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A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 3
|
'Is it not just like the Channel?' Barthe complained, waving a pudgy hand towards the waters beyond Plymouth Sound. 'When we do have a fair wind there is too much of it by half. This bloody gale shows no signs of abating, Captain. It will blow another day yet, I am certain.' He crossed Hayden's cabin to the gallery windows and gazed intently out through panes that ran with rain. 'I am certain we can make Tor Bay, sir, if we've a need to.'
'I am certain you are right, Mr Barthe, at some cost to our gear and danger to our people. No, Pool's convoy is not going anywhere in this. We shall wait.'
Early morning, oily sky, rain-streaked. A metronomic 'popplop, popplop' in the quarter-gallery as water dripped into the tin sink through a leak above. Hayden was already able to estimate how hard it rained by the cadence.
'What was that bloody row on deck at eight bells?'
'Some bum-boat men, sir. It appears Saint-Denis has considerable debt among them and monies expected from his family are now long overdue.'
'Pass the word to the marines that I do not want such a scene again – not upon my ship. Where is Mr Hawthorne, anyway?'
'Due back today, Captain. I believe there was yet a heart in Bath he had not broken but will return as soon as that matter has been settled.'
'Inform the ladies of Bath that they shall have to release him, for I require his presence aboard. His corporal is not quite up to a lieutenant's duties, yet.'
'I agree, sir.'
A knock on the door. 'Lieutenant Saint-Denis, Captain.'
'Yes, show him in.'
Saint-Denis strode in, several sheets of paper in one hand, hat under the opposite arm. 'I cannot account for it, Mr Hayden, but it appears your suspicions have been borne out. Stores have gone missing.' He raised the paper and glanced at the figures scribbled there. 'Particularly, three barrels of beef, a keg of tallow and sundry bosun's stores.' He lowered the papers so that they slapped against his thigh. 'I suspect it is the purser, Mr Hayden. Perhaps even the bosun.'
'I am quite certain it is not Franks, Lieutenant.' He turned to the sailing master. 'How long have you served with Taylor, Mr Barthe?'
'Some years, sir. He is the most private man upon God's earth, but there has never been even a suggestion that he is dishonest. And Franks… though not the most careful keeper of records, is honesty personified. I believe we shall have to look elsewhere for our thieves.'
'I agree with Mr Barthe. Franks I trust utterly and Taylor has a long record of reliability. I suspect we will find our thieves among the new men, Lieutenant. I trust you will ferret them out quickly enough. Anything more?'
'No, sir. Oh, there is a Jew asking for you.'
'Does this man have a name?'
'He did say his name…' The lieutenant's brow furrowed. 'It might have been Gold, sir.'
'Ah, Mr Gold. Please have him shown in.'
Barthe and Saint-Denis retreated from the cabin and a moment later one of the local merchants who served the needs of sailors and officers in port was let in. He stood, hat in hand, just inside the door. Hayden had known Gold for at least a decade, an honest, highly reserved man who navigated the sometimes hostile waters of Plymouth Sound and His Majesty's fleets with such skill that Hayden had long since come to believe him a kind of social genius.
'Mr Gold. I hope your labours go well?'
'They do, Captain Hayden. And may I congratulate you on your promotion, sir.'
'Very kind of you. I believe you have come to enquire about money outstanding on my account?'
Gold attempted to appear surprised at this question. 'Not at all, Captain Hayden. I heard of your prizes, sir, and knowing how slow the prize courts and agents can be, I thought you might wish to increase your credit, as you now have a table to keep and other expenses as senior officer of a frigate.'
Hayden was very short of money, and was indeed worried about keeping up the social requirements of his new post.
'You shall see a good sum from the frigate and the transport, I think, sir, and I should advance you money at the most reasonable rate. In truth, Captain Hayden, I have come to ask a favour and in return shall advance you any amount you require at no interest at all.'
'You know, Mr Gold, that I would never take a bribe…'
'Of course not, sir! And I never meant to suggest you would.'
'Then I shall pay you to advance me money, which offer I will accept. What is this favour, which I might do out of friendship?'
'I am flattered that you would consider me so, Captain. I understand you are in need of midshipmen, and would like to, respectfully, put forward the name of my son, Benjamin. He is a very clever boy, sir, and as eager to please and do well as any you will find.'
Hayden was more surprised than he could say. 'I remember him well, Mr Gold, and he is everything you say and more. There is, however, a very ancient act of legislation called the Test Act…'
Gold nodded quickly. 'I am aware of it, sir, but you might know my wife is a Christian and my son is willing to swear the same.'
'But is he willing to publicly take the sacrament, for he could be so required if the Navy wished?'
'I believe he would be willing, sir.'
'You believe or he would be?'
'He would be, Captain Hayden. I am quite sure of it. You must know you have Jews among your own crew.' The briefly distant look indicated he was gathering evidence to prosecute his case. 'And the Schombergs are a Jewish family… though the sons have converted to the Church of England. I have oft had the honour of fulfilling some small service for Captain Isaac Schomberg myself, sir.'
'Yes, Mr Gold, all that is undeniable but the truth remains that the officer corps is a bastion of Anglicanism. My father was a post captain, which for most men would almost make their career, but my mother is French and Catholic and I have been the object of bigotry all my years in the Navy. For your son, success will be very hard won if he succeeds at all. I highly recommend you reconsider.' Hayden could see the disappointment in Gold's face. 'Why would you want to subject your son to this life, Mr Gold? It is dangerous, uncomfortable, all-consuming.'
A sad smile flickered over Gold's face. 'It is his heart's desire, sir, to be an officer in the king's navy, instead of a bum-boat man… like his father.'
'We all play our part, Mr Gold.'
'Some parts are more respectable than others, sir.' The man was kneading his hat brim with both hands. 'Will you not take him?' he asked softly.
Hayden felt a strange helplessness descend upon him, almost a weakness of limb. To his very core he understood what a difficult life the boy would face – an outsider in an insider's world. He also retained a perfectly vivid memory of how blindly determined he had been to enter this profession, and how devastating he would have found a refusal. 'I cannot keep him out of danger, Mr Gold – you must comprehend that.'
'I do, sir.' Gold made a quick bow in Hayden's direction. 'And thank you, sir. I shall have him aboard as soon as you like, sir. I'll kit him out this very morning.'
'There is yet one thing more, Mr Gold. I am but a job-captain. When a post captain is appointed to the Themis any middies sailing with me will certainly be cast free. Their future will be as uncertain as my own.'
But this did not seem to dampen Gold's excitement in the least. In truth, Hayden had never seen the man so happy.
'I believe you will have a great future, Mr Hayden. I am quite certain of it. My Benjamin could not be in better hands. I know that full well.'
The moment Gold had departed Hayden regretted his decision. 'No good will come of this,' he muttered to himself in the mirror.
Some three hours later, Hayden was making the best arrangement of his few effects in the great cabin, which seemed palatially large compared to the eight-foot square he was used to, when the sentry knocked on the door and announced Mr Archer.
'There is a midshipman making application to you, Captain,' Archer said upon entering. 'He bears a letter from his father, I believe.'
'So soon? Well, send him down, Mr Archer, and then I will have you settle him in the midshipmen's berth.'
'Aye, sir.'
A moment later the door opened again and Hayden looked up from his labours to find Arthur Wickham standing just inside the cabin and grinning somewhat foolishly.
'Wickham!'
'Captain Hayden,' the boy said making a rather exaggerated bow. He held out a letter. 'My father has asked me to give you this. It is a request that you might find a place for me in the midshipmen's berth, for once I had learned you had a ship I was determined to have him ask such a favour of you.' He gestured around the cabin. 'But I was not expecting this, sir. I heard you had command of a sloop, not a post ship.'
'Nor am I a post captain, Wickham. Only a job-captain and once I have delivered the Themis to Lord Hood I shall more than likely be without a ship again and my midshipmen without positions.'
'Not for a moment do I believe such an event possible. You will have a ship, I am quite certain.'
'Your faith is heartening, Wickham. Truly it is.' Hayden received the letter, and broke the seal. A rather ill-formed hand very graciously requested that he take on Lord Arthur as midshipman, a request Hayden was delighted to grant.
'Well, Lord Westmoor has made such kind application on your behalf that I cannot help but grant his request. You will have a great deal to learn, I expect, young and green as you are.'
'I shall apply myself with a will, Captain Hayden. You will not regret taking me on.' Wickham laughed with pleasure. 'I understand that you are in need of middies, sir?'
'I have only one other and he truly is green – utterly new to the life. I hope you will give him the benefit of your experience and be kind to him.'
'That I shall, sir. I have taken the liberty of alerting two other young gentlemen in my position – having recently been released from their ship. I can vouch for them, sir, most highly.'
'And might their names be Hobson and… Stock?'
'Madison, sir. Hobson and Madison. I don't think Tristram Stock will go to sea again. He was much affected by the loss of his friend Williams. It will be some time before he recovers, I fear.'
'I am sorry to hear it. But Madison and Hobson I should be happy to sail with again. Are you certain of them?'
'I left London before I received answers to my letters, but I would be very much surprised if they did not make straight for Plymouth the moment they received word.'
Hayden could hardly have been more pleased with this turn of events. 'They will need all speed, for we make sail the moment the weather allows. Are you well, Lord Arthur?'
Wickham looked suddenly serious – his habitual pose when asked a question. 'I am, sir, and better now that I am to sail with my old shipmates. I understand from Archer that we have much of the Themis crew intact?'
Hayden shook his head at this. 'Yes. Is it not passing strange? No other captain would take them – a terrible mistake but much to our benefit for only the most loyal men were left after the mutiny and there are some very good seamen among them, too.'
'I will miss Aldrich,' Wickham said.
'As will we all. Poor fellow, rest his soul. He was never found so I suppose he did drown, after all.'
Wickham shrugged. 'I almost forgot! My father has sent you a gift, as well, for advancing me so far in understanding my trade, sir.'
'My part in the advance of your understanding was very small. You have a natural gift, I believe, and few men are so born.'
Wickham actually coloured a little. 'Why, thank you, sir. I count it a great compliment, Captain Hayden. But my father has sent you a rather handsome table – all the finest mahogany and fit for a cabin such as this. Perhaps he had a bit of foresight, Captain. It will seat a dozen or can be reduced to accommodate as few as four. The chairs are terribly cleverly made, sir, and fold up completely flat. You shall not have the least trouble storing them away when we clear for action, which I hope we shall be doing soon enough.'
'That is a very handsome gift! Too generous by a great deal, I fear. How shall I ever repay him?'
'It is Lord Westmoor who is repaying you, sir, for furthering my education. And perhaps for the prize money that will be coming my way.'
'When we finally see it. I shall sit down this evening and write the Marquis a letter expressing my gratitude.'
Wickham eyed Hayden's writing table with its impressive pile of papers. 'If I may, sir, I should go down and pay my respects to Mr Barthe and the doctor, and leave you to your work.'
'Indeed you should. They will be very pleased to see you.'
Another quick leg, and Wickham was nimbly out.
Having had his fill of paperwork, Hayden left his cabin intending to visit the sick-berth and then see to some particular racks he had ordered Chettle to build in the bosun's store room – an attempt to bring order to Mr Franks's realm and allow him to keep a better tally of his stores.
As he left his cabin, he was met at the foot of the companionway ladder by three men in the most disastrous state owing to the near torrential rains. The smallest and youngest was a mere lad of perhaps fourteen years, who stripped off oilskins to reveal an almost gleaming new midshipman's uniform beneath. Every motion the boy made seemed a self-conscious parody of a human movement, and he smiled awkwardly all the while. The tallest, and eldest, was a spare, cheerless-appearing man who gazed about with a look of poorly hidden distaste upon his narrow face. The last of three was his apparent opposite, round-faced and rather vacantly satisfied-looking. A little twist of a smile hovered upon chubby lips, and Hayden thought him the kind of gentleman who would stand, perfectly pleased with the world, in horse droppings without ever noticing or the smile being displaced.
Archer hovered just to one side.
'Here is our captain,' he said to the small gathering. 'The Reverend Dr Worthing.' The austere gentleman nodded. 'The Reverend Mr Smosh.' The smaller of the two made a leg. 'And our new midshipman, Mr Gould.'
'Gould?' Hayden echoed.
'My father arranged my place with you most recently, Captain Hayden.'
'Ah. Gould. Pleased to have you all aboard.' He turned to his second lieutenant. 'See these gentlemen to the cabins arranged for them, if you please, Mr Archer, and introduce young Gould to Mr Wickham, who will see him settled.' Hayden turned to the chaplains. 'I hope you will be free to dine with me this evening? Ship's fare, I am afraid, but one is forced to it eventually.'
That being arranged, Hayden left the men of various faiths to Archer. A package had been given to him by Benjamin Gould – from the boy's father. The package contained some money which Hayden would hold for the boy and release as needed – quite traditional – as well as the money Gold had advanced to Hayden.
Hayden's newly appointed steward passed by at that moment. 'Mr Castle. What is on the menu this evening?'
'It is pork day, sir.'
'So I feared. I shall be having a dinner in my cabin for a number of people and we shall be serving the lamb sent aboard for me this afternoon. Along with the most reverend gentlemen, I shall have Wickham, the new middy – Gould – and… I shall make you a list.'
They were ten at table; Mr Barthe, Lieutenants Saint-Denis and Archer, Midshipmen Lord Arthur Wickham and Benjamin Gould, Dr Griffiths, the Reverends Worthing and Smosh, the recently returned Hawthorne and, of course, Hayden. The table itself was an object of much admiration for it was a magnificent affair, far finer than anything Hayden could ever have purchased for himself. It had very conveniently arrived with exquisite linen, which was on display, putting all of Hayden's modest china, flatware and plain serving bowls and chaffing-dishes to shame. The fare, however, was first-rate – lamb sent aboard by Mr Gold, whose son's patronymic had evolved into Gould, it seemed.
'I am surprised to find a physician serving in a frigate, Dr Griffiths,' the Reverend Dr Worthing offered into a lull in the conversation. 'I assume you are a physician as you are habitually addressed as "Doctor"?' Worthing had a rather ponderous, haughty manner of speaking, as though his slightest observation was of undeniable import.
'I am a mere surgeon, Dr Worthing.'
Worthing's laden fork stopped on the journey to his sour mouth and returned to the plate. 'Is it not presumptuous to style yourself "Doctor", in that case? My own brother was a surgeon and never claimed any title other than "Mister".'
Hayden thought it proper to intercede, here, on Griffiths's behalf. 'It is the habit of sailors to refer to medical officers, indeed to address them, as "Doctor". Of the ships I have served aboard, it has been so upon all but one.'
'Why, I think it is a strange custom. Do seamen not appreciate the great disparity in learning between a surgeon and a physician?'
'Upon the land such a disparity in knowledge may exist, Dr Worthing,' Barthe said gently, 'but upon a ship the surgeon is also apothecary and physician. You will find that Dr Griffiths has educated himself, at great effort, far beyond the understanding of most Navy surgeons.'
'Well, I hope you will not be offended if I do not participate in this custom, Mr Griffiths, for I must tell you, I think it… undue.'
'I shall take no offence at all, Dr Worthing,' Griffiths answered easily. ' "Mister" me all you wish.'
Despite his claim to wish no discourtesy, Hayden thought that Worthing could not quite hide his disappointment that his censure had been accepted with so little sign of offence.
'What of this other doctor I heard mentioned?' Worthing went on. 'Is he a surgeon as well? I must say, I am surprised that a frigate should require two.'
'Which doctor is this?' Hayden asked.
'Dr Jefferies, I believe the man's name was.'
Grins were suppressed all around the table and at least one smirk obscured behind a wine glass quickly raised.
'Jefferies is the ship's cook, Dr Worthing. It is a jest in the Navy to refer to the cook as "Doctor".'
'It is an odd conception of a jest.' The man seemed a bit offended that anyone might find humour in this. 'Address within the service does seem peculiar. Am I given to understand, Captain Hayden, that you are no captain at all but hold the rank of master and commander?'
'That is exactly correct, sir,' Hayden replied.
'Even an admiral would address Captain Hayden as "Captain", Dr Worthing,' Wickham interjected. 'He has command of a ship and is therefore "Captain". You will soon find that Captain Hayden is very deserving of such address, for he is as fine a sea-officer as any man who has earned his post.'
'Then I do not doubt it,' Worthing responded.
When Wickham spoke, Hayden noticed, the clergyman was all attention and amiability. After all, the progeny of a man who might have a living to bestow was worthy of cultivation.
Thwarted from offering offence in this particular channel, the chaplain retreated into silence.
'Mr Gould,' Hawthorne offered into this moment, 'you must be something of an authority on the matter of physicians. Am I informed correctly that you have two brothers in medicine?'
'Yes, sir, Mr Hawthorne,' Gould answered up eagerly, pleased to be noticed. 'My eldest brother has opened a practice in London and the next eldest, Peter, is studying to do the same.'
'And why is it you didn't follow their example, Mr Gould?' Barthe asked. 'Lord knows it is a more sensible and gainful profession than the sea.'
'I contemplated it most seriously for some time, Mr Barthe. I even read many of my brother's texts, helping him with his studies. Medicine is an absorbing subject, I will grant you, but in the end being shut up in rooms all day in London…' A visible shudder passed through him. 'Two doctors are more than enough in any family, I am convinced.' He turned to the elder clergyman. 'Are you a physician, then, Dr Worthing?'
'My doctorate is of Divinity,' Worthing replied, clearly wondering what sort of blockhead did not know that.
Griffiths glanced Hayden's way, much unsaid.
'Did I see golf clubs among the baggage being carried aboard?' Saint-Denis enquired.
'They were mine,' Worthing responded.
'I have been thought quite a golfer in my time,' Saint-Denis informed them. 'I only regret that I cannot indulge my skills oftener. It is a capital game.'
'It has been spoiled somewhat by this foolish notion to reduce it from the proper twenty-two holes to an unholy eighteen. But I trust such a wrong-headed idea will shortly fail. Do you not agree, Lieutenant?'
Saint-Denis smiled winningly. 'Twenty-two is the proper number. I could not agree more.'
'I have played but once,' Wickham offered, 'and only managed nineteen. I was wholly fagged after that.'
'But that was only your first attempt,' Saint-Denis replied. 'After a few more matches you would soon see that twenty-two is the proper number. Why, perhaps we shall have the opportunity to indulge in a match someday, Wickham, and I will give you proper instruction. It is an endeavour in which every kind of nonsense is promoted as wisdom. When to use a track iron. Whether ash or hickory should be employed for shafts. I will set you straight, you needn't worry on that account.'
Wickham did not look terribly grateful for this offer, but Saint-Denis seemed rather pleased with his own generosity in the matter of golf instruction.
'I am not sure that you will find a proper course upon which to play in the Mediterranean,' Barthe offered innocently.
'I only hope to find a suitable bit of pasture, now and again, in which to practise. Accomplishments are very easily lost if they are not kept up by repetition.'
'That is why we have the men holy-stone the deck, every morning,' Saint-Denis said, laughing at his own wit.
'Why do you call it a holy-stone, pray?' Smosh asked.
Saint-Denis looked suddenly embarrassed, glancing around the table as though hoping someone might offer rescue, but no life-rings were thrown. 'I do not know the answer to that, Mr Smosh,' the lieutenant lied.
'Why, is it not because the stones used are the size and shape of the Christian Bible?' Gould asked.
Smosh laughed, earning him a withering look from Worthing, who was clearly offended by this insult to the holy book. The silent criticism did not affect Smosh in any way. He continued to take full enjoyment from the remark, his face turning crimson.
After a moment his laughter dwindled and he applied himself to his supper once again. 'If I had known the fare aboard His Majesty's ships was of this quality, Captain Hayden, I would have considered a career in the Navy. I believe I would.'
'It would appear you do have a career in the Navy, Mr Smosh,' Griffiths pointed out.
Smosh was not the least offended but only chuckled. 'So I do, Dr Griffiths. So I do, and pleased I am about it, too. To have such fine companions and a chance to see some part of the larger world, not to mention the prize money… The Navy never came into my mind and so I fell into the church for want of a better situation.'
This admission caused a great reaction from Worthing. 'You mean to say, sir, that you admit to entering the clergy for want of any true vocation?'
Smosh wiped his wine-moistened mouth with Hayden's new linen. 'I do, most freely, but I must point out that the church does not much care by what means a man comes to it. The church has long been gaining souls, not through love of God but out of fear of eternal damnation. Though I think it passing strange, the church does not consider the man who fears the fires – a coward by any definition – any less a Christian than the man who comes to the church out of true religious feeling. Therefore, I conclude that they do not much care how they get their ministers and consider the man who loves God no better than the one who comes for want of some better situation. It is all the same to mother church.'
'This is not only an affront to the church,' Worthing responded, so completely offended that he stumbled for words, 'but it is an affront to… to God!'
'I don't know why you would feel so,' Smosh replied mildly. 'I know several men ashore in possession of not one but two livings who leave curates do all their duties but the occasional Sunday sermon. Their valuable time is spent in shooting and similar pursuits. You'd be as like to see these gentlemen at a ball as visiting the sick or even in their own churches. No, I am merely honest about my reasons for entering the church and there is no merchandise in so little demand as honesty.'
There was no saving the dinner after that, though thankfully it was soon over. After the guests had departed Hawthorne and Griffiths sat with Hayden and took a glass of port.
'I dare say, the gunroom shall not lack for amusement for a few weeks,' Hawthorne observed. He appeared to be still so pleased by his exploits ashore that he was aglow, the trace of a self-satisfied little smile fixed continually upon his face.
'Worthing was rather determined that he would be the only man aboard addressed as "Doctor" was he not?' Griffiths smiled.
'I thought the good doctor of divinity might have an apoplexy when Smosh began to philosophize on his reasons for joining the church.' Hawthorne laughed. 'And Smosh seemed hardly aware that he had offended the man to his core. Such innocence.'
'It was not in the least innocent,' Griffiths assured him. 'It was carefully calculated and delivered so dryly as to appear without intent. Do not be taken in by Smosh's manner, Mr Hawthorne, it is utterly contrived, I am sure. Beneath the amiable halfwit offered up for public consumption lies a very shrewd mind. Much is hidden there, and for what reason I know not.'
'Oh, Doctor, I am certain you are wrong. An empty head upon a rather replete body, that is the Reverend Mr Smosh. I dare say, he has a weakness for food, drink and the fairer sex, if one may judge his appetites by this one night. Did you not hear him asking after the women we might meet upon our voyage? He was near to salivating.'
'That weakness he may share with the rest of us, but weakness of mind is not an issue with him. You will see.' Griffiths stood. 'I should look in upon my charges, if you will excuse me.'
Griffiths slipped quietly out, his footsteps retreating quickly to silence as he descended the stair.
'Have you ever noticed that each man has a footstep that is as characteristic as his voice?' Hawthorne asked. 'Although the secret of man's character is said to be contained in the fairness or unfairness of his hand, or in the shape of his skull, I have come to believe it is in his footstep.'
'Perhaps you should write a pamphlet on the subject,' Hayden suggested, smiling.
'Perhaps I should. But think on it… Have you never noticed that our doctor – or perhaps I should say "surgeon" – has the lightest possible footfall? I think it is more than just chance or even some physical cause that dictates this. I believe it is a desire on his part to discommode no one. Not even the sound of his footfall should cause vexation to another. And this is not mere shrinking on his part. No, in the proper situation Griffiths will offer his opinions or even contradict another. But he is, above all things, considerate.'
'And what of Barthe? I can, from my cabin when the skylight is closed, hear the man walking on the forecastle… in a gale. Does this mean he has consideration for no one?'
Hawthorne laughed. 'I don't believe the opposite holds true in all cases. Mr Barthe is stomping about because he is always fuming over something – the world is nothing but a constant affront to our sailing master's belief in the order of things. His stomping is much like his cursing – a manner of protest against the injustices of the Navy and life in general.'
'You have been contemplating this for some time, I see.'
'Only a few days. But I have begun to listen to the sound of men walking.'
'I hate to think what you might comprehend from my manner of getting about.'
'Oh, your footfall is easily understood, Captain. You know where you are going. It is a very decided footstep, yours. I know it the moment you pass overhead. No deck can hide you from me.'
'I know we are going to the Mediterranean, Mr Hawthorne, beyond that all is hidden. Perhaps you will hear me stumbling about the deck in a few weeks, this way and that, one moment running the next in a stagger.'
'No. Never you, sir. Always firm and decided.' He took a sip of his port, his expounding on the matter of footsteps exhausted, apparently.
'Well, here we are all together again, Mr Hawthorne.'
The marine raised his glass as though in toast. 'It is the greatest good fortune that we take such pleasure from each other's company, for no one else will have us,' Hawthorne observed.
'It is good fortune. Your affairs in Bath were brought to a successful conclusion?'
'To my greatest satisfaction, Captain Hayden – kind of you to enquire.' Hawthorne sat forward and said very softly. 'By utter chance, I learned something of our doctor while in Bath. Did you know he joined the Navy to escape a situation? He was very attached to a young woman in Portsmouth and his hopes were terribly disappointed; her family, you see, did not approve of him.'
'So it was not his family he came to sea to escape? I am sorry to hear of his ill-fortune, though I should have known – he has hinted at it more than once, I now realize.'
'There is more. When I learned of this I was determined to meet the lady, as her family were staying in Bath. I managed to discover her at a ball and insinuated my way into her company through the agency of an acquaintance. When first I saw her I thought that all made sense for she was quite a striking beauty, but when I was near enough to hear her speak I discovered that she was of the sort who has never been silent more than a moment altogether in her entire existence – I swear this woman must prattle on in her sleep – all the while saying nothing of any interest or value. I know that love makes fools of the most practical, level-headed individuals, but, even so, I was astonished. For a moment I was struck with the idea that I would attach her feelings and then dash her hopes cruelly, repayment for all the pain she had caused our friend, but I soon came to my senses on that account. But then, some time later, I was talking to a handsome lady of great charm and learning, when I discovered that she was not only the elder sister of the woman I believed had so injured Griffiths, but in fact I had been misinformed. She was the lady who had occasioned the disappointment. In a way, this made much more sense – I could easily imagine the doctor falling under her spell. Here is how I learned it. When some few details of our cruise came out in the natural course of conversation, she asked me if I were not much more inclined to make a life ashore now that I had witnessed all the dangers. I answered that we sailed with such a fine surgeon that we never worried – Griffiths would patch us up. "Obediah Griffiths?" the younger sister enquired. I had to laugh, partly from embarrassment and partly because I realized I had never known Griffiths's Christian name – and now knew why. We quickly sorted out that, indeed, Obediah was the very surgeon of whom I spoke. I saw her glance her elder sister's way, and the poor woman; all of her animation of spirit dissolved. Someone in the circle made a polite enquiry about Griffiths's well-being – on her behalf, I expect – and that was that.'
'Poor Griffiths. He has joined a larger corps than the Navy in that – the legion of disappointed hopes. Two years it has been since he took ship. Has this lady married?'
'She has not, and much surprised you would be if you met her for she is of a perfectly good family – not rich, but with some properties and excellent history – and is herself amiable and thoughtful and good-hearted. Just the sort of woman who would make Griffiths a most satisfactory wife, though his family are certainly beneath her own.'
'Perhaps she has come to regret giving him up, if she felt as you perceived when his name was mentioned. But there is little anyone can do about it, now. We are off tomorrow for points south. Griffiths will have to find himself a new love.' Hayden rose and cupped a hand to a pane in the stern gallery, shading out reflections, and pressed his face close to the damp glass so that he might peer into the darkness. 'The wind, I swear, has been making all day but the gale finally shows signs of blowing itself out.'
'Perhaps we will finally get to sea, and the French will offer up a ship to us so that we might add to our prize money.'
Hayden turned away from the windows. 'Our purpose on this voyage will be to see that no British ships are offered up to the French.'
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A Battle Won
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Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 4
|
Pool was a terse, impatient man who appeared much offended to find himself put in charge of a convoy on his way to join Admiral Lord Hood. The massive cabin of his seventy-four-gun ship was crowded with the masters of the transports and the escort captains.
'I expect everyone to make enough sail to keep their place,' Pool said loudly. 'I will hear no excuses nor tolerate the least independence in this matter. My signals are to be obeyed and repeated to the ships down the line. We must cross Biscay in this season and I do not plan to heave to until spring. Is that understood? Weather will not be with us and we must make the best of any wind we can.' He looked around at the gathered captains and masters, almost daring some poor fool to ask a question. 'Even so late in the year, the French will be on the lookout for us. They cannot have failed to learn of our convoy forming, and will snatch any who lag behind. Hayden will bring up the rear in the Themis, but he cannot abandon that position to rescue your ship if you fall out of line.' He held up a small book. 'Everyone has their copy of the signal book and my instructions? Good. If any among you has a question, ask it now.'
But no one did… or perhaps dared. The masters went out, muttering, leaving the escort captains behind.
Pool gathered them round a table, where a chart had been unrolled, his sailing master dumbly at hand. 'I will not hide it from you; I am much out of humour with this convoy duty. I have reason to be in the Mediterranean where Toulon is endangered and my presence will serve some real purpose. These masters will do everything within their power to hamper us, but I have learned that the loss of but one ship to French privateers will add a little urgency to all their evolutions and speed their indolent crews. Let us hope some enterprising Frenchman gathers up a laggard sooner rather than later so the lesson is quickly learned.'
Hayden dearly hoped that Pool said this in jest, but there was nothing in his manner or face to suggest that it was not utterly in earnest.
Pool put his finger on the chart. 'We must give Ushant a much wider berth than I should like, and keep all these unweatherly vessels away from the French coast, for gales from the south-west are too common in this season. We all know it is a bloody foolish notion to send a convoy to sea so late in the year, but we must make the best of it. I expect you all to do your part in hurrying these ships along and to bring the majority of them safely to Gibraltar. Captain Stewart shall be the 'whipper in' and try to keep transports in their places and carrying sail.' He glanced up at Hayden. 'You have not made your post, Hayden, but I expect you to play your part, even so. If a French squadron appears you must be prepared to meet them until such time as we can send you aid, and if aid is not possible, to forestall them as long as you can that the convoy might get clear. Is that understood? Your crew is up to it?'
'Completely up to it, sir.'
The other captains glanced slyly one to the other. Faint Hart's crew, it seemed, had a reputation that its recent endeavours had not yet erased.
Thirty-one transports made up the convoy along with Pool's seventy-four, Bradley's Syren, a twenty-six-gun frigate, and four other vessels – two schooners, an armed brig and, to Hayden's dismay, the Kent. Her captain, a lieutenant recently promoted to master and commander, stood across the table from Hayden. He could have been a school mate of Wickham's he displayed such a youthful appearance. A little smile of happiness would spread over his face at times, to be chased away by mock seriousness.
He is utterly thrilled to be here, among his elders, Hayden realized, but they are men of experience – he is playing at war.
'I understand your little schooner is a flyer, McIntosh?'
'She is that, sor,' McIntosh answered, unable to hide his pride.
'Then you will carry my signals throughout the convoy when the weather is too close for them to be clearly seen.'
'I will, sor.' McIntosh, whom Hayden knew slightly, had been even more recently made master and commander, despite being a few years older than Hayden and most of his life at sea. It was always surprising to realize there were officers in His Majesty's Navy with less interest even than he.
Pool gazed down at the chart of Biscay, as though the hidden positions of privateers and French cruisers could be made out if one but stared long enough. His right hand rose automatically and massaged his temple in gentle, circular motions.
'I will station the Kent to the west – probably to windward. Do not be alarmed, Jones; although French cruisers would almost certainly attack from windward, I expect to meet only small privateers and they will be on the lookout for stragglers, and position themselves to leeward and aft of the convoy. Captain Bradley shall take the leeward position, in Syren.' He glanced up at the others. 'In truth, gales shall be our greatest enemy. If the fleet is driven to leeward and any appreciable number of ships separated from it they will be in real danger of becoming prizes.' He straightened and looked quickly around the gathered captains, his eye meeting that of each man in turn. 'I have made myself clear, I hope?'
Nods and sounds of agreement.
'Hayden, if you would stay a moment, I wish to speak with you.' He nodded to the others. 'Keep a sharp watch for my signals, obey them without hesitation, and, God willing, we shall raise Gibraltar in a fortnight.'
Shoes clattered on the wooden deck as the captains made their way out, each more gracious than the other insisting this officer or that go first. Pool watched them leave, his gaze thoughtful. He could stand beneath the greater deck beams, making him five feet and perhaps nine inches (Hayden, by contrast, could only stand between the beams). Women, Hayden guessed, would find him a handsome man, dark-haired and dark-eyed, face well formed, though slightly marked by the smallpox – less than many. An athletic manner of moving and build gave him great presence in a room. A man not to be trifled with, that was certain.
'I will be perfectly candid, Hayden, and tell you that I would rather have a post captain in command of your frigate. I know you were Hart's first lieutenant, but I expect you to take your place in the convoy and not to shrink from enemy ships, no matter their rate or weight of broadside. Is that understood?'
Hayden felt his ears and neck suddenly flush with heat. 'Perfectly, sir. And let me say that I was Hart's lieutenant for a few weeks only. Before that I was Captain Bourne's senior lieutenant, and he would be the first to tell you that I am neither fearful to meet the enemy nor lacking competence in the management of my ship.'
The look on Pool's face, barely controlled outrage, told Hayden that he had spoken out of turn.
'Did I ask you for a history of your service, Hayden?'
'You did not, sir.'
'No, I did not. But I will ask you why Bourne, a captain very senior to me on the list, has command of a frigate, only? Why has he never been put into a seventy-four or a flagship?'
'He has turned them down, sir,' Hayden responded, jumping to his friend's defence. 'The first lord knows that he was made to be a frigate commander. The day Captain Bourne is given his pennant will be a great loss to the service – though he will make a very fine admiral, I am sure.'
'He will never fly his flag, Hayden, believe me.' Pool's voice and manner altered but a little, the edge of outrage replaced by something else – firm conviction and a touch of concern. 'The day Bourne leaves frigates will be his last day of active duty. Men like Bourne do not understand the workings of the Navy. He has condemned himself, foolishly, to a brief career, for he has never once proven himself capable of more.' Pool shook his head in something like frustration. 'I will grant Bourne his well-advertised bravery, and I hope this example has been well and truly learned by you.'
'I will not disappoint you, Captain.'
'Then be off to your ship,' Pool responded, not unkindly. 'We make sail immediately.'
On deck Hayden found Jones lingering by the rail, and when he saw Hayden he crossed to him immediately. 'It seems, Captain Hayden,' Jones began, 'that I have been given a ship meant for you. I was much concerned for any wound this might have caused, but see you have been put into a frigate. My congratulations!'
'I am conveying her to Lord Hood, who will find her a post captain. But do not concern yourself. I hold no grudge against you for the actions of admirals and higher officials.'
'Very decent of you.' Jones paused. 'Have you been on convoy before?'
'Oftener than I would like. Yourself?'
'One or two, in the North Sea. Rather boring business, commonly. I expect this will be the same… but for the weather, perhaps.'
'I am sure that boredom, in this case, is a wish common to us all.'
'Oh, not at all, Captain Hayden,' Jones informed him. 'Captains Pool and Bradley are hoping they might have the opportunity to take a prize!'
Hayden smiled. 'I am quite certain they were jesting.'
The man looked slightly offended. 'Not in the least were they jesting. They have both taken a number of prizes this year – small ones, admittedly – but they are hoping for greater things. I'm quite certain they meant every word.'
Hayden went down into his cutter wondering what kind of people he had fallen in with; the commodore thought him a coward for no reason other than his service with Hart, and it seemed Pool and Bradley believed themselves on a cruise.
'He has mistaken you for Landry,' Hawthorne responded when Hayden related his meeting with Pool.
'Perhaps, but I fear too many within the service have heard only Hart's tale of our cruise and not got it from some more reliable source.'
A knock on the door of the great cabin and then Archer thrust his head in at Hayden's bidding.
'We are ready to weigh, sir.'
'I shall be on deck directly,' Hayden replied. He retrieved a hat from his lovely table, and went out and up the stairs, stopping only for an instant on the gundeck to be sure that all the men were in their places.
'It is a relief to see men both ready and willing to perform their duties,' Hawthorne said as they ascended the ladder to the deck.
'I was thinking the same.' Hayden could not help but remember the day in Plymouth when half the crew had all but refused to sail. How many lives that might have preserved had they been successful? And why were they not? Because Hayden had intervened and convinced the men to sail, preserving Hart's command and leading to all that followed. Performing one's duty should not be so fraught with ambiguity.
Hayden quickly surveyed the gathered convoy, a collection of ships of every size and shape. They anchored in no particular order, all streaming to a faint nor'east breeze, like so many horses straining at their tethers. Signals fluttered aloft on the flagship, visible against a dull sky.
'We have permission to weigh and make sail.' Hayden turned to Saint-Denis. 'Take her out, Lieutenant, if you please.'
Saint-Denis touched his hat, his most charming smile in place – a smile that Hayden was already coming to detest. 'This is an excellent opportunity for Archer to perform this duty, Captain. But I shall watch over his shoulder and be certain that everything is done handsomely. You needn't be concerned for a moment about Archer's inexperience.'
Before Hayden could respond, Saint-Denis had gone off calling for Archer.
Hawthorne, who had been standing but a few feet away, glanced over at Hayden, his eyebrows raising only a little. A slow fuse of anger had been lit in Hayden's breast.
At that moment a cutter under sail drew near. 'Ahoy, Themis!' her coxswain called. 'Post.'
Sitting in the stern-sheets by the coxswain was Griffiths's assistant, Ariss, a number of packages balanced in his lap. The post came over the rail with the surgeon's mate.
'Will you open it, Mr Hawthorne?' Hayden asked. 'Saint-Denis's summons might be within.'
'God willing,' the marine lieutenant muttered. Hawthorne opened the bag and began quickly sorting through letters and packages. 'Here is a letter for him… and another.'
The first lieutenant had paused on the gangway and was looking back towards the quarterdeck, his attention captured by the call of mail. Hayden motioned to him and Saint-Denis jogged quickly back.
'Letters for you, Lieutenant.'
Saint-Denis took them from Hawthorne with barely a nod, and walking away a few feet tore open the first. He read, squinting at the creamy square, then turned his back before opening the second. There was no mistaking the fall of his shoulders, his long arms dropping away, the letters shivering loosely in the muted breeze. Hastily he shoved them into his coat, a long-fingered hand massaging his brow absently, then he walked silently back down the gangway to observe the anchor being catted, his buckled shoes making no sound.
'Apparently he has not been recalled to glory,' Hawthorne whispered.
'No. Davies has very deftly avoided command of the Themis and shed his first lieutenant in the same stroke.'
'His cunning is almost admirable,' Hawthorne said.
'Isn't it, though?'
Hayden walked forward a little, watching his crew work. The new men were fitting in well, and Franks was unable to find a soul to start, but limped about flexing his rattan and scowling threateningly. Forward, Wickham was explaining the evolutions to the new midshipman, pointing here and there, Gould attentive to his every word and gesture. Archer quietly gave orders to Mr Barthe and Franks that were passed along sharply to the men. The somnolent lieutenant appeared surprisingly confident, even cheerful.
To avoid thirty ships all weighing at once, Pool had ordered the most leeward ten to make sail to be followed immediately by the next decade, and then the last eleven. Tor Bay was crowded and they would more easily make their sailing formation – the transports in a rough square surrounded by their escorts – out in the Channel.
Mr Barthe came and stood by him, speaking trumpet under his arm.
'My compliments to you and Mr Franks.' Hayden nodded to the sailing master. 'The hands appear to know their business very well.'
'They will take a fair amount of working up, sir,' Barthe allowed, 'but we will make a crew of them, yet. Like many who have not served in His Majesty's Navy, they show a marked increase in enthusiasm when we exercise the guns, but they have yet to fire a single shot.'
'I think they will make a crack crew, Mr Barthe. In fact, I have no doubt of it. We are short a lieutenant and a middy or two but we will make do. I believe I shall promote Wickham to acting third lieutenant. Do you think he can manage it?'
'He is already more competent than several lieutenants I have sailed with.' Barthe did not glance toward Saint-Denis, though he did not need to. 'But he is barely sixteen – three years shy of the age such responsibilities would normally be given.'
'If I had a midshipman of eighteen or nineteen years I would give the position to him, but we are deficient in several ways – a mere master and commander for a captain, one lieutenant short, fewer middies than I would like, a ship no captain will take, and a crew no one will have. What am I to do?'
Barthe laughed. 'When you state it so, Captain, I cannot argue. It is Mr Wickham for third lieutenant.'
'I am pleased you agree.'
Sail was made with an alacrity that pleased Hayden even more, and the frigate gathered way and set out into the Channel. Much of a fair wind was wasted forming up the transports, but finally the convoy shaped its course down-Channel and for the distant ocean. Sail was soon reduced to allow them to keep pace with the slowest transport – the vessel that would set the speed for their passage, which, despite Pool's constant signals to make all sail, was going to be very slow indeed.
Leaving Archer as officer of the watch, Hayden went below to his cabin. Passing by the scuttle over the gunroom he heard laughter and conversation within and imagined Hawthorne pouring wine for all and sundry. His cabin seemed both empty and damply cool when he entered, despite the lamps his servant had lit. For a moment he stood in the centre of this vast space – many times the size of his cabin off the gunroom – and felt a strange sense of separation.
'You aspired to it,' he muttered aloud, then peeled off his coat and hung it on the back of a chair. The ship heeled but little to the small wind, bobbing over the short sea kicked up by flooding tide and outbound wind.
The marine sentry let his servant in and Hayden asked for coffee.
The sentry made a knuckle and cleared his throat as the servant passed. 'One of the men asked me give you this,' he said, holding out a sodden square of paper. 'He found it on the deck, sir.'
Hayden took the sheet of paper and held it up to the light. The ink had blotted and run over most of what was apparently a letter and was only barely legible here and there.
…ese debts, accrued against my express wishes, will not be honour…
And then, near the bottom,… make your own way in th…
Hayden attempted no more, but sent for Saint-Denis. The lieutenant arrived a moment later, his colour high, from drink, no doubt.
'You wished to see me, sir.'
Hayden proffered the sodden letter. 'This was found on the deck. I wondered if it might belong to you?'
Saint-Denis took the letter, glanced at it, folded it quickly and hid hands and letter behind his back. 'Does everyone aboard know what it says, then?'
Hayden shook his head. 'The man brought it to me because he could not read, and it is all but blotted, anyway.'
Neither knew what to say.
Saint-Denis looked like a man who had been told his wife had died. 'No flagship, it seems,' he said, attempting a little self-mockery.
Hayden shrugged, unsure how to respond.
Saint-Denis nodded – at the ship, Hayden guessed. 'Only this.'
'It is possible to work one's way up through the service without interest.'
'As you have done?'
Hayden tried to muzzle his offence at this remark. 'It is not the quickest route, I admit, but still possible… for a competent officer who distinguishes himself.'
'Good to learn it is not hopeless. Will there be anything more, Captain?'
'Yes. One thing.' Hayden paused to choose his words. 'When I give you an order, I do not expect you to pass the duty on to Archer. You will perform it. Do you understand?'
Saint-Denis gazed back at him with ill-concealed resentment. 'I am the first officer. Am I expected to scamper aloft and take in sail?'
Hayden's not inconsiderable temper flooded up. 'You know precisely to what I refer. If you do not feel equal to the duties of first lieutenant, please tell me so. I am quite certain Archer can perform them competently.'
The man shook his head, glancing away. 'That will not be necessary.'
'As we are short a lieutenant, I will have to ask you to stand watch. Wickham will be acting third until a new officer is sent aboard. That will be all.'
Saint-Denis went stiffly out, the sound of his footstep echoing back through the door, as the soles of his shoes bumped slowly down the stairs, stopped, and then continued.
Coffee arrived and the acting captain poured himself a cup with a hand trembling from anger.
'Send word for Mr Wickham, if you please,' he said to his servant. At least he would have good news for someone.
The coffee, steaming and strong, had the effect of an elixir. It turned his mood and changed his view of the world. Wickham arrived and Hayden offered the youngster coffee.
'Thank you, sir.' The boy sat expectantly, waiting to learn the cause of his summons. There was such a contrast between Wickham's will to please and to excel in his duties and the character of Saint-Denis – a dilettante if Hayden had ever met one. Wickham would make his way in the service if his father were a tradesman. His connections were helpful but not necessary.
'Can I assume, Mr Wickham, that if I offered to make you acting lieutenant you would not refuse?'
'No, sir, I would not! Thank you, sir! It is a great honour.'
'It is a great necessity. You are yet sixteen and should not be thrust into such a position for several years, but we have need of a lieutenant and I believe you will fulfil the position admirably.'
'I will do everything within my power not to disappoint you, Mr Hayden. I mean Captain.'
'I have no doubt. I regret you cannot have a cabin in the gunroom but the clergy have taken two. I'm sure you will be very welcome in the mess, however.'
'Thank you, sir.'
'How is our new middy adapting to life afloat? Not seasick, I hope.'
'Not in the least, sir. No, he has a great store of knowledge about ships and the Navy, Captain. Far more than I could claim when first I came aboard. But then he has been around ships most of his life.' Wickham paused. 'His father is a bum-boat man.'
Hayden was surprised. 'He told you?'
'No, sir. I recognized him. On occasion he would aid his father… when not in school. I am sure I am not the only one who will remember him, Captain.'
'Do you anticipate a problem?'
Wickham raised his cup and, gazing down into it, swirled the liquid. 'Well, sir, his faith means nothing to me, but the Admiralty might feel differently.'
'He is prepared to take the sacrament, if required.'
'So he's become Christian, then? There is no impediment to his service?'
'You heard what Mr Smosh said at dinner – the church does not much care how people come to it. Like the good reverend, perhaps, Gould had more need of a career than a new faith, but I shall not sit in judgement.'
'He is very bright and capable; I hope the men accept him.'
'Yes, let us hope they do. Enquire of Saint-Denis what watch he would have you stand.'
'Aye, sir. And thank you again, Captain.'
Hayden waved a hand in dismissal. 'You might as well join the play – acting captain, acting lieutenant. We are all actors here, it seems, and all the sea's our stage.' Thoughts of 'Romeo' Moat made Hayden smile.
Outside the door, Wickham's dignified retreat turned into a joyous gallop, the sound of his shoes clattering down the stairs like a colt released into a spring field.
Having accepted a dinner invitation from the gunroom for the evening next, Hayden supped alone in his cabin, constantly listening to the sound of the wind and measuring the sea state by the motion of the ship. The northerly was holding and bearing them out towards the Atlantic, but it was a cold wind and Hayden was pleased to see his dinner arrive, steaming.
When lids were removed from chafing dishes Hayden was surprised to find a meal in the French style, with exquisite sauces and cooked to a nicety.
'Good God,' he said finally to his steward, 'did Jefferies produce this meal? It is exquisite!'
The steward was suppressing a self-satisfied grin. 'Not quite, sir. Childers and Dryden learned you didn't have no cook, sir, so they found you one. I hope you don't mind, sir.'
'Mind? They are to be commended. I shall thank them myself. Who is this man – the cook I mean?'
'Rosseau, Captain.'
'He's French…' Hayden felt a sudden apprehension. 'An émigré?'
'I don't rightly know, Captain, but I should think so.'
'Well, I am happy such a man would agree to come to sea. I shall have to meet him. Would you bring him when I am finished? And Childers and Dryden too, if Saint-Denis can spare them.'
'Aye, sir.'
When Hayden had finished overeating, Childers and Dryden came trooping in, followed by a third: an oddly shaped, almost misshaped, face crowned by coarse, coal-dust hair. His eyes were astonishingly dark, large and fevered-looking. Skin pale and glossy, chin small, cheekbones high and overly large. Hayden hoped the man was not ill, for certainly, he looked it.
Hayden rose from his chair. 'This is the man who prepared the exquisite meal?'
'Yes, sir,' Childers answered. 'He don't speak much English but you'll find his French is crackin'.'
'And speaking of finding: wherever did you find such a man?'
Childers and Dryden glanced at each other, oddly uncomfortable. 'In Plymouth, sir.'
'So he is an émigré?' Hayden turned to the cook. 'Vous êtes un émigré, n'est-ce pas?'
The man looked confused. 'Non, monsieur… le ponton.'
Hayden's smile melted. 'A hulk…'
The Frenchman nodded. 'Oui, the 'ulk.'
Hayden turned on Dryden and Childers. 'Not a prison hulk…'
Dryden threw up his hands and looked at Childers, alarmed. 'We thought he was wandering around Plymouth looking for a position, sir. That's what we were told.'
'And who told you this?'
Both Childers and Dryden looked flummoxed, now. 'Well, sir, this fellow, uh… I don't rightly know his proper name.'
'Monsieur… Worth,' Rosseau said, his comprehension of English clearly better than had been represented. 'Monsieur Worth,' he said again, nodding hopefully.
'Worth…' Hayden could not quite believe what he was hearing. 'Our Worth? Speak up!'
'Aye, Captain.' Childers admitted.
Hayden turned to Rosseau. 'How did you come to England?' he asked in French.
'I was the captain's chef, monsieur, aboard the Dragoon.'
'The Dragoon!'
The man nodded, a curious bobbing of his small head.
Hayden turned back to his coxswain and master's mate, both of whom stood ramrod straight, eyes fixed forward. 'And Worth got him out of a hulk? Bloody hell, was no one thinking? The authorities will be looking for him.'
'They'll give it up after a few days… won't they?' Dryden responded softly.
'We thought you might like to have a French cook, sir, as we know you're fond of their victuals,' Childers spluttered.
'Indeed I would, Childers,' Hayden said, 'if he were not a prisoner of war!' Hayden paced across the cabin. Worth would be involved in this – the man who had risked prison, at Hayden's request, to steal back Barthe's logbook. He was greatly in Worth's debt… and now look what the man had done! 'Well, there isn't anything for it now. He can't swim back to Plymouth and we will all be in some difficulties if we turn him in.' Hayden stopped to stare at the two crewmen. No one returned his gaze. 'We shall have to keep him, for the present.'
'Shall he continue cooking for you? – he's on the books, sir.'
'What else would he do? Fight the French?'
'I don't imagine he's much of a fighter, sir,' Dryden offered meekly.
Hayden almost laughed at the absurdity of the situation. 'No, I don't imagine he is. Back to your duties.'
Dryden turned as he was about to pass through the doorway. 'Is Worth in trouble, sir?'
'You are all in trouble, Mr Dryden, I just don't know exactly what kind or how to mete out punishment to men who intended me such a kindness. No more such gestures, Mr Dryden. Do you hear? And tell Worth the same.'
'Aye, sir.'
Hayden nodded to the chef, who looked confused by these strange Englishmen. 'Excellent meal, Monsieur Rosseau. Très bon. Merci.'
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 5
|
Winds, varied in strength and point of origin, carried the convoy fitfully across Biscay. Ushant was left, unseen, to larboard, as Pool hoped to slip out of the Channel and into the Atlantic without privateers being alerted to their presence. But the chops of the Channel was one of the busiest shipping areas on earth and sail were seen. He had no doubt that news of their convoy was speeding faster than they were. They would not outrun it.
Unable to sleep, and suffering mild dyspepsia, Hayden took the deck at dawn of their third day. He found Wickham and Barthe on the quarterdeck, huddled in muted conversation. The night was very close, the decks wet from an earlier rain, but there was little weight in the wind – north-west by west. Before them he could see a few fitful lights of the convoy vessels, winking in and out of being.
Hayden addressed the helmsmen loudly, to alert his officers to his presence. Many a captain had come on deck to hear himself being discussed, not always in the most flattering terms, and Hayden wanted to avoid that.
'Captain,' Barthe said, touching his hat.
Hayden greeted them in return. 'All is well, I hope?' Their manner, serious, almost anxious, made him wonder if this were true.
'We believe so, sir,' Barthe replied, 'but Mr Wickham thinks he saw a light about an hour ago, off our starboard quarter some two miles distant. And then again, more abeam just a few moments ago.'
'It was just for an instant, sir, when the rain let up.'
'Have we a straggler?' Hayden turned and looked out to sea in the direction the light had been seen. Wickham could discern more in the dark than any man aboard, so Hayden was inclined to take this seriously.
'I hope not, Captain,' Barthe said, 'but it would not surprise me. Even so, we have had no signal, if a ship has fallen behind.'
'It will be light soon, and then we shall know.' Hayden made a tour of the deck, speaking with the sentries and some of the hands. He was trying to learn the names of the new men and make judgements as to their characters. A number had been sailors in the merchant fleet and were fitting in well, but among the landsmen, most of whom had been impressed, there was, if not discontent, despondency and confusion. Hayden had seen this before; men taken from their familiar world and thrown into a situation they neither aspired to nor understood. A hostile sea all around, enemy ships seeking them. It was enough to undermine the stoutest character. A little prize money would set them to rights, Hayden thought. But there would be little chance of that on convoy duty.
By the time Hayden had completed his circuit of the deck, the eastern sky had paled to tarnished silver and the dull waters stretched, restive, to a near horizon. Stepping back onto the quarterdeck, Hayden found Barthe and Wickham standing at the rail, the corpulent sailing master beside the slender youth. Wickham was pointing to the west and they were both staring with some intensity.
'There! Did you see?' Wickham clapped the master on the arm.
'No. But I cannot think that one of our transports has climbed so far to windward. Ah, Captain,' Barthe said as Hayden approached. 'Wickham has found sails out in the murk. One ship on our beam and maybe a schooner hurrying away to the north-east. Shall we signal Pool?'
Hayden leaned his hands on the wet rail and felt the chill bite into him. 'Have the flags readied, but let us wait a moment. Perhaps we can discover what manner of ship this is.'
Light penetrated the clouds slowly, revealing the myriad shades of grey. For a moment it appeared to grow darker, but finally the brightening sky, and a momentary break in the distant murk, revealed sails and a dark, unmistakable hull.
'Not one of our transports,' Hayden pronounced, and felt his breath suddenly grow short. He raised his hands but instead of slamming fists down on wood, slapped them down gently.
'I could not make her out,' Barthe said, still squinting into the distance. 'What manner of ship?'
'A frigate, Mr Barthe,' Wickham informed him. 'Shall I make the signal, Captain?'
'Yes. It is likely Pool has seen her himself, but let us not count on that. Call all hands, Mr Barthe. We shall beat to quarters.'
A moment later the remaining middies tumbled out on the deck, the officers in their wake. Hawthorne, pulling on his pipe-clayed straps, crossed to Hayden.
'Privateers?' he wondered, finding Hayden with a glass held to his eye.
'It is a frigate, Mr Hawthorne,' Hayden replied, not lowering the glass. 'Very likely French, though she has not the courtesy to show her colours.'
He passed the glass to the marine lieutenant, who steadied it against a shroud.
'We were not expecting that,' Hawthorne said. 'She is raising her colours, Captain. Do you see?'
'On deck! A hoist of flags going aloft,' the lookout called from above.
A train of massive flags, twelve feet broad, became barely visible between the sails.
'She's signalling,' Hawthorne said, confused. 'To whom?'
'Well, Mr Hawthorne,' Hayden ventured. 'We have differing possibilities; she has confederates just over the horizon whom we cannot discern, or she is signalling to no one at all but hoping we will believe she is not alone.'
'But which is it?' Hawthorne asked.
'If I knew that, Mr Hawthorne, I should be a seer, not a sailor.' Hayden nodded to Saint-Denis, who came up at that moment. 'We have a consort ship, it seems, Lieutenant, feeling a bit lonely on the great ocean.'
Saint-Denis raised his glass, his mouth drawn in a thin line, skin pallid. 'How many others are there, I wonder?'
'We will know by and by,' Barthe said, appearing beside them. 'If there is a squadron, the ships will soon show themselves.'
'Signals, captain!' Wickham called out, pointing to the convoy ships which ranged out before them. Wickham clambered up onto the rail, took hold of the shrouds and leaned out to gain a better view. His shadow, midshipman Gould, stood on the deck, gazing forward.
'I believe Captain Pool wishes us to exchange places with the Kent,' Gould said to Wickham. 'Or have I got it wrong?'
Wickham swung around and smiled at his protégé. 'It is right in every way – and without a signal book to hand. Well done, Gould!' He turned to Hayden. 'Did you hear, Captain? We are to exchange our place with the Kent.'
'Yes. Mr Barthe, make sail. If the wind shifts into the sou'west, which I believe it will this day, we shall have a nasty turn to windward to catch the Kent.' Hayden turned and found the bosun a dozen yards away in the midst of men releasing the quarterdeck carronades. 'Make all speed, Mr Franks. Let us show Pool that we know our business.'
Archer and Wickham knew their jobs well and sped the men in their work. In the midst of the ship being cleared for action, sail was made, yards braced, sail trimmed and the helm put over. They began to overtake the convoy, sailing out towards the western edge of the ragged formation and the ship that was once to have been Hayden's. A long groundswell from the south-west reached them, and the sound of the Themis rising and parting each low sea would have gladdened Hayden's heart if the groundswell had not been a harbinger of bad weather – and from an unfavourable point of the compass, too.
Hayden fixed the French frigate in his glass and watched her put a little sea room between them, perhaps thinking the Themis was being sent out to challenge her.
'She is keeping her distance, Captain,' Hawthorne observed. 'I would say her people are a bit shy of us, though they boast thirty-six guns to our thirty-two.'
'Her captain is merely being prudent, Mr Hawthorne, fearing Pool's seventy-four might be brought into any action.' Hayden called for Wickham.
'Sir?' Wickham replied, hurrying onto the quarterdeck and touching his hat.
'How certain were you of this sail going north?' Hayden asked the boy.
Wickham peered off north, as though he might yet catch a second glimpse of this phantom. 'Quite certain, sir. A schooner, I think, shaping her course for Brest.'
Hayden nodded. 'I will send a message to Captain Pool. It is not news that will improve his humour, but if there will soon be a French squadron hunting us he should be apprised of it. I will write Pool a note. Signal McIntosh that I have a letter for Captain Pool.'
Before Hayden could go below to his desk the clergymen appeared on deck, Worthing red-faced and in obvious illhumour. He glared about, spotted Hayden, and stomped across the deck to him.
'Mr Hayden, not only have I been insulted by your surgeon, but I am being prevented from exercising the duties of my office! I demand you discipline this man immediately.'
Smosh followed meekly behind, though Hayden thought he saw just a hint of pleasure flicker across the pudgy face.
'Whatever do you mean, Dr Worthing?' Hayden asked. 'What duties of your office?'
'Mr Griffiths will not allow me to visit in his sick-berth, to which place I had gone to bring comfort to the sick and hurt.'
'Ah,' Hayden said. 'Did Dr Griffiths not explain that the seamen believe that a clergyman visiting in the sick-berth is a sure sign that one of them will die?'
'Are we to run our ship on superstition!' Worthing thundered. 'It is no wonder that you are not a proper captain.'
A sudden urge to throw this pompous ass into the sea came over Hayden, and he stepped back, clasping his hands behind his back less they failed to resist this temptation.
'I do not give way to superstition when it comes to the running of my ship, Doctor, but in this one matter there is no choice. The men will not go to the doctor if a clergyman is allowed to visit them, and then all manner of illness can spread before Dr Griffiths is even aware of it. So, I am sorry, but I must insist that you – both of you – not enter the sick-berth.'
But Worthing was not about to concede this point and if anything became angrier. 'What kind of heathens are these men that they will turn their backs on the god of the Christians when they are ill?'
Hayden's temper got the better of him, but he managed to speak evenly. 'No offence, Doctor, but I do not believe you are the god of the Christians.'
Smosh turned away, his shoulders shaking silently.
Worthing drew himself up. 'I did not for a moment suggest that I was. You are aware, Mr Hayden, that my presence was requested in the Mediterranean fleet by the Lord Admiral himself.'
'A very impressive credential, I am sure, but I can tell you with authority that the parson aboard the Victory does not visit in the sick-berth; Lord Hood would not allow it.'
'That cannot be true.'
'It is, if I may say it, God's truth. Ask any officer aboard. It is a tradition of the Royal Navy, Dr Worthing, and I must ask that you respect it.'
'Well, it is a foolish, apostatical tradition and I am not pleased by it. I have half a mind to bring this before Commodore Pool – if he is a commodore and not some crossbreed of a master and a lieutenant whom Navy tradition demands I address as "Lord High Admiral".'
'I can assure you that such an action will not endear you to Captain Pool; nor will it improve your situation aboard this ship. I am to convey you to the Mediterranean, Doctor, but you have no official capacity aboard the Themis. You are a guest and I expect you to conduct yourself accordingly. Now, I am in the middle of clearing this ship for action and must ask that remove yourself from harm's way for the time being. Excuse me.' And Hayden turned away. He would never have spoken thus to Worthing if the man had not insulted him so – and upon his own quarterdeck! Had the man no common sense at all?
Hayden soon caught the Kent, and the little ship dropped back into his position in the convoy's wake and then exchanged places with Bradley's frigate so that the Kent was on the opposite side of the convoy to the enemy ship.
The day wore on, wind varying a point or two this way or that, making a little, then taking off. Rain, icy cold and hard as hail, stuttered down upon the deck like beads of glass. A confused north-westerly sea overlaid a long ground swell from the south-west, rolling the Themis in a strange, unnatural manner. Seamen easily adjusted themselves to a ship's rhythm but this day it had none, rolling and rising in ways no one could predict.
Hawthorne and Barthe stood by the taffrail, eyes fixed upon the ominous frigate that maintained its distant vigil. Twice since the morning she had moved out nearer the western horizon and made signals to invisible ships, but then she would resume her place, two-thirds of a league distant, her course parallel to their own.
'I have never known a groundswell to last so long without bad weather following,' Hawthorne observed to the sailing master.
Barthe shifted uneasily. 'No, and when it does happen it is commonly a sign of hard weather coming. Ah, Captain,' he said as Hayden approached. 'Do you think we are in for a harsh gale?'
'This groundswell is making me fearful, that is certain.' Hawthorne, who suffered a little illness in bad weather, did not look happy. 'Well, we have come through many a gale,' he said stoically. 'I expect we shall do so again.'
'No doubt, Mr Hawthorne.'
The schooner, Phalarope, appeared among the sails of the convoy, her course clearly set for the Themis. In a few moments she had rounded the Themis and ranged up alongside, a ship-length to leeward.
'Captain Hayden!' McIntosh called. The man stood at the rail, back to a sudden rain squall, his head drawn down beneath his sou'wester. 'The commodore requests that you come aboard Majestic.'
'Pass the word for Saint-Denis,' Hayden ordered.
'Aye, sir.'
Hayden reluctantly passed command of his ship to Saint-Denis and climbed down into the Phalarope's boat. As the boat pushed off from the Themis, Hayden was hailed from aloft and looked up to see Wickham in the tops, hand cupped to his mouth, calling down over the sound of wind and sea.
'Captain Hayden, sir! I believe I saw a sail on the horizon. Beyond the frigate.'
'Are you certain, Mr Wickham?' Hayden called back.
The midshipman hesitated a moment. 'No, sir. 'Tis thick as mud out there, sir, but even so, it appeared to be a sail.'
'Can you see it now?'
Wickham looped an arm around a stay, then raised his glass, sweeping it slowly across an obscure horizon. 'No, sir, I cannot.'
'Keep looking. If you perceive a sail, have Saint-Denis send word to Pool, immediately.'
'Aye, Captain.'
The oarsmen dug in and a moment later Hayden was aboard the schooner and making his way among the ships of the convoy. Hayden was made uncomfortable by Wickham's report and borrowed McIntosh's glass to examine the horizon himself.
'Do you think he really saw a ship, Hayden?' McIntosh asked.
'Many a time he has spotted vessels before any man aboard. It is not impossible.'
McIntosh gazed thoughtfully out towards the western mists. 'If there were French ship's over the horizon, why would they hide themselves away?'
'I don't know but I fear we will soon learn.'
Phalarope made the rounds of the escorting vessels and carried all the captains up to Majestic, where they went quickly aboard. Oilskins were shed and taken by servants before the gathered officers were let into the captain's cabin.
Pool appeared as impatient as always, pacing across the cabin as they entered. He stopped as the officers filed in, and waved them to chairs gathered around his table.
'We have no time for pleasantries,' he began, taking his place, standing, at the head of the table. He leaned forward and put his hands on the back of his chair. 'As you no doubt all know by now, one of Hayden's middies saw a schooner hurrying north at first light. I have decided not to wait until it returns with a squadron. I propose to engage and take the lone frigate just before sunrise. Thus, if a squadron does overtake us, there will be one ship fewer for us to fight.'
Hayden could feel the excitement and anticipation among the gathered officers. He felt it himself, and hated to be the one to ruin this mood.
'If I may speak, Captain Pool, the same midshipman thought he saw a sail on the western horizon just moments ago. Certainly the French frigate has been signalling as though to ships in that direction.'
'Did you see this sail, Hayden?' Pool demanded.
'I did not, sir, but he was in the tops and I had just climbed down into McIntosh's cutter.'
'Was he certain?' Bradley enquired.
'No. I questioned him and he was not, but he has better eyes than any man I know so I think it is something that should be carefully weighed in any discussion.'
'There is no discussion, Hayden,' Pool stated firmly. 'But you needn't worry – Bradley and I will go after the frigate and you will stay with the convoy, so there will be no danger to you.'
Hayden almost rose to his feet, his anger was so immediate and immoderate. 'Sir, I should gladly put myself in harm's way if it is required, and no one has any reason to believe otherwise.'
'Be at peace, Hayden,' Pool said soothingly, but not without a little sarcastic smile. 'Perhaps you shall yet have a chance to prove your courage. But not this day, nor tomorrow.' He turned his attention back to the others. 'Bradley and I will douse our lights and, just before first light, slip out to where the frigate has been holding position. If the Frenchman flies, Bradley will give chase and bring her to or harass her so that I may bring my guns to bear. We shall have a prize and all of you shall partake of the profit. I assume no one will complain of that?'
Hayden looked around the table. He thought he detected some doubt in more than one face but no one spoke. 'I believe we shall have a gale from the south-east,' Hayden said, forcing confidence into both his voice and manner, 'and what if there is a French squadron just out of sight?'
Pool sighed, theatrically, almost throwing up his hands. 'Captain Hayden, if there is a gale and we cannot open our gunports, then clearly we will not attempt to take this frigate. We are not fools. And if there is a French squadron why do they hide over the horizon? There could be no reason for it. This French captain is signalling to no one hoping to confuse us – hoping to keep us from doing exactly what we are about to do – sailing out to take him.' He turned away from Hayden. 'No one need move from their place in the convoy. Bradley and I shall take this Frenchman by surprise.'
A toast was drunk to the success of the action, and the gathered officers left, climbing quickly up to the deck. Hayden went down into the boat and then across to the Phalarope. None of the other captains spoke, as would be usual before an action, excitement and anticipation high. There was instead an awkward silence, most difficult to read.
Bradley was brought first to Syren, and once the boat was beyond hearing, Jones turned to Hayden. 'Do you truly believe there is a squadron out there, Hayden?'
Hayden felt both oppressed and sullenly angry. 'I only know what my midshipman said – a most reliable and enterprising young man. Certainly it was my duty to relate this to Pool.'
'But why would they remain there, out of sight?' Stewart asked.
'Why, indeed. I cannot give an answer to that. I only felt that, as we are on convoy escort and not a cruise, that this information might be taken under consideration – which it was not.' Hayden knew that he had said too much but anger and resentment were like an oil that loosened a man's tongue – his tongue, anyway.
He was back aboard the Themis but two hours after he had left her. In the interval Saint-Denis had created conflict with Barthe over the sail being carried, and Worthing, Hayden learned, had applied to Saint-Denis to visit the hands confined to the sick-berth. Saint-Denis had prudence enough not to accede to this request; a surprise to Hayden as the lieutenant appeared to have little common sense when it came to anything else.
Night was quickly upon them and the wind veered to the west, making noticeably until a high chorus sang in the rigging, slurring up and down a minor scale. Lights from the other ships winked in and out as the ships rolled and squalls of wintery rain soaked the canvas. An ancient mizzen topsail split from the mere weight of water.
Hayden invited Griffiths to dine with him, and the two made company in the great cabin, which had been reconstructed after having been cleared entirely away when they had beat to quarters. The rolling of the ship was such that only a little more and tables and chairs would need to be moved and secured, dinner eaten in some awkward arrangement that resembled a merry andrew juggling.
'Thank you for sparing me another speech from the good parson on what a favourite of Lord Hood's he happens to be.' Griffiths, smiled and shook his head. 'The man cannot secure a living ashore, and yet expects us to believe a personage of the eminence of Lord Hood has taken special notice of him. With such an amiable character and interest upon high it is a wonder he is not a bishop. Good Lord!'
Hayden laughed. The ship rolled heavily to leeward and Hayden preserved the wine bottle and a salt shaker, Griffiths the gravy boat. A fork slid away and clattered across the floor.
'We are carrying too much sail,' Hayden observed, and began to rise, but at that moment he heard hands being called. 'Ah, Barthe must have taken the deck.' He returned to his chair.
Griffiths took a sip of his claret. 'I understand our Frenchman is a royalist?'
'To which Frenchman are we referring?'
'The cook. Or should I say chef?'
'Rosseau. He's hardly going to claim himself a Jacobin aboard our ship, is he?'
'No, but Wickham informed me the man only just learned that the queen had been guillotined – if you can believe it. Wickham claims the Frenchman wept like a baby. Rosseau apparently told Wickham that he once served a noble family and cooked a meal attended by Louis and his queen.'
'I suppose it is possible. A man of such talents would hardly have been cook for a shoemaker.'
'From what the French claim of English culinary skills you would think the cook of a French shoemaker would be fit for the king of England.'
'Actually, Doctor, according to the French, a French shoemaker would be fit to cook for an English king.'
Griffiths laughed. 'I'm sure he would have some excellent sole recipes. Ha ha!'
Ever since Hawthorne had told him that Griffiths had had his hopes disappointed, Hayden had thought the doctor rather more melancholy than usual. His laughter seemed forced, his pleasantries mere formalities, with even less sincerity than was common. But then he had not known the doctor before his misfortune; perhaps he had always been thus. Or perhaps Hayden was merely reading more into Griffiths's manner than was reasonable. It had been two years since his suit had been rebuffed; perhaps he had put the past out of mind and looked only forward.
'I hope we survive having this man aboard,' Griffiths said, his manner suddenly grave. 'Worthing, I mean.'
'He is froward, there is no doubt, but I hardly think he is a danger to the ship's company. No one likes him.'
'That is true, but I wouldn't underestimate the trouble such a man could cause. His kind have great capacity for creating conflict. I have seen it before. He cannot be happy unless he is stirring the pot of others' emotions, setting one man against another, and taking insult where none is intended or could be perceived by a man of more moderate character. No, he will cause us trouble, you will see. Already he has tried to undermine your authority by going to Saint-Denis when you refused him entry to the sick-berth. He and your first lieutenant can make common cause as Worthing is… reverential of his social betters and both feel they have been valued beneath their worth. But I will say no more and hope to be proven wrong.'
'In this particular matter, Dr Griffiths, I will hope the same.'
'I am told we are going after a prize at first light.'
'No. We are to observe this action, and perhaps admire, but in no way are we to be involved, though, of course, we will stand by ready to offer assistance should it be required.'
Griffiths considered his wine glass a moment, the stem caught between two fingers, palm flat on the table. A small circle of the hand swirled the wine up the sides. 'You know I claim no particular knowledge on such matters, but is this prudent?'
Hayden drew a long breath. 'Perfectly so, if the French ship is alone.'
'But if it is not?'
'Then it is not.'
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 6
|
Hayden rose before first light, ate a meagre breakfast, and then ordered his cabin cleared, the guns moved back into position. Chettle and his assistants appeared, quickly taking down the bulkhead panels, his few possessions whisked away by servants.
'Take care with that table,' he ordered the hands.
Hayden climbed up a dimly lit ladder to the quarterdeck; a fresh wind, harsh and dense with spray, almost took his hat. Hawthorne and Wickham stood at the starboard rail, gazing out into the darkness. They ducked behind the bulwark, and turned their backs as spray dashed over the rail, then up again.
'Mr Wickham,' Hayden said, 'do you never sleep?'
'Apologies, Captain, we didn't see you,' the youth replied.
'No need. Can you make out Bradley and Pool?'
Wickham shook his head, his youthful face pale with worry. 'It is too close, sir. But we should have some light, by and by, and then, mayhap, I will know what goes on.'
Archer came up, then, and touched his hat. 'We are cleared, Captain Hayden. I have the men at their stations and no drum was beat, sir, as you ordered.'
'Well done, Mr Archer. I think this Frenchman will lower his flag after firing a single broadside,' Hayden observed, forcing confidence into his voice, 'especially when he sees both a frigate and a seventy-four appearing out of the darkness.'
'It appears our gale is finally going to arrive, though.' Archer peered into the darkness. 'The weather glass is falling, and the wind continues to veer. I fear our transports will not be able to lay their course if the wind goes even a little further south.'
'You are right – they will not. We'll wait for Pool's signals but I expect we will heave to on the larboard tack. He will not like it much but there will be little choice.'
Hayden took a turn of the deck, both to stretch his legs and to be sure his ship was ready for any eventuality. Ducking his head he went down to the gundeck, stopping to speak with the gun crews, being certain there was shot and powder enough. Many of the landsmen had never heard the great guns fire but had only participated in exercises without shot and powder. Still they knew the drill well enough, even if they were utterly innocent of the result. There was, about the men, an air of anticipation and anxiety, all of them sober-faced in the poor light.
'Do you think we'll be in an action, Captain?' Hobson asked.
'I do not, Mr Hobson, but we must be ready in case our assistance is required. I believe a frigate and a seventy-four-gun ship can manage a French thirty-six quite well. We need only watch and cheer.'
He could see the men relax a little as they heard this. They were also a little disappointed, Hayden sensed.
On deck the sky seemed as dark as ever, and time dragged by as though dawn would not come that day.
Rain began to fall, swept against the topside planking and the decks, clattering like a dropped box of lead balls. The gun captains covered the locks of the carronades with lead covers, and powder cartridges were hurried below. It was all but impossible to look to windward, and Hayden gave up, hoping the squall would pass.
Forty minutes the deluge lasted, then it began to abate. Light seemed to follow, the sky growing brighter by the instant.
'On deck,' the lookout called. 'Sail two points aft on the starboard beam.'
'There she is, sir, Majestic.' Wickham pointed.
A two-decker appeared, gun ports open, her course parallel to their own. And then a frigate, only two ship's lengths before.
'Is that Bradley or the Frenchman?' Barthe demanded. 'I cannot tell.'
'Nor can I, Mr Barthe,' Wickham answered.
'You're a lieutenant now; we expect you to see things when they need to be seen,' Barthe observed.
'My apologies, Mr Barthe, I shall endeavour to see better.' Wickham's hand shot up. 'There is a second, frigate, I think.'
'Where?'
'Beyond, Majestic, Mr Barthe.'
For a moment no one spoke, but all gazed anxiously into the gloom, grey wisps of fog, obscuring rain, and dark, rolling seas.
'Well, this will be a surprise for the Frenchman,' Hawthorne observed with satisfaction.
'That ship seems very large for a frigate,' Hayden said, trying to make out the vessel beyond Pool's seventy-four. 'That can't be Bradley…'
'Damn my eyes,' Wickham declared, straightening. 'She is a two-decker as well.'
Before anyone could frame a reply the more distant ship unleashed a broadside on the one nearer, several balls passing over the decks and holing the waves nearer the Themis.
'Is it a Frenchman?' Barthe demanded. 'Jesus! Can you not see, Wickham?'
'One of them is a Frenchman,' the boy replied, even his keen eyes unsure in this murk.
The nearer ship fired her broadside and then the frigate fired into the gloom, to be answered by a phantom. And then all the ships began firing, an incessant, random booming echoing across the rolling seas. A British flag was hoisted on the nearer ship.
'That is Pool,' Hawthorne announced unnecessarily.
'Yes, caught by surprise!' Barthe called over the noise. 'Where did that fucking French seventy-four come from?'
Another ship ranged out of the fog, and to cries of dismay from the crew of the Themis, ranged across Majestic's stern, raked her once, and then bore up alongside.
'A heavy frigate,' someone declared and cursed.
She was, indeed, a French thirty-six, her boats streaming aft like ducklings.
'Mr Barthe! Make sail. We shall tack immediately.'
'It is heavy wind to tack, sir,' Barthe called out over the sound of cannon. 'I fear we shall carry something away.'
'We shall tack, Mr Barthe, and then give us the mainsail. Handsomely now. Mr Franks! Call all hands. We shall tack then return to the guns.' Hayden hurried to the helm and took it from the surprised sergeant-at-arms. 'The yards must be braced around with all speed.'
The moment the hands were at their stations, Hayden brought the ship through the wind, everyone aboard staring up apprehensively to see if spars would carry away. The finger-nails-on-slate screech of stretching cordage rose above the wind, lingered too long, but then the ship came through the wind with all spars standing.
The mainsail rippled down, filled in an instant, and the ship heeled, picked up her skirts, and surged forward, seas breaking against the larboard bow.
'I'm not sure our gunports will be dry, Captain,' Barthe shouted. The master grabbed the rail and clapped his hat down to his eyebrows.
'There's nothing for it, Mr Barthe. We will keep them closed until the last moment.' Hayden turned to find Saint-Denis. The lieutenant stood by the capstan appearing undecided in his actions. Hayden gave the helm back to the sergeant-at-arms, crossed the few yards of deck and put his hand on the lieutenant's arm, leaning close to speak over the crash of the guns. 'Man the larboard guns, Lieutenant. Do not open the gunports until you have an order from me. Then we will run the guns out with all speed, rake the near frigate, pass by Pool's stern, rake the French two-decker, wear ship and give them our starboard battery. Have three of the gun captains – Tull, Brown and Wind-field – aim for the seventy-four's rudder. Is that understood?'
Saint-Denis nodded. Hayden watched him make his way to the companionway, but the man lost his balance and almost fell before reaching it, and then went awkwardly below. Hayden had come to believe the man's character so false that he worried he would lose his nerve at the crucial moment. It was impossible to know. One could never judge a man's courage before it had been tested.
Hayden stayed near the helmsman as they beat towards the firing ships, wanting to be certain they passed neither too close nor too near. All of his shot would have to tally if he wanted to preserve Pool from his present situation. Too far off and his carronades would be ineffective, too near and the Themis could pass the frigate on the wrong side of a sea and be unable to fire.
Smoke from the great guns blew down on them, sweeping, dark and ghostly, across their decks. A topmast tumbled on the Majestic, hung for an instant in the rigging, then toppled down into the sea.
As they drew nearer, rocking over the gathering waves, the pale faces of the officers came into focus. Hayden stood by the weather rail, grasping a mizzen shroud with his left hand, the cordage slippery wet and hard with tar. The distance between the Themis and her enemies seemed impossible to overcome, labour as she might. Hayden made his way forward onto the gangway, pausing by the hammock netting. Gould had been assigned as his runner, and the boy stood by, staring fixedly towards the battling ships, his face creased and ashen as though he aged before Hayden's eyes.
Leaning near to the boy, Hayden said, 'Run forward and tell Madison to fire his carronades into the frigate when he sees fit.' Hayden patted the boy firmly on the shoulder. He well remembered his first action at sea and knew a little of what the boy was feeling. It was a sobering moment to realize one's life could end within the hour.
'Aye, sir,' Gould replied, his voice thinned by apprehension. Hayden watched the boy hurry forward, frightened but overcoming his fears – a good sign.
Hawthorne ranged up alongside.
'Mr Hawthorne… here we are again.'
'Yes, and I thought convoy duty would be a bore. I should have known, with you in command, we would soon be in action.'
'I am not sure how I should take that, sir,' Hayden responded.
'As a compliment, to be sure,' Hawthorne assured him. 'You seem to need to fight the French every other day, which I approve most heartily. It is Tuesday and here are the French right on cue.'
Hayden could not help but smile.
Hawthorne went on. 'Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays we fight the French. Sunday rest and prayer. Mondays make and mend, and then Tuesdays it is the French again. Predictability is a virtue.' Hawthorne was pensively silent a moment. 'I must see to my men. Good luck to you, Captain.'
'And you, Mr Hawthorne.'
The French frigate was near, now. Hayden stood a moment more, judging their speed to a nicety, stepped quickly across the gangway, descended two steps and stood watching the approaching frigate. Bending low he looked down onto the gundeck. The men all stared back in awful silence.
To his first lieutenant Hayden called. 'Open larboard gunports, if you please, Mr Saint-Denis.'
Hayden stood again, stepping up one tread so that he could more clearly perceive what transpired. The ship rolled to larboard and Hayden ducked and called out. 'Cast free your guns.'
The ship rolled slowly back to starboard.
'Run out your guns!'
Hayden stood again, watching the frigate's stern draw near. The Frenchmen fired a stern-chaser at the Themis but Hayden did not take his eye away to see what damage it might have done. A second gun spoke.
A dull thud on the starboard side could only be the Frenchman's trailing boats colliding with the Themis.
Forward, a carronade spat fire and smoke, and Hayden squinted as a cloud enveloped him hiding everything for an instant. The brisk wind carried the smoke away just as another forecastle gun fired, and then another.
Hayden ducked his head below. 'Fire as she bears. Rake her, lads.'
Hayden went up onto the deck then, and watched the effect of his guns. One by one they fired, like the chiming of a massive clock. Boom!… Boom! He felt the power of them through the deck and the echo in his chest. The wind swirled smoke about the sails, and through it he would catch glimpses of the enemy frigate's stern, the shuttered gallery shattered, splinters flying up from the rail. He could hear men crying out. The orders of officers carried to him on the wind – his mother's tongue. Voices called upon God to aid them or to damn the English.
The wave of gunfire reached him, the gun beneath his feet shaking the deck, and Hayden turned his back for a moment, holding his breath and pressing his eyes closed, waiting for the wind to carry off the smoke. The next gun aft spoke, then the next. They were past.
Hayden had only a glimpse of the ruin they left behind as the stern of Majestic hid the French frigate. Above the crashing of guns he heard orders called to reload.
Majestic's stern towered over the Themis, and Hayden looked up to see a hatless lieutenant, his face bleeding, gesturing wildly and calling out words that could not be understood above the din. Hayden did not even make an attempt to reply, but sailed by, his course of action not about to be changed by some lieutenant who in all likelihood understood the situation less well than he. Pool had made a terrible error. That was the undeniable truth. Where the French ships had come from Hayden did not know. Perhaps they had been waiting over the horizon.
Hayden climbed down a stair and crouched, looking into the dim gundeck. Men were past their apprehension, now, caught up in the drill of loading and firing.
'The second ship is about to come abreast, Mr Saint-Denis. Fire as she bears. We made a ruin of that Frenchman and now we shall attempt to do the same to the seventy-four. Do not waste a shot.'
Saint-Denis's ashen face was powder-stained but his manner, though still awkward and stiff, did not lack resolve, which Hayden realized disappointed him; it would be easier to dislike Saint-Denis if he were shy, as well.
He stood and climbed a step, seeing the stern of the French ship not far off the larboard bow. The Themis plunged into the growing sea, the wind making by the moment. High above, on the stern of the French ship, Hayden could see men bearing muskets gathering at the taffrail. Climbing quickly out onto the gangway, Hayden called for Hawthorne, but the marine lieutenant had not missed the meaning of this, and was already scrambling aloft with a company of red-coated marines, muskets slung over their backs.
Hayden hurried forward, finding Mr Barthe and Wickham on the forecastle. The crack of musket fire sounded, and lead balls rang off the guns and buried themselves in the deck. With the motion of the two ships it was almost impossible to stand without holding on so hitting any target would be a matter of luck, but the gun captain of the forward carronade collapsed to the deck and was borne away by two sailors.
To Hayden's surprise, Wickham ordered Gould into the man's place and the boy stepped up smartly and took the offered firing lanyard. Barthe was barking orders to Franks and to his mates, trying to repair the small damage done by the French frigate's stern chasers.
One of the French musketeers plunged over the rail and down into the sea, brought down by Hawthorne's marines. And then a horrible, muted thud on the deck ten feet off, and a marine lay in a shattered heap, killed by the fall from aloft if not enemy fire.
A perfect accident of the sea occurred then; the Themis was thrown up on a freak wave as the French ship plunged into a deep trough. Hayden found himself staring along the enemy ship's upper deck, the surprised musket men not thirty feet away at eye level. Gould yanked the firing lanyard before Hayden could speak, and the party of French gunners were torn from the rail, bodies rent and strewn over the quarterdeck as though they had been cut down by a scythe. The gun had been loaded with grape.
The Themis plunged into the trough. The next gun did not fire as it should, for the men all stood, gaping in horror. Hayden forced himself to the next carronade, took hold of the lanyard and yanked it as the ship rolled up. He made his way quickly aft, down the stair onto the gundeck where cold water washed around his ankles.
Archer looked over to him, grim and worried. 'I'm not sure we can keep the gunports open, Mr Hayden.'
'Fire this broadside and then close them all. We will call hands to wear ship and chase the frigate again.'
Guns fired, one after the other, the ports slammed shut as they did so, muzzles neatly elevated and lashed in place. The ship rolled again and green water spilled over the port sills, and ran across the deck. It was a dangerous, dangerous thing they did, but Hayden felt he had no choice. Ships had run under doing just this and every sailor aboard knew it. If a gun broke loose with so many men at hand there would be injuries, even deaths.
The last carronade fired on the quarterdeck and Hayden hurried aft, watching the ships bear away south, guns still firing. Barthe came down the starboard gangway and met him on the quarterdeck.
'Shall I port my helm, sir?' the helmsman asked.
'Not yet,' Hayden answered. 'I want to rake the seventy-four once more and we shall need room to make our way to windward. Hold your course.'
Hands were called to wear ship and Hayden asked for his glass. Gould appeared at his side then, his face fish-belly white.
'How fare you, Mr Gould?'
'Did you see what I… what I did, Captain?' The boy's voice was raw with awe and horror. 'A dozen men torn limb from limb. It was like a slaughterhouse, sir, a slaughter—'
The boy slumped a little and Hayden caught him beneath the arm, Mr Barthe grasping the other. They stepped a little behind Gould to bear him up and shield him from the eyes of others. The men at the near carronades looked away.
'You'll be right in a moment,' Barthe said, his voice kindly. 'Breathe. Lean over the rail if you must be ill.'
The boy nodded, gasping for air. Hayden felt him take a little weight on his legs, then a little more. His hands, limp a moment before, reached out and grasped the rail.
'I am recovered, sir,' Gould said faintly.
'We will hold you a moment more,' Hayden replied.
But then he felt the boy take his own weight, and he released him, turning away and crossing to the helm.
'We will wear ship, Mr Barthe.'
'All hands to wear ship!' Barthe called into his speaking trumpet.
The rising wind was brought across the stern, the yards braced quickly around, for a moment the ship wallowed, then steadied, heeled and began to make way. The embattled ships were some distance off but under her press of sail the Themis closed on them quickly.
The shattered gallery windows and stern of the French seventy-four became clearer as they neared. Their eighteen-pounders had inflicted more damage then Hayden had hoped. Beyond the Frenchman, Hayden could see Majestic, her rigging and sails in ruin, her topmasts shot away.
The French seventy-four had the much vaunted weather gauge, but could not open the ports on her lower gundeck because she was heeled overly by the rising wind. Pool's marines were shooting any men sent aloft to reduce sail, thus keeping her adversary at a disadvantage. In response, the French skipper let sheets fly and some of his sails began flogging themselves to ruins.
Upon Pool's lee side, however, the French frigate was timing her broadsides to the crests, catching the British ship in a trough and causing slaughter across her decks.
'Mr Gould,' Hayden called.
The boy jogged over, doing his manly best to appear untouched by what went on.
'Go down to Saint-Denis and inform him we will go straight for the French frigate and leave the seventy-four to Pool. I want to rake her once, then range up alongside and give her our starboard broadside.'
The boy touched his hat. 'Aye, sir. Straight at the French frigate, sir.' He lumbered across the deck and down the companionway.
In the mist and rain beyond Majestic, Hayden found Bradley, who had worn ship and was running from the French frigate, his twenty-six twelve-pounders no match for thirty-six eighteens. The French captain was wearing ship to give chase. Beyond the smoke and chaos, Hayden could barely make out the nearest ships of the convoy, labouring heavily in the gathering seas.
The Themis passed the French two-decker at a distance, Hayden saving his shot. His gunners' attempts to disable the Frenchman's rudder shattered much planking in the transom, but the rudder head was intact – a nearly impossible shot in the best conditions.
A moment, and they were by the two battling ships. The stern of the French frigate came into view.
'Well, I'll be a god-damned French papist,' Barthe said. 'She's afire!'
Smoke streamed from the shattered gallery windows, and Hayden could see men running about her deck and, as she had no boats, climbing madly aloft to escape the flames. Her guns were silent.
'Shall we order the gunports opened?' Wickham asked as he came up. He fumbled his glass at that moment, and bent to retrieve it from the deck.
'No,' Hayden replied, shaken from his moment of surprise. 'We may be forced to come to their aid. Let the French captain signa—'
A sun of laval flame erupted through the enemy frigate's deck, and then a thunderous crash. Hayden felt himself hurled back onto hard planks. A moment of stunned silence as he tried to comprehend what had just occurred, and then splinters rained down all around, some aflame. He staggered up, found no one at the helm, and made his way there, taking hold of the wheel, relieved to have anything to help him stand. Men lay strewn about the deck, moaning.
Glancing up, Hayden realized his topsails were gone, only a few bits of rag snapping and fluttering in the wind. A twitching, red-sleeved hand hung down from the tops, the fallen marine's shoulder barely visible. Of the rest of the company, none could be seen.
'Good God!' Hayden muttered. 'Mr Hawthorne!' he called, searching about the deck. 'Mr Hawthorne!'
A red coat stirred beneath a pile of faintly writhing men, and then a confused Hawthorne sat up, holding a hand to his face. Hayden could not leave the wheel but Wickham had regained his feet, looking utterly disoriented but whole. 'Go to Mr Hawthorne's aid, Mr Wickham, if you please – there away, forward.' Hayden pointed.
The boy nodded dumbly and staggered drunkenly across the deck. Hawthorne was helped to his feet but collapsed against the rail, almost sinking down. Around Hayden others had propped themselves up and were sitting awkwardly; here and there men stooped or stood, hands on knees. Barthe was only a few feet away, his eyes open and blinking but he made no move and lay with his limbs thrown out oddly.
Some men came running up from below, into a sudden awful silence, fragments of burning wood and tar lying on the deck and strewn across the sea. Floating among them, the dead, all of them naked, pale bodies rocking and lifting on the crests.
Griffiths and his assistant, Ariss, appeared, and on their heels Mr Smosh.
'Doctor!' Hayden called, 'see to Mr Barthe, there.'
Griffiths hurried over, a quick penetrating gaze in Hayden's direction. 'What in God's name happened?' he asked.
'The French frigate exploded – her magazine…' Hayden could not finish, words drying up in his mouth.
Archer appeared on deck, a party of men on his heels. He sent Dryden to relieve Hayden and began giving orders to clear the burning debris. Relieved of the helm, Hayden still stood there in a daze.
'Are you injured, Captain,' Dryden asked, and Hayden realized it was most likely for the second time, and spoken rather loudly.
'My… my ears ring terribly.'
'You have blood, sir!' Dryden said loudly. 'It appears to be coming from your ear. The other one, sir.'
Hayden reached up and found liquid on the lobe. Withdrawing his hand he saw his fingertips were crimson. But it seemed as though it had happened to some other. Blood coming from his ear worried him not in the least.
Hayden went to the weather rail, and took hold of the shrouds. Gazing about at the rising sea. Wind blew hard in his face but made almost no sound.
At that moment, Pool and the French seventy-four wore almost together, passed beneath the Themis's stern, and resumed their firing, which had been briefly interrupted by the exploding frigate. For a moment Hayden watched them go, and then the rain and cloud swallowed them. Only the garish flashes of their guns could be seen, flaring in the murk.
'Where am I to steer, Captain?' Dryden asked.
'We will go to Bradley's aid.' Hayden raised a hand and pointed forward, where the sterns of the two frigates could be seen. 'We will run up to larboard of the French frigate and open fire.'
Hayden looked across the deck and found Smosh helping Barthe to his feet. The sailing master swooned and would have fallen but Smosh took him up, and, unaided, crossed the slanting deck and bore him below. Even confused as he was, Hayden knew this was no easy feat, as Barthe was a substantial man.
Archer came up then, fixing an inquisitive gaze on Hayden. 'Are you injured, Captain Hayden? You appear… bewildered, sir.'
Hayden made an effort to speak with precision and clarity. 'As are we all who were on deck when the frigate exploded.' Hayden glanced up and saw there was still a marine either dead on unconscious in the tops. He pointed. 'Send some men aloft to bring that marine down. All of his fellows were blown out of the tops and into the sea. I would go back but we will never find them, even if they lived, and Bradley has need of us. I am more angry than I can say that we abandon our own people to rescue Bradley, who should never have been prize hunting on convoy duty to begin with.' Hayden looked up again. 'Find Mr Franks. We will need to bend our spare topsails. How many men have we who can work the ship?'
'All of the men on the gundeck were untouched, sir. But the men who were above deck are either injured or… stunned, sir.'
'Yes, let us hope we all recover quickly. I'm better, Mr Archer, you needn't look so concerned. You will not require Saint-Denis to take my place. We need to put our rig to rights and bend sails.'
Archer nodded, satisfied that Hayden was still in his right senses, and went off gathering a party of top-men. There was much work to be done aloft, for the explosion and the subsequent debris had played the devil among their rig. Franks could now be seen hobbling about, giving orders, securing the loose falls of ropes. Chettle and his mates were abroad with their tool boxes, mending here, lending a hand there. It was as though the crew had been all asleep and were just now stirring to find much to be done.
Hayden realized his shoulder and head throbbed from being hurled across the deck. He raised his arm and moved it in a painful circle. He could not turn his neck without a stabbing pain. A small price to pay. Two hundred-some French sailors had lost their lives in the blink of an eye. Perhaps there might have been a few survivors – men high in the rigging blown clear – but they would perish in a quarter of an hour in the icy sea.
Men were being carried down to Griffiths, who had retreated to the cockpit again. Some could walk with a little aid, but others were carried, some senseless, others appearing half awake, but dumb and not responding to the entreaties of their fellows.
Wickham appeared, sheet of paper in hand. 'I am not finished with my muster, Captain, but it seems we lost nine marines out of the tops and three seamen who were aloft. It was the greatest good fortune that Mr Hawthorne had only just reached the deck when the frigate exploded or we would have lost him as well.'
'And yourself, Mr Wickham?'
'Good as gold, sir. I had ducked down to retrieve a dropped glass, sir, so was behind the barricade at the time. A bit of good luck.'
'Indeed. Have you counted the men in the sick-berth?'
'I have, sir, but the doctor is sending them out as they regain their reason. Most were merely stunned for a few moments and are recovering quickly. A landsman named Sterling was thrown into a gun, sir, and appears to have broken his collarbone. And the marine brought down from aloft was smashed against the mast and has only just come to his senses. Appears he has broken an arm.'
'I am sad for the marines, but I fear they drowned before they could have regained their reason.' Hayden shook his head.
An odd look came over Wickham's face. 'The Frenchmen who were thrown clear – did you see them, sir? They were, all of them, unclothed. Or perhaps I was bewildered a moment and did not realize?'
'No, I saw it as well. I have heard of it before, men so near an explosion their clothes are torn off by the violence of it. What is more peculiar than that?' Hayden had a sudden vision of the pale men, bobbing in the rising sea – like a nightmare.
Turning his attention to the French frigate, Hayden made his way forward and ordered the starboard chase gun readied. Not too far off he could see Bradley sailing for the transport fleet, the French frigate on his larboard beam. They fired at one another with deck guns, to little effect as the motion of the ships was now so violent upon the rising sea.
'I think we should fire a shot at the Frenchman, Mr Morris,' Hayden said to the gun captain. 'Let him know we are here.'
'Aye, sir. It will be a miracle if we hit her, sir.'
'Perhaps, but let us make our presence felt.'
The gun was hastily aimed and, as the bow passed over a crest, fired. Hayden peered through a glass his servant had brought him, and could just make out the French officers upon the quarterdeck, staring back. Three more shots were fired at Bradley, and then the French ship sheered off, and ran towards the north-east. For a moment there was silence, and then the distant echo of a gun, and then another. The two seventy-fours were not finished yet.
'Pass the word for Mr Archer,' Hayden ordered, and scanned the sea in all directions.
The convoy was spread over a large area of ocean and was in danger of scattering. He could see the transports labouring in the growing gale, men aloft reducing sail. They should have come about onto the offshore tack before the wind had grown so strong, but there had been no one to make the decision, as Pool and Bradley were both prize hunting. Bradley would have to order it now, and hope all the ships could wear safely. Hayden guessed the fleet would need to heave to immediately after wearing, and ride the gale out, trusting no French squadron could reach them in this weather.
Debris dotted the seas to the west, all of it doused now, and beyond it, a dark, threatening horizon.
Archer approached, touched his hat and waited.
'House the guns. Call all hands to prepare for this ill weather. Have the helmsman bring us into Bradley's lee, and find me Mr Barthe's speaking trumpet. I will have a word with Captain Bradley.'
'Aye, sir.'
Archer went off at a run, calling out orders as he went. Removed from the command of Captain Hart, the lieutenant was showing an uncharacteristic interest in his profession. Hayden was very gratified to see it.
It took a few moments for them to overtake the Syren, and when they finally did Hayden was distressed to see the damage that had been wreaked upon her. Her rig was torn apart, her sails cut to rags and her hull and deck had been shot through in many places.
Hayden took Barthe's speaking trumpet and called out to the officers on the quarterdeck. 'Where is Captain Bradley?' Hayden called. 'We have much to do if we are to preserve our convoy.'
'Captain Bradley is dead, sir,' a lieutenant called back. The man stood at the rail, his jacket torn, face powder-stained, his manner entirely distressed. 'Had you come but a little sooner you might have preserved his life for he was killed by one of the Frenchman's last shots.'
'I am very sorry to hear it,' Hayden called through the trumpet. 'We were almost thrown upon our beam-ends by the explosion. Our sails were blown away and we lost many of our own people. I could not reach you sooner. We must signal the convoy to wear, and collect them on the offshore tack. If this gale lasts a few days they could come to grief as they are.'
'Captain Pool is in charge of this convoy, Mr Hayden, and if he does not return Captain Bradley has given command to me.'
Hayden could not quite believe his ears. 'Captain Bradley has no business giving the command of the fleet to a lieutenant. I am the senior officer here.'
'You were a lieutenant yourself but a few weeks past. Neither Captain Pool nor Captain Bradley had faith in your abilities, for so they both stated. I will obey the orders of my captain.'
'Sir, we have no time to argue. We must preserve our convoy. I will order them to wear and heave to on the offshore tack.'
'No, sir. It was just this kind of malingering that Captain Pool wished to avoid. We shall not heave to but force our way on. I will not end up back in Plymouth because of foul weather.'
Saint-Denis appeared by Hayden's side.
Hayden spoke to him quietly. 'Man the starboard battery, quietly. We will open the starboard gunports and run out the guns.'
'You cannot be serious.'
'I am deadly serious. This is mutiny and I will not stand for it. They cannot open ports on this tack, but we can… just. Do it now.'
Saint-Denis did not move. 'Mr Hayden, I must protest at this action.'
'Mr Archer!' Hayden called.
'I will do it,' Saint-Denis, said, 'but I wish it noted in the log that I protested.'
'Noted.'
Hayden raised the speaking trumpet. 'What is your name, sir?'
'Cole. I am acting captain of the Syren.'
'Lieutenant Cole, I consider your refusal to obey orders as mutinous. I demand you comply or I will be forced to take action against your ship. Do you understand?'
'You would not dare, sir! I will see you court-martialled.'
Hayden turned to Gould. 'Have Mr Saint-Denis open ports and run out the guns.'
'Aye, sir.' The boy ran off.
Even with the ringing in his ears Hayden heard the ports open and the sound of gun carriage wheels.
'Mr Cole!' Hayden called. 'Will you comply with my orders?'
The men on the Syren backed from the rail, looking one to the other. Cole conferred with his fellow officers, urgently.
'This is not an idle threat, sir!' Hayden called. 'I will fire into you.'
Cole broke away from his fellows. 'I will comply. But I will have your coat when we reach Gibraltar. And that is no idle threat.'
Hayden turned away from the rail. 'House the guns,' he ordered. 'Make sail. Mr Wickham, we must signal the convoy to wear, leeward ships first. Then signal McIntosh to draw near. I will have him relay my orders lest they are misapprehended. I will also make certain he understands who gives the orders until Captain Pool returns.' Hayden looked about. 'This gale is going to become a great deal worse before this day grows old. I am certain of it.'
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 7
|
Three days the gale lived, forcing the convoy slowly west-north-west. Hayden and the other escorts had all they could manage to keep the ships together, and even then they tended to disperse by night. Two transports lumbered into one another in the midst of a squall, one so heavily damaged that her crew was taken off before she foundered. Hayden had watched her fall beneath the waves, jade sea washing over her decks, and then only her masts thrusting up, the banner at the truck flicking once, like a whip, before sounding. Hayden imagined her gliding, ever so slowly, down onto the hidden, lightless mud of the Atlantic floor.
The escort captains and the masters of the transports all worked mightily to keep the convoy together when the ocean tried to tear them apart. Cole played his part but Hayden could almost feel the man simmering upon his distant ship. No doubt he was hoping for Pool's return that he might have immediate redress – and Hayden feared, given Pool's opinion of his character, that he would comply only too happily.
Finally the wind dwindled, and left the ships pitching and rolling awkwardly upon an unquiet sea. A liquid sun wavered up through a distant mist to deliver a surprisingly warm day. 'Drying out' turned the ship into a laundress's nightmare. Hayden ordered the captains of the escorts to attend him, and watched the approaching cutters water-spider over the low swell.
In the course of half an hour all four officers heaved themselves over the Themis's rail, piped shrilly aboard by Mr Franks, who, to judge by his manner, appeared prepared to fire into any of their ships if even the slightest sign of disrespect was offered to his captain.
Hayden seated the officers and his first lieutenant around the newly acquired table but chose to stand at the head, gallery windows to his back, an unseasonally fair Biscay day glittering beyond. The irregular thumping and calling of men repairing the ship and renewing her rig filtered down the skylight, open to the warm, damp day. A gull swung by the stern windows, casting a slick shadow across the cabin sole and up over the faces of the gathered men.
All five appeared pasty-faced from fatigue, the strains of keeping the convoy together and afloat through the gale showing, but only Cole appeared sullen. He had cornered Saint-Denis upon coming aboard, a whispered conversation of such familiarity ensuing that there could be little doubt the two lieutenants shared a previous acquaintance.
Hayden cleared his throat, and when everyone's attention turned to him, began, 'Thank you all for attending so promptly –'
Cole snorted. 'And what choice had we? We should have been fired into had we refused.'
Hayden noticed that the other men did not nod or show signs of agreement. They, at least, accepted the necessity of Hayden assuming command.
'I am still hopeful that Captain Pool will find us,' Hayden continued, 'but until such time we must make our own preparations. My midshipman is certain he saw a schooner hurrying north the morning we first perceived the French frigate. If it returns with a French squadron we will be in a bad situation – especially if Captain Pool does not happen upon us.' Hayden hesitated only a second, wondering if he should offer his plan as a suggestion, and hear the opinions of others, or if he should state it as the course of action he had chosen. A brief look around at the attentive faces and the single resentful countenance made up his mind. 'The French will expect us to take the most direct route that weather will allow and shall seek us upon that course. For that reason we shall shape our course out into the Atlantic, at least thirty leagues, and proceed to Gibraltar so.'
'Have you not considered, Captain Hayden,' Cole asked, 'that such a course of action will make it exceedingly unlikely that Captain Pool shall ever discover us? Or perhaps that is your intention?'
'Mr Cole, my intention is to preserve the convoy and to proceed to Gibraltar with all speed. We are, however in a difficult situation, now; we have lost our most powerful ship. Our best hope lies in not being discovered by the French. There are few other courses open to us.'
Heads nodded again.
'If I may, sor,' McIntosh said, his manner unaltered from their previous gathering. 'Perhaps we should disguise some few of our transports as armed vessels. We count in our convoy a number of ships of the very type the Admiralty have, even recently, purchased and armed for just such employment. I am certain we can obtain enough uniforms to outfit their quarterdecks and then impress sailors from the other ships to give them numbers enough to speed their sail handling. They may not quite match our own vessels for sharpness, but they might fool a Frenchman.'
'I had considered this, Captain McIntosh, but wondered if such a commonly used ploy would not be too easily detected. The French might take this as an indication of our true strength and be emboldened.'
Stewart leaned a little forward, better to be seen. 'If we could keep our Trojan Horses distant from any French ships that appear it might answer, Captain Hayden.'
Hayden was uncertain of the descriptor 'Trojan Horses' but not unimpressed by the argument. 'So it might,' Hayden conceded. 'Let us enter three of our transports into the Royal Navy, temporarily. This was your idea, McIntosh; will you see it done?'
'I will, sor, if I might beg some old uniforms from yourselves – enough to outfit the quarterdeck of each ship.'
The other officers nodded, even Cole agreeing at least on this – though Hayden suspected it was because the idea had not come from him.
'I shall write a letter and have copies enough made to send to each master. Best they understand our intentions perfectly. We will continue as we are; Captain Stewart shall remain whipper-in, McIntosh will convey messages and relay signals. Captain Cole, I shall ask you take up the rear position, and Jones, you shall assume the forward. I will remain to weather where the Syren will join me if the French appear. Let us hope that a wind will find us this day and allow us to make some westing.'
Transports were selected to masquerade as His Majesty's ships and some other small business quickly concluded before the officers returned to their vessels.
Hayden took the deck to see the captains off and stood at the rail watching their boats lurch back to their respective vessels. The Themis's cutters were dispatched to carry Hayden's letter to each captain and to enquire of any damage from the recent gale – the calm was too fortuitous not to be used. Mr Franks and Mr Chettle were sent off in the ship's barge to aid the vessel that had survived the collision and two injured men were sent aboard the Themis and into the care of Dr Griffiths. All in all there was much coming and going among the vessels of the convoy.
Surrounded by attentive midshipmen, Mr Barthe took the noon sight and reported their position, which had not been precisely known for the three days of the gale, though Hayden was pleased to see that the master's dead-reckoning had not been far off the mark.
'How fare you, Mr Barthe?' Hayden asked him.
The sailing master pressed an open hand against the small of his back, having suffered some hurt when hurled across the deck by the explosion.
'My poor old frame was not made for such gymnastic manoeuvres, Captain, but it mends. Does your ear heal?'
'It causes no pain at all, Mr Barthe; bless your kindness for asking. The doctor assures me my hearing will return, by and by, though for the time being my good ear is doing the duty of two.'
Wickham approached then, to report on some repairs. Hayden informed them both of the decisions he had made and the response of the other captains, not mentioning the resistance from Cole, but did relate the man's fears that setting out west would make it less likely that Pool would find them.
'Cole has a point, Captain,' Barthe agreed, 'but it is still the right and proper thing to do. Pool has only his own rashness to blame for what occurred. Had he kept his place in the convoy we could have made a better defence, as our numbers were about equal, though the French frigates were heavier than our own. Still, I think we could have driven them off or held them at bay as long as you like.'
Hayden decided on discretion, for a change, and passed over Mr Barthe's opinion without comment.
'Pool might find us, yet,' Wickham stated. 'He must realize that we would change our course to confuse the French.'
