Chasing the Storm (3 page)

“I never said he was a criminal.”

“No. I am only saying, so you know the truth.”

“I believe you.” And he had. There was something about the little man, his attentiveness perhaps, that reminded him of one of his university professors. Not one of the law profs – they were all chilly wonks – but during his junior year he’d taken a philosophy course for kicks, and the professor had the same ability to listen with his eyes, to keep people talking.

Toward the end of the evening, Marin had gestured with his chin to the dancer beyond the glass. “I want you to have a good time,” he’d said. “If you like … I do not know your desires, but if you like, there are rooms in this club … Very private.” He was matter-of-fact about it, causing Rygg to shake his head, then immediately regret it. It had been a very long time since he had been with a woman and he could already feel the rush of blood down to his lower limbs.

“I am sorry,” said Marin. “In Russia, it is common …”

“Oh, I’m no saint,” Rygg had responded. “But I’ll pass, I think.”

“Once again, I thank you for saving my life. I am in your debt.”

“Forget it. If you ever need anything, give me a call, okay?”

“Do you mean that, Mr. Rygg?” he asked.

“Of course. Of course I do,” Rygg had responded.

Then Marin held out his left hand and they shook, a little less awkwardly that time, as if they were sealing some sort of pact.

April 3

Something was wrong. Dmitri Egorov scrubbed viciously at the ring of spaghetti sauce on the massive pan. From the beginning of this whole run, he’d felt something was wrong. First, the captain had actually come to his apartment in Zelenogradsk. His mother had invited him in and given him tea. Dmitri was embarrassed – the apartment was cramped and the walls were dirty and his mother was missing all but one of her front teeth. And then Boris had wandered in, drunk. But the captain seemed to take no notice of his surroundings, and had greeted Boris so courteously that he subsided, muttering, in a corner. The captain asked Dmitri whether he’d join him for the next run. It was nothing, he said, just moving some timber to Algiers, like they’d done last August. But the pay would be a bit better because they were dealing with a new company. Dmitri had agreed, mystified. Why hadn’t the captain gotten Yuri to round up the crew? Or, if he had to do it himself, why the house visit? Why hadn’t he just called?

Then Boris started talking about the fight he’d seen at the harbor, over some Bulgarian whore. One guy had his nose sliced off. Boris had picked up the piece of nose and dropped it in his friend’s vodka. Boris pretended to pluck something from his tea, and mimed his friend’s surprise. Dmitri’s mother watched from the door to the kitchen, her dress unevenly buttoned, her hand covering her mouth. The captain, tapping his fingers lightly against the rim of the teacup, waited until Boris’s laughter subsided into soggy coughing. Then he told Dmitri not to tell the others – he was going around personally. He gave Dmitri a time and date: seven thirty-eight p.m., April 2, gate C3. He had Dmitri repeat it twice. Then he left. He hadn’t touched his tea.

The sauce was seared on. Dmitri sprayed more water over it and set it aside to soak, then started cleaning the cutlery. He had one foot back and his hip propped against the edge of the steel refrigerator to counter the rolling of the ship. The Baltic, always an unruly sea, seemed choppier than usual. Seven thirty-eight. Why the precision? He couldn’t figure it out. He was still new at the game, sure. He’d done just fifteen runs, and some of those were little hops across the pond, to Frederikshavn or Stockholm. But the instructions had always been “morning of the 24th” or something like that, and they’d usually met in a bar beforehand for a round of vodka. Seven thirty-eight. The others seemed equally bemused, when they were clustered around gate C3 at 7:30, and Ilya had suggested that the captain had gone Swiss, but Ludo, the engineer, shook his head. “Don’t be naïve,” he said.

“What? You think …” said Ilya, but Ludo had just glanced at the sentry in his box.

Then there were the new sailors. Dmitri thought of them as the gray brothers. They’d shown up at exactly 7:38, and hadn’t bothered to shake hands. One was short and square, with hair the color of granite. The other was tall, with pale gray eyes. His name, he said, was Alexey. The short brother didn’t speak. Each carried a large duffel bag. Dmitri looked at the bags scornfully: all his belongings fit tidily into his backpack. When Ilya asked where they were from, Alexey said he was new in town. He’d been on the Black Sea mostly and had come to try his luck in the Baltic. Ludo, who’d been everywhere, said he’d seen him before somewhere, but he didn’t think it was on the Black Sea. Alexey had laughed, two little snorts, and offered Ludo a cigarette. When the captain arrived, coming at the gate from the port side, Ilya asked him where Yuri was.

