TWENTY-SIX
THE MERMAID
After Dries locked himself in the cabin to make a call that seems to have added ten years to the lines on his face, March confirmed that our next stop would be Istanbul. He remained evasive as to what we’ll do once we’re there. He keeps saying he’ll keep me safe, but we both know that’s not what I’m asking. Anyway, that would be my second most immediate concern. The primary one being whether I’ll live long enough to see the Blue Mosque at all . . .
Dries said the whole thing is perfectly safe, but like with most of his plans, I have doubts. It’s too late to chicken out though: I’m sitting between March’s legs in the long and narrow speedboat, my life jacket is secured, and in front of us, the ekranoplan’s massive rear-loading ramp is opening as the aircraft slows down, revealing a trail of crashing waves and whirlpools of foam. Cold air rushes in, along with the engines’ deafening noise. Around my waist, March’s arms tighten their hold. “It’s going to be all right.”
I grip his hands, my breath coming in short pants. I’m starting to identify a pattern: he always says that sort of thing before shit hits the fan . . . I get that Jan has to hide the ekranoplan, that it’d be a bad idea to cross the Bosphorus Strait in plain sight, with its populated shores, constant patrolling, and in a country that’s barreling fast toward dictatorship on top of that. So yeah, it’s a great idea to drop us twenty miles away from the strait so he can turn back and seek refuge for Dries’s “baby” on the safest shores of Bulgaria. But I didn’t sign up to be tossed into a washing machine, and since we all had to put on waterproof coveralls and goggles, I’m getting the feeling that it’s exactly what’s about to happen.
At the front of the boat, Dominik checks the Kevlar line connecting us to a winch while, in the back, Isiporho gets in position by the outboard engine, ready to lower it as soon as we hit the water. Sitting next to me, Dries grins at the whirling, roaring hell under us. “Best time of the year for a cruise!” he yells.
It’s the only warning I get before a whirring sound announces that the winch is spinning fast, and we’re being dropped. I grit my teeth, and screw my eyes shut as we accelerate down the ramp and toward the sea. We’re weightless for a split second before the boat hits the water and bounces on the turbulent rolls, shaking us like lotto balls. The next few minutes feel like a race in rapids as the ekranoplan’s trail drenches us in cold, salty water. My nails dig into March’s hands when a powerful wave threatens to make the speedboat capsize. It gets better though. Around us, the sea goes quiet, and we’re now rocked by a lazy swell as the aircraft becomes a blurry dot in the horizon.
“Woohoo!”
We all turn to Dominik, who just confirmed my suspicions that he’s a complete adrenaline junkie . . . He shakes his head to partially dry the water dripping from his skull and face. “Let’s do that again.”
“Perhaps some other day,” March offers before removing his goggles and running a hand through his own water-soaked hair, much in the same fashion Dries is.
Isiporho lowers the engine into the water. It gives a low gurgle and hums to life, and soon we’re gaining speed on the tranquil surface. When he notices that I’m still sitting frozen against him and give no sign of uncurling, March combs my hair back, squeezing a little water from the damp waves. “Biscuit, are you all right?”
I glower at Dries’s smug expression. “Let’s never do that again.”
“See?” he tells March. “She’s fine.”
The weather is kind enough that we’re eventually able to shrug out of our coveralls, and it doesn’t take us long to reach the Bosphorus. Hills rise and fall past us on each side, peppered with tile roofs and shrouded in afternoon mist. As we progress toward Istanbul, the number of seagulls circling over our heads increases exponentially. Villages become towns and harbors until modern buildings and beautiful white villas crowd the shores. I start to worry about the patrol boats cruising the straits, but Dries shrugs it off with a comment that Turkish coast guards have enough on their plates with the rubber dinghies on which thousands of refugees risk their lives every day to reach Greece: with only five passengers and a razor-sharp silvery hull that screams “rich tourist toy,” they couldn’t care less about us.
Against all odds, I lived to see the Blue Mosque. I shift on March’s lap to get a better look when we reach the southern mouth of the Bosphorus. There it is, overlooking the bay and competing with the equally majestic Hagia Sophia basilica. I squint at the complex stack of richly adorned domes guarded by six minarets, like arrows reaching for the sky.
March rests his chin on my shoulder, following the direction of my gaze. “When they built it, the Mecca mosque was the only one in the world to have six minarets. They had to build a seventh one there to keep up.”
“Gotta have standards,” I say in a laugh.
“Exactly . . .”
