Petra tou Romiou is a rock. A collection of rocks, really, dominated by a massive boulder, a big, bleached-tan monolith the size of a four-story office building, and various darker rocks scattered around the vicinity. This was the place where sea foam and Uranus … Or perhaps more appropriately the place where Botticelli had Venus standing with conveniently-placed blonde hair, rising naked on a scallop shell. His painting lacked the rock and added nonexistent trees, but it was the Renaissance and Botticelli was not a news photographer.
On either side of the rock are pebble beaches, with those pebbles running from gravel-size, to skipping stones, on up to smooth-worn, fist-sized stones that make a pleasant crunching sound underfoot while making it impossible to walk quickly.
Normally Petra tou Romiou is reached from a parking lot across the road. There’s a narrow underground walkway, a one-person-wide walkway that I was happy to avoid as I pulled over to the side of the road behind a line of cop cars and ambulances, all with lights flashing, and slid and scrabbled down the steep embankment in inappropriate shoes.
The boat had not reached either beach but had managed, with extraordinary bad luck, to smack into the rocks and now sat rising and falling sluggishly, trapped and being slowly but relentlessly disassembled.
Even by the standards of refugee boats, this craft was so astoundingly overloaded with people that even in the spotlight of a Cypriot Marine Police craft a hundred feet beyond it, it was not possible to make out the boat’s color or shape. It was a saltine supporting a quarter-pound burger; it was an unfunny clown car; a twelve-ounce beer poured into a six-ounce glass. People were packed together, standing, holding onto each other, stumbling and wailing as the boat surged and smacked into the rock with an audible sound, splintering by degrees.
The captain of the Marine Police boat must have known something about shoals because he was unable to get near enough to help. On the land side, locals mingled with cops who did a great deal of shouting and waving of flashlights and were generally ignored. Everyone seemed eager to help, and no one was actually doing anything useful.
One of the refugees leapt into the water wearing an orange life jacket, a man, young and strong. He surfaced and rolled over to swim away from the rock, but the sea wasn’t having it. A wave rolled in, lifted him up, flailing and shouting, to smash him against rock. It didn’t kill him, I saw his arms waving and thought I heard him yell, but then he was submerged by a new wave, and when it was past, I saw no more of him.
A yellow rescue helicopter raced up the coast from the Royal Air Force base, its spotlight speeding along the line of surf, but I had little optimism about the pilot’s chances – the wind was up enough to tear the tops from waves, the refugee boat moved like a drunken belly dancer, and the people aboard her were panicking, surging this way and that, falling over each other. What could they do from a helicopter aside from lowering a rope and pulling up a handful of people as the Mediterranean Sea carried out its eternal mission to sink and drown?
‘They’ll drown,’ Chante said. She was taping it all on her iPhone.
We were on the beach, the big rocks to our right, ignored as several among many watching a tragedy play out. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Most of them will.’
The chopper added its deafening noise and downdrafts to the scene and I saw a wet-suited diver jump from a hundred feet up, plunge and resurface, holding a rope end. He bobbed beside the stern of the refugee boat, fighting each surge just to stay in place, searching futilely for a place to attach the rope.
‘I’m going for a swim,’ Delia said.
She didn’t invite me, just informed me that she was going in. She handed her purse to Chante, kicked off her shoes, slithered out of her dress and ran in her underwear.
I was a good enough swimmer to know the difference between me, a beat-up forty-something in resort casual, and the wetsuited RAF diver out there, who was being grappled by a dozen panicky hands. I was a good enough swimmer to know that the space between a frisky sea and several big rocks was not a backyard pool. And I had seen Jaws more than once and had definite views on the advisability of swimming at night while bleeding.
But Delia was already splashing into the surf like a kid on holiday and I couldn’t very well just stand there looking impotent, so with markedly less enthusiasm I began shedding electronics, jacket and shoes.
Just then the sea took hold of the refugee boat, twisted it and smashed the stern into the monolith that was its main antagonist. The people screamed and pushed toward the bow. People fell into the water. The RAF diver was grabbing at windmilling bodies, fighting to save lives, very much including his own at that point.
The boat and rock played a tune, more percussion than harmony, bangs and scrapes and watery sighs.
It was time for me to decide whether I was a man or a mouse, so I uttered my heroic battle cry, ‘Fucking hell!’ and followed Delia into the surf.
The bow of the boat tilted slightly up now, not quite a last-act-of-Titanic tilt but on its way, as the splintered stern began taking on water.
Delia swam and I swam behind her. I carefully regulated my breathing, exhaling an angry, bubbling, ‘Fuck!’ into the water on each downstroke, inhaling salt and foam with each recovery stroke. From shore it was no more than two hundred feet, but I was tiring before we reached the first people. Still, it seemed pointless to swim this far and not do anything useful, so I grabbed the nearest drowning person I saw, a young woman, grabbed her by the hair and drew her to me, twisted her around so that her panicky arms wouldn’t brain me, and started back toward the beach in a one-armed, scissor-kicking sideways crawl. Subjective physics being what they are, the two hundred feet now seemed to be about nine miles.
