“Us you say? You and the Negro?”
Archer looked at Jupiter. “That is right, sir.”
“Your name?” the British captain said to Jupiter.
“My name is Jupiter, sir.”
“Jupiter? How pretentious. You have given me a fascinating tale, but even you two did not act as kidnapped men. You were carrying rations, and spoke of nothing when my men stopped you. You did nothing to free yourselves when this other man was killed. I do not know if your story is true, but if you were not prisoners aboard this ship, you will be now. If you were not criminals then, you are certainly criminals now.”
“No,” Archer screamed. “I am American! You cannot do this!”
“Easy, Archer,” Barrett said. “Don’t give them the satisfaction. Just another obstacle life tends to put in front of us.”
“You shut your mouth, you maggoty pile of cow shit.”
“Oh, this is becoming quite entertaining,” the British captain said.
“Your life was shit long before you met me,” said Barrett. “Isn’t that right, Jupiter?”
Jupiter stayed quiet.
“Take them to the cavern,” the British captain said. “They’ll be dealt with properly.”
“You can’t do this,” said Archer. “We are American. We deserve a proper trial.”
“Proper trial,” said Yerby. “My good man, you are lucky. I could kill you right now. I could bury you on this godforsaken island and no one would miss you. You should be grateful that I am a just man.”
Barrett stared. “What now?”
“We have just met and you are already a problem for me. I knew our paths would cross one day, but not quite under these circumstances.”
“So you know of me?” asked Barrett.
“I’ve grown tired of this game. The Dunham spoke highly of you. He said that you were the most cunning man he had ever known.”
“The feeling was mutual,” said Barrett.
“But he lived in constant fear that you were double-crossing him somehow. Which is why he decided to shift allegiances and partner with me.”
“And you are a man to be trusted? That doesn’t sound like the man I knew,” said Barrett.
“He feared that you would turn him in and your employer’s men would arrive on the shore at any moment.”
“I’ve never known him to be so impatient,” said Barrett.
“Well, it’s obvious that you did not know him as well as you thought.”
“Obviously.”
“Yet here you are. You have kept your word to him. You came back for your weapons.”
“I am glad that you agree that they are my weapons.”
Yerby laughed. “Well, now that you mention it—they are mine. It’s funny how easily weapons can change ownership.”
“If that were so,” Barrett said, “then you wouldn’t still have them. You would have sold them already.”
Yerby stared. “Tell me about your connection in Shanghai.”
“There is not much to tell. He is a man who needs weapons and has the means to pay for them. Too bad for him that he’ll never get them.”
“That’s a sad story,” said Yerby. “Think of another ending.”
“There is no other ending. He’s expecting me.”
“What if I told you that I already know who he is?”
“First of all, I would not believe you, and second, it would not matter if you did.”
“Why is that?”
“Because he is beyond your reach.”
“And what makes you think that anything is beyond my reach?”
“Well, you still have the weapons. You could have sold them to any of the pirate gangs, but you are a pirate hunter, and it would be foolish for you to arm your enemies. You wouldn’t try to sell them to the British—they would only seize them—and then sell them. Those that you can trust don’t have the means to offer you a price that would be attractive. And for some reason, you do not have any connections in Shanghai. So it seems that all you have is me.”
“That’s good, Barrett. Very good. I’m glad that we can work together.”
“No. I only work with men that I can trust. Right now, these two are the only men I can trust.”
“You can trust me, Barrett. You can trust that if you do not tell me what I want to know then I will kill these two men and feed you slices of their corpses.” Yerby nodded at his man.
“Greil, take Barrett away. Maybe he will be more forthcoming if the two of you are alone.”
“Of course,” said Greil. “I am sure he will open up to me in one way or another.”
51
Days passed and still no sign of Barrett. They grew anxious whenever footsteps were heard, hoping, this time, the sound would signal their release. Maybe Barrett would return with some news.
“He’s not coming back, is he?” asked Jupiter.
Archer sat huddled in a dark corner facing the wall
“No, he’s not.” Archer faced him. “Once he stepped out, we should have known he’d never return. We didn’t want to see it. I know I didn’t. But it happened because Barrett is who he is, and I am who I am. Maybe what has happened is the best outcome, and I must learn to accept it. Maybe it is best that we rot here; maybe the world is better with us in here, where we can’t do any harm.”
“Where we can’t do harm?” said Jupiter.
“Yes, we,” said Archer. “We hurt, we kill, and in your case, we profit from the hurt and the killed. Maybe this is our punishment. Maybe we should entertain the possibility that this all might be deserved.”
A scream, horrific, came from one of the cells in that vast place. Jupiter couldn’t say from which one.
“I don’t deserve this,” said Jupiter. He saw Archer’s shoulders move, then he heard Archer laugh.
“You don’t deserve this?” he said. “If anyone deserves this, it’s you. Who knows how many men you’ve crimped. How many of them have ended up in places like this?”
“I know none of them have ended up in places like this. The men I’ve crimped weren’t exactly the best humanity had to offer. Yeah, they were forced to work against their will, but at least they got paid something for their work. There’s plenty of people that haven’t been so lucky.”
