The Last Bookaneer

  I was ready to put away the Bible and commit my attention to the rest of my inventory when my eye struck on a verse of Revelation, or rather the footnote by Mr. Randolph Hawkins, the editor of this edition, to a particular verse about the “beast out of the abyss.” Hawkins’s scholarly exegesis suggested the beast due to emerge at the end of the world is Belial, one of the angels who fell with Lucifer and, according to Milton, one who could not be subdued even by Lucifer himself.

  The words with their new significance echoed in my mind and the room seemed to shake with them: Beware the beast, Penrose Davenport, beware the beast. . . .

  The beast.

  The beast was Belial all along.

  XI

  Whiskey Bill had known Belial would be on the island. At first a perverse pleasure dawned on me, because if my conjecture was correct, it meant Davenport had been right about Bill leading him into a trap, though not in the way he had originally expected. Confirming the genius of Davenport’s instinct was something perhaps much more important to me than it ever was to him. It must have amused the old hairless man, a sort of last chuckle of a frustrated life, knowing he was sending two of his brethren into a sort of final, mortal battle. Here was Whiskey Bill’s ultimate role: the Instigator. I remembered what he had muttered to me from his bed. “And he gathered them together into a place called Armageddon.” It was a lesser legacy than he dreamed about, maybe, but it was the best one he could produce given the time he had left.

  Upon first connecting the Bible’s passage and note about Belial as the beast, I got up from the chair and ran outside. I still had the book with me. When I realized this, I tossed it away, as though it could curse me. Instantly I regretted my action—it was a Holy Bible, after all, and it was Stevenson’s. But after a frustrating search I could not find where the woods had swallowed it up, and I fretted to myself that it could only be a bad omen, which I then had to reassure myself I didn’t believe in.

  Davenport listened to my theory but neither his eyes nor his general expression evinced any signs of life.

  “Don’t you hear what I told you, Davenport?” I said with frustration. I was speaking in quiet but urgent tones on one of the verandahs. “I think Whiskey Bill sent Belial—he knew that it would come down to the two of you.”

  “What difference does it really make if so?” he asked after considering my conclusion. Then he added, as though a kindness, “I suppose you are after praise for your clever thinking.”

  Perhaps the truth did not make a difference in what actions we should take at this point, but it certainly seemed as though it should. I stated as much, but could not satisfy him. We retired to our own rooms without speaking more about it.

  In fact, my discovery that Bill had pulled the wool over his eyes shot deeply to Davenport’s core, though in typical fashion he could never say that to me. But he did something more telling. He acted on it, heatedly, even recklessly.

  “You convinced that ginger-hackled rascal to send me here,” were Davenport’s words when he confronted Belial the next morning. He had found the faux missionary, white pith helmet on his head, planting flags in the ground, helping to mark the less sturdy trees that the native servants would cut now that the first storm was finally set to land. A light rainfall, which had begun overnight, pattered against the tops of the leaves and into the grass.

  “Are you talking about Whiskey Bill? Why would I want you—or any bookaneer—slithering your way onto this paradise and bothering me?”

  “Pray spare me the posing, Pope Thomas. If you didn’t convince Bill to send me, then he sent you.”

  “He wrote me a letter, Davenport,” Belial admitted. “With the spelling of a child and the mind of a woman. He did give me information about Samoa and Stevenson, and after I had the chance to examine it, it proved correct. Has his health improved? Whiskey Bill’s, I mean.”

  “He’s deader than George the First.”

  Belial nodded his head somberly.

  “Why would he have wanted us both to come after this book?”

  “Davenport,” he said with sudden and unexpected enthusiasm, “there is something I found over there that I think you ought to see.”

  Knowing he probably should not, Davenport shadowed Belial deep into the woods. When I daydream of the golden age of the bookaneers, I sometimes think of this tableau, of two great enemies pushing through to the edge of the known world. Belial used his long cane to point out a spot in the bush. Davenport moved closer cautiously. Within a tight web of harsh vines and thorns, a nest of human bones on the ground appeared untouched. Crossed over the bones was a long stick, which on closer inspection revealed itself as an elaborately carved spear.

  “What do you see?”

  “A skeleton.”

  “Notice what is strange.” Belial said this as a master would while waiting for his pupil to catch fire.

  Davenport stared until the horror of the oddity presented itself. His face darkened. “There are two skulls—but only one skeleton.”

  “Right you are! Can you tell what happened? Come closer. You see, this skull has a bullet hole in the front.” Belial used his cane again to demonstrate. “This,” he continued, indicating the full skeleton, “was the body of a heroic warrior. He killed his prey, probably a chief or a son of a chief of a rival faction, and then cut off his head, which brings us the second skull. The whole practice is gruesome to our sensibilities, yes, but remember it is their way, just as your American Indians scalp. All races have their eccentricities about killing each other. He was bringing his trophy back to his village but he had been injured, or was injured during his return journey, and fell here, dying quietly and out of sight. Clutching his spear to his chest with one arm and the head of his rival with his other.”

  “How old are these bones?”

