Black Projects, White Knights: The Company Dossiers

by Kage Baker

  Victor is one of those white men with nearly transparent skin. His hair and beard are a startling red, his eyes pale green, and his features are small and precise as a kitten’s. If he were mortal he might decay in time to a certain spare leonine dignity, but as it is he has perpetually the sharp edge of the adolescent cat. Victor was our Facilitator on this mission. He had arranged for our yacht and its crew, and had produced such papers as we might need to justify our actions to any mortals we might encounter. Other than the servants, of course. We were fortunate to have his assistance, for the customary glacial slowness of the Company in requisitioning such necessaries might have produced a delay of years before we attended to our present mission.

  “Madame D’Arraignee.” He ushered me to my chair. “Captain Kalugin. It appears we’re having ‘Bounty of the Sea’ tonight. Turtle soup, oysters, lobster salad and tunny a la Marechale. Just on the chance you don’t get enough of the briny deep on the morrow, Kalugin.” Kalugin sighed and held out his glass for champagne. “It’s all very well for you to laugh. Three days against the ceiling of that cabin! Do you know, when the storm had subsided enough for my rescue transport, I had/. W. Coffin and Sons, Boston, Massachusetts printed on my cheek? In mirror image, of course. From an inscription on the brass-work.”

  Victor laughed heartily. I thought what it must have been like, lying in darkness with drowned men, waiting for the storm to subside. I reached for Kalugin’s hand under the table and squeezed it. He gave me a grateful look.

  “So here’s a health to the infant Hercules!” Victor raised his glass.“Let’s hope the little devil is in reasonably good health too, after his sojourn in the bosom of Aphrodite. Have you inspected the laboratory yet, Nan? Everything to your satisfaction?”

  “Yes, thank you.” I leaned to the side as a mortal servant bent to ladle the soup into my plate. “They certainly gave me enough sponges. I didn’t find the antifungal, however.”

  “It’s down there. An entire drum of that and the other chemical you needed, the solvent, what’s it’s name?”

  “Diorox.”

  “Diorox, to be sure. I saw it loaded. Everything you need to restore the son of Zeus to his original splendor should be present and accounted for.”

  “I’m sure that will prove to be the case.”

  “I really did seal it up quite tightly,” asserted Kalugin. “There may be a little damage from the tacks. I did my best to remove them, but you’ve no idea—the rolling of the ship, and the shouting, and then the light had gone, you know, and the claw end of the hammer wasn’t the right size.”

  “You should have used pliers,” Victor admonished him briskly. “Though of course the really important thing, Kalugin, was the air seal. We can only pray it withstood the impact when you dropped it.”

  “Oh, it must have.” He twisted one corner of his napkin. “That’s all covered in my report, you see, the cylinder landed in mud. The seal must have held. There shouldn’t have been any errors.”

  “No, I daresay; the equipment scarcely ever malfunctions.” Victor tasted his soup with a delicate grimace. Kalugin looked wretched. He turned to me.

  “I’m afraid I might have torn one corner of the painting a little,” he said apologetically. “I did mention that in my report as well.”

  “I’m sure it’s of no consequence.” I smiled at him. “Canvas repair is the simplest of processes. You forget, my dear, the Renaissance work I’ve done. You ought to see what the Italians do to their paintings!

  Floods and mud and bird droppings—”

  “If you please!” Victor’s spoon halted in its rise to his mouth.

  “Pray excuse me.” I had a sip of champagne.

  “Have you spoken to Masaki?” Victor inquired of Kalugin.

  “The diver? Yes, and she seems a knowledgeable sort. Appears to have done a lot of this sort of thing.”

  “She has. She’s the best in her field.”

  “Might almost be able to handle the recovery operation herself, I imagine, if my nerve were to desert me,” said Kalugin casually.

  “Though, of course, it shan’t.” Victor gave him a hard smile across the table. We talked about the mission until half past eleven, and Kalugin drank too much champagne. I lay in the bunk across from him and watched as he slept it off. His eyes raced behind pale lids, his breath caught continually, and his soft hands pushed and pushed at something that would not leave him. It is a terrible thing to be immortal and have bad dreams.

