He sent his mind out, groping for Janie’s mind, as if reaching for her hand in the dark. Was she too far gone to hear his voice, or to feel his presence? Had she already moved on to the place of the glinting particles in the darkness, where his mother was? And if so, could he ever get her back?
He felt his heartbeat speed up in his body, in the hospital room, in protest. She couldn’t really be gone. Maybe he could let his father go, but he couldn’t lose Janie. He called her name again, in the darkness.
Nothing. Breathe in. Breathe out.
The message of the myth was that he had to be sure of her. He had to know that she would come back with him.
Finally he saw the dim walls of the After-room around him and his father’s voice came into his head. “Benjamin,” it said. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Where’s Janie?” he cried.
“Helping Jin Lo.”
“I need her back!”
“I’m trying to wait for her,” his father said. “But you need to leave. I can’t keep this up much longer.”
Benjamin looked around, and saw that the walls of the After-room were slowly dissolving. He could feel the vastness of the universe beyond, glinting with light. It was pulling at him. He wouldn’t be able to breathe soon. “What happens when you go?” he asked.
“This place won’t exist anymore,” his father said.
“And I won’t be able to find you.”
“No,” his father said.
“Will you be with my mother?”
“I will,” his father said, and again Benjamin heard that unfamiliar joy in his voice. “You have all her best qualities, Benjamin. I’m so proud of you. Our love still exists in the world, because of you.”
Benjamin thought of the lifeless body in the hospital bed. “Janie has to come back!” he said.
“I’m trying,” his father said. “But Benjamin, whatever happens, you have to live. You have to go.”
He could feel his hold on the After-room slipping. His body was stubborn, and didn’t want to die. It needed air. But if he left, he would never see his father again. “Listen!” he said. “It was my fault that you died! I’m sorry!”
“You were trying to do the right thing,” his father said. “You were braver than I was.”
“So you forgive me?” Benjamin asked.
“There’s nothing to forgive,” his father said.
“But there is!” Benjamin said. “Please!”
“Of course I forgive you,” his father said.
Benjamin felt a flood of relief and happiness, a burden lifting from his heart, but also a fear that now he was really losing his father. It was time. “Wait!” he said.
There was darkness again, and the pulling sensation. A roaring wind. He could feel that the After-room was disappearing. Ghosts rushed by him, and he felt the bone-chilling cold as they were pulled back through the portal by which they had come. The door was closing, closing.
Benjamin felt the heaviness of his body, and the disorienting electric light behind his eyelids. The walls of the hospital room appeared around him. He was clutching Janie’s hand so tightly that her fingertips should have been purple, but they weren’t. She’d lost too much blood. He rubbed her pale, lifeless hand in his.
The image of her sitting at the kitchen table that morning, in a shaft of sunlight, came into his mind. He thought of her leaning toward him, and how warm and soft her lips had been. He thought of the apple smell of her hair, and the electric jolt he had felt when she kissed him. The feeling that something had shifted, that they had acted on each other as separate substances, and become something new. It had scared him at the breakfast table, and he had wanted to think about it some more. Because if they really were so connected, then what would happen if he lost her? And now he was losing her. He heard her voice in his head: I think that would bring me back from anywhere.
He leaned forward to kiss her dry, cold lips. It was there again, that sense of transformation, but he wasn’t afraid. They had already become something different than they were before. The kiss had only made him aware of the magic of it, the way everything became possible. He smelled apples, and felt the morning’s sunlight.
Janie gasped, and coughed.
Chapter 55
Coercion
From the circus barge, Jin Lo thought she saw the moment when Janie and the commander’s son vanished. The look of heat rising from a road was gone. It happened so quickly after the shell sank into the canal that there were still ripples on the surface of the water. She wondered if Janie had survived.
Commander Hayes seemed meek and drained of energy, and allowed himself to be led aboard the circus barge without protest. His eyes were hollow, and Jin Lo wondered when he had last slept, and if he had been running on pure rage and vengeance this whole time. She wondered, too, how Janie had persuaded him to push the shell overboard, but it didn’t matter: It was done.
Buried in muddy silt at the bottom of the canal was not a bad place for the shell. The titanium casing would stay intact a long time. So she directed Xiao, still under the influence of the tea, to take the barge south toward the sea. They could come back later to recover the shell.
“But we have to dive for it now!” Ned Maddox said.
She shook her head. “It cannot fall into Danby’s hands.”
“That skinny Englishman? Seriously?”
“And the pirates. They are looking for us.”
“They’ll never find us,” Ned Maddox said.
Jin Lo did not want to argue with him. Janie was quite likely dead, along with Marcus Burrows, and Jin Lo felt as exhausted as Hayes looked. Grief was tiring. “Danby will find us,” she said.
“But we have to return the shell to the navy,” he said.
“It is a weapon to kill civilians.”
“It’s my job to return it,” he said.
“But it is not my job.”
He was exasperated. “Do you know how many more of those shells we have?”
Jin Lo looked at him, weary with sadness. “This is your reason to give it back?”
