The Old Enemy by Henry Porter

Author:Henry Porter [Porter, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

The Sargasso Sea

Luka drove Anastasia and Naji across the Bulgarian border to Sofia, where they took a plane to Warsaw then to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and just missed a connecting flight to Tallinn. At Naji’s insistence, they kept their distance during the day, but now faced a night in Vilnius airport hotel together before catching the early flight the next day. He had barely spoken to her in the preceding twenty hours and showed no sign of doing so now. When he wasn’t looking into the distance, he had his head in his phone and sat with his legs crossed, one foot jigging. He’d removed himself in the way he did as a boy in the camp on Lesbos where she first came across him. When she’d asked him about his parents, or pointed out the impracticality of his plan to walk across Europe to Germany, he simply shut down.

It was late and the hotel restaurant was closed. She insisted that he needed to eat and went to the bar, where the barman assembled a scratch meal of starters, breads, smoked eel and salmon, which Naji delighted in. She wasn’t going to ask him anything, but as she handed him the Diet Coke she’d brought with her glass of wine from the bar, she said, ‘I want you to know something, Naj. Me and Samson, we think you’re the best. We love you like family. You’re very, very special to us. You know that, don’t you?’

He looked up, tugged the ring pull and grinned awkwardly.

‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘I know how you feel. I just wanted to make sure that you knew we felt the same way.’ She smiled. ‘In my line of work, I realise life would be a lot easier for everyone if we took our courage in both hands and said the things that we all need to say but don’t know how.’

He nodded. ‘It is the same for me, Anastasia. Of course.’ Then the foot started jigging again and he took rapid sips of Coke. ‘I like eels. They come from the Sargasso Sea, which spins like a black hole, though it isn’t like a black hole because nothing disappears there except eels. That’s where they go to mate and die. Did you know that?’

‘I did. I know two other things about the Sargasso Sea,’ she said. ‘It has very clear water and it spins clockwise.’

‘Not if you are an eel. If you’re an eel, it spins counter-clockwise.’ He caught her puzzled expression and shook his head in exasperation. He took a piece of paper from his backpack and drew a clockwise arrow. ‘Hold the paper above your head against the light. Now you are the eel.’

‘Right, it’s counter-clockwise,’ she said. ‘I knew that!’

He shook his head. ‘You did not.’

She smiled. ‘How do you know about eels?’

‘Ifkar catches eels. He tells me about them. We eat them together. We like to go to catch fish together. It is the activity that I like best in my life to go fishing with my friend and Moon.

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