The Last Bookaneer

  “Well, you might be surprised that I should not be inclined to thank you for protecting my ‘slim book,’ as you call Jekyll and Hyde, from destruction by the amateur society of censors. In fact, I would have been happy to see the copies destroyed, not only because the piratical publishers selling them were stealing from me. It is a thing I have often thought over—the problem of what to do with one’s talents. Some writers touch the heart; I suppose I tend to clutch at the throat. Jekyll and Hyde was the worst thing I ever wrote. My brightest failure.”

  I tried to assess if this was one of his momentary fancies. “That book made you rich,” I blurted out.

  “And was that one of your responsibilities, Mr. Fergins? To know how much money every book made every author?”

  “To the penny,” I admitted.

  “You are wrong, Mr. Fergins. It did not make me rich. It made me richer. Financed our voyage here and, indeed, some of the construction of this house. Wealth beyond a certain point is only useful for two things, if you ask me: a yacht and a string quartet. The fact remains, and I repeat, Jekyll and Hyde is the worst thing I ever wrote. But you and Mr. Davenport would not understand. For you gentlemen, it’s only about money.”

  I felt myself blush and would have tried to defend against the accusation, but my companion reacted as you might expect, by fighting back.

  “As it has been for you authors from the moment when man stopped telling their stories for pleasure and honor, and began to forget it was the readers who made them what they were.” After a moment, he added, “You were able to intercept Belial. Please. Tell me that at least that one consolation remains for me.”

  “Thomas—the man you gentlemen and Whiskey Bill call Belial—is gone, my manuscript spirited away with him. It seems he entered the house and disappeared shortly before I read the letter I shared with Mr. Fergins. I had just collected the pages all together. I suppose we will never see him again. He is a man with luck on his side.”

  “Damn his luck. Send some of the natives to track him down before he leaves the island. I will pay the expenses and more. Do what you want with me, but do not let that man get off this island!” Davenport’s throat sounded hoarse and tight, his words unspooling wildly. Pleading was not part of his nature. It was heartbreaking. “Please, Tusitala—”

  “I am one of the foremost men of letters of the day, and you and that false missionary come here to steal the labors of my brain?” Stevenson interrupted, then swallowed down his fury. “You know, I liked you down to the soles of your boots. I did.” His eyes darkened and he could not stand still—shifting from the bed to the table to the door and all along the perimeter like an animal circling his prey. “In the future I would recommend you employing a different false identity.”

  “Tusitala?”

  “A real author would never introduce himself as an ‘author,’ Mr. Davenport. Why, if we had to walk around calling ourselves authors, remarking upon meeting a new acquaintance—‘Greetings, I’m an author. And you?’—we’d never consent to write in the first place. When I used to be asked my business, I would answer only: ‘I sling ink.’ Lord, I should have known from that very first meeting . . .” The novelist finished by murmuring under his breath, “Bookaneers!” Then, with a dark laugh to himself, he shouted an order in Samoan to someone unseen and stalked out through the door.

  “Tusitala! Please! Stevenson!” begged Davenport. I held him back from trying to follow, seeing at once it was fruitless.

  Stevenson only glanced back with a glare at the sound of his name, then continued on.

  Stationed in a chair in the hall was one of Stevenson’s larger Samoan men, a rifle slung over his shoulder with a strap.

  There was a thump from inside the room. I turned back to find my companion had fallen to the floor against the wall. He did not move from that spot for the next three or four hours. During the night, our guard was relieved by a tall, strapping Samoan named Sao, who looked in on us. Davenport seemed to take a little interest in this new arrival. Neither of us knew Sao, but had seen him doing his grueling work on the grounds chopping through encroaching liana with a bush knife in the impossible task of trying to keep paths clear of the ever-growing forest. He wielded an ax with grace. His legs were covered in tattoos that represented battles fought. Davenport called for assistance from Sao several times toward the end of the night shift, and Sao came in a state of utter exhaustion. Later, I could hear the Samoan curse his relief guard, the carefree and handsome Laefoele, for arriving fifteen minutes late, at least that was what I surmised from the part of the conversation I could translate. Davenport, I would discover, understood it all very well.

