From the novel: April Affairs

Wei Lai drove the car up to the riverbank and switched off the headlights.

It was a good while before the light off the water and the light of the stars seeped into the car. By that borrowed light, Wei Lai tore open a packet of compressed biscuits, chewed and swallowed them down with water, then asked Cen Jin to spare him a cigarette.

“You smoke women’s cigarettes?”

Wei Lai found this an odd question: “Is there a difference? At the end of the day, it’s all just tobacco.”

Cen Jin passed one over and lit it for him. The moment the flame caught, a point of amber light bloomed in her eyes, in his eyes, and in the glass all around them.

Then instantly gone.

Wei Lai pressed the window down and exhaled the first breath of smoke outside, then asked: “How did you work it out?”

“You want to know?”

“Yes.”

It never hurt to know a little more — you never knew when it might save a life, whether your own or someone else’s.

Cen Jin thought for a moment: “Four points.”

Wei Lai gave a rueful laugh — he hadn’t spotted even one.

“First: human trafficking has already become an industry. The UNODC publishes an annual report on trafficking, mapping source and destination routes and designating origin and receiving countries. That ship — Lithuania to Germany — fits precisely along those routes.”

“Second: the language spoken on board was Albanian. In Eastern Europe, human trafficking is controlled primarily by two major criminal organizations — the Russian mafia and the Albanian mafia. The Albanian faction, in particular, dominates the underground sex industry, with networks spread across Europe.”

Wei Lai was surprised: “You understand Albanian?”

“Only a few phrases. Do you remember, as we were boarding, how the tattooed man and the person in the bridge had a laugh and exchanged a couple of lines?”

He remembered — but he hadn’t understood it.

“The person in the bridge said: New merchandise? The tattooed man replied: No — she’s too old.”

Wei Lai hesitated: “That ‘old’ — he was talking about you?”

“He was.”

Cen Jin shrugged, entirely unbothered: “Trafficking networks want women as young as possible — a large proportion are girls. Young bodies can withstand more abuse. For them, any woman over twenty is already not the first choice. I specifically wrote a social commentary on human trafficking, which is how I picked up a few phrases the Albanian traders commonly use.”

“New merchandise. Can’t go cheaper. She’s too old. Premium goods. Deal. Pleasure doing business.”

“And the fourth point?”

“Fourth: when the tattooed man pulled open the hatch, the hold below was very brightly lit. On his tattooed arm, there were three scratch marks — made by fingernails. I thought perhaps some woman left those on him while struggling.”

“Put all of that together, and reporting them was entirely justified. Even if every one of my assumptions was wrong, it was still a ghost ship — that much was beyond doubt.”

Wei Lai said nothing.

It was precisely because it was her — someone who had specifically researched this kind of underground trade. Anyone else, even given twice as many clues, might not have been able to see through everything so quickly.

Looking back now, what Cen Jin had done was genuinely not an overreaction — the Albanian faction was deeply suspicious of outsiders. If they had simply asked to disembark, it would have raised immediate suspicion.

Wei Lai let out a long breath: “Fair enough — even if it means changing the route, it was worth it.”

“We don’t need to change it. Didn’t Tapio say there was another ship? We just have to wait four more hours.”

“We’re going back to the oil terminal?”

“Mr. Wei, one should see things through properly. The Albanian faction just had a major seizure by the coast guard — you think they’ll simply let it go? Won’t a pair of people who disembarked that very night and then vanished without a trace come under suspicion and face retaliation?”

She leaned toward Wei Lai and lowered her voice, the corner of her lips curling once again in the darkness of the car: “But if we go back to catch the next ship — the situation becomes entirely different.”

“It would mean that when we disembarked, it was a genuine sudden medical emergency. And when we go back to board, we are genuinely in a hurry to travel.”