  At dawn I opened my eyes and the cabin was full of the sublimest clear pink light, the same tender shade one sees only in the winter season. Its delicate beauty was in harsh contrast to the hoarse profanities that resounded on the morning air.

  Kalugin sat up and we stared at one another. We heard one of the Technicians approaching Victor’s stateroom and saying, quite unnecessarily, “Vessel off our starboard bow, sir. Crew of two mortals. They’re hailing us.”

  Hailing damnation on us, in fact, and worse things too. The voice echoing across the water was nearly incoherent with rage, backed up by the rattling throb of a steam engine, and growing closer with each moment. We heard Victor’s door open and heard his rapid footsteps as he went on deck. We dressed hastily and followed him.

  The vessel was just coming abreast of us as we emerged. Victor, dignified in his dressing gown, Turkish slippers and fez, confronted a wiry little man in stained canvas trousers and an old jersey. The mortal was bounding up and down in his fury in the manner of a chimpanzee, which resemblance was furthered by the fact that his arms were muscular and enormous.

  The other mortal stood at the tiller, a bedraggled girl in a faded cotton-print dress. She was heavily with child, and appeared to be on the verge of tears. Their old fishing boat was in a bad way, even to my untrained eyes: her ironwork had risen like biscuit with flaked rust, and her old wood was pearl-gray. Some attempt had recently been made to make her seaworthy, but her days on the water were numbered, clearly. ELSIE was painted in trailing letters on her bow. To render what her captain was saying into prose would be to produce a stream of invective not grammatical but profound.

  “For shame, sir!” cried Victor. “There are ladies present.” The general sense of the mortal’s response was that Victor might take himself and his female companions to any other place in the seven seas save this one.

  Victor’s mouth tightened and the points of his moustache stabbed the air. “I will not, sir. I will conduct salvage operations here, having every legal right to do so,” he stated. He might have continued, but Kalugin gave a sudden groan and clutched the rail.

  “Oh God, it’s Mackie Hayes!” Kalugin said. He didn’t say it loudly, but all heads turned to stare at him. The gimlet eye of the vulgar sailor widened. He uttered a word I will not stain paper with and followed it with the cry of “Captain Pomeroy!”

  Then, in an act of physical bravado I would not have thought a mortal man capable of performing, he vaulted the span of sea between his craft and ours and landed on the deck beside Kalugin. The girl at the tiller gave a weak scream. Kalugin found his lapels seized in an iron grip and the sailor’s stubbled face a bare inch from his own.

  “Where were ya?” shouted the sailor. “When the Gladstone was foundering and there was good men going to the bottom, I ask ya? Where were ya when the spars were snapping and the mast broke off clean? Hiding in yer bunk, ya no-good son of a w-—!”

  Kalugin had gone very white. He moistened his lips with his tongue and said, “You mistake me, sir. Captain Pomeroy was my father.”

  The sailor drew his head back to stare at him. He saw no gray in Kalugin’s hair, he saw no lines about his eyes, he saw no scar upon his chin. Nor should he, for these things had been cosmetically applied to make Kalugin look like a mortal man and had been removed when no longer needed. The ferocity of his regard diminished somewhat and he released Kalugin’s lapels.

  “Well, d—n me if ya ain’t the spit and image of Captain Pomeroy. But he was still a lily-livered coward, ya
hear me? He was hiding below when the storm done its worst. Even Mister Vandycook the owner, he come up on deck to see what he could do, but not yer old man. So I d—n ya for the son of a lubber and no true seaman.” He swung about to glare at Victor. “And the rest of ya for a pack of thieves. I lay claim to this salvage operation by rights of having survived the wreck of the Gladstone!” There was a poignant silence on deck. We had encountered what we operatives of the Company most dread: an error in the historical record. Such loopholes can have fatal consequences for a mission. Victor considered the sailor.

  “The Gladstone was reported lost with all hands, sir.”

