If I could draw a simple conclusion from my short stay on the island of Tutuila, it was the fact that everything here revolved around Ernesto Chavez and his exotic businesses, whether they involved rhino horns, South African swallows, ammonia, or some other shit. Otherwise, so many people wouldn’t have tried to persistently mess with his plans. And if I wanted to follow the tide, I obviously had to do just the same thing—try to find the guy and mess with him.

Later in the afternoon, after half a bottle of whiskey from the 3D printer in my room, I finally survived the shock from the rather inhospitable welcome the island had presented to me, and I was ready to mingle again. Since Olosega was a privately owned territory and no public transport served the destination, I obviously had to start my investigation with a trip to Ofu—the two islands were very close on the map. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any transport from here to Ofu either, as it turned out. It seemed very weird, and to solve my problem, I decided to visit the local harbor to figure out why that was. Ports are pivotal points for every scumbag in every city, and most of the exciting things usually happen there. Besides, it was also the right place to arrange my charter trip.

Charged with alcohol optimism, I quickly went down the hotel stairs, restraining myself from asking the receptionist for guidance because I had to be careful now—too many people knew too many things about me. In fact, I didn’t need to worry about finding the place because everything was at a hand’s distance in such a small city on such a small island. I accidentally hit the spot just twenty minutes later.

The first thing that struck me during my short walk through the streets of Pago Pago was how many East Asians I saw on my way. Literally, ninety percent of all the people I met had such origins. Chinese and Indians flooded the world after the industrial revolutions in their countries, but I had no idea they had virtually assimilated the entire traditional population of the Pacific islands. It felt like I walked across the suburbs of Delhi or Shanghai, and almost nothing indicated differently.

When I reached the harbor, it actually became worse. Until then, I could still recognize a European face here and there, but after that moment, I saw only Indians. They were just everywhere: shouting, spitting on the ground, pissing in the water, selling or buying things, chopping meat and vegetables, cooking, eating food—the guys practically lived here! There was no space to put your foot without stepping on someone’s toes, and the ubiquitous smell of urine was unbearable in the area. At least now I knew why it was so ubiquitous—everybody was cooking ammonia.

After adapting to my surroundings in a few minutes, I realized Peularia was right when she said indigenous people—the newly indigenous, in fact—were crazy about the stuff. A significant part of the entire trade activity here was devoted to or related to producing or transporting it to Ofu. There was an extraordinary variety of weird substances in bowls, basins, buckets, pots, barrels, and bottles that the “manufacturers” advertised as mona, and none of them seemed even slightly bothered by the fact that the boiling temperature of this chemical compound was minus thirty-three degrees Celsius. It just couldn’t exist in liquid form in this environment.

In addition, most people I saw around the place bore numerous scars, presumably obtained while producing the stuff. Many hands, shoulders, and chests were burned, as were, in some cases, faces and eyes. However, the terrible injuries didn’t stop anyone from trying, and the trade flourished. Some of these modern alchemists had their installations here with them, ready to prepare the substance on demand for everyone with a boat who wanted to sell to Greenspace. One of the “magicians” even poured sulfuric acid into a bucket full of goat dung to pull his “magic”!

After fifteen minutes, I was simply overwhelmed by the boundless human creativity, and since all the people around seemed nuts to me, I decided to plot my trip to Ofu with someone who had at least half of his mind intact. Finding such a guy wasn’t an easy task, but after ten more minutes, I saw a man sitting quietly on the ground by a crate full of oysters. He had no burn scars and looked different from all the Indians. I found that encouraging.

“Hello!” I approached the dude and tried to start a casual conversation. “Quite a good catch, huh? You must’ve been lucky last night!”

The guy sharply turned his head toward me, sulking as if I had just wanted to steal his wife. I had already learned that people on the island tended to be weirdly uncommunicative, but I decided to persist with this one anyway.

