Free Ransom by Jay McInerney

guy.”
    Ransom didn’t want to think about this now. It seemed improbable and far away. He was still rattled by his lost evening at Buffalo Rome, and very soon he would be sweating his way through practice. But Marilyn was probably right to keep it from Miles, whose ax handle could land him in deep trouble. As little as he liked Marilyn, he was pleased that she had come to him first. If she was telling the truth, she was in a hard spot, and had no one else to help her.
    â€œWell, tell the oyabun it’s me. Tell him I’m the one you’ve been seeing. Don’t come right out with it or he’ll never believe you. Let him threaten and cajole for a while.”
    â€œBut then he’ll come after you.”
    â€œBetter me than Miles. I’ll think of something.” Ransom didn’t have a plan, but he had his reasons. His first thought was to protect Miles, who had more to lose than he did, but what grew on him was the challenge.
    He put Marilyn in a cab and gave her the number of the coffee shop. They had agreed to meet at the Miyako Hotel at five the next day; he made her promise she wouldn’t talk to Miles in the meantime.

6
South China Sea, April 1975
    The Chinese sat at their own table. They ate different food, their faces buried in deep bowls, chopsticks waving in front of their heads like antennae. The children sat on their mothers’ laps, tipping their heads back to receive morsels from the fat, boatlike spoons. The rich smells of their food filled the galley. At the third-class table Ransom ate overcooked food without taste or smell, the Hong Kong version of British cuisine. This morning it had been cold vulcanized eggs and limp toast, tonight a piece of untanned leather with gravy, flaccid gray beans, instant mashed potatoes, grilled tomato garnish. Ransom’s fellow diners included an English schoolteacher on her way to a posting in Hong Kong, a quiet family of Indian Sikhs, and an American hippie whose girlfriend had not once left their cabin, being afflicted with dysentery, the progress of which her boyfriend faithfully reported.
    Ransom had tried to buy fourth-class passage in Penang, but the man at the ticket window on the dock told him there was no fourth class. “What class are those people riding?” Ransom asked, pointing to a Chinese family camped on a pile of bundles in the corner of the ticket office. “They’re Chinese,” the man, a Malay, had said. “Iwant the cheapest ticket you’ve got,” Ransom said. “I don’t mind sleeping on deck.” The man said that fourth class was only Chinese. “You buy third class,” he said.
    Ransom had come overland from the subcontinent, travelling like a fugitive in third- and fourth-class train cars. He sometimes feared he was being pursued; when he rested his head against the hard wooden benches and closed his eyes, he envisioned Pathan drug runners from the Hindu Kush brandishing long, curved knives and modified M-16s with prayer beads wrapped around the stocks; corrupt Pakistani police familiar with instruments of torture loomed up behind them. Much worse were the apparitions of Ian and Annette. Because he did not know what had happened to Ian, who simply disappeared in Afghanistan, Ransom was unable to imagine anything but the worst: various states of mutilation and dismemberment. Annette he had seen—lying peacefully in the dank, putrid room they had occupied for three weeks, waiting for Ian to come back across the border. Stumbling in the moonlight, Ransom had carried her up the hillside above Landi Kotal. There was no question of going to the police. Annette was past help, which may have been where she wanted to be. Ransom was where he didn’t want to be, on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a place without law. The authorities would have kept him in the country, subject to an investigation that would last as long as they thought they could squeeze out