by Jeffrey Ford
“And what of Malbaster, once we have him?” I asked.
“After he’s been taken, what happens to him is up to you lot. I’ve nothing to do with it,” she said.
The following day, each of us took a portion of that money Garrick had fronted me and we fanned out across the city to gather supplies for the assault on the barge. Ahab and Gabriel went to South Street to buy oil; Madi bought turpentine; Mavis, the alcohol. For my part, I went in search of a firearm. The fid had served me surprisingly well, but we were now approaching the endgame and I needed something with a little more punch. I was able to secure a nice used pair of Colt Navy revolvers.
The very fact that I was participating in a plan that called for the manufacture of torches was enough to make me nervous. What once made sense now seemed so grandiose. Was there nothing simpler we could do than burn ten tons of opium on an oyster barge to get to Malbaster? Why did it have to be so dramatic? But this seemed to be the plan Fate had written for us. There was no getting out of it, the story was set.
Later, while Madi and Arabella sat in the kitchen inspecting the two pistols I’d bought that morning, I sat with Ahab and Gabriel in the parlor, smoking a cheap cigar and poking around with questions to see if I could squeeze one more Mirror piece out of Ahab before the end of it all.
“What can you tell me about, Captain?” I said.
To my surprise, Ahab, who usually went quiet the moment he knew I was fishing for an article idea, unfolded his arms from across his chest and opened his hands outward as if he were presenting me with a gift. “Come with us, Harrow,” he said. “We have something for you.” He stood and put his finger to his lips in order to signal that we were to move quietly.
Gabriel lit a candle in its holder, and we left the parlor. Halfway down the hall, we came to a door, which Gabriel opened. Before us was a set of steps leading down into what I surmised was a cellar of some kind. We descended: Ahab leading, followed by me, with Gabriel bringing up the rear. When we reached the bottom, the young man held the candle higher, and the expanse of a full basement became clear. Ahab headed across the room to a workbench, and we followed.
He went to the back end of the bench and picked up something quite large. The candlelight revealed that he held a harpoon in his hand. He stood it on its butt end, and we all gazed at its double fluke pointing upward. “We bought the shaft to hold the head today when we were at the seaport,” said the captain. “But this fluke has a story behind it.”
I’d not really thought of Ishmael’s book much since our adventure had begun, but as Ahab spoke, I seemed to recall that in the novel, Ahab had the blacksmith, Perth, fashion a harpoon for him that was pulled straight from the burning forge and plunged into a cooling bath composed of the blood of the ship’s three harpooners—Queequeg, Tashtego, and Daggoo (Madi). I had a strange suspicion, and I blurted out as much without thinking.
Gabriel’s eyes widened and Ahab made his forgetting-how-to-laugh face, which no longer terrified me. “You’re correct, Harrow.”
“How can that be?” I asked. “It was that very double fluke you hurled at Moby Dick in the heat of the fateful hunt.”
“True,” he said. “And yet I have it now. This is the story about how it came back to me. After my convalescence from the brutal damages visited upon me by the white whale, I fled the Gilbert Islands. For some reason, I thought of my boy and suddenly had a desire to find him that was as true and righteous as my desire to track Moby Dick had been dark and destructive.” Here he paused and put his hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. The boy smiled very faintly and looked at the floor.
“I’ve already recounted for you my experience in Australia where, awaiting a ship going east, I was put up with a ghost. Well before I even made it to that port, I’d already stopped at several others. My homeward journey rivaled that of Odysseus. One such stop was at an island that at the time was unnamed. There was a small British settlement there of about 150 people. The ship I’d paid to take me to Australia, a Dutch clipper, Heilige van de Golven (Saint of the Waves) put in there in wait for another ship bringing teak wood from Burma.
“The small village lay at the base of a towering dormant volcano. It had a general store called the Pink Frog, no doubt named for the brightly colored creepers that filled the night with song. It was amazing to me how much stuff was crammed into that store. The old widow who ran it, a Mrs. Trumball (Mr. Trumball had been lost at sea) could find anything in that chaos. She had everything a sailor might need. There were books in English, Dutch, and German; sewing goods; dried food; biscuits; tinned meats; knives; pistols old and new; taxidermied wildlife from surrounding islands.
