Chapter 10
“Hey, Kojak, old buddy, listen to this,” I was saying. “Did you know the killer whale can swim thirty miles an hour? That’s faster than my pickup truck goes.”
Kojak finished inhaling the food from his plate, let forth with a fishy burp, then walked a few steps before the exhaustion of eating caught up with him. He collapsed in a ragged black pile of fur, rolled half over onto his side, and licked the rest of his dinner from his whiskers.
I was sitting at the kitchen table with the books I had borrowed from Dan Austin in front of me and my hand curled around a cold can of Bud.
“Okay, so you’re not impressed. How about this? Orcas travel in packs of six to fifty. They hunt as an organized team, the way wolf packs do, circle their prey and attack on signal. This should interest you. They play with their victims like cats.”
Kojak lifted his head. His owlish yellow-green eyes blinked. He had no idea what I was talking about because he is a pacifist when it comes to the rodents who claim squatters’ rights in the boathouse. Countless generations of mice have been born, grown up, and died of old age under Kojak’s nose. He probably attends christenings and other family ceremonies.
Despite Kojak’s cavalier attitude, I found Austin’s books informative. I knew now that the male orca could grow to thirty-two feet and weigh nine to ten tons, and the female who doesn’t watch her waist may reach a dainty twenty-eight feet and five to six tons. An orca can dive a mile and hold its breath thirty minutes.
Technically a dolphin, orkie is the largest and swiftest marine mammal that eats warm-blooded prey. The Romans named it orca, which means “sea devil,” and it isn’t hard to see why they did. It has forty-six to fifty teeth in powerful jaws with a large gape that close in an interlocking trap for gripping and tearing. One orca was seen to leap clear of the water holding a five-hundred-pound sea lion in its teeth. As Austin and Sally said, though, when it’s not hunting, the orca is a gentle animal with a highly developed social responsibility toward members of its group.
The first orca captured was named Moby Doll. She was harpooned in 1965 by a sculptor who wanted a model for a statue. He couldn’t kill her, so he took her captive, gained her confidence, and showed that killer whales are not the bloodthirsty villains people have said they were. They even like humans. And they learn quickly. Before long, killer whales were taught to wear fake sunglasses and to have their teeth brushed by a trainer who stuck his head in the whale’s mouth for a fake dental exam. Orcas became popular performers with the public, and every marine amusement park with a mind for making a buck wanted at least one.
I read on. An orca has a lousy sense of smell and its eyesight isn’t all that great, but it’s got a sonar system that could put the best nuclear submarine to shame. By bouncing low-frequency clicks focused into a narrow beam off objects in its path and reading the echoes, the orca gets an accurate sound picture in its brain. It can tell the size and position of underwater objects, especially when it’s looking for food. It uses high-frequency clicks run together in a stream to communicate over long distances.
I closed the book I was reading and pushed it away. Everything I read verified what Austin told me and Sally had implied. Fatal attacks on human beings happen, but they are rare. I got up and went out onto my deck.
The bay was a huge ebony disk of emptiness. Kerosene lanterns glimmered in the camps along the narrow barrier beach. The Big Dipper wheeled above, its stars blinking coldly in the black sky. I waited for inspiration, but none came. No light bulb went off over my head the way it does in the comics. All I had gotten from two hours of reading was a cranium full of information and a headache from drinking too much beer on an empty stomach.
I went back in the house and opened the refrigerator. It was the cook’s day off, so I would have to throw something together. I found the leftovers of a Greek salad: an onion, tomato, olives, cuke, and a scrap of feta cheese. On the door rack were the same two eggs that hadn’t been near a hen in months. The secret in cooking old eggs is to overwhelm their staleness with stronger ingredients. I mixed the eggs in a bowl and poured them in a buttered cast-iron frying pan. I sprinkled on the feta and vegetables, and while the omelet cooked I toasted a frozen bagel and popped another beer. I was about to sit down to enjoy a feast fit for the gods when the telephone rang. I picked it up and said hello.
“Hello, Aristotle,” my mother said. “Good. Your telephone is not broken.”
