The Consignment (17 page)

THREE

CHAPTER 22

In those first few hours after the ship sailed, I made several more excursions around the hold to satisfy myself that my initial assessment was correct. It was. We weren’t getting out. Rita, to her credit, didn’t blame me for the position we were in. She didn’t voice the accusation at least, but she must have known I blamed myself. She hadn’t wanted to go aboard without another Customs officer, I’d pushed her into it, and now she found herself trapped with me, without food or water, on an unscheduled and lightless voyage to Africa.

“Will you quit saying that,” she said after I’d said, yet again, that there had to be a light. She’d taken the flashlight from me, she was crawling along by the wall near the door. She stopped suddenly and made a sound.

“Rats?” I said.

“Close your eyes.”

I didn’t listen. I was watching her silhouetted when she hit the switch. Light pierced my eyes, I flinched, banging my head on the door.

“How’s that?” she said.

Holding the back of my head, I got up and let my eyes adjust to the glare. After hours of darkness it was like being reconnected to the world. Rita rose from her knees and dusted herself off. She saw me staring at the covered switch on the wall down by her ankle. “You’d tried everywhere else,” she said, referring to my increasingly desperate attempts to locate the damn switch. “It had to be somewhere.”

I walked out to the middle of the hold. The lights were set into a steel flange and angled upward, that’s why I hadn’t been able to locate them with the flash. Now that my eyes had adjusted, the lights didn’t seem so bright, they threw a dull, uneven glow across the containers and the rest of the cargo. For the first time since the hold cover shut, I felt a glimmer of hope.

I looked around the Haplon containers while Rita checked out the other end of the hold. The sacks of grain I’d climbed on earlier were stamped AgAid, the tag on one pallet said the sacks contained genetically modified seed, and that they were bound for some farming project out in Ghana. The other pallets were stacked with crates, mostly liquor destined for various ports along the West African coast. It seemed to be a cargo of goods that the main shipping lines had rejected as too small, or simply not worth the hassle. Returning to the hold door, I found Rita there already, slashing a screwdriver through the top carton of a stacked pallet. She peeled the carton open and pulled out a glass jar.

CHERRIES
, said the label.
BEST QUALITY
.

She unscrewed the lid, popped a cherry in her mouth, then sat down and propped herself against the stacked cartons. I grabbed a jar and sat down beside her and we ate the cherries and drank the sweet cherry syrup. The discovery of the light switch, and the cherries, buoyed us. Rita, to take her mind off our dire situation, began to tell me some stupid jokes she’d learned from her father. We laughed hard. Slightly hysterically. The jokes were only funny because they weren’t funny at all.

I went and took a leak at the back of the hold, over to the right. When I returned, Rita went back there, over to the left.

“God,” she said, tucking her shirt in as she came back. “If my dad could see me now. You know what he said when I told him I was joining Customs?”

“Don’t do it?”

“He didn’t say a damn thing. He just gave me this look he’s got and walked out.”

“Overwhelmed.”

She laughed. “Yeah. He was so overwhelmed that Mom had to withdraw conjugal rights before he’d speak to me again. Real overwhelmed he was. He wanted to know what kind of guy was going to marry a girl in Customs.” When I smiled at that, she said, “Can you believe it? The man is Jurassic. But I think about it sometimes, you know. I mean, look at me. Was he right?”

“You’ll find someone.”

“That’s what all my married friends say.”

I glanced at her. “For what it’s worth, my wife thinks maybe you already found him.”

Rita looked at me curiously. Then I told her. I hadn’t intended to, but the moment just seemed to have presented itself.

“You and me?” she said, aghast.

“You and me.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“Well, where’d she get the idea? She doesn’t even know me.”

“She had me followed. She knows I’ve been lying to her about something. She just drew the wrong conclusion.” I swigged the cherry syrup. “The guy she had tailing me took some pictures of you and me down at Grant’s Tomb.”

Rita turned that over. Then she laughed.

“It ain’t funny.”

“Oh, come on,” she said. “You’ve got to admit, it’s got its funny side. We’re doing the cloak-and-dagger thing, and some guy’s off in the bushes taking photos of us for your wife?”

