From the novel: April Affairs
All things considered, it wasn’t such a big deal. Life often brings you close to darkness — take the neighbor next door committing murder, or the person upstairs starting a fire. Boarding a ghost ship was simply drawing a little nearer to that darkness; being shoulder to shoulder with it, perhaps.
Wei Lai drove; Tapio sat in the passenger seat giving directions. Enormous oil tankers were moored near the harbor — some even connected to railway lines — and the car, an unremarkable toy, threaded through the shadows cast by the vessels.
They stopped at last beside one of the cargo ships.
It was a refrigerated vessel. Compared to the hulking giants around it, it was a little on the small side — lights kept to a minimum and dim, only the anchor lights at the bow and stern giving off a relatively bright white glow.
Tapio got out first, clicked on a powerful flashlight, swept it in a wide circle against the ship’s hull and bridge, then turned the flashlight on, off, on, off, on, off — three times.
After a moment, footsteps sounded on the deck, and a stocky man emerged from the darkness. Behind him, further back, several silhouettes moved with a watchful, guarded air.
The car was to be left here; as for how Tapio would return it to Milu, that was no longer his concern. Wei Lai picked up Cen Jin’s backpack for her; she didn’t simply hand everything over, and took the bag of food supplies from him in turn.
Fair enough — it wasn’t heavy.
The oil terminal at night: the water surface thick as black crude oil, shimmering with a faint glitter. The refrigerated ship rode at a normal waterline; painted on its hull above was the word “EAGLE” — presumably the ship’s name.
From somewhere further off, the figures seemed to be taunting one another, an uncomfortable sound of coarse laughter drifting over.
As they drew closer, the man’s features came into view: middle-aged, close-cropped hair, black jacket, sleeves rolled to the elbow, revealing thickly muscled arms layered all over with a chaotic jumble of tattoos.
Tapio sidled up and murmured a few words to him. The man’s English was heavily accented, and his manner just as hard — he led with several sentences beginning with “No.” Tapio kept nodding throughout.
After a moment, the man turned and headed up the gangway. Tapio quickly waved Wei Lai and the others over: “Come on, come on, follow him.”
The group walked in a loose, staggered line, their footsteps hollow, as if drumming against the deck. Someone leaned out from the bridge and shouted something at the man; the man laughed and called back a couple of lines.
The pace was quick, the language unfamiliar — likely one of the smaller Eastern European tongues. Wei Lai couldn’t understand it. Cen Jin, for her part, was doing something with the paper bag, making rustling sounds.
They reached the hatch. The man hauled it open with a clang. Behind it, a ladder descended steeply; the hold below was strangely quiet, the lighting unnervingly bright — looking down from the deck, it was like peering into a white underground pit.
The man looked at Wei Lai; his accented, hardened tone returned.
— “No wandering around.”
— “No sticking your nose in other people’s business.”
— “Whatever sounds or movement there may be, stay in your cabin and do not come out.”
···
These terms were unreasonable — if a fire broke out, or the ship started sinking, were they supposed to sit meekly in their cabin and wait for death? But this man’s face didn’t look like it welcomed jokes, so Wei Lai swallowed his wry quip and prepared to nod…
Beside him, a sudden, piercing shriek of agony rang out — hysterical, bloodcurdling.
An icy thread shot from his wrist straight up to his elbow; half his arm went numb. A terrible thought crashed into Wei Lai’s mind.
This was Cen Jin — standing just a short distance away!
Tapio stood there blankly, unable to make out what had happened. The tattooed man seemed about to rush forward, then caught himself. Wei Lai couldn’t catch Cen Jin in time — she collapsed heavily to the ground.
Everything happened in an instant. From the shadows, several men came charging out; the tattooed man bellowed at them: “No! No!”
Wei Lai caught a glimpse — each of them was carrying a long-barreled submachine gun.
Armed escorts? But there was no time to think about that now. He dropped to his knees beside Cen Jin, pinning down her convulsing body, and shouted at Tapio: “Lights!”