  “Lost she were, but I didn’t go down with her. Two days I hung on a barrel, kicking off the sharks, afore I washed up on that island yonder. Most of a year I been marooned there amongst landsmen. Took me better than three months to get that scow there seaworthy, and I’m salvaging the Gladstone, and be d-ned to you!”

  “You are mistaken, sir.” Victor smiled. “My firm purchased salvage rights on the wreck from its insurers.”

  There was a little cry of disappointment from the girl at thisannouncement. The sailor glanced once in her direction; then he turned back to squint at Victor. “Is that so? Well, they’re there and I’m here. I can’t make ya clear off, but ya can’t make me leave neither, and we’ll see who gets down to the Gladstone first!”

  With that he hoisted himself up on our rail and sprang nimbly back to his own boat, which received his weight with a hollow crash that did not bode well for the integrity of her timbers. Victor stared after him, twisting one end of his moustache until it threatened to part company with his lip. Then he turned on his heel and stalked within, motioning us to follow.

  “Lost with all hands!” he snapped as soon as we were gathered in the saloon.

  “It’s not my fault.” Kalugin sagged into a chair. “I was below when the Gladstone went down. You know that. My orders were to rescue the priceless painting a New York millionaire stupidly kept in the cabin of his yacht. It was not my responsibility to see to it that the crew drowned. When the rescue transport picked me up after the storm they made a clean sweep of the area. They found no survivors. The historical record says there were no survivors.”

  “Well, now we know otherwise, don’t we?” Victor went to the galley door and flung it open. “Coffee!” he shouted, and slammed it again and turned to pace up and down before us. “Who is this miserable little tattooed goat, may I ask?”

  “Only one of the hands before the mast.”

  “Biographical data?”

  Kalugin accessed. “Mackie Hayes, able-bodied seaman, age thirty-two, no residence given,” he replied. “He was an excellent hand, unless he got liquor. He was a fighting drunk. I recall he nearly killed a man in Honolulu. Trouble with the ladies, too. I should guess his nationality to have been Yankee, despite his oddities of speech, which I believe were due to an old injury resulting in partial paralysis of the facial muscles on the right side.”

  “You may as well update your entry to present tense,” remarked Victor bitterly. “We know very well he’s alive and kicking.”

  “And salvaging,” I pointed out.

  There was a knock on the door. Victor opened it to receive the coffee tray, borne not by a mortal servant but by one of our Technicians.

  “Sir, it appears the mortals are preparing to dive,” he warned Victor. I leaned back to look out a porthole and saw the sailor running about on deck, setting up the air pump. His young lady came struggling up on deck bearing an unwieldy mass that proved to be an old diving suit. He snatched it from her and said some angry thing. She hurried back belowand reemerged a moment later with a great brass diving helmet in her arms. He was already shrugging into the suit.

  “Even as we speak,” I confirmed, accepting a cup and saucer from Victor.

  “And, sir, we’re reading a storm moving in from the southwest,” said the Technician. “We expect heavy seas by twenty-three-hundred hours. Shall we put in to the island? The charts show a good harbor with anchorage on the windward side.”

  “There’s a thought.” Victor dropped a lump of sugar into his coffee and stirred it. “And perhaps the storm will sink that filthy rust-bucket and save us the trouble.”

  There followed another poignant silence. The Technician cleared his throat. “Is that one of our options, sir?”

  Kalugin rose to his feet.

  “Possibly,” said Victor at length. “You’ll get your orders when we’ve made a decision. For now, go tell the cook we want breakfast. And I particularly want some cinnamon toast!” he called after the departing Technician.

  Now it was Kalugin who paced back and forth, while Victor stood sipping his coffee. We heard a splash and the whirring as a drum of cable unwound.

  “What do you think he’s after, Kalugin?” inquired Victor.

  “Not the painting, he couldn’t be,” panted Kalugin. “Even if he’d known what it was worth, he wouldn’t have any reason to expect there to be anything left of it by now.”

  “What, then?”