“I’m just saying it won’t matter if we do!”
“It always matters,” she said. “Everything we do, it matters.”
“Well, I have to return it,” he said. “We need diving equipment. And a winch—it’s too heavy to bring up without a winch. Or serious floats.”
“We have no winch,” she said. “And it would not be safe to draw attention now. We must get out of the canal.”
“I will not leave U.S. nuclear technology in enemy hands!”
“It’s buried in silt, underwater. No one knows it is there.”
“Someone might find it!”
“One moment,” Jin Lo said. She went looking for the abandoned teapot and the cups, and found them stowed in the wheelhouse. The tea had gone cold. She had not had time to explain about the tea to Ned Maddox, and he had not seemed to wonder why everyone on the barge had done her bidding. She poured him a cup. Marcus Burrows would advise her not to do this, but he was not here. She took the cup to Ned Maddox.
“You are dehydrated, I think,” she said. “Have some tea.”
“We need to find a salvage barge,” he said.
She nodded.
“And we need to anchor. I have to take very specific bearings.”
“The tea will help you think.”
He sniffed. “It smells disgusting.”
“It’s my special blend.”
He gulped it down and then began to argue with her again, about winches and floats and where they could get them, but she could see the tea taking effect. And worse, she could see that he understood what was happening. He felt the tea melting his willpower away, and heard himself agreeing with her. A look of profound betrayal came over his face.
“We will leave the shell,” she sa
id, “and leave the canal. Now.”
He stared at her, horrified. “You drugged me.”
She turned away. Her regret for having given him the tea was swallowed up in all her other sadness. What she regretted was that she had needed to give it to him.
She gave the last cup of cold tea to Commander Hayes, but only because there was some left. She didn’t think he would give them any more trouble. He drank it down as obediently as a child. Then she dumped the sodden leaves overboard, imagining the fishes becoming biddable, offering themselves up to bigger fish, or to the hook, and she carried the pot and the cups down to the galley.
She should have kept arguing with Ned Maddox, without resorting to the tea. She should have explained to him why salvaging the shell and risking it falling into Danby’s hands would be the worst thing for the United States. Danby would sell the shell to his North Korean buyers, their nuclear program would leap forward, and the Americans would have a powerful new enemy in the world. But Ned Maddox would not have listened.
Maybe Marcus Burrows was right, and mind control was morally wrong, but the Wine of Lethe was just as bad, taking away people’s memories. And Marcus Burrows had given that to people he cared about—for their own safety, and for the greater good. Would it have been acceptable, if she’d had some of the wine, to make everyone on the barge forget what had happened and where the shell was?
But she would still have had the problem of Ned Maddox. To drug him or not to drug him. There was no good answer. And why should someone she loved be different from anyone else? The ethics should be the same. She should treat all people as she would treat a loved one. Or was it different?
She wasn’t sure. She wished she could talk to Ned Maddox about these questions. But he wouldn’t be himself until the tea wore off. He would be someone who was bound to agree with her.
She put the cups away and thought about what to do next. She would ask Xiao for food and water and fuel, and he would give them to her. They would take Hayes into Ned Maddox’s boat, say good-bye to the little girls, and head out of the canal. Ned Maddox could return the commander to the navy, if he was so desperate to return something to them. She went back out on deck.
Night was falling fast, and Jin Lo hadn’t even noticed. They were heading south, toward the mouth of the canal, past sailing junks and coal barges. The banks above the canal walls disappeared into the twilight.
Little Ming came walking on her hands across the wooden deck. When she got to Jin Lo’s side, she dropped her feet in a backbend and stood up, as if that were a normal way to get around. She was like a human Slinky toy.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“South,” Jin Lo said.
“Are you in love with that foreigner, the younger one?” Ming asked.
Such a good question. “Perhaps.”
“Will you stay with us?”
“Not for long.”
“Why not?” Ming asked.
“Because I need to go out to sea.”
“But why?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Another foreigner?”
“Yes.”
“Are all your friends foreigners?”
Jin Lo reflected on that. “Not you,” she said.
“I’ve never been out to sea,” Ming said. “Is it far?”
“It can be. It depends on how far you go.”
“Are you going far?”
“I don’t think so,” Jin Lo said. “The man I’m looking for is looking for me, too.”
“Are you in love with him?”
“No,” Jin Lo said, appalled by the idea of loving Danby. “I just mean it won’t take long, if we’re moving toward each other.”
Ming considered this idea. In the fading light, Jin Lo watched the concepts of time and distance play over the girl’s mobile face. Jin Lo’s own childhood in Nanking was hard to access, in her memory. It was on the other side of that great gulf formed by catastrophe. She watched Ming for signs of what she herself might have been like, back then. But had she ever been so open and so innocent?
“Jin Lo?” the little girl finally said.
“Yes?”
“Is that the man who’s looking for you?”
Jin Lo followed Ming’s pointing finger and saw a barefoot, black-clad figure climbing over the side of the barge, followed by another, and then another. They were swarming aboard. Jin Lo only had time to push Ming behind a barrel before the boarders had the captain facedown on the deck. Jin Lo heard a short scream from Xiao’s wife.