Barthe glanced at Hayden, a silent comment on Wickham's youth and trusting nature. Hayden suspected that Mr Barthe thought as he did – assuming Pool drove off the French seventy-four, he would spend as little time as possible trying to locate the convoy but make all speed to Gibraltar, blame whomever had assumed control of the convoy for changing its planned course, and then proceed to Toulon to join Hood. Losing his convoy Pool would consider the greatest possible blessing. The senior admiral might admonish him for giving up the search for his charges so easily, but no more would come of it. There would certainly be no court martial. And if Pool took or even substantially damaged the French seventy-four he would very likely be congratulated if not rewarded.
Hayden climbed aloft, partly to inspect repairs in progress, thus saving poor Franks from making the journey with his injured foot, and partly to scrutinize the surrounding ocean. From the topmast trestle-trees he swept his glass slowly around the horizon. There was a faint, almost imperceptible dot of ruddy brown to the north-east – perhaps a sail, perhaps nothing at all.
Hayden called down to the men working below him. 'Pass the word for Mr Wickham, if you please.'
A moment later the converted middy clambered up beside Hayden, who passed him his glass.
Hayden reached out and indicated an unfortunately large area of the Atlantic. 'Can you see that spot to the north-east, Mr Wickham? A sail, do you think?'
Wickham supported the glass on a hand clutched to a stay. For a long moment he remained very still.
'I believe it is a sail, Captain Hayden, but its nature and nationality are hidden from me. I can tell you this, though; that ship has wind.'
'Damn! If the wind carries it up to us we must hope it is Pool. But perhaps the wind will fill in before then and bear us out to sea. I wonder if he has seen us? You cannot make out her point of sailing, can you?'
Wickham raised the telescope again, gazed into its glassy depths for yet another moment, then shook his head. 'I cannot, sir.'
'Pass your duties on to Archer and remain here a while, if you please. I should dearly like to know in what direction that ship shapes her course.'
'Aye, sir.'
Hayden took back his glass and examined each vessel of his much dispersed convoy, all of them rising and falling slowly on the swell, some rolling more than they had any right to. They numbered thirty transports – losses remained a single ship to collision – but they still had many sea miles to go. A nod to Wickham, and Hayden climbed down, examining the rig as he went. The bosun, Franks, had been promoted unwarrantedly and then prevented from adequately learning his trade under his former captain, Hart. It was one of the many ways that Hart had found to oppress his crew; keep them in ignorance and yet abuse them for it whenever it pleased him. If not for Barthe and his mates the Themis would more than likely have lost a mast and, as it was, had required replacements for the main and mizzen that had sprung as a result of her badly maintained rig.
Franks might have not warranted his position as bosun but, ever since Hayden had come aboard, had done everything within his powers to learn his trade. It was unfortunate that Franks learned but slowly, and with his broken foot was hampered from going aloft. Hayden was of half a mind to replace him but, given the man's good service and loyalty on the recent cruise with the despicable Hart, could not bring himself to do it. In fact, he could see the bosun on the deck watching him – worried that Hayden might find some deficiency that his mates had not seen or of which they had not made him aware.
Upon reaching the deck he found poor Franks hobbling along the gangway, his unsmiling face set against the pain.
'There you are, Mr Franks. The cheek block of the main topmast-staysail requires your attention, as the housing is cracked. And the same sail will soon need its spring stay renewed; best do it now while there is no wind and little sea. Your mates are not keeping you informed of the state of the rig, Mr Franks, and that cannot continue.'
Franks looked much abashed by this, his face flushing. 'It is not willingly done, sir. It is their poor understanding of such matters.'
'It is an area in which poor understanding cannot be indulged. Let us consider a resolution to this problem, Mr Franks. We will speak of it again. Carry on.'
Franks went off calling testily for his mates, and snarling at two men who suddenly were not working with enough energy; his rattan snapped down on the shoulders of one.
Hayden called for Mr Barthe and awaited him by the taffrail. The master came waddling stiffly along the deck, touching his hat as he approached.
'Mr Barthe, we cannot continue as we are with Mr Franks. It is intolerable that we haven't a proficient bosun.'
Barthe became very serious upon hearing this. 'Mr Franks is very attentive to his duties, Captain.'
'And I would never suggest otherwise, but he has not yet mastered his trade, and that is not acceptable aboard a man-of-war.'
'He has made great progress in his learning, sir. I have been witness to it myself.'
'Yes, and if he were a bosun's mate that would be commendable, but he is not.'
Barthe made a sour face. 'He will take it very hard, sir, if you send him back before the mast.'
'I realize that, and it is not my intention – for whom would we replace him with? No, I intend to disrate Gordon, his mate, whom I would never have rated 'able' had I been in command. I will put a competent man in his place, which is why I am speaking of this with you. It is a great shame we do not have Aldrich to make bosun's mate, but is there not some other you would recommend?'
Barthe pressed a fleshy hand to his temple. 'There are some competent seamen, sir – no doubt of it – but men that I could see one day as bosun…? It is a position that demands much and returns little.'
'Would you give up Dryden for a three-month, Mr Barthe? By then, certainly, Mr Franks will be walking properly again and Dryden could do much to complete the education of both Franks and his mate, for though I shall remove Gordon I will leave Coffey in place. It is an imposition, I realize, but sacrifices must be made for the good of the ship.' Hayden thought of Admiral Cotton as he said this, and not without a little embarrassment. Hayden had not been too keen on making sacrifices for the good of the service when the admiral had demanded it.
Barthe considered this a moment. 'Who will you give me to take his place?' Barthe asked reluctantly.
'Who would you have?'
'Mr Gould,' the master replied without hesitation.
'Gould? He has barely got his boots wet. There must be some other who will fill the position more ably.'
'Gould might be newly aboard, Captain, but I have never been witness to anyone learning so quickly. You never tell him a thing twice. By the time we reach Gibraltar, I swear, he will be quite ready to pass for lieutenant – but for his sea years, of course. I have never seen the like.'
It was Hayden's turn to hesitate.
'To be a good officer he must be proficient in all the duties of the sailing master,' Barthe pointed out.
'Then you may have him, Mr Barthe, but he will remain a midshipman, only temporarily under you.' Hayden considered a moment. 'It will be a good education for him, I think. I will inform Mr Franks of our decision and you may speak with Dryden. I will pass the news to Gould as well.' Hayden glanced out at the horizon where he and Wickham thought they had seen a sail.
'Is it Captain Pool, do you think?' Barthe enquired.
'That is my hope, Mr Barthe.'
'That is mine as well,' Barthe responded, then touched his hat. 'By your leave, sir.' The sailing master made his way forward.
A rumour of wind from the north reached them, a darkening ripple spread southward, breaking up the surface into an irregular chop. Drying sails grew restive, wafted uncertainly, filled, fell slack, then bellied, the ship coming to life with a sigh. The usual disorganized scramble ensued as the masters brought their transports onto the same heading. The convoy began to make its way out into the Atlantic.
Very little time passed before Barthe had the men reducing sail to slow the Themis so the transports, heavily laden as they were, would not be left in their wake. Cole was signalled to tow the slowest of the transports – the Hartlepool – which had immediately fallen behind, to the fore of the convoy.
'That tub will be the end of us, Captain,' Barthe growled as he came onto the quarterdeck, waving stubby fingers towards the Hartlepool.
'Nothing quite so dramatic, I hope, Mr Barthe, but she is going to slow our passage by several days.' Hayden raised a glass and searched for the 'smudge' on the northern horizon.
'Can you make her out, Captain?' Barthe asked, the thinnest edge of anxiety entering his voice.
'To be honest, I am uncertain.' Hayden shaded his eyes and, looking up, called to the mizzen lookout. 'Aloft there! Smithers. Can you make out a sail to the north?'
Wickham had returned to the deck some time before and Hayden had to rely on the perception of others not so farsighted.
'No, sir, Captain Hayden. She looked to be moving off to the east some time ago and now I cannot make her out at all.'
'Well, that is good news, I think.' Hayden turned to Barthe, who had now a glass trained on the distant north.
The master lowered the brass tube. 'Unless it was Pool.'
'If it was he could not have failed to make us out. We could perceive him from a lower vantage than the tops of a seventy-four and we are many sail clumped together. Whoever it was they had no interest in us.' Hayden stood a moment more staring towards the secret north, hoping his statement was true.
The day wore on, the convoy making slow but certain progress westward. After a warm day the night arrived with an unexpected chill. A large, wooden frame was hauled aloft each night upon which lanterns could be lit in certain configurations to send signals to the convoy. It was an awkward bloody affair, too heavy by half, and heartily disliked by crew and officers. Hayden watched the men ready it for its journey up into the tops, the last light of a meagre sunset casting a cool, thin turquoise across the western horizon.
'Man halyards,' Mr Barthe ordered, overseeing the ascension himself. 'Handsomely, Wilson. Handsomely!'
Hayden turned away, took a single tour of the deck and then descended to his cabin. His steward, Castle, was lighting the lamps at that moment.
'I will be a guest of the gunroom this evening, Castle, so you have an evening free.'
The man nodded. He was not the oldest seaman aboard but was certainly twenty years Hayden's senior, and had been at sea since he was a boy – an orphan, apparently. Words were not Castle's medium, not if a nod or polite throat clearing would do. When he did dare speech it was whispered, halting, seeming wholly unfamiliar, as though he had only just learned, not just English, but any language, and was uncertain of its form. The man's entire manner was so opaque that Hayden felt he did not know him at all, yet by his deeds he appeared good-hearted, even generous. 'Slinking John' the men called him, though his Christian name was Cyrus (if Cyrus qualified as a Christian name). Whenever Hayden spoke to him he appeared to draw back a little, without actually changing his position, and he listened like a man expecting, in truth knowing, that he would receive bad news.
Slinking John's place among the hands was difficult to understand. He shared a mess with Chettle and the carpenter's mates, who appeared to accept him without judgement. The other older hands tolerated him, which led the younger men to vague imitation, and though they might have called him 'Slinking John' he was never mocked to his face – never bullied or practised upon. Being the senior officer's steward, of course, granted him a certain immunity, even privileges, but even the captain thought him an odd presence – almost more animal than human. Griffiths once likened him to a good hound 'that lurked about and occasionally fetched'. As a steward he was utterly efficient and unfailing but Hayden wished sometimes that he might learn to be a bit more human and less canine.
'Rosseau knows I will not require dinner?'
Again the man nodded. He waited a moment until Hayden dismissed him, and then went padding off.
For a few blessed moments Hayden sat in his cabin, the day's final light draining ever so swiftly from the eastern sky. The transition from daylight azure, through topaz, sapphire, indigo, violet then purple and finally inky black was a mystery he never tired of attempting to penetrate. Where did one colour begin and the other end? How could they bleed so seamlessly one to the other and alter so subtly that the eye could never really comprehend the moment of their transmutation?
A respectful knock interrupted his contemplation of nature's palette. Hayden called out for the marine to open the door.
'Dr Worthing wishing to speak with you, sir,' the marine said.
'Send him in.' So much for being a poet, Hayden thought. Blast.
The look of sour injury that Worthing habitually wore was, if anything, more embittered and indicative of greater injury than usual. The man could press his lips together so that all blood appeared to be forced away, leaving them empty, hardened, thin.
'Dr Worthing. I hope I may be of some service.' In truth Hayden hoped the man would announce his complaint – petty as it might be – and be gone as quickly as possible.
'Mr Hayden, I hope, sir, that you were not party to this… contempt for church and crown.'
'And what contempt might we be speaking of, Doctor?' Hayden asked innocently, sounding, he realized, too much like Smosh.
'You do realize that you have a Jew among your officers…'
'I do not. Of whom do we speak?'
'Mr Gould, sir, as you well know.'
'Mr Gould's mother is a Christian from a Christian family. Gould has attended church all his life.'
'His father is a Jew. I have it on good authority.'
'And what authority is that?'
But Worthing was not about to answer that question. 'Do you deny it, Mr Hayden?'
'No. In fact I do not, but the religion of Gould's father is of no consequence. The Test Act requires only that Gould belong to the Church of England and I assure you he does.'
'Well, I am not reassured. Has he taken the sacrament – publicly taken the sacrament?'
'That is a question I cannot answer, Doctor, and nor is it a question I am prepared to ask.'
'Not prepared to ask! Then I will ask it. I will see him take the sacrament before witnesses.'
Hayden's temper flared. 'Not aboard my ship. Only the Admiralty has the right to impose such a demand – and you are not the admiralty.'
'You refuse it?' The man's outrage attained new heights.
Hayden levelled his gaze at the parson and spoke with a clarity and firmness that he hoped would carry all the weight of his conviction. 'There will be, Doctor, no Inquisitions aboard my ship.'
'And what of you, Mr Hayden? Do you refuse it? Are you yet a papist as the men are saying?'
'I do not think it is a matter of concern to my crew – nor even a matter of interest.'
'In that you are wrong, Mr Hayden.'
'Dr Worthing, if you sow dissension among my crew I will confine you to your cabin for the duration of our passage.'
'You would not dare! Do you not comprehend what the consequences would be?'
'I comprehend what they would be if I did not. There has been one mutiny aboard this ship; there shall not be a second. Provoke my crew no more, or I shall be forced to –'
Worthing interrupted this declaration. 'I will not sit at table with a Jew.'
'Then you may dine alone.'
'I'm sure there are others who will join me.'
'Not if they wish to remain officers aboard the Themis.'
The two men stood, glaring at one another, their impasse complete. It infuriated Worthing beyond measure that he could not impose his will upon Hayden, and Hayden was not about to bend on a single measure, no matter how small. He had known Worthings before – petty tyrants; given a county they would demand a province. Worthing, unlike Hart, had only his ecclesiastical authority, which counted for very little aboard ship. 'Thank God,' Hayden almost added.
The man stepped suddenly a little nearer. 'I believe, Mr Hayden, that you are a papist and I will let this be known among my friends in the Admiralty.'
'I am sure your influential friends within the Admiralty will be deeply shocked by such a revelation. The war against France will seem footling by comparison. No doubt all of their energies will be turned from defeating Britain's enemies and focused where they should have been all along – on rooting out the secret papists and Jews in the Royal Navy.' Hayden waited for the man to respond and when he did not said, 'Do not come to me with such matters again.'
For a moment Hayden thought Worthing would speak – or scream – but instead the man assumed the battered dignity of the solitary oppressed, and went almost silently out.
Griffiths was standing beyond the door, no doubt awaiting his turn, and the marine hesitated, not certain whether to announce the doctor at such a juncture or not.
'You wish to see me, Doctor?' Hayden enquired.
Griffiths nodded.
'Do come in.'
The door closed behind the surgeon, who looked both embarrassed and angered.
'I fear you could not help but overhear at least some of what was said?' Hayden glanced at the doctor expectantly.
'Only that he accused you of being a papist and threatened to bring down the wrath of his "friends" within the admiralty. An empty threat if ever there was one. How dare he make such an accusation? Is the man unbalanced?'
'Oh, it did not begin with me. It began with young Gould. Worthing learned that Gould's father is a Jew.'
'Ah,' Griffiths managed. For a moment he considered. 'There is, Mr Hayden, the matter of the Test Act…'
'Indeed there is. But Worthing may not apply it. Only the government or the Admiralty may require it. I would not accede to his demand that Gould be forced to take the sacrament.'
'Ah.' The doctor took a seat on the bench before the gallery windows – thin fingers spread pale over meagre knees. 'I do see your point, and understand your principle, but I cannot help but wonder, if I may be allowed an opinion on this matter, if you might not save yourself a great deal of… controversy by simply having both Gould and yourself take the sacrament. It will remove all the ammunition Worthing would employ to cause you trouble – which is more than his intention, it is his nature. You could even have Smosh do it, if that would lessen the sting.'
'Though I esteem your opinions on all matters, Doctor, in this I cannot comply. Give in to that man and what will he demand next? Floggings for men who are not Christian enough? Trial by water? No, I will not allow him to test my crew in any way.'
'He will use this to cause mischief, as I have said.'
'But if not this it will be something else. Give way to him once and I will be doing it the entire voyage.'
'Religion, as you well know, is a fertile field for kindling resentments, animosities, even atrocities. He will spread the rumour that you are a papist. The crew all know you lived for many years in France. They will begin to wonder how you lived among the French as an Anglican. A conversion has been the cause of ruptures in many a family, and they will begin to wonder why your French Catholic relations were so accepting of your apostate beliefs.' The doctor glanced up at him – almost a question.
'Are you suggesting, Dr Griffiths, that I have not been forthcoming about my own faith?'
Griffiths waved this idea away with a thin hand. 'I am, like Mr Jefferson, a deist. Religions – all religions – are the creations of men and reflect all of man's worst instincts. The supreme being who created our universe, I am quite certain, has taken no notice of me or my petty aspirations. Which is by way of saying, Captain Hayden, that you could be either Catholic or Anglican or Mohammedan – it is all the same to me. But the crew might not share my enlightened beliefs.'
'I am not going to explain my beliefs to my own crew. Next Worthing will be questioning my loyalty to England!'
The two were silent, uncomfortable, for a moment, both taken by their own thoughts.
'Did you wish to speak with me upon some matter, Doctor?'
'Only to say that one of the men brought aboard from the Agnus is very ill.'
'I thought he came aboard with an injury?'
'So he did, but he has since taken such a turn that I am at a loss to explain it.' Griffiths stood, crouched, reaching up an angular arm to take hold of a beam.
Hayden was alarmed by the doctor's obvious concern. 'You don't think he has brought some… malady aboard, do you?'
'I did not a few hours ago but now I cannot be certain.' Griffiths leaned his forehead against a beam and closed his eyes a second. 'I do not think he will reach Gibraltar. I-It came on with such rapidity. A fever, then cramping pains in his legs and back. He bleeds very freely from the nose and his lungs are infused with fluid that he coughs up in a pink froth. The smell of his breath is unbearable and his pain now so severe that I have given him laudanum, of which I have but scant supply. I should hardly be worried about this spreading, but he arrived recently from Portugal.'
'They have not any contagion there, have they?'
'Not that we know of, but many a time a ship has left port bearing pestilence before anyone had become cognizant of the disease being there. Thus it is borne to some other port not yet alerted to the danger.' Griffiths looked up at Hayden. 'I would call this an influenza but I have never seen it so severe in a man so young and apparently hale. Can we send a boat to the Agnus to enquire if they have any sick among their crew?'
Hayden glanced out of the window. 'It is too late this night, I think, but immediately it is light we shall dispatch someone. Will you send Mr Ariss, Doctor?'
'No. I think it best I go myself.' Griffiths stood a moment lost in thought.
'Is there any other course we might follow in this case?'
Griffiths shook his head. 'No. That is everything.' He glanced up at Hayden and tried to shrug off his obvious apprehension. 'You are joining us for dinner?'
'I am.'
'Until then.'
'Keep me informed of this man's condition,' Hayden said as the doctor opened the door to leave. 'What is his name?'
'McKee.' Griffiths opened his mouth as if to say more, hesitated, decided against speech, and disappeared.
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 8
|
The strained atmosphere in the gunroom brought to Hayden's mind a rope being stretched. He could almost hear the elongated 'squeal'. Both tradition and etiquette demanded that guests be accorded every possible courtesy, but the present guests – or at least one of them – had trespassed upon every convention the sailors held dear.
Hayden believed that Worthing must take great, if unacknowledged, pleasure in the present state of affairs. In this Griffiths was utterly correct – the reverend doctor found some perverse satisfaction in creating conflict and aggravation everywhere he passed. Having accomplished little in his life, he was resentful of all humankind for this state of affairs. Why did they not see his natural superiority? Why did these foolish men sing the praises of others when they should be applauding him? And so his resentments curdled, the tally of slights and offences multiplied, his spite oozed bile until he became bloated with bitterness.
A number of attempts to generate polite conversation had sputtered and flickered out, and now the men seated round the table seemed intent on their food, on the motions of their glittering forks.
'How fare your patients, Doctor?' Smosh asked. The rotund little clergyman appeared the only one present unaffected by the disquiet in the gunroom.
'As well as can be hoped.' Griffiths glanced Hayden's way. Neither had spoken to anyone else about his fears for McKee.
Smosh went on, apparently not recognizing the concern that passed between surgeon and captain. 'I am unfamiliar with such matters, but it did seem to me that few were hurt in the action – at least aboard our ship. Was this true?'
Each waited for some other to reply, and after a few seconds of indecision Barthe answered.
'We were fortunate to lose so few,' he nodded to the marine lieutenant, 'though Mr Hawthorne's men were not so favoured.'
The marine lieutenant clumsily raised a glass, a dollop of claret slopping over the edge and slipping down his fingers and under-wrist toward his crimson cuff. 'To the victorious dead,' he said with excessive feeling. The marine was clearly numbing his emotions with wine that evening, for which no one blamed him. It was often seen that a single survivor of a slaughtered gun-crew would feel more than just the loss of his mates; he would feel ashamed that he, no more worthy than any one of them, had been spared.
The men present raised their glasses and echoed Hawthorne's salute.
Immediately the strained silence returned – the rope stretching out, creaking like a rusty hinge.
'I wonder,' Worthing ventured, making a small pile of potato shards with his fork, 'if we would not have had greater losses had we gone to Captain Pool's aid?' He then looked directly at Hayden, his usual air of lugubrious superiority less tolerable than ever.
'We did go to Pool's aid,' Barthe said bluntly.
The clergyman offered a half-grimace and a shrug. 'Upon our first pass we fired a few guns into the large French ship's stern, but upon our second pass we failed to engage the seventy-four, which I am told had the weather gauge on poor Pool. We sailed on, engaging no enemy vessels at all, though there were three to be had.'
'Sir,' Barthe began, his manners thrust aside, 'it is apparent that you do not understand such matters –'
Worthing looked up sharply at Barthe and interrupted. 'I understand that Captain Pool questioned Mr Hayden's courage, and that Mr Hayden then did not come to his aid when he had need.'
If the man had not been a cleric in the Church of England Hayden would have demanded he walk out with him.
'Dr Worthing,' Hayden said, his voice trembling with rage, 'I fired first upon the frigate that had raked our seventy-four and had then engaged Pool upon his larboard side where he had no gun ports open. I then raked the French seventy-four, brought my ship about and came back, intending to engage the French frigate which was wreaking havoc upon Pool's upper deck, the heel of his ship and the lifting seas making this deck vulnerable. The frigate exploded, probably the result of our first cannonade. I did not feel a need to engage the French seventy-four as I believed Pool was more than equal to that task, especially so as the French captain, though he did have the weather gauge, was fearful of opening his lower gun ports owing to the sea running and the heeling of his ship. I then went to the aid of Captain Bradley, who was engaged in battle with a frigate of superior force. No captain with common sense would have done differently.'
'A well-rehearsed speech, Hayden.' Worthing observed. 'I hope the senior naval officer in Gibraltar is persuaded by it. Of course, he might have another story from Pool himself. Bradley cannot speak to it as he departed this life – your "going to his aid" being a bit late.'
Hayden clutched his fork and knife in balled hands, like a child. Around the table the faces of the men appeared pale with anger. It occurred to Hayden that the company might fall upon the parson with their knives, for to speak to a captain so upon his own ship was unheard of.
At that instant Hayden apprehended a flicker of pleasure flash over Worthing's sallow features.
Forcing his hands to relax, Hayden said in an easy manner, 'Well, Doctor, you – and Captain Pool and anyone else – may make whatever reports you like once we reach Gibraltar. I am confident of my decisions.' Hayden turned to Saint-Denis, the gunroom's senior officer and the man who should have been attempting to defuse such a situation.
'This is an excellent claret, Lieutenant. My compliments.'
Saint-Denis nodded and tried to smile. An animal who had just heard the door of the trap slam behind him could not look more alarmed.
But Worthing could let no statement go unanswered. 'I'm sure you are equally confident that Captain Pool will never overtake us upon this course,' the reverend doctor said, 'and you will retain your assumed rank of "commodore" for a fortnight yet?'
Before Hayden could even consider a response, Smosh spoke.
'Your forthrightness must make you many a devotee,' he said to Worthing. 'I do admire it. I find myself perplexed that such insights have not gained you a living upon the land. But then I am sure, Dr Worthing, that you preferred to come to sea.' He smiled quickly at the gathering. 'Have we not all longed for a captive audience whom we might bless with our wisdom?'
Hawthorne turned his slitty gaze upon Worthing. 'Yes, Doctor, why is it you do not have a living upon the land? A man of your learning – of your eminence – must have had many offers.'
It was surprising to Hayden that a combatant so adroit in the art of opening wounds in others should allow himself to be injured in the same manner.
'I will tell you,' Worthing responded in his haughty, put-upon manner, 'I have been considered for many a position in my time; my particular talents have not gone unrecognized in all quarters. But others with more interest or better connexions invariably prevailed. When Lord Hood requested my services I felt that I was being called. That I had been meant to minister among the poor, benighted seamen of His Majesty's fleets. That, I believe, was the reason I have ever been passed over for positions ashore.'
'Divine intervention…' Smosh said without apparent sarcasm, but unable to suppress a hint of a smile.
'Mock me if you will, but our Lord operates in ways we cannot comprehend.'
'Indeed,' Smosh responded. He raised his glass. 'To the poor, benighted seamen of His Majesty's fleets.'
Everyone raised their glasses in reply, smiles not well concealed. 'Hear,' intoned one and all, though Hayden wondered if Griffiths had not said 'amen'.
Into this moment of levity Wickham's schoolboy voice enquired, 'Is it your opinion, Captain, that Lord Hood will hold Toulon?'
Everyone turned to Hayden expectantly and he had the feeling that his loyalty to Britain would be judged by his answer. But Hayden could not be dishonest, even so.
'Not if the French are determined to take it back, it pains me to say.'
'Truly, Captain?' Hawthorne said, a bit surprised. 'We have held Gibraltar.'
'Yes, and no offence is meant to Lord Hood, but Toulon is situated so differently. Coming at it by land is simply less arduous. A concerted siege by a properly prepared army of adequate numbers and Toulon will fall. I shudder to think what will happen to the inhabitants after it does. I fear they will regret allying themselves with us.'
'You have very little faith in Admiral Lord Hood,' Worthing observed, 'for an Englishman.'
Hayden refused to be provoked, believing nothing gave the parson more pleasure than seeing that his arrows caused aggravation. 'I have every faith in him, Dr Worthing, but I do not believe he can perform miracles. We can hope the French remain so concentrated upon killing one another that they will spare Toulon for some time.'
'It was audacious of Hood to assume control of Toulon in the first place,' Barthe spoke up before Worthing could frame another reproach. 'But it says a great deal about the French form of government that the people of Toulon would surrender their city to us rather than be governed by the Paris mobs. I have heard it opined that this man – General Paoli – is uncomfortable with the Convention, as well.'
'He has fought for Corsican independence most of his life,' Griffiths stated. 'Did anyone really believe he would ally himself with the French in the long haul? No. He will break his ties with France at the first opportunity.'
'But Corsica is a small land, Doctor,' Smosh said softly, 'and France is great, despite her present troubles. Or let us say that France will be great again. They chased Paoli from the island once with little difficulty. If Paoli chooses to break with the French he will not keep Corsica independent for many years, despite his admirable dream.'
'I met him once,' Wickham said, 'General Paoli. At the home of a friend of my father's during his years in England. I thought him rather a sad sight – very dignified, almost noble, really, but even so, like a figure in a play. Tragic, in the way that an exiled prince might be so. People attended to his opinions with exceeding deference, even some very great men who were present, but he looked terribly out of place to my way of thinking. Briefly, he spoke to me – most kindly – his English good but very simple – like a child's – and thickly accented. His French was better and he seemed pleased to speak it. He told me that one day he would return to Corsica and if ever I found myself there he would take me shooting in the mountains. I thought he must control an excess of feeling just mentioning his home.' Wickham fell silent, indulging his memory.
'He is a great champion to many,' Griffiths observed, 'and not just within his own land. He was welcomed to Paris like a revolutionary war hero: the enlightened man – this after the Bourbons had forced him into exile in our own country for twenty years. Rousseau corresponded with him, and our own Dr Johnson welcomed him to his literary club. He has not lived the modest, anonymous life of a shopkeeper, though I did think it rather ungrateful of him to characterize the British as "a nation of merchants" after we had sheltered him for two decades.'
'He didn't say that, truly?' Barthe asked, incredulous.
'I have had it now from more than one source, so I believe it. Of course it is not less cruel for being demonstrably true.'
'And I thought us a nation of seamen,' Hawthorne pitched in to small laughter – and then added, 'And clergymen, of course.'
'No, no,' Smosh contended, 'clergymen, one and all, have mercantile hearts. Some collect livings like stock certificates or manufacturies. They call the managers "curates" and collect a share of all the monies, often investing it in land or other businesses. No, we are merchants as well. And a church, despite all its manifest and demonstrable value, is nothing more than a place of business. Our "goods" are solace and salvation – excellent products, all must agree – and with the tithes and benefactions we build our shops, calling them churches and cathedrals. Increasing our trade is our avowed purpose. And is it not telling that we call a ministry "a living"? Not "a blessing" or even "a duty". No. We call it a living, and what does that refer to but an annual income?' He placed a hand on his chest. 'Beneath the pious breast of the cleric beats the calculating heart of a man of business.'
'Mr Smosh, you should not make such jests,' Worthing protested. 'Even if you are being ironical, you should not say it. Such opinions are near to blasphemy and there are people who might think you serious.'
'But I am not being ironical,' Smosh responded. 'I am being truthful. I have not denied that many a churchman does great good within his parish, but then one can make the same argument about a cheese merchant or a banker. Merchants have their value and their purpose, as do we all.'
Part of the satisfaction Hayden took in watching Smosh torture Dr Worthing was the little man's mental agility. Worthing was invariably at a loss for an answer, simply because he had never been presented with such arguments before, and when he did manage to mount a defence – invariably a tottering and faulty one – Smosh easily kicked out the braces and it came tumbling down.
Griffiths caught Hayden's eye at that moment and smiled cheerfully. Witnessing the torture of Dr Worthing could not help but bring a little warmth to even the most compassionate heart.
Hayden exited the gunroom, a bit befuddled by spirits. Wickham had gone before him and taken up a seat at the midshipman's table, where he engaged in a conversation of such gravity that Hayden found himself stopping.
'Is something amiss, Mr Wickham?' Hayden enquired.
The midshipmen looked one to the other.
'I believe there is, sir,' Wickham answered quietly, but appeared reluctant to say more.
Hayden glanced around – a few feet behind lay the gunroom, its door ajar. Forward the crew slung their hammocks and made up their messes.
'Come up to my cabin in a moment,' Hayden said softly, nodded to the young gentlemen, and retreated up the ladder to the gundeck.
His cabin was cheery, if cool. The gathered bodies in the gunroom had made it a place of warmth, if a little lacking in its usual cheer.
He lit several more candles and a moment later the sentry let Wickham and the midshipmen into the cabin. Madison and Hobson deferred to Wickham, almost taking a step back.
'Something would appear to be troubling all of you,' Hayden began, looking at each of them in turn. 'Mr Wickham, you seem to have been elected spokesman.'
Wickham glanced at the others, who nodded, and he turned to Hayden. 'It is Mr Gould, sir. A rumour has been spread among the crew that he is a Jew, sir, and has refused to take the sacrament.'
Hayden felt his eyes close. Would Griffiths be proven right in this matter?
'And what do the crew make of this?' Hayden enquired, opening his eyes.
'I think to most it means very little, but they are being… whipped up, Captain. Resentments are being…' he searched for a word, 'manufactured.'
'And who is doing this?'
The middies all glanced at each other. 'It is hard to be certain, sir, but it seems to have begun with Dr Worthing. He has befriended some of the men – if you could call it that – and they, in turn, are spreading his… preachings to the others. It is causing something of a division, sir.'
Hayden heard himself sigh. 'Damn the man!' he muttered. 'And what about Gould? How is this affecting him? Where is he, by the way?'
'On watch, sir,' Hobson offered.
'No man has refused to take his orders, Captain, but there are a few men who obey with some reluctance.'
'We will have to flog one or two of them, Mr Wickham. The first time you apprehend a hand not jumping to when Gould gives them an order, put him on report. Let the men know what supporting Dr Worthing and his ideas will cost them. I will have a word with some of the older men – they should be talking sense to the others. And I shall speak with Worthing, as well.' Hayden felt his frustration mounting. Smosh might find some amusement in Dr Worthing but Hayden thought him a dangerous nuisance. 'I shall be forced to confine him to his quarters yet. Thank you for speaking of this with me.'
The midshipmen, however, did not appear prepared to leave. There was an awkward shuffling and stalling feel about their manner.
'There is something more, I gather?' He raised an eyebrow at Wickham.
Wickham hesitated, then straightened and looked Hayden in the eye most directly. 'Some of the men are saying that you crossed yourself when you saw all of the dead Frenchmen floating, sir… like a papist.'
'I am sure I did no such thing.'
'And I am sure you are right, Captain, but everyone was dazed and had not their wits about them so no one can gainsay them. The men are suggesting that you had more sympathy for the dead Frenchmen than you had for our own injured, and that you should have gone back to search for the marines blown out of the tops.'
'Blast this interfering clergyman to hell!' Hayden said with feeling. 'You all know those marines would never have been found alive. If I had been blown over the side I would surely have drowned with that sea running – and I am a strong swimmer. At the same time, there was Bradley engaged with a heavy frigate. We could save more men there than marines in the sea.'
'None of us question your decision for a moment,' Wickham assured him. 'I am only telling you what is being said by the hands.'
'Of course, do pardon my outburst. Do you know, when the mutineers were hung I thought that would be the end of trouble among this crew.'
'There are a lot of new men, Captain,' Wickham said, 'and a man like Worthing… I think the crew are a bit afraid of him. No one wants to get on his bad side, sir.'
'I am certainly evidence of that. Who are these men whom Worthing has… befriended?'
Here Wickham's reticence blossomed into near refusal. Seamen did not like to be known as peachers. Hayden was tempted to say, 'You are a lieutenant now, Mr Wickham – no more schoolboy solidarity. Who are they?', but instead he waited, certain Wickham would work this out for himself.
'Weeks, sir, and Kitchen –'
'Chettle's mate?'
'Aye, sir,' Wickham replied.
'He is awfully religious, sir,' Madison added.
'No doubt triply true.'
'Bracegirdle, Elliot and Stephens.'
Hayden was surprised that certain names were not included – troublemakers always seemed to find trouble. 'Not too long a list. Bracegirdle and Stephens are new to the ship, are they not?'
'They are, sir, but Stephens grew up in the south-coast fisheries and then served in merchantmen. He is well thought of and liked, Captain Hayden.'
'Well, he is up for a flogging if he tries to undermine my middies. Thank you, gentlemen. You may be about your business. I will deal with this matter.'
Left alone in the chilly cabin, Hayden gazed longingly at his swinging cot, made up by his servant. A quick glance at his watch convinced him it was too late to confront Worthing this night. Morning would be soon enough. He wondered if he should take the deck and assess the mood of the watch – where Gould was on duty – but general exhaustion, drink and repleteness pushed him towards his cot instead. All could be dealt with in the morning. That would be soon enough.
A sound so distant, so faint – a deep-chested booming – that it hardly registered. One element of a jumbled dream. Hayden sat up in his swaying cot and listened a moment; just the common sounds of a ship at sea, though the wind did seem to be making. He laid back down, the swinging of his cot swaying him back towards sleep. Again, he was drawn back to the surface of a dream by a heavy, hollow report.
'Thunder,' he muttered, and let himself sink back down towards somnolence. Or was it the report of a gun? Again he sat up, calming his breathing so that he might listen. Feet came tapping, rapid-fire, down the companionway ladder outside his cabin. Before the sentry could knock, Hayden had swung out of his cot and was pulling on clothes, almost tumbling to the floor in his hurry.
'One moment!' he called, jerking on resistant boots. Snatching up a coat, he pulled open a door. Gould stood before him, looking perplexed if not worried, in the dim lamplight.
'Did I hear a gun?'
'We're not certain, sir,' the boy answered – a quick, worried blurting. 'Mr Archer sent me to ask for you, Captain.'
They went immediately to the aft companionway ladder and up two rungs at a stride.
'Was it a signal?' At night there was a prearranged signal code employing guns, lanterns and flares.
'I don't know, sir.'
Hayden reached the deck a step ahead of the midshipman. A great distance off, lightning illuminated a cloud for an instant. Muffled thunder burst upon them. 'Have we a ship in trouble, Mr Archer?'
Archer and Dryden, the master's mate, now mate to Mr Franks, stood by the larboard rail, Archer with a glass to his eye.
'We are uncertain, Captain Hayden,' Archer replied. 'Southeast by south – Mr Dryden and the mizzen lookout thought they saw a powder flash, sir, but as it occurred simultaneous with a thunder clap and lightning we cannot be sure.'
'Did you see the flash, Mr Archer?' Hayden asked.
The young lieutenant handed him the glass. 'I did not, sir'
Hayden turned to Dryden, the young man half a head shorter than he. 'Was it a gun or not, Mr Dryden?'
'I wished I knew, sir. I just saw it out of the corner of my eye, like. If it were a signal, Captain Hayden, they've not repeated it.'
Hayden began to lift the glass. 'Where away?'
Dryden raised a hand, chose a point in the distant darkness, and indicated carefully. 'There, sir, but well beyond the convoy.'
Hayden put the night glass to his eye and gazed at the horizon, the sea suddenly up, the stars below, as the night glass inverted everything.
'Do you see anything, sir?' Gould asked, not yet fully accustomed to naval etiquette – only Hayden's senior officers or warrant officers of long standing would ask such a question while he was concentrating on a task.
For a moment Hayden meant not to answer, but then remembering his conversation with Wickham and the other middies he relented. 'No, Mr Gould. We might have to call Mr Wickham to penetrate this darkness.'
A thunder squall blackened the horizon. The weather had changed. 'What is our heading, Mr Archer?'
'Sou'sou'west, sir. The wind has been veering slowly all this night. A gale would appear to be in the offing, Captain.'
'Yes. Damn. I had hoped the northerly might hold for a few days.'
The officers stood watching the spectacle, the night sky shattered by vague lightning, often buried deep within the inky blur.
'Tonitrus,' a voice intoned and a scarlet-coated figure appeared beside him.
'If you insist on speaking Latin, Mr Hawthorne,' Hayden said quietly, 'the reverend inquisitor will have you court-martialled as a papist spy.'
'And with my widely admired fluency in the French language I will no doubt be accused of serving the Convention as well.'
Hayden smiled. Hawthorne's abysmal French had almost got them killed on their last cruise. He lowered the glass.
'Well, I can see nothing but the lights of our convoy ships,' Hayden concluded. 'Have we lookouts aloft, yet?'
'We do, sir.'
'Call them down, Mr Archer. If we have the misfortune to be struck by lightning I want no one aloft. How long have we had this squall in view?'
'Some time, sir. It approaches but slowly.'
Hayden continued to gaze into the darkness, hypnotized by the lightning. When it burst low and within the cloud it did resemble muzzle flash.
'Was that a gun?' Gould asked.
'No. Almost certainly lightning,' Hayden replied.
'Should we clear for action, sir?' Archer wondered.
It was the very question Hayden was contemplating. Only a moment he wavered. 'No, Mr Archer. As no one is certain they saw muzzle flash and the signal, were it one, has not been repeated, we will proceed as we are.' Hayden looked back out into the darkness at the dim lights of the convoy ships. They undulated and guttered, floated up and fell, winking out here, blinking into being there – a field of drunken fireflies.
The officers stood at the rail, silent and contemplative.
'What is the meaning of Tonitrus?' Dryden asked suddenly.
'Thunder,' Gould replied.
'Well done, Gould,' Archer said. 'You soon shall be rivalling Mr Hawthorne for classical learning.'
'Well, as Gould appears to have your classical education in hand,' Hawthorne said, 'I will return to the rather pleasant dream I was having. Captain.' Hawthorne touched his hat and disappeared into the darkness.
Archer went back to his duty as officer of the watch, and Hayden was left standing at the rail with Midshipman Gould. Hayden wanted to ask him if any difficulties had arisen from his father's religion or his own race, but was reluctant to broach the subject – he knew not why. 'How are you fitting in, Mr Gould? No problems, I hope?'
'None, sir. Mr Wickham has been most attentive in teaching me my duties, and now I'm learning the skills of master's mate. There is a great deal to take in all at once, but I feel I am making progress.'
'"Making progress" sounds a little modest, Mr Gould. The reports I've received tell me you are learning like no other.' Hayden looked out at the swarm of lights again. 'And how do you get along with the hands?'
He could feel the boy's hesitation in the dark.
'Well enough, Captain Hayden,' he said too confidently. 'As in everything, I have much to learn.'
'Mr Barthe is an excellent sailing master, and a great seaman, but if you ever have need of some guidance in dealing with the hands you might come to me.' As soon as this was said, Hayden felt like a fraud. Was he not having his own problems with the crew – stirred up by Worthing? At least these had not yet become manifest in the running of the ship.
'Why, thank you, sir.'
'Do not be embarrassed to seek advice in this matter. Like making a splice, governing a crew is a learned skill.'
'Aye, sir.'
'I will leave you to your duties.'
Gould touched his hat and slipped quietly away. Much to his frustration, Hayden no longer felt the call of sleep – not that he wasn't fatigued, but he knew sleep would elude him this night. A desire for coffee came over him, but the stove would not be lit for some hours. Instead he paced the after quarterdeck, larboard to starboard, stopping occasionally to sweep his glass over the dark, southern sea. No one would approach him there unless upon a matter of absolute necessity. In a ship crammed full of over two hundred souls he was blessed to have a cabin and the after quarterdeck as his own private estate. Even so, he missed the camaraderie of the gunroom, a place he had become terribly familiar with since passing for lieutenant had granted him access to that little club. He missed the conviviality, the intense discussion, the wit of men like Hawthorne. He had passed out of that particular brotherhood. Dinner in the gunroom had brought that home to him. He was not only a guest, no longer privy to the discussions that had been taking place, but he was the captain – at least temporarily – the man upon whom everyone depended for their futures in the service. Even more unsettling, he was undoubtedly a subject for discussion around the table. Unlike that scoundrel Hart, Hayden wanted no spies reporting such conversations to him. Better not to know. Far better.
The wind veered uncertainly southward, then steadied in the south-west, sending the watch to sheets and braces, and the ship sailing obliquely back towards France. Perhaps two hours before first light sleep drove Hayden to his cot, but he was back on deck before dawn.
Wickham was officer of the watch and the midshipmen and Mr Barthe were readying to take the morning sight once the sun lifted a little higher. The squall had passed over them that night and left them rolling in a small wind with a little more west in it. Broken cloud bedraggled the sky, and the morning remained chill, the wind eating into his woollen coat.
Across the eastern sky, a featureless band of pearl grey cloud slowly blushed rose. The sun pushed upward into this miasmal haze, and day overspread sky and sea.
'Aloft there,' Hayden called when he judged the light adequate. 'Have you a count of our ships?'
Hayden could see the man sitting astride the top-gallant yard, a glass slowly sweeping east to west. Lowering the glass and steadying himself, the lookout peered down towards the deck.
'I can't be certain, Captain. Twice I've tallied twenty-nine and once thirty.'
'Blast,' Hayden muttered, refraining from saying, 'Damn your eyes.'
'I'll go aloft, sir,' Wickham offered and immediately clambered up onto the rail and began climbing the weather shrouds. Out to the end of the top-gallant yard he went, so sails would not obstruct his view. In a moment he lowered his glass and called down.
'I make it twenty-nine transports, Captain. All our escort vessels are in place but McIntosh is beating towards us.'
'You cannot see a ship in our wake, Mr Wickham, blown down to leeward, perhaps?'
'No, sir, but there is a low mist obscuring the horizon.'
Hayden muttered another curse. Once the sun rose a little higher his missing ship might be revealed, but it seemed now that there had been a gun fired and it was, of all things, most likely a request for assistance.
McIntosh was soon sailing along within hailing distance.
'We have lost a transport, Captain Hayden.'
'So we thought. What is her name?'
'The Hartlepool, sir.'
'I knew that little tub would get herself into trouble,' Mr Barthe complained. 'Never was she fit for sea.'
Hayden ignored this outburst. 'Has anyone reported a signal from her? A gun fired about two bells?'
'No, sir, Captain. Shall I sail back and search for her?'
'Yes. Yes, I see no choice. Will you carry my surgeon to the Agnus as you go? I'll lower a boat and you can take the crew aboard and tow it behind.'
'Gladly, Captain Hayden.'
Hayden motioned one of the middies over. 'Pass the word for Dr Griffiths, if you please.'
The boy bobbed his head and set off at a trot.
It always seemed odd to Hayden that the bosun – the boatswain – was not the officer who had charge of the boats; that duty fell to the carpenter. Chettle and Franks were now in the process of launching a small cutter from a rolling deck onto a rising sea. Of necessity, some rather inexperienced men were involved in this endeavour and their mates were schooling them in the usual genteel manner favoured by seamen. How Hayden missed Aldrich. He would have taken these bewildered landsmen in hand and with infinite patience turned them into sailors. Hayden would trade any ten of his present crew to have another Aldrich aboard.
Griffiths appeared at that moment, weaving down the gangway in response to the ship's roll. Clutched in one hand, a hat, in the other a small leather satchel. Griffiths's face was pinched and pale and he glanced out at the rising sea with both animosity and dismay.
'You could still send Mr Ariss, Doctor,' Hayden suggested.
'No, it is better I go myself.' The surgeon watched the boat, now raised by tackles, as it tried to swing across the deck, poorly controlled by landsmen who were none too steady on the deck themselves. The experienced hands were aloft reducing sail at that moment, watching the antics on deck with ill-disguised amusement.
Griffiths was silent a moment, and then seemed to make a decision. 'I must tell you, Captain, I found that clergyman down in my sick-berth this morning. Ariss had absented himself but a moment and the man stole in. How he knew when to come I do not know.'
'Worthing? I forbade him entry to the sick-berth.'
'He heard me say that McKee – from the Agnus – was in all likelihood dying and he slipped in with the intent of anointing the sick. Poor McKee would have none of it – he was horrified – but then he departed this life a few hours later. It has passed through the lower deck like consumption – the clergyman was in the sick-berth and a man died but a short time after. Who will come to me with their illnesses now? Did Worthing not comprehend the mischief he would effect?'
'I'm certain he did. It was explained to him most explicitly.' Hayden removed his hat and ran fingers back through his hair. 'And what of this man McKee? Do you know what did for him?'
The doctor shook his head, face folding into a grimace. 'Let us hope I do not find the answer aboard the Agnus.'
Childers had begun mustering his boat crew by the rail, and Hayden waved to him. 'This sea is rising, Childers; take no green hands.'
'Aye, sir.'
'If you judge it unwise to return, remain on the Agnus and I will have McIntosh carry you back later this day.'
Childers made a knuckle.
Gould appeared at Hayden's elbow. 'Excuse me, Captain. Is it not common to send a midshipman off with the boat?'
'I am sending Madison.'
Gould looked so very serious as he asked, 'Might I go in his place? I have asked and he will not mind. He told me so himself.'
Boys were always on the lookout for something resembling adventure. 'Go on, then.'
Hayden glanced over at Childers, who, overhearing the exchange, nodded. He would keep the boy out of trouble.
The boat was finally put into the sea with only superficial damage to the topsides and to the cutter itself, and the doctor was quickly ferried over to McIntosh's waiting schooner, where he and the crew were taken aboard. This vessel had not gone half a mile before the wind died away altogether.
'It is going to come around, sir,' Barthe pronounced. 'Blasted, fucking sou'wester!'
'Yes, I fear you are right, Mr Barthe. At least we made a little westing overnight. Our course will not be so very bad.'
Barthe waved a small hand toward the ships of the convoy. 'With this lot in tow we shall be hove to by dinner, Captain Hayden. Just see if we aren't.'
Gibraltar had never seemed so very far away as it did at that moment.
Hayden made his way forward, wondering what he would do with Worthing. The man had defied him and had caused Hayden and Griffiths a serious problem as a result. As he walked his eye played over every part of the ship. This was not a conscious act, but something he had been trained to do since his days as midshipman. The captains he had served had taught him that captains who missed no detail instilled high standards among their officers, who took pride in keeping up their parts of the ship to the captain's requirements.
Hayden found some landsmen coiling down ropes on the forecastle – a simple task any landsman should be able to master.
'These coils will not do!' Hayden informed them. 'You must be able to pull them off their pin and have them run free. You can endanger both the ship and crew if these ropes foul in a gale.' Hayden looked away from the surprised landsmen, who had never had the captain speak to them before. 'Tawney!' Hayden called one of the foretopmen descending from the yards at that moment. 'Show these men the proper manner of coiling down.' Hayden turned back to the men. 'You should have learned this your first days aboard. I expect better of you.'
Hayden turned to walk away as Tawney jogged forward but had not gone three paces when he heard one of the landsmen mutter, '… ing papist.'
He spun around in time to see Tawney stretch the man out with one blow, the landsman striking the deck so hard that his head bounced like a ball. For a moment no one moved, the man on the deck still as the dead, but then he moaned and squirmed a little, limbs writhing weakly. Blood flowed from his nose onto the dark planking. Tawney had turned white with rage, and then awareness.
'I-I didn't realize what I was about, Captain,' he stammered. 'Man called you a fu—… a papist, sir…' His mouth opened but no more words would come.
'Yes, and he shall be flogged for it, but it was not your place to punish him.'
'I'm sorry, sir.'
'I am sure you are. Jump down and get a cot from the sick-berth, and tell the master-at-arms the man shall be in irons as soon as Mr Ariss has released him.'
'Aye, sir.' The topman started to turn away.
'And Tawney…'
'Aye, sir?'
'No grog for these three days. Do you understand?'
'I do, sir. Thank you, sir.'
Hayden was not about to flog the men who took his side, but Tawney could not go unpunished. A feud among the crew was the last thing he wanted.
Every man on deck stood transfixed – apprehensive and curious – as they gauged what this meant to them, to their place in the ship. As Hayden began to make his way aft along the gangway men shook themselves out of this and turned back to their duties with renewed energy. An angry captain was not to be provoked.
Reaching the quarterdeck he said to Madison, 'Pass the word for Dr Worthing. I will be in my cabin.'
Once shut up in his cabin, Hayden paced quickly the width of the ship, containing the desire to strike one of the deck beams – an unfair battle if ever there was to be one. Just when he was about to send a second man to fetch the parson, he heard footsteps coming unhurriedly up the stair.
He ordered the sentry to let Worthing in and when the parson entered, Hayden stood with his arms crossed in the middle of the cabin. Worthing, not a man commonly attuned to the moods of others, took one look at Hayden and stopped sharply.
'I am informed that you were in the sick-berth this very morning against my direct orders and I have just had a man call me a papist – within hearing!' Hayden began, no attempt at politeness being made. 'Have you no comprehension what undermining the captain will accomplish? I am what stands between this ship and utter calamity. All my years of training and experience are what keeps this ship from foundering in a storm or being taken by the French. Do you not realize that subverting my authority puts you and every soul aboard in mortal danger? And this is not to mention that Griffiths thinks we might have a contagion aboard and you have just ensured, with your presence in the sick-berth, that no man will come to him except he is too ill to conceal it!'
'You have no right to speak to me thus!' Worthing replied haughtily. 'You who are not even a captain. Are you accusing me –'
But Hayden would have none of it, raising his voice over the clergyman's. 'Do you heed no voice but your own! This is a ship of war. We are crossing the Bay of Biscay – a sea plagued with privateers and French warships. I cannot, for a moment, tolerate dissension among my crew or allow any man to foster it. You, sir, for the duration of this voyage, are confined to your cabin. A marine guard will stand sentry outside your door. You shall be allowed out to eat your meals, use the heads, and to have one half-hour of air twice daily – under guard. You may speak to no one and have no visitors but Mr Smosh. That is all, sir. You may leave.'
Worthing was positively twitching with rage, his face contorting and shivering. For a moment words eluded him and then in a high quavering voice began, 'I am not some ignorant seaman you can call or dismiss at your whim!'
Hayden crossed the cabin in an instant, the clergyman stumbling back in trepidation. Opening the door Hayden confronted the surprised sentry. 'Escort Dr Worthing to his cabin and stand guard outside his door until Mr Hawthorne has you relieved. Dr Worthing is not to leave or have visitors. Is that understood?'
'I will not stand for it!' Worthing stated, but it was outrage without conviction. Hayden had frightened him and his shyness was now revealed. 'You cannot –'
'Lead him off,' Hayden said evenly, and then turned to Worthing. 'You may proceed to your cabin with dignity, Dr Worthing, or be dragged. It matters not to me.'
Worthing stood his ground only an instant, and then went clopping out, stumbling, his shoes rushing to catch up his ungainly body. He fell on the steps and required a steadying hand from the marine. Hayden stood a moment, gazing down the gundeck, at the two lines of blackened cannon, then pulled his door closed, retreated inside, and slumped down on the bench before the gallery.
A moment later a knock sounded at his door.
'Who is there?' Hayden called out, not rising.
'Hawthorne, Captain.'
'Come in.'
The door opened a foot, and Hawthorne's handsome face appeared. A moment he paused and then let himself in. 'I have a raging clergyman shut up in his cabin and a confused sentry standing outside his door not allowing him out. Your orders, I collect?'
'Entirely mine.'
'Excellent. Bread and water? Floggings at dawn?'
'He may take his meals with the gunroom mess, but is to have no visitors or to even speak to anyone but Smosh.'
'Which of the two gentlemen are we punishing?'
'It is not a matter for jest, Hawthorne.'
'No. And it is past time that you took this step. I will see he preaches no more subversion among the crew. Leave it to me.' Hawthorne paused a second. 'Do you wonder how this might appear to the authorities when we reach Gibraltar?'
'Deranged, I suspect. But what am I to do? The man is subverting my authority aboard my own ship. Spreading rumours that I am a papist. Telling utter lies, in fact. And this morning he went into the sick-berth against my orders. Never in this life have I met a man more prone to devilment – and I choose that word with intent. What ship will want such a parson aboard?'
'Lord Hood's Victory, I understand.'
'Hood would be rid of the man in a week.'
'So he would. I hear the crewman from the Agnus departed this life?'
'Yes. God rest his soul.'
Hawthorne digested this a moment, then said quietly, 'Do you think we have some plague aboard?'
It was a question Hayden did not even want to answer. 'I pray not. The doctor has gone over to the Agnus to see if they have any others suffering fever.'
'Griffiths has looked wholly distracted for more than a day. Distressed, even.'
'Yes, he is concerned but I take hope from the fact that he is yet uncertain. If McKee had yellow jack or something like the doctor would have known immediately.'
'Yes, certainly. Barthe tells me we are in for a gale and we have lost a transport?'
'Both true, I regret to say. I have sent McIntosh to seek our misplaced ship.'
'Have we a predator lurking near or did this ship merely slip beneath the waves from general lubberly negligence?'
'I wish I knew, Mr Hawthorne, but I do now regret not looking more carefully into the sighting of what might have been a flare this night past.' Hayden rose from his seat and fetched his hat.
He was still stiff and aching from being hurled across the deck. His ears rang – a high-pitched, relentless humming – and sitting for any length of time made him stiff again. Walking remained the best curative.
The wind was veering into the sou'west as Hayden took the deck, crests breaking ineffectually on a steel-dark sea. Saint-Denis had begun preparations for a gale. Top-gallant masts were being housed and yards sent efficiently down to the deck.
'Saint-Denis? Have you doubled all the breechings on the guns?'
'Archer is seeing to the gundeck, Captain,' the lieutenant called loudly over the rising noise. 'The weather glass has dropped like a whore's unde—Pardon me, sir. The weather glass has fallen sharply.'
'Yes, we are in for it, I fear.' Hayden gazed out over the chaotic sea. All the ships within sight were reducing sail, sending down yards, and making the common preparations for foul weather.
McIntosh's schooner had reached the Agnus, and Hayden saw the Themis's cutter pulling over the mounting seas towards the transport. McIntosh had already reefed, and now set out to look for the missing ship, a task made doubly difficult, if not impossible, by the deteriorating weather.
'It is a damned foolish business sending out a convoy this late in the season,' Barthe said as he approached Hayden and Saint-Denis on the quarterdeck. The sailing master appeared pasty pale, a fragment of red hair, loose from his queue, wetly plastered to his forehead.
Hayden did not respond but nodded. He was examining the ships in his convoy with a glass, appalled at how slowly evolutions were effected.
'Mr Hayden. Captain, I mean.' It was Archer, still struggling to remember proper address.
'Mr Archer?'
The lieutenant sounded out of sorts, his habitual 'recently awakened' manner thrust aside. 'I have just sent Hale down to Mr Ariss. He was shaking with what I believed was fever, but professed himself to be perfectly well, sir.'
'That loafer?' Barthe sounded surprised. 'He asks to put on the sick-and-hurt list if he can manufacture a sniffle.'
Hayden lowered his glass, and turned to Archer, who was very pensive, almost grim.
'What did Mr Ariss say?'
'Only that he hoped Dr Griffiths would return soon.'
'Lieutenant,' Hayden said to Saint-Denis. 'Set a man to watch the Agnus. I fear this sea will become too great for our cutter to venture forth in and McIntosh might not return before nightfall. The moment the doctor appears on deck signal that we shall fetch him in the Themis.'
'Aye, sir.' Saint-Denis went quickly forward calling for a man and a glass. For not the first time Hayden had to admit that the man, for all his flaws, and they formed not an inconsiderable list, was a passable seaman and officer. Hayden had seen many worse.
Ariss popped out of the after companionway, looked quickly about, spotted Hayden and hurried towards him. The man's face was dark, jaw tight, a deep furrow appearing between his brows.
'How fares Hale?' Hayden asked him.
'That is why I have come, sir.' He looked around at the listening men and fell silent.
'Excuse us, Mr Barthe,' Hayden said, and motioned for Ariss to follow him to the taffrail.
Once there Ariss pitched his voice low. 'Certainly you will want Dr Griffiths's more expert opinion, but I believe Hale has the same fever as the man from the Agnus – McKee – or so it appears to me.' He lowered his voice even more. 'And Pritchard, who has been in the sick-berth with a broken femur, is showing the same signs – high fever, sweats, aching joints, and his breathing is laboured and he has begun to cough up pink fluid, sir.'
Hayden tried to hide his alarm. 'We will fetch Griffiths back immediately and I will hear his opinion, though I do not doubt you are right, Mr Ariss. I will send a marine down to stand sentry. No one is to enter or leave the sick-berth without the permission of Dr Griffiths or myself. I wonder how many more men are feeling ill but will not come forward now?'
'I have wondered the same thing, Captain.'
Neither mentioned Dr Worthing, but he was clearly in their minds.
There was, at that moment, from among the men forward, something like a collective moan of apprehension or despair. Hayden and Ariss turned to look.
Freddy Madison came running back along the heaving deck. 'If you please, Captain,' Madison spoke from a respectful distance. 'You wished to be informed the instant the doctor appeared on the Agnus? Our cutter is away, sir, under sail and tacking towards us.' He paused, swallowing once. 'And sir… the Agnus has just sent aloft the yellow jack.'
Raising his glass, Hayden found the Agnus wallowing upon a wind-driven sea. At her crosstrees shivered a yellow flag. For a moment Hayden stared, willing the banner to be some other signal… but it was not. He lowered his glass and took a long breath. Turning back to the surgeon's mate he said softly. 'Keep me informed of the state of Pritchard and Hale, Mr Ariss.'
'Aye, sir,' the man replied. He looked frightened, and that would not help settle the crew's fears. Hayden could hear the whispering.
The wind had settled, sou-west by west, which gave the convoy a more favourable slant than Hayden had hoped – the one bright point of the day – but the ships were hard on the wind and most were not as weatherly as the Themis. Hayden wondered if the wind would not veer a little more and force them to heave to – luck was running that way.
'Mr Barthe!' Hayden called. 'Let us bear off and take aboard our cutter.' And then to the helmsman as Hayden made his way forward: 'Prepare to shift your helm at Mr Barthe's order.'
'Aye, sir.'
'Mr Saint-Denis,' Hayden addressed his first lieutenant. 'Let us get our cutter aboard before this sea gets up any more. This wind has not finished making.'
Saint-Denis nodded. 'Aye, sir. It appears we have need of our doctor…'
When Hayden refused to respond this, on deck where everyone could hear, the young lieutenant went quickly off.
Hayden raised his glass again and found their cutter, double-reefed, the crew crowded to weather, and making heavy work of it. Two men were bailing constantly as spray broke aboard. Gould, Hayden noted, was assisting Childers with a heavy helm.
A rain squall overtook the Themis, and Hayden stepped into the lee of the mizzen to await the appearance of his oilskins, brought a moment later by a running servant. The frigate flew down upon the cutter, scudding before the gathering seas. In a few moments Hayden ordered her hove to and the crew of the cutter came up the side, only the doctor and Mr Gould having trouble catching the rhythm of the two vessels. Griffiths tumbled over the rail and was caught by two seamen. He looked grim – even ill.
'As soon as you have found dry clothing, Doctor,' Hayden said. 'I will be in my cabin.'
He left Saint-Denis and Barthe to beat back to their place in the convoy, and took himself below to await the doctor.
A lengthy quarter of an hour crept by as Hayden paced, but then the doctor knocked and entered as quietly as ever.
'Three dead and half the crew ill,' Griffiths announced – a no-nonsense diagnosis. 'The master looks as if he will pull through, thank God, as the mate is a sot, if I am any judge. Why the man did not convey this information to us, I cannot even imagine. It is difficult to accept that anyone's understanding could be so diminished by drink.'
Hayden had not allowed himself to hope for better – or so he had believed until hearing the doctor's pronouncement. His own dismay spoke otherwise, however. 'And do you know what kind of contagion this might be?' he asked in what he hoped resembled a tone of calm acceptance.
Griffiths paused, his gaze flickering up as though he ticked off a mental list of symptoms. 'Well, it is the strangest thing – it appears for all the world to be an influenza, yet I have never seen one so… violent. Including McKee, it has killed four young men in the prime of their lives, and that is not the way of any influenza of which I have knowledge. The Agnus, short of crew, took aboard two men in Portugal, one of whom has already departed this life. It appears these two, though British, had jumped ship from a Yankee merchantman. The Yank had unwittingly carried the fever from Virginia, and the two men, fearing for their lives, got themselves ashore by night and signed on to the first vessel leaving port – the Agnus. They were a sennight back to Portsmouth, with a gale behind them, and though one of them fell ill he did not suffer so greatly as the men on the Yankee ship. They must have thought they had escaped it but the second man fell ill just before they joined the convoy in Torbay. Even then they informed no one. But then that man died and the contagion began to spread throughout the ship. The survivor admitted this to me, and told me that, in Virginia, the horses became ill first and then the stablemen and drivers.' Griffiths pinched the bridge of his nose, eyes closing. He had not slept much the previous night, Hayden conjectured, and bore a red-eyed, slightly unkempt look that day.
'And we carried it aboard our own ship… through an act of charity,' Hayden said softly.
Griffiths paced to one side, agitated. 'Yes, I cannot escape blame. I perceived he was fevered when I allowed McKee aboard but thought it merely a consequence of his injury. Corruption was my worry, not influenza, and even had I suspected influenza I should not have been much concerned as it will not commonly strike down a man in good health. The sick, the elderly, consumptives – these are its customary victims.' Griffiths stopped his pacing and met Hayden's eye, distress poorly hidden. 'I have made a terrible mistake, Mr Hayden.'
'No. I am confident that any doctor would have done the same. If only these bloody fools had had the common sense to inform the master of the Agnus. How did they get off the Yankee ship? Was it not quarantined?'
'I know not, Captain,' Griffiths admitted. 'I will have to inspect the crew, one man at a time. I can see no other way. The ill must be separated – immediately.'
'Do you not worry that you have brought this miasma from the Agnus yourself?'
'We were aboard only a few moments. It is much more likely that I have it from McKee. But what else can we do? No one will come forward now that Worthing – blast his soul to hell – has been in my sick-berth and the man he visited has died.'
'I am sure you are right. I will have Archer muster the men by their messes. Pestilence commonly spreads thus – through one mess and then another. We will build a quarantine berth for the men who have had close contact with the sick. Once he has done that, Chettle can make your sick-berth as large as you need.'
Griffiths nodded. 'Mr Ariss and I will hang our cots in the cockpit and take our meals there as well – for the time being.'
Hayden almost shuddered at the thought of living among the sick, but Griffiths was right; he and his mate were the most likely to spread the disease, so must keep themselves away from the uninfected.
'Have the crew of the Agnus had commerce with the people of any other ship?' he asked, though in fact he felt a little swell of emotion at Griffiths's understated courage. Hayden would rather face a dozen battles than spend even an hour among the sick.
'I asked but it seems they have not.'
'We have that to be thankful for.' Hayden might have said something about Griffiths's courage at that moment but knew the doctor would only have been embarrassed and he wished to spare him any mortification. Griffiths was taking it hard that he had allowed an influenza aboard the Themis.
'Yes. If you will excuse me, Captain, I should see to the crew without delay.'
'By all means.' But then Hayden asked the question that preyed upon him. 'How many of us do you think will contract this sickness, Doctor?'
Griffiths looked suddenly so exhausted that he might collapse where he stood. He reached up and clasped a beam. 'If we act quickly perhaps fewer than aboard the Agnus.' He seemed to lose all focus for a second, but then managed. 'One man in twenty has died, Captain.'
'I trust, with your skills, Doctor, we shall fare better than that.'
Griffiths nodded distractedly. 'Thank you.' Griffiths made a half-bow and hurried off, disappearing quietly below.
Hayden stood at the windows looking out at the gale-driven sea, the chill of the day seeping through the weave of his coat. One in twenty – ten men they could lose. They were separated from their most powerful ship and the commanding officer of the convoy, a transport had disappeared in the night, the weather conspired against them, and now this… If half his crew went down with the contagion how would he fight the French should they appear? What if he should become ill? Saint-Denis would not be his first choice to bring the convoy to Gibraltar or even to take command of the Themis.
A gentle tap on his door.
'Yes?' Hayden called.
The sentry opened the door only a little. 'Mr Smosh to see you, Captain.'
'Send him in, if you please.'
The corpulent little cleric entered. Clearly, he was gaining his sea legs, for the ship was pitching overly and he stood without grasping any handhold.
'Mr Smosh. Is there some service you require?'
'I see you have confined Dr Worthing to his cabin…'
'A measure that was forced upon me, I assure you; the man has a seditious character.'
Smosh nodded. 'Do not think I judge you, Captain Hayden. In truth, I approve it. As you say, he will cause mischief if it is at all possible. But that is not why I have interrupted your labours. It is being said that we have some plague aboard our ship?'
'I am afraid it is true. An influenza, the doctor conjectures, though a virulent one.'
'I am terribly sorry to hear it. Might I offer to conduct a service for the crew? Often at such times men discover their religious nature. I am uncertain of its practical value but it might ease the men's apprehensions somewhat.'
'You have my permission. When should we arrange this service?'
'I suggest as soon as the doctor has finished seeing to the crew.'
'Assuming the gale has not grown much worse, and crew can be spared, that would be perfectly acceptable. Thank you, Mr Smosh.'
Smosh made a little nodding bow. 'I am only too happy to do what little I can.' The clergyman hesitated a moment. 'It occurred to me that I might press one of your crew to assist me… Could you spare Mr Gould, briefly?'
Hayden was surprised at this and about to say 'no' when he realized that Smosh had not chosen Gould's name by accident.
'Indeed. I think Mr Gould would be the ideal candidate.' Smosh held up a hand. 'Do not discommode yourself, Captain Hayden. I will find Mr Barthe and the boy and inform them myself, if that is acceptable.'
'Entirely, Mr Smosh, thank you.'
The little parson smiled, made a leg, and let himself out.
'Remarkable,' Hayden muttered after the door had closed. It seemed Hawthorne would be proven wrong and Griffiths in the right in the matter of Mr Smosh. Certainly Smosh had asked that Gould assist him for the very purpose of demonstrating to the crew that the boy was, indeed, a practising Christian. Hayden only hoped this would prove to be true.
Within an hour, unable to contain his anxiety about the spread of influenza, Hayden took himself down to the lower deck – the berth deck – to discover how the doctor progressed. Griffiths was in the process of examining the men of number eight mess. Employing a narrow cylinder, the surgeon listened to them breathe, then looked into their ears and eyes, asked them numerous questions about their contact with the afflicted men and their general health, but above all he pressed his palm to their foreheads to ascertain if they were fevered and measured their pulse rates.
Seeing Hayden lurking nearby, Griffiths excused himself and he and Hayden retreated far enough towards the midshipmen's berth that they might speak privately.
'What is the verdict, Dr Griffiths?'
'I have not finished seeing the men, but so far we seem to be getting off rather too lightly. I fear there will be more cases in the days to come. The Agnus has half her crew down, after all, and I have only about six men who appear fevered.'
'Perhaps we will be able to confine it, then.' Hayden wondered if his relief showed.
'Such fevers spread easily and quickly, Captain. A low diet, in my experience, will accomplish more than anything else in resurrecting the sick, and I will bleed the men who require it. Physic will help soothe the nerves and the pulse, though we may need to speak with the Syren's surgeon; my supply of anti-phlogistics certainly will not be adequate – rosin of Jalap I possess in abundance but vitriolated tartat I am certain is all but exhausted and of mercurius dulcis I have but half a scruple.'
'The moment McIntosh returns I will send him to Cole with a request for physic – if you could write me a list.'
'As soon as I can put pen to paper.' Griffiths made the smallest motion with head and body towards the gathered and wary men.
'I will leave you to your work, Doctor.'
Hayden ascended the ladder to the gundeck, where a group of boys – off watch – were playing at firing an eighteen-pounder, pulling on imaginary tackles, plunging the invisible swab down the unseen barrel. They ran their gun out with elan and, all as one, bellowed the report, 'BOOM!'
'That's done for 'im!' One of the boys, the apparent gun captain, pronounced, gazing through the closed gunport at the battered French ship beyond. 'She's a-sinking, lads.'
'No! Not sinking!' one of the boys called out in dismay. 'Wot about our prize money?'
The gun captain took a second, more carefully considered, look. 'Wait! No. She's not going down. Let's board her, boys!'
The gunner, not far off, replacing the flint on a lock, spotted Hayden, and jumped up, alarmed. 'Hey, you lot!' he shouted at the boys. 'What are you about? Off you go and cause trouble elsewhere.'
The boys started to protest, when one spotted Hayden, and whispered loudly. 'Captain!'
A scrambling of skinny legs and arms, the dreaded word 'captain' echoing along the deck as the boys disappeared.
The gunner stood, abashed, teeth together, mouth awkwardly open – a sharp intake through teeth. 'My apologies, Captain. They weren't doing no harm, sir, but I shouldn't let them play around the guns, I know.'
'You certainly should not. And never again – even with the locks all covered and you present.'
'Aye, sir.'
Hayden found his oilskins and went up onto the deck. Wickham was standing by the mizzen shrouds, staring off to the north.
'Any sight of McIntosh?' Hayden asked.
Wickham seemed to be shaken from a reverie. 'Sir?' he said. 'McIntosh… can you see him?'
'No, sir. He sailed into the general murk some time ago and has not returned.'
'Hmm.'
Hayden took Wickham's glass and examined the ships of his convoy. A gust struck the Themis, heeling her ponderously. Hayden could feel the ship resisting, the wind pushing back. A sea broke against the forward quarter, spray arcing over the rail and splattering down on the deck.
'The weather glass has stopped falling, sir, but as yet it has displayed no inclination to rise.'
Hayden lowered the glass. 'This wind has not finished making, but I have seen winds defy the weather glass before.'
'No doubt, sir.' Wickham was silent a moment. 'How fares the doctor?'
It was an odd question and Hayden glanced at Wickham, decided it was only an awkward attempt to ask after the sick, and said, 'He hasn't done with the crew but has found fewer sick than feared.' Hayden glanced at Wickham to see if his tone of optimism had been believable.
'That is good news, sir.' Wickham appeared to relax a little, his carriage straightening. 'The men have every faith in the doctor, Captain. He will pull us through.'
'I believe their faith is well placed.'
'There, sir!' Wickham's hand shot up and he pointed into a inky squall that sagged low to the sea.
A glance through the glass assured Hayden that it was, indeed, a schooner and so almost certainly McIntosh. He passed the glass to Wickham, who confirmed that it was.
Hayden took a turn of the deck, stopping to speak with members of the crew, making a point of addressing the new men. At times like this a calm captain could soothe many apprehensions, and among such a superstitious community, dread of contagion was a fear as great as any but perhaps the sepsis. The term plague ship was whispered on all decks and the men set about their work, silent and grim. Everywhere he went Hayden assured the men it was not the yellow jack or some other such scourge, but an influenza – a word that did not strike so great a fear into their hearts.
Hawthorne met Hayden as he returned to the quarterdeck, a weak smile flickering across the marine's handsome face. 'Dr Griffiths has finished seeing the men,' Hawthorne informed him, 'though not the officers and guests.' The marine leaned closer and spoke quietly. 'Fourteen fevered, another half-dozen about whom he harbours fears. They have been separated from both the sick and the hale so that Griffiths might observe their state most closely.'
'So many!' Hayden heard himself say, unable to hide his distress.
'Was the Good Samaritan so repaid for his charity?' Hawthorne wondered. 'I have forgotten.'
'A good Christian does not look for rewards in this life, Mr Hawthorne.'
'Yet another way in which I have failed. But speaking of religion – we are rigging for church on the lower deck out of this bloody wind and rain. Mr Smosh is displaying uncommon energy in this endeavour, given his atheistic inclinations, and I must tell you, he has a most interesting curate this day.'
'Mr Gould.'
Hawthorne was clearly surprised that Hayden possessed this knowledge. 'Indeed. I do hope the boy has actually attended church. It will only fuel the rumours if he is un-acquainted with the common ritual.'
'I believe Smosh chose Gould with the purpose of suppressing such rumours and will be certain he knows his part. Or so I hope.' It occurred to Hayden at that moment that Smosh might have intended the opposite, but no, Smosh was not so inclined, he was sure.
'Let us pray,' Hawthorne intoned.
Hayden kept the deck until McIntosh made his way, board by board, through the convoy and hove to within hailing distance of the Themis. The little schooner, tightly reefed, was a flyer and as weatherly as any two-sticker Hayden had ever known.
'Nary a sign of our lost ship, Captain Hayden,' McIntosh called from the rail. 'Not even a wee scrap of flotsam. If she went down she had no time to launch boats.' He shrugged, his look perplexed. 'I cannee explain it.'
'I've never known a ship to go under so quickly,' Hayden called, 'lest she exploded. I do not think we can do more until this gale has passed but I have a letter for you to carry to Captain Cole, if you please.'
Hayden sent his servant down to Griffiths asking for the list of physic he required. This the servant produced in a quarter of an hour, and McIntosh eased sheets, flying through the ships of the convoy like a gull with the wind at its tail.
A gust struck Hayden on the back, pelting him with hard rain. A terrible flogging from above caused him to look up; below the crosstrees, the ochre jack lashed itself into a frenzy.
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 9
|
Smosh, a slightly comical figure at the best of times, surprised Hayden by appearing positively dignified in his vestments. By contrast, Gould looked nervous, even abashed; his uniform, of excellent quality, so new he almost appeared to be royalty dropped into their midst.
The men sat upon the benches at each table, all turned to face aft, where Smosh prepared to address them. A group had gathered on the floor at his feet and to one side the officers and warrant officers seated themselves on chairs.
If one had gone searching for a congregation of unrepentant sinners, certainly one would need look no further than the crew of a man-of-war. Yet, once church had been rigged, they became the most attentive and compliant group of absolute sinners one could ask for. They wore their best rigs, and sat like obedient schoolboys ready to take in a sermon on any of their cherished vices. One would think them a gathering of the most devout Christians rather than the tribe of heathens they actually were. Today, though, the men were more than solemn, a distressed, hunted look upon their wind-reddened faces. He had never seen such torment even aboard a ship about to enter battle.
Smosh cleared his throat loudly, awaiting the cessation of 'shushing' with great forbearance.
'O most powerful and Glorious Lord God, at whose command the winds blow,' he began, and Hayden glanced over at Hawthorne, whose surprise equalled his own, 'and lift up the waves of the sea, and who stillest the rage thereof.'
Hayden had been expecting a prayer for the sick, which would have been appropriate to their present situation, but this was a very well-known prayer to sailors for it was often recited in the midst of great storms at sea.
Smosh's pleasant voice echoed within the wooden church. 'We, thy creatures, but miserable sinners, do in this, our great distress, cry out to thee for help: Save us, Lord, or else we perish. We confess, when we have been safe, and seen all things quiet about us, we have forgotten thee, our God, and refused to harken to the still voice of thy word, and to obey thy commandments; but now we see how terrible thou art in all thy works of wonder, the Great God to be feared above all; and therefore we adore thy Divine Majesty, acknowledging thy power and imploring thy goodness. Help, Lord, and save us for thy mercy's sake in Jesus Christ thy Son, Amen.'
'Amen,' repeated the miserable sinners in a manner most heartfelt.
'There is aboard our ship, this day, a thing of great evil – a pestilence that has struck down our friends and spreads among us. Some say that this is a judgement of God, but I do not believe that our merciful God has sent this contagion as punishment. It is a thing of evil and therefore not of our Lord.'
Archer appeared at that moment, all a-lather. He looked about in the lamplit gloom, spotted Hayden, and, circling behind Smosh, came immediately to his captain. 'McIntosh has brought our physic, sir, but he asks to speak with you, Captain, on a matter of the greatest urgency.'
Smosh had stopped speaking as Archer appeared, and he nodded to Hayden very slightly, and continued. Hayden was out of his seat and upon the ladder in a moment – up to the gundeck and then the quarterdeck, pulling on oilskins as he went.
The wind moaned in the shrouds, and the ship heeled, decks streaming dark rivulets that collected and sloshed against the bulwark, gushing out scuppers.
McIntosh stood at the rail of his schooner, head bent and half turned away from the wind, thinned brim of a threadbare sou'wester fluttering about his face. Seeing Hayden, he cupped hands to his mouth and called, 'Sor, just as I took my leave of Captain Cole his lookout spotted a ship to the north-east. A frigate, he believes, and perhaps another in the cloud. As soon as he had made she out, she dropped back into the murk, sor.'
Hayden muttered a curse. 'No idea of its nationality?' he shouted back.
McIntosh threw up his hands and shrugged. 'None, sor.'
'They might explain our lost ship,' Archer said loudly.
A blast of wind luffed Hayden's oilskins, and rain battered down with such force that for a moment no one attempted to speak over the rattle. As the gust eased, and the howl quieted, Hayden called, 'I don't think signals can be seen in this bloody gloom, McIntosh. Alert the other escorts that they must clear for action. I will exchange places with Stewart.'
McIntosh, who Hayden was coming to appreciate was no fool, repeated Hayden's orders and called his crew to man sheets. Hayden did not wait to see him go but turned to Archer.
'I am afraid Mr Smosh's prayers must be interrupted, Mr Archer. Call all hands. We will clear the ship but for my cabin which can be left standing for the time being. We will man sheets and braces, wear ship, and if we do not carry away our rig, exchange places with the Cloud. Lord knows how Stewart will come here.' Archer turned to go when Hayden thought of something else. 'Oh… and pass the word for Mr Wickham, if you please, Mr Archer. Ask him to fetch a night glass with him.'
'Aye, sir.'
A moment after Archer had hurried below, the men came pelting up, looking no less wicked to Hayden's eye – if anything, inordinately pleased to have escaped Mr Smosh's sermonizing. Without speaking they hurried to their stations.
Barthe appeared, huffing out of the companionway, Archer and Wickham at his heels.
'Where is Saint-Denis?' Hayden asked, annoyed and not caring who knew it.
'I have just learned the doctor has sent him into the sick-berth, Captain,' Archer answered.
'The sick-berth? Not the quarantine-berth?'
'Pardon me, sir,' Archer replied, shaking his head. 'I misspoke. The quarantine berth, though much against his will.'
'Ah.' Would there be no end to his ill luck, Hayden wondered. Already he had too few officers and even to lose one as disliked as Saint-Denis would place a greater burden upon Wickham and Archer, not to mention himself. 'Well, Mr Archer, congratulations, it would seem you are acting first lieutenant. Ease sheets and braces and pilot us through the convoy. We will take up station in the Cloud's place.'
'Aye, sir.' Archer turned to Mr Barthe and repeated the orders.
Hayden motioned to Wickham, leaning close so that he would be heard. 'Mr Wickham, if you would search to the nor'east.'
The boy nodded. 'Cole saw a frigate, the men are saying. Is it true, sir?'
'That is what I am hoping you will tell me.'
Wickham went to the rail, steadied himself, and trained his glass to the north but in a moment the glass was lowered. He glanced at Hayden, embarrassed. 'The lenses have fogged entirely, sir – within the tube.'
'When do they not?' Hayden replied. 'Your naked eye shall have to suffice.'
A very passable evolution with reduced sail gave Hayden hope that he would have, one day, a crack crew – or more accurately, some other captain would. The truncated November day waned as they made their way through the fleet, but Hayden was thankful even for the dull illumination that penetrated scudding clouds.
The Themis took up position to leeward of the convoy and near to the transports that brought up the rear. The Syren was not too distant – Hayden thought he could make out the acting captain, Cole, standing by the mizzen shrouds.
'No sign of frigates?' Hayden enquired of Wickham.
'None, sir.'
'Then I shall retire below, briefly.' Quite chilled, Hayden slipped down to his cabin, which, though hardly warm, was at least dry and out of the wind. He sent his servant for coffee, and stared for a moment at a stack of papers requiring his attention – all neatly contained in a small, purpose-built, open-topped box made of cast-off white oak. The contemplation of this was brief before he settled on the gallery window seat, his feet spread wide to brace against the ship's motion. His situation never seemed to improve, but only grow worse with each day. Frigates to leeward, almost certainly not British, and given the proximity of the French coast, very likely of that nation. If his crew fell ill in equal proportion to the Agnus's he would be very hard pressed to fight, and would almost certainly be reduced to bluffing, which would only work if the French force was roughly equal to his own. McIntosh's fraudulent fighting ships might actually aid their cause in such a situation. But Hayden feared clear skies and good light would expose these little masquerading men-of-war to any observant enemy – a good reason not to hope for a short gale.
Coffee arrived, and to Hayden's surprise, so did the doctor. Griffiths was not merely grey before his time but, at least in appearance, prematurely aged. This day he looked even more time's victim. About him hung an unwholesome air, as though proximity to the sick and injured had worn away at his own health. His face was powder pale, dry and flaccid. Across the yellowish whites of his eyes branched fine lightning bolts of crimson. A naturally stooped carriage and angular frame never, even at the best of times, bespoke vigour and as he entered, a vinegar-soaked handkerchief clapped over his mouth, he looked a figure of dejection if not ruin.
Hayden stopped, his fingers about to find the handle of a cup. 'Dr Griffiths, I fear this will be a terrible trial for you. May I offer you coffee?'
Griffiths stopped, held out a hand, palm out. 'Come no nearer.' He took the cotton from his mouth, closed his eyes a moment, both body and face twisting in a tight grimace. In a few seconds he mastered himself and then said in a consciously steady voice, 'I must inform you, most regretfully, Captain Hayden, that I appear to have contracted this contagion.'
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 10
|
'I will continue in my duties as long as I am able,' Griffiths said, 'but if my judgement becomes clouded from fever I have ordered Mr Ariss to confine me to a cot in the quarantine berth. The sickness progresses rapidly, so I will be of service only a few hours more. I have given complete instructions to Mr Ariss for the care of the sick. I fear for Pritchard, who appears to have the pneumonia and is near to suffocating in his own fluids.'
'This is the worst possible news,' Hayden managed. 'Mr Ariss cannot care for so many alone.'
'I was about to say the same. We will need someone to act as his assistant. An intelligent man of steady nerve and kindly disposition. A young man is to be preferred as influenza will compromise such a person's health less drastically, should he be so unlucky as to contract it.'
'More than that, we need someone who is not afraid of the contagion.' Hayden thought a moment. 'Did Gould not claim his brothers were doctors?'
'I am not sure having a brother – or even two – in medicine is a qualification, Captain.' Griffiths covered his mouth with the square of cotton and emitted a small, shocking cough, followed by a wheezing breath, indrawn.
'It might be the best qualification on offer, I'm afraid. Have you any other objections to Mr Gould?'
The doctor shook his head, his face at that moment turning red. He coughed again more violently. 'None.' He fought for a breath and then pressed out. 'He is, in every other way… ideal.'
Hayden resisted the urge to clap the man on the back. 'Then I will speak with him, but I am not certain that compelling a man against his wishes will give you the assistant you need.'
'Let us hope that compulsion will not be necessary.'
As he let the doctor out, Hayden spoke to the sentry. 'Pass the word for Mr Barthe, and then after I will speak to Mr Gould.'
Hayden threw himself down on the bench, gales and phantom frigates pushed out of his mind. The crew had been counting on Griffiths to see them through – he had been counting on it; how would they react when they learned that their surgeon had himself been afflicted with this sickness? For the most part they were a steady lot but contagions had a way of creating a silent kind of panic that seemed to seep into men's hearts over time.
The stomping of Mr Barthe could be heard on the steps – even over the moans of the wind – and in a moment a rap on the door. The little sailing master hurried in, and stood expectantly.
'Mr Barthe. I must take back Mr Gould, I am afraid. He is much needed elsewhere.'
'But, sir, he has only begun to learn his duties.'
'I know it, but Dr Griffiths has more need of him than you, I fear.'
Barthe looked confused. 'What good could he be to the doctor?'
'The men will hear of it soon enough, but let us keep this quiet as long as we can. Dr Griffiths has been taken with the influenza. I need Gould to assist Mr Ariss, as strange as it may seem. His brothers are both physicians, you will remember, and he once contemplated taking up the study of medicine. I know it seems absurd to be employing a green midshipman in the sick-berth but he is intelligent and level-headed and I hope his acquaintance through his brothers has made him less fearful of disease. The truth is, Mr Barthe, we are rather desperate.'
The sailing master contemplated this a moment and then nodded. 'What of Dryden? May I have him back?'
'Who needs him more, in your honest opinion, yourself or Mr Franks?'
It was difficult for the master to admit but finally he said, 'Franks.'
'My feelings exactly. I will ask Gould if he will assist Mr Ariss. God knows I will understand if he does not wish to.'
'He will not say no, Captain Hayden. So intent is he on succeeding in the service I believe he would go into a flaming magazine if you asked him.' Barthe turned to go, remembered himself and said. 'Is there anything else, sir?'
'Try to keep yourself away from the sick, Mr Barthe. I might be master and commander in rank but prefer not to be so in truth.'
'I will do my best, sir.'
'Good. Send Gould in. I believe I heard him arrive outside.'
A moment later Gould came through the door, made the proper salute, and stood waiting Hayden's pleasure.
'Mr Gould, I have a rather difficult, perhaps even dangerous position for you.'
The boy nodded, waiting.
'It seems that Dr Griffiths has contracted the influenza and Mr Ariss has need of an assistant. The men who are ill need much care – more than Ariss can manage – and another steady pair of hands is required.'
The boy seemed perplexed for a moment. 'You want me to be surgeon's mate?'
'It is more a loblolly boy, I think, but certainly you will be nursing the sick. It is not without danger as you know – one man has died on our ship and more on the Agnus, but it must be done and you at least have the benefit of having read something of your brother's medical texts.'
'I am most likely as ignorant as the next seaman, sir, but yes, certainly, if you need me to do it I will.'
'Report to Mr Ariss, immediately. I have informed Mr Barthe that he will have to do without you… for the time being.'
'Yes, sir.' With only the smallest hint of hesitation, the boy went out. Hayden hoped he hadn't sent him to his death – a hope he held oftener than he would like.
There were, however, equally pressing matters requiring Hayden's attention. The unidentified ships seen in the fog, which had slipped back into the murk, were very probably not friendly, and unless they had, in the haze, mistaken Hayden's convoy for a fleet it was not likely they had flown. No, they were out there, he felt, and perhaps accounted for the missing transport.
What to do about them, that was the thing. He stopped before the windows and looked out onto a dark chaotic sea. Failing light made it all appear more ominous and threatening, but Hayden was no stranger to that. In truth he thought the wind was taking off a little and with luck the gale would blow itself out in a few hours. Mind made up, he went to the door and spoke to the sentry beyond.
'Pass the word for Mr Archer and Mr Wickham, if you please.'
'When Captain Pool suggested a similar plan, Mr Hayden, you opposed it, yet when it is a result of your own penetration, it is now a splendid strategy?'
A disgruntled Captain Cole hovered by the rail on a weeping deck, a dark and resentful silhouette. Hayden had sent him a summons and Cole had come aboard with only the greatest reluctance, refusing to go below out of the weather. Fear of contagion was great among seamen of every rank.
Though the wind had taken off noticeably a heavy sea still ran and clouds would, intermittently, release their entire burden of rain upon the wildly moving ship. An indistinct, pale apparition sixty feet to larboard was a cutter from the Syren, holding position, that action being easier than trying to lie alongside a ship that both pitched and rolled.
Hayden had suffered one too many affronts from this man. 'Captain Cole, I will take this opportunity to inform you that I find your tone offensive. You might not be pleased that I am in command of this convoy but it is the case and I believe that the Admiralty will uphold this. I do not wish to report that you were insubordinate but I will do so. Is that understood?'
The man's face was invisible but his frame appeared to contract a little. 'It is, sir.'
'I will explain why I have chosen to proceed in this manner, Captain Cole, if you will do me the honour of hearing me out.' Hayden did not wait for the man to assent but went on. 'Circumstances have changed utterly. Dr Griffiths visited the Agnus and that unlucky ship had half her crew down, too ill to stand watch. If the same fate befalls the Themis that will leave your frigate and a collection of sloops to protect the convoy. Your own lookout saw a frigate and perhaps a second – not British I would think as they skulked back into the fog immediately. I have no proof of it, but I suspect they took the Hartlepool last night and will be looking to manage the same caper tonight, as the gale moderates. Last time it was the French who surprised us. This time we must surprise them. We have no choice; we must damage or drive the French off before my crew becomes too ill to fight.'
In the pitchy night, Cole could hardly be distinguished, but Hayden was certain he perceived the man's carriage loosen, as though some of the inflammation of resentment drained out of his very joints.
'I do take your point, Captain Hayden,' he conceded, his tone moderated, 'but we have seen conclusive evidence that this course is not without risks. What will be the result if these two ships are the French frigate and the seventy-four-gun ship that engaged our ships but recently?'
'Is it not true that your lookout thought the second ship to be a frigate, as well?'
'And he might have been right but it was a ship in the fog, Captain. We cannot be utterly certain.'
Hayden did not like the sound of this. A slight disorientation swept through him, as though he fell. 'The only reason they would be hiding from us would be out of fear that Pool had rejoined the convoy. They were more than likely trying to discern that very fact.' Suddenly the risk involved in his planned action grew substantially. He hesitated, weighing all factors.
'Under any other circumstances, Captain Cole, I would never take such a risk, but my crew will only grow weaker. Our ability to fight will be continually diminished. Better we confront the French now, when we have surprise on our side, rather than later at a time of their choosing and in broad daylight.'
He saw Cole nod in the darkness. 'Which of us shall play the killdeer, then?'
'Killdeer?'
'A kind of plover, sir. It will drop a wing so that it appears injured, unable to fly, and then draw any creatures that might threaten its young away from the nest. Very clever, sir. It has a cry that sounds like "killdeer".'
'Ah. I've seen such a bird in Canada. Gravelot à double collier, the French call it.'
'That would be it – a double black band about its throat. I think it should be my ship that plays lame, sir. If I can draw them to me you can come out of the dark and take them by stealth.'
'The Themis will claim that role. Better the heavier ship be attacked – our eighteen pounders will be more of a match for the French. I'm sure you will come to our aid with all speed.'
'You may count on it.'
Hayden watched Cole go over the side, thinking that he was trusting the lives of his crew to a man who accused him of not coming to his aid in time to save Bradley. Cole might resent him but Hayden believed he was an honourable man. He would not abandon them if he could avoid it. No, Cole was the least of his worries. A seventy-four-gun ship lurking in the dark and pestilence aboard his own ship were on his mind now. Even contentious clergymen had been sent to the back of the ranks when it came to his concerns.
The coughing, liquid and suffocating, like men being throttled, could be heard through the thin deal-board walls that delineated the quarantine berth. The men who made up the watch below had gathered as distant from this little wooden cell as the confines of the lower deck would allow. When the door opened, Hayden peered into the dimly lit hell: men swinging in their cots, coverings cast off, skin a burnished rose, lips swollen purple. He clapped the vinegar-soaked cloth over his mouth and nose, inhaled and choked on the fumes. For a moment he hesitated, eyes watering, but then gathered his resolve, pushed past the sentry and entered the inferno. The fetor penetrated his protective veil even beyond the fumes of vinegar. For a moment Hayden thought he would retch. The men swayed in their cots, neat rows penduluming back and forth together, marking time. Some were still, drugged to sleep, Hayden thought, or at least insensate, though now and then one would choke, writhe briefly, perhaps prop up on an elbow, a confused, hopeless look upon his fevered face, and then sink back down. Gould perched on a stool, and wiped a man's forehead with a cloth, leaving a smear of shiny liquid glistening on the skin. Nearby, in a bowl chocked off on a small shelf, Hayden saw crimson liquid washing back and forth in time with the rocking cots. Ariss had been bleeding the sick.
'Sit him up! Sit him up!' a horrible voice rasped. 'He'll choke if you leave him like that.'
At the end of the berth Hayden found Griffiths in a cot, eyes bulging and fevered. He waved a hand limply at one of the sick, barking irritable instructions at his mate.
'Mr Ariss,' Hayden said as the mate caught sight of him. He was trying to prop a limp man up to half-sitting position, arranging some bedding behind him with one hand, but the man was resisting, weakly. Hayden went to his aid, taking hold of the man's shoulder with one hand. He could feel the terrible, unnatural heat of his body through the palm of his hand.
'He is burning,' Hayden whispered before he realized he should not.
'They're all burning, sir,' Ariss replied sadly.
Griffiths sat up in his cot, swinging his legs over the side, but then he sat there, shoulders bent, gasping.
'You should not be up, Doctor,' Ariss protested.
Griffiths only shook his head stubbornly. Hayden went over to him.
'You told Ariss to confine you to your berth when it became necessary, Doctor. I believe you should listen to him now.'
'But there is much to do.' Griffiths hissed. 'We must give them all a dose of… of…' The doctor's eyes, shining with fever, lost focus. He looked plaintively at Hayden. 'There is some… thing…'
Hayden helped Griffiths back down into his cot, where he stared up at the deck head somewhat fearfully.
'Mr Hayden?' he rasped.
'Yes, Doctor.'
Griffiths waved a limp, long-fingered hand. 'I believe Pritchard has departed this life. His earthly remains should be slipped over the side without delay.'
Hayden was not sure if the doctor was in his right mind, but when he went to Pritchard's cot he found the doctor was almost certainly right.
'Mr Ariss, when you have a moment…' Hayden said softly.
Ariss glanced up, nodded, and when he was finished with his charge crossed immediately to Pritchard. A quick search for a pulse, and then a small signal with his hand to Gould. The midshipman went to the door, spoke quietly with the sentry and a moment later two frightened seamen came in, took Pritchard's cot down, tied the sides and ends firmly about its occupant, and then bore the dead man out. His cot, bedding and clothing would all go over the side with him for fear of contagion. Only a few of the sick men took notice of this procession, but those watched in silent horror.
Five men, Hayden thought. This pestilence had claimed five men.
'Is there anything you might need, Mr Ariss?' Hayden asked.
'Cots, sir. I don't think any of the sick should be in hammocks, as it only makes breathing more difficult to lie bent in half. We have used all we could find.'
'I'll have Chettle and Germain make some up immediately.'
'Thank you, sir. That would be most helpful.'
'And how fare you, Mr Gould?'
The boy, Hayden guessed, was terribly distressed but managing to keep it in check. 'Well, sir. I follow the directions of Mr Ariss, or the doctor when he is lucid, and some of the men are on the mend, I think.'
'You said the same of bloody Pritchard,' one of the sick men muttered.
'He did rally for a bit,' Gould said softly, 'but it did not last, God rest his soul.'
'God rest his soul,' Hayden echoed. 'Send word if there is anything that you require.'
'Thank you, sir.'
As Hayden turned to go he spotted Saint-Denis, hunkered down in his cot as though he hid. The man was clearly more wretched and unnerved than any other.
'Mr Saint-Denis,' Hayden greeted him. 'I am very sorry to find you among the sick, sir.'
'I was not sick in the least,' the lieutenant whispered. 'But Griffiths put me in here with the afflicted, and now it has hold of me, just as he planned.'
'I am quite certain you were fevered, sir. Griffiths would never make such a mistake.'
'Mistake! It was no mistake! He wanted to do for me. But God saw what he was about. And look! Griffiths is taken with the fever. Now we will see who will live and who will be slipped over the side.' This seemed to exhaust him and he fell silent, panting. Delirium had overwhelmed his mind – Hayden had seen fever do the same to many men.
'Mr Ariss will see you recovered, I am quite certain.' Hayden nodded to the man, and retreated from the cabin, pausing at the door to glance back into the dimly lit room, utterly relieved that this duty was done. The pale, sailcloth cots acquired an ominous, death shroud aspect, in the warm light, like canvas coffins swaying slowly forth and back, rocked by some invisible force. Death was so present in the room that Hayden though it could almost take shape, rise up and devour the sick. He pulled the door quickly shut, nodded to the saluting sentry and hurried up the ladder to the gundeck, where the air seemed almost fresh and clean by comparison.
Hayden threw open his jacket and drew in great breaths of cold air. The quarantine berth had been so close that he felt fevered from just that brief exposure. For a moment he stood on the empty deck, leaning against the cascabel of an eighteen-pounder gun, mastering an almost overwhelming feeling that he had been touched by death.
As his breath calmed and his nerves soothed, Hayden heard a small sound – a tiny sneeze, and then simpering. Stealthily he made his way down the gundeck, until, in the shadow of a great gun, he discovered one of the ship's boys, huddled with his knees drawn up and face hidden in the little square of his bent arms.
'Mick?' Hayden said gently.
The boy started, looked up fearfully, and sneezed three times, a pathetic little sound. He then began to weep like the earth's most wretched creature and hid his face again.
Hayden crouched down, observing the boy a moment. Not being a father he was a bit out of his depth in such situations.
'What seems to be the trouble, here?' Hayden enquired. 'Has someone been ballyragging you?'
The boy shook his head, though he kept his face buried in the angular intersection of arms and narrow knees.
'I am the ship's captain, Mick, and when I ask you a question you are obliged to answer. Did you know that?'
The mass of hair nodded.
'Then what is the trouble here?'
The boy controlled his weeping with effort and half raised his head, revealing crimson face and runny eyes. 'I… I think I 'ave the fever, sir.' His face disappeared again and he commenced weeping, shoulders convulsing, his misery complete.
Hayden put out a hand awkwardly and stroked the boy's shoulder. He let the boy's fury subside a little before he spoke.
'Have you the cough, then?' Hayden asked, trying to sound reassuring.
'No, sir, but I'm sneezing something awful.'
'Ah. Well, we should have Mr Ariss look at you, but I am of the opinion that you have a cold. Just such a complaint came away with us from Plymouth and has been visiting one man after another. Your mate, David, had it not a sennight past and his mate Paul has only just recovered. So I think you are preserved from the influenza. Let us go down to Mr Ariss and see if that isn't the case.' Hayden patted him on the back. 'Up we get, then.'
He took the child's delicately boned hand and gentled him to his feet. The boy would not look at him, but wiped his nose on a shiny sleeve and came meekly along. As they walked Hayden thought how frightening this must be to a child – he himself had been unnerved by it for a moment. How frightening this whole way of life.
In a moment they were down the ladder and Hayden asked Ariss to come out and see to the boy, not wanting the child to view the inside of the sick-berth unless there were no choice. Ariss pronounced him free of the influenza, which he referred to as 'our new friend', and sent the boy off to his hammock to rest.
Hayden climbed up to his cabin, thinking how easily men were reduced to children in times of great distress.
By six bells the wind had moderated to a wholesome topsail breeze and Hayden gave the order to drop back into the lee of the convoy.
'Do you think we are distant enough to fire our signal gun, sir?' Archer enquired. He seemed to be neither intimidated nor pleased to be acting first lieutenant, as though it mattered not at all.
The officers had all gathered on the quarterdeck, where they stared into the dark night. The fear that a seventy-four-gun ship might suddenly appear kept pressing into their musings, but so far no such calamity had befallen them.
'Seven bells will be soon enough,' Hayden replied. 'I wish to be distant enough from the convoy that we will appear beyond aid. Can you make out the Syren, Wickham?'
'I thought I saw her a moment ago, sir,' the acting lieutenant answered from his position by the rail, 'but it is difficult to be certain on such a night.'
Cole's ship was somewhere off their starboard beam, awaiting the appearance of enemy vessels, or so Hayden dearly hoped.
'At least we shall be able to open our gunports,' Hawthorne observed.
'So will the enemy, Mr Hawthorne,' Barthe chided him gently.
'It would not be sporting otherwise,' Hawthorne replied.
Low chuckles greeted this. Hawthorne was known for his wit in tight situations, and his remarks were often repeated at table. Hayden thought the marine had something of a reputation to preserve now.
Hayden took a quick tour of the deck, speaking quietly to the men who waited silently by their guns on the quarterdeck. As he made his way along the gangway, he heard someone on the forecastle speaking very low, and was about to upbraid the man when he realized it was Mr Smosh.
'Ah, Captain Hayden,' the parson said when he realized who drew near in the dark. 'I was just reassuring the men that influenza quickly burns itself out. I have seen it before. In a few days we shall be free of it. Is that not so?'
'It does not cling to a ship the way the yellow jack does, that is certain. A few days, as you say. Certainly we should be free of it by the time we reach Gibraltar.' Hayden made a small motion with his hand, perhaps invisible in the dark. 'Mr Smosh, could I ask you to accompany me? I have a matter on which I would seek your advice.'
'Most certainly, Captain.' Smosh excused himself graciously from his flock and walked beside Hayden.
When they reached the gangway, and were beyond hearing of the forecastle, Hayden said. 'Mr Smosh, although I appreciate your desire to give comfort to the crew at this trying time it is our custom to preserve silence on the deck so that officers might be heard.'
'I do apologize, Captain. I am unfamiliar with naval custom, as you can see.'
'Do not apologize. Your efforts with the men are a great help to me, but we are in the midst of an action, or hope to be. Silence is the rule.'
'Which I shall observe with all devotion in future.' Hayden was about to take his leave of the clergyman when Smosh spoke again.
'Forgive me, Captain, I have a request, if I may?'
Did the man not realize this was not the time for favours?
Hayden struggled to keep his tone moderate. 'By all means, Mr Smosh.'
'I do believe that Mr Ariss and young Gould have more sick than they can possibly minister to on their own… I have been speaking with the men, sir, and after much discussion, I believe that if I were to remove my collar and forswear my duties – that is to say, I should not act as a clergyman in any regard – it would be acceptable to the men that I assist Mr Ariss in this time of need.'
Hayden was utterly surprised and felt immediate remorse for thinking the man an annoyance. 'I cannot begin to express my appreciation for this offer, Mr Smosh, but I do fear that the hands would not accept a priest in the quarantine-berth.'
'Forgive me, again, Captain. I requested Mr Madison to enquire among the men, and begging your pardon, it seems they are quite prepared to allow me into the quarantine-berth in a medical role. I am told that some parsons assist the surgeons in the cockpit during action? Is that not the case?'
'It is the case, but…' Hayden did not quite know what his next argument would be. 'Would you allow me to speak to Mr Madison?'
'Indeed. Thank you, Captain.'
As Hayden took his leave of Smosh and returned to the quarterdeck, a dark form stumbled out of a hatch and slumped down on the deck.
'Mr Ariss?' Hayden asked.
'Yes, sir, Captain,' the man scrambled to his feet and made a quick knuckle. 'I was in need of a breath of air, sir. I hope that meets with your approval, sir.'
'By all means. No one deserves it more.' Hayden stopped when he was two yards distant. 'How fare you, Mr Ariss?'
The surgeon's mate sounded utterly spent, his voice devoid of emotion, and scraping from exhaustion.
'I will manage, sir. It is only that the men keep falling ill. If there are any more, sir, I shall have to ask that the quarantine-berth be made greater.'
'How many do they number, now?'
'Twenty-two, sir.' Ariss lowered his voice. 'I must inform you, Captain Hayden, that the doctor is not faring well.'
Hayden reached out and put a balancing hand on the capstan. 'That is the worst possible news. Will he pull through, do you think?'
The mate hesitated. 'I dearly hope so, Captain.' But his hesitation said more than he professed.
'You have bled him, no doubt?'
'I have, sir, but it had little effect, which is highly uncommon in my experience.'
Hayden was so distressed by this news that he wanted to slump down upon the deck himself.
Madison hurried over to him at that moment. 'Captain Hayden!' came the boy's voice out of the dark. 'Mr Wickham believes he has seen a ship to leeward.'
Hayden wanted to tear himself away but did not. 'Mr Madison, tell me quickly: have you enquired among the hands about Mr Smosh serving in the sick-berth?'
'I have, sir. I believe the men will accept it, Captain, as long as he is not there in his capacity as parson.'
'Then he is yours, Mr Ariss. Excuse me.' Hayden took a step, then stopped and said to Ariss, 'Please do everything within your power for Dr Griffiths.'
'I will, sir.'
Hayden walked briskly back to the taffrail where the officers had gathered.
'No, no,' Wickham was saying. 'A point east of that.'
No one spoke or made any sound as they all stared fixedly into the night.
'Are you certain, Mr Wickham?' Hayden asked.
'There is something out there, sir, I have no doubt of that.'
'A frigate, do you think?'
'I could not say, Captain. It was just a mass of lesser darkness moving, perhaps, a little east.'
Hayden turned to the first lieutenant. 'Fire the signal gun, Mr Archer, then light the lanterns aloft.'
'Aye, sir.'
Almost immediately a gun was fired to leeward, and the signal lanterns lit on the frame aloft. A green flare was also ignited and cast a lurid glow over the deck.
'Certainly only a blind man could miss that,' Hawthorne said.
Hayden took stock of their situation. The wind had taken off until it was no longer blowing a gale but had begun veering into the north-west, and the temperature was dropping noticeably. An ugly cross-sea was beginning to develop and waves pressed by the north-westerly began to build and overlay the swell from the sou'west. The ship was now running almost free, but had a terrible corkscrew motion.
'Enough to make a man-o'-war's man retch,' Barthe growled. 'It will have gone around to the north in another hour and the seas will become more confused yet. We have a cold, uncomfortable night ahead.'
Hayden was about to agree when a meagre, reddish glow appeared off their starboard quarter. Almost everyone noted it at once, engendering a little choir of exclamations.
'It is a red flare, high up in the rigging,' Archer asserted. 'We are merely seeing it light the sails from abaft.'
As if to prove him right, a red flare appeared in a slot between the sails, and then a second, though how distant no one could gauge.
'A red flare!' the foremast lookout called. 'A point off the larboard bow.'
'We are between them,' Archer said in consternation. He looked about wildly as though fearing such flares would appear all around.
'Two ships,' Mr Barthe pronounced solemnly. 'Let us hope there is no third.'
