Rembrandt's Ghost Read online

  ‘‘We’re not going far,’’ said Finn.

  ‘‘We’re in trouble,’’ Billy answered, nudging her. There was a crash as the door opened at the far end of the coach. The two Asians, minus their umbrellas, had turned into three. One of them was limping, pushing his way through the crowd of people. He looked extremely angry.

  ‘‘Crap,’’ said Finn. She threw herself forward into the arms of the Nazi sergeant, reaching for his holstered Luger and pushing him out of the way in a single motion. The gun was far too light. It wasn’t the real thing. She waved it in the general direction of their pursuers anyway and instinctively half the people in the car screamed and everyone ducked, including the three Asians. The train pulled into a brightly lit station. The sign said: LEICESTER SQUARE.

  ‘‘No, it’s not!’’ said Billy.

  Finn threw the Luger down the length of the car as the doors slid open. She turned, put both hands on Billy’s back, and pushed him out onto the platform.

  ‘‘What the hell!’’ A man wearing headphones jumped back, barely avoiding being run down. ‘‘Who let you on! Wardrobe! Shit! They’ve ruined the shot! Sean! Who the bloody hell . . . ?’’

  Finn still pushing Billy from behind, they skirted the camera setup, jumped over a set of narrow rails waiting for a dolly shot, and battered their way through a regulation swarm of camera people, lighting crew, grips, first, second, and third ADs, sound men, set dec, props, and assorted need-to-bes, want-to-bes, and think-they-already-ares that make up a location shoot for a major motion picture. Predictably someone shouted out the classic angry comment heard by anyone who has ever interfered with the making of a film, even if only for a moment, destroying their expensive and very fragile illusion.

  ‘‘Hey! Can’t you see we’re making a movie here?’’ As though creating cinematic fantasy was more important than any possible reality that might stand in its silly way.

  Billy knocked over a light stand and there was a sharp bang as a hot bulb exploded. Finn caught a glimpse of a placard announcing that they were on the set of the DreamWorks production of Len Deighton’s novel SSGB, and then they were gone, sidestepping through a wide-open set of doors leading onto the actual Holborn Station platform and reaching the escalator. They took the moving steps two at a time, pushing past people riding to the surface, and finally found their way up to High Holborn. They were almost back to Tulkinghorn’s and the British Museum. The rain had stopped. There was no sign of the men behind them. Without a pause Billy stepped off the curb and waved. A black cab came to a jarring halt. They climbed in and Finn slammed the door. As the cab moved off into traffic she looked back and saw their limping enemy and his friends come out of the station entrance. A moment longer and it would have been too late.

  ‘‘Where we going, if you don’t mind me askin’?’’ said the cabbie without turning around.

  ‘‘Canvey Island,’’ said Billy, settling back in the wide, comfortable seat.

  ‘‘That’s in bleeding Essex, mate!’’ the driver said, startled.

  ‘‘I’ll pay.’’

  ‘‘Too right you’ll pay,’’ said the taxi driver. ‘‘Quite the distance. At least twenty miles.’’

  ‘‘More like thirty,’’ said Billy, sighing. The cabbie shrugged and slid the big car back into the stream of traffic. Ten minutes later they were on their way out of London, heading East along the Thames, making for the Channel.

  ‘‘What was that before you started saying dirty things in Latin?’’

  ‘‘Something rude in Cornish as I recall,’’ Billy said. ‘‘Something to do with goats and his mother’s sexual habits.’’

  ‘‘What’s on Canvey Island?’’ Finn asked.

  ‘‘Home,’’ answered Billy. ‘‘The Busted Flush.’’

  9

  Ask the average person in Wichita Falls where Mariveles is, and you’ll most likely get nothing but a blank stare, and for good reason: Mariveles has always been either in the middle of nowhere or at the gates of hell, depending on your point of view. The small coastal town lies at the entrance to Manila Bay on the northwestern arm of a jungle peninsula. The harbor is a deep-water anchorage clinging to the base of an immense, forest-covered volcanic cone. This mountain is usually wreathed in flirtatious mists, occasionally giving a glimpse of the summit as it waits patiently for better times to come again, as they had a few years previously for the mountain’s fiery brother, Mount Pinatubo, less than fifty miles away.

