In December 2018, Leon Prevant had a job in a Marriott on the southern edge of Colorado, not far from the New Mexico border. It wasn’t a big town but there were somehow two Marriotts, reflecting one another across the wide street and the parking lot. The Marriotts were just on the edge of downtown, but the downtown itself proved to be something of a mirage. On Leon’s first day he walked there on his lunch break, past a massive mural and then up a street where he found the best café he’d seen in a while, a large shadowy place attached to a coffee roasting business. He took a coffee to go and wandered up the street. There was a huge army surplus store that seemed to have spilled into three adjoining buildings, but most of the other storefronts were empty. No cars passed by. He was standing on a corner, with long views down two streets, and in all of that, he saw just one other person, a man in a neon-orange T-shirt sitting on a bench about a block away, staring at nothing. The tables outside the café were empty. Leon walked quickly back to the Marriott, clocked back in, and resumed the work of the day, receiving a new shipment of toiletries in the supply room and then skimming drowned bugs and leaves from the surface of the pool.
“See, that’s how I can tell you’re from the coast,” his coworker Navarro said later, when Leon mentioned the emptiness of downtown. “You people think a place has to have a downtown to be a real place.”
“You don’t think a downtown should have some people in it?”
“I think a place doesn’t have to have a downtown at all,” Navarro said.
He’d been there six months when Miranda called. He was in the RV after his shift, doing the crossword puzzle with ice packs on his right knee and left ankle, alone because Marie had gotten a night job stocking shelves at the Walmart across the expressway, and the call was so unexpected that when Miranda said her name he almost couldn’t comprehend it. There was an odd half beat of silence while he recovered.
“Leon?”
“Hi, sorry about that. What an unexpected surprise this is,” he said, feeling like an idiot because obviously unexpected and surprise were redundant in this context, but who could blame him?
“Good to hear your voice,” she said, “after all these years. Do you have a moment?”
“Of course.” His heart was pounding. For how many years had he longed for this call? Ten. A decade in the wilderness, he found himself thinking. Ten years of traveling far beyond the borders of the corporate world, wishing uselessly to be allowed back in. The ice packs slipped to the floor as he reached for a pen and paper.
“I’m afraid I’m not calling for the happiest reason,” Miranda said, “but let me just ask you first, before I get into it, would you be at all interested in coming back on a consultant basis? It would be a very short-term thing, just a few days.”
“I would love to.” He wanted to cry. “Yes. That would be…yes.”
“Okay. Well, good.” She sounded a little surprised by his fervor. “There’s been…” She cleared her throat. “I was going to say there’s been an accident, but we actually don’t know if it was an accident or not. There was an incident. A woman disappeared from a Neptune-Avramidis ship. She was a cook.”
“That’s terrible. Which ship?”
“It is terrible. The Neptune Cumberland.” The name wasn’t familiar to Leon. “Listen,” she was saying, “I’m convening a committee to look into crew safety on Neptune-Avramidis vessels as a general matter, and Vincent Smith’s death in particular. If you’re interested, I could use your help.”
“Wait,” he said, “her name was Vincent?”
“Yes, why?”
“Where was she from?”
“Canadian citizen, no permanent address. Her next of kin was an aunt in Vancouver. Why?”
“Nothing. I knew a woman named Vincent, a long time ago. Well, knew of her, I guess. Not that common a name for a woman.”
“True enough. I think the important point here is, I don’t need to tell you that this is the only investigation into her death that will ever happen. To be candid with you, if I had the budget I’d commission an investigation from an outside law firm.”
“That sounds expensive.”
“Extremely. So this is all she’s going to get, just an internal investigation by the company she worked for. Companies have a way of exonerating themselves, don’t you find?”
“You want an outsider,” he said.
“You’re someone I trust. How soon can you be in New York?”
“Soon,” he said. “I just have to wrap up a few things here.” He was calculating the length of the drive from southern Colorado. They spoke for a while about travel arrangements, and when he hung up he sat for a long time at the table, blinking. He checked the call log on the phone to confirm that he hadn’t imagined it. NEPTUNE-AVRA, a 212 area code, 21 minutes. The text on the call display seemed apt; it had been like receiving a phone call from another planet.
After Alkaitis, there was a different kind of life. Leon and Marie lasted a half year in their house after the collapse of the Ponzi, six months of missed mortgage payments and ruinous stress. Leon had put his entire severance package and all their savings into Alkaitis’s fund, and the returns didn’t make them wealthy but you don’t actually need much to live well in South Florida. They’d bought the RV just before Alkaitis was arrested. In the months that followed, with Leon trying to get more consulting work at Neptune-Avramidis, which was convulsed with layoffs and had put a freeze on consultants, and Marie rendered unemployable by anxiety and depression, the RV in the driveway had at first seemed malevolent, some kind of horrible joke, like their financial mistakes had taken on corporeal form and had parked there next to the house.
But in the early summer they were eating omelets for dinner by candlelight, the candles less a romantic gesture than a means of saving money on electricity, and Marie said, “I’ve been emailing with Clarissa lately.”
“Clarissa?” The name was familiar, but it took him a moment. “Oh, your friend from college, right? The psychic?”
“Yes, that Clarissa. We had dinner in Toronto all those years ago.”