“Fiona’s not laughing. Last night she was talking about a divorce.”

Rita studied me. “You’re serious.”

Looking down, I rescrewed the lid on my jar. I remarked that shooting the breeze wasn’t doing much to get us out of the hold. Then I got the flashlight and climbed up on a container and shone the beam up over my head till I finally saw what I was looking for. An air vent. It was no bigger than a hand. I half strode, half jumped onto the next container, then on again to the next. At the fourth container, I stopped and pointed the flash straight up. The vent was right above me.

“Harry Houdini couldn’t do it,” called Rita when she saw the vent. “Come back down and finish your lunch.”

From the top of the container to the vent was about twenty-five feet.

I switched off the flash and clambered down. I went across and slapped the boxes she was resting against, my glance flickering back to the container. “Feeling strong?”

“You want to stack them?” She was appalled. “And then what, climb up?”

“That’s what I want.”

She shook her head and ate another cherry. I could see she was thinking about mentioning Fiona again, but she didn’t, and the moment passed. “Never happen,” she said, referring to my suggestion about the boxes.

“If we can make a platform up there, five or six feet high, the vent’s reachable.”

“With a very long broomstick, maybe. What are you going to do, act like an irate neighbor, bang on the ceiling, hope someone hears?”

I got the sack of tools, explaining that the vents must open onto the deck. “If we could get something up through the vent, someone up on deck might see it.”

“Something like what?”

“Cloth. Material. Anything bright.” I tugged the metal straps binding the boxes to the pallet. “We can use these to feed the cloth up through the vent.” Rita looked at me skeptically. “It’s either that,” I said, “or sit on our butts till we get to Africa.”

“This is assuming they don’t already know we’re down here.”

I screwed up my face. We’d been through this a score of times. If the crew knew we were down in the hold, any effort we made to get out was going to be a waste of time. We looked at each other, then Rita finally got to her feet. She warned me that if she put her back out, she was going to sue me down to my shorts.

The container was too high to heft the boxes onto directly, so first I built a small step-platform of boxes on the floor beside it. Once I’d done that, I gave Rita a leg up onto the container, then I started carting boxes over from the pallets. I stepped up onto the platform, jerked the boxes onto my shoulder, then heaved them up onto the container, where Rita built them into a stepped tower rising toward the vent. The work was killing, after twenty minutes my arms felt like lead, but we kept going till Rita finally said, “Last one.” She grunted as she picked up the box.

I climbed up and watched her haul the last box up the tower. She positioned it carefully at the apex, then turned and trudged down and sat and buried her face in her hands. She was perspiring and her cheeks were bright red. I went and squeezed her shoulder.

“The last last one,” she muttered.

I climbed the tower behind her. Stopping on the second-highest tier, my legs straddling the apex, I looked up at the vent. Then I lifted my hand and stretched. The vent was about eight feet from the tips of my fingers. Then I suddenly overbalanced, my arm swung out, snatching air, and my knees buckled and I came down hard on my butt. It took me a few seconds to steady myself. When I glanced down, Rita was staring up at me.

“Don’t do that again,” she said quietly.

I came down, bracing my hands against the boxes as I descended. Over by the door, I found the crowbar, and I busted two metal straps off the pallets. I crimped the two straps end-to-end with the pliers, a total length of around forty feet. Rita found some red tape, we tore it into short lengths and tied them into something that looked like a giant fishing-fly. We used the last piece of tape to tie the fly to one end of my forty-foot-long metal strap.

Next I tested it. I lifted the strap and fed it into the air, but each time, the fly rose only three or four feet before the strap buckled and fell.

“A pole?” Rita suggested.

After searching the hold, she found something better than a pole, it was a long length of polyethylene pipe. I pushed the fly into the pipe, then fed the metal strap up after it. A second later, the fly popped out the other end.

I climbed onto the container. Rita handed the contraption up to me, and I made my way up the tower of boxes and sat on the apex and raised the pipe toward the vent. It was way short. I stood on the second-top tier and fed the metal strap up the pipe. Rita was standing on the container by this time, shining the flash up at the fly and the vent.