“Well, I mean, the weather was fine last night, so I guess these are fresh, aren’t they? Do you have more?” I pretended to be a customer. My goal was to seduce the man into a conversation.

“Ou te le malamalama. Ou te le tautala Igilisi!” the guy comprehensively explained to me after a moment of hesitating. “Alu ese ma a’u!”

“Uhh—” I hesitantly started but then briefly waved my hand, giving up. My mission was simply impossible here. “Actually, never mind! Have a nice day, buddy!”

I quickly walked away and reconsidered my strategy because it was clearly wrong. I thought maybe I’d be better off going for the most heavily burned man in the harbor instead—preferably someone who was swimming in a tank of sulfuric acid and making small pieces of origami out of his dissolving skin. After another ten minutes of wandering through the crowd, I found the right fellow. He was idling on the quay, sitting on one of those metal balls cemented to the ground where boatmen tie their yachts. A relatively big vessel gently swayed on the water not far from him. It was fastened to the ball with a thick rope, and it read Mountain Cougar on its bow. I found that a pretty weird name for a marine vessel.

The guy had no burns on his hands or face, but he had various other scars. He offered nothing, so I presumed he was a smuggler waiting here for clients. I cautiously went nearer and coughed.

“Hey! The boat yours?” I started casually because I didn’t know if he knew any English—he didn’t seem to be an Indian.

The man turned his head to me disparagingly and spit on the ground without answering. “So typical! I’m getting the usual neglect again.” I was annoyed but went on according to my plan.

“Could your baby outsail a police vessel?” I asked him, totally ignoring his unfriendly gesture. I knew he would take the bait eventually because he looked arrogant and vain. The boat probably meant everything to him.

“Of course, she can! Who cares?” He answered rather snappishly. His accent was weird but not enough to reveal his origins. He spoke well, however.

“Well, I care! I may have a business proposal for you, but you don’t seem quite interested, you know. Are you just hanging around to sweat in the sun and spit on the ground, or are you waiting for a client?”

The stranger fixed his eyes on me, stone-faced, and I thought he would spit again, but he didn’t do it right away. He glared at me for ten seconds, then spit twice!

“What do you want?” The smuggler mumbled after a while because he realized I wouldn’t get down on my knees and beg him for his boat. He pompously looked away as he spoke.

“For starters, I wanna be sure you can do the job right. There are too many boatmen in this place, but I’m not here for a tourist ride. I like dangerous things!”

The jerk promptly showed some interest. He unstuck his ass from the metal ball and stood upright in front of me. He was a little taller than I, with short dark hair, thin lips, and a goatee. His eyes had something East Asian, but not Chinese—maybe Japanese or Korean.

“I’m the best boatman here, and this is the best boat!” He stressed every word, obviously affected. “She’s four-point-four turbo hydrogen! She could outrun any police vessel!”

“Really?” I acted unimpressed. “Even a police speedboat?”

“Police speedboats, police thunderboats, police race cars, police choppers—everything!”

I smiled because he just narrowly missed involving police jets and space shuttles. The moron was really vain about his toy! I was aware I didn’t look like a merchant but rather like a fucking drug dealer, which wasn’t my intention, but I couldn’t figure out any other approach to a cold fish like him. I just wanted to try him and see how far he would go.

“Okay, fine!” I let my next bait out. “Your boat seems good enough for the job, but are you?”

The guy glared at me, extremely furious. I was literally getting on his last nerve—I could feel his hatred in the air between us. He spit on the ground demonstratively and said nothing.

“Okay then!” I made a sulky face and shook my head, falsely disappointed. “Clearly, you’re not the right guy for me! If you throw tantrums every time something goes wrong, we’ll both end up in jail. I wouldn’t want to waste my stuff with you!”

My acting enraged him even more. The jerk narrowed his eyes at me, inflamed, and for a moment, I thought he would spit in my face. Fortunately, he didn’t.

