by Jeffrey Ford
“I’d heard rumors of opium, small amounts, with the Chinese, and tales of the East, but nothing like this in Manhattan.”
“There are quite a few fallen here from it,” he said, scanning the bent shadows of the rock vault.
As we headed back toward the stairs, he swept the flame of the torch along each of the hapless forms huddled against the wall of the cave and studied their faces. I moved on ahead of him propelled by the sole desire to get the hell out of that dank pit. When I was about to set foot on the first step to salvation, the tap-tap-tap of his whalebone leg ceased. I turned and saw him leaning over one of the poor wretches.
“Come, come, Ahab,” I said, and left the steps to retrieve him. “I’m not going to spend my entire day drilling the living dead for information when I can ask one of my associates in the police department who Malbaster is.”
He didn’t budge. The man he stood over lifted an emaciated arm to block the glow of the torch. Ahab looked stunned. I stepped up next to him, prepared to pull him along if need be, but before I could hook my arm through his, I looked down and saw what had him agape. Somewhat thinner, paler, more bereft than last I saw him, now shedding patches of his curly hair, and sporting a ragged beard and ragged blouse, was Ishmael, who whined piteously for us to let him be.
7
“Ish,” I called my old copy editor as I might have back at the Mirror. It seemed to spark a sign of life in him. His crusted eyes fluttered open so slowly, I swore I heard a creaking noise. A moment passed, and I watched the flame of the torch dance in those glassy orbs. As he regained his sight, he brought his other arm up, moaned miserably, and said, “Leave me, spirit.”
The captain leaned in closer. “It’s me, Ahab.”
“I’m here as well,” I said, hoping it would be something of a comfort.
Ishmael turned to my voice and said, “Harrow?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you bring this ghost with you?” He dared not look at Ahab.
The captain said, “I’m no ghost. I survived. It is your blasted book that makes a spirit of me. Your words have become a truth beyond truth.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I wanted you to know.”
There was silence for a few beats and then a light snoring let us know that Ishmael had dozed off. Ahab gathered my former colleague’s collar in one fist and lifted him toward the flame. “Awake,” he yelled. Ishmael sputtered out of sleep. “I’m real,” said the captain. “You are not the only one who survived.”
“Not the only one,” Ishmael repeated as in a fog.
“There are two now. You and me. Don’t ever forget it.”
“Not two.”
“Aye, two,” said the captain with a ferocity in his voice.
I was about to intercede when Ishmael said, “No, three.”
“What say you? Three? Is that a dream?” asked Ahab.
“Ish,” I said gently and patted his cheeks. “Three?”
He nodded out of a doze and held up three fingers. “Daggoo,” he said.
“What the hell is Daggoo?” I asked.
Ahab released Ishmael’s collar and leaned him carefully back against the wall. He now asked softly, “You mean, the harpooneer?”
Ishmael nodded.
“The African,” said Ahab.
Ishmael nodded.
“Where is he?”
Ahab removed his hat and bade me go to the stream and bring him some water. Ishmael was out cold. I did as I was asked. As I dipped the brim in the stream, I heard from off in the distance the sound of a voice. I couldn’t make out where it was coming from, right or left, or what precisely it was saying. However, I could discern the rhythm and rhyme of poetry. I ran back to Ahab, hat in hand, and told him, “You’ve got minutes before I flee.”
“Stand fast, Harrow, ye sorry land mutt. Find some backbone.” That said, he tossed the dripping hat of water onto Ishmael’s head. I thought for a moment the poor fellow would drown, but eventually he came barely awake again.
“Where is Daggoo?” asked Ahab.
“Seneca.”
“Seneca?”
“Seneca Village?” I asked.
He nodded and shut his eyes.
“It’s up north,” I told the captain. “Now let’s get out of here. I’m feeling the smoke.” Breathing all that opium was sending me across the Far Tortuga.
“I’m a bit touched myself,” he said. “But what do we do with Ishmael?”