My mother did not really think my telephone was broken. It was her way of telling me she was annoyed because I hadn’t called her. I stood in the kitchen with the phone clenched in one hand, a can of beer in the other, trying to think of a plausible excuse that would get me off the hook. With a few words she had reduced me to the age of twelve. And I am not twelve. I am approaching middle age. Furthermore, I am six-foot-one, a combat veteran of Vietnam, and an ex-cop. I have spent some time in the amateur boxing ring and have scar tissue on my face to prove it.
To understand why a woman who is barely five feet tall can make a big tough guy like me squirm requires some explanation. And the best place to start is at the beginning. It was my mother who named me after the Greek philosophers. With Hellenic logic, she reasoned that if I bore the names of great men famed for their intellect, I might follow in their footsteps. As I grew older she became convinced she had made the right decision. For she saw something in me as a child that reminded her uncomfortably of her grandfather Nikos, whose looks I have inherited, and whose temperament she fears I bear.
Her memories of Nikos persuaded her to push me into college to study the classics, a course I abandoned to fight with the marines in Vietnam. Later, when I had the chance to resume my studies, I became a city cop instead. Even worse, I dropped out of the tightly knit Greek community in Lowell. After the woman I thought I might marry was killed in a car crash, I moved to Cape Cod and left my younger brother, George, to run the family business while I indulged in my fondness for alcohol and self-pity. Through the years I have accumulated a substantial and pathologically addictive burden of guilt. Even my cat takes advantage of it.
Ma was ready to lay a scolding on me. I was too tired to respond with the usual litany of lame excuses she had heard a hundred times. I said simply, “I’m sorry I haven’t called.”
The admission of filial malfeasance caught my mother by surprise. There was no outburst of the usual motherly martyrdom. Only a silence on the other end. After a moment she said pleasantly, “That’s all right, Aristotle. I know you are busy.”
Encouraged by the success of this newly discovered strategy of candor, I said, “Actually, I was planning to get in touch with you. I talked to Cousin Nick in Boston the other day. He said something about Uncle Constantine coming to Massachusetts. Is that true?”
“Neh, Aristotle. Yes. Your uncle will be here soon. And it is why I talk to you. I want you to do something for me.”
“Sure, Ma, what is it?”
There was another pause. My mother is no fool. She can be as sweet as the honey in a piece of baklava, but she didn’t make Parthenon Pizza into the premier frozen-pizza company in New England by being a dummy. It is no accident that the characteristic the ancient Greeks admired most about Odysseus was his craftiness. The brain under my mother’s pepper-and-salt hair is much too guileful to be fooled by any deviousness on my part. She knew I always tried to wriggle out of family obligations, but if she wondered why I was being the dutiful son, she didn’t show it.
“You know Constantine is very sad since your aunt Thalia dies from cancer. His children live far away and they are no good anyhow and never come to see him. He is very lonely. He wants to be busy again. He wants to come see me and the family here. So he finds a job to do on Cape Cod. Work is the best way to forget, he says.”
“What kind of work, Ma?”
“He wants to go under the water again.”
“Uncle Constantine wants to dive? He
hasn’t done anything like that since his sponging days. He’s as tough as nails, but he’s too old to go diving.”
“You are right, Aristotle. I tell him that when he calls me. But he gets angry. He is not too old, he says. He is stronger than ever. He says he will come in his boat and show me.”
“I thought he sold the boat when he retired.”
“He did. But he buys it back. Aristotle, I’m very worried.”
“I’m sure everything is okay. It’s not a bad trip if he sticks to the inland waterway, and Uncle Constantine knows the sea better than anyone I know.”
“No, I don’t worry about the trip, but later, when he dives. The boat is old, too, like Constantine. I am afraid he will hurt himself.”
My mother worries so much about everything and everybody that it’s easy to toss off her anxieties, but I had my own misgivings about Uncle Constantine’s plans.
“What do you want me to do, Ma?”
“When he comes to Cape Cod, maybe you talk to him. Stay with him. Make sure he doesn’t hurt himself.”