“If you want to make it even more airtight, you could have the Saudi arrange a hospital emergency record for me in Turku. But my current plan is already more than enough to deal with the Albanian faction’s level of thinking. They’ll be too busy rounding up moles and undercover agents — the ship being seized in international waters means the news will be blacked out for a stretch of time. By the time they’re in complete uproar, we’ll already be aboard the pirates’ ship.”

Wei Lai fell silent for a long moment, then burst out laughing.

He pressed the cigarette butt against the car window edge to put it out: “Impressive.”

He settled back into his seat and looked out at the distant night landscape. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and the outlines of shapes were slowly becoming visible — great boulders left over from road construction, rough and unwieldy, spared from the drill.

Wei Lai said: “Human trafficking has already become a full-scale industry?”

He had always assumed it was simply a rather rampant form of crime.

“All for money. Low cost, high profit, high demand — and the production cycle is renewable.”

“Renewable production cycle?”

“Yes. A bullet, once fired, is gone. Drugs, once consumed, are gone. But a girl of ten or so — you can work her relentlessly, without rest, all year long, until she’s thirty, forty. She can be resold. And on the day she has no more clients, she can still flow into the organ market.”

Oh. So that was it.

When they boarded, he knew it was a ghost ship — but he hadn’t known that the cargo was people.

When it came to people and their fates, words like “worth it” or “not worth it” felt far too light.

He turned to Cen Jin: “Where’s the wound? Let me help you dress it. Someone who likes wearing evening gowns as much as you do.”

He switched the interior light on. Cen Jin pulled off the makeshift tourniquet.

Wei Lai looked at the wound — on the inner side of her left arm. Had it been an ordinary blade, the cut would have been clean and would heal relatively quickly. The bear claw was the problem; it was brutal to both assailant and self. He first used mineral water to rinse away the blood, then cleaned the wound with an alcohol swab. He hesitated for a moment, then selected a small tube of skin adhesive: “The wound isn’t too deep — stitches would actually be safer. With adhesive, you need to be careful, otherwise a hollow cavity might form beneath the skin, and the wound could pull apart.”

Cen Jin made a sound of acknowledgment. She watched him bow his head and carefully apply the adhesive, and suddenly felt curious about him.

“Were you born there, or did you become a citizen later?”

Wei Lai smiled: “Hard to say. My father probably had debts back home — he took me on a clandestine crossing, and when we got to Europe, he sold me.”

“Sold to a foster family?”

“That would have been lucky. Child labor.”

He cradled her arm, tilting his head to check whether the adhesive was spread evenly: “People cost less than machines back then. They had you work a sewing machine — stitching seams, sewing on buttons. There was one needle that went straight through my fingertip. I thought my whole life I’d have a hole in my fingertip I could squint through and watch the sun. Turns out it healed.”

“And after that?”

“Kept sewing buttons. Got rescued by a humanitarian organization. Spent a few years in Chinatown. Went to Malaysia for beret training, didn’t make it through, got cut. Was about to sign up as a mercenary when I ran into Milu — he likes to go there to recruit.”

He rested her arm on the dashboard: “Let it air out a bit.”

“And what are your plans going forward?”

“No plans… what about you?”

Her turn.

Cen Jin said: “I was an orphan. Later, a Nordic couple adopted me and brought me abroad. When I was in high school, they died in a plane crash.”

“That must have been incredibly hard.”

A girl in her teens, in a foreign country, her adoptive parents gone, not a soul to turn to.

“Survival was what mattered. There wasn’t much time to grieve — I had to think about how to rely on myself, how to keep living with dignity in a world belonging to white people. So I made a plan. All the way to forty.”

That sentence went off in Wei Lai’s mind like a thunderclap, reverberating and echoing.

— I made a plan. All the way to forty.

He hadn’t even planned his next meal.

“Which university to attend, what subject to study, what kind of social organizations to join, which prominent figures in the field to cultivate connections with, what skills to acquire, what kind of institution to intern at, what financial and professional milestones to reach.”