Fortunately the water was not terribly deep and I eventually felt gravel under my feet and manhandled the woman until people on shore could wade out to take her from me.
It is hard to overstate just how quickly even relatively benign Mediterranean water saps your energy. I was bent over, hands on knees, gasping and wondering if I had done enough. Then I had a stupid idea that would involve still more swimming and plunged back in before I could come up with a good excuse not to. I powered through the surf, passing through people bobbing like corks, passing Delia who had a man in tow, passing other people straining just to keep their mouths above the water and crying out in desperate Arabic which I was glad I couldn’t translate since there was damned little I could do to help.
The RAF diver was around the stern, joined by a second man in a wetsuit from the Marine Police, the two of them overwhelmed by tumbling, writhing, kicking, screaming refugees. But the diver’s rope, thick-braided white-and-blue nylon, floated like a water snake. I took an end, formed a loop with fingers gone numb, put my shoulder through it, belatedly realized I had used the wrong damn arm so that the rope would scrape against my cut armpit, and side-stroked my way to the Marine Police craft, coughing and wallowing in deeper water. Some bright fellow aboard deduced my purpose and proffered a boat hook. I fed the loop over the hook, made eye contact with the young cop, and headed back beneath waves whipped to spray by the hurricane of the helicopter overhead.
I rolled onto my back and waved up at the chopper crewman leaning out of the door with his hand holding the pulley line. I made gestures I hoped conveyed the concept of ‘rope.’ It was still attached at that end to the helo’s hoist, and it took a while, during which I seriously contemplated drowning, but they figured it out finally and cast the rope off the hoist. It landed with a splash. I found a section, not the end, unfortunately, but a section I could hold onto, and with the absolute last of my getting-on-toward-middle-age energy towed the tangled mess to shore.
Hands took hold of me and half-carried, half-dragged me out of the water. Other hands took hold of the rope, unsnarled the mess and formed themselves into a queue – God bless British cultural patrimony – and set about playing tug of war with the Marine Police boat.
Between the boat and the straining civilians, the rope was made taut, running in a line just a few feet shy of the refugee craft’s plunging stern. Some of the refugees figured it out and made their way to the rope, either on their own, or assisted by the divers and the apparently tireless FBI Special Agent.
I sat shivering and gasping on the rocks feeling that I had swallowed more salt water than was healthy. Someone laid a blanket over my shoulders, probably mistaking me for a refugee. Then Chante appeared, carrying my neatly-folded clothing and without saying anything got me to stand up long enough to dress myself.
I spotted Delia twenty feet away down the beach, looking like I’d felt minutes before. I nodded at her and she nodded back, both of us tired, cold and a bit shellshocked. Chante and I trudged over to help her dress.
Now I could see the rescue operation more clearly. The helicopter had moved off to cut the turbulence from its rotors and used its spotlight to light up separated refugees in the water. The Marine Police were keeping station as well as could be and the civilians on the other end of the rope moved up and down the beach as needed to keep it taut. And spread out along its length were people clinging and being moved along by the divers.
And there were the bodies. At least two, a man and a child, were face down in the surf. EMTs were dotted here and there, kneeling over traumatized and in some cases injured people. A news crew now had a camera going, adding their klieg lights to the eerie scene. Folks from nearby towns were still arriving in cars parked atop the bluff. Many came down to the beach with blankets and Thermoses of hot tea and bottles of grappa.
‘That was smart,’ Delia said, damply-dressed and recovered. ‘The rope. That was smart thinking.’
I grunted. I wasn’t feeling very clever. I wasn’t feeling as if I’d accomplished anything. It’s hard to congratulate yourself while watching a child’s lifeless body reduced to flotsam.
‘I’m going to question some of those people,’ Delia said.
‘The fuck?’
‘May have useful info.’ She didn’t wait for me, which is a good thing because I saw no reason to accompany her. I was done.
Chante, watching her leave, said, ‘I have arrived in the middle of the movie.’
‘Speaking of which, pan that camera around in a full three sixty, will you?’
She seemed surprised by that, but for once did not argue.
We both watched Delia squatting down to talk to a trio of shivering refugees.
‘She is incredible,’ Chante said.
I could have objected that I was very nearly as incredible, that I’d also gotten a bit wet, and had come up with the idea of stretching a line and was therefore due some respect myself.
But as I watched Special Agent Delia Delacorte in her damp and sand-patched dress nodding and offering a comforting touch to frightened people while I sucked the last drops from my flask, I was painfully aware of the gap between us, between the sociopath who would occasionally behave well if pressured to do so and if there was no easy way out, and the servant of the law who spent her life trying to protect people. Maybe it was the weariness or the cold affecting my brain, but I could not help thinking that homo sapiens needed people like Delia Delacorte, but could do quite nicely without people like me.
No wonder she wouldn’t sleep with me. Who the fuck was I?
‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘she is.’