. Like with Nancy,” said Raleigh, looking at me. “Mostly, I get the feeling, they screwed up. They had some miscommunications. There were a couple power struggles, with them and the Keystone cops—a lack of unity, some confusion. So honestly? You lucked out.”

“How about the search?” asked Nancy. “And my colleague from Berkeley, what’s happening with him?”

While Chip talked to her I ran inside, went through my clothes and threw on a swimsuit. (I’d lost the bikini by then, but I had reinforcements.) I was unkempt and I needed liquid immersion, so I listened to the conversation from down in the water, clinging to the concrete lip of the pool. Occasionally I’d reach for a cocktail Janeane brought out to me, a tepid, mojito-like beverage in a flimsy plastic cup. I listened as Chip and Raleigh told stories, occasionally interjecting an anecdote of my own, and watched velvety bats flit under the patio overhang of a vacant room.

I floated in the pool throughout the planning session, in fact, dipping my head occasionally, smoothing back my wet hair. Periodically I’d hold a mouthful of mojito in my cheek pouches, just see how long I could keep it there. After a while Gina joined me, and we hung side by side, our arms adrift in the chlorinated water, our fingers pruney. A soldier would pass by,
now and then, stopping to refill our cups. We felt strangely content. (“Here we are,” said Gina, “in a swimming pool in the tropics, and at regular intervals young, muscular men in uniforms supply us with intoxicants.”)

She’d already shelved her vow to drink no cocktails, in fear of Thompson, and I didn’t remind her of it.

It was so satisfying, such a relief to watch Nancy sitting, talking, every bit as alive as a person can reasonably be. A reassurance of comforting proportions—almost enough to dispel the fear I’d been nursing earlier of loathing, of all the loathing crowds, the mermaid haters descending.

And I could consign them to the screen, almost, for a brief time: I could believe they only lived in that small, glowing rectangle. When I was a child and got scared by a TV show or movie, my mother used to say to me, “It’s not real, darling. It’s just pretend.” I’d loved it when she said that. I willingly believed everything bad was made up only for entertainment—nothing terrifying was real, nothing real was terrifying. Only in stories did the witches cackle, their mouths gaping open to show yellow, razor-sharp teeth; only on Hollywood sets were there wars, cruelty, the tragic deaths of unspeakably beautiful and innocent creatures. In life there were none of these.

I said that to myself when I thought of the screen, full of the angry words of people who had never seen the mermaids but nonetheless hated them.

How small it was, that screen. Irrelevant, maybe. A triviality.

Anyway, Nancy was determined to go out again first thing in the morning. We’d line up some boats, we’d motor out to where
the armada had dropped anchor, and we’d boldly confront it. Nancy said she didn’t even know if it was legal to drop those commercial fishing nets where they were dropping them, near the reefs—in fact, she strenuously doubted it. She’d like to hire a local attorney, she said, but that would have to wait—at least till businesses opened on Tortola, maybe even the U.S. islands, St. Croix, there had to be some lawyers familiar with the local situation.

In the meantime, we’d go out onto the ocean and board the armada, take on its leaders. Why, we’d defy them openly.

I swear, that parrotfish expert seemed to have no fear. She’d been far less affected by her death than we had.

In her experience, she’d been kidnapped; she’d been locked in a storeroom for a few days, treated with casual rudeness and brought paper plates of cold French fries to eat. There hadn’t been a microwave, plus the ketchup was watery. And they’d unlawfully injected narcotics. But still, she hadn’t particularly feared an escalation of the violence (Janeane could barely believe this, thought Nancy was the bravest woman ever to walk the earth). She’d fallen asleep fully clothed after the party in Chip’s and my cabana; next thing she knew she woke up on a cot in a storeroom that smelled of disinfectant and onions.

So that’s what Nancy had endured, but meanwhile,
we’d
endured her death—possibly even her murder!

Later she’d come back to life, but still. Attitude-wise, we’d taken a hit. Nancy had a can-do sensibility, while the rest of us were hesitant—with the exception of Thompson. He was still waiting impatiently for a chance to lob his grenade.

Anyway, Nancy got Miyoko on board—this scene too, she said, we needed to broadcast live; could Miyoko arrange for it?—and then she asked Raleigh for the loan of his beret-clad troops.

At first he hemmed and hawed, mulling it over since it wasn’t exactly low-profile, but eventually, once he had enough mojitos/beers in him, he seemed to give his consent. You got the feeling the soldiers hadn’t seen too much action, there in the British Virgin Islands. You got the feeling what they really wanted was just for something to happen.

Plus Miyoko had just agreed to go out to dinner with Sam, once the mermaid emergency was past. I think Raleigh wanted to show his solidarity.

IT WASN’T EVEN
light out when Ellis came barging into our room. He and Gina’d been sleeping in the adjacent one, through the unlocked door, and now he stumbled across the threshold in a torn, oversize Sex Pistols T-shirt and Monty Python boxers, mumbling and pushing his bangs out of his eyes. He typically sports a tousled, Hugh-Granty look. “The deputy governor’s here,” he said, having reverted to his approximately Oxbridge accent and away from the fake cockney of indignation. “Also a minister. I rang them yesterday.”

I was groggy, but awake enough to register shock: apparently Ellis had accomplished something. In general he carries off the dentistry, the accent, and the women; there the triple whammy ends. Things Ellis doesn’t do
and rarely remembers to delegate: Stock his refrigerator. Clean his condo. Pay bills. Fix what’s broken.

Chip and I pulled on some clothes and joined Gina and Ellis in their room, where they stood at the door talking.

“Let them in!” said Chip. “Please. We’re decent.”

So two people entered, dressed business casual, both dark-skinned like most islanders, slight of build and faultlessly polite, a woman and a man. Their accents were a kind of soft quasi-Brit Creole; they had a genteel quality. (Ellis told me later they weren’t elected officials but appointed by the Queen.) Gina tried to offer them coffee but gave up when she couldn’t find any. They were very concerned, they said, that required commercial-fishing permits had not been even
applied for
by the parent company. There’d also been a number of related “irregularities,” they realized, concerning the actions of the “constabulary.” They’d be going out to investigate shortly, heading out to meet the armada in an unannounced visit aboard the U.S. Coast Guard’s cutter.

The woman, who turned out to be the deputy governor, said we could hitch a ride, if we wished to. Could our party be ready by 6 a.m.?

It was then that Raleigh and Sam appeared at the open door; Raleigh winked at me. I grabbed Chip’s arm and inclined my head in the soldiers’ direction, impressing on him via sharp finger-squeeze that we probably shouldn’t shout out a joyful greeting. These were the “higher-ups” Raleigh had been avoiding, I figured; orders had finally come down.