“Mrs. Trumball was a tough, tightfisted proprietor. I’d once seen a sailor try to lift a thin cracker of hardtack. He quickly shoved it in his mouth when he thought she wasn’t looking. Oh, but she was always looking. She grabbed him by the throat with one hand and shoved a knife in his ribs with the other, forcing him to spit out what he’d stolen.
“About a week before my ship was due to leave for Australia, I was in the crowded store, searching for something or other when I came across the two-fluke harpoon head wrought by Perth the blacksmith, forged in the blood of the harpooneers, and which I’d buried deep in the white flesh of Moby Dick.
“You might say, ‘Ahab, how can you be sure it was the same?’ But it’s unlike any other—a wicked, snarling tool of death. In Ishmael’s book I say that the nails that were melted down to recast the harpoon ‘will weld together like glue from the melted bones of murderers.’ I, of course, never said that. I was never as dramatic as the book alleges, although I was quite mad at the time and fully believed the ritual of the harpoon’s creation would imbue it with greater killing power. I had flung that very harpoon at the creature, and in response, the white menace laughed and showed me how deep the world truly was.
“I knew the instant I saw it what it was. I asked Mrs. Trumball where it had come from. She told me she got it from two fishermen who’d brought it up in a net a few miles north of the island. I had to have it and bargained with her. The price she set for it was not unfair, but I had almost no money. I’d made it this far relying on the brotherhood of seafarers, fellow captains who agreed to transport me as a professional courtesy. But I still had a long way to go.
“Nonetheless, I struck a bargain with the widow and missed my ship for Australia. The next ship I could catch wouldn’t be in for another six months. I sacrificed an entire half year just to hold the harpoon. It made no sense to me no matter how much I thought about it, but I did it all the same. I had the harpoon head in my possession and agreed to work for Mrs. Trumball to pay off my debt. She let me stay in a back room of the store, where she set up a cot amid buckets and brooms. But the work was not at all what I’d expected.
“I was to go deep into the island’s interior, into the humid, shockingly green jungle, and collect feathers. She told me there was a bird in the jungle that was covered in a tricolored striped pattern. It was said that one of those colors was a color never seen by anyone before. Mrs. Trumball told me she prized those feathers of unknown color very highly. ‘Bring me just three of those,’ she said, ‘and your bill will be paid.’
“So I went out into the jungle. It took a few days to become accustomed to walking there. At first the exposed roots, soft ground, and divots made it slow going with the whalebone leg, but I had a job to do. I put everything of myself into being a good feather hunter. Mrs. Trumball let me take her dog, Suigui, a black hound, a very reliable beast. Besides my companion, I had an old blunderbuss for protection and a bag round my neck to collect feathers in.
“Nearly every day I went into the jungle, Mrs. Trumball would say, ‘You know, if you don’t see any feathers on the ground, load up the old buss and knock a few of the rascals out of the trees. It won’t matter, there’s always more of them.’ Instead, I played fair and only took the feathers that had fallen. It wouldn’t have paid to have the birds against me.
“Six months l
ater, when the ship for Australia arrived, I was waist-deep in the mangrove swamps. Although I’d long paid off my harpoon-head debt, my feather collecting had become something of an obsession. As I trekked through the jungle with Suigui, searching for feathers, I wrestled with why I felt the need to have the double fluke so desperately. Was it because I thought I might face Moby Dick again? Or was I grasping for a bygone time when my crew was alive and with me? Or was it because the flukes had been bathed in the three harpooneers’ blood—did I need that connection?
“One afternoon, as I scoured the jungle floor for feathers, my eyes caught sight of a bird emerging from a hole in the ground. The bird was the size of a house cat, with a short neck and beady eyes on either side of an orange beak. Its feathers were striped in maroon, yellow, and . . . some other color that to this day I cannot describe. Up to this point, I’d never seen one of these birds, despite all the feathers I’d found. It stared at me, unblinking, its head cocked to one side. Suigui stood still beside me; I found I couldn’t move. A feeling of panic enveloped me, as if I were momentarily glimpsing in those inky black eyes what awaited after death.
