Slow River

Chapter 14

Lore is fifteen. It is early March, and she is preparing to fly to Gdansk, where for the first time she will be assistant deputy project manager. An admin position, Katerine tells her, but a responsible one, nevertheless. Katerine will be taking charge personally.

Lore is up late the night before they fly, running over last-minute plans—so that she knows what is going on, so she won’t embarrass herself in front of Katerine, or Katerine in front of others—when the phone rings.

She accepts the call. “Tok!” He looks different, but at first Lore can’t pinpoint the change. Then she has it: his face has lost all trace of puppy fat. “How are you? It’s—”

“I’ve been talking to Stella,” he interrupts. “It’s true. All of it.”

“What—”

But he talks right over her. “Watch yourself. You might be next.”

Lore is glad to see him, glad to hear from him, but she remembers how he had fooled her for so many years. How he had never talked to her. How she felt betrayed when he left. And now he is being cryptic.

“I haven’t had any idea where you’ve been the last year or so, and now you…” She remembers she is fifteen; grown enough to take her first official job for the company. “It’s late,” she says, then—unable to help herself—bursts out, “Do you have any idea how badly you’ve hurt Mother”

Tok looks momentarily blank; then, incredibly, he laughs. “How much I’ve hurt her? Lore, look,” he shakes his head, “you don’t—”

But the laugh and head shake are enough. She is grown now, no longer a child to be patronized, deceived; She cuts him off midsentence. She is tired, she tells herself. She has a lot of reading to do. When he is ready to apologize, he can call again.

It is early spring in Poland. The remediation site is slippery with mud; small pockets of ice crackle under Lore’s boots when she takes samples for testing. The only wildlife she sees are worms, gray things that show a startling pink against the mud when a shovel cuts them accidentally in half.

It is a short job, but the weather and the work are brutal. Tok does not call. Lore is so busy she hardly ever sees Katerine, except one night when she is idly flipping through the net and comes across her mother, giving an interview to one of the national channels. Katerine is smiling with that expert one-eye-on-the-camera-one-eye-on-the-interviewer stance Lore knows so well.

“—efficient job at the old Gdansk shipyards,” the interviewer is saying. “How do you persuade your employees and team members to take on such difficult projects?”

“It’s not hard,” she says. “I throw myself on their mercy. People love to be asked for help.” They actually like you better if you show some vulnerability, Lore remembers her saying at a party once, if you bare your throat and say please.

Of course, Lore thinks. Everything Katerine does is for a reason.

It is April by the time everyone is satisfied the bacteria are doing their job and Katerine decides it is time to leave the shipyards in someone else’s hands.

“It’s autumn in Auckland,” her mother says. “It’ll soon be winter. I think we deserve a few days in the heat, don’t you?”

They book themselves into a hotel in Belmopan, Belize. It is hot in the two weeks before the rainy season. Lore drives out alone to the beach every day to dive the reef, the second-largest barrier reef in the world, and the most beautiful. She tries not to think about Tok while she glides through the cool water with the blue tang and banded butterfly fish, through the aqua and rose of the coral. She rents a jeep and drives through the interior, stopping sometimes to film chechem and banak tree, sapodilla and blood-red Heliconia. There are leaves here the size of canoe paddles, and beetles as long as her thumb. All around her she can feel life—creeping, crawling, running, leaping from branch to branch.

The nights are warm and soft, black skies streaked with bright city light, laughter, and the scent of honeysuckle and cold cocktails.

Lore is in the shower when her phone rings. She ignores it. It rings again. She climbs out of the shower. It is her mother. “Turn on the news,” Katerine says. “They’re announcing the verdict on the Caracas class-action suit.” The screen clicks off. Caracas… Lore, undecided, finds a news channel, but then turns the volume up high and gets back in the shower, only half listening.

“…great disappointment this afternoon in Caracas… Michel Aguilar, chief attorney for the plaintiffs, said earlier that this was a blow to all those who expected justice to ignore matters of privilege and influence…”

Lore hums to herself as she soaps her legs.

“…Carmen Torini, former head of the project in Caracas that…”

At the sound of the familiar name, Lore turns off the shower and pads into the living room. Carmen Torini, surrounded by reporters and looking older than when Lore first saw her on Oster’s screen, is talking to the camera. “And we think it is an absolutely fair settlement. The van de Oest company has always maintained that it scrupulously obeyed the law and all guidelines of the federal government of Venezuela. We are not to blame for the terrible tragedy of twenty years ago. The project undertaken here, the bioremediation of groundwater contaminated by careless contractors in the past, should have proved faultless. It would have proved faultless if not for the greed of the government-supervised subcontractors. If greed had not motivated the substitution of the correct bacteria there would not have been the release of mutagenic toxins into the water table…”

Lore, still watching, punches in her mother’s code. The news shrinks to a box in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. “When did you find out?”

“A few minutes ago. The judge just called.”

“And our liability?”

Katerine laughs. Her eyes, green today, sparkle. “None. None whatsoever. We’ll help, of course—that’s only good PR—but at least we won’t be suffering variations on this damn lawsuit for the next three generations.” She punches the air in triumph. “See you in the bar.”

Lore expands the news box. Now a mestizo woman is talking. She looks upset. “… got nothing! ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘it’s not our fault.’ Then whose fault is it? The government can’t afford to help. Look, this is my daughter…” She pulls a flat from her pocket, the camera zooms in. It is a picture of a limbless child, grinning. “She’s dead now. My only child. And thousands of others ruined because someone thought they could make some money. Because…” She seems to catch sight of something offscreen “Because of you!” She points and the camera pans wildly, picking up Carmen Torini, still talking to reporters. The reporters, sensing drama, part and let the two women confront each other. One, plump and weeping, beside herself with rage; one slim, well-dressed, patient.

“You’re all so greedy! For the sake of making more money—”

“It was not our fault. If our design specification had been followed to the letter, this would not—”

“Fault! Liability! Just words! Does it matter to our children who is to blame? No. All they want is their lives back. Lives that were ruined because of the van de Oest patenting policy. What would it cost to set right? A few million? Hardly a drop in the company coffers. You should do what you can out of common decency. Who cares about who should have done what? We want to fix it. If guilt at your greed doesn’t motivate you, then humanity, common decency should.”

Carmen seems impervious. “The van de Oest Company sympathizes with your grief in the light of this tragedy. Although the suit for compensation and total grafts for all victims has been dismissed and we have been judged not liable, as a gesture of sympathy to the people of Caracas, the company has authorized me to offer prostheses to all who feel the need—”

The mother of the dead child is having none of that. “We don’t want charity,” she spits. “We want justice. We will not give up. While our children lie in their beds and look at us with their sad eyes we will follow you from country to country, crying ‘Justice! Justice!’ and we will be heard!”

Lore towels her hair dry. It was not Torini’s fault that the locals had tried to cut costs and improve their profit margin by using a generic substitute for the specially tailored van de Oest bacterium around which the whole project had been designed. She thinks about the project in Gdansk and what might happen if, sometime in the next eight months, some greedy or stupid contractor swaps out one bacterium for another. Disaster. She makes a note on her slate to review the continuing supervision of this project and the others in which she has so far been involved, Mistakes happen, but they can be prevented. Then she turns off the screen, dismissing the matter from her mind. It has nothing to do with her and there is a cold drink waiting in the bar.