Albert had been walking a long time and, had he thought about it, was lost. He hadn’t thought about it. Nor would he particularly have cared if he had. An island is, after all, more or less round. If you head in one direction long enough, you’ll end up where you started, assuming that’s where you wanted to be.
Earlier, when Frenchie had failed to talk him out of “just strikin’ out willy-nilly,” she had found him an old U.S. Navy pea coat from a nearby fish house. Now, as the fog descended under the weight of the island’s collective mourning, he turned his collar to the cold, clammy fingers twiddling the back of his neck.
The thing about not having the constant undercurrent of music rippling audibly through the chambers of his subconscious was that the only thing left was space to think. But thoughts, Albert was discovering, were like the sheep he’d encountered on his walk, just wandering aimlessly from one clump of grass to the next, where they nibbled to no particular purpose, then moved on.
They needed a shepherd.
Albert considered the analogy, and it made sense to him. He wished he’d thought of it. There must be a way, he felt, to think specific thoughts, to compel the brain to focus on some particular thing and stay there until the thing had been thoroughly thought about. That, without really thinking about it, is what he’d set out to do. He wanted to think about how to forget seeing Woolie-Woolie’s body in the water, but the more he thought about forgetting, the more he remembered.
He found a seat-shaped rock on a high headland and sat there. Below, so far away that the waves he saw crashing on the rocks couldn’t be heard, a tiny crescent of beach resisted the assault in vain.
The mist collected on his horn-rimmed glasses, but he didn’t bother to wipe it away. Why bother when every time he opened his eyes, somebody was dead?
There were a lot to think about that he didn’t want to think about, so he thought about not thinking about them.
But how do you stop thinking about something once you’ve decided not to think about it? That was something else to think about.
Suddenly, like something sinister bobbing to the surface of a blackwater lake, a question announced itself. “How did Woolie-Woolie fall overboard after he’d hauled his last line?” Albert knew the process now: you tossed a hook, snatched the buoy; pulled up the trap; emptied it; kept the crays that met certain regulations; tossed the others back; tied a new bait bag into the trap; and dropped the trap—and the rope by which it was attached to all the other traps on the line—back into the ocean.
It wasn’t hard to imagine a lone fisherman getting his foot caught in an errant coil of rope and being pulled overboard by the trap, which is weighted by fifty pounds of stone to keep it on the bottom.
But that didn’t fit Woolie-Woolie’s case. Everyone said he was meticulous about his gear. Would somebody who was meticulous about his gear leave random coils of rope lying around the deck? No more, thought Albert, than he would play a concert with an untuned piano.
And if he’d already hauled his last line and was headed back to port—which he must have, if his boat was found ship-shape—the last line would have been hauled and replaced; there would have been no excess rope lying about the deck to get caught in.
A sheep wandered into Albert’s peripheral vision and tugged at his consciousness. Albert turned toward it and, for a half-minute or so, they regarded one another in guarded expectation. The sheep was fat with dirty wool, some of which hung in pendulous, matted masses from its underside. Its eyes were all but obscured by wool . It seemed to accept this as its cross to bear. It looked old and, in looking old, seemed wise, possessed of some secret that it was hoping to impart to Albert by osmosis, or telepathy, or just the depth of its stare.
Albert didn’t speak sheep.
He tried to recall whether or not he’d ever heard of someone being mauled, or bitten, or attacked by a sheep. The sheep, for its part, may have been wondering the same thing in regard to piano players.
“Maybe he just fell overboard,” said Albert at last, having determined that the animal presented no immediate danger to his person.
The sheep chewed thoughtfully, without taking his eyes from Albert’s, and blinked.
“Maybe he dropped something into the water, and was reaching for it, and a wave came along, and . . .”
The sheep stopped chewing and flared its nostrils.
Albert considered this. “No,” he said. “You’re right. That’s not what happened.”
The sheep resumed chewing.
Albert wiped his glasses. His suspicions were pricked. With so long a trail of premature and unnatural deaths trailing behind him, all death assumed a sinister dimension. Unfortunately, these experiences had made it much easier to attribute death to evil intent than natural or even accidental causes.
