Page 42 of The One Day You Were My Husband
“Rubbing it won’t help,” I said.
He laughed weakly. “Yes, Doctor Carrie.” He sat down next to me. “What I probably need to do is take a rest.”
“Have you had much time off since you flew out?”
He shook his head. “I can only dive for two hours at a time, but there’s been a lot of other stuff. I haven’t stopped at all.”
I squeezed his leg. “Perhaps we should just stay in.”
“Maybe. But I want to go out too. Shall we?”
I started laughing. “Oh, for God’s sake. Fine. Yes. We’ll go out.”
And so off we went, into the boiling evening.
—
I followed him down a bustling street where sex workers shared the pavement with food stalls and vendors of fake designer belts. We triedand failed to find a bar with space in the window for people watching, and then, because the evening wasn’t really taking shape, walked around Nana Plaza, where music pounded and girls danced on eight-inch heels, looking confusingly carefree and happy. Those not performing hung in groups, laughing and cackling, seemingly without a care in the world. From all directions, men watched.
“Why are we here?” I asked eventually. Johan had barely said a word since we’d got off the Skytrain, but he kept scanning around, as if he was waiting for someone—or being followed. There were probably just as many tourists as there would have been at the night market, but here they were mostly male and mostly disgusting. I could not understand why he’d wanted to come, and I told him as much. “I might be twenty-seven, but I’m embarrassingly poorly traveled,” I said. “Really, Johan, I’m fine with the beaten path. What’s going on?”
For what seemed like a long time he looked straight at me, unsmiling. Then his eyes slid off left, as if he was trying to find the right words.
I waited, frightened now.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “There has been something going on. You’re right.”
“What?”
He sighed. “So, our fixer in Myanmar called when I—”
“Hang on. What’s a fixer?”
“Oh, like a local person who sorts everything out for you when you’re doing a job in a foreign country. This guy does a lot of work with news crews, aid agencies, all sorts.”
“OK.”
“Anyway. He called last night.” He paused. “I don’t fully understand it. But it seems he bribed someone to get our diving permits. It’s standard practice, apparently; he has to do it all the time because otherwise they take months to go through and a lot of the applications just get ‘lost.’ ”
“Right…?”
“But the official he bribed has just been arrested for something. I don’t know what. But I imagine it’s a lot bigger than getting our diving permits through more quickly than usual.”
“OK…”
“And he—our fixer, I mean—he’s worried. He said the guy who’s been arrested has been throwing out names left, right, and center of people who’ve bribed him, accusing them of far more serious bribes and frauds than they actually committed.”
“Is your fixer in trouble? Are you?”
“I’d have thought that a bunch of geeky archaeological divers are of zero interest to the authorities. But I don’t know. He’s going to email an update, hopefully tonight.”
A Britney Spears track came pounding on in the bar behind Johan. The lights changed to blue and a bunch of dancers started a routine for the rash of men dotted around on bar stools. Johan didn’t seem to notice. He was staring blankly at the busy street behind me.
“You seem worried,” I said. I reached forward and held a hand on his cheek for a moment.
“I am, a bit. He just sounded…really weird. He basically said I had to ‘lie low’ while he got on top of this. Like, not hang out in the obvious places.”
“You mean, he thinks someone could be looking for you? The police?”
