The Night Ferry (32 page)

He sighs. “Just the one?”

“When you get back to London, run a ruler over Dr. Sohan Banerjee.”

“He was at your father’s party.”

“That’s him.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Does he have any links with fertility clinics outside of the U.K.? Also check if he has any links with adoption agencies or children’s charities.”

“I’l see what I can do.”

A stewardess is tel ing him to turn off his phone. “Safe journey.”

“You too.”

Forbes’s cold is getting worse and he’s developed a seal-like cough punctuated by the clicking in his throat. He sounds like a boom box.

“You should have stayed home,” I suggest.

“My house is ful of sick people.”

“So you decided to infect the rest of the population.”

“That’s me. Patient Zero.”

“Did you find them—the pregnant asylum seekers?”

“I should have locked you up when I had the chance.” He blows his nose. “They arrived in early July hidden in a shipping container. A Russian, aged eighteen, and an Albanian, twenty-one. Both looked ready to drop any time. They were fingerprinted, issued with identification papers and taken to a reception center in Oxfordshire. Three days later they were taken to a bed-and-breakfast accommodation in Liverpool. They had two weeks to fil out a statement of evidence form and meet with a lawyer but neither of them showed up. They haven’t been seen since.”

“What about the babies?”

“There’s no record of the births at any NHS hospital but that doesn’t prove anything. A lot of people have them at home these days—even in the bath. Thank Christ our tub wasn’t big enough.”

I have a sudden mental image of his wife, whalelike in the family bathtub.

“It stil doesn’t make much sense,” he says. “One of the attractions of the U.K. for asylum seekers is free health care. These women could have had their babies in an NHS hospital.

The government also provides a one-off grant of £300 for a newborn baby, as wel as extra cash for milk and nappies. This is on top of the normal food vouchers and income support.

These women claimed to have no family or friends in the U.K. who could support them, yet they didn’t take advantage of the welfare benefits on offer. Makes you wonder how they survived.”

“Or if they did.”

He doesn’t want to go there.

Ruiz is waiting for me downstairs at the Academisch Medisch Centrum. He looks like a kid being picked up from summer camp, without the peeling nose or poison ivy stings.

“The staff wished me a long and healthy life,” he says. “They also told me never to get sick in the Netherlands again.”

“Touching.”

“I thought so. I’m a medical bloody miracle.” He holds up the stump of his missing finger and begins counting. “I’ve been shot, almost drowned and now stabbed. What’s left?”

“They could blow you up, sir.”

“Been tried. Brendan Pearl and his IRA chummies fired a mortar into a Belfast police station. Missed me by that much.” He does his Maxwel Smart impersonation.

He pauses at the revolving door. “Have you been crying, grasshopper?”

“No, sir.”

“I thought you might have been pining.”

“Not pining, sir.”

“Women are al owed to be warm and fuzzy.”

“You make me sound like a stuffed animal.”

“With very sharp teeth.”

He’s in a good mood. Maybe it’s the morphine. It doesn’t last long. I tel him about Zala and can see the tension rise to his shoulders and move to his neck. His eyes close. He takes a ragged breath as though the pain has suddenly returned.

“They’re going to smuggle Samira into Britain,” I say.

“You can’t be certain of that.”

“It happened to the others. The babies are delivered in the same country as the parents lived.”

“The Beaumonts are dead.”

“They’l find other buyers.”

“Who are
they
?”

“Yanus. Pearl. Others.”

“What does Spijker say?”

“He says I should go home.”

“A wise man.”

“Hokke says there is someone who might help us find Samira.”

“Who is he?”

“Eduardo de Souza. Yanus used to work for him.”

“This gets better and better.”

My mobile is ringing. Hokke is somewhere noisy. The red light district. He spends more time there now than when he was walking the beat.

“I wil pick you up at seven from the hotel.”

“Where are we going?”

“Answers at seven.”

12

An enormous dishwater moon has risen in the east and seems to move across the sky, fol owing our taxi. Even in darkness I recognize some of the roads. Schiphol Airport is not far from here.

This is a different area of Amsterdam. The chocolate-box façades and historic bridges have been replaced by the functional and harsh—cement-gray apartment blocks and shops protected by metal shutters. Only one store is open. A dozen black youths are standing outside.

De Souza doesn’t have a fixed address, Hokke explains. He moves from place to place, never staying more than a night in any one bed. He lives with the people he employs. They protect him.

“Be very careful what you say to him. And don’t interrupt when he speaks. Keep your eyes down and your hands by your sides.” We have pul ed up outside an apartment block. Hokke opens the door for me.

“Aren’t you coming with me?”

“You must go alone. We wil wait here.”

“No,” declares Ruiz. “I am going with her.”

Hokke responds with equal passion. “She goes alone or there wil be nobody waiting to meet her.”

Ruiz continues to protest but I push him back into the car where he grimaces as he folds his arms across his bandaged chest.

“Remember what I told you,” says the Dutchman, pointing toward a building that is identical to the one next to it and the one next to that. A teenage boy leans against a wal . A second one watches us from an upstairs window. Lookouts. “You must go now. Phone me if there’s a problem.”

I walk away from the taxi. The boy leaning against the wal has gone. The second teenager is stil at the window. I walk through a concrete archway into a quadrangle. Lights shine on water. Chinese lanterns are strung from the branches of a leafless tree growing amid the weeds.

Pushing through a fire door, I climb the stairs, counting off the floors. Turning left at the landing, I find the second door. A bel sounds when I push a smal white button.

Another teenager appears at the door. His polished black eyes examine me but turn away when I meet his gaze. Shoes and sandals are lined up in the narrow hal way. The teenager points to my boots. I take them off.

The floor creaks idly as I fol ow him to a living area. A group of five men in their forties and fifties are seated on cushions arranged at the edges of a woven rug.

