White Water td-106

by Warren Murphy

  Not any of his hardworking uncles.

  Finally his father's father, Sirio Testaverde, agreed to take possession of the late Tomasso Testaverde. Sirio showed up at the Barnstable County morgue and said simply, "I have come for my grandson, Tomasso."

  "This way," the bored morgue attendant said.

  They walked the antiseptic corridors of death in silence. The still, cool air smelled of pungent chemicals. These things did not bother Sirio, who had skippered Grand Banks schooners in the golden era of the cod schooners. Although he hadn't gone to sea in two decades, there were still fish scales under his fingernails and salt grime caking his hairy nostrils. He was a greaser, as Sicilian-born fishermen were known.

  The body was slid out of the morgue drawer and a sheet thrown back.

  Sirio saw the blue design on the unrecognizable face of the only son of his only son and said, "Minga! This is not Tomasso."

  "Dental records say it is."

  "What is that on his face?"

  "That's how he was found. The funeral home will clean him up for interment."

  "He was found this way?" Sirio muttered, his old eyes squinting.

  "Yes."

  "That means someone did this thing to him," he growled.

  "You'll have to take that up with the Coast Guard. They have the full report on file."

  Sirio Testaverde did. He learned the unpleasant details of his grandson's passing, the fish inserted where fish should not go, the face painting, all of it. And although he had disowned his grandson many years ago for dishonoring the proud Testaverde name, the thin blood in his thready veins leaped hot and fast.

  "I will avenge this outrage," he said, voice low with feeling.

  "We have no suspects at this time," the Coast Guard information officer stiffly informed him. "Anyone could have done this."

  "The sign on his face, it has meaning?" Sirio pressed.

  "He may have painted his face this way."

  "For what reason?"

  "Maybe he was a hockey fan. They like to paint their faces to show support for their favorite team."

  "Hockey! Tomasso is Sicilian. We do not follow hockey. That is for others."

  "I think that blue symbol is a French-Canadian team's emblem or something. I don't follow hockey, either."

  Sirio Testaverde took possession of Tomasso's abused body and, after turning him over to the Kingsport Funeral Home, went to the United Fishermen's Club and began speaking to any who would listen in a low, urgent voice.

  "It is the damn Canadians that did this to my son's only son. The Testaverde name stops in this century because of what these scum have done," raged Sirio Testaverde.

  "Canadians?" someone asked incredulously.

  "Have they not seized our boats?" Sirio countered.

  This was allowed.

  "Do they not compete for the same fish as we?" Sirio added.

  This, too, was admitted.

  "They have come into our waters for as long as I am alive and on the seas, and after they exhaust our waters, they close off their own. We are excluded from the Grand Banks. Did we exclude Canadians from our waters? No. We did not. This is inherently unfair. Something must be done."

  "It is their waters to close," a reasonable voice said.

  "The waters belong to no one but the strong. To those strong enough to take fish from them. We are Sicilians. And Americans. We are strong. Canadians are weak. We will take their fish if we so wish."

  "What if they try to stop us?"

  Sirio Testaverde shook his sun-shiny fist in the smoky club. "Then we will take their boats and their lives."

  On any other night Sirio Testaverde's exhortations would have been dismissed as the bitter grievings of an old man who has come to the end of his bloodline.

  But in one corner of the club, set high on a rude shelf, a television set poured down its flickering kinetic light. The network news was on. No one was paying much attention to it. Neither was it being ignored entirely.

  "We will take what is ours because we are men," Sirio was saying. "For too long we get a poor price for our landings because we compete with Canadian fish that is trucked in to the Boston Fish Pier, already dressed and cooled. First they overfish our waters, then they overfish their own. Now they send their damn fish to our markets. They are swine."

  A fragment of a report caught the attention of a man seated closest to the TV. He turned up the volume.

