Merfolk Page 2

  He crashed face-first into the ocean. The cold water shocked his body. He tasted salt in his mouth. Out of panic he kicked furiously. His head broke through the surface. He gasped and flailed his arms back and forth to stay afloat.

  “Karlo!” Missy cried, staring down at him with terrified eyes. “Get out of that water right now! There’s a shark in there with you!”

  Not just any shark, he thought. A great white that is probably very pissed off at me.

  Karlo swam madly toward the boat’s stern. His hands gripped the uprights of the metal ladder; his feet found the underwater steps.

  “Hurry!” Missy shrieked, bending over the ladder to help him. “It’s right there!”

  Right there! Right where?

  Karlo scampered up the ladder, smashing his knees and elbows in his haste, Missy yanking him by his forearms, his wet shirt clinging to his body, his cap lost. In the back of his mind he knew he was doomed. Any second now the shark would strike. Missy would yank him up onto the deck and scream in horror when she realized he was just a head, arms, and upper torso. Everything below his waist would be gone. He would die moments later with no more dignity than the mackerel they’d used for bait…

  It didn’t happen.

  Karlo lurched up onto the deck, clear of the water and the shark in it, coughing water from his lungs.

  Whole.

  Missy wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her cheek to his, though this made it harder for him to catch his breath, so he shook her away. He rose unsteadily to his feet, his eyes going to the fishing rod holder attached to the port hull.

  It was empty.

  “Where’s the dadgum rod?” he barked, eyeing the deck with wild eyes. “It’s gone! It’s bloody gone!”

  “Who cares about that!” Missy said. “You’re alive.”

  “To hell with being alive! Did you see the size of that great white? It was the catch of a lifetime and I never got a picture!” He whirled on Chan. “You. This is your fault.”

  “Me?” The skipper frowned. “I stuck the rod in the holder. The shark must have tugged it free.”

  “Why did you ever let go of it in the first place?”

  “Because you fell into the water, sir! You needed help!”

  “Take us back to land!” Karlo barked, stalking over to the ice box and grabbing a beer to help with his jittery nerves. “And don’t think you’re getting one penny of that bonus we talked about.”

  “But sir—”

  “Don’t ‘but’ me, mate. You promised me gamefish. Instead, you almost got me killed, and what do I have to show for it? Nothing! This has been a bloody fiasco.”

  “That’s not fair, pookums—”

  “And you!” he said, whirling on his wife. “You—you two-faced gold-digging bitch! You probably wanted that shark to get me, didn’t you? That would have made your day. Yeah, I know. I know why you married me. I’m no bloody idiot.” He twisted off the beer cap and launched it, discus-style, as far as he could into the ocean, losing his balance in the process.

  “The turtles, pookie—”

  “Fuck the turtles!” he bellowed, dropping flat on his ass.

  Part 1

  Colombo

  “I started early, took my dog, And visited the sea; The mermaids in the basement Came out to look at me”

  —Emily Dickinson

  Chapter 1

  ELSA

  They call Sri Lanka “the land of eternal sunshine.” This morning it was anything but. Cool, wet, gray. Summertime was the rainy season, the weather affected by the annual south-west monsoon that brought hard and heady showers until October. Even so, the rain tended to fall at nighttime, leaving the days bright and sunny, hence the country’s moniker.

  As the day rolled on, however, the weather would likely follow the usual pattern. The streets would dry, the sky would turn a clear blue, and the tropical humidity would reclaim the island’s southern coast, a sticky and oppressive heat relieved only by the ocean breezes.

  Dr. Elsa Montero didn’t mind the year-round humidity and heat so much; she’d take it any day over the frigid, snowy winters of Hartford, Connecticut, where she’d been born and raised. She did miss the annual ski trips her family had enjoyed in Vermont and Maine…and of course a white Christmas. In fact, it had been all too long since she’d seen a sky drizzled with lazy snowflakes, front yards populated with crooked snowmen, and big two-story houses lit up with colorful Christmas lights. These memories sent a pang of sadness through her. Time was slipping away all too fast.

