Friday's Harbor: A Novel

by Diane Hammond

  “Not that I know of, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t come close.”

  “We?” Neva said.

  “We Who Swim with Whales.”

  “It seems like the smart people would work with warm-water cetaceans,” Neva said, cracking open one eye to look at him. “Bottle-nosed dolphins.”

  Gabriel waved this off. “Bottle-nosed dolphins are assholes. Honestly, when you’re moving, it doesn’t seem as bad. We spent a lot of time today just hanging around. That’s when you feel it the most.”

  Neva closed her eyes again. “You know, you’re an enigma. How come you never talk about the work you’ve done?”

  “I don’t have any reason to. I’ve been working with marine mammals my whole professional life, which means since you were a girl. I’ve had my hands on just about every killer whale in captivity. That doesn’t mean I’m an enigma, it just means I’m old.”

  “How many do you think you’ve collected?” she asked, still self-conscious about using the more zoo-friendly parlance for captured, though she’d said it a thousand times.

  Gabriel considered this. “I’ve never counted. Forty, maybe forty-five.”

  “How many were rehab animals?”

  “Not many. A few.”

  “What about the rest?”

  “Calves.”

  Neva opened her eyes to watch him as he went on.

  “When I first got into this business, hardly anyone anywhere had even heard of killer whales, never mind seen one, and half the ones who had thought they were some kind of fish. That was twenty-five, thirty years ago. Now there are killer whale toys, books, posters, stuffed animals, you name it. Hell, Southwest Airlines has Shamu airplanes. Every American kid has seen Free Willy at least five times. And why do kids love killer whales? Because they’ve seen one up close—not in the wild, but at SeaWorld or Busch Gardens or one of the other theme parks.”

  “I know, I know, it’s the whole conservation thing, making kids better stewards for tomorrow’s world. I get that—we say the same thing about elephants when people say it’s inhumane to keep them in captivity. People won’t take care of something they don’t know anything about, blah blah blah. And I have no problem at all with captive-bred animals. I’m just not sure I’d be able to grab a young animal from the wild. That’s just me.”

  “Well, hardly any are taken from the wild anymore anyway. Hell, SeaWorld wrote the book on successful captive breeding, and their whales are on their fourth generation. Turn any of them loose in the wild and they’d be dead inside two months.”

  “Do you really think our guy would have died, if he’d been left there—in Bogotá?”

  “I know it.”

  “I wonder if he was scared,” she mused.

  With closed eyes Gabriel said quietly, “Nature restores a state of grace at the end. By the time you die, you don’t feel a thing.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  Neva looked at him.

  Gabriel opened one eye. “What?”

  Neva whacked him with a loofah. “Tell me the story.”

  Gabriel shrugged. “There’s not much to tell. It was my own fault. We were collecting killer whales in the North Atlantic off Iceland and I got caught in the net. I was trying to untangle one of the calves. It was a stupid mistake.”

  “So what saved you?”

  “Not what, who. Christian. A Frenchman—we were collecting animals for an aquarium in Nice. I should have died. I was dying. And there really is a white light, because I was headed there when he dragged me up. I wasn’t scared, and it didn’t hurt. It was beautiful. So now I know it’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  Neva shook her head. “I’ve always been afraid of drowning.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Well, if this job doesn’t get you over that, nothing will,” said Gabriel.

  “You think?”

  “Sure. And if it does happen, remember, you’ll be dying among friends.”

  “There’s a comforting thought,” Neva said.

  “Yup,” said Gabriel, closing his eyes again. “I thought it would be.”

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON Ivy stopped by the pool to reassure herself that all was well. The office was empty and she was peering through the office window to see some sign of Friday when Gabriel came out of the locker room with a towel around his neck, wearing a fresh, dry wet suit folded down to his waist. Ivy turned to look at him, and took in the greenish-yellow remnants of the deep, ugly bruise on his chest. Even from across the room she could also make out the scars up and down around his arms and several longer, deeper scars on his sides and back. “Good god!”