  "...In New York, UN Secretary-General Anwar Anwar-Sadat has made a claim that is creating quite a stir in diplomatic circles," the mellow-voiced anchor was saying. "It seems, according to the Secretary-General, that a U.S. Coast Guard cutter and a submarine suspected to be of Canadian origin-French-Canadian origin, to be precise-clashed in disputed waters on the Grand Banks with the result that the sub was sunk with all hands aboard. In Ottawa, Canadian officials vigorously deny this story. From Montreal, additional denials. Yet the Secretary-General is insisting the report is true and furthermore that, like the current fishing crisis, it is a sign that individual nations cannot be trusted to oversee their own territorial waters, and that a UN high commission be established to patrol and safeguard the high seas, incidentally protecting the much-overfished stocks that are the cause of so much international friction these days."

  "See!" Sirio said, pointing to footage of the UN Secretary-General addressing a group. "See. The damn wog is correct. No one owns the sea. Let us take what is ours!"

  In other times Sirio Testaverde's demands would have fallen on deaf ears. For these were hardworking men who rose with the sun and, when they at last returned to port, slept for days afterward.

  But times were tough. Massachusetts had surrendered to Maine the distinction of being the most successful fishing state in the nation. These were men who owned their own boats, their own businesses, but had no control over their product. They were farmers of the sea, and their crops were in perpetual failure.

  "We must take!" Sirio ranted.

  Others began to vent their own grievances.

  Soon Sirio's gravelly calls were taken up by younger, more vigorous seamen.

  The hour grew late and the voices grew angry and, as word spread, the smoky hall filled with many out-of-work fishermen.

  "I say," Sirio Testaverde shouted, pounding the table at which he sat, "that we assemble an armada and take what belongs to us by virtue of our superior might."

  The scarred and cigarette-burned table shook with the vehemence of Sirio Testaverde's slamming fist. All around the room, other fists struck old wood, and voices, low and sullen, grew high and agitated.

  That night an armada was assembled. It slipped out of the Kingsport waterfront and made its way north to the richest fishery in the entire world.

  They were sailing into history.

  IN ST. JOHN'S, Newfoundland, Canadian Coast Guard Petty Officer Caden Orlowski received his orders by wireless and asked that they be repeated.

  "You are to arrest and detain any United States vessels operating near our waterways."

  "In our waterways? Or did I hear incorrectly and you said 'near.'"

  "Upon any pretext board and detain any and all U.S. vessels you encounter near our waterways."

  "Fishing vessels, you mean?"

  "Any and all U.S. vessels," his commander repeated somewhat testily.

  "Aye, sir," said Petty Officer Orlowski, who then turned to his helmsman and said, "Steer a straight course south. We are hunting American vessels."

  The helmsman turned from the wheel and made dubious eye contact.

  "You have your orders, as I have mine," Orlowski repeated.

  The helmsman fell to his duties.

  Aboard the Canadian Coast Guard cutter Robert W. Service, the word spread. They were hunting American maritime vessels. No one knew why, for certain. But all understood where the order had come from.

  It could only originate from the office of the minister of fisheries, who had only a year before closed off the Pacific salmon fisheries to Canadian fi
shermen. Obviously that had been only phase one. This, then, was phase two.

  Orlowski had another word for it.

  Damage control.

  He hoped that no U.S. commercial-fishing vessels were operating over the line. Otherwise he was about to become the pointman in an international incident.

  As he saw it, it wasn't a likely prospect for career advancement.

  For politicians did what politicians did. Often without weighing the consequences.

  Men like Orlowski were convenient scapegoats for such men as Gilbert Houghton.

  "Damn bluenose," he muttered. "Damn him and his Ottawa thinking."

  Chapter 23

  The Master of Sinanju was adamant. He presented his silken back to his pupil in his spacious kitchen where a wall clock in the shape of a black cat switched its eyes and tail like a lazy metronome.

  "No."

  "Aw, c'mon, Chiun. One night," pleaded Remo.

  "I have hired at great expense a woman who cooks passably. I will not eat in a restaurant just because you crave fish. You will eat duck."

  "What are you having?"

  "I do not yet know. The fish cellar is bare. I must hie to the fishmonger's and discover what is fresh today."

  "You can order anything you want at a restaurant," Remo suggested.

