The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories (30 page)

The
Tang Dynasty
was a themed cruise ship that did the Shanghai–Hong Kong–Macau route twice a week. The bulbous hull was more or less hull-like, though it was entwined with fiberglass dragons; but the superstructure looked like a series of palaces from the Forbidden City, each with the upturned eaves common in China and with the ridgepoles ornamented with the "fish tail" standard in Tang Dynasty architecture—a protection against fire, I was told, as in the event of a blaze the tail was supposed to slap the water and drown the conflagration. The buildings were covered with ornament, slathered with gold and vermilion, crowned with phoenixes, twined with dragons, fronted with lions.

To say nothing of the audioanimatronic unicorns.

The interior carried on the theme. The staterooms, swathed with silks and embroidery, gave every impression of being rooms of state in a thousand-year-old palace. At any time of the day, passengers could dine at the Peaches of Heaven Buffet, have a reading from any one of four fortune-tellers (Taoist, Buddhist, Animist, and an alcoholic Gypsy imported from Romania), get a pedicure at the Empress Wu Pavilion of Beauty, light incense at the Temple of Tin Hau, Goddess of the Sea, or defy the odds in the Lucky Boy Casino (international waters and Macau SAR only).

The crew were dressed in Tang Dynasty costumes, with the captain garbed as the Emperor, in yellow robes covered with the five-toed dragons reserved for the Son of Heaven. Those of us who played in the lounges were not required to dress as Chinese entertainers, except of course unless they
were
Chinese entertainers.

The water ballet guys favored Speedos whether they were in the water or not, and spent a lot of time in the ship's gym, pumping iron and admiring themselves in the mirrors. The troupe's three women kept to themselves except when they went for a smoke on the fantail. I and my band, when performing, abandoned the contemporary look we'd adopted in Europe and did so in our traditional alpaca-wool ponchos.

Our first performance, as the
Tang Dynasty
sped south through the night toward Hong Kong, was received fairly well, especially considering that we performed in a language that no one else on the ship actually spoke, and that the audience had come to see the Hopping Vampires anyway.

All but one. Right in the front row, where I could scarcely miss him, was a man in a red poncho and a derby hat. He spent the entire concert grinning from ear to ear and bobbing his head in time with my nephew Esteban's electric bass. I could have understood this behavior if the head under the derby had been from the Andean highlands, but the face that grinned at me so blindingly was plump and bespectacled and Asian.

The man in the poncho gave us a standing ovation and generated enough enthusiasm in the audience to enable us to perform a second encore. Afterwards, he approached.

"Mucho fantastico!" he said, in what was probably supposed to be Spanish. "Muy bien!"

"Thanks," I said.

"I'm a huge fan," he said, dropping into something like English. "That was a terrific rendition of 'Urupampa,' by the way."

"I noticed you were singing along."

I soon understood that he was a Japanese businessman named Tobe Oharu, and that he belonged to a club devoted to Andean folk music. He and a group of fellow enthusiasts met weekly at a bar dressed in ponchos and derbies, listened to recordings, and studied Spanish from books.

He was so enthusiastic that I never had the heart to tell him that in our culture it's the women who wear the derby hats, whereas the men wear knit caps, or in my case a fedora.

"I had no idea you were performing here till I looked on the
Tang Dynasty
website the night before I left!" he said. "My friends are going to be so jealous!"

I tried this story on for size and decided that the odds were that it was too bizarre not to be true. Besides, I knew that Japanese hobbyists were very particular about wearing the right uniform, dressing up for instance as cowboys while listening to country and western.

"How did you happen to become a fan of Andean music?" I asked.

"Pure accident. I was on a business trip to Brussels, and I heard a group playing at the central station. I fell in love with the music at once! How could I help it, when it was Fernando Catacachi I heard on the
kena
."

Since Fernando happened to be my uncle, I agreed at once that he was the best, though personally I've always had a soft spot for the playing of another uncle of mine, Arturo.

Oharu's eyes glittered behind his spectacles. "And of course," he said, "Fidel Perugachi is supreme on the
secus
."