“I remember. What’s she up to these days?”
“She lost her house, so now she’s living in her van.”
Leon set his fork down and reached for his water glass, to dispel the tightness in his throat. They were two months behind on the mortgage. “Tough luck,” he said.
“She says she actually likes it.”
“At least she would’ve seen it coming,” he said, “being a psychic and all.”
“I asked her about that,” Marie said. “She said she’d had visions of highways, but she’d always just assumed she was going on a road trip.”
“A van,” Leon said. “That seems like it’d be a difficult life.”
“Did you know there are jobs you can do, if you’re mobile?”
“What kind of jobs?”
“Taking tickets in fairgrounds. Working in warehouses around the holiday rush. Some agricultural stuff. Clarissa said she got a job she liked in a campground for a while, cleaning up and dealing with campers.”
“Interesting.” He had to say something.
“Leon,” she said, “what if we just left in the RV?”
His initial thought was that the idea was ridiculous, but he waited a gentle moment or two before he asked, “And went where, love?”
“Wherever we want. We could go anywhere.”
“Let’s think about it,” he’d said.
The idea had seemed crazy for only a few hours, maybe less. He lay awake that night, sweating through the sheets—it was hard to sleep without air-conditioning, but they were keeping a careful budget and Marie had calculated that if they ran the A/C that week they’d be unable to pay the minimums on their credit card bills—and he realized the plan’s brilliance: they could just leave. The house that kept him up at night could become someone else’s problem.
“I’ve been thinking about your idea,” he said to Marie over breakfast. “Let’s do it.”
“I’m sorry, do what?” She was always tired and sluggish in the mornings.
“Let’s just get in the RV and drive away,” he said, and her smile was a balm. Once the decision was made, he felt a peculiar urgency. In retrospect, there was no real rush, but they were gone four days later.
When he walked through the rooms one last time, Leon could tell the house was already done with them, a sense of vacancy pervading the air. Most of the furniture was still there, most of their belongings, a calendar pinned to the wall in the kitchen, coffee cups in the cupboards, books on shelves, but the rooms already conveyed an impression of abandonment. Leon would not have predicted that he and his wife would turn out to be the kind of people who’d abandon a house. He would’ve imagined that such an act would bury a person under fathoms of shame, but here on the expressway in the early morning light, abandoning the house felt unexpectedly like triumph. Leon pulled out of the driveway, made a couple of turns, and then they were on the expressway leaving forever.
“Leon,” Marie said with an air of letting him in on a delightful secret, “did you notice that I left the front door unlocked?”
He felt real joy when she said this. Why not? There was no plausible scenario where they could sell their house. The whole state was glutted with houses that were newer and nicer, entire unsold developments in the outer suburbs. They owed more on the mortgage than the house was worth. There was such pleasure in imagining their unlocked home succumbing to anarchy. He knew they would never come back here and there was such beauty in the thought. He didn’t have to mow the lawn anymore or trim the hedge. The mold in the upstairs bathroom was no longer his concern. There would be no more neighbors. (And here, the first misgivings at the plan, which was objectively not a great plan but seemed like the best of all their terrible options. He glanced at Marie in the passenger seat and thought: It’s just us now. The house was our enemy but it tied us to the world. Now we are adrift.)
Marie seemed a little distant in the first few days, as they drove up out of Florida and into the South, but he knew that was just the way she dealt with stress—she evaded, she avoided, she removed herself—and by the end of the week she’d begun to come back to him. They mostly cooked in the tiny RV kitchenette, getting used to it, but on the one-week anniversary of their departure they pulled into a diner. Sitting down to a meal that neither he nor Marie had cooked seemed wildly extravagant. They toasted their one-week anniversary with ginger ale, because Leon was driving and one of Marie’s medications clashed with alcohol.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked her, over roast chicken with gravy.
“The office,” she said. “Back when I worked at that insurance place.”
“I still think about my working life too,” he said. “Seems like a different lifetime now, to be honest.”
Being in shipping had made him feel like he was plugged into an electrical current that lit up the world. It was the opposite of spending his days in an RV, driving nowhere in particular.
They spent most of that first summer in a campground in California, near the town of Oceano, central coast. South of the beach access road, people rode ATVs over the dunes, and the ATV engines sounded like bugs from a distance, a high buzzing whine. Ambulances drove down the beach to collect ATV drivers three or four times a day. But north of the road, the beach was quiet. Leon loved walking north. There wasn’t much between Oceano and Pismo Beach, the next town up the coast. This lonely stretch of California, forgotten shoreline, sand streaked with black. The land here was dark with tar. In the evenings there were flocks of sandpipers, running over the sand so quickly that they gave the illusion of hovering an inch off the ground, their legs blurred like the animals in a Road Runner cartoon, comical but there was also something moving about the way they all somehow knew to switch direction at once.
Leon and Marie ate dinner on the beach almost every night. Marie seemed happiest when she was gazing at the ocean, and Leon liked it here too. He tried to keep her out on the beach as long as possible, where the horizon was infinite and the birds ran like cartoons. He didn’t want her to feel that their lives were small. Freighters passed on the far horizon and he liked to imagine their routes. He liked the endlessness of the Pacific from this vantage point, nothing but ships and water between Leon and Japan. Could they somehow get there? Of course not, but he liked the thought. He’d been there a few times on business, in his previous life.