  “VanderCook’s strongbox, I’m sure. Possibly some of the other objets d’art. There were some ormolu things, I remember, and a statuette. He might think they’d fetch a pretty price.”

  “And if he sees a shiny silver canister down there?” Victor drained his cup. Kalugin bit his lip “He’ll probably bring it up.”

  The door opened. Victor turned, perhaps in expectation of his cinnamon toast, but our underwater recovery specialist entered the room.

  “Mme. Masaki.” Kalugin bowed.

  “Good morning. Victor, are you aware that a monkey in a diving suit just went over the side in the general direction of the Gladstone?”

  “Quite aware. Did you manage to sleep through our little predawn confrontation somehow?” Victor poured a cup of coffee and presented it to her.

  “I wear earplugs. Are we aborting our mission, then?”

  “Certainly not. Cream? Sugar?”

  She shook her head. “We can’t conduct a dive while that creature’s down there.”

  “We might try,” Kalugin ventured.

  She widened her eyes at him. “Are you mad? That would be contrary to specific Company policy. Can we persuade him to leave, Victor?”

  “Not easily.” Victor steepled his ringers. “He’s determined and rather combative. We may be obliged to hope for an accident.”

  Mme. Masaki put down her cup and simply looked at him. There was yet a third poignant silence.

  “Good God, the woman is with child!” exploded Kalugin.

  “We needn’t touch her,” Victor assured him. “Though her mate might have a nasty accident whilst below. Such dreadful things do happen at sea.”

  I shook my head. “That would be murder, Victor.”

  “And it would fall to me to go down and cut his hose, I think,” said Mme. Masaki. “I’ve never killed one of them before; I should prefer not to do it now, if you don’t mind.”

  “You know, it’s deuced hard being your Facilitator when you won’t permit me to facilitate anything,” Victor complained.

  “Mr. Hayes won’t listen to reason, but perhaps the girl?… ” I offered.

  “Ahoy!” I waved a handkerchief at the mortal where she sat by the air pump, waiting for tugs on the line. “May we speak, Mademoiselle? I am so sorry that our gentlemen have had hard words. Please believe we had no intention of upsetting you.”

  She lifted her timid freckled face and gazed at me in wonder. “I never heard no colored lady talk like you before,” she stated.

  “I am from Algiers, Mademoiselle.”

  “Oh.” She was thinking. “Is that in Europe?”

  “No; but I have lived in both Paris and Rome.”

  “My Pa went to Europe once,” she told me. “He stayed at a place called France, afore he shipped out again.”

  “Ah. Is your father a sailor, too?”

  “No’m,” she replied, and then stopped with the particular mortification Cauca
sians felt, in that day and age, upon accidentally addressing a Negro with an honorific. She cleared her throat and tried again. “No, he ain’t, not no more. A hawser cut off his leg and now he and my Ma has a farm on that island over there. Miss, I got to ask you. That man with the funny hat, do you work for him?”

  “I am a guest of his, my dear.”

  “Well—do you suppose he will let us go shares with him on thiswreck? If Mackie don’t get what he’s after—” her eyes filled with tears. “He’s near crazy you folks showed up when you did. All he’s been talking about since I found him on the beach was getting down to the wreck, the wreck, the wreck, and when we go come out here there your boat is sitting right over it. It’s for our baby he wants it. He says it’s his big chance,” she implored.

  “Forgive me, Mrs. Hayes, but it seems to me that if Mr. Hayes truly cared for you and for the child, he would put you ashore and take some fisherman out to assist him instead.”

  “Ain’t nobody will go with him but me.” She wiped her eyes. “He’s had fights with all the neighbors and my Pa won’t even talk to him anymore.”

  “But, my dear, a woman in your condition! His behavior seems abominable.”

  “You might say so, Miss, but what of that?” She looked terribly earnest. “He’s my man and the father of my child. I got to stand by him. I know he’s meaner than a snake, but it was true love at first sight when I seen him lying there in the sand.” She clasped her frail hands above her swollen abdomen.

  “Beside, Miss, there ain’t any other men on the island what ain’t married already.”

  “I see.”