That’s when we heard the tramping of a dozen footfalls on the stairs. They hadn’t reached the first landing before I grabbed Ahab by the sleeve and pulled him away. I knew the sound of that shoe leather like I knew my mother’s own voice. It was the police, and judging from the enthusiasm in the slap of their step, I was certain they were there to crack heads. I held tight to the captain as we ran headlong into utter darkness. From behind us there erupted a sudden volley of groans and screams and the dull echo of clubs breaking bones, busting skulls, punctuated by gunshots. I snatched the torch from Ahab and tossed it in the stream.
I was frightened out of my wits, and somewhere along the way, Ahab had grabbed my sleeve and was pulling me along. Eventually, the sounds of agony became more distant, and then far removed. We stopped to catch our wind.
Leaning over with my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath, I said, “Ahab, for a drab fellow you attract a lot of madness.”
“Aye. Light one of ye matches. We need to find an escape to the street.”
I did as he suggested. What we glimpsed during the stick’s brief glow was more stream, more cavern, and more darkness ahead and behind. It was easy to decide in which direction to proceed. We moved on more slowly now, agreeing that I should light a match every few minutes. I informed the captain I had but five of them left.
“Why are the police assaulting those poor wretches?” he asked.
“The hunt for your boy has brought us into the middle of something I don’t wish to be in the middle of.”
It was by the light of my last match that we found a ladder running up the side of the cavern wall to a trapdoor in the floor of a dilapidated shed sitting behind an abandoned pub on Mott Street. We’d traveled quite a way underground. I had always been cocksure of my knowledge of Manhattan, that I knew it like a fifty-year lover, but never having heard of that cavern before, nor of the proliferation of opium use, made me feel left out in the cold. That plus the memory of those gunshots and beatings—the screams—made me jumpy.
Once we were out again beneath the steel-gray sky, cutting a path through the icy wind, Ahab said, “What next?”
“A drink at least,” I said.
We landed in an oyster shop at the foot of Wall Street, across from the old Coffee House slip. It was quite a hike getting there, but I hoped the chill would clear my head of, among other things, the fear of death. I considered how ordinary my life had been for a fellow who wrote exclusively about the strange. Then Fate seemed to have stepped in and shouted, I’ll show you strange.
Ahab didn’t eat, but I did—a six-cent plate of raw oysters and a beer. He only drank, some warm rum and coffee concoction obviously not for landlubbers like myself.
“Why are we here and not heading for Seneca Village?” asked Ahab. “We’re on to something. A school of answers runs just out of sight beneath our keel, man. I’ve got to act. All this sitting around in bars drinking and thinking is putting a cramp in my arse.”
“Slow down,” I said. “Take a deep breath. We’ll go to Seneca Village tomorrow. Finding the African won’t bring us any closer to your son.”
“I just want to move, shake off this feeling of shipwreck.”
“It’s too late to start up there now. It’s at the edge of the city. We’re here because it’s on my brother-in-law’s beat.”
“Beat, ya say?”
“He’s a cop. I’m gonna drill him on what he knows about Malbaster or the Jolly Host.”
“Sound thinking.”
“I didn’t
fall off the turnip cart yesterday,” I said. “I’ve got years of experience investigating stories.”
“But why do you investigate them when you’re just going to grind them into a spread of fiddle-faddle?”
“Don’t you understand that there can be a certain truth in fiction?”
“The word certain in that statement carries a clipper’s hold of import.”
“And then some,” I said. “But still it’s true.”
“I’m wonderstruck that there be a third survivor,” said the captain. “The Pequod was so thoroughly smashed. It astonished me when I discovered that Ishmael had come back. Now another? Daggoo. How could I have missed him in the debris?”
“Imagine,” I said, “that, in fact, you all lived. Your entire crew were all still alive and each living out his life unaware of the others, each burdened by the misconception that he was the only one to have survived. As the protagonist, you wander the world, discovering each and every one of them, as if your contact with them brings them to life. You see, that story has meaning; a certain truth. Something swims in its depths.”