There I had to disagree. "His playing is full of showy moves and cheap, audience-pleasing tricks," I said. "Compared to my brother Sancho, Perugachi is an alpaca herder."

Oharu seemed a little taken aback. "Do you think so?"

"Absolutely. It's a pity we're playing only traditional music, and you can't hear Sancho on 'Twist and Shout.'"

Oharu considered this. "Perhaps this could be an encore tune tomorrow night?"

I had to credit Oharu for being a man of sound ideas. "Good plan," I said.

He offered to stand us all a round of drinks, but I begged off, pleading jet lag. I had to meet with Jesse and with the water ballet guys between the first and second show and get involved in some serious plotting.

I did stick around for the opening of the Bloodthirsty Hopping Vampire Show, however. The title was irresistible, after all. I'd tried to chat with the performers during the interlude, but with no success. Apparently the actors all spoke a Chinese dialect shared by no one else on the ship: they were just told the time they had to show up, and went on from there.

The massed vampires, with their slow, synchronous hops, achieved a genuine eerie quality, and the young hero and his girlfriend were clearly in jeopardy, and were rapidly depleting their considerable store of flashy kung fu moves when I had to drag myself away for the meeting with Laszlo.

 

Next morning, after breakfast,
Tang Dynasty
's tourists swarmed from the ship for their encounters with the boutiques of Tsim Sha Tsui and the bustle of Stanley Market. From the other side of the ship, unobserved by the majority of the passengers, I and the entire Water Ballet of Malibu motored off on one of the ship's launches for our top-secret rendezvous with the
Goldfish Fairy
.

Laszlo had told everyone we were going, and he'd told everyone about the top-secret part too—except he'd made out it was a top-secret rehearsal of new water ballet moves, moves that he wished to conceal from the eyes of jealous rivals. His supercilious character and his obsession with artistic control helped to make this story more plausible, but even so I'm not sure we would have been given a boat if we hadn't greased a few palms among the crew.

It hadn't taken me long to work out that there was no way to conceal the fact of our presence in the Pearl River Delta, and secret water ballet rehearsals was the best cover story I could work out on short notice. It was bizarre, I knew, but it was bizarre enough to be true, and Laszlo and his crew were going to make it truer by conducting some genuine training.

The day was warm and humid, with shifting mists at dawn that had burned off by midmorning. We roared south out of Hong Kong's harbor, with bronzed Apollos striking poses on the gunwales like figureheads on the USS
Muscle Beach
. The posing wasn't entirely affected, as with all the diving gear stowed in the boat there was scant room for people; and the women of the troupe, with cigarettes in their sunscreen-slathered lips, draped themselves disdainfully on the bags that held the towels and the softer bits of scuba gear, and declined to speak to anyone.

About an hour after leaving port, our satellite locators told us we had reached our destination, and we sent our anchor down, shortly followed by Laszlo, one of the Apollos, and my own highly reluctant person.

I had decided that, as the person in charge, I should inspect the
Goldfish Fairy
myself. Though I had acquired diving skills for a task that involved retrieving documents from the cabin of a Tupolev aircraft that had made the mistake of crashing into the Black Sea, the Tupolev had been at a mere twenty-five meters, and the
Goldfish Fairy
was at sixty, well below the depth at which it was safe for sport divers such as myself to venture. But Laszlo and his crew—who by the way all had names like Deszmond and Szimon—had instructed me in the various skills required in staying alive at two hundred feet, and they would be on hand to look after me if I had a misadventure. I decided that the risk was worth taking.

I was carrying a ton of weight as I went over the side, not only the two cylinders on my back but another pair that would be clipped onto the anchor line at certain depths so that they could aid our decompression stops. Out of deference to me, I suspect, we were all breathing air, instead of the nitrogen-oxygen-helium mixture usually employed at depth—I had no experience with "Trimix," as it's known, and Laszlo had decided to save the exotic mixtures for when the water ballet guys actually had to stay down for a while and work. This would be a fast reconnaissance, it was thought. Fast down, and slowly but surely up again. There was no need to worry.