  • • •

  I FELT A TUG on my shoulder the next night. Raising my head, the reality of our situation pushed out the sweet oblivion of sleep. I had been sleeping on the floor, without even a mat beneath me. Davenport gestured for me to come with him. To my surprise, I saw he had opened the door very slightly. Now he pushed it farther open. An even greater surprise, there was no apparent reaction to this, so he peered around the edge of the door, holding his breath as he did. Sao, who once again was our night guard, was slouched in his chair asleep and nobody else was in sight. Davenport gestured that I hurry; I shook my head and mouthed a protest. But he already had started his dangerous path, leaving me to either obey or be left alone.

  Davenport dragged his uncooperative leg as quietly as he could and I remained so close behind I was almost touching him. We passed the guard’s chair without a stir from the dog-tired Samoan. Davenport later told me he had been tempted to grab Sao’s rifle, which rested loosely on the man’s lap, but judged it too risky. We did not know the exact time of night, but it was late enough that the rest of the house would be asleep—except perhaps for Laefoele, the relief guard, wherever he was. Possibly on his way.

  A loose floorboard emitted a sound under our feet. A soft creak, no louder than a sigh. I willed myself not to look back, as though the glance itself would alert Sao. But I could not help it, and as I turned my head, I knew what was about to happen. Sao looked first at the open door and then at us.

  Forgetting, it seemed, that he had a lethal weapon at his fingertips with which to shoot us down, Sao lowered his head and charged Davenport. The bookaneer watched this unfold with his usual composure, and easily dodged the runner. Sao smashed right through the stair railing. He toppled over the side and held one of the broken posts, dangling from the edge of the top floor, below him a long drop to the lower level.

  Davenport grabbed one of his hands and I clasped the other. We heaved.

  “Hold on to us,” Davenport said, struggling with his weight. I lost my grip on the other hand, which was slick with sweat, then the hand Davenport gripped began to slip, but Davenport was able to grab on to Sao’s long, thick hair and pull with better leverage. When Sao was safely back at the top, he remained on the floor, catching his breath and shaking off the scare.

  “Thank to you, White Chiefs,” he said in English. “Thank to you, you save Sao—”

  Davenport interrupted the speech by pummeling the back of Sao’s head with the butt of the rifle, which the man had dropped. “Apologies,” Davenport muttered as he stepped around the unconscious lump on the floor to close the door to our former prison. He gestured again for me, but my jaw and mind were slack, frozen by the scene as my companion strained to pull Sao into the chair. Though I was urging him to hurry, I had an idea why he would slow our progress to get Sao into position. If the relief guard thought Sao was asleep, we could win a few extra minutes for our escape before the room was entered.

  I helped Davenport down the back stairs of the house. He was extremely winded from the confrontation with Sao. It struck me with a fresh jolt of fear just how weak his injuries had left him, worsened by these last sedentary days at Vailima. We found a lit torch outside the ground floor and Davenport swept it up, staggering and groaning into the night.

>   It was steamy and windless, but the air on my face and mouth refreshed me. Davenport was visibly relieved to find no signs of pursuers from the house. He was emboldened. But as he took a few more steps onto the grounds, his head swiveled upward. I followed the line of his gaze.

  There, on the second-story verandah, the long figure of a man was wrapped into the hammock. I knew that some nights the novelist found relief from his physical ailments by sleeping in the hammock. I could see in the dim blue mushroom-shaped lamps of the verandah that there was a conch shell beside the hammock, alongside the ever-present supply of extra tobacco. A cat was curled up by his feet.