“There it is,” said Archer. “There’s that anger. It wasn’t enough for you to have your freedom by tearing the country apart—you want the power too. You wanted your freedom, but you wanted to take the freedom of everyone in the South—take theirs, take Father’s, take mine.”
“That’s shit you’re talking,” said Jupiter. “I’ve never taken a damn thing from you.”
Archer stood. “You’ve taken everything from me,” Archer said.
Jupiter stared at him a long time. He knew this would end badly if he pursued it. No one was thinking rationally. The two of them had nothing left to lose. That’s a dangerous place to be.
“I didn’t take your father from you. The South took him from you. That way of life, the expectations of a proper Southern gentleman, the war took him from you, disease took him from you, but I didn’t. He was already gone when I found him. A shadow of himself, babbling—it would’ve broken your heart to see him. I did the man a favor.”
“That’s how you see it?” said Archer. “You did me a favor by killing my father? Doing the world a favor by shanghaiing men? Well, you’ve got a deadly interpretation of favors.”
“You don’t think it was hard? He was my father too.”
“Don’t remind me. How often I was jealous of you—the way he would look at you, the way he’d take you into the house, teach you things, make me sit next to you while he tutored you—tutored ‘us.’ But then, when he thought I wasn’t looking, I saw the two of you in some conspiratorial whisper . . . teaching you things, things that remain a mystery to me. I can only
guess what they were. But I look at you now, and knowing what I now know, and seeing what I’ve seen, it must have been some secret for survival, because you just won’t go away. Whatever he whispered to you, he must have been pouring some of himself into you, because when I look at you now I see so much of him, even more than I see in myself, and it makes me sick.”
“What?” asked Jupiter. “You want the little black boy who sat next to his master’s son while being tutored and taught how to read—with every word becoming more and more aware of his inferiority—you want that little boy to apologize to you? You, the boy who had everything? The boy who could have done anything, still can do anything, even after the war you supposedly lost? The war I supposedly won? I should apologize to you because your daddy, for his own sake, shared some information with me? I should apologize to you for the type of father he was, and what you saw? What did I see? Him creeping into my mother’s shed on hot afternoons? And on those hot afternoons, the way your mother would look at me, as if I had somehow coaxed him to go in there and lay with my mother. Or the way your mother would look at me with disgust, while the rest of the slaves she didn’t bother to even look at. That little boy is supposed to apologize to you?”
“No,” said Archer, “I don’t expect an apology from that little boy, but I expect more from the man he became.”
52
Barrett had not been heard from in days. Or was it weeks? They did not know how long. The time in confinement, the hopelessness, began to twist Archer’s mind. “Help us!” he screamed, knowing that no one would answer or come to their rescue.
“No one will help you. No one will help us.” The voice echoed in the cavern. Jupiter ran to the cell bars, pressed his face against them, and tried to locate the source of the voice.
“This is where we will die. The sooner you accept it, the sooner the pain will go away.” There was darkness, except a thin curve of light coming from a candle on an adjacent wall.
“Hello,” said Jupiter.
There was no response.
“Let us out. Help us. We’ll make it worth your while. We’ll give you . . .” Jupiter searched the bare coffers of his mind. “We’ll give you . . .”
“Give me what?” asked the voice. “You have nothing, and I have nothing . . . I do not want more of what I already have.”
“Please, I have a wife and child,” said Jupiter.
“I have three wives and twelve children.”
“Good, then you understand what it means for a man to be separated from his family. Help us.”
“You can help me to see my family again?”
“I can.” Jupiter did not know how, but he meant it.
“Good,” said the voice. “I believe you.”
“Then you will help us?”
“Yes, I will help you, but I cannot let you out of the cell.”
Jupiter pressed his head against the bars. “Why not?”
“Because I am in the cell next to yours.”
Jupiter heard the sound of something metal run across the bars. The sound reverberating through the dark space.
• • •
Yerby approached their cell. He held a burlap sack. Blood had pooled on its bottom. He dropped it in front of the cell. “Gentlemen, I am afraid Captain Barrett is no longer with us.”
Jupiter stared at the sack.
“I am sorry for your loss, but we still have business at hand. Who is Barrett’s contact in Shanghai?” Yerby’s eyes bounced between Jupiter and Archer.
“We don’t know,” answered Jupiter.
“Come now, is this how you choose to honor Barrett’s memory—with deceit?”
“We know nothing of Barrett’s dealings in Shanghai,” said Archer. “He hardly mentioned the place.”
“I understand,” said Yerby. “You are lost without your leader. Shall you consult him one last time?” Yerby reached into the sack. He lifted the severed head by its black hair. They looked away before seeing the face that would haunt them forever.
“Stop,” said Jupiter. “Put it away.”
“As you wish.” Yerby dropped the head into the sack.
“Maybe Barrett told us something that we are forgetting,” said Jupiter. Archer looked at him. “Give us some time to recall something that may be of use.”
