The Fish Kisser (35 page)

“Yolanda,” he cried with joy.

“Quick,” she yelled. “They're getting away in the truck.”

She dragged him back to the car, the truck was already disappearing into the night. “Hurry, hurry,” she urged and within seconds they were in the car and roaring after the juggernaut.

“He's in the truck,” Yolanda shouted jubilantly. “It's like the one at the port with a secret door. I saw them put him in.” She urged him faster, “Go, go, go, Dave.”

He slammed his foot hard to the floor and sped in the direction of the truck, now well out of sight. “Alright, Yolanda,” he said, close to laughter at the craziness of the situation. “But no more arguments. As soon as we find out which way he's going we'll call the Turkish police and leave it to them.

“Okey dokey, Dave,” she replied softly, stroking the dust and dried tears from his face, adding, “Thank you,” in a tremulous voice.

“What for?”

“For saving my life,” she replied, tears of relief welling inside her. He shrugged it off, but felt a warmth as he drove ferociously along the badly made roads. “What did he look like, the guy in the truck?”

“I didn't see very well, but it wasn't Roger LeClarc.”

It couldn't have been Roger LeClarc. He was lying asleep in the smelly cabin of the Dutch herring trawler, somewhere between Holland and England. A relaxed expression
had spread over his face, his ordeal over. He had been rescued, and he had told them to save Trudy. He was at peace. His seemingly endless night had ended. Unfortunately for him, another was just beginning.

The old car seemed to understand the urgency of the situation and raced along under Bliss' guidance.

“Which way?” he shouted as they approached the first main intersection.

“Right,” she said, “No … Left.” Her voice hovered, “Left … I think.” Then she came down firmly. “Left Dave. Go left.”

He turned, ignoring the screech of brakes and the blaring siren of an approaching truck. The back of the old car tried to overtake the front as they swung onto the main road, then Bliss stomped his foot on the accelerator and the car straightened as the front pulled away. Yolanda egged him on. “Go, go, go.”

He went—faster and faster. Swooping recklessly in and out of gaps in the traffic; skimming either side of slower vehicles; leaping traffic lights and laughing at stop signs. Bliss drove like a man possessed with an urge for an early grave. Warnings came thick and fast: Horns blasted, tires squealed, and fists threatened. He took no notice, his whole being concentrated solely on catching the truck. And Yolanda peered determinedly ahead, intently searching the rear of every vehicle, desperately seeking a familiar licence plate.

“There it is,” she yelled. “Slow down.”

She was right. Straight ahead. The innocent looking truck was hiding out in a herd of similar juggernauts, trundling along at a modest pace.

Their wild ride over, they slowed toward sixty miles-an-hour and felt as though they had stopped.
Then, as Bliss matched his speed with that of the truck, the old car tried to shake itself to pieces. “Tires need balancing,” he said as the wildly bucking steering wheel fought to break free of his grasp. He touched the brakes and was disappointed at their reluctance, but, pumping hard on the pedal, he eventually caught their attention and the car slowed to a contented speed.

“Where are we?” he asked after a few miles.

“Istanbul,” she replied unhelpfully.

“I meant, where on the map?”

Reaching over to the rear seat she retrieved the map and switched on the interior light.

“Oh my God!” she flinched.

“What? What is it?” he screeched, assuming he'd missed an on-rushing hazard.

“Your hands Dave.”

He knew, but had said nothing. The frantic digging had cut and blistered his hands beyond recognition. She understood immediately and her face dissolved in tears, “You did that for me?” she blubbered.

He laughed it off. “Well I couldn't leave you. You hadn't paid for the hotel.”

“Give me your hands,” she commanded between sniffs.

“I'm driving!”

“Only one,” she said, trying hard to smile.

Using a tear soaked tissue she did her best to soothe the tender fingers and lovingly caressed and stroked them for several miles.

“We're stopping,” he said, noticing the traffic was slowing, and she released the hand with a brush of her lips.

“What's that?” she asked, looking ahead.

“I think it's one of the bridges over the Bosphorus.
I saw it on the map.”