Someone grabbed Jin Lo from behind, and she caught his wrists and threw him over her shoulder. He landed on his back with a heavy thump and lay there with the wind knocked out of him. He was upside down and gasping like a fish, but still she recognized the sharp features, the long straight nose, the white lock of hair at his forehead.
She was surrounded by pirates, and she stood up slowly with her hands in the air. They were on all sides of her, men in black clothes, with long curving knives. She tried to contain her fear, and to remember that she had wanted to find Danby—just not under these circumstances. She had not expected the pirates to come all the way into the canal. Their leader was either very brave, or completely mad.
She tried to make her voice clear and steady. “I demand to see Huang P’ei-mei,” she said.
• • •
The pirates locked Hayes and Ned Maddox and the circus family into the hold before their leader came aboard the circus barge. Even the captain’s nimble sons had been overwhelmed, unready for the attack. But Jin Lo had not seen the pirates take Ming, only her sister. So maybe Ming was still hiding. Again, she found herself hoping that this would not be the catastrophe that would divide the girls’ lives into before and after.
Huang P’ei-mei surveyed Jin Lo with a skeptical expression, by lantern light. The pirate queen was about sixty, her black hair streaked with silver and pulled severely back. She wore the same simple black cotton clothes as her crew. She didn’t look like a legendary pirate.
Danby had brushed himself off and recovered his dignity. “Jin Lo,” he said, “may I present the illustrious Huang P’ei-mei.” Jin Lo was surprised to hear him speaking Cantonese. He had the same lazy, supercilious, schoolboy drawl as he did in English—it was not respectful.
She sensed that a show of courtesy and deference would be her best strategy, so she bowed. “Madame Huang,” she said.
“Where is the bomb?” Huang P’ei-mei asked.
“It sank to the bottom of the canal.”
“Take us to where it sank,” the pirate queen said.
“I don’t know the place,” Jin Lo lied.
“Of course you do!” Danby said.
“I don’t.”
Ming stuck her head out from behind a barrel. “I do!”
They all turned to look at the little girl.
“I remember where it is!” Ming said. “It’s that way!” She pointed north, up the canal in the direction from which they had come.
Danby began to laugh.
“The bomb is worth nothing, Madame,” Jin Lo said. “The water and silt will have destroyed the mechanism.”
“Perhaps,” Huang P’ei-mei said. “Perhaps not. Catch up that little brat. And turn this barge around!”
A black-clad pirate grabbed Ming, who looked at Jin Lo from under his arm.
Jin Lo pleaded with her eyes: Don’t tell them.
One of the pirates took the wheel and began the slow process of reversing course.
“And seize the Englishman!” the pirate queen said.
“What?” Danby said, as two pirates grabbed his skinny, wasted arms.
“You are rude, and it makes me weary,” Huang P’ei-mei said. “Tie him up. I will deal with him later.” Then she turned back eagerly, to watch their progress up the canal.<
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Chapter 56
Primo
Primo kept seeing Janie fly through the air, in his mind, like a film playing over and over. He had seen many things, but he had never seen a car pick someone up and toss them like that. Benjamin had thrown his satchel down as if it meant nothing to him so he could run to Janie. She lay in the street, unmoving, and then there was the ambulance and Benjamin was trying to argue with the medics. Primo was too stunned to step forward. He had slipped the bag over his shoulder, for safekeeping. Couldn’t let the book that everyone wanted lie there in the street. He thought that Benjamin would ask for it back, and he would hand it over.
But Benjamin and the fat count were crazed with worry, they weren’t thinking. They flagged a cab and they were gone, and Primo was left with the strap hanging across his body, the heavy book weighing it down.
He could take it to the hospital. That was where they were going. They would thank him, give him coins, and say, “Oh, Primo, what would we do without you? Grazie, Primo. Grazie mille.”
That would be a nice moment. He liked these people. They were free with money. But they were foreigners, and foreigners always went away. Once, Primo’s cousin Gina had thought an American boy was going to marry her. She was going to move to America and be rich. She told everyone, bragging and prancing around. But then the American went home from his trip, and left Gina behind. He had come to Rome for the beautiful things, but he had never meant to take her. Gina had sobbed and sobbed. She threw herself into the river with a broken heart, and had to be fished out, puking water, by a man working on the dance boats.
But she’d been foolish to trust the American and his promises. Primo could do every single thing for these people, and they would still leave, and he could end up back in the orphanage. With the soup that was like glue, and the cruel older boys, and the matron who pushed his head into a bucket of freezing water to shave him when he got lice from the filthy beds.
No. He was not going back there. He had his whole life to think of.
There was blood on the cobblestones, Janie’s blood. It would be on the car, too. Should he go find the car? It had a broken windshield; it would be easy to find. But what then? Maybe the count would give him some more money and the driver would go to jail. It wouldn’t help Janie. It wouldn’t help Primo.