  Historically Mariveles was once a resting point for ships entering the bay and the famous Chinese pirate Li Ma Hong reportedly stopped there for food and water before attacking Manila in 1575. Under Ferdinand Marcos the town became the center of something called an ‘‘economic zone,’’ and the original fishing town was swept aside to make way for factories, docks, and official-looking government offices, most of which were now empty, and even a nuclear reactor, which they could never get to run. The grain terminal didn’t quite work out and neither did the ‘‘plastic city’’ manufacturing polyethylene sheets. Given Imelda Marcos’s infamous fetish, there was a certain irony in the fact that one of the few surviving factories manufactured Nike knockoffs. At the end of the day, if Mariveles was known for anything, it was as the place where the Bataan Death March began in 1942 and also as the place where the tennis balls for Wimbledon are manufactured. Though it’s supposedly a ‘‘first-class’’ city of seventy-five thousand or so, the real population is almost twice that, mostly unemployed and mostly living in slums on the far western side of the harbor and well outside the boundaries of the ‘‘economic zone.’’ It is a mixed-culture port town of immigrants fleeing even poorer places in the world and a place where hope is a commodity in shorter supply than jobs. The favorite recreation in Mariveles is the consumption of shabu, the Philippine version of methamphetamine, cooked up in enormous quantities in illegal, and violently explosive, drug microbreweries all over the hillside squatters’ ghettoes.

  From where he sat in the open-air beachside snack bar, Briney Hanson could see the old-fashioned cranes loading the Batavia Queen at the old Mariveles docks a little farther along the harbor. With berthing charges being what they were, Manila itself was far too rich for the old Queen’s blood and she was lucky to be picking up any cargo at all in Mariveles: banana chips and processed cassava meal for animal feed, which meant the Queen was going to stink all the way back down to Singapore.

  They’d off-load the banana chips there, pick up a load of electronics stuff, and then make a run up to Rangoon with the cassava meal. The last leg would involve taking the electronics stuff on to Madras, or Chennai as it was now called, for assembly into everything from car radios to talking teddy bears. After that, it was anyone’s guess. But right now Hanson and the Queen were still in Bataan.

  He took a swallow from his longneck liter bottle of Red Horse beer and swabbed a piece of ‘‘chicharon’’ pork crackling into the hot sauce on his plate. He forked up a mouthful of crunchy squid heads in rice and washed it all down with another hit of the strong, amber pilsner. Mariveles might have had the most corrupt municipal government in the Philippines—and that was saying something—but it had unbelievably good snacks.

  Hanson had spent the entire morning with his old friend Dr. Nemesio Zobel-Ayala, the local abortionist, Pratique officer for the docks, brother-in-law of the mayor, and all-round mordida man. Without kicking back to Ayala, you could be quarantined for a month, not allowed to off-load or on-load cargo, and even wind up getting beaten to a pulp if you even tried to step onshore.

  Hanson had swallowed his disgust and played the Good Buddy game just like always, sitting with the little weasel in his stifling dockside office above the customs warehouse for hours, watching him drinking shots of Napoleon Quince and listening to endless stories about his conquests in La Zona, the local brothel area where women and girls, most of them native and some no more than ten or twelve years old, plied their age-old profession in little blanket-divided cubicles, serving the seagoing tra
de and foreign workers from the few remaining factories in Mariveles.

  Zobel-Ayala had all the bases covered. Not only was he a pimp to half the girls in La Zona, but he was also the public health officer for Mariveles and made a bit extra on the side by selling off government-supplied antibiotics to the highest bidder.

  The doctor had big plans, most of which involvedsetting himself up in America one day, but Hanson thought it more likely that the slimy son of a bitch would probably wind up floating upside down under one of the Mariveles piers with his throat cut, either by his rivals in the Kuratong Baleleng or the Pentagon, both of which had big money in shabu labs and smuggling all through the islands.

  Hanson ate the last of the food on his plate, finished off the Red Horse, and dropped a few crumpled bills onto the counter. He climbed down off the old-fashioned, chrome diner stool, gave a satisfied belch, and headed back along the crushed coral path to the dock road. It was blisteringly hot and he could feel the beer leaching out of him, sweat dripping down the back of his neck from underneath the band of his old captain’s cap and down his sides.

