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Vanishing Island

Michael Washburn

Just after Randal’s arrival on the island, the staff of the airline went on strike. He tried not to let the news bother him. Given that a weekly flight to Brisbane was the only way off the island in the usual course of things, it was hard to know how much of a difference this made. For now there was space all around in the sunshine to explore. Compared to other islands, this lump of jagged rock and arid soil in the South Pacific was tiny. But it would still take an hour to walk all the way around, under a sun so fierce that every gleaming boulder, slope, or strip of road seemed to leer with the perverse satisfaction that comes from denying any shade to an interloper.

He found a modest bit of shadow under the thick canopies of the palm, mangrove, and breadfruit trees on the long curving road. The cobalt sky recalled Honolulu, but the sense of its infinitude was more daunting here. As Randal wandered along on the road’s edge, cars slowed and drivers peered out at the white figure skirting Topside with all the wonder of a boy on a nude beach.

Even as the looks and leers began to get to him a bit, he had to admit that his curiosity about this odd place verged on unseemly. But when you have come into a bit of money and you want to do things hardly anyone has done, to go places few people have gone, or have even heard of, you will pick up on what is outlandish and weird. Here was an island notorious for money laundering. Before him now was Topside, or its remnants. For so many decades, the greed of the global firms had brought about the mining of phosphate at a merciless pace, the removal of an island’s heritage, the exportation of this resource to ports in Honolulu and San Francisco and ports all over the southern hemisphere.

Now the absence of white rock, hardened guano, all around bothered him on a deep level. After all, the phosphate was kind of like the soul of this nation. He gazed out at the barren spaces whose nudity the sun threw into blistering relief. Here on his left lay a slope, with a few lonely stalks rising from the arid ground, the thin layers of soil dumped into this area of Topside in an effort to blunt the visual impact of the devastation. There sat a boulder, round and rough, bare save for obscene graffiti.

He pressed on, ignoring the looks from the cars. Here were more slopes, crevices, crags, valleys, spaces, zones where absence had the power to hurt, even if you were not a native and thought yourself far from vulnerable to the mental dislocations that the ripping off of this island over so many decades could inflict.

The day was long and brutal. He rejoiced as dark as last swept over the island. Within a mile of his hotel stood a bar with a big open court and multihued lights strung all over its tall lattice partitions. He heard Bob Marley’s voice call out into the night, crooning one of his redemption songs. The voice was welcome, reassuring, after the hours in the sun where the looks from strangers were so hard to fathom.

When he got to the bar, the crowd was a bit smaller than he expected. A few people danced in the center of the place but most languished at the tables and the small raised platforms at which you could rest your drink and stand and chat. Randal got himself a glass of Japanese beer and ambled over to one of these platforms, five yards away from a man who was overweight even by the standards of an island where too many people, through no fault of their own, had few choices but to scarf canned food from Australia morning, noon, and night. The man grinned at the dancers and raised a glass full of a ruby liquid to his lips. The Bob Marley song coming from the mikes ended and another tune, a Men at Work song from the early eighties, began. All around Randal in the yard, natives laughed and drank and looked in a fine mood. Randal could not guess why almost everyone seemed to avoid his gaze.

But that was not what was really odd. What bothered him was the scrutiny coming from the obese stranger five yards away. The man looked at him the way you might gaze on an animal caught in a trap, and the unease Randal had felt under the gaze of strangers from the passing cars was puny compared to what he felt now.

He did not last long at the bar. The road to the hotel was dark and barren of cars though it was not really so late. He heard the waves pound the rocks, so thick and numerous that no one had been able to sell vacations on this island. The strip of beach where you could hang out was tiny. Turning his head to the right as the wind swept his hair, taking in once again the crags of Topside, nude and barren under the moon, Randal thought this place deserved its obscurity.

The fortyish clerk at the front desk looked tired but greeted him warmly enough. Randal took this opportunity to reiterate the concerns he had voiced shortly after checking in about his little room, which looked out on an ugly patch of coast and whose ceiling fan barely moved. He really would like a nicer, cooler room with a grand view. The clerk nodded and promised to see about it as soon as the manager was back on the premises the next day.

Soon Randal lay awake in his little room with the window open, not trusting the weak fan to do its job, hearing the waves gather and gather and slam the shore as if with a conscious wish to assail the jagged rock. As a breeze wafted into the room, he wondered in what other rooms, in what faraway cities, lay others with a bit of curiosity about the island he had come to explore. He sensed there were secrets hidden around him somewhere. Randal had not chosen this destination at random. He knew a bit about the history of the island, about the money laundering alleged to have gone on here.