Eduardo de Souza is immediately recognizable because of his place at the center. Dressed in white pantaloons and a dark shirt, he looks Turkish or possibly Kurdish, with a high forehead and carved cheekbones. Unfurling his legs, he rises and touches my hand briefly.

“Welcome, Miss Barba, I am Eduardo de Souza.”

His neatly trimmed beard is black and gray—the gray like slivers of ice hanging on dark fur. Nobody speaks or moves, yet there is a perceptible energy in the air, a sharpening of focus. I keep my gaze down as eyes roam over me.

Through the doorway to the kitchen I spy a young Nigerian woman in a flowing dress of bright colors. Three children, two boys and a girl, jostle at the doorway, regarding me with fascination.

De Souza speaks again. “These are friends of mine. This is Sunday. He is our host this evening.”

Sunday smiles. He is Nigerian and his teeth are a bril iant white. Each of the men introduces himself in turn. The first is Iranian with a Swiss German accent. His name is Farhad and his eyes are set so deep in his skul that I can scarcely see them. Beside him is Oscar, who looks Moroccan and speaks with a French accent.

Final y, there is Dayel, a smooth-shaven Indian, with an oil burn on his neck.

“One of your countrymen, although not a Sikh,” says de Souza. Dayel smiles at the introduction.

How does he know I’m a Sikh?

There is a spare brocade cushion beside him. I am expected to sit. Sunday’s wife enters the room carrying a tray of mismatched glasses and begins pouring sweet tea. Her hair is braided into a curtain of long beaded plaits. She smiles shyly at me. Her teeth are perfect and her wide nose flares gently as she breathes.

Dishes arrive. A meal. Holding his hands together, de Souza studies me above his steepled fingers, weighing up whether or not to help me. His English is perfect, overlaid with an educated British accent that is especial y noticeable on the long vowels.

“This area of Amsterdam is cal ed Bijlmermeer,” he says, glancing at the window. “In October 1992 a cargo jet took off from Schiphol and lost two engines. It buried itself into an apartment block like this one, ful of immigrant families who were sitting down to an evening meal. Fifty apartments were destroyed by the initial impact. Another hundred burned afterward as jet fuel ran through the streets like a river of fire. People threw themselves off balconies and rooftops to escape the flames.

“At first they said the death tol was 250. Later they dropped the estimate to 75 and official y only 43 people died. The truth is, nobody knows the true number. Il egal immigrants have no papers and they hide from the police. They are ghosts.”

De Souza hasn’t touched the food, but seems particularly satisfied to see the others eating.

“Forgive me, Miss Barba, I talk too much. My friends here are too polite to tel me to be quiet. It is customary for a guest to bring something to the feast or provide some form of entertainment. Do you sing or dance?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you are a storytel er.”

“I don’t real y understand.”

“You wil tel us a story. The best of them seem to me to be about life and death, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal.” He waves his hand as if stirring the air. His amber eyes are fixed on mine.

“I am not a very good storytel er.”

“Let us be the judge of that.”

I tel him the story of two teenage girls who met at school and became best friends. Soul mates. Later, at university, one of them slept with the other’s father. He seduced her. She al owed herself to be seduced. The friendship was over.

I don’t mention names, but why would I tel them such a personal story?

Seamlessly, I begin talking about a second pair of teenage girls, who met in a city of widows and orphans. People traffickers smuggled them out of Afghanistan as far as Amsterdam.

They were told that they owed a debt for their escape. Either they became prostitutes or carried a baby for a childless couple. Virgins were implanted with embryos in a ritualized form of medical rape. They were the perfect incubators. Factories. Couriers.

Even as I tel this story, a sense of alarm dries my throat. Why have I told de Souza such personal stories? For al I know he is involved. He could be the ringleader. I don’t have time to consider the implications. I don’t know if I care. I have come too far to back out.

There is a moment of silence when I finish. De Souza leans forward and takes a chocolate from a platter, rol ing it over his tongue before chewing it slowly.

“It is a good story. Friendship is a difficult thing to define. Oscar here is my oldest friend. How would you define friendship, Oscar?” Oscar grunts slightly, as though the answer is obvious. “Friendship is about choice and chemistry. It cannot be defined.”

“But surely there is something more to it than that.”

“It is a wil ingness to overlook faults and to accept them. I would let a friend hurt me without striking back,” he says, smiling, “but only once.” De Souza laughs. “Bravo, Oscar, I can always rely on you to distil an argument down to its purest form. What do you think, Dayel?” The Indian rocks his head from side to side, proud that he has been asked to speak next.

“Friendship is different for each person and it changes throughout our lives. At age six it is about holding hands with your best friend. At sixteen it is about the adventure ahead. At sixty it is about reminiscing.” He holds up a finger. “You cannot define it with any one word, although honesty is perhaps the closest word—”

“No, not honesty,” Farhad interrupts. “On the contrary, we often have to protect our friends from what we truly think. It is like an unspoken agreement. We ignore each other’s faults and keep our confidences. Friendship isn’t about being honest. The truth is too sharp a weapon to wield around someone we trust and respect. Friendship is about self-awareness. We see ourselves through the eyes of our friends. They are like a mirror that al ows us to judge how we are traveling.” De Souza clears his throat now. I wonder if he is aware of the awe he inspires in others. I suspect he is too intel igent and too human to do otherwise.

“Friendship cannot be defined,” he says sternly. “The moment we begin to give reasons for being friends with someone we begin to undermine the magic of the relationship. Nobody wants to know that they are loved for their money or their generosity or their beauty or their wit. Choose one motive and it al ows a person to say, ‘Is that the
only
reason?’” The others laugh. De Souza joins in with them. This is a performance.