“Yuri’s not coming,” said the captain. He seemed angry. “His mother’s in hospital.”

“His mother’s always in hospital.”

“She’s worse.”

Dmitri set the pan aside, and started on the bread dough, first taking off the necklace with its silver-and-amber cross and hanging it from a hook above his head. The cross was special – it had been his grandfather’s and his father’s, and he didn’t want it getting into the dough. He liked kneading – it allowed his mind to wander. He pummeled the dough like a boxer.

And finally, there had been the incident at lunch yesterday. Dmitri had been filling the bread basket and saw it all. Wolfie was sitting beside the squat brother and had just finished his steak. Taking out his cigarettes, he turned to the brother and patted his jacket pocket. “Got a light?” he asked. And then Wolfie was screaming, with his face in the gravy on his plate, and the whole table had risen to see what was happening. Only the brother looked calm, though he was holding the little finger of Wolfie’s left hand. He let go of the finger, and Wolfie picked up the hand and looked at it. His hair was matted to his cheek with gravy that dripped onto his collar. He screamed again. The finger was bent backwards at the second knuckle. “You broke my fucking finger!” he screamed. “Fucking bastard! Fucking bastard!”

The brother cut a sliver of steak, wiped it in gravy, and put it in his mouth. He chewed and swallowed. “Not broken. Dislocated,” he said, and they heard his voice for the first time. He spoke Russian with a flat accent. Cutting another slice, he held it up. Then he said: “Don’t touch my jacket again. I don’t like it.”

Dmitri was still kneading when Ludo came down and sat on the steps of the galley, one leg up on the doorjamb. He often did that; he claimed it was the perfect smoking perch: out of the wind but still with a view of the sky. Sometimes he said nothing at all, but occasionally Dmitri could winkle a story out of him. Ludo had the craziest tales if you got him going – he’d worked in an emerald mine in Colombia and had lived in Yemen for a while, and there were rumors that he had an African girlfriend. Tonight, however, he just smoked, not even answering when Dmitri asked how his girlfriend was. Dmitri looked at him. Ludo’s face was crumpled brown leather, little triangles torn open so the eyes could peer through. He kept his hair, even on board, slicked down to his collar. Ilya claimed he used axle grease. Finally, toward the end of his second cigarette, he said, “You keep your eyes open on this one, all right, little Dmitri?”

“What do you mean?”

“Each run has its own smell. You’ve smelled something funny with this one already, right?”

Dmitri nodded.

“After a while you get to know the different smells. If there’s a hidden cargo, if the cargo’s under a false name, you can sniff it. But I haven’t smelled this one before.”

“Drugs?” Dmitri whispered the word.

Ludo sucked the ember down to the filter, then flicked the butt up the stairwell. “I’ve been on drug runs,” he said. “Meth, heroin.” He shook his head slowly. “I’m just saying, keep your eyes open and your mouth shut on this one, okay?”

Dmitri thought that was good advice. He dumped the dough into a pan, covered it, then grabbed a mop and started on the floor. Do your duty, he told himself. The captain said it would be good money this time. So do your duty, keep watching, and don’t start poking around with questions. Still, he liked the little tickle in his gut: there was something up, he was involved in something. Maybe this would turn into a story he could tell, when he was Ludo’s age.

“There’s another thing,” Ludo said.

“What’s that?”

“Yuri’s mother.”

“She’s sick, the captain said.”

“No she’s not.”

“How do you know?”

“She’s dead. Yuri told me. She died two weeks ago.”

April 4

An hour before dawn, after six hours of sleep, Dmitri was getting breakfast set out when he heard two shouts and boots rattling up the stairs. He left the stack of plates on the table and went to see what was happening. There was more shouting, from the bridge, and he ran across the deck and looked along the railing.

The captain was standing at the base of the bridge, with Jonas, the mate, and Ilya. With them were three men dressed all in black. They wore black balaclavas. One of them gestured, and Dmitri’s stomach made a sudden fist when he saw the weapon in the man’s grip. It was one of those chunky little machine guns, shaped like a fat T. Two more black-clad men swung across the railing, then two more. He looked over the side. Two black rubber boats with pointed prows bobbed beside the hull, the yellow light of the ship lamps glistening on their fat gunwales. On the side of the nearest boat, in fluorescent white capital letters, he read the word POLIS. More commandos scrambled up rope ladders like gigantic spiders.
I didn’t do anything
, he thought. I didn’t do anything. He turned to run back across the deck, but one of the commandos was already on him, shouting at him in English: “Turn around! Hands on the railing!”