While Ahab pondered that with his horrid forgetting-how-to-laugh face, I inquired of the boy who brought us fresh drinks, “Max, has my brother-in-law been by yet?” The young man turned to face the bar and called to the bartender, “Tommy been in?”
“Any minute,” said the bar man. I put a coin in Max’s hand.
I told the captain that I’d heard someone reciting poetry in the cavern. I don’t know why I admitted this to Ahab, but his silence had a strange way of drawing me out. “It was a female voice,” I said.
“When?” he asked.
“As I was fetching your hat full of water.”
“The manticore?”
Something hard slapped against my left shoulder. I nearly jumped out of my seat. It was Tommy. He hung his club back at his side and took a seat with us by the window.
“How’s Ivy?” I asked.
“You know, hard on the balls,” he replied and laughed.
“This here is Mr. Ahab,” I said. “I’m helping him try to find his boy.”
Tommy nodded to the captain and then removed his hat, setting it on the bench beside him.
“They’ve got you in the new blue uniforms, eh?” I said.
He nodded and mumbled, “That’s fashion for ya.”
I called to Max to fetch Tommy a beer.
“What brings you down here?” he asked.
“We’re looking for you,” I said. “We want you to tell us about Malbaster.”
“The Jolly Host,” said Ahab.
Max brought the beer then and Tommy waited for the boy to get out of earshot before he spoke. He leaned in toward us, and the captain and I followed suit. If we didn’t look like a table of conspirators, I don’t know who would.
“Malbaster is not someone you want to know,” he said.
“Why?”
“He’s a fella that dead bodies accumulate around. Whatever it is you want to find him for, it’s not worth it.”
“We think Ahab’s kid is working for him.”
“Christ on a crutch, George, I never took you for stupid.”
“I promise we will not involve you in the least,” Ahab said.
“Only when it comes time to shovel your bodies off the sidewalk.”
“Just tell us who he is,” I said.
“He’s the walkin’ Prince of Death. We don’t know what he looks like. He’s got a stake in a lot of crimes, but his main mission is to sow unrest among the poor, the micks, blacks, chinks, wops. He’s paid off by big cheeses, anonymous bigwigs of the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner and such to practice violence against Catholics and coloreds and make their lives miserable. He’s got a small army of followers all hopped up on the Chinese molasses.
“On what?” I asked.
“Opium. That’s how he keeps the Jolly Host loyal. The police are at war with him. He’s taking over our turf.”
“We witnessed the results of that this morning in a cavern under where the edge of the Collect Pond used to be, down the street from the Tombs,” I said.
“You were there?” asked Tommy.
Ahab nodded as did I.
“Listen, the kid’s as good as gone.”
“I’ll do whatever it takes to get him back,” said the captain.
“Kill?”
“Yes.”
“How many are you prepared to kill?”
“All of them,” said Ahab.
Tommy stood up and leaned down over us. “We’re done. Last I’m gonna tell you. Stay as far away from this as you can. That’s it. There’s nothing I can do to help you.”
“Give my best to Ivy,” I said as Tommy walked away.
“Get smart, Georgie,” he called back over his shoulder.
8
By the time we left the oyster bar, the temperature had dipped and the wind, which had been steady all day, blew even stronger. The sun briefly appeared before setting. Those gilded seconds made even the drab buildings along the east side of Water Street beautiful. The captain was in a funk since meeting with my brother-in-law. The only thing he said to me on the walk to my house was, “So many wasted days.”
The sun had set by the time we stepped through the door. Ahab and I hung our coats in the foyer closet as Misha approached up the hallway. “You have visitors, Mr. Harrow,” she said.
“Mavis?” I asked.
Misha nodded. “She and her brother are in the kitchen.”
“Tell her I’ll be right with her.”
“Yes, sir.”
I went into my parlor study and Ahab followed. When I was done cutting the pages of an article from my notebook, he remained seated on the couch, filling his pipe. He seemed swamped by the predicament his son was in. I feared he’d slip into despair, so I said, “Captain, you should come and meet these young people. One of them is the girl who located Maisie’s house for us.” I took a risk, hoping that the sight of the boy, Mavis’s younger brother, might be something of a balm to him. I was dangerously unsure as to why I thought that would be a good idea.
