Crossing the Waters
While Chris refilled our steins I studied the three book piles, noting the impressive values of the titles without caring. I might care later, or I might not. Right now, it was enough for the books to distract me from the oppressive atmosphere and the cats, all of whom were staring at me, their ears twitching and turning to trace sounds invisible to human ears.
As soon as he put the steins down, Chris touched the black notebook, skimming the cover with his fingertips as if he were testing bathwater for a baby. “It’s just a journal,” he said. “Mostly business stuff. I want to read you some notes I wrote on a private jet. I was on my way back from a private island in the Bahamas. Fucking place has its own runway.” I wasn’t surprised: by that time, Chris was working exclusively for a half dozen obscenely rich clients. “I’d been to the island before, to deliver merchandise to my client. If we ever build a second Mount Rushmore, to commemorate the founding of the Internet, his face will be carved into the mountain. I’m going to call him Ted, as in Ted Talks, because he gave a few back in the day.” He forced a smile for my benefit and opened the journal. “This happened near the end of November.”
I ran the dates in my head: whatever happened on that island, I realized, corresponded with the rumours of Chris’s retirement. He’d taken a shock, one that still reverberated through his jangled nerves. What the hell happened, I wondered, my lurid imagination already transforming his rich client into a combination Bond villain and Jeffrey Epstein sex slaver whose vile machinations snared anyone who ventured into his lair.
As crazy guesses go, mine was pretty close to the mark.
“On this trip, I went strictly as a courier,” Chris said. “I was to deliver a package that I was under strict orders not to open. I obeyed. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d burned the fucking thing. I’d be dead now, but…” He took a deep breath and another swig of beer. “I was only on the island for a few hours. This is what I wrote on the plane ride home.” He started to read silently, as if he’d forgotten I was there, then he closed the cover. “Fuck it, I’m just going to tell you what happened.”
He didn’t hesitate this time. The words seemed to pour out, tumbling over each other in their race to freedom. I felt flattered to be singled out to hear this story, which he clearly hadn’t shared with anyone, but the elation didn’t last. I could have done without the honours.
A limousine picked him up at home that morning. The driver took him to a nondescript warehouse near the airport where Chris met four men: three armed guards—ex-military, probably former mercenaries—and their boss, a sun-baked Anglo with a pan-African accent, his eyes lidded from scrutiny by designer sunglasses. The package, a medium-sized leather satchel, sat on an empty barrel; the men had no intention of touching it again. The boss took a photo of Chris holding the package and emailed it to someone. Then he nodded to his guards. They couldn’t get out of that warehouse fast enough.
Chris admitted that he should have asked himself a few questions. Like, why didn’t the dude with the guards bring the package to the island? Why did the client insist that only Chris could ferry it? And why was the leather satchel wrapped in military-grade steel cables?
“Not that my answers would have stopped me,” Chris admitted. “If you want to work for billionaires, you don’t question their little whims. You’re paid not to notice anything. Even so, this job was already way beyond the fucking pale.”
The driver dropped him off at the private terminal where one percent of the One Percent and their flunkies rack up their frequent flier perks. I’ve never been there but Chris was practically a regular, and in happier times he’d joke about the place over beers, telling me straight-faced that the drinking fountains ran with imported mineral water and zero-body-fat was an employee mandatory. A quick waltz through the la-dee-da security check where the guards tip their hats and call you Sir before escorting you across the runway to the sleek Leer jet, where the pilot stands hat in hand and the Victoria’s Secret-model attendant has chilled your favourite bourbon.
On board, Chris placed the leather satchel in a wall safe by the pilot’s cabin and took his seat. Soon he was flying over the Appalachians, the mountains and the valleys flattened by the jet’s sheer height. Chris said he must have fallen asleep because when he looked out the window an invisible hand had torn away the dun-coloured landscape to reveal a crystal ocean beneath, the Atlantic sparkling aquamarine, an image, he said, he might have carried over with him from the land of dreams. There he was, he said, air-locked in titanium 30,000 feet above the waves, waited on by a goddess who tactfully ignored the drool drying on his chin, on his way to an island with no purpose but to please its lucky inhabitants.
“That might have been the last happy moment of my life,” he confided. “I hope not. Good miracles happen. I have to believe that.”
He returned to the story before I could deliver an optimistic platitude. The pilot landed the jet without a bump or a skid on a runway no longer than a carrier deck, and the salty, vegetation-drenched Caribbean air soon flooded the cabin. He was almost off the plane when he felt the lightest tug on his sleeve, as if he’d reached the length of his diamond-studded leash. He’d forgotten something. The package. He turned his head quickly enough to catch the beautiful attendant before she donned her habitual mask. Her expression was of total loathing. And relief—relief, he understood only later, that Chris was taking the leather satchel with him. She held it in her trembling hands as if it contained a coil of poisonous snakes. She didn’t smile or say goodbye after she handed it over. He was dead to her now.
The satchel was heavier than he remembered, so much heavier that he almost dropped it. But how? The cables hadn’t been tampered with. The bag itself wasn’t any bulkier. And the leather was cold to the touch, as if it had been stored in a freezer, not a temperature-controlled safe. Which was impossible: no one stores priceless artefacts on ice. But as he stepped into the soupy Caribbean heat, the cold seemed to emanate from the satchel like dry-ice vapour, tickling his skin where it touched the leather.
“Tickling is not the right word,” Chris said. “There is no right word. I mean, it tickled, but it was like being tickled by your dead grandmother as you bend down to kiss her face at her funeral.”
Chris got into the fancy golf cart waiting to drive him to the estate. It wasn’t like he could get back on the plane or swim to the mainland. He had a job to do, and he was being very well paid to do it.
Part IV of The Heart of a Pig, “Severing the Binds,” will appear in the next few days. To read Part I, click here; to read Part II, here. Keep the comments coming.
Bwa ha ha. Loving it!
Wow, I am on tenterhooks. Fascinating story.