“What are you thinking of?” Marie asked once, on a clear evening on the beach. They’d been in Oceano for two months by then.
“Japan.”
“I should’ve gone there with you,” she said. “Just once.”
“They were boring trips, objectively. Just meetings. I never saw much of the place.” He’d seen a little. He’d loved it there. He’d once taken two extra days to visit Kyoto while the cherry trees were blooming.
“Still, just to go there and see it.” An unspoken understanding: neither of them would leave this continent again.
A containership was passing in the far distance, a dark rectangle in the dusk.
“It’s not quite what I imagined for our retirement,” Leon said, “but it could be worse, couldn’t it?”
“Much worse. It was much worse, before we left the house.”
He hoped someone had done him the favor of burning that house to the ground. The scale of the catastrophe was objectively enormous—We owned a home, and then we lost it—but there was such relief in no longer having to think about the house, the vertiginous mortgage payments and constant upkeep. There were moments of true joy, actually, in this transient life. He loved sitting here on the beach with Marie. For all they’d lost, he often felt lucky to be here with her, in this life.
But they were citizens of a shadow country that in his previous life he’d only dimly perceived, a country located at the edge of an abyss. He’d been aware of the shadowland forever, of course. He’d seen its more obvious outposts: shelters fashioned from cardboard under overpasses, tents glimpsed in the bushes alongside expressways, houses with boarded-up doors but a light shining in an upstairs window. He’d always been vaguely aware of its citizens, people who’d slipped beneath the surface of society, into a territory without comfort or room for error; they hitchhiked on roads with their worldly belongings in backpacks, they collected cans on the streets of cities, they stood on the Strip in Las Vegas wearing T-shirts that said GIRLS TO YOUR ROOM IN 20 MINUTES, they were the girls in the room. He’d seen the shadow country, its outskirts and signs, he’d just never thought he’d have anything to do with it.
In the shadow country it was necessary to lie down every night with a fear so powerful that it felt to Leon like a physical presence, some malevolent beast that absorbs the light. He lay beside Marie and remembered that in this life there was no space for any kind of error or misfortune. What would happen to her if something happened to him? Marie hadn’t been well in some time. His fear was a weight on his chest in the dark.
“How’s retirement treating you?” Miranda asked. They were sitting in her office, which had previously been Leon’s boss’s office. It was larger than he remembered. Several days had gone by since she’d called him in Colorado, during which he’d left his job at the Marriott—an urgent family matter, he’d told his boss, in hopes of being rehired later—and driven the RV to Connecticut, where they were parked in the driveway of one of Marie’s college friends.
“Can’t complain,” Leon said. Miranda seemed not to know that he’d been an Alkaitis investor, although the information wasn’t hidden. There was a victim impact statement online somewhere, which he didn’t specifically regret but probably wouldn’t have written if he’d realized it was going to be available to anyone who typed his name into Google.
“No complaints at all?”
He smiled. “Did I seem ever-so-slightly overeager on the phone?”
“I didn’t sense any reluctance to give up your life of leisure and take on a consulting gig, let’s put it that way.”
“Well,” Leon said. “There’s such a thing as too much retirement, if we’re being honest here.”
“There’s a reason why I’m not planning to retire.” Miranda was flipping through a file folder. I didn’t plan to retire either, Leon didn’t say, because he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t be desperate or bitter, that if anyone asked he’d spent this last decade living in an RV because he and Marie had had enough of the hassles of home ownership and had always wanted to explore the country. Miranda passed him the file, which was labeled VINCENT SMITH. Had Miranda really been his assistant once, or was that a false memory? He vaguely remembered the era when he’d spent his life on the road and Miranda had made his travel arrangements, but it was difficult to reconcile that quiet young woman with the executive across the table, impeccable in a steel-gray suit, drinking a cup of tea that someone else had made for her.
“Take your time with the materials,” she said. “Obviously strictly confidential, but you can take that file home to read tonight. I know you’ve been gone a long time, so let me know if any questions come up. I imagine some of our procedures have changed since you left.”
Gone a long time? Yes, he thought, that’s one way of putting it. It was disorienting, coming back here after all this time. He’d spent the past hour walking unnervingly familiar corridors and shaking hands with people who had no idea how lucky they were.
He cleared his throat. “You mentioned on the phone that someone from the security office will be conducting the interviews,” he said. “What’s my role in all of this?”
“Yes, Michael Saparelli will conduct the interviews,” Miranda said. “He’s the one who talked to the captain on the phone last week and wrote up these preliminary notes for us. To be absolutely clear, I have nothing but respect for him. He’s former NYPD. It’s not that I don’t think he’ll do a good job, I just think with such a sensitive matter, these interviews should have more than one witness.”
“You’re worried about a cover-up?”
“It’s more that I’d like to remove any temptation for a cover-up.” Miranda sipped her tea. “It’s not that I suspect Saparelli of being a dishonest person, nothing like that. But companies are like nation-states. They all have their own cultures.” Leon suppressed a flicker of annoyance—Is my former administrative assistant lecturing me about corporate culture?—but on the other hand, she wasn’t wrong. “I’ve dedicated my professional life to this place,” Miranda was saying, “but if forced to point out a cultural flaw, I’d say I’ve noticed a certain reluctance to accept blame around here. In fairness, that’s probably true of most of the corporate world, but a little frustrating regardless.”
