“Let us be the judge of that.”
I tell him the story of two teenage girls who met at school and became best friends. Soul mates. Later, at university, one of them slept with the other’s father. He seduced her. She allowed herself to be seduced. The friendship was over.
I don’t mention names, but why would I tell them such a personal story?
Seamlessly, I begin talking about a second pair of teenage girls, who met in a city of widows and orphans. People traffickers smuggled them out of Afghanistan as far as Amsterdam. They were told that they owed a debt for their escape. Either they became prostitutes or carried a baby for a childless couple. Virgins were implanted with embryos in a ritualized form of medical rape. They were the perfect incubators. Factories. Couriers.
Even as I tell this story, a sense of alarm dries my throat. Why have I told de Souza such personal stories? For all I know he is involved. He could be the ringleader. I don’t have time to consider the implications. I don’t know if I care. I have come too far to back out.
There is a moment of silence when I finish. De Souza leans forward and takes a chocolate from a platter, rolling it over his tongue before chewing it slowly.
“It is a good story. Friendship is a difficult thing to define. Oscar here is my oldest friend. How would you define friendship, Oscar?”
Oscar grunts slightly, as though the answer is obvious. “Friendship is about choice and chemistry. It cannot be defined.”
“But surely there is something more to it than that.”
“It is a willingness to overlook faults and to accept them. I would let a friend hurt me without striking back,” he says, smiling, “but only once.”
De Souza laughs. “Bravo, Oscar, I can always rely on you to distill an argument down to its purest form. What do you think, Dayel?”
The Indian rocks his head from side to side, proud that he has been asked to speak next.
“Friendship is different for each person and it changes throughout our lives. At age six it is about holding hands with your best friend. At sixteen it is about the adventure ahead. At sixty it is about reminiscing.” He holds up a finger. “You cannot define it with any one word, although honesty is perhaps the closest word—”
“No, not honesty,” Farhad interrupts. “On the contrary, we often have to protect our friends from what we truly think. It is like an unspoken agreement. We ignore each other’s faults and keep our confidences. Friendship isn’t about being honest. The truth is too sharp a weapon to wield around someone we trust and respect. Friendship is about self-awareness. We see ourselves through the eyes of our friends. They are like a mirror that allows us to judge how we are traveling.”
De Souza clears his throat now. I wonder if he is aware of the awe he inspires in others. I suspect he is too intelligent and too human to do otherwise.
“Friendship cannot be defined,” he says sternly. “The moment we begin to give reasons for being friends with someone we begin to undermine the magic of the relationship. Nobody wants to know that they are loved for their money or their generosity or their beauty or their wit. Choose one motive and it allows a person to say, ‘Is that the
The others laugh. De Souza joins in with them. This is a performance.
He continues: “Trying to explain why we form particular friendships is like trying to tell someone why we like a certain kind of music or a particular food. We just do.”
He focuses on me now. “Your friend’s name is Cate Beaumont.”
“Were you ever jealous of her?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Friends can be jealous of each other. Oscar, here, is envious of my position and my wealth.”
“Not at all, my friend,” he beseeches.
De Souza smiles knowingly. “Did you envy Cate Beaumont’s beauty or her success?”
“Sometimes.”
“You wished she had less and you had more.”
“Yes.”
“That is natural. Friendships can be ambiguous and contradictory.”
“She is dead now,” I add, although I sense he knows this already.
“She paid money for a baby. A criminal act,” he states piously.
“Yes.”
“Are you trying to protect her?”
“I’m trying to rescue the surrogate mother and the babies.”
“Perhaps you want a baby for yourself?”
My denial is too strident. I make it worse. “I have never…I don’t…”
He reaches into a small pouch tied to the belt of his tunic. “Do you think I am a criminal, Miss Barba?”
“I don’t know enough—”
“Give me your opinion.”
I pause. The faces in the circle watch with a mixture of amusement and fascination.
“It’s not up to me to say,” I stammer.
Silence. Perspiration leaks into the hollow of my back, weaving between the bumps of my vertebrae.
De Souza is waiting. He leans close, his face only inches from mine. His bottom teeth are brittle and jagged, yellowing like faded newsprint. It is not such a perfect face after all.
“You can offer me nothing,” he says dismissively.
I can feel the situation slipping away from me. He is not going to help me.
The anger fermenting inside me, fueled by hostile thoughts and by images of Zala, suddenly finds an escape valve. Words tumble out. “I think you’re a criminal and a misogynist but you’re not an evil man. You don’t exploit children or sell babies to the highest bidder.” I point to Sunday’s wife who has come to collect our plates. “You would not ask this woman, the wife of a friend, to give up one of her children or force her to have another woman’s baby. You support asylum seekers and illegal immigrants; you give them jobs and find them homes. They respect and admire you. We can stop this trade. I can stop it. Help me.”
Sunday’s wife is embarrassed at having been singled out. She continues collecting the plates, eager to get away. The tension in the room is amplified by the stillness. Every man’s eyes are upon me. Oscar makes a choking noise. He would slit my throat in a heartbeat.
De Souza stands abruptly. The meeting is finished. Oscar takes a step toward me. De Souza signals for him to stop. Alone, he walks me to the front door and takes my hand. Pressed between his fingers is a small scrap of paper.
The door closes. I do not look at the message. It’s too dark to read it. The taxi is waiting. I slide into the backseat and lean against Ruiz as I close the car door. Hokke tells the driver to go.
The note is rolled into a tube, wedged between my thumb and forefinger. My hands are shaking as I unroll it and hold it up to the inside light.
Five words. Handwritten. “She leaves tonight from Rotterdam.”
13
Our taxi driver takes an entry ramp onto a motorway.
“How far is it?”
“Seventy-five kilometers.”
“What about the port?”
“Longer.”
I look at my watch. It’s 8:00 p.m.
“The Port of Rotterdam is forty kilometers long,” says Hokke. “There are tens of thousands of containers, hundreds of ships. How are you going to find her?”