He followed me into the kitchen where we found Mavis, hat in her lap, holding a cigarette between her fingers. She and her brother were seated at the table beneath the window. Her brother, I forget his name, was a towheaded imp with a scrunched face full of freckles. Whenever he’d arrive at the house with his sister, Misha would make him a butter and sugar sandwich. That disgusting concoction was like manna from heaven to him. His sister never partook but sat and smoked and smiled at him as he laid waste to it.
I introduced Ahab to Mavis and her brother. The boy took a look at the captain’s whalebone leg and stopped chewing, his mouth open. Finally, he spoke. “For shit sake, Mavis, he only got one leg.”
She reached across the table and tried to swat him with her hat. “Words,” she warned. The boy turned his attention back to the sandwich until Ahab tapped the floor.
“It’s made from the bone of a monster.”
“What happened to your leg?” asked the boy.
“Bit off by a spermaceti whale, white as a snow-covered hill.”
“Did it hurt?”
“It still hurts,” said Ahab, making his horrid trying-to-laugh face. When she beheld it, I noticed Mavis instinctively reach halfway toward her gun.
The boy finished his sandwich and sipped at his tea. Every other moment, he peered at the captain from the corner of his eye.
“Are you brave?” Ahab asked him.
The youngster looked at his sister and she made as if to think for a moment before nodding.
“Yes,” said the boy.
Ahab stepped forward and placed an Indian penny next to the empty sandwich plate. He bowed and thanked Mavis for finding his wife’s aunt. Before she could acknowledge it, he abruptly turned and tapped away down the hall to my study.
I asked Mavis to see what she could find out about Malbaster. I wrote the name out for her and she put the slip of paper in her pocket. I w
alked them to the front door. Her brother, half her size, leaned against her hip, yawning. She had one arm around him and her other hand on his head.
“I’ve heard the name before,” she said. “But I steer clear of it. Try to put two streets between me and wherever I hear it.”
“If you can do it without getting hurt, bring me some information on Malbaster and I’ll pay you well for it. I want to know about the Jolly Host, where it congregates, what place is its home. I want to know the same about Malbaster. Where can I find him?”
“What do you mean by pay me well?” she asked.
“Ten dollars if you bring me the answers to those questions.”
“Twelve,” she said.
I acquiesced.
“We’ll see what I hear,” she said, leaning over to help her brother on with his coat. She shoved the hat down over his ears and they left.
I called behind her as they moved down the street, “Tell Garrick I’ll need more cash soon.”
Misha had a four-alarm blaze going in the study fireplace, and so I anchored there and opened a bottle of gin.
“Harrow, good God, man, you’re a lush,” said the captain as I handed him a drink. He waved it off, and I shrugged.
“It fortifies me against reality,” I said.
“How long will it take to journey to Seneca Village tomorrow?” he asked.
“I don’t understand why you want to go up there. We need to keep looking for your boy. What difference does it make to our cause if another of your crew survived?”
“I must be a whole person and not a ghost when I meet my son. I need to speak to the harpooneer. If I don’t, I’ll never be sure that I’m not, as the Nantucket night watchman believed, a walking spirit.”
“Must be strange,” I said and, with that, silence reigned for a solid hour. When the fire died down, I pushed the bottle away. I thought the captain had fallen asleep staring at the slow dancing shadows, but as I stood to head upstairs to my bedroom, he spoke.
“After I could again get up and around, one of the craftsmen of the village fitted me out with a wooden leg. My whalebone piece had been shattered in the melee of my meeting with Moby Dick. The I-Kiribati cared for me as if I were one of their own and nursed me with their island medicine back to health. I was welcome anywhere in their village, and I never wanted for a meal or companionship. They gave me use of a hut and would come, one or two at a time, to smoke a pipe, speak to me. I picked up much of their language in the years I spent among them.