The next day was bright and brutal and he spent what felt like an unconscionable amount of time sipping coffee in the lobby, where the air was cool and the chairs were cozy. The young, subordinate clerk on duty now could tell him nothing about his requested room change. Randal went back to his room and sat at the bottom of the shower with the water going full blast until he remembered the warnings he had gotten about never wasting water on this island. He got dressed and went outside and walked around for a few hours, sat in the lobby and read with brooding impatience, and then as evening finally fell set out for the bar again with high hopes. If he let one mean guy intimidate him, he was less than nothing.

Now as he walked into the mostly empty place, he knew the source of all the unease he been feeling. It is something you never want to admit. Randal was desperately lonely. He must leave the island fairly soon and he faced the prospect of having passed through here without engaging in any way with a native woman. That would be a failure, a curse he might never live down.

He got a beer and looked around. At this hour he could have a table to himself. Of course if he began drinking now, he might end up tanked when it was not even late. But sitting here doing nothing looked pretty silly, and he needed to take the edge of his nervousness. He drank with abandon.

The sky dimmed as the bar began to fill. He was still drinking resolutely when a trio of strangers came to the table.

“Mind if we join you?” said one of them.

Randal took them in. They were casually dressed and had the jovial manner of blokes in a Queensland bar.

“Evening, fellas. Feel free,” Randal said.

He sensed that they were glad to have found a spot where they could carry on a discussion that had begun earlier in the evening and had grown quite lively. They sat down and made introductions. The native who had first spoken to the white visitor was Vincent, and his friends were Lionel and Moses. The more they talked, the more they did remind Randal of beer-swilling blokes he had met in Australia. They seemed to love booze and rugby. But then the conversation took a sudden turn.

“What are you doing on our little island?” Lionel asked.

“Ah, the question we knew was coming. I’ve been curious about this place for a long time. Ever since I read an article in the New York Times magazine, I think in December 2000, by Jack Hitt. He came here to look into—”

“Shadow banks and money laundering,” said Moses.

“Exactly. But it’s not that topic specifically that interests me. It’s the chance to see what almost no one has seen. This is one of the least-visited places on earth. It’s one of those places, like North Korea or Somalia, that people will laugh in your face for saying you’ve visited until you pull out some photos. And then they fall on their knees and express their awe.”

“This sure isn’t North Korea or Somalia,” said Moses.

“Oh, it’s a safe place. But, like I said, extremely remote and hard to get to.”

“Yeah, and you need to see it before it’s gone,” Lionel said.

“I don’t follow.”

“Don’t you know anything about climate change, man? The water level’s rising. In a matter of years they’re going to have to evacuate every last man, woman, and kid. We still don’t know where we’ll end up. Australia doesn’t want us. Other islands the same size are unpopulated but they’ve got even fewer resources than we do now. Everyone’s in denial but the island is vanishing bit by bit.”

“So get all your sexy stories while you can. Come on, you want to know about money laundering. I work for the Corporation. You wouldn’t believe who does business on this island. The companies, banks, funds, governments, A-list people who use accounts registered here. This is still the golden age of money laundering,” Vincent said.

“Who sends money to banks here? Tell me everything,” Randal said.

Vincent was so drunk. Blitzed. His mates laughed hard at his outlandish statements. Randal just felt confused. If the Corporation was active on the island and Vincent worked there, it was, to Randal, a fact so outlandish that its secrecy enjoyed a built-in protection. He could never bring himself to believe it.

“Hey, don’t listen to him. But, you know, there is a lot of crazy stuff here,” said Lionel.

“You’re all drunk,” Randal answered.

“Yeah, what a keen observation. But listen, man. You know about Robert Louis Stevenson, right?”

“Of course I do.”

“Yeah, right, college boy and all. And you may know he lived out the end of his life in Samoa. What I don’t think you have a clue about is that there’s a manuscript few people have ever laid eyes on. Stevenson wrote an untitled novel and then couldn’t make up his mind whether to destroy it or let it come before the world. He went out on a boat from Samoa and put it in a bottle, corked the bottle, and tossed the bottle into the sea. And guess where it is now?”

“It’s on this island. You know what, Lionel, I don’t believe you. This place has so many money problems and you would have auctioned that off for a fortune long ago.”

“What makes you think the owner is so civic-minded that he’d put it up, Randal?”

“Who is the owner?”

“A very rich guy. He lives like a prince in Melbourne and he doesn’t give a damn what goes on here.”

