The Last Bookaneer

  Each lurch and pull of the ship sent my stomach reeling and my heart with it. I had used every last cent of the funds that had been restored to me in my belongings returned by the prison officials to arrange my passage inside the depths of the vessel. I was lucky to be able to afford even steerage. If my berth was the cloud, I reminded myself that the silver lining would be that the more time I spent down below, the better hidden I was from the sight of Belial, if he really was onboard at all. By the time I had reached the ship in Apia’s port, there had been no time to confirm his presence—I had to trust instinct alone, in the incorrigible style of Davenport, and arrange my passage or remain behind on the island.

  I carved a little calendar from a loose square of wood and crossed off each passing day of this horrid journey with an X.

  After the first few nights the sea and my stomach grew calmer and I wandered with caution. I came across a big brown trunk in stowage that could have been the one I saw in Belial’s wagon during our first encounter with him. It was unlocked and filled with some out-of-season clothes and nothing more. No hidden compartments. Little to go on. Still, it was just enough for me to keep faith he really might be on the ship.

  Had Davenport been there and demanded to know my plan, I would have been able to lay it out in a very logical fashion. First step, I would have said, was to confirm the Subject’s presence; then locate his stateroom; then identify to a reliable degree what times he was dining with the officers (where else would Belial dine?), before infiltrating and searching his chambers. Not as laden with natural impulse as Davenport might have orchestrated, but it was efficient and sensible, which was my life in a nutshell. But none of it mattered.

  As my cot rocked me through the fourth night of fitful sleep and terrifying movements, I was jolted awake by the sound of music. It was beautiful humming—an aria from an opera that had been staged in London a few months before our departure. I had attended one of the first performances. I could not begin to imagine how one of my poor Chinese steerage mates had learned this tune, or why he would be rehearsing it in this floating dungeon. Thoughts and memories crashed together in the manner of a confused dream. I felt around for my spectacles, hanging on a nail protruding from the boards on the wall. Then I groped in the dark for a lantern and turned the gas up. It gradually illuminated the craggy, remarkable face of Belial, grinning expressively. He was sitting at the edge of one of the other passengers’ cots, with the prone man pinned underneath peering up at the formidable stranger. From one of the other hammocks emerged a string of curses in Chinese.

  “How did you know that I was here?” I asked, a question I had been imagining I would hear from Belial’s lips before the voyage was finished.

  His humming stopped and he bestowed upon me a munificent nod. “With our dear friend Davenport so unjustly detained, I supposed the only move he had left would be to charge the king with his pawn.”

  “I am a pawn, you mean. And you are the king.”

  “You understand me. I supposed you sufficiently intelligent to find the first large ship to sail after the storms fully cleared, and correctly presume I would be sailing on it, and if so that you would attempt to conceal yourself from me, and of course to sail in steerage would be the best way to do so, if an affront to your good English sensibilities. I might have waited for you to show yourself. But to be honest, I tire of all the games just as Davenport did. Tell me, bookseller, how do you sleep in here, swinging like a man hanged?” He passed a sad glance around the crowded berth, and a disgusted look at the confused man on whose arm he was still sitting. “Look what Davenport has done to you.”

  “What do you mean, what he has done to me?”

  “Surely you are sufficiently intelligent to see . . . Well, no matter. He has lost his final gambit. It must be a sweet relief for you, in a way.”

  “Relief?”

  “You do not have to struggle to help fulfill his potential for him any longer. That is too much a burden for any man, even—no, especially—Pen Davenport himself.” Then, with increasing pity and a strangely uncaring solicitude, he whispered, “Look at yourself.”

  I needed no mirror to know what he beheld. I was unshaven, my hair unwashed and greasy, my once-pristine and polished spectacles stretched, blackened, and scratched. I was almost touched by the note of sympathy in his words. I welled with emotion and could not convince my tongue to work.

  “You are lost, dear man,” he concluded, in his Pope Thomas voice, which, after all, was just a natural part of him. I had known him only in his missionary role, but it now occurred to me it had reflected the bookaneer’s natural disposition.

  Belial invited me to take breakfast with him on the upper deck. Liberated from the tough salt pork and vinegary bread of the lower mess chest, I gratefully ate the finer servings of fruit and meat, and it seemed to give Belial pleasure to watch, chin at rest on his knuckles. After the meal, we walked the length of the ship. I took in the raw, fresh air with the eagerness of a starved man.

  “Did you really believe in your heart you would come here and filch Stevenson’s manuscript from me?” he asked. He seemed genuinely curious but also completely unthreatened.

  “I suppose.”

  He gave a heavy, rolling laugh while he patted my arm with the affection a victorious politician might grant his opponent. “Is there anything less natural than taking a stroll on a ship? It is as if the earth were flat, and in every direction you will eventually drop into nowhere. I despise it. We never should have been at each other’s throats, Mr. Fergins. Davenport got in the way of what could have been a friendship between us. You have been one of the greatest appreciators of our profession. Where did you rate me as a bookaneer?”

