The Catch: A Novel by Taylor Stevens Page A

between the long spells of silence Sami pointed out markings on shore and narrated a travelogue that tied in with his own history, and after he’d interrupted her thoughts for the fifth or sixth time, Munroe said, “How many languages do you speak?”
    “I have five.”
    “Perfectly?”
    “Three perfect,” he said. “I have Swahili, my mother Kikuyu, my father Kalenjin all perfect. And I have English, Arab, and some words here there for more.”
    “Good,” she said, and scooted slightly on the bench. Patted it to indicate he should move in closer. “Come talk to me in Swahili.”
    “Then you cannot understand,” he said.
    “You can interpret,” she said. “Tell me the story twice.”
    He smiled again, his cocky smile, and she liked him all the more for it. He sat next to her and throughout the hours recounted one tall tale after the next, first in Swahili and then with equal animation and flourish in English, each story growing longer, larger, and more animated as his audience prompted and questioned. Through snippets and flashes, between water and food and the occasional reapplication of sunscreen she’d picked up in a tourist shop in Lamu, Munroelearned his family’s history, of his many siblings and half siblings, his education—or lack thereof—and his adventures on the water as a fisherman that had started when he was ten.
    By the time they passed Malindi in the early-afternoon hours, Munroe could feel the syntax, the grammar, the resonance of patterns of the country’s lingua franca beginning to form, could feel the tension relaxing now that the key to the aural lock had been handed over, and soon enough, over time and of its own accord, her ability to speak would grow and she would rapidly become more and more fluent.
    This same poisonous gift—this savantlike ability to visualize the way the words configured into shapes—had defined her life and turned her into what she was now. Without language, there would have been no gunrunning, without the gunrunning no nights in the jungle fighting off the worst of human predators, without the nights, no instinct of self-preservation and the speed and the need to kill that had marked her every moment, waking and sleeping, since.
    T HEY REACHED THE outer stretches of Mombasa in the late afternoon. Beach houses and large hotels spread out between palm trees and lush manicured greenery, and the rate of sea traffic seemed fast-paced and hectic after the idyllic slow quiet of Lamu.
    The beach shallows sloped out far into the ocean, and jetties and docks were plentiful. Munroe chose one at random, tied off, and then utilized the easier and less attention-garnering option of sending Sami on ahead to discover whom the pier belonged to and if space could be rented. In his absence, she knelt to untape the captain from the pillow, was overwhelmed by the strength of his stench, and held back the gag reflex.
    Sour body odor and perpetual decay were part of the pungent bouquet that made up the sub-Saharan landscape, but the body fluid and days without bathing, amplified by the humidity and the hours in the sun, had turned his stink into something else altogether. With only one IV pack left she needed to get him to a hospital soon, and there was no way to take him into a city like this.
    Munroe emptied a plastic container, dipped it over the side, and dumped the water over the captain, and when he didn’t react, she did it again and again until he was thoroughly soaked and the runoff took with it the harshest of the smell.
    Sami returned to the pier with a local watchman, an
askari
as Sami called him, a man Munroe pegged as in his early fifties, who wore a worn-out button-down shirt, pants two sizes too large, and shoes made from tire rubber, and carried a handmade baton as a symbol of authority. The
askari
negotiated with Munroe for the price of berthing, money that would go directly into his own pockets—or more likely a beer bottle—but as long as it kept the boat