  “It looks worse than it is,” he said of the bruise.

  “Did you get hit by a bus?”

  “Sea lion. Same thing.”

  “Yowza.”

  Gabriel shrugged with a certain degree of pride. “Goes with the territory. In this industry all us old guys look like we’ve been mauled by tigers. I’ve broken both ankles—one of them twice—both wrists, all my fingers, most of my toes, and blown out both knees and an eardrum.”

  “Talk about a leaky ship.”

  Gabriel pulled on the upper part of his wet suit and reached over his shoulder, feeling for the zipper pull.

  “Here,” she said, stepping over and efficiently zipping him up. “You must be taking the evening watch.”

  “Yep. I want to keep an eye on him for at least one more night.”

  “If you call the Oat Maiden, Johnson Johnson would probably send over a pizza.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Well, you can’t object to a little company, at least.”

  Together they climbed the metal stairs, Ivy with one of her oversized tote bags, Gabriel with a bucket of fish, a security radio, and a flashlight. Dark was moving in and one by one the automatic lights sputtered on. Friday was fast asleep in his corner.

  Ivy fetched Julio Iglesias from her car, where he’d been methodically chewing through the passenger’s seat belt, brought him upstairs, set him down on the pool deck, and watched him trot away on skinny tweezer-legs to pee on a coiled hose. “He’s such a little martinet,” she said. “You know, in one of his lives he was either a pharoah, a king, or a fascist. I’m serious.”

  Gabriel dragged two Adirondack chairs to Ivy, who had bought the second one to the pool yesterday, complaining that the lawn chairs were going to do them all in. Now she pulled a cushion from her bottomless tote and put it on the chair. “Sciatica,” she said, sitting down with a soft grunt. “Handiwork of the devil.”

  “Think sitting out in the cold and dampness could have anything to do with it?”

  “Nah. My doctor—who, by the way, sits at Satan’s right hand—would tell you it’s my own damned fault. Lose a little weight, exercise more, turn the clock back fifteen years, and I’d be perfect.” Ivy fished out her flask and took a good swig, then offered it to Gabriel. “Scotch. Excellent scotch. Go on—it’s not going to kill you to break the rules once.”

  As they passed the flask back and forth, Ivy extracted a sky-blue afghan-in-progress from her bag, peered at it, consulted a dog-eared pattern, and ripped out some of the stitches. “You know, the last time I spent this much time with a man, I was engaged to him.” She gave him a puckish look before setting to work, the metal knitting needles briskly clicking.

  “And?”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “I came to my senses.”

  “Any regrets?”

  “None,” said Ivy. “He died at forty-nine. I’d have been a grieving widow.”

  “Better to have loved and lost than never to have—”

  “There’s a crock,” said Ivy. “How about you? Ever been married?”

  “Once. Back before the flood. If you believe her, and you probably should, I’m not cut out for domestic life.”

  “What on earth is that supposed to mean?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “I travel. I put m
y work first.”

  Ivy nodded, holding a cable needle loosely between her lips like a forgotten cigarette.

  “The real deal-breaker, though, was kids,” Gabriel said. “She started to want them, and I didn’t—if you’re going to have kids, you should stay home and have some sort of relationship with them, which I obviously would not be doing. It was all very amicable, though. She’s married again and has two sets of twins. I see her on Vashon sometimes when I’m home. She looks happy.”

  Barely visible in the darkness, Friday exhaled and inhaled, clapping his blowhole closed, his warm breath steaming. Ivy put the empty flask away and Gabriel sipped coffee from a mug that said I ♥ MY WALRUS. He watched her, after a while saying, “My grandmother used to knit. Socks, mostly. She said it was an act of contrition.”

  “For what?” “She’d never tell me, and I can’t imagine. The woman was a saint. Married at fourteen, five kids by twenty-one. She grew up on a cattle ranch in Alberta and single-handedly fed twenty ranch hands three hot meals a day.” He gazed across the pool. “She used to say she had kids so if she ever had to go back there at least she’d have help.”