Her eyes searched the map and found the bridge, looking like a staple holding together a wound between Europe and Asia. “It's a toll bridge Dave. There's bound to be cops at the booths.”

Bliss reached for the radio, having in mind something slightly tortuous ending in a triumphal flourish; Mahler's
8th Symphony
perhaps, but the knob came off in his hand and dropped to the floor as the radio burst into a terrifying screech. He bent, scrabbling at his feet, desperate to quell the radio's dreadful din, when Yolanda calmly bashed it with the side of her fist and, with a whimper, it died.

There had been no policemen at the bridge control, and Bliss had watched as Yolanda raced from booth to booth desperately begging help from the attendants, while he had been pressured onwards in the line-up by a dozen blaring horns. Then he looked up. “Yolanda,” he yelled, realizing that it was too late; the truck was already climbing into the sky.

“Yolanda,” he shouted again, catching her this time, and he beckoned furiously, then felt a bump as the following car shoved him forward.

She was breathless and downhearted. “Nobody speaks English and there's no cops,” she said leaping back into the car as it was physically shunted eastward by the irate follower; “Trust in Allah,” stencilled across his windshield.

Tossing a handful of coins and her nastiest look at the man in the booth, they were away, riding up into the sky, high over the black ribbon of sea that forms the perpetual rift between east and west.

“Asia,” she said simply as they crested the summit,
and descended into a new continent, and the start of another day.

The old car easily kept up with the truck as the night hours ticked by. Following the truck was easy, the driver avoiding the spotlight by cruising in convoy. Although they had both concentrated furiously at first, determined not to lose their quarry, while desperately scouring the roofscape of every oncoming vehicle, eventually, it became apparent they would never spot a police car in the dark and, if they did, they'd never catch up with it, so Yolanda dozed off.

“We'll find a police station at first light,” Bliss assured her, but she was asleep.

They had stopped once in the night, at the insistence of the fuel gauge and Yolanda's bladder. Bliss pumped the gas, to the annoyance of the young lad, who saw his entire career being jeopardized by westerners, more accustomed to self-service. Yolanda ran to the washroom—a bottomless bucket over a smelly hole—and to the store. Sweeping a handful of unrecognized and unpronounceable packets off the shelf, she gave the owner enough money to cause a fit of choking, and four minutes later they were back on the road. It took another fifteen minutes of Yolanda's break-neck driving to catch up to the truck, then it was Bliss' turn to sleep.

The sun's rays were just peeking over the mountains ahead when disaster struck. “Puncture!” yelled Yolanda excitedly, as the car began bucking and weaving uncontrollably on the rotten road surface.

“No brakes,” she added in alarm and desperately fought with the kicking wheel while furiously pumping the pedal. Bliss was awake in an instant and his hand shot out and gripped the wheel alongside hers.

“Truck!” he shouted, wide eyed in horror. She had seen it—coming straight at them—its siren blasting a pathway ahead. They wrenched at the wheel and the car slewed sideways, tilting dangerously, flinging Bliss against the door. Yolanda held on and wrenched it back. The tires bit into the rough road surface and flung them the other way. Now they were headed straight for the truck again. The siren was screaming and the leviathan was snaking drunkenly from side to side as the driver wrestled with the wheel, guiding it one way then the other, trying to avoid the skidding car. Finally, the brakes gripped and locked, jarring them to a halt, ripping the deflated tire off the rim, leaving them stationary in the middle of the road as a front wing slowly dropped to the ground.

They stared, powerless, as the monstrous vehicle bore down on them, the driver's frantic face clearly visible in the early morning light. Then with a hurricane's blast it roared passed, skimming the car's purple paintwork and nudging it aside like an unwanted plaything. Without stopping, and with the same concern he may have shown to a squashed rabbit, the truck driver banged his foot back on the accelerator and fled. The two detectives sat motionless, drained and petrified.

Yolanda spoke first. “Did you see what was on the front of the truck?” she asked breathlessly.

He nodded, the huge gold letters forged into his brain. “Trust in Allah.”

The old car limped off the road onto the verge like a mortally injured stag, and they climbed out to survey the damage.