The light flooded in, unsteady, swinging. Cen Jin’s eyes had rolled back; her mouth was flecked with bloody foam; half her face and neck were smeared with blood. Her arms jerked and spasmed as if struck by an electric current. Wei Lai reached out to press on her chest to check her heartbeat, when her throat suddenly produced a long drawn-out sound — like someone gasping for air — her hands clawed at nothing, her body lurched straight upward, her spine arching clear off the ground, as if she had gone into sudden cardiac arrest.
No wounds to the head or neck — not a sniper shot. Poisoning? When would she have been poisoned? He had been with her the entire time, and yet he had not noticed!
Noise erupted all around. Crew members kept pressing in from every direction. Wei Lai heard their exchanges with the tattooed man — the same sharp, incomprehensible language again. He snapped his head up and looked at the man; the man understood at once and shouted: “Not us! It wasn’t us!”
Tapio kept offering suggestions: “Call an ambulance? No — we can’t bring people onto the ship. Take her to a hospital.”
Wei Lai scooped Cen Jin up and strode off the ship in long strides. Tapio grabbed the luggage he had left behind and jogged along after him in a hurry. A handful of crew members still stood there murmuring in bewildered discussion; one reached down curiously, about to wipe a drop of blood from the deck — the tattooed man, lightning-quick, kicked him flat on his back and roared: “Idiot! What if it’s toxic? What if it’s contagious?”
——
Back into the car, Cen Jin laid out across the back seat. Wei Lai wrenched the wheel and shot away at full speed.
His palms were sweating; his back was rigid, so taut it felt pulled straight to the scalp. Countless questions raced through his mind simultaneously.
— Hospital. Where’s the hospital? Turku isn’t large; there should be a sign at a high point — he should be able to find it.
— He was certain there had been no mistakes since picking Cen Jin up from the villa. If she had been poisoned, it must have happened before she came into his care.
— Was it poisoning? Her color was normal — no discoloration. But one couldn’t be sure; in this high-tech age, perhaps there were newer methods of harm.
— This was going to be extremely difficult to explain. The journey hadn’t even properly begun, and already the person was…
Abruptly, a hand seized the outside of his thigh, and a low voice said: “Don’t stop. Drive out of the city.”
What the —!
Wei Lai’s heart gave a violent lurch; the car swerved into an S-curve, the tires screaming against the asphalt.
Fortunately his body had already responded — he quickly regained control of the vehicle. His chest heaved hard. He looked up at the rearview mirror inside the car.
In the mirror, Cen Jin was sitting up. The blood was most vivid at the corner of her mouth — like a vampire who had just bitten into something living. She pulled out a tissue and wiped her face, saying: “Keep driving. I remember there’s a phone box along the road. I need to make a call.”
Wei Lai didn’t respond. It wasn’t a good time to ask anything. After a pause, he reached over to the passenger seat, grabbed a bottle of water, and tossed it to her. Cen Jin caught it, unscrewed the cap, wadded a tissue into a stopper at the mouth to dip it, and used the dampened tissue to wipe her face.
They drove on a while longer. He spotted a red-topped, glass-paneled phone box in a grove by the roadside — the lower half frosted glass, repurposed as an outdoor toilet. Phone boxes in the Nordic countries tended to be quite practical, designed with the less well-off in mind, offering a few extra functions. Wei Lai had even seen one fitted with a rinse tap and water hose.
The moment the car stopped, Cen Jin opened the door and climbed out.
Wei Lai didn’t move. He watched her through the car window. Good — her stride was steady, no swaying, her sense of direction intact. The collapse, the convulsions, the gasping for air — all of it already felt as distant as a previous lifetime.
His chest felt thick and oppressive; only now did he notice his back was soaked with sweat. He felt a faint urge to curse. He rummaged through the glove compartment for a while, found no cigarettes, and looked down — on the side of his trousers, a blurry handprint in blood, as if he’d stumbled onto the set of a horror film.
He looked up. Cen Jin was already on the phone, leaning against the glass panel of the box, one hand toying with the spiral-wound cord of the receiver.