  "I do not trust restaurant fare. They serve fish whose names cannot be found in cookbooks on fish."

  "Name one."

  "Scrod. I have never heard of scrod before I came to this cold province."

  Remo frowned. "I think scrod is some kind of little cod."

  "Others have claimed it is something else entirely."

  "Well, you can order anything you want besides scrod. And it'll be on me."

  "You will remain home and eat duck," Chiun insisted.

  "Not if I go to the fishmonger's and buy my own food."

  "You will have to cook it. I will forbid my personal cook to prepare it for you."

  "I can cook."

  "And you will cook. Now I must be off."

  "I'm coming with you. No way I'm hanging around here with that old battle-ax you call a housekeeper. She won't even tell me her name."

  "I cannot stop you," said the Master of Sinanju, who floated out the door and began walking at such a fast clip that his kimono skirts shook and swayed with every step of his churning pipe-stem legs.

  Remo followed along with brisk but casual steps. He wore his habitual T-shirt and chinos because it saved making decisions in the morning and, when they got dirty, he just threw them away and donned new ones. The cold air caught the warm carbon dioxide escaping from between his thin lips and made white plumes with it.

  As they walked, Remo tried to strike up a conversation. "I wonder where Freya is?"

  "I wonder where my fish are. I was promised veritable riches in fishes."

  "There's plenty of fish in the seas. To coin a phrase."

  "That is exactly what Bamboo-hatted Kim said," spit Chiun.

  "Who's Bamboo-hatted Kim?"

  "The seventh Master of Sinanju."

  "The bigamist?"

  "No, that was the eighth."

  Remo looked thoughtful. "Was Kim the one with the bamboo leg?"

  "There were no wooden-legged Masters of Sinanju, although Gi limped during his end days."

  "Keeping track of past Masters is as tough as counting phantoms," Remo muttered.

  Chiun looked up. "Phantoms?"

  "You know, the Ghost Who Walks Phantom. The comic-strip character who passes his name and costume down from father to son, just like we pass our skills down. They made a movie about him a year or so back."

  Chiun made a distasteful face. "I am considering suing those people for theft of intellectual property."

  "So tell me about Bamboo-hatted Kim. I take it his name comes from the kind of hat he wore."

  Chiun shook his head. "No, from what he did with it. For many Masters wore hats of bamboo."

  "Okay..."

  "I have told you that the first Masters took to plying the assassin's trade because the land was rocky and the seas too cold for fishing."

  "Seventy billion times," Remo said wearily.

  "You were but a child in Sinanju when I first told you this. The truth is more complicated."

  "Truth usually is," Remo said ruefully.

  "You have swam in the waters of the West Korea Bay many times."

  "Yeah," said Remo, in whose mind's eye flashed a chilling image. It was one of the last times Remo had seen his daughter. Remo still remembered running across the bay chasing a flying purple pterodactyl that was carrying off little Freya in its talons. It was an illusion created by an old enemy. Freya had been in no danger. Now it was a different story.

  "The waters are very shallow," Chiun noted.

  "Yeah."

  "Very shallow for many ri out."

  "If you say so."

  "In such waters it is possible to walk for several ri without one's head being submerged in water."

  "That's why the sub has to wait pretty far out while rafts bring in the gold."

  "Do not speak to me of gold when a more precious commodity is under discussion," Chiun said, his voice tinged with bitterness.

  "What's more precious than gold?"

  "Fish. For without fish we cannot live."

  "With gold you can buy all the fish you want," Remo countered.

  "Not from a hungry man. A hungry man will spurn gold if he possesses but one fish. For one cannot eat gold, only hoard it. Or if necessary, spend it."

  "Man cannot live by rice and duck alone," Remo said.

  "In the beginning, Masters subsisted on rice and fish exclusively," Chiun went on.

  "No duck?"

  "Duck was unknown in those early days. Common Koreans do not eat duck."

  Remo raised an astonished eyebrow. "I didn't know that."

  "You know this now." Chiun walked on in a tight silence.

