The Night Ferry

2

The lawyer’s office is on Prinsengracht in a four-story building that deviates from the vertical by a degree or two, leaning out over the brick-paved street. A high arched doorway leads to a narrow courtyard where an old woman is swabbing flagstones with a mop and bucket. She points to the stairs.

On the first floor we enter a waiting room full of North Africans, many with children. A young man looks up from a desk, pushing his Harry Potter glasses higher up his nose. We don’t have an appointment. He flicks through the pages of a daily schedule.

At that moment a door opens behind him and a Nigerian woman appears, dressed in a voluminous floral dress. A young girl clings to her hand and a baby is asleep on her shoulder.

For a moment I don’t see anyone else. Then a small woman emerges, as if appearing from the folds of the Nigerian’s dress.

“I’ll send you a copy of the papers once I’ve lodged the appeal,” she says. “You must let me know if you change your address.”

Dressed in a long-sleeved cotton blouse, black cardigan and gray trousers, she looks very lawyerly and businesslike, despite her diminutive stature. Smiling absently at me as though we might have met, she glances at Ruiz and shudders.

“Mrs. Caspar, excuse this interruption. Could we have a word?”

She laughs. “How very English that sounds. Just the one word? I’m almost tempted to say yes just to hear which one you might choose.” The skin around her eyes wrinkles like peach stones. “I’m very busy today. You’ll have to wait until—”

She stops in mid-sentence. I am holding up a photograph of Samira. “Her brother is dead. We have to find her.”

Mrs. Caspar holds her office door open until we follow her inside. The room is almost square, with highly polished wood floors. The house has belonged to her family for generations, she explains. The law practice was her grandfather’s and then her father’s.

Despite volunteering this information, Mrs. Caspar has a lawyer’s natural caution.

“You don’t look like a police officer,” she says to me. “I thought you might require my services.” She turns her attention to Ruiz. “You, however, look exactly like a policeman.”

“Not anymore.”

“Tell me about Hassan,” she says, turning back to me. “What happened to him?”

“When did you last see him?”

“Eleven months ago.”

I describe the discovery of his body in the truck and how my name and address were sewn into his clothes. Turning her face to the window, Mrs. Caspar might be close to tears, but I doubt if such a woman would let strangers see her emotions.

“Why would he have your name?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping you could tell me.”

She shakes her head.

“I am trying to find Samira.”

“Why?”

How do I answer this? I plunge straight in. “I think a friend of mine who couldn’t have children tried to buy a baby in Amsterdam. I think she met Samira.”

“Samira doesn’t have a baby.”

“No, but she has a womb.”

Mrs. Caspar looks at me incredulously. “A Muslim girl doesn’t rent her womb. You must be mistaken.”

The statement has the bluntness and certainty of fact or dogma. She crosses the office and opens a filing cabinet, taking out a folder. Sitting at her desk, she scans the contents.

“My government does not welcome asylum seekers. They have made it more and more difficult for them. We even have a minister of immigration who claims that only 20 percent of applicants are ‘real refugees’—the rest are liars and frauds.

“Unfortunately, legitimate asylum seekers are being demonized. They are treated like economic refugees, roaming between countries looking for someone to take them in.”

The bitterness in her voice vibrates her tiny frame.

“Samira and Hassan had no papers when they arrived. The IND claimed they destroyed them on purpose. They didn’t believe Samira was a minor. She looked closer to twelve than twenty, but they sent her for tests.”

“Tests?”

“An age evaluation test. They x-rayed her collarbone, which is supposed to establish if someone is older or younger than twenty. Hassan had his wrist x-rayed. A report was prepared by Harry van der Pas, a physical anthropologist at Tilburg University.

“It backfired on them. Samira appeared even younger. Poor diet and malnutrition had stunted her growth. They gave them both temporary visas. They could stay, but only until further checks were done.”

Mrs. Caspar turns a page in the folder.

“Nowadays the policy is to return underage asylum seekers to their own country. Hassan and Samira had no family. Afghanistan can scarcely feed its own people. Kabul is a city of widows and orphans.”