Wei Lai opened the door, stepped out without drawing attention to himself, and walked over, stopping nearby.
The air was damp with the scent of trees. The glass door of the phone box was half-open — she had probably left it that way because of the smell inside.
Wei Lai caught snatches of what she was saying.
— “E-A-G-L-E. The name painted on the hull.”
— “I have already reported this to different regulatory authorities. If the coast guard chooses to cover for them, they’ll be facing consequences they can sort out themselves.”
— “Even once the ship enters international waters, universal jurisdiction applies — it can be boarded and seized.”
···
As she spoke, the corner of her lips curved upward without her seeming to realize — carrying a barely perceptible edge of cold menace.
Wei Lai leaned against a tree trunk and watched her with great interest.
She had given herself away.
He had thought she was a charcoal going cold — but, without warning, a flake of the charcoal’s surface had peeled back, revealing the core beneath: burning a fierce, incandescent red.
At last she hung up and came out.
Wei Lai said: “You were acting, weren’t you? Quite convincing. I still haven’t figured it out — could you give me a hint?”
Where had the blood come from? She couldn’t possibly have carried a supply of blood plasma on her person, ready to perform at any moment.
Cen Jin said nothing. After a pause, she extended her hand — a Smith and Wesson bear claw dangled from her index finger, swaying gently.
Wei Lai stared at it for a moment, a faint chill spreading through his chest.
— She had been carrying the bag of food supplies; inside were the bear claw and a first aid kit.
In the moment when he was preoccupied — watching the surroundings, listening to the tattooed man speak — Cen Jin had used the bear claw to slit open a blood vessel somewhere, drawn the blood into her mouth, applied a tourniquet, and then let out that piercing, hysterical scream.
She had manufactured the crisis herself.
Wei Lai felt a prickling at the back of his scalp. His feelings were beyond words — beyond anything except sheer, visceral shock. Thinking back, the blood loss had been considerable. That cut had to have been deep.
“Miss Cen, a bear claw is a full-serration blade with powerful bite — the wounds it creates don’t heal easily, and even after they close, the scarring is unsightly. All of that, to report one ghost ship… you’re really not sparing any expense.”
It was just a smuggling vessel. Was it worth it? In this moment, across calm seas and rough ones, across open oceans and territorial waters, tens of thousands of smuggling routes stretched in every direction — so vast in scale that countries had been forced to establish dedicated agencies, recruit enormous numbers of personnel, and even pursue cross-border cooperation to fight it.
If she bled herself dry reporting every ship she encountered, the result would still barely make a dent.
Cen Jin said: “I think it’s quite worthwhile.”
Different values — if you find it worthwhile, then it’s worthwhile. Wei Lai didn’t want to say more. He turned and got back in the car. Cen Jin climbed in: “You think it’s meaningless, don’t you?”
Wei Lai shrugged: “I just think — we already knew it was a ghost ship. We were just hitching a ride. Whether they’re running guns or drugs, you may not actually have saved anyone — someone who wants to buy weapons or use drugs will always find another way. But we were following the plan, on schedule. This stunt of yours may very well mean changing the route…”
“No.”
Wei Lai didn’t follow: “What — no?”
“Drugs and weapons trafficking rank first and second in global underground trade, but that’s not what this ship was carrying. If it were, I wouldn’t have bothered.”
Is that so? Wei Lai started the car; for a moment he wasn’t sure which direction to drive in: “So what was it — cigarettes? Liquor? Luxury goods?”
“People.”
Wei Lai was taken aback.
Cen Jin pressed the car window down a crack and picked up a cigarette: “Human trafficking ranks third in global underground trade. It operates through tightly organized networks, international coordination, and armed escorts. Among victims, 80% are women. What fate awaits them… I don’t need to spell it out, do I?”
She lit the cigarette, drew a long breath, tilted her head back and exhaled slowly: “If I were you, I wouldn’t park the car right next to a phone box. At minimum, find somewhere hidden, convenient — and with a decent view.”