O'Connor laughed and offered up his chest.
"Come on," he snarled.
But Giovanni put the knife down on the table.
When they got there it was too late. The killing blow had been struck.
***
Wrapped in sailcloth, Giovanni's body was swallowed by the sea the same day. Captain Eagleton wasn't present at the funeral. O'Connor represented him. The crew suspected he'd turned up only to relish his meaningless triumph.
Isaiah arrived with a shovelful of ash from the galley.
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," the cook's boy said, and scattered the ashes over Giovanni's body as it lay on the deck in its sailor's shroud.
At that very moment, a gust of wind came like an avenging hand and flung the ash right into O'Connor's maimed face, where it settled into every line and crack, including the slits of his eyes. It burned and stung. He roared and thrashed about as if a real enemy had attacked him, and the men scattered: nobody wanted to be hit by the random's flailing of his fists. From a distance they saw him commit a final act of sacrilege against the deceased as, cursing and shouting, he lifted Giovanni's frail corpse from the deck and tossed it over the rail like a piece of rubbish.
They were watching the funeral of a mutineer. That, at least, was the message that Captain Eagleton passed on to them.
But below deck, they plotted O'Connor's death.
EVERYONE VOLUNTEERED for the job. No one had any scruples when it came to killing O'Connor. If they hadn't all been hardened men when they signed on to the Emma C. Leithfield, they were now. They'd been abused daily, and there wasn't one of them who didn't bear the mark of the first mate's fist. He even beat his fellow officers. The second mate, a Swede by the name of Gustafsson, went around with a closed-up eye that might never regain its sight.
With no rule of law on board the Emma C. Leithfield, they'd have to create one themselves. It wasn't mutiny: it was justice.
Their only concern was technical. How to do it?
O'Connor was stronger than any of them: they'd learned that much. They'd never defeat him in an open fight. But the thought of their own weakness merely added fuel to their anger.
"When he's asleep," said a Greek who went by the name of Dimitros.
Could that be the answer? They exchanged glances. There were two problems. The first was the loaded gun that O'Connor always carried, and the second was the dog. When the first mate dozed in his chair on deck, the dog always lay at his feet, and the minute anyone approached, it raised its massive head and growled menacingly. No one could figure out how to get close to O'Connor without waking the dog first. At this point their rebellion began to crumble. They discussed the dog at length, but it wasn't really the dog they were scared of. The revolver, then?
No. It was simply O'Connor.
Even without his dog and his gun, he seemed invincible. What terrified them most was whatever went on inside that scarred, pumpkin-like head of his. They could never confess that openly, though. After all, they were seventeen against one. They sat in silence, some of them staring at the table, others at the bulkhead.
It was Albert who broke the silence. "Anyway, isn't it wrong to kill another human being?"
They stared at him as though the idea had never crossed their minds. And perhaps in some cases it hadn't. They knew very little about one another's past, but they also knew that anything could happen in port or out at sea. A man's drowning wasn't always an accident—and O'Connor may not have been the only unpunished killer on board the Emma C. Leithfield.
"Would Giovanni have wanted to be avenged like that?" Albert continued.
"I don't care what Giovanni would have wanted," said the Welsh seaman Rhys Llewellyn, surveying the hairy hands folded in his lap. The first mate had given him a bruise on one cheek—and it was a greeting he dreamt of returning. "I'm speaking for myself," he added, looking around the group. "But I'm thinking about us too. It's him or us. It's not revenge. It's survival."
The others muttered their approval.
"Giovanni didn't want to pull the knife," Isaiah said. "I saw him put it down again."
His voice was hesitant, and we could hear him breathing between the words. He was only fourteen, and it took courage to speak up in a gathering of men who were senior to him in rank and age. "Do you remember that he said he was a knife thrower and not a murderer? Are we murderers?"
"Shut up, you black dog!" retorted the Welshman.
"No, I won't!" The words erupted unexpectedly. Isaiah had found his courage now. He'd spoken out, and the damage was done. "I get beaten by him just like you. So I've got a right to speak. And I don't think we should kill him."
"The boy's right," Albert said. "We don't want to become like him. He's just waiting for us to become as desperate as Giovanni and pull a knife on him, because that's the game he plays. It's what he wants. Do you think he's stupid? At this very moment he's probably hoping that we're plotting to kill him because then he's got us. Do we really want to be like him?"
They mumbled and looked down again. Undoubtedly some of them did want to be like O'Connor. But they never could be. They'd have to find other ways of matching his power.
"I think I know how we can win, but it'll take patience," Albert said. And he laid out his plan.
At first they didn't understand what he meant.
"It can't be done" was the universal message—uttered in almost as many languages as there were men. No matter where they came from, none of the sailors had ever seen justice dealt in the way Albert proposed. The idea wasn't just unfamiliar; it flew in the face of all experience.
"But this is America," Albert kept repeating.
"It's not America, it's a ship," they said. "And a ship has its own rules."
But Albert dug in his heels and refused to back down. Every time he refuted one of their objections, they saw his certainty grow. And every time he spoke, he finished with the same question: "Does anybody else have a better idea?"