“So if whatever happened to Ms. Smith was something that could potentially have been prevented by the company…”
“Then that’s something I want to know about,” Miranda said. “Look, this is the kind of place where if I request a report into our overcapacity problems, I can pretty much guarantee I’ll get twenty pages about the economic environment, and literally not one word to suggest that maybe we could’ve managed the fleet a little differently.”
“I’ll be your eyes and ears,” he said.
“Thank you, Leon. You’re still okay with leaving tomorrow?”
“Absolutely. It’ll be a pleasure to leave this country again.” Although he was ashamed later when he remembered using that word. He read through the details of the case that evening. Vincent Smith: Thirty-seven years old, Canadian. Assistant cook on the Neptune Cumberland, a 370-meter Neopanamax-class containership on the Newark–Cape Town–Rotterdam route. She’d settled into a pattern of going to sea for nine months at a time, followed by three months off, and had no permanent address, which wasn’t at all unusual among seafarers who maintained that work schedule. She came and went between land and sea for five years, until she disappeared one night off the coast of Mauritania.
Insofar as there was a suspect in her disappearance, the suspect was Geoffrey Bell. Notes on Geoffrey Bell: From Newcastle, a name that in Leon Prevant’s mind automatically summoned the wrong continent and an entire class of vessels—the fifty-by-three-hundred-meter Newcastlemax, largest ships allowable in the port of Newcastle, Australia—but Bell’s Newcastle was the original, Newcastle upon Tyne. Son of a retired coal miner and a shop clerk, got his able seaman certificate and spent a few years with Maersk, switched companies twice before he landed at Neptune-Avramidis, where by the time he boarded the Neptune Cumberland he held the rank of third mate. His career was undistinguished and would have passed without notice, if he hadn’t been dating Vincent when she died.
Two people told the captain that they’d heard an argument in her cabin on her last night on the ship. A short time after the argument, security footage captured her movements as she left her room and traversed several corridors and a staircase to reappear outdoors on C deck, even though the crew had been told to stay inside until the weather improved. There was a blind spot on the ship, a corner of C deck with no cameras. On the security footage, she turned a corner and disappeared from sight. The same cameras recorded Geoffrey Bell’s route, thirty-five minutes later, as he walked the same corridors to the same corner of C deck and stepped into the blind spot. He was out of sight for five minutes before the cameras captured his return, but Vincent didn’t appear on security footage again, on the ship or anywhere on earth. Bell told the captain he’d gone looking for her but couldn’t find her. The captain reported that he was unconvinced by this, but there were no witnesses, no body, and no evidence. The first stop after her disappearance was Rotterdam, where Bell walked off the ship.
“It goes without saying,” Miranda had said, in their initial phone call, “but of course no police force is going to investigate this.”
The closest country to her disappearance was Mauritania, but she’d disappeared in international waters, so it wasn’t actually Mauritania’s problem. Vincent was Canadian, the captain of the ship was Australian, Geoffrey Bell was British, the rest of the crew German, Latvian, and Filipino. The ship was flagged to Panama, which meant that legally it was a floating piece of Panamanian territory, but of course Panama had neither the incentive nor the manpower to investigate a disappearance off the west coast of Africa. It is possible to disappear in the space between countries.
Leon didn’t meet Michael Saparelli until he was aboard the plane to Germany. Two minutes before the cabin doors closed, a flushed and out-of-breath man in early middle age came in with the last few straggling passengers and dropped into the seat beside him. “Security was crazy,” he said to Leon. “I don’t mean crazy as in insanely rigorous, I mean crazy as in actually insane. They were manually inspecting sandwiches.” He extended a hand. “I’m sorry. Hi. I’m Michael Saparelli.”
“Pleased to meet you. Leon Prevant.”
“You were a road-warrior type, weren’t you?”
“I was, back in the day.” I used to barely notice that I’d crossed an ocean.
“I couldn’t do it, personally, on any kind of regular basis. Me, my idea of a perfect weekend? Not leaving my house. Anyway. What do you see as your role in all this?”
But a flight attendant had appeared to take their drink orders, so there was a pause while Saparelli ordered coffee and Leon ordered ginger ale with ice.
“Just an observer, in answer to your question. You conduct the interviews, I’ll sit there and watch.”
“Right answer,” Saparelli said. “The only kind of partner I can stand is the silent kind.”
“I get that,” Leon said, as affably as possible.
Saparelli was fumbling around in his bag. He was carrying the kind of messenger-style bag that Leon associated with twentysomething men in Converse sneakers on the Brooklyn-bound subway trains, but then he realized that he’d been away from New York City for so long that the twentysomething hipsters of his memories would be middle-aged by now. They’d turned into Saparelli.
“I did some digging into Geoffrey Bell,” Saparelli said. He’d produced a notebook filled with minuscule block handwriting. “Seems like no one did a background check when he was hired.”
“Aren’t background checks standard?”