“And then, as if it had come to a decision, it squawked, spread its wings, and flew away, leaving three feathers drifting downward in its wake. I felt as if I’d woken from a dream and suddenly remembered that this island was but a temporary stopover on my journey. I’d tarried an entire year, chasing bird feathers, when my son needed me. I hobbled all the way back to the village as quickly as my ivory leg would carry me and just managed to catch the ship for Australia.”
“You can give me no hint of the color?” I asked, thinking if I massaged this poppycock into an article, I’d need something more.
“I swear I can’t, man. But I can tell you what the natives of the island said. Something Mrs. Trumball never warned me about. Only a handful of islanders had ever seen the bird. Of those who did, supposedly all died in battle, which for the natives was a happy conclusion to life. As for me, though, I’ve only just found my son. Dying at this juncture, battling Malbaster’s grimy legion, is not a happy conclusion. So . . . what I’m trying to say, Harrow, is that the harpoon is a gift for you.”
“Wait, Ahab, what does this mean?”
“Well, after all is said and done, you did help me find my boy. And so I give you this lance. With this harpoon you have a chance to defeat the thing that is Malbaster.”
“Where are you going to be?” I asked.
“Gabriel and I are leaving. We’re taking a back way out. Call it cowardly, call it a father protecting his child. But we are going. I need more time with my son.” He grabbed my collar as if to shake understanding into me.
“I grasp your point,” I said to him. “But we have a deal with Madi.”
“I truly don’t want to renege, but I’ve not come this far to simply give up my life. I want at least a year or two with the lad.”
Losing Ahab and Gabriel would put us at a definite disadvantage, but I tried to put myself in his place. “Do what you must, Captain,” I said.
He handed me the harpoon and I took it. He then put his arm around his boy’s shoulders and said, “Let’s go.”
To my surprise, Gabriel suddenly shrugged off his father’s arm and turned on him. “I won’t do this. We’ve made a commitment. You go on,” he said to Ahab. “You’re the one with the curse on his head. I’ll meet up with you after the job is complete. Besides, I want Malbaster dead more than anyone.”
For the first time since he entered the story, I thought of Gabriel as more than just a lumpen body draped across the back of Madi’s horse, or the pale near-corpse lying in bed, the captain’s words laving him like the waves of the sea. Now, suddenly, he was a person, and through the dim candlelight I saw the character in his face. Sad green eyes and a shock of dark hair hanging down over one eye, the vaguest mustache sprouting.
Ahab had tears in his eyes, and he must have remembered how to cry. “You’re right,” he said to Gabriel and put his arm back around the lad’s shoulders. “I didn’t come all this way to set a bad example for you. We must honor our commitment.” We went back upstairs with the blood-forged harpoon and showed it to Madi and Arabella and, in turn, they showed us how to load the guns.
Later that night, as I sat writing in the kitchen, trying to put some meat on the bones of Ahab’s bird feather story, I heard the front door creak open and close. The only other person awake was Arabella. She was in her writing room working on her insane bid to bring the manticore under her control and no doubt polishing up her favorite bullwhip. I got up and went to the front door and peeked out the sidelight window. It was lightly snowing, and among the shadows I could just make out the silhouettes of Gabriel and Mavis sharing a kiss.
30
The following evening, after darkness fell, Mavis, Arabella, and I found ourselves in a rowboat on the Hudson River. I had a list of complaints about this situation; for starters, it was freezing, and we were lucky the river wasn’t iced over. My second complaint was that I was the designated rower, and whenever I brought an oar up too quickly and water splashed or a paddle slapped the surface, eyes were rolled, and I was shhhhh’d. My third and perhaps biggest gripe was that of the two guns I’d bought the previous day with the money from Garrick, I got to carry neither and was stuck again with the fucking fid.
Mavis took one of the new guns and gave the other to Madi. I told her I thought Madi was determined to kill Malbaster by slitting his throat. She simply shrugged. “And what about the gun you already have?” I asked. She told me she’d given it to Gabriel since he was going to be part of the ambush and would need it more. She reminded me that if our plan was executed perfectly, we shouldn’t need any guns whatsoever.
