Mirage

  “How far north?” Juan asked. With the Aral Sea shrunk to a quarter of its size, there were tens of thousands of miles of exposed seafloor between here and the Kazakh border.

  “We do not know.”

  That statement hung in the hot air for several seconds.

  “But there is someone who might,” Mina said.

  Juan cocked an eyebrow in her direction.

  “He often traveled with old Yusuf,” she explained. “He was once a fisherman on the Aral before the waters went away. Now he is just an old man, but Karl claimed that Yusuf knew the lake bed as sure as he’d once known its surface.”

  “Did you question him about where Karl had gone?”

  “Of course,” Kamsin said. “But like many of the old-timers, his directions were vague. He talked about certain islands and winds and how the earth felt. He could give us nothing concrete.”

  “And you didn’t want to go out and look for yourselves?” Juan asked, already suspecting the answer.

  “If what Karl found got him killed . . .” Kamsin replied, his voice trailing off.

  “I understand,” Juan said to both of them. Kamsin had a job, a life he would not want to jeopardize, and had probably been living in fear that his ignorance might still not keep him safe. Mina’s motivation for not investigating further was nibbling chocolate in the next room. “What about Yusuf? Would he be willing to go back?”

  Kamsin had to think for a moment. “It is possible. He didn’t volunteer when Mina and I first questioned him, but we didn’t exactly ask to be shown either.”

  “Of course,” Juan said, knowing both were embarrassed by not following through on what had gotten Karl Petrovski murdered.

  The Uzbek people had only been independent from Russia for twenty years. These two were old enough to remember what life was like under a Stalinist regime. People didn’t ask questions, didn’t make eye contact with strangers, and never made themselves noticeable to anyone else. It was the only way to stay safe. As much as Karl’s death hurt both Mina and Kamsin, they wouldn’t—couldn’t—do anything but accept the official ruling from Moscow and move on.

  “Does the term ‘eerie boat’ mean anything to either of you?” Cabrillo asked in the uncomfortable silence.

  The pair exchanged perplexed looks. “There are many boats out on the lake bed,” Kamsin replied. “I know none called Eerie.”

  “Karl never mentioned it to me either,” Mina added. “Is this what Karl died for?”

  “I don’t know, and it is perhaps best if you forget I asked.”

  They nodded knowingly.

  “Why don’t I take you to meet Yusuf?” Kamsin offered. “I am sorry, but he speaks only Uzbek. I would be more than happy to translate for you.”

  “You are most kind,” Juan said, getting to his feet. He pulled two more Hershey bars from his satchel and handed them to Mina Petrovski. “For your daughters. For later.”

  Wherever his investigation took him was a place she could not visit. Karl was dead. Knowing why would not bring him back. Ideology was for the others, her look said to him. I must be pragmatic.

  As soon as they were outside, Arkin grabbed Cabrillo’s arm and stared into his eyes. “Will there be justice?”

  Juan glanced back at the house, an already-empty shell, only its occupants hadn’t moved on. “For Mina?” he threw the question back at the academician.

  “For any of us?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  Juan took a second, which surprised him. “Because a friend died in my arms and I thought that I could at least give him justice. Is that enough?”

  “For us? Here? I guess it has to be.”

  The two remained mostly silent on the drive to find Yusuf, the only words exchanged were directions as Cabrillo steered through the empty city. The buildings seemed little more than façades and lifeless husks.

  Yusuf lived down by the harbor in the rusted carapace that had once been a fishing boat. Arkin didn’t think the old man had owned this particular one, but he’d moved into the hulk nevertheless. The boat, like all the others in the harbor, sat on the ground, sand piled up to the gunwales in some places. Juan scanned a couple of the nearby craft and guessed the old fisherman had chosen this particular one because it sat a little more level than the others, many of which were canted over onto their sides.

  Cabrillo stopped in the dust next to the boat. The two men stepped out.