“Yeah, they’re supposed to be. Someone dropped the ball. Anyway, I got a local contact to pull arrest records, and seems there was a history of violence back in Newcastle. Nothing horribly sinister, but he had two arrests for bar fights in the year before he went to sea.”
“That seems like something we should have caught,” Leon said.
“Ideally, right? We can only hope that’s the worst we’ll find.”
They didn’t talk much after that. Leon spent the flight reading through the file again, as if he hadn’t already memorized it.
He studied the photo from Vincent Smith’s security badge. He just wasn’t sure. It seemed plausible that Vincent Alkaitis and Vincent Smith were the same person, but the glamorous young woman on Jonathan Alkaitis’s arm in old photos on the Internet bore only a passing resemblance to the unsmiling, middle-aged woman with short hair in the security photo. It was incongruous that she could have gone from being Alkaitis’s wife to being a cook on a containership, although if they were the same person, perhaps incongruity was the point. If he’d been Alkaitis’s spouse, Leon found himself thinking, he’d probably have wanted to go to sea too. He’d have wanted to leave the planet. When he’d read through the file, he turned to the magazines he’d bought in the airport, purchased partly because he found them genuinely interesting and partly because he wanted Saparelli to see him as a serious kind of person who read The Economist and Foreign Policy. You could call it a performance, or you could call it presenting yourself in the best possible light, no different from putting on a suit and combing your hair. Saparelli spent the flight typing on his phone and reading Nietzsche.
A black car met Leon and Saparelli at Bremen Airport and ferried them north under low gray skies, through the pretty red-brick districts of Bremerhaven proper to the place that everyone in the shipping industry was actually talking about when they said the name of that city: a massive terminal between the city and the sea, not quite in Germany but not quite anywhere else, one of those liminal spaces that have proliferated on this earth. When he was a younger man, Leon had spent a great deal of time in these places, and now, walking with Saparelli and their security escort toward the Neptune Cumberland, he had a strange sense of haunting a previous version of his life. He felt like an imposter here.
It was jarring to see the ship there before them, after a week of hearing and reading its name. High overhead, the cranes were doing their work, lifting shipping containers the size of rooms from the lashing bridges and the holds. The ship was painted the same dull red as all of the Neptune-Avramidis ships, sitting high in the water now that half its cargo was gone. A pair of miserable-looking deckhands met Leon and Saparelli on shore and escorted them up to the bridge.
Morale was low, the captain confirmed. He was an Australian in his sixties, deeply shaken by the incident. He shared the commonly held suspicion that Geoffrey Bell had had something to do with Vincent’s disappearance.
“Did he ever cause any trouble for you?” Saparelli asked. The three of them were at the table in the captain’s stateroom, watching the movement of cranes and containers through the windows and establishing the template for every interview that would follow: Saparelli speaking with the interviewee, while Leon took cursory notes and felt utterly extraneous.
“No, he never caused trouble, as such. But he was kind of an odd duck, you could say. A little antisocial. Not great with other people. He was decent at his job, but he mostly kept to himself. I didn’t get the sense he was well liked among his peers.”
“I see. I understand you had heavy weather, the night she disappeared.”
“Bad storm,” the captain said. “No one was supposed to be out on deck.”
Other interviews:
“I saw them holding hands on deck once,” the first officer said. “But they didn’t take shore leave together. Smith liked to go off by herself for three months. I had the impression they were sometimes a couple, sometimes not.”
“They were fairly discreet,” said the chief engineer. “I mean everyone knew they were seeing each other, because when you’re stuck on a ship everyone knows everything, but they weren’t showy about it.”
“Did you know she was an artist?” asked the other third mate, the one who wasn’t Geoffrey Bell. “I don’t know if that’s the right word. She did this video art thing that I thought was kind of cool.”
“She was competent,” the steward said, Vincent’s former boss. His name was Mendoza. “More than competent, actually. She loved her job. I liked working with her. Never complained, good at her work, got along with everybody. Maybe a little eccentric. She liked to shoot videos of nothing.”
“Nothing?” Saparelli asked, pen poised over notebook.
Mendoza nodded.
“As in, for example…”
“As in she’d literally stand there on deck filming the fucking ocean,” the steward said. “Pardon my language. Never saw anything like it in my life. I caught her doing it once, asked her what she was doing, but…”
“But?”
“She just kind of shrugged and kept doing it.” He was quiet for a moment, eyes on the floor. “I respected that, actually. She was doing a strange thing and she felt she didn’t owe me any explanation.”
“Did she ever seem at all depressed to you?” Saparelli asked. Leon had heard this question in every interview today and knew already what the answer would be. “It’s difficult to know how anyone will respond to stress, but if someone told you that she’d left the ship of her own accord, if she’d jumped, would that idea seem plausible to you, given what you observed of her temperament?”
“No, she was a happy person,” Mendoza said. “She’d work nine months, then take three months off, and when she came back she’d always have these great stories. The rest of us, we mostly just go home and hope our kids remember us, but she had no family, so she’d just travel. She’d come back, I’d ask where she’d been, and she’d been hiking in Iceland, or kayaking in Thailand, or learning how to do pottery in Italy or something. We used to joke about it. I’d say, when are you going to get married, settle down? And she’d laugh and say maybe in the next life.” A silence fell over the table. Mendoza wiped his eyes. “Did I say I liked working with her? I loved working with her. I considered her a friend. You know how rare it is to work with someone who loves their life?”