  “That is hard to say but I would guess ten or fifteen years, back to the battles between the forces of Laupepa and Talavou, two great chieftains from the time, which would have occurred on what is now Tusitala’s land. I am thinking of making a sketch of it to bring back to Christina. My doubting other half will not believe many of the scenes I have witnessed here. This, well, this is a dilemma. Do you think they should be buried together? Would you bury a skull without its body?” Belial’s big eyes flashed. He straightened his priestly collar and took a few steps until he had a view of the estate below. “I’d see it all burned to the ground before we are done.”

  “What nonsense are you talking about?”

  “Vailima. Reduced to ashes. There is something that suits me about that.”

  “Stevenson’s manuscript. That is the mission. That alone.”

  “You know I have done what I do for the common people who would otherwise be abused and excluded by the publishers. What we do—you and I—provides more access where there would be less. Men such as the two of us do what the ordinary person is not equipped to accomplish. I am the Prometheus, but instead of fire I hold creativity in my hand. If this is to be the last mission of our race of men, I should as soon leave nothing behind—just flames and bones, the past charred and punished. You and I are no different from those two warriors. We have done much, but the world will not let us leave any mark.”

  “You can spout gibberish and high ideals about common people all you want, Belial. Remember, I know you. The only thing that makes your blood flow is power and the only thing that thrills you once you hold that power is destruction. What happened between you and the girl?”

  Belial frowned in his lofty manner, blinking himself out from his vision. “You must know what it is that makes you want to protect the Samoan girl,” he said, with his typical way of presuming more knowledge about another person than that person. “Kitty. You see her in Vao! Not Kitten as you knew her, no, not that woman who enlisted you into this life as the price of winning her approval; but a different Kitty, one from long before, a poor girl from the outskirts of Paris w
ithout wiles, a Philistine at heart, craving a better life, when you could have steered her, possessed her, saved her, or so you imagine, if only time and place were different. Even when I first knew her, she had been an actress, spy, and a budding bookaneer. She was ruined before you met her.”

  “Take care how you speak.”

  Belial ignored his warning and continued to pontificate. “The young women of Samoa are just old women trapped into young bodies, waiting for age. But not Vao. She is different, not simply because of her pure beauty, which is even more irresistible to whites than to her own kind. Vao refuses to marry. She is fierce in determination to be different and better than those around her; she is content to be alone because of it, and aims to change—she is an actress, too, who could betray or love you just as easily. A seductress.”

  “Are you saying Vao tried to seduce you before Mr. Fergins and I found you in that room?” Davenport asked with an angry laugh.

  Belial shook his head slowly. “You see the most superficial part of the picture, and only that. Just as you did when you watched helplessly while indomitable Kitty left behind everything—left you behind—to chase down Mary Shelley’s nightmares.”

  Had he been in possession of his usual steadiness, Davenport would have walked away. Here was the topic that could unmoor him. He knew that better than anyone. He felt his clothes soak through from the rain as his heart was careening to a dangerous tempo. “You know nothing about that.”

  “I know it all,” said Belial, his tone free of any boast.

  Davenport had to raise his usual chalky voice to speak over the pounding rain. “You were after the Shelley papers, too. She beat you to them, didn’t she? That is why you still resent her.”

  “Wrong. True, she got them before I did. But those documents went straight from her hands and into mine.”

  It was as though the earth had opened up below Davenport’s feet. Later, he would say it seemed an eternity passed before his mind would stop spinning long enough for him to speak again. “No. It was an anonymous collector who paid her. . . .” Davenport stopped.

  “Anonymous,” Belial confirmed with a proud grin.

  “You sent her after them. You paid her for them? Why would you do that?”

  “Kitty was my greatest competition, and nothing I tried all those years slowed her down. She would not have stopped until she was considered the best bookaneer.”

  “The more you speak the less I believe you. If your aim was to surpass her, then why let her have the rare glory of one of the great missions in our profession?”

  “Because over time I came to realize there was one way to weaken her, and only one: turn her ambition against her. Let her have the highest achievement imaginable in her career. She was a woman who thrived on improving herself. Did you ever notice what happens to a person like that when they reach the summit of the mountain? When there is nowhere else to go but down the other side? They do not descend—they tumble and fall, or jump. I knew she would become bored, distracted, maybe wander into listlessness.”

  “And opium.”

  A twitch of regret narrowed Belial’s mouth. “No, I could not know that would happen.”

  The question that had been plaguing Davenport for nine years came out. “Why did she go back to Geneva once the mission was already completed?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Belial asked, in his demeaning way of being deeply surprised at another’s lack of knowledge.

  “She was looking for something else, something new. There had been another mission she came upon after the Shelley novelette, wasn’t there?”

  “Don’t I make myself understood to you, Davenport? Nothing new was worthwhile to her anymore. The novelette would have been the ultimate mission for most bookaneers. I not only handed it to her; I made certain the whole thing would be rather easy. Once it was over, she could think of nothing else. Any other mission, any other spot on earth, was just a reminder, a kind of emptiness, because she knew she would never be close to that other feeling again. She wasn’t returning to Cologny looking for something new—quite wrong thinking, Davenport. She was clinging by a fingernail to the last great thing she had accomplished, the greatest thing she ever could reasonably expect to do.”