  Elsa worked in a two-story white building on Mirissa Beach. It was flanked by a tour operator business on one side and a large hostel on the other. The hostel bustled year-round with foreign backpackers. Music could be heard pumping out of the three-story structure at all hours, and every now and then Elsa would catch a whiff of pungent marijuana floating on a warm breeze.

  In her past life Elsa was an oceanographer and National Geographic explorer-in-residence, famed for her exploration of underwater cave systems throughout the Americas. Now, four years after her husband perished on a dive in Mexico, she worked as a shark scientist for the Sri Lankan Sharks Board Maritime Center (SBMC), an NGO that owned and maintained all of the shark safety gear and nets along the country’s southern coastline. It was a small operation with only ten employees, and there was always something to keep her occupied. If you’d asked her ten years ago what she thought she’d be doing with her life at forty-two, would it have been this? No. Nevertheless, she enjoyed her work and was starting to find peace with herself, something that had long eluded her.

  Pushing these thoughts aside, Elsa entered the SBMC building through the front door. “Good morning, Christine,” she said to the young Sri Lankan girl seated at her desk on the other side of the rectangular-shaped room. Christine, twenty-one, was fresh out of university, bright-eyed, and pretty enough to turn most men’s heads.

  She pressed her palms together beneath her chin and said, “Kohomada, Doctor. Some storm last night! Almost blew the roof off my house.”

  Elsa wasn’t sure whether the girl was speaking figuratively or literally, though she suspected it was the latter. Christine had yet to move out of her family home, a cinderblock structure with a corrugated iron roof in a shantytown overrun by wild fowl and stray dogs. She lived alongside three older brothers and a younger sister, which was most likely why she was always the first to the office building in the morning and one of the last to leave in the afternoon or early evening.

  “I didn’t even hear the storm,” Elsa admitted. “I sleep like a baby, I guess.”

  “I never get that saying,” Christine said. “Babies wake up at all hours of the night, don’t they?”

  “How about…like a log?”

  “Do logs sleep?”

  “Too early for this, Christine.” Elsa dropped her handbag at her desk. “I haven’t even had my coffee yet. Speaking of which, got you one too.” She handed the girl one of the two coffees she’d picked up at the seaside town’s only Starbucks.

  Christine’s big eyes lit up; on her salary, Starbucks was a rare luxury. “Oh! You didn’t have to!” she said, accepting the paper cup, popping off the lid, and looking inside.

  “It’s a cinnamon latte.”

  “Yum!” She sipped, then said, “Mark caught a shark in one of the Matara nets about an hour ago. He’s on his way back to shore right now.”

  Elsa’s mouth twisted in concern. She was pleased the safety nets worked to protect swimmers from possible shark attacks. Yet at the same time, every dead shark weighed on her conscience. Far from being the monsters of the deep portrayed in Hollywood movies, they rarely attacked humans, and when they did, it was usually a case of mistaken identity, confusing humans for their regular prey. Most importantly, sharks were essential to the overall wellbeing of the ocean’s ecosystem, and any dramatic change to their population would have a devastating effect all the way down the food chain.

  “Was it another whitetip?” she ask
ed. They’d caught two oceanic whitetip sharks in their nets over the last three weeks.

  Christine shook her head. “Bigger.”

  “A thresher?” Elsa said, naming another common endemic species of shark that sometimes got entangled in their nets. Larger than the oceanic whitetip, threshers grew up to eighteen feet in length, though much of that was due to their unusually long caudal fin.

  “No, not that either, Doctor. It’s a great white.”

  Surprise crossed Elsa’s face. Although great white sharks were largely coastal territorial predators, they had a knack of staying out of the shark nets that lined the beaches up and down the southern coast. In fact, in all of Elsa’s time at SBMC, out of the dozens of sharks caught in the nets over that time, not one had been a great white. “Mark’s sure of that?” she asked.

