The Ark Sakura (8 page)

“Let’s get a move on.” Motioning to him to slide over, I climbed into the driver’s seat, put the gears in four-wheel drive, and started up in second, heading for the sands, gradually picking up speed as we circled around and went up from the beach onto the ledge.

“Easy! Don’t push your luck.” Clutching the dashboard, he put a cautionary hand on the steering wheel.

“Leggo—you’ll break a finger!” I yelled.

Flying to the right, careening to the left, we dashed furiously along. A shadow crossed the headlight beams. I slammed on the brakes and broke into a sweat as a stray dog, one hind leg missing from the knee down, slunk off deliberately into the grass with its head down. A white beard and a sagging back gave the animal a decrepit appearance, but he was a wily old rascal, boss of the seven or eight strays whose territory this was.

“So it
was
a dog’s footprints.” The insect dealer stiffened, and added grimly, “Bloodthirsty-looking creature.”

I turned off the engine. Low growls crawled over the ground, and a panting sound like the chafing of pieces of wood.

“Hear it?” I said.

“Are there more of them?”

“Seven or eight, as far as I can tell. The one you just saw is their leader.”

“Dogs seldom attack, I’ve heard,” he said hopefully. “They say if they’re not expressly trained to kill, they won’t.”

“These would. They don’t trust people.”

“They know you, though, don’t they, Captain?”

“Well, yes …”

This time I caught a touch of sycophancy in his use of the word. Still, it was better than being laughed at. I switched the ignition back on, drove straight under the bypass, and pulled up as close as I could to the cliff ahead. Insects attracted by the headlights crashed into the windshield.

A mountain of garbage and trash reached nearly halfway up the cliff: besides the usual assortment of kitchen refuse, there were nylon stockings wound around a bicycle seat; homemade pickles, complete with pickling crock; a fish head, its mouth the socket for a broken light bulb; an old refrigerator, now a dog coffin; an empty Coke bottle crowned with an old shoe that had melted into gum; and a TV tube stuffed with an insect’s nest that looked exactly like cotton candy.

“Great—a garbage dump. Just great.”

“Camouflage,” I explained. “I’ll bet you can’t tell where the entrance is.”

“I’ll bet I can. Inside the body of that old junk heap on top of the pile.”

His powers of observation were impressive. I had to admit that if you looked carefully you could see a rope hanging down inside the rusty, abandoned car. But I had hardly expected my camouflage to be seen through so quickly. Even inside the car, it would have taken someone of enormous experience and insight to find anything suspicious in the smell of fresh machine oil on the door handle and hinges.

“You have good instincts.”

“Not bad. How the heck did you collect all this junk?”

“Easy. I just posted a sign on the road overhead reading ‘Private Property, No Littering.’ ”

“Ingenious. But doesn’t it make a huge racket when you climb up to grab onto the rope?”

“It’s all fastened down.”

“Let’s go.” The insect dealer slapped his hands on his knees and bounded out of the jeep. He spread his legs apart, placed his clasped hands behind his head, and began to do warming-up exercises, twisting right and left. He was more agile than I’d expected, and his oversize head was not terribly conspicuous. There probably were athletes of his build, I thought. “I’m ready for an adventure,” he said.

“Look in back under the canvas and you’ll find a box with rubber boots and cotton gloves inside.”

“I can see where you’d need the boots. Just the thought of worms and centipedes crawling in my socks gives me the creeps.”

As if they’d been waiting for him to go around in back of the jeep, several of the dogs began howling. They were apparently roving around in the shadows. Stray dogs are like volleyball players in the split-second timing with which they switch from defense to attack. Forcing open the canvas top with his whole body, the insect dealer dived inside.

“I told you once I don’t like barking dogs. And ones that bite are worse.”

“Don’t worry—they’re used to me.”