  “A bookaneer without her trade is a farmer without land. It was Kitten who told me that. You stripped her bare. You left her rudderless.”

  “How did I put it a minute ago? Yes, to quote myself: ‘All races have their eccentricities about killing each other.’ But I shan’t take so much credit, certainly not for her death. Really, Davenport, it was you two who were engaged in a depraved relationship. A woman with a man almost half her age. That damaged her, made her feel as though she had to remain young and noticeable forever. An unnatural state for a woman.”

  “You pushed her into the hole.”

  Belial stuck his powerful chest out. “All I did was clear the field a bit. Made a profit, too.”

  “I want that Shelley novelette back. It cost her life and I won’t permit it to be passed around for money. Tell me where it is.”

  “Certainly. I sold it to a wealthy Russian, a man who liked to dress like a peasant, and apparently took some perverse pleasure in destroying manuscripts.”

  Davenport cringed. His head was spinning madly. “Not long after that, you were also involved in seeing Molasses arrested, spoon-feeding evidence to the police.”

  “Who says that?”

  “Whiskey Bill was a nuisance, never skilled enough to risk your crown, so you left him to destroy himself, and for the most part he complied. Kitten, Molasses, those were your closest competitors for years. And me. But you never tried to push me out.”

  “You wish I had?” A mocking laugh.

  “Why do I deserve the sorry fate of being your last rival? If you were intent on clearing out the competition, why leave me alone?”

  “I didn’t think I had to do more.” He let out a sigh that broke through as unusually sincere. “When I heard what happened to Kitty, I was certain you would fold up, that you would leave our line without any effort on my part. You may think me devious, Davenport, and maybe sometimes I have had to be. But I do try to be efficient. One fell swoop. Still, you proved me wrong. You persisted—your soul cleaved in half, perhaps, but persisted nevertheless.”

  “What you did to Kitten . . . What were you after that was worth that?”

  “The same thing as you, the same as she. The same as anyone who has ever been doubted or told to go away. To prove myself better.”

  Davenport grabbed Belial’s arm and leaned into his face. “I haven’t gone away.”

  “You’re right, Davenport.” He acted as though he did not even feel the other man’s grip. “I thought you would fall to pieces like a poorly bound book. But no. You are more like me than I ever knew.” He slipped his arm out and turned his back, hands in his trouser pockets.

  “You’ve made a mistake this time, Belial. I have you by the throat.” Davenport’s voice lost its usual hush completely, the words roaring out with the rage he could no longer contain on Kitten’s behalf.

  Belial slowed down his pace to listen, but did not turn around.

  “Assaulting Vao. Let us pretend the young girl’s word would not be trusted. There were witnesses. The dwarf, for one, and me, and Mr. Fergins. You’ve no doubt seen Tusitala angry. If the chief of Vailima hears that the trusted missionary was attempting to force his will on one of his beloved servants, you’ll be thrown out of his sight, probably put in jail to rot. Then you can say all you want to Tusitala about me. At that point, nothing you say would be believed and I would be the only one left close enough to him to get the manuscript.”

  “You wouldn’t be trying to break our truce, would you, my friend?” He seemed morally troubled by the idea.

  “I’ll warn you one time. Stay away from Vao.”

  Coconuts torn from trees by the w
ind flew overhead. Both men looked up at the sky. Now it was Davenport who turned and began walking away. The last glimpse he had of Belial showed his features contorted with uncharacteristic ire. I did not hear any of these particulars until late that night, hours after a bloody, soaked Davenport collapsed at the doorstep of Vailima.

  • • •

  “THE SKY WAS FILLED with branches and coconuts used like missiles by the wind in a war of divine forces. We both fled as the downpour started. The water became torrents around us. I’m afraid his foot got caught in a spontaneous mudslide. Poor Mr. Porter—he truly tumbled. Never saw a man fall so hard, so suddenly.” Belial was telling the story to the rapt household after some of the servants helped him carry Davenport inside.

  “Please. I’m well enough,” Davenport said, struggling not to show any discomfort and to shoo away the solicitous natives (and me). There were cuts and abrasions all over his body from his fall, but the pain seemed to me to be concentrated in his right leg.

  “How did you ever get back, you poor idiot?” Belle asked, taking his hand. Her eyes were wide and wet.

  “Father Thomas found me, and helped me, thank heavens,” Davenport said, and I would venture to say never had my companion wanted to chew and swallow his own words so much.

  Belial’s grin, inimitable as always, could not have been contained if his life depended on it.

  After the mud was washed off him, Davenport was carried to his room and tended to by Vao, who cleaned and bandaged his leg, and Belle, who mostly sat and blinked at him. I had followed them in. He screamed in pain when Belle poured what she said was perchloride of iron on the deepest gash.

  “Imagine the luck,” he said to me after we were alone, “that he would be the only man there to rescue me.”

  Davenport refused to follow Stevenson’s recommendation (command, really) to rest and stay in bed, but he grimaced with pain when he tried just to walk around the room. He claimed he was not tired, simply angry, then passed into sleep in an instant.