  “He sent me a picture. Have a look for yourself.” Christine tapped on her mobile phone’s screen and brought up a picture of a huge shark floating on its back next to Mark’s thirty-two-foot vessel. Sure enough, it was a great white, evidenced by the white underside, conical snout, and large jaws lined with deadly triangle-shaped teeth.

  A huge great white, Elsa thought, a little starstruck.

  “She must be close to twenty-five feet…”

  “She, Doctor?” Christine said.

  “Sexual dimorphism is present in great whites. Females grow larger than males, and I’ve never heard of a male reaching…well, this one has to be—”

  Just then Christine’s phone rang. She answered it in Sinhala. Elsa could hear Mark’s voice on the other end of the line. Christine spoke easily and with a smile on her lips, causing Elsa to wonder, not for the first time, whether the girl and Mark were romantically involved.

  When Christine hung up, she said in English, “He’s transferring the shark to his trailer right now. Should be here in about fifteen minutes.”

  Elsa nodded. “I’ll meet him in the shed.”

  ∆∆∆

  The shed was attached to the east side of SBMC’s main building and accessed via an internal door. The large interior resembled a morgue, with a cement floor and cinderblock walls and shelves stacked with all sorts of miscellaneous items. An oversized stainless-steel necropsy table dominated much of the space. Elsa flicked on the bright overhead fluorescents, then pressed a button that raised the roller door facing the beach. A gust of briny, saltwater air blew into the shed, tousling her blonde, shoulder-length hair. The moody sky, she noted, was already breaking, revealing patches of bright blue. The aggressive surf foamed where it crashed and retreated against the beach.

  Two hundred yards to the east, Mark’s Toyota Hilux sped easily over the hard-packed sand close to the waterline, pulling a flatbed trailer burdened with its large cargo. He slowed as he angled toward the shed, the truck’s tires chewing through the loose sand. When he stopped before her, Elsa couldn’t take her eyes off the great white laying on its side on the flatbed. She estimated it to be at least fifteen feet from snout to forktail, its weight pushing one and a half tons. The crescent-shaped tail alone had to be at least six feet tall, the pectoral fins over three feet. The absence of clasper fins on the bottom of the body, which were used by males during mating, indicated it was indeed a female.

  From the corner of its tooth-lined mouth protruded a black hook and two feet of trailing braided line. She lifted the line in her hands disapprovingly. The red marks around the shark’s nose were likely caused by the steel line scraping across its skin as it thrashed.

  “Snapped, not cut,” Mark said, hopping out of the cab and coming to stand next to her. He was a fit young man in his mid-twenties, cleanshaven, with short, black hair parted neatly on the left, and a curl that had a habit of dangling across his forehead. His broad mouth was often spread in a confident, carefree smile, as it was now. Nothing ever seemed to get him down, making him pleasant to work with.

  Elsa said, “I’ve never heard of anyone catching a great white on a line before.”

  Mark nodded. “It’s not common, but it happens.”

  “You think whoever caught this one was fishing specifically for sharks?”

  “We won’t know until we look inside and see what kind of hook is in her belly.”

  Back inside the shed, Elsa climbed into the cramped cab of a mini-crane and drove it over to the flatbed so the short boom angled above the shark. Mark secured the cable around its caudal fin. When he gave her a thumbs up, she maneuvered the monster specimen to the stainless-steel table. They hosed it off, then collected parasitic copepods that liked to attach themselves to areas of low velocity on the body, particularly behind the pectoral fins and on the ventral side of the tail. They placed them in a dish (and would later send them to a laboratory for identification), then performed a morphometric assessment of the shark, which involved measuring nearly every inch of its torpedo-like body. Given that scientists rarely had the opportunity to examine great whites up close (in large part because the animals didn’t float when they die and thus don’t get washed up on shore), measurements were vital to gathering a better understanding of the growth and evolution of the species.

  As she worked, Elsa lamented the slow progress of shark conservation in Sri Lanka. While efforts had been made to combat unregulated overexploitation, the country still lagged years behind the conservation efforts undertaken by neighboring countries such as the Maldives. The biggest impediment was the world’s demand for shark fins, meat, and liver oil. Over the past ten years alone, Sri Lanka exported fifty-nine metric tons of shark fins annually. However, that was only the official report. There was also a flourishing black market, with many more tons of fins being exported as dried fish.