  “Did she? Ever go back?”

  “Nope. She moved to Vancouver, B.C., all by herself, taught herself typing and shorthand, and met my grandfather taking a night-school class on modern English literature. She married him a month later, when she was twenty-two, and they moved to Vashon Island. She loved it there. I remember someone once told her she was a good woman, and she said she was motivated because she’d already been to hell and she wasn’t about to go back. You’d have to work her over with a crowbar to get her to talk about her growing up. She was ashamed of her family.”

  “Because they were poor?”

  “Because they were uneducated. She brought up my dad on Vashon, but sent him off to the University of Washington in Seattle with a promise that he’d never come back except to visit. He got a PhD in English Literature, met my mother, and waited until my grandmother died to come home and be a scholar-janitor. Cleaned the church every Sunday, shops and the bank every evening. Good honest work, he called it. He always had a book in his back pocket so he could read while he waxed the floors. Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Joyce, Vonnegut, Clancy.”

  Ivy smiled. “Eclectic tastes.”

  Gabriel nodded. “He died when he was fifty-four, had a heart attack in the nave of St. John the Divine. Father David found him with a book in his hand and a smile on his face.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She still lives on Vashon, still does some light cleaning for my dad’s old clients.”

  “Do you see her often?”

  “Not as often as I should, but I go when I can.”

  They fell silent while Ivy considered her work, employed her cable needle, then tucked it back between her lips. She hadn’t thought of Gabriel as coming from an educated family; to her he’d seemed more elemental, like the son of a milkman or a plumber. “Shouldn’t he be breathing more?”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It just seems like an animal that big should need more oxygen.”

  “First, they’re much more efficient at using oxygen than we are, and second, he’s dozing.”

  “How do you know he’s not cowering in fear?”

  “If he were afraid, his respirations would be faster,” Gabriel said.

  “Do you really think he’ll be okay here?”

  “Absolutely. We’re going to be throwing a bunch of new stuff at him that’ll keep him busy and challenged.”

  “I hope so—I really do. I have to admit that some of what that animal psychic said shook me up a little,” Ivy said.

  “Such as?”

  “Thinking that he might still miss the wild, even after all these years. Who are we to play God?”

  “For one thing, animal psychics are frauds—there’s no such thing. For another thing, Friday would be dead inside a week if he were released back to the wild. He’s used to being hand-fed dead fish, not having to figure out where the schools of fish are today and tomorrow. He’s immune-suppressed, so he’d pick up the first infection he came across. And the North Atlantic is a big, big place—the odds of him finding his pod, or of them finding him, are remote. Reality bites.”

  Ivy nodded, only slightly heartened.

  LIBERTINE SAT AT the celestial table at the Oat Maiden and talked softly into her cell phone. On the other end of the call was Katrina—Trina—Beemer, a grim-faced, sour woman in her early fifties at whose hammer toes Libertine had been unable to keep herself from staring in fascination during a Sea Shepherd gathering in Seattle two summers ago; and to whom she hadn’t spoken since. Trina headed an organization called Friends of Animals of the Sea and often tagged along when the big animal activist organizations like PETA and Sea Shepherd staged protests.

  “I won’t ask you how you infiltrated that place, but you’re a hero,” Trina was saying. “Everyone’s saying so.”

  “What place?”

  “What place?—you silly woman!” Trina said coyly. “The Breederman Zoo or whatever. You’re all over the Internet.”

  Libertine’s heart sank. She believed in the animal welfare groups’ efforts to improve the lives of captive whales and dolphins, even to shut their programs down when the conditions warranted it, as they clearly had in Bogotá, but that wasn’t her work. She merely represented those individuals who couldn’t represent themselves. She’d had no intention of taking a political stand when she talked to Martin Choi. She was just telling him what she knew to be true. It wasn’t the first time she’d talked before she’d thought things through, and while it probably wasn’t the last time, either, she longed for a do-over.