“Yeah,” Saparelli said quietly. “I do.”
Vincent’s cabin was as she’d left it. The bed was unmade. Her personal effects were minimal: some toiletries, some clothes, a laptop computer, a few books. The books mostly concerned a ship called the Columbia (Hail, Columbia; Voyages of the Columbia to the Northwest Coast; etc.). Saparelli swiftly packed her belongings into her suitcase and a duffel bag while Leon flipped through the books and shook them over the bed. Nothing fell out. Leon wasn’t really sure what he was looking for. Incriminating letters from Bell? Threatening marginalia?
“If you’ll take the duffel bag,” Saparelli said, “I’ve got the suitcase.”
Leon took the bag and they stepped out onto the upper deck. The cranes were lowering new containers onto the lashing bridges. He thought he remembered having read about the Columbia, now that he thought about it. A ship out of Boston, eighteenth or nineteenth century. He’d look it up later. It was late afternoon, and the cranes cast a complicated shadow over the deck. In memory, these last few minutes on board took on an unwarranted vividness and weight, because they were also the last few minutes before Mendoza reappeared. In all the ambient noise, the clanking and grinding of cranes and boxes and the constant vibration of the engine, Leon didn’t notice the steward until he was very close. “I’ll walk you down,” he said. They were near the top of the gangway stairs.
“No need,” Saparelli said, but there was something about the way the steward was staring at them, so Leon nodded and let Mendoza lead the way. Saparelli shot Leon an irritated look.
Mendoza spoke quietly over his shoulder as they descended. “I saw him hit a woman once.”
Saparelli visibly flinched. “Who? Bell?”
“This was a few years ago, when we were on rotation together on another ship. There was a woman on board, an engineer, she and Bell had a thing. We had a barbecue on deck one night, I heard her and Bell arguing, so I turn my back, you know, give them some privacy—”
“Wait,” Leon said, “you were all out on deck together?”
“Yeah, this was back before they banned alcohol on the ships. It used to be possible to have a drink with your colleagues after work in the evening, just like a normal adult. Anyway, I turn my back, pretend I’m interested in the horizon, and then I hear a slap.”
“But you didn’t see it,” Saparelli said.
“I know what a slap sounds like. I turn around fast, and it’s obvious he just hit her. She’s standing there holding her hand against her face, crying a little, they’re both staring at each other, like in shock or something. I’m like, what the hell just happened, what’s going on here, she looks at me and says, ‘Nothing. I’m fine.’ I say to him, ‘You just hit her?’ and she’s like, ‘No, he didn’t hit me.’ Meanwhile there’s practically a handprint on the side of her face, this red mark appearing.”
“Okay.” Saparelli exhaled. “What did Bell say?”
“Told me to mind my own business. I’m standing there, trying to figure out what to do, but if she’s insisting nothing happened, who am I to say something did? I didn’t actually see it.” Mendoza was walking down the stairs very slowly, so Leon and Saparelli were walking slowly too, struggling to hear him. “She looks at me,” Mendoza said over his shoulder, “she looks at me and says, ‘No one hits me. You think I’d let someone hit me?’ And I’m a little exasperated, I mean, it’s so goddamn obvious, but what can I say? So I leave them and walk away a little, and I hear her say to him, ‘You do that again, I’ll throw you overboard.’ ”
“Then what. What did he say.” Saparelli’s voice was flat.
“He says, ‘Not if I throw you overboard first.’ ”
They’d reached the bottom of the stairs. Leon’s heart was beating too hard, and Saparelli looked like he wanted to be sick. Leon was imagining the report: Upon investigation, it emerged that Geoffrey Bell previously threatened to throw a woman off a ship.
“When was this?” Saparelli asked.
“Eight years ago? Nine?”
“No similar incidents since then?”
“No,” Mendoza said, “but you don’t think that one incident is kind of bad?”
“Did you report the incident to the captain?”
“I talked to him the next day. He told me he’d keep an eye on Bell, but if the woman’s insisting nothing happened, then what can we do? It’s hearsay, my word against theirs, except I didn’t even see it.”
“Right,” Saparelli said. “Where’s that woman now? The engineer he was dating?”
“Raising her kids in the Philippines, last I heard.” Mendoza looked away. “Keep my name out of it, will you? When you put this in your report.”
“I can do that,” Saparelli said, “but why didn’t you tell me any of this in our interview earlier?”
“Because I liked Geoffrey. This thing I’m telling you about, it doesn’t mean Geoffrey had anything to do with whatever happened to Vincent. But after I talked to you earlier, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Thought you should know.”
“Thank you. I appreciate you telling me all of this.”
Leon and Saparelli didn’t look at one another in the car, but both wrote in their notebooks. Leon was recounting the conversation, as close to word-for-word as he could remember, and he assumed Saparelli was doing the same. At the hotel by the airport, they checked in and Saparelli took Vincent’s duffel bag from him. “Good night,” Saparelli said, when they had their room keys. It was the first thing he’d said to Leon since the port.