  The cruelty, greed, and ignorance boiled Elsa’s blood. She didn’t want to put an end to the country’s shark fishery altogether, yet it wasn’t sustainable in its current form. This was the reason she joined SBMC in the first place. It was an opportunity, however small, to educate regulators and fishermen about the need for conservation while also promoting the ecotourism of sharks as an alternate revenue model to fishing for the local economy.

  “Doctor, come have a look at this,” Mark said, tugging her from her thoughts.

  Elsa joined him where he was bent close to the shark’s head, snapping a photograph of the milky white throat. “See that?” He pointed to what looked like a black puncture wound in the V-shaped scales. “Something’s stuck in her.”

  “Let’s find out what it is.” She went to the steel shelves lining one wall and returned with a pair of needle-nose pliers. She pinched the lodged object between the tips of the tool and slowly extracted what turned out to be a four-inch-long bone with serrated edges. It was shaped like a pen, with one end tapering into a sharp point.

  “A stingray barb,” Elsa said, unsurprised. Sharks often preyed on stingrays.

  Mark was nodding. “And look, another one.”

  She extracted the second barb, this one located farther down the throat, near the gills. It was roughly the same size as the first. “Want to wager what we’ll find in her stomach?”

  “I’m not a betting man, Doctor,” Mark said. “But I will guess things didn’t end very well for the stingray. I’ll get the preparations underway for the necropsy.”

  ∆∆∆

  Two and a half hours later Dr. Elsa Montero stood inside the brightly lit shed, looking out at the excited audience packed beneath the marquee that Mark and two other colleagues had erected on the beach. Elsa performed all her shark dissections in public, as it was one of the best ways to educate locals and tourists alike about the misunderstood creatures. Typically, a shark necropsy attracted a dozen or so curious spectators. Today, however, the great white had drawn a record crowd. She guessed there must be at least twenty people beneath the tent, as well as another twenty or so fifth graders from a prestigious international school. The students, all dressed in mauve shirts and navy shorts or skirts, had been on a field trip to the beach to participate in various sporting activities. Upon hearing there wa
s a great white in the shed awaiting dissection, they had swarmed the roll-up door, shoving at one another and standing on tiptoes to steal a glimpse of the apex predator.

  One brave girl with blonde pigtails poking out from the sides of her head ventured into the shed to stand right before the shark. She studied the fish’s beady black eyes with apprehension, as though she thought it might somehow be watching her.

  “If it’s dead,” she said without looking away from it, “why doesn’t it close its eyes?”

  “Because unlike you and I,” Elsa replied, “great whites don’t have eyelids. What’s your name, little girl?”

  “I’m not little. I’m ten, and my birthday’s in July.”

  “My mistake, young lady. So what’s your name?”

  “Julie,” the girl replied, finally glancing up at Elsa. “I’m not afraid of sharks.”

  “Have you ever touched one before?”

  She shook her head. “Can I?”

  “Be my guest.”

  The girl stepped forward and extended her hand. After a brief hesitation, she patted the great white’s snout as though she were patting a dog. Giggling, she glanced back at her classmates, who were watching her with a combination of amazement, amusement, and alarm.

  Elsa said, “Try moving your hand in the opposite direction.”

  The girl cried out, “It’s sharp!”

  Elsa nodded. “A little like sandpaper, isn’t it? That’s because the shark’s skin is made up of thousands of tiny teeth, or what scientists like me call denticles. They’re covered in a hard enamel and packed tightly together with their tips facing backward to reduce the water’s drag on the shark’s body as it swims through the ocean. From an evolutionary standpoint, these little teeth are the same as the big ones in its mouth.”

  The girl’s eyes went to the great white’s mouth, which hung partly open, exposing the many rows of thin, savage teeth. “Can I touch one?”