We sail west, around the old district of Fatih, the jewel that travelers once called Constantinople. Concrete progressively replaces old stones as we reach Bakirköy, a commercial district on the European side of the city, where Atatürk Airport lies, surrounded by shops and hotels. Our destination is a tiny marina south of the airport, right in front of a park. You’d think the winter weather would deter the locals, but there’re quite a few people sitting on benches or enjoying a drink in nearby cafés. The place must be a little summer paradise, if the number of yachts lined along the pier is any indication. We moor between Simarik and Latin Lover in the general indifference of the Istanbulites strolling by with their kids.
Once we’ve left the speedboat behind us, Dominik’s eyes scan the area until a predatory grin curls his lips. My money is on that blue Land Rover . . . and yep. With a casual stride, he crosses a patch of lawn to reach the coveted vehicle. He’s so quick, so sure-handed that to the external observer this must look like nothing more than a man briefly fumbling with his car’s key lock.
We follow in his footsteps, and I shush my guilt when climbing into the back seat between March and Dries while Isiporho sits in the front with Dominik. Dries pats my shoulder, watching his disciple switch the engine with smug satisfaction. “He’s almost as good as your mother. She had gifted hands . . . and expensive tastes,” he adds with a wink.
I stare at him in amazement. This isn’t much—almost nothing, really—but he’s never talked about her until now except that one time back at the cabin, and all I had to jog the ruins of my memory were Anies’s lies and March’s faithful but limited account.
“How did you meet her?” I ask eagerly while we drive past shops and palm trees toward Atatürk Airport.
A wistful smile softens his features. “In a circus.”
“What were you doing in a circus?”
“Nothing. It was in ’87; we’d just finished a job in Rome, and with nothing to do for the next twenty-four hours, I went for a walk around the city.”
“And you ended up in a circus?”
He rolls his eyes. “The great Federicci circus . . . They’d set up their tent in the northeast, and it was . . . pathetic. The crowds were scarce, and they were barely making ends meet. Have you seen Down and Dirty, by Ettore Scola?”
I shake my head, unsure whether to answer “no” or “I don’t remember.”
“It was something just like that. Filthy trailers, haggard clowns . . . and the ringmaster’s wife—what was her name?—Mandorla . . . No, Mandorlina . . . ‘Little almond.’ Who must have weighed a quarter ton and dyed her hair blue, because she had this act . . . as a mermaid in a water tank.”
Behind the wheel, Dominik snickers, and March and Isiporho too can’t contain a smile.
“And my mom worked there?”
“Oh, yes, she did . . . It was in August, and the heat was crushing. I walked around that dump, bored and curious, I suppose. And I saw a sign on a trailer that said they had lions, so I looked for the cages, and I then saw her.” He pauses, visibly pleased by his little effect on an audience that’s now captivated by his story. “She was standing there in a bikini, hosing two mangy lions.” He shakes his head. “They were poor beasts, declawed, with their fangs filed down. But her . . . she was barely twenty, and you should have seen her . . .” He clasps his hands in a silent prayer to the goddess who lives in his memory, the young woman with long red hair and mysterious green eyes I saw in the sparse pictures Anies showed me. “It took me all of five seconds to make a move.”
Something is happening in that stolen car: for a moment, Anies and his terrifying plans have been forgotten, and a concert of laughs rises: deep chuckles—Isiporho’s and March’s—echoed by Dominik’s breathless chortles and my giggles.
“What did you tell her?” I ask. On my left, I glimpse planes waiting on the tarmac, and I want to hear more, to make this moment last before reality catches up with us.
Dries crosses his arms with a grin. “It’s like for women with children: you always pet the baby first to break the ice. So I went for the lions. I played with them, showed a bit of dominance to impress her.”
I clasp a hand over my mouth, my shoulders shaking in hilarity.
“And it worked,” he goes on, nodding to himself. “We chatted a bit. She had this magic act back then: pulling rabbits from her hat, card tricks . . . She’d tell everyone she was a Romanian orphan who had fled Ceaușescu’s dictature.” He wiggles his eyebrows. “Sandra the Romanian wonder.”
My brow flies up. “You can’t be serious.”
“Dead serious. She had a little side act lifting the parents’ wallets while the kids petted the rabbit. We got to know each other better, and I discovered she knew her way around safes too . . . I did a little digging up on her, and it turned out that trouble seemed to follow the Federicci circus wherever it went.”
“She was a thief . . .” I complete, my joy turning bittersweet.
“Artist would be more appropriate in her case. It’s not every day that you meet a twenty-year-old who does jewelry stores without getting caught.”
“How long did you stay together?” I probe.
Dries draws a sigh and goes quiet. I gather he doesn’t want to get that personal with his disciples listening. “It never really ended,” is all he says before Dominik parks the SUV a hundred yards away from a low building on which a sign reads General Aviation Terminal.
Dries clasps his hands, his confident façade falling back in place. “At least we’ll be flying into the storm first-class.”
