Rembrandt's Ghost (22 page)

She stripped off her soaking clothes and changed yet again, cramming herself into her last pair of jeans and one of the pipe-tobacco-smelling heavy roll-neck sweaters Run-Run had let her borrow. Dry socks finished off the ensemble and after struggling back into her rubber boots she stumbled back along the corridor and into the galley.

Toshi, the cook, and Bazooki, the huge Samoan steward, were filling thermos jugs with hot soup made from dry mix and water heated with an electric kettle. Both the tiny Japanese cook and his hulking companion seemed completely at ease in the wildly tossing little galley cabin as pots and pans hanging from their spring hooks in the ceiling smashed and clanged together and six inches of water streamed back and forth across the deck at their feet.

Toshi handed Finn one of the jugs and four tin mugs on a bungee cord that he looped around her neck. He pulled an industrial-sized Hershey’s Special Dark bar down from a shelf and stuffed it into the zip pocket of her slicker with a wink and grinned. She tried to smile back, pecked both men on the cheek, then stepped out into the storm again.

Squinting against the raging spray blowing up all around her, Finn made it back along the deck to the bridge companionway and started up, manhandling the jug as best she could, the tin mugs clattering around her neck in the tearing wind. As she reached the bridge itself, she heard an unimaginablesound of tearing metal like the terrible grinding of an enormous dragon’s teeth. The dragon lashed its tail and an earthquake seemed to shake the ship, then grab it and shake a second time.

The horrible grinding sound came again, booming throughout the entire hull as the
Queen
lurched, groaned terribly again, then heaved up and rolled onto her side. The soup thermos flew out of Finn’s hands, her booted feet slipped on the slick metal of the bridge decking, and the massive pummeling grip of the huge wave that broke over the suddenly grounded ship tossed her back and out into the air. Flailing she had a brief glimpse of the heeling rusty hull of the
Queen
and then she was in the sea, the weight of her heavy boots and the crashing surf pulling her inexorably downward into the cruel and unforgiving belly of the ocean.

Finn woke the following morning from a dreamless sleep as deep as death. The typhoon had passed, leaving the skies a brilliant blue, with high, pure white clouds like strips of ragged cloth and the early sun like a bright gold coin. She crawled a little farther up the wide white beach, realizing that her heavy Wellington rubber boots were gone, probably in the rogue wave that had swept her off the
Batavia Queen
. She turned her head and felt a burning pain in her neck.

She probed the spot with her fingers and felt a long splinter of wood embedded deep in the tissue just below her jaw. She pulled it with one swift movement and almost fainted with the pain as the jagged sliver came out, followed by a brief spill of blood. She felt the coppery taste of it in her mouth and realized the splinter had penetrated her throat, although the wound didn’t seem terribly serious. But what was serious on an island like this? A simple cut or fever could kill you here. No drugstores just beyond the next coconut tree. She blinked hard and tried to clear her head. She couldn’t remember getting the splinter wound. Didn’t remember anything at all after the sudden, thunderous impact of the wave.

Finn coughed once, spit blood, and climbed slowly to her feet. She began to survey her surroundings. The storm had passed, but heavy waves still pounded, foaming onto the sand. Torn clouds raced by in the brilliant blue sky and a strong wind still shook the line of palm trees on the foreshore.

Finn turned and looked out toward the sea. The surf was rolling in angrily in hard-packed heavy waves, dark and still heavy with the passing power of the storm. There was no sign of the
Queen
, no huge wreck hanging on the teeth of whatever hidden shoal she’d hit so forcefully.

The hurricane was gone and so was the
Batavia Queen
, but the evidence of her was scattered everywhere along the beach in both directions— crates from the hold, some stove in and others intact, pieces of wood from the shattered ship’s boats, the shredded remains of a rubber boat, supplies from the galley.

Finn didn’t know whether to be pleased or frightened. She thought of somehow being the only survivor, like some female Tom Hanks in a twenty-first-century version of
Cast Away
. She shrugged the thought off and turned again, staggering a little on the sand. She had more important things to think about, like finding out if there was anyone else with her here. She stripped off the sodden sweater Run-Run McSeveney had given her and tossed it on the sand. Then, instinctively, she bent and picked it up again, knotting it around her waist. There might well be cold nights ahead.

She moved farther along the beach, her back to a high, rising, jungle-covered headland and the distant blur of what might be a river flowing into the sea a mile or so in front of her. A hundred yards farther, she came to a body. It was Kuan Kong, the Korean who had assisted McSeveney in the engine room. Finn had barely exchanged ten words with him, but seeing him on the beach was a horrible shock.

He lay stretched out on the sand, his short gray hair tangled with seaweed that lay around his face in long wet strings. The skin of his hands and feet was a sickly pale purple and already his limbs and belly were beginning to swell in the morning sun. He lay on his side, with his head twisted at an odd angle, both eyes already pecked away by birds. Finn felt like vomiting.

She silently told herself to calm down, then dropped onto her knees beside the body. She forced herself to go through the pockets of his loose trousers and his shirt, but there was nothing she could use. She thought about burying him and then saw how ridiculous that was, especially when she realized that when the tide came in he’d almost certainly be swept away to sea. She had to think of herself now, and her own uncertain future. There was one other thing. Gritting her teeth she crouched down at the dead man’s feet and slipped off his soaking Nikes. They were huge on her, but walking barefoot in a place like this was asking for trouble.