  It was the second time in my life I had heard a variation of that question. “Quite at the top. Indeed, with Davenport’s failure in Samoa, I suppose you will be seen as rather untouched in your position.”

  “Thank you! It is an honor to hear so from your lips, and Christina will be tickled pink to hear of your praise. Think of this, you have been witness to the last and greatest of the bookaneers. You will have that story to tell in the future to those with brains enough to listen. What will you do when you go home?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “My informants wrote me that your bookstall in London is shuttered.”

  “Perhaps I will not go home,” I said with a windy sigh, acknowledging the fate of my life’s work. “Not yet, anyway. I cannot bear to go back to Hoxton Square—well, I can stay with my brother and his wife in Slough, where we were raised; there is plenty of space and my nieces humor my reading habits. Or I can do something temporary when we make port in New York, perhaps, until I feel ready to go back. Perhaps a traveling book cart.”

  “A fine idea. Gothamites are as aggressive about reading as about all their sport. Or, as my Christina says, the people of New York are as fine as they are rich.”

  Most of my waking time on the ship was spent with Belial. The Chinese men were passed along to their buyers at a small port island where we made a brief stop for the purpose. Belial convinced the officers to move me into a comfortable berth on an upper deck. Though he did not say as much, I knew Belial would not want to make himself too conspicuous to the captain or the officers during a mission, and so he limited his society with them; his intrinsic need for adulation and interest kept bringing him back to me, and the fact that I knew who he was and what he was doing allowed him to talk freely. And talk and talk and talk. He spoke frequently about his wife, which in his mouth really somehow seemed fantastical, just as Davenport had warned me. I asked him if they had children and he said four daughters. “Alas, no sons to carry on my work, but, then again, there is nothing left to carry.” There were not many opportunities to interject my questions and thoughts because of his fluid and winding elocution, but at least, unlike with Davenport, I never felt obligated to keep up both sides of a conversation. Belial lect
ured, pontificated, boasted, and brayed. He would ask, “Do you know what I’m thinking?” and, after having to reluctantly admit I did not, he would not tell me the thought until a half hour later. From afar, this tendency in him seemed utterly obnoxious, but after being taken into his confidence I noticed that something changed. I could not help but feel enthusiastic to be the object of his general attention, even when he was especially self-important and obnoxious. The secret of despots and tyrants is that people enjoy dining with them.

  We took our meals together; lounged and played cards in the common rooms together; sat on deck chairs on sunny days. He even told me his given name: Benjamin Lott. I only called him that once because in a feral voice he said, “Belial.” The weather, which had been mild, turned harsh and Belial began to appear less often. Strangely, I was not seasick even as we dipped and sloped. A new feeling settled over me. Now that I was suddenly without Belial’s frequent company, I was eager to talk to someone, anyone; the first mate had grown comfortable with me, a sailor thirty or thirty-one years old with a square jawline and half-moon eyes. I began to tell him stories from my stay in Samoa—without names, of course—stories about a white genius making his life among island natives as a sort of king or chief. He urged me to go on, and though I felt an indescribable and unexpected itch to tell every detail, even to confess why I had gone there in the first place, I knew I should not, and made an excuse to return to my berth. That was how close I came to throwing away discretion for the temporary glow of friendship.

  When the sky grew wild, the ship had to tack and change course, and Belial appeared at my door with a tired, twitchy air. His head was covered with an oilskin hood used to keep dry above deck. I had not yet seen him look so distracted.

  “The calendar,” he demanded.

  “What?”

  “I saw you scraping one out. The damned calendar you were carving from wood!” He stomped his boot against the floorboards as he spoke. His eyes bulged and his substantial lips and chin quivered.

  “Oh. There.” My voice sounded meek and defeated in my own ears.

  “Thank you,” he said with relief. I watched him carefully as he rummaged where I’d pointed, under my mattress, until he found it. “Have you been checking off the days?”

  “Yes, since the very beginning of the voyage. There is little else to do at night.” Indeed, by this point I had read each of the few books in the ship’s library twice through, all but one of which I had read in the past (the downside of being a bookseller, at least the kind who reads).

  We conferred about how long the vessel would be delayed, according to the members of the crew we had each consulted. “Let us put the worst case forward,” he said, studying my calendar, “and add four full days to our journey—why, that would return us to New York City on the twenty-seventh of June.”

  “I believe that’s correct.”

  “Splendid!” He checked the calendar again and found the same result, which expelled the tension from his face and voice. “Time to spare. Splendid indeed. You know, Fergins, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Would you like to read it?” He leaned forward with a smile that showed all his teeth. “Stevenson’s novel.”

  “Truly?”

  “This will be an historic moment for me as a bookaneer. The last book I can bring to the public before the wrongheaded changes in law set in. There is one thing more I’d like to do, something I’ve never done. I’d like to watch the pleasure I bring to a reader, the very first reader of the thing. I want it to be you.”

  “You mean you’d want to watch me while I read the book?”