“How’d it end up in the hotel, of all places?”

Moses spoke up.

“You know what, Randal? Don’t listen to this guy. You’re too smart to believe crazy rumors anyway. That manuscript in a bottle story is nonsense. Someone from this island went to visit Samoa and asked to meet Stevenson, the great writer. Our visitor heard he had finished a novel and offered him a lot of cash. After our guy took the manuscript back here, he died intestate. It’s a tiny island. His brother owns the hotel but lives in Australia. All the dead guy’s stuff ended up at the hotel and it’s still lying around there. They can’t begin to work out all the legal issues, so the stuff just sits there getting moldy.”

Randal realized how drunk he himself was. As crazy as this sounded, he couldn’t marshal the logic to argue with it.

“It’s not a novel, it’s a short story,” said Vincent.

“Actually I don’t think it’s fiction at all. I heard it’s a memoir,” said Moses.

“Don’t listen to these guys, Randal,” said Vincent.

“So it’s all horseshit?”

“We have birdshit on this island, Randal. Or used to.”

The three mates laughed hard again.

“But, really. That lost manuscript story is just smoke they put up to keep people off the trail of the real story,” Vincent added.

“The real story?”

“Yeah, mate. The G-7 powers held a secret conference here a few years back. Concerning what to do about North Korea, climate change, poverty and social tensions in South Africa, and the Taiwan question. I’m sure you know that this country recognized Taiwan for money. Anyway, someone got ahold of the minutes long enough to scribble a handwritten version. They are here somewhere.”

“You’re right, Vincent. I don’t believe it.”

“You would not believe it, but China wants to know how much it would cost to switch recognition back from Taiwan to the mainland. And one of the Benelux countries, I’m not going to tell you which one, wanted to offer to pay the resettlement costs of white South Africans on the grounds that they would enrich the local economy. Native-born Benelux people are leaving for better education and jobs elsewhere. Just like the situation here, but with different factors at work.”

Lionel looked probingly at Randal.

“Vincent here’s a little drunk, in case you hadn’t noticed. The real story, Randal, has to do with a former executive of one of the global tech firms. He wrote the code for a new website. He can’t launch it because of an agreement they made him sign, but when it does launch, it will be worth billions!”

Moses interrupted.

“Ignore both of them, Randal. You know what I think you’ll find far more plausible? This island is where D.B. Cooper fled to after he extorted that money and bailed out of that plane. His confessions are here and they contain facts the world would like to know.”

“That was in 1971. You’re telling me D.B. Cooper is alive?”

“He wasn’t in his mid-forties at the time of the hijacking, like they say. Not even close to that age.”

Lionel quickly retorted.

“Shut up, Moses. There really is a villa on the island where a bad man lives. Kind of like that Dr. No character. But the old man is not D.B. Cooper. He has been active in many rackets and earned many friends and enemies out there in the world. Albanian mobsters. Irish Republican terrorists. Militias in the U.S. Somewhere in the hotel I believe you can find a first-person account, pseudonymous of course, of an employee. Think of what that could be worth, Randal! There’s no way you’ll leave here without something the world craves!”

The three mates laughed long and hard again. Randal thought they must really enjoy messing with the mind of this fool who presumed to come here and find out things that were none of his business. Vincent spoke next.

“Hey, Randal. We were just running with you there. All of that stuff’s made up, okay? We came over here because we saw you sitting here all alone and you looked sad. It’s no fun being alone in a strange country where you came in the hope of having adventures that would impress people.”

Randal nodded glumly. Vincent went on.

“Tell you what, man. I’m meeting some women when I get off work tomorrow. We’ll pick up some beer and swing by your hotel around 8:30 or so. Would you like that?”

Randal quickly nodded.

“I can even bring the beer by early, so it can stay chilled. But I imagine you’re going to be out most of the day.”

“That’s my plan. Here,” Randal said, taking out one of his two key cards and giving it to Vincent.

“Sure you’re okay with this?”

“I trust you, Vincent. Where are you going to go? There’s no way off this rock. And anyway, as a rule, I never leave anything remotely valuable in a hotel room.”

That was all true. But Randal knew that above all else he was desperately eager to party with some local women. If Vincent could make that happen, bless him. The four of them drank and laughed on into the night.

He made his way back to the hotel in a daze, averting his eyes from the lights of cars as they loomed and receded. They saw him in a pitiful state, lurching wildly, but soon he would be gone and would never see any of them again, or so he hoped. When he entered the hotel’s lobby, the young woman behind the desk looked warmly at him. He had not seen this clerk before. It had been either the fortyish man or the kid.