“Superficial,” muttered Bliss, but then he stared into the trunk and the empty space stared back. “There's no spare wheel,” he said, shaking his head. “That's it Yolanda—this car's road kill. We'll never catch them now.”

“I didn't like the colour anyway,” she said, cheering him, then she leaped into the path of an oncoming car and flagged down the driver as if it were something she did every day of the week.

“I do not speak English,” explained the driver, with a snooty Oxbridge twang; Aznalehu: Amarigna Alchilim he went on, in the Amharic of an Ethiopean camel driver. Then he proceeded to say he couldn't speak French, with the accent of a Parisian boulanger, and could not “Sprechen Deutch,” with a guttural dialect obviously learned from a Münchener Braumeister.

Bliss and Yolanda sat in silent contemplation as they sped toward the sunrise with a man who demonstrated his linguistic prowess by explaining in at least thirty other languages that he couldn't speak any of those either.

Twenty miles and twenty minutes later, with no idea of where they were, where they were going, or how they were going to break the bad news to Abdul and his cousin, Yolanda glanced out of the window at a passing truck stop. “There it is,” she screeched, catching Bliss and the driver by surprise. “Stop!” she cried. The driver gave her a blank stare. “Halte! Stoppen! Arret! Pausa!” she screamed desperately. He got the message and slammed on the brakes.

“The truck's back there,” she said, stabbing the air furiously. Bliss peered at the row of big-rigs laying off to the side of a ramshackle roadhouse, and conceded one of them looked familiar.

“I saw the number, Dave. It's ours. Come on.”

“I don't recognize anybody,” she whispered, a few moments later, after furtively scouring the smoke-filled café. The chatter of coarse voices had died briefly as they entered, a blonde woman and a six-foot tall man giving pause for thought amongst a bunch of swarthy
middle-eastern truckies. A few tables at one end of the room seemed to be reserved for misfits and foreigners, and the hubbub started again as they chose seats near a couple of hitch-hikers, festooned with stars and stripes.

“What are we going to do?” asked Yolanda, tiredness and worry etching lines in her forehead. “There's a kidnapped man in that truck. We must do something.”

He had no idea and said so. “We don't even know where we are,” he added, turning the map over and over in his hands. “We can't call the local police and we can't follow him.” He paused for a second, “I could call the office from the payphone if …” his voice faded. “That's just a waste of time. I've no idea where we are.”

The coffee stuck to the cups. “Mud,” protested Bliss, but drank anyway. The cakes cloyed to their mouths.

“Yesterday's,” moaned Yolanda, but they ate—it had been a long night. She stared out of the window. “Too late,” she said with defeat in her voice. “It's going.” He looked. In the daylight he could see the white truck with red lettering pulling onto the highway and half-rose, saying, “We've got to do something,” though had no idea what.

An expansive middle-aged man with a fiercely tweaked moustache and monks tonsure, inside a stretched grey suit—flecked indecorously with the ash of a thousand cigars—placed his coffee on the table next to them and re-established the Ottoman empire on the same territory conquered by his predecessor in 1281. Osman would have been proud as the Turkish businessman flaunted his self-importance by colonizing two tables, six chairs, and a windowsill, with a briefcase load of papers and files, an imposing ledger, plates of food, adding machine, coffee cup, and two laptop computers.

Yolanda slid the map from Bliss' hands and mouthed, almost silently, “Get ready to run.”

“What?” he said, loudly, and she stuck her fingers to his lips and leaned forward, “Give me thirty seconds then drag me away.”

Totally clueless, he nodded and hoped he would work it out when the time came.

With a flourish and a non-stop babble of Dutch, Yolanda threw the map wide-open onto the businessman's table. Sliding into the seat opposite him, she caught his eye and gave him a smile that could launch an entire fleet. “Where are we?” she tried in Danish. Bewildered, flustered and visibly drooling, he desperately tried to help. She encouraged him, grabbing his hand and guiding it over the map as she caressed his fingers. His blood pressure soared, sweat poured from his brow. She leaned forward and his eyeballs nearly exploded as he caught a glimpse of her pale white breasts down the top of her blouse.

“Show me,” she pouted, leaning right across the table and toying with his nose.