Next to me, I feel March stiffen, but he doesn’t comment and instead opens the door for me. I look up at the cloudy sky from which a light drizzle has started to fall. With a sigh that’s part exhaustion, part delight, I inhale the damp air, heavy with the scent of gasoline and wet grass.
Once we’re inside the terminal, a nice ground attendant leads us to a bright, spacious lounge. I sink into a blue-suede-upholstered couch while Dries locks himself with Isiporho in the business-meeting room to have what appears to be a private conversation. From the corner of my eye, I watch them nod to each other through the tinted glass isolating the room. Possibly to divert my attention from their plotting, March brings me apple tea in a plastic cup before he goes to retrieve two suitcases he had his assistant deliver at the desk. One is a sleek black little thing that I’m afraid looks every bit like his previous magic suitcase—I hope they’re not too fussy about scanning hand luggage at Atatürk. The other is a regular rolling suitcase I’m guessing is for me.
He returns to the lounge at the same time that Dries and Isiporho exit the meeting room. Dries plops himself onto the couch next to me and casually wraps an arm around my shoulder. I tense involuntarily—it’s the first time he’s touched me like that since our reunion. It’s not uncomfortable, just a little foreign, the smell of his spicy cologne, that warm weight. There’s something intimate about it that I never realized existed between us until now. We’re family after all.
His gaze seeps over me, an odd tenderness laced with his usual smugness. “Our roads part here, little Island.”
I freeze.
“Isiporho and Dominik are going to check something for me at the Paris temple. You’ll go with them.” He sends a pointed look at March. “And I trust Mr. Menahem to keep you safe while we solve our differences with the brothers.”
I have no idea who Mr. Menahem is—another Lion?—and I also make a mental note that March mentioned those “temples” back in Finland. There’s apparently something going on with them that matters a great deal to the brotherhood. But it’s not what makes the blood rush to my head and my mouth quiver with sudden anger. I glare at Dries. “You’re not getting rid of me.”
He welcomes the statement with a chuckle. “Yes, I am, but I recognize your—”
“Shut up,” I snap, before turning to March. “I want to discuss this with you.”
Without waiting for his answer, I get up and walk to the business-meeting room. A couple of guys in suits are already in there, but I barge in, fuming. “Sorry, gentlemen, we’re going to need the room.”
The oldest one, a paunchy Arab guy pushing sixty, turns to me and looks me up and down with obvious disdain. “Not free. You go away.”
He shouldn’t have. I’ve taken enough shit in a short two days. I take a deep breath, puffing my chest, and without warning, swipe his papers from the table angrily. The guy steps back, his nostrils flaring in outrage, and I’m about to unleash my fury on his tacky gold MacBook, but March stops me just in time, catching the laptop before I send it crashing to the floor.
The second occupant, a young guy with a pink tie and a gelled mohawk, gets to his knees to pick up the papers with trembling hands and grabs the precious laptop. He squeaks something that sounds like Arabic, seemingly urging his colleague to get the hell out of here.
With cautious steps, they draw a wide berth around me to reach the door. Yeah, that’s right; look down: I am the law! The second they’re gone, the door closes behind us. March crosses his arms and gauges me with hard blue eyes. He’s been nothing but kind to me since he rescued me from Ingolvinlinna, but this time, in his irises the waters are dark and dangerous. I sustain his icy gaze bravely as he says, “Are you done? This is hardly like you.”
“How would I know that?” I shoot back.
“Island, I won’t be dealing with a tantrum—”
My palm slams painfully hard onto the meeting table. “I’m sorry, a tantrum? Anies killed my mother, he locked me up, he wiped my brain clean . . . he erased my entire life! And now that stuff with Odysseus, and you’re telling me to wait in Paris with Menahem-whatever-no-one-cares?” I yell, my breath short.
He takes a step forward, his expression completely blank save for a twitch in his jaw. And his eyes . . . they pin me in place, compel me. I swallow and try to control my breathing when I realize he’s got me trapped against the table. “My mother died when I was thirteen,” he says in a flat voice, like he’d comment on the weather. “She overdosed in our bathroom, on speedballs that my father gave her. I found her body.” His Adam’s apple rolls in his throat as he continues. “After the ambulance took her, I cleaned the floor. She had bled from her nose and . . . emptied her bladder.”
I grit my teeth, shivers coursing through my body as his pain flows to me, like poison I’m absorbing. He’s not finished, and I wish I could look away, but he’s taking me with him kicking and screaming somewhere I’m not sure I’m strong enough to go.
“You’re not the first woman I’ve loved,” he continues, the same cold anger enveloping each word.
This time I flinch and avert my eyes. I’m still standing, but it’s like I’m losing my footing. “Who was she?”
