Davis waited for the punch line. Waited for the he-left-me-for-that-bitch howitzer round. It never came.
“He is perfect in his own eyes as well. He …” her words drifted off.
Davis let the silence build.
“The divorce has been coming for years,” she said. “We both saw it. I have found my calling here in Sudan, although I still live and work in Milan for a portion of each year. We have taken different roads in our lives.”
“No second thoughts?” he asked.
“No.” One word, but delivered with unwavering decisiveness.
“Children?”
“No,” she said. “But someday. I am hopeful.”
“I highly recommend it.”
“It is the best one can do for the world,” she asserted, “to raise a person who will be good and kind.”
He nodded.
“So, Mr. Davis—”
He held up an admonishing finger.
“Sorry — Jammer.” She said it just like he knew she would. Zh for the J. Accent on the second syllable. Zhammér. He liked the way it sounded. “Enough about me,” she continued, “I would like to hear about you.”
After a pause, he said, “My wife died. It’s been almost three years.”
Her turn to say it. “I’m so sorry.”
“Diane and I were happy. Very happy. I had just retired from the Air Force and taken a job with the NTSB as an accident investigator. Things were going great. We had a terrific daughter, and our future was playing out nicely. Diane was killed in an automobile accident.”
“How awful. And your daughter?”
“She struggles with it. So do I. But time helps with things like that. Jen is in Norway right now, staying with friends and spending a semester in school. That’s the only reason I can be here now.”
“You would be a good father, I can see it.”
“I don’t feel like I am.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Right now, for example. I haven’t talked to her in over a week. My phone was my only link, and it’s out of commission.”
Antonelli reached into her purse, pulled out a heavy satellite phone, and slid it across the table. “The agency tells me I should not use it for personal calls. I ignore them.”
“Thanks.”
He picked it up and dialed Jen’s number. Six rings later he got her recording.
It’s me. You know the deal.
He waited for the tone. “Call me at this number or I’m putting you in a convent.” He gave Antonelli’s number, then hung up.
Across the table, the doctor had her knuckles to her mouth as she stifled a snicker.
The meal that came was fish — grouper, if Davis wasn’t mistaken — served with rice and some kind of local vegetable. It was damned good, one of the best meals he’d had in months.
Antonelli seemed to enjoy it as well, though at times she fell distracted. He’d noticed it before, on the long drive from Khartoum. Briefly, he thought she might be pining over her soon-to-be-ex-husband. But Davis discarded that idea. He was beginning to understand her, and suspected he knew what was really preoccupying her thoughts. Treatment plans, shipment dates, patients who needed specialists. Antonelli was the kind of doctor who took her work home. Davis recognized it because he was the same way.
To one side of the patio, the low sun was playing the hills in the distance. On the other side, the sea fell to a deep shade of purple, its choppy texture driven by a gathering breeze.
“Tell me, Jammer, how do you find an airplane that has crashed into the sea?”
Davis again looked toward the water, this time eyeing the shoreline where a small fleet of fishing boats was beached above the high-tide line.
“Actually, I need your help with that. I need to hire a guide.”
“A guide?”
“A fisherman, somebody who knows the local waters. And he has to have a boat.”
She looked at him curiously. Almost mischievously. Her mind had to be working out wild scenarios, some probably pretty amusing. If she only knew, he thought.
“Let me go make an inquiry,” she said. Antonelli got up and headed into the house.
By the time they finished dinner, the sun had set. They walked out to a beach that was pockmarked with footprints, the thin divide where al-Asmat met the sea. Somewhere behind them a generator was humming, providing power for pole-mounted bulbs that gushed blotches of yellow light over the waterfront.
Davis and Antonelli found their man pulling his boat onto the beach for the night. He looked like a fisherman, a North African version of Hemingway’s old man. He might have been fifty years old, might have been a hundred. His skin was wrinkled leather, somewhere between black and brown, cured by a lifetime of saltwater and sun. The close-cropped gray hair was thin, and his black eyes were set deep behind clouded sclera, as if they had their very own measure of protection against the elements. His hands were scarred like any fisherman’s, having been pierced by hooks and fish spines, calloused from casting hand lines, hauling anchor ropes, pulling oars.
When Davis and Antonelli walked up, the man stopped his shoving and stared at them. There wasn’t any anticipation or annoyance. Maybe curiosity. Two westerners walking onto his spit of beach, clearly with something on their minds. That couldn’t happen often in al-Asmat. Probably hadn’t happened to this guy in all his years. Fifty or a hundred. Davis considered helping him pull his boat a few feet higher onto the beach, but decided against it. A guy who spent his life alone on the sea might take that the wrong way.
Antonelli looked at Davis and said, “What do you want me to ask him?”
“Just tell him I’d like to hire him.”
“He’ll think you want to go fishing.”
“Tell him I need to find something in the water.”
Antonelli said it in Arabic. The old man listened, replied with one word.
“He wants to know what you’re looking for.”
“Okay, tell him.”
Antonelli did, and the old man looked at him quizzically, probably trying to wrap his mind around the idea of using a boat to find a sunken airplane.
Davis said, “I want to hire him and his boat for a day. Ask him how much.”
She did, and got two words from the old man this time. It was probably the longest conversation he’d had in a month.
Antonelli relayed his answer. “How much do you have?”
Davis took out his wallet and turned it upside down over the weathered wooden seat in the boat. A small pile of twenties and some other odd denominations fell out. Two hundred bucks, maybe a little more.
The old man nodded, then spoke again. He was chewing something now, and Davis recognized it as khat, the herb that was wildly popular in this part of the world as a mild stimulant.
“He wants to know how you will find this airplane in the ocean,” Antonelli relayed.
Davis took out the scribbled coordinates he’d taken from Larry Green and showed them to the old man.
The old man shook his head. Spoke again.
“He says the ocean is very big, very deep. How will you find it?”
It was a valid question. Davis had done marine investigations before. He was practically an expert. To find submerged wreckage you wanted magnetometers and side scan sonar. You used ships that had navigation computers coupled to autopilots so that search patterns got corrected for wind and drift. Everything tight and precise. Davis had none of that. He told Antonelli his plan.
She told the old man.
He, in turn, looked quizzically at Davis. A smile creased his mahogany face and his clouded eyes sparkled. Sometimes you didn’t need to know a person’s language to understand exactly what was on their mind. Certain expressions were universal.