  Up ahead a stooped Vietnamese man came hobbling along. Spotting Chiun, he hastily crossed the street. By that, Remo assumed the Master of Sinanju had been out terrorizing the city's Asian population again.

  "In those days the soil had not been exhausted. Certain foods could be grown. And fish were plentiful in the shallow waters by the village. In the winter not as much fish as during the warm season, but for our tiny village there was a sufficiency of fish."

  A cold wind brought to Remo's nostrils the heavy smell of nearby Wollaston Beach at low tide in winter. It smelled of dead clams and beached seaweed. The beach at Sinanju smelled like that on good days.

  Chiun went on. "Now in those days, as now, the villagers were afflicted with the lassitude of indolence. They fished when their stomachs required them to fish. In the winter they did not fish at all because the waters were inhospitable and the fish, being intelligent, seldom ventured close to the rocks from which my ancestors threw their nets and hooked lines."

  "Smart fish," grunted Remo, noticing a Chinese woman duck back into her house at their approach.

  "All fish are smart."

  "That's why they call it brain food," said Remo.

  "That was what Wang the Greater said. Eating fish improves the brain. It is one reason why Masters of Sinanju use their brains fully."

  "It's rich in omega-3 fatty acids, too."

  "I do not know what white voodoo it is you speak," Chiun said darkly.

  "That means it's lower in cholesterol."

  "Cholesterol is good for some people."

  "Not for us."

  Chiun lifted a finger skyward. The light caught his nail protector of imperial jade. "It is good for us if our opponents wallow in it. For then the advantage is ours."

  "Good point," said Remo, who was starting to relax.

  They passed an apartment building where the words Go Home Gook were scrawled on the asphalt driveway. Remo recognized Chiun's slashing strokes-not that there was any doubt. The words were gouged in the asphalt as if by a very sharp knife.

  "You been trying
to stampede the local Asians?" Remo asked.

  "If they are easily frightened, they should not try to dwell among their betters."

  "Tell that to the mayor's Task Force on Racial Harmony."

  "As I was saying," Chiun continued, "the fish who dwelled off Sinanju, the carp and the tuna and the corbina, understood that they were food. So they avoided the shore waters, forcing the fishermen to go into the far waters to seek them. In the warm months this was only a bother. But in the winter months it could kill. For it was not possible to stand in bitter ice water waiting for a cunning fish to succumb to a lapse in judgment."

  "Fish are smart because they eat other fish, right?"

  "Correct. Now Bamboo-hatted Kim was in his dotage when the hunger of the villagers began to vex him. For he had ventured out many times to Japan and Cathay to serve the emperors who held sway over those realms. Kim grew weary of the long journeys that brought the gold that paid for the rice the villages could not grow and the fish they could not catch.

  "It occurred to Kim, not yet known as Bamboo-hatted Kim, that there might be a better way. In those days he wore a hat like a great rice bowl of bamboo that was tied to his head by a catgut string so it would not fall off. One day, seeking his own supper, he waded out into the frigid waters of the bay with his line and hook of fish bone-for the best way to catch a fish is with one of its own sharp bones, Remo."

  "I'll try to remember that."

  Chiun resumed. "Kim was forced to wade out three entire ri because many fish had sought warmer waters. But at last he came to a place where the carp and the corbina swam in promising numbers. There he dropped his hook and waited.

  "When a fish larger than the usual snapped at his hook, Kim thought the Dragon King had smiled on him. You know of the Dragon King, who lives under the waters, Remo?"

  "Yeah. He was the Korean Neptune."

  "The Romans mangled the truth as usual," Chiun sniffed. "No sooner had the carp taken Kim's line than Kim jerked his wrists to snap the fish living out of the water, where he would break its spine and claim it for his dinner."

  "But the line snapped, right?"

  "How did you know this, Remo?"

  "Wild guess."

  Chiun touched his tendril of a beard. "The line snapped. And the carp splashed back into the water to escape, leaving Kim with a three-ri walk back to his home and another three-ri wade back to his favorite fishing spot with a new line and still another three-ri trudge back to cook his dinner."