'Jump forward, Mr Wickham, if you please,' Hayden ordered, 'and see if you can make out the ship.'
'Aye, sir.'
Wickham and Madison went running forward. A gust from the north struck them then, and a little rain obscured all flares in the blur. The squall seemed to race past, and the wind fell to lulls and gusts. Some distance aft, the flares of the ship reappeared, setting sails aglow and silhouetting a faint tracery of rigging.
An urgent rapping along the deck was Madison returning. 'Captain Hayden,' he whispered urgently. 'Mr Wickham believes that is a ship of the line off our bow. At least a seventy-four, sir, perhaps greater.'
'Is luck never to be with us?' Barthe demanded, his voice despairing.
Not another word was said among the officers on the quarterdeck but Hayden could sense their distress. He fought down his own panic and misery. The thought that he had miscalculated, horribly, brought on a moment of near blankness before he mastered his feelings and brought order back to his mind.
'How distant?' Hayden asked, his voice dry.
'It is difficult thing to measure in the dark, but Mr Wickham ventured a mile, sir.'
Hayden took up his night glass and fixed it on the ship in their wake. 'Well, that is no seventy-four. It is a frigate, at best, and very likely the same that Bradley fell in with and we drove off. Is Captain Cole to be seen?'
A moment of desperate searching – but no one could find the British twenty-six.
'Mr Archer,' Hayden asked, forcing his voice to something resembling normal, 'have we red flares made up?'
'I'm certain we do, sir,' Archer answered with admirable calm.
'Have someone fetch them, if you please.'
'How many, Captain?'
'At least two. Half a dozen, if they are to be had.'
'Aye, sir.'
'Mr Hayden,' Barthe whispered, drawing near. 'I do not know what we can do. When the captain of this ship realizes he faces only a pair of frigates… we will be dished…'
Hayden could not have his senior officers losing their nerve and replied equally quietly to the sailing master. 'Mr Barthe, guard your words, sir.' And then to everyone present. 'We have but one chance,' Hayden said. 'Snuff every light, aloft and alow. Mr Barthe, we will slack sheets and let this frigate overtake us. Reload the guns with chain and bar and, on a roll, when well-heeled to larboard, fire at her lights and rigging aloft. If we can bring down her flares, and damage her rig enough to slow her, we will put the Themis between her and the larger ship, light red flares aloft and go after the second Frenchman. I will speak to the ship when we draw near, and, I hope, confuse them long enough that we can sail across her stern and fire every gun at her rudder, wear ship, and attempt the same a second time.'
'With these gun crews, Mr Hayden?' Barthe responded. 'Half their musters are landsmen.'
'The captains are all experienced gunners, Mr Barthe.' Hayden heard a little frustration and peevishness creep into his voice. 'If we can damage her rudder so that her helm no longer answers, she will not make harbour lest she is towed. And we might slip away.'
'What about Cole, sir?' Archer asked. 'I should hate to have him mistake us for a Frenchman, or worse, collide with us in the dark.'
Hayden stared out into the night. Where the devil was Cole? 'Captain Cole should be some distance to starboard and clear of us for a few moments yet. We shall have to trust to sharp eyes and providence to keep us apart.'
'I will see to the flares aloft,' Madison offered, and went off at a run.
'Douse the lanterns, then,' Hayden ordered. 'And we must have silence on the deck. Mr Archer, have the starboard guns reloaded, if you please, and be certain the gun captains understand what is expected of them. We have but one chance this night and can make no mistakes.'
'I'll see it done, sir.'
The quarterdeck gunners ran in their carronades, wormed out the wadding, lowered the barrels as far as the carriages would allow and, on the roll, coaxed out the ball. Bar and chain shot were carried up from below and the guns quickly reloaded and run out, ready to fire. It was not accomplished in the most efficient or seamanlike manner, which made Hayden wonder if Barthe might be proven right, but they were in a corner and had only one very precarious track out.
The sails flapped as Barthe ordered sheets eased. A bitterly cold northerly was building, and kicking up a short, steep sea over the swell left by the sou'west gale.
'This ship is coming up rather quickly, Captain,' Hawthorne whispered. 'Can she see us, do you think?'
'It is rather close out here, but perhaps they have a French Wickham aboard whose eyes penetrate the dark.'
The red flares appeared to illuminate more of the ship as she drew near, casting a devilish glow over rig and hull. Hayden could see her pitching and rolling on the confused sea, her flares making great, ponderous ellipses in the sky. Judging distances by night was always something of a black art, but Hayden guessed the Frenchman was no more than a hundred yards distant. An order, called out in French, drifted down to them. The sails shook in a frigid gust, the thrumming travelling down stays and shrouds to the very deck.
'I dearly hope this Frenchman catches us up,' Barthe growled, 'before our sails have flogged themselves to ruin.'
'Another seventy-five yards, Mr Barthe,' Hayden predicted. 'Mr Archer? Open the starboard gun ports, if you please.'
'Aye, sir.'
Wickham reappeared on the quarterdeck and Hayden sent him down to the gundeck to oversee the gunners' efforts.
Another gust. A few drops of hard-driven rain clattered against the transom. Sails flogged, thrashing the air unmercifully. The French ship loomed up to starboard. She was a frigate now, not just a faintly glowing apparition. Hayden could almost make her out in detail. He could even see the obliquely angled gunports – open. The Themis would receive a broadside.
'Helmsman,' Hayden whispered. 'Port your helm. Bring her up two points to starboard. We will haul our wind, Mr Barthe, just enough to allow us to fire before she can bring her larboard battery to bear. Then we will bear off.'
A slow turn to starboard, which gave the ship an even stranger motion as the seas struck them on the quarter. Hayden knew this would make the gunnery even more untenable. He stepped to the nearest carronade, crouched down, and sighted along the barrel. A dull, silver filigree in the trough of the Atlantic was reflection from a smudge-moon that raced among tattered clouds. And then the ship began to roll to larboard, and pitch and yaw. The view along the barrel of the gun was sea, then slashed left to right across a great arc of sky. It would be a miracle if they hit any part of the French ship at all. They might be better to lay close alongside, pour in the broadsides that time would allow, and then return to their convoy and hope the French might be discouraged. But Hayden knew it was too late for that. He had made his decision – there was no losing one's nerve now.
'Mr Baldry,' Hayden said quietly to the gun captain. 'This will be a madly lucky shot, and I don't think you will get more than one. Crouch here and watch the progress of your gun so you can judge the path of it. You shall have to time your firing to a nicety, or you will be bringing down nothing but cloud. I will take the helm and try to position us so that we might have a chance. Good luck to you.'
'Thank you, sir, but if I am not speaking out of place, we'll get more than one shot, sir. I promise you.'
'I hope you are right.'
Hayden relieved the helmsman of his wheel. His only hope was to keep the ship on her course; it was all but impossible under such conditions to counter the yaw caused by seas on their starboard quarter. If he could but give the gunners half a chance… They would have enough to do trying to predict the motion of the two ships and then pull the firing lanyard at the right instant. There was always a delay between the lanyard being tugged, flint striking steel, sparks igniting the powder in the pan, the flare of the touch-hole powder, and detonation of the charge in the barrel. Occasionally guns failed to fire at all or hung fire for seconds… or longer.
The seas coming from the north and the swell originating in the sou'west, though each of reasonable regularity, never seemed to converge at the same point – crest meeting trough, or two crests mounting up together. The sea was, therefore, chaotic, and the motion of the ship utterly unpredictable. It did not help that darkness hid the seas until they were upon the ship from astern, and Hayden was unaware of the sou'east swells until they lifted the bow.
'Gun captains,' Hayden said loud enough to be heard across the quarterdeck, 'fire when you have a shot.'
'Aye, sir,' the men answered up promptly but without confidence.
There was utter silence on the quarterdeck. Every man there knew what a mad endeavour this was. Gun captains crouched in the near darkness, sighting along their carronades, the dark shapes of their crews arrayed about them like standing stones. Hayden fought the wheel, trying to keep the stern from being pushed off to larboard. The mouths of the quarterdeck guns swept across the sky with such speed and unpredictability that no one dared fire.
'Mr Baldry,' Hayden said urgently. 'You have to take a chance. Mr Barthe, take the helm, if you please.'
The sailing master crossed the swinging deck and took the wheel from Hayden, who went to the nearest carronade. There was a danger that the French ship would pass before a single gun was fired. The gun captain found Hayden's hand in the dark and placed the lanyard in his fingers. As Hayden crouched, a gun on the deck below fired, to no appreciable effect; the shot blasted out into the dark sky.
'Damn,' one of the officers swore.
Hayden tried to time the swing of the ship with the roll, yanked the lanyard and the gun, hesitated a second too long, and fired, hissing back along the wooden slide. He'd missed… utterly.
Other guns began firing then, the element of surprise lost. One struck the rig low down – too low down – but most holed only sky.
A little moonlight filtered down, and Hayden could see the French ship turning to bring her own guns to bear.
'We're going to receive fire, Captain,' Hawthorne warned.
Hayden had jumped back to let the gun crew reload.
'Haul sheets aft, Mr Barthe,' Hayden called and the sailing master, unable to leave the helm, called the order to Franks.
A French gun discharged harmlessly down into the sea, and then a sporadic firing began from the enemy frigate, most of it missing but one shot passed through the mizzen a dozen feet above Hayden's head, and another thundered into the hull amidships – above the waterline, Hayden hoped.
The deep, jagged screech of eighteen-pound balls lacerating the air pimpled Hayden's skin. It did not matter how familiar – it was a horrifying sound felt in one's chest. Just the noise alone seemed capable of tearing away limbs.
The fire from the Themis was utterly ragged, and apparently without purpose or discipline, as the gun captains attempted to aim high into the rig of their enemy. The scream of spinning bar, as it went end for end through the air, tore apart the oceanic night, but only a few shots struck the French ship, and none produced the desired effect. The red flares still burned, their glow diluted by the faint moonlight.
Desperation was beginning to press up through Hayden's conflicting emotions. More and more he felt like a man in the grip of a relentless undertow, struggling to keep his head above water. He heard one of the gun crew whispering, 'Please, God. Please,' with all the discouragement he felt.
The gun crew ran out the carronade and Hayden took the lanyard again, wondering if Baldry might not do better than he. Sighting one-eyed along the barrel, he realized that it would be a matter of the most complete luck to bring down the flares on their frame. He waited a second as the ship began to roll to larboard. The Frenchman's guns were firing as the roll brought them to bear, and they were beginning to damage the Themis's rig. Hayden tried to ignore it, concentrating on the motion of his own ship. Entirely by intuition he yanked the lanyard just as two other guns fired aboard the Themis. The red flares jerked suddenly forth and back, plunged, swung oddly aft, then checked.
There was a cheer from the men on the quarterdeck.
'We've shot away the forward halyard,' Barthe called out.
The invisible frame hung oddly askew, the flares still blazing. Supported at only three corners, the light-frame flopped and swayed to the movement of the ship. More shots were fired from aboard the Themis but the flares persisted in their odd, jerky motion.
Hayden watched, mesmerized, expectant, wondering how quickly the French sailors could get hold of the wildly moving frame and rig a new halyard. The flares jerked suddenly, plunged a fateful yard, flailed madly, then swung down in a long arc, fetching up against the mainsail. Before the wet canvas could catch fire, the frame plummeted to the deck.
There was another cheer, and Hayden went immediately to the helm. 'Mr Barthe, discover how badly our rig is damaged, trim sails and chase that seventy-four. We will wear as we draw near, brace our yards, and sail across her stern.'
The immense relief that Hayden felt could not be expressed, as though he'd made a last wager with all his resources on a worthless hand of cards and somehow, inexplicably, won.
Barthe was calling out orders, and the hands clambered aloft to repair damage.
'Shall I order the flares lit, Captain?' Archer asked. The sound of relief and elation in the lieutenant's voice could not be mistaken.
'Immediately.' Hayden motioned to the helmsman to take the wheel. 'Can you see the French two-decker?' Hayden asked the man.
'Aye, sir.'
'We will run up on her starboard quarter, wear, and cross her stern within thirty yards – twenty, if we can manage it.'
'I'll manage it, Captain.'
'Mr Franks! Silence on deck.'
'Aye, sir.'
'Well, done, Captain,' Hawthorne said. Hayden could hear the grin in the marine's voice.
'That was the part most easily managed. Have you ever taken on a seventy-four-gun ship with a deck of eighteen-pounders?'
'No, but I once fought a rather large artillery corporal who offered offence at an inn.'
'How did that come out?'
'Not at all well.'
'Ah.'
A fiery glow suffused the night, illuminating spars and rigging with a deep wine blush. At the same instant, a cold squall overtook them from astern, lobbing great dobs of rain down into the sea. The officers turned their backs to the weather, but Hayden could feel the massive rain drops battering his back and the cool water seeping through his oilskins, slowly saturating his woollen coat.
'Do you believe this deception will work?' Hawthorne asked quietly.
'If we reach the seventy-four before the French frigate; it was difficult to judge how badly damaged she might have been.' Hayden turned, shaded his eyes with a hand, and tried to look astern but the rain hid all and stung his face until he turned away.
The frigate was quickly gaining on the larger ship, which was clearly under reduced canvas in anticipation of action.
'Mr Archer,' Hayden spoke to the lieutenant so no other might hear. 'I will go forward and speak to this ship in French. It is your responsibility to see that the helmsman brings us across the Frenchman's stern.'
'Aye, sir.'
'Mr Barthe? You are prepared to wear ship?'
'Every man is at his station, Captain. Mr Franks has been told to maintain silence on the deck.'
'I will be on the forecastle.'
Hayden careened forward on the strangely heaving deck. Rain continued to rattle against the planking, and a blast of wind luffed his oilskins like a stiff sail. Just as he stepped onto the quarterdeck the air exploded to his right and he fell hard on the slippery planks. Immediately he hauled himself up, awkwardly.
Around him men were cursing and clumsily finding their feet.
'Fucking Frenchman,' someone growled.
'Shall we return fire, sir?' one of the gun captains asked.
'Only if you want to kill Englishmen. Those were twelve-pounders.'
Hayden went to the starboard rail and shouted in French. 'Cole, you English bastard! You would fire upon your own brothers!'
He hoped that he could not be heard upon the French ship they chased, but if he was they might glean only enough to realize he spoke French.
Two more guns fired, one after the other, and then fell silent.
'Do they realize it is us, sir?' Madison asked.
'Let us hope someone speaks French.' Hayden turned away, remembering that he had threatened to fire into Cole's ship but three days before. As he went to the forward barricade, he wondered if a second broadside would suddenly tear into his ship. With great effort he focused on the swaying flares of the French two-decker as they appeared and dissolved between sails or impenetrable squalls of rain. How distant the Frenchman might be was impossible to gauge. The screens of rain would diminish for a moment and the chase would appear too near, but then the gale would close in again and the ship would be mysteriously pulled away.
'Mr Madison, when I give you the word I would have you run aft and order the helmsman to put his helm swiftly up. Do you understand?'
'Helm to starboard, sir.'
'Yes.'
The ship rolled so that rain and seawater washed across the deck, pressing about his ankles and seeping into Hayden's boots. Wind among the spars and shrouds ran down and up, then yet again up a minor scale. Rain, wind-driven and harsh, fell into the sea – a clatter like glass beads upon gravel. A long moment this persisted, began to relent, then recommenced. The men around him pulled in their necks and hunched shoulders, backs to the onslaught. A momentary lapse overtook them, and Hayden almost started. The French ship appeared out of the gloom, large and formidable.
'Run to the helmsman!' Hayden said to Madison over the din of the gale.
The stern of the two-decker rose up not twenty-five yards distant. Hayden could see the shapes of men gathered at the taffrail. On such a night he could not be certain of being heard, but cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted in French, 'There is an English frigate out here in the darkness bearing no lights.' But the ruse did not work this time. He could see officers pointing – most likely at the position of the bridle ports or perhaps the figurehead. A stern-chaser exploded with flame and smoke lobbing a ball among the rigging overhead to little effect.
'Prepare to fire,' Hayden said in English. He felt the Themis begin a ponderous turn to larboard, a sea from the north heeling them far over in the opposite direction. Hayden grabbed the barricade to stop himself from sliding down the deck. A swell from the sou'west found them, an inky wave-top lolloping over the rail to douse carronade and crew.
The Themis began to round up, wind pressing her down even as the wave rolled her heavily to starboard. The stern of the French ship of the line was abeam, but no guns could be brought to bear as the ship rolled. Before Hayden could call out, Barthe ordered sheets to be let fly, and the ship began to roll slowly back.
'Come up. Come up – damn you!' Hayden muttered. Barthe released the mizzen sheet, letting the sail flog, the gaff threatening to batter shrouds and any crew aloft within reach, but it allowed the helmsman to bring their bow a little to starboard and as the ship rolled up the gun captain of nearest carronade yanked his lanyard. No explosion followed, the lock too wet to fire. Guns did begin to fire then, raggedly, some from the gundeck below, others from the quarterdeck.
Shot struck the Frenchman's stern. At such small distance – twenty-five yards – Hayden could hear iron crashing into wood. The French crew kept firing their stern chasers, and some men with muskets appeared at the rail. Hayden's own marines returned fire but the Themis was quickly passing even as the French ship drew away.
'She's turning to larboard, sir,' the gun captain declared. Hayden had just registered the same thing. 'Run back and tell the helmsman to wear ship immediately.'
The man went off at a run.
Madison had returned from the quarterdeck, and Hayden called him over. 'We will fire the larboard battery, Mr Madison. Go down to the gundeck and inform Mr Wickham.' Hayden called to the bosun. 'Mr Franks. We will fire the larboard battery as we cross the Frenchman's stern.'
Barthe was on the gangway ordering headsail sheets hauled to bring the ship's head around; the mizzen still luffed and would soon do itself damage if it hadn't done so already but they could not sheet it in now or it would resist their turn to starboard.
The French two-decker and the British frigate turned slowly in opposite directions, the French to larboard. The distance between the two ships had somewhat increased, as the Frenchman had been flying downwind, but the ships were still too near.
Barthe came huffing up the gangway. 'I'm not certain we can wear without tearing away our jib-boom,' the sailing master observed, measuring the slow turn of their ship and the small distance between the tip of the jib-boom and the larboard quarter of the French ship.
'The alternative is to take a full broadside from two decks of heavy guns,' Hayden replied, all his attention fixed on the same sight. 'I will risk our jib-boom.'
The frigate was handier than the seventy-four and brought the wind across her stern more quickly. A carronade on the enemy's quarterdeck fired and the ball tore over Hayden's head and down into their ship between the gangways. A gust pushed Hayden bodily off balance and he clutched the rail. Rain all but obliterated the French ship.
'If we lose the jib-boom, Mr Barthe,' Madison asked shakily, 'will the foremast follow?'
'Not with the wind aft and our topmast housed… At least, it's unlikely.'
'Sail!' a man called from the waist. 'To starboard! Upon us…!'
Hayden almost fell he spun so quickly. A dark mass issued out of the tangled rain, so near that spray from its plunging bow slapped over the Themis's rail, soaking hands standing mesmerized by their guns.
'Helm hard to starboard!' Hayden shouted, the words nearly tearing out his throat from sheer volume.
The Themis continued her turn, her jib-boom almost scraping the French ship. Aboard the ghost ship, looming out of the darkness but yards away, men shouted… in English.
'It's Cole, sir,' Barthe said turning to Hayden in astonishment.
Both British frigates lifted on the same sea, and began to surge forward, the Themis sheering to larboard, the Syren running straight. The French seventy-four wallowed in the trough for an instant, and as the Themis continued to turn away, Hayden watched the jib-boom of the Syren shatter the stern gallery of the Frenchman then tear away as the bow of the frigate slammed into the settling stern with a tremendous rending of timbers.
The two ships stuck fast as the sea passed beneath them, buckling them upward and then they tore apart with a splintering, wrenching sound. Although the French ship turned abruptly to larboard the Themis was miraculously spared her broadside.
'She is stove in, sir…' Barthe said breathlessly, 'the Frenchman.'
'And the Syren is down by the head.'
Hayden turned and made his way back along the swaying deck. 'Mr Archer! Haul in the boats. You will have command of the ship. Keep us as near as you can to the Syren, but distant enough to be free of her spars should she roll toward us.' Hayden stopped on the gangway and called down into the gundeck. 'I need twenty-four men to man the boats, Mr Wickham – no, twenty-eight; I shall employ the jolly-boat as well. There are two hundred men to be rescued so the crews must be small. You shall have command of a cutter. Madison another. Hobson the launch. Childers the jolly-boat. Mr Hawthorne! Two armed marines to each boat and one to accompany Childers. We cannot have boats overset by panicked men.'
The boats were hauled quickly alongside, the crews mustered and sent down the heaving ladder. Hayden took his place in the largest boat – the barge – and grasped the tiller himself.
'Away boats.'
'Pull, lads,' Hayden called over the wind, 'the Syren is down by the head and will not swim long. We have two hundred souls to take away in this bloody gale. Let men say we broke our backs but none were lost.'
The boats set out over the confused sea, the dark shape of the Syren not too distant but slightly upwind. Although rain slashed down on them, as Hayden quartered the waves, the moon appeared between racing clouds offering a cool, thin illumination of dark seas. The Syren was unquestionably down by the bow; Hayden could see her sails flogging as she turned beam-on to the wind. Steerage-way had been lost. She was going to go down more quickly than he had hoped.
'Good God, sir,' one of the oarsman swore, 'is that the Frenchman?'
Hayden twisted around to look aft. In a pool of moonlight the French two-decker lay down by her stern, her bow rising unnaturally, spars strangely angled. She had begun a slow roll to starboard, and the ants teeming in the rigging were men trying to stay above the surface of the winter sea. For a moment Hayden could not look away, the sight so nightmarish, so preternaturally horrifying. And then he turned back to his business. He had his father's people to rescue. But for the few who might be preserved in the boats, his mother's would go down into the sea.
It seemed a long pull to the Syren. Hayden had kept the boat crews minimal so that they might have room to carry away as many as possible, but it meant they were undermanned for rowing to windward. He wondered what might await him as he neared the Syren. A scene of panic, or one of desperate order. In his short career in the Navy he had been witness to both. Good officers could make a difference, preserving both order and life. The Syren had lost her captain and Cole was untested. If there was a scene of panic he would have to restore order before they could begin to take away the men. In his belt Hayden bore a brace of pistols that he hoped he would not be forced to use.
As they drew near the Syren, Hayden could see her bow was now just beneath the surface, her stern high. Men were clambering down into the boats from a gathering at the rail, someone calling out orders. No signs of disorder or mutiny could be seen.
'Captain Cole,' Hayden called. 'We have come with all our boats. We must get you off, sir.'
'God bless you, Hayden,' Cole said with some emotion. 'We can put but a few more into our own boats.'
'Get them clear and have them pull for the Themis.' Hayden looked around and for a desperate moment could not find his ship. And then there she was, a nebulous glow of red from her flares. Archer had put her about and was working his way back up towards the sinking Syren, but Hayden was distressed to see how distant she was.
The Syren's boats, overburdened for the weather, pushed off, and Hayden ordered his own boats alongside. Cole leaned over the rail; he held a pistol pointed at the sky. 'Mr Hayden,' he hissed. 'I am not sure we can maintain order here. This ship will not be long afloat.'
'Then let us get men into the boats and send them away.' Hayden turned to his marine lieutenant. 'Mr Hawthorne, come with me, if you please, and bring a marine from each boat.'
Hayden clambered up the side, the redcoats in his wake. 'I have twenty armed marines, Captain Cole,' he lied loudly, 'but I see we do not need them.'
Cole looked uncertain and frightened, and Hayden did not have time to raise his spirits.
'Are there any ship's boys or sick left aboard?' Hayden called out. To his utter surprise, some boys and other men came out of the agitated mass of crew. Hayden ordered them down into the boats, a few of the sick requiring aid. He knew no names but he began touching men on the shoulder and sending them down as fast as the boats could receive them. To call for a number of men into the boats would have set off a rush leading to men being hurt or drowned, boats overset.
He could feel the men swallowing down their panic, like choking bile. But they were not faint-hearted, he could see that. Hayden went to the rail to be certain he had all the men the boats could bear and no more. 'The best oarsmen must take up the spare sweeps. Pull like your lives depend on it.'
'Captain Hayden, are you not going?' Cole asked, surprised.
'There will be time yet,' Hayden said loud enough for all to hear, 'we will all get off when the boats return.'
The ship did not lurch; nor did it seem to rise or fall much with the passing seas. A sluggish, unrelenting drift down into the winter sea was its only motion. There was barely any conversation among the officers or men who remained, though several stared at the water as it inched up the slanting deck from the bow towards the stern. The passing waves washed aboard forward and sluiced across the deck, higher each time. Finally one ran up the forecastle planks and sloshed down onto the gundeck through the great opening in the waist. The following sea did the same and then water from below rose up to meet it. Even Hayden regarded this with growing horror.
He turned and gazed out to sea, wondering if the first boats had intercepted the Themis and how quickly they would return. Even a strong swimmer would in all likelihood perish before he was found on this foul night for the winter sea drew the heat from a man's body and left him helpless in but a few moments. Once in the water they would be lost.
Hayden turned back to the gathered crew, now muttering among themselves, the mass of them creeping back up towards the taffrail like a multi-legged creature.
'Cole,' Hayden said leaning close to the acting captain, 'we should send the men up the mizzen.'
Cole nodded then leaned even closer to Hayden. 'Will the boats return in time?'
'Let us keep up our spirits,' Hayden replied, 'for the sake of the men.' He said this with confidence but the entire scene seemed dark, a dream vision, the men all gathered silently aboard the sinking ship, the black, gale-driven seas rolling past. Hayden felt light-headed and wondered if he would wake.
Cole turned to the remaining crew, and said, in a voice only slightly shaky, 'We will go up the mizzen mast in an orderly fashion. There is no need to rush. Laughlin, take those dozen closest you and proceed. Get out on the yards and make room for as many as we can.'
Hayden was trying to estimate the number of men – counting in the dark was impossible – and guessed there were perhaps sixty and fewer than a dozen officers and warrant officers – more than he'd hoped. The men began to climb, and Hayden was impressed by their nerve, gathering at the shrouds on either side of the quarterdeck and going up, quickly but without any pushing or shouldering aside. Bradley had a good, steady crew, Hayden could see.
Cole and Hayden went up last, each bearing a lantern, climbing awkwardly one-handed. A small box with the ship's papers was passed up ahead of them, man to man, and the carpenter had the sense to send up axes to cut away the yards, in case it came to that; the men would have something to cling to in the sea while they perished of cold.
In the meagre moonlight, and the irregular smudge of illumination from smoke-stained lamps, Hayden could see the deck below contracting. It also angled a little more, forcing the men to cling to the tilting mast. The sailors did not speak, but clutched the rigging and each other, the stronger men aiding the weak, pulling them back to safety when they slipped or their grip gave way. Cole glanced at Hayden, his mouth a harsh line.
'Sir…' one of the men said. 'Is that a ship?'
This caused a little hum of excitement among the men.
Hayden clambered up to the next ratline to look over the man nearest, and there, by moonlight, saw a dark hull and sails silhouetted against a moonlit cloud. The ship's stern-lamps glowed unmistakeably.
'The French frigate,' another pronounced, and Hayden agreed.
The men began to shift about as though they would protect themselves from musket fire or the great guns but Cole and Hayden shouted over the noise assuring the men that the French captain would not fire. Not, Hayden thought, upon men who were so soon to be dead.
Hayden could make out men at the rail as the ship went ghosting by – silent men, staring in horrified fascination. Who had ever seen the like? – six dozen men clinging to the rigging of a mast that appeared to jut out of the sea – all slipping inescapably away.
'Will they not save us?' someone asked in a tone of lamentation.
'No,' an old sailor answered, his voice burdened with the sorrow of resignation. 'No, they will rescue their own first, of whom there are so many more.'
Air began bubbling up audibly from the sinking ship. Only the aft ten feet of the stern remained dry, the foot of the mizzen already submerged. The ship began to go down more quickly now, as the air boiled out of the hull. Men began pressing themselves higher, doubling up, but still no one was forced off as they were looking out for one another. Hayden felt oddly proud of them, sticking together under the most desperate circumstances. Most of the men could not swim.
'Who has the axes?' Hayden called out. 'Prepare to cut away the cross-jack yard. I don't want yards falling on the men below, so await my order.'
Hayden stared down into the dark waters, the seas rolling past. Already the rail was under and the water approaching the futtock staves. Like all the men, he searched the seas towards the Themis but could see no sign of boats.
The men had crept up so that most were astride the cross-jack yard or above on the tops or in the rigging of the top-gallant mast, which had not been housed. Hayden and Cole were the lowest men, perched on the ratlines just below the yard. Two men with small axes sat astride the mast just above them, looking, anxiously, from the rising water to Hayden. A sea rolled by beneath them and the water seemed to have risen half a dozen feet.
'By God, we're going down quickly now,' Cole whispered to him.
'Can you swim?' Hayden leaned close and asked.
'A little,' Cole answered after the briefest hesitation.
'We will have to get clear of this yard so it can be cut away. Pass up your lamp.'
The two lamps were sent up and Hayden and Cole climbed over the men above so that they might cling to the mizzen-top platform.
Hayden spoke loudly so that all the men might hear. 'When the yard is afloat it will not support all of you if you try to mount it. Remain in the water and put your arms around it only.' The water reached Hayden's feet, even before it ran into his boots he could feel the cold of it through the leather, which was pressed around his foot and ankle by the pressure. Immediately his foot began to ache.
'Cut away the jeers,' Hayden said to the axemen, 'and the lifts below the blocks so that we have some rope to hold on to.'
The axes began to rise and fall with urgency.
The few strokes required to severe the ropes were only just completed a moment before the water reached the yard, so that the spar, with all of its riders, plunged fewer than three feet, but spilled all of the men aboard into the frigid sea. A wave broke upon the last men clinging to the sinking mast and Hayden was torn from his precarious perch and flung into the icy sea. The cold knifed into his flesh, cramping muscles, and prying apart his joints. He broke the surface gasping, looked around and saw a boy astride the mast, balanced precariously and holding aloft a lamp – their only hope of discovery and salvation. Grabbing a flailing sailor by the scruff of his jacket Hayden swam the few strokes to the yard, just awash from all the bodies clinging to it.
Leaving the rescued man gasping, Hayden swam out again as he could hear men crying out. A sea lifted him as he reached a man. The sailor grasped for Hayden, pushing him under, but Hayden surfaced behind the man, took a hold of him strongly, and on his back dragged him to the yard. After that he was spent utterly, barely able to hold the yard as the sea lifted them.
'Call out,' Hayden shouted. 'All at once or we shall never be heard. 'Here!' he called. 'Here!'
Men joined him. 'Here!' they called from lips so cold they could barely form words. 'HERE!'
A sea broke over them, battering Hayden down into the frigid waters, though he somehow kept his grip on the spar. When he surfaced again, the man to either side of him was gone, as was the boy holding the lantern.
'Call out or we're lost,' Hayden cried. 'Here!'
Fewer men took up the cry this time, and with less energy.
By luck Hayden found the foot rope, which had remained with the yard, and this allowed him to bear himself up a little more easily, though his leg soon trembled with the effort of supporting his weight even in the sea.
Men began to fall away, as though blown by the wind or some current in the sea. The man nearest Hayden slipped under, gasping. Reaching out, Hayden found the man's coat sleeve but his fingers could not close on it. The last he felt was the man's stone-coarse hand scrape by his own, neither able to take hold.
It became increasingly difficult for Hayden to keep his head from sagging into the water, the muscles of his neck no longer obeying his commands. He leaned his temple against the arm thrown over the spar. An urge to retch washed through him, the cold penetrating deep into his bowels. No one called out. The moon broke free of the clouds and cast its chill glow upon a glassy ocean of irregular seas crested in moonlight. A few stars, scattered among the clouds, shimmered in the heavens. Hayden knew that he would not endure ten minutes more and thought of his father upon a ship, so many years ago, foundering in the winter Atlantic. Often, he dreamt of his father drifting in the depths, asleep until the sea gave up her dead. Hayden would soon begin his own slow descent, leaf-like, to join the elder Hayden.
'Sir?'
Hayden's eyes had closed and he opened them with effort. A small boy, lips bruised and eyes sunken, pushed at the shoulder of his jacket.
'Sir.'
'Yes?'
'I thought I 'eard s-someone cry out.'
'Where away?'
'Don't know, sir.'
Hayden tried to make his addled brain work. 'Let us get you up on the yard. Can you manage?'
'I don't think so, sir.'
'I will help. Crook up your leg and let me get a hand under your knee.'
The boy did so, but when he put weight on Hayden's bent wrist, Hayden nearly went under, his arm giving way. The ocean had sapped all his strength.
'Sorry, sir.'
'You are not to blame. Listen carefully. I'm standing on the foot-rope. I will duck under the water and you will step on my back, climb up and straddle the yard. Do you understand?'
'Are you sure, sir?' the boy asked.
'It is the only way. Ready?'
The boy nodded and Hayden let the water close over his head, holding the yard with his wrists, fingers fused and useless. A knee thumped into his temple, passed by, and a small foot pressed down on his shoulder, almost sending Hayden into the depths. A long moment he bore the weight and just as he was about to give way, there was a sudden push and the foot was gone. Floating to the surface Hayden might have drifted off, but the boy took Hayden's arm between two wrists and helped pull it over the spar.
'Cry out,' Hayden gasped.
'Here,' the boy squeaked. 'Themis!'
Over the roar of the gale no one would hear him, Hayden despaired.
'Here!' the boy managed, a little louder – a little more desperate. 'Thee-mis!'
The wind answered with a gust, spume flung upon them from the streaked surface.
'Did you hear, sir? S-sir?'
'No,' Hayden thought he answered but was not certain. He felt as though he were slipping into a dream.
'Hold tight, sir. H-here!'
The sea no longer felt cold, but warm, inviting. How easily he could depart this life for the sweet dream that beckoned – Henrietta drawing him into her arms, his father whispering his name in joyful awakening. A jumble of memories and emotions. Then voices. What were they saying?
He was hauled bodily over a hard edge and tossed down on some unyielding surface. The voices kept yammering, words unfathomable, and then someone said, 'Is he alive? Mr Wickham! Is he alive?'
He surfaced into warmth, a soft weight pressing him down – like a covering of warm snow. For a moment Hayden lay still, uncertain, afraid to open his eyes. And then he did. A reddish glow illuminated a small circle, and within it, distant but a yard, crouched a figure on a stool.
'Wickham?' His voice came out parched and harsh.
The figure stirred. 'Captain Hayden!' Of an instant, the boy was on his feet. 'We thought, when you stopped shivering that meant either you recovered or…' He chose not to complete this sentence.
'What in the world is in my cot?' Hayden asked, hardly able to move under the weight. 'And what has me bound to my mattress?'
'We have every blanket the officers possessed, or nearly so, to cover you. And Jefferies heated nine-pound balls in the stove and we placed them all around you – it was Mr Gould's idea. Mr Barthe and Mr Franks ran several ropes up to the deck-head to bear all the weight. We have been exchanging the balls for newly heated ones as they've cooled. But here you are, sir! Alive!'
Hayden thought the boy would weep.
Hayden found his mind was a jumble of half-remembered images. 'There were others…'
'From the Syren, sir? We preserved the lives of all who made it into the boats but for two who were found floating near to you, Captain. All the men who first came away in the boats we kept separate from our crew, so they should not be exposed to the influenza, and have placed them on other ships in the convoy.'
'Cole?'
Wickham lowered his voice. 'Never found, sir.'
'The French?'
'We have not caught sight of them since their seventy-four went down.'
'How long have I been… asleep?'
'I do not know if you have been properly asleep, Captain. There has been a great deal of muttering and incoherent speech, and opening your eyes. You were in a delirium, like, but lacking the fever. The opposite, in truth, for you had the life nearly drawn out of you.'
'How long?'
'Most of a day, Captain.' Wickham brightened. 'I shall inform Mr Hawthorne and Mr Barthe that you are awake, sir. They have been terribly concerned, and in and out of your cabin every bell.'
'What of the sick? Griffiths?'
Wickham took his gaze from Hayden's face, and shook his head just perceptibly. 'We've lost more men, sir. The doctor is with us, yet… but is most grievously ill.'
There was a moment of silence between them.
'I shall tell Mr Hawthorne that you have survived, Captain, if you will excuse me.'
Before Wickham reached the door, Hayden had slipped into a dream – the warmth of a female embrace.
Fatigue hovered ever near. Hayden found he could not stay upon his feet long and required sleep after even a brief period out of his cot. He continued to eat the diet Ariss had prescribed – even so, his strength was returning but slowly.
Archer and Barthe were more than able to command the Themis, but there was an entire convoy that required the direction only a single, decisive commander could provide, and Hayden could not slack for a moment if he hoped to bring his charges safely to anchor in Gibraltar.
For this reason he was on deck as often as he felt able, and when abroad, found himself regularly passing by the quarantine-berth. As much as the place unsettled him, he could not stay away. Enquiries about the doctor's condition were met with hopeful words but disheartened looks.
Upon one of his rounds, Hayden happened upon Mr Gould sitting at the aft mess table. Realizing that Ariss, Gould and Smosh must periodically have fresh air and a few moments' respite from their labours, the starboard aft mess had been designated for their use alone – not that the crew needed to be encouraged to keep their distance.
Here he found Gould seated at the table – 'slumped' would be a more accurate description – and before him, a dozen paces distant, stood a small gathering of hands.
'Will you have more, Mr Gould?' one of the men asked.
Gould managed a shake of the head. Hayden could see only his back, but clearly he was bent over, engaged in the act of eating.
'Mr Jefferies has been saving some cheese…?' another wondered. 'Shall I fetch you a slice?'
To this a nod of the head.
The crewman went off at a trot.
Seeing the captain the men all made their knuckle.
'How fare you, Mr Gould? No, do not rise. Eat while you may. Lord knows, you will be called away soon enough.'
'I am well, sir,' Gould responded, hurrying to chew and swallow that he might answer his captain.
The man returned at that moment with cheese on a wooden plate and reaching out to his furthest extreme set it upon the table and then scurried back to stand among the men attending the midshipman.
'You are in good hands, I see,' Hayden observed.
'Yes, sir. The men have been most kind, Captain.'
'I can see that, and well deserved. Carry on.' And Hayden passed by, feeling the greatest sense of relief he had in many days. The hands would forgive a courageous officer many offences or shortcomings. He had seen it oftener than he could say. And there was nothing the men feared so much as a pestilence – with the possible exception of sepsis. Aiding Mr Ariss in the quarantine berth had won Gould the admiration and appreciation of the older hands, no doubt, and the rest would follow their example. Gould would have no troubles with the hands for a very long time, and Hayden was very pleased to see it. Very pleased indeed.
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 11
|
They lowered the dead man, twisting slowly in a crude sling, the noose he had used to hang himself still tightly encircling his delicate neck. Two of his mess mates caught him as he neared the deck and guided the body, almost tenderly, to the hard planks. He laid there, unnaturally, limbs stiff, strands of fine, youthful hair drifting about a bloodless face.
Hardly more than a boy, Hayden thought.
The men, gathering silently, removed their hats, and stared as though they had never seen a corpse before. Hayden hardly remembered the boy alive, but thought, now, he would never forget the sight of him in death, his slack mouth, swollen, purple lips, traceries of crimson across his cheeks where blood vessels had ruptured.
Griffiths came forward, still so weak that he braced himself on a walking stick, and unable to sustain a crouch, thumped down awkwardly on his knees by the boy's side. He loosened the noose, a badly made knot that had slipped tight and tighter, suffocating him finally. An abrupt examination of the boy's hands, his neck, then the doctor nodded to the men who stood by with a cot.
'Carry him down to the sick-berth,' he said hoarsely. 'God rest his soul.'
'God rest his soul,' echoed in ripples across the deck, repeated by each man in turn.
Setting his stick and placing two hands upon the knob, Griffiths hauled himself up with difficulty. A quick, direct look at Hayden and the acting captain fell in beside the surgeon, the two making their way to the taffrail.
'Please, sit, Doctor,' Hayden insisted and Griffiths, a little out of breath, did so gratefully, tumbling down onto the little bench. Hayden leaned back against the larboard rail and waited.
'I will examine him more thoroughly,' Griffiths said, a little out of breath from even these small exertions, 'but almost certainly it was self-murder.'
Hayden shook his head – the second such death since he had come aboard the Themis. A memory of the haunted look of Giles Sanson as he cast himself into the sea came to him – another face never to be forgotten.
'I… I hardly noticed him when he was alive. One of the impressed men, I believe… What could have led one so young to so rash an act, one must wonder?'
Griffiths took a handkerchief and wiped perspiration from his face, still gaunt from recent illness. 'I will attempt to determine if any… unnatural acts were forced upon him.'
A muttered curse escaped Hayden's lips. 'Perhaps the men who knew him can cast a little light on this matter.'
'If anyone knew him. Even so, I doubt you will learn anything that causes the least surprise; a young man, quite likely of sensitive disposition, impressed against his will, thrust into a harsh world he neither knew nor understood, taken to sea by winter, threatened and unnerved by terrible winds and seas, an enemy he knew nothing of trying to kill him with savage guns, and even his own crew probably hostile or at least uncaring, mayhap even cruel. I have seen melancholia sink its claws into men subjected to less. 'Self-murder' you will write in the log, but the boy was murdered by the Royal Navy. That is the truth.'
Griffiths was so fragile and peevish since his illness that Hayden chose not to argue this particular point. He thought it more likely that the boy was being ballyragged or even buggered, and that was a fault to be laid at the feet of the officers, of whom there were too few and of those only a handful had enough sea miles to know their business. He himself felt shame that this had happened aboard his ship – that the boy, friendless and despairing, had been driven to take his own life. Hayden felt the failure was his and his alone.
'The good news,' the surgeon said, 'if there can be good news on such a day, is that the port doctor has declared us free of influenza. We may lower that cursed yellow flag and even venture ashore.' Griffiths turned his gaze upon Hayden, who felt that the doctor had slipped a little away from life after his illness, and when one looked into his eyes he seemed to be somehow deeper inside, as though the man's essence was falling into a dark and narrow well.
'Then let us have it down this instant.' Hayden looked about for the officer of the watch. 'Mr Archer? Haul down the quarantine flag, if you please.'
'Aye, sir!' Archer responded, as though he had never been given such a gratifying order in all of his life.
'Do tell me if you find anything out of the ordinary regarding… the dead boy.' Hayden had already forgotten his name, but then his poor brain had not been quite the same since the Atlantic had nearly drawn all the life out of him. 'I am called away. To report to the admiral, don't you know. I pray it will be more productive then my last such encounter.'
Hayden went quickly down to his cabin and gathered up the diverse papers he would need – a list of those who had died of influenza, and those who had been lost in the foundering of the Syren. Requests for stores and water would go to the commissioner.
In a moment he was in the stern-sheets of the ship's barge, Childers at the helm, and set off across the harbour, the little town of Gibraltar bathed in sunlight some distance away.
Admiral Joseph Brown sat at a writing table. Across the stern gallery, curtains hung, precisely drawn, so that the Mediterranean sun slanted down upon his desk leaving all of his considerable bulk in shadow but for powdery white hands. Thick spectacles and a puzzled squint suggested to Hayden that the man's sight was failing. Not looking up from the report Hayden had submitted, the admiral said quietly, 'How many men were found with you after the Syren went down?'
'Six, sir… though two of those passed on soon after.' Hayden did not say that he had almost been among them, hanging between life and death for several hours, the furnace of his body having been quenched by the winter ocean.
For a moment Hayden waited for the admiral to say more, but the man read on, as though he had not received the report some weeks previously, for the Themis had been lying a month in Gibraltar harbour, quarantined, land tantalizingly near. The influenza had burned through Hayden's crew like a fire, spreading from man to man, felling one then another. Twenty men the disease had claimed – one in ten – unheard of for such a contagion. Those who had fallen ill recovered slowly, a lingering cough, shortness of breath and loss of vigour common. And now, in the aftermath, the crew seemed haunted, silent, wary, as though the angel of death had walked among them, invisible, unmerciful, touching this man upon the brow then that. Even those who had escaped illness altogether appeared, somehow, convalescent.
Brown laid the letter aside and turned in his chair, a shuffling of the feet, a brittle twist of the shoulders. He removed his spectacles and for a moment contemplated Hayden. 'The Syren's only surviving lieutenant informs me that you threatened to fire into his ship. Is this true?'
Hayden felt his mouth go dry and when he spoke his voice was thickened and harsh. 'Captain Bradley seemed to have believed he possessed the authority to appoint one of his lieutenants to command of the convoy. Certainly he did not. As senior officer the responsibility fell to me – by all practices of the Navy. Cole must have known this, and his actions were insubordinate, verging upon mutinous. I acted as the situation dictated to establish the proper chain of command.'
'You did not mention this in your account to me…'
'Cole was dead, sir, I saw no reason to attach this unfortunate incident to his otherwise good name.'
'It was his name you were attempting to protect?' Brown's sarcasm was clear.
'Indeed, sir, it was.'
'Pool informed me that he had little faith in you.'
Hayden shifted in the straight-backed chair. 'I assure you, Admiral Brown, I gave Captain Pool no reason to hold that belief.'
Chalky fingers drummed upon the mahogany table. 'The service is a small community, Mr Hayden. Men's reputations precede them.'
Hayden felt his face flush. 'In my particular case,' he replied heatedly, 'it is the reputation of one of my former commanding officers that precedes me.'
The drumming stopped, and Brown's head cocked slightly to starboard. 'Are you suggesting, sir, that one of your captains is responsible for your character within the service? Is that your idea of loyalty?'
Hayden shut his eyes a moment. Fool, he berated himself, Hart has many friends both in and out of the service.
'I did not mean that, sir,' Hayden offered lamely.
'Then I cannot comprehend what you could have meant.' The admiral glanced at his hand, still resting on the table, flexed the waxy fingers and resumed his staccato drumming.
'The Reverend Dr Worthing has written me – three letters! – complaining of his treatment at your hands. Did you confine this gentleman to his quarters?'
'I did, sir. He was provoking unrest among my crew and would not desist even after being warned.'
'So say you. Dr Worthing believes you are dangerously inexperienced if not subject to delusions.'
'You may enquire among my officers, Admiral. I don't believe you will find one who shares Dr Worthing's opinion.' As though Worthing might divide good officers from bad – the man had never previously been aboard a ship!
But Brown seemed little interested in enquiring among Hayden's officers. 'Do you deny this as well? – after asserting your control of the convoy, against the wishes of Captain Bradley, you then relinquished your ship and command of the convoy to a junior lieutenant so that you might go on an ill-prepared rescue mission? Did you not comprehend where your responsibilities lay?'
'I did, sir, fully, but my senior lieutenant was ill with the influenza, my third lieutenant was a midshipman of sixteen years temporarily promoted, and my second, though an excellent young officer, lacked experience. There were two hundred souls at risk, and I had no one else I might send.'
Brown raised his greying brows a little. It was clear he remained unconvinced by this argument.
'If I may, sir,' Hayden managed, struggling to keep his tone mild, 'we did bring the convoy through under difficult circumstances, rescued most of the Syren's crew, and sank both a frigate and a French seventy-four –'
The hand banged down flat on the desk, gripping the edge with an arthritic thumb. 'Mr Hayden, the seventy-four gun ship sank due to collision caused by incompetent execution of a poorly contrived plan. The frigate went down when her magazine exploded – which, for all that is known, was very likely due entirely to the mismanagement of the French crew. I will give you no credit for sinking ships by chance!'
The admiral rose from his chair, walked stiffly to the stern gallery and drew back the curtain, undamming a deluge of stark sunlight. It raced across the cabin deck, enveloping Hayden so that he lifted a hand to shade away the pain in his eyes. For a moment the admiral stood, gazing out, and Hayden realized he was mastering his anger.
'I have no captain to take your place; none who would take your ship, at any rate.' Brown spoke calmly and turned his head but little in Hayden's direction. 'I will send you as escort to a few transports to Genoa, and then on to Toulon. Do not tarry in Genoa; indeed, once the transports are safely in harbour you need not even anchor. Dr Worthing and… this other parson must go with you. Allow me to give you some counsel in this matter, Hayden; confining parsons to their cabins for sedition is likely to make you something of a subject of… merriment within the service. I suggest you not do it again. Good day.'
A moment later Hayden was in the warmish sunshine, wondering if he would ever leave an interview with a superior not feeling as though he had been ill-used, insulted, his actions subject to flagrant misrepresentation, and his motives questioned. Pool had abandoned his convoy, leaving Hayden without adequate means to repulse the French squadron, and for this Pool had apparently received not the smallest censure – though he had managed to impugn Hayden's character while explaining away his own dereliction of duty. Hayden brought his convoy – Pool's convoy! – across Biscay through difficult winter conditions, repulsed an enemy squadron of superior force, sank two French vessels – one a ship of the line – and for this he was mocked and told that his reputation had preceded him! It was more than a saint could bear.
The trip across the busy harbour passed slowly, Childers, sensing Hayden's mood, silently glancing his way occasionally. Hayden's stomach, not his best friend under perfect circumstances, growled like a terrier. As Childers brought the barge alongside the Themis, Hayden stepped onto a rung of the topside ladder and climbed quickly up, barely acknowledging bosun and marines as he gained the deck. In a moment he was in his cabin, sealed orders slapped down upon his writing table, and pacing angrily larboard to starboard.
A half-hour of this fruitless activity did little to reduce his choler but Hayden believed he might, at least, be capable of concealing his frustration from others. He sent for Saint-Denis.
The first lieutenant arrived a few moments later, haggard, thinning hair lank and faded, his entire carriage bespeaking fragility. It seemed to Hayden that Saint-Denis grew weaker, in fact was relapsing into illness. Along with this, his character appeared to be breaking down – at least his arrogance had been compromised.
'Are you well, Lieutenant?' Hayden enquired.
Saint-Denis nodded stiffly. 'Well enough.' Then, 'I recover but slowly, Mr Hayden.'
'It appears to be true of those who were most ill. I worry that Griffiths's health has been broken.'
'It is an irony that he came nearer death than any who did not succumb. If not for young Gould I believe we would have lost the doctor.' He touched a hand absently to his temple. 'Lost any number of us, in truth. He nursed us back to health. I never expected to be spoonfed like a babe at this time of my life, but so I was.'
'We all owe Gould, Ariss and Smosh a great debt of thanks.'
Saint-Denis nodded, his manner intense but unreadable. Since his recovery he appeared to be in confusion about Gould – as though disdain and gratitude had commingled to form some strange emotion for which men had no name.
'How went your meeting with Brown, sir?' the lieutenant enquired, mastering himself.
Hayden felt the wound in his pride bleed a little but he attempted to show no sign of it. 'We are to escort seven transports to Genoa and then precede directly to Toulon. Presumably, Lord Hood will find a captain for the Themis… and all will be well with the world.'
'When do we sail, sir?'
'In a few days. We must water and take on powder and shot.'
'Very good, sir.'
A golf match was arranged by Wickham, to be held in a pasture just beyond the isthmus. Hayden thought it a strange idea but it seemed to animate his officers and – given their recent states of both mind and body – that was no bad thing. The players would be Saint-Denis, Dr Worthing (hardly to be left out as he possessed the only clubs), Mr Smosh and Wickham. Hayden, who had never even seen the game played, declined an invitation but agreed to observe. A good part of the ship's company also planned to join the audience, and food and drink were quickly organized, the whole enterprise taking on something of a holiday atmosphere. Interest was so keen that Hayden suspected wagering had slipped into the matter, and he only hoped that none of his crew would be ruined, given the precarious state of most seamen's financial affairs.
The chosen day presented itself: warm, windless, the vault of the Mediterranean without cloud and flawlessly blue. Boats carried the party of sportsmen ashore, landing them near the town. The goodness of the day, the gaiety of his companions and the sense of hardships past put Hayden in a mood of benevolent contentment. All that remained for him to feel utterly at peace with the world was the presence of Henrietta Carthew, and though this was clearly impossible, he allowed himself to fall into brief reveries in which his memories of Henrietta were so palpable that the emotions he felt in her presence were recaptured entirely, giving his feelings of tranquillity a luxurious edge of yearning, which was not at all unpleasant.
As the crew of the Themis proceeded along the street, some of the locals were drawn into its sphere: a few young men looking for diversion, and a number of young women of dubious occupation, who immediately found themselves the object of much male attention. To Hayden's surprise, Griffiths seemed interested in these girls, and then Hayden realized it was one particular girl that drew the doctor's eye. She was, Hayden noted, very comely, her skin delicate, hair shining coppery in the sun. Her behaviour was so modest that Hayden wondered if she were not a sister of one of the young men who had joined the party (and he wondered at the young man's judgement to bring his sibling into such company) when he noticed the girl had but a single hand – the left being missing. The scar of her surgery was still pink and fresh upon her wrist.
'Do you see, Doctor,' Hayden said quietly. 'That young woman has lost her hand.'
Griffiths nodded, taking his gaze away, flushing a little with embarrassment. 'Yes, and an ugly job the surgeon made of it.'
They continued to walk, saying nothing more. Hayden, Hawthorne and Griffiths made a small party within the party, strolling along the street among sailors, inhabitants and soldiers. The three seemed happy in each other's company, as they had been when all were residents of the gunroom, and this alleviated some of the isolation Hayden felt as captain.
This peaceful state, however, was interrupted by great alarm from down the street. People could be seen dashing into doorways and bolting up side alleys and a few seconds later, shouts of 'Mad dog! Mad dog!' reached them. Faces appeared at upper windows, leaning precariously out to stare down into the suddenly chaotic street.
A black mongrel dodged among the flying bodies, muzzle thick with drooly froth, snapping at any who happened in its path. Hawthorne looked quickly about and snatched up a barrow-handle that leaned against a wall. He strode to the centre of the narrow way, spread his legs and hefted the handle like an axe. Before him the sea of people seemed to part in a swirl of skirts and frock coats, children being swept up and thrust through open windows into waiting arms. Without warning, the dog tacked to starboard, chasing after a corpulent man who, in his alarm, ran first towards a closed door, and then clumsily changed course. The mongrel snapped at his ample buttocks as he turned but then carried on towards Hawthorne, who barred its way. In a moment it was done, the barrow-handle flailing down, a sharp 'crack', and the brute lay on the cobbles, his limbs twitching faintly. Hawthorne fetched him two more blows to the skull, and the mad dog lay limp and still.
'I am bit!' the corpulent man cried. 'I am bit!' He pulled at his breeches, twisting around awkwardly in an attempt to see an area of his bulk that had not been in view for some years. 'My God, the brute got hold of me!'
Griffiths took charge, galvanized by need. He and Hawthorne peeled the man's breeches down around his ankles right there in the street, the crew of the Themis and emerging residents crowding round.
'It is a scratch only,' Griffith's pronounced, crouched by the man's bulging derriere. 'The teeth did not penetrate the skin.' He turned to a group of locals. 'Is there a smith?' he demanded.
'I'll fetch him, sir,' a young man offered, and went off at a run.
The corpulent man had grown somewhat pale and Griffiths had him sit down on the ground, and then lie down when he did not show signs of recovery. The dog was an object of almost equal curiosity, people collecting around it but keeping a little distance in the event it was not wholly dead. A pock-marked boy prodded the beast with a stick, the dark skin mounding into creases where the point pressed, but the dog did not respond otherwise.
A smith appeared, running down the street with a pair of tongs in one hand. The crowd opened a narrow corridor to let him pass, and he stopped over the mad dog's victim.
'Who is the doctor?' he asked.
'I am,' Griffiths answered, reaching out to take the offered tongs.
This sight caused the corpulent man to stir but Hawthorne and two crewmen pinned him, squirming, to the ground, before he could escape.
'Do not move!' Griffiths ordered, and with only the slightest pause to take aim, applied the glowing, hot coal to the man's buttock. A hissing sound and the smell of burning flesh caused everyone to draw back, some covering their nose and mouth.
'Done,' Griffiths announced, returning the tongs to their owner. Griffiths turned his attention to several people who seemed to be the victim's friends. 'He must be submerged in a cold bath for as long as he can hold his breath – as many times as he can bear – then whipped with towels. I believe we applied the coal in good time and he will be preserved from the madness.'
Griffiths hauled himself to his feet using his walking stick. 'Shall we carry on?' he said testily, embarrassed by his physical weakness.
'By all means,' Hayden replied.
Griffiths might have been put out of sorts by the incident but it was clear the rest of the crew thought it a most diverting entertainment and talked of nothing else as they made their way down the street and out of the town. Occasional cries of 'Mad dog! Mad dog!' produced immediate alarm and much laughter for a short stretch but then the novelty wore away and these ceased altogether.
Through a gate in the stone wall the golfing party emerged into the pasture. The bullocks, carried there from Morocco to feed the British fleet, could be seen collected in a distant corner, where herdsmen with dogs had agreed to keep them. The habitually dull-rummy, and today confused, looks in the eyes of the cattle as they observed the progress of the sportsmen and their entourage seemed appropriate to Hayden. As human endeavours went, golf did seem to be one of the oddest. Around him seamen partook of coarse Spanish wine, which could be had cheaply from any merchant in the town, and already they were none too steady on their feet. It did not help that several weeks upon a moving deck made the land seem to sway about – a strange phenomenon familiar to any man who had gone to sea.
'It is rather like the links land at St Andrews,' Worthing observed, surveying the area. 'Have you played the old course?' he enquired of Saint-Denis.
'Twice only,' Saint-Denis replied, frustrating Worthing, who seemed certain that in this he would prove superior.
Worthing sported a bright red coat, an item of apparel which had originally been adopted by golfers to give warning to strolling families who might otherwise find themselves in a cannonade of small missiles. This garment had apparently been made to fit a slightly smaller man or perhaps had been purchased some years earlier, when the worthy doctor had been youthfully slim, for now it seemed to pull his entire form upward, fitting tightly around his small belly and forcing back his shoulders.
A few feet behind walked Worthing's servant, a particularly devout hand whom the crew had nicknamed 'Dismal Johnny'. He bore, under his right arm, with shafts pointing aft, a small array of play clubs, spoons, putters and diverse curious and exotic-looking implements, some of which appeared to be tools especially manufactured for cutting hay or perhaps pounding beef.
The procession stopped at the first teeing-up place and stood about wondering what would happen next, the sailors looking on faintly bemused. Saint-Denis retrieved one of the play clubs and hefted it knowingly. He flexed the ash shaft, sighted along its length, then, taking hold of the sheepskin grip, waggled it back and forth.
'A most excellent club,' he pronounced it. 'Who is your cleek maker, Doctor?'
'Jarvis, in Edinburgh,' Worthing said, perhaps a bit defensively.
'Jarvis? I have not heard of him.'
'He is not so well known as some, but does excellent work and has made a number of clubs to my own design.'
Saint-Denis drew the club back slowly, a little above waist-height, then whipped it fiercely around his body, sweeping the ground before him and continuing through, the club making a most satisfying and impressive 'swoosh' as it went.
'Ah, I wondered. Several of these were unknown to me.'
'This I call the "mishleek",' the reverend doctor said proudly, handing the lieutenant an object that looked like a small garden hoe fixed at an angle on the end of a wooden shaft. 'For playing out of sand or soft dirt.'
Saint-Denis waggled this one. 'Of course. I can see its utility immediately.'
Worthing retrieved another. 'The globmudge, for playing out of ditches.'
Saint-Denis smiled broadly as he received this one, returning the mishleek. 'I have needed such a club many times but had none.' He turned to his student in the gentleman's game. 'Do you see, Wickham? – for ditches in which a little water might lie. A globmudge,' he said admiringly. 'I possessed a mud-flinger for a time but found it unsatisfactory in all ways.'
'Oh yes, the mud-flingers were poorly conceived and deficient in every way that mattered. You will find the globmudge its superior for unditching the ball and getting it down the links. Many a player who has seen me swing my globmudge in a little rivulet of mud and the ball, almost miraculously, flying up has hurried off to Jarvis to possess just such a weapon of his own. I hope we will find a ditch in which I might demonstrate its handsomer qualities.'
'So do I. Three putters, you carry?'
'Yes, one can hardly do with fewer, and God knows I have tried. And I also have this,' he took yet another club from those on offer, 'I haven't a name for it yet. The 'new-cleek' I have been calling it until inspiration supplies better.'
'Let us make this an object of our day – to find a suitable name for your new-cleek.' Saint-Denis took it to hand and gave it a half-swing. 'For long grass?'
'No –'
'Mud holes?'
'By no means. It is for driving one's ball out of the sheep dung while preserving one's apparel. You will see, there is hardly any splatter at all.'
'Mr Smosh?' Saint-Denis called, making a slow circle.
The Reverend Mr Smosh was at that moment standing among a gathering of sailors and tipping the contents of a near-empty wine bottle down his throat.
'Do you see? Dr Worthing has another career as an inventor of cleeks.'
'Indeed, I have been most attentive,' Smosh replied, running some vowels into consonants just perceptibly. 'I have no doubt the modgeglub will prove its uses before the day is out. When do we begin?'
'Let us not waste this perfect day,' Saint-Denis said. 'Dr Worthing… I believe you should have the honour of first ball.'
Wooden tees and 'featheries' were produced from a canvas sack and distributed to the sportsmen. Wickham turned his feathery over in his hand, squeezing it then tossing it up a few times as though gauging its weight or ability to fly through the air.
'I am surprised to find Worthing could afford those,' Hawthorne whispered.
'Are they dear?' Hayden asked.
'Quite. And one needs several for every match.'
'What kind of wood are they?'
'Not wood at all. Leather stuffed hard with soaked goose down that expands as it dries. Quite hard, and then painted to preserve the leather.'
The course, five holes, had been set up by Wickham and Saint-Denis the previous day, playing back and forth the length of the vaguely 'L'-shaped pasture and once, narrowly, across it. The pasture was more flat than not, surrounded by a stone wall, overgrown in various places. A few shade trees dotted the field proper and half a dozen more grew just beyond the wall, their canopies spreading over the grassland.
Worthing selected a levellish area, free of cow dung, and pressed his tee down into the cropped grass. Taking a broad stance, his manner almost solemn, he made a stiff practice swing, whipping a play club around his body and thudding it into the ground, tearing up a chunk of turf that went tumbling along the green.
'Damn!' he muttered and tried the same again, this time to his satisfaction. Stepping up to his ball he addressed it in his splayed stance, club waggling behind the sacrificially mounted feathery. After a moment of indecision, he drew back his club and as he leaned left, about to begin his swing, the ball tottered off the tee, made a small bounce and rolled half a foot.
'Damn this ball to hell!' the reverend doctor spat out.
Bending awkwardly in his tight coat, Worthing snatched up the ball and set it delicately back upon its tiny perch.
He went through the same motions, waggling his club, his belly thrust forward, shoulders pulled back. The club began its circuit about his frame, hovered thoughtfully a moment, then lashed forward, striking a glancing blow upon the unsuspecting feathery. The little sphere went spinning off, not ten feet above the trampled turf, drawing a low arc towards the stone wall. It struck the ground obliquely, bounced once altering its path even more to starboard, found the ground again and fetched up almost immediately against the wall where all progress stopped with a dull, vowelless 'thnmp'.
Worthing dashed the head of his play club against the turf, and cursed like a sailor. He thrust the grip at Wickham, who was next to stand up, and stomped off to the side. While laying out the course the previous day Wickham had received instruction from Saint-Denis and had the opportunity to strike a few featheries so he was not completely unprepared for what was to follow. Pushing a tee into the ground and mounting his ball upon it, Wickham took his stance as previously instructed. He waggled the club-head behind the feathery, threateningly, drew the club back, his face set all the while in perfect, childlike concentration. His stroke was not nearly so fast as the doctor's, but it was apparently more true, for the ball shot off the tee cleaving the air low over the pasture, landed at such an angle that it did not bounce but only rolled for forty yards, spinning to stop in what appeared to be a clump of thistle.
Saint-Denis offered his student congratulations, and a few small corrections to his technique, and then insisted Mr Smosh be next to the tee. Smosh handed his bottle to a ship's boy, unbuttoned his jacket, rotated bent arms at the shoulders to loosen his muscles, stepped forward and planted his tee. He stood upright, short legs straight, lower lip thrust out, face almost aglow from drink. Apparently he felt no need of a practice swing, but went straight to business. He lined his club up behind the feathery, measuring its precise position with one eye closed, as though he aimed a fowling piece. A moment he stood thus, arranging his club in exactly the right attitude, then yanked the club back and high up into the air. With a strange motion, somewhere between splitting wood and scything hay, he drove the ball up into the sky. Off it went, hissing through the warm Mediterranean air, a small white dot against the perfect blue. For an impossible time it seemed to stay aloft, as though it had sprouted wings and hovered like a shrike. And then down, down it tumbled, gathering speed until it struck the ground no little distance off, bounced froglike, and settled out of sight.
'You have a… unique swing,' Saint-Denis observed, clearly not approving, perhaps even a little amused.
Smosh made a small bow, proffered the club to Saint-Denis, and, to a round of spontaneous applause and some cat-calls, retrieved his bottle and resumed his place, indifferent, apparently, to the fate of a little leather sphere stuffed with goose down.
Saint-Denis then took the stage. His usual vanity and bravado had been much eroded by recent illness, but he still clearly took pride in his golf prowess – had bragged about it at table – and now was forced to perform before a gathering, not all of whom called him friend. His stance was not unlike Dr Worthing's, but his limbs, frail from influenza, seemed as thin as the shaft of the club he held. His stroke, though well-schooled, lacked potency, and the ball set off but slowly, lofting low over the ground and was soon rolling to a stop not much beyond that of Dr Worthing, though in open ground.
The party set off, the gallery chattering and laughing in their wake. As Dr Worthing's ball was 'away' he was first to play, and found his feathery in a clump of weed not a yard from the stone wall. After a moment's deliberation of the ball's situation, and a thoughtful assessment of the distance to the hole, Worthing selected a spoon. He took careful measure of his back-swing to be certain of clearing the wall – there would be no cleek-maker in Gibraltar to mend a broken club – and took his odd stance upon uneven ground. A moment he concentrated his mind, then drew the spoon back and thrashed the air, sending the ball sputtering along the ground where it fetched up fifty feet distant. This time there were no oaths, but he lifted the head of the club and inspected it with much disapproval.
'Bloody cleek-maker,' he muttered, then tossed the offending stick to Dismal Johnny.
Saint-Denis, much to his wounded pride, was next away. Having learned from the doctor's example, he chose a different club, flexed and hefted it, then stepped up to his ball. He drew the club back once, succumbed to indecision and returned it to hovering aft of the ball, drew it back again, and made an awkward slicing motion. To his obvious surprise, this sent the ball rocketing towards the hole, so that it fetched up not forty yards distant from the vertical staff that marked the cup.
'You see, Wickham,' he said, 'it comes back to me, though I have not played in some time.'
'It seemed a perfect stroke,' the midshipman observed.
'By no means perfect,' the lieutenant answered, 'but very near.'
Poor Wickham was forced to make his shot out of a stand of vicious thistle, which would have been difficult enough, but Saint-Denis, encouraged by his recent success, insisted on giving much instruction, correcting Wickham's stance and grip and adding abundant criticism of his swing.
With all of this tutelage, much of it contradictory, Hayden thought it a wonder that Wickham could swing the club at all. But swing he did, and even managed to make a decent shot of it, flaying thistle flesh and scattering prickly leaves all about. The ball did not fly far but it soared true, rolling to stop in open ground.
'Well done, Wickham,' Saint-Denis pronounced. 'Mr Smosh… Mr Smosh?'
The chaplain's name was repeated by various members of the crowd, and a moment latter Smosh staggered out of the party, his neckcloth half undone, face crimson, eyes nearly shut. He took a club, seemingly at random, from the servant, and stepped up to his feathery. Again he took his strange, high swing, struck the ball a resounding 'smack' and lofted it high into the air. It shrank smaller and smaller until it was petite, then minute, minuscule… it began to fall, gathering speed, gathering size, until it thumped dully down onto the ground and bounce-rolled up to within a few yards of the thin spar marking the first hole.
The crowd reacted with great acclaim and many a thump on the sportsman's back. Smosh was absorbed into this cheering mass which supported him, embraced him, and encouraged him to drink to his success.
Griffiths glanced Hayden's way, all unsaid. It was a holiday, Hayden thought, and Smosh had no duties aboard ship. Let him indulge himself.
Worthing was next to play, and seemed even more determined to make a good show of it. This determination, however, increased his self-consciousness and banished all ability to focus his mind. Twice he drew his club back and lost confidence returning the club to address. Flushed a little with embarrassment, he resolved to make a stroke, drew the club back, thrashed it through the air and missed the ball completely, though it rolled an inch off the nubbin it perched upon as if avoiding the doctor's attack.
A string of oaths that would have made Mr Barthe proud followed, causing much surprised laughter among the crew. Again the chaplain addressed the ball, drew his club back with exaggerated care, and flashed it forward. The ball this time had the decency to stay in place and take its proper thrashing. It flew forward, hardly two feet above the grass, and then began a series of long, low bounces, almost loping over the ground, until it rolled to a stop eight yards short of the hole and three dozen feet to the left.
'Excellent shot, Dr Worthing,' Saint-Denis offered cheerfully, to a dark stare from the clergyman.
The gathering trudged on, though a good number broke off to seek the shade of a tree that overhung the enclosing wall. The young ladies who had attached themselves to the sailors accompanied this party, the pleasures of golf apparently not the diversion they sought. From the sounds erupting from this group Hayden was sure a certain variety of commerce had been contracted, and not with much privacy, either – something the sailors were well used to. The young lady who had so recently lost her hand could be seen hovering, unhappily, upon the fringe of this gathering. From all sides she was urgently besieged by sailors, and the other women mocked her reluctance.
'You're not above it, now, princess,' one of the whores called out.
The sailors had begun tugging at her arms, and the sleeves of her dress. Without a word, Griffiths broke away from Hayden and Hawthorne, striding stiffly towards the shade tree, swinging his cane, shoulders taut with apparent anger.
Hawthorne glanced at Hayden, a smile quickly giving way to a look of alarm. Hayden took a step to follow the doctor – drunken sailors were capable of much trouble – but Hawthorne held up a hand to restrain him.
'I think we shall have fewer floggings if the captain remains here,' he said. 'If I may…?'
Hayden nodded once, and watched Hawthorne set off in the wake of Griffiths, a few marines taking up positions in his wake. Griffiths reached the girl first, waving his cane at bemused and then, almost immediately, indignant sailors. They squared up to the advancing doctor but then noticed the small party of marines quickly converging. Hawthorne was much admired among the hands but he also had a reputation as a man not to be trifled with. The sailors backed away resentfully, giving up their prize, and Griffiths rather quickly led the young woman away, towards the town.
'Isn't it just like a surgeon to take a fancy to a woman with one hand removed,' Hawthorne said as he rejoined Hayden.
'All a bit out of character,' Hayden replied. 'But then the doctor, I am sure, is much like many another man in this regard.'
'Indeed,' Hawthorne agreed. 'Who is to play?'
'Wickham.' And both men made a show of turning their attention back to the golf match.
The midshipman's ball squatted in the open on a sparse patch of flattened grass and dried mud.
'A good lie, Wickham,' Saint-Denis pronounced. 'Not quite so good as being raised up a little by grass but not so very bad. You will not need a baffing spoon here, or Dr Worthing's estimable globmudge. A simple spoon will do, eh, Doctor?'
Worthing selected a club from among those on offer and thrust the grip in Wickham's direction. 'This will suffice for a player of your experience.'
Saint-Denis did not seem to approve of the selection but apparently felt he could not gainsay the owner of the clubs.
'A vigorous half-swing, Wickham, no more. Just as I demonstrated yesterday.'
Wickham made a practice swipe at an imaginary feathery.
'Quite acceptable,' Saint-Denis said, nodding his head, 'but keep the club low throughout the back-swing and do not, for love of God, raise your head. All the authorities agree the player who lifts his head shall be damned to golfers' purgatory for all eternity.'
'And, pray, what does golfers' purgatory look like?' Hawthorne enquired innocently, causing laughter among the thinning audience.
'At the deepest level, Mr Hawthorne, there is no golf at all, and at the intermediate levels the courses are devised by cruel madmen determined to ruin a sportsman's every pleasure. Sand there is aplenty, rain daily, holes so far apart that days must be set aside to play but a one.' He grimaced. 'It unnerves me even to speak of it.' He turned to Lord Arthur. 'Mr Wickham.'
The middy stepped up to the ball and with a deft, shallow swing sent the ball lofting upward and then down near the hole where in three bounces it approached then passed the cup, rolling to a sudden stop three yards beyond.
'Well struck, Wickham! Well struck!'
Saint-Denis's ball was quickly found, sitting in a little depression like a solitary egg in a bowl.
The sportsmen, minus Smosh, formed a triumvirate to contemplate this terrible lie, no one offering an opinion for a moment, silenced, perhaps, by the utter horror of it.
'A spoon will not scoop that meal out,' Wickham said at last.
'No,' Saint-Denis agreed, his brow furrowed in frustration. 'An iron is called for. A track-iron, I wonder?'
Smosh approached at that moment, a look of cherubic delight upon his chubby face. He tacked back and forth a half a yard as he came, but appeared unaware of it. He fetched up where his fellows stood in conference, looked down at the ball in its nest and pronounced. 'Nulick.'
'What are you saying, Smosh?' Saint-Denis asked, clearly offended by the clergyman's state.
'Nigleek,' Smosh ventured, but then shook his head in frustration. He raised both hands to shoulder height and lowered them in pace with his next, deliberate pronouncement. 'Niblick,' he enunciated in a vain attempt at precision.
'Are you saying "new-cleek"?' Wickham asked.
Smosh nodded vigorously, clearly unwilling to risk more verbalization.
'Pass me the "niblick" then,' Saint-Denis said. 'I shall give it a go.'
The new-cleek was handed forward and Saint-Denis took his stance over the ball, which laid almost entirely below the level of the ground. A quick joggle from one foot to the other and then a violent swipe at the ball sent a small clod of earth and roots in a tumble along the ground. The ball, however, had been but jostled by the effort and lay, mockingly, in the same spot.
'That counts a stroke,' Worthing announced for all to hear.
Smosh clearly agreed. 'A stork,' he echoed.
A second, more violent, attempt produced an explosion of dirt but out of it the ball materialized, plopping down three yards distant, dirt and stones raining all around.
'You could not have managed that without my new-cleek, I'll wager,' Worthing crowed.
'No,' Saint-Denis said heatedly, 'the niblick is a device of utter, bloody genius.' He turned and stomped off, leaving an offended Worthing in his wake.
Smosh caught the clergyman's attention and held up the club, which Saint-Denis had all but thrown at him. 'Niblick,' he said tentatively.
Worthing drew himself up, a look of unmitigated contempt upon his face. 'And you call yourself a man of God,' he said in disgust, and turned away.
His ball still farthest from the hole, Saint-Denis was forced to take another turn. This time he did not tarry over it, but grabbed a club seemingly at random from the servant and took a swipe at his ball, sending it in bouncing, erratic flight over the harsh terrain. A moment of this hare-like behaviour and it hopped past the hole a good thirty yards then spun five more for good measure. It was Saint-Denis's turn to curse, which he managed as coarsely as any foremast hand. The spectators erupted into applause, whether at this display of golfing prowess or his newly revealed talent for profanity, Hayden could not be sure.
The players and their entourage set off again.
En route to his ball, Smosh actually stumbled and would have fallen but for the intercession of Hawthorne, who managed to catch him by the arm. This caused much laughter among the thinning gallery. Approaching Smosh's ball, a disgusted Saint-Denis retrieved a club from the caddy and, holding it by the head, tapped the drunken clergyman on the arm with the grip. Smosh took the club without comment or even looking, stepped up to the ball, closed one eye, turned his head to assess the distance to the hole, then pulled the approach putter back, somehow maintaining his balance, and made a clean, even swing. The ball performed a gentle, balletic arc towards the hole, not rising above a foot, landed with nary a bounce, rolled five feet and stopped within inches of the cup.
Wild applause from the small audience. Smosh turned to them, made an elaborate and solemn bow, pivoted back to his ball, tripped on his own feet and sprawled full length, his putter, thrust out before in an attempt to save himself, made slight contact with the ball and rolled it softly into the cup.
Overwhelming 'huzzas' from the bystanders.
Smosh was dragged ungently to his feet by the crowd, and almost carried off in their enthusiasm.
Both Worthing and Saint-Denis were away and as the reverend doctor's ball must be passed to reach the other, Saint-Denis insisted the clergyman be first. With perhaps forty feet to the cup, Worthing elected to use his approach putter. As making this shot would tie him with Smosh – whom Hayden expected he did not want to lose to under any circumstances – Dr Worthing spent some moments examining the terrain, deciding where best to land his ball and how far it would carry and 'break'.
'What does he mean, "break"?' Hayden enquired of Hawthorne.
'The amount it will deviate to either starboard or larboard dependent on the slope of the ground,' Hawthorne answered.
'Have you played this game before, then, Mr Hawthorne?'
'Only once or twice but I have friends in London who are overly… zealous. I have been subjected to a great deal of their talk.'
'You did not speak up when Wickham was looking for players,' Hayden noted.
'Between us,' Hawthorne whispered, 'I would rather be whipped around the fleet and marched barefoot back to London. Have you never attempted it?'
Hayden shook his head.
'It is a game perfectly contrived to induce the greatest possible frustration and test one's mastery of choler to the utmost. I have seen men of the mildest character dash a play-club to splinters on a tree in a passion that would befit an especially violent lunatic. No, never take up this cursed game unless you have the disposition of a saint, the patience of a nun.'
'Or the skill of Mr Smosh,' Hayden added. 'Do you believe our reverend guest is so proficient? And he is completely foxed, forced to close one eye lest he see more than one feathery.'
The marine lieutenant laughed. 'Yes, which to hit, that is the question.'
Saint-Denis had come over to discuss with Worthing his situation and use it as an opportunity for instruction with Mr Wickham.
'His lie is perfectly good, though perhaps a little below the level of his feet. Easily accommodated by a bend of the knees. The ground, however, slopes away to the left and the ball will break toward this natural incline. Dr Worthing will play the ball "high" or to the right to allow for this slope. But the principal objective of such a shot is to get the ball into the air somewhat, for rolling over uneven ground the ball may find any little hillock or hollow and deviate off in some unpredicted direction. Are you ready, Doctor?'
Saint-Denis and his student withdrew, leaving the clergyman to contemplate his shot in solitude. After crouching down to examine the lie of the ground yet one more time, Worthing stood up to his ball, arranged his stance, rocked a little from one foot to the other, eyed the target, and drew back his putter. A slow, pendulum motion and the ball was propelled up, not quite a foot, and sailed unerringly wide of the hole by a mere inch, landed and rolled a dozen feet.
The clergyman checked his cursing before it began but walked purposefully to his ball, his face a mask of denied fury. He took the putter used for holing out and again examined his lie, plucking a small stone out of the path as he did so. Taking a stance over his ball, both arms and legs rod straight, he pulled his club back and brought it forward again with a slight wobble. Contacting the ball too high it sputtered away, rolled and bounced toward the hole and at the last second curled a little to larboard and lost all way two feet beyond its intended berth.
A collective 'Ohhh' escaped the crowd.
Worthing marched over to the feathery, bent, and struck it with a 'pop'. The response of the gallery was quite wild as the ball fell into the hole, but by smiles on faces it was clear that sincerity was lacking.
'Well done, Doctor!' and 'Purely struck!' were heard among the 'huzzas'.
The doctor did not even deign to glance towards the audience, but thrust his putter at the servant, and walked a few paces off, fairly twitching from suppressed rage.
Saint-Denis was sizing up the situation of his feathery and did not appear to be in any hurry to draw a conclusion. After a minute examination of the ground near the hole, and some consideration to most of the terrain in between, he selected a spoon. The eyes of the masses upon him, Saint-Denis was suddenly all manufactured authority, standing up to the ball with great resolve. Every movement was made with deliberation, apparent concentration. He waggled the club strongly, set it behind the little feathery upon the cattle-cropped grass, drew it back with utter focus, and flashed it forward in a low, sweeping stroke. The ball went winging off the toe of the club, avid in its desire to avoid the hole. It did not, however, struck so obliquely, travel far so the distance to the hole remained much the same though the direction had changed utterly.
Saint-Denis muttered an oath under his breath, shook his head, and stomped off towards the offending ball, which had so brazenly defied his authority. Again the ground was examined foot by foot, the lie evaluated; he even threw a pinch of dried grass into the air to assess the direction and strength of the wind – which seemed like an overabundance of caution given that a dead calm prevailed.
Another stroke and the ball this time relented and went where it was told, rolling up within six feet of the cup.
Wickham, then, two-putted from ten feet and Saint-Denis holed out in one. The first hole went to Mr Smosh, who was nowhere to be found but was finally carried forth, his frock-coat gone, his neckcloth missing and his collar open. A hint of powder lay upon his cheek – a chalk-like dusting – and a trace of rouge smeared around his mouth. Thus made up, the clergyman took up a play club, addressed the feathery teed up by the servant, and with astonishing precision, given that he swayed while he stood, sent the ball sailing off towards the next hole.
And so the match went, Worthing and Saint-Denis becoming more and more determined not to be outplayed, which undermined their ability to focus the mind. Wickham's natural athleticism combined with his low expectations allowed him to relax and actually enjoy the match. Smosh, drunker at every hole, continued to hit the ball with perfect balance and grace, sending the feathery wherever he liked, though seeing the hole became more and more difficult.
'Mr Smosh… You are aiming the wrong way. No, traverse more to larboard… More yet. Just so. Flail away.'
By the seventh hole Smosh had opened up an impossible lead on the other players. But on the eighth he stood up to his ball, bent over and vomited horribly upon his feathery. He then stood, drew back his club, and sent the befouled ball off in a splatter of half-digested breakfast.
Inevitably, featheries fluttered down into pancakes of soggy cow dung; Dr Worthing's ball was the first to find such a nest. He strode up to the ball, confronted it with hands on hips, lips pressed thin, and then called for the new-cleek, which caused a rise in excited chatter.
'He's going to hit out of the shit with the niblick!' voices were saying. An expectant hush settled over the pasture.
Grasping the club, Worthing took his stance, waving the niblick in the direction of the ball, which lay in the centre of the flattened mush like the yolk in the middle of an egg. Thrice he drew the niblick back two slow feet, then brought it forward with equal speed, careful not to sully the club in the manure. Then, to everyone's horrified fascination, he drew it fully back, whipped it forward, and in a storm of green-grey shit, sent the ball skittering along the ground, spinning off the foul material as it rolled. The niblick was not quite as effective at preserving the player's boots and breeches as the designer had boasted but it did propel the ball along proficiently.
Each player took his turn at extracting a ball – or two – from the manure piles, though depending upon how long the dung had aged it could be more or less messy. Wickham faired best in this, though Smosh, at one point, lost his balance and sat down in dung without being even the least aware of it.
By the tenth hole the gallery of spectators had retired to the shade and were almost all passed out on the grass, a few famous snorers serenading the cattle. Only the officers remained interested in the match, the smart money backing either Smosh or Wickham depending upon the gambler's faith that Smosh could actually finish the round. Despite being clearly befuddled and hardly aware that he played golf at all, Smosh continued to amaze with his unerring ability to strike the ball cleanly and get it down in the fewest strokes.
On the fourteenth hole he was beginning to falter, standing for an impossible length of time over his ball, as though unsure where he was or what he was to do. Just as Saint-Denis stepped forward to prompt him, Smosh drew back his club, struck the ball with customary authority, performed a complete pirouette, and toppled, face first, to the ground where he lay still as a corpse.
Mr Ariss was wakened, and he pronounced Smosh alive, though no effort to bring him back to consciousness produced any effect. Finally, the clergyman was taken up and propped against a tree, watched over by his servant lest he choke on his own gorge. The match was abandoned after eighteen holes, the players too fatigued or disheartened to continue. Worthing gathered up his clubs and strode off towards the town, clearly offended by all that had occurred. Saint-Denis told one and all that he would certainly have played much better had he not been so weakened from his recent illness, but congratulated Wickham on learning the game so quickly, pointing out that solid instruction was the key to golf.
'And what thought you of the match?' Hayden asked Hawthorne as they walked back to the boats.
'Not so interesting as a hanging, but more diverting than old women at cards.' Hawthorne was pensive a moment, then smiled. 'Let me pass along a bit of drollery from my golfing friends. It is a rusty old saw, but perhaps you have not heard it. Two gentlemen went out upon the links one fair morning to indulge in a match. At the third hole, one of the gentlemen, by the name of Herald, sustained an attack upon his chest and fell down instantly dead. Upon returning home that evening the other man, when asked by his wife how went his play…'
Griffiths returned to the ship at an uncharacteristically late hour. Upon boarding he visited the sick-berth, briefly consulted with Mr Ariss on several cases of near-fatal poisoning caused by excesses of cheap wine and then presented himself to the marine sentry at the captain's door. Immediately, he was admitted, and found the captain and Mr Hawthorne seated within.
'I do apologize, Captain, for my tardiness,' he said formally.
'Not at all, Dr Griffiths. I trust you have left Mr Ariss with all necessary instructions. Your hour of return is your business.' Hayden trusted his officers, even his warrant officers, to police themselves, and given that they were, to a man, responsible and dutiful, this system worked perfectly well. 'Mr Hawthorne and I are about to indulge in coffee, Dr Griffiths. Would you care to join us?'
'Thank you, sir.'
The three men took chairs at Hayden's table, an unusual and awkward silence settling among them. Hayden thought that Griffiths was about to break this silence when a knock on the door announced their coffee.
The steaming liquid was poured, the perfume of it filling the cabin.
'Did you enjoy the golf match, Doctor?' Hawthorne enquired.
'The little I saw. Who was the victor, pray?'
'Wickham,' Hayden answered, 'but only because Smosh became insensible from drink. Saint-Denis was too weakened by his recent illness and should have retired, I think, and the reverend doctor too prideful and was punished for it.'
'Even clergymen are subject to divine censure,' the doctor declared. 'Vanity is often our undoing.' He seemed to grow even more solemn. He was a man whose mind was clearly on another matter – a matter of some gravity. He took a long breath, hesitated, and then plunged. 'No doubt you saw me effect the rescue of the young lady this day?'
'I did, and thought it most noble of you,' Hayden said, and Hawthorne nodded his agreement.
Griffiths shrugged. 'She did not seem to me… one of the common port Sallys and you noted yourself that she had lost a hand…'
Hayden remembered that he had.
'I had seen another similar circumstance – or so I imagined – when I was undergoing my surgical training. A young woman came to the hospital – a seamstress – and a more captivating creature it would be difficult to conceive of. She had run a needle through the thenar eminence, missing the first metacarpal, here, at the base of her thumb,' he held up a hand by way of explanation, 'and it had become infected – very badly so. The corruption had quickly spread. After consulting with another student on the matter it was decided to remove her hand to save the arm, and more than likely her life. This was done successfully, the delicate young woman, not more than two and twenty, suffering the agony of amputation with nary a complaint. I made as neat a job of it as I could, and under my careful eye, for I will admit she seemed very fair to me, a full recovery was made. She was sent home, and not a fortnight later I learned, upon making enquiries, that she had drowned herself. It transpired that, having lost her only means of livelihood and having no family or connexions, she chose death rather than debasement. I cannot recount to you, gentlemen, the nights I laid awake, haunted by what I had done to this poor girl. My teacher in anatomy and surgery assured me that there had been no other possible course and that what I had done had saved her life, but it was little comfort. My feelings of shame over this have hardly lessened over the intervening years. And then, today… I was confronted with another young woman in what I perceived might be similar circumstances. You know what next I did. Some time it took to coax her story forth but believing me, after many assurances on my part, to be a gentleman interested only in her welfare, she did relent and tell me. Her hand had been crushed by a wagon in the street after she had been knocked down by some drunken lout. Unable to save it, the hand was removed – and poorly so – by a local surgeon. Until that unfortunate event, Miss Brentwood, for that is her name, had been employed as a maid of all work by the chief carpenter in the Navy shipyard. This… man had made improper and unwanted advances to her for some time, which she had always rebuffed. Once she had lost her hand, and he knew she could not find work elsewhere, this man informed her that she must accept his attentions or she would be put out in the street. She left his employ that day. But a maid of all work with only one hand has no prospects and her savings were small. Today we saw where it led… She contemplated debasing herself rather than go hungry, but in the end could not. I came along just as she had resolved that starvation would be preferable.' Griffiths availed himself of his coffee. He looked more than a little mortified by this admission. 'I think I have found her a position with a family I know through an acquaintance. Certainly, she would be better off in England and if I can manage it I'll contrive to send her hither.'
'I hope these good deeds do not go unrewarded.' What Hayden really hoped was that Griffiths had not fallen prey to a woman more cunning than pure.
Hawthorne said nothing.
'It is, I realize, an unusual thing to do for a stranger but I could not allow the same fate to befall a second young woman were it within my power to intercede. I have lived these many years with my remorse over the previous affair; I could not bear to have it doubled.'
A knock on the door stopped Hayden from answering. His sentry opened the door at a call from Hayden.
'Beg pardon, Captain. Mr Ariss is urgently seeking Dr Griffiths. One of the men who was ill… seems to have gone a bit mad, sir. Screaming somewhat about spiders, sir.'
Somewhere below, Hayden thought he could hear shouting.
Griffiths excused himself and hurried out.
Hawthorne fixed Hayden with a look, difficult to read.
'You appear to have some opinion of this matter, Lieutenant?' Hayden ventured.
For a moment, Hawthorne contemplated, took a sip of his coffee and then began. 'I believe, Captain, that there are two romantic… "myths" as I have come to think of them – one rather natural to women and the other to men, though neither exclusively so. The romantic myth common to women is a belief in the transformative power of love. I have, over the years, witnessed women give themselves, body and soul, to men most unlikely to ever bring them happiness either by the nature of their character or owing to impossibly different hopes and desires in life. It was the belief of these women, most often to their everlasting sorrow, that the men would fall so impossibly in love with them that they would transform themselves simply to retain the affection of such a perfect female.' Hawthorne again had redress to his coffee. 'I have also been witness to many young women rebuffing men who were in every way deserving and compatible, only to then marry a man who was neither. But a man who would completely transform himself to be worthy of her love – now there was a man worth having – not some poor sod who simply adored her and wanted the same life.' Hawthorne turned his gaze to the windows a moment. 'The male romantic myth,' he continued, 'is rescuing the maiden in distress and this is equally fraught with danger. Rescuing a young woman from a bad situation or circumstances might seem entirely noble but gratitude, too often, has proved a poor foundation upon which to build a marriage – compatibility of temperament or a large fortune, apparently, are to be preferred. Gratitude, in my experience, flowers briefly and then withers into resentment. Let us hope that our friend does not suffer another disappointment, for his character is such, in these matters, that he will not easily withstand it.'
The ship's bell rang at that moment, and Hawthorne rose to his feet.
'If you will excuse me, Captain, I have duties.'
'By all means.'
Hayden found himself alone, contemplating upon the deed of Dr Griffiths, and the observations of Mr Hawthorne, who in matters of the heart was greatly experienced, and clearly more thoughtful than Hayden would have predicted. Certainly, Hayden agreed that the doctor's character was delicate in such matters, although he was not certain why he believed this, but he did. Even so, it was a noble and generous deed, assuming the woman's story to be true, and Hayden honoured Griffiths's sentiments. Still…
Hayden gazed at the cold, muddy liquid remaining in the doctor's coffee cup and the sight unsettled him in some way he could not explain.
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 12
|
A late-December dusk blew in from the east, carrying with it a fleet of aggrieved gulls, mourning and grumbling pitifully in the ruins of the recent gale.
'Fucking levanter,' Mr Barthe pronounced the wind. He lowered his night glass but continued to stare into the darkness. 'Can you make out anything at all, Mr Wickham?'
Wickham, who stood at the forward barricade with a night glass pressed to his eye, answered softly, as though they approached the harbour of Toulon by stealth. 'There are no ships in the roads, Mr Barthe.'
'What said you?'
'I do not believe there are ships anchored in the roads, Mr Barthe,' Wickham repeated, raising his voice only a little.
'Mr Wickham, either I am gone deaf or you are whispering.'
Wickham raised his voice. 'There are no –'
'… ships in the roads. Yes, yes. I heard that. Ah, Captain Hayden.' The sailing master touched his hat as Hayden mounted the forecastle. 'There don't appear to be any ships –'
'… in the roads, or so I have heard. The eastern gale has no doubt made that anchorage untenable. They have all shifted their berths to the inner harbour.'
'If I have learned anything of the bloody Mediterranean in winter it is that this weather is not done with us yet,' Barthe offered. 'A little calm means only that worse approaches. I am quite confident I can con us in, sir. The wind could not be better suited to such an endeavour and there is moonlight enough.'
'If you are certain, Mr Barthe. With another gale in the offing and these confounding currents setting us first one way and then another, I do not mind telling you, I would rather be safely at anchor this night.'
'Then we shall be, sir. Mr Wickham has volunteered to see through the dark for us and it is an excellent, spacious plot of water, sir. I shall have us all sleeping sound within the hour, Captain Hayden. See if I don't.'
'Then you are appointed pilot, Mr Barthe – take us in.'
This simple proposition, however, was not so easily effected, as the east wind and confounding currents conjoined forces, the wind dropping away to a mere breeze and the current setting them in the same direction. Several anxious hours saw them weathering Sepet Point and even dropping anchor once to hold them off the shore as the wind died away altogether. It was nearing midnight when a small but steady breeze, originating in the east even then, began making. At the same time, the current appeared to subside, and, setting sail, the Themis passed slowly over a glassy, dark sea toward the entrance of Toulon harbour.
Eight bells sounded as they crossed the outer roads, echoed distantly by a more numerous chiming within the nearing city – twelve bells upon the land.
'Midnight,' Hawthorne announced. 'Will this wind carry us in, do you think, or will it leave us wallowing in the roads?'
Hayden shrugged. 'Despite all appearances, Mr Hawthorne, I am not the god of the seas. What the winds might or might not do is a mystery to me.'
Hawthorne chuckled. 'I do apologize, Captain. In the dark I mistook you for Neptune.'
'Easily done, Mr Hawthorne. No need to apologize… except, perhaps, to Neptune.'
A small presence materialized to Hayden's left – Rosseau, his cook. 'Toulon, Capitaine?'
'Oui, monsieur. Toulon.'
'If… if we fall into the hands of the… our people, Capitaine,' Rosseau said hesitantly in French, 'would you be so kind as to tell them I am a prisoner – not your cook.'
'I will do that, monsieur,' Hayden answered in the same language, 'but do not be concerned. Toulon is yet in the hands of Lord Hood.'
In the vague moonlight Hayden could see the man – could even perceive his anxiety. The administration of Toulon had, some months previously, invited Admiral Lord Hood to assume control of the city and port – and the French Mediterranean fleet which was lying there. As in other parts of southern France, the citizens were in rebellion. Hayden had been told Lord Hood had demanded the city fathers swear allegiance to the Bourbons, but that they had done so reluctantly. It appeared that the citizens of Toulon were in rebellion against the excesses of the Convention and the Committee of Public Safety rather than rebelling because they favoured the former royal family. It was, Hayden thought, a tremendous gamble they took, but the benefit to the British could hardly be overstated. The French Mediterranean fleet on a platter! Despite the clear advantages to Britain, Hayden could not help but feel some concern for the people of Toulon – despite the war, the French people remained dear to him. If the revolutionary government took the city back there would be reprisals, and everyone, even his cook, understood what form these would take.
Hayden and Barthe returned to the quarterdeck, leaving Wickham on the forecastle to part the darkness.
'Turn up the hands, Mr Franks,' Hayden ordered, 'let us hand all canvas but topsails, and then make ready to bring the ship to anchor.'
The crew took the deck at a trot; bringing the ship into a new harbour was always an event of interest, and doubly so in this case as it was a French port in British hands – a sight not often to be seen.
To starboard the Grand Tower could be made out, looming over the entrance. A few lights were most likely from the city, almost due north. The wind kept backing until it bore down on them from Toulon.
'Do you smell that?' Barthe inhaled deeply. 'An old, smoggy stench of charred wood and powder smoke? They have been under terrible siege, I would venture.'
Hayden could smell it – rain somehow brought out the pungent odour of burned wood. He felt for the people of Toulon. If the revolutionary army took back the city, Hood would never be able to remove them all.
Leaving Barthe on the quarterdeck, Hayden went forward. Even though he knew Wickham had far better sight in the darkness, he was becoming anxious about the situation.
'Why are the siege guns silent?' he muttered to himself as he hurried along the gangway.
'There are ships at anchor nearer the quays, Captain,' Wickham reported, 'and a little brig not so distant before us. We will not weather her, sir.'
'Let us pass beneath her stern, Mr Wickham,' Hayden replied, 'and work our way up towards the town where our own ships will have come to anchor.' Hayden turned to Gould, who, as usual, was acting as Wickham's shadow. 'Mr Gould, would you pass the word to Mr Barthe to set foresail and driver. We will tack as we pass beyond the two-sticker.'
'Aye, sir,' Gould answered crisply and hastened off towards the stern.
Out of the darkness came a voice, speaking French. 'What ship?' a man called from the brig.
'We are His Majesty's Ship, Themis.' Hayden replied in the same language.
Over the still waters voices drifted, conferring in his mother's tongue, but the words were torn apart on the little breeze and arrived in slurred syllables, shattered vowels; he could not splice them back together.
Mr Barthe came hurrying along the gangway, giving orders for sails to be set. Hayden was not reassured by his manner, which seemed suddenly to lack its former resolution.
'What is this about a Frenchman…? Ah.'
As the stern of the brig grew more distinct Hayden called out in French, 'Where does the English admiral anchor? Where is Lord Hood?'
A muffled conference seemed to take place. 'You are an English ship?' someone called. Hayden could almost make out a shape at the taffrail.
'Oui. Une frégate anglaise.'
More talk, incomprehensible to Hayden.
'Can you make out what they're saying?' Mr Barthe asked, attempting not to reveal his growing anxiety.
'I cannot. Can you, Mr Wickham?'
'Somewhat about sending a boat to the admiral, sir. "Amiral " must mean 'admiral', does it not?'
'Luff!' came a cry from the French brig. 'Luuuff!'
'Helm hard down!' Hayden cried along the deck. 'Dryden! Hard down! Let us have the lead… handsomely.'
The Themis began a slow turn in the little zephyr. Hayden could hear the men aboard holding their breath, as everyone made thwarted little gestures, a strained twist to the right, as though they could help bring the ship's head around.
'She will not tack in this small wind, sir,' Barthe whispered.
'Back the foresail as she luffs, Mr Barthe,' Hayden ordered, but the wind fell away to nothing even as he spoke.
Before the sailing master could repeat Hayden's order the ship shuddered once, heeled a little to starboard and abruptly lost all way.
A foul oath escaped Mr Barthe. 'There is no shoal on my chart.'
'Send the men aloft with all speed,' Hayden ordered. 'Clew up and hand the sails. We cannot be very hard aground with so little way on. Mr Franks! Swing out two cutters, if you please. Mr Landry, the kedge and two hawsers for the boats; we shall warp ourselves off.'
Men began hurrying this way and that but Hayden was pleased to note that there was no panic. Men waited in silent expectation for orders and then went coolly about their business.
'A boat is away from the brig, Captain.'
'Perhaps they have gone for help,' someone offered only to be silenced by Archer, who had come forward.
'Kedge and hawsers on the way, sir,' Archer reported. 'Boats will be afloat in but a moment.'
Hayden looked aloft. Sails were being handed with dispatch, the crew galvanized by their predicament – aground by night in a strange harbour. A pennant at the mast-head began to waft at that moment.
'There is a bit wind coming down the harbour, sir,' Barthe said, hope present in his voice.
Hayden went to the forward barricade and stared down into the water. 'Drop the lead to the bottom and tell me if we make stern-way,' Hayden called to the man in the chains.
Only a moment did he wait for an answer.
'Making stern-way, Captain,' the leadsman called.
'Hoist the mizzen-staysail and driver, Mr Barthe, if you please. Keep the sheets to windward so we might be carried away from this shoal.'
Hands jumped to the halyards before orders were given, sails flashing aloft in the miserly light of a haze-hidden moon. The wind lasted only a moment, blowing a few loose strands of hair about Hayden's ear.
'We must not, now, drift onto another shoal. Let go the best bower, Mr Archer, and we will discover our situation here.'
'Aye, sir.'
The forecastle men hurried to their places to drop the anchor.
'Mr Archer. We have no time for niceties. Let go the shank painter. We will make repairs to the planking at another time.'
The shank painter was let go, whipping about the anchor shank with buzzing sound and snapping against wood. The upper anchor fluke scraped down the topside planking, men grimacing all around.
'Let go the ring stopper,' Archer ordered and the anchor plunged down into the water with an unmanageable splash. The cable flashed out through the hawse hole on the gundeck, a crewman pouring water on it as it passed so that it would not cause fire. But before a few fathoms of cable had been veered, the anchor found bottom. Hayden let only a little more cable run – not really enough – and ordered it checked.
The leadsman began sounding by the bow.
'Five fathoms and one half, Mr Archer,' he called.
A general relieved murmuring flitted around the deck but the motion of the ship did not comfort Hayden.
'Sound the stern, if you please,' Hayden ordered the leadsman, who quickly coiled up his line and went trotting aft, lead swinging from his right fist.
'Sir,' Gould called as he bustled down the gangway from the quarterdeck, 'the helm does not answer. It is seized fast, sir.'
Barthe swore.
'We are aground aft, I am sure, Mr Archer,' Hayden announced, then went to the starboard rail to see if the kedge and hawsers were aboard the boats.
'Mr Archer, you will go with the boats, if you please. Set the anchor there,' Hayden pointed to the north-west, 'so that we might pull free of this shoal. Sound as you go so you will know how much cable to veer. The anchor must hold, Mr Archer. Five times our depth in cable at the least – seven would be better.'
'Aye, sir,' Archer replied, going down the side at a dangerous pace.
'Away boats.' And the boats went off into the cool darkness. At that same instant and from the same direction a boat appeared, hailing them as the 'frégate anglaise'. Immediately it came alongside and a party climbed over the rail, two apparently naval officers, though in the darkness it was difficult to be certain.
Introductions were brief, most of the French party not brought forward. None of them spoke English and were clearly relieved when Hayden responded in flawless French.
'Capitaine Hayden,' one of the officers began, 'it is the order of the Commanding Officer that you perform ten days' quarantine. With us we have a pilot who will guide you to the quarantine berth.'
'Is this the order of Lord Hood?'
'It is the usual procedure for foreign ships entering Toulon. I apologize for the inconvenience.'
'Will you carry a letter to Lord Hood for me? I must alert him of our arrival at the earliest possible moment.'
'Certainly. It will be our pleasure.'
'Captain,' Wickham whispered, touching Hayden's sleeve. 'Look at their hats, sir. They wear national cockades, I am certain…'
Hayden turned back to the party of Frenchmen, all of whom looked unsettled or out of sorts, though they made great effort to hide it. The poor light turned all colours to near greys, but Hayden was sure, after a moment, that Wickham was right; the Frenchmen wore tricolour cockades. The feeling in his heart at that moment was not unlike the feeling he had known when first his mother had informed him of his father's death. An overwhelming, numbing distress.
'I believe I will send my own boat to Lord Hood,' Hayden announced, watching the reaction of the visitors carefully.
The two French officers glanced at one another and nodded.
'Soyez tranquille,' one said, 'les Anglois sont de braves gens, nous les traitons bien; l'amiral anglois est sorti il y' quelque temps.'
Wickham cursed – which Hayden hardly ever remembered him doing.
The men at the capstan bars began to strain at that moment, hauling taut the cable which led to the kedge.
Hawthorne leaned close to Hayden and whispered. 'What did they say, sir?'
Hayden spoke equally quietly. 'We are their prisoners. Toulon has fallen.' A cooling, little breeze touched Hayden's face at that moment as it rippled the waters all around. 'Gather your sentries, Mr Hawthorne. I will endeavour to get us out of this predicament.'
Several of the visitors, sensing that things were not going as they had hoped, began to draw swords, only to find themselves surrounded by a party of sailors, many hefting belaying pins threateningly. Hawthorne's marines were quickly there in support, muskets levelled.
'Take them all below, Mr Hawthorne, if you please,' Hayden ordered. 'Mr Barthe, send the hands aloft. Prepare to make sail.'
'Aye, sir. Lay aloft if you don't want to rot in a French gaol.'
The hands ran to the shrouds as though they raced for a gold piece. The men at the capstan strained, veins bulging at their necks as they stamped and 'humphed', forcing the bars around and the ship forward by brute strength and will.
'Mr Saint-Denis, set two men to cut the bower cable this instant. We will cut the kedge hawser upon my command.' Hayden made a silent prayer to no god in particular that their rudder might not be damaged.
'Aye, sir.'
Barthe was ordering yards braced around and was disposing of the crew to set the most sail possible as quickly as could be humanly managed.
Hayden was using the French brig to gauge the Themis's progress but noticed now there was a bustle aboard the enemy ship – they were readying their guns.
'Mr Barthe, we cannot haul ourselves much farther. Loose sail.'
'Loose top-gallants and clear away the jib,' Barthe ordered. 'Man top-gallant halliards and sheets.'
'Lieutenant,' Hayden called, 'cut the kedge hawser. If this breeze holds we will have way on immediately.'
Sails came rippling down or shot up their respective stays – a display of seamanship that any officer would admire. Sails filled, the ship answered, swayed a little to leeward, then gathered way.
'Mr Wickham, have you sight of our cutters?'
The boy hesitated a second, searching to the north-east, then his hand shot up. 'There! Not too distant, sir, and pulling like they are being chased by the French navy entire.'
'Lieutenant Saint-Denis!' Hayden called, and found his first out on the beakhead, crouched, making certain the kedge hawser did not foul.
'Sir,' Saint-Denis replied smartly, though he struggled over the barricade, still weakened by his illness.
'As soon as the hands are off the yards we will clear for action. The brig will bring her guns to bear as we pass. I should like to return fire.' Hayden looked up at the sky, which appeared almost empty of clouds for the first time in three days. 'Bloody moonlight,' he muttered, 'it will see the end of us.' Hayden turned a slow circle, examining the French positions bearing on the harbour. In a moment the Themis would be under fire from both sides of the harbour mouth. If the wind died away at that point – as it had several times this night – they would be at the mercy of the French guns.
'Cast off the French boat, if you please, Mr Gould,' Hayden ordered the young middy.
Before Hayden's own guns could be run out the brig fired a small broadside with her six-pounders, all aimed up into the rigging hoping to retard or end the Themis's progress. Musket fire began, much of it directed toward the Themis's quarterdeck.
'Mr Hawthorne!' Hayden called, seeing the marine lieutenant mustering a party to go aloft and return fire. 'Keep your people on the deck, for the moment. This brig is intent on bringing down our spars.' Hayden had lost enough marines in the tops; he could afford to lose no more.
Hawthorne appeared disappointed. 'Aye, sir. Shall we return fire from the deck, Captain?'
Another salvo fired from the brig just as gunports opened on the Themis.
'Yes, you shall, Mr Hawthorne.'
The Themis fired her broadside at that moment, battering the brig unmercifully, for she was not three ship's-lengths distant. No guns sounded in return.
Archer's boats caught the Themis up and the men came huffing over the rail opposite the open gunports, and threw themselves down upon the deck, too spent to stand. Even Archer was utterly done for, as he had clearly taken up an oar with the hands.