“This is a beautiful island with wonderful people,” he said.

This made her smile even more broadly.

“The island’s a warehouse for all the world’s secrets.”

He laughed. That must be a line that the management coached clerks to use on dumb visitors, such as there were.

“It’s strange when you’re the only white face on an island of 12,000.”

“Not quite, sir. A freighter arrives tomorrow.”

“I thought all the phosphate was long gone.”

“The lime phosphate, for fertilizers, yes. There are still deposits of calcium phosphate here and there. Plus we export frozen fish and air conditioners. This and that. Whatever we can make to scrape by.”

As he lay on his bed, hearing the surf pound the shore, his mind turned back to the chatter in the bar, the giddy faces, his shame at his loneliness before those guys joined him. He must have cut a pathetic figure sitting there drinking one beer after another by himself. But that was quite ridiculous, of course. Part of him felt he might yet have met a woman if those guys had not come and taken over his space. He had every reason to be in that bar. He was a young man with a zest for beautiful women, or in plain lingo, a tourist looking for action. Of course he had felt a bit uneasy over how women here would view an emissary from one of the countries from which the corporations extended their tentacles. As he drifted off, the vision that opened in his mind was broader and more mesmerizing than any dream of the Grand Canyon or the Plains of Abraham or the Holy Land or any place invested with gravity and splendor in the minds of so many. The land called to him, the sense built as he roved over the blanched rocks and crags and swells and cliffs that he was drifting ever closer to a presence epitomizing all the beauty and charm he had picked up on while he gazed at the women in the bar tonight and the night before without the guts to speak to one of them. The dark-haired women here were so voluptuous to Randal, not to mention intelligent. He did not see the physical form toward which he moved, yet his sense of the alluring persona was powerful.

Two hours later he sat straight up. The smallness of the bed containing him felt demeaning. The pathetic ceiling fan barely stirred the air. He flicked on the lamp beside the bed and gazed uneasily around the rectangle of space, its bare wood floor, chipping unpainted walls, and dusty ceiling. A place in the world. He tried to recall that line from the poet he had read in high school, the dull one everybody reads, T.S. Eliot, about coming back to where you started out and knowing it for the first time. Not once before had he really paused to take in the proportions of this room, even after learning that any unit of space on this rock might well be host to secrets for which millions around the world would kill and die. With a groan he got up and took a position in the middle of the floor. The rising seas might soon wipe out the place and it would be as if the island never existed. To fail to act was to court madness and death. But banality stared back at him from every corner and crevice as he took in the drawers of the plain squat dresser, the solitary drawer of the night table, the door to the little closet, the boards of the floor on which he stood.

Surely the hiding place of a lost manuscript or the minutes of an all-important meeting could not be something as obvious as a drawer. Maybe you had to rip out one of the boards to get at the stash whose blinding content would shock the world. But the most terrible secrets lurked in plain sight. As they had written on the back cover of a paperback edition of Hitler’s book, “For years Mein Kampf stood as proof of the blindness and complacency of the world.” It would have been easy to stop Hitler early. The choice to ignore the ideology and aims plainly set forth in Hitler’s writings had allowed the most unspeakable evil in the history of the world to thrive. Revelations, facts, secrets, communiqués lurked all around Randal in this space now and might perhaps be of greater benefit to the world than racist filth. Whatever their character might be, it was up to one person in the world now to unearth them, one drunk lonely man in a country most people could not spell or find on a map. The moment was too overwhelming. Before he could get his bearings, he pitched forward onto the bed and slept face down with drool leaking onto the pillow.

In the morning, the jagged light. The unbearable brightness that the odd configuration of panes brought to his senses now. The heat, the stuffiness, the insulting weakness of the little fan in the beige ceiling. Still, all around, the mocking sameness of the places whose secrets he had not begun to uproot.

He sat outside on a rock under his hotel window for a couple of hours, sipping coffee and watching waves crash. Then he entered and left the hotel a few times, unable to find a focus for the curiosity he felt was making him a little crazy. Once when he passed back into the lobby, the smiling kid was bold enough to speak to him.

“You have the air of the eager explorer about you, sir. I can tell you are here to discover the secrets of this island.”

Though Randal was in no mood for idle chat, he saw that the kid was trying to be friendly.

“Well, you know, I don’t plan to leave this island without having exhausted every little bit of mystery and surprise.”

These banalities made the young clerk smile. Then Randal remembered something.