It was nevertheless one highly nervous Injun that flopped backward off the side of the boat into the Pearl River Delta and descended with the others into the murky water in search of Jesse's lost cargo.

In any event, I needn't have been so worried. From the forty-meter mark, I spent the entire dive in a state of complete hilarity.

I chortled. I laughed. I giggled. I found the fish in my vicinity a source of mirth and tried to point out the more amusing aspects of their anatomy to my fellow divers. Eventually I became so helpless with laughter that Laszlo, wearing an expression of even greater disgust than was normal for him, grabbed me by one of the shoulder straps of my buoyancy compensator, or B.C., and simply hauled me around like a package.

I had become prey to nitrogen narcosis, more colorfully known as "rapture of the deep."

When we got within sight of the muddy bottom, it was clear that the
Goldfish Fairy
was not to be seen. The captain appeared to be a little off on his calculations. So, still a good fifteen or so meters off the bottom, Laszlo checked his compass and we began searching the bottom, so many kicks in one direction followed by a ninety-degree turn and so many kicks in the next, the whole creating a kind of squarish, outwardly expanding spiral.

We found the
Goldfish Fairy
within moments, the bow section looming suddenly out of the murk like that of the
Titanic
in, well, the film
Titanic
. Bibbling with laughter, I tried to point out this similarity to Laszlo, who simply jerked me in the direction of the sunken ship and yanked me over the bows to begin his inspection of the vessel.

The bow section was a little crumpled, having struck first, but the rest of the little ship was more or less intact. The hatches were still secure. These would present very little trouble, but the fly in the ointment was the ship's mast, which had fallen over both hatches and which presented a nasty snarl of wire designed as if on purpose to entangle divers.

Laszlo grimly dragged me around the ship as he made his survey, and I spat my air supply from my mouth and tried to explain to a school of nearby fish the finer points of playing the
charango
, which is the little ten-string guitar with its body made from the shell of an armadillo. Eventually Laszlo had to look at me very severely and wrote a message on the underwater slate he kept clipped to his B.C.

I think you should breathe now
, I read, and I flashed him the okay sign and returned the regulator to my mouth.

Our survey complete, Laszlo tied a buoy to the stern rail of the ship so that we could find it again, inflated the buoy from his air supply, and then led us in stages to the surface, breathing during our decompression stops from the cylinders we'd attached to the anchor line. As soon as we passed the forty-meter mark, I became cold sober. The transition was instantaneous, and I wanted to dive down a bit and see if I could trigger the narcosis once more—just as an experiment—but Laszlo wasn't about to permit this, so we continued to rise until we saw from below the remaining members of the water ballet practicing their moves. The women were wearing their mermaid tails, the better to convince any prying eyes that their reasons for being here had nothing to do with any hypothetical wrecks lying on the bottom sixty meters below, while the men swam in formation and flexed their muscles in synchrony.

"Just sit in the boat and
don't do anything
," Laszlo hissed to me after we were back in the launch and had got our gear off. "And don't
say
anything either," he added as he saw me about to speak, even though I had only opened my mouth to apologize.

A pair of Apollos went down next, breathing the gas mixtures that would enable them to stay longer at depth. They were to enter the hold through one of the crew passages that led down through the deck, and in order to find their way back, carried a reel with a long line on it, one end of which they attached to the launch and the rest of which, like Theseus in the Labyrinth, they payed out behind them as they swam.

"That approach won't work, I'm afraid," Laszlo explained to Jesse later. "When the ship hit the bottom, it threw everything in the hold forward against the bulkhead. We can't shift it from down there, so we'll have to open the hold and go in that way.

"It should be an easy enough job." We were sipping drinks in Jesse's palatial
Tang Dynasty
lodgings. He had, of course, acquired a suite, complete with a little Taoist shrine all in scarlet and gold. The Taoist god, with pendulous earlobes the size of fists, gazed at us with a benign smile from his niche as we plotted our retrieval.

"Clearing the wire is going to be the most dangerous part of it," Laszlo continued. "Afterward we'll have to use jacks to get the mast off the cargo hatch. Actually opening the hatch and retrieving the target will be the easiest part of all."