  “Exactly,” he replied with haughty triumph. “Who else will read it on a ship like this? A sailor? I want to read the surprise and gratitude in your face as you become the first man on earth to bear witness to Stevenson’s final masterpiece. You saw that the poor exile does not have long in this world. I know you cannot resist such an offer. Not you, of all people. You cannot turn down serving an immortal part in the history of literature.”

  After the initial dramatic surprise of his offer waned, I turned the idea over in my head. Then, you may not believe it, you may believe I am reporting someone else’s words, but I flattened my hands together and said: “I will decline, but thank you.”

  It was as though I had struck the man. “Did you understand what I said to you?”

  I explained myself the best I could at the time, knowing how quickly the bookaneer could be enraged. “I came to Samoa with Pen Davenport to help him with his mission and to chronicle his final success. He failed, of course, and in his failure, I also failed. If I read the novel before the rest of the world, I would do so with the sneaking knowledge that I did not earn it—in fact, that I earned no privilege like it.”

  He held his gaze on me for another moment before dropping his chin in thought, then giving a heavy nod, as though in mourning for me. “You are an honorable man, Mr. Fergins. I am thankful that we have become such fast friends, and I know Christina would adore making a big feast for you. Do you like a brace of grouse, fried with truffles and butter? Of course you do. That is what it shall be.”

  My racing heart slowed. I knew I was never going to meet his wife and eat grouse alongside his four daughters, yet the offer to do so felt generous beyond description. I had a sudden feeling as though I had betrayed Davenport, my lost master, by engendering such feelings of friendship from his rival. I thought back to what Davenport had once asked me in the smoking room of the Garrick Club, so many worlds removed from the strangling jungle and the swamp-bound prison of Upolu, through the more civilized suffocating air of his cigars. If he and Belial had both offered me a place beside them, what would I do?

  Belial popped his lips, as he did when he seemed to have a thought that impressed him. “You said you came to chronicle Davenport’s mission to Samoa.”

  “Yes,” I answered, “though that plan became waylaid by, well, all the complications, in many cases because of you.”

  “You must have come to finally realize what poor Davenport’s biggest flaw was.”

  “I have not stopped to think about it.”

  “He was a professed misanthrope, yet he had this need to know that people recognized him and knew him as a great bookaneer.”

  “You speak as if he were not still alive.”

  “Take his missions, for instance. When he was not on a mission, he was rather lethargic and sluggish, lying around in hotels and brothels and concert halls for weeks at a time. But when he was on a mission, he was bigger than life. When he secured a prize, for instance, a manuscript or proofs to sell, he marched in plain view to the publisher to sell it.”

  “So?”

  “You see, he disappeared at the wrong time. The time to disappear, utterly and completely, without a trace, is as soon as one has a prize, and if you think nothing of the literati, then they will think of nothing but you.”

  I nodded.

  “There is more for you to learn and witness if you’d wish,” he said, the familiar self-satisfied grin on his face. “I mean it’s not over, our journey, even when we reach port. They will be after the thing, you know.”

  “Who? You mean bookaneers? But they—” I stopped myself. I knew why he had been so urgently concerned with the calendar, and I understood the relief that possessed him after examining the dates. On July 1, the new copyright laws would finally be in effect.

  “You needn’t shy away from talking about it. Speaking of the death of our profession is like eulogizing an old friend. True, as you consider, that most of the bookaneers have run for the hills before now. It is the barnacles I speak of—the lowest of our line—they are minor fellows and rather ordinary, that is true, but with all this time they would have heard of our mission and be expecting my return. These bottom-feeders are without vision or philosophy but possess certain skills—in gathering intelligence, in smuggling. If you wish, you may accompany me off the shi
p and watch me scrape them away.”

  In the depth of his vanity, I saw traces of Davenport. It should have been no surprise, at the end of this, that I found these two men possessed twin souls, however differently expressed, separated into enemies by the cosmos. I accepted Belial’s invitation to be by his side when we disembarked.

  He was right about the so-called barnacles waiting for him. When we arrived in New York, having switched from the merchant ship to a packet in the tiny port of Halifax, he sent his trunk up with one of the porters who came onboard; the trunk disappeared before we reached the docks. Belial was carrying a bundle of papers in a valise; I turned and saw him jostled as we entered the crowds. After a passing few seconds in which my view was blocked, when the crowds cleared a bit, his valise was gone. He gave me a meaningful look free of any concern. I knew the papers inside the valise were actually worthless ledgers that had been left in his berth by a businessman on a previous voyage. More jostling and every item from the inside pockets of his coat had been removed in a flash. Meanwhile I had not been able to identify a single one of the barnacles among the crowds, as though these bandits were invisible and operated by black magic.

  A sculpture of the look on Belial’s face as we walked down the street—the creased eyebrows, the wide black nostrils, the tight pucker in his mouth—would seem to say, “Is that all you can manage, you fools?”

  “You see, my dear Fergins, that barnacles are merely that. Thieves. Pickpockets and launderers. A true bookaneer is another breed altogether, one the world will now be emptier without. You may write that in your chronicle, if you like, but attribute it to me.”