The Night Ferry (30 page)

“It doesn’t make you a coward. It makes you human.”

“Yeah, wel , that’s when I got to thinking about doing something else.”

“Maybe you just need a sea change.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe you don’t real y want to marry me.”

“Yes I do.”

“Would you stil want to marry me if we didn’t have children?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m asking.”

“But you
want
children, right?”

“What if I couldn’t have children?”

Dave straightens up. He doesn’t understand.

I try to explain. “Sometimes children just don’t arrive. Look at Cate. She couldn’t get pregnant and it twisted her up inside until she did something foolish. Don’t you think if two people love each other that should be enough?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

He stil doesn’t get my point. There is nowhere else for me to go except the truth. Words tumble out and I’m surprised at how organized they sound. Almost perfect sentences.

A woman’s pelvis is meant to expand and tilt forward as a baby grows inside her. Mine can’t do this. I have metal plates and rods holding my spine together. My pelvis cannot bend or twist. Pregnancy would put enormous strain on the disks and joints of my lower back. I risk being paralyzed and nursing a baby from a wheelchair.

He looks stunned. Desolate. It doesn’t matter what he says now because I have glimpsed his soul. He wants to raise a child. And for the first time in my life, I realize that I want one too.

I
want
to be a mother.

In the hours that fol ow al possibilities are considered. On the taxi ride to the hotel, over dinner, afterward in bed, Dave talks of second opinions, alternatives and operations. We use up so much air in the room that I can scarcely breathe. He hasn’t answered my original question. The most important one. He hasn’t said if it matters.

While on the subject of true confessions, I tel him about sleeping with Barnaby El iot and fal ing out with Cate. There are moments when I see him flinch but he needs to hear this. I am not the person he imagines.

My mother says the truth is unimportant when it comes to love. An arranged marriage is al about the fictions that one family tel s another. Perhaps she’s right. Perhaps fal ing in love is about inventing a story and accepting the truth of it.

10

I wake in the early hours, with his heart against my back and his arm around me. A part of me wants to stay like this, not moving, scarcely breathing. Another part wants to run down the hotel corridor, the stairs, along the street, out of the city, away!

Slipping out of bed and into the bathroom, I dress in jeans and a blouse and fil the pockets of my jacket with cash and my mobile. I bend to lace my boots, accepting the dul ache in my spine for what it is, a part of me now.

Daylight is leaking over the rooftops and the streets are beginning to stir. A machine with spinning brushes seems to be polishing the cobblestones with overnight rain. Most of the windows are closed in de Wal etjes, with curtains drawn. Only the desperate and the lonely are on the streets at this hour.

I wonder if this is what it feels like to be a refugee—to be a stranger in a place, despairing and hopeful al at once. Waiting for what wil come next. I have never lived like this.

Hokke is waiting for me at the café. He knows about Samira. “A bird told me,” he says, raising his eyes. As if signaled, a pigeon flutters onto a branch above us.

The air inside the café is noisy with whistling steam and banging pots. Counter staff and waitresses acknowledge Hokke with waves, shouts and handshakes. He leaves me for a moment, threading his way between tables. The kitchen door is open. Bending low over sinks, scrubbing pans, are three young men who greet Hokke with respect. He ruffles their hair and shares a joke.

I glance around the café, which is almost empty except for a table of hippies who seem to be communicating in a code of clicks and clacks from their beaded hair. On her own, a young teenage girl nurses a hot drink. Waiflike and hol ow-eyed, she is just the sort pimps prey upon with warm meals and promises.

Hokke has returned. He, too, notices the girl. Summoning a waitress, he quietly orders breakfast for the girl, thick toast, jam, cheese and ham. She accepts it warily, expecting there to be strings attached, and eats greedily.

His attention turns to me.

“I have to find Samira,” I tel him.

“Again.”

“Refugees have networks. You said so. You mentioned a name: de Souza. Could he help me?”

Hokke puts a finger to his lips. He leans closer, speaking out of the corner of his mouth like a prisoner under the eye of a warder. “Please be very careful when you speak such a name.”

“Who is he?”

Hokke doesn’t answer immediately. He pours coffee from a pot, tapping metal against glass. “Despite what you have read, the Netherlands is defined more by what it forbids than by what it permits. We do not have slums. Graffiti is cleaned away quickly. Broken windows are repaired. Abandoned vehicles are towed. We expect our trains and trams to run on time.

We queue. It doesn’t change the people, of course, just the aesthetics.”

He gestures with a slight nod toward the kitchen. “There are half a mil ion il egal workers in the Netherlands—Iranians, Sudanese, Afghanis, Bosnians, Kosovars, Iraqis. They work in restaurants, hotels, laundries and factories. Newspapers wouldn’t be delivered without them, hotel sheets wouldn’t be laundered, houses wouldn’t be cleaned. People complain, but we cannot do without them.”

A pipe appears in his hand. He packs it slowly, pressing tobacco into the bowl with his thumb. A match flares and flickers as he sucks in a breath.

“Imagine a person who could control a workforce such as this. He would be more powerful than any trade union leader or politician.”

“Is there such a person?”