He did as he was told. The metal railing was yellow, newly painted, but he could feel the scabs of older paint beneath. He had no breath at all, and thought he was going to throw up. He licked his lips, trying to moisten his mouth, which had suddenly gone dry. Flakes of light skipped in the black water. There was a sudden rattle, like a length of chain released across metal.
Oh my God
, he thought
. They’ve shot the captain.
Barely turning his head, he swiveled his eyes sideways and saw the captain on his knees. Ilya and Jonas lay face-down on the deck.

There was another rattle, and Dmitri saw with relief that the commando was shooting into the air. Then his arms were yanked behind him and bound at the wrist. He was prodded down into the rec room, joined in a minute by Ilya and Jonas. They were forced onto the floor, in a row. Ilya turned his head to look at him, and Dmitri saw that his forehead was slick with blood. Ilya’s eyes, which normally harbored a little joke, looked strangely dull, as though he were trying to remember something. Dmitri looked away. His heart was bumping his head on the pine wainscoting and he inched himself backward slightly. There were more footsteps on the stairs. Looking behind him, he saw the boots stumble in and thought,
they’ve got the whole crew
. A figure fell beside him, knocking his head against the wall, and Dmitri turned to see Wolfie subside into a fetal position. Blood bubbled out of his nose onto the carpet.
I’ll have to clean that up
, Dmitri thought, ridiculously. Then he closed his eyes.

Chapter 3

Drammen

April 14

Driving back along
the highway to Drammen, passing the light bulb logo on the derelict factory – once a cornerstone industry of the city – Rygg felt, more strongly than he usually did, that he was entering a world bleached to black and white after a few days of color. The sky was a bank of gray, as if the smokestacks of the few remaining factories had poured it full. It had been gray when he left and he wondered if it would ever clear again. The girders of the silos were like black macramé against the gray sky, and the vast fields of containers beyond the bridge were monochrome bricks, scribbled over with graffiti. The drivers of the passing cars seemed two-dimensional behind their tinted glass, like old silver prints. Even his hand on the wheel looked gray.

He hadn’t slept well the night before, and now felt as though he’d been wrung out. His tongue was parched, and his eyelids scraped over grit.
I’m an old gray dishcloth
, he thought. They should just throw me out. And then tomorrow he’d be heading back along this same road, past the silos, listening to the newscaster prattle on.

The traffic clotted on the bridge, then stopped. He closed his eyes and was back in the hotel lobby, and Lena was looking up from her handbag. The color of her eyes, that endless blue, like an antidote to this gray poison. He thought about the private room in the club, the bottles twinkling like a fairground attraction, the cozy pools of light through the glass, and Marin. What was it about Marin? He wasn’t handsome. If anything, he was too skinny, too short, his face battered by tobacco and vodka. But those listening eyes.

He remembered Marin sewing himself up in his hotel bathroom, the rich drops of blood against the porcelain. He remembered Marin sitting beside the bank of flowers, asking him, in his impeccable, delicately accented English, to pull his cigarettes from his breast pocket. And he remembered the woman’s face in the Orfeoplatz, her thin lips working. The sky had been blue in Hamburg.

He noted the fresh graffiti in the well of the apartment as soon as he stepped through the door. The local gangs – immigrant kids and neo-Nazis mostly – had recently, after a lull, started up their wars again. The newspaper said that Fjell was a safe place to live these days, but Rygg couldn’t disagree more. The week before he’d left, he’d seen a skinny, shaven-headed boy stabbed to death in the parking lot. The attackers had just laughed at the boy’s pleas. He’d chased them, too – chasing seemed to be his thing these days – but they’d run off. What would he have done if he’d caught them, anyway? One on six, and they had knives, maybe even guns.

He took the shabby elevator to the seventh floor. His apartment door was open, and he stood in front of it, cursing, his keys dangling from a finger. They’d pried it open, with a crowbar, perhaps, splintering the wood around the triple locks. Kicking the door savagely, so that splinters sprayed, he went in. They’d taken the television, but he didn’t really have much else to take. They’d cleaned him out the last two times.