“One of Erwin’s agents. Her name was Charlotte and I was”—his brow quivers, and he shakes his head, as if rejecting that particular memory—“I would have done anything for her, but she didn’t love me. She left me because she didn’t want . . . that level of complication. I scared her, and she was probably right to go.”
One of my hands lets go of the table edge to rest flat on his chest. His skin burns under Isiporho’s wool sweater, like he has a fever. “March . . . what are you trying to tell me?”
He wrestles his features back into an emotionless mask. “She died too. She was killed during a mission in Ivory Coast. I struck a deal with Erwin to go rescue her, but I made it too late. The soldiers necklaced her.”
Each beat of my heart echoes painfully all the way up to the back of my throat and I think a deeply buried part of me already knows, fears what’s coming next. “Necklaced?”
March takes a sharp breath. “They trap the victim’s body in tires, douse them with gas, and set them on fire. She was barely alive when I found her, and all I could do was end it . . . I shot her. I killed her myself.”
My eyes squeeze shut, and I clutch his sweater. A vision of a charred body flashes behind my eyelids. I picture March’s finger, pressing the trigger. I steel myself. He weathered my pain and my anger; I’ll shoulder his. I stroke his chest soothingly. “March, I am . . . so, so sorry.”
One of his arms snakes around my waist while his free hand cups my cheek. “Island, I lost them both because I couldn’t protect them. Like I lost you once already. You can’t”—his voice catches as he holds me tight—“you can’t ask me to bring you back to him.”
It dawns on me that because March bared himself to me like that, I’m now carrying a little part of his memories, as he carries mine. I understand how he feels, and I measure the magnitude of the gesture, from this man who shields himself so much. I only wish I could let him protect me the way he wants to. Life is a bit more complicated than that though . . . I relax in his embrace and return his hug. “Was I like that before?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you told me to do something, when you wanted me out of the way, did I obey?”
A pained chuckle rumbles through his chest between us. “Yes. You were . . . very reasonable. And you always let me keep you safe.”
“Nice try. I must have been a dream girlfriend then.”
His lips press in my hair, the words muffled against my temple. “You were bliss and chaos . . . still are.”
“I need to do this,” I say quietly. “I need answers; I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, hiding and being afraid. I want a life with you, but for that, we need to end this first. And you’ll need me; if Stiles was right, I’m Anies’s weakness as much as I’m yours.”
“Island, I’m not certain that’s what I want to hear . . .”
He’s right. No amount of rational arguments will change the fact that he wants to protect me and I want to fight this battle. I know what he needs to hear, words I’d have never imagined saying two days ago, and which now seem so evident. They tumble from my lips, hushed yet confident. “Je t’aime.” I love you.
Against me, I can feel his posture relax. “You’re not playing fair,” he murmurs. “But I love you more than anything.”
“Then keep me with you.” I smile, nuzzling his chest.
“What do you make of Dries’s opinion?”
“I think he’d want his child to show some balls.”
March’s chest shakes with suppressed laughter. “That sounds wrong on so many levels.”
•••
We were wrong. Dries wanted his disciple to have balls. His anger has been slowly simmering under a stone-cold mask since March and I came out from the meeting room and announced a minor change of plan. He led us in dignified silence to a damp tarmac glistening from the afternoon drizzle, and waited, as Isiporho and Dominik said their good-byes and wished us good luck with a respectively heartfelt and reluctant bro hug.
As soon as they’re out of sight, the pressure cooker of Dries’s fatherly resentment explodes. “Is that how you thank me?” he hisses at March as we make our way toward a long navy-blue jet next to which a ground attendant awaits us. “My leg hurts every day, you know.”
My gaze drops to said right leg, the one I noticed was sometimes a bit stiff back in Finland. Did he wound it when dragging March out of the Poseidon?
“It hurts,” Dries goes on while March follows him in cautious silence. “And the pain gets even worse when an ungrateful little maggot who owes me everything, including his life, stabs me in the back.”
“Look,” I begin. “It was my decision and—”
“Silence, young lady!” He flashes me a withering glare. “You shouldn’t even be here.” He points to a distant point at the other end of the tarmac. “You should be on that plane, bound for Paris!”
My neck shrinks into my shoulders, and March shakes his head in silent encouragement not to egg the beast on.
As he’s about to climb onto the airstair, Dries freezes and spins on his heels with surprising ease for a fifty-three-year-old guy whose leg is supposedly causing him constant agony. His eyes turn to hateful slits as he tells March, “I’m rescinding the authorization I gave you to touch my daughter.” He pauses for dramatic effect and adjusts his jacket. “Permanently.”
It could be a trick of the dying daylight, but I think I just saw despair flash across March’s face.