“A boat? Wouldn’t it be easier to just get a passport?” Either my clavicles suddenly dissolved, or I unconsciously slumped my shoulders. Yup, the guy was nuts, I figured.
Anna chided, “He was your idea.”
“I wonder how to get the genie back in the bottle?”
Alexi snapped around, cape trailing in his wake as he goosestepped away from us. We ended up chasing him to a marine outfitter’s store at a strip mall. He strutted in and ordered a clerk with disfiguring acne to show his clients, “The boats for sale in Odessa.” The young man glared disdainfully and moving with deliberate disinclination, swung the monitor around, opened a browser, and navigated to a website called Yacht World. In the search parameters, he entered Odessa. Then he asked Alexi a run-on series of single word questions: “sail-power-length-range?”
Alexi in turn asked me, “Do you want a boat with a sail or a boat with the motor? How much money do you have for your boat?”
“I don’t want a boat!” I looked at him for even the slightest glimmer of cognition which might indicate he had heard me. “What I want is to get Anna out of Ukraine, and you said you could help us, Captain Aladdin.”
“Captain?” The clerk raised an eyebrow. At Alexi’s insistence he showed me some frighteningly neglected sail, power and fishing boats on offer in Odessa. The blasé clerk flashed from one ad to the next, rattling off prices in US dollars.
“Whoa, enough! I can’t come up with that kind of cash, I don’t want one of those boats, and this is a complete waste of time.” I looked at the clerk with contrition. “Sorry about this.”
“Whatever…” He shrugged and turned away, muttering some Ukrainian curse.
Maybe Alexi really was actually nuts. Outside the store, I told him, in the simplest terms I could muster, that I was not going to buy a boat and, unless he came up with some other way of getting us out of Ukraine, our acquaintanceship was finished. We left him silently cogitating.
SIXTEEN
Not being in Vancouver to push Gavin or pull in new business, our network security firm was inexorably grinding to a halt. Cash flow concerns had literally become palpable. From the hotel’s business center, and thanks to Sandy’s cousin’s proxy server, Gavin and I kept in touch via an encrypted email correspondence. His latest email was a threat to shut down our business and terminate my last trickle of income. Unless, of course, I ditched Anna and returned to my senses.
I had barely been aware of Anna, at an adjacent desktop, finally having it out with The Skater. She was speaking to her mother over an anonymous Internet-to-phone service. Anna’s side of the conversation had increased in volume to the point I couldn’t help overhearing. Neither could anyone else, if we not been the only two there. I looked over at her. In response, Anna cranked the volume on the desktop’s speakers and glared back at me. Eyes locked on mine and narrowed, cheeks bright red, she leaned toward the tiny boom microphone protruding from the CRT monitor and carried on. “How can you do this to me? How can you be attacking me like this? You are lucky I am still talking to you after what you’ve done to me and Jess — my friend. Why can’t you just let us be?”
The Skater’s voice, modulated by the familiar rasp of Internet telephony, squawked from the desktop’s plastic speakers. “I did it for you, Anna. I was so worried. I don’t know who she is and where she is taking you. Who else can help you, but me? Who will look after you?”
“I’m an adult. I can look after myself and Jess isn’t taking me anywhere. I can go where I want with who I want. I’m not going to live under you for the rest of my life. I told you I am happy, why can’t you just accept it?”
“Look what you are doing. You must be insane! That woman, that ‘friend,’ she could be a cult leader. She has brainwashed you. Do you really think she likes you? She probably wants to sell you into prostitution or kill you for your organs. How can you possibly trust her? A woman, Anna! What could she want from you?”
Anna clenched her fists. “Stop this! Jess is not a criminal. It is you who is a criminal.”
“What? What are you saying? You are speaking in this manner to your mother? If only your father could hear you.”
“I phoned the bank. You took all my money. Every last kopeck! The shares too.”
Only hissing from the speakers. It might have been The Skater inhaling for another tirade.
“You stranded me here. Do you know that? You took my money, my stocks, my passport. I’m entirely dependent on Jess now. If you think she is going to do me harm and you care about me, you would not have done this to me.”
More hissing.
“What stocks? Shares of what?” First I’d heard anything of Anna’s finances. “How can she take your money from the bank, Anna?”
The microphone was open and The Skater heard me. “So I can hide it from you, Americanka!”
“But Mother, it is my money. I earned it.” It was Anna. “How dare you! Do you not have any conscience?”
“It is only because of me you had this job! Nobody will ever hire you on your own. You are a weak and sick woman! You betray Misha, such a perfect man for you. He loves you more than you deserve and you abandon him for stupid dreams of western perversion. If you think life will be better there with that woman you are insane and one day you will crawl back to me and beg my forgiveness.”
“Mama, stop. Enough!” Anna pulled back from the microphone. The speakers emitted an earsplitting, rasping squawk. Anna cut the sound with the speaker-mute button. Taking a breath and leaning back in to the microphone she spoke without knowing whether or not her mother was even listening. “I am not insane, I know what I am doing, and I want you to give me my passport back.” When Anna disengaged the speaker mute, we heard the tail end of a series of square-wave modulated shrieks and yells. The skater hadn’t heard a thing.
Anna turned down the volume, looked at me and waited for what sounded like a coyote attack on a chicken coop to abate. Then she repeated her request. “Give me back my passport.”
Silence.
Then, “No, no, no!” rasped from the speakers. “You are in danger. You can not leave like this. Come home and we’ll talk it over. You will explain to me and father where and why you are leaving and then go. I need to see you off.”
“You had a chance to see me already. Why didn’t you use it?”
“We needed to take you away from her. She is a criminal.”
“If she is a criminal, why didn’t you call the police?”
“They wouldn’t help. You know our police, come on, you are not that stupid. They wouldn’t move a finger.”
“And that’s why you trapped and beat me? What am I supposed to think about you after that? Do you really believe that I will respect or trust you after that?”
“I was terrified for you Anna. What could I do?”
“If you worry about me, give me my passport and money back so I’m not trapped and completely dependent on Jess.”
The Skater reverted to ice-cold. “No, Anna. I won’t give anything to you. You don’t know what you are doing! I am not going to help that criminal. You have already taken everything from me. I am destroyed now. Think about my well being for a change? I might need that money, your father and I, we are not getting younger.”
“Then at least give me my passport.”
“No! I won’t give it to you. You are not going anywhere. I gave up my entire life for you. You have no right!”
“Yes I do! Don’t you understand that? In the real world you would get arrested for this!”