It seemed odd to him that Florin Popa, a bodyguard, would own a boat. But then, considering how carefully the key had been hidden, maybe Popa didn’t actually own the Recursive. Maybe he was just using it.
Peter followed the slip numbers until he came to 31. The Recursive was a 36-foot Cobalt inboard. Judging by the open deck and the seating arrangement, it was a pleasure craft, not a fishing boat. Taking hold of one of the dock’s wooden uprights, he swung aboard. The first thing he did was check to make certain no one was aboard. This was an easy enough task, considering that the Cobalt had no closed cabin or, apart from a minuscule head, belowdeck area.
Taking the key, he slid it into the ignition slot. He could only get it in halfway, however. It would not start the boat. Removing it, he began a thorough search, removing cushions that covered storage areas, opening the small dash box facing the passenger’s seat, pulling on the metal ring that opened another, larger storage area, all to no avail. There was no slot anywhere on the Recursive in which to insert the key.
By this time, twilight was falling on DC, and a chill wind whipped across the water. Peter sat on the rear cushions, staring out at nothing, trying to figure out what he had missed. The key was etched with the name Recursive. He was aboard the Recursive. Why couldn’t he find what the key was meant to open?
He pondered this vexing question for another fifteen minutes or so. By then, darkness had fallen, the lights had been switched on, and he was forced to admit defeat, at least for the moment. He called Soraya at home, then disconnected, remembering that she had told him that line was out of order. Instead, he punched in her mobile number. It went right to voicemail. He left a brief, necessarily enigmatic message asking her to call him, and disconnected.
At home, he fixed himself a meal cobbled together from leftovers, but he scarcely tasted a thing. Afterward, he wandered around, touching things absently, while his mind whirred away a mile a minute. Finally, recognizing that he was as exhausted as he was wired, he slipped a DVD into his system and watched several episodes of Mad Men, which calmed him somewhat. He fell into a reverie where he was Don Draper, only his name was Anthony Dzundza. Roger Sterling was Tom Brick, Peggy was Soraya, and Joan was the strength-training guy at the gym Peter had been trying to approach for months.
Martha Christiana, watching the terrible inertia of what was left of her mother, said, “Is this how it ends?”
“For some.” Don Fernando stood close beside her. “For the broken.”
“She wasn’t always broken.”
“Yes,” he said, “she was.” When she turned to look at him, he smiled encouragingly. “She was born with a defect in her brain, something that wasn’t working correctly. In those days, it wasn’t something that could be diagnosed, but even today, there’s not much that can be done.”
“Drugs.”
“Drugs would have turned the young woman she used to be into a zombie. Would that have been better?”
Martha’s mother moved uncomfortably, made a mewing sound, and Martha went to her, helped her over to the bathroom. She was inside with her for several minutes. Don Fernando crossed to the dresser, picked up the two photos, and one by one, studied them. Or rather he studied the young girl Martha Christiana had been. He had the unusual ability of being able to glean people’s psychological quirks from “reading” old photos of them.
The door opened behind him, and, putting down the pictures, he helped Martha bring her mother over to the bed, where they sat her down. The old woman seemed exhausted or, perhaps, not there at all, as if she were already asleep.
The nurse came in then, but Martha waved her away. By silent mutual consent, she and Don Fernando got the old woman into bed. As she laid her head on the pillow and Martha arranged her hair around her emaciated face, a tiny spark appeared in her eyes as she looked up at her daughter, and it was possible to believe for just that instant that she recognized Martha. But the ghost of a smile evaporated so quickly that it might never have existed.
Martha sat on the edge of the bed while her mother closed her eyes, drifted deeper into the impenetrable jungle of her mind. “We’ll all end up here, in the end.”
“Or we’ll die young.” Don Fernando’s mouth twisted. “Except me, of course.” He nodded. “‘No one here gets out alive.’”
“‘Five to One.’” Martha recognized the line written by Jim Morrison.
He smiled. “It isn’t only Bach and Jacques Brel I’m partial to.”
Martha turned back. “How can I leave her here?”
“You left her before.” She turned on him, but before she could say anything, he said, “That’s not a criticism, Martha, simply a statement of fact.” He approached her. “And the fact is, she’s best off here. She needs care, and these people are caring.”
She turned, looked down at her mother’s sleeping face. Something had happened. She no longer saw herself there.
At length, Peter slept, dreaming of the Cobalt running at full throttle, while he desperately swam to keep from being chopped to kelp by the whirring prop. The next morning, as he disinterestedly poured cold cereal into a gaily striped bowl, he got a brainstorm.
Firing up his laptop, he Googled recursive, which referred him back to the noun recursion, whose main definition in the postmodern world was “the process of defining a function or calculating a number by the repeated application of an algorithm.” That told him nothing, but when he looked up the origin, he discovered that the Latin recursio meant “running back, or repeating a step in a procedure,” as in, say, shampooing: lather, rinse, repeat.
That led him to consider that there might be a recursive within the Recursive. The trouble there was that he had checked everything within the boat and had found nothing. But what about the area around Recursive?
He showered and dressed in record time, drove back to the marina, where he arrived at slip 31 and jumped onto the Cobalt. It looked just the same as it had yesterday. He moved methodically around the boat, peering over the side. There was nothing on the port side, bow, or stern, and it seemed the same for the starboard side, until he reached down under the second bumper and found a rope tied to the underside.
With mounting excitement, he hauled up the rope, hand over hand, until he had retrieved what was on the end of it: an immense rubberized watertight satchel. With some difficulty, owing to the weight, he set it on one of the aft cushions. Sure enough, the satchel was locked. When he inserted the key and turned it to the right, the lock popped open.
Removing it, the satchel’s top opened like an animal’s jaws. Inside, he found stacks of five-hundred- and thousand-dollar bills. All the breath went out of him. Instinctively, he looked around, peering through the bright morning sunlight to see if anyone was watching him. No one was. The few people he had passed earlier had taken their boats out. The marina was deserted.
He spent the next half hour counting the bills, adding up the sums of the stacks, which, he quickly discovered, each held the same number of bills. When he was finished, he couldn’t believe the figure he had come up with.
Good God, he thought. Thirty million dollars!