A few fish splashed in the dark lagoon as they paddled southward and an occasional bird ruffled its feathers amid the reeds. It took an hour and a half to reach the extreme southern end of the bay and it looked as unremarkable as all the rest, a wall of reeds capable of surviving in the brackish water. Sloane played the beam of her light along the shoreline as they searched the area. After twenty minutes in which her anxiety mounted she spied a small cut in the tall grasses where a stream trickled into the lagoon.
She pointed silently and she and Tony maneuvered their little inflatable into the gap.
The reeds grew over their heads and joined above them, forming a living tunnel that blocked out the silvery moon. The current from the small stream was negligible and they made good progress, cutting a hundred yards into the wetlands before coming to a little pond inside the reed forest with a small island at its center that would just barely stay free of water when the tide was at its highest. The light from the moon revealed a crude hut that had been fashioned from driftwood and bits of packing crates. The door was a blanket nailed to the lintel and just outside it sat a fire pit, embers still smoldering beneath a layer of ash. Off to the right was a fish-drying rack, rusty barrels for storing fresh water, and a wooden-hulled skiff tied to a stump with a single line. Its sail was furled tightly to the mast and the rudder and centerboards were lashed inside. The flat-bottomed boat wasn’t exactly ideal for fishing the open waters, leading Sloane to consider that Luka had been right about Papa Heinrick sticking close to shore.
The camp was rough but a seasoned outdoorsman could live here indefinitely.
“What do we do?” Tony whispered when they beached the inflatable.
Sloane approached the door, confirmed the sound she heard was snoring of a single person and not the wind or surf and backed off again. She settled her backside onto the sandy beach, pulled her laptop from her bag, and started typing softly, her lower lip lightly clenched between her teeth.
“Sloane?” Tony whispered a bit more stridently.
“We wait until he wakes up,” she replied.
“But what if this isn’t Papa Heinrick’s? What if someone else lives here? Pirates or bandits or something?”
“I told you I don’t believe in luck. I also don’t believe in coincidences. Us finding a cabin exactly where we were told Papa Heinrick lives means that we’ve found Papa Heinrick. I’d rather talk to him in the morning than scare the old codger in the middle of the night.”
The gentle snoring from inside the cabin didn’t change in timbre or volume but suddenly a wizened African wearing nothing but an athletic supporter pushed aside the blanket. He stood on bandy legs and was so thin that every rib showed across his chest and there were hollows above and below his collarbones. He had a broad flat nose and large jug ears pierced through with some sort of horn earrings.
His hair was pure white and his eyes shone yellow.
He continued to snore and for a moment Sloane thought he might be sleepwalking, but then he scratched at himself rudely and spat into the fire pit.
Sloane got to her feet. She was easily a foot taller than the Namibian and she realized he must have some Bushmen blood to possess such a tiny stature. “Papa Heinrick, we have come a great distance to meet with you. The other fishermen at Walvis Bay say you are the wisest among them.”
Sloane had been ensured that Papa Heinrick spoke English, but the gnomelike man gave no recognition that he understood. She had to take the fact that he’d stopped pretending to snore as an encouraging sign and plowed on. “We want to ask you some questions about where you fish, places that are difficult, where you lose lines and nets. Would you answer such questions?”
Heinrick turned back into his cabin, letting the blanket flow back to drape over the entranceway. He emerged a moment later with a padded blanket over his shoulders. It was made of loosely sewn sheets and feathers escaped the seams with each movement. He went a short distance off and urinated loudly into the water, scratching his belly languidly.
He squatted down next to his fire pit, his back to Tony and Sloane. The bones of his spine looked like a string of black pearls. He blew the coals into life, feeding scraps of driftwood into the embers until he had produced a small flame. “There are many difficult places to fish these waters,” he said in a surprisingly deep voice for such a small frame. He hadn’t turned. “I have fished them all and dare any man to follow where Papa Heinrick goes. I have lost enough fishing line to stretch from here to Cape Cross Bay.” That was more than eighty miles north. “And back,” he added as if challenging them to deny his boast. “I have lost enough net to cover all the Namib Desert. I have battled seas that make other men wail and turn their bowels to water. And I have caught fish bigger than the biggest ship and I have seen things that would drive other men mad.”
He turned finally. In the wavering light of his fire his eyes had taken on a demonic cast. He smiled, revealing three teeth that meshed together like gears. His smile turned into a chuckle, then a barking laugh that was cut short by a coughing fit. When he’d recovered he spat into the fire again. “Papa Heinrick does not reveal his secrets. I know things you wish to know, but you will never know them because I wish you not to know them.”
“Why would you wish that?” Sloane said after she analyzed his grammar in her head to make sure she’d heard right. She squatted next to him.
“Papa Heinrick is the greatest fisherman that has ever lived. Why would I tell you and make you my rival?”
“I do not want to fish these waters. I am looking for a ship that sank a long time ago. My friend and I”—she waved at Tony, who’d stepped back after getting a whiff of Papa Heinrick’s body—“want to find this ship because…” Sloane paused and made up a story. “Because we were hired to recover something from it belonging to a rich man who lost it when it sank. We think that you can help us.”
“Does this rich man pay?” Heinrick asked slyly.
“A little, yes.”
The fisherman waved a hand like a bat fluttering through the night. “Papa Heinrick has no use for money.”
“What would it take for you to help us?” Tony asked suddenly. Sloane had a bad feeling about what the old man might want and shot him a scathing look.
“I will not help you,” Heinrick said to Tony and looked at Sloane. “You I will help. You are a woman and do not fish so you will never be my rival.”
Sloane wasn’t about to tell him that she’d grown up in Fort Lauderdale and had spent her summers crewing her father’s charter fishing boat and then took it out herself when he was struck by Alzheimer’s at age fifty. “Thank you, Papa Heinrick.” Sloane pulled a large map from her pack and spread it next to the fire. Tony edged in and added illumination with his flashlight. The map was of Namibia’s coastline.
There were dozens of stars penciled in just off shore. Most were clustered around Walvis Bay but others were scattered up and down the coast.
“We have spoken to many other fishermen, asking them where they lose lines and nets. We think one of these places might be a sunken ship. Can you look at this and tell me if there are any they missed?”
Heinrick studied the chart intently, his eyes darting from one spot to the next, his fingers tracing the outline of the coast. He finally looked up at Sloane. She could see there was a kernel of madness behind them, as if his reality wasn’t quite her own. “I do not know this place.”
Confused Sloane placed her finger on Walvis Bay and said its name. Then she drew it southward and said, “Here we are at Sandwich Bay. She tapped her finger toward the top of the map. “And here’s Cape Cross.”
“I do not understand. Cape Cross is there.” Heinrick pointed emphatically northward. “It can not be here.” He touched the spot on the map.
Sloane realized that despite a lifetime at sea, Papa Heinrick had never seen a nautical chart. She groaned inwardly.
For the next two hours Sloane laboriously talked the old fisherman through the places where he had lost nets or had lines tangled. Because the desert continued under the ocean for hundreds of miles from the coast, anything that tore lines or ripped nets was either a rock outcropping or a shipwreck. Papa Heinrick would tell her that two days sailing southwest from Sandwich Bay was such a place, or five days northwest was another. Each one he described corresponded with the map she’d made over the past days talking to the commercial fishermen and day excursion captains at Walvis.
But there was one spot that only Papa Heinrick mentioned. It was nearly seventy miles out by Sloane’s