'Do not stream the boats,' Hayden ordered the coxswains. 'Cast them free. Let us have nothing to impede our progress.'
A report from a battery on the eastern point, and a ball sent up a splash just short of the Themis.
As they were now sailing almost free, the wind gave the appearance of having dropped away to a zephyr, but the sails were full and Hayden could see by the land that they moved… slowly. If the wind would but hold for half of the hour they would slip away. If…
They sailed very near the brig, now, and would be past in but a moment. Musket fire came from that quarter with renewed energy, balls cracking off carronades and burrowing through the air with a deadly hiss.
Gould, who stood but two paces off, looked despairingly about at the others. Hayden feared the boy might lose his nerve. A reassuring hand on his shoulder from Saint-Denis – an uncharacteristic show of compassion – and the first lieutenant took a step forward and sideways, interposing himself between the musket fire and the midshipman. Saint-Denis had only just moved when he stumbled back as though pushed, a look of utter surprise and confusion on his face. He fell against Gould who grasped ineffectually at him, half pulling off his coat and breaking the tumble only a little.
Immediately, Gould crouched over the prostrate Saint-Denis, who blinked up at the sky as though his vision had been suddenly compromised. He took hold of Gould's arm and said something lost beneath the booming of guns. A liquid breath, and he choked out a little blood.
'Captain Hayden!' Gould cried. 'There is something… amiss with the lieutenant.'
Wickham went to the fallen officer, but a dark, and growing stain on his white waistcoat told all. 'Bear the lieutenant down to Dr Griffiths,' Wickham ordered three seamen, who came forward and took up the wounded officer. 'You, there, support his head. Just so. Handsomely, now.'
Through the musket fire, that continued unabated, the officers watched Saint-Denis being borne below, his arms hanging limp and joggling, hands bouncing along the deck.
'My God, sir,' Gould managed to no one in particular, 'the lieutenant only just survived the influenza and now he has been shot through. Will he die?'
Before anyone could answer the Themis fired a second broadside, smoke blooming up, and slowly spreading over the rail. All musket fire from the brig ceased. From diverse points along the shore, cannon began spouting flame, heavy balls rending the air.
'Mr Archer, we will direct fire toward the shore batteries as our guns can be brought to bear. Perhaps we will prevent a little shot from finding us.'
'Aye, sir.'
As they passed beneath the Grand Tower, the tiny breeze that bore them on sighed once then fell away. Sails hung limp as pelts, but the ship drifted onward, carrying her way over a star-festooned sea.
'Blast this wind to hell!' Barthe pronounced. 'We shall sit here and be cut to flinders if we cannot sail.'
Hayden cursed himself for cutting free the boats. 'Mr Franks,' he called, 'Launch the barge. We will warp out of range of these batteries, if we must.'
'Aye, sir,' Franks answered. 'Lay aloft! Lay out!'
Galvanized by fire from all around, the men went quickly about their business, the barge swinging up into the air in record time, two men aboard hurriedly arranging its gear. Hayden could feel the ship losing way, like a boat run up on soft sand.
The wind gasped, wafting the sails, the highest aloft bellying an instant, then all went slack and restive.
Barthe turned to Hayden, his manner very brittle. 'We are for it, now, Captain,' the master said gravely.
Hayden did not reply but turned to Archer. 'Extinguish all lights… and let us pray for a cloud to cover the moon.'
But the few clouds abroad that night appeared to be going about their own business without a thought for the moon or British frigates adrift in Toulon harbour.
Balls began to land in earnest all around or to tear open the air above. Just as Franks ordered the barge to be lowered, a ball struck it amidships blasting out the larboard side and showering the men with splinters and shards of planking.
In the silence that followed, Franks could be heard hollering, 'Childers? Price?' The bosun gazed up at the shattered hull. Childers emerged, staggering in the swaying craft. He stumbled two steps aft and threw himself at the falls of the tackle, grasping hold and clinging there, as though he thought the boat would break apart and drop him to the deck. The other man, more frightened yet, came over the side, grabbed a guy rope, and flew down to the deck hand-over-hand.
'We shall have that ruin of a hull down on the deck, Mr Franks,' Hayden called, 'and the launch over the side – smartly! Have the small kedge brought up from the hold, Mr Madison.'
The barge, all but broken backed, thumped down and the tackles were transferred quickly to the launch, which swung aloft with all speed.
'If those bloody Frenchmen do not manage to shoot that one away…' Barthe grumbled, gazing up at the boat hanging from the yard-tackles.
A moment everyone held their breath as the boat was swung out, then quickly lowered by squealing blocks down into the calm sea. The kedge went next, swung out on tackles, and then the hawser, followed by the remaining crew. Archer and the still-shaken Childers clambered into the stern. Immediately the boat pushed off, a flaw of wind came down the harbour, bellied the sails, pressing the Themis forward. Shot continued to fall all around, the scream of it tearing at every man's nerves. Two heavy balls smashed into the hull forward, but the ship gathered way, her own guns replying. A dense cloud of smoke enveloped the ship and hung over it, carried on the same wind. Wickham clambered out to the end of the jib-boom, more or less out of the smoke, and conned them out.
As the Grand Tower fell behind to larboard, Hayden felt a little wave of relief pass through his knotted muscles.
'We are out, Captain,' Hawthorne pronounced. He raised a hand as though he would clap Hayden on the back, remembered his position, and turned the gesture into an awkward wave towards the shore.
'Throw a rope to the launch and we will take her in tow,' Hayden ordered. 'I do not want to heave to so we can bring them aboard if this wind keeps making.'
As they passed out of the inner harbour, the breeze, which had been blowing from nor-nor-east came around to the east.
'We will not weather Cape Sepet on this slant, Captain,' Barthe observed. The sailing master stood by the binnacle scrutinizing their heading. 'If we are forced to make several boards to weather the cape, the French might stir themselves to give chase.'
'The wind has not settled itself, yet, Mr Barthe. Let us hope, when we travel farther from the land, that it will back a little more.'
'Which it might manage, Captain,' Barthe agreed, 'we have had some luck this night. Let us pray it will sail with us but a little farther.'
Shore batteries along the peninsula opened fire, and Hayden ordered that fire be returned. The ship barely had enough way on to answer her helm at times, and then the fickle wind would pick up and hurry them on, allowing a more favourable course. Archer's boat was drawn alongside and the crew retrieved. Hayden could not lose another boat so they took it in tow, even though it slowed them a little on such a small wind.
The quarterdeck was a silent place, the French batteries landing shot all around but little of it finding its mark. Barthe and Franks had men aloft repairing damage to the rig, and the gun crews were kept busy returning fire, though largely to obscure the Themis from view with clouds of smoke. The leadsman cried out his soundings – minor proclamations of the ship's safety – until the bottom began to shoal.
'Mr Barthe?' Hayden called to the sailing master. 'How go your repairs, sir? I believe we shall be forced to tack.'
'We can clear away in a moment, sir,' Barthe replied from the waist.
'Then let us coil down and make ready.'
Before the order could be given to tack ship, the wind backed a little more, and more yet, and the leadsman found the bottom dropping away. The darker mass of Cape Cépet moved further to starboard as the ship's heading altered, and tacking ship was delayed for the time being.
The leadsman worked furiously as the Themis skirted the edge of the bank, calling depths over the 'crash' of French guns. In the midst of this Griffiths appeared on deck, a grim, greying presence, consumptively spare.
Hayden, whose eyes ran from powder smoke, saw the doctor as though through a pane of flawed glass, distorted and dulled.
'Doctor,' Hayden said as Griffiths approached.
'I am very sorry to report, Captain, that Saint-Denis has departed this life,' the doctor stated, but haltingly. 'The musket ball found his heart and he bled his pitiful life away.' The doctor paused a moment, clearly not finished, though Hayden wondered what more there could be to say. 'He asked for pen and paper at the end, but had not the firmness of hand to write. Mr Ariss kindly offered to take down anything he might speak, thinking it would be a letter to his family or perhaps a final will.' Again Griffiths paused as though wondering what to say. 'It was, instead, a letter to Mr Gould. Saint-Denis thanked him for saving his life during his recent illness… He also asked his forgiveness for persecuting him. I must say, I was rather surprised. Very near the end, Saint-Denis managed to ask, "Have I wholly wasted my days?" Mr Ariss assured him that this was not the case but Saint-Denis would not hear it. "Perhaps Gould can make something of himself," he said, "where I could not." Those were his final words.'
Hayden could not hide his surprise. 'It seems Saint-Denis was more honest with himself than we might have presumed.'
Griffiths's facial gesture was unreadable. 'It is passing strange,' he ventured. 'I have misliked Saint-Denis since first we met, but these past weeks I have had a change of heart towards him. No doubt his brush with death caused him to re-examine his place in this world – and showed him that it was not nearly so high as he had believed. He was humbled but as a man is humbled before God, if I may say it. Putting himself in the way of musket fire to preserve young Gould was very likely the first time he had ever placed another before himself.' Griffiths stood a moment lost in thought, shook his head, then wandered away without remembering to touch his hat or even take leave.
Hayden stood at the starboard rail looking out towards the shadowed coast of France – a distant world divided from him by a narrow river of sea – and the booming of guns suddenly seemed a salute, as though someone great had passed who was mourned and honoured.
Wickham came quickly up, touching his hat. 'Mr Barthe says we shall double the cape on this tack, Captain.'
'Yes, I am quite certain he is correct. Saint-Denis has just died.'
Wickham said nothing for a moment and then, 'God rest his soul,' the midshipman said softly. 'I am very sorry to hear it.'
'Do you think Mr Gould will have any particular… sentiment about this? Were he and Saint-Denis friends?'
'Given that Saint-Denis persecuted him relentlessly upon learning he was a Jew, I would think not, but Saint-Denis seemed to suffer a sea-change after Gould nursed him back to health. Did they become friends? Gould has a desire to think the best of any man, or so I believe. He forgave the lieutenant his trespasses, but… Well, Captain, I should not speak for Mr Gould.'
'Yes, certainly.'
The guns ashore stopped firing at that moment, and on the Themis they fell silent as well. After the great guns had been exercised Hayden often noted that the ensuing quiet was somehow deeper, more complete or perhaps more profound. The night wrapped itself around them as the ship's almost silent progress carried them seaward. Hayden felt a deep melancholy settle over him, for some reason he could not fathom. Perhaps because Saint-Denis's life had been so misguided and cut short before there was any chance of redemption. Perhaps it was relief at their narrow escape from Toulon. He did not know, but he felt as though, were he alone, he might weep.
'We shall have daylight in a few hours, Captain,' Wickham observed.
'Not for us all. Ask Mr Smosh if he will read the service when we commit Saint-Denis's body to the depths.'
'Aye, sir.' Wickham touched his hat and turned to go.
'And Mr Wickham?'
'Sir?'
'You are acting second lieutenant, now.'
Wickham nodded and touched his hat. 'Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,' he said softly. For a moment he stood as though he might say more and then made his way forward like a man in a daze.
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 13
|
At dawn, a British frigate, blown off station in the gale, appeared to leeward. She was desperately beating toward the Themis, and signalling for her to hold position.
Hayden and Hawthorne stood at the rail watching her bob through a streak of sunlight. A bracing easterly pressed against their backs and shook pennants overhead. Neither man had slept after their escape from Toulon. Having come so near to losing their ship and being made prisoner, their minds had been left in such a turmoil as to prohibit repose.
'I believe this was the ship charged with preventing British vessels entering Toulon,' Hayden ventured.
'They made a bloody poor job of it.' Hawthorne's voice had a harsh, hollow tone – his throat abraded by exhaustion.
'And I shall not shrink from telling them so.'
In under an hour the two frigates rolled, hove to, side by side, the respective commanders calling to one another through speaking trumpets. Hayden refrained from upbraiding the man before his crew but let it be known that it was something near a miracle that they had escaped Toulon with the loss of only a single man, three ship's boats and sundry minor damages. The frigate's captain felt such guilt at hearing this that he offered Hayden a cutter, which was gladly accepted. It was only later that Mr Gould pointed out the frigate had four cutters, as well as the usual complement of ship's boats, so could easily afford this act of apparent generosity.
Admiral Lord Hood, it transpired, had been driven from Toulon with his various allies, by the Republican armies, and though the crew of the Themis were aware of this from the previous night's altercation, to hear it spoken still brought a groan from one and all. The British fleet had shifted its berth to Hyères Bay, some small distance down the French coast. The wind, brisk and blowing north-east by north, would not allow them to sail along the coast but dictated a course of east by south – not so terribly bad, Hayden noted, but they would not find the admiral that day. The worst of it was, they must have sailed past the British fleet by night, distant enough that they had been unaware of its presence.
As it was probably his last night as commander of the Themis – a thought that left him troubled and anxious about the future – Hayden decided to invite some of his officers and guests to dinner to take his mind off such matters. This impending loss of command removed some sense of his obligations as senior officer and he decided not to invite Worthing, but to invite the other ecclesiastical guest, the Reverend Mr Smosh – an unforgivable snub but Hayden did not care. Worthing had not only attempted to undermine him with his crew but had done the same while in Gibraltar. Undoubtedly he would continue in this endeavour once they found Lord Hood. Inviting such a man to his table was beyond even Hayden's sense of duty. But when Hayden's guests arrived, Worthing was among them, having assumed that the invitation to Smosh included him. Despite his near hatred of the man, Hayden could not then send him away. Another chair was quickly added and a setting produced, so subtly that almost no one noticed.
The Reverend Mr Smosh, Hawthorne, Archer, Wickham, Barthe and Dr Griffiths were all in attendance, as well as midshipmen Madison and Gould (Hobson was officer of the watch, the ship being short of senior officers), Mr Ariss, the surgeon's mate, and Mr Franks, the bosun.
The atmosphere at this dinner was subdued, though Hayden was not sure why. Perhaps it was the near loss of their ship the previous night, or the British retreat from Toulon. Hayden wondered what had become of all the thousands of Toulon residents who had supported inviting the British into the city. Certainly Lord Hood could not evacuate them all.
'What do you think will become of them, Captain?' Barthe asked, referring to the very people who were so constantly in Hayden's thoughts.
Hayden was forced to shake his head. 'One would hope for a trial but the country is in the grip of… bloodlust, it seems.'
'A trial!' Worthing said. 'Do wolves make trials? Have we not all read the reports of what transpires in that accursed country? How the guillotine is active night and day? The queen executed. The Duc d'Orléans executed. The Girondin leaders executed. Marat murdered. Madam Roland, Bailey, Barnave… The French are not a people, they are animals.'
There was an uncomfortable shifting about the table, but before Hayden could reply Griffiths looked up from his dinner, fixing his much-darkened gaze on Dr Worthing.
'I was once taken to a hanging, Doctor, by the man who taught me surgery and anatomy… an English hanging. The criminal was a young woman of perhaps five and twenty – no more. She had been given a trial, or so I understood, and convicted of stealing a few loaves of bread. No guillotine being available, she was brought to the gallows in a cart, drunk, I suspect out of pity. With her was a boy' – he nodded to Wickham – 'half a dozen years younger than Mr Wickham, who was to be half hanged for his crimes.
'The woman staggered onto the gallows before the usual crowd of civilized English men and women, many nobles in their carriages, the ladies turned out very fine for the occasion. They cheered unreservedly when the young women blew kisses to the bucks in attendance and indulged in some drunken banter with the executioner, who turned her off in the midst of a laugh.
'The boy was then dragged onto the gallows, weeping and begging hysterically not to be killed, to which the audience all cried "Shame" at such a show of cowardice. They had not come to see that! The executioner threw the boy down and put a knee upon his chest, then proceeded to loop a cord around the child's neck and to strangle him until insensible. When this criminal lay utterly still, the cord was removed and the boy brought back to this just world by the agency of a bucket of cold water dashed over him. He was then carried, silent and stupefied, to the cart that had borne him there, stripped to the waist and tied to the tail where he was to be whipped about the town for his crime, which was, if I have not already noted, begging. We then learned that the woman who had been hanged was his mother, and many of the people present voiced the opinion that, no doubt, this would prove an excellent lesson for him. The dead woman was then delivered to her father, who stood by with a barrow. As the man wheeled his daughter away he had the misfortune to impede the progress of a man and his wife in their carriage, so incensing the wife that she snatched up the whip and beat the man so that the barrow over-tipped, tumbling the poor, dead girl into the dirt.' Griffiths took a sip of his wine with a shaking hand and then went on. 'But I make it sound as though I was innocent in this affair – a mere paying bystander – but two nights later my teacher sent, by moonlight, myself, two of my fellow students and his man to disinter the body of this young woman so that we might have her fresh corpse for our anatomy class. Lots were drawn and I got to dissect the head and broken neck. We have little to recommend us over the French, or any other people, I believe.'
There was a silence around the table.
Worthing appeared not the least chastised by this account. 'I am uncertain of your exact meaning, Mr Griffiths. The woman was a criminal, tried and found guilty. She was punished according to the laws of the land – the same that apply to you and me. My only disagreement is with the poor benighted people who believed the boy would learn from this example. I can tell you with utter assurance that he will not. Half hanged he may have been at ten years but fully hanged he will be before he is two and twenty. I have seen it times too numerous to recount – entire families with no moral principles to guide them. But half hanging this boy was our society's attempt to preserve him from what awaits if he continues down his mother's path. What is half hanging and being flogged compared with the torment of eternal damnation? It is a mercy. The good magistrate who stood in judgement no doubt hoped the memory of the noose tightening about the boy's neck and the slipping into darkness would stay the child's hand when next he was tempted to steal bread… or your coat or boots. It was an act of compassion, if entirely misplaced.'
'Certainly we flog men with regularity upon our own ship,' Franks said, clearly in agreement with Worthing, even if such agreement was not to his taste. 'And I have been known to start many a man. The hands would not be inclined to work smartly or even obey the officers' orders without such encouragements.'
'Surely that is true, Mr Franks,' Wickham said, 'but many of our crew are not sailors by desire; they were impressed. It is not a life they have chosen' – he waved a hand around the table – 'as we have chosen it.'
Worthing appeared to suppress a small smile of affection. 'When you are a captain of your own ship, Lord Arthur, I hope to sup with you again and hear your views on this subject. Time may alter your opinions in ways you cannot expect.'
'Perhaps, Dr Worthing,' Wickham replied, clearly disliking being patronized, 'but I doubt human nature will change appreciably in so short a time.'
'Am I given to understand, acting lieutenant,' Hawthorne said, 'that you believe you will make your post in "so short a time"?'
'That was never my meaning!' Wickham protested, actually blushing.
'There are a few lessons yet to be learned,' Mr Barthe added. 'Spherical trigonometry yet to be completely mastered, working a ship over a bar, predicting tides…'
'Shaving,' Hawthorne said wickedly, causing much laughter.
'To Mr Wickham making his post,' Madison offered, raising a glass. Everyone lifted their wine in response.
'To Mr Wickham making his post,' the guests responded, as well as, 'To Captain Wickham.'
Wickham laughed and coloured at the same time.
Hayden thought Wickham's statement was more truth than boast – Lord Arthur would very likely make his post before Hayden, especially as things were progressing. Already Hayden dreaded reporting to Lord Hood, who had, no doubt, received reports of Hayden's character from Captain Pool when he joined the Admiral several weeks earlier.
'I think we should have a toast to Captain Hayden,' Mr Smosh suggested, 'who has brought us this far through storms, groundings, attacks by the enemy, abandonment by our comrades, pestilence, and most recently by preserving us from a French prison.'
'Hear,' the others responded. 'To Captain Hayden.'
Despite knowing this was done in good faith and out of concern for his impending loss of command, Hayden thought to deflect this attention from himself. 'I believe we should drink to Mr Ariss, Mr Gould and Mr Smosh, who saved so many lives through their utterly tireless efforts. Saint-Denis believed that he and the doctor would both have died without you,' Hayden added, nodding to Gould and Ariss. He lifted his glass. 'To your tireless efforts.'
And so they toasted. But after this a silence fell on the assembly and Hayden thought that it would be his last such dinner with these men for in a day or two at most he would be removed from his command and probably waiting for a ship to return him to England.
He resembled, to a remarkable degree, engravings Hayden had seen of George Washington. The same nose and elongated chin. The high forehead, kindly, intelligent eyes. Hayden would not allow himself to be misled by the eyes; Lord Hood was the commander-in-chief of His Majesty's fleets in the Mediterranean and had not achieved this position in life through the agency of kindness. The Lord Admiral sat upon a large, almost throne-like chair, coatless, his silk waistcoat as white as sea foam on a summer's day. His long, almost melancholy face was tanned like a ploughman's, his massive hands the same. For a moment he regarded Hayden, his look, if anything, appearing to grow sadder, which alarmed Hayden no end.
'Captain Hayden,' Hood said, his voice strong and surprisingly melodic, 'I have had several letters, posted at Gibraltar, from the Reverend Dr Worthing, and another from Captain Pool, all mentioning your name in less than benevolent terms. Dr Worthing especially appears unable to contain his venom.'
It had been driven home in his conversation with Admiral Brown that one could never be certain who might be acquainted with whom in the service, so Hayden decided to be circumspect. 'I am sorry, sir, for any irritation such letters might have occasioned.'
The admiral chose not to answer this but only raised his thick brows a little. He lifted his cup of coffee from a small table, found it either empty or not to his taste, and with a sour look returned the dainty china to its saucer.
'Am I to understand that you were left with Pool's convoy after he was separated from it?'
'Yes, sir. Captain Pool could not discover us, apparently.'
'And given how soon after he arrived in Gibraltar, I cannot say I am surprised.' Hood turned his gaze on Hayden. 'I should like to hear your accounting, Hayden. Be candid; I mislike modesty as much as vanity.'
Hayden was not sure if he could walk a road so narrow; nor was he certain that Hood wanted the truth. The admiral's small slight of Pool, however, gave Hayden some hope and he began a retelling of the story of his convoy across Biscay, holding back only matters relating to Worthing. It seemed he hurried overly, for Hood kept interrupting with questions, finally leading Hayden to relate almost every circumstance – the French squadron, influenza, the accidental ramming of the French seventy-four, the loss of the Syren and poor Cole. He ended with their near capture in Toulon, at which Hood sat silently, as though turning over the events Hayden had related.
'Dr Worthing wrote that you confined him to his quarters?'
'That is true, Lord Hood. I do apologize for treating your chaplain so.'
'He is not my chaplain,' Hood stated firmly. 'I have not met the man above three times – at the home of a friend – but it is the curse of command that everyone asks favours… and then never returns them in kind. A relative of Worthing's – a surgeon – delivered my niece of a child in the worst circumstances for either mother or child to survive let alone thrive, and brought them both through – subsequently, I promised to find Worthing a position aboard ship.' The admiral shrugged as though to say, 'What other course could there have been?' 'It seems you have had a rather adventurous time of it, though one would hardly call the influenza an adventure. Never in all my years have I heard of one so severe. It was the influenza? Your surgeon was not mistaken?'
'He is an excellent surgeon, sir, and he had seen influenza before. I would be very surprised if he were wrong.'
The admiral made a little gesture with shoulders and face that seemed to say 'perhaps'. 'Admiral Cotton has requested I find a captain for the Themis, which has had infamy attached to her name, unfortunately. I shall have to give this matter my full consideration. For the time being, Hayden, I shall leave you in command. I understand you are short of officers?'
'Yes, sir. My first lieutenant was killed in Toulon, and I have only one lieutenant and a midshipman acting. He is a precocious young middy, sir, but has only been two years in the service.'
'I will give this some thought as well. I might have a lieutenant for you. He is aboard my ship and hoping for promotion but I believe a year or two in a frigate would benefit him greatly.' The admiral fell into thought again.
Given the demands on his time, Hayden was surprised Hood had spent so much time with a mere master and commander.
'Worthing wrote that one of your middies is a Jew – or so he claimed. Is this true?'
'His father is a Jew, sir – a reliable Plymouth merchant – but his mother is not. The boy has been raised in the Church of England, as the Reverend Smosh – the second chaplain I have brought you – will attest.'
'Ah. Do you know Captain Schomberg? Isaac Schomberg?'
'Only by reputation, sir.' Hayden knew the Schombergs were a prominent London Jewish family, though the sons were said to have been raised outside of their faith.
'A sea officer of great ability. Should you feel it necessary, I believe Captain Schomberg would take this boy on. I would ask it of him myself, on your behalf.'
'I believe Gould has won the respect of the crew, sir. He is well placed for the moment.'
'As you like.' Hood looked up at Hayden and almost smiled. 'Do I understand, Captain, that you have something of a gift for languages – remember, I mislike modesty.'
'I speak several well enough, sir.'
'Italian?'
'There are numerous dialects, sir. I should do well enough in Genoa.'
'I think that will answer nicely. You also speak French?'
'Yes, sir.'
'I would have you make company with several army officers. They all travel with Sir Gilbert Elliot to Corsica to treat with General Paoli. Do you know him?'
'I know to whom you refer, sir. One of my midshipmen, Lord Arthur Wickham, was acquainted with him in England. Apparently the general promised to take him shooting should he ever visit that island.'
Hood chuckled. 'Is the boy of a… practical nature?'
'Indeed, sir. He is mature beyond his years and I believe has a great future in the service.'
Hood contemplated this only a second. 'I wonder if his presence would please General Paoli – he is a stubborn old man, I will tell you.'
'Wickham wins over all around him, sir. I don't know if General Paoli would be any different.'
'Take the boy as your aide. We cannot hope to drive the French out of Corsica without Paoli's supporters.' Hood appeared to gather his thoughts a moment. 'We shall need to transport and land troops on the island, Hayden, and I want to be certain the army officers do not concoct some plan dependent on us landing troops in some untenable situation. I expect you to speak up and be certain any such landing places will be acceptable to the Navy.'
'Aye, sir.'
'I have prevailed upon Dundas to send Colonel John Moore.' A little amused smile appeared on the admiral's face. 'He is too perfect by half but one of the more capable officers I have met – capable of sizing up a situation and drawing a plan without dithering. A very decisive sort. Not unlike you, Hayden. You shall either be like brothers or loathe each other utterly.' This made the admiral smile but then again he slipped into his thoughts.
For several long moments the admiral did not speak. Once Hayden was sure he would, but Hood appeared to change his mind.
Finally Hayden asked, 'Is there any other service I might perform, Lord Hood?'
'No,' the admiral said softly, shaking his head. As Hayden rose to his feet, the admiral asked, 'How old would your father be, now, Hayden?'
Hayden could not have been more taken aback, and for a few seconds could not answer. 'Fifty-one, sir,' he managed, 'this coming June.'
Hood did not look at Hayden but brushed at something on his breeches. 'He might have had his flag by now. Imagine. And your mother, Captain… she is well, I hope?'
'Very well, sir. She has removed to Boston.'
'Boston!' Hood repeated, clearly surprised. 'You have more of your mother's features, though you have the carriage, even the gestures, of your father.' The admiral looked up at Hayden. 'You have heard this before?'
Hayden nodded. 'I have been told I have my father's voice and habits of speech.'
'So you do. It is a bit unsettling for any who knew him. Good luck in Corsica, Captain Hayden.'
'Thank you, sir.'
Hayden turned and went to the door, but just as he put his hand on the handle, the admiral spoke again.
'I wonder if I shouldn't assign Worthing to Captain Pool's ship? Does that seem a good match?'
Hayden tried not to smile. 'I believe they would get along famously.'
'Then it is done. And this other parson… what was his name?'
'Smosh, sir.'
'Aye, what a name! I wonder who will deserve him…'
'If you have no ship in need, sir, he might serve aboard the Themis for the time being. We would welcome him.'
'Then he is yours, Hayden.' He raised a finger. 'I have almost forgotten. This evening I shall have the captains of the fleet to dine. I hope you will join us.'
'It would be my honour to do so.'
'And bring this middy we are sending to Paoli. Until then. Good day to you.'
'Good day, sir.'
Hayden exited the cabin in something like shock. Having so often left such audiences in a rage it was utterly strange to feel that he had been treated both kindly and with justice. He had only needed to travel a few thousand miles from England to find this. Lord Hood had known his father! Had known him and held him in high regard; perhaps, even, affection. A remarkable stroke of good fortune… for a change. He emerged into the sunshine with these thoughts whirling in his head.
Upon the Victory's deck Hayden found the same scene that had greeted him earlier. French families, gathered in small groups, endeavouring to stay clear of the sailors working. British army officers formed their own squadrons. Children played chase-me around the capstan, laughing as though on an adventure, unaware that their parents had relinquished everything to escape Toulon. By the expressions on the adults' faces, however, Hayden knew this innocence did not extend to them.
A well-dressed gentleman, clearly English though with excellent command of French, was surrounded by supplicants, and Hayden could hear him promising over and over that the English would not abandon them. Hayden hoped that this would prove true, as these poor refugees had sided with the British against the excesses of the Convention. The loss of Toulon had left them without a country.
As I am, Hayden thought. This idea came to him unbidden and engendered a little vertigo of distress.
Hayden stopped and stood by the rail, observing his own ship a moment. It had not occurred to him until then to feel any sense of relief – he had not been cast free by Hood and replaced but still had his post ship – though without his post to accompany it. Still, he had much to be thankful for, though there was no way of knowing if and when Hood would decide to replace him with some other. It was ever his situation that uncertainty could not be banished, but hung on the horizon like an irresolute gale which might at any time sweep down upon him, bearing with it utter disaster.
As Hayden turned to cross the deck, a small child rammed him, head foremost, in the thigh, and fell upon the planks, with a look of confusion upon her face. Immediately he knelt.
'Are you injured?' he asked in French.
The girl, of about five years, gazed at him as though he spoke some foreign language.
'Are you in disguise?' she whispered in the same tongue.
'In disguise?' He could not imagine what she meant.
'I won't tell,' she said, sitting up and whispering even more quietly. 'I am Princess Marie, and I am escaping from the Jacobins. Will you help me?'
'Yes, my Princess,' Hayden replied. 'I am the Count de le Coeur, and I have been sent to find you.'
'I knew you would come,' she whispered passionately. 'Will we go by ship?' She jumped to her feet and stared Hayden in the eye.
'Yes, by an English ship – the Victory, I have it all arranged. The admiral is one of us.'
'That is why you are dressed as an English officer. Very cunning, Monsieur le Comte. When I am returned, one day, to my throne, I shall reward your bravery and loyalty.'
Hayden stood, swept off his hat and made an elaborate bow. 'I am humbled by your generosity, my Princess. Certainly, the admiral has prepared a cabin for you and will have you to dine this very evening. But I must be off; there are so many who require rescue.'
'Yes, yes. Rescue as many of my subjects as you are able. My people have suffered terribly under the Jacobins.' And with that, she glanced behind, turned and dashed off.
Hayden realized that two women had been watching, and both smiled. Charmed they might have been by the little play, but this did not entirely mask the distress in their lovely faces.
'You speak French perfectly, monsieur,' the older woman observed in heavily accented English. Both were so handsome that, for a few seconds, Hayden could not think what to say. Undoubtedly, they were mother and daughter – the younger woman's countenance claimed that she could be no other – though the elder did not look thirty. This was an obvious impossibility, for her daughter was in the first bloom of young womanhood – one and twenty Hayden thought.
'Thank you, madame,' Hayden replied, making a slight bow. 'My mother is French.' Hayden found the young woman so comely that he struggled not to stare.
'Forgive me, monsieur, but from what region?'
'Paris and Bordeaux.'
'We are from Toulon,' the woman informed him, 'but, no doubt, you understood that.'
'Yes. I am very sorry so many have been driven from their homes.' Hayden felt a small pang of guilt that the English had not held Toulon – as though they had somehow acted in bad faith with that city's citizens.
The woman pressed her lovely lips together, and made the slightest nod of agreement.
Dismay was so clearly written upon their faces and in their carriage that Hayden felt his heart go out to them.
'Pardon, Captain,' the woman said to Hayden, struggling, but insisting to speak English, 'do you know the idea of Lord Hood for what will 'appen to… ourselves?'
'I am sorry, madame,' Hayden replied in French, 'but Lord Hood has not confided this information to me.'
But the woman continued to speak English. 'We fear that Lord Hood intends to place… us… Is that correct? Us?
'Yes.'
'He intends to place us in Genoa or Naples. This will not do. The army that drove us from Toulon will very soon march south – that is what everyone say – and we will be force to flee again or be capture and on the guillotine for our assisting of the English. We must be taken somewhere safe – England or Canada.'
Hayden thought their fears could very likely be borne out. There was much talk among the British officers that the Jacobin army would press on into the northern Italian states, and sooner rather than later.
The woman curtsied. 'Pardon, monsieur. I am Madame Bourdage and this is my daughter, Héloise.'
'Charles Hayden. Enchanté.'
Madame Bourdage's gaze wandered to Hayden's left, and she and her daughter both curtsied very low. 'Sir Gilbert,' she said.
Hayden turned to find the Englishman he had previously seen surrounded by supplicants. The man nodded to him, but addressed the women.
'Madame Bourdage. Mademoiselle. As I have told everyone, I have yet no answer as to where you will go. Very soon, I hope. Very soon. You have not been forgotten, I assure you.' Sir Gilbert's manner was very courtly and charming. Clearly the beauty of the two women had not gone unnoticed by the gentleman. Age, Hayden had observed many times, did not dampen this particular appreciation among males.
The two women were swept up into his wake, curtsying quickly to Hayden as they went, other men and women drawn into the gentleman's orbit as he made his way along the deck.
Hayden stood a moment watching them retreat.
'Sir Gilbert Elliot,' a voice informed him.
Hayden turned to find a young army officer smiling and nodding towards the English gentleman, who was again afloat in a sea of forlorn orphans.
'The friend of Burke?' Hayden wondered.
'The very one.' The young man made a small bow. 'Colonel John Moore.'
'Charles Hayden, captain of the frigate Themis.'
'So I thought. You are to accompany us to Corsica?'
'Yes, and very happy I am about it, too. I have just come from Lord Hood, who informed me of this decision, but, I confess, I know little more about it.'
A conspiratorial smile made Moore appear even younger. 'It is fortunate that I have had several conversations on this matter with Sir Gilbert, General Dundas, my superior, and Lord Hood.' He waved a hand forward. 'Shall we take a turn around the deck and I will recount what I have learned?'
Hayden immediately agreed. There was often distrust, if not animosity, between the two services, but Moore showed no signs of this in his manner – of course they had just met and he might have reasons of his own to be speaking so kindly to a Navy man. Hayden was certain he would find out soon enough. In appearance, Moore was rather Hayden's opposite – yellow-haired, blue-eyed, though of Hayden's height and well made in much the same manner. If calmness and animation could be combined into one person, Moore appeared to be that person. Hayden's immediate impression was of a man very content within himself – unusual in one so young.
'No doubt you have heard that there has been a rebellion against the French on Corsica?' Moore began, 'And that General Paoli and his supporters have shut the French into a few strongholds along the northern coast?'
'I had not.'
Moore glanced Hayden's way, perhaps a bit dismayed at how uninformed he was.
'I have but lately arrived from England,' Hayden offered in defence, 'and was several weeks in Gibraltar in strict quarantine resulting from an influenza contracted en route.'
Moore appeared a little relieved by this. 'News does not travel quickly enough – unless it is bad news, of course.'
'Even bad news travels too slowly. We learned that Toulon was lost when we sailed into that harbour by night and barely managed to withdraw.'
Moore drew back a little and looked at him anew. 'That was your ship? I have heard several sea officers voice the opinion that the captain of that vessel must be a most skilled seaman.'
'Most lucky, I think,' Hayden corrected. 'The wind favoured us or we would be guests of the French, yet.' Hayden stepped around a running child whose attention was fixed elsewhere – perhaps another miniature noble fleeing the Jacobins. 'You were speaking of Corsica…'
'Yes, it seems that Paoli has written several letters to Lord Hood requesting British aid or perhaps an alliance. Sir Gilbert even speculates that the Corsicans might put their land under British protection. A naval base so near the northern states of the Italian peninsula would serve our interests well, especially now as there is a significant Republican army in Toulon, only a few days' march from the borders.' He paused here, as if awaiting Hayden's agreement, so the Navy man nodded.
Moore, Hayden thought, had understated the importance of a naval base on Corsica. The British desperately needed a safe port east of Gibraltar, nearer the Italian states. The Mediterranean was large and Gibraltar isolated at the western extreme. But a Corsican port could be used to resupply ships blockading the French ports, not so far away, or to carry aid to the numerous Italian states that might find themselves fighting the French – sooner rather than later.
'We are sent to Corsica to discover if, indeed, the French have been driven into their few ports and towers, and, if so, if it is possible to dislodge them – and how best this might be accomplished. As this enterprise will take the efforts of both Navy and Army, representatives of both services are to be sent.' He gestured to himself then Hayden. 'We will be accompanied by Lieutenant-Major Kochler, I am told.' Moore glanced at him. 'You look surprised.'
'In truth, I am astonished. Lord Hood knows nothing of me. That he would not choose an officer with whom he was more familiar, and in whose abilities he had greater faith, is a puzzle.'
'Apparently, he does not lack faith in your abilities, Captain,' Moore ventured. 'Lord Hood took the time to show me a map…' He glanced at Hayden and grinned at his mistake. 'A chart, I suppose you would name it, displaying all the environs surrounding San Fiorenzo Bay and the supposed French positions. We are to make a closer inspection and recommend a plan of operations. I will rely upon your expertise in knowing how best the Navy might be used to cannonade French batteries – there are at least two strong towers and greater fortifications at San Fiorenzo. The city of Bastia has extensive fortifications, I am given to understand, and Calvi is also invested. Landing places must be found… Well, certainly I don't need to explain such things to you, Captain.' They had stopped at the rail where Hayden's boat awaited. 'We are to present ourselves to Captain Davies aboard the Lowestoff e tomorrow morning at daybreak. Until then.'
Hayden went over the side thinking that Moore was either a consummate actor, a politician, or a rather singular specimen of an army officer. That he would appear so open to co-operation with the Navy was highly unusual. Hayden had barely got his anchor down, earlier that day, before receiving an acquaintance who informed him that Hood did not get on with the senior army officers and thought them ditherers if not outright cowards. Moore had struck Hayden as neither of these things, but then time might change his opinion of him.
Hayden sent Wickham to inform Dr Worthing of his new situation for he was determined to be rid of that vexing provocateur at the earliest possible moment. A note was composed in haste and Hayden had his coxswain carry it, immediately, to Pool's ship, informing the good captain that his new chaplain would be arriving, post-haste. Worthing was ordered to pack up his belongings, golf clubs and all, and to be ready to shift his berth to the Majestic upon a moment's notice. Hayden could not erase a small smile – it might better have been described as a smirk – at this turn of events. There was no one, with the exception of a certain Captain Hart – now retired from the service – to whom Hayden would rather send the good doctor.
Hawthorne intercepted Hayden climbing to the gundeck. He, too, sported a poorly disguised expression of satisfaction. 'Am I given to understand that the good Dr Worthing is being sent to minister to Captain Pool and his crew?'
'Lord Hood felt that Captain Pool would benefit from the… efforts of a chaplain of Dr Worthing's particular talents.'
'How would such an idea occur to Lord Hood, I wonder?' Hawthorne asked, smile turning to a grin.
'I had no part in it,' Hayden protested. 'The idea, splendid as I might think it, originated entirely in the mind of Admiral Lord Hood. He did elicit my opinion on the matter and I endorsed it most heartily, but to suggest that I made interest for this happy turn of events would be utterly false.'
Hawthorne laughed, unable to hide his delight at this news. 'I shall run down to the gunroom and offer to help the man pack. With my own hands, I will bear his belongings onto the deck, though I suppose I will not be alone in offering the parson a helping hand over the side.'
'No, I would guess we will not be the first congregation to be happily rid of him.'
The grin wavered into a genuine look of concern. 'Where is poor Smosh to be sent? To a more likely captain than Pool, I hope?'
'How likely the man is I cannot say, but Smosh is to be chaplain aboard the Themis until a more appropriate position is found for him. And, oddly, I am to remain in command of the same ship until Lord Hood appoints a proper captain, though I am to be sent away for a time – I cannot say how long. I will leave Mr Archer in command. Lord Hood has said he will send me a lieutenant – he has one to spare, apparently – but I do not think I will install this new man over Archer, who has shown a marked increase in zeal for his profession these last weeks.'
'Every man aboard has shown a marked increase in zeal for their profession since the departure of Captain Hart. It is remarkable how disheartened we all had become under that little tyrant.'
Hayden nodded absently.
'And where is it you go – or should I not ask?'
'It will be known soon enough, though I ask you to confine this information to our officers. I am for Corsica, if you can believe it, where I hope to meet General Paoli. Sir Gilbert Elliot is sent to that place to treat with the general and I am to accompany him with two army officers to discover if it is, indeed, possible to drive out the French.'
'Army officers,' Hawthorne said darkly. 'You have my sympathy in that.'
'Not at all. One I have met, and he is a man of excellent judgement who did not even seem aware that my coat was blue and not crimson.'
'Let us see if this innocence of fashion can last more than a few days. The services are ever at crossed purposes in my experience.'
'Which has long been my view, Mr Hawthorne, though with the caveat that I believe that neither service fully understands the other's field of operation. Army officers do not understand why ships cannot make progress into the teeth of a gale or why we cannot land their troops on a lee shore with a sea running. Likewise, seamen misunderstand how armies are best utilized on a given landscape or why they march so slowly.'
'I hope such misunderstandings are few, then.'
Moments later Hayden and Hawthorne stood at the rail while the disgraced Reverend Dr Worthing watched his belongings being lowered into the boat. He did not look at Hayden or offer to make any sort of goodbye but simply climbed over the rail. As his head was about to disappear below the level of the bulwark, he stopped, unable to leave without having the last word.
The chaplain eyed Hayden darkly, his sour mouth turned down and pressed thin. 'Lord Hood might have been easily convinced of your innocence in your mistreatment of me but the Lord God will not similarly be deceived. It is on your soul.'
The man disappeared down the ladder, and Hawthorne turned to Hayden, a great smile of disbelief overspreading his handsome face. 'Well, there you have it. God will punish you for confining his chaplain to his cabin. All of the mischief he intended was no doubt the will of our Lord.'
The crew were not so kind as Hawthorne and laughed openly at this final threat, the mockery in their voices unmasked. Even the oarsmen in the barge that bore him, sitting stiffly in the stern, grinned openly. A few men began to call out taunts but Hayden had Franks put a stop to that – out of respect for Worthing's position, not his person. Hayden had seen justice so seldom in his career in the king's Navy that he could hardly tear his eyes from the sight of Worthing borne across the open bay to Captain Pool's Majestic. It was unseemly to gloat so he displayed a mask of utter neutrality – or so he hoped – but secretly the thought of all the troubles that would soon befall the captain who had been maligning him from Gibraltar to Toulon caused him more than a little satisfaction. It made Hayden wonder if, on occasion, God did not intervene in the affairs of men to arrange a higher justice.
A few gulls circled over the retreating barge and the erect form of the eternally wronged clergyman. They called out – mockingly, Hayden thought. Worthing waved a dismissive hand in their direction but this only seemed to excite their malice.
Hayden could not help himself: he laughed.
The admiral's cabin aboard the Victory seemed a palace to Charles Saunders Hayden, who had, only a few weeks before, been marvelling at the scale of his own cabin aboard the Themis. The table, which stretched almost the width of the ship, put his newly acquired dining table to shame, not only by its scale but with its grandeur. Twenty-two men were seated without the least crowding, and the table, six feet in breadth, bore a collection of silver candelabra and plate that Hayden's meagre salary could not have purchased were every ha'penny saved over the course of several decades. White-painted deck-head and ceilings reflected the candlelight and the white linen and waistcoats of the officers seemed contrived to set off the blue sea of the gathered officers' best coats.
Hayden sat a little uncomfortably at the table, placed only one down from Lord Hood on the right, Lord Arthur immediately to his left. Many officers senior to him were seated farther down the table, and Hayden felt them looking at him wondering who he could possibly be that Hood would show him such favour. It was not a situation to which Hayden was accustomed.
To the admiral's left sat Sir Gilbert Elliot, whom Hayden had seen earlier that day, and to his right General Dundas. Directly across the table from Hayden sat Admiral Hotham, whom Hayden had never met but knew by reputation, although this could be said of many a man dining with the admiral that evening.
Hood, as his appointment of Worthing to Pool's ship had indicated, had a wicked sense of humour though at the same time was very droll, never laughing at his own jests, so that the more junior captains, or those who were unfamiliar with this characteristic, did not know whether to laugh or keep silent.
'Admiral Hotham,' Hood said, after the dinner had been properly launched with appropriate toasts. 'Does this young officer seated opposite you not have a familiar cast?'
Hotham gazed at Hayden for a few seconds. 'I dare say he does, Lord Hood. I knew just such a man, these many years ago. A promising young officer whose career was too soon ended; let us hope the apple has not fallen too far from the trunk.'
'Did you know my father, Admiral Hotham?' Hayden asked.
Hotham, whose manner was both stern and formal, denied this appearance each time he opened his mouth, for he was entirely amiable and pleasant in all his discourse. He was also known to be the cautious second-in-command to Lord Hood, whose recent taking of Toulon was typical of his lordship's boldness.
'Indeed I did, Captain Hayden. I was a newly passed lieutenant when he entered the midshipmen's berth aboard the old St George. I knew him all his life and esteemed him greatly. But you must often hear such things said.'
'Not at all, sir. I had begun to think that men who served with my father had all retired the service so infrequently have I encountered them.'
Hotham laughed. 'There are yet a few of us who have not been cast upon the beach.' He glanced Hood's way – almost a wink. Turning his attention back to Hayden he continued. 'Lord Hood tells me that your dear mother has removed to Boston… What has taken her so far away, pray?'
'She remarried, sir – a prominent Boston ship owner.' Hayden was not surprised that every man familiar with his father remembered his mother – she had been known within the service for her considerable charm.
'Do remember me to her when next you meet. I wish her all the happiness in the world, for when your poor father was lost she was utterly disconsolate, I will tell you. If she had not had a fine young boy to raise I fear she might have faded away from sorrow.' Hotham tried to smile at Hayden but did not quite succeed. 'But here you are, looking much like both your dear parents, which warms my heart and makes me think that your father did not pass from this world entirely.' He fell silent at that moment, almost sorrowful.
A slight man in the uniform of a captain caught Hayden's eye at that moment. He reminded Hayden a little of Landry with his small chin and sloping forehead – not a handsome man at all – but there was such animation in this face that Hayden could not help but smile in return.
'Was it you, Captain Hayden, who escaped Toulon so recently?' the man enquired.
'It was, yes, though I have heard some others were not so fortunate.'
'Yes, some transports slipped in there and were taken. Bad luck. Handsomely done on your part, though.' He raised a wine glass in Hayden's direction and they toasted. 'You must have a steady crew to have managed so well.'
'Yes, they acquitted themselves nobly, I must say. Not a man among them shirked or shied.' Hayden was so used to hearing his crew maligned – Hart's crew maligned – that he felt an unusual gratitude towards this man.
'I am sorry, sir,' Hayden said, 'but we have not been introduced…'
'Nelson. Horatio.'
'Of the Agamemnon?'
Nelson nodded. 'And who is this young middy who has fallen in among all these terrible captains and admirals?'
'Lord Arthur Wickham, Captain, though acting third lieutenant at this moment.'
'A great pleasure, Acting Lieutenant Lord Arthur Wickham.'
'It is an honour, sir,' Wickham replied quickly, clearly impressed with this young officer. 'I have heard much about you, Captain Nelson.'
Nelson glanced at Hayden, a little smile playing about his mouth. 'Never believe all the stories you hear in the Navy, Lieutenant. We are all terrible liars when it comes to our own accomplishments.'
Hood broke into the conversation then. 'Captain Nelson, am I to understand that you are calling all the officers at my table "liars"?'
'Oh, no one at this table, Lord Hood. It is quite well known that we are the most modest gentlemen in the Navy, never writing even in our private journals of our exploits. No, sir, advancing our own causes never enters our thoughts. Why, have you even heard me mention my recent success off Sardinia?'
'Not above a dozen times,' Hood replied, this exchange causing much laughter among those near enough to hear.
'You see, Lord Arthur,' Nelson said, 'it is unseemly to bring your accomplishments to the attention of your superiors more than a dozen times. Do not forget that and your future in the service will be assured.'
'I shall remember your advice, always,' Wickham answered. 'All the details of our recent escape from Toulon, I shall keep to myself, though my own part in the affair was quite worthy of a knighthood – or so everyone present claimed.'
This charmed Nelson, and Wickham was never addressed by anyone for the rest of the evening by anything but 'Sir Arthur', which pleased and embarrassed him at the same time.
It was a convivial affair, given that the gathered company had so recently been driven from Toulon. There were, at table, a few officers who did not seem to partake of the joy: General Dundas had only the most stilted conversation with anyone, especially, it seemed, their host. And to Hayden's satisfaction, Captain Pool, seated far down the table, could not help but glance Hayden's way with both envy and ill-disguised indignation.
The conversation, however, was not all pleasantries, as much was said about the recent evacuation of Toulon, and the survival of the greater part of the French fleet – a fact which both distressed and chagrined everyone present.
'If I had known the Dons would betray us, I would have fired a dozen more ships,' a handsome young officer proclaimed. 'Without the least doubt, the Spanish will make peace with the Jacobins any day, and reveal their true colours.'
Hayden could not help but notice Nelson's reaction to this, how he caught the eye of another captain and both appeared to be controlling their anger or perhaps disdain.
'Sydney Smith,' Hotham whispered, seeing the question on Hayden's face.
Smith was another Hayden knew by reputation. Most recently, he had been naval adviser to the king of Sweden, for which the king had granted him a knighthood and he now went about insisting that everyone address him as 'Sir Sydney'. Although Sir Sydney was well known for his courage and enterprise, he was boastful and ever a promoter of his own career even at the expense of others, by which means he had made many enemies. Perhaps for this reason, his real accomplishments were ever denigrated by some, who deemed them nothing but puffery. It was also known that Smith was never shy when it came to arrogating powers unto himself that his superiors had not conferred. The term 'loose cannon' could not be misapplied to the vainglorious Sir Sydney.
The army officers, of whom several were present, including Lieutenant-Colonel Moore, whom Hayden had met earlier, and Lieutenant-Major Kochler, who also was to accompany them to Corsica, fell sullenly silent when the subject of Toulon and its loss were discussed. Hayden had heard from various sources that the senior British general had advised Lord Hood against taking Toulon as he had never believed it could be held. The naval officers, meanwhile, believed it could have been held had the officers commanding the army committed themselves fully to the project. It was no secret that Hood thought General Dundas timid and indecisive – two traits of which no trace could be found in the character of Lord Hood.
Hayden wondered if Moore would ever be coaxed into expressing his own opinion on the matter, for Hayden, though predisposed to believing the naval point of view, had long thought that Toulon could not stand against a determined siege by a large, well-equipped force.
Sir Gilbert Elliot was a man of parts, Hayden quickly realized, fluent in several languages, articulate, thoughtful – a bit of an idealist, perhaps, but Hayden felt there was a place for idealists in this world. They set the goals for which others then strived.
'Have you visited Corsica previously?' Sir Gilbert enquired of Hayden.
'I have not, sir, but I am anxious to see it for myself. The people have chased their freedom for so long that, I confess, the thought that we might aid them is gratifying.'
Sir Gilbert smiled his approval, nodding vigorously. 'Yes, and again yes. It is my hope that we can provide a political structure, not unlike our own, but with certain modifications that will better suit the Corsican character. And Lord knows our own system is not perfect. Perhaps we might step a little nearer perfection in this case.'
Lord Hood listened to this exchange, his look thoughtful, perhaps amused. 'If the good Lord had meant us to mount the sky, Sir Gilbert, he would have given us wings. He did not. We are destined to remain on the ground and muddle through as best we are able. Perfection is not in the nature of our species. What serves us best today will not do at all tomorrow, yet we will attempt to continue as we were, not casting aside the things which once served but no longer. Perhaps, if we are wise, we might modify yesterday's ideas or institutions so that they half function. Or we will cast them aside and adopt something that is no better or perhaps worse. No, perfection, if we even attain it for a moment, will be entirely a matter of good fortune, not good planning, of that I am quite sure. It is my belief that in life, as in military matters, things change more quickly than we comprehend and our knowledge of events is ever inadequate. We make our decisions based on rumours and guesses. Sometimes they turn out well – sometimes ill.'
'Well, I will continue to hold out hope that in the matter of Corsica they will turn out well.'
'And so will I!' Lord Hood seemed surprised that he might be expected to think otherwise. 'How could I not? The events of this world are predicated upon forces that we only vaguely perceive. Toulon might have been the core of a rebellion that encompassed all the southern part of France – which would have been much to our advantage. It was not impossible, even if somewhat improbable. But this did not come to pass. We may never fully understand why. Corsica may one day be a prosperous and peaceful province of the British Empire or it might make common cause with our enemies despite our best intentions.' He threw up his hands. 'All things are possible.'
'I shall endeavour, with all my powers, to make Corsica a land both prosperous and peaceful and, it is my hope, kindly disposed towards our own people.'
'As long as we do not try to make the Corsicans into little Englishmen,' John Moore offered. 'It is a mistake we British have made too often.'
Sir Gilbert nodded apparent agreement, though he said nothing. 'Captain Hayden, was it you I heard speaking today with Madam Bourdage?'
Hayden admitted it had been.
'How is it that you have such perfect command of the language, for, I confess, I have not heard an Englishman speak it so well.'
'My mother is French, Sir Gilbert. I spent some time in that country when I was a boy.'
'It must be very difficult for you, Captain, at war against your mother's people.'
'I am an Englishman, Sir Gilbert,' Hayden answered, aware that others were listening. 'I know where my loyalties lie.'
Hayden could not help but notice a few of the officers within hearing glancing one to the other, as though some unspoken language was shared among them, but unknown to outsiders, like Hayden.
When dinner ended, and the gathered officers and guests stood to leave, Hayden found John Moore on a course designed to intercept him. In tow, he had another army officer, rather a contrast to Moore, who was tall and fair, for this man was dark and somewhat replete, though not much shorter than either Hayden or Moore.
'There you are, Captain,' Moore addressed him. 'May I introduce Major Kochler. Captain Charles Hayden.'
Kochler returned Hayden's bow with a slight, impatient nod. 'Your servant.'
'As we are all off to Corsica on the morrow I thought you should meet.'
Kochler acknowledged this with what appeared to be more of a grimace than a smile, apparently more interested in the jostling officers as they exited the cabin.
'I am much looking forward to arranging our efforts in whatever way will best serve to expel the French,' Hayden responded, trying to save the moment and not embarrass Moore, who clearly had not expected such discourtesy from his fellow officer.
When Kochler did not respond to this, Moore said, 'And I am sure we are all of like sentiment, Captain.' He glanced at Kochler, whose attention seemed to have been drawn elsewhere. 'Until tomorrow.'
Hayden was swept out with the tide of officers, who ebbed onto the gundeck and then up the ladder into the autumnal winter night. Navy men flowed into pools of blue, chatting amiably, while the army officers all drained redly down into a corner of the forecastle, where their muted conversation could not be distinguished.
By order of the officers' seniority, boats arrived to bear away the admirals and various captains. As a mere master and commander, Hayden's own barge would be very near the last, so he found a small section of rail to lean against and stood drinking in the warmish winter night.
'Ah, Captain Hayden…' Sir Gilbert appeared in the lamplight. 'I thought you might have slipped away. May I have a word?'
'Certainly, sir.'
Elliot motioned Hayden to accompany him, and, finding a small, unpopulated area of deck, began speaking so softly Hayden had difficulty hearing.
'You had, this day, the good fortune to meet Madam Bourdage and her daughter…'
'I had only just made their acquaintance.'
'It occurred to me, this evening, that you must have family in France… on your mother's side?'
Uncertain as to the direction this conversation might take, Hayden agreed rather reluctantly.
Sir Gilbert pressed on. 'If you were to discover some members of your family among the Toulon refugees, it might be possible to send them on to England, and safety. I do not know if Bourdage is a name found in your family tree… but then no one else would know, either. Certainly I would never question such a claim.'
'I am quite certain, Sir Gilbert,' Hayden answered, as pleasantly as he was able, 'that Bourdage is not a name to be found in my family, at any remove.'
'Ah.' Sir Gilbert looked rather more surprised than offended at Hayden's response. 'If, upon further reflection, you find that you have made a mistake in this – no one's memory is perfect – do not hesitate to inform me. I can hardly imagine the joy of your relations to find themselves sent safely on to England. Were someone to perform such a service for me, I know I should feel uncommon gratitude.'
When Hayden was finally in his boat and being rowed across Hyères Bay towards the Themis, the single event of the evening that remained in his thoughts was his private conversation with Sir Gilbert Elliot. Was Madame Bourdage – or her beautiful daughter – Sir Gilbert's mistress? Or was there some reason, other than the obvious, for him approaching Hayden? Hayden also wondered if he were not putting too fine a point upon his honour in this matter. If it were within his power to rescue two of the refugees cast adrift by the British failure at Toulon should he not take the opportunity to do so? The thought that these lovely women might eventually be discovered by a French army and put to death was rather unsettling.
Upon reaching the Themis, Hayden immediately retired to his cabin, doffing his coat and neckcloth. He had indulged rather too freely at dinner, and his miserable stomach was not about to allow him to lie prone. It was also true that wine had muddled his brain more than a little, so he sat listlessly on the bench beneath the gallery windows, propped uncomfortably on pillows and folded blankets.
The near silence of the ship was interrupted by a sentry challenging a boat that had ventured too near, and then footsteps came swiftly down the ladder. A hushed conversation outside his cabin was followed by the most discreet knock upon his door.
Thinking that he could never be left in peace, Hayden crossed the cabin and pulled open the door. Two apprehensive marines stood beyond, one his sentry.
'My apologies, sir, but I could see there was yet a light. Two women are asking to speak with you, if you please, Captain… a Madam Bourdage, and her daughter, I believe.'
'At this hour?' Hayden replied. 'Well, I suppose you should bring them to me.'
'Aye, sir.'
A moment later the two women were shown into his cabin.
'A thousand apologies, Captain Hayden,' Madame Bourdage began. 'I was informed that you might sail at first light.' She appeared so utterly distressed, her eyes rimmed in red as though she had wept only recently.
Hayden directed them both to chairs, but Madame Bourdage could not sit still, such was her agitation, and she rose immediately, taking Hayden by the arm and then clutching his hand.
'We are,' she stated in French, 'as you see us, utterly desolate and dependent for our very survival upon the goodwill of others – men who have counted our people among their enemies for many years. I know that Sir Gilbert has spoken with you, and that he has asked a great favour. In truth, he has asked you to compromise your honour and say something that is not true… that will see us to safety. I should never ask this of you for myself…' She gestured, almost tenderly towards her daughter, and her eyes glistened. 'But for my daughter I would beg. Please, monsieur, if you could find it within your heart to aid us… We should be in your debt, always. I have a necklace – not a fortune, certainly, but enough to pay our passage to England. In London we have friends… who escaped there at the beginning of the troubles. They will not turn away from us, I am certain.'
Hayden glanced towards her daughter, who gazed at him with such a mixture of hope and dread upon her beautiful face that Hayden felt utterly bewildered.
A moment he vacillated, first this way then that, the two women appearing almost to hold their breath. 'I shall inform Sir Gilbert that you are a cousin of my mother.'
Immediately Madame Bourdage released such a flood of tears and began kissing his hands. 'Oh, monsieur, monsieur,' she repeated over and over. Her daughter rose up from her chair, and grasping his right hand, began doing the same.
'Merci, monsieur,' she said with feeling. 'Merci beaucoup.'
When the two women had mastered themselves, Hayden asked, 'The little girl… the one who collided with me on the deck. Who was she?'
'The daughter of Monsieur and Madame Mercier,' Héloise informed him in French.
'Have they money to take them to England?'
Mother and daughter looked at each other, and shrugged.
'I cannot say for certain,' replied Madame Bourdage, 'but it is possible.'
'I will inform Sir Gilbert that they are also related to my mother… and to you, if you don't object.'
'No, of course not.' She realized, at last, what Hayden intended. 'We will see them to England, Captain Hayden – somehow. Though they are five altogether. We will find a way.'
Hayden escorted the women onto the deck and to the rail, where a bosun's chair had been rigged to return them to their boat. All the while 'thank you, thank you' rained down upon him, and he saw them off with a feeling that he had never told a lie in so good a cause. Afterwards, Hayden went to his cot with a warm glow in his heart and feeling rather proud of himself, which he realized he did not feel nearly often enough in this wretched, soul-destroying war.
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 14
|
From the sea, Corsica appeared fair and green, the crests of her mountains dusted with snow that reflected coral and gold from the dawn sky. The frigate Lowestoff e carried a fair wind towards the island's northern shore, and Hayden stood alone at the rail, a strange emptiness in his stomach. Were it a time of peace, this island would look idyllic, even romantic, against the morning sky, but today it appeared enigmatic at best; menacing if one dwelt upon the morbid possibilities.
'So what think you, Captain Hayden?'
It was Moore appearing at his side, crimson jacket not out of place against the morning sky.
'I was not expecting snow.'
'I am told it is only on the tallest peaks of the inner mountains. It should be no concern to us.'
'That is some relief.'
'You have been pondering the charts and maps?'
Hayden nodded. 'As we need an anchorage to land your troops, it would appear that San Fiorenzo will answer in that regard. The western shore of the bay has been invested with cannon and is fortified, but once the French have been driven thence, I believe the citadel on the eastern shore will capitulate, after a hasty display of resistance.'
Moore nodded his agreement. 'Yes, Bastia and Calvi shall prove the more difficult shells to break, but San Fiorenzo will take a co-ordinated effort of both army and Navy.' He hesitated a second. 'Do you think our superiors will be able to make common cause or will this matter go the way of many another where both our services have been engaged?'
The lieutenant-colonel had not attempted to affix blame for such difficulties, which Hayden approved.
'At least let us hope that we might make common cause, Moore, without bickering and thwarting one another's efforts,' Hayden offered.
'Yes, by all means. Let us attempt that, Hayden.' Moore turned to face him. 'It is of the greatest consequence not to make enemies of one's friends.'
'Then let us shake hands on it,' Hayden suggested, and they did, most heartily.
'Did I say that my brother, Graham, is a Navy man?' Moore asked.
'You did not. Graham Moore?'
Moore regarded him with a little surprise. 'Yes.'
'I am quite certain we met – in Halifax, some years ago. I believe he told me he had a brother named Jack.'
Moore laughed. 'So I am known in my family. The service is both great and small, is it not?'
'So it is.' This explained a great deal – a brother in the Navy. Hayden felt his small distrust of the man evaporate, as though they were almost brothers themselves.
The captain's barge rocked over the small swell, the bottom visible through glassy clear waters. Rozza island, actually a peninsula, lay between the French positions at Calvi and the Bay of San Fiorenzo. It was understood to be under the control of General Paoli. Both Moore and Hayden hoped this would prove true for it seemed possible that the old general was misrepresenting how much of the island he controlled so that driving out the French would appear to be an easier task than it actually was. Certainly, without British aid in the form of guns, powder and soldiers he would never manage it.
The shore was a patchwork of eroded cliffs, extending rocky shoals and sandy beaches. These beaches, and the mouths of the occasional small stream, would make ideal landing places but some of the low shoals of monolithic stone would do if the sea were calm. Tides in the Mediterranean were so small as to be unmeasurable, which simplified matters considerably. How many times had he heard of armies asking to be put ashore at some propitious time only to have their plans thwarted by inconsiderate tides?
The boat rounded a rocky point, and a small bay opened before them – their chosen landing spot. Hayden could see a crowd gathered on the shore, but the distance hid all details.
'Wickham, have you your glass to hand?'
'I am sorry, sir,' the boy replied, 'but I have it packed away.'
Moore, Sir Gilbert, Major Kochler, Hayden and Wickham took passage in the barge, and though Hayden was certain everyone, including Sir Gilbert, possessed a glass, no one had thought to leave one accessible – a situation almost more amusing than embarrassing.
'And we call ourselves professional soldiers,' Moore said, and shook his head, smiling.
Oars dipped into the limpid sea, then emerged to make dripping arcs through the air, little rings forming between the larger swirls. Between each oar-driven surge, the barge slipped forward gently, surged, then slipped.
Wickham rose suddenly to gaze intently at the shore. 'Sir… these men appear to be dressed in the French national uniform.'
'Are you certain?' Hayden stood, as well, but his eye was not so keen as Wickham's and no one else could tell, either.
Kochler tossed some baggage aside and, in a moment, dug out his glass, which he fixed on the shore. Hayden guessed he was not a man given to harsh language but a mild blasphemy escaped him and the glass was passed to Moore and then to Sir Gilbert, who both confirmed that Wickham had been right. Before Sir Gilbert could offer it to Hayden, Kochler requested its return.
Men, similarly dressed, began to appear along the cliff to their right, much to everyone's distress, for the these men bore muskets.
'But we were to meet Paoli's representative here…' Sir Gilbert protested with great indignation.
'There is nothing for it now,' Moore replied with remarkable equanimity. 'If we turn about they will have us.'
As retreat was impossible, there were no dissenting opinions.
Wickham looked anxiously at Hayden, as though his French heritage might allow him to intercede on their behalf.
'What will they do with us, do you think?' Wickham asked quietly.
'The French are not a savage people. They will not mistreat us.' And though Hayden believed that this was quite likely true, the thought of being held prisoner for months, or even years, filled him with a barely containable frustration. That he should finally have found a superior officer who seemed prepared to believe in his abilities and then that he should almost immediately land in a French prison was unbearable.
The Englishmen remained silent as the boat approached the beach. Hayden watched the party ashore for any evidence of their intentions but they showed signs of neither hostility nor welcome. Their utter neutrality was most madding. Moore glanced his way, no doubt thinking similar thoughts.
As they neared the beach, Hayden clambered forward through the oarsmen to the bow, hoping this act would not be interpreted as a threat, but the men gathered ashore did not seem to care one way or the other. As the boat ran up on the sand, and Hayden stepped over the gunnel and into ankle-deep water, one of the men raised his musket, fired it at the sky and called out, 'Viva Paoli, la patria e la nazione inglese!' Around him others echoed his act and words, filling the still air with acrid smoke.
Hayden turned back to Sir Gilbert and the others, who almost to a man breathed a great sigh of relief. Sir Gilbert released his hold on the gunnel and surreptitiously flexed cramped fingers.
The Corsicans came forward, then, and aided the sailors in dragging the boat up the beach a few feet so that Sir Gilbert and the others could disembark on dry sand. Suddenly, the previously dour Corsicans were all animation, smiling and speaking at once. Muskets were fired in the air and decidedly British 'Huzza!'s shouted. Immediately the Englishmen's baggage was carried ashore and taken up by the inhabitants, who would allow no one to aid them.
Il Signor Leonati, the Englishmen were informed, was already on his way to meet them.
'Who is Signor Leonati?' Hayden enquired, pleased to find that his Italian was readily understood and that he comprehended most of what was said to him, if he could but convince the speaker to slow down a little.
'The nephew of the general,' he was informed. 'General Paoli.'
'And where is the general?' Sir Gilbert asked, his command of Italian equal to that of his French.
'Not far,' he was told. 'Not so very far.'
Although General Paoli was 'not so very far' – and in English miles this was true – it took the remainder of the day, the day next, and half of a third day to reach him. The ruggedness of the countryside was unrelenting, and Hayden had the impression of a dusty, dry island, sparsely covered with hardy scrub and stunted trees, relieved only by deep valleys where rivulets greened the parched landscape in snaking narrow bands. Hayden wondered if there were a place on the entire island where rock did not thrust up through the ground. But when he asked this of Sir Gilbert he was surprised by the answer.
'There lies, on the eastern shore, a coastal plain that is very fertile. And high in the mountains you will find areas where the ground is moist and covered by ferns beneath very tall, straight pines. It is a more varied landscape then our small view of it reveals.'
As they travelled, snakes darted out of the bush and, just as quickly, slithered off, but the local men assured the visitors that these serpents were not venomous; indeed, they hardly paid them any heed. Even more numerous than snakes were salamanders, not the length of a man's hand, which sunned themselves on sheltered, rocky shelves – soon to be victims of the serpents, Hayden suspected.
At one point Wickham asked Hayden, 'Why are these people dressed as Frenchmen?' and Hayden, in turn, asked this of the nearest Corsican.
'Ah,' Hayden responded when the explanation was made. 'Most of the people wore the French national uniform while the French were in control of the island, and out of economy continue to do so, though it is not the best economy, I am informed, for several men have been mistaken for Frenchmen and shot during skirmishes.'
'Are the French yet abroad?' Wickham wondered. 'I was informed that they were shut up in their few strongholds along the coast.'
Moore, overhearing this, answered the midshipman quietly in English. 'So we have been told, Mr Wickham. Whether it is strictly true…' He shrugged.
Hayden did note that as they travelled, parties were constantly sent ahead and often reported back. Small companies occupied the heights nearby, and the visitors were led along paths that wound along the valley floors. Very infrequently did they find themselves in exposed positions, upon hillsides or ridge-tops, and when they did, the Corsicans hurried them along.
Hayden was concerned that the countryside might prove too difficult for Sir Gilbert Elliot, who appeared to be at least two decades older than the military men, but this worry was soon put away. Sir Gilbert's claim that he walked often and far was certainly true. Rather like John Moore, the diplomat's manner was very refined, his understanding great. As they walked he gave the plants their names, both Latinate and common, and plucked leaves here or there to examine and to show his companions.
'See! Juniperus oxycedrus.' He bruised a leaf with his fingers and insisted the others inhale the scent. 'And here is myrtle,' he observed, plucking a leaf to show them. 'The French tower on the bay of San Fiorenzo sits on Mortella point, which is to say, "Myrtle Point".'
If Sir Gilbert had a flaw to his impressive character it was that he felt his understanding was superior to that of other men, though this was carefully veiled behind excellent manners and a cultivated modesty.
On their third day on the island, the convent of Recollets, abandoned since the revolution, was reached shortly after midday. Walls, manned by armed Corsicans in numbers, loomed out of the trees, and the moment these men perceived the Englishmen and their escorts they all cheered most heartily. This was the largest building Hayden had yet seen on the island, old but in good repair despite falling into disuse a number of years earlier. Gladly, the visitors gave up their mules to eager boys, who, with their dark clear eyes, stared openly at the visitors. Hayden suspected they had never seen an Englishman.
Wine and various fruits were offered for refreshment but as they were all anxious to meet Paoli it was decided that they should demur on this offer and go immediately to an audience with the general.
They were led up stairs through the old convent and into a small cell where Paoli sat by a window, book tilted towards the light. Immediately they entered, he rose, with some difficulty, to greet them most cordially. His English was good but softly accented, his once-powerful frame becoming frail. In both his voice and manner, there was about him an air of delicate sorrow, as though he were in mourning. Sir Gilbert had told them that the general had lost a well-loved brother a year previously, but somehow Hayden did not think that was the cause of his sadness. Paoli had dedicated his life to achieving independence for Corsica and his people, yet despite all that he had done, this freedom seemed as distant as ever it had.
'Do you remember Lord Arthur Wickham?' Sir Gilbert asked the general.
As the old man seemed perplexed, Wickham spoke up. 'You once proposed to take me shooting in the mountains should I ever visit Corsica.'
Paoli laughed. 'I fear I have grown too old to keep my promise but I will certainly arrange for some other to fulfil my obligations in this matter.'
The visitors were offered chairs and they and a few of Paoli's followers crowded the small room, some leaning up against the plastered stone walls. A letter from Lord Hood was produced by Sir Gilbert and offered to the general, who appeared to regard it with suspicion or displeasure. The old man opened it with a small blade and read thoughtfully. For a moment he stared at the page, his face exhibiting mild consternation. With the page shivering faintly, he laid the letter on the small table that held his books and spectacles then turned his attention to Moore, Kochler and Hayden. Immediately he began to talk of the terrain and the kind of attack that he believed would succeed on the nearby fortifications.
At the first opportunity Moore interrupted him. 'I must tell you, General Paoli, that Major Kochler, Captain Hayden and I are under Sir Gilbert, who is the king's senior commissioner in the Mediterranean. Until you have had some previous conversation with Sir Gilbert we are unable to enter into a discussion of our mission.'
This did not please the general. 'I have grown tired of ministers and negotiations,' he declared, not hiding his disappointment and frustration. Asking first some people in the room to withdraw, he turned to Sir Gilbert. 'It pains me to find in this letter that Lord Hood remains inexplicit and diffident of me. In affairs of this nature I have found that it is always best to be open and candid.' Even as he said this his voice grew thick with emotion so that he spoke only with difficulty. 'Long ago I wrote to your king and his ministers; I have also repeatedly written to Lord Hood that I and my people wished to be free, either as subjects of Great Britain, which I know does not want slaves, or free under the protection of Great Britain, as the king and the country may hereafter think most convenient to adopt. Having said this I do not know what else I might say. Why, therefore, does his Lordship tease me with more negotiations? Has he not already injured me sufficiently with promises of succour which he has always withheld? If it is meant to include mes compatriotes in any arrangement which may hereafter be made with the Bourbons, I can have no hand in it. I shall retire. All I wish, is to see, before I die, my country settled and happy after struggles that have lasted three hundred years. Under the protection or government of the British nation, I believe my countrymen will enjoy a proper degree of liberty. I have told them so, and they have such confidence in me that they believe me and wish to make the experiment.'
No one had dared to interrupt the general as he spoke, even if some of his expressions with regard to Lord Hood were less than polite. Clearly he felt himself wronged, but Hayden guessed the general's desire for peace for his people was obviously so great that emotion made his words intemperate.
'My dear General,' Sir Gilbert began, 'I am sure that it was never the intention of Lord Hood to take even the smallest advantage of you or your people. I have been sent, and it is to this end that Lord Hood has written, to discover if there is any method, by assembling the states or otherwise, of receiving assent from the people for what you have so eloquently stated is their wish.'
This only seemed to aggrieve Paoli more. 'How can this be done while the French are still present? They must first be expelled; then it is my intention to convene the states. Until such time I know what is their wish and can speak for them.'
This seemed a less than perfect solution to Sir Gilbert, or so Hayden thought from the sour look upon his face, but he threw up his hands. 'Then we must first expel the French,' he declared.
At that moment, dinner was announced, and they made their way down to the refectory. The fare was simple but flavourful, as though the food that grew upon the parched island had its essence concentrated, and was not diluted by an overabundance of moisture.
The general begged their indulgence and retired soon after the meal's end, saying that his ageing body must have its sleep. Convent cells were prepared for the visitors and they found themselves with the luxury of separate beds, even if there were two to a room.
Moore sat upon his cot, face warmly illuminated by candlelight. 'The general appears much broken since last I saw him,' the soldier observed. 'Leonati told me that he had an attack upon his chest but a few months ago, and that learning what has transpired in Paris has reduced his health even more. That, as much as anything, led him to turn against the French. Let us hope he lives to see his people free.'
Hayden hung his jacket upon a wooden peg in the wall. 'Yes, I should like to see that as well. It appears to me that the Corsicans have a strong case for wanting their independence but have not the strength militarily of achieving, or at least maintaining, it in the long term.' Hayden paused, the earlier conversation repeating itself in his mind. 'I did not think Sir Gilbert and Paoli were in sentiment with one another…'
This appeared to distress Moore a little. 'I thought the same. Let us hope they soon pass beyond the difficulties of their first meeting. Paoli clearly felt that Lord Hood had done him some injury but it is the responsibility of Lord Hood to first consider the interests of Britain – not Corsica, however worthy her people might be.' He folded his jacket and laid it on a chair and then began to pace the three steps allowed by the small room. 'I hope tomorrow we might begin to reconnoitre the French positions. I am not well-suited to diplomatic missions.'
'Nor am I,' Hayden agreed. 'I should rather be on blockade, and that is saying a great deal.'
The conversation appeared to be at an end, prompting Hayden to wish the soldier a good night of rest, when Moore spoke again.
'I do apologize, Captain, for the lieutenant-major's incivility… It is an attitude much ingrained in our service – and regrettably so. Kochler is, I believe, an excellent officer, and I do hope that, in not too short a time, he will have his opinions of the Navy altered by mere observation of your service's zeal and capabilities.'
'There is no cause for you to apologize,' Hayden replied. 'I am well aware that the same attitude perseveres in the Navy. Jealousy and mislike of your service are ever two of the sentiments that bind sailors together. A regrettable state of affairs, I believe.'
Moore had stretched out on his bed, and laid, staring up at the ceiling, thick hands locked behind his head. 'I do despair, at times, for our race. It is as though we are ever trapped in adolescence and never reach our majority. How do we make a world when we are forever children?'
Hayden was surprised to find Moore sounding positively melancholy – perhaps it happened only at day's end when fatigue overcame him.
'I do know what you mean,' Hayden said. 'Perhaps some of us never even reach our lieutenant-majority.'
'Oh, Hayden, you have no shame.' The colonel laughed. 'Even for a sailor.'
Hayden woke early and slipped out of his room before dawn. Descending the stairs, Hayden intended to walk out into the soft, morning air. Instead, he found General Paoli, sitting at a candlelit table, eating bread and cheese and drinking warmed milk.
'It is, as you English would say, salubrious' – a crease appeared between heavy brows – 'from the Latin salubris. It is one of the great advantages of the English language – adapting words from every tongue without distinction.' He smiled, perhaps a bit embarrassed. 'My stomach is not so hardy as once it was,' he explained, and invited Hayden to join him. A jam made of figs was being applied to bits of cheese with a spoon, and at the general's behest Hayden soon found himself doing the same.
'What ship is it you command, Captain?' Paoli asked.
Hayden was quite certain that the general had spent enough time in English society to realize his visitor did not wear a post captain's uniform.
'I hold the rank of master and commander, only,' Hayden answered, 'and am in temporary command of a thirty-two-gun frigate – the Themis.'
Paoli nodded. 'The goddess of order,' he observed. 'What will become of you when the Admiralty appoints a captain to take your place?'
'Lord Hood was to do that when I arrived here from England but he has chosen to leave me in place instead.'
Hayden thought the old man's face darkened a little at the mention of the admiral, but he did not show it in his voice.
'Perhaps his lordship will decide to confirm your command of this ship. Would the Admiralty not support his decision?'
It was more than Hayden would allow himself to hope. As commander in chief, Lord Hood could appoint him post captain and grant him command of the Themis, or any other vessel for that matter. In such situations, the Admiralty almost invariably confirmed the admiral's choice – though Hayden knew of exceptions.
'Perhaps they would, but I am no favourite of the Admiralty, I must tell you.'
'Ah. I have been told that your recent service has been exemplary.'
Apparently the general had been uncovering information about the men Hood had sent to treat with him. Hayden did not think Paoli had survived in politics to this age by being obtuse.
'I do my duty to the best of my ability.' Uncomfortable speaking of his own accomplishments, Hayden chose to change the subject. 'How strong a resistance do you believe the French will mount, General?'
The old man spread a little jam on his cheese with unsteady hands. 'One can say many things about the French,' Paoli observed softly, 'but one cannot call them cowards. Even so, no man likes to give his life in a cause that is lost. Corsica is lost to the Jacobins unless they can carry an army here, and presently your navy prevents that. French courage will not fail, but I believe their commitment will falter a little more as one fortification after another falls. It is akin to pushing a cart lodged in the mud; difficult at first but once it begins to roll it grows easier. I am content to see it take as long as it takes. It is one of the great benefits of age; life teaches many lessons but patience it reminds us of most often. Almost all of my life I have struggled to see my people and my homeland free from foreign domination; I can wait a little longer. Twenty years the French have been here. Before that we enjoyed ten years of freedom, of self-government. The Americans are so proud of their republic and their democracy, as though they invented these things. No, we, a simple people on a small island, achieved these things before them. All we had to do was spend three hundred years driving out the Genoese! But in sixty-nine the Bourbons sent their armies and we could not stand against them – they were too great – and our experiment in self-government was brought to an end. That is why we need to ally ourselves with England. Corsica is not strong enough to stand alone. That is our tragedy. But it is the other great lesson of age – compromise. We are not great enough to stand alone, so we must ally ourselves with the country most likely to respect our independence – your nation, Captain, where I spent twenty long years in exile.'
Hayden did not know quite what to say, and so stammered, 'Perhaps your long-held dream of independence can yet be achieved, guaranteed by Britain.'
Paoli shrugged. 'Before I die, I should like very much to see the fate of my country settled. Let the next generation of Corsicans spend their days pursuing the common pleasures of this life – love, children, the scent of maquis on the morning air – instead of constantly being called out to fight one enemy after another. For so many years we have struggled that now we ask little of life. We do not want wealth or empire or military glory. Just peace and to decide our own affairs… and some more fig jam,' he said, scraping the last dollop out of the jar. But then he paused and regarded Hayden, his manner sombre. 'That is enough for my people.'
'It should be enough for anyone, I believe,' Hayden responded, touched by the sincerity of this man.
Suppressing a charming smile, Paoli touched Hayden's arm with a large hand – a stonemason's hand. 'Then let me find us more of this jam, Captain.' He rose stiffly and went to a cupboard, moving things about inside and muttering. 'Ah!' he said, snatching up a jar with not a little triumph. Returning to the table, he sat heavily in his chair, as though at the last instant his legs betrayed him. 'Do you have children, Captain?'
'I do not, General, though I hope to one day.'
'To most I say, "do not hurry" but to military men I say, "now is not too soon". It is a life of great uncertainty, the one we have chosen. I myself have been most fortunate to have survived so long when many of my comrades have given their lives for our cause. A priest once told me that God preserved my life so that I might bring independence to my people. I do not believe that God is so concerned with the fate of Paoli, or that another man could not do what I have done or might yet do. No, Paoli is not so important that God has taken notice.' He lifted his cup, but before it reached his mouth he paused, meeting Hayden's eye. 'Is this not pleasant to be alone without a crowd always pressing? I rise so early for this and this alone – a few moments of peace.'
'I hope I have not interrupted your… solitude, General.'
'Not at all. It is a pleasure to speak English with an Englishman. I will tell you in the greatest privacy, that there are times when I wish my own people were as practical and – what is the word? – pragmatic as yours. But no: Corsicans are passionate and impulsive people, very quick to take offence and to anger. That is our curse, Captain. But it is a greater curse to be without passion, I think.'
Hayden was not allowed to respond to this observation, which he thought might have been levelled at his father's people, for the other visitors came downstairs then, and followers of Paoli appeared bearing food. Clearly they had been staying quietly away from the general for some time. Breakfast quickly became a social event, attended by many of the general's followers. Hayden found himself feeling a little sorry for the old Corsican, who bore the burden of his people's aspirations upon ageing shoulders.
Perhaps Sir Gilbert had sensed the growing impatience of his young companions, for once he had them alone he proposed an alteration in plans. 'I think it best,' he told them, 'that I spend today in private conversation with General Paoli. I have asked and received permission for you, Colonel, Major Kochler and Captain Hayden to visit the area of San Fiorenzo where the French hold several prominent positions. One of the general's people will accompany you.'
'Am I not to go with them?' Wickham asked, disappointment clear in his voice.
'You, young Lord Arthur, are to be taken shooting this day; the general arranged it himself.'
'Shooting!' Wickham responded in dismay.
'Exactly so,' Sir Gilbert said, and then very quietly, 'but do not let the Corsicans hear you respond in this manner. The general is showing you great favour and that means everything to his people.'
'I am not ungrateful,' Wickham answered, chastised, 'I only hoped to assist the other officers in any way I could.'
'Today you may assist them by going shooting. And you may assist me later by returning for supper and telling the tale of your day to the general, who believes you are to be a great admiral one day.'
The military men did not linger over their preparations but quickly gathered together what effects they might need and went down to the courtyard. Here they were met by the young man whom Paoli had appointed as their guide and interpreter, Pozzo di Borgo.
Di Borgo had, at the commencement of the revolution, been elected a deputy to the National Assembly in Paris, there to represent his people, and he had much to say of what he had witnessed during his time in that city – which had been the first occasion of his life to leave the island.
As they rode out, di Borgo told them of all the recent events that had led the general to break with republican France. 'It was distressing enough that Jacobins ruled in Paris, but the Committee of Public Safety… that was a different madness. What dismayed the general most was that Corsicans, primarily Saliceti, had conspired against him, blackening his name before the Convention and accusing him of treason. The general was then invited to the mainland to 'discuss' the situation in Corsica, but he had no delusions about the Convention's intent. Very wisely, he did not refuse the Jacobins' invitation but simply wrote to say that his health would not allow such a journey. The situation on our island grew ever more fractious, several factions vying for control, all to their own ends. Only General Paoli put Corsica first. The break with Jacobin France was inevitable.'
As they rode and talked, Hayden noticed that their escort occupied the peaks ahead and abreast, companies constantly being sent out before, leapfrogging one another, to maintain their vigil.
'You have known the general a long time?' Moore asked.
'Not so long as I would like. Even in exile he was an inspiration to our people. It is sad to see him finally return, so broken in health.' He shook his head. 'But now, perhaps, with the aid of your nation, he can see our people free and retire from active life, as I know he wishes to do. All of our people wish him happiness and rest. No one deserves it more.'
Hayden thought di Borgo was rather too ardent – perhaps eager – in his desire to see the general retiring, despite his tone of respectful sorrow. It was not something new to find young lions standing by, impatiently, when the old lion showed signs of failing. Paoli had been the leader of the Corsicans' revolt for so long that younger men of ability had, for decades, been thwarted in their ambitions.
'We learned,' observed Moore, 'after the evacuation of Toulon, that the general there had been a Corsican.'
'Bonaparte.' Di Borgo said this as though he spat out dirt.
'You've heard of him?'
'He is well known among my people. Once he was a lieutenant-colonel of the Corsican Volunteers but his intemperance and arrogance led to a near insurrection in Ajaccio. Bonaparte's father had once been General Paoli's secretary; the general introduced him to the woman who became his wife – Letitia. But the brothers Bonaparte… they will intrigue as long as they can draw breath. It is no secret that the general thought Napoleon Bonaparte unprincipled and ambitious. General Paoli has always put Corsica before any aspirations of his own and he looks for men of like character. Thwarted here, Bonaparte offered his services to the Jacobins. He is now seen as a man the French might send to invade our nation and imprison the general. I am ashamed to say that the Bonapartes have their supporters here, but people who love Corsica know them for what they are – a family of opportunists.'
They had ridden perhaps three leagues when musket fire began on the hill above them. Di Borgo tried to turn his charges round and herd them back, but as soon as cries of 'The French! The French!' and 'Jacobins!' were heard, both Moore and Kochler dropped from their mules, and, muskets in hand, began toiling directly up the rugged slope. Hayden took up his own firearm and went in pursuit. The hill was a litter of large, broken blocks of stone and low bramble, making progress difficult. As the army men were not commonly confined to ships for months on end, they were not so easily winded and quickly put distance between themselves and Hayden. By the time he reached the crest, Hayden worried the skirmish would be over, but in fact, the firing grew hotter the higher he climbed.
As he mounted the hilltop, Hayden found the army men crouched behind a table-sized stone, both reloading their muskets. Around them the Corsicans kept up an erratic fire.
'Kind of you to join us, Hayden,' Kochler remarked, earning him a dark look from Moore.
Under the circumstances, Hayden chose to let the remark pass, though it stung him more than he knew it should. Below, in a narrow valley – almost a ravine – a company of French soldiers advanced from rock to rock, a disciplined fire being returned first from the right, as soldiers advanced on the left, and then reversing so that the right might advance. The scattered Corsican militiamen fired as the desire struck, often not at the men who advanced but those who had gone to ground.
'This will never do,' Moore announced, and sliding back a few steps so as to be out of the line of fire, began exhorting the Corsicans to concentrate their fire and not waste it. Leonati lent his voice to Moore's, and in a few moments, under the colonel's direction, the French were sent retreating down the slopes. The Corsicans would have jumped up and given chase – some did leap up to do just that – but Moore managed to put a stop to this, and instead moved his force down the slope in a concentrated, ordered manner, not letting them get spread out so that the quick could range too far ahead and become isolated from their fellows.
For nearly an hour they chased the fleeing French until, finally, the enemy managed to outdistance the militiamen. A single wounded man was the only Corsican casualty and the British escaped all injuries but for scratches and bruises inflicted by the island of Corsica on the unsuspecting visitors.
Moore was examining a bloody gash across the back of his hand as Hayden joined him.
'The inhabitants do not seem to have suffered as we have,' Hayden observed, inspecting his own small injuries.
'Apparently they know which bushes bear thorns. Look at what I have done…' Moore held up his hand. 'A bayonet could not inflict such injury.'
Twenty feet off, the Corsicans were stripping a dead French soldier of his valuables – including his uniform. As most of the locals bore only fowling pieces, the dead soldier's musket was a great prize, claimed, unfortunately, by more than one. Di Borgo was forced to step in and confiscate the musket until it could be properly decided where it should be bestowed (several claimed to have fired the fatal shot).
Upon the instant that this small dispute had begun, the Corsicans had assembled into two distinct parties, each supporting a claimant, and the discussion grew, quickly, heated.
As they began the walk back to their mules, a frustrated di Borgo joined them.
'It is always thus,' he said in French, though quiet enough that only the British could hear. 'No matter that they swear loyalty to the general and the cause of Corsican independence, the moment there is any dispute or sign of conflict, they form into clans, and old resentments and disputes from three generations past bubble up as though these things occurred only yesterday. I am ashamed for my people. They are like children in this.'
In his anger and frustration he ranged ahead of the visitors, leaving Hayden to look around and notice that the militiamen no longer mingled freely as they walked but stayed in two antagonistic groups that had formed only a quarter of an hour before. They muttered among themselves and cast resentful glances at the others. Hayden had the feeling that if di Borgo had not been so close to Paoli he might not have been able to end this dispute. Blood could have been spilled… seemingly, over a musket. How were the British ever to drive out the French with such allies?
A plague on both your houses, Hayden thought.
The French scurried about like industrious insects, digging a nest into the grey-brown earth. Seven hundred feet above and some eight hundred yards distant, the British officers – army and Navy – fixed glasses upon the earthworks being thrown up below.
'They call it the Convention Redoubt,' di Borgo told them.
Colonel Moore gazed down upon this scene through his glass. 'Given that the French are cutting off the heads of anyone not sufficiently ardent in support of the revolution, it could hardly have been christened otherwise,' Moore observed, keeping his eye fixed on the efforts below. 'That is Fornali Bay, then, to the right?'
'Yes,' di Borgo agreed. 'There is another battery just beyond the trees.' He pointed to the hillside above the little bay.
Fornali Bay formed an irregular, narrow triangle that cut back into the island between two hills – an inlet opening onto the much larger bay. Anchored fore and aft, near to the northern shore, were two frigates, both well under cover of the guns above. On the hill to the right, or south, of the bay stood a small stone tower with but a single gun visible. Below this, and to the left, just to be made out through a stand of trees, a battery had been raised on a meagre, near-level shoulder. To the left of the little bay the French were busy constructing their redoubt with the industry of men expecting imminent attack. All of these positions were arranged to repel assaults from the sea, and were open at the rear – a fact not lost on any of the military men gazing down on this scene from above. The French, Hayden realized, were confident that no guns could be carried to the hilltops behind, and it was easy to imagine why.
Across the larger bay, perhaps a mile and a half distant, grey buildings apparent in the sun, stood the town of San Fiorenzo and the old, stone fortress where most of the troops, according to the Corsicans, were stationed.
Pivoting in his place, Hayden turned his telescope to the north, following the undulating coastline until he found the tower on Mortella Point. This was of an entirely different nature from the small tower below – which was only a watch-tower, really. Round and squat, the tower of Mortella reputedly had walls fourteen feet thick. Captain Linzee had taken it the previous October with a single frigate, but the Corsicans, to whom it had been delivered, were unable to hold it and the French had taken it back.
'So that is the Martello tower,' Kochler said, his own glass following Hayden's.
'Mortella,' Hayden corrected before he thought better of it.
'Did Lord Hood not say Martello?' Kochler protested, glancing at his comrade.
'He did,' Moore agreed, 'but one can hardly correct an admiral.'
'Unlike lowly majors,' Kochler noted, indignantly.
Hayden might have apologized had not Kochler been so continually discourteous to him.
Kochler glanced up at Hayden, making clear his silent affront, then back into his glass. 'The Martello Tower fell rather easily to a frigate I am told. It must have been manned by French sailors.'
'I don't know who manned it,' Hayden replied, 'but Captain Linzee took it in a hard-fought exchange.'
'Hard fought?' Kochler said, and looking up at Hayden he waved a hand towards the Convention Redoubt. 'You will be up against French army regulars, now, Captain, not sailors; do not expect them to break and run the first time you fire a gun. You will actually have to fight them.'
Before Hayden could respond to this insult, Moore literally stepped between them. 'Is it not enough that there can be no accord between our superiors? Those of us who will actually fight these battles cannot afford such pettiness. I do beseech both of you to remember that such antipathy can only aid our enemies and create ill will between ourselves.'
'If there is ill will it did not begin with us,' Kochler responded, his choler rising. He turned his gaze upon Hayden, anger overriding his judgement. 'Your admiral has passed up no opportunity to smear the reputation of the army. We were blamed for the loss of Toulon though the general told Hood the city could never be held. And now, if Corsica is not emptied of the French, and quickly, the army will be condemned, though if we succeed it will be the Navy who will claim the victory.'
'Major!' Moore said forcefully. 'This will never do! Captain Hayden has made every effort to aid and befriend us. This criticism is misplaced. I will not have this in my command. If you cannot work in harmony with the Navy then tell me so and I will return you to Gibraltar.'
Hayden felt his own heart pounding for he had taken such offence at the man's manner and words he had been about to demand satisfaction. Moore, however, ever the voice of reason, was right, and the part of Hayden that was not in a rage knew it.
Kochler made no answer to Moore; nor did he offer to apologize to Hayden for a moment but then he relented a little. 'For the sake of this enterprise,' he said, clearly neither mollified nor repentant, 'I shall refrain from speaking the truth regarding this subject. Do accept my regrets, Captain; clearly this is not the time to bring forward such matters.'
'Bring them forward at a time of your choosing, Major, and I shall be happy to satisfy you upon every count.' Co-operation with the army, Hayden was willing to attempt, but he would not suffer such offences.
Kochler made a little half-bowing nod of the head in Hayden's direction.
Moore was clearly unhappy with both of them and said, in a tone of exasperation, 'There is much to be done. Let us move down towards the tower on Mortella Point. I should like to see it closer to, and discover if there is a place where the major thinks a battery might be erected.'
Beneath an air of strain, the British officers walked north-north-west, among their honour guard of Corsicans, towards the mouth of the larger bay of San Fiorenzo. The walking was not easy, up and down rugged slopes, and Hayden was soon hot from exertion.
The line of hills they followed parallelled the nearby shore, more or less, and to their left lay a deep valley with a narrow stream hidden at the bottom. Both Moore and Kochler had remarked, unable to conceal their concern, that moving guns over such a landscape would be arduous if not impossible.
'Certainly we can drag a small howitzer or two up here,' Kochler observed, though he did not sound confident even of that. He turned in a small circle so that he might examine the landscape, his mouth turned down and gaze half-focused.
'What think you, Captain?' Moore enquired of Hayden.
'I am quite certain that sailors could manage it,' Hayden replied, and immediately felt both foolish and childish.
'I am sure each of you will toss a pair of howitzers in your pockets and stroll up here over the course of a leisurely morning,' Kochler said.
'Major Kochler…' Moore intoned a warning.
'I am but jesting, sir,' Kochler responded, 'in an attempt to ease all misunderstandings with Captain Hayden. I have no doubt the sailors will surmount all difficulties and bear guns up to the appointed outlooks. Their zeal cannot be questioned. Their officers without parallel.'
'I do understand your disdain for sea officers, Major,' Hayden responded. 'We are clearly all fools. How else could you describe a man who spends ten years at sea, in all seasons, to become a mere master and commander? An intelligent man would simply invest six and a half thousand pounds to procure a commission in some fashionable regiment, remove to London and while away his evenings at White's.'
Kochler did not reply but walked quickly on, stopping now and again to quiz the shore and the lie of the land with his glass, lingering over every shrub, every outcropping of weathered stone. If he had heard Hayden, and certainly he had, he made no sign of it other than a slight stiffness to his posture and his refusal to look in Hayden's direction. Apparently, Hayden's riposte had struck too close to home, and Kochler knew there was no denial to be made: it was a matter of common knowledge that wealthy young gentlemen did purchase commissions and then spent little or no time with their regiments, but preferred to disport themselves in London's clubs and less reputable establishments.
For a few moments they stopped to rest and drink water, staring out over the azure bay to the town and hills beyond, and back towards the higher mountains, where clouds hung, as though unable to find their way between the rugged peaks.
'Landing troops should not prove difficult here; is that not true, Captain Hayden?' Moore asked, trying to make some conversation, rather than gain real information.
'These beaches are ideal for our needs,' Hayden replied, beginning to regret his response to Kochler. Moore's professionalism shamed him. 'Beyond the tower on Mortella Point there is a beach of such scale that we could land all of Britain's armies at once, and with excellent anchorage in the roadstead beyond. The beaches this side of Mortella Point are commanded by the French batteries; we cannot use them except by night and even then it would be a danger.'
'Do you know, Major,' Moore said to Kochler, clearly trying to jolly the man out of his ill humour, 'with the French largely shut up in their towers I think the taking of San Fiorenzo shall be no great thing. With the aid of the Navy we shall manage it most expeditiously.'
'So men said at the beginning of the American war,' Kochler growled; he touched his hat, rose, and walked away.
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 15
|
Hayden had arrived at the appointed hour, met at Victory's rail by a marine who led him below out of some rather unpleasant weather. Shedding oilskins, Hayden took the offered chair outside the admiral's day cabin and composed himself to wait.
'Lord Hood has the general with him,' the admiral's secretary informed him. 'I shouldn't think they will be much longer.'
Hayden, whose hearing had not yet been compromised by the din of cannon fire, could distinguish the admiral speaking within – and though Hood clearly made an effort to keep his voice low, he was not addressing his guest in the most gentle tone.
'These three days past it was artillery that was lacking. Now it is camp equipage. Tomorrow it will be the season that will not permit it.'
Dundas's voice equalled Hood's in discretion but exceeded it wholly in umbrage. 'I will not send my men into the field without the necessary artillery so that I may satisfy your desire for reputation!' His hissed whisper shivered with anger. 'Nor will I send them without food to eat nor proper clothing. We make all haste but the swiftness of our retreat from Toulon left all things in disorder – guns on one ship, infantry on another, equipage… who knows where.'
'I do not serve my king for personal glory, sir,' Hood returned, the anger palpable even in such hushed tones. 'I seek only to expel the French before they have time to fortify their positions. How many more men will be lost through delay? That is what I wonder.'
'There is more to this than stowing some furniture, knocking flat a few bulkheads and running out the guns,' Dundas whispered, his voice thickening.
'There is a great deal more to it!' Hood shot back. 'I could ready my own sailors for such an expedition in a tenth the time it has taken the army.'
'And look where this impulsiveness has led you!'
'Whatever do you mean, sir!'
'Toulon could never have been held. It was the height of folly even to consider it.'
'It would have been the height of folly to not take such a chance – the French fleet offered to us on a platter.'
'A fleet that is largely afloat and in Jacobin hands!'
An even more heated exchange followed, voices rising, and then Dundas suddenly burst out of the room, stormed by the admiral's stricken staff, and disappeared. The door was closed softly from within and Hayden waited, no one daring to announce him. An hour passed, before the secretary finally worked up enough nerve to knock timidly upon the door.
Hayden was ushered in to find Lord Hood, standing, hands behind his back, staring out of the gallery windows at the unsettled sea. He turned as Hayden entered, complexion still high from his recent anger.
'Captain Hayden,' he mumbled, and then stared at the junior officer a moment as though unable, for the life of him, to remember why Hayden had been sent for. His gaze cleared and he crossed to his work table, snatching up several sheets of paper. 'I would have your opinion of this.' He thrust the papers at his visitor. It did not escape Hayden that for a man of advanced years and still in the grip of outrage, Lord Hood's hand held remarkably steady. 'It is from Colonel Moore. Read it with all due care; I wish your most considered judgement.'
Hayden took the letter, composed his mind a moment, and began.
Lord Hood:
Agreeably, to your Lordship's order, I landed in Corsica and waited upon General Paoli. The following is my report upon the different heads of instruction delivered to me by Lieutenant-General Dundas. The first object seems to be the possession of Martello Bay [Hayden took note of the spelling – Moore was more of a courtier than he expected] for the security of the fleet, and to enable it to co-operate effectively with the army when landed. The works which defend the bay are a stone tower with two or three light guns (4-prs) at Martello point, another of the same kind at Fornali. The fort of Fornali consists of a strong battery immediately under the tower, and a redoubt open in the rear lately erected on a height between the towers of Martello and Fornali. In the last there are four guns of different calibres. One hundred and fifty or 200 men from the garrison at San Fiorenzo guard these different works. They are chiefly designed to act against shipping but are commanded by heights in their rear. If these are occupied with cannon the works must be abandoned. The road leading to the heights has generally been thought impracticable for cannon. It is, however, by no means so for light guns or howitzers. I annex a detailed plan, concerted with General Paoli, for an attack on the works of Martello, by landing a body of 500 men with light field pieces at the northern point of the bay, and marching by a path that has been reconnoitred, under cover of the hills, to a place called Vechiagia, which commands within a few hundred yards the new redoubt and the tower of Fornali. The possession of this bay having been secured for the fleet, General Paoli points out the bays of Vechia and Nonza upon the eastern side of the Gulf of Fiorenzo as places proper for the landing of the troops, provisions, ordnance &c.
The army, immediately upon landing, will have to move with a few light guns about a league into the country.
There followed a detailed account for attacking the cities of Bastia and Calvi, which Hayden thought would very likely fall to others. Towards the end of the letter, which was long and of impressive detail, Hayden found Moore's opinion of the Corsicans, which was very different from that of General Dundas.
The French and the few Corsicans in their interest are confined to the posts I have mentioned by the inhabitants attached to General Paoli who call themselves 'patriots' and give the others the name of 'Jacobins'. Paoli's men are armed, in general, with fowling-pieces, and turn out voluntarily with provisions on their back and serve without pay. When their provisions are expended they return home but are succeeded by others in the like manner. Thus, though the individuals fluctuate, a body of men is constantly kept up sufficient to stop the communication of the enemy by land. General Paoli can command at any time for a particular service a considerable body of Corsicans, but he thinks that 2000 will be sufficient to embody as a permanent corps to act with the army. To enable him to do this he requires £4000 immediately, 100 barrels of powder, with proportion of lead and flints, and if possible, 1000 stands of arms. He will endeavour to provide provisions himself, and only wishes that when his people are detached with the British they may occasionally receive rations.
The Corsicans seem to be, in general, a stout, hardy and warlike people, excellent marksmen and well adapted to the country they have to act in. They will be particularly useful in possessing heights, and by surrounding our posts prevent the possibility of surprise.
Hayden returned the letter to Lord Hood, who gazed at him with his sorrowful eyes. 'And what think you of Moore's plan?'
Hayden held both Moore and Paoli in the highest regard, but had a single objection to their design. 'I believe it is an excellent plan, sir, and would admirably have answered given the situation in San Fiorenzo when last we were there.'
Hood nodded as though he had almost expected Hayden to say just this. 'There have been the inevitable delays, some unavoidable – weather, finding the guns, which were loaded in haste at Toulon – but there has been a great deal of… hesitation that cannot be explained away so kindly. What do you think will await us when finally we land Dundas's troops?'
Remembering Kochler's claim that the Navy never passed up an opportunity to damage the reputation of the army, Hayden chose his words with care. 'The French were cognizant of the British military presence on the island, sir, they could not help but guess why. Certainly all of their fortifications will have been strengthened so that they cannot be so easily attacked from the rear. That is what I would have done.'
'Then this plan, in which Paoli and Moore and Kochler have invested so much energy, will not procure the bay for us?'
'Not if the French have been employed as I have suggested. The plan will need to be adapted somewhat but I have utter faith in Moore. And General Paoli had a most sound grasp of all matters military – we all thought so.'
'You did, did you?' Hood paced a few steps, head down, then turned back to Hayden. 'That old rascal could talk a viper out of her eggs. I have never met his like. But Paoli commands the Corsican militia – we cannot hope to prevail without him… alas. I have little faith in these army men and even less in Paoli, I will tell you. If we hope to see the French driven out of Corsica – in our lifetimes – our own service may be called into action… and sooner rather than later.'
It was a scene of great industry and order, Hayden thought. The ships' boats ferried ashore soldiers or provisions, guns or equipage; all landed in the small surf without calamity. Tripods – often to be heard called 'triangles' – were erected to sling the guns out of the boats and onto carriages that rolled up tracks hastily constructed of makeshift fascines laid upon flour-soft sand. The Royals and the 25th and 51st regiments were all under the command of his friend, Lieutenant-Colonel John Moore, who attempted to meet every boat as it landed and direct its cargo, human or otherwise, to the appropriate section of the beach. Seven hundred men – 120 of them sailors under Hayden's command – formed into orderly companies.
A bright, Mediterranean sun illuminated this scene, while to the east, a press of clouds streamed rain in ribbons down upon the mountains' green slopes. Three weeks had passed since Hayden had left Corsica with Moore to report to Hood and Dundas. It astonished Hayden. A naval attack would have been prepared in hours, if necessary, though one must admit that ships of the Royal Navy left their home ports ready to clear for action at any moment. The army did not have the luxury of a vessel of war for each of its brigades – in this, Dundas was correct.
Out of the ordered chaos appeared Major Kochler, who did not seem to be regarding the scene with the same sentiments as Hayden. He stood, hands on hips, and was clearly judging the spectacle rather severely. Glancing to his left he noticed Hayden.
'Can we not land men in one place and equipment in another? I should like to see the crews engaged in unloading guns not tripping over the men packing victuals.'
Hayden took a deep calming breath to little effect. 'It is only this single boat,' Hayden explained, waving a hand at a cutter drawn up to the beach. 'All others have landed on their assigned plot of sand.' Hayden was chagrined to have his efforts criticized. Kochler would happen by when this single boat landed out of place!
Kochler seemed rather unimpressed by Hayden's claim, and went back to watching the operation with apparent disapproval.
Remembering his decision to follow Moore's example and attempt co-operation with all officers of the army, Hayden said, 'I had been told you still kept company with General Paoli?'
For a moment Kochler did not answer, and then finally replied, 'I have only just arrived… and brought your Mr Wickham with me.' The officer looked around and then shrugged. 'I don't know where he has gone.' He paused and Hayden thought he had finished speaking when Kochler offered. 'Are you ready to bear our guns up onto the hills?'
'One in each pocket, sir.'
Kochler turned and gazed at him. 'What pockets you must have, Captain', and with that he marched off down the strand.
'Ah, there you are, Wickham.' Hayden spotted the young man stepping out of the way of sailors bearing eighteen-pound balls ashore. 'How went your shooting with the general?'
Wickham looked very pleased to see Hayden, breaking into his boyish smile. 'It went well, sir. To have been given an opportunity to spend time in the presence of that great man is something I will always be thankful for.'
'Well, your shooting holiday is over. I am going to put you in charge of landing the powder. Do not blow yourself up and spoil everyone's high opinion of you.'
'Aye, sir,' the middy replied, suppressing a smile. 'Once a man's character has been blasted it is almost impossible to remake it.'