  The netted cradle rocked Stevenson and the cat back and forth. After trading whispers, neither Davenport nor I could say whether the man above us was asleep or awake. The long face was covered in shadows. Thunder from the retreating storms rolled through the mountain. Davenport started scrambling across the grounds toward the paddock and I did the same. Sao, Laefoele, Stevenson: the ways to be caught were multiplying at a rapid rate. When we were close enough to the paddock for our eyes to memorize the path beyond, Davenport extinguished our torch under his boot. The blinding darkness that swept around us immediately made the decision seem like a bad one. The hammock still rocked back and forth in a blue glow, now the only light we could see. Stevenson’s head had turned slightly, facing us. For all the gold in the world I still could not say whether the novelist was awake, though the fact that he was not moving from his hammock in spite of our flight suggested he slept soundly. Then I noticed that Stevenson’s long toes curled and then stretched, curled and stretched again, scratching the cat’s back. Davenport perceived this at the same time I did, and launched into the best run he could manage. Stevenson had been watching us all along, toying with us.

  When Davenport emerged from the paddock climbing on a horse, his aches seemed to recede; the creature’s strength became his own. He reached down to me.

  “What are you waiting for, Fergins?”

  “Not Jack.”

  “What?”

  “We can’t take Jack! He’s Tusitala’s favorite! It will kill him.”

  “It is the best animal on this rotting terrain, and our best chance; now take my hand!”

  The hammock was empty and the next noise was the sound of a conch being blown. The slightest differences in the shell’s notes could call the family to dinner or announce that the island was at war, but neither of us had mastered the sounds enough to guess their meanings. Then we heard shouts in Samoan, including one deep, angry voice I recognized as Sao’s, amid the din of general chaos we had just unleashed.

  I never before noticed how tall Jack was. I was struggling to climb up behind Davenport, and slipped down into a cloud of dust.

  “Go without me,” I urged.

  He was determined to wait, but I had hit the ground hard. When we heard hoof-falls I yelled again for him to go, and Davenport finally set himself on the animal and galloped away. A few moments later, I heard Jack snorting and whinnying, the sounds moving back toward me. The clouds covering the moon had begun to fall away. There were silhouettes of Samoans everywhere I looked. Axes, rifles, and knives were at the ready.

  • • •

  WE SPENT THE REST of the night in the same room from which we had originally escaped, this time with two guards at all times who were, I assume, exhorted by Stevenson to stay more vigilant, or at least awake. We made no further attempts to flee. The next morning we were escorted by John Chinaman and two young Samoans into Stevenson’s sanctum, where the master of the house was sitting up in the bed, not so different from the position I now take telling you the story. The bed was covered in mosquito netting. His flageolet was disassembled into many pieces, spread out on the quilt in front of him.

  “I have just discovered what is wrong with me, my white gentlemen,” Stevenson said, looking at his reflection in a small mirror. He contorted his face a couple of times, then turned to the profile. “I look like a Pole.”

  Davenport and I glanced at each other, unsure if the novelist waited for a response.

  Stevenson put down the mirror and waved his hand over the segments of his musical instrument. “Seventeen separate members, you see, my white gentlemen, and most of these have to be fitted on their individual springs as fine as needles. Sometimes two at once, with the springs showing different ways.” His rage seemed to have dissipated, at least outwardly.

  I looked again at Davenport, whose eyebrow was now raised and taut as he was nodding in agreement.

  “Tell us just one thing, if you would,” the bookaneer said. “About the other stream.”

  Stevenson squinted.

  “We only found four,” Davenport explained. “Vai means water and lima means five. We looked everywhere we could. Where is the fifth stream and where does it lead?”

  The novelist shrugged. “There are only four. ‘Vailima’ sounded better than the Samoan word for ‘four streams.’”

  Davenport smiled his gratitude for the explanation, then tried to build on the exchange with a confidential tone. “Perhaps we can still work out an arrangement, Tusitala.”

