Then he placed the chair back on the floor, lay down in the middle of the conference table, and slept soundly.
“THE POINT TO be conveyed by this little demonstration should be obvious to anyone with a bit of imagination. And you are obviously that kind of girl. So I, personally, consider it a waste of time. But my colleagues here are earthy chaps. They like concreteness. They don’t trust their ability to communicate across cultural and language barriers.”
Jones was preceding Zula down a steel-runged ladder into the ship’s hold.
“Or,” he added brightly, “perhaps they are just sadists.”
At this, Zula whipped her head around and got a brief whirling impression of a large, poorly illuminated space with several men in it, and Yuxia seated on a chair in the middle. Her instincts, of course, told her to get out of there. But Jones’s lieutenant—she had figured out that his name was Khalid—was above her on the stairs, practically treading on her hands.
The ship’s engines had started up some minutes ago, anchor had been weighed, and they had pulled out of the crowded cove and begun swinging around to the back side of the island, which seemed to be completely unpopulated. It was exposed to weather from the sea and it lacked a natural harbor, so it was probably accounted worthless. In this space belowdecks, the engines made a maddening racket. But as Zula cleared the bottom rung and touched down on the deckplates, the throttle was eased back to a low idle, just enough to make a bit of headway and keep the vessel under control.
Yuxia’s legs had been tied together at the ankles and knees, and her arms were pinioned behind her back.
A crew member came down the ladder after Khalid, bent sideways under the load of a five-gallon plastic bucket filled to the brim with seawater. A lot of it slopped out as he staggered across the cabin, but when he set it on the deck in front of Yuxia, it was still filled to within a couple of inches of the top.
“Stop,” Zula said, “this is just totally—”
“Unnecessary. Yes. I just finished saying that,” Jones said. “For you and me, yes. And for her, certainly. But it seems terribly important for everyone else.”
Khalid had moved around behind Yuxia, and for a moment the tableau presenting itself before Zula’s eyes looked just like one of those grainy webcam videos in which a helpless hostage gets butchered.
But this was not to be one of those. Not exactly. “Your friend!” Khalid announced, and then nodded to the men standing to either side of Yuxia. They converged on her and, in a display of clumsiness and ineptitude that would have been funny in other circumstances, eventually managed to get her turned upside down, feet in the air, head down, whereupon they maneuvered her head into the bucket. Displaced water flooded over the rim and washed across the deck.
“No,” Zula said quietly.
“Think of it as a performance,” said Jones.
“Please tell them to stop it,” Zula said.
“You misunderstand,” Jones went on. “You are the one who needs to be performing. They want to reduce you to blubbering hysteria. And the longer you continue to play it cool, the longer she goes without oxygen.”
Zula launched herself forward and almost made it. Jones kicked out and tripped her. She fell full-length across the deck, her outstretched right hand only a few inches from the base of the bucket. She gathered herself to spring forward again, but a booted foot descended and trapped her hand. She twisted and looked up into the face of Khalid, staring directly down at her with a look of fascinated ecstasy. With her left hand she pawed at his ankle. He was wearing military-style boots with speed lacing hooks. One of them caught the bandage wrapped around her pinky; this spiraled away from her flailing hand and took the fingernail with it. His other foot stomped down on her left forearm, trapping it too. She had twisted around so that she was lying full-length on her side, both hands pinned, only inches away from the bucket within which Yuxia was now struggling for her life, her nicely cut black hair washing against the translucent plastic as she thrashed to and fro trying to knock it over, the surface of the water burbling as her lungs emptied.
Zula was not feeling anything like what they wanted her to feel. She simply wanted to kill them. And had it not been for Jones’s helpful suggestion, she might have failed to give them the performance they wanted: the only thing that could save Yuxia’s life. But a couple of the details—Yuxia’s swimming hair, and the blood streaming freely from the end of Zula’s pinky—were enough to send Zula over the edge, into some kind of community-theater method-acting headspace in which she finally let go of all the grief and rage that had been accumulating in her emotional buffer during the last several days and let herself fly out of control and degenerate into the weeping, wailing, messed-up, out-of-control basket case that these guys apparently wanted to see.
She understood what Jones had been trying to tell her. These men needed to know that she was broken. Because only then could they trust her.
Which raised the question: Trust her to do what? Because if they just wanted to kill her, well …
What could Zula possibly do for these men that would be worth all of this trouble?
“Please, please, please,” she heard herself blubbering, “please, please, please, let her go!”
Khalid took his foot off her hand and gave the bucket a kick. It rotated out from beneath Yuxia’s head and emptied its contents onto the deck, which meant that Zula got soaked. Yuxia’s head was still hanging upside down just out of Zula’s reach. She coughed water out of her lungs, gasped once, and then vomited. When she was finished with that, they upended her again and sat her back down on the chair. The first thing Yuxia must have seen was Zula lying stretched out on the deck at her feet with blood pouring from her trashed pinky. Zula couldn’t really get a good look at Yuxia until Jones had hauled her back up onto her feet. She wanted to go and throw her arms around Yuxia and tell her how horribly sorry she was that all this had occurred, simply because Yuxia had, a few days ago, taken it upon herself to befriend a group of lost Westerners wandering around the streets of Xiamen. “No good deed goes unpunished” was one of Uncle Richard’s favorite aphorisms. But Jones was gripping both of Zula’s upper arms from behind and was dragging her back toward the ladder. “Time to go,” he was saying. “The sooner we get under way, the sooner she is free.” He spun her around to face the ladder, then shoved her into it hard enough that she had to bring both hands round in front of her to stop herself from slamming teeth-first into a rung.