Despite the most concerted efforts of both services, the better part of a day was required to ferry all the men and equipment ashore. A frustrated Colonel Moore ordered the men to lie upon their arms that night. As there were no tents (these had either been lost in the retreat from Toulon or not yet located) the men slept in the open but the evening was so fair that no harm came of it.
Hayden supped with the army officers and then sat by their fire afterwards sipping port and cursing the fickle smoke, which seemed to chase him wherever he moved.
'At least we are ashore and ready to march at first light,' Moore observed. Hayden noted that the man was unable to remain downhearted for any span of time but was soon finding something with which to be pleased.
Hayden excused himself momentarily to see to a small matter and upon his return overheard the army men speaking quietly.
'The general has given our plan his fullest support?' Kochler enquired of his companion in the most discreet voice, though, betrayed by the stillness of the night, the words carried to Hayden.
Burning wood cracked loudly, a spray of sparks exploding up among the cold stars. Realizing his approach had not been perceived, Hayden was about to make some noise, but instead stopped, perfectly aware that this constituted an unforgivable breach of manners.
In the firelight, Hayden saw Moore take up a stick and begin rearranging some of the burning logs, his face appearing very thoughtful in the flickering light. 'So I believed, until the final moment,' he offered, lowering his voice, 'but last night and this morning again I had to press him to land the troops, as he found every excuse not to do. The weather was not right, the plan should be reconsidered, were we certain of the French numbers?' He shook his head. 'But we are ashore now and let us hope we can conclude our business with dispatch.'
Hayden thought Kochler looked more than a little troubled by what Moore had said; in truth, Moore did not look less distressed. As much as he might like to, Hayden did not dare reveal the conversation he had overheard between the senior officers of both services. It did satisfy him a little, however, to find that both Moore and Kochler appeared to share Hood's perception of Dundas. When he went to his own blankets to sleep, Hayden realized that Moore was in greater need of his aid than he had previously realized. Not only did Dundas not support his efforts as he should, but he actually appeared to oppose them.
At first light, Moore and Kochler went ahead with the Royals, the 25th and the 51st Foot, leaving Hayden to bring forward the guns. The track the Navy men took, much aided by the Corsicans' knowledge, was nothing more than a goat path that twisted through the broken blocks of stone and coiled among stunted trees. Nowhere was it wide enough for the guns to be rolled upon their carriages, and Hayden was forced to have his carpenters build narrow sledges which were dragged by harnesses of men, and prised upwards by bars so that they went forward half a foot or a foot at a time. The path was so winding that only a few men could be sent to the ropes to pull, there never being enough length of path to allow more. Seldom could blocks be employed, though here and there a strap was wound around a rock and the ropes run off so that a purchase could be gained, making the whole frustrating enterprise, briefly, a little easier. A crew went ahead, clearing bush and trees with axes and filling in depressions, building the path up here, levelling there. Hayden hurried back and forth between the different parties giving instructions, mulling solutions to difficulties in concert with his officers. Always he was thinking that he wanted to acquit himself well so that the reputation of the Navy should not be injured, but the island of Corsica did not much care for the reputation of the Navy and thwarted him at every turn.
Anywhere the path passed too narrowly between stones, the sledges had to be got over them, so fascines were employed to make bridges. Here and there the stones were higher than a man and a path around had to found.
Hayden took up a crowbar himself, in his turn, setting the bar beneath the sledge runner. 'One, two, three… Heave!' The gun grated forward three inches. 'Again.'
As Hayden was digging his bar in beneath the sledge runner, yet again, the boom of a distant cannon reached them, and then an almost constant fire ensued.
'Ship's guns,' one of the men pronounced. 'Attacking the Martello tower, I would imagine.'
Wickham looked over at Hayden, question unspoken.
'I do believe he's right. But it is no concern of ours. We have our own task to complete.'
Late in the afternoon, Hayden received a request from Moore to join him at the forward position. Leaving the guns under the able command of Wickham and a more senior lieutenant, Hayden took up his musket and field-pack and hurried forward to find Moore.
The lieutenant-colonel was not with his men, who had reached the site of their proposed encampment near Mont Rivinco, but he was directed towards a neighbouring hilltop, where Moore and Kochler were discovered gazing through field glasses onto the French positions at Fornali Bay.
This was not the first sight that struck Hayden, though; instead, his eye was drawn to the bay immediately before the stone tower on Mortella Point. Here a seventy-four-gun ship and a frigate – the Fortitude and Juno, Hayden believed – were anchored fore and aft so that they fired broadsides continually upon the tower, which, at a much slower rate, returned fire. From this distance Hayden could not perceive any damage to the French stronghold and the ships were so thickly shrouded in smoke from their guns that their state could only be guessed at. For a moment his eye lingered on this distant drama and then he turned his attention to the scene directly below.
Hayden did not need to look through a glass to immediately perceive that the concerns he had voiced to Lord Hood had been more prescient than he had hoped. The French had not wasted the three weeks the English had been absent. All of their positions had been enlarged and strengthened. The small tower above Fornali Bay had embrasures in every direction and a closed battery had been thrown up in front of it. The battery below the tower boasted a mortar and several new guns. Perhaps the most changed was the Convention Redoubt, which lay across Fornali Bay from the tower and had been much enlarged, enclosed in the rear, and better armed. Men could be seen completing the earthworks even as the British officers looked on.
Moore said nothing beyond the briefest greeting, his jaw tight and entire manner stiffly controlled. Retrieving his glass, Hayden examined the works below in some detail. With every moment he felt his frustration increase tenfold, and it was not moderated in the least that he had been proven right. Their carefully drawn plans had been made obsolete by the length of time it had taken to organize the attack and by the energies of the French. The urge to speak some ill of Dundas was almost irresistible.
Hayden lowered his glass and addressed Moore. 'I will defer to your more expert opinions in this matter, for war on land is not my province, but it does appear that our previous plans will no longer answer. Am I not correct?'
Moore nodded. 'You are absolutely correct. These positions are too strong for our small force and a single howitzer and six-pounder. What think you, Kochler?'
Kochler sat down upon a stone and dug out his drinking water. 'I should curse these bloody Frenchmen but of course we have no one to blame but ourselves.' He looked up at Moore, frustration, even anger, contained in every gesture. 'Our entire force shall be needed, and how we shall manage it even then I do not know.'
'I will write to General Dundas and acquaint him with the situation.'
'It would be best if he would come ashore and view the French positions for himself, if he can be so convinced,' Kochler responded, not able to hide his consternation. 'Perhaps that will galvanize his actions.'
'I shall urge him to do so in the strongest possible terms. Our provisions will now be inadequate and we shall have to land and carry forward more food.'
'I shall see it done,' Kochler stated tersely.
Moore turned to Hayden. 'Bringing the guns forward will no longer be necessary. They will do us no good.'
'Shall I return them to the beach?'
'I am afraid the answer is yes. We are not ungrateful, however, for your efforts, Hayden.'
Before he left to return to the guns, Hayden aimed his glass at the tower and the two British ships. Beyond, he could see the transports and other ships anchored and still engaged in landing men and equipment. He would much rather have been aboard ship, firing on the tower, but he reminded himself that at least he had employment in this matter. Many sea officers did not.
Hayden hiked back to his men, wondering at Dundas's apparent reluctance to come ashore. Hayden was used to the traditions and duties of the Navy, and this reluctance seemed peculiar to him. Certainly Moore and Kochler were perfectly capable, but even so, when fleets went into action, admirals put their own ships into the line of battle and stood upon the quarterdeck among the other officers.
The rest of the day was committed to hauling 'the damned' guns back to the beach, which Hayden and his sailors managed sometime after midnight, whereupon they tumbled down upon the sand and passed into unconsciousness. Hayden himself fell into a stupor and did not wake until the sun was up and the crash of distant guns penetrated his dreams.
He propped himself up on one elbow and, with dirty fingers, rubbed at his eyes, causing one to sting terribly for a moment. The army was in motion, food being prepared and consumed in orderly fashion. His own men were not quite so smart – an exhausted, bedraggled-looking lot, to be honest – but they were mustered and then went about breaking their fasts, lieutenants and midshipmen bringing order to what might have been chaos, though of a rather subdued nature. Taken off a ship and out of their usual routines the sailors appeared a little lost.
'There is news, sir,' Wickham said, arriving with a cup of murky black liquid that smelled vaguely like coffee. 'The Fortitude and Juno were forced to sheer off, sir. Fortitude was set afire from hot shot, and she lost above sixty men. Juno was not nearly so badly mauled but hauled herself out of range as well. Very little damage was inflicted on the tower.' Wickham took a seat upon a little stool. 'I would not have expected them to have a furnace for heating shot, sir. It had not been the case previously.'
'Clearly, the French were better prepared, on this occasion,' Hayden answered, glancing around at the soldiers, embarrassed that the Navy had failed. He then tasted his coffee, which was more bitter than he had expected.
After a spartan breakfast, Hayden retrieved his glass and hurried off to the distant hill overlooking the French positions. As he expected, he found Moore and Kochler, with some of their senior officers, all staring off towards the tower of Mortella. Smoke blossomed up from the low hill behind the tower, and a fragment of plaster or stone was blown away from the stronghold.
'They've established a battery ashore,' Hayden said, realizing immediately that he was stating what everyone already knew.
'Yes,' Moore told him, 'and to damned little effect. Our only advantage appears to lie in the fact that, even if our guns are not inflicting perceivable damage, the French cannot traverse their guns to fire upon our position at all. A small comfort.'
'Has General Dundas agreed to come on shore?' Hayden asked.
'We hope that he might arrive this very morning,' Kochler replied. 'If we show you a position not too distant from this place, Captain Hayden, can you tell us in perfect honesty if you believe large guns could be got up there?'
'How "large" do you mean?' Hayden asked.
'Eighteen-pounders.'
Hayden was stunned by this. 'Naval eighteen-pounders?'
'The army has no guns of that size, Captain,' Kochler informed him.
'Hauling a six-pounder and a howitzer over this godforsaken landscape was almost more than we could manage.' The idea of eighteen-pounders being brought to even the base of the hill, let along carried to the top, seemed absurd to Hayden: they weighed forty hundredweight! His professional pride, however, silenced his immediate objections. 'But, by all means, let us look.'
Although the hike was not far, the roughness of the landscape made progress slow. It was some time before they had traversed the half-mile. A slightly down-sloping shelf of brown-grey stone seemed an ideal place to mount a battery.
'It is perfect,' Moore muttered.
Hayden knew from dragging small guns along the path behind this ridge that the landward slopes of these hills were steep, rugged in the extreme, and an arduous climb for men unencumbered by anything at all, let alone guns weighing 4000 pounds. Certainly a plunging fire from this place would soon drive every man from the Convention Redoubt or the batteries of Fornali. It was difficult to imagine that any gun could be elevated to return fire, but even if it were possible it would be dismounted by the British guns in moments.
Moore was gazing through his glass at the redoubt. 'Eight hundred yards,' he announced. 'Do you agree, Hayden?'
'Within half a cable's length, yes.'
Hayden turned away from the view across the bay of San Fiorenzo, and walked a few yards over the crest. Traversing a little to the north he found a promontory from which he could inspect the greater part of the hill's vast, arcing back. The landscape on this side of the bay was all of one piece – ubiquitous lichen-stained, greyish-brown stone, much of it broken away from the mother rock and tossed about in blocks. Over-spreading this, a sparse underwood of myrtle, and what appeared to be stunted arbutus. It was no wonder the French, and the Genoese before them, largely abandoned the inner mountains and the west coast to the inhabitants and left them to govern themselves. Moving troops over such difficult terrain was all but impossible and ambushes could be laid anywhere.
In a way it would have been better had the slope been steeper. Then cables could be run from top to bottom and the guns hauled up the cables, as his men had hauled the guns up a small cliff the previous day. But this slope would not allow that, for any cables run must sag so much that the guns would be always on the earth.
'What think you, Hayden?' Moore asked, approaching the promontory upon which Hayden crouched.
'There is,' Hayden said pointing vaguely, 'down to the left, a wide and very shallow gully. Do you see? Perhaps "gully" is not the proper description. It is the only place that is not clearly impassable – which is to say that it is only very likely to prove so. I will climb down and see what is to be seen.' He turned to Moore. 'Can it be managed without guns?'
Moore looked very pensive. 'You have seen the effects of grape at short range?'
'I have.'
'Then you know – the loss of life would be very great, and even then I am not certain the French positions could be carried.'
Hayden nodded. 'Let me climb down. If it is within the borders of human strength and endurance, I will attempt it.'
Moore made a little bow toward him. 'Thank you, Captain. Lord Hood chose well in you. I will speak to the general.'
Left on his own, Hayden scrambled across the slope and began to pick his way down. To his left and right the terrain was impossible. There was simply no way a 4000-pound gun could be borne over it. Men were not strong enough and the gun would present a grave danger should it slide.
He climbed down the draw, tacking side to side, examining every foot of terrain. The gully itself was an extremely shallow trough, nearly thirty yards broad – and though green with sparse vegetation, no more impassable than any other part of Corsica that he had yet seen. Though Hayden could not put a name to the rock that formed these hills, it had clearly been eroded by the ages in such a way that it offered jagged edges and was everywhere coarse and abrading. For a moment he stopped and gazed back up the slope, and his heart despaired. 'Blast these damned hills,' he muttered. 'Why do these army men insist on guns?'
He resumed his descent, which even unencumbered was perilous, and he was forced, here and there to climb hand over hand. The vegetation was so hardy that he used it for hand-holds without the least worry of it giving way.
When he reached the bottom, Hayden turned and stared again up the forbidding slope. Perhaps halfway down, Moore picked his way among the rocks, eyes focused on his footing. In a quarter of an hour he reached Hayden, who sat upon a rock, training his glass over the backs of the hills.
'What think you, Captain?' Moore asked as he reached the bottom. 'Is it at all possible?'
'I must be truthful with you, Colonel, I don't believe it can be managed.' Hayden removed his hat and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. 'But I am willing to make the attempt, even if I am doubtful of its outcome.'
Moore took a seat beside him, gazing up the hillside.
'There is a reason the French did not occupy the hills,' Hayden observed. 'Nor did they build their fortifications to be protected from that quarter; they believed it to be beyond human endurance to carry guns to such heights.'
Moore turned to Hayden with a look of utter sincerity. 'I hope you can prove them wrong, Captain. It will save many lives among my men, for which I would be grateful beyond measure.'
'I will tell you this, Moore, I know my men; they will break their backs before they will give it up.'
Moore made another little bow of thanks in his direction. 'Let us find Kochler. He believes there might be a second gun position – not so perfect as this for it is farther off, but of easier access.'
'I should like to examine this slope once more. I expect it will reveal more of its impediments while I ascend than it did when I climbed down.'
'I will come with you, and offer what counsel I can.'
The climb was not more encouraging, every yard appearing more impassable than upon his first examination. By the time they reached the top, Hayden felt he had been too confident by far in his prediction. Only a miracle would see success.
They set off along the ridge line in the wake of Kochler, who just could be seen in the distance, a red coat in the grey-dusty landscape.
'This terrain is so rugged,' Moore declared, 'that moving men over it in a timely fashion will be one of our greatest obstacles. To mount a surprise attack while moving so slowly would be impossible.'
'I have noticed the Corsicans do not suffer in this matter as we do,' Hayden ventured, wondering even as he said it if it were true, or simply misperception.
'I have observed the same,' Moore agreed. 'I must speak with them and have an explanation, for surely this would greatly aid our efforts.'
They caught Kochler up at the jagged crest of a hill. He was staring down into the valley below, where a stream drained into a small slough, parted from the sea by a sandy beach.
Moore pointed down the slope below. 'This is almost a natural ramp beneath us.'
Kochler nodded thoughtfully. 'I thought the same.' He turned and gazed off toward the fortifications around Fornali Bay. 'Certainly we are not more than a thousand yards, and, with this height, in range of eighteen-pounders.'
'Do you agree, Captain?' Moore asked Hayden.
It was difficult to be sure of the distance – Hayden was much better at estimating such things over water – but he thought Kochler's measure quite close.
'Yes, a thousand yards – not fewer.'
Moore gazed back down at the slope below – a green triangle of vegetation angling steeply up from the slough; to the right a ridge, craggy and broken, taking the same attitude. 'If guns could be hauled to this height, I don't know where we would mount them, and this last section would be difficult to climb let alone bear guns over.'
'The engineers would have to build up a platform, here.' Kochler pointed. 'Is this the Old Pivot?' he asked, giving Dundas his nickname. He fixed his glass on a not too distant point.
A company of Corsicans and British soldiers hurried along the very path where Hayden had borne the guns. It struck him how much more quickly they moved unburdened by cannon.
Moore confirmed this was their commanding officer, and the three set out to intercept Dundas, who was no doubt coming, at Moore's request. There was no easy or direct way down from this peak, so it was only the greatest good fortune that someone in Dundas's party spotted them.
An hour later they were toiling up the hills again, with Lieutenant-General David Dundas in tow. At nine and fifty, Dundas seemed a sorrowful and greying presence, mounting the hills slowly but without pause, until the top was reached. There, out of breath, he required a moment to recoup, then followed the others to the best vantage. Moore pointed out the changed situation around Fornali – the British battery adding punctuation in the background as the cannonading of the Mortella tower continued.
Hayden thought the lieutenant-general looked ill, as he directed his glass to each salient or embrasure, and every battery in turn. After this catalogue was completed, Dundas stood staring down at the French positions, saying nothing, his two senior officers waiting for him to pass judgement. 'Perhaps we can bombard them from the sea?' he finally offered, with little conviction.
'We agree with Captain Hayden that the batteries all are well fortified on their seaward side, and could withstand any number of broadsides, while nothing will impede the French from returning fire, to great effect. We saw what damage was inflicted on Fortitude and Juno but yesterday.'
Dundas nodded – it had seemed a slim chance but he had, perhaps, been hoping his officers might simply defer to his opinion – something that Hayden suspected they were becoming less and less willing to do.
'We have discovered two excellent positions on the heights where batteries could be advantageously erected,' Moore offered.
'And is there some road I am unaware of by which you would carry your guns up to these positions, Colonel Moore?'
'There is not, sir, but Captain Hayden believes it might be managed, all the same.' Moore glanced Hayden's way, clearly embarrassed at having misrepresented Hayden's opinion so. There was no doubt in Hayden's mind, however, that Dundas would never allow the attempt if he were not assured, perhaps repeatedly, of its success.
Dundas continued to stare down upon the shore, where the tricolour shimmered in the soft breeze. Just as Hayden thought Moore should repeat himself – perhaps in the belief that Dundas had not heard – Dundas nodded. 'Let us survey these positions, then.'
For the second time that day they made their way along the line of hills, stopping at the first proposed battery. 'Certainly it is an excellent situation,' Dundas agreed, 'but eighteen-pounders…' He trailed off, clearly doubtful of the feasibility of the idea.
They then showed the lieutenant-general the route proposed to carry the guns to the crest, which appeared to unnerve Dundas altogether. 'Over the course of several campaigns I have witnessed attempts to bear guns to such eminences – many easier of access than this. Almost without exception these attempts ended in failure.' He turned to his officers. 'This is simply not possible, Moore… that is why the French have not occupied these hilltops. Guns cannot be raised here.'
'Sir,' Moore said reasonably, 'you have seen the strengthened French positions for yourself. Storming them will cost many lives and success is by no means assured. Certainly we may fail to bring guns to these heights, but it will cost us nothing in lives and only very little time in delays to allow the Navy to make the attempt.'
Dundas did not seem pleased by this, and turned to Kochler. 'You have not offered your opinion, Major,' Dundas observed, though this only seemed, to Hayden, merely an attempt to avoid making a decision.
Kochler hesitated. Hayden thought he would agree with Dundas, for certainly the man had little faith in the Navy to accomplish this task.
'It is my opinion that we should allow the Navy to attempt it,' Kochler declared, 'but success or failure of our enterprise shall be upon their heads. Admiral Lord Hood must be made to understand that.'
Hayden's surprise was quickly overwhelmed by resentment and chagrin. For a moment he even wondered if Moore had conspired with Kochler in this, but could not bring himself to believe it of the colonel. In a very real sense, Hayden had committed the Navy to this nearly impossible task, and the success of the operations in San Fiorenzo Bay would now depend upon him raising guns to the heights. Failing that, the army would claim the French positions could not be stormed without such batteries, and place all blame for failure upon the Navy – upon Hayden, in fact. Hood's good opinion of him would be lost.
Dundas brightened visibly upon hearing this. 'If the Navy have agreed to take on this responsibility.' But he could not, even then, bring himself to make the commitment.
'Perhaps we might leave Captain Hayden to consider the possibilities here, and discuss the present circumstances among ourselves,' Moore suggested.
The army officers retreated back to Moore's encampment, leaving Hayden to fume upon the heights. In frustration, he walked over to examine, again, the slope up which he had proposed to haul the guns. 'Well, there it is,' he muttered to himself. If he failed, all hopes that Hood might grant him a post ship would be lost. And then he wondered if he were becoming one of those men who put success in his career above all. What of Corsica and the hopes of Paoli? But the army had created a situation in which he must almost certainly fail, blasting all of their hopes – British and Corsican alike.
'Damn you both,' he whispered, Kochler and Dundas being the objects of this profanity. He walked slowly back to the encampment, hoping above all things that Dundas would not allow the attempt, all the while wondering if his new 'friend' had betrayed him most cunningly.
Before he had begun the actual descent, the cannonade, which had gone on ceaselessly throughout the day, suddenly fell ominously silent. Walking back up a few steps, Hayden fixed his glass on the distant tower. A great feather of dense smoke swelled up into the hazy blue.
'It is a tower of stone,' he muttered. 'How can it burn?'
But there could be no other explanation for such quantities of smoke, and certainly the men within must surrender or suffocate. As he turned to proceed down the hill he was met by Moore hurrying up.
'They have broken off firing,' Moore stated, though it was half a question.
'Yes,' Hayden said testily, but then added in a more civil tone, 'it seems the tower, or something within, has caught fire.' Hayden indicated the smoke rising above the shoulder of the hill.
'One would think the place was packed with straw!' Moore observed. 'I can't imagine why it should burn so.'
Hayden nodded agreement, his resentment rising.
'I must tell you, Captain,' Moore said, turning away from the sight and fixing his attention upon Hayden. 'Kochler throwing all responsibility for the success or failure of our enterprise upon the Navy was as much a surprise to me as to you, and I do deplore it.'
This was said with such utter sincerity that Hayden could not help but hope the man was telling the truth.
'It was never my intention to commit the resources of His Majesty's Navy to this endeavour,' Hayden said; 'only Lord Hood may do that. I meant merely to indicate my willingness to make the attempt. If Dundas represents my willingness as an offer, I shall be in a difficult position with my commanding officer.'
'I will speak with the general and represent your situation to him most adamantly. It is utterly unfair to place the entire success of our enterprise upon your shoulders; we must bear it all together.'
'Thank you, Moore.'
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 16
|
Two days were wasted as Dundas attempted to decide upon a course of action. In frustration, Moore wrote him a letter again begging that Dundas allow him to attempt to move the necessary guns up to the heights, and the general finally relented and gave his permission. Whether Hood had been informed of this, Hayden knew not, and as he had no directions from that quarter he accepted the task of moving the guns, as his previous orders had been to give all support and aid to the army in this enterprise. He was not, however, pleased with the prospect, and not at all because of the difficulty.
There was, now, one advantage that had not existed formerly – the guns could be landed on a beach much nearer to their final objective. This was made possible by the fall of the tower on Mortella point, the guns of which had previously traversed the beach to its south. The landing would have to be made by night, as the batteries at Fornali were near enough that they could lob shot down onto the beach, but once the guns were moved inland fewer than a hundred yards they would be completely sheltered from any fire the enemy could mount.
Four eighteen-pounders, one ten-inch mortar and a single eight-inch howitzer were shifted into boats from a ship by day and readied for their journey ashore. Once this had been accomplished, Hayden made a visit to the stone tower on Mortella Point. An aide of General Dundas's was there drawing a plan of the fort and taking careful measurements. He showed Hayden why the tower had smoked so magnificently – the parapet had been lined to a depth of five feet with bass junk which had caught fire when the British had thrown heated shot into it. The tower itself mounted but a single gun, and contained a small furnace for heating shot. The walls were thick – perhaps fourteen feet, and there was but a single small entry high up in the wall. Its weakness had been its inability to fire in any direction but out to sea and towards the nearby beaches. The battery erected inland had been able to prosecute its cannonade with impunity. 'It seems an excellent design for shore defences,' Hayden observed. 'Did the Corsicans erect it?'
'I don't believe they did. But whether it was the Genoese or some other I cannot say.'
As the day drew to a close, Hayden put off for the ship, from which the guns had been shifted, and as soon as darkness was deemed complete returned with them to shore. The beach was the very same one Kochler and Moore had been speculating about from the heights – backed by a small freshwater lagoon. Hayden's intention was to land the guns in the usual manner – using tripods – drag them on sleds across the beach, pull the boats across, load the guns back into the boats, and then ferry them over the lagoon. They would then be landed in two separate locations: two eighteen-pounders and the ten-inch mortar would be dragged up the ramp to the nearest position; the eight-inch howitzer and two eighteen-pounders would be transported down the valley, following the path Hayden had previously employed, and then moved to the crest directly behind the Convention Redoubt. It all sounded rather easy if stated quickly.
The boats lumbered heavily through the water, thin starlight offering the most meagre illumination. Each eighteen-pounder equalled the weight of twenty-five men, so the boats with their crews and a single gun, sat low in the water. The carriages were borne in their own boats, so that a small flotilla was needed to carry all the artillery, shot and powder. A dark, ragged line that blotted out the stars marked the crest of the hills. In this poor light they seemed much higher than Hayden remembered, as though only darkness revealed their true stature.
The boats landed silently, the beach having been occupied previously by the Corsican militia and a company of Royals. Erecting tripods was the work of a few minutes, though slinging out the guns took longer. Before the guns could be lifted, the crack of musket fire sounded above, and lead balls began thumping into the sand. A man standing near to Hayden was struck in the calf and collapsed onto the sand, howling.
'Douse torches and lamps!' Hayden called out, forcing himself to hold his place and stand tall in the centre of scrambling men.
The Corsicans were off at a run to engage the French, and the Royals began returning fire. In five minutes the French, who had sallied forth from one of their batteries, were in flight.
Moore, who had come to observe the landing of the guns, found Hayden in the dark. 'Have you any wounded?' he asked.
'One man shot through the leg, another through the hat. I'm not sure the hat will live but I think the man will survive. What of your men?'
'Unharmed, thank God. Do you think the French will try to find us with their guns?'
Hayden had wondered the same thing. The beach was a good distance from their batteries, but not impossible. He hoped to be off the beach long before first light, and under cover of the hills. 'We might hope they do; it will be a wasted effort. The more shot and powder they use the less will be preserved for their defence.'
After the French attack, the British would only risk dim lanterns, and these were shielded as much as possible so that their light did not spill out where it was unneeded.
The guns were raised, the boats slid out from beneath, and gun carriages pulled into their place. Guns were lowered carefully onto the carriages. To cross the narrow span of sand, fascines were laid the width of the carriage trucks apart, and staked in place. Ropes were attached to the carriages and the hands took hold of these. The sheer, dead weight of an eighteen-pounder gun was difficult to overestimate but slowly they went up the sloping strand, and down the other side, only to have the process reversed: tripods erected, guns raised from their carriages and lowered gently into the boats.
The waters of the lagoon were so shallow that the boats bearing the great guns sat on the silty bottom, and no crews could climb aboard. Instead, the boats were heaved, a few inches at a time, until they swam, and then floated by wading sailors who pushed them across the inky surface. All the while men kept looking about, listening, fearing the sound of musket fire again.
There was very little speech, by order, and what little was needed, whispered. Hayden himself waded across the lagoon, his hands on the gunnel of a barge. A sailor with a torch went ahead, the sound of his legs washing through the cool waters all that broke the silence. In less than half an hour landing places were reached, and the easy part of the task was over. Guns were slung out and lowered onto crude sledges, officers and bosuns carefully overseeing the rigging of tripods and tackles – dropping a forty-hundredweight gun could maim a man or worse. The guns were dragged a few feet up from the waters lest a sudden downpour in the mountains swell the stream and sink their guns, and then the order was given for the men to lie upon their arms for the remainder of the night. The Corsicans and some of Moore's men stood guard, and Hayden bundled into his blankets, and fell into a strange dream, where hands reached out of the ground as he walked and took hold of his feet and ankles, so that a single step required more strength than he could muster.
Before dawn, the men assembled and were released to break their fasts. Had it been somehow possible to lift an eighteen-pounder without mechanical aid, it would have taken forty souls, but that number could not find purchase on the gun at one time, so the cannon were dragged, sometimes upon the ground, at other times upon wooden tracks hastily constructed. Everywhere it could be contrived, even for the shortest distances, tackles were rigged using the largest ship's blocks Hayden had been able to procure. With crowbars and muscle the guns were inched over the unyielding terrain, over rocks and gullies, men straining so that veins bulged blue and faces turned crimson. Two men were carried back to the surgeon at the beach camp beyond Mortella Point, both with what Hayden suspected were hernias. A third collapsed in the forenoon, writhing on the ground and clutching his back, and he, too, was borne away on a litter.
Despite the brutality of the work, no one complained. It had got about that the army intended to blame the Navy men for the failure to take the French positions if the guns were not carried to the heights, and no sailor was willing to live with that. Injured backs and hernias be damned.
Having seen the guns on their way along the valley, Hayden went quickly to the ramp where the second set of eighteen-pounders were being readied to haul. This slope, though gentle-appearing from a distance, was not so upon closer inspection. It was also far more rugged than any had realized. The slope had the distinct advantage, however, of allowing block and tackle to be used to haul the guns the majority of the distance to the top. Very heavy cables were being long-spliced together and a purchase created by rigging massive ship's blocks. Men were clearing away brush and small trees in a direct line up the slope, and arguing over ways to get the guns over rocks. Hayden struggled up the slope to see how the blocks were being attached at the top, and here he found Wickham overseeing the men as they ran ropes several times around rocks.
'How go your efforts, Lieutenant?' Hayden asked. Wickham always seemed to colour a little with pleasure each time he was addressed as 'lieutenant'. He had doffed his coat and was in the thick of the work, hair plastered to a sweaty forehead.
'Well enough, sir. I don't think we can manage more than two-to-one purchase, but I'd rather haul twenty hundredweight than forty, so it will do.'
'We can put as many men to hauling as there is rope to take hold of, so I dare say it will answer.'
'How go your own efforts, sir?'
'It is a slow business, Wickham. But if it cannot be managed yard by yard or foot by foot than we shall press forward inch by inch. Perhaps the French will run out of victuals before we get the guns to the top.'
Wickham smiled. 'Little worry of that, Captain. We shall drive them from their redoubt, yet. I am certain of it.'
Hayden climbed up then, to look at the place Kochler had proposed to mount the guns. To the left of the ramp, up which the guns were to be hauled, a jagged ridge of broken stone inclined steeply downward to the beach. Although this ridge provided protection, from both the prying eyes of the French and from their cannon, the guns would have to be raised to its top before they could be employed, and this, Hayden despaired, might be their undoing. Even the climb up this ridge was difficult, and Hayden once found himself unable to proceed, but not quite sure he could descend, either.
Casting about for a hand or foothold, Hayden felt his legs begin to shake from the strain, and his fingers were cramping. He fought down panic, searching with a foot beneath him for any kind of toehold.
'Bloody island,' he cursed under his breath, 'shall be the death of me.'
But then his boot encountered a small ledge, hardly wider than his thumb, and he lowered his weight onto it, quickly finding lower handholds, and from here he was able to climb quickly down.
A few moments he rested and contemplated the rock, until he discerned what he believed to be an easier route of ascent. Steeling his nerve, he tackled the rock again and was soon pulling himself over the top. Here he found an officer of the engineers and a crew at work on levelling ground for the battery. At least someone thought it possible the guns might reach the top, and Hayden was quite certain he knew who it was not.
An hour saw Hayden returning to the other guns, finding them sooner than he had hoped. Progress was always frustrated on this rugged, little goat path. An image of British infantrymen charging the French positions into a hail of grapeshot occurred to him. This he found so horrifying that it made him recoil almost visibly, and he tore his mind away from such thoughts and back to the guns that lay, massive and indifferent, upon hoof-hardened ground.
Winter days were short, and the sun soon plunged into a pool of cloud on the horizon, setting it afire. Torches were lit and the men kept to their task. Conversation grew less and less frequent and more and more terse when it did occur. Finally, about a quarter of eleven, it was apparent that the men were too exhausted to continue, and Hayden called a halt to all work.
A rough camp had been readied for the men, and they rolled into blankets around fires, watched over by dutiful Corsicans. Sleep was easily found by one and all. Even Hayden collapsed and was insensible in moments.
Late in the night he opened his eyes to find a moon riding high, adrift in a hazy sea of black and blurry stars. The fire had burned low and he was cold. That was what had wakened him. For a time he remained prone, hoping some other would rise and feed the fire, but when no one did he roused himself and piled wood on the coals. He stood near the heat, surrounded by the dusky cocoons of men wrapped in woollen blankets. The fresh wood began to smoke, then caught with an aspirated 'wooph'. A moment Hayden stayed, warming himself. His body was stiff and aching from his day's labour and he felt a deep sense of exhaustion.
'Sir?'
Hayden turned to find one of the cocoons had risen and was lumbering towards him.
'Mr Wickham. Did I wake you?'
'I don't believe so, sir. I was but half asleep.' The boy pulled his blanket closer about his shoulders.
Hayden had spent enough time around Wickham, now, to know his moods and tonight he was not reassured by the tone of the midshipman's voice. 'Has something troubled you, Mr Wickham?'
The boy said nothing a moment, moving to stand over the fire so that he might warm himself. 'I had several conversations with General Paoli, while you were away, sir. And as many with Sir Gilbert…' The boy's decision to speak appeared to dissolve.
'These conversations distressed you?'
'They did, sir, though I am not certain in what way.' He said nothing a moment more. 'I do not hold out much hope for this enterprise, in the long run.'
'Raising the guns?' Hayden asked, confused.
'No, sir… our presence in Corsica – British presence.'
'Why is that, pray?'
Wickham brushed back his hair with a hand mittened in his blanket. 'Sir Gilbert is an intelligent man, and certainly he has the best interests of the Corsicans at heart, but he does not seem to understand how… life is arranged on this island. It is not in the least like England, sir; nor are the Corsicans like us. They are strongly divided into clans… and the bonds of loyalty exceed our own loyalty to family or friends. Although General Paoli has tried to eliminate this, the Corsicans kill each other over perceived insults, and then go on killing each other… sometimes for generations. When one clan gains any kind of political office it is expected, by everyone, that they will look after their own people at the expense of others. It is not even thought wrong. The idea that you might appoint the most capable person to a position is unknown here, as is the idea that justice should be meted out equally. Leonati told me that when the general first came to power a relative of his was arrested. Everyone expected that Paoli would see him pardoned of his crimes – but he did not. He let the man suffer the fate decreed by the courts. It was unheard of. Our ideas of justice, of fairness, do not hold here. Paoli binds all the clans together because he understands them and they respect him. I am not sure that Sir Gilbert comprehends this. He seems to perceive Paoli as an impediment to the creation of a perfect state. I think Sir Gilbert is a little like Mr Aldrich in this; he believes that if something seems reasonable to him it must seem reasonable to all. But what is reasonable in Corsica is that you look after your own… and they will look after you when their time comes. Only Paoli and a few others see the need to rise above this. They believe that the Corsicans will learn this lesson too… in time. But not overnight. I fear Sir Gilbert is in such a hurry to create perfection that he will try to push General Paoli aside. And if so, he will quickly lose the trust of the Corsicans. He does not know the history of the clans' alliances, of their grievances one against the other. He cannot smooth over the indignation of one clan towards another for he does not understand the source of the indignation to begin with. We are strangers here. It is as though we have travelled to a place where the laws of nature are different. Gravity does not pull bodies down when they fall – instead, they rise or tumble sideways.'
Hayden wanted to protest at this – after all, Sir Gilbert Elliot had travelled widely and seen many cultures – but everything Wickham had said seemed disturbingly true. As though the boy had given voice to fears Hayden shared but could not previously acknowledge. To admit these things aloud, though, made the present enterprise appear somewhat futile.
'All we can do, Wickham, is drive out the French and hope that Paoli and Sir Gilbert can work out their differences.' But Hayden could not maintain this pose of neutrality and hope, and let out a long breath. 'Lord Hood did not trust Paoli, either. He seemed to think him an old scoundrel.'
Wickham turned to him, his face flickering in the firelight. 'Oh no, sir. General Paoli is a very wise man. With all respect, Lord Hood and Sir Gilbert are much mistaken. The general is a man of great integrity and broad understanding. It is true that he does not always reveal all of his intentions, but a lifetime in politics has taught him some painful lessons. Betrayal is not unknown to him.'
'No doubt, Wickham. No doubt. Let us, at least, not betray his trust. We will drive out the French as we have promised. That is our part of the bargain. If others fail we can say that we held true.'
'Aye, sir. If we can carry these guns to the hilltops, the French will not tarry in their batteries.'
'Indeed. The French, the Corsicans and the British Army do not believe guns can be carried to such heights, but I believe we shall prove them wrong.'
'So do I, sir. And then' – Hayden could see him smile – 'we shall have to carry them down again.'
Hayden laughed softly. 'You could have been a dandy in London society, Mr Wickham, but you, rather rashly, I think, chose the Navy instead. Our tasks are Promethean, our rewards intangible –'
'Our boots are smoking.'
'Oh, damn! Look what we've done! Baked our boots in the service of England. What more can be asked of us, Wickham? What more?'
After his conversation with Wickham, Hayden had barely closed his eyes when it was time to rise, form up the men and then breakfast. Sunlight had not offered even a suggestion of its powers when they were back at the guns, hauling again on ropes, Hayden feeling that, indeed, they had been cursed and set an impossible task. The sunken-eyed faces of his men, slick with sweat and dirt, appeared haunted in the torchlight.
The sun announced its intentions by illuminating the underside of a cloud that hung low over the eastern mountains, turning it various hues of ember-red, before a shaft of filtered light pierced between two peaks.
'It's a sign from the almighty!' one of the men jested.
'We's all to go 'ome and 'ave tea, lads!' another announced.
It was one of the things about sailors that endeared them to Hayden; he had heard them make jests, sometimes very black in nature, at moments when any sensible man would have been frightened into utter silence or too exhausted to speak. They found ways to keep their spirits up under any circumstances.
As soon as it was light enough, Hayden left his train of guns and hiked over to find Wickham. The first eighteen-pounder, on its sledge, had been fastened to the rope, and the men were set to haul by walking down the slope, all the weight they could manage hanging on the cable.
Wickham stood by the gun, holding a pistol.
'Are you expecting a mutiny, Mr Wickham?'
'No, sir. The men hauling are too far off to hear my commands so I'm signalling with guns and flags, sir. When I fire my pistol they are to leave off hauling and belay.'
'Most ingenious, Lieutenant. Be certain you kill no one.'
'There is no ball in the pistol, sir.'
'I was jesting, Wickham.'
'Of course you were, sir.'
A flag was raised by a midshipman, and the men commenced hauling, the gun inching up its prepared path. In a dozen feet the sledge reached a gap between rocks too narrow to allow passage, and Wickham fired his pistol into the air. Hauling ceased, and the sledge came to rest, as though waiting.
'We shall have to build a bridge over,' Wickham called to the lieutenant, who came jolting down the slope at that moment.
'I will leave you to it,' Hayden said, and set off to rejoin his own party.
Hiking up over the crest of the hill, Hayden could soon perceive his own crews below, massing about each gun like predators at a carcass. Along the hilltops to his left, Hayden could see Corsican militia and companies of Moore's 51st making certain the French remained in their redoubt and did not attack the toiling sailors – a thought that lay in the back of every Navy man's thoughts.
Picking his way down the slope, Hayden quickly caught the crews up.
'How goes it?' he asked the Juno's bosun, a quietly competent man named Germain.
'Lead arse is always slowing us down but the others move along handsomely.'
'Lead arse?'
The bosun laughed, a bit embarrassed. 'The men have given the guns new names – christened them with dirt, sir. The eighteen-pounder at the fore is 'Swift' because… well, its always in front so it's winning, like. The other eighteen is 'Lead Arse' and the howitzer is 'Bill's Sweetheart', because…' The bosun coloured and fell silent.
'You needn't explain that one,' Hayden replied.
He turned his attention to speeding up their progress but it was nearly futile. Coaxing 'Lead Arse' twenty yards could take an hour. At times, an hour did not see the guns progress twenty feet!
But despite Corsica's efforts to thwart Hayden and his crews at every turn, by day's end the three guns lay at the bottom of the slope up which Hayden had proposed to drag them. The mood of the hands was much improved and enough grog was carried from the beach to give every man a taste before supper. Hayden thought it less than they deserved.
Before darkness could settle in, Hayden hiked back to see how Wickham and the lieutenant fared. To his great relief, he discovered the first eighteen-pounder at the top of the slope ready to be slung up to the peak, but the second, though halfway up the ramp, lay among the ruins of its sledge. Hayden made his way down to this gun, where he found Wickham at the centre of the gathered men.
'Mr Wickham. Your gun seems to have run afoul of Corsica.'
'Yes, sir. We were pulling it over these rocks by means of a wooden bridge when the bridge collapsed. We shall have it all put to rights in a few moments.'
Indeed, men could be seen already bearing wood up the slope, and the gun was being readied to sling as soon as a tripod could be firmly erected above the irregular slope. Two hours Hayden spent seeing the gun remounted on its remade sledge, and guided over the rocks, everything managed to a nicety.
It was, by then, thoroughly dark.
And out of this darkness came a familiar voice. 'I have wagered all my savings that you shall not be thwarted in your efforts by anything so minor as a mountain. After all, it is only a small one, as these things go.'
Hayden turned to find Hawthorne grinning at him in the torchlight.
'Mr Hawthorne!' Hayden said, genuinely happy to see the marine. 'How is it you are here?'
'You have surely been too busy to notice, but your ship lies anchored in the bay beyond Mortella Point.'
'The Themis?'
'None other. I asked Mr Archer's leave to come ashore and protect my investment. If these guns are not perched atop some mountain by the day after tomorrow, I shall be pauperized, and my children after me.'
'You have a very strong back, Mr Hawthorne, which makes you doubly welcome. How fare our crew and officers? Is our new lieutenant finding his way, do you think?'
'Ransome, sir?'
'Ransome?'
The marine lieutenant laughed. 'Yes, the poor man is named William Albert Ransome. William Albert Ransome the second, we have discovered. Other than his impressive appelation, he appears to be an excellent officer, if a little eccentric.'
'And he is eccentric in what way?'
'He has some very odd beliefs, Captain. Transmutation of the species is one of his several hobby horses. He told us all at dinner, this two nights past, that ships would one day sail without wind and that the sailors' arts would be confined to pulling levers and steering, though reading a chart and navigation I doubt will go out of fashion. A very peculiar sort of man, but we have all taken a liking to him just as men always do the village idiot.'
Hayden was very anxious, suddenly, to see his ship, and, a few moments later, he and Hawthorne were striding along the beach towards the tower on Mortella Point. Hardly more than an hour saw them boarding the Themis, which rode to her anchor on a calm sea.
The officer of the watch was Gould, who greeted Hayden with genuine affection, and perhaps a little relief. It made Hayden realize that Gould was yet not confident of his place on the ship and was happy to see, back aboard, the officer who first supported him.
Mr Barthe met Hayden as he descended to his cabin.
'Captain Hayden, sir,' the sailing master began, 'have you set your guns upon the hilltops?'
'Not yet, Mr Barthe. I hope you have not been wagering, as well,' Hayden teased. 'You know Mrs Barthe's feelings on this count.'
Barthe, whose passion for gaming had all but ruined his family in the past, looked suddenly chagrined, and he cast a resentful look at Hawthorne. 'You needn't worry, Captain Hayden,' Barthe offered, a little abashed, 'I will not fall back into my old ways. I am quite determined.'
A sense of disquiet crept over Hayden – perhaps it was the fact that Barthe did not deny that he had been gambling, but Hayden did not want to embarrass the sailing master by pursuing this further with others present. Barthe had finally freed himself of debt as a result of the prize money earned on their last cruise; to see him take his family back into those straitened circumstances would distress Hayden more than a little, not to mention that gambling was not officially permitted aboard ships of the Royal Navy. Hawthorne, Hayden assumed, had been jesting about his own wagers.
Mr Archer appeared, and he and Barthe informed him of all events aboard the Themis since he had departed. As they spoke, Griffiths announced himself at the door of Hayden's cabin and was invited in. Medical matters were quickly dispensed with, and port was produced, the officers all pleased to find themselves back in one cabin. It occurred to Hayden to tell the gathering that he considered himself fortunate to have such excellent officers and companions, which they all drank to most heartily.
'We have not told you about our recently departed parson,' Hawthorne said, breaking into a grin.
'Is Mr Smosh no longer with us?'
'Most happily, he is still aboard, but Dr Worthing… there is another story.'
Laughter and shaking of heads all around as the gathered men waited for Hawthorne to continue.
'Our dearly departed parson had not been aboard Majestic a week when he ran afoul of his new captain – Pool. Letters were sent off to Lord Hood – by both Worthing and Pool, Worthing asking that his captain be replaced for incompetence, and Pool begging that Hood relieve him of this vexatious man of God.' A finger pointed at the deck-head. 'We have all of this from a friend of Ransome, who is a lieutenant aboard Majestic. Lord Hood, however, has refused to honour either request, and has informed both gentlemen not to aggravate him more with such petty matters.' Hawthorne's smile grew even larger. 'I only regret that I am not allowed to observe these proceedings more closely that I might extract the fullest measure of contentment from every exchange.'
'If you were observing it that closely, Mr Hawthorne,' Barthe informed him, 'you would be marine lieutenant aboard Majestic… and I do not think that would provide you with such "contentment".'
'Lord preserve me from that.'
There was a moment of silence – there being, perhaps, so much to say that no one knew where next to proceed.
At that moment the new lieutenant arrived and was introduced. He was by manner and address unmistakably from a better family than anyone aboard save Wickham. Although he was not remarkably handsome in any way, he was a pleasant-looking young man of perhaps twenty years, with auburn hair, pale skin and uneven teeth that somehow formed a disarming smile.
As soon as he had been introduced he looked at Hayden rather closely in the lamplight. 'You do have differently coloured eyes!' he blurted, to much laughter. Ransome looked around, embarrassed. 'I am sorry, Captain. I believed I was being practised upon when they told me that you had one blue eye and one green.'
'No, I am afraid you were being told the truth. Would you join us in some port?'
'It would be an honour.'
Conversation strayed a bit, as though it could not find its wind.
'I understand, Captain Hayden,' Ransome said after a moment, 'that you have a gift for discovering the French and bringing them to action.'
Hayden laughed. 'Now there you have been practised upon. And, to be honest, I think of getting into action as being rather bad luck.' Hayden wondered what was being said about him in his absence.
'You do not think of it in that manner at all,' Griffiths interjected. 'I have never known a man so pleased by the prospect of action.'
'We are all pleased to do what we joined His Majesty's navy to do,' Hayden protested, 'engage our enemies. But I believe the lucky captains are the ones who never seem to have an opportunity to engage the enemy. Think how seldom they must write home to a family to inform them their son or husband or father has departed this life. I cannot tell you how much I should like to be relieved of that particular duty.'
'It is odd, is it not,' Barthe observed thoughtfully, 'how some captains do always seem to be in some kind of action or another, while others can go a whole war and never catch sight of a French ship.'
'It cannot simply be a matter of luck,' Ransome said, looking around, as though asking for agreement.
'In truth, Lieutenant,' Hayden said, 'I think it can be attributed to precisely that: chance and nothing more.'
'But not in your case, Captain,' Hawthorne protested, suddenly serious. 'You understand the enemy better than anyone else as a result of having lived among them. Perhaps it is not cognizance on your part, but, instinctively, you know what the French will do, where they will be, even. You understand the French mind.'
'Oh, Mr Hawthorne,' Hayden protested. 'I know where the French will be at mealtimes – at table – but, otherwise, where a French ship will be is as predictable as where an English ship will be. Measure tide, wind and the proximity of threats and perils; couple those with some contemplation of the enemy's intent and you will know as much about the French mind as do I.'
'Protest all you like, Captain,' Hawthorne stated, 'but you knew the French frigate was signalling a ship over the horizon, while Pool and Bradley did not – which cost Bradley his life. You knew the French frigate and seventy-four were lurking out in the fog, and just how to draw them out – which led to the seventy-four's destruction. You may protest, Captain, but we all know better.'
The others nodded heads, which disconcerted Hayden, for they were certainly attributing abilities to him that he did not possess.
Hayden turned to Ransome. 'How are you adjusting to life aboard a frigate? A little different from Victory, I should think.' This obvious change of subject made his companions all smile a bit too knowingly.
'I am finding it much to my liking, Captain Hayden. Do you think it possible that we shall again be sent on a cruise?'
'The intentions of the admiralty are a mystery to me, Lieutenant. I was sent here to deliver the Themis to Lord Hood so that he might find her a captain. It surprises me, yet, that he has not done so.'
'Then you are under the command of Lord Hood?' Ransome enquired. 'When he spoke with me, I was given the impression that you were not…'
'No one wishes to claim the Themis, it appears. I fear, at times, that we shall spend the war sailing about with neither orders nor purpose, shunted from one admiral to another, turned away from port after port.' Hayden had meant this in jest, but his words silenced the gathering and distress surfaced in every face – every face but Ransome's.
The new lieutenant actually brightened with pleasure. 'Well, if we are without orders, I suppose we might consider ourselves to be privateers – in all but name.' He rubbed his hands together comically. 'Think of the prizes that await us.'
This made the others laugh and a toast was drunk to becoming privateers.
The gathering broke up soon after but before he took himself back to shore, Hayden wanted to have a word, privately, with some of his officers, beginning with his senior lieutenant.
'It is true, sir, what you said.' Archer appeared a bit dismayed. 'Lord Hood doesn't seem to have duties for us, even though, I am informed, he has written frequently to the Admiralty requesting frigates. I was ordered to anchor here and offer support – to whom was never made clear.'
Hayden felt as though he were falling, his stomach ballooning up. The Mediterranean was a massive theatre; surely Hood had employment for any number of frigates. To leave the Themis adrift seemed more than peculiar.
'What is in the mind of Lord Hood, I cannot tell,' Hayden responded. 'But surely he will have some duty for us shortly. He must.'
Archer did not appear convinced, but nodded rather hopelessly.
The last officer to be spoken with was the doctor. Though the Mediterranean sun had darkened his flour-pale complexion, Griffiths still appeared frail and unwell. Hayden worried that the doctor had gone back to his duties too soon but had not yet recovered enough to execute them. Enquiries after his health Griffiths brushed aside, claiming that he recovered apace and that Hayden need not concern himself. But Hayden was concerned and resolved to have a word with Ariss about the doctor at the first opportunity.
The medical condition of the crew Griffiths reported as good. Almost everyone had made a full recovery from the influenza, and, apart from a mild bowel disorder which had passed through the crew the previous week, the men were hale. He did, however, have more to say about one man, and this was not of a medical nature. 'He has shown a distinct interest in our recent prizes and the amount of prize money we might realize from them,' Griffiths reported, speaking of their new lieutenant. 'We learned that Hood had been trying to place him in a frigate for some months, believing that this would be a great boon to his education as an officer, but he has always managed to make some excuse or argument that spared him this fate. Likewise, he was not in favour of joining the Themis… until he learned of our recent prizes. It appears that our new lieutenant has a passion for money that is barely controlled and poorly disguised. His family was attempting to marry him to a suitable fortune in London this past year, but apparently this was being effectuated rather too obviously and the suitable fortunes withdrew. Avarice, of course, is hardly uncommon, but I came to my senses in this matter a day ago. Do you know the name Samuel Albert Ransome? No? Well, he was once an extraordinarily wealthy man, but an untimely investment in the South Seas Trading Company brought him to a complete and humiliating ruin. He died not long after, and it was widely suspected, though his family vigorously denied it, that it was by his own hand. Lieutenant Albert Ransome is this unfortunate man's grandson.' The doctor shifted uncomfortably in his chair. 'That is the first part of the story. Since arriving at Corsica but a day ago, he has been much engaged in a… certain enterprise in which he has embroiled a number of crew members. It seems that a rumour has been circulated among the men of the army that a certain Captain Hayden, a brash and rather arrogant young officer, told the Navy that though they might not be capable of carrying guns to the hilltops certainly he could do it. This rumour engendered no little resentment among the army men, and was followed by a rash of wagering with some of the officers of this very ship. Lieutenant Ransome's confederate in this is none other than our sailing master – a previously reformed gamester. It seems that Ransome goes about lighting the flame of resentment among the army men, and then Mr Barthe happens along some time later pretending to be somewhat unworldly, and suggests a friendly wager. I am quite certain they have taken on gambling obligations beyond their ability to discharge, should your enterprise fail.'
'Bloody fools!' Hayden spat out. 'Clearly they had not been ashore and seen the countryside we struggle with before they began this lunacy. So, now my failure will see the ruin of Mrs Barthe and her lovely daughters? I shall roast Mr Barthe alive.'
'Let us hope that none of these army officers gain an understanding that they have been played for fools, for it will be Mr Barthe forced to walk out and I do not think he will survive it. I note that Ransome has arranged matters so that it was not he who made the wagers, so Barthe will bear all responsibility for them.'
'Perhaps it is Ransome I should roast alive. And this is the lieutenant Hood has sent me? For a brief moment I believed the admiral's acquaintance with my father disposed him to favour me.' Hayden shook his head as though to clear it of illusions. 'Of all people, I should have known better.'
As he was being rowed ashore, Hayden found his spirits noticeably lowered. He had imagined that, finally, a patron had been found in the service, and one very highly placed. And what had Hood done, but saddle him with a scheming lieutenant out to make his fortune at any cost. Hayden himself was not unfamiliar with ambition and with a desire to improve one's material circumstances, but he would not stoop to duping soldiers to do it! If his task was not already difficult enough, now he had two of his senior officers breaking regulations. Ransome he did not care about. The man could pay the price for his folly, but Barthe had supported Hayden from almost the beginning – even under the tyrannical Hart – he did not want to see the man and his family ruined – again – and it frustrated him no end that he should be forced to discipline one of his most loyal supporters – but discipline the pair he must.
But, in truth, the feeling that he had misunderstood Lord Hood's intentions unsettled him as much as Barthe's gambling. In some strange way he felt humiliated by this and he could not make the feeling go away.
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 17
|
Four hours' sleep was all the hands were allowed, and Hayden even less. The blocks intended to haul the guns were of such size that a single man could not lift one. The ropes were of compatible diameter. To bear them, a large party of hands carried them over their shoulders, as though they had all been manacled in a line, and held fast to cables fashioned by giants.
The bosun and his crew were kept busy splicing rope and positioning the blocks.
'I'd not bet my pay that she'll pass through the block and make the turn, sir,' Germain reported to Hayden. He sat upon a stone, fid in hand, working slack out of the drawing-splice. 'I worked she down as much as I could, Captain. But look…' He pushed a section up a few inches with both hands, presenting it to Hayden. 'She's like a pregnant constrictor snake, sir.'
'If it will not pass, we will clap on a stopper, unmake it, pass it through and make it again.'
The bosun nodded, but did not look pleased at this prospect.
Up the slope above them, parties had begun clearing away the bush and moving away any rocks that could be prised up and shifted. That left any number of rocks too great to be moved, many larger than a ship's boat.
By sunrise the rope was ready to be carried up to the high block, which had been rigged to a massive stone by a strap. Men were sent up the slope until a hundred stood evenly spaced, and the rope was started at the bottom by a party that carried the end to the first man, then the second and so on. When the end had reached to the top, the men began to haul in concert, the bosun standing halfway up the slope with a speaking trumpet. 'Heave!' he hollered. 'HEAVE!'
Ten times the men heaved, and then they rested. Then ten more. Any place where the rope passed over a rough corner of stone the bosun's mates rigged a mat to reduce chafe.
The rope had to be fastened by one end at the top, run down the slope and through the block attached to the sledge, then up and through the top block. The fall streamed down the slope, and it was upon this that the men would haul.
The instant it grew light enough to walk without a torch, Hayden left this task to his lieutenant and bosun, and set out for the hillside where Wickham wrestled with his guns. He knew the quickest path now, and even his Corsican bodyguard hurried to keep up. Along the way he saw Moore and several companies of the 51st on a hillside, a scattering of red petals against the dusty green. Having studied the way the Corsicans moved so easily through the countryside, the colonel was accustoming his men to do the same. Hayden was certain he had never met with an officer so diligent and thorough.
As the eastern sky brightened, Hayden emerged at the top of the slope to find Wickham and his fellow lieutenant, not a hundred feet below, deep in conversation. With aching thighs absorbing each long step down, Hayden made his way to them, Wickham calling out and waving as he was perceived.
'It is as we thought, Captain Hayden,' Wickham explained as Hayden reached them. 'The slope is such that we cannot run the guns up a rope on a block. The rope will stretch too much to allow it.' Wickham stared up at the jagged slope above. 'The longest sheer legs that we can manage do not extend far enough to raise a gun lying at the cliff's base; it is too distant.'
Hayden gazed at the cliff as well. 'We will have to raise the guns as we do when unshipping them, Mr Wickham, rigged just so, then we will fasten a tackle to the ring, with the other end made fast to a convenient rock – there are enough about – and we will lift it little by little, taking up on the one and paying out the other.' Hayden turned to the lieutenant. 'Will that not answer?'
'It might be made to work, sir. I have never seen a gun raised so far in this manner, but I can't think of any reason it should not work, if everyone keeps their wits about them.'
'Then let us keep our wits about us. Send the carriages up first. That will accustom everyone to their part without the weight. Do not allow the carriages to be dashed against the stone; we should lose much time bearing others up from the ships.'
Hayden left them to carry up spars for sheer legs, and set off back the way he had come.
The rope had not formed its great 'N' upon the slope when Hayden arrived, but had very nearly made a 'V', leaving only the fall yet to be run.
Hayden observed Lieutenant-Colonel John Moore loitering about, speaking with some of the men, but when he saw Hayden he started immediately to intercept him. He seemed always rather sanguine, to Hayden – absorbed by preparations for the coming battle, but never apprehensive. From all that he had said, Hayden suspected his only fear was that he might commit some error of judgement that would cause a British loss or unnecessary deaths. If any man had been born to achieve the status of hero, it was John Moore.
Hayden harboured a similar fear – fear of failure, in Hayden's case – but the idea of his own death always whispered in his mind, and had to be suppressed actively lest it hinder him from performing his duties. At such times, Hayden's faithless stomach would choose to announce itself, sometimes protesting so stridently that others must hear. No small cause of embarrassment, especially upon the quarterdeck.
Moore waved a hand at Hayden as he approached, and the Navy man walked over to meet him, allowing them a degree of privacy.
'Your guns are ready to ascend, I see,' Moore called.
'If Corsica will suffer them to do so,' was Hayden's response. Until the guns were mounted upon the crest and trained down onto the Convention Redoubt he would take nothing for granted.
'Corsica is as anxious to be rid of the French as are the Corsicans,' Moore assured him. 'She will allow it.'
'For a country so eager to be rid of the French, she has been uncommonly froward, but perhaps we have had to prove ourselves worthy.'
'Let us hope we do not all need to prove ourselves worthy,' Moore replied. He glanced up at the gathering of army officers above, who appeared to be measuring the progress of the guns with uncommon interest. 'I have been informed, Captain Hayden, that one of your officers…' He hesitated. 'One of your officers has been speaking to men of the army and giving you a bad character these last days.'
'Ransome.'
'You know of it then? I cannot imagine what the man is thinking. No matter what has transpired between you –'
'Nothing has transpired between us. I only met the man for the first time last evening.'
Moore looked confused. 'Then this seems very odd…'
'Have you also been informed, that after Ransome has spoken to your officers, and created no little resentment towards this arrogant Navy captain who believes he can carry guns to the hilltops where the army could not, that a second man from my ship then happens along and induces your officers into wagering that I will fail – at odds, I am given to understand.'
'So that is the explanation.' Moore shook his head in near disbelief. 'And this man, Ransome, goes about blasting your character for his own profit!'
'Yes, and he is the lieutenant Lord Hood assigned to my ship after we had left for Corsica.'
Moore kicked a small pebble aside, still shaking his head, clearly incredulous. 'How do you intend dealing with this matter?'
'I have been uncertain, since first learning of it last night, but now I have fixed upon a plan. Might I ask you the great favour of attending a brief meeting with Ransome and his confederate in this scheme?'
'Yes, certainly. And what, precisely, will be my part?'
'If you could stand by and look stern and disapproving I believe that will answer nicely.'
Moore smiled. 'I have understudied officers who mastered every aspect of stern and disapproving. You may count on me in this regard.'
'Excellent. I shall send one of the hands off with a note asking that these two gentlemen attend me ashore. Could you meet me in two hours at the other guns?'
'I shall not be late.'
A few moments later Hayden sent a man running off with a note, and then turned his attention to hauling the guns up to the crest. Over the course of an hour his considerable anger over the gambling scheme was subsumed in solving the problems that faced him, but once he had set off to see to Wickham's guns and confront Ransome and Barthe, he found his choler rising with every step.
He reached the slope where Wickham laboured over his two eighteen-pounders and solitary mortar and found them preparing to raise the second gun carriage. Barthe and Ransome were conversing amiably with Wickham, when they spotted Hayden and Moore converging on them from slightly different angles but apparently about to reach them simultaneously, or nearly so. Barthe looked a bit sheepish, which actually pleased Hayden a little. Ransome, however, hid all signs that he felt anything but utter ease.
Hayden greeted Wickham perfunctorily, promising to watch the raising of the carriage as soon as he had a word with Barthe and Ransome. Moore followed silently along, playing his part perfectly.
'Mr Ransome,' Hayden began as soon as they were out of earshot of any other, 'I am very disappointed to learn that you have been maligning my character among the officers of Colonel Moore's companies –'
'Sir –' Ransome immediately protested.
Hayden raised a hand to silence him. 'I do not wish to ask Colonel Moore to produce the officers in question, but I have had your words liberally quoted to me and wish to hear them no more.' Not allowing Ransome to respond, Hayden turned to Barthe, whose complexion had risen to match the colour of his hair. 'And you, Mr Barthe, have been benefiting from the resentment caused by Mr Ransome to induce Colonel Moore's officers into wagering… that I will fail in my attempt to raise guns to the hilltops!'
'But, Captain Hayden –' Ransome began to protest.
'It is true,' Barthe interrupted, silencing Ransome, who blinked as though he had been struck and left staggering. 'And I am heartily ashamed for my part in it… which I entered into of my own choosing. No one else bears any blame.'
'I expect all monies to be returned to Colonel Moore's officers by tomorrow afternoon, at the express orders of Colonel Moore and myself. All wagers are suspended.' Hayden looked from one chastened man to the other. Barthe was clearly ashamed, just as he had said. Ransome, however, appeared merely chagrined, perhaps suppressing anger. But contrite he was not.
'After all your years in the service, Mr Barthe, you should certainly have known better. And you, Mr Ransome… how do you intend to punish members of the crew for gambling – a vice you are overly familiar with yourself?'
'I am certain the crew know nothing of it, sir,' Ransome spoke up.
'And I am equally certain that you are even more naive than you are corrupt. Lord Hood assured me you were a promising young officer. What will he think, now?'
This finally appeared to drive home the seriousness of the offence – Lord Hood would learn of it, the very man upon whom he was dependent for his future in the Navy.
'You may both return to the Themis and collect the monies to be returned. That is all.'
Master and lieutenant slunk off down the slope, leaving Hayden and Moore gazing after them.
Moore nodded towards Ransome. 'You had best watch that one,' he pronounced quietly.
'Indeed. I cannot tell you how often I have seen cunning and foolishness commingled in the same character. The scheme was almost admirably sly, even if the outcome uncertain. But how does he now govern men when he has broken the law he is to enforce?'
'And to go about maligning his own commanding officer in the bargain… Such a blockhead should not be able to pass for lieutenant.'
'I wonder if Lord Hood has any idea what kind of man he has sent me?'
The two remained a moment more, and then walked back to the men preparing to raise the gun carriage. The lieutenant in charge had seamen manning the tackle slung from the sheer legs positioned on the ridge-top. A second company manned the tackle fastened to the carriage's stern. The two companies had to both work together and oppose each other, the upper tackle raising the carriage, the lower pulling back enough to keep the carriage clear of the rocky bluff while at the same time paying out to allow the carriage to rise. It was a delicate dance and proceeded in jerky fashion, the lieutenant giving each party orders to haul or belay in turn. It was only by a helping of good fortune that the carriage managed to avoid disaster and alight at the top, where it was rolled clear by a dozen men hauling and pushing.
The young lieutenant did not look pleased by the effort, or was perhaps a little discomfited before Hayden and Moore. Hayden did not want to increase this embarrassment but was truly concerned that a gun raised in such a manner would suffer some damage, so decided he would step in.
'Handsomely done, Lieutenant,' he offered. 'Let us rest these men and put others in their places.' Before the lieutenant could climb down from where he had perched himself, halfway up the rocky spine, Hayden ordered the men to fall out, and began pointing to men to take their places. The lieutenant had used well-formed young men for this task, but Hayden selected a preponderance of older seamen, and a smaller number of strong youths. These old hands – the man-of-war's men – had slung guns aboard ships or lowered them into boats hundreds of times and would know their business.
The first eighteen-pounder had been rigged to be raised, trussed up ready to be slung from a single eye. It took a few moments for the hands to climb up to the base of the sheers, but once they had reached the top, Hayden called out, 'Man the falls…! Haul taut…! Hoist away!' The gun shifted in place. 'Walk!'
To the men on the tail-tackle Hayden cautioned, 'Hold it taut. Now ease away slowly.'
The experienced hands gauged just how quickly to ease their fall so that the gun went aloft but remained clear of the rocks. Hayden hardly said a word to them. As the gun raised higher the pull on the tail-tackle increased, and Hayden ordered more hands to man the fall. An orderly row of strong men, feet planted and leaning back with all their weight. If the rope parted they would all be thrown in a heap, Hayden realized.
The gun went aloft in a slow, smooth arc, the four-sheave block creaking and the line bar-tight. The two spars forming the large, inverted 'V' of the sheer legs bent only just perceptibly. The sheer-legs were also controlled by a purchase run back at a precise angle to a massive rock behind so that the sheers leaned out from the vertical.
Hayden moved a little up the slope to where he could gauge the gun's height more accurately. 'High enough!' he called as the gun passed over the edge of the ridge.
'Ease the tail-tackle… More yet… Enough!' Hayden crossed a little to his right to be more easily heard. 'Roll the carriage under her, if you please, Mr Wickham.'
The gun carriage was positioned, shifted a little to one side using bars and brute strength.
'Lower away on the winding tackle!' Hayden ordered. The gun inched down as the men walked slowly forward, Mr Wickham motioning with a hand.
'Mr Wickham, I am going to ease away on the tail-tackle so that you can align the gun and carriage. Be wary, now.'
'Aye, sir.'
Hayden ordered the tail-tackle eased and the gun was steadied by several experienced hands, all of whom kept themselves out of danger as best they could.
'Mr Wickham, order those others to stand clear. They have no business there.' Hayden did not like to see too many men crowded near the gun which, if the rope parted, would fall and cause grievous injury. Best to give a small number of men involved room to jump clear.
'Avast lowering!' Wickham called suddenly. 'My apologies, Captain,' he called down to Hayden. 'We have to shift the carriage but a little.'
'Proceed, Mr Wickham. I shall allow you to give the order to ease away.'
The carriage was quickly shifted again, the gun hanging but two feet above. Wickham ordered the fall eased, 'slowly, slowly' until it seated in the carriage. The acting lieutenant took off his hat and waved it as though an enemy ship had struck her colours. The men all cheered.
'Where are the bastards who claimed it could not be managed?' a man called out to more cheering. Hayden wondered what the French would make of this.
'We've two more guns to raise,' the lieutenant called.
'I will leave you to it, Lieutenant,' Hayden said. 'You seem to have it well in hand.'
'Thank you, sir. Shall I rest these men and employ others in their place?'
'Rest them, certainly, but I would employ the same men. They appear to know their business.'
'Aye, sir.' The young officer took Hayden's point.
Moore intercepted Hayden and shook his hand, a great smile spreading over his handsome face. 'Well done, Captain! You have saved uncounted British lives with that act alone.'
'"Alone" is not how it was achieved.' Hayden waved his hand to encompass all the sailors. 'These men have put both hearts and backs into it, Colonel. No few have sustained hurts, both great and small.'
'And my own men owe them a debt of thanks that I shall endeavour to make clear to them. We shall demonstrate our gratitude by performing our part – driving the French from their batteries and redoubts.'
The walk back to his company seemed, somehow, easier, the exhaustion Hayden suffered, if not lifted, surprisingly diminished. What would Kochler have to say now, Hayden wondered. His zeal to raise guns to the second battery was renewed.
As he descended to the floor of the narrow valley, Hayden was met by a party of Corsicans, all under arms, of course, and a few mounted on mules. It was among the latter that Hayden found, to his surprise, General Paoli, smiling at him in a manner both charming and amiable.
'Captain Hayden,' he called out, 'we heard a great British 'huzza!' which I hope indicates you have succeeded in bearing a gun up to the hilltop?'
'It signified that precise event, General,' Hayden reported, happily. 'We now have an eighteen-pounder staring down at the French in their redoubt, which I believe will give them pause to reflect upon their continued presence on your beautiful island.'
Paoli laughed. 'Never for a moment did the French think this feat might be accomplished, and I must tell you, Captain, that my own people were of the same opinion. "Never underestimate the English." I have said it many times and shall certainly have cause to repeat it again. Nobly done, Captain. Nobly done!'
The old Corsican's bodyguard parted before Hayden, creating a small channel to the general. Paoli beamed down at him.
'Do not let me keep you from your duties, Captain Hayden. But if you have no objections I shall observe your method of accomplishing this, for in Corsica we have many hills and one never can know when a gun might need to be so raised again. Perhaps later we might share a meal or at least some wine?'
Hayden agreed that this would be most welcome, and carried on his way. Pleasing the old general, he realized, was more gratifying than he had foreseen. There was, about Paoli, some air or presence that made one wish to do this. Captain Bourne, one of Hayden's former commanders, had been the same. Men threw themselves into the most dangerous situations hoping to gain his notice and approbation. And yet, how either man accomplished this, Hayden could not say.
When he came within sight of his own party, Hayden observed a large gathering of army men just below the crest. From this outlook they surveyed the progress of the guns and spoke among themselves.
Immediately Hayden wondered if these were some of the men Barthe and Ransome had beguiled into wagering against them, and among whom Ransome had been attempting to lower his reputation for no reason but personal gain, a thought that vexed Hayden more than a little. He attempted to put this aside to focus his mind on the task required but found his thoughts straying back to Ransome at odd moments, and he would be piqued yet again. The day wore on, unseasonably warm, only a simple breeze from the sou'west – hardly enough to stir a sailor's desire.
Clearing a path up the slope proved a more arduous enterprise than any expected, and devoured all of the forenoon, and some hours of the afternoon as well. Hayden spent the time clambering up and down the slope, until his legs ached, overseeing the efforts of the men who laboured among the massive blocks.
Although Wickham and the lieutenant had proven that guns could be raised in the manner Hayden intended, the slope here was both notably steeper and more rugged. The height was also greater. Whether it could be managed was unknown and would remain so for some time.
A more reasonable man might have drawn one of the gun carriages up first, or the howitzer, as a trial, but Hayden reasoned that if they could not carry eighteen-pounders to the crest there would be no use for carriages or even the howitzer. For this reason, it was his intention to make the experiment with one of the great guns.
'In for a penny, in for a pound,' Jinks responded when Hayden explained his reasoning to him, but it was 4000 pounds that concerned Hayden.
On one of his several ascents to the crest that day, Hayden found Moore awaiting him, his entire manner apparently approving of all the sailors' efforts.
'I see a gun lying trussed up, and ready to ascend to the heights,' Moore observed.
'It is ready, but are we?'
'There is no doubt on that account, Hayden.'
The two officers walked the short distance to the place where the engineers prepared the batteries, and stared down at the French below. Hayden was certain that Moore hoped above all things that there would soon be guns upon this very spot, for the effectiveness of the more distant battery was still somewhat in doubt, and it was unlikely to reach the batteries surrounding the tower above Fornali Bay. Guns upon this spot, however, would be devastating to all of the French positions.
The two frigates lying in the tiny bay between the tower of Fornali and the Convention Redoubt drew Hayden's attention, and not for the first time.
'I have noted, Captain, that the French ships weigh upon your thoughts,' Moore observed.
'Yes. I fear they shall be scuttled or burnt when the works are carried.'
'Better that than they escape,' Moore ventured.
'Indeed. But we have need of frigates, here in the Mediterranean almost more than anywhere of which I can conceive.'
'Can they be taken?' Moore asked. He had raised his telescope and directed its glass eye towards the two ships.
'Not easily. They've rigged boarding nets all around, and have no doubt loaded every gun with grape. We would have to cut them out by night. Preferably at the exact moment the works were being carried. I don't think the French will burn such valuable ships until it is apparent they have no choice.'
Moore lowered his glass, his countenance pensive. 'Has Lord Hood indicated his thoughts on this matter?'
'He has not. I am considering making application to him to allow my crew to attempt to cut them out.'
'It seems an excellent enterprise, to my mind.'
When Moore and Hayden returned to the place where the blocks were strapped to the rocks, the hands were already bearing the rope back down to the base. Calling out the names of two of the Themis's men, Hayden sent one down the hill to fetch a glass and then stationed them to watch the French frigates.
'I am most interested to know if either ship has a full muster,' he told the men, 'or if they are making preparations to fire the ships. Keep the closest possible watch – turn about.'
As the men were delighted to be spared the brutal toil of raising guns, Hayden was certain they would not take their eyes from the enemy ships, lest they be sent back to the ropes.
Hayden then turned to Moore. 'The moment of truth,' he announced. 'Or perhaps I should say the several hours of truth.' He looked up at the sun. Daylight appeared to be flying with even greater than usual haste.
'It will be done, Hayden; I have no doubt of it.' Moore's face turned suddenly serious. 'I do have one small wager over this matter. If you bear the eighteen-pounders to the crest, Major Kochler must seek your forgiveness for his unacceptable treatment of you and amend his views of the Navy in the future.'
'And if I fail in this task?'
'Well, he can hardly treat you worse.'
Hayden laughed. 'I shall not disagree with you there.'
On his way down the slope, Hayden stopped to speak with the men who manned the great rope, being certain they were able to continue and seeing to their need for food and water. The day was warm, without being hot, but the task was arduous and lack of water, even on this mild day, would soon tell.
The sun rode low over the western hills, casting its thin, winter light down upon the blue sea and dusty-green island. An hour would bring twilight. Hayden had torches and lanterns made ready.
He saw to the eighteen-pounder himself, to be certain it would not shift on its bed. Satisfied, he turned to Jinks. 'You may give the order to begin.'
'Aye, sir. Man the falls!' he called loudly. 'Haul taut!' A slight tug on the sledge bearing the gun shifted it into line. 'Hoist away! Walk!'
The rope seemed to stretch for an impossible length of time. After several long moments, the rope growing ever tauter, the sledge stirred, scraped forward a little, hesitated, then began the slow, burdensome climb towards the crest. Hayden climbed up beside the sledge, guiding it with a Samson bar. Despite the manifest dangers of this enterprise, hanging back at such a moment would earn him the scorn of the hands. His time with Captain Bourne had taught him that officers need always brave the worst dangers faced by their crews to maintain respect. He did not always do it without trepidation, or even foreboding, but he always forced himself to step forward.
The doubly heavy gun caused the sledge to snag and lodge upon the smallest edge, and the men with the bars were constantly active to keep it from stopping altogether. Knowledge that any stoppage might be the cause of the rope parting galvanized them into prompt action.
The first impediment appeared, and Hayden called out, 'Mr Jinks! We shall call a halt in but five yards.'
'Aye, sir!'
A long, steep-sided rock greater than a yard in height stood in the way. All progress was brought to a halt, while Hayden examined the ground all around.
'Lieutenant!' Hayden called. 'I believe we can shift the sledge to larboard and get round.'
Two baulks of timber were laid athwart the slope, wedged in place by heavy stones.
'They must stand the weight of an eighteen-pounder,' Hayden instructed the hands. 'They cannot shift.'
Crowbars and levers were then employed to shift the gun sideways, an inch at a time, until the sledge rested on the two timbers, which were spaced perhaps six feet apart. These were quickly greased. Taking up his bar, Hayden dug it in beneath the heavy runner. 'One and two and three and heave! Again!'
The sledge lurched to the side but two inches. And then two more. Hayden was soon dripping with sweat and handed his bar to another while he removed both jacket and waistcoat. Taking back his bar he drove it into the unforgiving ground just beneath the runner, presssing his shoulder against the top, the sledge relenting and sliding less than an inch.
'That will do,' Hayden announced. 'Lieutenant! Commence hauling.'
'Aye, sir.' The lieutenant called up. 'Man the falls!'
The sledge reverted to scraping and grating up the rocky slope. The heavy runners – two timbers with their bows shaped to an upward angle – left shavings and chips of rust-coloured wood in their wake. The ancient rock was surprisingly sharp, almost serrated, and tore away at feet and hands so that all the men bore small wounds. 'Medals' they called them, and went in search of the most decorated man – the least decorated, excoriated for not toiling sufficiently and being unwilling to bleed for his country.
A man with a bucket caught them up and Hayden thankfully took the dipper, pouring warmish water down his throat. At that precise instant the sledge slid back, and a hissing slash knifed the air. The rope went scything and coiling up the slope, making the most horrifying noise. The men manning the falls threw themselves down but he heard screams among them. Five feet the sledge grated then came to an abrupt halt against a stone, the gun straining at its bonds. Hayden dropped the dipper and began clambering up the slope as quickly as his tired legs and arms could bear him.
To his relief he saw Jinks emerging from behind a rock, hatless and dishevelled, but otherwise, apparently, whole.
'Are you injured, Mr Jinks?'
'No, sir, but it near took my head off even as I threw myself down. My hat is gone… I know not where.' It was then the moans of the injured men penetrated Jinks's consciousness. He turned quickly up the slope, and then back towards Hayden in distress and alarm. As Hayden reached him the two scrambled up the slope side by side.
He could hear men calling out that they would need a surgeon.
Three men lay in the rubble of the Corsican hillside, one gashed open across the right side of his abdomen. A second bore an ugly purple welt, as wide as a man's arm, across his chest and biceps. Both were in terrible pain, and making no secret of it. A third man had been struck on the temple and lay still as stone, though breathing shallowly.
'Mr Jinks,' Hayden said, his wits returning. 'Climb down and secure the gun. Send a man to the beach to bring a surgeon. We shall make up litters to bear these men away.'
'Captain Hayden!' came a distant voice.
Hayden turned to find Kochler and some of the other officers who had been observing the gun's progress making their way with all speed towards them across the steep slope. 'We have sent for our surgeon, who shall hasten to this place with all speed.'
Moore was also making his way down the slope towards them.
'Mr Jinks…' Hayden prompted softly.
'Aye, sir. Shall I send for the surgeon, yet?'
'No. But we will require litters, all the same.'
Kochler arrived before Moore, in his wake a few junior officers. For a moment Kochler stood catching his breath, gazing at the fallen men. 'Our surgeon shall not take twenty minutes, I am certain.' He turned his attention to Hayden. 'I am sorry, Hayden. It is the worst luck. But our surgeon is a cunning hand. He shall soon put them to rights. See if he doesn't.'
It was the longest quarter of an hour Hayden could recall. The hands tried, with a shirt, to staunch the bleeding of the man who was gashed, but the cotton was soon crimson with blood and the man kept passing from consciousness. Each time his fellows thought he had died, but he would then come around and recommence moaning, faintly.
Finally the surgeon appeared across the slope, leading a small party of men bearing litters. He was soon bending over the wounded, speaking to them in a soft, reassuring voice. Hayden thought him overly young for his position, but he was well-made and confident, moving about the rugged slope with a grace that few exhibited. A dressing was soon applied to the bleeding wound, which appeared to be oozing less by the moment, and the three men shifted gently into litters. With difficulty, they were borne across the slope and up. Hayden was not surprised to see Moore lending a hand whenever needed, and taking the greatest care with the wounded, but to see Kochler step in to bear the litters over rough patches was more than unexpected.
Daylight was rapidly slipping away, and Hayden propelled himself down the slope to the waiting bosun. The man was running his fid into one coil of the cable, and muttering a stream of black invective.
'It has a rotten heart, Captain Hayden,' Germain stated, prising the stained hemp apart, revealing the black interior. 'Just the one strand. How it lasted as it did, I cannot say.'
'It is a wonder,' Hayden agreed.
'This here's the end of it. Then she's sound as stone, sir.' He looked back along the length of the rope to where two seaman stood holding a section up. ''Bout seven fathoms, Captain Hayden, sir. I've more than half a cable in reserve so t'would be simple enough to cut this out and splice in a length. Take a little time, I fear.'
'It cannot be helped. Let us make up the splices with all speed.' Hayden turned around, looking for the lieutenant, and found him down by the gun. 'Mr Jinks. We shall splice in some new rope. Find three able seamen and examine this cable from one end to the other. Lay it open, for this was rotten within and showed no signs of it.'
'Aye, Captain. There are some cracked planks in the sledge, sir, but I think it will hold until the top.'
'I shall climb down and see for myself.'
Indeed, there were cracked planks – three of them, but Hayden agreed with Jinks that it would probably hold together until a repair could be effected. Hayden tried not to let his frustration overwhelm him. They had been a few hours from having both eighteen-pounders on the crest! At least the rope had been rotten and had not broken undamaged – that would have been a setback they might never have overcome. There was no question that the cable should have been strong enough to bear the gun's weight, but the extreme slope and the added friction of the coarse stone was greater than forty hundredweight, Hayden believed.
Before the splices were made the sun settled into the west, leaving an opalescent sky. Jinks picked his way down the slope towards Hayden. 'The cable is sound, sir, but for that one section. Here and there strands have chaffed through, but not so many as to weaken it overly.'
'Let us hope that is true. If the rot were greater we should have to send for more cable. I do not like to do this work by dark; it is dangerous for our people, but we have little choice, now.'
Twilight waned rapidly, light draining away into the west. All around, the faces of sailors appeared pale, almost haunted, in the failing light. The men were done in.
We are so close, Hayden thought. The work of but a few more hours.
He almost did not want to ask it of them but knew they would jump to the ropes without hesitation when the order was given. They would raise the guns to the hilltop if they had to bear them on their backs, he was sure.
The new section of rope was run through the block on the sledge and then spliced into the existing cable. There was no one more adept at this craft than sailors but, even so, it was not the work of a moment, and the failing light did not help. Torches were lit, but there was that odd, brief period, when the sunlight faded and yet the torchlight appeared utterly inadequate. Somehow, the eye adjusted to it as the night grew darker, and torchlight seemed, almost, to grow brighter.
Splices were made, the cable drawn taut.
'Haul away, Mr Jinks!' Hayden called from his place beside the great gun.
The sledge jostled a little as the rope went taut, slid forward an inch, hesitated, then began jarring and jolting up the slope, pitching up or down as it teetered over some rock. Hayden dug his bar into the hard ground, and diverted the sledge a little to starboard. Two men with torches scrambled along beside, trying to keep light on both sledge and ground, while not setting Corsica afire. The sledge would catch on an edge, and Hayden and the man opposite would prise the bow up, hurrying lest the rope stretch too much. For a foot, the sledge would surge forward, then settle back to grating over stone, as though the gun were some massive, black grub inching its way upwards.
Halfway up the slope they found a place where the sledge could be wedged in place so that the men hauling might have a short respite. Hands on knees, he bent over to catch his breath, not from the speed of their ascent but from the steepness of the slope. Life aboard ship did not build stamina for such work.
When the men had all drunk their fill from hands bearing buckets and dippers, Hayden called to Jinks to continue. The half-blind sledge went forward – the men with torches appearing to guide it, casting their smudge of light upon the shattered landscape.
The crest appeared, as unexpected as a silent whale rising out of the oily, darkened sea. Hayden called down the slope to Jinks, and then collapsed on the gun, drawing in deep draughts of warm Mediterranean air. The smell of the sea reached them here, and Hayden felt a sudden longing to be on a ship and done with this war on land, for which he had neither training nor inclination.
'I do hope Kochler apologizes while I am present,' a voice said, and Hayden turned to find a beaming Moore, hands on hips, gazing down at him.
'I find I do not much care about apologies, Colonel. To have managed this thing seems reward enough, at this moment.' And indeed it did. Despite his physical exhaustion, Hayden felt a great sense of elation, as though rising to the hilltop had only been the first step, and now he was floating higher.
'I offer you my congratulations, Captain!' Jinks said, as he came puffing over the rise.
'And I you, Mr Jinks. It is not every day that one manages the impossible, but so we were informed this task was.' Hayden patted the gun with an open hand. 'Yet here is one of Mr Blomefield's eighteen-pounders, upon a mountaintop where it has no business at all.' He waved a hand down the slope. 'All of these men have much of which to be proud.'
'No more than you, sir.' Jinks nodded to Moore. 'Colonel.'
'The men may rest before they carry the rope back down the hill, Mr Jinks, and then we will tackle the second eighteen. All done before midnight, and tomorrow, once the carriages and howitzer have been raised, the men may take their rest or disport themselves as they choose.'
'Aye, sir.'
A fathom of the rope used to haul the guns, Hayden estimated, weighed five or six stone – dry – and a cable length consisted of one hundred fathoms, more or less. Several cables had been long-spliced together to make the whole, so the weight was very great. Upon this rugged ground a man per fathom of cable was required to move it with any speed, and Hayden hadn't enough, even after he had pressed Corsican militiamen into service, but even so, he was not going to ask aid from the army. Kochler and many others had been so disdainful of this attempt that Hayden was damned if he would allow the army to take any part of the credit for the success.
Instead he forced himself up and took hold of a section of cable himself. Every seaman who could walk joined in the work, and though exhausted from their efforts, dragged a fathom of the cable back down to the base of the hill.
The final eighteen-pounder seemed to have doubled its weight. Hayden could hear the men talking as they paused for a break part-way to the top.
'I believe someone lied about the tonnage of this gun,' one man suggested.
'Falsified the customs certificate, that's sure.'
Darkness slowed the ascent, and made finding solid footing awkward and difficult. For the men guiding the sledge – and Hayden was one – torchlight did not reveal the sharp edges, the grabbing roots.
Midnight passed before the gun reached the hilltop, and, once the halt was called, men collapsed where they stood, too exhausted to even cheer, their faces vacant and shadowed. No one offered congratulations or even muttered thanks; they simply toppled to one side where they sat and fell into a stupor.
'Sir…' Jinks managed after a moment.
Hayden had thumped down on the edge of the wooden sledge, his back against the gun.
'I fear it will soon grow cool, and the men… they have no shelter here.'
'I will not order them to rise, Mr Jinks; they are fatigued beyond measure. Let them lay out this night. Snow could fall, I think, and they would not be sensible of it. Let us hope they come to no harm.'
Hayden felt himself sliding down the rugged slope towards sleep.
'If I may, sir,' a voice said quietly, and Hayden opened his eyes to see a figure bent over him. He thought he felt a light weight settle over his body, and realized a rough blanket covered him. He could see torches down the slope, where the hands who hauled the guns had fallen upon the unyielding ground. In the faint light, men moved among them, as priests went among the fallen after a battle.
'They've brought us blankets, Captain Hayden,' Jinks said, his voice coming from some great distance.
'Who…?'
'The soldiers, sir.'
'Wherever did they find them?' Hayden asked, but he fell back into dream before anyone answered.
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 18
|
A league distant, the island appeared verdant, almost lush, but from the deck of the Themis, anchored a cable-length from the beach, Corsica appeared a dull grey-green. This was the result of the low branches of the underwood being a woody-grey and largely unconcealed by leaves, which, at a distance, had the curious effect of dulling the green, as though the eye mixed the two colours into one.
Upon the nearby hilltops, the batteries kept up an incessant firing upon the French positions below, bombarding them with both shot and exploding shells. Hayden was only a little cheered by the idea that the French were hiding in holes while their earthworks were blasted apart around them. In truth, he was yet too fatigued to take the least pleasure from his accomplishment, as though it had been managed by some others or perhaps completed decades previously.
He gazed, for a moment, down into the perfectly clear waters that, from any distance, appeared to be the most vibrant azure. He could see the sandy bottom, and here and there misshapen, flattish rocks, like a dark shadows on the sea floor. The day, still warm, was very nearly windless, the sea and sky as unblemished as a sudden understanding.
'On deck!' came the call from aloft. 'Boat approaching.'
Many boats came and went, among ships and between the anchored fleet and the shore, but this one appeared to be making its way directly towards the Themis – and it was not, Hayden noted, one of their boats. In the stern he could see a midshipman seated by the coxswain and, near to him, some other in a coat of indistinct colour – perhaps green.
Hayden was about to call for his glass when Wickham appeared at his side, and after barely a second's perusal announced, 'Sir Gilbert!'
'Mr Barthe?' Hayden called to the sailing master, who was bent over a small table with his mate.
Barthe straightened, with a look of slight confusion. 'Sir?'
'Can you make out the occupants of this cutter?'
Barthe crossed the deck to stand at the rail by Hayden, only slightly frustrated to be interrupted during his instruction. 'I cannot.'
'I am pleased to hear it,' Hayden replied.
'Sir?'
'Nor can I make the man out, but Mr Wickham here tells me it is Sir Gilbert, a truth I can only discern with a glass. But I'm pleased to hear you cannot make him out either. My eyes are not failing.'
'Pleased to be of service.' Barthe hovered, as though about to turn away.
'Carry on, Mr Barthe.'
'Thank you, sir.'
A few moments later, Sir Gilbert came puffing over the rail, a smile spread over his pleasant face.
'Captain Hayden! I have just been to see the places where you hauled the guns up to the hilltops and had the whole manner of it described to me. Well done, sir! May I offer my congratulations! How General Dundas must grind his teeth to see those guns firing down upon the French – when he said it could never be done! But it was done, sir, and not by the army, neither.'
Hayden could not help but be gladdened by the ardour of Sir Gilbert's praise and excitement.
'Colonel Moore tells me that he believes Dundas will give him the order to attack the French positions the day after tomorrow.' He began patting his pockets. 'Which brings to mind… Ah!' He produced three letters, examined the addressees, returned one to his pocket and handed the others to Hayden.
The hand that addressed the first was known to him. The second, from Admiral Lord Hood.
'Go on! Go on! I am certain you are all in a lather to see what the Admiral has written you.'
Hayden did not require further encouragement, and broke the seal.
Sir Gilbert watched his face with great attention and anticipation. When Hayden folded the letter without a word, Sir Gilbert laughed pleasantly.
'You needn't be so secretive, Captain; Lord Hood explained his plans to me. You are to go after the French frigates?'
'Indeed. You are singularly well informed.'
Sir Gilbert waved this away with a hand. 'I am the representative of his Majesty's government in these waters. Lord Hood confides all to me. And I repay him by repeating nothing, Captain. Can you take a ship into that little bay?'
'No. The batteries would destroy it. We will have to cut the frigates out by night, boarding them from ship's boats. It must be done in concert with the assault on the French positions. If we were to attack before, the French soldiers might come to their aid. If we attack after, the French sailors might fire their ships.'
'They would not try to sail them out under cover of darkness?'
'Lord Hood has set a very close watch on them by night, and our frigates would soon have them in a corner in this small bay. The great concern is that the French will either fire or scuttle them before they can be taken. And certainly they must have all their preparations made, given the cannonade raining down on the French batteries.'
'The French cannot help but be sensible of their position here,' Sir Gilbert agreed. 'Once the batteries were opened on the hilltops, they must have realized the redoubt could not be held.' Sir Gilbert looked around the deck of the ship and at the anchored fleet. 'A very thankful Madam Bourdage and her lovely daughter took ship for Gibraltar these two days past, where they will go on to England. When you have occasion to return home I am certain you shall be the beneficiary of such an outpouring of gratitude from these ladies as will make you blush with pleasure. It is only unfortunate that you could not claim all the evacuees as your relations.'
'Few families are so large. Would you care for a refreshment, Sir Gilbert? Coffee, perhaps?'
'I should like nothing better.'
Hayden was anxious to open his second letter, which was from Henrietta, but schooled his emotions and played a passable host to Sir Gilbert Elliot. Without being indiscreet, Sir Gilbert had a propensity for gossip, and given his circle of acquaintance this made for fascinating conversation. He not only moved in the highest political circles in England, but was intimate with many of the great thinkers and influential personages. Both the king and the Prince of Wales were known to him, as well as Burke and Fox and a host of others. The First Secretary of the Navy, Philip Stephens, was also a familiar personage.
'You might find yourself addressing him as Sir Philip when next you see home,' Sir Gilbert informed him. 'I have it on good authority that his knighthood is in the offing. And well deserved it is, too.'
The moment Sir Gilbert settled himself in the waiting boat, Hayden hurried back down to his cabin and broke the seal on his letter from Henrietta.
My Dear Captain Hayden:
I began this letter by writing, My Dear Charles, as though we, like Robert and Elizabeth, were cousins, or upon Christian names from childhood. I do not know, quite, what tone in which I am permitted to write but your last dear letter to me was couched in terms of such unrestrained affection and warmheartedness that it has emboldened me and made me dare to reply in kind, hoping all the while that I do not presume too much.
I have missed you terribly and you are very often in my thoughts. Women who have sons, husbands or cousins engaged in this terrible war must always be anxious. How they must all watch the post, fearing that single, fateful letter, yet exalting when that sweetest of missive comes from whatever distant theatre, saying that their loved one is well, unharmed, in good health and spirits. You cannot think what this means, and how these poor women then have cause to weep from both worry and relief. And then, but a few hours later, return again to their anxious vigil.
I should not fret so much if you were but a bit more fearful. It was not difficult to read between the lines of your letters telling all that occurred on your convoy, and Elizabeth could not help but confirm my beliefs, as much as she wished not to. It was not quite the routine convoy you described it as.
England remains much as you left it, but for an unseasonably cold winter. Among our little circle, Robert remains perfectly pleased with his new command, and hopes for some action to equal your own. My dear Elizabeth is, as always, busy and content, and would be transported entirely to have her dear husband home. I have but recently returned from Plymouth and can report that Lady Hertle continues to amaze all with her vigour, though I have become aware that the cold winter is hurting her poor joints and she is at great pains to hide this when walking or pursuing needle work, which she has almost abandoned these last weeks.
My own family continue to prosper, and I do hope you shall have occasion to meet them when next you return.
As for myself, I am at my family home along with three of my sisters. The days are much taken up with walking, playing various instruments, reading aloud (my family detests cards), writing almost daily missives to my dearest you, working on the secret novel, and indulging in equally secret pining. Oh, how I hope you will return home before the spring!
I am called away. My father is duplicating the investigations of Mr Newton. I cannot tell you why. It is his latest hobby horse and I am his dutiful assistant. Today we have somewhat to do with prisms.
I do pray this finds you in perfect health, content, and anchored safely in some unassailable harbour.
Your captive heart,
Henri
The evacuation from Toulon had few beneficial effects upon the British fleet, but for the number of ship's boats that had been required – confiscated from the French. This surplus of cutters, barges and gigs allowed Hayden to replace all the boats he had lost in the same harbour.
'Mr Chettle, we will swing the boats aboard and paint them all black – both inside and out.'
The angular carpenter might have been trying to hide his disapproval of this order but he was not entirely successful. 'Black, sir?'
'Yes. As black as we can make them. Will that be a problem, Mr Chettle?'
'No, sir. I have all the lamp-black we should want, sir.' He appeared at a loss for words. 'It is just… uncommon, Captain.'
'It will all become clear. Four blackened boats… by tomorrow, if you please, Mr Chettle.'
'Aye, sir.'
'Oh, and the sweeps, as well, Mr Chettle.'
'Of course, sir.'
'Mr Barthe?'
The sailing master came hurrying along the deck with his characteristic waddle.
'Captain?'
'I think it best that our painting not be visible to anyone ashore. Perhaps some drying sails can be arranged to hide Mr Chettle's efforts, if you please?'
The sailing master appeared as confused by the order as Chettle had been, but answered quickly. 'Aye, sir. I shall arrange for a few sails to take the air.'
'Thank you, Mr Barthe.'
Hayden called his officers together, and when they had gathered in his cabin, all silently expectant, Hayden began. 'Lord Hood has ordered us to cut out the frigates anchored beneath the batteries in Fornali Bay. I am to get sufficient men from the Foxhound to take one ship; our crew will take the other. The attack must be co-ordinated with the army's assault upon the French fortifications.'
'That will explain why poor Chettle is shaking his head as his crew paints the boats black.' Wickham was smiling, but whether at Chettle's consternation or at the prospect of action, Hayden could not tell.
Hayden looked at the faces of his officers. 'Mr Barthe,' he said. 'It is apparent by your countenance that you disapprove of this plan, I suspect, heartily.'
'Captain, you know as well as I do that the ships will be set afire or scuttled the instant the assault begins upon the redoubt. They'll not let those ships fall into British hands if there is any way at all that it can be prevented.'
'I agree entirely, Mr Barthe, but the attempt must be made, and if we can surprise the French crews, I believe we have at least a chance of capturing one ship if not both. After all, they will hardly set fire to a ship they are still aboard, will they? If we can engage them and prevent them from abandoning their vessel, we might carry it. We just might.'
'I am quite certain we can manage it, sir,' Wickham interjected. 'If we can come upon them by stealth, sir, so that we are climbing aboard before they are aware of us, it can be managed.'
'Are they fully crewed, Captain?' Hawthorne asked.
This was the question Hayden had been asking himself, without a certain answer.
'I set two men to watching them from the hilltop as we raised the guns, and it was their opinion that the ships were not fully crewed. Sailors' uniforms could be seen among the men establishing the works, so I suspect that neither ship possesses a full muster. The captains will not want to find themselves in the situation of having to suddenly disembark two hundred men so that the ship can be fired. No, they will have only a few men aboard. My lookouts thought there might have been as few as sixty souls – no more than eighty.
'Mr Archer, I will leave you in charge of the Themis. And before you ask, your request is denied; the senior lieutenant will stay with the ship. Have you been on a cutting-out expedition, Mr Ransome?'
The new lieutenant stirred from thought. 'I have not, sir.'
'I shall send Mr Hawthorne in your boat; he is a deft hand at such things.'
Hawthorne broke into a grin.
'Mr Wickham and Mr Madison will each have command of a cutter. I will command the barge. Mr Wickham, take a seaman with good eyes and station yourself on the hilltop near the number one battery, if you please. You will observe the French frigates. If their crews suddenly return or their numbers change appreciably, inform me immediately. I will visit the battery tomorrow afternoon to assess the situation for myself.
'I should like to take eighty men in the boats. A cutlass and brace of pistols for each man with shot and powder in proportion. Each boat will carry axes and pikes as well. It is my intention to approach by stealth, cut the boarding nets on the larboard quarter, kill or render senseless the sentry, then board in silence. If we are discovered we shall cut away the boarding nets with axes and get as many men over the side as we can. It will be hot work, I should think.
'Mr Hawthorne, I shall want half your marines with muskets and bayonets, the company divided between the first two boats. There will almost certainly be moonlight, so the hands should wear blue jackets. As my boat shall be the first to approach, I will make a list of the men I want and let you make the arrangements, Mr Archer.'
'Aye, sir.' Archer attempted to hide his disappointment at being left aboard, and Hayden was pleased to see he was managing nicely.
'Upon concluding here, I will visit General Dundas and learn his intentions. I will speak with Colonel Moore, and then pay my respects to Captain Winter of the Foxhound.' Hayden realized that he felt a great sense of elation at the prospect of action that did not involve dragging heavy guns over hostile countryside. 'The armourer should examine the flint of every pistol and replace any that are not perfectly satisfactory. Is there anything that anyone wishes to suggest at this moment?'
The officers all glanced one to the other.
'We might blacken the men's faces, Captain,' Wickham offered, 'in deference to the moonlight, sir.'
'Yes. Mr Ransome, ask Mr Chettle for some cork to burn.' Hayden realized Ransome had been very keen to earn prize money. 'I might remind everyone that even if we do take a frigate that we are under the orders of Lord Hood, who will receive a share, and all the ships present will also receive shares for both officers and crew. I fear no carriages will be purchased with the small monies we receive.'
Smiles and laughter told Hayden that everyone was excited, if not a little anxious, at this enterprise.
'Mr Archer, any man who must go ashore should be strongly cautioned to say nothing of our intentions. Even General Paoli advised me that the French still have their supporters among his people. Best they not learn of our plans.' He looked around at the gathered faces, the barely contained eagerness of the middies, Mr Barthe's knowing resolve. The sailing master had served long enough in His Majesty's Navy to see many a man lost on just such an enterprise. He understood the terrible luck of it all. But he would not shirk or shy – Hayden knew.
'Mr Barthe,' Hayden said on impulse, 'I will ask you to stay with the ship. Mr Archer will need a sailing master should anything untoward befall me.'
'But, sir…'
Hayden raised a hand and Barthe's protest died in his throat, a look of disappointment and frustration overspreading his face.
When the cabin was empty, Hayden found himself taking out Henrietta's letters and reading them all again – an unforgivable use of his time, given the circumstances. He could not forget his promise to return. An idle promise, he knew, even as he spoke it. Nor had Henrietta been so naive – she comprehended the dangers… as well as anyone could who had not been in an action at sea. Hayden tied all the letters up in a red ribbon and returned them to a box. He then took quill and ink and wrote her a long letter containing all of his hopes and none of his fears. This he sealed and delivered into the hands of Perseverance Gilhooly with instructions that it be delivered by an officer of the ship into the hands of Miss Henrietta Carthew should he not survive the voyage. The young Irish boy looked terribly alarmed by this, but Hayden felt a great sense of relief. This duty of the heart discharged, he made an effort to focus his mind on preparations for the cutting-out expedition.
The one boat that was not being repainted was quickly manned to carry him ashore, where he went in search of Dundas and Moore. Upon learning that both men were at the nearby battery, Hayden set out to find them. The beaches north of the Mortella Tower were crowded with soldiers drilling and sailors bearing ashore all manner of stores. Supplying even a small army required great co-ordination and more men than Hayden had ever understood.
A line of sailors snaked slowly back and forth across the rise to what Hayden thought of as Wickham's battery. Each man carried a hundredweight of either powder or shot upon his shoulders, which was deposited in a cargo net at the trail-head. Using block and tackle, and the sheers, the net was raised up to the level of the battery and quickly emptied by artillery men.
Hayden took the more direct route that the guns had travelled, and then clambered up the rocks with the aid of the ropes that had been established for this purpose. The smoke from the battery curled over the edge, carried on a gentle breeze, and stung his eyes. In a moment he was on the crest, enveloped in a caustic, black cloud. He tacked immediately to starboard, holding his breath, and as he came into the clear, found Moore, Dundas and General Paoli all standing uphill from the battery, field glasses in hand, Moore pointing with one hand and speaking in Paoli's ear.
One of Dundas's aides spotted Hayden and informed the general, who glanced Hayden's way and then raised his glass to quiz the French positions again.
'Captain Hayden!' Moore greeted him. 'You have finally come to witness the effect of your guns upon the French. You shall not be disappointed, I will wager.'
Moore offered Hayden his glass after the Navy man had greeted Paoli. Even a cursory examination revealed substantial damage to the works of the Convention Redoubt. Not a soul could be seen moving among the earthen walls, and one gun laid on the ground, its carriage smashed. Even as he watched, a ball buried itself in the side of a trench, throwing up a dark blossom of Corsican dirt. Everywhere he looked were small pits, many joined together to form substantial craters.
He could not resist a quick glance to be sure the frigates had not moved, but only their masts could be seen from this vantage.
'Have any of the works been abandoned?' he asked as he returned the glass to Moore.
Moore looked a little troubled by the question. 'No. The French have dug themselves in, but we are still managing to kill more than a few and they must comprehend that we can keep this up indefinitely. It will sap their will to fight, I am certain.'
One of the eighteen-pounders fired, the explosion tearing the air.
'The works will still need to be carried,' Paoli offered into the silence. 'The French cannot, with honour, quit them.'
'The general is, no doubt, quite correct,' Moore told Hayden. 'But you and your men hauled the guns up here at great cost; we shall do our part in driving the French from their positions. Your part is finished, Captain.'
'Not entirely,' Hayden replied. 'Lord Hood has honoured me with the task of cutting out the frigates. This would be best accomplished by night. If our effort can be co-ordinated with the army's assault on the redoubt, I believe there is an excellent chance of success.'
Dundas glanced his way. 'I have not yet decided upon the day of the attack let alone the hour, Captain.'
Hayden tried not to show his annoyance at this remark. 'I shall patiently await your decision, General Dundas – when you feel the success of an attack is most assured, and not before. I have only come to request that I will be given ample opportunity to arrange my assault on the frigates with your own upon the redoubt.'
Dundas did not answer a moment and then nodded, rather grudgingly, Hayden thought. At no time did he take his eyes from the French positions to acknowledge Hayden.
An awkward moment Hayden stood there, growing more angry and frustrated, when finally Paoli intervened.
'Colonel Moore has kindly offered to escort me down to my mule, Captain Hayden. Perhaps you might walk so far with me?'
'It would be an honour, sir.' Hayden nodded to Dundas. 'General.'
The three men set off up to the crest of the hill, and then down the winding path. Hayden could see a band of Corsicans below, perhaps halfway down the slope, two tethered mules browsing halfheartedly among the scrub.
The old general went very slowly along the path, often putting weight on the shoulder of one of his guards. The Corsicans treated Paoli with enormous respect – deference, in truth – which Hayden found touching.
'We did not, Captain Hayden, share the glass of wine that we had intended,' Paoli said, when they stopped for a moment to allow him to rest (Moore, seeing the old man's state had asked if they could take a moment's rest, claiming that he had earlier twisted an ankle).
'We did not, General, but perhaps we may yet. After the French have been expelled; then we may all raise a glass.'
The old man lowered himself down onto a rock with a sigh. He seemed shrunken and fragile at that moment, his entire manner uncertain – uncharacteristically so.
'Yes,' Paoli replied as he caught his breath, 'we shall drink a toast to the Corsican and British island, but how long will your people stay, I wonder? Will the British leave and the Austrians come? – or the Spanish?' He shook his head. 'Do forgive me. I am easily fatigued now, and my mood can become very low at such times. I believe the French shall retreat from San Fiorenzo in a few days, and then Bastia and Calvi will fall. Who can see the future? For a time we shall be the subjects of His Britannic Majesty, and I believe Corsicans will know the greatest freedom they have will have had since the Bourbons came. I will hope it lasts many years.'
He rose then, and kissed both Moore and Hayden on each cheek. 'My people owe you a debt. They say that Corsicans never remember a good deed but cannot forget a bad one, but Paoli will not forget what you have done. As long as I am alive, your names will be spoken with great honour here and in the mountains and in the seaside towns. We are a poor people and cannot raise statues, but we can say your names and tell our grandchildren how you raised the great guns to the hilltops when everyone believed it could not be done, and drove the French from our shores to give us our freedom, however long it might last.'
With that Paoli turned and continued his slow descent, stopping at the bottom of the hill to wave once before mounting his mule and riding off, soon lost in a stand of green.