“Then why do you need the new one?” I asked.
“If we’re being shot at, would you rather be shooting back or would you rather me be shooting back?”
I had to admit, in a gunfight, I was, as Garrick might have said, “useless as Millard Fillmore.” We borrowed a dinghy north of Fulton, beneath the pier at the end of Barclay Street, and rowed amid the pilings of the dock at Vessey. We circumnavigated a ship to reach the oyster barge. The night was pitch-black and the moon lost behind thick cloud cover. In the bottom of the small boat there were four bottles of our fire starter concoction, three torches, and a shiny bullwhip. I carried my empty writing satchel around my neck, having left its contents at the house. Other than that, I had two boxes of wooden matches and, of course, the perfidious fid.
Mavis wore her fake charcoal beard. She’d told me she wore this disguise when engaging in dangerous activities so that in case she was seen, she might be mistaken for a small man. Arabella, on the other hand, wore a rather flamboyant ensemble: riding pants, a silk blouse, a velvet vest, and patchwork coat; atop her head was a derby with a tricolored feather in the band.
It was easy enough to get to the back of the barge. The vessel was enormous. The fifty or so timbers that formed the base were whole tree trunks. Luckily, a ladder hung off the stern to the waterline. Arabella wore her bullwhip around her neck like a pet snake as she ascended from the dinghy. I followed her, trying to hang on to my bottle of fire starter and a torch. Her pungent perfume, a combination of fruit and flowers that I found intoxicating, wafted tantalizingly in her wake.
Behind me, Mavis very untantalizingly poked my ass with her torch to prod me along. When we made it over the side onto the deck, we crouched, huddled together in the dark silence, alert for any sound that might indicate the presence of a night watchman. Once satisfied that we were alone, we began to move, with the pale moon providing the light.
It was slow going across the uneven deck, which was strewn with all manner of junk—coils of rope, empty baskets, winch parts, rakes, netting. But we reached the back wall of the onboard warehouse and stopped to get our bearings. Mavis told Arabella and me to stay hidden and quiet, that she was going to figure out the location to the entrance of the opium storehouse. An anxious few minutes passed and the
n I heard the squeal of hinges, followed almost immediately by three gunshots and a scream.
I don’t know what I was thinking, but I stood up, intent on charging to Mavis’s rescue. Just then a man came running around the back of the warehouse, holding a rifle. When he caught sight of me, he lifted the gun to his shoulder. Arabella sprang up out of the shadows and I heard that whip moving through the air. With a loud crack, the tip punched the gunman in the side of the face and sent him sprawling, the gun dropping from his hands.
Arabella approached the prostrate, unconscious man to see if he was still breathing. When she found that he was, she drew a knife from her belt and severed each of his Achilles tendons. Even in the dark, I could make out the unhesitating efficiency with which she completed her task. I suppressed a shudder as I followed her around a corner and toward the warehouse door.
The door was ajar and lamplight shone out. All was silent save for the whistling of the wind and the lapping of the pilings below. We crept along the outer wall and when Arabella kicked the door open and leaped through the entrance, she found three dead bodies and Mavis staring up at the stacks of wooden chests. I gazed up at the ranks of boxes that disappeared into the darkness. A mountain of opium.
Mavis broke the silence, gesturing to the three dead men and saying, “I didn’t see any others, so this must be all who were left on guard.”
“There’s one on deck incapacitated,” said Arabella.
“Well,” said Mavis. “Just in case we missed someone, I’ll keep an eye on the door while you two set the fires. She pointed toward a lantern and bottles of oil. Holding her gun in one hand, she picked up a torch with the other and said, “Got a light, Harrow?” I found a match and set fire to the thing, which she held high above her head as she trained her pistol on the warehouse door. “Get to it,” she said.
Arabella and I worked as a team. I’d spill some oil all over a bunch of cases and then move down the row. She’d follow with her own torch, sending the stacks up in flames. I had to wonder at the stockpiling of the drug—the degree to which the wealthy acquired and stored things put to shame even my most imaginative stories. I thought about the Astor warehouse we’d investigated. So much stuff just sitting there. It was as if he were saving up things to start another world.