“Given the way you’re telling the story,” Zula said, “I have to guess that he closed down the girls’ school and had the teacher stoned to death or something.”
“It’s what he did before stoning her to death that’s especially interesting,” Jones said.
“And what was that?”
“He raped her.”
“Okay,” Zula said, “so what is the point of the story? That he’s not as much of a Muslim as he claims to be?”
“On the contrary,” Jones said, “he did it for the most Islamic of reasons. By his lights, anyway. I happen to disagree with him on a fine point of theology here.”
“You’re saying there’s a theological justification for what he did?”
“More like a theological motive,” Jones said. “You see, by raping that schoolteacher, he made her into an adulteress. And you know what happens to an adulteress after she gets stoned to death?”
“She goes to hell?” Zula was trying to play this very cool, but her voice cracked.
“Precisely. So, in Khalid’s mind, he wasn’t merely killing the schoolteacher — he was doing it in a way that condemned her to — ”
“I know what hell is.”
“I am merely trying to impress on you the danger of being in the power of people like Khalid.”
“I reckoned,” she grunted.
“You may have reckoned, but now you have gone beyond mere reckoning. Now you feel it so that it will guide your actions.”
“Guide, or control?”
“That’s a Western distinction. Anyway. They have now got what they wanted from you: blubbering hysteria. Nicely played. For me, its patent fakeness almost made it more moving.”
“Thanks.”
“I, on the other hand, Westerner that I am, need something that is a little more intellectual.”
“Namely?”
“Islam,” he said, “submission.”
“You want me to submit.”
“That bit of cleverness in the cellar this morning,” he said. “Sending Sokolov to the wrong apartment. It cost me a lot.”
“How do you think I feel right now?”
“Not as bad as you deserve.”
She had known men like this, lurking at the outer branches of the family tree. Men who seemed to attend the re-u for the sole purpose of making the small children feel bad about themselves. Fortunately Uncle John and Uncle Richard had always been around to keep them at bay.
Her uncles were not, of course, here.
She was getting tired of this. “I submit,” she said.
“No more plucky stuff?”
“No more plucky stuff.”
“No more clever plans?”
“No more clever plans.”
“Perfect and total obedience?”
This one was harder. But really not that hard, when she thought of Yuxia and the bucket. “Perfect. And total. Obedience.”
“Well chosen.”
WHEN THEY HAD turned Yuxia upside down, her greatest fear had not been being stuck headfirst into a bucket of water — for she sensed, somehow, that this was nothing more than a demonstration — but that the phone would fall out of her boot.
She had been wondering if these men had ever seen a movie. Because in the movies, prisoners were always being frisked to make sure that they didn’t have anything on them. But no such treatment had been meted out to Qian Yuxia. Perhaps it was because they were Islamists and had a taboo against touching women. Perhaps it was because she was female, therefore deemed harmless. Or maybe it was because she was wearing a snug-fitting pair of jeans and an equally snug sleeveless T-shirt, making it obvious that she was not carrying anything. Whatever the reason, they had never bothered to inspect her for contraband; they had merely taken her into a large cabin on the main deck and handcuffed her to the leg of a table. The cabin was a busy place, serving as the galley and the mess for the ship’s crew, and the table she had been chained to was the one where they took meals and drank tea. Someone was always in the place, and so she had not thought it advisable to pull the phone out of her boot and use it for anything. From time to time a buzz against her ankle would inform her that she, or rather Marlon, had just received another text message. If the place had been a little quieter, she’d have worried that someone might hear the buzz, but with the grumbling of the engines, the slap and whoosh of waves against the hull, the clanking and hissing of cookware, and bursts of static and conversation emerging from the radio’s speaker, she was safe from that. Zula had been put somewhere else, apparently in a separate cabin, and Yuxia had wondered: If their positions had been reversed, and Yuxia had been alone, what would she have done with the phone? The two basic choices being: communicate with Marlon, or call the police and tell them everything.
When the men had come in to tie her up, one of them had knelt down in front of her, and she had stifled a gasp, thinking that he knew about the phone in her boot and that he was about to reach in there and snatch it out. She had crossed her ankles to hide it. But the man had paid no attention to the contents of her boots. Instead he had passed a rope behind her ankles and brought its ends around to the front and tied them in a knot above the phone, which meant that it was trapped in there. So securely that even being turned upside down had not shaken it loose.
After the terrible thing with the bucket, they dragged her back up to the galley. One of the crew members — the one who seemed responsible for most of the cooking — put a cup of tea in front of her. She was sick and quivering, coughing and raw chested, but basically undamaged, and so she picked up the cup, pressing it hard between both of her hands, which were shaking uncontrollably, and sipped. It was actually pretty good tea. Not as good as gaoshan cha but sharing some of the same medicinal properties, which were just what the doctor ordered for someone who had recently been upside down breathing seawater.
Until now, the main thing driving her actions had been concern for Zula. And she was still very concerned about Zula. But that emotion had now been forced out by something much more intense and immediate, which was a desire to see every man aboard this vessel dead. Not even a desire, so much as an absolute nonnegotiable requirement.
Her hands were not shaking with fear. This was rage.
After a few minutes, they moved her to a cabin: the same one, she guessed, where Zula had been held earlier. Which raised the question, What had they done with Zula?
They must be taking her into Xiamen for some reason. The whole purpose of the affair with the bucket had been to force Zula to run some errand for them.
She became so preoccupied by this that she failed to notice for a long time that the phone was buzzing against her ankle. Not just once, to announce a text, but over and over again in a steady rhythm.
She snatched it out in a panic, worried that it would go to voice mail before she could answer it. The number on the screen was hers; this was Marlon, calling her with her own phone.
“Wei?” she whispered.
In the background, she could hear a rhythmic squeaking noise.
“What is that sound?” she asked.
“Csongor rowing,” Marlon said.
DURING THE LONG run to Heartless Island, Marlon and Csongor had learned from direct observation what every waterman knew from experience, and what engineers knew from wave theory: that longer vessels inherently go faster than shorter ones. They had given the larger vessel something of a head start, since they didn’t want to follow it obviously. Not long after the beginning of the voyage, they had noticed that their quarry was pulling away from them, in spite of the fact that they were running the outboard at full throttle and felt as though its frail-seeming wooden hull would be smashed to pieces by the waves at any moment. The boat they were following did not appear to be running at high speed and yet it was gradually outdistancing them.