The Night Ferry

12

An enormous dishwater moon has risen in the east and seems to move across the sky, following our taxi. Even in darkness I recognize some of the roads. Schiphol Airport is not far from here.

This is a different area of Amsterdam. The chocolate-box façades and historic bridges have been replaced by the functional and harsh—cement-gray apartment blocks and shops protected by metal shutters. Only one store is open. A dozen black youths are standing outside.

De Souza doesn’t have a fixed address, Hokke explains. He moves from place to place, never staying more than a night in any one bed. He lives with the people he employs. They protect him.

“Be very careful what you say to him. And don’t interrupt when he speaks. Keep your eyes down and your hands by your sides.”

We have pulled up outside an apartment block. Hokke opens the door for me.

“Aren’t you coming with me?”

“You must go alone. We will wait here.”

“No,” declares Ruiz. “I am going with her.”

Hokke responds with equal passion. “She goes alone or there will be nobody waiting to meet her.”

Ruiz continues to protest but I push him back into the car where he grimaces as he folds his arms across his bandaged chest.

“Remember what I told you,” says the Dutchman, pointing toward a building that is identical to the one next to it and the one next to that. A teenage boy leans against a wall. A second one watches us from an upstairs window. Lookouts. “You must go now. Phone me if there’s a problem.”

I walk away from the taxi. The boy leaning against the wall has gone. The second teenager is still at the window. I walk through a concrete archway into a quadrangle. Lights shine on water. Chinese lanterns are strung from the branches of a leafless tree growing amid the weeds.

Pushing through a fire door, I climb the stairs, counting off the floors. Turning left at the landing, I find the second door. A bell sounds when I push a small white button.

Another teenager appears at the door. His polished black eyes examine me but turn away when I meet his gaze. Shoes and sandals are lined up in the narrow hallway. The teenager points to my boots. I take them off.

The floor creaks idly as I follow him to a living area. A group of five men in their forties and fifties are seated on cushions arranged at the edges of a woven rug.

Eduardo de Souza is immediately recognizable because of his place at the center. Dressed in white pantaloons and a dark shirt, he looks Turkish or possibly Kurdish, with a high forehead and carved cheekbones. Unfurling his legs, he rises and touches my hand briefly.

“Welcome, Miss Barba, I am Eduardo de Souza.”

His neatly trimmed beard is black and gray—the gray like slivers of ice hanging on dark fur. Nobody speaks or moves, yet there is a perceptible energy in the air, a sharpening of focus. I keep my gaze down as eyes roam over me.

Through the doorway to the kitchen I spy a young Nigerian woman in a flowing dress of bright colors. Three children, two boys and a girl, jostle at the doorway, regarding me with fascination.

De Souza speaks again. “These are friends of mine. This is Sunday. He is our host this evening.”

Sunday smiles. He is Nigerian and his teeth are a brilliant white. Each of the men introduces himself in turn. The first is Iranian with a Swiss German accent. His name is Farhad and his eyes are set so deep in his skull that I can scarcely see them. Beside him is Oscar, who looks Moroccan and speaks with a French accent.

Finally, there is Dayel, a smooth-shaven Indian, with an oil burn on his neck.

“One of your countrymen, although not a Sikh,” says de Souza. Dayel smiles at the introduction.

How does he know I’m a Sikh?

There is a spare brocade cushion beside him. I am expected to sit. Sunday’s wife enters the room carrying a tray of mismatched glasses and begins pouring sweet tea. Her hair is braided into a curtain of long beaded plaits. She smiles shyly at me. Her teeth are perfect and her wide nose flares gently as she breathes.

Dishes arrive. A meal. Holding his hands together, de Souza studies me above his steepled fingers, weighing up whether or not to help me. His English is perfect, overlaid with an educated British accent that is especially noticeable on the long vowels.

“This area of Amsterdam is called Bijlmermeer,” he says, glancing at the window. “In October 1992 a cargo jet took off from Schiphol and lost two engines. It buried itself into an apartment block like this one, full of immigrant families who were sitting down to an evening meal. Fifty apartments were destroyed by the initial impact. Another hundred burned afterward as jet fuel ran through the streets like a river of fire. People threw themselves off balconies and rooftops to escape the flames.

“At first they said the death toll was 250. Later they dropped the estimate to 75 and officially only 43 people died. The truth is, nobody knows the true number. Illegal immigrants have no papers and they hide from the police. They are ghosts.”

De Souza hasn’t touched the food, but seems particularly satisfied to see the others eating.

“Forgive me, Miss Barba, I talk too much. My friends here are too polite to tell me to be quiet. It is customary for a guest to bring something to the feast or provide some form of entertainment. Do you sing or dance?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you are a storyteller.”

“I don’t really understand.”

“You will tell us a story. The best of them seem to me to be about life and death, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal.” He waves his hand as if stirring the air. His amber eyes are fixed on mine.

“I am not a very good storyteller.”

“Let us be the judge of that.”

I tell him the story of two teenage girls who met at school and became best friends. Soul mates. Later, at university, one of them slept with the other’s father. He seduced her. She allowed herself to be seduced. The friendship was over.

I don’t mention names, but why would I tell them such a personal story?