  Trina was still talking. “—reconnaisance,” she was saying.

  “I’m sorry?”

  She heard Trina sigh and start over, using the vaguely singsong tone women used when talking to small children and the mentally challenged. “We’re hoping you’ll do some reconnaissance for us, since you’re there. If you could make a map of the whale building, filtration plant, entrances, exits, and which ones are locked and when, that would be really great.”

  “I don’t think I’d be comfortable doing that,” Libertine said.

  “Well, you’re not doing anything else, are you? I assume you don’t have direct access to him.”

  “Him?”

  “Viernes or Friday or whatever his latest name is,” Trina said impatiently. “The whale.”

  “Oh. No, not physical access.” She hadn’t had psychic access to him, either, since the day after his arrival. Not that she would tell that to Trina. “I guess I ought to get online and see what people are saying.”

  “Listen to the radio, too. Joe Minton did a whole piece on the whale’s background and prospects on NPR. You can probably find it on their Web site.”

  “Oh.”

  “Look, we really, really need that information. Will you at least think it over?” The phone line went silent until Libertine finally said, “I’ll think about it.”

  “Oh, that’s great!” said Trina. “That’s my little guerrilla warrior.”

  Chapter 6

  EARLY THE NEXT morning Truman received a call over his security radio.

  “Ah, sir, we seem to have someone sneaking around the whale facility. Over.” Truman had been trying to get the security officers to stop calling him “sir” for three months, but so far, no luck. On the other hand, they’d been trying equally unsuccessfully to get Truman to say, “Roger” and “Over,” so Truman guessed they were even.

  “Is this Toby?” he asked over the radio.

  “Yes, sir, this is Security One. Over.”

  Truman sighed. “What do you mean, ‘sneaking’?”

  “Well, sir, we have a woman walking the fence line. She appears to be looking for a way in. Over.”

  “Is she heavyset?”

  “No, sir, more like an elf sort of a person. Small like that. She doesn’t look dangerous, but s
he’s walking back and forth a lot like she’s maybe looking for something. Over.”

  Truman sighed again. “All right, why don’t you introduce yourself and bring her to my office?”

  “Roger that. Over and out.”

  Truman couldn’t help smiling as he set down the radio. Most of his security employees had wanted to be in the military or the police force, but were unfit in some way: Toby was severely asthmatic; another was an aging Vietnam veteran with lingering PTSD; a third had epilepsy; and the fourth had suffered a serious head injury which, while he adhered absolutely to the zoo’s security rules and procedures, made him somewhat lacking when it came to assessing complex situations. Truman believed strongly in giving people chances, and he was very proud of his motley team, which he’d originally assembled six years ago, when, as the zoo’s business manager, he’d supervised the security department. They were among the zoo’s most dedicated employees, tenacious in their loyalty to the zoo and to Truman himself. This year, for the first time in what he intended to make an annual practice, he’d invited them to undertake the facility-wide security audit he’d originally proposed to former director Harriet Saul way back when and which she’d flatly rejected as busywork.

  He cleared his desk of sensitive papers, pulled two teacups from his credenza, and turned on the electric teapot just as a knock on his door announced that Toby and Libertine Adagio had arrived. Truman indicated to Libertine that they’d sit at a small round table by the window, and said to Toby, “Would you find Miss Levy and ask her to come see me? I’d like her to join us.”

  Toby self-consciously removed and reseated his Biedelman Zoo ball cap—briefly exposing hair as sparse and fine as duck down—and then hitched up his radio holster in a pair of tandem tics. “Roger that.”

  Once he’d left, Truman stepped to the doorway and asked Brenda to keep an eye out for Ivy. Then he joined Libertine Adagio across the table. She smiled at him nicely. He was surprised to find her slight and messy; her small hands flew around her like birds, checking the lay of her hair and clothes. He’d remembered her being larger and more assertive. He offered her tea and she accepted.