“Isn’t there a bookshop on the island?”

“Yes, sir. A small one, by your standards, but well worth seeing.”

The clerk wrote out the directions and handed a slip of paper to the guest. Randal walked out and made his way along the curving road until he came to a narrow lane leading through a cleft in the rocky hills. At the end of it stood a shack with a weathered roof and a sign in the front window reading YAREN USED BOOKS. At least he knew which district he was in now.

Randal went inside and pored over the paperbacks in the small aisles under the gaze of a thin man with wispy hair, in an old button-down shirt and soiled trousers. The books were novels, story collections, memoirs, and poetry by people he had never heard of. The faces of the natives, bearers of the most arcane knowledge and memory, gazed out at him from the back covers. Of course that was just the prejudice of a visitor from a rich country, Randal knew. Randal’s own attitudes, ways, customs, and civilization were pretty weird in their way.

He gathered a pile of books and went up to the register. Randal would have liked to talk to this stranger and sound him out on the lore, legends, mysteries, and here came that word again, arcana of the national past that had inspired such creativity. But he paid and headed back to the hotel with his pile of books and dumped them in his room. Now he remembered how slow the hotel had been to process his request. Something strange was going on. This was not very professional. He was still stuck in this decrepit little space. But now was not the time to take up the matter again. The day was getting on and he not begun to fulfill his purpose here, whatever, at bottom, that was.

He went out again into the day, burning with the need to possess this meteorological moment. The sun had begun to set and the air was cooler. He wandered around taking in the lazy scene as a breeze caressed his locks and felt newly emboldened. The road to the bar felt shorter than ever. As soon as he took a spot at one of the raised platforms, with a drink in front of him, eyes began to shift, people started to whisper. He was from a rich country, but felt that the rudeness had another source entirely. Another inspiration. He tried to shut out the gazes and focus on drinking. Though the crowd off to his right was indistinct to him, a feeling came creeping back, an irrepressible sense, that in a spot over there, not too far away, the same native who had made him uneasy two nights before was staring him down.

Randal drank resolutely and did his best to mind his business. But then a face appeared before him in the dim light.

“Hope mistah not goan’ take tour. Mistah find crazy shit here.”

The stranger grinned.

The accent, the voice, the content of what he said were so absurd, so offensive to Randal that he thought of tossing his drink in the stranger’s face. Most natives on the island had a good education and spoke clear, clipped English with an Aussie accent. He had no idea what he faced now. He looked down into his drink.

“Boss need help findin’ de good stuff,” the stranger said.

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Boss come to island to look aroun’. Boss here to find de good stuff, yeah? Bring home and make rich rich.”

“Get out of my fucking face. You’re ruining my evening.”

“Boss need—”

“You stupid sorry uneducated fuck. Leave me alone or I will hurt you.”

It was not the right answer. Though Randal had spoken with far less vehemence than he might have in an American bar, heads turned and people whispered. Ooohhhh, did you hear what that white guy said?

Now to Randal’s stupefaction the grin disappeared and the stranger spoke in the clear, precise English he had heard so often.

“Tell what you thought you’d find here. We’re so curious, all of us, each and every person in this bar, to hear what drew a rich kid away from his toys and his drink and his women. As if our lives weren’t bad enough already. Tell us, you little speck of dirt. We’re listening. Tell us now!”

The stranger’s body language was unambiguous. This man was menacing Randal, and that was a crime.

“I thought I was kind in showing the curiosity to come here. Maybe you should all die in a tsunami!”

He could not begin to imagine the legal consequences of a fight and whether he would ever get off the island. He had heard so many stories about torture and rape happening in jail. Even so, what he did now made him hate himself for his cowardice.

Before anyone could react to his words, Randal was gone. He dashed out of the yard and onto the road ringing the island, struggling to remember where the police station was. Then he thought it was on the far side of the island, on the border of Yaren and another district. He might never find it in his current state. A bunch of guys from the bar followed, shouting and cursing. If he kept to the road, he would never lose them.

He leapt over a boulder, crossed a zone of rocky soil with a few pitiful stalks bending here and there, and entered Topside. Here one false step could make you fall hard and bust your head wide open on one of the jagged rocks thrusting up toward the moon. It would be a curt answer to his prurience about this island and its storied centuries if he fell and came to rest here amid the stillness and the rocks denuded through the rapacity of corporations over so many years. The moon was bright, majestic, incomparably remote. Cries followed him from the road. They had figured out his route and had entered Topside. He tried to get his bearings. All around him the sheen of rock unobscured by vanishingly faint traces of phosphate mocked him, dared him to try to escape.