She continued down the beach. A hundred yards farther on, she came upon more things swept off the
Queen
. The first was a foam pillow and pillowcase. The second was an orange garbage bag Toshi the cook had used to store recyclables. She used the pillowcase and a strip of plastic from the garbage bag to make herself a makeshift head covering to ward off the effects of the hot sun that was now almost directly overhead. She stuffed one of the empty Coke cans in the zip pocket of her jacket. She tore the rest of the pillowcase into rags and stuffed them into the shoes. She laced them tightly and took a few experimental steps. Not good, but not bad, either. They’d have to do for the time being.

She started back along the beach. Next on the list were water and some kind of shelter, even if it was only short-term. It was hot enough now, but who knew what the night would bring?

Another half hour brought Finn to the indentation in the landscape she’d seen from far down the beach. It was a mangrove swamp that went inland for quite a distance. On the far side of the swamp, she could see more sand beach stretching off to the north. To the east, out to sea, she could see the breakers that marked the hidden reef the
Queen
had struck. Finn looked across the mangrove swamp and considered trying to wade across it.

She hesitated; she’d read enough to know that swamps like that could contain any number of dangerous things, from tiny poisonous snakes and bloodsucking leeches to huge crocodiles. The swamp could wait until another time. Instead she headed inland along the narrow strip of beach that stood between her and the gnarled forest of trees, their muscular roots standing out of the brackish water almost as though they were walking toward the sea.

Another twenty minutes brought her to the apex of the cove and there she found the outlet of a narrow river, really no more than a broad creek, less than fifty feet across at its mouth. She made her way a few yards upstream, dropped down onto the low bank, and lay facedown, drinking deeply from cupped hands. The water was clear and cold, tasting just faintly of some mineral.

After drinking her fill, Finn spent a few more moments dashing more water over her face and tenderly bathing the small puncture wound in her neck. That done, she stood up and began heading deeper into the interior of the island. The land rose steadily, the creek water flashing and burbling over stones and boulders. She could see fish pointed upstream like gold and green arrows, tails beating back and forth to keep their station against the current, mouths wide to catch whatever came their way. They looked like some kind of pale catfish, tendrils around their bony mouths waving softly in the stream; not hard to catch if you knew how.

Finn paused and watched them, frowning. She wondered how she was supposed to catch them without a hook, then put the thought aside for the moment. Tom Hanks and Robinson Crusoe again, with a bit of an NYU summer internship at a neolithic dig in Alaska thrown in. If she could find the right geology here, she could easily chip herself a stone knife—a skill she’d never really thought would ever have any practical application. Like her mother once telling her you never could tell when algebra might come in handy. That at least was still in the future.

Continuing up the stream she looked around for some likely place that might offer shelter nearby. The foliage was thick and close to the bank, sometimes leaning over it. Strange-looking trees bent close to the water. Huge ferns spread over the ground with banks of broad-leafed shrubs. Long dangling vines and some heavy mosslike substance drooped from the upper limbs of trees that arched overhead like canopied umbrellas.

She continued upstream, and a few minutes later, she found what she was looking for. The bank of the waterway fell back, leaving a small crescent of sand. Above it, capped by a mass of foliage, was a large, pockmarked outcropping of pale limestone. Her view partly screened by several trees, Finn saw what she first thought was a sun-dappled shadow on the limestone but which she then quickly realized was the entrance to a cave.

Finn hesitated for a moment, remembering just about everything she’d ever heard about vampire bats and things that lived in caves, then stepped forward and ducked inside the opening. She’d just lived through a typhoon and a near drowning. What was there to be afraid of inside a cave? She stopped again and remembered the scorpions that had run over her booted foot the last time she had been in a cave. A scorpion sting would probably kill her. But so could a lot of things. She went deeper into the cave.

It was dry and well aired with a river gravel floor and no sign of scorpions or bats or anything else. There was a skin of old lichens on the walls of the entrance. The opening was as wide as her arms held apart and a little higher than her height. Beyond the entrance it opened up into a broader room, the ceiling ten feet above her head and made of limestone rather than roofed with dirt and roots from the jungle overhead.

At the far end of the cave was another opening leading to a second chamber. It was too dark to see anything except shadows. Finn turned her cheek to the opening and felt cool air against her skin, so she knew there had to be another exit. The opening was more than wide enough for her to slip through, but to explore farther she’d need to light her way. She smiled briefly at the thought; like the stone tools, she had that covered, and a lot better than Tom Hanks in
Cast Away
.

She went back outside and spent the better part of an hour gathering together a supply of relatively dry branches from the undergrowth above the creek. She found a small piece of flat rock and used it as a scraper to gather some of the dead lichen from the head of the cave and brought it all together at the entrance. She stripped off her all-weather jacket, took out the chocolate bar Toshi had given her and the empty Coke can, and got down to work.

With an archaeologist for a father and an anthropologist for a mother, Finn knew, at least in theory, of at least a half dozen ways to make fire, from the “fire plow” method used by Tom Hanks in the movie, to the slightly more sophisticated North American Indian bow method, and even the wonderfully simple fire piston she’d discovered in an old wood lore text in her father’s library called
Cache Lake Country
, a treasure trove of information about everything from snaring rabbits to pemmican recipes.

One thing she’d learned about all these fire-making methods was that none of them was guaranteed. The fact that Tom Hanks got a little bit of tinder going overlooked the fact that any wood he gathered to make his fire machine needed to be bone dry and of two distinct types: a hardwood for the pusher and a softwood for the base. The bow method also required absolute dryness, extreme patience, something to make the bowstring out of, and once again, two kinds of wood. She was never able to get the fire piston right even though the neat little drawing in
Cache Lake Country
was perfectly clear.