  Kamsin shouted a greeting to the derelict boat, and Cabrillo spotted movement through a porthole in the cabin below the pilothouse. Methuselah was a teenager compared to the man who trod out onto the craft’s broad rear deck. He wore robes and a head scarf and leaned on a cane made of gnarled wood. Wisps of pure white hair coiled from under the scarf while the lower part of his face was covered in a beard befitting a fairy-tale wizard. His cheeks and eyes were sunken. One eye was a dark brown, almost black, while the other was covered with the milky film of cataracts. He had an ancient AK-47 slung over one buzzard-like shoulder.

  It wasn’t until Yusuf reached the railing and was peering through the four feet of space separating him from his two visitors that he finally recognized Arkin Kamsin. He gave a toothless smile, and the two men began speaking in Uzbek. Cabrillo knew how things worked in this part of the world and waited patiently while they went through the longish greeting custom, asking about family, presuming either man had any, commenting on the weather, recent town gossip, and the like.

  Ten desultory minutes passed before Juan detected a change in the conversation’s tone. Now they were discussing Cabrillo and his reasons for being here. Occasionally, Yusuf would glance his way, his withered face as blank as a cipher’s.

  At last Arkin turned to Cabrillo. “Yusuf says he is willing to help but he himself isn’t certain what had so interested Karl.”

  “Did you mention the eerie boat?”

  “I did.”

  “Please ask him again.”

  So Kamsin interrogated the old man further. Yusuf kept shaking his head and holding out his empty palms. He knew nothing, and Juan began to see that this trip had been a complete waste of time. He wondered if somehow his meaning was being lost in the translation. He was well versed in interrogation techniques and knew how to draw details out of the dimmest memories, but without being able to speak Uzbek, he was powerless. And then it hit him, and for a moment he was back aboard the Oregon, cradling Yuri Borodin as he uttered his last words.

  He’d spoken in English.

  “Eerie boat,” Juan said in the same language. Yusuf shot him a blank look. “Eerie lodka,” he said, this time using the Russian word for “boat.”

  All of a sudden that toothless grin was back, and his one good eye glittered piratically. “Da. Da. Eerie lodka.” He turned back to Kamsin and unleashed a long monologue in Uzbek. This time, his skinny arms waved around as though he were being swarmed by wasps, the tip of his walking stick arcing dangerously close to his two guests.

  Arkin finally was able to translate the verbal onslaught. “The eerie boat is out on the Aral Sea, a hulk like all the rest, but Karl told Yusuf that there was something special about it, something ‘magical,’ is how he described it. It was a couple of days after they explored the wreck that Karl made his request to go to Moscow.”

  Cabrillo asked, “Can Yusuf show it to me?”

  “Yes. He said if you two left at first light, you can reach it by the afternoon.”

  Juan wasn’t keen on roughing it out in the desert, but he realized that there was no help for it. He had a counterproposal and asked through Kamsin if they could leave now and camp on the way. The old man seemed reluctant until Juan pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket. Yusuf’s one good eye lit up again, and he nodded until Juan thought his head might roll off his scrawny neck.

  Twenty minutes later, with Arkin’s help get
ting provisions, which included a fifth of what passed for premium vodka in these parts and which set Cabrillo back the equivalent of eighty cents, the two of them drove out across a wasteland that had once been the bottom of a lake, a wake of dust, not water, boiling into the air behind them.

  As the name implies, the Aral Sea, the “Sea of Islands,” once had thousands that dotted its windswept waves. Today, they poked up from what had once been the seafloor like mesas in the American Southwest, lonely sentinels on an otherwise desolate plain. After a near-sleepless night in which the temperatures plunged into the forties and Cabrillo was forced to wedge himself into the rear cargo area because Yusuf had passed out in the backseat, the empty vodka bottle clutched in a bird-like claw, they were up again shortly after the sun.

  Yusuf navigated using his vast knowledge of the islands. He had been a fisherman as the water levels ebbed and recognized the shape of each one even now as he had to look up at them from their very bases. As they passed each former island, he would point to a new heading, as sure of himself as if he were reading a map and consulting a compass. There was no need for GPS in your own backyard, and for sixty-plus years all of the Aral Sea had been the old fisherman’s domain.