A cry rose behind him. “Kill the white bastard!”

A gunshot rang out and a bullet whined off rock somewhere.

He took off as fast as he could over the crags and rocks and dust, darting and weaving as he had heard they trained you to do in the military. Randal had once watched an account of a hitchhiker who fled from the serial killer, Ivan Milat, who had picked him up on a road in New South Wales. As soon as the latter’s intent became clear, the hitcher ran as Randal was now doing. How often odd bits of data come into play unexpectedly in a person’s life. But he had not gotten very far away. Another shot rang out.

“Where’s that bastard?”

“Over there!”

“That way, I think!”

“I saw the fucker! He’s down that way!”

Still their voices rose as he leapt and darted and ran every which way. In his drunkenness he came down at strange angles and hurt his joints. Stones and pebbles jerked and leapt out of his path as he kicked and charged with renewed desperation under the bright moon in all its majesty. The cries rose higher and higher. All around him in the island’s interior, the faces of rocks gazed up with blasé contempt at Randal, one of the very temporary things of this world, a victim of his own asininity.

“I saw him! That way!”

He ran frantically in what he thought to be a northerly direction, figuring that if the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, then this one cut right past the bar and led toward the hotel. But the rocks ahead were big and jagged and denied him any view. He might be heading deeper into the denuded zone where you could get lost and the heat radiating off rocks at the height of day would annihilate a man. The cries followed him. Vaulting a row of rocks, he saw that the road was near and the hotel not that much further.

As soon as he entered the lobby, the fortyish clerk smiled and preempted any words Randal might try to get out.

“Good evening, sir! We have a nice surprise for you.”

“Oh, that’s nice. Now, listen—”

“We found a new room for you, and that’s not all, sir. One of our employees left something special there for you. I won’t tell you what it is. But it’s something people will be curious about and it will be in your sole possession!”

Randal stood there in the garish light of the lobby, still panting, trying to think coherently. The new room meant little now. But he wondered what they could have left for him there in the spirit of placating his curiosity about the island’s secrets. Just maybe it was one of the priceless items alluded to the night before. He could not fathom why a stranger would leave it there for him. This seemed too improbable. But he had to find out what it was, and if he had the police come now, they might take him into custody, if only for his own protection, and cordon off the hotel and all its contents.

“Th-thank you. I’ll, ah, need some time to move my stuff over and examine my surprise properly in privacy. Don’t give out my new room number to anyone, okay?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it, sir.”

He took the key to the new room and dashed up the stairs, figuring it should take a few minutes to gather his things from the old room, bring them to the new one, and figure out how to proceed.

As he moved down the second-floor hall toward the old room, loud noises met his ears. A party was going on in there. A male voice and a trio of female ones drifted down the hall, against a driving backbeat, and Randal knew exactly who the man was. Vincent had made good on his offer, and had seen no reason to wait for Randal to show up. They must have come through the rear entrance and gone up the back stairs, or the clerk on duty, the kid probably, had accepted whatever reasons Vincent had given for coming in without being a guest. Things were lax around here and everyone knew everyone on this tiny island.

Now he heard a gaggle of voices in the lobby downstairs, and footsteps in the stairwell. He could not stay where he was. The new room was at the end of the hall opposite the old one. As he entered, he saw it was only a marginal improvement, but he hardly cared. He felt inexpressibly grateful for the diversion that Vincent and company now offered. He closed the door and sank to the floor with the lights off, careful not to make a sound. For now, no shapes appeared in the gap under the door, but the thugs’ voices came loud and clear from other points in the hall.

“Find that bastard!”

“Cut him!”

“Cut his tongue out!”

“Watch it, mate. If you go bangin’ on all the doors, the cops’ll be here.”

“I don’t trust the police here. They’re all in Moscow’s pocket.”

“Shut up. Find him!”

“He’s not in the party room, forget that.”

“The other rooms are dark. Maybe he’s not here at all.”

“Like he would have a light on! He’s not that dumb.”

“Look, fuck it. We’ll get him later. There’s only one flight per week when they’re not on strike. Tell me where he’s gonna go.”

He sat there on the floor behind the thin wooden door, yards away from the men who would rend and maul him. The banter continued for a while as steps moved up and down the hall, and then he heard them going down the stairs. The last line that reached his ears was, “He won’t leave this island alive.”