Returning to the beach, Hayden found a good portion of his crew, including midshipmen, practising armed combat, some with wooden cutlasses, others with musket and bayonet, still others with pikes. Hawthorne had, some time before, requested Hayden order the carpenter to make up wooden weapons so that the men might practise their small arms without risk of injury. He and his officers had drilled the men relentlessly, when weather allowed (quarantine in Gibraltar had seen a flurry of this activity), and Hayden was very gratified with the results. He had always felt that this was one aspect of naval warfare that did not receive the attention it deserved. Losing a man simply because he was uneducated in the use of his weapon was unacceptable to Hayden. In truth, he would feel responsible in such a case, so Hawthorne's dedication to drilling men under arms earned his complete approval.
Among the middies, he found Gould, wooden cutlass in hand. The reefers were still youthful enough that they seemed more like boys at play than men learning to preserve their lives and take the lives of others. Gould, he noticed, was not the least bit cavalier about this exercise and lunged and parried with a ferocity that Hayden found surprising.
Hawthorne noticed his captain and came striding over. He had doffed his scarlet jacket and was, rather jauntily, using a wooden sword as a walking stick. A slick of sweat made his face shine and his colour was high from exertion. 'I hope they are as proficient at killing Frenchmen as they are at murdering each other,' the marine officer commented.
'They have shown marked improvement, Mr Hawthorne. My compliments to you.'
Hawthorne lowered his voice. 'In truth, they were as like to stab themselves before, but I think they will acquit themselves well enough now.'
The two stood a moment, critically observing the thrust and parry.
'Our Mr Gould appears to be becoming quite a warrior,' Hayden observed.
'Indeed. I believe it is born half out of desire to succeed in his profession and half out of desire to preserve his own young life.'
'I applaud both,' Hayden replied.
'As do I. I fear these blockheads who rush into battle without the least trepidation. Men born without fear often seem bereft of conscience, as well.'
Hayden was a bit surprised to hear Hawthorne give voice to this. 'I have thought the same. But what does their footfall sound like, I wonder?'
Hawthorne looked at him sideways, a foolish grin upon his face. 'Well, I thought it a fruitful line of enquiry at the time.'
Hayden laughed. 'And so it was. Is there anything you require here?'
'No, sir. We have come with water and victuals. I wondered when we would get back to fighting the French, Captain Hayden. I always believed hauling guns a waste of your particular talents.'
'As did I! But I have just been up to observe the effect of our guns upon the French and I can report that it is considerably more than satisfactory. The enterprise was very nearly worth the hernias and injured backs.'
Hawthorne laughed with pleasure. 'I am sure the men in the sick-berths will be much fortified when they hear it.'
'Carry on, Mr Hawthorne.'
'I will, sir.'
In a few moments Hayden's coxswain had delivered him to the frigate Foxhound, and into the presence of Captain John Winter. Hayden could not help but take in the austere cabin with its few shabby furnishings. The ancient little table was such a contrast to the grand affair he had so recently been given.
Winter rose from his chair as Hayden entered, a deluge of paper spread out before him. The man did not smile or look in the least pleased to be receiving Hayden.
'Is it no longer customary to send a note in advance of such a visit, Captain Hayden?' Winter enquired peevishly.
'As I was certain we had both received orders from Lord Hood, I believed that you would anticipate such a visit, Captain.'
Winter wore a uniform that was at least a season, if not two, past need of retirement, impeccably clean but visibly mended at the shoulder, both elbows and upon the cuffs.
'I am to put a number of my men under your command, I am informed.' The man's apparent anger was growing by the moment.
'If you please –'
'I am not pleased! Why a man, who has not yet made his post, should be given such a command in place of a more experienced officer I know not.' For a second, Winter appeared embarrassed by this outburst, but then a second wave of anger washed over him. 'Why is it, Hayden, that you should be shown such favour? Are you a nephew of the admiral's?'
'I am no such thing, sir,' Hayden said coolly. 'I believe I have been given this command as a reward for my recent efforts – mounting guns upon the hills.'
'Rewarded for service rather than parentage? Do such things occur?' The man took a few steps towards the gallery windows, clearly trying to master his emotions. 'How many men is it you require?' he snapped at Hayden.
'Eighty men, armed with pistols and cutlasses, with a few axes and pikes as well… and the boats to transport them.'
'Eighty! I am informed, Captain, that the French frigates do not have their full muster.'
'That is correct, sir, or so I believe. We have been observing them and believe they each have sixty to eighty men.'
'Well, then, sixty Englishmen for each French ship will be more than adequate. I shall allow you sixty… and three cutters. And they shall be under command of my own lieutenant or I will not provide them at all.'
Hayden was about to protest but realized the futility of such resistance. The man intended to co-operate with him to the least possible degree. This was very common in the service when officers were given orders of which they strongly disapproved. Hayden had quite likely been guilty of it himself – especially when serving under Captain Josiah Hart.
'Sixty men under your own lieutenant,' Hayden repeated. 'We have painted our boats black to make them less easily observed by night.'
Winter appeared to have been freshly offended. 'I have never painted my boats black for any reason – not in twenty years of service. I do not intend to begin, now. They will remain white.'
'There will almost certainly be moonlight,' Hayden informed him.
'White.' Winter fixed him with a look of such firmness that Hayden knew he would not alter his decision in the least way.
'I believe the attack will take place the evening next, though it is dependent upon the army and they will not yet commit themselves to any hour.'
'My men could be ready with very little notice.'
'I will send word the moment I know more.'
Winter merely stared at him; he did not acknowledge that Hayden had even spoken. Making a slight bow, Hayden retreated from the cabin, his considerable temper heating towards white-hot. He was in his boat and being carried across the glassy bay when he realized that he could very easily become Winter in a few years. A man clearly without a patron in the Admiralty or among the flag officers. Whether he was competent Hayden did not know – perhaps not – but surely he was unlucky. Even his post captain's wages should have seen him in better circumstances than he apparently lived in. And to think, he had been resentful of Hayden's connection with Lord Hood, whom he had only just met and was the first man outside of Philip Stephens who had ever shown the least interest in him (and certainly Stephen's patronage had proven more useful in theory than in practice). Hayden's anger dissolved away; he almost laughed. Either he was without a patron and struggling to make his way in the service, or his patrons were attaching him to a captain like Faint Hart or having him haul guns up to hilltops for which 'less fortunate' captains resented him. It was all rather ironical.
Climbing over the rail of the Themis, Hayden discovered Mr Chettle and his mates busily applying a second coat of black to the boats, which already appeared coal-dust dull. Upon stained tarpaulins, imperfect rows of sweeps had been arranged. Thick paint was splashed upon these by hasty ship's boys, who splattered paint upon each other in equal proportion.
'Hey, you lot!' Franks called when he spied Hayden coming over the rail – previously he had been watching with great amusement. 'I find a spot of paint on our clean deck and you'll all be hanging from the topsail yard by your ankles until the blood rushes to yer heads and yer eyes pop out.'
The boys made a show of applying the paint judiciously, each stroke slowed to a deliberate wobble.
'Mr Archer. It seems you have everything in hand.'
Archer touched his hat and smiled. 'I hope so, sir. You saw Mr Hawthorne drilling the crew? I gave him permission, Captain. I hope I did not overstep…' The lieutenant's sentence drifted and died away.
'I approve of your decision most heartily, Mr Archer,' Hayden informed him kindly. Archer was still finding his way as first lieutenant and Hayden tried to support him in every way possible. 'Don't forget about blackening the men's faces.'
'Aye, sir,' Archer said with some relief. 'I'll have all the men looking like the ship's boys.'
They both laughed. Spotting Mr Barthe on the quarterdeck Hayden went aft. 'Mr Barthe, might I call upon your superior knowledge of the service? Are you familiar with a post captain named Winter?'
'That rum bastard?' Barthe growled. 'I had heard he was in command of the Foxhound. What have we to do with him?'
'He is supplying the rest of the men for the assault upon the frigates. I have just had a less than satisfactory meeting with him.'
'There isn't a meaner officer in the service, Mr Hayden. Can't keep a purser because they claim his practices are very sharp and cost them money. Can you imagine? His practices are sharper than a purser's!'
'I was in his cabin and it is…shabby, I must tell you. The man was wearing a very ancient coat that had been mended, and in numerous places, too.'
'That is him, sir. But it's not due to ill luck with investments or straitened circumstances, or even economy, as we would think of it. No, it is simply meanness. He possesses every farthing he has ever earned, sir. All cunningly invested. Men say he is as rich as a lord. I've heard tell that his wife and children live in penury, Captain Hayden. They even jest that he sends his children out to beg, but I wonder if it is a jest at all. After you have employed his men he will be sending you a reckoning, I would warrant.' Barthe laughed at his own wit.
'Thank you, Mr Barthe. It is always useful to know whom we are dealing with. Your knowledge in these matters in invaluable.'
'I am most happy to do it, sir.' Barthe stepped a little closer, his manner changing. 'And as to the monies, sir. It was all returned, sir, and most ashamed I am for my part in that matter. I do hope you will not hold it against me, sir.'
'No, Mr Barthe, but do be wary in the future. We shall need to keep a close eye on Mr Ransome, I fear.'
Barthe nodded vigorously. 'Aye, sir.'
On the gundeck, Hayden found the armourer, his mate and several able seamen cleaning pistols and changing flints. Forward, in an area inspected to be clear of all powder, two men had been detailed to sharpening cutlasses on a wheel, one pumping the treadle to make it spin, the other grinding carefully at the cutting edge, a spray of sparks thrown out in a narrow fan.
As the man finished edging his weapon, Hayden caught his attention. 'I shall send you my sword, Smithers. It might need to be touched here and there.'
Smithers made a knuckle. 'It's already sharp as a woman's tongue, Captain Hayden. Perse… that is Mr Gilhooly took the liberty of bringing it to me, sir, and I lavished great care upon it, too, as you will see. It is sharp enough for Frenchmen, I'm quite certain.' He smiled. 'Mr Longyard has already seen to your pistols, sir.'
'Thank you, Smithers.'
'Not at all, sir.'
Hayden suppressed a smile as he turned away. Harold Smithers – Harry – without ever meaning to mimicked the airs of his betters, especially in address. He suffered much teasing over it, though very good-natured, for he was, for the most part, well-liked and a more than passable seaman. He was every bit as likely to say, 'Why, think nothing of it', when the proper response would be 'Aye, sir.' Hayden indulged it out of simple liking for the man and because everyone aboard was aware that Smithers did not mean the least disrespect.
All about the ship Hayden found his crew in a mood of excitement and expectation. Archer had not made all of the dispositions, yet, so it would be some little time until the uncertain looks would appear among the men – those who had been spared the duty would have neither the stories to tell afterwards nor the jealous admiration of their mates. They might, however, live as a result.
A moon, just past full, illuminated plaster-flat clouds pressed hard up against the starry vault. A breeze, frail and irresolute, barely rippled the open bay. In a whisper, Hayden ordered the coxswain to hold his position, muffled oars dipping, silently, dipping.
They were farther off the mouth of the bay than Hayden would have liked, but the white cutters Captain Winter had supplied could be perceived, faint and ghostly, at some distance. Hayden had ordered Winter's lieutenant, a thirty-year-old officer by the name of Barker, to station his boats beyond Hayden's so that they would be partly screened from the shore by the Themis's cutters and barge.
Hayden took up his night glass and fixed it on the two ships anchored, bow and stern, in the narrow bay. The bow of the nearest, Fortunée, with her beak-head, sprit and rigging, was just visible against the darker shore, moonlight shining dully off wooden surfaces. With some regularity, a sentry would pass before one of the deck lamps, and Hayden tried to estimate how often this occurred.
The frigate anchored deeper in the cut, the Minerve, was obscured by Fortunée. Hayden could have ordered the boats to move to the south to open up his view of the bay, but the high tower and batteries on the hill there commanded such a view that he feared the boats would be perceived. Hayden swept his glass slowly over these positions, looking for any signs of activity. All remained quiet.
To the right of the bay stood the Convention Redoubt – Moore's first objective – and it too was nearly silent. A careful examination of the hillside behind revealed nothing, much to Hayden's relief. Moore would be moving his troops down that slope very soon, if he had not already done so. Even with the redoubt severely battered, the colonel would not want to lose the element of surprise. He and Hayden had debated this very thing for some time the previous day. Was it better that the frigates were attacked first or the batteries? Would Hayden's assault on the ships warn the troops in the redoubt, and vice versa? And if so, which would be less to their disadvantage?
A simultaneous attack had been rejected out of hand. Such things were difficult to co-ordinate on land. There were too many unknowns to even begin to hope it could be managed by both land and sea. In the end, they had agreed that overrunning the batteries was essential to driving out the French, whereas taking the frigates would not affect that particular outcome in any appreciable way.
For that reason Hayden and his crews hung off the mouth of the bay, waiting for the first sounds of battle.
'Can you make out anything, Captain?' Hawthorne asked in a whisper.
Hayden shook his head. 'No.' Then shook his head again to discourage further conversation. He saw Hawthorne break into a grin and he did the same, both stifling the urge to laugh. Hayden did not need to ask why – the marine lieutenant looked as absurd, no doubt, as he did, with his face blackened by burnt cork, eyes shining out like a drunk's in a mask.
Childers shifted his helm but a little to keep them head-to-wind, and the oarsmen dipped their long, black sweeps into the Mediterranean in a slow rhythm calculated to hold their position. Hayden could hear the men breathing, shifting as they pulled on the sweeps. He could almost sense the apprehension on the smell of their sweat. Waiting to go into battle was never good for morale. It gave the imagination too much time to magnify the strengths of the enemy, and to diminish one's own advantages.
A black cutter moved out of position and drew silently abreast. In the stern, an officer leaned over the rail towards Hayden.
'I just caught sight of Moore's company descending the hill, Captain.' It was Wickham speaking. 'They are almost at the bottom, sir.'
Hayden waved a hand in acknowledgement. Who else but Wickham would be able to see that? Hopefully not the French, who were a damned sight nearer.
After their first, unfortunate, meeting, Winter had sent Barker to treat with Hayden. The man was too old by half to still be a lieutenant, and overly aware of it. In every little thing, he tried to have his way or appear to possess superior knowledge. Over a chart of San Fiorenzo Bay, in Hayden's cabin, the two had argued how best to proceed. Various means of assault were considered, the only point of immediate agreement being that Hayden, with his black boats, should attack the Minerve, which lay deeper into the bay. Without admitting it, Barker was clearly concerned that his own boats might be seen and wished Hayden to draw the attention of the French crews.
The plan finally agreed to was that, upon hearing the first volley against the redoubt, Hayden would take his boats and slip down the southern shore of the bay, most distant from the redoubt and opposite where the ships anchored. This would allow him to come at the farthest frigate from astern, where the French would least expect an attack. Both officers hoped that the French would be prepared for assault from their starboard sides, and not from larboard which lay nearest the shore.
It was a simple plan and relied only on Hayden being able to approach unseen and draw the attention of the French crews, which would allow Barker and his men to approach the Fortunée's bow, where cannon could least effectively be brought to bear. Once this plan had been formed, and Barker had imagined that it was his own, the two had parted almost amiably.
Hayden found himself straining for any sound that would indicate an attack. Moore planned to carry the works at the point of the bayonet but certainly the French would begin to fire the moment that they became aware of the British. Moore, too, was relying on surprise. Most of the guns in the redoubt had been rendered useless – but not all. Grape could still cut down many a British infantryman, and Hayden found himself hoping that Moore would not be among these. The colonel would certainly be at the front of his company and most likely to fall – which would be not only the loss of a man Hayden had come to esteem as a friend, but, Hayden believed, a great misfortune to the British nation.
He tried to exhale in an even, quiet manner lest his own breathing mask the first noises of conflict ashore. Around him, the small sounds of the men, the low clearing of a throat, a hand scraping over an unshaven cheek, seemed impossibly loud. Knowing how the least sound travelled over water, they all cringed when the slightest noise escaped.
A dull little explosion, muffled and distant, carried to them over the rippled sea. A collective in-drawing of air was followed by every man there holding his breath, and remaining unnaturally still. The sound had been so faint, so indistinct, Hayden began to wonder if he had imagined it. Just as the men around him began to draw breath, two more reports carried to them.
'Musket fire!' Hawthorne whispered urgently.
'Mr Wickham…' Hayden raised his voice loud enough to be heard. 'Follow us. In line astern.'
'Aye, sir,' Wickham answered, then whispered to the boat nearest, 'In line astern.' These three words were repeated, one boat to the next, until all were informed and in motion.
The men bent to their sweeps, visibly relieved to be moving.
'Softly, now,' Childers cautioned. 'Softly.'
The men eased their cadence, and fell into an almost languid rhythm. Hayden divided his attention between the nearby shore and the frigates on the bay's far side. If they were perceived at a distance, grapeshot and French musketeers would cut them up horribly.
Aboard the two frigates, a stirring could be heard, men erupting onto the decks. Hayden listened for the officer's commands trying to get some sense of what they might do, but the French kept their voices so low Hayden could not make out the words. Men did not appear to be going aloft, which meant it was likely they would not try to sail out in the event of the redoubt falling to the British. Firing or scuttling the ships must be their intent.
The sound of a furious musket fire came from the redoubt now, and as the British boats entered the small bay, this sound carried to them more readily. Hayden could see the muzzle flash reflecting off the works. To his great relief, no great guns had yet been heard.
The sounds of battle began to increase, with much shouting and firing of muskets and pistols. Even the clash of steel could be heard at this distance, and, believing this would cover any small noise made, Hayden ordered the oarsmen to increase their pace.
The bay was very snug, and they had soon travelled to its narrow end.
'Port your helm, Mr Childers,' Hayden whispered. 'Take us across her stern.'
The boat swung to starboard. The moonlight was so bright it cast a broad, unbroken path upon the glassy bay, and Hayden worried that the boats would be seen against this. He found himself ducking down a little, as though to hide and noticed others doing the same.
Hawthorne grinned at him. The marine was known for his desperate wit as they went into battle – a nervous response that Hayden had seen many times before – and must be finding it difficult to remain silent.
Hayden searched the deck of the French frigate, watching for anyone who might be looking their way. No one. Nor were there any signs of increased alarm aboard the Fortunée – though the crew seemed completely engaged in doing something… readying the ship for fire, Hayden suspected.
As they neared the stern of the Minerve, Hayden found himself holding his breath, waiting for a cry of discovery and a volley of musket fire. A moment he waited, hunching his shoulders and drawing his head down into his collar.
'Les bateaux! Bateaux! Les Anglais!'
Hayden all but leapt to his feet, tore a pistol from his belt and pulled back the cock with two thumbs. With a slightly unsteady hand, he pointed it up at the taffrail, looming above. The call had come from somewhere forward.
A gun fired. A horrible splatter of grape into water and planking. And then a second.
'They have spotted the Foxhound,' Hawthorne whispered, utterly surprised but also relieved. 'Bloody fool captain,' he muttered. 'Could not spare a bit of paint.'
At that moment, none of them had energy to spare in pitying the Foxhound. As Childers brought them around the frigate's stern, oars were taken silently aboard, not raised where they might be seen. Balanced with a foot on the rail-cap, men reached the chains and pulled them forward. Three French boats laid against the hull, only a single boat-keeper present, and he was standing on the thwart, straining to see what went on aboard the Fortunée, his back to the approaching British.
Before Hayden could give an order, one of the hands crept forward, bare feet making no sound, and encircling the man's throat with an arm, drove a blade down into the soft triangle aft of his collar bone. A moment of silent, gagging struggle and the man was gently lowered down into the dark boat.
Hayden went quicky forward between the oarsmen, Hawthorne and Gould behind. Over the bow into the French boat, then up the ladder until his head raised above the deck. Forward he could see a crowd, and then one of the forecastle guns fired. Drawing out his sword he cut through several ropes of the boarding net.
Hayden turned back to Hawthorne and whispered. 'Not a sound.'
Up he went onto the deck, conscious that his boots were not nearly so quiet as unshod feet.
A staccato gunfire erupted now, on both ships, as quickly as cannon could be loaded. Hayden did not like to imagine the effect. Before he had gone a step, he realized he had made a terrible mistake. Half a dozen men were gathered along the quarterdeck rail, leaning out, to get a view of what went on forward.
Motioning to Hawthorne to take a group and deal with them, he counted out the first eight, placing a hand on each man's arm and whispering near to his ear, 'With Mr Hawthorne.'
Hayden had the men step clear of the ladder as they came aboard and crouch down so as to be less visible – given a little cover from the shadow of the bulwark. A moment they waited. Hawthorne and his men did not hesitate but went right at the men, dispatching them in the same manner as the boat-keeper. One Frenchman almost struggled free and managed a half-strangled cry, but no one forward heard over the firing of the guns.
Hayden stood and motioned to Hawthorne, who started down the starboard gangway as Hayden led his own party down the larboard. He hastened forward without raising a weapon or appearing in anyway threatening. It was his hope that his blue coat would appear merely dark in the moonlight, and an officer hurrying forward would hardly seem unusual, even if he were followed by a crowd of seamen. But he needn't have worried. So intent were the French crew on driving off the English boats that no one thought to glance behind.
Hayden was twelve paces away before a French sailor looked around. The man watched Hayden approach a moment before realization struck.
'They are upon us!' he cried in French. 'The English!'
Hayden rushed forward but Hawthorne was quicker, running the man through the body with his cutlass. Hayden's first thrust into the uneven wall of men struck bone, the blade deflecting like a bow, but the second, almost instantaneous upon the first, slid terribly into flesh.
And then he was in the centre of a melee, pistols discharging, blades thrusting and parrying. An enormous Frenchman was throwing iron balls with tremendous force, taking down a Themis with each one. Hayden pulled out his pistol and shot the man in the chest from ten paces. The Frenchman, a near giant, lowered the ball he was about to throw, put a hand to the stain growing on his breast, looked up at Hayden, raised the ball, and with a bubbling cry charged. Hayden felt himself step back, but then raised his sword, certain nothing would stop the man.
At that instant, Gould stepped forward and shot the man again, which did not slow him in the least. Hayden ducked the ball, which whizzed past his head. A massive fist, drove into his shoulder and he was thrown down, hard, upon the planks, his blade clattering away. The Frenchman was upon him, fist drawn back, when suddenly he stopped, a look of confusion upon his face. He fell upon one hip, almost atop Hayden. A blade was thrust through his neck so that the point appeared out the other side, and another had been run into his heart. Hayden realized it was Wickham and Gould, who let go of his cutlass, yanked out his second pistol, aimed it at the man's temple from six inches distant, and fired. The Frenchman toppled heavily down and lay utterly limp, his hair in flame. Gould and Wickham dragged Hayden to his feet and some other pressed a blade into his hand.
'Are you wounded, Captain?' Gould yelled, his colour high, hat gone.
'No…' Was this true? His left shoulder was all but numb. 'No. I think not.'
Wickham and Gould retrieved their blades from the dead Frenchman, and the three were immediately beset on all sides. Hayden knew not if they lost or prevailed. It was a desperate fight, the deck slick with blood. Men fell all around and soon they fought half-standing upon the bodies.
Out of the corner of his eye, Hayden realized that there was a substantial battle going on behind him, and wondered where these Frenchmen had come from. A man with a pike twice tried to run him through, which Hayden barely avoided both times. He then tried to strike Hayden on the skull, which Hayden again avoided, but the point cut through his coat and right down his front, slicing into skin. This gave Hayden an opening and in a quick step forward he put his blade into the man's chest.
Hayden stepped back and touched a hand to his belly, half expecting his innards to come spilling out. He was bleeding, certainly, but had not been opened.
'Too bloody near,' he muttered.
A body careened into Hayden's shoulder, staggering him to his knees. Leaping up, he saw two men crash to the deck in a tangle, wrestling and grunting, but in the poor light which was English and which French he could not tell. The man beneath was half hidden, his face in shadow – but was it cork-stained? Hayden drew back his sword but then hesitated.
'Which ship? Which ship?' he shouted at them. Neither man responded or even seemed to notice.
'Quelle frégate?' he cried.
'Minerve…' the man on top gasped, and Hayden ran a cutlass into his heart so that he slumped down onto his adversary. Hayden rolled the dying Frenchman off, and found Childers underneath.
'Good lord, Childers,' Hayden said, dragging the coxswain up, 'I almost murdered you.'
'He… chocked me…' Childers gasped, almost slumping down.
Hayden was near to dropping himself, when around him Frenchmen began throwing down arms and calling for quarter. Quickly, they were herded together, some so badly wounded they could not stand without aid. Hayden bent to catch his breath, but then forced himself upright to assess the situation. Smoke rolled up from the Fortunée, and her guns were silent. There was no fighting aboard that ship, nor any sign of men from either nation.
The sounds of firing and battle had also ceased in the redoubt, but had been taken up by the batteries around the tower to the south of Fornali Bay.
'They're firing into the Convention Redoubt, sir.' Wickham stood a few feet away, right hand pressed to his left arm above the elbow.
'Are you injured, Mr Wickham?'
'Not at all, sir. Well, no more than a scratch. I shall hardly need to bother the doctor with it. Mr Ariss can patch me up when he has a moment.'
'Where is Mr Gould?' Hayden called out, looking around, fearing he might find the midshipman lying, still, upon the deck.
'Here, sir,' some of the crew replied, and Gould emerged from the group, apparently unhurt.
'See to Mr Wickham's arm, if you please, Mr Gould,' Hayden instructed. 'I have too few lieutenants as it is.' Hayden looked about again. 'Where is Mr Hawthorne?'
'He led some men below, sir,' Wickham informed him, 'chasing Frenchmen.'
'Ah. Who is hale enough to go to Hawthorne's aid?'
Men, almost unable to stand from exhaustion, stepped forward, and Hayden sent them after Hawthorne, under command of a marine.
'And Mr Ransome, what has become of him?'
'We have him, sir,' one of the men replied. 'If you please, sir. Over here.'
Hayden found Ransome slumped upon a gun carriage, propped up by Freddy Madison and a crewman. A sailor was tying a neckcloth about his thigh.
'Mr Ransome, you appear to be injured.'
The young man nodded, looking a little sickly and faint. 'Frenchman ran a blade through the meat of my leg, sir. Very little bleeding, though.' He pressed his eyes closed and let out a low grunt of pain.
'I am very sorry to see it. Bear him down into the barge. All the most grievously wounded we will send back to the Themis. Don't you worry, sir,' he said to Ransome, 'the doctor will soon see you put to rights.' Hayden turned around. 'Mr Gould? When you have done with Mr Wickham, see to the wounded, if you please. We shall send them back to the doctor in the barge.'
'Aye, sir.'
'And you, Mr Madison: take possession of the magazines, if there is powder in them. There might yet be some Frenchmen lurking about.'
A crewman emerged from the gundeck. 'Captain Hayden, sir,' he called out. 'Mr Hawthorne begs that you come at once, sir.'
Hayden fell in behind the man and was quickly down the ladder onto the gundeck. Men with lanterns stood as distant as they could from a barrel, with its ends knocked out, wedged in the centre of the deck. The smell of oil and fat stung his eyes.
'Put those lanterns out!' Hayden ordered. 'Station men at the ladder heads. No one is to come below with a light. Do not fire a weapon under any circumstances.'
Men ran to obey orders and the lamps were blown out, but before the shadows fell, Hayden had clearly seen a torn and soaked sail and bits of kindling in the barrel.
'There's powder on the deck, sir,' one man offered.
'Captain Hayden?' It was the man whom Hawthorne had sent. 'Mr Hawthorne is in the hold, sir.'
'Lead on.' Hayden had thought the barrel, prepared by the French to fire the ship, was why he had been called. 'You men, put that barrel over the side. Douse all flame aboard ship until this powder has been cleared away. Wet it down, first.'
Hayden descended into utter darkness, suddenly apprehensive that Frenchmen might lurk in the shadows. Down the ladder to the lower deck and then down again onto the forward platform, where there was a blessed bit of lamplight. Hayden found Hawthorne and some hands, below, shifting a barrel by brute strength. Another hand was down in the bilge water on hands and knees, feeling about.
'Mayhap, they've opened a seam, Mr Hawthorne,' the man said, his voice echoing around the hold.
'A seam!' one of the top-men sneered. 'What kind of bloody foolishness is that?' This man, too, plunged down into the water.
'Are we taking on water, Mr Hawthorne?'
Hawthorne looked up as Hayden jumped down onto the barrels.
'Aye, sir. It has risen half a foot in but a few minutes, I swear.'
Hayden cursed.
One of the hands who was down in the bilge water banged his fist on a barrel. 'We have to move this one.'
A large hammer was quickly found and the end of the barrel stove in, brine and chunks of beef sloughing out and bobbing in the bilge water. Hayden slipped down into the water and helped the men roll the empty barrel out of the way.
The seaman went back to feeling along the hull, water up to his chin. 'I can't be certain, Captain. Water's floodin' in. Look at it rise! The ceiling has been chopped way in places. Mayhap they've drilled holes, then rolled barrels back down here to stop us from finding them.'
Water poured in so quickly that Hayden could clearly see it rising. Some hands appeared on the platform and stood looking on. 'Mr Dryden? Is that you, sir?'
'It is, Captain.'
'We shall fother this opening if we can locate it. Have you experience in this?'
'I have, sir.' And without waiting for further orders, set off up the ladder.
Hayden touched one of the men on the arm – with the blackened faces and poor light he did not know whom. 'Find men to man the pumps. We are going to lose our prize if we cannot check this water flooding in.'
'Aye, sir.' The man scrambled up out of the water, and a moment later the hollow rattle of chain in the pump-well echoed around the hold.
Hayden turned to the men who were desperately splashing about in the rising water, hands groping along the submerged planks. 'Have you found our leak?'
Even as he said this, Hayden realized that it was almost too deep to do anything about the ingress, even if he were to find its source.
'Keep them at this as long as you can,' Hayden said to Hawthorne, and then climbed up onto the barrels and leapt to the platform. A river of water trailed behind as he went thumping up the ladder. Upon the gundeck he found the men at the pumps, frantically turning the cranks and gasping for breath. They did not plan to win one battle only to lose another – and their prize money – but he knew they could not keep this up for long.
Up into the cool night, Hayden was faced with the terrible sight of the Fortunée, burning. Flames climbed the tarred rigging and set aflame the sails furled on the lower yards. From the waist, a column of flame and black smoke erupted up into the night, blotting away stars and flowing out over San Fiorenzo Bay.
'Save us,' Hayden muttered. He turned to the nearest man. 'Find Madison. I sent him below to take possession of the magazines. I must know this instant if the powder has been carried ashore.' He turned back to the burning ship. If the Fortunée's magazines exploded every man aboard understood what the consequences would be. The men who were not engaged in any activity had moved as far aft as the deck would allow.
Dryden was lowering a sail over the larboard bow, men running ropes, attached to the sail's corners, under the sprit and up to others standing by the starboard barricade.
'Leave this matter to me, Dryden,' Hayden informed the master's mate. 'Take a lead into a boat and sound astern. We shall warp her astern as far from the Fortunée as possible. If we cannot stop the water, I shall attempt to settle her in the shallows.'
Dryden made a quick knuckle. 'Aye, sir. Depth of hold twelve feet, sir?'
'So I would think. She must settle in fewer than four fathoms – three would be better – if we hope to patch and float her again.'
'Aye, Captain.' Dryden began calling out names of oarsmen as he hurried aft to the boats.
Madison appeared at that moment.
'Ah, Mr Madison. What of the powder?'
'Gone, sir. But for a small quantity for the muskets and pistols and some cartridges for the great guns.'
'Let us pray the same was done aboard the Fortunée,' Hayden said, feeling a small sense of relief. The powder would have been needed by the batteries and, if it had been left aboard, could have endangered the surrounding French positions when it exploded.
Hayden heard the voice of Mr Wickham, calling instructions. 'We shall have to have weights on the ropes to sink them – they will never take up quickly enough.'
'Mr Wickham, did I not send you back to the Themis with the wounded?'
'No, sir. Excuse me, Captain. I meant, I did not realize that you had. I've only a scratch, sir.' His arm was in a sling, but he raised it a little as though to prove it undamaged.
Hawthorne came hurrying onto the deck. 'Captain! We've found the leak – or leaks, sir. These cursed Frenchmen drilled holes through the planks and then they must have bunged them up – there must be a hundred of them. They pulled the bungs when we boarded.'
'Then we shall have to find them and bung them up again.'
Hawthorne stood a moment, chagrined and hesitating.
'Mr Hawthorne?'
'Water's already very deep in the hold…'
'I will see for myself. Mr Wickham? Leave off fothering. I do not think it will answer.' Hayden thought a moment. 'The men at the pumps must be relieved. Have them stand by the riding bits to cast off. It is my intention to haul her into shallow water, if it is at all possible.'
'Aye, sir.'
In the hold Hayden found the situation worse than he'd hoped. Men were diving down into the water, searching for holes, but to little avail. The looks on their faces when they broke the surface told all.
He turned to Hawthorne. 'Bring these men up to the deck; we might be forced to abandon this ship, yet.'
Hayden returned to the deck, where he found the French prisoners sitting in a group, surrounded by Hawthorne's marines, muskets levelled. A shot from the Fornali batteries screamed overhead at that moment, and ploughed into the earthworks of the Convention Redoubt. Forward, the Fortunée was engulfed in flame; spars began falling to the deck, and the entire bay was illuminated.
Hayden hurried to the taffrail. 'Mr Dryden?' he called into the darkness. For a moment he could not find the boat, but then it appeared, a dark apparition in the wash of moonlight.
'Sir,' came Dryden's voice, 'the stern anchor has been cast in very shallow water. I believe you can warp her directly astern and will find the bottom in sixty yards or fewer.'
'We shall go astern immediately,' Hayden called.
Hayden hastened to the gundeck ladder and called down into the darkness. 'Mr Wickham. Cast off the bower, but keep the cable taut. We shall warp astern immediately.'
'Aye, sir. Messenger almost rigged. I require hands to man the capstan, if you please, Captain.'
Hayden found all the healthy men he could and sent them down to the gundeck.
'You, there!' Hayden called out to one man forward. 'You cannot carry that lantern down onto the gundeck lest you blast us all to hell. Mr Hawthorne, I ordered guards set at the ladder heads. No lanterns below.'
'Aye, sir.'
In the confusion, Hayden feared he might have ordered the ladder guards below. Everyone was working in near darkness on the gundeck, for though the fire-barrel had been put over the side, oil and fat and powder had yet to be cleaned away. A light could still set the ship ablaze.
'Mr Madison. Send men aloft with buckets. We will wet the sails and rigging, and then the upper deck. If this breeze were to turn we would have embers raining down upon the ship.'
Hayden stood on the moonlit deck, hands on the cool rail cap, staring at the darkened shore and then at the cable stretching off astern. He could actually feel heat from the burning ship upon his back.
For a long moment there was no sign of movement. He was about to call for a lead to sound astern, when he realized that the ship was making stern-way; so glassy was the water that the motion was almost undetectable.
Very slowly the frigate went aft, water swirling aside. Hayden could gauge their progress against the firelit shore. And then the frigate came to a gentle stop. Hayden called to the man at the ladder head. 'Inform Mr Wickham that we are aground. Thank God.'
'Aye, sir.'
'Mr Madison. Once the deck has been thoroughly soaked, order all the men down to the lower deck but for a few sentries.' If the Fortunée exploded, Hayden wanted his men below.
At that instant there was a dull thump aboard Fortunée and a section of her quarterdeck buckled upward a few feet, settling in a clatter of burning planks.
One magazine gone, Hayden thought, and not much powder in it. As he watched the ship burn, hardly able to take his eyes away, her main-topmast, yards and all, came tumbling down, tearing away burning rigging. The ship, a virtual inferno, began to drift out towards the larger bay, her anchor cables burned through. The conflagration that had been the frigate Fortunée spun slowly to larboard, the flames glittering upon the calm waters. Her mizzen fell aft, crashing into the taffrail. The main tumbled down to larboard. In a few moments she was carried out of the little bay and around the point, where she still illuminated the night.
Hayden turned back to the rail, gazing out over the small V of bay bathed in moonlight. The undulating line of dusky hills blocked out the low stars. Bright flashes of musket fire could be seen, as the French retreated towards Fornali, pursued, no doubt, by vengeful Corsicans. Even as grapeshot hissed overhead, Hayden felt a calm come over him. The letter he had written, but not sent, to Henrietta could wait. He would write another, mentioning that they had taken a frigate but without recalling any of the brutal fighting or the men lost – on both sides. He drank in a breath of air, a fragrant zephyr slipping down from the hills, leavened by moisture as it passed over the bay.
A figure appeared beside him at the rail.
'There you are, Mr Gould. Have the hurt been sent off to the Themis?'
Hayden could see the boy nod in the moonlight; all his excitement had drained away and he looked about to weep.
'All but a few Frenchmen,' he answered thickly, 'who are not too badly off, sir. I shall send them along when the boat returns.'
'And you? Unhurt, I hope?'
'Scratches and bruises, sir.'
'You are one of the lucky ones. I have not thanked you for saving my life – you and Wickham.'
Gould looked confused and then surprised. 'I suppose we did…'
Neither spoke for a moment – a blessed moment.
'We lost a good number of men, Captain Hayden… and many of the men I sent back,' his mouth worked but no words came. 'I am not confident they will survive, sir.'
'In a few short weeks, Mr Gould, you have seen much of the worst the Royal Navy can offer. If my introduction to the service had been similar, I am not sure how I would have felt.'
'I am not at all confident that I am made for this profession, Captain,' Gould blurted out, he turned a little away – to hide his face.
Hayden did not quite know what to say to this young man. 'The brutality of it all, the killing…' But he was not sure what direction his speech would take. 'Not everyone can make their peace with it. I am not certain I have, though I have been witness to my share.'
'It is difficult… sir,' the boy replied, struggling to master the emotion in his voice. 'That a man I have never met is set on murdering me, and I am equally intent on murdering him, though he has wronged me in no way, nor I him.' The boy paused to work some moisture into his mouth. 'It seems… mad.'
Hayden agreed. At times it did seem mad… that a stranger might end his life for reasons that sometimes appeared to lose their meaning.
'If you please, Captain…' A voice from behind.
Hayden turned to find one of the hands, two yards distant. 'It's one of the Frenchies, sir. His wound has opened, and he's gone down in a swoon.'
Before Hayden could speak, Gould replied.
'I shall see to him.' He turned to Hayden. 'If you have no other duty for me, sir?'
Even by moonlight, Hayden could see the distress, poorly hidden, upon the boy's face. 'By all means, see to the man.'
Wickham appeared at the ladder head, looked around the deck quickly, and hurried aft.
'I believe she's settled, Captain Hayden. We're not taking on any more water.'
'I believe you're right, Mr Wickham. Do you not feel the difference in her motion – that is to say, there is none.'
Wickham fell uncommonly still – for a second he even closed his eyes.
'Well, the bay is very calm, sir.'
'Yes, but the deck now slopes forward, as you shall certainly see by daylight. We have some wounded French sailors I should like Dr Griffiths to see. And we should run cables to the main-top. Row a kedge out to starboard and a cable ashore to larboard. I do not think it is likely she will begin to heel, but one can never predict the bottom, and I shall take no chances.'
'Aye, sir. May I have Mr Dryden? He is already in a boat.'
'Yes, certainly.' The next question, Hayden dreaded. 'Have we a butcher's bill, Mr Wickham?'
'Fifteen dead, sir,' he replied softly. 'And many more wounded – twenty-two by my count.'
'More than I feared,' Hayden replied in a whisper.
'We did not fare so badly as the Foxhounds, sir. The French fired grape into their boats at very close range.' He took a long breath. 'I should not want to know how many were lost and maimed.'
'Yes, what they were doing so close to the Fortunée before we had reached Minerve I do not know.'
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 19
|
Hayden was making a second attempt to tie his neckcloth presentably when there came a knock on his cabin door and Mr Hawthorne was announced.
'Mr Hawthorne. Is there some service you require?'
Hawthorne smiled conspiratorially. He seemed overly pleased with something. 'None, Captain. I have only come to wish you luck.'
'I was unaware that I should require luck, Mr Hawthorne.'
Hawthorne's smile broadened. 'You might know there has been some friendly wagering in the gunroom about your audience with Lord Hood. Some think the admiral will grant you your post, Captain.'
'I hope I did not hear you say "wagering", Mr Hawthorne.'
'I used the term only figuratively, sir.'
Hayden gazed at the results of his efforts in the mirror. Less than perfect, but it would have to do. In truth, he was rather agitated at that moment, and trying not to rush ahead of himself, for the very reason that Hawthorne had just explained.
'I fear it will be nothing so propitious, Mr Hawthorne,' Hayden replied. 'The French have retreated to Bastia and I believe we shall sail for that same place. There will be more bloody guns to haul, I expect.'
'If that is the case, and you are not granted your post, I shall figuratively lose five pounds.'
'Well, I should not risk any of my own money on the outcome. I cannot imagine why anyone else would. Even if Lord Hood were to so honour me, I rather doubt the Admiralty would confirm it, in my case.' Hayden pulled on his best coat, wondering, at that instant, who had bet against him.
Hayden turned away from the small mirror towards his friend. 'Presentable, I hope?'
'Perfectly so.'
'Then I shall have to excuse myself, Mr Hawthorne. Lord Hood awaits.'
Hawthorne opened the cabin door for him and as Hayden passed through said, 'Luck to you, Captain Hayden.'
A preoccupied secretary ushered Hayden into the admiral's day cabin, in which place he found Lord Hood and Captain Winter, the latter clearly rather surprised by his sudden appearance.
Hood looked up, his long face pasty and serious. 'Ah, Captain Hayden. Captain Winter and I have just been trying to comprehend what transpired the night the Minerve was taken. Captain Winter lost his lieutenant and suffered many killed and wounded in a failed attempt to capture Fortunée.'
'I am not in the least in doubt of what occurred,' Winter said indignantly. He waved a hand sharply in Hayden's direction. 'This man was supposed to attack the Minerve first, but hung back so that Lieutenant Barker was forced to proceed. Barker was perceived and the French fired numerous rounds of grape into his boats, killing more men than I care to recount.'
Hood was not caught up in the indignation of Winter, Hayden was relieved to see. The admiral turned to Hayden and asked, 'Is this your understanding of what occurred, Captain?'
'In truth, sir, I do not know what happened aboard Lieutenant Barker's boats. It had been agreed that my crew would slip down the bay and come upon the Minerve from her larboard quarter, sir. We did this as quickly as prudence would allow, for it was our hope to manage this without being perceived, to which end we had painted our boats black and blackened our faces.'
A frustrated sigh escaped Winter, which Hayden pretended not to hear.
'Just before we crossed the stern of Minerve, we heard musket and then gun fire from Fortunée and cries that the English were upon them. Directly we boarded the frigate, and took her in a bloody fight, sir. Our own losses were not insubstantial, I can assure you.'
'You did not hesitate or delay?' Lord Hood enquired civilly.
'Not for an instant, sir. Lieutenant Barker and I had agreed that he would stand off the mouth of the bay until he heard fighting aboard the Minerve.' Hayden tried to recall exactly what had gone on that night, but it was all much of a jumble. 'There was a great deal of musket fire and fighting quite nearby, in the redoubt. I can only surmise that Lieutenant Barker mistook this for firing aboard the Minerve and stood in to the bay too soon.'
Lord Hood nodded. 'Very well, Captain. Please, take a seat.' He turned to Winter. 'I am satisfied that Captain Hayden performed his duty in an exemplary fashion, Captain.'
'Exemplary fashion!' Winter exploded. 'I have near to fifty men dead because of this man shirking. This is not my understanding of "exemplary".'
Hood did not speak for a moment, but fixed his gaze upon Winter in a manner that could not be misunderstood. 'I comprehend, Captain, that losing so many men is distressing but I do caution you. Captain Hayden has an unblemished record for coolness under fire. I do not for a moment believe he shied away from a fight.'
'Some have given him quite a different character,' Winter said, though quietly and without show of emotion.
Hood, who had the reputation of a man with a hot temper, remained remarkably calm. 'May I ask, Captain Winter, were your ship's boats painted black?'
Winter drew himself up a little, not hiding his resentment well. 'No, sir, nor have they ever been.'
'The moon had only just passed full.'
'I am aware of it. If Captain Hayden had attacked first, the attention of the French would have been drawn away and Lieutenant Barker would not have been perceived. I am sure of it.'
'It is regrettable that he mistook musket fire ashore for fighting aboard Minerve. But I must point out that Captain Hayden's boats travelled the length of Fornali Bay without being observed by the French. Indeed, they had crossed the French ship's stern without the French becoming aware of them. Under conditions of bright moonlight, painting the boats appears to have been rather enterprising.'
Winter did not answer.
'Have you anything more to say, Captain?' Hood asked of Winter.
'No… I have not, sir.'
'Then I will not keep you longer from your duties.'
Winter rose, made a leg to the admiral, and then strode towards the door without acknowledging Hayden in any way, though Hayden had risen at the same instant.
Hood turned to Hayden. 'If you will remain but a few moments, Captain. I have a matter I must discuss with you.'
At a motion from the admiral, Hayden took his seat just as the door closed behind Winter. For a moment the admiral said nothing.
'You met Barker, of course,' the admiral observed at last.
'Yes, sir.'
'A thirty-year-old lieutenant… I fear I shall not be able to spare him in my report, though I mislike tarnishing a man's record after he has departed this life.'
'I am sure he mistook fighting in the redoubt for gunfire aboard Minerve, sir,' Hayden replied, not quite sure why he was defending Barker. 'Very easily done under the circumstances.'
'One mistake of many in the man's career, though this one cost half a hundred lives. Winter must be aware of it. He cannot be so obtuse.'
Hayden had not thought that, but was not about to disagree with the admiral on this particular point.
'It seems the Minerve will float again. My compliments, Mr Hayden.'
'Thank you, sir.'
Hood looked up and met Hayden's eye. 'You informed Captain Winter that you would paint your boats black?'
Hayden hesitated. 'I did, sir.'
'I assumed you had. You would not have wanted Winter's boats to be discovered while yours went undetected. Winter still does not understand that this was in all likelihood the reason Barker and so many of his crew were killed. That and Barker's incompetence.' Hood thought a moment. 'I understand Mr Ransome received a wound?'
'Yes, sir, but Dr Griffiths reports that it has shown no inclination to turn septic, so I believe he will recover.'
Hood appeared somewhat pleased by this report. 'Prize money is not fired out of cannon, is it, Hayden?'
'No, sir, it is not.'
'Good that Ransome learns this now. Greed is no substitute for sound judgement.'
Hood reached across his table and rustled through a pile of papers. Finding what he sought, he raised a page and shook it gently.
'There is one other matter before us.'
Hayden actually held his breath.
'You have been recalled… to England.'
Hayden was utterly surprised and unable to hide it. 'To England… When, sir?'
'Immediately.'
'I see…' But Hayden did not see at all. 'Aboard what ship?'
'The Themis, Captain. The Admiralty, it seems, has need of her.' Lord Hood almost smiled. 'You look rather surprised.'
'I was sent to deliver the Themis to you, Lord Hood. And now the Admiralty wants her returned?'
'That is my understanding.' Hood seemed amused by Hayden's confusion. 'You will carry the mail, of course, and proceed to England without delay. It is not a cruise, Captain.'
'Yes, sir.'
'Are you not pleased to be going home, Hayden?'
'I am, sir. Most pleased.' Hayden was uncertain of his own reaction, for though he did feel great excitement he also felt somewhat distressed. 'But I had hoped to see the French driven from Corsica.' Hayden realized that he had wanted to do this for the old general, Paoli. To help this principled and honourable man fulfil his single ambition – before it was too late.
'It is commendable of you. I am sorry to see you leave, as your particular talents will be required. There are batteries to be erected outside of Bastia, if I can ever convince Dundas to mount an attack.' Hood looked up at Hayden and tried to cover his frustration with a smile, somewhat bitter. 'Nelson will manage it, of course. If not for officers like Moore I should rate the army more of a hindrance than an aid. That a man like Moore is not a general and Dundas not his writer tells you everything about the king's army. Our own service might be less than perfect in our manner of choosing officers, but we do not let idle boys purchase commissions because their families have the means!'
Hayden knew many an officer in the Royal Navy who, despite exemplary service of long standing, had not advanced nearly so far nor so rapidly as less capable officers with better connexions. The Navy was far from perfect in this particular matter.
The admiral stood, and smiled. 'I wish you the very best, Hayden.'
'Thank you, sir.'
'You will not forget to remember me to Mrs Hayden – I suppose that is no longer her name?'
'Adams, sir. And I shall not forget.'
'I believe you have a very promising career ahead of you, Hayden.' The admiral met his eye, a little wash of emotion crossing his face. 'I know it is often said as mere matter of form, but I say, with all sincerity, that I believe your father would be very proud of you. I am quite certain of it.'
'Thank you, sir.' Hayden himself felt a flood emotion that he struggled to control. 'That means a great deal to me.'
'Safe return,' the admiral said, glancing down and shifting some papers on his desk.
'Thank you, sir. Good luck in your endeavours.'
Hood gave a small nod, and Hayden was out and then upon the ladder. A moment later he was in his boat, Childers beaming at him foolishly.
'Shall I return you to your ship, Captain?' the coxswain asked.
'No. Set me ashore. I wish to take my leave of a friend.'
'Aye, sir.' Perceiving the seriousness of Hayden's manner, Childers stowed his foolish grin, and ordered the boat away. All the distance to shore he looked somewhat confused and kept glancing Hayden's way as if trying to read his captain's face.
As Hayden had secretly feared, even if he had hoped otherwise, Hood had not granted him his post. Hayden's disappointment was very great and he berated himself for getting his hopes up. He, of all people, should know better. But the admiral had treated him with such favour! Had even said what a great future Hayden would have. And yet he would not, despite his friendship with Hayden's father and obvious admiration for his mother, grant him his post, though it was entirely within his power to do so.
Hayden wondered, given the admiral's tirade against the purchasing of commissions in the army, if he suddenly had felt some reticence over granting rank to the son of a long-dead friend. It seemed a terribly inconvenient time to be growing a conscience over this particular matter!
But Hood had offered something else, and though it was rather expected and somewhat maudlin, Hayden was certain of the admiral's sincerity. The idea that Hayden's father would be proud of him affected him more than he would have guessed. In truth, he was rather moved. And saddened, in the same instant. For the entire journey to shore, Hayden struggled to master his emotions lest he embarrass himself terribly.
Asking after Moore, upon the beach, he was directed to the nearby tower, where he found the colonel upon the ramparts. The bay spread out before them, incomparably azure, the distant hills softened by a faint haze. Billowing up above the worn hills, foam white clouds, expanding as they rose into the Mediterranean sky.
'Captain Hayden,' Moore said, obviously pleased to see him. 'We are off to Bastia, I understand.'
'Perhaps you are, Colonel, but I am for England.'
'England! Have you not just arrived in the Mediterranean?'
'Yes, but the decrees of the admiralty are beyond the comprehension of mere mortals.'
Moore looked genuinely disappointed. 'It was my hope that we would complete this task together.'
'It was mine as well.' Hayden shrugged. 'But I understand Nelson is quite a hand at establishing batteries.'
'No doubt. When not making interest among his superiors he manages to be an excellent officer.'
Both men were silent a moment, Hayden, at least, uncertain of what to say.
'Is General Paoli nearby?' Hayden asked.
'He has retired to Oletta, I believe.'
'Ah. Will you take leave of him for me? And repeat my hopes for him and his people.'
'It is a service I would perform with the greatest pleasure.'
'Well, Moore,' Hayden offered, 'perhaps what we have accomplished here will never look large in the annals of war, but I am proud of it, none the less. It was a great honour to serve with you.'
Moore nodded, but did not meet Hayden's gaze. 'The honour was mine.' He paused. 'I have not been granted prescience, Hayden, and cannot say we shall ever meet again, but I do wish it.'
'Let us agree to introduce our wives, one day, and bore our children with tales of driving the French out of Corsica.'
Moore tried to smile. 'Yes, let us wish for that. Take my hand, Hayden. I wish you fair winds and a calm sea.'
'Success in all your endeavours,' Hayden responded.
The two shook hands and then Hayden retreated, down to the rocky bones of the island. For a few moments he toiled along the shore towards the beach where he had left Childers and their cutter. Briefly he stopped and turned round to look back at the tower, the hills of Corsica, in cloud and shards of light, rising up behind. The silhouette of John Moore upon the tower wall, a glass to his eye, gazing off towards the fortress of San Fiorenzo or up into the hills, trying to discern the road he would take to Bastia and beyond.
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 20
|
Gould lingered by the taffrail, gazing at the ship's wake curling away into darkness. A scrap of moonlight found its way through shreds of milky cloud and diffused over the racing ship and the nearby seas.
Hayden came to the rail, a yard distant. 'It appears, Mr Gould,' he observed, 'that you manifest more interest in where we have been than in where we are going.'
Gould looked up, a little surprised by Hayden's sudden materialization. 'I was merely contemplating all that has occurred since first I came aboard. A great deal, sir.'
'And what do you make of it all?'
'I do not know if I can say, Captain.' Gould fell silent a second and Hayden thought that was probably all the answer he would get – young men not being terribly adroit at explaining such things. 'I spent much of my childhood puttering about Plymouth Sound, sir, and though it changed every day it was always much the same, if you take my meaning. I set foot aboard the Themis and all at once there were gales and ships exploding, battles and pestilence, war upon land, and great port cities being taken and then falling again. I've been in fights for my very life, sir, and taken the lives of others.' He paused a moment. 'It is as though I spent all of my life in a curtained room, and then one day was thrust out into bright, blinding sunlight. All those years I spent dreaming of adventure, and now it is my life before that seems like a perfect idyl.' A moment he considered. 'Yet, how does one go back into the darkened room?'
'Some do, Mr Gould.'
'I have no doubt of it, sir, but I am not sure I am one of them. I think all of my senses would feel as though they were being starved, Captain Hayden. It is not that I do not long to see England, sir, and my mother and father and brothers and sisters. I do, with all my heart. But now that I have seen this war close to, and comprehend that I am fully able to play my part in it… well, I should feel like a shirker, Captain, if I gave it all up, now. There is duty, after all, and I cannot ask all of you to fight this war for me while I sit peacefully at home in my little room.'
'You comprehend, Mr Gould, that you might be called upon to kill again?'
Even in the faint light Hayden could see the boy's face change.
'I do, sir, and I don't believe I shall ever make my peace with it.' He shrugged, almost embarrassed. 'That is the nature of war, and I shall have to do my part, though I detest the killing of others with all of my heart and soul.'
'As do I, Mr Gould. Even so, I try never to hesitate, for that moment of indecision might bring about the death of one of my crew mates, and I am more able to live with the death of a stranger, who wants me dead, than with the loss of one of my own people.'
'I agree, sir, wholeheartedly.'
'Then you mean to continue with the service?'
'I do, sir.'
Hayden was very surprised, but gratified. 'I am glad to hear it, Mr Gould.'
For a moment they stood gazing at the ship's wake etched on the black ocean. Hayden had a brief feeling that perhaps he had done well by this young man.
'May I ask you a question, Captain Hayden?'
'Yes. Certainly.'
'Do you think I might make a passable officer, one day?'
'Far more than passable, Mr Gould. I think you shall make an excellent officer, if you continue to apply yourself as you have these past months.'
'That is my intention, Captain. I want to stand my lieutenant's examination upon the moment I am nineteen years.'
'I am confident you will acquit yourself with honour, Mr Gould.'
A throat was cleared behind and Hayden turned to find Freddy Madison standing two yards distant.
'Begging your pardon, Captain, I have been sent to invite you to table, sir.'
'Is it that hour, already?' But apparently it was. 'Go along, Mr Gould,' Hayden said. 'I wish to have a word with the officer of the watch.'
When Gould and Madison disappeared below, Hayden turned back to the rail, gazing out into the liquid night. There was no pressing need to speak with the officer of the watch; Hayden had only wanted a moment alone. England on the morrow – if the wind held. For all the weeks of their return Hayden had been wondering at this sudden recall. With all that he had learned from Barthe, he thought it likely that he was being brought home to do nothing but linger upon the land, without a commission of any sort. He rather doubted that Stephens, his one ally in the Admiralty building, had arranged his return. When first Cotton had saddled him with the Themis, Hayden had been so resentful – a job-captain yet again – but now the thought of having her taken away was more than distressing. He knew the ship, officers and crew. All were more than he could hope for. He worried, too, about what would happen to the good men who had served so loyally through all that had occurred over the last few months. Would they suffer the same fate as he? Was it guilt by association?
This return to England was so fraught with hopes and fears. There had been times on this voyage when he could not bear to be parted from Henrietta for another minute let alone several more weeks. He yearned for her. Dreamed of her, and thought of her constantly. How he hoped she might be in Plymouth visiting her aunt. If only.
The ship's bell rang, jarring Hayden from his thoughts. His shipmates awaited. Their last meal together before they were all cast to the wind.
Despite their return to late winter, and the coolness of the night, the gunroom was a place both light and warm. When all were seated, and an unusually large body it was, Mr Smosh raised a glass.
'To our successful voyage,' he said.
Barthe, who had begun to lift his glass – water, only – returned it to the table with such rapidity that it slopped over. Others followed, though with a little more decorum, leaving only the clergyman with a raised glass.
'Oh, my,' the clergyman muttered.
'Mr Smosh,' Barthe admonished him, 'it is the worst luck to toast a successful voyage before the ship is safely in port.'
Hawthorne laughed. 'See what a collection of superstitious heathens you have fallen in among, Mr Smosh?' The marine raised his glass. 'I shall take a little wine with you, sir, for I believe we shall arrive just as safely whether we toast or not.'
Uncertain quite what to do, but not wishing to offend the smiling marine, Smosh completed his toast with a sip of wine. He then retreated into an embarrassed silence.
Hayden could not allow this. 'You see, Mr Smosh, like General Paoli, Mr Hawthorne is a man of the Enlightenment. Not only does he know everything worth knowing about the latest advances in scientific agriculture, he has shed superstition altogether.'
'And religion, too, I dare say,' Wickham interjected.
'Not in the least true,' argued the sailing master, 'Mr Hawthorne worships Venus.'
Which statement was met with much laughter. A toast was drunk first to the goddess, and then to all the fair Venuses any of them had ever known or even seen, which was regarded as a suitable replacement for 'Wives and Sweethearts'.
The first course was served, and there was a brief moment of relative quiet.
'Dr Griffiths,' Hawthorne observed. 'Are you well, sir? I have never seen you looking so melancholy, and as you are of a decidedly morose character, that is saying a great deal.'
The doctor paused with a soup spoon hovering. 'I was thinking that it is very likely that this will prove the last time we shall ever sail together, and though I mislike almost every man aboard more than words can express, I felt a strange sadness settle over me.'
'It is the soup,' someone offered.
But the laughter was brief and forced.
Hawthorne saved the silence. 'I am quite sure you are not shut of us yet, Doctor. Captain Hayden shall be granted his post by the Lords of the Admiralty, the Themis shall be his, and off we shall all set on a cruise that will make us rich beyond the dreams of avarice.' He smiled at the surgeon. 'Is that the phrase, Doctor? "Beyond the dreams of avarice"?'
'I believe it is, and I do hope you are correct.'
'I still do not understand why Lord Hood did not grant you your post, Captain,' Gould wondered innocently. For this he received a glare from Barthe.
'Is this another superstition?' Smosh asked, glancing from Barthe to Gould and then back. 'One does not speculate about officers making their post?'
'In truth, officers do little else,' Archer informed him.
When the small laughter this occasioned had died away, Hayden, in an odd mood, turned his attention to Mr Smosh. 'And what of you, Mr Smosh? Will you continue in the service or have you seen enough of this life?'
'Indeed, Captain, I have no other wish but to continue. I am rather embarrassed to admit so romantical a notion, but I have felt a growing attachment to the sea.' Smosh's smile made it difficult to know if he was being ironical. 'I find seamen refreshingly candid, and if you add to that an opportunity to see the larger world…'
'And get yourself blown to hell in the bargain,' Hawthorne interjected, and then hastily added, 'or heaven, in your particular case.'
The clergyman's smile disappeared. 'I am in God's hands, Mr Hawthorne. I accept whatever fate He decrees.' The smile returned. 'Like so many of my fellows in the church, I have decided to take up the study of natural philosophy. It is my intention to learn the names of all the birds and shrubs, the purpose of every creature in the sea and the species of every cloud. After I have made numerous important contributions, the opportunity for which shall be afforded by our travels, my name will, I am confident, be put forward for membership in the Royal Society. At which point you shall all have no choice but to treat me with the respect I am due.'
'Mr Smosh,' Griffiths declared, 'you are held in the highest regard among the men of this ship. If not for Mr Ariss,' he nodded to the surgeon's mate, 'Mr Gould and yourself the influenza would certainly have claimed more souls than it did. Many of us, I believe, were brought back from the precipice by your diligent ministrations.'
There were nods and words of concurrence all around the table.
Spoons descended and were raised in a strangely syncopated dance. A full topsail breeze heeled the ship and strained the shrouds – a banshee muttering – and a quartering sea rolled the ship slowly forth and back.
The mood around the table that night was one Hayden had remarked many times before, as voyages drew to a close. All of the men present anticipated a return to England and loved ones with the greatest possible joy, yet the feeling in the gunroom was underlain by sadness or perhaps regret. An end to the familiar. The beginning of the uncertain – England and the ambiguous relations and commerce of the landfaring.
Landsmen were often heard to say, 'out of my depth'. Seamen, Hayden had often thought, were like boats hauled up onto the land, removed from their element. 'On the hard,' the seamen said of such vessels. And that was the seafarer, too. And yet they longed for it… until they were about to raise the shores of fair England, when a cool, little breeze of distress touched them.
As bowls and dishes from the first course were cleared, Hayden took the opportunity to raise his glass.
'I should like to make a toast, though highly unpalatable to present company: I give you the finest group of officers I hope ever to serve with. Gentlemen.' Hayden raised his glass to the men seated around the table.
'It is a highly unpalatable toast,' Hawthorne agreed, 'for we cannot raise glasses to ourselves. So I must reply – to Captain Hayden, post or no, he brought the convoy through after Pool was shut of us, sank a frigate and a seventy-four, brought us out of Toulon when we were certain to be made prisoners, hauled guns to the mountaintops, and cut out as sharp a French frigate as you are likely to find.'
'To Captain Hayden,' the others seconded.
This small ceremony had the effect of rendering Hayden unable to speak for a moment, such was the up-welling of feeling.
A song was then sung, as melancholy as the mood.
The meal came to an eventual, though regretful, conclusion, and as the officers streamed out, Hayden asked the sailing master meet him in the great cabin.
When Barthe arrived, but a moment later, Hayden rose from his perch upon the gallery bench, and took two paces, gathering his thoughts.
'Mr Barthe,' Hayden began, turning towards the sailing master, seated by the table, his colour high, despite refraining from all spirits that evening, 'may I ask you a question?'
This request appeared to surprise the sailing master, who drew back with a look of some confusion. 'Certainly, sir.'
'Are you in possession of some knowledge regarding Lord Hood's apparent decision not to grant me my post?'
Barthe shifted uncomfortably in his chair and placed a hand on the edge of the table. 'You know the service, Captain: there are always rumours, most unsubstantiated if not outright fabrication…' His sentence trailed off.
'I am certainly not asking you to break a confidence,' Hayden stated quickly. 'If you feel you cannot, in good faith, speak…'
'It isn't so much that, Captain – certainly I could never reveal how I came by this knowledge…' Again the sailing master's voice trailed away, and he sat for a moment, staring down at his knees. A slight nod of the head, and he looked up. 'I cannot tell you if this is true, sir, but I was informed that Lord Hood would never grant you your post because he was aware that the Admiralty would not confirm it. He comprehended that this would occasion great embarrassment, from which he hoped to preserve you.'
'Ah,' Hayden breathed. 'And why is it that the Admiralty would not confirm my appointment, I wonder? Other than the First Secretary, I have laboured under the belief that no one within the confines of that building was aware of my existence.'
'It would seem, sir,' Barthe replied very quietly, 'that it is not the case. I do not know who, sir, but there is someone who is very familiar with the name "Hayden". The rumour I heard, Captain, was that more than one man had his hopes pinned upon your dear mother, in her youth, but these hopes were dashed when your mother became attached to your father.'
Hayden stopped utterly still. 'Mr Barthe… if such an event did transpire it would have occurred over a quarter of a century ago. Disappointed hopes, and any resentment they might have engendered, could not persist for so long, nor can I believe that anyone would seek their revenge upon the child of this union; we are not Corsicans.'
Barthe shrugged. 'It would seem impossibly petty, and perhaps it is not true, but I was told that some gentleman within the Admiralty is determined to block your advancement. Lord Hood did all that he could for you, leaving you in command of the Themis. It is as though you are caught in the middle of a pushing match – one gentleman driving you down while another forces you up. The sum of all this is that you cannot move either way. One blocks you from gaining your post; one will not allow the Themis to be given to another. It is not the strangest story I have heard in my career.'
For all of him, Hayden wanted to ask Barthe for a name, but knew that he could not. The sailing master had revealed more than he had wanted to as it was.
'Thank you, Mr Barthe.'
'I am terribly sorry, Captain,' the sailing master replied, 'to be the bearer of this news. And as I have said, I cannot vouch for the truth of it.'
'Do not apologize. If it proves true, certainly it would explain many things that have occurred.'
'I can tell you this, sir, the captains of the fleet – those who could see beyond their own noses – thought you a most enterprising officer. Our escape from Toulon was much discussed, and raising guns to the hilltops, in defiance of the army's predictions, met with great approval.'
'It would certainly please me to learn that I was finally overcoming the character that has been attached to me since I served under Hart.'
'Oh, I think you have an excellent character among the captains of Lord Hood's fleet, sir. Very good, indeed.'
Unfortunately, Hayden could not forget Winter's unkind words aboard the Victory. Certainly that man was not singing his praises – nor would be Pool. 'Thank you, Mr Barthe. I do hope that proves true.'
Barthe was about to rise, but stopped. 'You are a very decisive officer, sir, if I may say so. It is a quality that could benefit us all, both ashore and afloat.'
Hayden tried not to smile. 'If you are referring to my reticence regarding certain affairs ashore, I can assure you that my mind is completely made up on that matter.'
'I am very happy to hear it, sir. May I offer my congratulations?'
'Not quite yet, Mr Barthe, and I would prefer you not to mention this to any other.'
'Certainly not, sir.'
'Good evening, then, Mr Barthe. We shall most likely be in Plymouth on the morrow and very happy Mrs Barthe and all of your daughters will be to see you home, I am sure.'
'Not as happy as I shall be to see them, sir. Good night, Captain.'
Hayden crossed to the gallery bench and sat down, gently, elbows on knees, fingertips of either hand touching. There it was. Someone within the Admiralty was blocking his rise in the service… because of disappointed hopes! But could such a thing be true? Could there be any man embittered and vindictive enough to punish the child of a woman who had injured him? The answer was, Hayden well knew, certainly there could. And perhaps it was not Hayden's mother the man reserved his resentment for – but Hayden's dead father. Was he not told, repeatedly, that he reminded people of his father?
Hayden shook his head and laughed. It seemed utterly mad. Certainly, he would rather believe that someone blocked his way for private reasons than that he could not progress in the service because he was thought a blunderer. Many a man of limited ability told stories of lack of connexions or of enemies within the service who blocked his advancement. Did Hayden really want to join that pitiful company?
Best to say nothing, but keep his ears open. He never paid much attention to rumours within the service. Gossip had always seemed to him to be the preoccupation of lesser minds. A terrible snobbery. It was time to begin listening a little more carefully. After all, he would have the well-being of a family to guard in the future. A little wave of anxiety washed through him at this thought. What if Henrietta had suffered a change of heart?
He took out all of her letters and spent the next hour reading them through from first to most recent, and when he was done, felt utterly convinced that her heart was more constant than sunrise. Every day her feelings would be renewed as bright as the day before. He hoped only that his would always shine as strongly.
It was as though he had never left: Plymouth dripping under a sheen of English rain, a low groundswell unsettling the harbour. The blue Mediterranean sky and warm, windless afternoons seemed impossibly remote – memories of a summer long past when he had been young and in the admiral's favour.
Hayden was anxious to get ashore, now that all his doubt had been swept away. To this end, he had sent a note to Lady Hertle at the earliest permissible hour. It was his secret hope that Henrietta visited her aunt and that he could see her that very day and ask the question to which he was determined to have an answer. That he had hesitated at all now seemed impossibly foolish and he hoped that Henrietta had not been injured by his reluctance.
Paperwork fanned across Hayden's beautiful table, the quantity being far too great for his small writing desk. Both Mr Barthe's log and his own journal lay open, as he composed his account to the Admiralty and letter to the Port Admiral. There were monies to be accounted for, stores to be tallied, requests to the Ordnance Board and the Victualling Board. The Hurt and Sick Board must be alerted to the injuries among Hayden's crew, and the Navy Board could not be ignored. The Hurt and Sick Board had requested a detailed account of the influenza, which fortunately Griffiths would write; Hayden only need add a few observations and a signature. Then, of course, there was the First Secretary of the Navy, Mr Stephens, to be sent a missive. Hayden still did not know why he had been so quickly recalled to England and hoped that Philip Stephens might be inclined to intercede on his behalf. Mr Barthe's news of the previous night seemed somewhat unlikely in the light of day, but Hayden could not discount it either.
All his officers hoped for leave to visit loved ones and friends, and no one wanted to be left aboard to oversee the thousand details required to make the ship ready for sea again. Hayden counted himself among the latter. Hood might have left him in command of the Themis, but he was not so certain that his friends in the Admiralty, whoever they might be, would keep him in that position. Add to his uncertainties the want of a ship, and it appeared quite a list.
Thus it was later in the afternoon that Hayden found an excuse to venture ashore, ostensibly to deliver some papers personally. No reply had been forthcoming from Lady Hertle, which made him think that his note had gone astray or that Lady Hertle was not at home that day. Once his errand had been dispatched, Hayden resolved to make the short walk up to Lady Hertle's residence, all the while preserving hopes that the good widow was out visiting with her niece, Henrietta, and that upon their return they would be overcome with delight to discover he had returned, months in advance of his most optimistic predictions.
The door was answered by Lady Hertle's footman – the same old seaman Hayden remembered from his earliest visit. The man, who in the past had always appeared pleased to see him maintained, this morning, a stony dignity.
'My note of this morning to Lady Hertle has gone unanswered,' Hayden explained, 'which led me to believe it had gone astray or that Lady Hertle was not at home. I have taken the great liberty of presenting myself at her door, in hopes that I might send up my card.'
'I shall inform Lady Hertle of your request, sir, if you will wait.' Instead of granting Hayden entrance, he then closed the door and left a surprised Hayden standing upon the step.
A few moments he waited thus, both embarrassed and confused by this unusual treatment, before the servant returned.
'Lady Hertle is indisposed,' the man informed him, his face betraying not the least emotion.
'I am sorry to hear it,' Hayden answered. 'May I leave a note for her?'
'She has your note of this morning, Captain. I hardly think you need disturb her with another.'
Hayden was so surprised by this he hardly knew what to say. Before he could form a reply, the servant spoke again.
'Good day, sir,' he said, and shut the door.
For a moment Hayden stood there, injured and confused, and then terribly, terribly alarmed. Lady Hertle had ever been pleased to see him, and his great ally in his courtship of her niece. To be treated thus… it bespoke the most awful possibilities.
Hayden returned his ship, unable to focus his mind or energies on the thousand tasks that required his attention. Finally, upon a very insistent enquiry by a concerned Mr Hawthorne, he admitted what had occurred.
'You must speak to Miss Henrietta, immediately,' Hawthorne said, 'and put to rest your fears.'
'I cannot leave my ship – not for several days.'
The two sat in the great cabin, Hayden so anxious and distressed he could hardly keep to his chair.
'If I am to believe you, Captain,' Hawthorne observed, 'it is not your ship. Archer is more than capable of doing all that is required, in any event.'
'I have given Mr Archer leave to visit his family.'
Hawthorne bounced up. 'Let me have a word with our young lieutenant.'
Ten minutes later the marine was back.
'All is arranged. Mr Archer has agreed to delay visiting his family. There is a late coach which shall see you in London Wednesday morning before first light. That affords you full two hours to prepare. In what manner might I assist?'
In short order, Hayden took leave of his remaining officers, all attempting to hide their own anxieties about the future, which occasioned a great sense of guilt within Hayden, who felt ashamed that he had been so preoccupied with his own matters that he had forgotten his shipmates. Not a single officer aboard was the least certain of returning to the Themis, or any other ship for that matter.
Feeling like a truant, Hayden boarded the coach for London, taking a seat outside in less than promising weather. The physical discomfort of the journey was nothing to the mental anguish he experienced. Why would Lady Hertle, who treated him as a nephew, snub him so cruelly? Certainly he had been irresolute in his courtship of her niece, but not unforgivably so or so he had thought. In truth, he often believed that Lady Hertle comprehended the reasons for this better than others – approved it, even. And Henrietta had said on more than one occasion that she did not believe in precipitate courtships or impulsive offers of marriage. As this was the one sin that could be laid at his door in regards to Henrietta, he was utterly unable to explain Lady Hertle's treatment of him.
A gale forced him into oilskins, and chilled him through, until he shivered uncontrollably, more susceptible to the cold, somehow, since his near drowning in the winter Atlantic. By the time the coach reached the outskirts of London, Hayden, who had hardly slept the entire thirty-six hours, was utterly spent, both physically and emotionally, and his nerves in such a state that he could hardly think what to do.
Alighting from the coach, it was too early to present himself at the home of Robert and Elizabeth, who he hoped might shed some light on what had occurred with Lady Hertle, but also, more importantly, know the whereabouts of Henrietta. As he hoped to press his suit at the first possible opportunity, he had resolved to speak with his prize agents that morning so that he might have a better idea of how his finances sat, before embarking on married life.
Sending his baggage on to the inn where he customarily resided when in the city, he broke his fast at the coaching inn, and then walked the half-mile to his prize agent's, arriving before their hours of business. A bleak half-hour was consumed wandering the nearby streets until the prize agent's office opened.
A young clerk went off to announce him to his employer, who Hayden was certain would be pleased to see him, given his recent good fortune. He was, immediately, ushered into the office of Mr Reginald Harris, who rose, a broad smile overspreading his thin face.
'May I offer my most heartfelt congratulations, Captain Hayden. I must declare you one of the most fortunate men in all of England.'
Hayden felt at least some release of anxiety. 'Thank you, sir. Have we received so much for the sale of the Dragoon?'
The look on the prize agent's face changed, becoming a bit amused and wary, as though he thought Hayden practised upon him. 'I am referring to your marriage, of course.'
It was Hayden's turn to be confused. 'My marriage? I believe these congratulations are premature, Mr Harris, as I have only recently determined to ask for the hand of a certain lady.'
Bemusement changed to confusion. 'Do you jest, sir?'
'In no way.'
The man seemed unwilling to accept Hayden's meaning. 'You have not recently married in Gibraltar?'
'I have not. Whatever are you talking about?'
Harris slumped down in a chair, an air of utter misery overcoming him. 'This is the worst possible news.' He tried to speak a moment but could not find words. Finally he said very softly. 'I have advanced monies to a woman – to a woman and her mother – who claimed to be your wife, recently married. She produced a certificate to that effect, from Gibraltar, and a letter from yourself, requesting that I advance her funds against your prizes.'
If the man had produced a pocket-pistol and shot him, Hayden could not have been more staggered. 'But… you do not advance funds against prize money. That is your policy – "strict and invariable", as I have been informed on numerous occasions.'
The man nodded agreement, a hand rising to his forehead. 'We do not, but in this case, Madam Bourdage and her daughter were in such unmistakable distress… and we were so certain of receiving a handsome sum for the Dragoon…'
Hayden closed his eyes – the extent of his folly suddenly overtaking him. 'And Madame and Héloise Bourdage were so very beautiful and apparently guileless…'
The man looked up. 'You know them, then?'
'Yes, I aided them after they had been evacuated from Toulon. It was through my agency they were carried safely to England.' Hayden so wanted to sit but did not. 'And thus I have been repaid.'
The agent almost brightened a little, a predatory look in his eye. 'Well, Captain Hayden, if you aided them in coming to England, then you must bear some of the responsibility –'
'I bear none of it!' Hayden interrupted, his considerable temper unchecked by lack of rest. 'I made no request that you advance funds to Madame Bourdage, nor for a moment did it ever occur to me that you would do such a thing as it is against your express policy.'
'Did you or did you not provide them with a letter of introduction?'
'Indeed I did, as I have done for many another. The letter said nothing of Héloise Bourdage being my wife, but was only a general letter of introduction – the sort gentlemen write every day.'
The man waved a hand, as though sweeping this statement away. 'There it is then, by your own admission.'
'Whatever can you mean, sir? I played no part in this deception that has been perpetrated against your company. It is entirely your own error.'
'I will consult our solicitor, but I am quite certain that we shall not pay you this six hundred pounds twice.'
'Six hundred pounds!' Hayden put a hand to a chair back. 'I will consult my barrister, for I do not require you to advance me the monies twice. Once will be more than adequate. It is entirely upon your head if you have given money to impostors. Certainly every officer whom you represent trusts that you will not give their prize money away to anyone coming through the door and laying claim to it. Admit it, sir, you were taken in by their beauty and their very accomplished acting.'
'As were you, sir.'
'Yes, much to my regret, but as I was no part of their scheme, and only an innocent victim, you cannot attach any of the blame to me.'
'We shall see, Captain Hayden.'
'Indeed we shall.'
Hayden exited the prize agent's and hurried north towards the home of Robert and Elizabeth Hertle. His fears grew with each step, until he was almost running along the paving stones. Oh, how he regretted helping these women! And listening to Sir Gilbert Elliot, who had requested this favour. Now he would be embroiled in a suit in the courts – all because he had attempted to rescue two women who appeared to be in the greatest possible distress. If only he could discover them before they spent the whole of the six hundred pounds, then he could bring the law down upon them.
The distance to Robert's home was covered in record time, and Hayden found himself tugging on the bellpull at a very early hour. A moment later, Anne answered the door, and Hayden felt so relieved to see this servant, who had known him many years.
'Anne, I cannot tell you how relieved I am to see you. Please tell me that Captain or Mrs Hertle are within, or that Miss Henrietta is visiting?'
Anne appeared more than surprised to see him; she almost swayed back a little on her feet. Immediately she recovered but offered no smile or greeting, which only added to Hayden's distress.
'Captain Hertle is upon his ship, sir,' she informed him. 'Mrs Hertle is at home, though it is very early, sir, if I may say so.'
'Indeed, and I am sorry for it. Will you inform Mrs Hertle that I am here and request the honour of speaking with her immediately upon a matter of the utmost importance?'
'I shall, sir.'
For the second time in three days, a door, which had always been opened to him, was shut in his face and he was left outside, rocking from one foot to the other.
Anne was absent for so long he began to think that he was to be left there with no response or explanation, which he knew would cause more injury than he might bear. Finally after more than a quarter of an hour, Anne appeared again – not Elizabeth as he'd hoped – and thrust a note into his hand. She made no other explanation but retreated immediately, closing the door behind her.
With a growing sense of dread, Hayden broke the seal and unfolded the stiff paper and read:
How could you ever have been so pitiless and cruel? I do not wish to receive you, Captain Hayden, not today nor at any other time, nor do I wish any communication from you.
There was no signature, but Hayden knew Elizabeth's hand. He pressed three fingers gently to his brow and closed his eyes a moment. Clearly news of his alleged marriage to Héloise Bourdage had reached all of the people it should not. He thought of pulling the bell again, but decided instead to retire to his inn, where he might collect his thoughts, and write a letter to Elizabeth that he dearly hoped she would read.
Poor Henrietta, he thought. Certainly she must not have wanted to believe that he had married on some impulse, but then, no doubt, reports of the striking beauty of Héloise Bourdage would have reached her… Many a man would have been swayed by such beauty, despite any other attachments or commitments. Had Henrietta, by some stroke of ill luck, set eyes upon Héloise?
He was, in short order, at his inn, where he was met by the owner.
'May I offer my congratulations, Captain Hayden,' the man said.
Hayden was forced to lean against the wall, so exhausted was he. 'How do you know of this?'
'Why, Mrs Hayden and her mother stayed here a fortnight. I have never met more gracious or lovely women, if I may say so.'
'And they paid for none of it, I assume?'
The man looked somewhat taken aback by this. 'Your own wife, sir? Of course not. They have received quite a lot of post, sir. Shall I fetch it?'
'Yes, why not.'
Hayden was not the least surprised to find a sheaf of bills from creditors – milliners, clothiers. Madam Bourdage and her daughter had bought shoes and trunks and all manner of apparel. Clearly they dined in great style, dressed in the height of fashion, and spared no expense when it came to entertainment. And they were gone. Had been so for some time. Hayden expected that they had not only quit London but England as well.
All told, their bills amounted to something over three hundred pounds – almost three years of his income! A visit to Mr Archer's brother, the barrister, would be the next order of business.
Before he had the heart to inform his innkeeper that he had not, in fact, married while away, he was told that a gentleman enquired after him. Expecting yet another creditor with some claim on his limited funds, he descended the stairs and was let into a small sitting room where a man perched on a chair, a hat on his knee.
'Captain Charles Hayden?'
'I am,' Hayden admitted, though at that moment he wished he could say otherwise.
'Henry Morton. My services have been engaged by the prize agent Mr Reginald Harris. I am a thief-taker.'
Hayden sat and the man followed suit.
'I am to search for two women who apparently have perpetrated a fraud upon Mr Harris, stealing from him a substantial sum. May I ask, Captain, how you came to know these women?'
'I am not sure, Mr Morton, that I am inclined to answer your question, as my prize agent, this very morning, informed me that I would be liable for the monies these women have taken from him – fraudulently taken from him – though it was done without my knowledge, or my permission, and while I was absent from England.'
The man leaned a little closer. 'You do comprehend, Captain Hayden, that were your name to be attached to this crime in any way it would go very seriously against you? The punishment for theft of such magnitude is hanging, sir.'
'I cannot be implicated, Mr Morton, as I have just learned of it this morning. But it does not seem to matter to Mr Harris, who informed me that the full six hundred pounds would come out of my prize money, whether I was aware of the crime or not.'
'The affairs of Mr Harris and yourself are no concern of mine, Captain. I have been engaged only to discover Madam Bourdage and her daughter. Perhaps, if I can find them and prove that they alone perpetrated this fraud, then you will be cleared and this will aid you in the matter of Mr Harris and the six hundred pounds. How did you first meet Madam Bourdage and her daughter?'
There seemed to be, in this interview, a certain inevitability, and Hayden was encouraged to learn that Harris was making a serious attempt to recover the monies, which would appear to indicate he had little faith in winning a lawsuit against Hayden. Taking a deep breath, Hayden let it out in an embarrassingly theatrical sigh, and answered, 'I had just come from speaking with Admiral Lord Hood upon the Victory, and had made the acquaintance of Princess Marie, who was fleeing the Jacobins.'
'Who?'
'It is of no import. Madame Bourdage and her daughter were on the upper deck among the refugees who had evacuated Toulon. They overheard me speak French, promising to rescue Princess Marie.' His voice thickened. 'Immediately, they knew me for what I was.'
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 21
|
Percival Archer, KC – the very brother of Lieutenant Archer, who had advised so many of the Themis's officers throughout the recent court martial – listened to the final words of Hayden's account with all of the disinterest of a judge trying a man for murder. Not once during Hayden's narrative did this neutrality of countenance show the least sign of transforming. And now he regarded Hayden with a distressing, reproachful silence, which had the effect of making Hayden feel even more a fool.
'You do realize, Captain Hayden, that I am not a solicitor and my opinion on this matter may be less than authoritative?'
'I trust your judgement completely.'
A quick gulp of air. 'Your prize agent, Mr Reginald Harris, fell victim to a deception,' Archer began, 'and violated his own stated principles by advancing funds not yet received from the prize court. I do not believe a court of law will hold you in any way responsible for his folly. Immediately – this very morning – you should notify both your prize agent and the prize court that this gentleman no longer represents your interests and has no legal right to collect monies on your behalf. This should be done in writing. Such a step is justified by Mr Harris's foolishly paying out money on your account, without your permission, to complete strangers. As to the debts of Madam… what was her name?'
'Bourdage.'
'The debts of Madam Bourdage and her daughter… we do not yet know their full extent. It appears they are many and various and might not all come to light for some time. You must place notices in the Times and the Chronicle warning merchants and shopkeepers that Mademoiselle Bourdage is not your wife and stating that you will not honour any debts accrued by her or her mother. I will instruct you in the precise wording. I fear, however, that you shall be forced into court more times than you would like by diverse merchants and innkeepers who have been victimized by the charms of these women, which are, apparently, considerable.'
'Certainly I was deceived.'
'As was as formidable a gentleman as Sir Gilbert Elliot, if that draws a little of the sting from it.' The barrister made a sour face. 'I think you will win all of these various actions but I fear your legal fees might be considerable if numerous merchants come forward with claims.'
'I should rather give the money to you than pay the debts of those two women – though I do feel compassion for their victims, among whom I count myself.'
'They have certainly placed you in a most difficult situation but we will take on these creditors one at a time, and, I dare say, we will rebuff most if not all of their claims. I will not lie and tell you this will be easy or pleasant, but I believe, in the end, we will prevail. Set your mind at ease on that score.' He tried to smile. 'May I ask you a question, Captain, on another matter entirely?' An upward gesture with a hand. 'That is, if we have concluded this business.'
'Yes, certainly.'
'How progresses my younger brother's career? I ask this out of the most profound concern for his future and well-being.'
Hayden was a bit surprised that his legal situation, which seemed utterly impossible and complex to him, had been so summarily dispatched. The barrister's assurances, though welcome, had done very little to relieve the dismay he felt but he hoped the much-looked-for relief of this anxiety would arrive shortly. 'I believe Mr Archer's career progresses apace. I have noted a marked increase in zeal in your brother since Captain Hart quit our ship. Indeed, he has proven something of a revelation, these last months. I have come to believe he will make an exemplary officer.'
'I suspect you did not hold this opinion formerly…'
'Situations alter, as do men. I am very pleased with his progress.'
'I am happy to hear it. In truth, I am relieved. He has long been a worry to me. Perhaps Ben has told you that I am his legal guardian – or was?'
'I did not know.'
'Since the death of his mother. We are but stepbrothers, Ben and I. Our father passed on some years ago and then his mother followed – far too young. As I am his elder by just shy of fifteen years, I became his guardian. He seemed inclined to do little, lest the reading of rather tawdry adventure novels is now counted a vocation, so I pressed him to choose a more pragmatic path. To my great astonishment, he chose the Navy. This was, to my way of thinking, a rather misguided decision, as it seemed to me nothing could be further from his nature than such regimentation, but he had some romantical idea of going to sea and I eventually gave my consent. It has always been my belief that young men should be allowed to make their own mistakes' – a quick smile – 'and then employ lawyers to extricate them. I found him a position with Captain Hart through the agency of friends. It was, I now realize, a grave error. My brother, who has always been rather… contained within himself, became even more so. I thought him deeply unhappy and expected him to give up this foolish idea at any moment. I still marvel that he did not. And now you tell me he might become an exemplary officer. I rather expected his fate was to be an author of tawdry adventure novels – a good-natured ne'r-do-well. After but a few years in my profession, you come to believe that human beings can no longer surprise you – but my own brother has done just that.'
'He has not lost his taste for reading, I will tell you, but he was not alone in that pursuit aboard our ship. Our midshipmen formed a debating society and read all manner of books and pamphlets so that they might argue their merits and demerits. Your brother joined in with great enthusiasm. But I do not think that reading is harmful unless one is inclined to believe everything cast into print.'
For a moment the barrister's mask of neutrality seemed about to be cast aside, as a little tide of emotion swept over him. Instead, he produced a sheet of paper and a pen.
'Let us make certain of the wording of the notice that should be placed in the papers, and write the letters to your agent and to the prize court. Tell me again the names of these women?'
Before he could speak, Hayden's stomach growled loudly in response.
'Do excuse me,' Hayden said.
Archer did not raise his head. 'Bourdon?' he asked.
'Bourdage.'
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 22
|
Hayden could not remember feeling so ineffectual. Above all things, he must speak with Henrietta and that was the one thing he was utterly unable to do. Where she was, he did not know and there appeared to be no way of discovering her present location. It was like being becalmed on a glassy sea when one desperately needed to reach a nearby harbour. One spent every second watching the horizon, the sky, praying for any sign of a breeze, even a zephyr. A man in such a situation could be reduced to willing the wind to appear – and there was hardly any endeavour more futile.
If only Elizabeth Hertle would consent to see him… but she would not. He was not certain she remained in London (was she with Henrietta?). Hayden could not believe that Robert would not grant him a hearing – their lifelong friendship would entitle him to that – but Robert was at sea and beyond reach or recall.
It had occurred to Hayden that the agency of a mutual friend was required but the two people with whom Hayden was acquainted well enough to ask such a favour could not be found. His frustration was all but unbearable.
As a result, he was reduced to writing letters of the rather pathetic pleading variety. Mrs Robert Hertle he did not think would read any letter originating with him, but Hayden was too aware that a letter sent to Robert might not find his ship for weeks, perhaps months – far more time than he could possibly wait. Certainly he could write to Henrietta at her family home, but there was hardly any guarantee that she would be in residence there, or that she would open such a letter if she were. Her well-meaning family might even withhold it, for all Hayden knew.
If only Robert were in London! The worst of all this was that all misunderstandings could, he believed, be easily swept aside by a simple explanation. He had not married Mademoiselle Bourdage – he was merely the victim of a deception.
Perhaps Mrs Hertle or some friend might find his notice in the papers and inform Henrietta. The frustration of it was that the notice would not appear for full three days.
Again, he took a seat at his small writing table and dipped his quill in ink.
Dear Robert:
I trust, you, in the name or our long friendship, will do me the honour of hearing me out. I have been the victim of the most scandalous fraud. Two French émigrées – a Madame Bourdage and her daughter Héloise Bourdage – have been claiming that I married this young woman in Gibraltar. They have even produced some falsified licence to verify their claim. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The worst of this is, at the request of a man of some consequence, I claimed these women were relations of my mother's so that they might then travel to England. In other words, I perjured myself, after their escape from Toulon, so that they might find a place of safety. And for this they have rewarded me by running up tremendous debts in my name, convincing my prize agent to advance them monies not yet paid out by the prize court (from Harris, if you can believe it!), and generally ruining my good name. I have engaged the services of a barrister to deal with all the creditors and Mr Harris, who is attempting to hold me responsible for his act of folly.
All of this, however, is of small matter. What pains me above all things is that Miss Henrietta somehow learned of these women and their claims and believes that I did marry this young émigrée. At least so I imagine. I cannot discover the whereabouts of Miss Henrietta to have an explanation with her, nor will Mrs Hertle or Lady Hertle receive me or read my correspondence. Had I been guilty of this heartless act, I could not blame them, but my actions have been blameless, if a little naive.
Please, Robert, I beg you, write to Mrs Hertle and Miss Henrietta at the first opportunity and inform them of my situation. I can hardly bear to be treated like some callous rogue for much longer. I cannot explain it, but accused of some terrible act long enough, even an innocent man begins to feel guilt.
Your servant,
After a careful reading Hayden deemed the letter acceptable, folded it, sealed it with wax, and addressed it, taking time to read the address twice lest he made some error that would send it astray.
For a moment he leaned his weight against the chair back and stared out of the window. Clocks began to chime at that very moment. Three of a morning. Sleep, never a commodity easily procured, had become even more rare. He was, at once, unable to sleep, and almost overwhelmed by fatigue.
'Always torn in two,' he whispered to the room.
He reached out and slid before him an undefiled sheet of paper. For a long moment he stared at its pristine surface, wondering what words he might place there to somehow, magically, make Henrietta open the letter. Would she open it out of curiosity? Out of regard for him? Or would she simply toss it in the fire?
'She will give me a chance,' he said aloud. 'In her heart she must know that I could not so betray her.'
But barely a moment later he was not so certain.
A half-hour of pacing over the creaking floor was required but then he took his seat again before the empty page.
My Dear Henrietta:
Before anything else is said, I must inform you, all rumours that I married while parted from you are utterly untrue. No such thing occurred. Two women, French émigrées, mother and daughter, have been making this false claim and using my name to amass a vast quantity of debt, and to acquire substantial sums from my prize agent. Neither Lady Hertle nor Mrs Hertle will speak with me or read any correspondence I write, so I have been at my wits' end to find some way to send you word of what has occurred. I am also very dismayed to think that the claims of these two women have caused you distress. The worst of all this is, that, at the request of Sir Gilbert Elliot, I aided these two women in coming to England and they have repaid my kindness by using my name to defraud any number of merchants and my prize agent and to cause you pain. Seldom has a good deed been so unjustly repaid.
I do hope you will read this and understand that I did not betray your trust in any measure and that my heart has not changed in the least these past months except that it is even more your own.
This letter was not so easily dispatched and was written twice more, though it actually varied little, before Hayden was prepared to commit it to the post. London had begun to shift restively by this time, waking slowly, the grinding wheels of tradesmen's carts and delivery drays echoing along the still darkened streets.
Hayden lay down again in his narrow bed, and for a time hoped that either the notice in the papers or the letters he had written would bear fruit. A brief, troubled sleep crept over him and he tossed and rolled like a ship on the sea.
London had not long risen when Hayden sent his letter off to Mrs Hertle by a servant of his landlord's and entrusted his other letters to the post. All through the morning he waited, hoping that Elizabeth would relent and read his letter. That was all he asked – that someone would give him a fair hearing.
Twice, letters were delivered to the inn, and the post came as well, but no one brought word to him; nor did his enquiries produce the desired results. He paced. He ate little. Gazed hopefully out of the window. Then paced again.
About two of the afternoon, when he sat trying to fix his mind upon a book, he heard a footfall upon the stair and then a knock at his door. Having decided that it was better not to live in expectation every moment, Hayden was quite surprised. Springing to the door he found the landlord's daughter bearing a letter.
'The letter you have been awaiting,' the girl said with a curtsy.
Very deliberately Hayden did not snatch it up, but retrieved it with an air of equanimity he did not feel. He thanked the girl, gently pushed his door to, and tore the letter open with his fingers.
It was from Philip Stephens, First Secretary of the Navy. His presence was requested at the admiralty – at his earliest convenience.
The dun brick structure that housed the Admiralty was, by day, ever a scene of blue-coated bustle. The carriage gate and gates that allowed the entrance of men on foot were almost never passed without a polite moment of allowing others to exit or enter before. Beyond, in the courtyard, irregular circles of officers formed here and there, largely by rank, though not exclusively so. Sailors went to and fro bearing messages and names were called out across the yard as sea officers greeted their fellows, some of whom had not been seen in months or years.
Hayden's name, however, was not called, and he crossed the courtyard apparently without anyone being aware that he existed. The First Secretary, he was informed, would see him at the first opportunity and Hayden found a convenient column to lean against while he awaited Mr Stephen's favour.
Many another's name was announced while Hayden loitered, becoming more embarrassed by the moment… as though he were of so little consequence he had been forgotten. Just when he became convinced that, indeed, that was the case, and he would have to submit his name once again, it was, miraculously, declared.
He was quickly upon the stair among the throng of officers coming and going. Here, someone did call his name, and though Hayden raised a hand in response, he was never certain who it had been. With his heart pounding from more than the exertion, Hayden was ushered into the room of Philip Stephens, First Secretary to the Admiralty.
Since their last meeting, a few days before the now infamous court martial of the Themis's officers, Stephens appeared little changed. The same inflamed arteries afflicted a bulbous nose. The same spectacles sat, slightly askew, upon his narrow face. Immediately the First Secretary rose to greet him, emerging briefly from behind his desk, then retreating there again. Both lowered themselves into chairs, and Stephens, who had removed his spectacles, gazed at him a moment with the same emotionless stare that Hayden well remembered. Men would commonly size up a cut of beef with more feeling.
'Are you well, Captain Hayden?'
'Very well, sir. I hope you are the same.'
The First Secretary made a noncommital little shrug. 'I understand you are embroiled in some legal troubles?'
How Stephens knew of this Hayden could not say. Had the story been so quickly circulated?
'It appears I am, though a very reputable barrister assures me that I will not be held responsible for any of it.'
'Well, it is nothing to the service, thankfully. I do hope it turns out well. Such matters are invariably unpleasant and rob us of much-needed sleep.' Stephens produced a square of linen and began the familiar ritual of cleaning his spectacles. 'I do hope your barrister can take the matter entirely in hand. I have arranged to send you back to sea…' the hands stopped working the linen… 'immediately.'
'But I cannot possibly leave England!' Hayden blurted out. 'There are matters that require my entire attention.'
'And why is that, pray?' Stephens asked, his mouth turning down but a little.
'It is this legal matter you have mentioned. Well, not precisely that, but it has unfortunately spilled over into my private life. There are matters I must attend to – matters of the greatest urgency.'
Stephens sat back a little in his chair, steepled his fingers just as Hayden remembered, and regarded him cooly. 'I will tell you in all honesty, Captain, there is but one route that will carry you to the destination you desire – making your post. That route involves proving to the Lords Commissioners that you are thrice worthy of this rank. You must prove yourself and then prove yourself again, and yet once more until the powers that be can have no choice but to grant you your post. My position will not allow me to explain further, but if you do not accept this commission, Captain Hayden, it may never be within my power to offer you anything like it again. I will own that I have secured you this position at no small… sacrifice to myself.' The steepled fingers flexed once. The gaze did not falter.
Hayden had so few supporters in the service, he could not afford to alienate the most powerful and steadfast, even if the First Secretary's efforts often seemed to produce mixed results. It was very clear that Stephens's continued support depended on Hayden's full co-operation.
In a voice both small and dry, Hayden replied, 'Of course. I accept it most gratefully. Excuse my… my hesitation.'
For a moment the First Secretary said nothing. 'There is a French frigate inflicting substantial losses among the ships of our merchant fleet. For some time now we have been endeavouring to discover from where it sails, with little result. Most recently, however, it has come to light that it is almost certainly sailing from Le Havre. Are you familiar with this port?'
'I am,' Hayden answered, his mouth going unaccountably dry.
'So I hoped. It will be upon you to take this frigate a prize or destroy it. The sooner this is managed the better.'
'What ship shall I be given?'
Stephens looked mildly surprised by this question. 'The Themis, of course. It is to your great good fortune that no other will have her. I should never have been able to secure you such a vessel without your post.'
Hayden's mind was racing. 'I will need to gather my crew.'
'They are all speeding towards Plymouth as we speak,' the secretary informed him, 'and your lieutenants have been busily watering and taking aboard stores. I believe you shall find your ship ready to sail or very nearly so. I suggest you secure a place upon the mail coach this evening. I want you at sea – and beyond recall – as soon as can be arranged. Is that understood?'
'Completely.'
'Luck to you, Captain.'
'Thank you, sir. Apparently, I have need of it.'
|
A Battle Won
|
Sean Thomas Russell
|
[
"adventure",
"historical fiction"
] |
[
"naval",
"Adventures of Charles Hayden"
] |
Chapter 23
|
Luck appeared in the form of Midshipman Lord Arthur Wickham. He was standing in the coaching inn courtyard, one foot set upon his sea-trunk as though he were afraid it might slink off into the gathering dusk. The young man almost gave a little jump of joy, so pleased was he by the appearance of his commanding officer and friend.
'Captain Hayden!' The boy broke into a grin. 'Are we aboard the same coach?'
'If you are travelling to Plymouth, I would wager we are.' Hayden, who had been dreading the thirty-six-hour journey, was equally happy to find the midshipman.
'Why, sir, it is a great stroke of good fortune. And the weather looks very promising, barely a rain cloud in sight.'
'Very promising indeed. Are there any other of our shipmates aboard?'
'I don't believe so, sir.'
'No matter, we shall certainly make do with each other's company. I am very pleased not to be travelling alone, I will tell you.'
'As am I, sir. The novelty of it wore away some time ago.'
The mail coach was soon drawn into the yard, and the team exchanged by the ostlers, the tired horses led away by diminutive stable boys, who clicked and muttered to them in a private language known only to boy and horse.
'Watch out Bill, 'e's a biter, that one,' one of the boys warned, just as the horse referred to took a half-hearted lunge at the boy's shoulder and received a smack across the nose with a leather rein for his offence.
Hayden and Wickham watched their trunks being loaded and then mounted to the outer seats, taking their place among diverse travellers, a woman and her grown daughter among them. Almost immediately the coach lurched off into the night, beginning its journey across the greater part of the breadth of England.
Wickham was very circumspect, and had been raised in the best possible circumstances, so would never enquire into Hayden's private life. He did, however, direct the conversation near enough to similar matters – twice bringing up 'marriage' in a different context – to allow Hayden the opportunity to announce his news, if he so desired.
For his part, Hayden desperately wanted to speak of all that happened with someone – even someone as young as Wickham – but the utter lack of privacy in their present circumstances simply would not allow it.
Not long after they had passed the outskirts of London city, however, their fellow travellers all settled into silent states, and if they did not sleep soundly, they at least dozed.
Hayden then chose to relate to the midshipman a truncated version of the story, being careful not to reveal the distress he felt about all that had happened. Wickham's response was to assure Hayden that all would be well, and in short order, too, which had some small effect on Hayden's mood.
The young gentleman was soon asleep himself, leaving Hayden alone with the English countryside and a moon that floated among clouds, casting its pale light down upon the land like a sorrowful, fading sun.
The second morning of their journey brought them to the towns of Dock and Plymouth, where a herd of bullocks blocked up the streets, and drovers cursed at all and sundry. Ordering his trunk delivered to the Themis, an impatient Hayden, followed by Wickham, finally hopped down from the carriage, determined to continue on foot. Soon they were striding through side streets and alleys, making their way around the great, lowing pox of bullocks that spread along the high street.
In but a few moments, they were descending the steep hill where the quay hove into view with its fishermen and oyster costers. Hayden soon found them a boat to bear them to the Themis, but Wickham was suddenly overwhelmed by a need to write to his father.
'I'm very sorry, sir,' the boy apologized, 'but it is on a matter of some importance. I will follow along directly, by your leave, sir.'
Hayden did not hide his annoyance well. 'Will you be very long?'
'Not at all, Captain Hayden. Nary a moment.'
'Well, quickly then.'
Wickham rushed off and in less than a quarter of an hour returned, jumping down into the boat beside Hayden, full of apologies and 'if you pleases'. Immediately they set off into the bay, the waterman bending to his sweeps. With each plunge of the oars Hayden felt his ability to resolve matters slipping away in his wake. Life ashore was not suspended while he was at sea – this fact had somewhat surprised him when he was a young midshipman. Parents aged, siblings grew taller, the sick passed away, and young girls married. And all of these things happened without reference to him, as though no one was the least concerned what he might think or feel about any of it. When last he had been at sea, his life ashore – his other life – had been thrown into turmoil. He wondered what would happen, now. Would the prize courts finally award him his money, or would the law courts hold him responsible for the veritable mountain of debt those French women had built up? He might return to find himself in possession of a handsome sum or he could be ruined.
Would Henrietta learn the truth of what had happened, or would she meet some other and forget him?
'There is our ship, sir,' Wickham informed him.
Hayden looked up and saw the Themis lying to her anchor a short distance off. The ship that no captain would have. 'The mutineers' ship' she was called. The only post ship in the Royal Navy lacking a post captain. A kind of limbo where one could not ascend to paradise but neither could one fall further. Hayden's home, between nations, between ranks, between money and poverty, love and loss. A place he seemed destined never to escape.
'She looks very fine, does she not, Captain?' Wickham said.
'Dante would be pleased.'
Wickham was not sure if he made some jest. 'Pardon me, sir?'
But they came within hailing distance of the ship at that moment and Mr Barthe discovered them and hurried to the rail.
'There you are, Captain,' he called from the quarterdeck. 'We are waiting upon the pleasure of the powder hoy, our victualling is not complete. We've not enough shot to fight an oyster smack, and the bosun has no cordage.' The sailing master appeared to lose track of his catalogue of complaints, gazed unhappily off towards the distant dockyards and slammed a pudgy fist on the rail. 'Fucking navy!' he declared, causing both Hayden and Wickham to erupt into laughter. Neither could tell why.
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 1
|
Since the first light of dawn, the morning had shown itself to be erratic and whimsical. And so, by contagion, Montalbano's behavior would also prove at the very least unstable that morning. When this happened, it was best to see as few people as possible.
The more the years passed, the more sensitive he became to variations in the weather, just as greater or lesser humidity will affect the pain in an old man's bones. And he was less and less able to control himself, to hide his excesses of cheer and gloom.
In the time he'd taken to go from his house in Marinella to the Casuzza district—about ten miles consisting of dirt paths only good for tanks and of little country roads slightly less wide than a car—the sky had turned from light pink to gray, and then from gray to a faded blue before stopping momentarily at a hazy off-white that blurred the outlines of things and muddled one's vision.
He'd received a phone call at eight o'clock that morning, just as he was finishing his shower. He'd slept late because he knew he didn't have to go to the office that day.
His mood darkened. He hadn't been expecting any phone calls. Who could it be busting his chops first thing in the morning?
Theoretically, there shouldn't have been anyone at the station other than the telephone operator, since it was supposed to be a special day in Vigàta.
Special in the sense that the illustrious Minister of the Interior, returning from a visit to the island of Lampedusa—where the reception centers for immigrants (yes, they had the gall to call them that!) were no longer in a position to house so much as another one-month-old baby, being packed tighter than a can of sardines—had expressed his intention to inspect the makeshift tent-camps that had been set up in Vigàta, even though these were likewise stuffed to the gills, with the added aggravation that the poor wretches were forced to sleep on the ground and relieve themselves outside.
For this reason Hizzoner the C'mishner Bonetti-Alderighi had mobilized the entire police forces of Montelusa as well as Vigàta to line the streets the high dignitary was to travel, so that his tender ears would not hear the boos, Bronx cheers, and cusswords (called "protests" in proper Italian) of the population, but only the applause of four or five assholes paid for that express purpose.
Without a second thought, Montalbano had dumped the whole business onto the shoulders of Mimì Augello, his second-in-command, and had taken advantage of the situation to enjoy a day off. The mere sight of the Minister of the Interior on television was enough to set the inspector's blood boiling, so he could only imagine what it would be like seeing him personally in person.
The whole thing in the unstated hope that, out of respect for a representative of the government, nobody in Vigàta or environs would kill anybody or commit any other crimes. The criminals would certainly be sensitive enough not to make trouble on a day of such joy.
So who could it be trying to reach him on the phone?
He decided not to answer. But the telephone, after falling briefly silent, started ringing again.
And what if it was Livia? Maybe needing to tell him something important? There was no getting around it: He had to pick up the receiver.
"Hallo, Chief? Catarella sum."
Montalbano froze. Catarella, speaking Latin? What was happening to the universe? Was the end of the world at hand? Surely he must not have heard right.
"Wha'd you say?"
"I sai', 'Catarella 'ere,' Chief."
He breathed a sigh of relief. He'd heard wrong. The universe fell back into place.
"What is it, Cat?"
"Chief, I gatta tell yiz afore anyting ilse 'at iss a long an' compiclated story."
Montalbano's foot stretched out and pulled a chair close to him, and he sat down in it.
"I'm all ears, Cat."