“Here!” He suddenly showed me a scar on his cheek. “This is from a sea eagle when it tried to steal a baby dolphin from me! This here, on my shoulder, is from a tiger shark in the Gulf of Davao. This is where a stingray stung me near the shore of Borneo, and this one is a stonefish, which almost killed me when I accidentally stepped on it!”

He kept spinning on his axis like a human top, showing me various scars on his body and explaining his heroic deeds. I found it necessary to stop him at some point because I was afraid he would eventually spin away into the water.

“And what about the police?” I murmured, still not impressed. “Do you have any memories with them?”

This sobered him up a bit. He pulled up his shirt and showed me a gun wound on his chest. It was just a centimeter away from his heart—he was lucky to be alive. Then he bent down a little and pointedly spit three times.

“Are you here for business, or do you just want to drive me crazy?” He hissed, clearly offended, and made a point of not looking at me anymore. Instead, he looked at the sea. It was obviously time for me to step up.

“Okay, I need your boat to carry me and my stuff to Ofu,” I said nonchalantly. The guy instantly turned his greedy eyes toward me.

“What’s the stuff?”

“It’s ammonia, of course! What do you think?” I huffed disparagingly.

He drew a step back and gave me an appraising look, but after a moment, it became apparent that his final judgment wasn’t exceptionally high. Before he spit on the ground again, I snapped in order to stop him.

“What’s with your fucking attitude, dude?” I blew up. “Do you see goddamn buckets in my hands? I’m talking real business here, not fucking alchemy!”

I definitely grabbed his attention with this one and wondered whether I should spit on the ground, too, to show him how serious I was. He nervously looked around and stepped closer to me.

“How much is the stuff?” he whispered.

I glanced at his boat. She had an approximate storage capacity of about twenty-five tons of water. At the same time, I didn’t know what the density of liquefied ammonia was. In any case, the boat was quite big and good.

“A hundred and fifty tons!” I offered generously after a quick hesitation.

The smuggler furtively looked around again.

“For such shit,” he said quietly, “I can take you directly to Swains. Why waste time and stuff on Ofu?”

I looked at him, surprised, without any idea what he was talking about. Unfortunately, I couldn’t ask him now because I had already made a “professional” out of myself, and he would have suspected I wasn’t.

“No, I wanna go to Ofu!” I insisted, still uncertain.

The smuggler remained silent for a while, giving me a second, appraising look. He seemed unsure now, and it was clear that, in his eyes, I had become an amateur again.

“Why do you need me anyway?” he roared eventually. “There is no factory in the region anymore. If you really have one hundred and fifty thousand kilos, you’re bringing them on a boat from Chinasia or Australia. You can set your course wherever you want, then!”

“Hah!” I bulged my eyes and almost gasped. I hadn’t actually thought about that. I had started the game spontaneously, but now it was turning into serious business, and I had to figure out how to “lay my hands” on one hundred and fifty tons of liquefied ammonia urgently before I lost the guy completely.

“My supplier’s afraid to sail his ship in the waters near Ofu,” I grunted, shaking my head pompously. “He has no boaty like yours, and it’s shallow there. Didn’t you know that?”

As I said this, I instinctively stepped back because I suddenly realized I had declared war on him by offending his baby. The boatman transformed literally before my eyes, and his chest ballooned, ready to explode in my face. I took another step back in case he decided I was a sea eagle trying to pinch a baby dolphin from him.

In the end, however, the jerk didn’t explode. He only looked at me with genuine disgust and spit such a massive blob of spit in the water that it probably contributed a good ten centimeters to the world’s sea level! Afterward, he returned to sit on his metal ball with his back turned to me, obviously furious. Then, he regularly kept spitting smaller, ordinary spits on the ground.

I just shrugged and turned around because our grandiose deal was over now. I had to find another boatman, but I felt somewhat discouraged. The people here were a true nightmare! Half of them didn’t want to talk at all, and the other half spoke in a way that made me feel sorry I had started the conversation in the first place.