“Very well.” Yerby looked around. “This place has been here for a very long time. It is a perfect place to wait.”
• • •
“Yerby is a violent man,” said the voice in the other cell. “Something is broken inside him. He does not forgive.”
Jupiter slid to the floor of the cell.
“I made the mistake of embarrassing him. Years ago—I do not know how long—but before the wars with the British over opium, the Emperor assigned me to rid the ports of foreign opium. It was weakening our people. I seized many crates of opium, Yerby’s among them. He was the criminal he is now; he was one of the governors of the port. When he tried to get me to return the opium, I refused and told him that I had burned it all. He became enraged and beat me publicly for all to see—including my subordinates. To save face, I had him imprisoned. Eventually, the war ended and we lost control of our own ports. Opium continued to flood our country, drown our people. We could no longer punish a foreigner—British, Europeans, or Americans—for breaking our rules. When Yerby was released, he had his men track me down and beat me savagely. The Emperor complained to the British on my behalf. The treaty was still new, and they did not want to jeopardize it, so the English exiled Yerby. Although he intervened, the Emperor was not pleased with me. He considered me a failure for not ridding the ports of opium as he had asked of me. I too was exiled. Unfortunately, I was found by Yerby again. Without the Emperor’s protection, I was doomed.”
• • •
“You asked me if there was a way to escape this place. I have just remembered there is one.”
“What is it?” asked Jupiter.
“I once shared my cell with someone. He showed me how to escape. They pushed the man into the cell. His hair was long, as was his beard. He’d been lost for some time. I did not know what to make of him. I watched him, huddled in the corner on his floor mat. For what seemed like days, all he did was sleep.
“Then one day he sprang up, alert. Every morning thereafter, he did a series of rituals, of poses, each one in slow motion. There were other strange things as well. He would save the gruel that was served as a meal in this horrible place. He let the gruel dry and rolled it into little balls until he had made a dozen or so.
“I watched all of this. But something about the man made me more curious than nervous or fearful, no matter how strange his actions seemed. He would look out the cell window for hours. Mountain. Sea. Beautiful from a distance, but deadly from this height.
“He placed the dried ball of food on the edge of the cell window and waited. A bird flew by, then landed at the edge and pecked the dried balls of gruel. The man watched the bird, inspecting, it seemed to me.
“ ‘Yes, this one will do,’ the man said aloud. He snatched the bird by his neck, so fast that I wasn’t sure if the bird hadn’t been tied to an invisible string attached to the man’s hand. He slowly brought the bird into the cell, soothing it, mimicking the bird’s sounds, making a cooing noise. The bird stopped its frantic fluttering. The man put food in his palm, and the bird began to eat out of it.
“ ‘My name is Xiao Pei,’ he said. ‘You can tell me your name if you want, but you will have to hurry. I won’t be here for long.’ ”
“What happened to him?” Jupiter asked. “Did he escape?”
“Well,” the voice continued. “Xiao Pei ripped a piece of fabric from the bottom of his pant leg, and divided that piece into two. He took a strip of cloth over to the bars and pressed his head against them to see if any guards were approaching. He put the fabric in the torch adjacent to the cell.
He brought the flaming fabric back in the cell and stamped it out. All that was left was a pile of soot. Xiao Pei spat in the soot, mixing it together with his fingers. With his blackened fingers, he drew Mandarin characters on the other piece of fabric. When he had finished writing, he beckoned for the bird. It came readily. He spoke to the bird in soft tones. He would not allow me to hear. It seemed to me that he was building up the bird’s confidence before going into battle.
“Xiao Pei wrapped the fabric around the bird’s foot and cinched it with the remaining string. He put the bird back on the window, and pushed it through the bars so that its wings could spread. ‘Fly now,’ he said to it. It soared away from the cell, disappearing in the horizon.”
Archer and Jupiter looked at each other. “All of that for a bird?” asked Archer.
“No, he was not finished. ‘You have just seen the beginning of your freedom—at least the beginning of mine,’ said Xiao Pei. ‘When that bird delivers the message it carries, I will be free.’ ”
Jupiter and Archer were silent.
“‘It is fine. You don’t have to believe,’ said Xiao Pei. ‘I believe. It is strange, but life has a way of making strange things come. Here I am, a boy born in the country, taught to speak English by missionaries, which allowed me to move freely in the West. Such a gift for me, but then those same English oppress my country, and I am thrown in a jail.’ ”
He paused in his story. “You are American, are you not? Not African?”
Jupiter looked around the cell. “You can see us?”
“Of course,” said the voice. “A piece of polished glass was left in my cell. It reflects nicely. I have it angled at your cell.”
A light twinkled in the darkness. “I am American,” Jupiter said eventually.
“And the other one,” the voice said to Archer. “You look like the son of money. What are you doing here?”
Archer looked at Jupiter. “Wrong place, wrong time.”
The voice laughed. “I like that. ‘Wrong place, wrong time.’ I suppose we can all say that. But how did you two get here?”
The Abduction of Smith and Smith Page 17