A horn honked somewhere in the fog behind him. The sheep looked up to see who it was. Albert twisted around from the waist up for the same reason. It was Frenchie. She had gotten out of her vehicle, which idled on the grassy verge, its location marked by the blurry smudges of its headlights, and was running toward him, waving her hands.
Frenchie was not built to run, and the effort she was putting into the act was not commensurate with the time it took her to cover the distance between them. She finally arrived and, too winded to say whatever it was that had agitated her, collapsed in a heap beside him.
He let her catch her breath.
“Al,” she said, when she was finally able to form a sound. “Al . . .!”
Albert waited.
“Al!” said Frenchie, latching onto the theme, “Woolie-Woolie was . . .”
“A bear?” said Albert. He didn’t know why he said that, but it struck him as funny, and he smiled.
Frenchie, whose smile reflex was ordinarily easily tripped, didn’t smile.
Nor was the sheep amused.
This was serious. Albert let the smile fall from his face. “Has something happened?”
“Too bloody right, it has!” said Frenchie. She had evidently caught up with her breath. “Woolie-Woolie was eviscerated!”
Albert didn’t know what that meant, but it didn’t sound like a good thing. “Eviscerated?” he said. He didn’t like the taste of the words. “That means . . . ?”
“It means his insides are missing!”
Frenchie’s eyes widened as she said this, and Albert couldn’t help but imagine they were trying to self-eviscerate.
Chapter Eleven
“Heart, lungs, kidneys, eyes, spleen, liver, all gone.” This was the litany of a butcher bemoaning a scarcity of offal. “The boy was harvested, neat as you please.”
The speaker was Tipene Patuai, the island’s the part-time constable, mechanic, and tow-truck operator. His hearers were Frenchie, Doc “Steamy” Pyle, the retired grocer and former ANZAC medic who, as nearest thing to a doctor in the neighborhood, came over from Pitt Island, Wart Martin, Captain of the Sea Queen, and Albert who, after all, had found the body. They were sitting in the Patuai’s car, parked in a little turn-around just off Waitangi Tuku road that hugged the coast just south of Waitangi. “We’re not letting Woolie know that, of course. That’s all he’d need.”
The windows were rolled up, and it was hot inside the vehicle and the air was 97% carbon dioxide, flavored with fish, vinegar, and beer, and it congealed in droplets on the windows.
“It’s the Trade,” he said meaningfully.
Albert didn’t want to hear the answer to the question his mouth was about to ask, but it asked it anyway. “What does that mean, ‘harvested?’” And followed up with another to which he didn’t want an answer. “What is the Trade?”
Albert knew he wouldn’t like what he was about to hear, and wished he could remove his ears before they were filled with it.
“Body parts,” said Patuai as matter-of-factly as those words and their hideous implication could be spoken. “Been going on a while now, especially here in the South Pacific. Had a training on it over in Christchurch last autumn. Gang o
f these pirates commandeer a boat, keep the crew members alive ’til they find a market for this organ or that. They cut it out, together with any other bits that might be useful, toss the cadaver overboard and fatten the fish.”
“Never thought we’d run into it out here, though,” Martin lamented.
“Harvested,” Albert whispered. His view of the world—until four years ago—had been one of benign indifference. His upbringing may have been circumscribed by the demands of his Gift, and he may have been a slave to it and the expectations that others put upon him because of it, but it had been sheltered. He’d known nothing of the real-life horrors behind the impossible-to-avoid glimpses of newspaper headlines in the grocery checkout, and the blurry blue images that would spill across the screen of the old television someone had given him and which it had, long ago, been his habit to turn on, muted, as he ate his supper—his lone connection to the dimension that existed beyond the sanctuary of musical academe.
His perspective had broadened in four years, his soul soiled by every revelation of the depravity surrounding him. But this was beyond even that. Who would purchase one life at the expense of another? And what kind of life, what kind of being, what crop of conscience, would grow from such fertilizer? That would be the harvest.
