Rembrandt's Ghost by Paul Christopher

onshore.
    Hanson had swallowed his disgust and played the Good Buddy game just like always, sitting with the little weasel in his stifling dockside office above the customs warehouse for hours, watching him drinking shots of Napoleon Quince and listening to endless stories about his conquests in La Zona, the local brothel area where women and girls, most of them native and some no more than ten or twelve years old, plied their age-old profession in little blanket-divided cubicles, serving the seagoing trade and foreign workers from the few remaining factories in Mariveles.
    Zobel-Ayala had all the bases covered. Not only was he a pimp to half the girls in La Zona, but he was also the public health officer for Mariveles and made a bit extra on the side by selling off government-supplied antibiotics to the highest bidder.
    The doctor had big plans, most of which involvedsetting himself up in America one day, but Hanson thought it more likely that the slimy son of a bitch would probably wind up floating upside down under one of the Mariveles piers with his throat cut, either by his rivals in the Kuratong Baleleng or the Pentagon, both of which had big money in
shabu
labs and smuggling all through the islands.
    Hanson ate the last of the food on his plate, finished off the Red Horse, and dropped a few crumpled bills onto the counter. He climbed down off the old-fashioned, chrome diner stool, gave a satisfied belch, and headed back along the crushed coral path to the dock road. It was blisteringly hot and he could feel the beer leaching out of him, sweat dripping down the back of his neck from underneath the band of his old captain’s cap and down his sides.
    Even though he was wearing sunglasses, the light was enough to make Hanson squint, as it glinted off the small broken waves in the harbor and hammered down like a ringing gong from the cloudless sky. Like everywhere else in this part of the world, he knew it could change into black monsoon within a single tick of time, turning the harbor into a witch’s cauldron and bouncing the
Queen
around like a beach ball at her moorings, but for the moment he was trapped inside a furnace with its thermostat on the blink.
    The meal at the snack bar and the few minutes by himself had been a nice break after a morning with the sleazy doctor, but making his way past the tumbledown warehouses and the junk-fronted chandlers’ shops along the quay brought Hanson back to reality with a hard knock; the oppressive heat, the stink of rot and old rope, of tarred pilings and the dead fish along the bilge-filthy waterfront was the stink of his own future, and he knew it. Endless runs through dangerous seas taking things to one place and other things back again. It was no way for anyone to live. If something didn’t change soon…
    Hanson could see the jib cranes at the dockside working, swinging over big, two-hundred-pound bags of cassava meal in rope slings. On deck Elisha Santoro, his first mate, was overseeing Kong and a few hired Filipino day-hands. The day-hands were dressed in
bahag
loincloths and Eli wore jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt. The closest thing to a uniform on the
Batavia Queen
was the dull strip of gold braid on Hanson’s battered cap.
    He frowned, staring down along the pier. The banana chips wouldn’t arrive until the next day, but there was a pile of wooden crates on the dock next to the
Queen
and a four-ton Mitsubishi Fighter Mignon truck parked beside them. Bulk banana chips were shipped in jute bags, like the cassava meal, not wooden crates. Stranger still, Zobel-Ayala hadn’t said a word about any new cargo, and he would have been the first to know since every clearance certificate issued on the docks had to go through him.
    As Hanson came closer, a man climbed out from the passenger side of the truck cab and stood waiting beside the pile of crates. Hanson saw that all of the crates were stamped with the familiar Slazenger pouncing tiger logo. The man from the truck