The possibility that their retreat was a ruse and someone still lurked in the hall weighed on him. He climbed onto the bed and fell asleep in his clothes. When he woke a bit after 4:00 a.m., he judged it safe to turn the light on. Then he noticed the note on the little table. Here was the reward for all his intrepidity, the secret that would shake up the world.

He unfolded and read the note from a chambermaid.

Dear sir, my name is Estella Robles I live here 4 yrs. and work hotel 8 mos. They treat us horrible here. $6.50/hr. and no vacation. The manager he slap my ass and call me sweetie. Real pig. And the owner, he a playboy bigshot in Australia RE market. Not like he dont have no money to fix up this place and treat us right. If you go home hope you tell the world mister. Thank you.

Well, here was what he had nearly died, and might still die, to bring to the world.

If you go home.

Resisting the urge to tear up the note, he dropped it on the table. Then he went back to his former room, which was dark and empty now. He went inside with a quick simple task in mind. But as soon as the light was on, he noticed the sheaf of papers on the bed.

He upturned the sheaf and let the papers slide out. Here was a fair volume of correspondence and downloaded email setting forth in broad strokes and minute detail the Corporation’s relationships with funds, banks, broker-dealers, filthy rich people, firms, foundations, and governments around the world. As he read a few of the letters and messages, he felt disbelief that a minister in the government of Russia or the vice president of a mining firm had ties with banks registered here and operating under the Corporation’s aegis. There were also communications from people whose names he recognized from news reports about mafia, drug-running, and terrorist operations in various parts of the world. He clutched the sheets hard with both hands. If the documents here were damning for the Corporation, their ramifications for the counterparties in question were hard to put into words.

There were dozens of revelations, but the connections with Russian firms and politicians stood out above all else.

As he started down the stairs two hours later, he heard a pair of voices conversing with the clerk. It was the kid, who had just started his shift. He guessed the cops would be up here in seconds. Luckily he had gathered all his stuff in preparation for checking out. He went down the back stairs.

The road to the docks on the northeast side of the island was short and bare. Just as he got within sight of the piers, he heard sirens coming up the road from the southern half of the island. He hurried off the road and onto a jumble of rocks and took shelter behind one of the big boulders. He waited there, his heart pounding, as the sirens screeched past on the road.

 Still he waited. The day was not as hot and miserable as he feared. For all the discreteness of this island, it was not impossible to maneuver yourself into a spot where no one would look. Those cops who had just sped by might well comprise half the island’s police force. Even if they had the means, they were not going to comb the island end to end over an argument in a bar.

In the dimming afternoon he moved out onto the road and advanced up the barren concrete to the piers. A ship sat in the harbor, the flag of Poland fluttering above. In the foreground he made out a party of sailors, sitting in a circle, playing cards, laughing, raising bottles to their lips. Pausing in his march up the road, he tried to capture a bit of the banter, but it was all in Polish. They went on drinking and laughing or staring at their cards as if Randal did not exist. He stood there, awkward, ashamed. At last one of the sailors looked up. Randal gazed at the sailor in a comradely but urgent way, hoping to foster a bond of complicity. But the sailor just looked away and went back to talking with his mates and taking swigs from a bottle.

Feeling the heat even at this late hour, Randel looked around in desperation. The road was empty. He thought shrill sounds must pierce the air again at any moment. He ran up the dock to the vessel’s port side. Just as he arrived there, a middle-aged sailor bounded to the rail, wielding a carbine. With a cry of surprise and fear, Randal held up the sheaf of papers. He literally did not know a word of Polish, but his look said, You must take this. The sailor raised the carbine as if making ready to fire. Randal turned and bolted back down the pier and into the clearing. With a few quick moves, he slid in front of the stranger he had traded looks with before, fell to his knees, and proffered the sheaf with a look of desperate entreaty.

The Pole looked at his mates in incredulity, laughing and letting out caustic phrases. Randal could not know their meaning and did not want to know. He saw now how drunk this stranger was. The others found the scene funny. Randal tried talking to the stranger in French, then in German, but got a blank stare. Looking around miserably, Randal saw a couple walking arm in arm down the road, toward the hotel. He recognized the female member as one of the clerks he had encountered in the lobby, but could not tell whether she had noticed him.

He fixed the sailor again with pleading eyes. It was so awkward. Then at last the Pole’s look softened a bit and he took the sheaf. Randal made gestures of thanks and tried to signal that the other man must guard the documents with his life and present them to the media. He denoted the latter by mimicking a man reading a newspaper with wide eyes. It was a clumsy pantomime and he did not think the Pole got it.