“Pirates,” he said. Jeremy Ash had been right. “Dealing in human beings,” he said.
“I wouldn’t say pirates,” said Patuai. “They’re more hit and run opportunists. The kind of work we’re talking about here,” said Patuai, “suggests a pretty large network, careful planning. To them, their victims are just product. Every organ’s worth its weight in gold to someone, somewhere.”
Suddenly the car was too close. Albert couldn’t breathe. He opened the door and jumped out, slamming it behind him, sealing the barbarous miasma within.
He still had his hip boots on. They were heavy and beat about his knees as he stumbled through the thin strip of moorland between the road and the ocean. Frantically, tripping several times in the process, he kicked them off. His feet, now free, screamed for the release of the rest of his body. He began to run, throwing off his clothes and the uncleanness that clung to them until, with nothing but his underwear between himself and the elements, he slithered down the grassy slope to the beach. The voice of his flesh screamed at him to stop; the voice of his soul demanded total immersion. Purging. It was the latter he obeyed.
From the lip of the moorland above the beach, having followed the trail of clothes—retrieving them from wherever they’d landed between still-soft piles of sheep droppings—Frenchie, Wart, Patuai, and Pyle congregated and watched, stunned to inaction, as Albert threw himself into the surf.
Instantly the ocean, having recognized one that got away and determined to reclaim its prize, clawed at him with frozen fingers, drawing him in, pulling him down. The shock of the cold tripped a series of internal alarms sounding through the corridors of his mind, but they were lost amid the cacophony of cries, the aural train-wreck of fragmentary music and fractured crescendos, salted with the crack of a bullet, the crackle of an inferno, and the scream of words that couldn’t be unheard.
He didn’t care that he couldn’t swim. He didn’t care that he was about to drown. Why should he care to leave a place where such things happened? Could what waited, whatever it was, be worse?
The cold was clean. Its embrace seemed to tear life from him in slow, stinging strips. The members of his body convened a hasty parliament and voted to override his wishes, but were unable to form a consensus on how to go about it. His arms and legs thrashed to no particular purpose, his lungs spasmed, his eyes opened and closed and stung, and his heart—the broken little engine at the junction of his will and his reflexes—could only pump away furiously and await the outcome.
Ironically, the violence of the surf, while pulling him under, also pushed him back, so that he was never in more than four feet of water, which was all Patuai and Wart had to battle to grab him by the armpits and drag him ashore, while Frenchie, tortured as a French chanteuse, shouted instructions.
There was a large, flat rock halfway up the beach, and they deposited him on it. Frenchie threw his shirt and sweater around his shoulders, and the men made aggravated noises at him. He wasn’t listening. His ears were full of a voice he’d heard in the ocean, a still, small voice confirmed the notion that had brought him to Chatham Island: Venice Regent.
“That’s where the girl on the beach came from,” he said and, when he spoke, the ambient chaos collapsed into silence and listened.
Frenchie was the first to speak. “What’d you say, Al?”
Albert punched a finger at his glasses which, though wet and askew, still straddled his nose. “I need a cigarette,” he said, his hands crossed his chest, clutching at the sweater and pulling it tight. Frenchie lit a cigarette and stuck it between his lips. Sitting there, soaking, shivering, and puffing, he related the story of the girl on the beach and the suspicion, whispered him by the ocean, that she had escaped from the Trade, and that what she had escaped from, in particular, was the Venice Regent.
Despite the fact he didn’t want it to, it made sense.
“What if that’s what happened?” he asked the ocean, while those around him eavesdropped. “What if she was kidnapped and being kept for . . . being kept fresh. But she got away. She jumped overboard and they couldn’t get her back?”
“And knocked her head on something,” said Frenchie, taking up the narrative, “Which is why she’s in a coma.”
Patuai nodded. “And the current carried her to the beach where you found her.”