“Two more feet,” she said.

I pushed more strap up the base of the pipe, and saw the strap emerge from the top of the pipe and begin to buckle. I pulled it down and tried again. Again it buckled.

I lowered the pipe. The ship was rolling gently, I looked at the top box on the tower. Rita saw what I was thinking.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Shine the flash up there at the vent. Direct me.”

I climbed onto the top box. When I felt balanced, I stood upright, then raised the pipe with my left hand. With my right hand, I fed the strap up into the pipe and saw the red-tape fly bob out a few inches beneath the vent.

“A little more,” Rita said. “And toward me.”

Stretching, I pushed on the strap. High above, the fly touched the steel plate. I moved the pole left, overshot the vent, then dragged it back.

“There!” she called. “There!”

I shoved the strap hard, the fly shot up and straight into the vent. Rita whooped.

“Okay,” I told her. “Come up here. Push some more of this strap through the pipe before I fall and kill myself.”

She stopped just below me and fed the strap through. “How much before the tape’s out on deck?”

“Keep feeding.”

“Hey,” she said after a while. She grinned, surprised. “It feels easier. Like maybe it’s out there?”

I told her to feed through another few feet, then to jiggle the strap. She did that.

“What if it’s come out where no one can see it?” she said, but there was nothing we could do about that, so I didn’t answer, just told her to keep jiggling the strap. I craned back, arms extended, then I suddenly overbalanced again. This time when I jerked upright, recovering my balance, Rita swore. “Get the hell down from there,” she ordered.

I got down. She jiggled the strap fiercely.

My neck was sore. I rubbed it and turned my head. I was aching and tired, but pleased to have done something. Then a movement caught my eye away to the right. I peered into the shadows.

“Rita,” I said after a moment, but she kept working the strap. I reached and touched her shoulder. When she finally looked at me, I nodded to the shadows on our right. She turned that way, and I jiggled the pipe in my hand. In the shadows, something fluttered. Rita peered at it hard. Then, tentatively, she jiggled the strap. In the shadows, there was an answering flutter. She turned to me slowly. We’d been working for at least an hour, working hard. We were totally shattered. And what did we have to show for all our labor and ingenuity? A tower of boxes going nowhere, and a metal strap passing through a vent twenty feet above us and emerging, pointlessly, from another vent fifteen feet to our right.

Rita jerked the strap, the tape-fly danced, and she gave a sound like a sob. “Oh, Jesus.”

“We could try another vent.”

She flung aside the strap and flopped back, spent.

We were not going to get out. Not unless the Ukrainians let us out. I looked around at the steel hull, our prison, then I climbed down off the tower and the container and went over and busted open a crate of bourbon. I needed something to wash away the sweet taste of cherries.

It was past ten before we decided to try to get some sleep, I hauled some sacks of grain to over near the door by the light switch, then I built them into two makeshift mattresses, six sacks apiece, a couple of yards apart.

When Rita came back from the far side of the hold and saw what I’d done, she held out the torn sleeping bag, the one I’d mistaken for a body bag when we first came aboard.

“It’s yours,” I said.

“Push the sacks together,” she suggested. “I’ll unzip the bag, we can use it like a blanket.”

I told her I had my jacket, I could pull that over me if I got cold.

“Toss you for it,” she said.

“Go to bed.” I sat on my sacks of grain and unlaced my shoes.

She dropped the sleeping bag on her sacks, then she fetched the open cherry jars left over from supper and the half-empty bottle of bourbon. She put these on the floor between us, then stood up and unbuttoned her blouse. I turned and stretched out on my dusty bed.

“You want the light off or on?” she said.

“Off.”

“What if there’s rats?”

“Leave it on if you want.”

“I’ll get the flash.” I heard her fetch it, then place it on the floor between us. “It’s by the cherries if you need it,” she said. There was a pause. “A nightcap might help us sleep.”

“I’ll sleep fine if you just turn off the goddamn light.”

I heard her slither into the sleeping bag and pull up the zip. A second later, the light went out. The sudden dark seemed to chill the air.

“Ned?”

“What?”