I wondered how I was going to baby-sit a man in his seventies while I was undercover at Oceanus, but I’d figure a way. “Sure, Ma. No problem. Do you know how to get in touch with him?”
“He has your address and telephone. I tell him to make sure he calls you. He says he will. You should hear by now.”
“He could have been delayed by anything—weather, engine trouble. But I’ll call around to some of the big marinas and leave a message for him to call me pronto when he gets in. I’ll talk to him.”
“You are a good boy, Aristotle.”
“Don’t worry. How’s the rest of the family?”
“Good. Father and George are working hard. Your sister Chloe is helping out in the office. It is very busy. We are selling many diet pizzas.”
The idea of a diet pizza struck me as being something of an oxymoron, but my mother and father have had a steady success since they left their mom-and-pop pizza joint and got into wholesale production.
“I’ll have to try one the next time I come up,” I said.
“Yes, Aristotle. Make it soon.”
We said goodbye and hung up. I took a sip of my beer. It was warm and flat. Then I tried my omelet. It was cold, but I was hungry and ate it anyway.
Chapter 11
Sam and I met at Elsie’s Restaurant for breakfast the next morning. Eating at Elsie’s is like playing Russian roulette with all the chambers loaded. The blackboard special was cranberry Belgian waffles. The waffles tasted like balsa wood. The cranberries were hard as bullets. Sam spit a mouthful into his paper napkin and made a face, lowering his voice so Elsie wouldn’t hear. “Soc, I’ve tried every dish under the sun in my life, but this is the most god-awful thing I’ve ever eaten.”
I tried a pulpy nugget liberally lubricated with Vermont Maid maple syrup, decided it was a lost cause, and used my napkin, too. Then I rinsed my mouth with the caffeine-flavored dishwater that passes for coffee at the restaurant. Elsie came by to ask how the waffles were. Sam and I swore up and down it was the best breakfast we could remember. It doesn’t pay to lie, I guess. She gave us more waffles, on the house.
Sam was looking kelpy around the gills as we left Elsie’s. My stomach was full of blast-furnace clinkers.
“Good to get some air,” Sam said. “I’m going down to the boat. The mechanic’s coming early to work on the engine. Says it could take a few days, so we won’t be fishing for a while.” He looked up and sniffed the air. A lemon sun hung in the unclouded blue sky. “Darned shame. Weather’s perfect.”
I promised to call Sam that afternoon and headed off to Oceanus. I had time to spare and made a detour off Route 28 to Bass River. Windmill Park was deserted. I got out of the truck, walked over to sit on a green wooden bench, and watched a fishing boat head toward Nantucket Sound. A harpoon was lashed to the pulpit. It was a tuna boat going out to hunt for bluefin that could pay ten thousand dollars or more per fish on the Japanese market. I watched the boat wistfully, wishing for a day at sea and the purity of fishing. I sat awhile, thinking, then looked at my watch. Time to go. Reluctant to leave the bucolic spot, I got back in the truck and drove to Oceanus.
Again I got there before the pickets. I let myself in the staff door, changed into a clean pair of shorts and jersey, and wandered out onto the central plaza. Sun-sparkled droplets of water played pitty-pat in the fish fountain. I found my mop and bucket and strolled over to the dolphin theater, stopping first at a big observation window on the lower level to watch Huff and Puff and Froggy the beluga perform a graceful underwater ballet. Then I climbed the stairs to the dolphin pool. Huff and Puff saw me and swam over, chirping like crickets.
“Sorry, guys,” I said. “Don’t have a sardine to my name.” The beluga came up and let out a basso grunt. It was either a hello or tongue-lashing. Hard to tell with a beluga.
If I wanted to poke around without interference, I had to move fast. With my mop over my shoulder and my bucket in hand I walked quickly across the plaza to the orca stadium. The iron gate was ajar. I set the mop and bucket down, went through the gate, and followed the passageway that opened onto the spectator section. Pausing at the top row of bleachers, I swept my eyes around the stadium. A man stood in the ten-foot-wide space designated as the splash area between the lowest row of bleacher seats and the pool’s plastic wall. His back was to me.
