They go down to the hotel, where a policeman awaits them. It’s a different one, a younger one, and for a moment Kunicki feels hopeful of getting good news, but then he is asked for his passport. The youthful officer takes down Kunicki’s information, carefully, meticulously, telling him as he does so that they’ve decided to expand their search to the mainland, too – to Split, and to the neighbouring islands.
‘She could have made it to the ferry along the shore,’ he explains.
‘She didn’t have any money,’ Kunicki says, in Polish, and then in English, ‘No money. Here, everything.’ He displays her purse to the policeman, pulling out her red wallet, embroidered with little beads. He opens it and holds it out. The policeman shrugs and writes down their address in Poland.
‘And the kid was how old?’
‘Three,’ says Kunicki.
They drive down the serpentine road back to the same place, the day promising to be hot and bright, everything overexposed like in a picture. By noon all images will have been drained from it. Kunicki wonders whether they couldn’t do the search from on high, from a helicopter, given that the island is almost completely bare. Then he wonders about those chips they can put in animals, migrating birds, storks and cranes, and yet here they don’t have enough for people. Everyone should have one of those chips, for their own safety; then you could track every human movement on the internet – roads, rest stops, when people start to get lost. How many lives could be saved! He can just see the computer screen with its colour-coded lines that mean people, uninterrupted traces, signs. Circles and ellipses, labyrinths. Maybe, too, incomplete figure eights, maybe unsuccessful spirals cut short suddenly.
There’s a dog, a Black Shepherd; they hand him her jumper from the backseat. The dog sniffs around the car and then sets off into the olive grove. Kunicki feels a rush: it’s all about to be cleared up, now. They run after the dog. It stops at a spot where they must have peed, although there’s no trace of them. It looks pleased with itself – but come on, dog, that isn’t it! Where are the people? Where did they go? The dog doesn’t understand what they want from him, but reluctantly it sets back off again, off to one side now, down the road, away from the vineyards.
So she went down the main road, thinks Kunicki. She must have been confused. She could have kept going and waited for him a few hundred metres from here. Hadn’t she heard him honking? And then what? Maybe someone had given them a ride, but since they hadn’t turned up yet, where could that someone have taken them? Someone. A vague, out-of-focus, broad-shouldered figure. Broad neck. A kidnapping. Would he have knocked them out and shoved them into the trunk? He would have taken them aboard the ferry, to the mainland, and now they’d be in Zagreb or Munich, or wherever. Although how would he have crossed the border with two unconscious people in his trunk?
But the dog turns now into the empty ravine running diagonally off the road, into the deep, stony breach, running down along those stones into its depths. You can see an untended little vineyard down there, and within the vineyard, a stone hut that looks like a kiosk covered in rusted corrugated steel sheets. A heap of dried grapevine stalks lies in front of its door, probably for a fire. The dog meanders around the house, circling and circling and then returning to the door. But the door is padlocked. It takes them a moment to take this in. The wind has scattered sticks across the threshold. There’s obviously no way anyone could have gotten in there. The police officer looks in through the grime on the windows and then starts to beat at it, harder and harder, until he finally batters it down. Everyone looks in then, struck in unison by the all-encompassing smell of must and sea.
The walkie-talkie crackles, they give the dog something to drink, and then they have him smell the jumper again. Now he circles the hut three times, goes back to the road, and then, after some hesitation, continues in the same direction towards bare rocks, only occasionally grown over by dry grass. The sea is visible from the cliffs. The search party stands assembled, facing the water.
The dog loses the trail, turns around, lies down in the middle of the path.
‘To je zato jer je po noči padala kiša,’ somebody says, and Kunicki, parsing the Croatian through his own Polish, understands that they’re discussing the fact that it rained last night.
Branko comes and takes him for a late lunch. The police stay there while Branko and Kunicki go down to Komiža. They hardly speak. Kunicki thinks Branko must not know what to say to him, and in a foreign language besides. So fine, let him not talk. They order fried fish at a restaurant right on the water; it’s not even a restaurant, just a place belonging to some of Branko’s friends. He knows everyone here. They’re all sort of similar-looking, too, with sharp features, sort of windblown, a tribe of sea wolves. Branko pours him some wine and talks him into drinking it all. He downs his own, too. Then he doesn’t let him pay for anything.
He gets a phone call. ‘They manage to got a helicopter, an airplane,’ Branko explains afterward. ‘Police.’
They work out a plan of attack, deciding to take Branko’s boat along the island’s shores. Kunicki calls his parents back in Poland. He hears his father’s familiar raspy voice. He tells him they have to stay another three days. He will not tell him the truth. Everything’s fine, they just need to stay. And he calls in to work, says he’s run into this minor issue, asks if he can have three more days of holiday. He doesn’t know why he says three days.
He awaits Branko at the dock. Branko shows up wearing that same T-shirt with the red shell symbol, but then Kunicki sees it’s a different one, fresh, clean – he must have a bunch of them. They find the little fishing boat among the many moored vessels. Blue letters written ineptly across its side proclaim its name: Neptune. Suddenly Kunicki remembers that the ferry they’d taken to get here had been called Poseidon. And a lot of things, a lot of bars, a lot of shops, a lot of boats, are called Poseidon. Or Neptune. The sea must spit these two names out like outgrown shells. How do you obtain copyright from a god? Kunicki wonders. What would you have to pay for it?
They settle into the fishing boat, small, cramped, actually a motorboat with a little cabin cobbled together out of wood planks. Here Branko keeps a store of water bottles, both empty and full. Some of them contain wine from his vineyard – white, good, strong. Everyone here has their own vineyard and their own wine. The boat’s motor is kept in the cabin, too, but now Branko hoists it out and attaches it to the stern. It starts on the third try. Now in order to talk they have to scream at each other. The motor’s roar is deafening, and yet after just a moment the brain grows accustomed, as it does in the winter to thick clothing that separates the body from the rest of the world. That noise slowly submerges the view of the diminishing inlet and the port. Kunicki catches a glimpse of the apartment they were staying in, the kitchen window with its agave flower desperately shooting off into the sky like a frozen firework, a triumphant ejaculation.