“Good night.” Instead of going upstairs, Leon went to the bar for a while, because he was in his seventies and had no money for travel and this was probably the last time in his life he was going to have a drink at a bar in Germany, but the flattening influence of the nearby airport meant that everyone was conversing in English. He wished Marie were here. He finished his drink and went upstairs, ironed his other button-down shirt, and watched TV for a while. Trying to imagine what that last conversation would look like in the report: An interviewee reported that Geoffrey Bell once threatened to throw a female colleague overboard. He and this colleague were involved in a romantic relationship at the time. The interviewee reported the incident to the captain. However, no mention of the incident appears in Bell’s personnel file, which leads to the conclusion that the company took no action. He lay awake all night, rose at four-thirty a.m., and drank four cups of coffee before he went downstairs to meet Saparelli and catch their car to the airport.
“Is that the same suit you were wearing yesterday?” Saparelli asked. They were sitting together in the business-class cabin, an hour into the flight. Saparelli looked as terrible as Leon felt. Leon wanted to ask if Saparelli had been awake all night too, but it seemed too intrusive.
“Short trip,” Leon said. “Didn’t think I needed two.”
“You know what I was thinking about?” Saparelli was staring straight ahead. “The way a bad message casts a shadow on the messenger.”
“Is that Nietzsche?”
“No, that’s me. May I please see your notebook?”
“My notebook?”
“The one you were using in the car yesterday,” Saparelli said.
Leon extracted it from the front pocket of his bag and watched as Saparelli flipped to the last page of notes, read it over quickly, then tore off the last two pages and folded them into an inside pocket of his jacket.
“What are you doing?”
“We actually have similar interests,” Saparelli said. “I was thinking about this last night.”
“How are your interests served by taking pages from my notebook?” Leon felt that he should be furious about the notebook, but he was so tired that he felt only a dull sense of dread.
“I know you’re not retired,” Saparelli said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I know you live in campgrounds and work in fulfillment warehouses at Christmas. I know you spent last summer working at an amusement park called Adventureland. Where was that again, Indiana?” He was staring straight ahead.
Leon was quiet for a moment. “Iowa,” he said softly.
“And the summer before, I know you and your wife were campground hosts in Northern California. I know you were recently employed doing menial labor at a Marriott in Colorado. I know that that’s your only suit.” He turned to look at Leon. “I’m not saying it’s your fault. I read up on the Ponzi scheme when I came across your victim impact statement. Obviously a lot of smart people got blindsided there.”
“Then what are you saying, exactly? I’m not sure what my employment history has to do with—”
“I’m saying that you want more consulting contracts, and I want to be able to walk down the hall without everyone thinking Oh, there’s that guy who wrote that awful report that leaked to the press and got people fired. You want that too, by the way. You want to walk down the halls and have people not look at you like you’re some kind of avatar of doom or something.”
“You’re thinking of not including that last conversation in your report.”
“Anything outside of the official interviews, well, that’s basically just a question of memory, isn’t it? I recorded the interviews, but nothing outside of that.”
Leon rubbed his forehead.
“We may or may not have heard an unsettling anecdote,” Saparelli said softly. “An unsettling anecdote that proves nothing. The facts of the case are unchanged. The fact remains that we’ll never know what happened, because no one else was there.”
“Geoffrey Bell was there.”
“Geoffrey Bell disappeared at Rotterdam. Geoffrey Bell is off the grid.”
“It doesn’t seem suspicious to you that he walked off the ship at the first stop after she…?”
“I have no way of knowing why he walked off the ship, Leon, and we both know no police force is ever going to interview him about it. Look at it this way,” Saparelli said. “No matter what I write in my report, Vincent Smith will still be dead. There would be no positive outcome whatsoever in including that last conversation. There would only be harm.”
“But you want an accurate report.” Everything was wrong. The sunlight through the cabin windows was too bright, the air too warm, Saparelli too close. Leon’s eyes hurt from sleep deprivation.
“Let’s say, theoretically, the report includes every conversation we had on that ship. Will that bring Jonathan Alkaitis’s girlfriend back?”
Leon looked at him. Upon inspection, he was certain Saparelli hadn’t slept either. The man’s eyes were bloodshot.
“I just wasn’t sure,” Leon said. “I wasn’t sure if she was the same woman.”
“How many women named Vincent do you know? Look, I was a detective,” Saparelli said. “I look into everyone and everything, just as a matter of professional habit. Seems like a bit of a conflict of interest, doesn’t it? Your accepting this consulting contract, involving the former companion of a man who stole all your money? Does Miranda know?”
“I’ve never hidden anything,” Leon said. “It’s all publicly available—”
“Publicly available isn’t the same thing as recusing yourself. You didn’t tell her, did you?”
“She could have looked. If she just typed my name into Google—”
“Why would she? You’re her trusted former colleague. When was the last time you Googled someone you trusted?”
“Gentlemen,” the flight attendant said, “may I offer you something to drink?”
“Coffee,” Leon said. “With milk and sugar, please.”
“Same for me, thank you.” Saparelli leaned back in his seat. “If you think about it,” he said, “you’re going to realize that I’m right.”
Leon had the window seat; he gazed out at the morning Atlantic, vastly upset. There were no ships below, but he saw another plane in the far distance. The coffee arrived. A long time passed before Saparelli spoke again.