The flashlight beam served to increase the dogs’ frenzy: some jumped up and clawed the jeep, others started to dig in the ground for no reason, still others began to mate. After letting the insect dealer get a little scared, I decided to do my howling imitation. For some reason, that always dispirits them and leaves them docile. I leaned partway out the half-open window and let loose three long howls into the night sky. One dog nearby howled an accompaniment in a shrill, nasal voice, while another gave a plangent shriek. The insect dealer burst out laughing, his body rocking with mirth. I could certainly understand why he was laughing, and yet for someone who’d just been rescued, he seemed remarkably indiscreet.

“I had a dream like this once, when was it … ?” He changed into a pair of rubber boots, bit off the string joining a brand-new pair of work gloves, and climbed over the backrest into the front seat. “Shall I go first? Two at a time probably wouldn’t work.”

“You’re probably right, although I’ve never tried it.”

“Then let me go first. I can’t think of anything worse than hanging from a rope, with a pack of hounds snapping at my rear end. It’s true, you know—round objects activate a dog’s hunting instincts. Must be the resemblance to animals seen from behind.” One foot on the running board, eyes casting about in the dark, he said, “Howl again to distract them, will you?”

I felt a sudden, inexplicable hesitation. Acquiring crew members was a matter of the deepest urgency, I knew all too well. But I had grown used to living in solitude. Logically I was prepared to welcome the insect dealer aboard, but emotionally I was terrified. I suspected that everything today had happened too fast. Certainly there had been times, after coming back from an outing, when the moment I inserted the key in the padlock I was assailed by an unbearable loneliness. But that never amounted to more than a fleeting spell of dizziness. As soon as I was settled in the hold, I would return to a mood of such utter tranquillity that the concept of loneliness lost all meaning. In the words of the insect dealer—or rather of something he had parroted out of the newspaper—I had perhaps fallen prey to the confusion of symbol and reality, to the longing for a safe place to hide.

“Hurry up and do your howl again,” the insect dealer urged. “I’m hungry.”

“First don’t you think we’d better work out a strategy?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just in case they did beat us here, what are we going to do?”

“You’re worrying about nothing. That’s impossible, isn’t it?”

“Maybe.”

I wasn’t in fact seriously expecting to find them there, but there were one or two signs that
could
have indicated an invasion during my absence. For example, that arrangement of chair legs and storage drums which I always inspected when I came back from my outings was noticeably out of order. Probably it meant nothing, considering the heavy downpour we had just had. Some caving in of the ground was only to be expected. It was equally possible that a cat had knocked the storage drum aside, using it as footing to escape the dogs.

A series of large trailer trucks went by overhead. When they were gone, the insect dealer said in a fed-up tone of voice, “All right, then, you want to bet? I say they’re not here. Are you willing to bet me they are?”

“How much?”

“The key to the jeep.”

Ignoring this, I said, “Actually I was talking about something different—a more general question of frame of mind. Having you here is naturally going to change the way I deal with unlawful occupation, compared to before… .”

“If it’s general frames of mind you’re talking about, how about cleaning up your front doorstep for starters?” He gave a laugh edged in irony. “Between your garbage dump and your pack of wild dogs, I’d say you don’t have too much to worry about. Nobody’s going to break in here. This place stinks to high heaven. Just trying to breathe gives me a headache.”

“It’s the weather. And what you smell is some disinfectant I scattered around.”

“I don’t think that’s all. Pardon me for saying so, but I suspect it has more to do with your personality, Captain. Overly defensive. Frankly, with a captain who’s so determined to shut people out, I must say the prospect of a long voyage doesn’t offer much excitement.”

“Look—if you were dealing in pots and pans or medicine bottles, you’d have an obligation to make them watertight, wouldn’t you? With a ship, it’s even more vital. Your whole life depends on it.”

“I’m not taking the shill’s part, mind you,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. But a ship’s captain has got to be a trifle more broad-minded, it seems to me… .”

“You were the one who kept insisting they were people to keep an eye on.”

“You’ve got to keep an open mind. If they managed to get inside despite all the obstacles in their way, they’d deserve a prize, wouldn’t they?”