  Even though he was wearing sunglasses, the light was enough to make Hanson squint, as it glinted off the small broken waves in the harbor and hammered down like a ringing gong from the cloudless sky. Like everywhere else in this part of the world, he knew it could change into black monsoon within a single tick of time, turning the harbor into a witch’s cauldron and bouncing the Queen around like a beach ball at her moorings, but for the moment he was trapped inside a furnace with its thermostat on the blink.

  The meal at the snack bar and the few minutes by himself had been a nice break after a morning with the sleazy doctor, but making his way past the tumbledown warehouses and the junk-fronted chandlers’ shops along the quay brought Hanson back to reality with a hard knock; the oppressive heat, the stink of rot and old rope, of tarred pilings and the dead fish along the bilge-filthy waterfront was the stink of his own future, and he knew it. Endless runs through dangerous seas taking things to one place and other things back again. It was no way for anyone to live. If something didn’t change soon . . .

  Hanson could see the jib cranes at the dockside working, swinging over big, two-hundred-pound bags of cassava meal in rope slings. On deck Elisha Santoro, his first mate, was overseeing Kong and a few hired Filipino day-hands. The day-hands were dressed in bahag loincloths and Eli wore jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. The closest thing to a uniform on the Batavia Queen was the dull strip of gold braid on Hanson’s battered cap.

  He frowned, staring down along the pier. The banana chips wouldn’t arrive until the next day, but there was a pile of wooden crates on the dock next to the Queen and a four-ton Mitsubishi Fighter Mignon truck parked beside them. Bulk banana chips were shipped in jute bags, like the cassava meal, not wooden crates. Stranger still, Zobel-Ayala hadn’t said a word about any new cargo, and he would have been the first to know since every clearance certificate issued on the docks had to go through him.

  As Hanson came closer, a man climbed out from the passenger side of the truck cab and stood waiting beside the pile of crates. Hanson saw that all of the crates were stamped with the familiar Slazenger pouncing tiger logo. The man from the truck stepped forward. He was fortyish, flabby, and wore a perfectly cut and blindingly white suit that almost made his pot belly disappear. He had small feet and small hands. The feet were encased in gleaming black patent leather shoes and he wore one too many rings on his pink fingers.

  The costume was topped off by a Borsalino Panama as white as the suit. The man wore the formal straw hat with the forced casualness of a bald man, tilted just so, but somehow you knew there was nothing underneath. The eyes were shaded by a slightly feminine-looking pair of leather-covered Fendi Sellerias. There was no facial hair and the faint smell of expensive cologne shimmered in the overheated air. Fat lips smiled. The man had teeth like perfect polished pearls. At five foot five, he should have been almost dainty looking. But he didn’t look dainty at all; he looked dangerous.

  ‘‘Captain Hanson?’’ he asked. There was a faint, aristocratic Spanish accent.

  ‘‘Yes?’’

  ‘‘My name is Lazlo Aragas.’’ The smile got wider. ‘‘My good friends call me Lazzy.’’

  Hanson nodded. Call this one Lazzy and he’d shove a knitting needle through your eye socket. ‘‘Mr. Aragas. What can I do for you?’’

  ‘‘It is what we can do for each other, Captain Hanson.’’

  ‘‘Then what can we do for each other, Mr. Aragas?’’

  ‘‘I have a shipment that needs to go to Singapore,’’ he said. ‘‘I understand that you are going in that direction.’’

  ‘‘A shipment of what?’’ Hanson asked.

  Aragas waved a jeweled hand in the general direction of the crates. ‘‘Balls, Captain. I am shipping balls to Singapore.’’

  ‘‘Tennis balls.’’

  ‘‘Quite so. Specifically Wimbledon Ultra Vis.’’

  Three things were wrong with that. One, the Wimbledon balls were made in the Mariveles factory, but they were shipped out of the superterminal at Pier 15 in Manila. Two, the balls were shipped in six-dozen-can cardboard boxes plastic-strapped in dozen box cubes and loaded into containers, not wooden crates. And three, there wasn’t a chance in the world that Slazenger would ever ship anything at all on the Batavia Queen or any tramp steamer like her.

  Hanson nodded. ‘‘I see.’’

  ‘‘Do you, Captain?’’

  ‘‘I think I do,’’ he answered slowly.

  ‘‘What exactly do you see?’’