An hour later, he was back at the hotel, where, technically speaking, he still had a room for this night and the next. On the side of the isle he could not see from his room, the sun set. From his window, he watched the ship move further and further out and fade with infinite languor in the distance, its flag flapping in the breeze. He tried to relax. No sooner had he begun drinking than the knock came.

The detective who faced him in a dim little room in one of the few buildings with an official mien was better dressed than most men on the island, and spoke well.

“I guess you are going to tell me you had no idea Vincent Solomon really did work for the Corporation, and there are myriad legal and ethical reasons why you should never have asked him about his work.”

“No idea at all.”

“Imagine my surprise. Anyway, as soon as someone at the Corporation found out about the theft of certain documents, we heard about it, and we quickly found out that he had met you socially. The fact that you’ve been in hiding has not exactly allayed suspicious about you and your role here. That’s without even getting into your interactions in a certain bar last night. I hope you will consider all this before getting indignant over your treatment at the hands of the police in a poor backwater.”

Randal guessed the police here really were in the pocket of a powerful force. He passed the night in a tiny cell and forbore asking for an upgrade.

When he faced the detective in the room again, the native demanded to know what Randal had done with the sensitive papers. Randal guessed that Vincent had sung and sung.

“I never received any such documents.”

“You don’t begin to grasp the geopolitical significance of these papers, Randal. If they get out, they could start World War Three.”

“Well, that would be pretty messed up. But this has absolutely nothing to do with me.”

They questioned him a third time and a fourth before concluding they must let him go for lack of evidence. But they made him understand that they were monitoring him and it was a small island.

The intrepid traveler and discover of secrets sat in his hotel in a depressed state from morning until night. When he woke, he did not know the day of the week or whether the airline was still on strike or whether the flight to Brisbane had left. The detective summoned him back to the station.

“Have you heard?”

Randal looked across the table with bleary eyes.

“Huh?”

“I assume you watch the news in your hotel and you have an inkling of what the world is talking about.”

“No, sir.”

“The sinking of a Polish merchant vessel about midway between here and Guam. Satellites have furnished some pretty incredible images.”

“Oh, God. . . . No!”

Suddenly Randal could not speak or breathe. He sank back in his chair as the meaning of the mental image sunk in. Those revelers on the beach. All gone now. And the documents, the secrets, for which he had risked his life and, without fully articulating his wishes, had asked others to risk theirs!

“That’s not half of it, you poor ignorant fool. Not half.”

Randal steadied himself, gazing at the officer warily.

“You haven’t heard a word about this?”

He shook his head. The detective sighed and went on.

“A Russian sub surfaced about 300 kilometers away. They picked up its markings and confirmed its likely course. There hasn’t been an international incident like this since a Russian fighter shot down KAL007 back in ’83.”

So somewhere, within the Corporation or the local police force, someone had let his Russian contact know about the breach. That contact, whether a mining executive or arms dealer or high-level official in Moscow, or maybe the friend of such an official, had told colleagues that the spilled documents must never, ever come before the world’s eyes. No cost was too high to avert the scandal and humiliation over a mining firm’s or government bureau’s tendency to launder money through banks registered on this tiny island, and someone at the highest levels of the Moscow regime agreed. Maybe the crime syndicate that got alarmed about the vessel’s escape with the documents was the government. Somewhere along the line, someone pretty important had found out about the risk, or maybe things did not have to get that far because the contact initially alerted about the leak was the President of Russia.

As he walked out into the equatorial sun, blazing and punishing him as it had hurt the odd interloper in years and decades past, Randal thought of returning to the bar whence his troubles had sprung one night not so long ago. But he knew he could never drink away his guilt over having entrusted others with secrets that brought about their death. For him, every moment of life now was a curse.

The bar was nearly empty. No one looked at the forlorn figure. He languished there, drinking and feeling suicidal, until the screen above him conveyed the news that a Liberian ship had crossed paths with a raft bearing one survivor from the demolished freighter.

▪ ▪ ▪

Michael Washburn is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. His short fiction has appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Rosebud, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, New Orphic Review, Stand, Obelus, Still Point Arts Quarterly, Weird Fiction Review, Weirdbook, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, Nomadic Sojourns, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and many other publications. Michael’s books include the short story collections The Uprooted and Other Stories, When We’re Grownups, and Stranger, Stranger. His story “Confessions of a Spook” won Causeway Lit’s 2018 fiction contest, and another of his stories, “In the Flyover State,” was named a Distinguished Mystery Story of 2014 by Best American Mystery Stories.

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