  Again, Juan was struck by the surrealism of their situation each time they drove by what remained of a sunken ship. Often they would be surrounded by debris fields of fishing gear and kitchen utensils. One wreck was a car ferry, and, judging by the shapes of the rusted-out cars still atop her deck and strewn around her keel, she had sunk sometime in the 1960s or ’70s. The vehicles had that boxy, no-frills utilitarianism that the Soviets so coveted. Yusuf pointed out that they should go slower, so Cabrillo guided their UAZ until they were abreast of one particular car, a sedan that had once been tan but now showed more rust than anything else. Its tires were deflated puddles around each wheel, though remarkably all the glass was still intact.

  Yusuf swung his skinny body out of the SUV and indicated Juan should follow. Not knowing the old man’s interest, Cabrillo moved cautiously, scanning the distant horizon and the hump of what had once been an island a mile to the west. Out here, the bitter taste of salt swirled up by the wind was even harsher than it had been back in Muynak. He took a pull from a water bottle before leaving the truck and had to spit out the first mouthful. It tasted of the ocean. The second was brackish, and it was only the third swig that tasted fresh.

  The old Uzbek stood next to the sedan’s driver’s-side window. He’d used the sleeve of his robe to clear a small opening in the dust that crusted the car and peer inside. He was motionless for a minute before gesturing for Juan to take his place. Juan felt a chill of superstitious dread climb his spine. He pressed his face to the hot glass. Enough light filtered through the filthy windshield for him to see the remnants of a body laid out on the passenger seat. Not much was left but bits of cloth and bleached white bones. The skull remained intact but was at such an angle he could only see the rounded hump of its occipital lobe.

  Cabrillo shot Yusuf a questioning glance. He said something in his native language and then dredged up the Russian word. “Brother.”

  Juan grunted, thinking what it must have been like to lose a brother at sea only to find his body years later as the waters that had claimed him slowly evaporated to nothing. He wondered too why Yusuf hadn’t given the remains a proper Muslim burial but realized that this had been his tomb for decades and to disturb him now would be a sacrilege. There were no words he could say, so he gave the old man’s bony shoulder a squeeze and walked back to their idling truck. Yusuf joined him a minute later, giving his brother what Cabrillo sensed was one last long look, and pointed off to the north.

  For six more hours, as the temperature climbed and the sun beat down harder and harder, they pinballed their way toward their destination, zigging and zagging from one island to the next as they followed the map Yusuf carried in his head. At least once an hour they had to shut down the UAZ and let the engine cool. At one such stop, Cabrillo prudently added a gallon of water to the radiator at the same time he topped up the gas tank from the spares they carried.

  Of course he couldn’t understand a word of what Yusuf said as they drove along, but the old man kept up a running monologue. He could only assume the Uzbek was recounting stories of fishing trips he had taken to the spots off the islands they passed. He pointed out a great depression in the ground that had once been an undersea trench. At its bottom were dozens of rocks, and fanning away from them were the remains of countless large fishing nets spread across the ground like fallen spiderwebs.

  Yusuf spoke passionately about the spot, his voice terse with anger until he couldn’t help himself, gave one final curse and spat. Juan understood that he must have lost more than one trawling net to the trench’s traitorous bottom. He couldn’t help but smile. Yusuf caught the grin, and his scowl deepened until he too saw the lunacy of blaming unseen rocks for lost catches from so long ago.

  The laugh they shared was bittersweet at the prospect that no fisherman would ever lose a net there again.

  The desert stretched forever.

  A little past noon, a shape started to form on the horizon, shimmering out of the desert heat. Beyond it was another island, a palisade of rock that rose sheer and vertical like the walls of a fortress. As they drew nearer, the image resolved itself from an amorphous lump on the desert floor to yet another ship, this one a little larger than the typical fishing boats they’d stumbled upon, though smaller than the car ferry. Judging by its condition, it was older than many others too. The sea had been given much more time to erode steel, and the underwater creatures had had plenty of time to eat their way through the ship’s wooden decking. Yusuf thrust a crooked finger at the derelict with finality.