The place stank, and he wondered if there was another plumbing problem. But walking to the bathroom, he saw that one of them had taken a shit in the middle of the table. “
Jævla forpulte rasshøl!
” he shouted. “Fucking assholes!”

He’d just gotten the shit cleaned up and was scrubbing the tabletop with steel wool, when the telephone rang. It was his ex-wife, and she started in instantly. Nora, their daughter, was moving into her own place with a friend, and she needed money for the down payment. He sat on the edge of the kitchen cabinet and held the receiver and looked down at it. He tried to break in: “Karin … Karin … Karin, listen … Karin …” Finally he shouted her name. She shut up. “Karin, I just got in. I just got in the door one minute ago from Hamburg, and I have to listen to this shit. You deal with her, okay? I’ll get you the money, but you deal with her. I need to sleep.” He unplugged the phone, then turned off his cell. He opened the fridge door, releasing a sweet stench of rot, and quickly shut it again. He shook his head.
That’s right
, he thought. Keep it closed. Keep the rot inside. Don’t let anyone know. He opened the liquor cupboard, but they’d cleaned that out as well. Too weary to curse any more, he fetched the bottle of duty-free aquavit from his suitcase, twisted off the cap, and tipped a gurgle down his throat. He loved the way the alcohol made him feel; warm and relaxed. Happy-go-lucky.

April 15

When he got to his office the next morning, one of the senior partners, a podgy old man with a nose that resembled a red potato, poked his head around the door and said, “The insurance papers for the White Angle FPSO, are they ready yet? Evagas and the yard are blaming each other for the oil leak, so make sure you get the figures right this time. We need to send the report over to the Evagas’ lawyers by Thursday.” No ‘Hi, how was your trip?’ No ‘Welcome back.’ Just straight into the bullshit again.

“I finished that before I left,” he said.

“Didn’t Frank tell you?”

“Tell me what? I’ve been in Hamburg.”

“Don’t you read your emails?”

“Not on the plane.”

“Oh, Lord. Okay, the Koreans got the report, sent it on to Paris, and the Evagas folk say it’s incomplete; they need something more thorough. Rigid rules, I know, but they won’t let the Hayundi yard do anything with the case before all the formalities are okayed. There’s not much I can do, sorry. Frank has the details. Talk to Frank.”

Rygg just sat there staring at his desk. It was a foot thick in files already, and now he had to do the Evagas report over. He clicked open the computer. There were a hundred emails in his inbox, including eight in a row from Frank. The most recent was headed: ‘URGENT!!!’

He worked methodically through the day. There was no way he could finish it by Thursday. It had taken him a week the first time through.

After drinking five cups of coffee and gleaning not the slightest buzz, he checked the bag to make sure it was caffeinated. Late in the afternoon, he tried flirting with the new secretary, and she didn’t even seem angry, just looked at him the way you’d look at a pimply teenager. He went into the bathroom and peered at himself in the mirror, trying to see what she saw. What had happened to the trim athlete who used to get all the girls? He was big, and that helped, but his chest and stomach had started to slop forward, and his eyes were so tired. He needed to start running again. But there was no time, no time.

The episode in Hamburg, starting with the woman’s face and ending with the club, coalesced in his mind, like a movie he’d seen a while ago. Plowing through the emails, he’d pause and close his eyes and think back. That was when he was alive. Then he’d open to the screen, the stacks of numbers, which would never end.

He toiled through the night on the Evagas report, and finally tried to get to sleep at four in the morning, but sleep wouldn’t come. Lying there with his eyes closed, he saw the numbers scrolling like a horrible dream.
They’re like a disease
, he thought.
Like a virus and I’m losing the fight
.

Finally, he got the insurance report finished four minutes before the deadline on Thursday, and went to tell Frank. Frank nodded without taking his eyes from the screen, and said, “The exploration application for northern Norway was due yesterday, Torgrim.”

Going back to his desk, Rygg spent a few minutes browsing on Facebook, as some sort of reward. He found a law school acquaintance, who’d been the girlfriend of his buddy. Ingrid. He’d always sort of had the hots for her. She was divorced, living in Nordberg. He got her number from the online phonebook and called her up, right then, and they made a date for that night. Over lunch break, he bought himself a new shirt, got a haircut. And he even felt a little surge of something when she stepped out of the elevator of her building. She hadn’t let herself go like some of the others. He took her to an Italian place, Mama Rosa in Bygdøy. The restaurant was on the docks, among potted palm trees. He bought a bottle of
Chateau Margaux
, and made a little show of chewing it, testing its legs. In the light, across the table, he saw that her look was a clever artifice: she was thickly made up, with a stiff corona of hair that did not budge when she nodded, and scarlet, impeccable fingernails. Her smile seemed practiced in a mirror.