  ‘‘I see some wooden crates with Slazenger pussycats all over them.’’

  ‘‘Full of tennis balls,’’ said the man in the white suit, smiling.

  ‘‘If you say so.’’

  ‘‘I do.’’ Still smiling.

  ‘‘Does Dr. Zobel-Ayala know about your tennis balls?’’ Hanson asked flatly.

  Aragas laughed. He sounded like a particularly vicious dog barking. ‘‘Zobel-Ayala tiene el famban barretoso,’’ he said pleasantly. ‘‘If he doesn’t do as he’s told, I’ll put my foot to it, or something more painful perhaps.’’

  ‘‘So what does all this really have to with me?’’ Hanson asked carefully. If Aragas was sidestepping El Abortista, he was putting them both into dangerous territory.

  ‘‘I need a shipper. You are here.’’

  ‘‘You and your tennis balls aren’t on my bill of lading.’’

  ‘‘This will be a separate shipment. Just between you and me, Captain.’’

  ‘‘Zobel-Ayala isn’t going to like it.’’

  ‘‘He’ll do as he’s told.’’

  ‘‘Maybe so, Mr. Aragas, but I have to come back here. You may get to kick him in his fat juicy ass, but I’m not in the same position . . . so to speak.’’

  ‘‘It is not your concern, Captain. Your concern is in loading my shipment as quickly as possible.’’ There was ice in the words.

  ‘‘And how do I explain this shipment to the agent in Singapore?’’

  ‘‘You don’t.’’

  ‘‘How’s that?’’

  ‘‘You will develop engine trouble just off Sentosa. An hour or two at most. A fast boat will take my tennis balls off your hands.’’ Sentosa Island was a redeveloped fishing village turned high-end resort just outside Singapore Harbor.

  ‘‘Customs, the Checkpoint Authority?’’

  ‘‘Taken care of.’’ Mordida again. The Philippines had made a fine art out of it over the last four hundred years.

  ‘‘And what do I get out of all of this trouble?’’ Hanson asked.

  ‘‘This,’’ said Aragas. He pulled the inevitable envelope out of his inside jacket pocket. It was about a half inch thick. ‘‘Euros, if that is convenient.’’ Once upon a time it had been American dollars, but things were changing. ‘‘Twenty-five thousand.’’

  Roughly thirty-three thousand dollars depending on the day rate. It didn’t mat
ter. What really mattered was that with the envelope there was no more pretense. You didn’t pay somebody that much money for carting around a couple of hundred crates of tennis balls.

  It was a distinctly nasty spot to be in because if Aragas was in a position to sidestep Zobel-Ayala, that meant he was heavily connected. Turn Aragas down and he’d get somebody’s nose out of joint. Or he could take the envelope and go along with Aragas and if things screwed up he could easily land in Changi Prison for the rest of his life—not a pleasant thought at all.

  So he was trapped—damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. Standing here baking in the hot sun he didn’t see any way out. So he stopped looking, at least for the moment. He took the envelope from Aragas, folded it in half, and stuck it into his back pocket.

  ‘‘Very good,’’ said Aragas as though he were speaking to a dog he was training to roll over and play dead. ‘‘It would be appreciated if you could have the crates loaded as quickly as possible. As you know, there is a great deal of petty theft in this area.’’ Anything that wasn’t nailed down was considered fair game, but Hanson had an idea: Aragas could leave his crates just where they were for as long as he wanted and the locals would avoid them like the plague.

  ‘‘Not a problem,’’ said Hanson. He glanced up and saw Elisha Santoro casually leaning on the forward rail and looking down at him. Eli wasn’t going to like this at all.

  ‘‘Good,’’ said Aragas. ‘‘I am very pleased that we have reached an accord on this matter. When you load the crates please make them as available as possible for quick unloading. I shall return at seven this evening.’’

  ‘‘Return?’’ asked Hanson, startled.

  ‘‘Didn’t I tell you?’’ said Aragas. ‘‘I will be accompanying the shipment to Singapore.’’ With that, he put two fingers to the brim of his hat, tipped Hanson a brief salute, and climbed back into the truck. The Mitsubishi’s engine chugged to life and it lumbered off down the docks and disappeared. Hanson watched it go, feeling the lump of the envelope in his pocket pressing into him like a tumor.