No one did, apart from killing O'Connor—and in their hearts they knew they couldn't. They didn't have the courage, either individually or together.
So what was that strange, indefinable imperative that finally made them change their minds and agree to Albert's proposal? Might it be conscience? It was. But it was so mixed up with other things, like fear, and deviousness, and caution, and the clannishness of men in a pack, that in the end no one particular urge could be singled out. "So to simplify it, we'll just call it conscience," Albert always said when he told the story later.
They'd sailed for eight months with O'Connor by the time they called at St. Iago in the West Indies to load sugar for New York. There'd been no shortage of opportunities to jump ship, but the crew had resisted because if they deserted, their plan would never bear fruit and their suffering would have been in vain. The real test of their strength would come here in St. Iago. It would have nothing to do with muscle power—a commodity that had long been tried and tested and whose shortcomings were daily confirmed when they endured O'Connor's violence. But they stuck it out and began to look at O'Connor with an increasing boldness. For they'd discovered a force that the brutal first mate knew nothing of. Its name was fortitude.
The more experienced among them had already figured out that this was the place where Captain Eagleton would try to make them jump ship. They'd been through this before on other vessels. When a voyage nears its end, a bad captain will treat his crew so atrociously that they'll throw in the towel. And invariably, once they're branded as deserters, they'll forfeit their unpaid wages—thus increasing the profits of the trip. And so it was on the Emma C. Leithfield. First of all, O'Connor reduced their water rations while they sweated in the tropical heat. And then the provisions grew scarce too. Isaiah had picked up some cooking skills since Giovanni was murdered in his own galley, but now his limited knowledge was entirely superfluous: the crew's daily rations dwindled to three small ship's biscuits per man, while on Saturdays they were given rice and a single piece of salt mea
t. Their stomachs screamed for food. O'Connor's dog ate better than they did. The whole strategy was so damn clever. So devilishly, fiendishly cunning. You spend eight months with a brutal and malicious jailer, and then he opens the door to your cell.
Yet they refused to come out. They still had a score to settle with him. But oh, how they longed to escape from his brooding presence and from their own terror.
They stayed because they had a plan. They stayed.
Faint with hunger and thirst, they scrubbed the deck and the deckhouse with sand and stones under the tropical sun. They were roused from bed a full hour before any of the crews of the other ships anchored in St. Iago, and couldn't turn in until long after the rest of the port was asleep. Shaded by an outstretched sail, O'Connor sat in his chair, with a loaded revolver in his hand and the huge hound at his feet. But he wasn't there to ensure they worked hard. Indeed, if one of the men had left the murderously hot deck, bolted for the gangway, and rowed himself ashore, he wouldn't have lifted a finger to stop him. Instead he'd have grinned in raw triumph and wished him a fair wind.
When the washee-washee girls sailed by in their canoes, with their pinned-up hair, bare shoulders, and flared dresses, calling out flirtatiously, "We're coming on board!" O'Connor rose and threatened them off with his revolver.
The battle of wills weighed the men down, and they became more exhausted, silent, and emaciated with each day that passed. But by now, the sum total of their injuries constituted a victory. They saw O'Connor's gaze become evasive and a puzzled expression begin to disturb the restful calm of his mangled face.
On arriving at New York they did two things. First, they signed off from the ship where their only consolation in the face of daily abuse and humiliation had been the limited triumph of passive endurance. Then, all together, they marched to the nearest police station and reported the first mate of the Emma C. Leithfield.
This had been their plan. It was Albert's idea, and it had helped them endure. They'd discussed killing O'Connor, but something—perhaps their own terror more than anything—had held them back. Albert had realized that if a captain fails to intervene with someone as out of line as O'Connor, then his ship is lawless. The crew can't make the rules on a ship just because the captain fails to, unless through mutiny—which is no more than a cry for help and does nothing but add to the general lawlessness. So if justice can't be found on board, it must be found ashore.
And that was why they marched together to the police station: not to get revenge on O'Connor, but to seek justice.
They came to ask if there was any to be had.
And they received their answer.
They walked up the Lower East Side until they reached the police station on Twelfth Street. Grouped close together, they filled the width of the sidewalk, and passersby had to step aside to make way for them. Deep down they still felt ashamed that they'd failed to deal with O'Connor themselves. Here were seventeen large, broad-shouldered men, used to hard work, coming to beg others for justice—on one man.
Was the law something only the weak resorted to?
They reached a grimy yellow building whose sign proclaimed it to be the home of the law. When they entered and saw men not unlike themselves being dragged in from the street by policemen, for a moment they weren't sure which side of the law they belonged on. But they went over to a counter and stood there, nudging one another hesitantly. Albert ended up doing the talking. He told the police officer about the murder of Giovanni, and the Swedish second mate showed him his blinded eye.
The officer wrote a report. The moment they saw their words being committed to writing, something changed. They could look one another in the eye again and stand up straight. They were no longer a group of frustrated men whose complaints merited no more than a disdainful shrug.