She’d flunked out of law school and was now a hairdresser. She had two kids who still lived with her. Over the wine, they reminisced about college, then talked about their marriages. Hers had lasted a year longer than his. She talked about her battle with her landlord
over a cupboard door, about her youngest son’s grades.

He started telling her about the trip to Hamburg, and thought he was going to tell her about the shooting, but couldn’t. He didn’t want to sully that memory somehow, not with this plastic-haired woman. “I met a man there,” he told her, lamely. “Some Russian journalist. Interesting person.” They ate their desserts in silence.

On the ferry back to Aker Brygge, they stood like statues, leaning on the railing, without saying a word. Rygg watched the smaller boats passing by. The seagulls screamed overhead, fighting for attention. Across the fjord a heap of white marble – the opera house – sparkled in the setting evening sun. He drove her back to her apartment, and she mentioned that her boys were with their father that weekend, but he didn’t even get out of the car. He let her peck his cheek, patted her hand, and said: “I’ll see you sometime, then.” And he drove off, disgusted with himself.

When he got back to his place, there was a plain envelope on the floor. Why hadn’t they put it in the mailbox? He opened it. Inside were two folded pieces of paper. One was an electronic ticket: Oslo to Prague to Zagreb. The other paper bore a message in black ballpoint. He recognized the cramped, slightly accented writing. “I need your help.” That was it – a single line in the middle of the page. No name, no date. But he recognized the tingling in his palms. He turned back to the ticket. It was in his name. April 20. But that was Monday. Monday afternoon. He laughed. Zagreb was in Croatia, wasn’t it? He opened the laptop, did a Google search, and tapped through images of tidy markets and folk dancers and massive, crusty loaves of bread. He couldn’t go. No way. It was too risky; he didn’t know anything about this man. He felt dizzy. Needed to lay down. Should he …? No … he couldn’t go. He had to go to work. But he knew he’d already decided. To hell with the exploration application and the filthy Drammen skies and skinheads shitting on his table and plastic-haired Ingrid. He was going to Zagreb.

April 5

Dmitri was in the galley again, peeling potatoes. His wrists still bore the corrugated imprints of the thin plastic straps the commandos had used to cuff them. The crew had spent most of the morning in the rec room, watched by two of the commandos. One of them said, in English, that they were Swedish police and were searching the ship for drugs. Ludo had complained that he was thirsty and got a boot in the teeth, and after that they all lay quietly. One of the commandos came through the room, patting their pockets, removing cell phones, matches, lighters, knives. After an hour, the captain was taken away. Another hour, and one of the commandos came down the stairs and called: “Dmitri?” He turned onto his back and raised his head cautiously. The commando came over. He cut the strap off his wrists with a knife and pulled Dmitri to his feet.

Dmitri was taken to the galley and ordered to prepare a lunch. “But not too much food,” the commando told him. “We must save the food.”

So Dmitri was peeling potatoes. Meat was boiling on one of the gigantic gas rings. He could see the boots of the commando at the top of the metal steps.
So it was drugs
, he thought. Ludo was wrong – it was drugs. The police must be taking them to Sweden. What were Swedish prisons like? he wondered. Did you automatically get a sentence if you were just on board? The captain must have known – maybe the captain could convince them that he’d known nothing about the cargo.

The commando came down the steps and looked into the galley. “Not too many potatoes,” he said. “One for each person, enough.”

Dmitri nodded. Then he asked, “How many are you?” His voice came out as a tremulous croak.

“Eleven.” The commando went back up to the top of the steps. Quickly, Dmitri reached up to the spice shelf where he’d left his cell phone. He half buried the phone under potato peelings, on the far side of the pot of boiling meat. Stirring the meat with his left hand, heart pounding, he tapped out a message. His hand was shaking so badly that he had to grip his forefinger between thumb and middle finger to hit the buttons accurately. It seemed to take forever. He kept glancing up at the boots, to make sure they were in the same place.
11 Swedish police on board
, he wrote. He glanced at the boots again. Then he added:
Drugs?
He sent the message. Then he tossed the phone out the porthole.