I walked down to the poolside. The man faced the pool and was unaware of me. I said hello. He didn’t answer. A second later I saw why. He was wearing earphones. The headset was attached to a rubber cord that was plugged into a tape recorder. Another cord reached from the recorder over the transparent plastic wall and ended in a foot-long black rod suspended in the water.
The man wore dark blue slacks and a yellow shirt instead of the regulation blue and tan, so I guessed he wasn’t on the Oceanus staff. He had black hair going to gray at the sides, worn longish over his collar. He was tall, over six feet, but almost fragile looking, as if a good northeast wind would knock him down. His shoulders were bent into a slight stoop, like someone who spent a lot of time hunched over a desk. He was jotting notes into a clipboard with a Bic ballpoint pen. Finally sensing I was there, he turned his head. I recognized him as the man I had seen leaving Austin’s office the day of my interview. He was the same guy whose picture was in The New York Times. He examined me with alert eyes that were almost black, magnified by thick-lensed glasses perched on a large nose that protruded from a gaunt face. I expected him to be annoyed at having his work interrupted, but his mouth widened in a friendly smile. He took the earphones off and handed them to me.
“Put them on,” he said. “Rocky is being very talkative this morning.”
I slid the earphones onto my head and heard a hiss of background static. Rocky was about twenty feet back from the glass, hanging vertically just below the surface in the Christmas-ornament pose he favored. Slowly, he lifted his tail into a more horizontal position to face me head-on and opened his mouth in a toothy grin. A couple of clicks came over the earphones. The clicks grew more frequent and rapid, running together.
Yeeeeeooooooeeeeeeee.
The piercing, primeval banshee shriek filled my ears. A chill went up my spine. It was like listening to an alien creature calling across empty space from another world. I ripped the earphones off my head.
“Wow,” I said.
“Tell me what you heard on the hydrophone.”
“It sounded like Dizzy Gillespie blowing a high E riff in my ear.”
A sparkle of amusement glinted in his dark eyes. “Absolutely wonderful, isn’t it? They make that sound when they’re communicating.”
“What was Rocky saying?”
He took the earphones back and draped them around his neck. “You would have to compare it to other orca sounds to be absolutely sure, but given Rocky’s situation, I’d guess he’s saying he�
�s lonely, probably bored, and wants to know where everybody is.” He glanced at my Oceanus jersey. “You’re new here, aren’t you? I thought I knew everybody on the staff. I don’t think I’ve seen you around.”
“I started yesterday. My name is Socarides, but just call me Soc. Normally, I’m a fisherman, but the work hasn’t been there. Austin says there’s a chance of something full-time when the park reopens. He’s got me doing scut work. I guess he figured his regular people would quit if he asked them.”
“Well, that doesn’t surprise me. I’ve run into a few prima donnas around here.” He extended his hand. “My name is Henry Livingston. Call me Hank. It’s Doctor Livingston, actually, which earns me a lot of kidding, as in ‘Dr. Livingston, I presume.’ But don’t get sick around me, because my specialty is marine mammals, not humans. I run a little research outfit called Cetacean Explorations out of my house in the town of Sandwich. We do consulting work for Oceanus and other marine parks and aquariums on a contract basis.” He pointed to the black rod hanging in the pool and tapped the clipboard with his pen. “That’s a transmitter as well as a microphone. I’m seeing how killer whales respond to human sounds, feeding him words and sentences to see how he answers. Have you met Rocky?”
“We introduced ourselves yesterday. He seemed glad to see me.”
Rocky wasn’t wasting an interested audience. He plunged to the bottom of the pool like a dive-bomber, then turned and shot halfway out of the water, giving us a nice view of the shiny whiteness of his belly before he hit the surface in a foamy echoing explosion.
“He’s even happier today having two of us around,” Livingston said. “Orcas are very social animals. He’s been quite lonely without his daily routine to keep him busy. I’ve advised the park to get someone in here every day to play with him, run him through his tricks, anything to keep that magnificent body and that large brain active. You don’t have any experience working with killer whales, by chance?”
Death in Deep Water Page 10