Viator

—What can I tell you? When I call him, I always throw in some figures, some revised estimates. To keep him happy, you know. I like this job. But if I try to draw him out, if I ask about the project, when will the rest of the men arrive, or even just say, What’s up? he either says he’s got another call or that someone in the office needs his help. I used to think he was doing his pals a favor, giving us this easy job, but he doesn’t act friendly anymore. Maybe he’ll explain it to you. After all, you’ll be making the calls now. You’re the man in charge. Arnsparger grinned and threw Wilander a snappy salute. You’re the husband of the linden tree.

Two

“…the queen of Kaliaska…”

Viator had come to rest in a nearly horizontal position, wedged into a notch between hills (a circumstance, Wilander noted, that lent a certain clinical validation to Mortensen’s imagery of penetration and consummation), her port side braced against an outcropping of stone that had torn a ragged thirty-foot-long breach in the hull as the ship scraped past. An aluminum ladder was positioned at the lip of the breach, affording access to the ground. To reach the ladder, it was necessary to descend a many-tiered stair to the engine room, all but engineless now, a monstrous rusting flywheel lying amid bolts, wires, and couplings, the mounts and walls painted a pale institutional green, dappled with splotches of raw iron, and then you would pass through a bulkhead door into the bottom of the cargo hold. Light entered the hold not only through the breach, but through hundreds of small holes that Arnsparger had made in the hull with a cutting torch, removing triangular pieces of metal and, subsequently, storing them in jewel cases, and when the sun was high, hundreds of beams skewered the darkness with an unreal sharpness of definition, putting Wilander in mind of those scenes in action moves during which villains with assault rifles turn spotlights on an isolated cabin, a collapsing barn or the like, and fire a fusillade that pierces every inch of the walls, yet by some miracle fails to kill the hero and heroine, as if their true purpose had been to produce this dramatic effect.

Two days short of a month after taking up residence aboard the ship, Wilander descended into the hold, clambered down the ladder, and set out under an overcast sky for Kaliaska, where he intended to make a few minor purchases and hoped to spend the evening, and perhaps the following morning, with Arlene Dauphinée. Their friendship, after numerous long walks and hours of energetic conversation, had reached that awkward stage at which it would necessarily evolve into something more intimate or else plane back into the casual, and he was not confident that things would proceed as he desired, nor was he confident that what he desired was the best possible outcome—he had been without a woman for years, wandering from mission to alley to sewer grating, a world wherein the only women available were filthy, deranged, dangerous, like the young girl he’d befriended in Seattle, saved from the threat of rape and fed and otherwise helped, never once touching her, and then she had stabbed him as he slept because, she later told the police, his eyes had begun to glow, shining so brightly, redly, hotly from beneath his closed lids, they had irradiated the refrigerator carton in which they sheltered and set it afire—and he didn’t know if he was prepared for the demands and stresses of an adult relationship; he valued the peace he had found aboard Viator, the lazy mornings, reading on deck under the linden boughs, writing in his journal about the ship, its curious crew, the woods, the sounds and sights of natural life surrounding him. And yet Arlene was unique. That was the only word for her; beautiful was insufficient a term, perhaps not an entirely applicable one, for her outer beauty had been worn down to the dimensions of middle age, her face whittled by years and eroded by the heart’s weather, so that on occasion he thought of her as a figurehead supporting the bowsprit of a three-master, voluptuous and calm of feature, her core strength undamaged, but her paint faded, wood cracked by seas and storms. Even this minor stress, that created by the dissonance between his desire and his sense of security, was hard for him to bear, and he considered staying home that night, going into Kaliaska the next morning to offer her excuses, apologies, because he believed he needed a fresh start with her, another week or two to pull himself together, and then he would be ready; yet as he walked along the starboard side of Viator that day, passing beneath the linden, idly patting the trunk, he began to feel less anxious, less out of sorts, and though he did not reach a conscious decision, he soon left behind all thought of returning to his cabin.