“That’s right; it would be too much for that girl, anyway.”

“But then, anything
you
could handle—” he said, and quickly caught himself. “Oops, sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. Remember now, a ship’s captain has to be tolerant… . That just shows how much I really trust you. Anyway, don’t forget we live in an age when women climb the Himalayas. Although between these dogs and this garbage dump, it might be too much for her at that.”

I was starting to feel the same way. Maybe I was only jumping at shadows. It seemed impossible that the padlock on the entrance—or the gangway, properly speaking—would be missing. Was it merely fear of shadows that had led me to acquire a weapon in the person of the insect dealer—a weapon for which I would have no use?

“Okay. If the dogs go after you, I’ll distract them,” I said. I turned off the engine, and together we stepped out of the jeep. I handed him a penlight, and lit the way for him with a large flashlight. “The door on the driver’s side of that car opens directly into the tunnel, so watch your head. It’s about thirty feet to the entrance. I’ll be right behind you.”

The insect dealer grabbed the rope and hauled himself up, his feet knocking down large clumps of dirt and sand at each step. This did not signify that he was any less surefooted than I; the slope was steep, and on it lay junk of all sizes and shapes, precariously piled together, each item supporting and supported by the rest. A monkey could have done no better without knowing where the footholds were.

A thin, runty black dog with long ears came sidling over to my feet. Was this a newcomer, paying his respects? Thanks to my talented howling, the pack of dogs had quickly accepted me as their leader. With humans it wouldn’t be so easy.

I put on my rubber boots and heavy-duty gloves. The insect dealer disappeared inside the abandoned car with a wave of his penlight. After the rope stopped swinging, I grabbed it and followed him. As I went up, I placed my feet safely and securely in the footholds, enjoying a mild sense of superiority. The rusted metal plate of the car door came before my eyes—beyond it gaped the mouth of the tunnel, exactly 4.83 feet square. I could see the insect dealer’s light flickering up ahead. Why they had chosen that exact measurement I did not know. The entranceway itself had a steel frame, but from there on the walls were bare rock, still showing the marks of the power saw with which they had been carved out. At my feet were rusted rails, their width adjusted to that of the handcars used for hauling stone. The tunnel cut directly under the town road, and continued another sixteen feet. Directly above the inmost part was where my biological mother had run her tobacco store—the place, incidentally, where I was born.

The farther in you went, the more pronounced the acoustical alteration: high-pitched sounds created mutual interference and were absorbed into the stone walls, leaving only the deep roar of low-pitched sounds. The howl of wind, the boom of waves, the singing of tires on the highway, all had a common denominator: the sound of a great wet canvas flapping in the wind.

“Oh, no—the lock’s gone. Come have a look.” His voice was muffled, as if he were speaking over the telephone.

“It’s over on the far left, as you stand facing the latch.”

He was right. The padlock was gone. It was stainless steel, a fairly big one several inches across, so there was no way we could have missed it. Someone had opened the door. It could only be them. Since it was a padlock, just turning the key wasn’t enough; you had to remove the whole thing from its fastening. They certainly weren’t going to stop there and just take the thing home as a souvenir. I’d been invaded. Bitterly, I regretted the lack of a keyhole that would have let me peer inside. I sat cross-legged before the steel door and listened attentively. Such a mélange of sounds came to my ears that I could hear nothing.

“Looks like they’re here, after all. I’m glad we didn’t make that bet.” The insect dealer spoke in an undertone, wiping the sweat from under his chin with the tail of his shirt. In the process, his pale abdomen was exposed, revealing next to his navel a dark red birthmark the size of my palm.

“I
told
you I wasn’t being an alarmist,” I said.

“But is it really them?” he asked. “Couldn’t it be somebody else?”

“Forget it. Who else has a key?”

“But we didn’t see any cars parked along the way—and that shortcut would be impossible to figure out from a map.”

“Maybe they took the train.”

“Eh? You never said anything about a train.”

“If you can get right on the express without waiting, it’s faster. Put out that light.”