  “Do you know what the traditional punishment for deception in Samoa is, Mr. Porter?” Stevenson said, now looking right at him. “Apologies, I mean Davenport. It is this: You are cast off alone in a canoe in the middle of the ocean. If you are lucky, you die at sea rather than make land on one of the cannibal islands.”

  “Is that your intention for us?” I asked, swallowing hard.

  “I forced Mr. Fergins to accompany me,” Davenport said. “He deserves no punishment.”

  Stevenson opened his mouth, then closed it before he started again. “Do you know what angers me most? The truth should have occurred to me. After all, where would one meet a man as agreeable as you, but in fiction? A man who would volunteer to hold my cigarette after only knowing me a few weeks.” He twisted two pieces of the flageolet together. “I have been disappointed in so many friendships I supposed I tricked myself into having high hopes. Has any author ever fought back against you bookaneers?”

  “Some.”

  “Have any succeeded? Have you literary Robin Hoods and Rob Roys ever been vanquished by a mere scribbler?”

  “That remains to be seen,” answered Davenport.

  “You made a grave mistake this time, taking on one of your ‘missions’ of greed against what may be the only author on earth who has his own little militia”—another piece of the musical instrument was fitted and twisted in—“armed up to my teeth. When I deal with literary pirates, I do it with gloves off. You know, I suspect there is more that drives your conquests, Mr. Davenport. Love for a woman, perhaps, hindered or lost long ago. Is that so?”

  Davenport’s eyes popped.

  “What are they still doing here?” It was Fanny, who had just walked in. Her lips trembled after she spoke.

  “Never mind, Barkis, I am taking care of it.”

  “Taking care! You told me these men came to steal from you. This is no house; it’s an asylum, where our family has come, one by one, to lose their minds, and everyone else looks in on us to make certain it happens!” She was in tears. Lloyd trailed a few steps behind her. “No, don’t take me away! These men must be judged! You”—she pointed right at me—“you were supposed to help convince Louis to take us all back home! Now we are all doomed!”

  Lloyd could not manage to pacify his mother at all. But Stevenson extended his hand through the netting and reached hers.

  “Teacher, tender comrade, wife,

  A fellow farer true through life,

  Heart whole and soul free,

  The August father gave to me.”

  Her hysteria settled down to a low sob as he recited and she squeezed his hand. Lloyd managed to lead her away into another room, leaving us to resume our quiet confrontation.

  Davenport, as though he were in the
position to make demands, said, “Let us be done with the games. What will you do? What will happen now?”

  Stevenson turned his head away without answering. Then he said, almost reassuringly, “Whenever I think of you, I will damn you until the air is blue, and when you think of me, you will damn me until the air is blue, and everything will be all right in the world. Tell me, what happens to ‘bookaneers’ when they must finally leave the little bubble of literary life?”

  “I suppose they usually disappear from sight.”

  “Then you shall be no different. Men, you are now retired from your business. I suppose I know nothing, except that men are fools and hypocrites, and I know less of them than I was fond enough to fancy.” At a signal from Stevenson, John led us out of the room and through the house as Stevenson began to play a slow, tortured tune in a minor key.

  Davenport spoke in Chinese (he later translated the conversation for me). “I will pay you generously to help us.”

  “You can speak my tongue,” John answered back in Chinese in utter surprise.

  “My profession has brought me many places,” Davenport continued smoothly in the other man’s tongue. “I know you wish to go away from here, to go home. Back to your own people. Where you will not be demeaned any longer as ‘John Chinaman.’ Help us to find Father Thomas and get off the island safely, and I could help you. I will send you money and find your passage.”

  John grabbed Davenport by the throat. They had to be separated by native servants. We were then pulled and pushed until we were outside, where we were both thrust into the same empty stall of the paddock inside which Charlie had died in the midst of hallucination and mental anguish. Davenport looked as though he had been dropped into hell, kneeling to examine the ropes and leather straps that had held Charlie down. After a few hours, we heard a commotion outside, and I pressed my face against a slot between two boards.