Two police officers accompanied them back to the ship. O'Connor was sitting in his chair on the deck, his dog lying at his feet. They knew he had a loaded revolver in his pocket—but you don't shoot the law. If you shoot a police officer, ten more will take his place.
They saw O'Connor's astonishment. He glared at the crew of the Emma C. Leithfield one by one. And when none of them looked away, he understood. They'd done the unthinkable. They hadn't beaten him up, or arranged a counterattack, or tried to murder him—all of which would have met with his approval. Indeed, he'd have wanted it, because that was the language he spoke and understood. But now they'd acted in a way that was incomprehensible to him, in which might and right didn't share a meaning.
For a moment he hesitated as he took head-to-toe measure first of them, and then of the policemen. The officers' faces betrayed no reaction upon seeing the giant with the grotesquely scarred face, the tattered clothing, and the obvious bulge in his nankeens that revealed I the presence of a revolver. But the crew saw them stiffen as their hands sought the butts of their own weapons.
O'Connor spotted it too, and displaying a cunning they would not have credited him with, asked the police officers what the problem was. They replied that he'd been accused of murder and assault and that the witnesses were the men standing next to them. They informed him that he was under arrest.
O'Connor handed over his revolver voluntarily. The men saw him trying hard to look smaller as he was led away between the two policemen. O'Connor!
They exchanged glances.
The law was so strong that a mere snapping of its fingers could reduce even the most bloodthirsty monster to a lamb.
They'd never have believed that O'Connor had the gift of the gab. He'd certainly never provided them with evidence of an extensive vocabulary. Grunting and roaring had been his favorite forms of expression. But now he revealed a completely new side of himself. They'd noted a flash of deviousness in his eyes when he agreed to go with the officers voluntarily. Now, in court, they began truly to understand what sort of calculating fiend was lurking within that brutal mass of flesh.
When the charge against him was read out in court, O'Connor grabbed the Bible and kissed it with a passion that he'd hitherto reserved for outbursts of rage. He held up his hand and swore that he'd never, in all his life, laid a finger on any man. Then he clasped his maimed head and turned it from side to side, as if his neck were a socket and he was attempting to unscrew it.
"Look at this face," he cried. "Is this the face of a killer?"
He stared directly at the judge and then at the public gallery.
Had his latent violence not been visible in every bulging sinew, some members of the public might have burst out laughing, so grotesque was his claim to innocence. It was hard to imagine a more fitting face for a ruthless killer.
However, even the judge himself looked down when O'Connor stared hard at him, and they began to wonder who was stronger: the law or O'Connor.
Again O'Connor turned his head.
"Look," he said. "Look at my ruined face. This isn't the face of a man who fights back. It's the face of a man who turns the other cheek even when he's wrongly attacked." He looked directly at the witness box, and not one of the crew met his eyes. He showed the court first one scarred cheek, then the other. "Do you really think that I would let anyone come near me if my blood was as bad as people say?" He ripped his tattered shirt, which he wore even here, with a theatrical movement, baring his scarred chest. "This," he said, his voice turning hollow from emotion, "this is the body of a martyr. This is the body of the lamb."
"He's going to win," Gustafsson said, fingering his ruined eye as they sat in the nearest bar after the session. "Did you see how scared the judge was of him?"
"But the law isn't scared of him," Albert objected.
"What good's the law if the judge is small and weak and the criminal is big and strong?" asked Rhys Llewellyn.
Albert was the only one who still believed in the law. Every day they turned up in court, to be called as witnesses one by one. O'Connor contradicted them brazenly every time, looking at the judge, who averted his eyes. Their cuts began to heal, and their blue and yellow bruis
es were fading: only Gustafsson's eye stayed ruined, but even on his blind side he didn't have the courage to meet O'Connor's stare.
They'd had to put off looking for new work until the trial was over.
They grew restless and lost faith. They drifted around the bars and drank their savings away.
"We should never have reported him," they said to Albert.
"The law's stronger than O'Connor," he replied.
"Look at the judge," they retorted.
They didn't believe in shore justice. Albert had talked them into this. Soon O'Connor would be freed and he'd take his revenge. They should have swallowed their defeat and never sought the help of the law. It always sided with the strongest anyway.
"Look at the judge," they repeated. "He's small and he stoops. He's bald. He's barely bigger than a child."
"So don't look at him," Albert said. "And listen instead."
"So, what did you hear?" Albert asked them after the next session.
They mumbled something and looked away. Well, he had a point.
When you listened to what the man actually said, you got a different impression. He sank his teeth in like a bull terrier. He was impossible to shake off: he kept asking questions until he got to the heart of the matter, until the giant snapped and banged the counter in front of him with his fist as he roared across the courtroom, "I'm a man of peace; everyone will testify to that!"
"Everyone except the crew of the Emma C. Leithfield," the judge commented. He looked away again, but his voice stayed calm.
"It's the law that comes out of his mouth," Albert said.
"No, he's speaking for himself," Rhys Llewellyn said, "but he does it well."