“What sort of business?”
“I think you know what kind.” A smile and sly wink. “May we speak to your leader? Someone we can … um, how do you say … negotiate, yes?”
“Vityazka iz kornia,” Ronson said. Mikhail gave him a sharp look, but he saw no need to dance around the subject. There was only one reason why a boat would be all the way out here. “I’m looking to buy yaz.”
The Aussie looked at the older man and spoke to him in his own language. The Russian cropper studied Ronson and Mikhail for a few moments, dark eyes sizing them up. Then he slowly nodded, and the Aussie turned to the visitors. “Sure, c’mon … this way.”
Ronson glanced back at the wheelhouse. Angelo was standing at the door. He shook his head, silently telling Ronson that he was going to stay behind. Ronson nodded, then followed Mikhail off the boat. With the two croppers leading the way, they walked onto the island.
The ground was soft and spongy. Until he reached the crude walkway of wooden boards laid down by the croppers, Ronson’s shoes sank a bit with each step he took, making squishy sounds. The forest closed in around them as he and Mikhail were led away from the dock until they couldn’t see Aphrodite anymore, and he fought an impulse to hold his breath against a pungent reek that permeated the humid, chlorophyll-laden air. It got stronger the farther they walked, and at first he thought it came from the jungle around them, but then they reached the middle of the island and he saw what was causing it.
A clearing had been hacked out amid the trees and tangled underbrush, and it was here that the croppers had set up camp. Wooden shacks and canvas tents surrounded an open area. Nets were suspended from tall poles erected around the periphery, doubtless to ward off night shrikes but probably also to provide camouflage from any aircraft that might pass overhead. The camp had the basic amenities—a cook tent, a cluster of satellite dishes, outhouses—and might just as well have belonged to a wilderness expedition were it not for what was in its center.
Vats made from discarded fuel drums had been set up above iron braziers. Brackish water slowly boiled over wood coals, emitting stinking fumes that made his eyes weep. The men and women stirring the vats wore bandanas around the lower parts of their faces, and Ronson wished he’d known enough to take the same precautions. Lumpy brown scum floated on top of the bubbling water; as he watched, one of the croppers dipped a large, long-handled spoon into a vat, carefully scooped out a dripping mass, and placed it on a tray, which was then carried to a wooden platform set up beneath a tarp and laid out to dry.
“Yaz,” Mikhail murmured, nodding toward the platform.
“Yeah, here’s where we make it.” The Aussie—his name was Graham, Ronson had learned during the trek through the forest—proudly pointed to the vats. The Russian, whose name was Boris, had left them as soon as they entered the camp. “We drop the roots in there, boil off the resin, scoop it out, cure it … that’s how we get the good stuff.” His finger moved to an open-sided shed, where a couple of women were using a grocery scale to weigh bundles of vityazka iz kornia before wrapping them in paper and twine. “Each of those is half a kilo,” Graham went on, indicating a nearby shack where a large stack of bricks could be seen through the door. “From this island alone, we’ll probably get … oh, I’d say, five hundred kilos at least.”
“And then you move on,” Ronson said.
“Uh-huh … another island, another crop, another big pile of rubles.” Graham laughed, clapped him on the back. “Your pot farmers back in the States got nothing on us. They’re stuck in one place, but we’re a mobile operation.”
Ronson only half listened to Graham as he searched the faces of the men and women around them, trying to spot David Henry. No one here looked like him, though, even allowing for the bandanas covering the faces of the men stirring the vats. Indeed, no one in the camp looked like they were being forced to do anything. Some smiled and joked as they worked, and there were no armed guards keeping them in line. If anyone here had been shanghaied, they didn’t seem to be upset about it.
Bulgakov might have been wrong, and the frogheads … Ronson felt annoyance growing in him. How could he have been so stupid as to trust those things? Masters of the World Ocean, his soaked ass. Animals, really, despite what Mikhail claimed. No wonder he was called Mad Mikhail … Someone tapped him on the shoulder. Ronson looked around, saw that Boris had returned. And standing beside him, wearing a jungle hat and a sweat-stained Coldplay T-shirt, was David Henry.
“Hello,” David said, offering a handshake. “I hear you’d like to buy some yaz.”
It was only his brief experience working undercover for the NYPD vice squad that kept Ronson from showing the surprise he felt. In an instant, he realized why David Henry had disappeared without a trace. Perhaps he hadn’t come to Venus intending to become a drug lord. Perhaps the opportunity presented itself only after he’d been here awhile. Yet he wasn’t a captive of these yaz croppers; he was their boss.
“That’s what I’m looking to do.” Ronson shook his hand. “Nice little operation you’ve got here. Never knew how this stuff was made.”
David grinned, shrugged nonchalantly. “Not many people do until they see it themselves. No harder than weed … or even crack, for that matter. And out here, it’s a little easier to get away with.” He motioned to the nets strung above them. “That’s really just to keep out the birds. The law’s just about given up trying to find us. I don’t think they even give a shit anymore.”
Ronson silently agreed. Bulgakov had just about told him as such. “Must be a hassle getting the roots, though,” he said, trying to find something to talk about while he gave himself a chance to figure out how to play this. He looked around the camp. “I mean, it doesn’t look like you’re cutting down any trees.”
“Well, I’ve got my own …” David’s voice trailed off. His gaze had fallen on Mikhail, who stood quietly nearby. “Hey, I know you!” he exclaimed. “You’re”—he snapped his fingers a couple of times, trying to summon a memory—“that guy! The one who hangs out on the docks in Veneragrad and gets the froggies to pose for pictures!”
“Mikhail Kronow.” Mikhail’s eyes shifted nervously back and forth.
“Yeah! Mad Mikhail!” David was both surprised and happy to see him. “I guess you don’t remember me. We never talked or anything, but … man, do I remember you! I owe you a lot, dude!”
Mikhail stared at him. “You do?”
“Uh-huh.” David looked at Ronson again. “You got him as your translator, right? I mean, he couldn’t have known how to find us, so I guess the dude who’s driving your boat must have done that.”
“That’s pretty much it, yeah.” Ronson let David make his own assumptions. “Mikhail hooked us up when I told him what I was looking for, so …”
“Cool.” David returned his attention to Mikhail. “Like I was saying, that trick you have? Getting the froggies to come running for chocolate?” He waved an expansive hand around the camp. “That’s made all this possible. C’mon, lemme show you …”
Another boardwalk led away from the camp. It ended at a smaller clearing not far away, where two croppers stood around a hole. It appeared to have been cut straight down through the vines and moss that made up the floating island, forming a deep well. A wheelbarrow stood nearby; the two men watched the hole, as if waiting for something to emerge.
“When I first came here,” David explained, as they approached the hole, “croppers were using roots of slickbark trees cut down by the lumber operators. Which is okay, except that by the time our people got to them, the roots were all dried out, and that meant the yaz they got from them had lost much of its potency. Everyone knew that fresh roots make better yaz, but since slickbark roots grow underwater, you’d have to use scuba gear and trained divers to swim beneath the islands to get to them. And that’s dangerous as hell … something might eat you while you’re down there. Then I had an idea …”