She looked back at him over her shoulder. Some sort of uncomprehending look must have been on her face, because he suddenly looked disgusted. “The entire point of what you have just seen,” he said, “is that your friend will be kept here as a hostage, and that if you do not behave perfectly at all times during what is to happen next, she will simply be thrown overboard with something heavy attached to her and suffer the fate just now intimated.”
Zula looked past Jones at Qian Yuxia, sitting there in her chair, still breathing rapidly, gazing ahead at nothing in particular. It was hard to imagine how any person could be calmer, more unruffled, by the experience of torture and near drowning. Perhaps Yuxia was just stunned, or brain damaged, or holding in some deep emotional trauma that would later emerge in dramatic and unpredictable fashion.
But that was not how she looked. She looked as though she were calculating how best to revenge herself on these bastards.
“Girlfriend, I’ll do whatever I can to make sure you don’t get hurt anymore,” Zula said.
“I know,” Yuxia muttered.
Then Jones shoved Zula up the ladder, and she began climbing toward the light of the stars.
A smaller vessel, similar to the one that had brought them in from Xiamen, but without a taxi crater in its cargo deck, had met them and tied up alongside. Zula was made to understand that she should climb down into it. She did so and found a place to sit where she would not be in the way.
At least half an hour passed in discussions and preparations. It seemed to her as
though a lot of gear was being collected from the larger vessel’s various cabins and holds and lockers and that it was being gone through, sorted, checked, repacked. And having spent her whole life around guns, she knew from the sounds, from the weight of the stuff, and simply from the posture of the men carrying it, that some of it was weaponry. She was intensely interested in what the men were saying to one another and was maddeningly close to being able to follow the Arabic. She definitely heard the words for airplane and airport, which delighted some little-girl part of her soul (“Yay, going on a trip!”) even as her higher brain was ticking off all the bad things that could happen when men like Jones came into proximity with jet aircraft.
She was pretty certain she heard the word for “Russian” too. But it was difficult to make anything out, since all of the conversations were sotto voce, and anyone who raised his voice to a conversational level was glared at and shushed.
Some kind of sorting process seemed to be under way. She had noticed that some of Jones’s men had more of a Middle Eastern look about them and preferred Arabic to whatever it was that the other, more Chinese-looking men spoke to each other. The latter were staying behind while the former took places on the smaller boat.
In a manner familiar to anyone who had ever packed a car for a family trip, genial confusion gave way to impatience, then furious ultimatums, then ill-advised snap decisions. Finally the lines were untied, and the smaller vessel began to move away.
Having apparently delegated Khalid to boss the skipper around and generally run the show, Jones disengaged himself from the main group and came over and sat down next to Zula. “Earlier,” he said, “I had been looking for some way of telling you that you’ve fallen in among men who are happy to stone young women to death as a penalty for wrong sorts of behavior.” And he nodded in the direction of Khalid’s crew, who had busied themselves sorting through and repacking all the gear they’d brought on board. “But you have probably guessed that already.” He turned and looked at her brightly. “Then I remembered something about Khalid. You know which one he is?”
“The one who’s glaring at me right now?”
Jones looked. “Yes. That one.” Then he turned his attention back to Zula. “When Khalid was fighting the Crusaders in Afghanistan—”
“Meaning what? Knights with red crosses on their shields?”
“The Americans, in this case,” Jones said. “He and his group were driven, for a time, out of a district that they had controlled for some years. The Americans occupied it and began to impose their culture on the place. Things changed. A school for girls was established.”
“Let me guess—Khalid didn’t approve?”
“Not at all. But there was nothing he could do except watch from the hills and bide his time. Of course, nothing prevented him and other members of his group from slipping into town occasionally, just to conduct espionage operations. They would disguise themselves—you’ll like this—by putting on burqas, so that people would think that they were women. Now, Khalid had a lot to think about beside just the girls’ school, but he did make inroads from time to time. Two men on a scooter, one driving, the other carrying a squeeze bottle full of acid. Wait until you see a group of girls walking down the street on their way to school, ride past them, aiming for the faces—squirt, squirt—” Jones pantomimed it, aiming an imaginary squirt bottle at Zula’s face, and she tried not to flinch. “It scared some of them off. And the poison gas attack very nearly closed the place down altogether. But the teacher was a tough lady. Indomitable. Irrepressible. The kind of woman you only aspire to be, Zula. And so, with plenty of help from the Americans, the school kept on going in spite of all of Khalid’s best efforts. But eventually the Americans decided, as they always do, that they had pacified the place quite enough and that they were tired of seeing their young men picked off one by one by snipers and IEDs. So they declared the job finished and they pulled out of that town. You know what Khalid did then?”