She slides a page of notes toward me—a family history. “They were orphans. Both spoke English. Their mother was educated at Delhi University. She worked as a translator for a publishing company until the Taliban took over.”

I look at the notes. Samira was born in 1987 during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. She was two years old when the Soviets left and ten when the Taliban arrived.

“And their father?”

“A factory owner.”

I remember Hassan’s photograph.

“They made fireworks,” explains Mrs. Caspar. “The Taliban closed the factory down. Fireworks were forbidden. The family fled to Pakistan and lived in a refugee camp. Their mother died of dysentery. Hamid Khan struggled to raise his children. When he grew tired of living like a beggar in a foreign country, he took his family back to Kabul. He was dead within six months.”

“What happened?”

“Samira and Hassan witnessed his execution. A teenager with a Kalashnikov made him kneel on the floor of their apartment and shot him in the back of the head. They threw his body from a window into the street and wouldn’t let his children collect it for eight days, by which time the dogs had picked it over.”

Her voice is thick with sadness. “There is an Afghan proverb. I heard Samira say it: To an ant colony dew is a flood.”

It doesn’t need any further explanation.

“When did you last see her?”

“Mid-January. She surprised me on my birthday. She made me fireworks. I don’t know how she managed to buy the chemicals and powder. I had never seen anything so beautiful.”

“What about their application for asylum?”

The lawyer produces another letter. “Eighteen is a very important age for an asylum seeker in this country. Once you reach this age you are treated as an adult. Samira’s temporary residency was revoked. She was deemed to be old enough to look after Hassan, so his visa was also canceled. Both were denied asylum and told they had to leave.

“I lodged an appeal, of course, but I couldn’t prevent them being forced onto the street. They had to leave the campus at Deelen. Like a lot of young people denied asylum, they chose to run rather than wait to be deported.”

“Where?”

She opens her arms, palms upward.

“How can we find Samira?”

“You can’t.”

“I have to try. Did she have any friends at the campus?”

“She mentioned a Serbian girl. I don’t know her name.”

“Is she still there?”

“No. She was either deported or she ran away.”

Mrs. Caspar looks at Ruiz and back to me. The future is mapped out in the lines on her face. It is a difficult journey.

“I have a friend—a retired policeman like you, Mr. Ruiz. He has spent half his life working in the red light district. He knows everyone—the prostitutes, pimps, dealers and drug addicts. Walls have mice and mice have ears. He can hear what the mice are saying.”

She takes down the name of our hotel and promises to leave a message.

“If you find Samira, be careful with her. When she finds out about her brother she will hurt in places where it matters most.”

“You think we’ll find her?”

She kisses my cheeks. “There is always a way from heart to heart.”

Back at the Red Tulip I call DI Forbes. Straightaway he demands to know where I am. A quiet inner voice tells me to lie. It’s a voice I’ve been hearing a lot lately.

“Have you interviewed the truck driver?” I ask.

“Are you in Amsterdam?” he counters.

“What did he tell you?”

“You can’t just leave the fucking country. You’re a suspect.”

“I wasn’t made aware of any restrictions.”

“Don’t give me that crap! If you’re running a parallel investigation I’ll have you up on disciplinary charges. You can forget about your career. You can forget about coming home.”

I can hear the annoying click in his voice. It must drive his wife mad—like living with a human metronome.

Eventually he calms down when I tell him about Hassan. We swap information. The truck driver has been charged with manslaughter, but there is a complication. U.K. immigration officers received a tip-off about a suspect vehicle before the roll-on, roll-off ferry docked in Harwich. They had the license number and were told to look for a group of illegal immigrants.

“Who provided the tip-off?”

“The Port Authority in Rotterdam received an anonymous phone call two hours after the ferry sailed. We think it came from the traffickers.”

“Why?”

“They were setting up a decoy.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They were sacrificing a small number of illegals who would tie up resources. Customs and immigration would be so busy that they wouldn’t notice a much larger shipment.”

“On the same boat?”