His voice drops to a whisper. “His name is Eduardo de Souza. Nobody has more real power in this city than he does. He has an army of couriers, cleaners, drivers and spies. He can get you anything: a pistol, a fake passport, a kilo of the finest Afghani heroin. Drugs and prostitution are only a smal part of it. He knows which politicians are sleeping with which girls and which il egals are looking after their children or cleaning their houses or tending their gardens. That is
real
power. Destiny making.” He sits back, his soft blue eyes blinking through the smoke.

“You admire him.”

“He is a very interesting man.”

His answer strikes me as peculiar. It carries a hint that there are things he hasn’t told me.

“How long have you known him?”

“Many years.”

“Is he a friend?”

“Friendship is something I find harder to understand as I get older.”

“Wil he help me find Samira?”

“He could be behind it al .”

“Why do you say that?”

“Yanus once worked for him.”

He places his hands on the table and wearily pushes himself to his feet.

“I wil get a message to him.”

His pipe slips into his jacket pocket. He won’t let me pay for breakfast. The bil has been covered, he says, nodding toward the owner.

Outside it is raining again. The puddles are shiny and black as oil. Hokke offers me an umbrel a. “I wil cal you in a few hours. Give my regards to DI Ruiz. Tel him that old policemen never die. They just miss a beat.”

Barnaby answers his cel phone quickly as if he’s been expecting a cal . It must also be raining in London. I hear car tires swishing on a wet road and raindrops on his umbrel a. I ask about the funerals. There is a long pause. I swap the phone between hands.

“Saturday at the West London Crematorium. They won’t release the bodies until Wednesday.”

There is another silence. The knowledge of Samira and the twins expands in my chest. Lawyers and medical ethicists can debate al they want about who “owns” the twins, but it doesn’t change the fact that Cate provided the embryos. Barnaby should know.

“There’s something I have to tel you.”

He grunts a response.

“I know why Cate faked her pregnancy. She arranged a surrogate. Her embryos were implanted in someone else’s womb.” Something shifts deep in his chest. A groan. “I told you to leave my daughter’s affairs alone.”

I don’t expect this reaction. Surely he must be curious. Doesn’t he want to know the outcome? Then it dawns on me that none of this is new. He knows already.

He lied about finding Cate’s computer, which means he must have read her e-mails. If he knows, why hasn’t he gone to the police?

“What are you doing Barnaby?”

“I’m getting my grandchildren.”

He has no idea what he’s dealing with. “Listen to me, Barnaby. This isn’t what you think. Cate broke the law.”

“What’s done is done.”

“These men are kil ers. You can’t negotiate with them. Look what happened to Cate.”

He isn’t listening. Instead he charges ahead, trying to attach logic and fairness to what should happen next.

“Stop, Barnaby. This is crazy.”

“It’s what Cate would have wanted.”

“No. You’l get yourself kil ed. Just tel me where you are. Let’s sit down and talk.”

“Stay out of this. Don’t interfere.”

The line goes dead. He won’t answer again.

Before I can dial Spijker there is another cal . DI Forbes’s voice is hoarse with a cold and the clicking sound in his throat is muffled by phlegm. I can imagine one of his children bringing the infection home from school and spreading it through the house like a domestic plague.

“Having a nice holiday?”

“It’s not a holiday.”

“You know the difference between you and me? I don’t run away when things get tough. I’m a professional. I stick with the job. I got a wife and kids, responsibilities…”
And wandering hands.

He sneezes and blows his nose. “I’m stil waiting for your fucking statement.”

“I’m coming home.”

“When?”

“By Friday.”

“Wel you can expect a warm welcome. A Chief Superintendent North has been on the phone. Says you didn’t show up for work. He’s not happy.”

“It’s not important,” I say, trying to change the subject. I ask him about the two trucks that couldn’t be accounted for on the ferry that carried Hassan and the other il egals. One was stolen from a German freight yard three months ago, he says. It was resprayed and registered in Hol and. According to the manifest it was carrying plumbing supplies from a warehouse in Amsterdam, but the pickup address doesn’t exist. The second truck was leased from an owner-driver five weeks ago. He thought it was doing a run from Spain to the Netherlands.

The leasing documents and bank accounts are in false names.

This case is populated with people who seem to be ghosts, floating across borders with false papers. People like Brendan Pearl.

“I need a favor.”

He finds this amusing. “I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

“We’re on the same side.”

“Cel ar-dwel ers.”

“Running into form.”

“What do you want?”

“I need you to check the Customs and Immigration files for the past two years. Among the stowaways and il egals were any of them pregnant?”

“Off the top of my head I can think of two in the past three months. They were hidden in the back of a container.”

“What happened to them?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can you find out?”

“Yeah, sure. Along with a thousand other fucking things on my plate.”

I feel the heat in my cheeks.

“There’s something else. Hassan Khan has a sister, Samira. She’s pregnant. I think traffickers are going to try to move her into the U.K.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. You might want to give Customs a heads-up.”

“I’m not a free agent here.”

“It’s only a phone cal . If you don’t want to do it, just say so.”

“How are they going to move her?”

“They’l probably stick to what they know.”

“We can’t search every truck and container.”

I can hear him scratching a note on a pad. He asks me about Spijker and I give him the nuts and bolts of the surrogacy scam.

“I’ve never known anyone who attracts trouble like you do,” he says.