“Given the way you’re telling the story,” Zula said, “I have to guess that he closed down the girls’ school and had the teacher stoned to death or something.”
“It’s what he did before stoning her to death that’s especially interesting,” Jones said.
“And what was that?”
“He raped her.”
“Okay,” Zula said, “so what is the point of the story? That he’s not as much of a Muslim as he claims to be?”
“On the contrary,” Jones said, “he did it for the most Islamic of reasons. By his lights, anyway. I happen to disagree with him on a fine point of theology here.”
“You’re saying there’s a theological justification for what he did?”
“More like a theological motive,” Jones said. “You see, by raping that schoolteacher, he made her into an adulteress. And you know what happens to an adulteress after she gets stoned to death?”
“She goes to hell?” Zula was trying to play this very cool, but her voice cracked.
“Precisely. So, in Khalid’s mind, he wasn’t merely killing the schoolteacher—he was doing it in a way that condemned her to—”
“I know what hell is.”
“I am merely trying to impress on you the danger of being in the power of people like Khalid.”
“I reckoned,” she grunted.
“You may have reckoned, but now you have gone beyond mere reckoning. Now you feel it so that it will guide your actions.”
“Guide, or control?”
“That’s a Western distinction. Anyway. They have now got what they wanted from you: blubbering hysteria. Nicely played. For me, its patent fakeness almost made it more moving.”
“Thanks.”
“I, on the other hand, Westerner that I am, need something that is a little more intellectual.”
“Namely?”
“Islam,” he said, “submission.”
“You want me to submit.”
“That bit of cleverness in the cellar this morning,” he said. “Sending Sokolov to the wrong apartment. It cost me a lot.”
“How do you think I feel right now?”
“Not as bad as you deserve.”
She had known men like this, lurking at the outer branches of the family tree. Men who seemed to attend the re-u for the sole purpose of making the small children feel bad about themselves. Fortunately Uncle John and Uncle Richard had always been around to keep them at bay.
Her uncles were not, of course, here.
She was getting tired of this. “I submit,” she said.
“No more plucky stuff?”
“No more plucky stuff.”
“No more clever plans?”
“No more clever plans.”
“Perfect and total obedience?”
This one was harder. But really not that hard, when she thought of Yuxia and the bucket. “Perfect. And total. Obedience.”
“Well chosen.”
WHEN THEY HAD turned Yuxia upside down, her greatest fear had not been being stuck headfirst into a bucket of water—for she sensed, somehow, that this was nothing more than a demonstration—but that the phone would fall out of her boot.
She had been wondering if these men had ever seen a movie. Because in the movies, prisoners were always being frisked to make sure that they didn’t have anything on them. But no such treatment had been meted out to Qian Yuxia. Perhaps it was because they were Islamists and had a taboo against touching women. Perhaps it was because she was female, therefore deemed harmless. Or maybe it was because she was wearing a snug-fitting pair of jeans and an equally snug sleeveless T-shirt, making it obvious that she was not carrying anything. Whatever the reason, they had never bothered to inspect her for contraband; they had merely taken her into a large cabin on the main deck and handcuffed her to the leg of a table. The cabin was a busy place, serving as the galley and the mess for the ship’s crew, and the table she had been chained to was the one where they took meals and drank tea. Someone was always in the place, and so she had not thought it
advisable to pull the phone out of her boot and use it for anything. From time to time a buzz against her ankle would inform her that she, or rather Marlon, had just received another text message. If the place had been a little quieter, she’d have worried that someone might hear the buzz, but with the grumbling of the engines, the slap and whoosh of waves against the hull, the clanking and hissing of cookware, and bursts of static and conversation emerging from the radio’s speaker, she was safe from that. Zula had been put somewhere else, apparently in a separate cabin, and Yuxia had wondered: If their positions had been reversed, and Yuxia had been alone, what would she have done with the phone? The two basic choices being: communicate with Marlon, or call the police and tell them everything.
When the men had come in to tie her up, one of them had knelt down in front of her, and she had stifled a gasp, thinking that he knew about the phone in her boot and that he was about to reach in there and snatch it out. She had crossed her ankles to hide it. But the man had paid no attention to the contents of her boots. Instead he had passed a rope behind her ankles and brought its ends around to the front and tied them in a knot above the phone, which meant that it was trapped in there. So securely that even being turned upside down had not shaken it loose.
After the terrible thing with the bucket, they dragged her back up to the galley. One of the crew members—the one who seemed responsible for most of the cooking—put a cup of tea in front of her. She was sick and quivering, coughing and raw chested, but basically undamaged, and so she picked up the cup, pressing it hard between both of her hands, which were shaking uncontrollably, and sipped. It was actually pretty good tea. Not as good as gaoshan cha but sharing some of the same medicinal properties, which were just what the doctor ordered for someone who had recently been upside down breathing seawater.