Except for the shoulder bag. Ivanov’s leather man-purse.
He had been pacing about aimlessly on the deck but now turned on his heel and stormed to the cabin where he’d been sleeping, just in time to confront a young man who was just stepping over the threshold with the said bag slung nonchalantly over his shoulder. The youth twisted his body as if to dodge around Csongor, but as Csongor kept coming he blocked nearly the entire opening for a moment before suddenly going chest to chest with the interloper and body-slamming him back into the cabin. This was already drawing attention from passersby on the gangway outside, trafficking in coiled-up wire rope, plastic fish bins, MREs, and other goods they’d fetched up from the hold. Csongor pulled the hatch shut and dogged it, then turned around to see the young man clutching the bag possessively with one hand while brandishing a knife with the other.
He was better dressed than Csongor, in an immaculate Boston Celtics T-shirt and flower-patterned surfer jams with gravid cargo pockets that made his legs look even skinnier than they were to begin with. Until a couple of weeks ago, Csongor would have found it all quite alarming. As it was, with a sour and contemptuous look on his face, he grabbed the hem of his ragged and salt-stained shirt and pulled it up just high enough to expose the butt of the Makarov protruding above the waistband of his shorts. This had less impact, at first, than he’d hoped for, since for several moments the man simply could not get over the spectacle of Csongor’s huge, hairy torso. This was not as convex, nor as pasty-white, as it had been two weeks ago, but even in its slimmed and tanned condition, it was a sort of Wonder of the World or sideshow spectacle to this young Filipino, who in any case did not know what to make of the odd gesture: Was Csongor offering his belly to be stabbed? In time, though, the scavenger’s eyes wandered down and focused in on the butt of the gun. It was, Csongor knew, a somewhat hollow threat. If the scavenger were serious about using the knife, he could do serious damage to Csongor, maybe even inflict a fatal wound, before Csongor could pull out the pistol and get it ready to fire. But his sense was that the scavenger was not making a serious promise to use the knife, just trying to bluff his way out of a bad situation, and that all Csongor need do was raise the stakes with a bigger bluff.
Anyway, no attack came. Csongor continued to stare into the man’s eyes until finally he put the knife away. Then Csongor pointed at the bag and crooked his finger. The man rolled his eyes, sighed, and slung it off his shoulder, then kicked it across the deck plates. Csongor scooped it up, then moved sideways and let the scavenger go out.
Thirty seconds later, they were aboard one of the boats, having accepted the offer of a ride ashore. Thirty seconds after that they were standing on dry land, haggling with the skipper, who professed to be shocked that they had not expected to pay for his services. Communication was difficult until Yuxia — who, since they’d made landfall, had alternated between jumping up and down on the sandy beach, as if testing its structural integrity, and dropping to her knees to kiss it — realized that the man was speaking a recognizable dialect of Fujianese. She rolled up and pitter-patted over and began to try out words on him, framing syllables with sandy lips. Csongor could see that communication between the two was far from perfect but that they were getting a few concepts across. Marlon — who until a few moments earlier had been lying spread-eagled on the sand, screaming exultantly — sat up, cocked an ear, listened for a bit, but didn’t seem to understand what they were saying any better than Csongor did.
Csongor moved several paces away so that the boatman would not be able to look directly into the bag, then set it down on the sand, dropped to his knees, and unzipped it.
A shadow fell. He looked up to see a girl of perhaps eight years, holding a baby on her hip, staring down curiously. Csongor hooked his arm through the bag’s shoulder strap and stood back up, elevating it up above the level where she could see it, and then pulled it open. She edged around, standing up on tippytoe, trying to look in, and the baby reached out with one saliva-drenched hand and got a grip on the bag’s edge and pulled it down, as if trying to help his big sister satisfy her curiosity. The situation was impossible; Csongor couldn’t very well lay his hand on someone else’s baby. But he really did not want any of these people finding out how much Chinese money they were carrying around.
The sun shone down into the bag’s central cavity, revealing nothing except a few loose magenta bills. All the cash had disappeared.
Csongor remembered now the young man in the cabin. How his cargo pockets had bulged. He turned to look back out toward the beached hulk of Szélanya. A hundred people were on it now, and more were on the way. Others had already finished taking whatever they wanted and were dispersing on their little boats. The situation was impossible. Even if Csongor bought passage back to the wreck, or swam to it, and somehow managed to impose his will on a large number of people, most of whom were probably armed with (at least) knives, the odds were very small that the young man who had taken the bricks of money was still anywhere near the thing.
Csongor checked his wallet and found a lot of Hungarian currency and a few stray euro notes.
He glanced up at the boat pilot, who, by the standards of Filipinos, looked almost totally Asian in his racial makeup. What sorts of connections did people here have back to China? Just a vague awareness that their ancestors had come from there, centuries ago? Or did they go back and forth all the time?
“What kind of money is this guy willing to accept?” Csongor asked Yuxia.
“He is willing to take our renminbi,” Yuxia reassured him.
“Any other kind?” Csongor asked.
She asked the question and Csongor heard him say, “Dollars.”
The girl, seeing that there was nothing marvelous to look at in Csongor’s bag, had lost interest, pried the baby’s fingers loose from it, and backed away to make further observations. Ambling back toward Yuxia and the boatman, Csongor groped his way into one of the bag’s internal side pockets and pulled out the Ziploc bag containing Peter’s effects. He extracted and opened Peter’s wallet, which was made of ballistic nylon. Flipping it open, he observed what he took to be Peter’s state of Washington driver’s license, trapped beneath a window, and a number of cards and slips of paper stored in a fan of transparent plastic envelopes: some kind of insurance card, a voter’s registration card, a rectangle of white paper with several long strings of random letters, digits, and punctuation marks printed on it: passwords, probably. No photograph of Zula, which only confirmed certain uncharitable opinions that Csongor had been harboring about Peter since the moment they had met. Pockets with credit cards and debit cards. A billfold containing two American dollar bills and a great deal of some other, more colorful currency that Csongor did not immediately recognize: Canadian, he now saw. Very odd to be handling this carefully preserved relic of a dead man’s life in a completely different world, here on a beach in Luzon.