Seamlessly, I begin talking about a second pair of teenage girls, who met in a city of widows and orphans. People traffickers smuggled them out of Afghanistan as far as Amsterdam. They were told that they owed a debt for their escape. Either they became prostitutes or carried a baby for a childless couple. Virgins were implanted with embryos in a ritualized form of medical rape. They were the perfect incubators. Factories. Couriers.

Even as I tell this story, a sense of alarm dries my throat. Why have I told de Souza such personal stories? For all I know he is involved. He could be the ringleader. I don’t have time to consider the implications. I don’t know if I care. I have come too far to back out.

There is a moment of silence when I finish. De Souza leans forward and takes a chocolate from a platter, rolling it over his tongue before chewing it slowly.

“It is a good story. Friendship is a difficult thing to define. Oscar here is my oldest friend. How would you define friendship, Oscar?”

Oscar grunts slightly, as though the answer is obvious. “Friendship is about choice and chemistry. It cannot be defined.”

“But surely there is something more to it than that.”

“It is a willingness to overlook faults and to accept them. I would let a friend hurt me without striking back,” he says, smiling, “but only once.”

De Souza laughs. “Bravo, Oscar, I can always rely on you to distill an argument down to its purest form. What do you think, Dayel?”

The Indian rocks his head from side to side, proud that he has been asked to speak next.

“Friendship is different for each person and it changes throughout our lives. At age six it is about holding hands with your best friend. At sixteen it is about the adventure ahead. At sixty it is about reminiscing.” He holds up a finger. “You cannot define it with any one word, although honesty is perhaps the closest word—”

“No, not honesty,” Farhad interrupts. “On the contrary, we often have to protect our friends from what we truly think. It is like an unspoken agreement. We ignore each other’s faults and keep our confidences. Friendship isn’t about being honest. The truth is too sharp a weapon to wield around someone we trust and respect. Friendship is about self-awareness. We see ourselves through the eyes of our friends. They are like a mirror that allows us to judge how we are traveling.”

De Souza clears his throat now. I wonder if he is aware of the awe he inspires in others. I suspect he is too intelligent and too human to do otherwise.

“Friendship cannot be defined,” he says sternly. “The moment we begin to give reasons for being friends with someone we begin to undermine the magic of the relationship. Nobody wants to know that they are loved for their money or their generosity or their beauty or their wit. Choose one motive and it allows a person to say, ‘Is that the only reason?’”

The others laugh. De Souza joins in with them. This is a performance.

He continues: “Trying to explain why we form particular friendships is like trying to tell someone why we like a certain kind of music or a particular food. We just do.”

He focuses on me now. “Your friend’s name is Cate Beaumont.”

How does he know that?

“Were you ever jealous of her?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Friends can be jealous of each other. Oscar, here, is envious of my position and my wealth.”

“Not at all, my friend,” he beseeches.

De Souza smiles knowingly. “Did you envy Cate Beaumont’s beauty or her success?”

“Sometimes.”

“You wished she had less and you had more.”

“Yes.”

“That is natural. Friendships can be ambiguous and contradictory.”

“She is dead now,” I add, although I sense he knows this already.

“She paid money for a baby. A criminal act,” he states piously.

“Yes.”

“Are you trying to protect her?”

“I’m trying to rescue the surrogate mother and the babies.”

“Perhaps you want a baby for yourself?”

My denial is too strident. I make it worse. “I have never…I don’t…”

He reaches into a small pouch tied to the belt of his tunic. “Do you think I am a criminal, Miss Barba?”

“I don’t know enough—”

“Give me your opinion.”

I pause. The faces in the circle watch with a mixture of amusement and fascination.

“It’s not up to me to say,” I stammer.

Silence. Perspiration leaks into the hollow of my back, weaving between the bumps of my vertebrae.

De Souza is waiting. He leans close, his face only inches from mine. His bottom teeth are brittle and jagged, yellowing like faded newsprint. It is not such a perfect face after all.

“You can offer me nothing,” he says dismissively.

I can feel the situation slipping away from me. He is not going to help me.

The anger fermenting inside me, fueled by hostile thoughts and by images of Zala, suddenly finds an escape valve. Words tumble out. “I think you’re a criminal and a misogynist but you’re not an evil man. You don’t exploit children or sell babies to the highest bidder.” I point to Sunday’s wife who has come to collect our plates. “You would not ask this woman, the wife of a friend, to give up one of her children or force her to have another woman’s baby. You support asylum seekers and illegal immigrants; you give them jobs and find them homes. They respect and admire you. We can stop this trade. I can stop it. Help me.”

Sunday’s wife is embarrassed at having been singled out. She continues collecting the plates, eager to get away. The tension in the room is amplified by the stillness. Every man’s eyes are upon me. Oscar makes a choking noise. He would slit my throat in a heartbeat.

De Souza stands abruptly. The meeting is finished. Oscar takes a step toward me. De Souza signals for him to stop. Alone, he walks me to the front door and takes my hand. Pressed between his fingers is a small scrap of paper.

The door closes. I do not look at the message. It’s too dark to read it. The taxi is waiting. I slide into the backseat and lean against Ruiz as I close the car door. Hokke tells the driver to go.

The note is rolled into a tube, wedged between my thumb and forefinger. My hands are shaking as I unroll it and hold it up to the inside light.

Five words. Handwritten. “She leaves tonight from Rotterdam.”