"Aright. So, seein' 'at 'iss mornin' yoys truly betooked 'isself onna orders o' 'Specter Augello insomuch as they's aspectin' the 'rrival o' the heliocopter carryin' Hizzoner the Minister o'—"
"Did it arrive?"
"I dunno, Chief. I'm not appraised o' the situation."
"Why not?"
"I'm not appraised cuz I'm not at the scene."
"So where are you?"
"At anutter scene called Casuzza districk, Chief, which is allocated near the ol' railroad crossin' 'at comes after—"
"I know where Casuzza is, Cat. But are you going to tell me what you're doing there or aren't you?"
"Beckin' yer partin', Chief, bu' if ya keep buttin' inna wha' I's sayin'..."
"Sorry, go on."
"So anyways, at a soitan point in time the foresaid Isspecter Augello gotta phone call true our swishboard insowhere I's replaced by a replacement, Afficer Filippazzo, foist name Michele, insomuch azza foresaid twissèd 'is leg—"
"Wait a second, who's the aforesaid? Inspector Augello or Filippazzo?"
He shuddered at the thought of Mimì hurting himself, which would mean he would have to go and welcome the minister himself.
"Filippazzo, Chief, 'oo fer the foresaid reason couldna be prescient fer activist soivice, an' so 'e passed it onna Fazio, 'oo, when 'e 'oid da foresaid phone call, tol' me to fughettabout the aspectation o' the heliocopter ann'at I's asposta go immidiotly at once to Casuzza districk. Which..."
Montalbano realized it was going to take half the morning for him to grasp any of what Catarella was saying.
"Listen, Cat, tell you what. I'm gonna fill myself in on this stuff and then call you back in five minutes, okay?"
"But should I keep my sill-phone on or off?"
"Turn it off."
He called Fazio. Who answered right away.
"Has the minister arrived?"
"Not yet."
"Catarella rang me but after talking for fifteen minutes I still hadn't managed to understand a thing."
"I can explain what it's about, Chief. Some peasant called our switchboard to let us know he found a coffin in his field."
"Full or empty?"
"I couldn't quite figure that out. It was a bad connection."
"Why'd you send Catarella?"
"It didn't seem like such a big deal."
He thanked Fazio and called Catarella back.
"Is the coffin full or empty?"
"Chief, the caffin in quession's got iss lid coverin' it an' theretofore the contense o' the foresaid caffin in't possible to know whass inside."
"So you didn't open it yourself."
"Nossir, Chief, issomuch as there warn't no orders consoinin' the raisin' o' the foresaid lid. But if you order me to open it, I'll open it. Bu' iss useless, if y'ask me."
"Why?"
"Cuz the caffin in't empty."
"How do you know?"
"I know cuz the peasant farmer jinnelman 'oo'd be the owner o' the land whereats the foresaid caffin happens a be allocated, an 'ooz name is Annibale Lococo, son o' Giuseppe, an' 'oo's right 'ere aside me, he lifted the lid jess anuff t' see 'at the caffin was accappied."
"By whom?"
"By a dead poisson's body, Chief."
So it was a big deal after all, contrary to what Fazio had thought.
"All right, wait for me there."
And so, cursing the saints, he'd had to get in the car and drive off.
The coffin was the kind for third-class corpses, the poorest of the poor, of rough-hewn wood without so much as a coat of varnish.
A corner of white linen stuck out from under the lid, which had been laid down crooked.
Montalbano bent down to get a better look. Gripping it with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, he pulled it out a little more and was able to see the initials BA embroidered on it and intertwined.
Annibale Lococo was sitting on the edge of the coffin, down near the feet, a rifle on his shoulder, and smoking half a Tuscan cigar. He was fiftyish and sinewy, with sunbaked skin.
Catarella was about one step away but standing at attention, unable to utter a word, overwhelmed by emotion at conducting an investigation alongside the inspector.
All around them, a desolate landscape, more rock than earth, a few rare trees suffering from millennia of water deprivation, shrubs of sorghum, huge clumps of wild weeds. About half a mile away, a solitary little house, perhaps the one that lent the place its name.
Near the coffin, in the dust that had once been earth, one could clearly see the tracks of a small truck's tires and the shoeprints of two men.
"Is this land yours?" Montalbano asked Lococo.
"Land? What land?" said Lococo, screwing up his face at him.
"This land, where we're standing right now."
"Ah, you call this land, sir?"
"What do you grow on it?"
Before answering, the peasant glared at him again, took off his beret, scratched his head, took his cigar out of his mouth, spit on the ground in disdain, then put his Tuscan half-cigar between his lips.
"Nothing. What the hell do you think'll grow on it? Nothing ever takes here. This land's cursed. But I come an' hunt on it. It's full o' hares."
"Was it you who discovered the coffin?"
"Yessir."
"When?"
"This mornin', roun' six-thirty. An' I called you immediately on my cell phone."
"Did you come through here yesterday evening?"
"No, sir, I ain't been true here for tree days."
"So you don't know when they left the coffin here."
"'A'ss right."
"Did you look inside?"
"Of course. Why, didn't you? I's curious. I noticed that the lid wasn't screwed on an' so I lifted it up a little. There's a dead body inside, covered by a sheet."
"Tell me the truth: Did you raise the sheet to have a look at the face?"
"Yessir."
"Man or woman?"
"Man."
"Did you recognize him?"
"Never seen 'im before in my life."
"Do you have any idea why anyone might want to leave a coffin in your field?"
"If I had any ideas like that, I'd start writing novels."
The man seemed sincere.
"All right. Please stand up. Catarella, raise the lid."
Catarella knelt beside the body-box and raised the lid slightly. Then he turned his head suddenly and twisted his mouth:
"Iam fetet," he said to the inspector.
Montalbano leapt backwards in astonishment. So it was true! He hadn't heard wrong! Catarella spoke Latin!
"What did you say?"
"I said it already stinks."
Oh no, you don't! This time he'd heard clearly! There was no mistaking it.
"You're trying to fuck with me!" he exploded, deafening himself first and foremost with his shout.
By way of reply, a faraway dog began barking.
Catarella immediately let the coffin lid drop and stood up, red as a rooster.
"Me? Wit' yiz? 'Ow can y'ever amagine such a ting? Never in a million years would I ever..." Unable to finish, he buried his face in his hands and started wailing:
"O me miserum! O me infelicem!"
Montalbano could no longer see straight and lost control, jumping on Catarella, grabbing him by the neck and shaking him as if he were a tree whose ripest fruit he wanted to make fall to the ground.
"Mala tempora currunt!" Lococo said philosophically, taking a pull on his cigar.
Montalbano froze in terror.
So now Lococo was talking Latin too? Had they all gone back in time without noticing? But then how was it that they were wearing modern clothes instead of tunics or togas?
At this point the coffin lid moved from the inside, crashed to the ground with a loud thud, and the corpse, which looked like a mummy, began to stand up very slowly.
"You, Montalbano: Have you no respect for the dead?" the corpse asked, dark with anger as it removed the shroud from its face, becoming immediately recognizable.
It was Hizzoner the C'mishner Bonetti-Alderighi.
Montalbano remained in bed for a long time, thinking about the dream he'd just had and feeling terribly spooked.
Not, of course, because the corpse had turned out to be Bonetti-Alderighi or because Catarella and Lococo had started speaking Latin, but because the dream had been treacherous, deceitful—that is, one of those where the sequence of events follows strict patterns of logic and chronology. And every detail, every element appears in a light that increases the sense of reality. And the boundaries between dream and reality end up becoming too subtle, practically invisible. At least in the last part the logic disappeared, otherwise it would have been one of those dreams where after some time has passed you're unable to tell whether what you remember was real or just a dream.
Except that there wasn't a single thing that was real in the dream he'd just had, not even the arrival of the minister. And therefore, the day that lay ahead was not a day off. He had to go to work. Like any other day.
He got up and opened the window.
The sky was still half blue, but the other half was changing color, tending towards gray, owing to a blanket of flat, uniform clouds coming in from the sea.
He'd just come out of the shower when the phone rang. He went to answer, wetting the floor with the water dripping from his body.
It was Fazio.
"Chief, sorry to bother you, but—"
"What is it?"
"The commissioner called. He just got an urgent communication concerning the Minister of the Interior."
"But isn't he in Lampedusa?"
"Yes, but apparently he wants to come and visit the emergency camp in Vigàta. He's arriving in about two hours by helicopter."
"What a goddamn pain in the ass!"
"Wait. The commissioner has put our entire department under the command of Deputy Commissioner Signorino, who'll be here in about forty-five minutes. I just wanted to let you know."
Montalbano heaved a sigh of relief.
"Thanks."
"You, I assume, have no intention of attending."
"You're right about that."
"What should I tell Signorino?"
"That I'm sick in bed with the flu and apologize for my absence. And that I'm quite dutifully twiddling my thumbs. When the minister leaves, call me here, in Marinella."
So the minister's visit was real after all.
Did this mean he'd had a prophetic dream? And if so, was he soon going to find the commissioner in a coffin?
No, it was a simple coincidence. There wouldn't be any others. Especially because, if one really thought about it, there was no chance on earth that Catarella would ever start speaking Latin.
The phone rang again.
"Hello?"
"Sorry, wrong number," said a woman's voice, hanging up.
But wasn't that Livia? Why'd she say she had a wrong number? He called her up.
"What's wrong with you?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Sorry, Livia, but you ring me at home, I answer the phone, and you hang up, saying it's a wrong number?"
"Ah, so it was you!"
"Of course it was me!"
"But I was so sure you wouldn't be at home that... by the way, what are you doing still at home? Are you unwell?"
"I'm perfectly fine! And don't try to dodge the issue!"
"What issue?"
"The fact that you didn't recognize my voice! Does that seem normal to you, that after all these years—"
"They weigh heavy on you, don't they?"
"What weighs heavy on me?"
"All the years we've been together."
In short, they had a nice little row that lasted a good fifteen minutes and more.
Afterwards, he dawdled about the house for another half hour in his underpants. Then Adelina arrived and, upon seeing him, got scared.
"Oh my God, Isspector, wha' ss wrong? You sick?"
"Adelì, don't you start in now too. No, I'm not sick, don't worry. I feel fine. In fact, you know what? Today I'll be eating at home. What are you going to make for me?"
Adelina smiled.
"How about I mekka you a nice pasta 'ncasciata?"
"Sounds fabulous, Adelì."
"An' enn tree or four crispy fry mullets?"
"Let's say five and leave it at that."
Heaven had suddenly fallen to earth.
He stayed inside for another hour or so, but as soon as an angelic scent began to reach his nostrils from the kitchen, he realized it was hopeless: he would never be able to resist. An empty feeling began to form in the pit of his stomach, the only solution for which was to take a long walk along the beach.
When he returned about two hours later, Adelina informed him that Fazio had called to say that the minister had changed his mind and gone straight back to Rome instead of coming to Vigàta first.
Montalbano got to the station after four o'clock with a smile on his lips, feeling at peace with himself and the entire world. The miracle of pasta 'ncasciata.
He stopped for a moment in front of Catarella who, seeing his boss enter, had sprung to attention.
"Tell me something, Cat."
"Yessir, Chief."
"Do you know Latin?"
"O' course, Chief."
Montalbano balked, stunned. He was convinced that Catarella had only made his way, barely, through the compulsory years of schooling.
"Did you study it?"
"Well, I can't rilly say as how I rilly studied it, as far as studyin' goes, but I c'n say I know it pritty good."
Montalbano felt more and more astonished.
"So how did you do it?"
"Do wha', Chief?"
"Come to know Latin?"
"Iss one o' my favorite stories."
"What's one of your favorite stories?"
"The one 'bout Latin an' 'is magic lamp. You know, where the genius comes out an' grannit 'is wishes."
The smile returned to Montalbano's lips. So much the better. Everything was back to normal.
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 2
|
On his desk loomed the inevitable mountain of papers to be signed. Among the personal mail that had come in was a letter inviting Inspector Salvo Montalbano to the inauguration of an art gallery that called itself "Il piccolo porto." Launching the new enterprise was a show of twentieth-century painters, the very artists he liked. The letter had arrived late, since the inauguration had already taken place the day before.
It was the first art gallery ever to open in Vigàta. The inspector slipped the invitation into his jacket pocket. He intended to go and check the place out.
A short while later, Fazio came in.
"Any news?"
"Nothing. But there might have been big news."
"What do you mean?"
"Chief, if the minister hadn't changed his mind and had come here, the whole thing would have been a disaster."
"Why?"
"Because the immigrants had organized a violent protest."
"When did you find this out?"
"Just before Commissioner Signorino arrived."
"Did you inform him?"
"Nah."
"Why not?"
"What else could I do, Chief? As soon as he arrived, Signorino had us all line up and advised us all to keep a stiff upper lip and not to create any useless alarms. He told us the television cameras and journalists would be there, and that for this reason we had to be careful to give the impression that everything was working to perfection. So I began to worry that if I were to tell him what I'd been told, he would accuse me of creating useless alarms. So I told our men just to remain on the alert, ready to intervene, but nothing more."
"Well done."
Mimì Augello came in, looking upset.
"Salvo, I just got a call from Montelusa."
"So?"
"Bonetti-Alderighi was rushed to the hospital a couple of hours ago."
"Really? Why?"
"He was feeling bad. Something to do with his heart, apparently."
"But is it serious?"
"They don't know."
"Well, find out and let me know."
Augello left. Fazio's eyes were fixed on Montalbano.
"What's wrong, Chief?"
"What do you mean?"
"The moment Inspector Augello told you the news, you turned pale. I wouldn't think you'd take it so hard."
Could he possibly tell him that for a second he'd seen Bonetti-Alderighi inside the coffin with the shroud covering his face, just as in the dream?
He answered Fazio rudely, quite on purpose.
"Of course I take it hard! We're men, aren't we? What are we, animals?"
"Sorry," said Fazio.
They stood there in silence. A few moments later Augello returned.
"Good news. Nothing with the heart, nothing serious. Just a case of indigestion. They'll release him this evening."
Montalbano felt quite relieved inside. In the end, there had been no premonitions in his dream.
There wasn't a single visitor in the art gallery, which was located exactly halfway down the Corso. Montalbano felt selfishly delighted; this way he could enjoy the pictures in total comfort. Fifteen painters were on exhibit, each with one painting. From Mafai, Guttuso, and Pirandello to Donghi, Morandi, and Birolli. A real treat.
Out of a small door, behind which there must have been an office, emerged an elegant woman of about forty in a sheath dress—tall, good-looking, with long legs, big eyes, high cheekbones, and long ink-black hair. At first glance, she looked Brazilian.
She smiled at him, then approached, hand extended.
"You're Inspector Montalbano, aren't you? I've seen you on television. I'm Mariangela De Rosa—Marian the gallerist, to friends."
Montalbano liked her immediately. It didn't happen often, but it did happen.
"Congratulations. These are very fine paintings."
Marian laughed.
"A little too fine and expensive for the Vigatese."
"Indeed, I can't imagine how a gallery like yours, here in Vigàta, could—"
"Inspector, I wasn't born yesterday. This show is just to attract attention. The next one will feature engravings—still of high quality, of course—but much more affordable."
"I can only wish you the best of luck."
"Thanks. Can I ask whether there's one painting here that you especially like?"
"Yes, but if you want to persuade me to buy it, you're wasting your time. I'm in no position to—"
Marian laughed.
"Well, it's true, that was a self-interested question, but my only interest was in getting to know you better. I have this belief that I can understand a lot about a man by knowing what painters he likes and what authors he reads."
"I once knew a mafioso, author of some forty murders, who would weep with emotion in front of a painting by Van Gogh."
"Don't be mean to me, Inspector. Care to answer my question?"
"All right. I like the Donghi painting, but also the Pirandello. Equally. I don't think I could choose between them."
Marian looked at him, then closed the two headlights she had for eyes.
"So you're a connoisseur."
It wasn't a question but a declaration.
"Connoisseur, no. But I know what I like."
"Well, you like the right things. Tell me the truth: Do you have some art at home?"
"Yes, but nothing of any importance."
"Are you married?"
"No, I live alone."
"So will you invite me one day to see your treasures?"
"Gladly. And what about you?"
"In what sense?"
"Are you married?"
Marian pursed her beautiful red lips.
"I was until five years ago."
"How did you end up in Vigàta?"
"But I'm from Vigàta! My parents moved to Milan when I was two and my brother Enrico four. Enrico came back here a few years after graduating, and he now owns a salt mine near Sicudiana."
"And why did you come back?"
"Because Enrico and his wife kept insisting... I went through a bad patch after my husband..."
"You don't have any children?"
"No."
"What made you decide to open an art gallery in Vigàta?"
"I wanted something to do. But I have a lot of experience, you know. When I was married I had two galleries, small ones, one in Milan and the other in Brescia."
A fiftyish couple came in gingerly, looking around almost as if they feared some sort of ambush.
"How much does it cost?" the man asked from the doorway.
"It doesn't cost anything to enter," said Marian.
The man whispered something into the woman's ear. Then she did the same to him. Whereupon the man said:
"Good evening."
And the couple turned around and went out. Montalbano and Marian started laughing heartily.
When, half an hour later, Montalbano also left the gallery, he'd already made plans to pick up Marian at eight o'clock the following evening and take her out to dinner.
It was a lovely evening, and so he set the table on the veranda and ate the pasta 'ncasciata left over from lunch. Then he fired up a cigarette and started contemplating the sea.
After their row that morning, there was little chance Livia would be calling. She would let a good twenty-four hours pass just to let him feel her resentment.
He didn't feel like reading or watching TV. He just wanted to sit there and not think about anything.
But this was surely a hopeless proposition, since his brain refused to remain thoughtless and, on the contrary, kept a good hundred thousand simultaneously in play, unleashing one after the other like rapid-fire camera flashes.
The dream of the coffin. Bonetti-Alderighi's initials embroidered on the shroud. The Donghi painting. Catarella speaking Latin. Livia not recognizing his voice. The Pirandello painting. Marian.
Ah, Marian.
Why had he immediately said yes when she suggested they go out to dinner together? Twenty years earlier he would have answered differently; he would have refused and would have even been surly about it.
Was it perhaps because it was hard to say no to a woman as beautiful and elegant as this one? But hadn't he said no endless times to women even more beautiful than Marian?
This could only mean one thing. That his personality had undergone a change due to aging. The reality was that nowadays he very often felt lonely, and he was tired of feeling lonely, bitter about being lonely.
He knew perfectly well that if he dragged certain nights out by smoking and drinking whisky on the veranda, it wasn't because he couldn't sleep, but because it really bothered him that he was sleeping alone.
He wished he had Livia at his side, but if it couldn't be Livia, any other good-looking woman would do.
And the strange thing about this desire was that there was nothing sexual about it. He wished only that he could feel the warmth of another body next to his. He remembered the title of a film that expressed this desire perfectly: To Sleep Next to Her.
He didn't even have any friends he could really call friends. The kind you can confide in, the kind to whom you can reveal your innermost thoughts. Fazio and Augello were certainly his friends, but did not belong to this category.
Disconsolate, he stayed out on the veranda to finish the bottle of whisky.
Every so often he nodded off but then would wake up barely fifteen minutes later, feeling more and more melancholy, more and more convinced he'd done everything wrong in life.
If only he'd married Livia when he should have...
For heaven's sake, let's not start in with any stocktaking.
Let's call a spade a spade: If he'd married Livia they would have broken up after a few years of marriage. He was as sure of this as he was of his own death.
He knew himself well, and he knew he had neither the will nor the ability to adapt to another person, not even someone he loved as much as Livia.
Nothing—not love, not passion—would have been strong enough to force them both to spend the rest of their lives under the same roof.
Unless...
Unless they had adopted François, as Livia had wanted.
François!
François had been a total failure. The kid had done his best to make sure the situation worsened, but he and Livia had delivered the coup de grâce.
Back in 1996 they'd had to take a little Tunisian orphan of ten into their home for a short while. François was his name, and they'd grown so fond of him that Livia had suggested they adopt him. But Montalbano hadn't felt like it, and so the kid ended up going to live on the farm of Mimì Augello's sister, where he was treated as one of the family.
Viewed with the hindsight of many long years, this may have been a big mistake.
The agreement was that he would send Mimì's sister a check each month to help pay expenses. He'd instructed his bank to take care of this, and it had gone on for years.
The problem was that the older François got, the more difficult he became. Disobedient and belligerent, always surly and complaining, he didn't even want to hear about studying. And yet he was extremely intelligent. In the early going, Livia and Salvo went to see him often; then, as often happens, the visits became fewer and farther between, until they stopped going altogether. But for his part, the kid refused to go to Vigàta to see Livia when she would come down from Genoa.
Clearly François suffered from his situation and maybe had even taken the fact that they hadn't adopted him as a rejection. A few days after the boy's twenty-first birthday, Mimì Augello told Montalbano that François had run away from the farm.
They searched for him over land and sea, but never found him. And so they'd all had to resign themselves.
Now that he was twenty-five, it was anybody's guess where he hung his hat.
But why go over the past again? What was broken couldn't be fixed.
The thought of François brought a lump to his throat. He dissolved it by downing the last quarter of the bottle of whisky.
At the first light of dawn he saw a majestic three-master on the horizon, heading for the harbor.
He decided to go to bed.
When he woke up, Montalbano realized he was in a dark mood. He went to open the window. As if to prove the point, the sky was gloomy, completely covered with dark gray clouds.
Catarella stopped him on his way in.
"'Scuse me, Chief, but there's a jinnelman waitin' f'yiz."
"What's he want?"
"'E wants to report a armed assault."
"But isn't Augello around?"
"'E called sayin' 'e's gonna be late."
"What about Fazio?"
"Fazio's betooken hisself to Casuzza."
"Why, was another coffin found?"
Catarella gave him a bewildered look.
"Nah, Chief, iss cuzza some kinda nasty fight 'tween two hunners an' one o' them, I dunno which, if i' wuzza foist or the seccon', shot th'other, an' so, consequentially, I dunno if i' wuzza foist or the seccon' 'at got wounded inna leg, but jest a li'l, jest a grazin' wound."
"All right. What did this gentleman say his name was?"
"I can't rilly remember, Chief. Sumpin' like di Maria or di Maddalena, sumpin' like 'at."
"The name's di Marta, Salvatore di Marta," said a well-dressed man of about fifty, generously doused in cologne, completely bald, and shaven to perfection.
Martha, Mary, and Magdalen, the Pious Women of Calvary. Catarella got it wrong, as usual, but he was close.
"Please come in and sit down, Signor di Marta."
"I'd like to report a case of armed assault."
"Tell me what happened, and when it happened."
"Well, my wife came home past midnight last night—"
"Excuse me for interrupting, but who was assaulted, you or your wife?"
"My wife."
"And why didn't she come in person to file the report?"
"Well, Inspector, Loredana is very young, not quite twenty-one years old... She got very frightened, and even seems to have a little fever..."
"I understand. Go on."
"She got home late last night because she'd gone to see her best friend who wasn't feeling well, and she didn't have the heart to leave her all alone..."
"Of course."
"In short, as soon as Loredana turned onto Vicolo Crispi, which is very poorly lit, she saw a man lying on the ground and not moving. She stopped the car and got out to give the man assistance, but then he suddenly stood up, holding something that looked to her like a gun, and he forced her back into the car and sat down beside her. Then—"
"Just a minute. How did he force her? By pointing the gun at her?"
"Yes, and he also grabbed her by the arm, so hard that it left a bruise. He must have been very violent, since he also bruised her shoulders when he pushed her into the car."
"Did he say anything?"
"Who, the attacker? No, nothing."
"Was his face covered?"
"Yes, he had a kind of bandana covering his nose and mouth. Loredana had left her purse in the car. He opened it, took out the money that was inside, took the keys out of the ignition and threw them out into the street, far away, and then..."
The man was clearly upset.
"And then?"
"And then he kissed her. Actually, more than kiss her, he bit her twice on the lip. You can still see the marks."
"Where do you live, Signor di Marta?"
"In the new residential neighborhood called I Tre Pini."
Montalbano knew the area. There was something about this that didn't make sense.
"I'm sorry, but you said the attack occurred in Vicolo Crispi."
"Yes, and I think I know what you're getting at. You see, when I got home yesterday, I hadn't been able to deposit the supermarket's receipts in the night safe of my bank. And so I gave the money to Loredana and asked her to be sure to deposit it before going to her friend's house. But she forgot to, and only remembered when she was on her way home, and that was why she had to take that detour which—"
"So there was a lot of money in your wife's purse?"
"Yes, a lot. Sixteen thousand euros."
"Was the guy satisfied with only the money?"
"He kissed her too! And it's a good thing he limited himself to one kiss, even if it was violent!"
"That's not what I was referring to. Does your wife usually wear jewelry?"
"Well, yes. A necklace, earrings, two rings... A little Cartier watch... All valuable stuff. And her wedding ring, naturally."
"The attacker didn't take any of it?"
"No."
"Do you have a photo of your wife?"
"Of course."
He took it out of his wallet and handed it to Montalbano, who looked at it and gave it back.
Fazio came in.
"Just in time," said the inspector. "Signor di Marta is going to go into your office now and file an official report of an armed assault and robbery. Good-bye, Signor di Marta. We'll be back in touch with you soon."
How does a man some fifty-odd years old manage to marry a girl not yet twenty-one? And not just any young girl, but one like Loredana who, to judge from the photo, was so beautiful it was almost frightening?
How did the guy manage not to realize that by the time he was seventy, his wife would be barely forty? In other words, still desirable and with her own solid, healthy desires?
Okay, it was true he'd spent the previous night crying over his loneliness, but a marriage like that would be a cure worse than the disease.
Fazio returned some fifteen minutes later.
"So what supermarket does the guy run?" the inspector asked.
"The biggest one in Vigàta, Chief. He married one of the checkout girls last year. People around town say he lost his head over her."
"Does this story make any sense to you?"
"No. Does it to you?"
"No."
"Can you imagine a thief taking only the money and not grabbing the jewelry as well?"
"No, I can't. But it's still possible we've got it wrong."
"Do you believe in gentlemen thieves?"
"No, but I do believe in desperate people who suddenly turn to robbery but wouldn't know where to resell stolen jewelry."
"So how do you want me to proceed?"
"I want to know everything about this Loredana di Marta. What her best friend's name is and where she lives, what her habits are, who her friends are... Everything."
"Okay. Do you want me to tell you about that little hunters' quarrel in Casuzza?"
"No. I don't want to hear anything about Casuzza."
Fazio looked perplexed.
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 3
|
After Fazio left, the inspector resumed his bureaucratic labors, signing page after page. Finally, by the grace of God, it was time to eat.
"You cheated on me yesterday," Enzo reproached him as soon as he came into the trattoria.
"I ate at home. Adelina cooked for me," Montalbano quickly replied, to forestall any fits of jealousy on Enzo's part. Having the inspector as a regular customer was very important to the restaurateur.
For some reason, the story that Signor di Marta had told him had dispelled his bad mood. Deep down, the man had practically been asking for his wife to cheat on him. Not that the inspector was in the habit of taking pleasure in others' misfortunes, but all the same...
"What've you got for me?"
"Whatever you want, Inspector."
He ordered and was served. He may even have abused his power: He ordered too much, and repeatedly. So much, in fact, that he even had a little trouble getting up from his chair.
A stroll along the jetty, ever so slowly, one foot up, one foot down, thus became a dire necessity.
The handsome three-master he'd seen heading for the port in the early morning was now moored in the berth where every day at eight p.m. the postal boat docked. Apparently it would have to put back out to sea before that hour.
Two sailors were busy swabbing the deck with buckets and mops. No other crew members or passengers were visible. Astern, on the side of the boat, was the name: Veruschka. It was flying a flag that Montalbano didn't recognize. On the other hand, how many Italian moneybags flew the Italian flag on their yachts? He vaguely recalled that there was a famous model named Veruschka many years ago.
He sat down as usual on the flat rock beneath the lighthouse and lit a cigarette.
Halfway down the rock he noticed a crab that was staring at him without moving.
Was it possible that for all these years he had been harassing the same crab by throwing pebbles at it?
Or was it perhaps a family of crabs that had passed the word on from father to son?
"Look, Junior, almost every afternoon Inspector Montalbano comes around here to play with us. Just indulge him and let him get his jollies. He's a lonely old bastard who means no harm."
He stared back at the crab and said:
"Thanks, crab, but I don't feel like it today. Sorry."
The crab moved and started walking sideways to the edge of the rock, then vanished into the water.
Montalbano wished he could stay there until sunset.
But he had to return to the office. He got up, sighing, and started heading back.
As soon as he'd passed the three-master's gangway, three taxis in a row arrived and pulled up beside the boat. Apparently the passengers had wanted to visit the Greek temples.
He spent the whole afternoon boring himself to death signing useless papers. But he absolutely had to do it, not out of any sense of duty but because he'd learned that the subtle vengeance of an unsigned paper was to multiply into at least two other sheets, in one of which he was asked to explain why he hadn't signed the previous one, while the other was a copy of the first, just in case he had never received it.
Around seven in the evening, Fazio returned, looking like a disappointed hunter coming home with nothing in his game bag.
"Chief, I got some info on Loredana di Marta."
"Let's have it."
"It's not much. The girl, whose maiden name is La Rocca, is the daughter of Giuseppe La Rocca and Caterina Sileci; she was born in..."
Fazio was off and running with his usual obsession, which was to recite the entire records-office file of a person under investigation. If Montalbano didn't stop him at once, the guy was liable to go back to the girl's great-grandparents. He threatened him with a dirty look.
"Hold it right there. I'm warning you: If you continue to indulge in your records-office mania, I swear I'll—"
"Sorry, Chief. I'll stop. As I was saying, before marrying di Marta, this Loredana had been the girlfriend of a certain Carmelo Savastano, a debauched good-for-nothing. They'd been together since she was fifteen and he was twenty. Apparently she was hopelessly in love with him."
"So why'd she leave him for di Marta?"
Fazio shrugged.
"Who knows? But there's a rumor going around."
"Let's hear it."
"That di Marta made a deal with Savastano."
"Let me get this straight. He told Savastano to leave her?"
"So they say."
"And Savastano accepted?"
"Yes, he did."
"I guess he was well paid."
"Well, he certainly wasn't persuaded by words alone."
"So di Marta basically bought Loredana. What do people in town say about her?"
"Nobody has a bad word to say about her. They all say she's a good girl. Well behaved. She goes out only with her husband or to visit her girlfriend."
"Do you know what that girl's name is?"
"Yes. Valeria Bonifacio. She lives in a freestanding house in Via Palermo, number 28."
"Is she married?"
"Yes. To the captain of a ship who spends months on end at sea before returning to Vigàta."
"So, in conclusion, it really was a case of assault with a deadly weapon?"
"Apparently."
"Which means we have to start looking for the robber."
"Which won't be easy."
"I agree."
As soon as Fazio went out, the inspector had an idea. He called up Adelina, his housekeeper.
"Wha'ss wrong, Isspector? Somethin' happen?"
"No, everything's fine, Adelì, calm down. I need to talk to your son, Pasquale."
"He jessa wenn out. I have 'im a-call you when'e comma beck."
"No, don't bother, Adelì. I'm about to leave my office and I won't be home tonight either. It's better if he calls me tomorrow morning, here at the station."
"Okay, whatteva you say, Isspector."
Pasquale was a habitual offender, a house burglar constantly in and out of prison. Montalbano became the godfather of Pasquale's young son at the baby's baptism, and in a gesture of gratitude, they named the boy Salvo. Every so often the inspector turned to Pasquale for useful information.
Why was the metal shutter of the gallery lowered almost to the ground?
And yet it was five minutes to eight. Had Marian forgotten about him and their date?
Feeling discouraged, he rang the doorbell. A moment later he heard her voice say: "Raise the shutter and come on in."
The first thing he saw as he entered was that there were no more paintings on the walls.
He didn't have time to say anything before Marian came running up to him, embraced him, grazed his lips with hers, stepped back laughing, and then did a pirouette like a dancer.
"What's going on?" Montalbano asked.
"I sold all the paintings! All at once! Come."
She took his hand, led him into the office, sat him down in an armchair, opened a mini-fridge, and pulled out a bottle of champagne.
"I bought it just for the occasion. I was waiting for you, so we could have a toast. Please uncork it."
Montalbano uncorked the bottle while she went and got two glasses.
They toasted. Montalbano was happy that she was happy.
This time Marian held out her lips for him, and Montalbano placed an ever so chaste kiss on them. Then she sat down in the other armchair.
"I'm happy," she said.
Happiness made her more beautiful.
"Tell me how it happened."
"Around ten-thirty this morning a very elegant lady more or less my age came in. She spent a whole hour looking at the paintings, and then complimented me on her way out."
"Was she Italian?"
"I don't think so. She spoke perfect Italian, but with an accent that sounded German to me. She came back fifteen minutes later with a man who looked about sixty, obese but very distinguished. He introduced himself as Osvaldo Pedicini, an engineer, and said that his wife wanted to buy all the paintings on exhibit. I very nearly fainted."
"Then what happened?"
"He asked me to name a price. I did some math and gave him a figure. I was expecting to have to bargain, but he didn't bat an eyelash. But he said he was in a hurry. So I closed everything up and we went to the bank. He spoke with the manager, and they made some calls. I used some excuse to go out and went and had a cognac at a bar. I could barely stand up from the shock of it all. When I returned, the bank manager and Pedicini said I should come back at three."
"What did you do?"
"Nothing. I was incapable of doing anything. My mind was confused. It all seemed so incredible. I just waited here, in this armchair. I wasn't hungry. Just very thirsty. Then at three I went back to the bank. Only Pedicini was there; his wife hadn't come. The manager assured me that everything had been taken care of, and that I would have my money tomorrow, but I could consider it already in the bank. So we came back here, and I found three taxis stopped outside the gallery. Two sailors brought in some crates and packaged all the paintings under Pedicini's direction. By six it was all done."
She got up and refilled their glasses, then sat back down and extended one of her legs towards Montalbano.
"Pinch me."
"Why?"
"So I can be sure I'm not dreaming."
Montalbano bent forward, reached out, and executed a sober, gentlemanly squeeze of her calf, but then jerked his hand back as if he'd received a shock. Marian was vibrating. The nerves beneath her skin were like so many little snakes. An uncontrollable energy emanated from her.
"I owe everything to you," she said.
"To me?!"
"Yes. You brought me good luck."
She stood up and came and sat on the arm of Montalbano's easy chair, putting her arm around his shoulders.
Her body gave off warmth and scent. The inspector immediately began to sweat.
Perhaps it was best to go out and get a breath of air, to relieve the tension that with each passing moment became more dangerous.
"Has your appetite returned?"
"Yes. And how."
"Then tell me where you'd like to go, and—"
"First let's finish the bottle."
Apparently Marian had other things in mind.
"Have you told your brother what happened?"
"No."
The answer was immediate and blunt.
"Why not?"
"Because Enrico and my sister-in-law would have rushed right over here."
"So?"
She said nothing.
"You don't want to see them?"
"Not tonight."
You couldn't get any clearer than that! Shouldn't he perhaps nip this in the bud before things got more complicated?
Meanwhile, it was utterly imperative that he not get drunk.
"Listen, Marian, we can't finish the bottle."
"What's preventing us?"
"We have to drive."
"Oh, right," she said, frowning in disappointment. "Too bad. Excuse me for just a moment."
She got up, opened a little door, behind which Montalbano got a quick glimpse of a bathroom, then went inside and locked the door.
The moment lasted half an hour. Then Marian came back out, newly made up and fresh as a rose.
"What do you feel like eating?"
"Whatever you do."
"I think it's better if we go in separate cars. Mine is parked right here in front."
"So is mine. Oh, I wanted to tell you something. There's a nonnegotiable condition to my coming out to dinner with you."
"And what's that?"
"It's on me. I have to celebrate."
"No, come on."
"Then no deal."
She was serious. And firm. Montalbano didn't want this to drag on.
"All right then."
They went out. The inspector helped Marian roll down the shutter. Then she pointed to a green Fiat Panda.
"That's my car."
"Okay, just follow me," said Montalbano, heading for his car.
He wanted to take her to that trattoria at the water's edge where they served great quantities of antipasto, but he made two wrong turns. After a while he gave up, realizing he had no idea where he was or where he should go. He stopped the car. Marian pulled up beside him.
"Can't find the way?"
"No."
"But where are we supposed to be going?"
"There's a restaurant that serves all kind of antipasti that—"
"I know that place! Follow me."
How humiliating.
Ten minutes later they were sitting down at a table.
"Did your brother take you here?" Montalbano asked.
"No. Someone else," she replied, cutting him short. Then she said: "I want to know everything about you. How come you're not married? Are you divorced? Engaged?"
It was a good opportunity. He talked to her at length about Livia, and when he was done she made no comment.
Montalbano was pleased to see that she ate with gusto and left nothing on her plate.
She told him about a marriage gone wrong and the difficulties she had to overcome to get a divorce.
"If you fell in love with another man, would you remarry?"
"Never again," she said decisively.
Then she smiled.
"You're sharp. One can tell you're a cop."
"I don't understand."
"You've started your questioning with a specific goal in mind."
"Really? And what would that be?"
"To find out whether there've been any other men in my life since the divorce. Yes, there have been, but they were all brief affairs of no importance. Happy?"
Montalbano didn't answer.
Then out of the blue she said:
"Tomorrow, I'm sorry to say, I have to go away. But first I'm going to stop in at the bank to make sure everything's in order. We won't be able to see each other for at least a week."
"Where are you going?"
"To Milan."
"To see your parents?"
"I'll certainly see them, yes. But I'm going because Pedicini told me something that interested me very much."
"Care to tell me what?"
"Sure, it's not a secret. He wants me to find him some seventeenth-century paintings of value. He and his wife will be back in Vigàta in a couple of weeks. He gave me the name of a gallerist friend of his in Milan who might be able to help me. Are you sorry?"
"A little."
"Only a little?"
Montalbano preferred to dodge the question.
"I'm afraid I don't understand."
"Don't understand what?"
"If Pedicini is a friend of this gallerist, why does he need you as a go-between?"
"Pedicini told me he doesn't want to get personally involved, not even with his friend." Then, caressing the back of his hand: "I feel like getting drunk."
"You can't. Don't forget you have to drive."
"Ouf! Then I'm going to pay the bill right away and we can go. We're finished, aren't we? There's no room left in my stomach, not even for a single clam."
Montalbano asked the waiter for the bill.
"Do you want to go home?" he asked.
"No."
"Where do you want to go?"
"To your place. Got anything to drink?"
"Whisky."
"Excellent. Anyway, I want to see your paintings."
"I don't own any paintings. Only engravings and drawings."
"That's just as good."
The veranda sent her into ecstasy.
"God, it's so beautiful here!"
She sat down on the stone bench and gestured impatiently for Montalbano to sit down beside her.
"Didn't you want to see my—"
"Later. Come here."
Oh, well. The best he could do was play for time.
"I'll go and get the whisky."
He went and returned with a new bottle and two glasses.
"Would you like some ice?"
"No. Sit down."
He sat down. He reached for the bottle to unscrew the cap but was immediately prevented by Marian, who embraced him and kissed him. Long and hard.
She then released him and laid her head on his shoulder. Montalbano poured half a glass and handed it to her.
She didn't take it.
"I don't feel like getting drunk anymore. I want to remain perfectly lucid."
Montalbano drank the half-glass in her place, downing it in two gulps, in hopes of recovering from the mental and physical disorientation her kiss had caused him.
But he could tell that Marian was troubled. In fact she stood up.
"Let me by."
Montalbano got to his feet, and as soon as she was in front of him, she grabbed his hand and led him away.
They stepped down from the veranda. Marian took off her shoes.
They walked down the beach to the water, hand in hand.
Then she let go of him and started running along the water's edge, laughing.
Montalbano started running after her, but she was faster. He gave up.
Marian disappeared into the darkness.
The inspector turned around and started heading back.
He didn't hear her come up behind him.
He just felt himself grabbed roughly by the waist and turned around, as she pressed her whole body up against him, panting, trembling, and whispered in his ear: "Please, please. I swear that afterward I won't..."
This time it was Montalbano who took her by the hand and started running towards the house.
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 4
|
He woke up with a start and looked at the clock in the light filtering through the slats in the shutters. Seven o'clock. He immediately remembered everything that had happened. And he felt deeply disturbed by it. In "day after" scenarios in the past, he had felt shame and remorse upon awakening. But not this time. This time was quite different. Over the course of the night, something unexpected had happened between the two of them. And the feeling frightened him.
He sat up in bed. The place beside him was desolately empty, as nearly every morning. He shut his eyes again, lay back down, and sighed, unable to put in any kind of order the contradictory and confused feelings clogging his brain.
At any rate, the fact was that Marian had got out of bed and gone into the bathroom, got dressed, and left, and he hadn't heard a thing, dead to the world in a tomblike sleep.
He'd been swept away by a cyclone, a veritable equatorial tempest that had gone on for a long time—a storm by which, just to be clear, he had been delighted to be carried away, and which in the end had left him utterly breathless and drained of strength, like a castaway who finally reaches the shore after swimming desperately without end.
He felt a surge of pride. Good God! Considering all the years he was carrying around, when you came right down to it...
But it was time for him to get up too.
Quite unexpectedly, the wonderful smell of fresh-brewed coffee reached his nostrils.
Had Adelina come early?
"Adelì!"
No answer. He heard footsteps approaching.
Then Marian appeared, all dressed and ready to go out, with a cup of coffee in her hand.
He remained spellbound as he watched her draw near. And the feeling that so frightened him returned, powerful and unstoppable.
Marian set the cup down on the bedside table, smiled a happy smile, then bent down and kissed him.
"Good morning, Inspector. It's so strange. I can make my way around your house as if I've always known it."
By way of reply, Montalbano's body acted on its own, without involving his brain in the least.
He leapt out of bed and held her body tight in a mixture of renewed desire, tenderness, and gratitude.
She returned his kisses vigorously, but at a certain point stepped away, firm and decisive.
"Please stop."
Montalbano's body obeyed.
"You don't know what I would give to be able to stay," said Marian. "Believe me. But I really have to go. I also slept in, and I'm late. I'll try to return to Vigàta as soon as I can..."
She took a cell phone out of her pocket.
"Give me all your numbers. I'll call you tonight from Milan."
Montalbano walked her to the door.
He still hadn't been able to say a word. He was in the grips of an emotion that prevented him from speaking. She threw her arms around his neck, looked him straight in the eye, and said: "I didn't know I..."
Then she quickly turned around, opened the door, and went out.
Montalbano, who was naked, just stood there, head poking out of the door, and watched her get in the car and drive off.
As he was heading back to the bedroom, the house seemed much emptier than before.
He immediately wished Marian was back. Then he threw himself onto the bed on the side where she had slept, burying his face in her pillow to get another whiff of her flesh.
He'd been in the office for five minutes when the phone rang.
"Chief, I got the son o' yer 'ousekipper, meanin' Adelina, natcherilly, onna line."
"Put him on."
"Mornin', Inspector. Pasquale here. Mamma tol' me you wannit a talk to me. Anything wrong?"
"How's my godson Salvo doing?"
"Growin' like a dream."
"I need some information."
"Always glad to help..."
"Have you heard anything about a mugger who robbed a lady at gunpoint in Vicolo Crispi? He took her money but not her jewelry, then he kissed her—"
"He kissed 'er?"
"That's right."
"An' 'e din't do nothin' else?"
"No."
"I'm shocked."
"You haven't heard any mention of it?"
"No, I don't know nothin' about it. But if you want, I can ask around."
"You'd be doing me a big favor."
"I'll ask around and get back to you, Inspector."
Mimì Augello and Fazio came in together.
"Any news?" the inspector asked.
"Yes," said Augello. "Last night, not five minutes after you left, a certain Gaspare Intelisano came in to report a crime."
"What was the crime?"
"Well, that's just it. Normally a person comes in to report that someone broke into his house or something, whereas this time it was just the opposite."
"I haven't understood a thing."
"That's the point. It seemed like a delicate matter, and complicated, and so I asked him to come back the following morning, when you'd be here. It's better if he talks with you. Anyway, he's here now, waiting for you to arrive."
"But just tell me a little beforehand!"
"Believe me, you'll understand a lot more if he tells you himself."
"Oh, all right."
Fazio went out and came back with Intelisano.
He was about fifty, tall and slender, with a little white beard that looked like a goat's, and shabbily dressed in trousers, a threadbare green velvet jacket, and clodhopping peasant boots. He was visibly nervous.
"Please sit down and tell me everything."
Intelisano sat down at the outermost edge of the chair, mopping his sweaty brow with a handkerchief as big as a bedsheet. Mimì pulled up in the chair in front of him, and Fazio went and sat at the little table with the computer.
"Shall I put this on the record?"
"Let Signor Intelisano start talking a little first," Montalbano replied, looking at the visitor.
Intelisano sighed, mopped his brow again, and asked:
"Do I have to start by giving my name, date of birth, and—"
"For the moment, no. Just tell me what happened."
"Mr. Inspector, let me start by sayin' that I'm the sole owner of three large pieces of land my father left me, which are planted mostly with wheat and vines. I hang on to them just so as not to dishonor my late father, rest his soul, because it costs more than I earn. One of these properties is in the district of Spiritu Santo, and it's a big pain in the ass."
"Why? It doesn't produce?"
"Half of it's productive, and half is barren. The good half is planted with wheat and fava beans. But the pain in the ass is that the boundary between Vigàta's territory and Montelusa's runs right through it, and so it's registered in two different towns, and every so often there's a big confusion with municipal taxes and duties and so on. Know what I mean?"
"Yes. Go on."
"I hardly ever go to the barren part. What am I gonna do there? There's a little house with the roof caved in and no door, a few bitter almond trees, and nothing else. Yesterday morning as I was on my way to the good part of the property, I suddenly needed to take a leak as I was passing by. So I decided to go into the house, but I couldn't."
"Why not?"
"Because someone had put a door on the house, made of strong wood, and locked it with a padlock."
"Without you knowing anything about it?"
"Right."
"You're telling me someone went there and put up a door where there wasn't one before?"
"That's right."
"So what did you do?"
"I remembered that there's a little window in the back of the house. So I went to look. But I couldn't see inside because they'd covered it up from the inside with a board."
"Do you have any farmhands working for you who—"
"I do. I've got two Tunisians workin' for me on the Spiritu Santo property. They didn't know nothin' about the door. It's a big property and the part that they work on is pretty far from the little house. An' I'm sure that whoever put the door there did it at night."
"So you have no idea whether they turned the house into a residence or storage facility?"
"Well, to be honest, I think I do have an idea."
"Tell me."
"I'm sure they made a storehouse out of it."
"What makes you think that?"
"In front of the house there's some tire tracks, a lot of 'em, that look like they're made by a Jeep or somethin' similar."
"Is the door very big?"
"Just big enough for a big crate to pass through."
A thought flashed through Montalbano's head. A little house. Casuzza in Sicilian. Casuzza district. A crate. A coffin. Tire tracks in the dusty ground. Was there any connection with his dream?
This was perhaps why he said:
"I think it's best if we go and have a look."
Then he had second thoughts.
"Is the house on the part of the property in Vigàta's territory or in Montelusa's?" he asked.
"Vigàta's."
"So it's in our jurisdiction."
"Want me to come too?" asked Augello.
"No, thanks, I'll go with Fazio."
Then, turning to Intelisano:
"Think one of our cars can make it out there?"
"Bah! Maybe with a good driver..."
"All right, then, we'll go with Gallo. Signor Intelisano, I'm sorry, but you have to come with us."
Miraculously, Gallo managed to take them all the way to the little clearing in front of the house. But it was like being on a roller coaster for a whole hour, with your stomach about to come out of your nostrils.
Montalbano and Fazio looked first at the house and then at Intelisano, who was standing stock-still with his mouth open.
There was no door. Nothing preventing people from entering. Whoever wanted to go inside could freely do so.
"Did you dream it?" Fazio asked Intelisano.
The man shook his head emphatically.
"There was a door, I tell you!"
"Look down before speaking," Montalbano said to Fazio.
There were a lot of very visible tracks made by large tires, crisscrossing in the dusty ground.
Montalbano went up to the entrance, where there was supposed to have been a door, and looked carefully around.
"Signor Intelisano is telling the truth. There was a door here," he said. "There are recent traces of quick-drying cement between the stones where they'd put the hinges."
He went in, followed by Intelisano and Fazio.
Half the roof was caved in. The entire house consisted of a single, large room, and in the part still protected by the roof there was a great quantity of straw piled up.
Upon seeing the straw, Intelisano looked puzzled.
"Was that there before?" Montalbano asked him.
"No, sir, it wasn't," said Intelisano. "The last time I come in here, about two or three months ago, there was nothin'. They brought it here."
He bent down and picked up a long piece of metal wire. He looked at it and passed it to the inspector.
"This is what you use to tie up bales of straw."
"Maybe they used the straw to sleep on," said Fazio.
Montalbano shook his head.
"No, I don't think they brought it here for sleeping," the inspector rebutted him. "They used it to hide something. If someone had happened to come up here and look inside through the damaged roof, all they would have seen was a pile of straw."
The floor was of beaten earth, untiled.
"Give me a hand removing some of this straw," Montalbano said to Fazio and Intelisano.
They pushed some of it aside, to the opposite side of the room.
Now they could see three broad streaks in the floor, one beside the other.
"These were made by three crates that were dragged along the ground," said Montalbano.
"They must have been pretty heavy," Fazio added.
"Maybe we ought to remove all the straw."
"All right. You go outside and smoke a cigarette, and I'll get Gallo and Signor Intelisano to help me," Fazio advised him.
"All right. But be careful and pay attention. Anything you see—I dunno, a piece of paper or metal—could be important and help us figure out who was in here."
"Gallo!" Fazio called.
Montalbano went outside and fired up a cigarette. Not knowing what to do to pass the time, he started walking and, without noticing, ended up behind the house. They'd left the board over the little window. Either they'd forgotten to remove it or it had seemed unimportant after they'd emptied the place out.
About thirty yards away stood eight or nine sickly almond trees that must have originally been part of some orchard rows long since gone.
There was nothing else around them. Or rather, there was only a desolate landscape quite similar to the one in his dream.
No, wait a second. Actually, if one looked closely, there were not eight or nine trees, but exactly fourteen.
Or, more precisely, there were nine whole trees with full trunk and foliage, and five trees with only the trunk remaining.
The upper parts had not been chopped off piece by piece with an axe. The trees looked as though they had been decapitated with a single blow, clean and precise, because each mane of leaves and branches lay on the ground, whole, some ten yards away from its respective trunk.
How could that have happened?
His curiosity aroused, he wanted to understand and went up to the nearest of the decapitated trees.
The cut was clean, as though made with a scalpel. But he couldn't really get a good look, not even on tiptoe.
And so he took another ten steps and went and looked at a treetop that, in falling, had turned upside down.
No, it wasn't a sharp, powerful blade that had chopped the tree in a single cut, but something fiery. You could clearly see the dark brown signs where the wood had burned.
Suddenly he understood.
He turned on his heel and started running towards the house. As he rounded the corner he nearly collided with Fazio, who had come running to call him.
"What's going on?" Fazio asked.
"What's going on?" Montalbano asked at the same time.
"We found..." Fazio began.
"I found..." Montalbano began.
They stopped.
"Shall we conjugate all the tenses of the verb 'to find'?" Montalbano asked.
"You speak first," said Fazio.
"Behind the house I found some trees that had been cut with something that might have been a bazooka or a rocket launcher."
"Holy shit," said Fazio.
"And what did you want to tell me?"
"That we found six pages of the Giornale dell'Isola, all with oil stains."
"How much you want to bet that it was lubricant for weapons?"
"I never bet when I know I'll lose."
"There were weapons here, and the people wanted to test them by firing them at the trees. I'd bet the farm on it," said the inspector.
"So what do we do now?" asked Fazio.
"Quick, call the others."
"Where are we going?"
"Over to the trees to look for wood chips."
They combed the grass and the ground until one o'clock.
When they'd found about a kilo's worth of specimens, the inspector said it would suffice and they could go back to town.
They drove Intelisano home, advising him to remain available and not to talk about the matter with anyone. Then they headed back to headquarters.
"So what's the plan?" asked Fazio.
"Bring all the wood chips and newspaper pages into my office, then inform Mimì that we'll meet back up at four o'clock. I'm going to get in my car and go eat. Come to think of it, let me use your cell phone for a second."
He was afraid that, since it was already past two-thirty, Enzo might be closing. And he was so hungry he could hardly see.
"If I get there in fifteen minutes, can I still get something to eat?"
"It's closed!"
"This is Montalbano!"
It sounded like the desperate bark of a starving dog.
"Ah, sorry, Inspector, I didn't recognize you. Come whenever you like. For you we're always open."
Montalbano was walking through the station's parking lot, heading for his car, when he heard Catarella calling him.
"Chief! I gatta phone call f'yiz."
Good thing he'd called ahead to Enzo. He followed Catarella back to the switchboard.
"Chief, 'ere'd happen a be a lady onna line 'oo don't seem like much of a lady, an' she wants a talk t'yiz poissonally in poisson."
"Did she tell you her name?"
"She dinna wanna tell me, Chief. 'Ass why I said she din't seem like much of a lady."
"Explain what you mean."
"When I ast 'er the name o' the fimminine individdle in quession she jess started cussin'."
"What do you mean 'cussin'?"
"Cussin', Chief. She started takin' the Madonna's name in vain, sayin' Maria—"
Marian! The inspector snatched the receiver out of Catarella's hand, pressed the button for the line, then glared at his receptionist, who fled. When he tried to speak, his voice failed.
"...ski?" was all he managed to say.
"Hi, Inspector, I'm at the airport. We're about to take off. I told you I'd call you this evening but I couldn't resist. I wanted to hear your voice."
Easier said than done! He still couldn't utter a single syllable.
"Well, at least wish me a pleasant journey."
"H-hav... a p-pleasant j-journey," he mouthed, feeling like he'd been handicapped since birth.
"I get it. You have people there and can't talk. Okay, ciao. I want you."
Montalbano set the receiver down and buried his face in his hands. If Catarella hadn't been in the vicinity, he would have started crying from shame.
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 5
|
They removed all the mail that was on his desk and piled it up higgledy-piggledy on the little sofa to make room for the wood chips and newspaper pages that they had stuffed into two bags, a jute sack for the chips and a plastic bag for the newspaper.
Montalbano locked the door to his office after telling Catarella not to disturb him for any phone calls or for any other reason, then sat down to consult with Augello and Fazio.
Seeing that neither of the two saw fit to open his mouth, the inspector prodded them.
"You guys do the talking."
He'd gone out to eat rather late and had been so hungry he couldn't hold back. For this reason, and because he'd been unable to take his walk along the jetty for lack of time, he now felt a bit muddled, despite downing three coffees. Not that he felt muddled or anything; he just didn't feel like talking.
"Well, in my opinion," Augello began, "they'll be back to use the house again. So I think we should set up some surveillance—not a twenty-four-hour watch, mind you, but we should have one of our men passing by often, even at night."
"I'm convinced instead that they won't be using the house again," said Fazio.
"Why's that?"
"Because, first of all, these kinds of improvised depots are always used only once and then abandoned, and, second, because Intelisano asked the two Tunisians working in his fields if they knew anything about the door. In short, the Tunisians were tipped off indirectly that Intelisano had discovered what was going on."
"So what? What makes you think the two Tunisians are complicit in the arms depot? Did a little bird tell you?"
"Nobody told me. But it's a possibility."
"Since when have you become a racist?" Augello pressed on provocatively.
Fazio didn't take offense.
"Dear Inspector Augello, you know perfectly well I'm not a racist. But I wonder how these weapons smugglers or terrorists—because that's what we're dealing with here, there's no getting around it—how did these people, who are certainly foreigners, come to know that there was a tumbledown house in a godforsaken spot that they could use? Somebody must have told them."
"I hate to admit it," said Augello, "but you're probably right. There's total chaos these days in Tunisia and they're desperately in need of weapons. So do you think we should arrest the two Tunisians and put the screws to them?"
"It seems to me the only logical thing to do."
"Just a second," Montalbano cut in, finally deciding to open his mouth. "I'm sorry, I've come to the conclusion that this investigation, for all its importance, is not for us to conduct."
"And why not?" Fazio and Augello resentfully asked in unison.
"Because we haven't got the means. It's as sure as death that there are fingerprints on those pages of newspaper. And it's as sure as taxes that there's someone somewhere capable of reading those wood chips and telling us what weapons were used and where they were made. And we don't have specialists like that. Is that clear? And therefore it's not up to us. Get over it. This is a job for the counterterrorism unit."
Silence ensued. Then Augello said:
"You're right."
"Good," said Montalbano. "So, since we're all in agreement, you, Mimì, gather all this stuff together—wood chips and newspaper—and take it to Montelusa. Ask for a meeting with Hizzoner the C'mishner, tell him everything, and then go, with his solemn blessing, to the counterterrorism department. After you've told them the whole story and turned over the bags, wish them a fond farewell and come back here."
Mimì looked doubtful.
"But wouldn't it be better if Fazio went, since he was actually there when the newspaper and chips were found?"
"No, I would rather that Fazio got immediately down to work."
"Doing what?" asked Fazio.
"Go back to Intelisano and talk to him. Try to find out as much as you can about the two Tunisians. No one's saying we can't conduct a parallel investigation. But be careful: for the time being, nobody at the commissioner's office must know that we're moving on this too."
Fazio smiled in satisfaction.
Around seven o'clock, Catarella rang.
"Chief, 'ere'd be Pasquali 'oo'd be the son o' yer cleanin' lady Adelina 'oo says 'at if ya got the time 'e'd like to talk t'yiz poissonally in poisson."
"Is he on the line?"
"Nossir, 'e's onna premisses."
"Then send him in."
Pasquale doffed his cap as he entered.
"Good to see you, 'Spector."
"Hello, Pasqualì. Have a seat. Everything all right with the family?"
"Everything's fine, thanks."
"You got something for me?"
"Yeah. But first I need to know the exact time and place of the mugging. I think you said Vicolo Crispi, right?"
"Right. But wait just a second."
Montalbano got up, went into Fazio's room, grabbed the written report of di Marta's testimony, and wrote a telephone number down on a scrap of paper. Then he went back to his office, turned on the speakerphone, and dialed a number.
"I want you to hear this, too," he said to Pasquale.
"Hello?" said a young woman's voice.
"Inspector Montalbano here, police. I'd like to speak with Loredana di Marta."
"This is she."
"Good evening, signora. I'm sorry to bother you, but I need a little more information on the armed robbery of which you were the victim."
"Oh, God, no! I wouldn't want... I feel so..."
She seemed quite troubled.
"I know, signora, that you—"
"But didn't my husband tell you everything?"
"Yes, signora, but you were the person who was robbed, not your husband. Understand?"
"But what can I add to what he's already told you?"
"Signora, I realize that talking about this ugly incident is very painful for you. But you have to understand that I can't help but—"
"I'm sorry. I'll try to control myself. What is it you want to know?"
"Exactly how many nights ago did the attack take place?"
"Three."
"What time was it?"
"Well, purely by chance, right before I noticed the man lying on the ground and pulled over, I'd looked at the clock in the car. It was four minutes past midnight."
"Thank you for your courtesy and understanding. And now that you've told me when it happened, can you tell me where?"
"What? I think I've told you that over and over! In Vicolo Crispi, because I had to go and deposit—"
"Yes, I know, but where on Vicolo Crispi? Can you be more precise?"
"What do you mean, where?"
"Signora, Vicolo Crispi is not very long, right? I think I remember there's a bakery, a fabric sto—"
"Oh, I see. Just bear with me for a second. Okay. If I remember correctly... yes, that had to have been it, right between the fabric store and the Burgio jewelry shop. Just a few steps away from the night-deposit box."
"Thank you, Signora. For the moment I have nothing else to ask you."
He hung up and eyed Pasquale.
"Did you hear?"
"I heard."
"Was that what you wanted to know?"
"Yes."
"And so?"
"I can assure you the mugger's not part of the local action."
"So he's an outsider or a one-offer?"
"More likely a one-offer than an outsider."
"I see."
But Montalbano also saw that Pasquale had something else to say to him but couldn't make up his mind.
"Is there something else?"
"Maybe."
It was hard for him to say what he wanted to say.
"Speak. You know I'll never mention your name to anyone."
"I've never had any doubt of that, as far as that goes."
He made up his mind.
"It's all bullshit," said Pasquale.
"What's all bullshit?"
"What that lady just told you."
"How do you know?"
"Tell me something: Don't the police ever talk to the carabinieri? Or the carabinieri to the police?"
"Why do you ask?"
"Because Angelo Burgio, the jeweler with the shop in Vicolo Crispi, reported to the carabinieri that he'd been burglarized exactly three nights ago."
Montalbano's eyes opened wide.
"Can you tell me any more?"
"I could, but... don't forget what you said."
"There's nothing to worry about, Pasqualì."
"As they always do, the guys had posted a lookout inside the doorway to one of the buildings, where he could see all the way up and down the street. The lookout stayed there for a whole hour, from eleven-thirty to twelve-thirty. It don't add up."
"Meaning?"
"He didn't see anybody lying on the ground, and he didn't see any cars stop either."
"I see."
"And, for your information, I can also say that during that hour, the only vehicles that came down Vicolo Crispi were an ambulance, a small van, and a three-wheeler."
"Thanks, Pasqualì."
"Much obliged, Inspector."
And so the beautiful Loredana had told her husband a big fat lie.
They had to find out what really happened, and where the sixteen thousand euros had gone.
Every conjecture now became a possibility, starting with the chance that the mugging had taken place somewhere else, that Loredana had recognized the mugger and didn't have the courage to tell her husband, and ending with the possibility that Loredana was in cahoots with the mugger himself.
The inspector got up, went into Fazio's office, picked up the paper accompanying the report that Fazio had covered with notes, and there she was: Valeria Bonifacio, Loredana's bosom friend, Via Palermo 28. There was even her telephone number.
He sat down at Fazio's desk and dialed it.
"Hello?" said a woman at the other end.
Montalbano pinched his nose to change the sound of his voice.
"Is this the Bonifacio home?"
"Yes."
"I'm ragioniere Milipari of Fulconis Shipping. I'd like to speak with the captain."
"My husband is currently in Genoa. His ship called at port there."
"Okay, thanks. I'll call him on his cell. Oh, listen, if we want to send a package to him in Vigàta, will you be home tomorrow?"
"Yes, until ten a.m."
"Thank you, signora."
He hung up. He was determined to go and pay a visit to Signora Valeria early the next morning. With the husband not around to make trouble, it was more likely she would say what he wanted to know.
When he got home, he noticed that Adelina had left him a note on the kitchen table.
yissterday you et out an so I hed to trow out what I cookt wich was rilly a shem. An sints I see you hedda good campany lest nite, I didna mek nuthin for tonite, figgerin you was gonna eat out tonite too an thet way I woudna hev to trow out good food aggenn. If you wanna eat at hom tomorow leev me a note tellin me.
He cursed the saints. But this was not a vendetta on Adelina's part because a woman had slept there; indeed the housekeeper would roll out the red carpet for any eventual rival of Livia's, since she had a strong dislike of Livia, who repaid her fully in kind. No, Adelina's good faith was beyond dispute, but the fact remained that there was nothing to eat in the house.
It wasn't that he was really so hungry at that moment, but his appetite was liable to sneak up on him later.
Eating out again was out of the question. Marian was liable to call when he was out and he wouldn't be there to answer. He could, of course, take his cell phone with him, but he wouldn't have been able to speak in the presence of other people.
He opened the fridge. There was just a little jar of anchovies in olive oil.
But how could there not be anything else? Obviously Adelina had forgotten to restock him with the usual reserves of tumazzo and other cheeses, passuluna olives, salami...
He looked at his watch. In theory, there should have been enough time to go down to the Marinella Bar, buy a few provisions, and come back before Marian called.
He was halfway home when a tractor-trailer right in front of his car skidded and swerved crosswise, blocking the road. With a speed worthy of a race car driver in the Carrera Panamericana, he drove off the road, went about ten yards with two wheels on the slope of a ditch and the other two in the open countryside, at a tilt so sharp he looked exactly like a stuntman, then passed the semi and got back on the road.
He was immediately overcome by terror at what he had just done. His hands began to tremble. So he pulled over at the side of the road and waited until he was a little calmer and fit to drive again.
When he was just outside the front door of his house he heard the telephone ringing inside. Laden with shopping bags, he lost precious time searching for his keys and unlocking the door.
He shot inside, dropping the bags to the floor, and grabbed the receiver.
"Hello?"
He was greeted by a dial tone. Surely it had been Marian.
And now what? How could he have been so stupid not to have asked Marian for her cell phone number? Actually, to be more precise, he had no telephone number whatsoever for Marian, or even an address.
He had to resign himself.
After going and retrieving the shopping bags from the entranceway, he set the table on the veranda. But he still didn't feel like eating. He fired up a cigarette.
What was Marian doing in Milan at this hour?
The telephone rang. He raced over.
She was answering the question he'd just asked. As if by telepathy.
"Ciao, Inspector."
"Ciao. Was that you who called just a few minutes ago?"
"Yes. I'm just on my way out of my parents' house. I'm going to dinner with that dealer I mentioned. I've been speeding things up. I spent all afternoon glued to the telephone, because I want to get back as soon as possible. You have no idea how much I miss you."
She paused, then:
"If you don't have the courage to tell me anything else, tell me how much you like me."
"I like you... a lot."
"Can I call you later? Even if it's a little late?"
"Of course."
"I send you a kiss."
"Same..."
She stopped.
"Same who? You or someone else?"
"Me."
He hung up and headed out to the veranda on stiffened legs, but then the telephone rang again.
He figured Marian had forgotten to tell him something.
"Ciao, Salvo."
It wasn't Marian.
"Who is this?"
As he was asking the question, he realized he was making a mistake bigger than a skyscraper.
How could he not have recognized the voice at the other end? Perhaps because he still had Marian's voice ringing in his ears?
"Now that it's you who don't recognize my voice on the phone, what am I supposed to do?" Livia asked angrily.
There was no escaping it, he would have to start telling lies. He took a deep breath and dived in.
"Apparently you didn't realize I was kidding."
"I know you too well, Salvo. You were waiting for a call from another woman, I'm sure of it."
"Well, if you're so sure, then there's no point discussing the subject any further, is there?"
"Tell me her name."
Better to continue with the joke.
"Karol."
"Carol?!"
"Yes, what's so strange about that? Karol with a K. Exactly like the last pope, remember?"
"But is it a woman?"
"Of course."
He pretended to be offended.
"But how could you possibly imagine that I... with a man?"
"And what does she do?"
"She's a lap dancer in a club in Montelusa."
Livia thought about this for a minute. Then she said.
"I don't believe you. You're just fucking with me."
A tremendous weariness suddenly came over Montalbano.
He didn't have the courage to tell Livia what was happening to him. Not over the telephone. It would have been impossible.
"Listen, Livia, this is a very difficult moment for me, and—"
"At the office?"
He seized the escape valve.
"Yes, at the office. It's a long story that I'd like to tell you about in calmer circumstances and even ask for your advice, but very shortly Fazio's coming by to pick me up. I'll be back too late to call you. I'll call you tomorrow evening, if I can. All right?"
"All right," Livia said frostily.
The phone call had worn him out. He went back to the veranda and tried to eat something, but he just wasn't up to it.
He cleared the table and went and sat in the armchair in front of the television. He channel-surfed until he found a police film that went on for two hours, including the commercials. Then he watched the eleven o'clock news report on the Free Channel.
How was it that nobody said a thing about the burglary at Burgio Jewelers? Apparently the carabinieri had succeeded in keeping the news under wraps in order to conduct their investigation in peace.
He found a western that helped another two hours go by.
At last he turned off the set when his eyelids started drooping. Then he went out on the veranda and sat down.
This was a risky move, because it meant he would start thinking about his situation with Livia and Marian.
And he didn't want to do this. He wasn't ready yet.
Of course, sooner or later, he would have to face the matter head-on.
And whatever the solution turned out to be, it was certain to bring him much happiness and cause him great pain.
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 6
|
He glanced at his watch. Almost two. How long did dinners in Milan last, anyway? What the fuck! Not even if all the waiters were over eighty or walked on crutches could it take so long! And what did Marian and the dealer have to say to each other, after all? Did they have to review the entire history of art? True, she'd warned him she would call late, but here the birds were going to start chirping before long!
I'm going to unplug the phone and go to bed, he thought.
And at that exact moment the telephone rang.
He'd become so agitated in the previous few minutes that he gave a start in his chair that very nearly made him fall on the floor.
"He... hello!"
"Ciao, Inspector. Forgive me for keeping you waiting, but the dinner dragged on and on."
Montalbano the gentleman emerged in all his splendor.
"Forgive you? For what? I realize perfectly well that there are certain things..."
"And then Gianfranco wanted to go and have a drink in a nightclub. I got back just now."
Montalbano the gentleman was swallowed up by Montalbano the caveman.
"And who's this Gianfranco?"
"Gianfranco Lariani, the art dealer. Oh, that's right, I never told you his name. He was so insistent: 'Come on, what's it to you, five minutes—come on, don't be silly.' In short, I had to give in for diplomatic reasons."
Oh, how familiar they were with each other!
"Did you know him before?"
"Who, Gianfranco? No, but I think I already mentioned to you that it was Pedicini who told me to get in touch with him."
And so, right off the bat, on first meeting, they're all friendly and familiar, come on, what's it to you, don't be silly...
Better change the subject.
"Everything all right?"
"Everything's great. At least I think it is."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because Lariani's a slyboots, the kind that... doesn't bare his soul so easily."
And a good thing, too! That was all they needed! Montalbano couldn't hold back any longer.
"What's he like?"
"In what sense?"
"As a man."
"Well, very elegant, gentlemanly, around forty-five, rather good-looking..."
And there it was, the pang of jealousy kept long at bay, but in vain.
Zap! An arrow square in the chest.
"Did he try to seduce you?"
"I would have been surprised if he hadn't. You should have seen me! I was in top form. His jaw dropped when he saw me. But that's of no importance. I think Pedicini was right, and Lariani has the stuff."
"Did he tell you himself?"
"Not explicitly. But indirectly, he did. I told you he was a sly one, didn't I? He's not going to show his hand right away. But I realized he had a weakness. Money. In fact he opened up when I told him—without putting much emphasis on it—that I was in the habit of paying in ready cash, with bank transfers."
"So how did you leave things with him?"
"I'm going to go see him tomorrow afternoon."
Alarm bells started ringing.
"Where?" he asked, trying to seem indifferent.
"At his house."
No, no, no! This was getting serious!
"Why at his house, if I may ask? Doesn't this man have an office? Or is this the custom in Milan?"
"Don't be ridiculous, come on. From what I gathered, I think he has an apartment connected to his house where he keeps the paintings. But I doubt I'll conclude anything."
"Why not?"
"I know how these people operate. He'll show me a few daubs just to test me. I'll tell him I'm not interested in that kind of stuff, and he'll be forced to grant me another appointment. And that's when he'll let me into his inner sanctum."
"I don't understand."
"He'll show me his best stuff. And that'll be the moment to make a deal. Provided, of course, that Lariani, as I seem to have gathered, has what Pedicini is looking for."
"Why, what's he looking for?"
"Well, in seventeenth-century Italian painting, there are Madonnas, crucifixes, Nativities galore. But he's not interested in those subjects, or portraits either. What he wants is still lifes, landscapes, and genre scenes. And he wants large-format canvases."
"I see. But will this keep you away for a long time? Do you think you'll be able to conclude a deal soon?"
"I hope so. It's very hard being far away from you. It's never happened to me before, to feel so..."
She stopped.
"What did you do today?" she asked.
"At the office?"
"Yes. I want to share every minute of your life."
"Look, I'd be happy to tell you, but you'd just get bored."
"All right, I'll make it easier for you. Tell me what you did while waiting for my call."
"I watched two movies on TV and..."
He was about to say inadvertently that he'd spoken with Livia, but he held himself back just in time.
But Marian felt him braking.
"And?"
He didn't want to start telling lies to her too. One would be enough.
"Then Livia called."
"Oh."
A pause. Then:
"Did you tell her about us?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"I don't think it's the right time yet."
Another pause, longer this time.
"Look, Salvo, I hope you realize that for me, at least, this wasn't just a one-night stand. Nor is it just a momentary whim. I know myself too well."
"I realize that."
"And from what I felt the other night, I'm convinced it wasn't just a brief affair for you either."
"If I thought it was just a one-night stand, I wouldn't be here talking on the phone to you."
"We should talk about this together when I get back. But now I have to go. When I get into bed, I'm going to pretend you're lying there beside me. What time can I call you tomorrow?"
"I can't really say. Why don't we just get in touch in the evening, when we'll have more time to talk?"
"Whatever you say. Good night, my dear Inspector."
There were two options. Clear and precise. Either stay up thinking about how to broach the question with Livia, or try to fall asleep immediately, with the sound of Marian's voice still in his ears.
He chose the second, closing his eyes and forcing himself to sleep.
The amazing thing was that he succeeded.
His last thought was a question: How long had it been since he'd spoken with Livia that way?
He woke up feeling satisfied. It was a beautiful day. He drank a mug of coffee, took a shower, shaved, and, before going out, wrote a note to Adelina informing her he'd be eating at home that evening.
He got in his car at eight-thirty and by nine-twenty was parking in Via Palermo, right in front of number 28.
It took him that long because Via Palermo was in the elevated part of Vigàta, the outermost suburb on the edge of the countryside, and consisted of many small, freestanding houses fairly distant from one another, each surrounded by a yard. The house at number 28 looked well tended. The little iron gate in front was open.
He went through the gate, walked up the little path, and rang the buzzer.
"Who is it?" a woman asked a few seconds later.
"Inspector Montalbano, police."
A pause.
"Who are you looking for?"
"Signora Valeria Bonifacio."
More silence. Then the voice said:
"I'm here alone."
What, was he a rapist or something?
"Signora, I repeat, I'm—"
"Okay, but I haven't got dressed yet."
"I can wait."
"Couldn't you come back this afternoon?"
"No, signora, I'm sorry."
"Then I'll let you in in about ten minutes."
His method of never letting the person know in advance that he was coming always worked.
Surely at that very moment Valeria was picking up the phone to talk to her friend Loredana and find out how she should act.
He smoked a cigarette. Via Palermo had little traffic, especially since there were no shops. During the ten minutes that he waited, only one car passed.
He went back and rang the buzzer again.
"Inspector Montalbano?"
"Yes."
The lock clicked, and the inspector pushed the door in and entered.
Signora Valeria came forward to greet him, hand extended, then led him into the living room and sat him down in an armchair.
For whatever reason, Montalbano had expected a middle-aged woman, whereas Valeria was quite young, probably the same age as Loredana, blond and pretty, with a shapely figure put duly on display by a form-fitting blouse and tight pants.
"Would you like a cup of coffee?"
"Thanks, but no."
She sat down in another armchair opposite his and crossed her legs. She looked at him and smiled. But Montalbano could tell that the smile was a bit tense. She was clearly on tenterhooks but controlled herself well.
"What can I do for you, Inspector?"
"I'm truly sorry for disturbing you. Didn't someone call you from the station to inform you of my visit?"
"No, nobody told me anything."
"Well, they'll hear from me when I get back to the office. I need some information from you concerning the armed robbery of your friend Loredana di Marta. You must know that—"
"Yes, I know the whole story. Loredana told me over the phone. She was in shock. I went immediately to see her and she told me everything, even... the disgusting details."
"Are you referring to the kiss?"
"Not only."
Montalbano got worried.
Want to bet that Signor di Marta had only sung half the mass? And the whole incident was more serious?
"Were there other things?"
"Yes."
"Could you be clearer?"
"It disgusts me to talk about it. To make a long story short, he grabbed her by the hand and put it... understand?"
"Yes. Did he go any further?"
"Luckily, no. But Loredana says the whole experience was disgusting, horrible."
"She's absolutely right. Well, at least it ended there. Do you remember at what time your friend left here that evening?"
"I couldn't really say exactly."
"Roughly, then."
"Well, it must have been a little before midnight, because the clock chimed after Loredana left."
She gestured towards a huge pendulum clock, of the kind that functions as furniture, in a corner of the large living room.
"Nice," said the inspector.
Even if it wasn't precise, since it was a few minutes fast.
"Yes. It was my father's. He had a mania for pendulum clocks. Our house was full of them. I managed to break free and kept only that one."
"So shall we say that it was around ten minutes to twelve?"
"Maybe a quarter to."
"Not more?"
"I really don't think so."
"Signora, it's essential for us to know as precisely as possible the time at which the robbery took place."
"Then I can confirm: quarter to twelve."
"Thank you. Does Loredana always leave so late?"
"No. Normally she leaves before dinnertime."
"So that evening was an exception."
"Yes."
"May I ask why?"
"I wasn't feeling well and Loredana didn't want to leave me. She was very worried, but it turned out to be just a passing malaise."
"Do you live alone? Aren't you married?"
"Yes, I am. But my husband's a captain of a container ship and stays away for long periods of time."
"I see. But, tell me something. Was Loredana still here when she realized she had forgotten to make the deposit for her husband? Or, as far as you know, did it only dawn on her after she left?"
"No, she remembered as soon as she got here. In fact, she wanted to go right back out and take care of it. It was I who told her she could do it later. I had to insist a little."
"Ah, so it was you?"
"Yes. And I felt terribly guilty afterwards for what happened. If I'd just let her go when she wanted to..."
"Come now, signora! What are you thinking? It was just an unexpected coincidence!"
He stood up.
"You've been very helpful, signora. Thank you."
"I'll show you out," said Valeria.
Just as she was opening the door, Montalbano asked:
"Do you know Carmelo Savastano?"
He hadn't foreseen the effect of his words. Valeria turned pale and took a step backwards.
"Why... do... you... ask?"
"Well, since I found out that your friend Loredana had been in a long relationship with this Savastano..."
"But what's that got to do with the robbery?"
She'd raised her voice without realizing it.
"Nothing at all, signora. I'm just curious."
By now Valeria had recovered.
"Of course I know him. Loredana and I have always been friends. But I haven't seen Carmelo for a long time."
While getting in the car, he glanced at his watch. Ten-thirty-one. He drove off.
But instead of heading for the office, he went in the direction of Vicolo Crispi, trying to drive fast. The traffic was normal.
When he got to Vicolo Crispi, between the fabric shop and Burgio Jewelers, he looked at his watch again. Eleven past eleven. It had taken him forty minutes.
Based on what Valeria and Loredana had said, it had taken the girl only nineteen minutes to cover the same distance. Not counting the fact that Valeria's clock was fast. At that time, however, it was almost midnight, and therefore you had to take into account that there was a lot less traffic.
As soon as he sat down at his desk, he wanted confirmation and phoned Loredana.
"Montalbano here."
"Again?"
"Sorry, but I have only one question."
"Oh, all right."
"Do you remember precisely what time it was when you left your friend Valeria Bonifacio's house on the evening of—"
"It was quarter to twelve."
Lightning fast, without the slightest hesitation.
Apparently just after he left, Valeria had filled Loredana in on their conversation.
He called Fazio.
"Got any news for me?"
"A couple of things."
"Me too."
"Then you go first, Chief."
Montalbano told him what he'd learned from Pasquale; Fazio, in any case, knew how things stood with Adelina's son. Then the inspector told him about his meeting with Valeria Bonifacio, ending with the call he'd just made to Loredana.
"Sorry, Chief," said Fazio, "but if we know with some certainty that Signora di Marta's car did not drive down Vicolo Crispi that night, why are you so interested in knowing how much time it took the girl to get there from Via Palermo?"
"Think about it for a minute. Can I possibly write in the report that I know that her car never drove down Vicolo Crispi because I spoke with a thief who spoke with the lookout for a band of burglars? Can I have Pasquale and the lookout called as witnesses? No."
"You're right."
"And, even if I could pull off the miracle of calling them as witnesses, no one would believe a word they say. The defense lawyer would rip them to shreds. Because they're thieves known to law enforcement and therefore branded as liars by nature. Whereas a great many thieves not known to law enforcement can tell all the lies they want and everyone will believe them, because they're lawyers, politicians, economists, bankers, and so on. And so we have to prove, playing by the rules, that Loredana is not telling the truth."
"And how will we do that?"
"In the meantime I want you to do me a favor."
"Anytime."
"Tonight, starting at quarter to midnight, I want you to drive your car from Via Palermo to Vicolo Crispi. Then tomorrow morning you can tell me how long it took you."
"Wouldn't it be better to send Gallo instead?"
"No, because it would only take him seven-and-a-half minutes, if that. And now you talk."
"I went and talked with Intelisano, and he gave me the names and address of the two Tunisians, who live in Montelusa. They're both about fifty years old and good workers, and all their papers are in order because they were granted political asylum after arriving illegally four years ago."
Montalbano pricked up his ears.
"Political asylum?"
"Yessirree."
"We need to find out how they were able to prove—"
"Already taken care of."
Whenever Fazio said that, it irritated Montalbano.
"Then if you've already taken care of it, please be so kind as to fill me in."
Fazio took notice.
"Sorry, Chief, but I thought—"
"No, I'm the one who's sorry," said the inspector, immediately regretting his pique. "Go on."
"They both have sons in jail. Antigovernment activities. There were arrest warrants out for the fathers, too, but they were able to escape in time."
Montalbano twisted up his mouth.
"These two Tunisians smell a little fishy to me."
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 7
|
"Good morning, everyone," Mimì Augello said upon entering.
"Congratulations," replied the inspector, smiling. "You were right."
Mimì acted astonished.
"Congratulations? And you actually admit I'm right? What on earth is happening? What is this, world kindness day? And what is it you think I'm right about?"
"The two Tunisians."
"Meaning?"
"They're political refugees. Enemies of the Tunisian government. They've both got sons in jail back home. So it's likely that—"
"Stop!" Augello cried. "Nobody move!"
"What is going on?" asked Montalbano.
"I hereby inform you all that we have been officially taken off the case by the commissioner. He said to me, and I quote: 'Tell Montalbano that as of this moment the investigation is in the hands of the counterterrorism unit. And that he mustn't interfere, or there'll be trouble.' There, you've been informed. And now, with all best wishes to the commissioner, how shall we proceed with the Tunisians?"
"As things stand now, I haven't the slightest idea," the inspector admitted. "But something might come to me after I eat. Fazio, tell Inspector Augello the business about the mugging of Signora di Marta."
When Fazio had finished telling him the whole story, Mimì looked questioningly at Montalbano.
"And what do you think about all this?"
"Mimì, I put myself in the mugger's shoes. Assuming Loredana's story is true, which we know is not the case. So there I am, waiting in a doorway in Vicolo Crispi for a car to pass, so I can throw myself down on the ground. Now, as the thief, I have no idea what's inside that coming car. Imagine there's two or three men inside. Already, even if I'm armed, the whole business becomes more complicated. Because one of the guys is gonna get out of the car and check out the situation, while the other or others wait inside the car, ready to react however they want. And what if meanwhile another car passes? No, it's just too risky. Unless you know from the start what car is going to come down the street, and especially who's going to be in it."
"In conclusion?"
"In conclusion, the mugging, if there was indeed a mugging, must have happened somewhere else and in other circumstances, and the mugger must have had at least one accomplice."
"I agree," said Mimì. "But the question now is where do we go from here? We're certain the lady's telling us lies, but how do we get her to admit it?"
"We'll get her to give us some clues without her knowing. We'll call her into the station this afternoon, let's say at four-thirty. Fazio, take care of it and get back to me with a confirmation. If she wants to bring her husband along, there's no problem. I'll ask her a few questions, and afterwards we'll decide how to proceed. But you, Mimì, mustn't show your face anywhere around here for any reason whatsoever when Signora di Marta is here."
Mimì made a resentful face.
"And why can't I be present for this meeting?"
"I'll explain later, after she's gone. It's better for you, believe me. You have everything to gain from it."
As he was heading out to the end of the jetty, it occurred to him that if he had a clear idea of how to act with Loredana di Marta, he had no idea how to approach the two Tunisians.
He had to go about it carefully, because if it became known that they were under investigation, the immigration authorities might send them straight back to Tunisia without a second thought, without considering that they might be sending them to be tortured or killed. How many other times had they done the same with other poor bastards who'd met a nasty end after they'd been repatriated? He didn't want to have this on his conscience.
When he sat down on the flat rock, he noticed at once that the crab was waiting there for him.
"Greetings," he said.
He reached down, picked up a handful of pebbles, got rid of the bigger stones, and the game began. It consisted of tossing tiny pebbles at the crab. If he missed, the crab would remain motionless. If he hit it, the crab would move a few centimeters sideways. Until, finally, it arrived at the water's edge and vanished.
As he was watching it move laterally, Montalbano realized that the way to approach the two Tunisians was to move exactly the way the crab did: sideways.
In the twinkling of an eye he came up with a precise plan that would bring no harm to the two Arabs.
To reward himself, he decided to smoke one more cigarette, after which he returned to the office.
Where he called Fazio straight away and told him to come and listen to the telephone call he was about to make to Intelisano.
"Hello, Montalbano here. Sorry to bother you, but I urgently need to talk to you."
"When?"
"By this evening, if possible."
Intelisano thought about this for a moment.
"Would seven o'clock be too late?"
"No, that's perfect."
He hung up.
"What do you want from him?"
"Didn't I tell you that after lunch a good idea would come to me?"
"So what is it?"
"To go with Intelisano tomorrow morning to the Spiritu Santo district and have him introduce me to the two Tunisians under a false name with no mention of course that I'm with the police. I'll have him say I'm interested in buying the land. Do you like it so far?"
"Yeah. Then what?"
"Then in the afternoon I'll go back there, alone this time, and tell the two Tunisians that Intelisano mustn't find out about this visit because I want to hear the truth about that land from them. How productive it is, how much it earns, and so on. And I'll also ask about the barren part, where the little house is, since Intelisano is selling the whole property as a unit. Naturally, I'll pay them well. And since one thing leads to another, I'm hoping to extract some useful information."
"Sounds to me like a good idea," said Fazio.
Mimì Augello came in.
"How much time do I have before I disappear?"
Montalbano looked at his watch.
"About five minutes."
"I wanted to tell you that I just remembered something. This Loredana, was she a checkout girl at the supermarket in Via Libertà before marrying di Marta?"
Fazio answered for Montalbano.
"She sure was."
"Then we know each other."
"O matre santa!" Montalbano exclaimed. "You mean you—"
"No, but a friend of mine tried, and I met her through him. Then this friend gave up on her because she'd long been with some guy she was hopelessly in love with."
"So she knows you're with the police?"
"No. I introduced myself as the lawyer Diego Croma."
Montalbano started laughing. It sounded to him like a character in a Harlequin romance.
"So that was your nom de guerre?"
"One of many."
"Tell me another. This is fun."
"Carlo Alberto de Magister. But that was when I was playing the gent with noble blood. But will the fact that we know each other compromise what you've got in mind?"
"No. On the contrary."
The telephone rang.
"Chief, 'ere'd be a male jinnelman an' a female lady onna premisses sayin' you summonsed 'em 'ere."
"Is it Mr. and Mrs. di Marta?"
"I dunno if 'ere bote called Martha, Chief, but one of 'em's a man an' th'other's a lady."
Montalbano got discouraged.
"Never mind, Cat. Just—"
"Bu' if you like, Chief, I c'n ask e'm fer their peculiars."
"I said never mind. Tell you what: Count up to ten, then bring them in here to me."
"Shou' I count ou' loud, Chief?"
"Count however you like, Cat."
He hung up.
"I'm outta here," said Mimì, opening the door and leaving.
"Leave it open!" Montalbano shouted to him.
A minute went by, and still no sign of anybody.
"How long's it take Catarella to count to ten anyway?" Fazio asked.
Another half minute later, Montalbano picked up the phone.
"Well, Cat?"
"Ya gotta 'ave patience, Chief, 'cuz nobuddy's lettin' me finish countin' a ten—one minnit iss the phone, next minnit iss summon cummin' up to me, an' so I gotta stop countin' an' start all over, an' now 'at you called me too, I forgot 'ow far I got an' I gotta start all over again again."
"Stop counting and just bring them in."
Moments later he saw, at the back of the corridor, Signor di Marta and his wife coming towards his office. He stood up and went out to greet them, introduced himself to the wife, and led them inside and sat them down in front of his desk.
Fazio settled into the chair in front of the computer.
Loredana di Marta, who wasn't quite twenty-one but looked eighteen, was a genuine dark beauty. Tall with long legs and eyes that must have been luminous but were now a bit clouded with emotion, which also made her nervous and pale.
Instinctively the inspector's eyes fell on her plump lips. They were perfect in outline, with no trace of her assailant's bite.
"We came here without any questions, but I have to say I don't understand the reason for..." di Marta immediately began.
Montalbano's raised hand silenced him.
"Signor di Marta, just remember that if you are present here at this discussion, as you requested, it is only because I've granted you this courtesy. You therefore mustn't intervene in any way, is that clear? You will best understand the reason for this meeting by listening in silence to the questions I ask your wife."
"All right," di Marta muttered.
"I'll try to keep you here as briefly as possible," Montalbano said to the girl. "So without any further ado, I'll get straight to the questions. Please tell me at what point of the evening your husband gave you the money to deposit."
Husband and wife exchanged a quick glance. Clearly they hadn't expected the inspector to begin with that question.
"When I was on my way out to see my friend Valeria."
"And what time was that?"
"Probably around eight-thirty."
"And you hadn't had any other opportunity to visit your friend during the day?"
"I'd already been to her place in the afternoon, from four-thirty to seven."
"And after dinner you felt the need to go back there?"
"Yes. She wasn't feeling well. I went home at seven, as I said, and made dinner for my husband. Then after we ate I told him I had to go out again, and that was when he gave me the money to deposit."
"Was it the first time?"
"Was what the first time?"
"That it was you depositing the money instead of him."
"No, I'd done it before."
"I see. But on the way to your friend's house you forgot about it."
"Yes. I was thinking of other things. I was... I was so worried about Valeria."
"That's understandable. So therefore there were only three people who knew that you had that money in your purse."
"Two people," Loredana corrected him. "My husband and me."
"No," said Montalbano. "Valeria Bonifacio told me that as soon as you, Signora di Marta, got to her place you remembered that you were supposed to have deposited that cash and that you even wanted to go back out to do it, but your friend talked you out of it, saying you could do it on your way home. Is that correct?"
"Yes, that's correct."
"So, as you see, I was right. There were three of you who knew about it. Do you rule out the possibility that anyone else could have known?"
"Yes, I would rule that out completely."
"You didn't stop anywhere on your way to your friend's house?"
"Why would I have stopped anywhere?"
"It happens, signora. Maybe you'd run out of cigarettes and needed to buy more, something like that."
"But I don't see how that could have anything—"
"I'll tell you why I asked. Because if you did stop to buy something, it's possible that somebody noticed that you had a lot of money in your purse."
"I didn't stop anywhere."
Montalbano paused and decided that it was time for amateur hour—time, that is, for a little theater.
He screwed up his lips in a grimace, whistled, stared for a long time in silence at a ballpoint pen, and finally started wailing softly:
"Ahh! Ahh!"
Di Marta looked at him in dismay but didn't say a word. Loredana, however, spoke:
"What is the meaning of this?"
"It means it doesn't look good."
"For whom?" the girl asked angrily.
"What a question, signora! Can't you figure it out for yourself?"
"No, I can't!"
"For your friend, Valeria, signora! It's obvious!"
"What are you saying?" Loredana said, confused.
"My dear signora, allow me to formulate a hypothesis. Just a hypothesis, mind you. You arrive at your friend's place saying you forgot to deposit a huge sum of money and would like to go back out and do it at once, but your friend talks you out of it. Don't you find that strange?"
"Why do you find it so strange? Given the fact that sooner or later I was going to go back home..."
"No, no, no. It's one thing for you to go and make the deposit at nine p.m., and it's another thing altogether for you to go and do it at midnight. And alone. A woman as young and—if I may say so—as beautiful as you! Don't you think it was a rather careless suggestion, to say the least?"
"But I had no idea I would be staying so long at Valeria's, and she didn't either!"
The girl was quick with her answers, no doubt about it.
"Let me continue with my hypothesis. Your friend purposely exaggerated her malaise to force you to stay late. And so, as soon as you leave her place, she rushes to the telephone to call her accomplice, informing him that you'll be passing through Vicolo Crispi with a large sum of money in your purse. So the guy races there and sets up the scam."
Loredana was glaring at him in astonishment, mouth wide open. The inspector made a gesture as if waving away a fly.
"But let's set aside that argument, which concerns our investigation of Signora Bonifacio. And I ask that neither of you make any mention of these suspicions of mine to her. But let's move on to the next question. You say that between the fabric store and Burgio Jewelers in Vicolo Crispi you saw a man on the ground. My question is this—and you should think carefully before answering: That man, when you first noticed him, was he already on the ground or in the process of falling to the ground?"
"What difference does it make?"
"It makes a huge difference."
"I don't understand."
"I'll explain. Now pay attention. Your attacker certainly did not lie down on the ground in order to rob the first car to drive by. What if it was a truck or a three-wheeler? What's he going to rob from them? Five euros? No, he has to wait for the right car to pass. And so he stays hidden in a doorway, and as soon as he sees your car coming, he throws himself down on the ground. Do you follow?"
"Yes."
"But since Vicolo Crispi is not very long and perfectly straight, you must have seen not a man already fallen but a man in the process of falling. Is this all clear to you?"
She looked him straight in the eye. Now her gaze was no longer clouded; it was sharp and alive. She apparently was a rather intelligent girl. She was proving to be a formidable opponent.
"I stand by my declaration," Loredana said firmly. "It's possible I didn't notice the man moving because I was looking at the clock or doing something else, but when I saw him, the man was already lying on the ground."
Hats off. She wasn't just smart, but shrewd. She'd understood that by reconfirming her version of events, she was weakening the inspector's hypothesis as to Valeria's complicity. Montalbano sensed that his next question might trigger a row. And so he coolly decided to spring it on her by surprise, to achieve maximum effect.
"I'm sorry, but in your statement it says that as soon as he got in the car, the attacker took the keys out of the ignition and threw them into the street."
"That's right."
"So after your attacker left, you had to get out of the car and look for them?"
"That's right."
"Did it take you very long?"
"I think so. The street's not very well lit, and I was upset."
"Which way did he go?"
"He started running in the direction my car was pointed in, with the headlights shining on his back. Then at the bottom of the street he turned right."
"Moving on," said Montalbano, "your friend Valeria also mentioned a detail to me that curiously does not figure in the report filed by your husband."
Signor di Marta, who up until that moment had been listening attentively, made an ugly face and butted in.
"I told you everything!"
"You told us everything your wife told you," Montalbano clarified.
Di Marta understood immediately. He turned angrily towards Loredana. He looked like an infuriated bull ready to gore.
"Didn't you tell me everything? What else happened? And yet you swore you'd told me everything!"
The girl didn't answer, but only kept her eyes lowered. Montalbano realized he should intervene.
"I told you you mustn't—"
"I'll talk whenever I bloody well please!"
"Fazio, accompany Signor di Marta out of this office," the inspector said coldly.
"What is the meaning of this?" the other reacted, jumping to his feet.
"It means I consider your presence no longer convenient at this time."
"This is an outrage! An abuse of power!" di Marta yelled, pale as a corpse and clenching his fists.
But Fazio had grabbed him forcefully by the shoulders and was pushing him outside as he kept on yelling.
"Would you like some water?" the inspector asked the girl.
She nodded yes. Montalbano got up, grabbed a glass, filled it from the bottle he normally kept on top of the filing cabinet, and handed it to her.
She drank it down in a single gulp.
Fazio returned.
"I persuaded him to wait in the waiting room. At any rate, I've got someone keeping an eye on him."
"Do you feel up to continuing?" Montalbano asked.
"Well, I'm here," she said, resigned.
"Why didn't you tell your husband that the robber, on top of the kiss, had demanded something else?"
Loredana turned flaming red. Her upper lip was damp with sweat. She was forcing herself with visible effort to remain calm, but it was clear she was very upset.
"Because... he's very jealous. Sometimes he's quite irrational. He gets so blind with jealousy he's liable to say I consented. Anyway, I thought that if I told him... something bad might happen to him, physically. I wanted to spare him... And I honestly don't understand why Valeria felt obliged to go and tell you..."
"Your friend acted correctly. But to be honest with you, I was under the impression she didn't tell me everything."
It was a shot in the dark. He hadn't had that impression at all. It was Loredana's agitation that had given him the idea.
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 8
|
Loredana didn't answer. Indeed, she seemed not even to have heard the inspector. She was staring hard at the floor, shoulders slightly hunched. Every so often she would shake her head as if to discard some troubling thought or memory. Then she opened her handbag, extracted a small embroidered handkerchief, and wiped her upper lip. When she'd finished, she held it tightly with both hands.
The inspector figured that this was the right moment to throw down his trump card. He closed his eyes, reopened them, and fired away.
"Would you please give me the name and address of your gynecologist?"
Loredana gave a start in her seat. She turned and looked at Montalbano with surprise and fear.
"Why?"
She'd shouted it out, with all her heart, goggling her eyes and stiffening all over, nerves tensed.
Montalbano couldn't help but congratulate himself. He'd been right on target.
"Because I want to ask him a question that he'll have to answer, since it won't violate any norms of professional secrecy."
"What question?"
Loredana's voice was barely audible.
"I will ask him, quite simply, when was the last time you went in to him for an examination."
Loredana suddenly started crying in despair. Remaining seated, she turned three-quarters towards him, sliding to the edge of the chair. Then she joined her hands in supplication and laid them on the desk.
"For heaven's sake... stop! Take pity on..."
Fazio was staring at him, but Montalbano avoided his gaze.
"I'm sorry, signora, but I have no choice but to continue. Try to control yourself. Do it for your husband's sake. If he sees you so upset... I'll help you out, okay?"
"How?"
"I'll tell you what I think happened, and if I get anything wrong, I want you to correct me. So. The attacker made you get into the car, took the money from your purse and then, threatening you with a gun, ordered you to start the car. Is that right?"
Loredana nodded yes. She was now holding the handkerchief up against her face with both hands, almost as if she didn't want to see the world around her.
"Then, as soon as you were in a dark, secluded spot, he told you to pull over and get into the backseat. Am I right?"
"Yes."
"And then he raped you."
"Yes," said Loredana, almost voicelessly.
Then, with a cry, she fainted, sliding off the chair and to the floor.
Rushing to her aid, Montalbano and Fazio collided. Then Fazio lifted her bodily and laid her down on the little sofa. Montalbano wiped her face with his handkerchief, which he had wet with water from the bottle. It took them about ten minutes to rouse her.
"Do you feel like taking a few steps?"
"Yes."
"Fazio, take the young lady into your office and stay there with her."
The moment they left, he rang Catarella.
"Bring the gentleman in the waiting room into my office."
"Where is my wife?" di Marta asked as soon as he entered and didn't find her there.
"She's in Fazio's office. As soon as your wife pulls herself together, he's going to draft her new deposition."
"New deposition?!"
They stared at each other. There was no need for the inspector to say anything else. Di Marta seemed suddenly short of breath. And his head began to shake, quake. He brought a hand to his heart. Montalbano feared he might have an attack.
All they needed was for him to faint too.
"She was raped, wasn't she?"
"Unfortunately," said Montalbano.
Five minutes after the di Martas left, the inspector held a conference with Fazio and Mimì. First off, Montalbano told Fazio to bring Augello up to speed on the investigation while he went out to the parking lot to smoke a cigarette.
He needed to think alone about what had just happened. When he returned, he opened the session.
"I want to hear from you first, Fazio. Do you have any questions for me?"
"I do. I realized when you expressed your supposed suspicions of La Bonifacio, that it was only to provoke the reaction that Valeria will have as soon as Loredana tells her about it. But, concerning what happened after the kiss, were you really under the impression that Bonifacio, when she mentioned the fondling, hadn't told you the whole story?"
"No. At the time, when I was talking to her, I didn't have that impression. It was Loredana's attitude here, with us, that led me to realize what her game was."
"Sorry, but what game do you mean?"
"Didn't you think Loredana wanted to take me by the hand and lead me wherever she wanted to go? And like a good boy I held out my hand for her and let myself be led?"
"Are you trying to tell me she wasn't raped?" Mimì asked. "Then what was her reason for going in for medical examination?"
"That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that she let herself be raped. She needed certification of a sexual attack. And got it from her gynecologist. Please note that she didn't tell us of her own accord that she'd been raped; she made me force it out of her. She's extremely clever."
"But for what purpose?"
"I'll tell you for what purpose. Clearly, though, those two women... So Loredana comes home with a bite on her lips. Valeria tells me the mugger also had her touch him, and then Loredana comes here all agitated as if she's hiding something... How skillfully those two managed to plant the idea in my head that she'd been raped! They worked together perfectly! A couple of real pros, those two!"
"All right," Augello said impatiently. "But what need was there for her to have been raped?"
"To neutralize any suspicion of complicity between her and the mugger."
"You're right," Fazio quickly chimed in.
"And for that reason, since two plus two usually equals four, the rapist and rape victim must have been in cahoots, which means that Loredana can lead us to the mugger. And this, Mimì, is where you come in."
"I get it. You want me to come on to Loredana."
"You're wrong."
"So what am I supposed to do then?"
"Come on to Valeria Bonifacio. Who, I assure you, is worth the effort, as women go. Have Fazio fill you in on everything, and don't set foot back here until you've established contact with her."
Montalbano noticed that Fazio looked pensive.
"What is it?"
"I'm not convinced, Chief."
"You're not in agreement over Inspector Augello's assignment?"
"That's fine. I'm not convinced they would go through this whole song and dance for just sixteen thousand euros."
"Why, does that seem like so little to you?"
"It's plenty, but it doesn't seem like a lot in relation to all the rest. But that's just my impression."
"You may be right. But given where we stand, we have no choice but to move forward."
There was a pause, and then he continued.
"Anyway, I have a vague idea myself as to the identity of this mugger, which came to me the moment I realized we were dealing with a consensual encounter."
"As far as that goes," said Fazio, "I've got an idea myself."
"Oh, yeah? Then tell me the name."
"You tell me."
"Tell you what. I'll say his first name, and you say his last. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Carmelo..." the inspector began.
"Savastano," Fazio concluded.
"Wow, what a couple of geniuses you are!" Mimì exclaimed in disdain. "It was so obvious it was him that I didn't even want to take part in your silly competition, which seemed like something out of kindergarten."
He got up and left. The telephone rang.
"Chief, 'ere'd be a Signor Intelligiano onna premisses."
"Is he intelligent?"
"I dunno, Chief, wan' me to ax 'im?"
"No, just send him in."
Intelisano had no problem with doing what Montalbano asked of him.
"That's fine with me, Inspector. If you wanna go an' talk to the two Tunisians in Spiritu Santo, it's more convenient to go by way of Montelusa, 'cause there's a good road there. That's what I always do."
"So what's the plan?"
"I think it's best if we go in two cars, mine and yours. We can meet outside Montelusa, at the intersection for Aragona. Seven-thirty okay with you?"
"Seven-thirty sounds perfect."
"How should I introduce you?"
"As Engineer Carlo La Porta."
He was about to head home when Catarella rang to tell him that Dr. Squisito from Counterterrorism was on the premises and wanted to talk to him personally in person.
"His name is Sposìto, Cat. Send him in."
Sposìto was an assistant commissioner of about forty-five, always shabbily dressed and disheveled and always in a hurry. He and the inspector had never had any direct dealings with each other, but had crossed paths many times at Montelusa Central, and Montalbano found him reasonably likable.
"I'll take just five minutes of your time," said Sposìto. "I'm in a hurry. Since I was already coming this way, I thought I'd take advantage of—"
"No problem at all. Have a seat."
"I'll start by saying that we've already checked out the little house in Spiritu Santo—on the sly, of course—and you were absolutely right. It was almost certainly being used as a depot for one crate of rocket launchers and two crates of ammunition. But I need some further clarification."
"I'm glad to help. What do you need to know?"
"According to what Inspector Augello told us, when the property's owner noticed that a door had been put on the house, he didn't come to report this to you the same day that he discovered it, but the following day. Is that right?"
"No, he came the evening of the same day, but I'd already left and Augello told him to come back the following day."
"And did you go to the site on the very morning the report was made?"
"Yes. Why do you ask?"
"Because if that's the case, it's clear that someone's been keeping an eye on the house—someone who knew that Intelisano wasn't just some passerby, but the owner. And they must have immediately taken measures and rushed over there to empty it out as soon as Intelisano went away."
"I see. And so?"
"And so it's possible—since for them it was an unexpected surprise—that the weapons haven't yet been sent away to their destination. They may have been moved somewhere close by, perhaps not far from the house, maybe even in a place that wouldn't be too hard to find. So there you have it. Thanks."
He got up, they shook hands.
How come Sposìto didn't say a word about the two Tunisians? Was it possible he hadn't yet been informed of them? Or did he not want to talk about them with him?
When the inspector got home, the first thing he did was to make sure that Adelina hadn't left him to starve despite the note he'd left for her.
He found a savory cake of potatoes and anchovies in the oven. A big one. Apparently Adelina, not knowing whether he would be alone, decided to make enough for two and more.
He'd just finished setting the table on the veranda when the telephone rang.
"Ciao, Inspector."
"Ciao, Marian. How'd it go with Lariani?"
That was what he was keenest to know.
"Badly."
He grew alarmed. Want to bet the bastard had invited her to his house just to take advantage of her?
"Did he touch you?"
"Come on, are you kidding? Do you really think I would have let him? No, it went badly because, as I'd expected, he showed me some second-rate stuff, and when I told him to stop kidding around, he replied that he might be able to get me what I was looking for, but he would need more time and would have to give it some thought."
"How much time?"
"At least two days."
"He's really dragging it out."
"Yes he is. Which means unfortunately that I won't be able to return to Vigàta as soon as I'd hoped."
"Where are you now?"
"At my parents' place. We're going out to dinner in a little bit. Oh, listen, shortly after I got back here, Pedicini called me from Corfu. He wanted to know how things were going with Lariani. I told him Lariani was stalling. And so he told me something that at first seemed strange to me."
"And what was that?"
"He suggested I tell Lariani that I was particularly interested in something by Paolo Antonio Barbieri."
"And who's that?"
"Guercino's brother. And a specialist in still lifes."
"And why did that seem strange to you?"
"Because in my opinion it severely narrowed the range of Lariani's search."
"You mean it made things more difficult."
"Or maybe simpler."
"Why?"
"Because naturally I called Lariani immediately and told him that if he had to consult any third parties in his search, he should focus on Barbieri, and he started laughing and said that he'd expected that I would end up asking for him."
"What does that mean?"
"I don't know. But that's enough talking about my business. Can I make a confession to you?"
"Of course."
"I'm starving!"
"Didn't you just say you're going out to dinner soon?"
She laughed.
"Salvo, are you serious or just pretending? I'm starving for you! What about you?"
Though he was alone, Montalbano blushed.
"Naturally," was all he managed to say.
Marian laughed again.
"Good God, sometimes you are so awkward... it's adorable. Come on, Inspector, buck up and tell me you want me."
Montalbano closed his eyes, took as deep a breath as possible, and dived in.
"I... wa... wa..." he began.
He froze. Of course he wanted her, he just couldn't bring himself to say it. The words inside him would head towards his mouth enthusiastically, but his lips wouldn't move. They were unable to say them.
"Come on, a little effort. You're almost there," said Marian. "You're better off starting all over."
"I..."
Nothing doing. This time the culprit was his throat, which was drier than the Sahara.
"They're calling me to dinner," said Marian. "At this rate it'll take an hour to make you say it. So you're safe for now. I'll call you back before I go to bed, to wish you good night."