“I’m going to tell Miranda that you were extremely helpful to me and I appreciated having you along, and I’ll recommend that we bring you on board for future consulting gigs.”
“Thank you,” Leon said. It was that easy.
After Germany, Leon began to see the shadow country again, for the first time in a while. For the past few years he hadn’t noticed it; after the initial shock of the first few months on the road it had faded into the background of his thoughts. But a few days after he returned from Germany, at a truck stop in Georgia, Leon happened to be looking out the window when a girl climbed down from an eighteen-wheeler nearby. She was dressed casually, jeans and a T-shirt, but he realized what she was at the same moment he realized that she was very young. She disappeared between trucks.
At a gas station that night, he saw another girl climb down from another truck, a hitchhiker this time, wearing a backpack. How old? Seventeen. Sixteen. A young-looking twenty. He couldn’t say. Dark circles under her eyes in the harsh blue light. She saw him watching her and fixed him with a blankly appraising look. You stare at the road and the road stares back. Leon knew that he and Marie were luckier than most citizens of the shadow country, they had each other and the RV and enough money (just barely) to survive, but the essential marker of citizenship was the same for everyone: they’d all been cut loose, they’d slipped beneath the surface of the United States, they were adrift.
You spend your whole life moving between countries, or so it seemed to Leon. Since the collapse of the Ponzi, he’d often found himself thinking about an essay he’d read once by a man with a terminal illness, a man who wrote with gratitude of the EMTs who’d arrived when he woke one morning and found himself too sick to function, kind men who’d ferried him gently into the country of the sick. The idea had stayed with Leon, and after Germany, in the long quiet hours behind the wheel of the RV, he’d begun formulating a philosophy of layered and overlapping countries. If a medical misfortune sends you into the country of the sick—which has its own rituals, customs, traditions, and rules—then an Alkaitis sends you into an unstable territory, the country of the cheated. Things that were impossible after Alkaitis: retirement, a home without wheels, trusting other people besides Marie. Things that were impossible after visiting Germany with Michael Saparelli: any certainty of his own morality, maintaining his previous belief that he was essentially incorruptible, calling Miranda to ask about other consulting opportunities.
A week after he returned from Germany there was an email from Saparelli, with a link to a password-protected video. The email read, “We examined Ms. Smith’s laptop and reviewed hours of video. Several videos like this one, some shot in very bad weather. Thought you should see it; supports our conclusion that her death was most likely accidental. Remember weather was bad the night she disappeared.”
It was a short clip, five minutes or so, shot from a rear deck, at night. Vincent had recorded several minutes of ocean, the wake of the ship illuminated in moonlight, and then the camera angle changed: she stepped forward and peered over the railing, which on this particular deck wasn’t especially high. She leaned over alarmingly, so that the shot was straight down at the ocean below.
Leon played it twice more, then closed his laptop. He understood that Saparelli was doing him a kindness, sending him evidence to assuage Leon’s conscience and support the narrative of the report. Leon and Marie were in Washington State that night, in a private campground that was almost deserted in the off-season. Night was falling outside, the branches of fir and cedar silhouetted black against the fading sky. The video proved nothing except a certain recklessness, but the video also made it easy to fill in a narrative: rough seas, high winds, a distracted woman on a slippery deck, a low railing. Perhaps Bell had walked off the ship because he’d killed his girlfriend, but on the other hand, perhaps he’d walked off the ship because the woman he loved had disappeared.
“This is such a beautiful place,” Marie said one night, a year after Leon returned from Germany. There had been no more consulting contracts. They’d just spent the pre-Christmas season at a warehouse in Arizona, ten-hour days of walking quickly over concrete floors with a handheld scanner, bending and lifting, and had retreated to a campground outside Santa Fe to recuperate. Difficult work, and it got harder every year, but they’d made enough money to get the engine repaired and add to their emergency fund, and now they were resting in the high desert. Across the road was a tiny graveyard of wood and concrete crosses, a white picket fence sagging around the perimeter.
“We could do a lot worse,” Leon said. They were sitting at a picnic bench by the RV, looking at a view of distant mountains turning violet in the sunset, and he felt at that moment that all was well with the world.
“We move through this world so lightly,” said Marie, misquoting one of Leon’s favorite songs, and for a warm moment he thought she meant it in a general sense, all of humanity, all these individual lives passing over the surface of the world with little trace, but then he understood that she meant the two of them specifically, Leon and Marie, and he couldn’t blame his chill on the encroaching night. In their late thirties they’d decided not to have children, which at the time seemed like a sensible way to avoid unnecessary complications and heartbreak, and this decision had lent their lives a certain ease that he’d always appreciated, a sense of blissful unencumbrance. But an encumbrance might also be thought of as an anchor, and what he’d found himself thinking lately was that he wouldn’t mind being more anchored to this earth.
They sat watching the sunset fading out behind the mountains, they stayed out well after dark until the sky blazed with stars, but they had to go in eventually and so they rose stiffly and returned to the warmth of the RV, performed the various tasks of getting ready for bed, kissed one another good night. Marie turned out the light and was asleep within minutes. Leon lay awake in the dark.