“Two articulated lorries haven’t been accounted for. The companies listed on the freight manifest are nonexistent. They could have smuggled a hundred people in the back of those trucks.”

“Could the air vents have been closed deliberately—to create a more effective decoy?”

“We may never know.”

“I don’t want a health club, I want a gym,” I tell the desk clerk who doesn’t appreciate the difference. I shadow box and she backs away. Now she understands.

I know a little about gyms. In our last year at Oaklands, I convinced Cate to take karate classes with me. They were held in a grungy old gym in Penwick Street, mostly used by boxers and old guys in sleeveless vests whose veins would pop out of their heads when they were on the bench press.

The karate instructor was Chinese with a Cockney accent and everyone called him “Peking,” which got shortened to “P.K.,” which he didn’t seem to mind.

There was a boxing ring and a weight-training room with mirrors and a separate annex with mats on the floor for karate. P.K. spent the first few lessons explaining the principles behind karate, which didn’t particularly interest Cate. “The mental discipline, physical training and study help build respect toward our fellow man,” he said.

“I just want to be able to kick them in the balls,” said Cate.

“The two Japanese characters that make up the word ‘karate’ have the literal meaning of ‘empty hands,’” explained P.K. “It is a system of self-defense that has evolved over hundreds of years. Every move is based on a knowledge of the muscles and joints and the relationship between movement and balance.”

Cate raised her hand. “When do I learn to hit people?”

“You will be taught the techniques of counterattack.”

He then described how the word “karate” came from Mandarin and Cantonese phrases like “chan fa” and “ken fat,” which sent Cate into a fit of giggles. The literal meaning is “The Law of the Fist.” Attacks to the groin of an opponent are frowned upon by most martial arts. Karate also doesn’t approve of targeting the hip joints, knee joints, insteps, shins, upper limbs and face.

“What’s the bloody point?” muttered Cate.

“I think he means in competition.”

“Forget competition. I want to hurt their balls.”

She persevered with learning the theory but every week she pestered him with the same question: “When do we learn the groin kick?”

P.K. finally relented. He gave Cate a private lesson after the gym had closed. The blinds were drawn and he turned off all the lights except for the one over the ring.

She came out looking flushed and smiling, with a mark on her neck that looked suspiciously like a love bite. She didn’t go back to self-defense classes again.

I kept going, working my way through the belts. P.K. wanted me to go for black but I was already at the police training college.

Ruiz is on his second beer when I get to the restaurant. He’s watching the pizza chef spin a disk of dough in the air, draping it over his knuckles before launching it again.

The waiters are young. Two of them are watching me, commenting to each other. They’re trying to fathom my relationship with Ruiz. What is a young Asian woman doing with a man twice her age? I’m either a mail-order bride or his mistress, they think.

The café is nearly empty. Nobody eats this early in Amsterdam. An old man with a dog sits near the front door. He slips his hand beneath the table with morsels of food.

“She could be anywhere,” says Ruiz.

“She wouldn’t have left Amsterdam.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Hassan was only sixteen. She wouldn’t leave him.”

“He made two North Sea crossings without her.”

I have no answer.

So far we have been trying to make inquiries without drawing attention to ourselves. Why not change our tactics? We could print up posters or place an advertisement.

Ruiz doesn’t agree. “Cate Beaumont tried to take this public and look what happened. This isn’t some seat-of-the-pants operation where someone panicked and killed the Beaumonts. We’re dealing with an organized gang—guys like Brendan Pearl.”

“They won’t expect it.”

“They’ll know we’re looking.”

“We’ll flush them out.”

Ruiz continues to argue, but he understands my point. Chance or fate will not decide what takes place next. We can make things happen.

Hotel rooms in strange cities are lonely places where the human spirit touches rock bottom. I lie on the bed but cannot sleep. My head refuses to abandon the image of a child in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, lying next to his mother, beneath a closed air vent.

I want to rewind the clock back to the night of the reunion and further. I want to sit down with Cate and take turns at talking and crying and saying we’re sorry. I want to make up for the last eight years. Most of all, I want to be forgiven.