Albert was still watching the sea, as if it had made these deductions, simply using those around him like ventriloquist’s dolls to voice its thoughts. “Which would explain why no one knows anything about her,” he said. “Why no one called. She was kidnapped far away. Maybe from another ship somewhere out there.” He turned his misted glasses toward Frenchie. “No one would suspect her being in New Zealand.”
“Poor child,” said Frenchie. “At least she’s still alive. Could be worse.”
If she was still alive, Albert thought.
“And there he sat, in his tighty-whiteys,” said Frenchie as she unpacked a third box of white porcelain coffee cups, handing them one-by-one to Kumara, one of the few full-blooded Maoris on Chatham, the others being her father and mother, who lived at opposite ends of the island, thus ensuring that the status remained quo, “and that whole sad story just poured out.”
Kumara dipped a cup into the suds, rinsed it under a stream of scalding water, and placed it on the drainer to dry in its own good time. “Sounds like that’s what he was running from in the first place,” she hypothesized.
Frenchie stopped in mid-motion. “How thick was I?” she said. “I never even thought to ask him what brought him here. I mean, he said he was curious, but I didn’t . . . You’re right. That’s what he was doing, running away, just like he did today down at the shore, what with all this with Woolie-Woolie, and that. Poor sod.”
Whether the poor sod was Albert or Woolie-Woolie, or even Woolie One, there was no indication. Nor did Kumara want clarification. She held one of the cups out for Frenchie’s inspection. “This one’s got a crack at the top of the handle. There, see?” She pointed at the hairline fracture.
“Oh, it’ll hold a while yet,” said Frenchie. “Dabba glue will put it right one day.”
Kumara smacked the handle of the coffee cup against the counter and, cracking like a cray’s carapace, it fell into her hand. “Best fix it now, before someone gets a lap full of hot coffee. I’ll see to it.”
“Suit yourself,” said Frenchie.
“He’s up at the inn now?”
Frenchie blew a little nest of cardboard chips from the next cup before handing it over. “Mm. Milly’s taken him in charge.”
“She’ll have him warmed and fed within an inch of his life,” said Kumara.
“I wonder if his people are looking for him.”
Kumara blew int
o the cup into which Frenchie had blown, removing the remaining debris. “Bound to be, someone famous like that.”
“Better have his come-to-Papa moment on Chatham. There’s nowhere else to run.”
“What do you make of that,” said Kumara after a moment’s thoughtful silence, “what happened to Woolie-Woolie? You think there’s really people out there doing that? What Patuai said?”
Frenchie tossed the now-empty box aside, and settled a haunch on a stool. “Makes you despair to think so, don’t it, Ku’? I mean, it’s one thing if someone’s an organ donor and if something happens to them—they get old, or die by accident somehow. That’s one thing. But, just murdering people and selling the pieces to the highest bidder, that’s . . . well, it’s beyond anything I can imagine. Sick.
“I see why Al ran into the ocean. I really do,” she said. “It’s like just inhabiting the planet with people who would do such things makes you filthy by . . . by whatchyamacall it?”
“Osmosis,” said Kumara. “Like Moses from Australia. Oz-Moses. That’s how I remember words like that. Oz-Moses.”
“Osmosis,” Frenchie repeated. “Right.”
“Or could be Wizard of Oz-Moses,” Kumara said, on second thought. “But I think the other way’s easier.”
Frenchie shook her head briefly, as if to dislodge a distracting thought. “They exhale the air we breathe. Makes me sick, the things people do to each other.”
“But who did it?” Kumara wanted to know. “Never somebody from the island.”
“Perish the thought! It’s pirates, whatever Patuai says. Must be. They steal ships, pluck folks out of the water, off the shore, off other boats.” Frenchie was resting the cup in her hands on the counter. She spun it back and forth by the handle. “Never anyone on the island.” Pause. “Never.”
Albert wasn’t doing well.
After a hot bath and two cups of coffee, he wandered into the orbit of the spinet piano in the corner of the dining room. He sat on the bench and, from long habit, opened the cover, ran his fingers over the keys without pressing them, and waited for the music to come.
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