To Wei Lai, this was like hearing a foreign language.

It took him a long time to find words: “Forgive me for asking — does your life now fall within the scope of your plan?”

Cen Jin looked at the wound on her arm. The adhesive had long since set; the skin around it was pulled a little taut.

“I am twenty-seven this year.”

“According to the plan, I should be working in a government department, already married, to a lawyer, a doctor, or a professor — that combination is the most fitting.”

“Financially comfortable, with property, a car, savings, and a full range of insurance and benefits. I should already have one child — a stable family gives the public a good impression, which would help my continued advancement in the political sphere.”

“I would be making regular charitable and public-service appearances, attending industry receptions, building connections with journalists, media professionals, emerging business elites, and various figures from polite society.”

···

Was that so. Real life seemed to have gone quite far off the rails.

Something must have happened in between.

Wei Lai said: “You’d better take some time to readjust.”

——

The car pulled back into the oil terminal as the first light of dawn began to break.

Tapio was sprawled in a dead sleep, empty beer bottles all around him. When Wei Lai shook him awake, he was disoriented for a long moment, then exclaimed: “Oh — you!”

He yawned his way to sitting, flipped through the logbook again, then looked at the alarm clock: “There’s a ship. The timing works out perfectly.”

Of course it did — they had timed their arrival precisely.

When they got in the car, Tapio glanced back at Cen Jin in the rear seat. She was wrapped in a thick jacket, her face pale; she managed a weak smile in his direction.

Tapio said: “Is she… going to be all right?”

“Gastric ulcer flared up, stomach was bleeding. She went to the hospital.”

“But her body… can she handle it?”

This old fellow was actually quite kind-hearted.

Wei Lai glanced at Cen Jin: “She’s not the one who matters. In our line of work, you follow orders from above — whatever time you’re supposed to be somewhere, you be there. Unless you’re dead, you crawl there if you have to. You’ve seen enough of this; you should know how it goes.”

Tapio sighed: “True enough.”

As luck would have it, this vessel was also a refrigerated ship, carrying fruit, vegetables, fish, meat, and other perishables.

The anchor was about to be weighed; crew members were scattered about the deck in twos and threes, and someone came down to meet them.

Tapio didn’t board — he stood by the car and waved them off, yawning an enormous yawn as he did.

Wei Lai walked alongside Cen Jin the whole way; she was supposed to look “weak.”

As they passed one of the crew members, the man was leaning against the ship’s railing, adjusting a wireless set. Through the crackling static, a line of broadcast came through:

“The world’s gaze continues to focus on the Sirius, the costly oil tanker…”

Wei Lai and Cen Jin stopped in their tracks simultaneously.

The crew member looked at them in surprise; the next second, realizing something, he quickly turned the dial to one side.

The broadcast grew louder, drifting through the fog.

“The pirate faction remains hardline, rejecting the ship owner’s proposal for ransom negotiations. The Saudi negotiating team held a press conference in Mogadishu yesterday, stating that the option of a military resolution has not been ruled out.”

“Experts have warned that the situation in the Gulf of Aden is complex, the piracy problem long-standing. Should a military resolution be pursued, the entire region’s shipping lanes could be paralyzed, with consequences too grave to contemplate…”

Wei Lai couldn’t help but feel the urge to laugh.

What an absurd world. The Saudi faction was there, staging a drama with an ever-thickening whiff of gunpowder — eyes wide open, sleeves rolled up, all the posturing of imminent combat — spinning journalists, experts, and analysts into a frenzied whirl.

The eyes of the whole world were fixed on that spectacle: Mogadishu, the Sirius, the Saudi negotiating team, the pirates.

No one knew that the most pivotal person of all was, at this very moment, boarding a ship right here.

Wei Lai turned to look back at the shore.

Tapio had already driven off in the car and was gone.

The long gray line where the shore met the water was slowly retreating.

The ship had set sail.