Disappointed, I headed for the exit, deciding it was enough for me today. I was pissed off and already dreaming of having a glass of whiskey in my hotel room when, after a few steps, I felt someone grabbed me by my left elbow. It made me jump, startled, because I thought Sengupta had changed his mind about my life and his thugs were coming to evaporate my heart with their positron guns. When I turned around, I saw another local man, though. He was short and curly-haired, with his neck and chest burned, and he was trying to pull me discreetly aside. He didn’t seem dangerous, but I followed him with mixed feelings.

“Come here, sir!” he whispered. “I sail you! Come see my boat, and you be happy.”

He quickly dragged me through the crowd to the very end of the marketplace. His vessel was a small and ancient diesel-engine thing, and her name was Saranya-82. I had severe doubts if she could carry us further than half a kilometer into the sea before heading straight down to the bottom, but the proud owner explained that Saranya was the goddess of clouds and dawn, and his Saranya-82 was fit to take us to the end of the world and maybe even beyond. Such exaggerations were typical of the people here, making me feel uneasy, to say the least. I nervously looked at the boat again and then back at him.

“How much do you want for a trip to Ofu?” I asked him, just to get the current prices.

The guy immediately sank into deep calculations, probably considering the course, the wind direction and its effect on energy consumption, the volatility of carbon-based fuels on the stock market, and a few more variables. Then, finally, he announced his offer.

“Fifty dollars!” he cried, excited he would have the chance to get so much money.

“Is the return included, or is it just one-way?” I asked.

“One-way, one-way! One hundred dollars and back!”

For my part, I also made some brief calculations, taking into account his marital status and the fertility of his potential wife, his social status and nonexistent bank account, and the level of his desperation given his financial situation. Then, I announced my counterbid.

“Fifty bucks for going to Ofu and back!”

“Deal, deal!” he shouted quickly, eager to grab the offer before I further lowered his unrealistically high expectations. That was, in fact, what I liked about the indigenous people most—no deal was closed and sealed here until it was reduced to half the initial price.

We quickly arranged the details then, and I said I would meet him here the day after tomorrow at dawn. He informed me that the distance to Ofu was about one hundred and twenty kilometers, and traveling would take four hours. He also wanted fifteen bucks in advance, and I gave him twenty, which made him the happiest man in the world. However, his face darkened when he knew I wasn’t taking my mona on the trip because it seemed suspicious to him. Maybe he thought I was a thief and aimed to steal his stuff. I explained that my mona was coming on a larger vessel later, and I just wanted to pre-arrange the deal now, which calmed him down eventually.

Five minutes later, we shook hands and sealed it. The guy was happy because he would travel with his stuff anyway, and my offer was an unexpected profit for him—some kind of insurance if they didn’t accept his mona, which would be the case for sure. He just didn’t know it yet.

After finishing on the harbor, I headed toward my hotel, having mixed feelings again. I was glad everything with my plan was okay now, but on the other hand, I was a little worried about traveling in such a wreck. Unfortunately, I had no other option, and besides being an amateur, the guy was unlikely to reveal anything about my trip to anyone, so there was a plus side to the whole thing. He was a simple-minded local man who probably knew other simple-minded local people and no big shots or foreigners. While slowly advancing through the crowd, absorbed in my thoughts like this, something strangely familiar flashed for a second ahead of me, and it made me stop, alarmed. I didn’t see it well, but it seemed like Marty Cork’s face.

I stayed there for a few minutes, scanning the area, but I couldn’t glimpse the guy again. Eventually, I decided it must have been someone else because it was unlikely to meet the bastard here, and it was also easy to make such a mistake in this rippling sea of faces. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to meet Cork so soon because I wasn’t ready yet. I didn’t know the island very well, and if he knew I had come, my task would become more difficult because he would be more careful. For now, Bobby Bjornson was giving me enough trouble with her Indian friends, so I just turned around and quickly walked away.

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