  “Eerie lodka?” Juan asked.

  “Da.”

  Cabrillo swung the truck until it was parallel to the old ship, which he judged to be a hundred feet in length and quite beamy. She would have handled the seas well, and he wondered what had sunk her. The island was close enough that on a moonless night a careless navigator could have slammed into a rock peaking above the surface and holed the hull.

  This side showed no such damage. Some plates were buckled from when she hit the seafloor, but that was all. She had the remains of an A-frame crane over her rear deck and a sloping stern that would have allowed her to deploy and then reship her nets. The bridge was a glassless cube hunched over the bows, the open window frames like mouths caught in a terrible scream.

  Juan killed the UAZ’s engine and stepped to the ground. At his foot, embedded in the salt and dust, was a ceramic coffee cup, a substantial piece of pottery befitting the harsh life aboard a fishing boat and the big hands of the men who worked her.

  Yusuf joined Cabrillo, and together they walked around the ship, inspecting its hull. On the far side, Juan saw the evidence he thought he would, a long gash below the waterline that ran for nearly a third the ship’s length. She had hit some rocks near the island, and this amount of damage would have capsized her in moments. It might have been possible that some of the crew managed to swim to the island a quarter mile distant. It all depended on the weather. A rough sea would have crushed them against the unforgiving stone.

  The old Uzbek suddenly threw up his hands and made a strangling sound in his throat. He jerked a thumb at the fishing boat. “Nyet eerie lodka.”

  He pointed to a long depression in the ground a hundred yards farther on. Like some mythical monster climbing out of the earth, the remains of another ship looked like they were rising from the shallow trench as though the rim was a wave and the vessel was struggling to crest it. “Eerie lodka,” Yusuf announced.

  This one looked to be much older than the ship behind them. Her length was impossible to determine because only her first thirty or so feet rose above the lip of the trench. She was narrow in the beam. She had a good amount of foredeck, which was surprising for a fishing boat since all the work took p
lace at the stern, and her superstructure looked more befitting a yacht than a commercial vessel.

  Rather than circle back around to the truck, Cabrillo strode across the desert toward the other ship. Yusuf trailed him, using his walking stick to steady his uneven gait.

  The old ship had a sharp prow and dual anchors still tucked tight against their hawseholes. Her entire skin was of a uniform rust color, not a fleck of her original paint remained. Juan reached the edge of the ravine and looked down. Her single funnel rose out of the sand ten feet from where her hull disappeared into it, the metal flakey from erosion. Using the funnel as a reference, Cabrillo guessed she was about seventy feet long in total. She had the straight vertical lines of a ship much older than the nearby fishing boat. She reminded him of a turn-of-the-century luxury cruiser, something out of the end of the Victorian age.

  This wasn’t the workboat of the local fishing industry or a ferry to bustle peasants across the Aral. This was a rich man’s toy, perhaps belonging to a member of the old royal family who vacationed along the inland sea’s shores. But that made little sense. Why would the tsar and tsarina want to vacation in this backwater of their kingdom?

  A local oligarch? Someone from before the revolution who made a pile of money and had the ship built on the Aral? The boat was much too big to have been transported here whole, even by rail, and there were no oligarchs left after the Bolsheviks were finished.

  Juan suddenly saw this ship as an anomaly. There was something to her presence here that had piqued Karl Petrovski’s interest, and he felt it too. This wasn’t the type of vessel to be plying these waters. He looked around at his surroundings. She shouldn’t be here in a desert either, he thought.

  The ship’s bow was undamaged, so he had to assume that whatever had sunk her showed up in the parts of the hull that the sands had swallowed.

  Yusuf finally shuffled up and tapped Cabrillo on the arm to guide him around the prow to where someone, presumably Petrovski, had piled stones up against the hull high enough for him to climb over the gunwale. Juan scaled the cairn and gripped the metal skeleton that was all that remained of the rail and pulled himself up, twisting his fists as he pivoted and leaving skin behind as he managed to throw a leg over and gain the deck.