He set down the receiver, went out on the veranda, and the telephone rang.
Naturally it was Livia.
"Could you wait just a second?"
He went and drank a glass of water.
"Okay, here I am."
"I tried earlier but it was busy. Who were you talking to?"
"Fazio."
The lie had come to him spontaneously, quite naturally. To the point that Livia swallowed it without hesitation.
By the time he hung up, he figured the number of lies he'd told came to at least ten.
Could he go on this way? No, he couldn't. With every lie he told he felt physically sullied, to the point that he now needed absolutely to go and take a shower.
What a fine example of a man he was!
On the one hand, for all of Marian's effort to wrench it out of him, he'd been utterly unable to tell her even that he wanted her, though he felt that he loved her; and on the other hand he lacked the courage to speak clearly and honestly to Livia, to tell her that he no longer felt that he loved her.
After his shower he felt better and sat down to eat. He scarfed down half of everything and then cleared the table.
He wanted to go to bed early, since he had to get up at six so he could be at the crossroads for Aragona at seven-thirty.
He took the phone and plugged it into the jack next to the nightstand in the bedroom.
Going over to the bookcase, he grabbed the first book that came to hand without even looking. When he lay down he discovered that it was Stendhal's On Love. He laughed and opened it at random.
The first few times I felt love, that strangeness I recognized inside me, it made me think that it wasn't love. I understand the cowardice...
He went on reading for a few hours, until his eyes began to flutter. The telephone rang.
"Good night, Inspector."
"Me too," he said clumsily.
Marian started laughing.
"Come on, are you retarded or something? That's the response you should have given me when I asked you if you wanted me too! So this 'me too,' which you uttered through clenched teeth—does it apply to the previous question or does it mean 'I, too, wish you good night'?"
"The second thing," replied Montalbano, feeling at once ridiculous and cowardly.
The right words just wouldn't come to him.
As he was about to leave the house, he was seized by doubt. What if the two Tunisians had seen him on television and recognized him as Inspector Montalbano? It was highly unlikely, but still possible. How was he going to change his appearance in five minutes without having anything in the house that might serve such a purpose?
He made do with a pair of sunglasses that covered half his face, a ridiculous scarecrow hat that came down to his eyes, and an enormous red bandana that he wrapped around his neck in such a way that it came up to his nose. Then he put his fate in God's hands.
He found Intelisano at the crossroads, on time and waiting for him. The farmer looked a little surprised to see him in his getup, but asked no questions.
At a certain point, Intelisano's car stopped in the middle of a dirt road that was nevertheless fairly passable. Montalbano, who was following behind, did the same.
"From here we have to go on foot. Lock your car."
To the left was a path for carts. They took it.
"My property starts here."
They walked for about twenty minutes through freshly plowed land. The scent entered Montalbano's nostrils. The earth smelled as good as the sea.
Then they passed near a stable made of masonry with animals inside. There was a rather large shed made of corrugated metal beside it. The upper part of it was a sort of hayloft.
For a brief moment, as Montalbano was looking, a bright beam of light flashed from the loft and shone straight in his eyes. Despite the sunglasses, he instinctively shut his eyes and when he reopened them the light was gone. He had to take the glasses off and wipe his eyes, which were watering. Maybe it was just a piece of glass that had reflected a ray of sunlight.
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 9
|
"That shed is really convenient," Intelisano explained, "because there's a hayloft up top and the ground floor can be used as a garage and for storing equipment, grains, and seeds... The farmhands also use it for shelter at lunchtime if the sun's too hot or if it's raining."
"Do they have the keys?"
"Of course."
"And do they also sleep there at night?"
"No, I think I already mentioned to you that they sleep in Montelusa."
After another ten minutes of walking they reached the spot where the Tunisians were working.
Montalbano was able to confirm that, from where they stood, one could not see the other half of the property, the barren part with the ramshackle house, because of a low hill that blocked the view.
But surely the two Tunisians had climbed the hill to work the land up there and thus knew of the existence of the abandoned house.
The two men stopped working. The one on the tractor got down. They doffed their caps. Intelisano introduced them.
"This is Alkaf and this is Mohammet."
"Pleased to meet you," said Montalbano, holding out his hand, which the two men shook.
"They're from Tunisia," Intelisano continued, "and have been workin' here for two years. This is Engineer Carlo La Porta, who's thinkin' of buying this land."
"You sell?" Mohammet asked Intelisano with a look of displeasure.
"Three large properties are pretty hard to keep up with," said Intelisano.
Alkaf smiled at Montalbano.
"You make good buy."
"Even better if you keep us working for you," said Mohammet.
They were both about fifty, but wore their age well. They were slender with intelligent, attentive eyes. Though dressed like paupers, they had an air of distinction about them.
"In Tunisia, did you work for others or did you have some land of your own?" Montalbano asked them.
"Yes, land our own," they said in unison.
"But only a little," Alkaf clarified.
"Did you use tractors?"
"No," said Mohammet, "no money for tractor. Hand-plow and hoe. I learn drive tractor here."
"Shall we continue our visit?" Intelisano asked.
Montalbano nodded yes and took his leave of the two men, shaking their hands again.
Once they were out of sight, Intelisano asked the inspector when he intended to come back to talk to the two men alone.
"I'll be back here by five at the latest. But almost certainly before that."
"Don't forget that when the sun sets they finish workin' and head back to Montelusa."
"Okay."
"What's your impression?"
"They seem sharp, intelligent."
"They are. And great workers."
"So you would tend to rule out that—"
"Inspector, in normal circumstances, they would be two honorable men, but in their current circumstances..."
Montalbano felt the same way. They got back to the place where they'd left their cars.
"I'm going to Montelusa, I have some stuff to do there," said Intelisano. "I'll be back here around one or maybe earlier, but I'll make myself scarce for you by three o'clock."
As he was heading back to Vigàta, the inspector felt certain that Alkaf's and Mohammet's hands were not the hands of peasants accustomed to working the land from morning to evening.
When he shook their hands the first time he'd found them relatively smooth, with none of the calluses they should have had.
He'd wanted confirmation the second time. And he got it.
"Good morning, Chief!" said Catarella as soon as the inspector came in.
Montalbano stopped dead in his tracks.
What? He was wearing sunglasses, a ridiculous hat and a giant bandana that made him look like a walking scarecrow, and Catarella recognized him at once, just like that?
"How did you know it was me?"
"Wasn' I asposta know it was you?"
"No. I'm in disguise."
Catarella looked troubled.
"I'm sorry, I din't realize you was diskized. I beckon yer partin, Chief. Bu', if you like, you c'n go back out an' come back in, an' I'll preten' I don'—"
"Never mind. Tell me instead what made you recognize me."
"Well, foist of all, by yer mustashes an' mole. An' seccunly, by yer walk."
"Why, how do I walk?"
"Ya walk the way ya walk, Chief."
In short, he was better off not disguising himself.
"Get me Fazio."
Once in his office he immediately took off his hat, sunglasses, and bandana and shoved them into a drawer of the filing cabinet. He didn't want to do a repeat with Fazio.
"Good morning, Chief. How'd it go with the Tunisian peasants?" Fazio asked as he came in.
"They may be Tunisian, but they certainly aren't peasants."
"Why not?"
He told him about their hands. Fazio remained pensive.
"But Intelisano says they know how to work the land," he said.
"It's possible that back home they were small landowners, and so they know how it's done. At any rate, I'm going back there this afternoon. I'll have to be very careful about what I say. They're the type that can even read your mind. So what've you got to tell me?"
"Chief, around town they're saying that last night Loredana di Marta was checked into a clinic in Montelusa."
"What happened to her?"
"There are rumors, with nothing confirmed, that she's got a few contusions on her head and some broken ribs."
"Does anyone know how this happened?"
"Well, nobody knows for certain, but some say that it's from the beating her husband gave her over the armed robbery, and others say that she fell down the stairs."
"If you ask me, Signor di Marta must have reached the conclusion that Loredana knew the robber and tried to find out his name by raising a hand and maybe even a foot."
"I agree."
"Now we have to try and find out whether Loredana told him the name or not. Don't you think it's time we had a little look at Carmelo Savastano?"
"Already taken care of."
Montalbano felt irked, as always happened whenever Fazio uttered those four words. On top of everything else, when did the guy find the time to take care of what he said he'd taken care of? The inspector crushed one foot with the other under his desk to calm himself down.
"So fill me in."
"Savastano continues to live the same debauched life as before. Nobody knows where he gets the money to live as well as he does. Yesterday evening he got into a row at the fish market and beat someone up. The carabinieri had him spend the night in a holding cell. By this time he's probably already been released, or will be very soon."
"I think you'd better have somebody keep an eye on him."
"Yes, sir. I wanted to mention something that you ordered me to do. I did it, but you never asked me about it again and I forgot to—"
"What was it?"
"You wanted me to find out how long it might have taken Loredana to get from Via Palermo to Vicolo Crispi."
"You're right. Did you do the test?"
"Yes. Twice. You can't do it in less than half an hour, thirty-five minutes."
He went to eat at Enzo's, taking it slowly. He had time to kill. By the time he came back out, it was almost three.
He decided there was no need to take his customary stroll along the jetty, since he'd be able to digest while walking through the countryside later.
But first he had to drop in at the station to retrieve his sunglasses, straw hat, and bandana.
As soon as he walked in, Catarella assailed him.
"Ah, Chief! Good ting you're 'ere."
"Why?"
"Cuz you best call Signor Intelligiano emoigently an' straightaways-like, cuz he rung 'ere awreddy twice! An' 'e avized 'at ya shoun't go where yer asposta go before 'e called yiz back, 'e bein' 'im, the same Signor Intelligiano."
So what had happened? Montalbano dashed into his office.
"Signor Intelisano, what's going on?"
"Somethin' incredible, Mr. Inspector!"
"What?"
"Somethin' otherworldly!"
"Speak!"
"Somethin'—"
"Are you going to tell me or not?" Montalbano cut him off impatiently, raising his voice.
"Like I tol' you, I went to Montelusa an' was back in Spiritu Santo by twelve-thirty. An' I noticed immediately that the tractor was sittin' in the middle of the field with the motor runnin', but there was no sign of the two Tunisians anywhere."
"Where were they?"
Intelisano didn't even hear him.
"So I went over to the shed. Which was locked, but the keys was just layin' on the ground right in front of the door. So I opened up and went inside. The Tunisians couldna gone too far, 'cause their backpacks was still there with all their other stuff."
"So what did you do?"
"I waited half an hour. Those keys tossed on the ground outside the shed made me think they might come back at any moment. Then, seein' that they wasn't comin' back, I got in my car an' drove to Montelusa. I knew where they lived; they rent a little room in the Rabato. They weren't there. An' the other Tunisians livin' next door tol' me they came back aroun' eleven, grabbed all their stuff in a hurry, an' ran out."
"Where are you now?"
"In Spiritu Santo."
"Please wait for me there. I'm on my way."
Half an hour later he was with Intelisano. Who was sitting out in front of the open shed looking disconsolate.
"I can't explain it."
"Then I'll explain it for you. The two Tunisians recognized me, and since they've got something to hide, they ran away."
"So you're saying they had something to do with those weapons?"
"They had a lot to do with those weapons. Their escape proves it."
"But how could they have recognized you?"
"They must have seen me on TV."
Intelisano grimaced.
"'Scuse me for askin', but when was the last time you was on TV?"
Montalbano did some quick calculation in his head.
"About ten months ago."
"And you think that someone that doesn't know you and sees you for a few minutes ten months later's gonna still remember what you look like? Not even if they held a flashlight up to your face..."
Flashlight! The flash of light! It hadn't been a reflection off a sheet of metal, but probably...
"How does one get up to the hayloft?"
"Behind the shed there's a little iron ladder on the outside, but I never go up there 'cause I'm ascared o' heights."
Montalbano raced behind the shed, followed by Intelisano. The ladder was almost vertical, and dangerous, but the inspector paid no mind, climbing up as nimbly as a fireman, as Intelisano stayed behind on the ground, watching.
The hayloft was practically empty, except for ten or so bales of hay stacked at the back in front of the large window above the shed's main entrance.
Montalbano noticed, however, that the bales had been moved in such a way that a sort of passage was created between them. One could enter it and, from that vantage, see what was going on around the shed.
He went in. The view from up there stretched as far as the spot where he'd left his car and beyond. On top of this, since there was a dip about three-quarters of the way up the small hill dividing the two sections of the property, you could even see the ramshackle house that had served as a temporary arms depot. It was a perfect observation point.
Therefore, when he'd come by that morning with Intelisano, someone had been watching him from the hayloft. Probably with a pair of binoculars, which had then produced the beam of light that had struck him in the eyes.
And it was that person, not the two Tunisians, who'd recognized him. But it explained their hasty escape.
He came back out of the passage between the bales and looked around. In the part of the loft nearest the ladder, someone had arranged enough of a cushion of hay to sleep on.
Beside it was an empty bottle of mineral water. And a folded-up newspaper. Using two pieces of wood, and taking care not to touch it with his fingers, he managed to read the date. It was from that same day. Apparently the Tunisians had bought it early that morning and brought it to the man hiding in the hayloft.
Then he noticed a small plastic bag and opened it with a piece of wood. Inside were the bits of a hard-boiled eggshell, a still-fresh piece of bread, and another bottle of mineral water, half full. Along with the newspaper, they'd also brought him breakfast.
There was nothing else to see. He went back out and down the ladder.
"Did you find anything?" asked Intelisano.
"Yes. The two farmhands were hiding someone in the hayloft. I guess they figured that since you suffer from vertigo, you'd never go up there. He must have been the one who recognized me."
"So what are we going to do now?"
"Close everything up now and come with me to Montelusa."
"What for?"
"To talk to the counterterrorism unit."
Montalbano went into Sposìto's office alone, making Intelisano wait outside.
"Dear Inspector, to what do I owe the pleasure?"
"I'm here to confess to a fuckup on my part."
"On your part?" Sposìto asked in surprise.
When Montalbano had finished explaining, Sposìto asked:
"But did the commissioner know you were conducting this parallel investigation?"
"No."
"I get it. Well, for my part, I won't tell him anything."
"Thanks."
"But, look, we don't know for certain that they left because they recognized you."
"We don't?"
"No. What time was it when you and Intelisano left Spiritu Santo?"
"It was probably around nine-thirty, quarter to ten."
"It tallies."
"With what?"
"As I said, we're combing the countryside for those weapons, because I'm convinced they weren't taken very far. This morning at nine, the team working under Peritore, my second-in-command, went back to search the house where the arms had been kept. Then they moved their search towards the hill, looked inside a cave where they found nothing, and looked around a tractor that was stopped farther away, but didn't find anything or anybody. Peritore told me there was also a shed made of sheet metal and a stable. Since they found the keys to the shed outside on the ground, they opened it, looked inside, and found nothing of importance. There wasn't anything inside the stable either. And so they headed for the adjacent property."
"And they didn't look in the hayloft?"
"No. As you see, we're guilty of our own little fuckup."
"So you think the three ran away not because they'd recognized me but because the man in the hayloft saw your men heading for the shed?"
"It's plausible."
"Of course it is. But there's one thing that isn't."
"Oh, yeah? What?"
"That it never occurred to Peritore to send someone to search the hayloft."
Sposìto threw up his hands.
"What can I say? It happened."
No, there was something that didn't add up.
"Can I ask you a question?"
"You can ask, but I don't know if I can answer it."
"What kind of net did they tell you to use for your fishing expedition? One with big meshes or little meshes?"
"No comment. At any rate, I'll give Peritore a ring and tell him to go back to the shed and check out the hayloft. There must be fingerprints on the bottle and the newspaper. Happy? While we're on the subject, you didn't touch anything, did you?"
"No. I don't think I did any damage."
Montalbano stood up.
"I brought Signor Intelisano here with me. He owns the property in question. If you'd like to question him about the two Tunisians..."
"I certainly do, thanks."
Back in his office, the inspector held a meeting with Fazio and Augello and told them the whole story. And he also mentioned Sposìto's beating around the bush when they discussed it.
"I think I know why he acted that way," said Augello.
"Tell me."
"He's head of Counterterrorism, right? So it's his job to find terrorist cells and discover in time whether some cell is planning an attack against us. Right?"
"Right."
"But what if the people aren't terrorists? What if it involves people who have no intention of doing us any harm and the weapons are supposed to be sent on to their native country to fight the government?"
"Whether they're terrorists or patriots, clandestine arms traffic is still a crime," said Fazio.
"Agreed. But Sposìto doesn't know whether they're terrorists or foreign patriots. You must admit the problem is rather complicated. And so he's handling this with kid gloves."
"You may be right," said Montalbano. "And if that's the way it is, I'm convinced that Sposìto is hoping soon to raise the issue of conflicting jurisdictions. If they're not terrorists, then it's a case for the Secret Services. Whatever the case, he tried to rid me of the idea that the escape of the Tunisians and the mystery man was my fault. He said it was his team's fault."
"So why would he do that?"
"To get me to drop our investigation, which I had to admit was unauthorized, among other things."
"But we still don't—" Augello cut in.
"Mimì, just think for a second. Sposìto's attitude with me means three things. The first is that he's convinced I was indeed recognized by the man in the hayloft. The second—which stems directly from the first—is that this man is someone who knows me not just in passing but quite well, if he figured out who I was from my mustache, mole, and walk. The third is that the man in the hayloft may not be a foreigner but from Vigàta or somewhere nearby. In short, Sposìto was trying to keep me from formulating this argument, which would have made me more curious. At any rate, curious or not, now that the Tunisians have disappeared, we have no more cards to play. So let's talk about something else. Mimì, what have you got to tell me? Have you made contact with Valeria Bonifacio?"
Augello smiled.
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 10
|
"Of course I made contact. Boy, did I ever!"
"Don't tell me..." Montalbano said in amazement.
"No, we didn't get that far. Don Juan himself couldn't have. But I have to tell you the whole story from the start, because it's interesting. This morning—it must have been around nine—I went to stake out Bonifacio's house in my car, ready to wait a long time. She came out like a bat out of hell at ten, got in her car, and headed for Montelusa. I followed her, naturally. At the Clinica Santa Teresa, she turned onto the driveway and parked in the lot. I did the same as she was entering the clinic. By the time I got to the information desk, she was gone. And so I identified myself, and they told me that La Bonifacio had asked what room Signora Loredana di Marta was in. I didn't know she'd been hospitalized. But I didn't want to waste any time so I didn't ask any questions. I took the elevator to the third floor, which was where I'd been told Loredana's room was. As soon as I was in the hallway I heard some angry shouting. There was a man of about fifty, certainly di Marta, saying: 'Forget about my wife! Don't even think about her! I forbid you to see her! This is all your fault!' To which La Bonifacio retorted: 'Get out of here, cornuto!' At which point di Marta grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her up against the wall. Luckily two nurses intervened. Di Marta went into his wife's room, Valeria headed for the elevators. I managed to get back there before she did. And so we found ourselves inside the elevator together. Since she was crying, I asked her if someone she was close to was very ill. To make a long story short, I took her to the hospital bar. But she didn't want to go in; she wanted to leave. So I persuaded her to come and sit at some other bar nearby that had tables outside. We were there for almost two hours."
"Well done, Mimì. But tell me something: How did you introduce yourself?"
"As Diego Croma, attorney-at-law. I figured it was best to use the same name by which Loredana knows me."
"Did she pour her heart out to you?"
"Not really. She said she was crying in anger, not sorrow, because her best friend's husband had prevented her from seeing her. When I asked why, she said that the husband was jealous of their friendship. And that it was he who had put his wife in the hospital with the beating he'd given her."
"Did she say why he did it?"
"He was jealous, again. But of another man."
"So it took you two hours to get this brilliant result?"
"No, the real upshot was that tomorrow, at four p.m., I'm going to her house. She wants some legal advice from me. And so I started telling her about a court case I was involved in, something I made up on the spot."
"What kind of case?"
"A complicated criminal case in which I come off as an unscrupulous lawyer."
"Why'd you do that?"
"Because I had the impression that La Bonifacio wasn't looking for an honest lawyer."
He'd just got home and was opening the French doors to the veranda when Marian rang.
"Hello, my dear Inspector. How are you?"
"Well, and you?"
"Today was a boring day. Lethally boring."
"Why?"
"I spent the whole day waiting for Lariani's phone call."
"And did he call you in the end?"
"Yes, he finally deigned to call at seven. He told me he found what I was looking for."
"That doesn't seem like such bad news."
"Wait before you say anything. He added that the picture was not in Milan and that I wouldn't be able to see it for another three days. He made me an offer."
"What kind of offer?"
"That while waiting I should come to Switzerland and stay with him at a chalet of his to pass the time. In the end I was convinced."
Montalbano felt his blood run cold.
"You accepted?"
"No, silly. I was convinced that that was a good way to make the time go by."
"I don't understand."
"I'll explain. Tomorrow I'm getting on a plane to Palermo to come back and spend two days with you in Vigàta. And then I'll go back to Milan. What do you think?"
Hearing these words, he felt torn. On the one hand, he would have liked to start jumping for joy; on the other, he felt quite uneasy.
"So, are you going to answer?"
"Look, Livia, normally I would be overjoyed, as you can imagine. But the fact is that at the moment I'm extremely busy. I would only be able to see you in the evening, and there's no guarantee that..."
He had the impression that the call had been cut off.
"Hello? Hello?" he started yelling.
Whenever his phone connection was cut off he felt as if some limb had been suddenly amputated.
"I'm still here and my name hasn't changed," said Marian in a voice that sounded as if it were coming from a polar ice floe.
He didn't understand a word she said.
"What that's supposed to mean, that your name hasn't changed?"
"You called me Livia!"
"I did?!"
"Yes, you did!"
He felt annihilated.
"I'm sorry" was all he managed to say.
"And you think that's enough to make up, saying you're sorry?"
He didn't know how to answer.
"Okay, don't worry, I won't come down," said Marian.
"I didn't tell you not to come, I was just trying to explain that—"
"Okay, okay, end of subject. I'll be out late tonight, I'm going to dinner with a girlfriend. I'll call you tomorrow. Good night, Inspector."
Good night, Inspector. Curt, dry. With no "my dear."
His appetite was gone. He went and sat down on the veranda with a bottle of whisky and a pack of cigarettes at his side.
But as soon as he sat down he had to get back up because the phone was ringing. It must be Livia.
Remember that name well, Montalbà: Livia. Don't fuck up again. Once is more than enough.
"Hello?"
"Excuse me for a minute ago. I acted foolishly."
"I..."
"No, don't say anything, because when you speak, you only get yourself into trouble. I just wanted to wish you good night again. Good night, my dear Inspector. Till tomorrow."
He hung up, took one step, and the phone rang again.
"Hello?"
"How is it that the phone is busy every evening?"
"And why do you call me only when the phone is busy?"
"What kind of argument is that?"
"I'm sorry, I'm tired. I have two investigations ongoing, and—"
"I understand. Well, owing to a number of circumstances that would take too long to explain, I suddenly have three free days. What do you say I come down to be with you?"
He balked. He hadn't expected this. How was it that all these women suddenly had all this free time?
"It might be a good opportunity to talk things over calmly," Livia continued.
"To talk what over?"
"Us."
"Us? Do you have something to say about it?"
"No, I don't, but I can sense, in my bones, that you have something to tell me."
"Listen, Livia, I should warn you that at the moment I'm extremely busy during the day. I don't have a free moment. We would only be able to talk in the evening. But I don't think I would be in the right condition to—"
"To tell me you don't love me anymore?"
"No, of course not, what are you saying? I would be tired, agitated..."
"I get the drift. No need to waste any more breath."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I'm not coming, since you don't want me."
"Jesus Christ, Livia, I didn't say I didn't want you. I was merely informing you, in all sincerity, that I wouldn't be able—"
"Or willing..."
And so began another spat. It lasted fifteen minutes, and by the end of it Montalbano was drenched in sweat.
On the other hand, perhaps in reaction, he suddenly felt hungry as a wolf.
In the refrigerator he found a platter of seafood risotto; in the oven, fried calamari rings and shrimp that he had only to heat up.
He lit the oven and set the table on the veranda.
While eating he kept thoughts of Livia as well as Marian at a safe distance; otherwise his appetite would quickly vanish.
He concentrated instead on Sposìto's attempt to persuade him that the two Tunisians had not fled because the man in the hayloft had recognized him.
Sposìto must have had a reason for this.
Was it possible he already had some idea of who this man might be?
And was he perhaps afraid that Montalbano, if he got wind of this idea, might react in the wrong way? The inspector thought long and hard about this, but couldn't come up with an answer.
And in the end he was no longer able to keep his thoughts about his situation at bay.
One thing was certain: that Livia had provided him with the perfect opportunity to talk face-to-face, and he had recoiled. If Marian were to find out that he'd refused to clear things up with Livia, she would surely have called him a coward.
But why was he suddenly so uncertain?
Hadn't he had other love affairs in recent years? Never had he felt so unable to make up his mind. But, if he really thought about it, even this wasn't exactly true. He hadn't mentioned any of those prior affairs to Livia, and that was that.
So why, then, did he feel that he couldn't do the same with Marian?
Wasn't it better perhaps, before talking with Livia, to have a serious talk with himself, poissonally in poisson?
As he reached out to grab the bottle of whisky and pour himself a splash, his elbow struck the ashtray, but he managed to catch it in the air before it fell on the floor and smashed to pieces, being made of glass. It was an ashtray that Livia had bought him and...
At that moment he realized he would never be able to reason freely with himself in that house, where the many years of life spent together with Livia were present in every nook and cranny.
In the bathroom hung her bathrobe, in the nightstand were her slippers, in the armoire two drawers were full of her underwear and blouses. Half the armoire, in fact, was filled with her clothes...
The glass he was drinking from was bought by her, as were the dishes and cutlery...
And the new sofa, the curtains, the sheets, the clothes-stand, the doormat in the entranceway...
The house oozed Livia. There was no way he could ever come to a decision freely in that house.
He absolutely had to take at least a twenty-four-hour leave and go far away from Marinella.
But it wasn't something he could do right away. He couldn't just drop the investigations he had under way.
He went to bed.
Before falling asleep he remembered a historical figure he'd studied in school, a Roman consul or something similar, Quintus Fabius Maximus, who'd been nicknamed Cunctator, which meant "the procrastinator."
He'd already outscored the old Roman.
The telephone woke him at seven o'clock the next morning.
"Chief, beckin' yer partin an' all, seein' as how iss rilly oily inna mornin' an' all, but Fazio tol' me as how aspite o' the oiliness o' the hour, I's asposta call yiz an' tell yiz to call 'im an' get ready."
"Get ready for what?"
"Get ready meanin' washin' up an' gettin' dressed."
"Why?"
"Cuz Gallo's gonna come an' pick yiz up in so much as they gotta call sayin' as how there's a car all boint up wit' a cataferous copse isside."
Half an hour later, he was ready. The doorbell rang as he was downing his last cup of coffee.
"Why'd they send you? All they had to do was give me the address and I would have come in my own car."
"You never woulda found it, Chief. It's in a godforsaken place called Casa di Dio."
"And where's that?"
"In the Casuzza district."
He felt a little worried. Could the dream be coming true?
When they got there, he saw that the landscape was exactly like the one he'd dreamt, except that in the place of the coffin there was a burnt-up car.
The peasant was different—or, more precisely, he wasn't a peasant at all but a well-dressed thirty-year-old with an alert look about him. He was standing next to a motor scooter. In Catarella's place there was Fazio.
The air stank of a mixture of burnt metal, plastic, and human flesh.
"Don't get too close; it's still very hot," Fazio warned the inspector.
A body was visible in the passenger's seat. It was all black and looked like a large piece of charred wood.
"Have you informed the traveling circus?" the inspector asked Fazio.
"Already taken care of."
This time the reply didn't bother him. He turned to the young man.
"Was it you who called us?"
"Yessir."
"What is your name?"
"Salvatore Ingrassia."
"How was it that—"
"I live in that house right over there."
He pointed at it. It was the only one in the area.
"And since I work at the fish market, I always have to pass this way to go into town."
"What time was it when you got home yesterday evening?"
"It was probably around nine, at the latest."
"Do you live alone?"
"No, sir, I live with my girlfriend."
"And the car wasn't there when you passed by?"
"No, it wasn't."
"Did you hear anything unusual during the night—say, some shouts or gunshots...?"
"The house is too far away."
"I can see. But here it must be as silent as the tomb at night, and every little sound..."
"Of course, Inspector, you're right. And up until eleven o'clock I can assure you I didn't hear anything."
"And so you went to sleep at eleven?"
The young man blushed.
"You could put it that way."
"What's your girlfriend's name?"
"Stella Urso."
"How long have you been together?"
"Three months."
Apparently the couple was too busy with other matters to hear anything, even the bombing of Monte Cassino.
"When do you think the circus will get here?" he asked Fazio.
"Forensics and Pasquano should be here in about an hour, an hour and a half. But I doubt Prosecutor Tommaseo will ever get this far."
It was well known that a seal or kangaroo could drive a car better than Judge Tommaseo. Who, when at the wheel, never missed a chance to get a piece of a tree or pole.
So what was the inspector going to do to pass the time? Young Ingrassia must have realized what Montalbano was thinking.
"If you'd like to come to my place for a cup of coffee..."
"All right, thank you," said the inspector. "Leave your scooter here, we'll take the squad car."
As they headed off, Montalbano asked Ingrassia:
"Have you told your girlfriend what you discovered?"
"Yes, I called her on the cell phone right after calling you. She wanted to come on foot to see, but I told her not to."
"Come back and pick us up the moment somebody arrives," Montalbano said to Gallo when they got to the house.
The house was very clean inside and in perfect order. Stella was a pretty girl with a pleasant manner.
When she returned with the coffee, Montalbano asked her the same question he'd asked Ingrassia.
"Last night, did you hear any shouts or gunshots or..."
He was expecting her to say no, but Stella turned pensive instead.
"I did hear something."
"Then why didn't I?" said the young man.
"Because you always fall asleep after..."
The girl stopped, blushing.
"Please go on, it's important," the inspector coaxed her.
"At some point I got up and went into the bathroom, and that's when I heard a bang."
"What kind of bang?"
"Like a door slamming in the distance."
"So a sharp, sudden noise."
"Yes."
"Could it have been a gunshot?"
"I don't know, I've never heard one."
"Could you tell me, even roughly speaking, what time it was?"
"I can tell you exactly what time it was because before going into the bathroom I passed through the kitchen to drink a little water and I looked at the clock. It was five past one."
They chatted about young Stella's difficulties finding a job of any kind and the fact that she wouldn't be in a position to get married and have children until she found one.
Then Gallo came and picked them up. The Forensics lab had arrived together with Dr. Pasquano, but there was still no news of Tommaseo.
Luckily the chief of Forensics, with whom the inspector shared a mutual dislike, had sent his second-in-command, Mannarino, in his place. He and Montalbano exchanged greetings. The inspector looked on as the Forensics team, dressed up as if for a moon landing, got to work around the burnt-out car.
"Too early to have found anything, I guess?"
"Actually, we have found something," said Mannarino.
"Can you tell me what?"
"Sure. A bullet shell. In the backseat area, on the floor. Excuse me for just a minute."
Mannarino returned to his men.
Fazio had overheard the whole exchange. He and Montalbano exchanged glances but didn't say anything. Montalbano went up to a car with Dr. Pasquano sitting inside, angrily smoking a cigarette. It was always best to stay away when the doctor did this, but Montalbano wasn't worried.
"Good morning, Doctor."
"Good morning, my ass."
They were off to a good start.
"What's wrong? Did you lose at poker last night?"
Pasquano was an inveterate poker player but all too often did not have luck on his side.
"No, it went fine last night. I'm just sick and tired of always waiting around for Tommaseo."
"But Tomasseo would be on time if only he never got lost or crashed into trees. You have to feel sorry for him."
"Why should I? I can feel sorry for you, who are on the threshold of senility, but not for someone who's still young."
"And why would I be on the threshold of senility?"
"Because you're showing the symptoms. Didn't you notice what you just called Tommaseo?"
"No."
"You called him Tomasseo. Getting people's names wrong is one of the first signs."
Montalbano got worried. Maybe Pasquano was right. Hadn't he called Marian Livia?
"But no need for alarm. It's usually a long process. You still have plenty of time left to screw up."
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 11
|
Considering that after another half hour had passed there was still no sign of Tommaseo, and considering that he had run out of cigarettes, and considering that he didn't know what to do with himself, Montalbano decided it was best to have Gallo drive him back to headquarters.
After all, he was just wasting his time hanging around there. His presence was utterly useless.
He didn't have the courage, however, to say good-bye to Pasquano, who'd come out of his car and was pacing swiftly back and forth, four strides forward, four strides back, like a bear in a cage.
Back at the office, having nothing to do, he started signing document after document. There was no end of it.
Fazio straggled back in just before one o'clock.
"Have anything to tell me?"
"Well, Chief, as you were able to see for yourself, before setting the car on fire they took the license plates off. But Mannarino was able to read the serial number on the chassis. I'm expecting an answer at any moment now. We should be able to find out what car it belonged to and who its last owner was. As long as the car wasn't stolen for the occasion."
"Did they find any other shells?"
"No, just that one. But Mannarino said there were tracks from two different cars."
"Naturally. How else would they get back? On foot? And apparently the jerry cans of gasoline for setting fire to the other car were in that one, and once they emptied them out, they took them away, fingerprints and all. Pasquano didn't say anything?"
"He said it'll be hard to identify the body, given the state of the corpse. At any rate, at a glance he said it looked to him that the man had been killed with a single shot at the base of the skull and had his wrists and ankles bound with metal wire."
"A Mafia hit, in short?"
"It certainly looks like one."
"And you're convinced of it?"
"Bah."
Fazio's cell phone rang.
"'Scuse me just a second," he said, bringing the cell phone to his ear.
He said, "Hello," and then listened silently.
"Thanks," he said in conclusion.
He looked at the inspector, frowning.
"They told me the name of the car's owner."
"Who is it?"
"Carmelo Savastano."
Montalbano digested this bit of news without any difficulty. It wasn't anything that would complicate matters; on the contrary, it might actually simplify them.
"But what's Savastano got to do with the Mafia?"
"Bah," Fazio repeated.
"But it's not certain he's the corpse."
"No, it's not."
"Does Savastano have any family?"
"Yes, his father's name is Giovanni. But they had a falling out and haven't spoken for years."
"You should go and talk to him immediately. Find out whether his son ever broke his leg or has any other distinguishing features that might help to identify the body."
"I'll go right away."
But he didn't move. He looked doubtful.
"What is it?"
"If it turns out to be Savastano, then there's something I found out that I should tell you."
"Let's hear it."
"You know the young guy from this morning, the one who discovered the burnt-up car?"
"Yes, Salvatore Ingrassia."
"Well, he's the guy who got into a row with Savastano at the fish market, after which the carabinieri hauled him in."
"And does Ingrassia seem to you the type who would do something like that?"
"Nah. But I thought I should tell you."
After eating, he took his customary stroll along the jetty. The crab was not there and hadn't sent a replacement.
The inspector started thinking.
If the body was Savastano's, he would bet the family jewels that Ingrassia had nothing to do with the murder. The young man would never have been so stupid as to kill him and leave his body a few hundred yards away from his house.
Whoever killed Savastano either knew nothing about his quarrel with Ingrassia, in which case it was all a coincidence; or else he knew everything about it and committed the murder near Ingrassia's home to throw the police off the track.
Savastano was not a mafioso, but a small-time hoodlum. So why had a Mafia ritual been enacted?
Here there were two possible answers: Either he'd offended some mafioso or other, or else the ritual was supposed to lead the investigation astray.
If, say, Savastano had been found dead on the ground along any old road, shot in the face or the chest—in other words, without any Mafia theatrics—who would have been immediately suspected?
Di Marta, naturally.
The only person who could have had a plausible motive, if he'd grasped how the business of the holdup and rape had really gone.
At the office he found Fazio waiting for him.
"Savastano's father couldn't tell me anything. They hadn't spoken to each other for a long time. He's just a poor bastard, an honest man who had the misfortune of having a delinquent son. But I may be on to something just the same."
As if a bloodhound like Fazio wouldn't be on to something.
"And what's that?"
"Looking through our papers, I discovered that some time ago a girl who'd been living with him, named Luigina Castro, reported him for domestic violence."
"But wasn't he with Loredana?"
"Yes, but when they broke up because Loredana became engaged to di Marta, he—"
"Got it. Go on."
"Well, Luigina reported him after they'd been together barely two months, but then she withdrew the charges."
"Have you got her address?"
"I've got everything."
"Go and see her right away."
Fazio got up and went out, and a moment later Augello came in. Montalbano looked at him with a bit of surprise.
"But weren't you supposed to be at La Bonifacio's place at four?"
"She called and postponed things till this evening. She invited me to dinner. The prospects are looking good."
"Have you heard about the burnt-up car?"
"Yes."
"Apparently the car belonged to Carmelo Savastano, Loredana's ex-boyfriend."
"And was that him in the car?"
"We don't know yet."
He paused a moment, then asked Mimì:
"If we were to find out that it really is Savastano, who would be your primary suspect?"
"Di Marta. It's possible that he beat Savastano's name out of her."
"Actually, since we haven't been able to discuss it calmly, I'd like to know how you think the whole mugging scene went."
"In my opinion, after her marriage, Loredana and Savastano remained lovers. Apparently that evening, when he found out, maybe from Loredana herself, that her husband had given her sixteen thousand euros to deposit, he made an arrangement with her, saying he needed the money. They met, Loredana gave him the money, and then they had rough sex, to make it look like a rape."
"And where does Valeria Bonifacio come in?"
"She comes in to cover for Loredana—who, in my opinion, did go to her friend's house that evening, but left immediately to go meet Savastano. And now Valeria's worried that if you discover the truth, you'll have proof of her complicity. I'm convinced that's why she needs a dishonest lawyer like yours truly."
In a general sense, the inspector saw things the same way as Mimì. But there were a few details, by no means minor, about which he had a very different opinion.
Around six, Fazio returned.
"I've got something big, Chief. The girl who broke up with Savastano after reporting him for abuse told me he's missing two toes on his left foot. Apparently an iron coffer fell on them, crushing them to smithereens, and he had to have them cut off."
"Excellent. Well done, Fazio!"
Montalbano didn't waste a single minute and immediately rang Dr. Pasquano, turning on the speakerphone.
"Excuse me for disturbing you, Doctor, but—"
"The disturbance you create is of such magnitude and depth that there can be no excusing it."
"My, how well you can speak when you put your mind to it!"
"Thanks. It's you who have this effect on me. Elegant speech comes instinctively to me as a way to put some distance between us. Naturally you'd like to know something about the charred corpse."
"If you would be so kind."
"You are incapable of imitating my eloquence. Or anything else about me, for that matter. So you might as well not even try. I can only confirm what I told Fazio. A single shot at the base of the skull, ankles and wrists bound with metal wire. A textbook Mafia execution."
"Nothing that might help us identify him?"
"Yes. Two—"
"—amputated toes on the left foot," Montalbano finished his sentence.
Pasquano remained speechless for a moment, then exploded.
"But if you already knew, then why the fuck did you have to bust my balls?"
Montalbano hung up and dialed another number.
"Dr. Tommaseo? Montalbano here. I urgently need to talk to you. Can I come by in half an hour? Yes? Thank you."
"What do you want from Tommaseo?" asked Fazio.
"Authorization to put a tap on Bonifacio's and di Marta's phones. Have we got all their numbers?"
"Yessir. Even the cell phones."
"Gimme all of them, including the addresses, and then go and give Savastano's father the bad news."
He was expecting to have to battle with the prosecutor to get permission for the phone taps, but as soon as Tommaseo heard there were two attractive young women involved, he gave in, hoping he'd have a chance to meet them sooner or later.
His eyes began to glisten, and he licked his lips. He wanted to know the whole story of Loredana's rape, down to the last detail.
Just to have Tommaseo on his side, the inspector invented a few details worthy of a porno flick.
Tommaseo wasn't known to have a woman in his life. Interrogating them was perhaps his way of letting off a little steam.
With Tommaseo's authorization in his pocket, the inspector went to Montelusa Central, to the basement facility from which all telephone intercepts were conducted. It took him a good fifteen minutes to pass through all the checkpoints, and over an hour to set the whole operation in motion without delay.
As he was coming out of the building he suddenly thought of a way to verify that Savastano had no business at all with the Mafia. He walked around for five minutes reviewing and examining every aspect of his plan.
In the end, he convinced himself that it was the right move and, on top of that, the only one he had available.
He got into his car and headed for the studios of the Free Channel, the local television station under the direction of a very good friend of his, Nicolò Zito. It was almost nine o'clock.
"Inspector! What a pleasure to see you!" exclaimed the receptionist. "Do you want Nicolò?"
"Yes."
"At the moment he's finishing his news broadcast. You can go and wait in his office."
Zito came in less than five minutes later. They embraced. Montalbano asked after his family and then said:
"I need something from you."
"I'm at your service."
"Have you already broadcast the news of the charred body found in a burnt-up car?"
"Of course. I went there in person this morning to cover the story, but you weren't around, you'd already left. I had to keep to generalities because no one could tell me anything."
"Would you like an exclusive interview?"
"Are you kidding?!"
"Then let's get right down to it. Could you include it in your next news broadcast?"
"Absolutely."
"But first we have to agree on certain questions."
"Inspector Montalbano, thank you for agreeing to meet with us and answer our questions. What can you tell us about this horrific crime, which has upset so many people?"
"Well, for starters, I can tell you the name of the victim. He was a young man from Vigàta, Carmelo Savastano."
"Did he have any sort of criminal record?"
"Yes, but just things like petty scams, illegal appropriation, threatening a public official..."
"How was he killed?"
"He was kidnapped somewhere unknown to us, probably as he was going home, and then taken to the place of his execution in his own car, which was driven by one of the killers. Savastano's wrists and ankles were bound with metal wire and he was sitting in the passenger's seat. He was shot once at the base of the skull, and then the killers set the car on fire."
"So, at a glance, everything would point to Mafia-style execution."
"It certainly would, in my opinion. And I intend in fact to conduct my investigation accordingly."
"But do you really think Savastano was a Mafia punk?"
"Don't take it the wrong way, but I'm not at liberty to answer that question."
"Might he have been killed for having made some sort of mistake, or for not obeying orders?"
"I don't think so."
"Could you explain a little better?"
"I'm just hoping this doesn't turn out to be the first in a series of murders in a war between the families, like the one that caused so much bloodshed in our region a few decades ago. That's why I want to do everything in my power, and by every means possible, to nip this thing in the bud. And I'm ready, if necessary, to request exceptional reinforcements of personnel."
He'd lowered the baited hook into the water. He was positive that a fish or two would bite.
When he got home it was ten-thirty. Too late. Surely Marian had tried to call earlier.
His hunger was so extreme that it didn't allow him time to set the table on the veranda.
He ate standing up in the kitchen the pasta e fagioli he found in the refrigerator while waiting for the mullet all'agrodolce to warm up in the oven.
When the mullets were hot, he pulled them out, put them on a plate, and took this to the chair in front of the television, where he sat down just in time to watch his interview.
It would be rebroadcast on the midnight edition of the news, as Zito had promised.
Having finished eating, he got up and went out on the veranda.
But less than half an hour later he was back in front of the television. At eleven-thirty there was the nightly news on TeleVigàta, the Free Channel's competitor, and he wanted to see whether they would comment on the interview.
The anchor giving the news made no mention of it.
As he was about to wish the viewing audience a good night, a hand holding a sheet of paper came into the picture.
The newsman read it.
"We have just received notice that there appears to have been an exchange of gunfire in the countryside near Raccadali between the police and three non-Europeans who were able to slip through an encirclement by the forces of order. The police have neither confirmed nor denied this report. The incident appears to have involved three non-Europeans with ties to local organized crime. One of them is reported to have been wounded. We have no more details at this time, but will present any updates we may receive in the meanwhile on our twelve-thirty report, in an hour."
For no good reason, Montalbano thought again of Alkaf, Mohammet, and the third man, the one who'd kept hidden in the hayloft.
Might they be the three non-Europeans who clashed with police? And how, if it was indeed them, had they come to such a pass?
At midnight he watched the Free Channel report, which ran his interview again. As for the firefight, Zito only pointed out that one of the three foreigners had been armed with a machine gun and that it was he who fired first at the police.
The whole thing made sense. Alkaf and Mohammet did not seem like men who would fire a gun like that, but the one in the hayloft might well have been armed and ready to kill.
He went to bed reluctantly, putting the telephone on the bedside table just to be sure.
Why wasn't Marian calling?
He started reading, but was too distracted by the thought of Marian and had to reread a page twice because the first time he hadn't understood a thing. After half an hour of this he couldn't stand it anymore and turned off the light, closed his eyes, and tried to fall asleep.
Why wasn't Marian calling?
And why, despite the fact that he had promised himself to do so, had he never asked her for her cell phone number?
And why had she herself never thought of giving it to him?
And why...
And why don't two plus two equal three?
The ringing of the telephone awoke him so unexpectedly and so noisily that he was unable, in the dark, to get ahold of the receiver and made the whole thing fall to the floor.
He turned on the light. It was six a.m.
"Hello?"
"Is this Inspector Montalbano?"
A man's voice, which he didn't recognize. He was tempted to tell him he had the wrong number.
All he wanted to hear was Marian's voice.
Then he realized that it would be a mistake to pretend he wasn't himself.
"Yes, who's this?"
"This is Orazio Guttadauro, the lawyer."
In a flash the inspector's brain was completely lucid.
Guttadauro, a sweet-tongued, courteous man, and as dangerous as a snake, was the lawyer for the local Mafia family, the Cuffaros. He was practically their spokesman.
The fish were biting. Montalbano decided to leave him dangling for a spell. One must never appear too interested.
"I'm sorry, sir, but could you please call me back in about ten minutes?"
"Of course!"
He went into the kitchen, prepared the coffee, went into the bathroom, washed his face, returned to the kitchen, drank a mug of black espresso, and fired up a cigarette.
The telephone rang.
He let it ring. Then picked up the receiver after the tenth ring.
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 12
|
"What can I do for you, sir?"
"First of all, I beseech you to accept my apologies for calling you at this hour. Surely I woke you up, snatching you straight out of the arms of Morpheus."
"What makes you so sure I was in the arms of Morpheus?"
The lawyer got worried that Montalbano, perhaps not knowing who Morpheus was, might have misunderstood and taken offense at the insinuation. After a moment of perplexity, he clarified: "I didn't mean in the least to imply... Surely you know that Morpheus was the god of sleep, not a human being in the flesh."
"Exactly, counsel. What makes you think I was asleep?"
"Well, then so much the better. I'm at Punta Raisi airport, about to catch a plane."
"Going anywhere interesting?"
"Rome, for the usual business."
Which consisted of speaking with a few indulgent members of parliament or some big-cheese bureaucrats in charge of public contracts, alternating promises with threats.
"Therefore," the lawyer continued, "if I hadn't called you now, I wouldn't have been able to try you again until after eight o'clock. And I thought that I might no longer find you at home at that hour. And so..."
"You could have called me at the office."
"I don't know whether it would have been advisable to disturb you at police headquarters. You're always so busy..."
"All right, then. I'm all ears."
"I wanted to tell you that we had the pleasure of seeing you on television last night. We were a veritable chorus of wonderment. Are you aware how good-looking you are?"
"Thanks," said the inspector. And fuck you and the Cuffaros, he added in his mind.
"May God preserve your fine health and intelligence for many long years to come," Guttadauro went on.
"Thanks," Montalbano repeated.
One had to be patient with these kinds of people, who always spoke with contorted pretzel logic, never directly. Sooner or later, however, the lawyer would get to the point.
"Last night," the lawyer resumed, "there was a man with us, an elderly peasant of the Cuffaros whom we invite every so often because he keeps us in good spirits with all the marvelous stories he tells. Ah, the age-old peasant culture, now gone forever! This globalization business is destroying our ancient, healthy roots!"
Montalbano understood the game.
"You're making me curious, counsel. I could use a little mood elevation myself. Why don't you tell me one of these stories?"
"But of course, with pleasure! So, there was once a lion hunter on whom his fellow hunters decided to play a joke. Having seen a native who'd killed an ass and covered it with a lion's skin, they bought the animal and hid it amongst the trees. The hunter saw it and shot it. And he had himself photographed with the lion he thought he'd killed. And everyone became convinced that he'd really killed the lion, whereas not only had he not killed the lion, but the lion itself wasn't even a lion but an ass."
"Cute."
"Didn't I tell you? If you only knew how many of these stories he has!"
"And now, counsel, tell me what you—"
"I'm terribly sorry, Inspector, but they've already started boarding my flight. Take care, and I hope to speak with you again soon."
Montalbano smiled, feeling satisfied. The interview had proved to be a good idea.
It was clear that in speaking of "fellow hunters," Guttadauro was referring not only to the Cuffaros, but also to the Sinagras, the rival Mafia family.
They must have called an urgent meeting for the occasion.
The gist of the argument was that the Mafia had nothing to do with the case, that Savastano was not a Mafia punk (an ass, the lawyer'd said), that he'd been killed by someone not from the Mafia (a native, Guttadauro had specified), and the killing had been made to look like a Mafia hit, when in fact it wasn't.
The inspector had intuited all this from the start, but in Guttadauro's phone call he now had his confirmation.
The call had surely not been made as a favor to him, but only because the mob had been frightened by his promise of sweeping investigations and wanted to be left in peace.
So it was a native who murdered Savastano. Translation from Guttadauro's code: someone from Vigàta who was not in the Mafia.
He rang Fazio.
"What is it, Chief?"
Montalbano told him about Guttadauro's phone call.
"So how should we proceed?" Fazio asked.
"I want Salvatore di Marta in my office at eleven o'clock."
"Why so late? Do you have something to do before that?"
"No. But you do."
"What do I have to do?"
"I want to know everything there is to know about this di Marta."
"Already taken care of."
One of these days I'm gonna kill him, thought Montalbano.
But he said only:
"Then have him come in at nine-thirty. At nine you and I will meet and discuss what to do."
He stayed home until half past eight, dawdling about the house in the hope that Marian would call.
What on earth could have happened to her? He had no explanation for her silence.
At a certain point he thought of looking in the phone book for the number of the mine where Marian's brother worked and finding some excuse for asking him for Marian's number. But he didn't have the nerve.
He waited a bit longer, but still no word from Marian. And the more the minutes passed, the more he realized how much he needed to hear her voice. And so, with all the waiting, he ended up not getting to the office until nine-twenty-five.
"Does di Marta pay the protection racket?"
"Yessir."
"Who does he pay it to?"
"The land his supermarket sits on is in the area controlled by the Cuffaros."
"And who's their collector?"
"A man named Ninì Gengo."
"Think it's possible di Marta arranged something with him?"
Fazio made a wry face.
"Ninì Gengo is not a killer. He's a bloodsucking louse who will only matter until the Cuffaros decide he doesn't matter anymore."
"But don't you think di Marta might have asked Gengo if he knew someone for the job?"
"It's possible. But in so doing, di Marta would end up putting his fate in too many other people's hands."
"You're right."
"And if, on top of that, Guttadauro phoned you specifically to tell you they had nothing to do with it..."
"But can we trust the word of a lawyer who's hand in glove with the Cuffaros?"
Fazio shrugged and the telephone rang.
"Chief, 'ere's 'at man called Martha onna premisses again."
"Send him in."
Di Marta was in such a state of agitation that he couldn't keep still for even a second. He squirmed in his chair and was continuously moving his hands, touching the tip of his nose one minute, the crease in his trousers the next, the knot in his tie the next, profusely sweating all the while.
"I'm in trouble, aren't I?" he asked the inspector.
He'd figured it out by himself. So much the better. That would save a lot of time.
"It's true you're not in the best of situations."
Di Marta's shoulders hunched forward as if an immense weight had just been placed on them. He heaved a sigh so long that Montalbano was afraid his lungs might burst.
"I beg you, please, Signor di Marta, to try and remain as calm as possible. And to answer my questions sincerely. Believe me, being sincere could help you a great deal. I also want you to know that this will be a conversation just between us, a private one, so to speak, and it won't be recorded by my colleague here, Fazio. Is that clear? I have no authorization to make any kind of decision. Otherwise I would have told you to bring your lawyer."
Another long sigh.
"All right."
"Can you tell me please where you were the night before last after ten p.m.?"
"Where do you think? At home."
"And was anyone there with you?"
"No. Loredana is still in the hospital. I think they're going to discharge her tomorrow."
"Tell me what you did from the afternoon onwards."
"I was at the supermarket until closing time, then—"
"Just a minute. When you were at the supermarket, did you receive anyone into your private office?"
"Yes. A detergent representative and Signora Molfetta, who comes in weekly to pay an installment of her bill with us."
"Nobody else?"
"Nobody else."
"Go on."
"At closing time, I stayed on alone to do some bookkeeping, and then I went to deposit the day's receipts at the bank in Vicolo Crispi, and after that I went home."
"What time was that, more or less?"
"Nine-thirty."
"You didn't eat dinner?"
"Yes, that morning the cleaning lady made me something to eat later for supper."
"What?"
"I don't understand."
"What did she make for you to eat?"
Di Marta gave him a puzzled look.
"I... don't remember."
"Why not?"
"I was thinking of other things."
"And after dinner?"
"I watched TV and then went to bed around midnight."
Therefore he had no one who could testify that he'd stayed home the whole evening and night. And this was a point against him. He didn't have what they call a verifiable alibi.
"Why did you beat your wife?"
The question, fired point-blank, made di Marta lurch in his chair.
But he didn't answer.
Montalbano decided to use his imagination a little.
"We know that Signora Loredana told the doctors she fell down the stairs. Clearly she wanted to avoid having to report you. But the doctors didn't believe her; they claimed her injuries were not consistent with a fall. And so they filed a report themselves. I've got it right here in the drawer. Would you like to see it?"
"No."
The ruse had worked.
"Was it you who beat her up?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"After I found out here that she'd been raped, when we got home I asked her why she hadn't admitted it. I found her answers unconvincing. So unconvincing that I started to think she knew the attacker and wanted in some way to protect him. After which I lost my head and started hitting her."
"So it was only in anger?"
"Yes."
Montalbano frowned sternly.
"Signor di Marta, I advised you, for your own good, to tell the truth."
"But I am..."
"No, you're not. You wanted your wife to tell you the name of the man who robbed and raped her."
Di Marta sat there for a moment in silence. Then, as if he'd made up his mind, he replied decisively.
"Yes."
Montalbano realized that from that moment forward, di Marta would be as cooperative as possible.
"And did she tell you?"
"Yes."
"Now you tell me."
"Carmelo Savastano."
"How did you react?"
"I... broke down and cried. Then... I realized what I'd done and I took Loredana to the hospital."
"Were you thinking of taking revenge on Savastano?"
"I wanted to kill him. And I would have if somebody hadn't beaten me to it."
"How were you planning to kill him?"
"By shooting him the next time I saw his face. Ever since Loredana told me his name, I've been going around with a gun."
Montalbano and Fazio exchanged a quick glance. Fazio stood up.
"Do you have the gun with you now?"
"Of course."
"Stand up slowly with your hands in the air," the inspector ordered him.
Di Marta was halfway up when Fazio grabbed him and removed the pistol from the back pocket of his trousers. He removed the cartridge clip.
"There's one shot missing," he said.
He raised the barrel to his nose and sniffed.
"Have you fired this recently?" he asked.
"Yes," di Marta admitted. "I kept that gun forever in a drawer in my bedside table, and since I'd never used it, never taken it out of the box, I wanted to test it, to see if it worked."
"When did you test it?" asked Montalbano.
"The other evening, in the parking lot behind the supermarket, after everyone had gone home."
"Try to be more specific. You mean the same evening Savastano was murdered?"
"Yes."
"Do you have a license to carry a weapon?"
"Yes."
"Please sit back down."
The strange thing was that the more they spoke, the less nervous di Marta became.
"Let's go back a little in time. Feel up to it?"
"I can try."
"When you first fell in love with your wife, Loredana, she worked for you at the supermarket as a checkout girl, is that correct?"
"Yes."
"We've learned that at the time she was the girlfriend of Carmelo Savastano. Did you also know this?"
"Yes. Loredana herself told me, once I succeeded in winning her trust. But they weren't getting along very well anymore."
"Why not?"
"Savastano mistreated her. And she would come into my office in tears and pour her heart out to me. I'll tell you a few episodes. One day he spat into the plate she was eating from and forced her to keep eating. Another time he wanted her to prostitute herself to a guy he owed money to. And when Loredana refused, he took a pair of scissors and cut up her clothes. She'd pretty much made up her mind to leave him, but he would blackmail her."
"How?"
"By threatening to circulate compromising photos of her. And even a little video they filmed in the early days of their relationship."
"I see. And what did you do?"
"I convinced myself that I had to confront Savastano."
"Weren't you afraid that, if you found yourself alone with someone like that..."
"Of course I was afraid. But by then, Loredana was everything to me."
"Were you carrying a weapon when you went to confront him?"
"No. It didn't even occur to me."
"What did you say to him?"
"I got straight to the point. I wanted to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. I asked him how much he wanted for leaving Loredana, and to give me all the photos and everything else. I knew he needed money. He was a regular at the gambling dens and didn't have much luck."
"Where did this meeting take place?"
"He'd suggested his place, but I told him I would only meet him out in the open. We met on the jetty."
"Did he accept your offer?"
"Yes, after shilly-shallying a bit."
"How much was it?"
"Two hundred thousand in cash, a hundred upon his delivery of the material requested, and a hundred on the eve of my marriage to Loredana."
"Why wait until the marriage?"
"So that I could be certain that he wouldn't harass Loredana, who'd gone to stay with her parents during the wait. It would have cost him half the sum agreed upon, so it wasn't in his best interest. Then if, after the wedding, he got it into his head to reappear, I would defend Loredana myself."
"Did he abide by the agreement?"
"Yes."
"Do you still have the material Savastano turned over to you?"
"No, I destroyed it."
"Assuming everything you've just told us is true, what reason do you think Savastano could have had for robbing and raping your wife?"
Montalbano was expecting the answer di Marta gave.
"I think he was put up to it."
"By whom?"
"By Valeria Bonifacio."
"And what motive would Signora Bonifacio have for—"
"Because she hates me. To do me harm. Because she's jealous of Loredana's love for me."
"But do you have any proof at all to support this claim?"
"No."
Montalbano stood up. Di Marta likewise.
"Thank you. I don't need you anymore."
Di Marta seemed doubtful.
"So I can go?"
"Yes."
"And what happens next?"
"I'm going to talk with the public prosecutor. He'll decide on the next step to take."
"What about my gun?"
"It stays here. Anyway, what do you need it for? Savastano's dead now."
Fazio showed di Marta out. When he returned, Montalbano asked:
"So, what do you think?"
"Chief, he's either a clever rogue playing a difficult game, or just some poor bastard who's up to his neck in shit. What do you think?"
"I think exactly the same as you. But in the meantime we should assign ourselves some homework for the vacation. While I go and talk to Tommaseo, you should take di Marta's gun to Forensics. They've still got the bullet that killed Savastano, and we can see if it was shot by this gun. Then you have to try to find something out."
"And what's that?"
"Did you hear the news about a firefight between police and three foreigners?"
"Yes. And I thought the same thing as you, that it might be the three men in Spiritu Santo."
"If I dare to ask Sposìto for a few details, the guy's sure to cuss me out or refuse to answer. If, however, you could talk to a few of your colleagues..."
"Got it. I'm on my way."
But he didn't get out in time, because at that moment Mimì Augello walked in.
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 13
|
"I didn't come in earlier because Catarella told me di Marta was with you. Not knowing whether I should enter or not, I figured it was best to stay away."
"You were right, Mimì."
"Want to hear how my dinner with La Bonifacio went?"
"If it's not a long story..."
"It's rather short, actually."
"Then have a seat and tell us," said Montalbano.
"For the first part of the evening, Valeria played the saint. She acted like she'd just come down from heaven, believe me. Demure, eyes lowered, high-necked blouse, skirt below the knee. She told me the story of her life, starting with elementary school. She told me how unhappy she was as a little girl because her father had a mistress who had a son from him. And so family life was one big quarrel. As she was recalling all this, she wiped her eyes with a handkerchief. She wanted me to believe that her husband had been, and continues to be, the only man in her life. That the months and months he's away weigh heavy on her, yes, since she's a girl with a healthy, indeed remarkable constitution, but her privations are compensated by the great love that holds them together like ivy—her exact words. In short, a crashing bore that continued until eleven o'clock."
"And what happened at eleven o'clock?"
"Well, the television was on, and you, Salvo, appeared on the screen. Upon hearing the news of Savastano's death, she changed completely, turned into a madwoman, screaming that the killer was surely Loredana's husband. I tried to calm her down, but it only made things worse. She had a hysterical fit, broke a dish, tried to head-butt the wall, and so I had to take her by force into the bathroom, wash her face, and put her head under the shower. So she got all wet. She wanted to change clothes but was unable. Her hands were trembling too much and she couldn't stand on her own two feet, so she was leaning against me. I was the one who had to take off her blouse and bra and put some dry clothes on her. And her skirt, too."
"But not her panties?"
"No, those were dry."
"And then?" asked Montalbano and Fazio in unison.
"Sorry, but I have to disappoint your piggish male expectations. She showed me the merchandise, real top-notch stuff, but I realized that it wasn't for sale that evening. She told me she needed to go to bed, and so I kissed her hand like a true gentleman and left. I'm going to see her again this evening, and we're having dinner together."
"And in conclusion?"
"In conclusion, she's a terrific actress. And a bitch on wheels. Cunning and dangerous. She put on a tragic scene with mastery. I'm sure she was intending to say something to me against di Marta, but your TV appearance fell out of the sky and she grabbed it on the fly and ran with it. She's taking things step by step with me. Tonight we'll see how far she goes. Speaking of which, Beba's been grumbling that I'm never at home anymore. Don't be an asshole this time: please tell her I'm on a job. How'd things go with di Marta?"
"Badly, at least for him."
"Meaning?"
"He doesn't have a verifiable alibi for the night of the murder. And he's got the motive. I'm going to talk with Tommaseo now, but the guy's sure to issue a notice of investigation to di Marta. In fact, we'll be lucky if he doesn't have him arrested."
Arriving at the courthouse, he was told that Tommaseo was busy in court and would be tied up until one o'clock.
He'd been stupid not to phone ahead and find out whether the prosecutor could see him.
Since he had the time, he went to Montelusa Central to see how the phone taps were coming along. When he got to the basement he was told that for the case concerning him, he should go to booth 12B.
Inside was a uniformed officer wearing headphones and doing a crossword puzzle. Two people could barely fit in the booth.
"I'm Inspector Montalbano."
"Officer De Nicola," said the other, standing up.
"At ease. At what time did you start the intercepts?"
"Seven o'clock this morning."
They'd been quick about it, he couldn't complain.
"Have any calls been made?"
"Yes. If you'd like to listen..."
"Of course."
De Nicola sat him down beside him, gave him another headset, and pushed a button on a sort of computer. The policeman then listened to the recording again with him.
"Hello?" said a woman's voice.
"Hey, Valè, how are you doing?"
"Loredà, my angel, my darling, any news as to when they'll decide to discharge you?"
"Tomorrow for sure. My husband got called in to the police for questioning."
"Think they'll arrest him?"
"I don't know how it'll turn out, but it certainly doesn't look good for him. Listen..."
"I want to ask you... Everything okay?"
"Are you referring to..."
"Yes."
"Don't worry, everything's fine."
"Swear?"
"I swear."
"Valè, I can't take it anymore, I'm going crazy in this place, not being able to—"
"Calm down, please. Don't do anything stupid. Just be patient. You'll have plenty of opportunity to make up for time lost."
"I have to go now. The doctor's coming in."
Then there was another call to Valeria. A man's voice, rather young-sounding.
"Valè, iss me."
"You must be insane!"
"Valè, just lissen to—"
"No. And don't call back unless I tell you to beforehand."
And Valeria hung up.
"Can you tell me where that second call came from?"
"From a cell phone connected to the Montereale network. That's all I can tell you."
"Could I have a copy of that recording?"
"What kind of recorder have you got?"
Too complicated.
"Actually, just get me a sheet of paper and I'll write it all down. They're not long conversations, after all."
"Technically any transcription is supposed to be authorized by the prosecutor," said Officer De Nicola. "But I think I know a solution. Will you grant me permission to take a coffee break?"
"By all means."
"Thanks. Here, use my headset. If you happen to hear a telephone ringing, first press this button, then this one. And you'll find all the paper you need here, in this drawer."
Luckily there were no phone calls. Otherwise God only knows what kind of mayhem he would have unleashed.
He went back to the courthouse, waited awhile, and was finally able to meet with the prosecutor.
"But it's ten past one! It's time for—"
"Sir, this is about that case with the two girls, remember?"
Montalbano had touched his weak spot.
"Of course I remember! Look, I'll invite you to lunch. That way we can talk it over calmly."
Montalbano broke out in a cold sweat. God only knew what sucky sort of restaurant Tommaseo would take him to. The prosecutor was the kind of person capable of dining on wild berries and dog meat.
"All right," said the inspector, resigned.
Instead he ate a decent meal. He had no complaints, even though he was forced to talk while eating, contrary to habit.
When they'd finished, they went back to Tommaseo's office.
"How do you intend to proceed?" asked Montalbano.
"Given this di Marta's hours, I'll send two carabinieri to pick him up at the supermarket at four p.m. That way we can be sure to find him there. The carabinieri will give him time to find his lawyer, and then escort him, with his counsel, to my office."
Montalbano made a rather doubtful face, and Tommaseo noticed.
"Is anything wrong?"
"If you send the carabinieri to the supermarket, someone will inform the press, the TV stations, and..."
"So what?"
"As you wish, sir. I simply wanted to warn you that the store will be under siege. Is my presence needed?"
"If you've got other things to do..."
"Then, with your permission, I won't be there."
"Oh. Listen, Montalbano, when did you say di Marta's beautiful wife will be discharged?"
"Tomorrow."
"Then I'll nab her tomorrow," said Tommaseo, licking his lips like a cat at the thought of a mouse.
It was three-thirty when he got back to headquarters. Fazio immediately joined him in his office.
"I left the pistol with Forensics. They're gonna call me later with their answer."
"Did you talk to anyone in Counterterrorism?"
"Yes. The team had been on the trail of our friends from Spiritu Santo for two days."
"So it was them?"
"Yessir."
"And they were the ones who'd turned the ruined house into an arms depot? Was this confirmed?"
"Yessir. Apparently they'd been involved in arms shipments to Tunisia for some time. They weren't doing it for money, but because they oppose the current government and are planning a revolution. Sposìto's orders were to arrest them but to avoid as much as possible any gunfire."
"So how did it turn into a shootout?"
"The three men were hiding in a grotto, which the team had just passed in front of without noticing anything, when they heard a burst of machine-gun fire right behind them. They blindly fired back, but the three managed to escape."
"Are you telling me they only heard the machine-gun fire?"
"Yes."
"So it's possible it went off accidentally?"
"That's what they thought, too. They also told me that one of the three was definitely wounded. They found quite a lot of blood."
After Fazio left, the inspector started signing papers. He was planning to leave the office early and be back home in Marinella by eight at the latest. He wanted to avoid doing a replay of the previous evening. By now he was convinced that Marian had tried to call but he hadn't been home.
Fazio reappeared around six-thirty.
"It doesn't match."
"What doesn't match?"
"The rifling on the barrel of di Marta's pistol doesn't match the marks on the bullet extracted from Savastano's head. He was shot with a pistol of the same caliber, a seven-sixty-five, just not di Marta's."
This was a point in di Marta's favor.
"Does Tommaseo know this?"
Fazio shrugged.
"Dunno."
A little while later Augello came in to say good-bye.
"Isn't it a little early for dinner?"
"First I have to go home and change."
"You gonna get all spiffed up?"
"Of course. And douse myself in cologne."
"What's it called?"
"The cologne? Virilité."
"And are you still up to the promise of this cologne?"
"I can't complain."
He was about to get up and go out when the outside line rang. It was Zito.
"Can I come by in about twenty minutes?"
"What for?"
"Will you grant me an interview?"
"What about?"
"Come on, you mean you don't know?"
"No. What happened?"
"Tommaseo arrested di Marta."
Montalbano cursed, not about the arrest but because of the interview request.
How could he say no to Zito, who had done him so many favors in the past? But that might very well cause him to get home late, and Marian...
"All right, but try to get here as soon as you can."
He immediately called the prosecutor.
"Dr. Tommaseo? Montalbano here. I heard that—"
"Yes, the evidence is there, and it's quite damning. If we let him run free, we risk tainting the evidence. And he might even harm his wife again."
"You should know that Forensics checked the pistol I confiscated from di Marta and they didn't—"
"Yes, I know, they let me know during the interrogation. But that doesn't change the overall picture."
"Let's make this snappy, so I can air it on the nine-thirty news broadcast," said Zito, coming in with a cameraman.
"And if you can manage to be out of here in fifteen minutes I'll kiss you on the forehead."
Five minutes later they were ready.
"Inspector Montalbano, thank you for being so kind as to talk with us. So now we have Carmelo Savastano's killer. My compliments to Prosecutor Tommaseo and yourself. You moved quickly."
"First of all, I'd like to make clear that neither I nor Prosecutor Tommaseo believe that it was di Marta who physically carried out the killing. If anything, he was the instigator."
"Prosecutor Tommaseo told us that revenge was the motive. But he wouldn't say any more than that."
"If Prosecutor Tommaseo limited himself to saying only that, then it's certainly not up to me to add anything."
"But was that the only motive?"
"If that's what the prosecutor said..."
"People are whispering that di Marta had Savastano killed out of jealousy."
"I have no comment on that."
"Have you questioned Salvatore di Marta's wife, who is presently in the hospital due to a fall?"
"Yes."
"Can you tell us whether Signora di Marta—"
"No."
"But do you have material evidence against her husband?"
"Not yet, but we have strong circumstantial evidence."
"Is it true that you confiscated a handgun belonging to di Marta?"
"Yes."
"It's been said that your Forensics department, after examining it, has ruled it out as the murder weapon. Can you confirm or deny this?"
"I can confirm it. It was not the murder weapon. Just the same, I would like to point out that we consider di Marta the instigator of the crime, and therefore the fact that his pistol was not the one used in the killing is irrelevant."
"So the investigation to find the material executor of the crime is still ongoing?"
"Of course. But it involves two persons."
"Thank you, Inspector Montalbano."
When Zito and his cameraman left the office, Montalbano looked at his watch. Past eight-thirty. But there was one more thing he had to do, and he thought it was important.
He called Augello on the cell.
"Where are you?"
"In my car. I'm on my way to Valeria's."
"Did you know that Tommaseo had di Marta arrested?"
"Yes. I heard it on the eight o'clock news."
"I wanted to let you know that at nine-thirty there's an interview with me on the Free Channel. I want you to observe how Valeria reacts this time."
"No problem. She always has the TV on."
He dashed to the car and sped home.
As he was opening the door he heard the phone ringing. But he managed to pick up the receiver in time.
"Hello?" he said, out of breath.
"Ciao, Inspector. Been running?"
He heard bells chiming, birds singing, guitars playing, fireworks popping in his head.
A deafening uproar.
"Yeah. I just got in. I want... I want everything from you, immediately."
Marian giggled.
"Gladly, but how?"
"No, I'm sorry, what were you thinking? I meant I want you to give me all your telephone numbers."
"Don't you already have them?"
"No, and I keep forgetting every time to..."
"Okay. Let me give you my cell phone and my parents' number."
He jotted these down on a piece of paper.
"Why didn't you call me last night?"
"I'll tell you later. It was a stupid idea I had that turned out to be wrong."
"Could you be a little clearer?"
"I was just on my way out. Can I call you around midnight?"
"Of course."
"Until then, Inspector."
He suddenly felt hungrier than a wolf on the Siberian steppes.
With a kind of inner howl, he set out in search of his quarry—that is, whatever it was that Adelina had cooked for him. He yanked the refrigerator open with such force that the door nearly came off in his hand.
Hymns of thanksgiving were the only fitting tribute that could be paid to what he found—two dishes like two Van Gogh suns shining with their own light: risotto with artichokes and peas for the first course, and fresh young tuna in tomato sauce as the second.
As the dishes were warming up, he went and opened the French door to the veranda. He was surprised to see that it had started raining lightly, in what Sicilians call a peasant-drenching drizzle. But it wasn't at all cold, so he could eat outside.
The mist accentuated the scent of the sea, which he breathed in deeply, filling his lungs.
The sand, too, had a pleasant smell about it.
And the gentle sound of the raindrops on the porch roof was like a distant melody that...
What the hell had gotten into him?
How was it that he so suddenly appreciated the same rain that had always put him in a bad mood?
Was it the inevitable change that came with age which made him more understanding?
Or was it much more likely the "Marian effect"?
He decided not to watch his interview, which was about to come on.
He set the table, waited for the rice to get nice and hot, and then brought it outside.
He savored it down to the last pea and grain of rice.
Then he moved on to the tuna, which he gave the same reception as the risotto.
Then he cleared the table, grabbed his cigarettes and an ashtray, and went back out on the veranda.
No whisky this time. He wanted his mind to be lucid.
From his pocket he extracted the sheet of paper with the transcriptions of the intercepted phone calls and started studying them.
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 14
|
The first thing that jumped out at him like a black blot on a white sheet was that neither Valeria nor Loredana exchanged so much as a single word on the murder of Carmelo Savastano.
After all, it wasn't as if a lot of time had passed since news of the identification of the body had come out.
Maybe they'd already touched on the subject in some prior phone call before the line had been tapped. But in any case it seemed as if the two girls were glossing over a very important matter. As if they had expressly agreed not to talk about it.
And this was very strange.
Until proven otherwise, Savastano, aside from having spent a long time with Loredana as her boyfriend and master, had also been her mugger and rapist.
The very fact that she was now in the hospital was in a certain sense a consequence of her intimate acquaintance with the murder victim.
How was it that not a single word about him, either of insult or compassion, had ever come out of the girl's mouth? Savastano had suffered a horrific end. You'd think that some sort of heartfelt exclamation—"Poor guy!" or "He deserved it!"—would be forthcoming.
But no.
And how was it that Valeria, who with Mimì made a great show of accusing di Marta, made no mention of the fact that Loredana's husband had been summoned by the police for questioning? Shouldn't she have expressed some hope that they would send him straight to prison?
Too many omissions, too much silence.
And there were some other things that were utterly incomprehensible.
Loredana's questions, when she wanted to know if everything was okay and said she was going crazy having to stay in the hospital, without being able...
Without being able to do what?
And then Valeria's reassuring reply, when she said she would have plenty of opportunity to make up for time lost...
Make what up? And with whom?
Whatever the case, it was clear that Valeria was the only link between her friend and the thing that Loredana missed so much.
As for the second phone call, it was probably best not even to try. It was impossible to understand anything about it at all.
But the tone of Valeria's voice when he'd heard the recording with his own ears had given him a clue.
Valeria's immediate reaction had been somewhere between astonishment and fear. Or better yet, it contained both astonishment and fear.
She'd said: "You must be insane!" But she'd stopped short, hadn't finished her sentence. She must surely have been about to say "to call me on the phone."
So there must have been a prior agreement between Valeria and the caller, made who-knows-when. That the man must not call for a certain amount of time. And the man had not kept his word.
But given that Valeria was at home alone at the time of the call, as she nearly always was—and therefore no one could overhear her talking to the man—why was she so against talking to him over the phone?
If he was just a lover, she certainly would have had no problem talking to him.
Therefore he was not a lover.
So what was he?
And who was Valeria afraid might overhear her conversation with him?
Certainly not her faraway husband. Nor Loredana in the hospital.
Then who?
Want to bet Valeria thought her phone line might be tapped?
If that was the case, this meant that any contact with that man constituted a potential danger for her.
Mimì's mission was becoming more and more crucial.
The phone rang at eleven-thirty. It was Livia.
"I'm going to bed. I just wanted to wish you good night."
Her voice sounded like she had a cold.
"Are you okay?"
"No."
"What's wrong? Do you have a fever?"
"I don't think so, I don't know, this has never happened to me before."
"But what are you feeling?"
"Ever since I woke up this morning I've been feeling like I want to cry."
He got worried. It wasn't as if tears came so easily to Livia.
"And I don't even feel like talking. I just want to sleep. I'm going to take a sleeping pill after I hang up. I'm sorry."
"No, I'm sorry."
It came straight from his heart. It was all his fault. But then Livia said something he hadn't expected.
"You have nothing to be sorry about. It has nothing to do with you, or with our current situation."
"Then why?"
"I told you. I don't know. I don't understand. I feel a kind of looming emptiness, a loss that can never be filled. My own, personal loss. It's a bit like when I learned that my mother had an incurable illness. Something like that. But I don't want to depress you. Good night."
"Good night," said Montalbano, feeling like a cad.
And he was a cad. But he couldn't help it.
He grabbed the phone, brought it into the bedroom, went to the bathroom, then lay down in bed.
He lay there belly-up, staring at the ceiling, unable to get Livia out of his head.
When, just before midnight, the phone rang, it was like a gust of wind that blew away any thought that didn't have to do with Marian from his mind.
"Hello, Inspector."
"Hello. How's it going with Lariani?"
"What can I say? Today he phoned to tell me that he will almost certainly have two paintings for me the day after tomorrow."
"Let's hope this time it's for real."
"Let's hope, because wasting all these days isn't something I..."
"Can you tell me why you didn't call me yesterday?"
Marian giggled.
"Why are you laughing?"
"Because sometimes you assume this inquisitorial, coplike tone of voice."
"Sorry, I didn't mean to, I only wanted—"
"I know. Do you really want to know?"
"Yes."
"Well, I realized that after I talk to you, I have trouble getting you out of my head. It intensifies my thoughts of you. And the more I think of you, the more I'm overwhelmed by the desire to be with you. And since I can't be with you, I become cross and distracted and sometimes can't fall asleep. So I wanted to do an experiment, and I didn't call you. That made it even worse. And so here I am again, talking to you from Milan. I can't stand it any longer, I'm going crazy here, not being able to..."
It was like a thunderbolt.
"Holy shit!"
It just came out.
"What is it?" Marian asked in surprise.
"Finish the sentence, finish the sentence!"
"What sentence?"
"The one you were saying, that you couldn't stand it any longer, you were going crazy there, not being able to..."
"Have you lost your mind?"
"Please, I beg you, I implore you: not being able to what?"
There was a pause.
When she finally spoke, Marian's voice was icy and mocking.
"To hug you, silly. To kiss you, moron. To make love to you, stupid."
And she hung up.
She'd used almost the exact same words as Loredana! Wasn't it possible Loredana was in the same position as Marian?
But now he had to repair the damage immediately.
He tried calling Marian on her cell phone. It rang and rang. He called her on her land line. No answer. Maybe she'd unplugged it. The fourth time he tried her cell phone, Marian finally answered.
It took them half an hour and then some to make up.
Then Marian wished him good night with her usual loving voice.
And he was able to sleep soundly.
At the station he found Mimì and Fazio waiting for him.
"I'm here to report," said Augello.
"You look fresh as a rose this morning," said the inspector. "So Valeria didn't wear you out?"
"I'm still not there yet."
"So where are you?"
"I got her to display the merchandise again and let me taste-test the freshness. I declared myself madly in love with her and ready to do anything for her."
"I see. And how did she react to my interview?"
"I'm convinced that it was only after seeing you on TV that she got the idea to let me taste the merchandise. At a certain point, when I was hoping to go from tasting to purchasing, she stopped me and asked me if I was prepared to take a big gamble for her."
"Were those her exact words?"
"Yes. 'To take a big gamble.'"
"And what did you say?"
"That I was ready to give my life for her."
"Was there any background music?"
"Absolutely. From the television."
"Who knows what she has in mind?" Fazio cut in.
"I'm going to find out this afternoon, you can count on that," said Augello. "She's expecting me at four. Apparently it's going to take a while."
The meeting broke up.
"Ahh, Chief! Ahh, Chief Chief!"
Whenever Catarella intoned this litany you could be certain that it had something to do with Hizzoner the C'mishner, as he called him.
"Did the commissioner call?"
"Yessir, 'e did. An' 'e's still onna line!"
Montalbano imagined Commissioner Bonetti-Alderighi as a scruffy crow perched on an electrical line.
"Put him through."
"Montalbano?"
"What can I do for you, Mr. Commissioner?"
"Could you dash over here as quickly as possible?"
"As quickly as it takes me to get there."
He got in his car and drove off. Normally, when the commissioner summoned him, it was to give him a solemn scolding, rightly or wrongly, and therefore Montalbano made a conscious effort to remain calm, whatever his boss might have to say to him.
The commissioner received him at once.
He must not have been feeling well, because his face had the same yellowish cast it had when he rose out of his coffin. He was even polite.
"Dear Montalbano, please sit down. How are you?"
Never before had Bonetti-Alderighi asked him this. Perhaps the end of the world was nigh?
"Not too bad, thanks. And yourself?"
"Not too well, but I'll get over it. I asked you here to find out whether, aside from the Savastano murder, you have any other investigations in progress."
"No, none."
"Now answer me frankly: Could this ongoing investigation be carried on by Inspector Augello?"
"Of course."
"Good. As perhaps you already know, Commissioner Sposìto and the rest of the counterterrorism unit are engaged in a manhunt for three Tunisians involved in illegal arms traffic and hiding out in our province. The area they have to cover is too vast, and Sposìto asked me this morning, before going out to join his men in the field, to provide some backup. I think you and a couple of your men would suffice... We're only talking about two or three days."
The commissioner had no idea how deeply immersed the inspector was in this affair.
"That's fine with me," said Montalbano.
"Thank you. I just wanted to make sure you were available before discussing it with Sposìto. I'm sure he'll be pleased when I tell him."
The commissioner stood up, shook the inspector's hand, and smiled.
Montalbano felt numb as he left the office, seriously concerned for Mr. C'mishner's state of health.
But while he was there, he might as well go all the way.
He went downstairs to the basement. In booth 12B De Nicola was still doing crossword puzzles.
"Good morning. Any calls?"
"Yes. One from the husband, at eight o'clock, another at eight-thirty from a lady asking for a charitable contribution, and then at nine, Signora Bonifacio called Signora di Marta."
"Let me hear the last one," said the inspector, putting on the headset.
"Loredà, darling, what time are they releasing you?"
"At noon."
"I'll come and pick you up in my car. I can't believe we'll be together again. It doesn't seem real."
"I can't believe it either. Oh, goody! Listen, don't get mad, but did you tell anyone I was getting out?"
"No, I didn't."
"Why not?"
"Because for now it's better this way."
"But I..."
"It's better this way, I tell you. And don't make me repeat it a thousand times. Did you hear about your husband?"
"Yes. I have a TV in my room."
"I met someone who might be a big help to us. I'm working him over pretty good."
"Who is it?"
"A lawyer. His name is Diego Croma."
"What did you say his name was?"
"Diego Croma."
"I think I've met him. And why do you think he could be useful to us?"
"I'll tell you when we're together. See you later."
"Should I go and have a coffee?" De Nicola asked, smiling.
Montalbano gave him a confused look.
"You don't need to transcribe this one?"
Montalbano remembered and smiled.
"No, thanks."
Not a word of comment from the two women about di Marta's arrest. And Loredana found herself up against a wall when she wanted to get back in touch with someone against Valeria's wishes.
He didn't drop in at the station, but went straight to Enzo's for lunch. Afterwards he took a stroll along the jetty and sat down on the flat rock. The crab scurried into the water the moment it saw him. Apparently it didn't feel like playing. Most likely crabs themselves had their bad days and dark moods.
By now it was clear that the person who had to be placed at the center of the whole investigation into Savastano's death was Valeria Bonifacio. And perhaps letting Mimì handle everything was the wrong approach. It was time to get Fazio involved too.
He returned to the office.
"Ah, Chief! C'mishner Sposato called sayin' if ya call 'im straightaways 'e'll be there."
"Cat, you wouldn't happen to mean Commissioner Sposìto, would you?"
"Why, wha'd I say?"
"All right. Ring 'im and put the call through to me."
"Montalbano?"
"What can I do for you? I spoke with Commissioner Bonetti-Alderighi and am ready—"
"That's why I'm calling. I told the commissioner that's not what I need."
"I don't understand."
"I think the commissioner misunderstood what I said. I told him I needed men."
"And what am I, a horse?"
"I need grunts, Montalbà, not someone like you."
"Ah, I see. You don't want me in your hair."
"Oh, come on! That's the furthest thing—"
"Are you worried I might steal your thunder if they're caught?"
"Oh, fuck off! At any rate, I don't want you. Got that?"
"Got it."
Sposìto seemed to be having second thoughts.
"I'm sorry, Montalbano, but the circumstances—"
"Now you fuck off."
He didn't know Sposìto could be so petty. And what were these circumstances, anyway?
There was something about this that didn't add up.
He'd provoked Sposìto on purpose, but the guy didn't fall for it.
He thought for a second of calling Bonetti-Alderighi and demanding an explanation, but then decided to let it drop.
Maybe it was better this way. He would be spared the long treks across the countryside in the sun and rain, where he might even be forced to eat lamb stew or blood sausage, stuff he refused to put in his mouth, at the home of some shepherd or other.
He summoned Fazio and had him read the transcriptions of the two intercepted phone conversations. Then he described the exchange he'd overheard that morning.
"What do you think?"
Fazio basically made the same observations he had, and concluded that Bonifacio was up to her neck in this.
"So this is where you come in, Fazio. You've already told me a few things about Valeria Bonifacio, but it's not enough. We have to dig deep into her life. We have to know everything about her, everything."
"It won't be easy, but I can try."
"Get on it right away."
"Oh, there was something I wanted to tell you. Di Marta's supermarket reopens tomorrow."
"Was it closed?"
"Yes."
"So who's going to manage it?"
"Di Marta had his lawyer give his wife power of attorney."
"Does di Marta have other properties as well?"
"The guy's loaded, Chief. He owns warehouses, homes, land, fishing boats..."
Augello shuffled back in around seven.
"Got any news for us?"
"Yes. As I said, I went to Valeria's at four. She received me in a state of undress, wearing only a little bathrobe that opened up when she walked, showing her panties and bra."
"In battle gear."
"That's exactly right. But since she's careful only to dole it out in small doses, she didn't take me into the bedroom. We stayed on the sofa doing everything you can possibly do without doing the main thing. She has remarkable control; she was always able to stop me in time."
"But did she tell you anything?"
"Salvo, you've got to believe me, the girl's a master. She mentioned some package she was going to give me but which wasn't for me personally. When I asked her who I was supposed to give it to, she started laughing. But she explained that I wasn't supposed to give it to anyone or even show it to anyone. I was simply supposed to put it somewhere without being seen. If I was discovered, I could be in grave danger. When I asked what was in the package, she said it was better if I didn't know. At any rate, I told her I would do it."
"And when is she going to give you this package?"
"She said she didn't have it with her. But she's having it brought to her tonight."
"Are you going back there for dinner?"
"No, for lunch tomorrow. She has to go out tonight."
"Maybe to pick up the package?"
"Dunno."
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 15
|
At eight o'clock sharp he left the station and sped home to Marinella. The evening was more than perfect for eating outside. When he went to open the refrigerator, he froze.
Not because of what he saw inside, which he hadn't had the time even to take in, but because of what had unexpectedly flashed through his mind, stopping him dead in his tracks.
Where the hell was he keeping his head? What the hell was happening inside his brain?
Rhetorical questions, of course, since he knew perfectly well what was going on in his brain and where his head was: It was in Milan, with Marian.
And that was why he'd made a mistake as big as a house—actually, as big as a skyscraper.
So what could he do now to set things right? There was only one solution. To go personally in person.
He had to inform Marian at once. Upon hearing his voice, Marian sounded surprised.
"Ciao, Inspector. To what do I owe—"
"Sorry, I just wanted to say good night."
"Where are you?"
"At home, but I'm on my way out."
"Why, where are you going?"
"I've got some work to do tonight."
"What time will you be back?"
"I have no idea."
"So I can't call you later?"
"I don't think I'll be here."
"I'm sorry to hear that. Are you in a hurry?"
"Yes."
"Then till tomorrow, Inspector."
"Till tomorrow."
He prepared some coffee while hurriedly changing his clothes, putting on a pair of trousers with pockets all over, in which he put his cell phone, cigarettes, a book, a lighter, a flask of whisky, and a small thermos which he filled with the coffee he'd just made.
Then he donned a hunter's jacket and put a beret on his head and a pair of binoculars around his neck.
Then he made two sandwiches, one with salami and the other with provolone. Luckily Adelina had bought new provisions. He grabbed a half-bottle of wine and put everything in the pockets of the jacket.
He went out, got in the car, and drove back to Vigàta.
Destination: Via Palermo, number 28.
Valeria Bonifacio had said two important things to Augello: that she would be getting the package that night, and that she had to go out after dinner.
The easiest thing would have been to have her followed and find out who she was meeting with. But he'd forgotten to give anyone this order, lost as he was in thoughts of Marian.
And so it was up to him to do what he'd neglected to tell someone else to do.
Via Palermo seemed to belong to another world. Indeed, one could park wherever one wanted. He pulled up right in front of her house, but on the opposite side of the street. There were two windows lit up, a sign that Valeria was still at home.
He pulled out a sandwich, the one with provolone, and started eating it. Instead of satisfying his appetite, it only made him hungrier. And so the salami sandwich met the same fate as its counterpart. He finished the wine and fired up a cigarette.
Some fifteen minutes later, seeing that nothing was happening, he started up the car and, in reverse, moved it under a streetlamp. From this position, the two windows were less visible and seen from the side, but still visible.
At half past eleven the two lights went out. He shut his book and set it down on the passenger's seat, ready to drive off.
Another ten minutes passed without anything happening. He started wondering whether Valeria might have gone to bed, in which case the whole thing would have been for naught. Or maybe she went to get her car. But where did she keep it?
He couldn't remember whether, when he'd gone to Bonifacio's house, he'd checked to see if there was a garage in back.
He saw a car come out from the street parallel to the house, but it was too dark to make out the person behind the wheel. Luckily at that moment another car drove by fast and lit up the first car for a moment with its headlights. There was no question: It was Valeria.
She drove slowly, making it easy for the inspector to follow her. If she started speeding there was no way he'd be able to keep up with her. Valeria took the Montereale road, driving past Marinella.
Hadn't De Nicola said that the call that Valeria had cut off came from the Montereale area?
But they didn't quite get to the town itself. About a quarter mile from the first houses, Valeria turned right onto a dirt road. It was a dark night, with almost no moonlight. Montalbano cursed the saints and, turning off his headlights, followed behind her, keeping a safe distance.
He couldn't see a thing and was afraid that at any moment he might end up in a gutter or ditch.
Suddenly he no longer saw the lights of Valeria's car. She'd stopped. It would have been too dangerous to get any closer in his car. She might hear it and get suspicious. He saw a sort of public fountain to his left and steered the car around and pulled up behind it. He locked the car and continued on foot.
After walking for about ten minutes he noticed a white glow up ahead. It was an open area in front of a stone quarry. Valeria had stopped her car there. He could see the red dots of her taillights.
At that moment he heard another car approaching. Montalbano quickly jumped off the road, hiding behind a large tree.
The second car went and pulled up alongside Valeria's. Meanwhile she'd gotten out of her car and was square in the path of the other car's headlights, which were promptly extinguished, though the driver left the parking lights on. There was now a man standing beside Valeria. They exchanged no greeting but immediately started talking. Montalbano could hear them but couldn't understand what they were saying.
They were two silhouettes whose faces remained indistinguishable. The man, however, must have been a good six feet tall. Montalbano tried his night binoculars, but they didn't help much.
His only option was to try to get closer, walking blindly in the dark and trying to make as little noise as possible. It wasn't easy, and he stumbled twice on tree roots and another time put his left foot in a deep hole full of water, soaking his leg to above the knee. All this without being able to curse the saints to let off steam.
At last he was able to make out a few phrases, not because he'd come that much closer, but because the two had started raising their voices.
"But... what on earth... thinking?" said the man.
"...listen... ," said Valeria.
"I wouldn't give it to you... even... rted crying."
"But don't you... ize that if... succeeds... and the police... find... Marta is fucked for... and you... free?"
"And if... doesn't? How can you... st this lawyer?"
"...feel I... trust him."
"But who ca... you feel! My ass! Anyway, I... into the sea."
"I don't believe you."
"I'm telling you... I threw it into the sea."
At that moment Montalbano sneezed.
"What was that?" Valeria cried.
Montalbano sneezed again.
Without saying a word, the man was already in his car and driving away.
Sneeze number three.
Now it was Valeria who was running away. In the end fourteen straight sneezes left him in a daze. He must have inhaled some sort of pollen he was allergic to. Or maybe it was due to the liter of cold water he had in his left shoe. At least none of his men were around to see him make such an ass of himself. He walked back to his car and drove home. Clearly the man had not agreed to Valeria's plan. And he had no intention of giving her what she wanted. Or he could no longer give it to her. Something that could have fucked di Marta for good. But who was this man? Perhaps the same man Valeria hadn't wanted to talk to over the telephone?
And, speaking of telephones, how had Valeria managed to contact him and set up an appointment at the quarry? Clearly she'd used neither her cell phone nor her land line.
The first thing he did when he got to the office was call Officer De Nicola. This was not an easy task. He had to jump through numerous hoops, but in the end he got through to him.
"I'll take just a few seconds of your time. Did Signora Bonifacio either make or receive any phone calls from six-thirty onwards yesterday evening?"
"I think she made just one. If you can wait just a minute, I'll go and check."
"Please take your time and tell me what was said. I can wait."
He had to count up to 658.
"Hello?"
"I'm all ears, De Nicola."
"Signora Bonifacio called a certain Nina from her land line at six-fifty p.m., telling her she needed her because she'd had to invite some people to dinner at the last minute and needed Nina's help with the cooking. She had to insist because Nina didn't feel well. I also wanted to mention, sir, that at eight o'clock this morning she made a long call to a certain Diego, whose cell phone number is—"
"Never mind, that one's not important. Thanks."
Why had she called Mimì at eight o'clock? Maybe it was because the man she'd met the previous night hadn't agreed to do what she had in mind.
But the important thing was that the reason she'd given for needing this Nina was a lie. There hadn't been any dinner with guests, and therefore Nina's presence must have been needed for some other purpose. Perhaps they'd even spoken in code.
Mimì Augello showed up at half past nine, and to judge from his face, he looked rather crestfallen.
"She dumped me," he said, sitting down.
"Valeria dumped you?"
"She called me at eight this morning and kept me on for half an hour. She said our affair ended here and she didn't feel like taking it any further, she couldn't do that to her husband, she was an honest woman, after all... She was so convincing, I very nearly thought she was telling the truth. At any rate, there was no changing her mind."
"Mimì, I think you're losing your touch, if women are starting to ditch you at the first opportunity," said the inspector, just to be an asshole.
"I guess I am," Mimì assented disconsolately.
"Good morning, everyone," Fazio said, entering.
"Have you heard the news?" Montalbano asked him. "Valeria doesn't want anything more to do with our good Inspector Augello."
"And why not?"
Mimì was about to reply, but the inspector raised his hand to stop him.
"I'll answer that question."
"I'd rather you didn't," said Mimì.
"Why?"
"Because you just like to make fun of me."
"I assure you the explanation is entirely in your favor."
"Okay, then, let's hear it."
"Valeria broke up with the Don Juan here present because she was never given the package she was supposed to hand over to him."
"And how do you know that?" asked Mimì.
Montalbano recounted the whole story of his adventure of the previous night, leaving out the minor detail of his sneezing. The immediate effect was to bring a smile back to Augello's face.
"So she dumped me because she didn't need me anymore."
"And not because your manly gifts were wanting," said Montalbano. "You can take comfort."
And he continued:
"I want you to try to remember something, Mimì: Did Valeria ever happen to mention a certain Nina to you?"
"Nina? No, never," said Augello.
"Maybe it's the name of her cleaning lady," a pensive Fazio cut in.
"Look into it. Meanwhile, have you found out anything new?"
"Not much. This Valeria naturally has many acquaintances, but only one true friend, Loredana. If she ever goes to the movies, it's always with her. If she has to go to Montelusa to buy herself a dress or a pair of good shoes, she goes with her friend. They are never apart. They're like Siamese twins."
"No men?"
"An elderly lady—but one with good vision—who lives in the house almost directly across from her and sits at her window in a wheelchair all day every day told me that until about two months ago, a man would come and visit Valeria three times a week, always in the afternoon. Then, about two months ago, he stopped coming and hasn't been seen since. According to her, they had a quarrel, a nasty one. When the man was leaving, the last time he came, Valeria stuck her head out the window and started yelling obscenities at him and told him never to come back."
"And how old was this man?" asked Montalbano.
"Maybe twenty-five, max."
"Maybe a lover," Augello commented.
"I asked the old lady," said Fazio. "She said she didn't think so."
"How could she possibly know? It's not as if she can see all the way inside their house, is it?"
"No, but sometimes Valeria would come out with him and walk him to his car. According to the woman, they didn't say good-bye the way lovers do."
"Then maybe he's a relative," said Augello.
"She doesn't have any. No brothers or sisters, no cousins."
"What strikes me most," said Montalbano, "is the regularity."
"In what sense?" asked Augello.
"That he went there three times a week and always in the afternoon. It's a kind of standing appointment."
He paused, then looked at Fazio.
"Did she tell what days of the week?"
"Yes, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays."
He had an idea.
"Can you go back and talk to her again?"
"Sure."
"Ask her whether Loredana was also there when this man came to Valeria's, and explain to her what she looks like."
He turned to Augello and continued:
"Mimì, I still need your brazen face."
"What for?"
"Starting this morning, Loredana will reopen the supermarket, which has been closed because there's been nobody to manage it, and she'll probably be filling in for her husband. So starting now, she'll have to be there mornings and afternoons."
"So?"
"So you have to go and talk to her."
"On what pretext?"
"Tell her that you're desperate, that you want to kill yourself, that you realize that without Valeria, you're finished, ruined. And ask her to intervene on your behalf."
"And what if she says no?"
"If she says no, you've at least established a relationship with Loredana. It's better than nothing."
"I'll go there now."
"No, it's too early, let her get oriented first. Show up there around four, in tears, when the store reopens. And we'll all meet back here at five. Let's go, guys, the solution may be just around the corner."
As soon as he sat down on the flat rock after having eaten and drunk, he noticed that this time there were two crabs waiting there for him. Maybe they were brothers.
Valeria has no brothers or sisters.
Maybe the crabs were brother and sister. How do you tell a male crab from a female crab?
As he was tossing little sea pebbles at the crabs, a thought whirled around inside his head.
It was something that someone had said concerning Valeria. Something that at the time hadn't seemed important to him. But maybe it was. The problem was that he couldn't bring it into focus.
Fazio and Augello came in punctually at five.
"You talk first, Mimì."
"Loredana immediately remembered me. I was able to talk to her for barely ten minutes in the manager's office. She said she knew about me and Valeria because her friend had told her about it in great detail. She even said that it was the first time since Valeria got married that she was interested in another man. I went into hysterics and even started crying. She took pity on me and said she would talk to Valeria."
"So how did you leave things with her?"
"She wanted my cell phone number. She's gonna get back to me on it."
"And what about you?" Montalbano asked, turning to Fazio.
"I talked to the old lady. You were right on the money, Chief. Whenever that man came, Loredana was always there."
"Did you ask her what he looked like?"
"The young guy? Yes, she said he was a good six feet tall and always came in the same car."
"Did she remember any part of the license plate number or the make of car?"
"No, Chief, she didn't get a look at the license plate and doesn't know the first thing about car models. All she said was that the car was silver."
"I'm almost certain that the guy's car the other night was also silver," said Montalbano. "But there's no question it's the same guy who used to go and see her at home. Unless all the men Valeria frequents are six feet tall."
"I found out something else," Fazio went on. "That her cleaning lady's name is Nina. But she's not really a proper cleaning lady; she was Valeria's wet nurse when her mother stopped producing milk because of some unpleasantness."
"And who told you all this?"
"The only greengrocer in all of Via Palermo, where Nina does her shopping."
Hearing this story about Valeria's mother losing her milk because of an unpleasant misfortune brought back to Montalbano's mind the thing that had occurred to him when he was sitting on the flat rock.
And he suddenly remembered that it was Augello who'd said this important thing.
"Mimì, if I remember correctly, when you came and told us about your first encounter with Valeria, I think you said that she'd told you her life story."
"That's right."
"I can't quite remember now, but didn't you say she talked about her family?"
"Yes, she said she'd had an unhappy childhood because her father had a mistress with whom he had a son."
"Okay, that was it. Did she tell you whether this son was born before her?"
"Yes, four years before."
"So Valeria has a half-brother."
"Well, if that's the case..."
"Did she tell you whether her father ever acknowledged paternity?"
"No, she didn't."
Fazio was already standing up.
"I'm gonna dash over to the records office. Our computer system is down. The office closes at five-thirty. Maybe I can still make it."
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 16
|
"I don't understand why you think this half-brother is so important," said Mimì Augello.
"Mimì, it is crystal clear that Valeria leads a double life. Or, at least there's a large part of her life she now wants to keep hidden at all costs. Do you agree?"
"I agree."
"If the scheme of the package she wanted to give you had gone according to plan, by now we would surely have discovered something. But since things didn't go as expected, we still know nothing at our end of things. But all roads are viable. It's possible that she and the half-brother have continued to meet."
They kept talking about Valeria until Fazio returned, discomfited, half an hour later.
"All I found at city hall was that there's only one male Bonifacio in Vigàta, Vittorio, who's fifty years old and is Valeria's father. Therefore Vittorio did not acknowledge paternity for his illegitimate son, who must be registered under his mother's maiden name."
"Speaking of mothers, what is Valeria's mother's maiden name?" asked Montalbano. "Maybe through her..."
"Her name was Agata Tessitore. She died three years ago."
"We've reached a dead end," Mimì commented.
But the inspector had already clamped his teeth around the bone and wasn't about to let go.
"Okay, I'm going to make a desperate move," he said. "But I should let you know that it worked once before."
He dialed a number on the outside line and turned on the speakerphone.
"Hello?" answered a woman's voice.
"Adelì, this is Montalbano here."
"Ah, so iss you, Isspector? Wha'ss wrong? Everyting okay?"
"I need a little information. Do you know an elderly woman who keeps house for a certain young woman with the surname of Bonifacio?"
"No, sir."
"This elderly woman's name is Nina."
"Nina Bonsignori?"
"I don't know her surname."
"I know an ol' leddy who buys a fish atta semma place I buy itta masself, anna she alway talkin' about 'er boss, always a talkin' my ear offa tellin' whatta goo' younga leddy she is anna so beautyfull. She sez she raise her, an' she wazza her wet nurse..."
Bull's-eye.
"That's the one!"
And after casting a triumphant glance at Mimì and Fazio, he continued:
"And is her boss's name Valeria?"
"Yessir."
"When are you going to see Nina again?"
"I'm a sure am a gonna see her tomorra mornin' azza usual, a' seven-thirty atta fish market."
"Okay, now I'm going to tell you what I want you to ask her, but you should do it offhandedly, as if it's just out of curiosity. And when you have her answer, I want you to call me at home."
"It canna wait till I comma to you house?"
"No, I have to know right away."
After hanging up, he turned to Fazio and said:
"Tomorrow morning, as soon as I have this woman's name, I'm going to call you with it, and I want you to run immediately to the records office."
He got home just before eight-thirty, and the moment he entered the phone rang.
"Hello, Salvo."
It was Livia. She spoke slowly, in a faint, faraway voice, as if it cost her great effort to breathe.
"Hi. Are you feeling any better?"
"No. Worse. Today I couldn't even manage to go to work. I stayed home."
"But are you sick? Do you have any fever?"
"No, no fever. But it's as if I did."
"Can't you explain any better what—"
"Salvo, I'm living with a sense of continuous, piercing anguish inside me. However hard I try—and, believe me, I do try—I can't find the cause of it. But there it is. It's as if something really terrible was about to happen to me at any moment."
Montalbano felt very bad about this.
He imagined her there alone, disheveled, eyes red with tears, walking gloomily from room to room... The next words came straight from his heart:
"Listen... Do you want me to come to Boccadasse?"
"No."
"Maybe I could help you."
"No."
"Why?"
"I would be impossible."
"But you can't just stay like that without doing anything!"
"If I still feel like this tomorrow, I'll go and see someone. I promise. But now I need to sleep."
"I hope you can."
"With sleeping pills I can. Good night."
He had a bitter taste in his mouth, and a heavy heart.
He sat down in the armchair and turned on the television. Zito was just ending his report.
"...for the investigating magistrate, Antonio Grasso, today was the deadline for confirming or dismissing the arrest of Salvatore di Marta, but Judge Grasso has requested an additional forty-eight hours before deciding. We can therefore infer that the evidence the prosecutor's office considered sufficient for issuing the arrest warrant was deemed not quite as convincing and certain by the investigating magistrate.
"Elsewhere in the news, the hunt for three immigrants after an exchange of gunfire with law enforcement officials a few days ago continues in the Raccadali countryside. An abandoned farmhouse has been discovered in which the three men are believed to have temporarily taken shelter. Bloodied rags have been found there, confirming the report that one of them had been seriously wounded. Commissioner Sposìto, head of the counterterrorism unit of Montelusa and its province, says that the ring around the three fugitives is tightening and that their capture and arrest is now just a question of time.
"In other news, we have just learned that the municipal council of..."
He started changing channels, looking for a movie. He didn't feel the least bit hungry. Livia's phone call had killed his appetite. He found a spy movie and watched it till the end, even though he didn't understand a thing.
He turned off the TV and went and sat down on the veranda. He didn't even feel like any whisky. He felt melancholy about Livia.
He started thinking of her again at home in Boccadasse. The sorrow, tenderness, and compassion he felt for her brought a lump to his throat.
And he saw himself reflected in her, since she was suffering from the same loneliness he had felt before meeting Marian.
Maybe Livia had been right to refuse his offer to come to Boccadasse. What comfort could he really have given her? Would he have been able to hold her and caress her the way he used to do?
Maybe with words? But not only would his words not have been up to the challenge, they would have rung false. Because you can't live with a person for years on end, get to know him inside and out, and not notice when something changes inside this person. And Livia had surely already noticed the change in him.
But this time she hadn't reacted. On the contrary, she'd made a point of saying that her malaise had nothing to do with their relationship.
So what could have happened to her? What was the cause of this anguish that had suddenly overwhelmed her? Was it some bad joke of advancing age?
What he found most disturbing was the fact that Livia was not prone to hysteria or sudden fits of depression, or wild fantasies or mood shifts. On the contrary. She had a gift for concreteness, for having both feet always on the ground. If she was feeling this way now, the reason must be very serious. And the situation could become more dangerous if they didn't soon find the cause.
No, he couldn't possibly abandon her at such a moment. It would be an act of twofold cowardice.
Almost as if she'd heard him thinking, Marian called. That is, as the phone was ringing, he was absolutely certain that it was Marian at the other end. Reaching out for the phone cost him a great deal of effort, and the receiver seemed to weigh a ton.
"Hello... who is this?"
"Ciao, Inspector, how are you? Your voice sounds strange."
"I'm... tired. Very tired."
"Last night must have tired you out."
"Yes. It was... rough. How are things with you?"
"Lariani was very mysterious the last time we spoke on the phone. He said he had to be extremely cautious with the people he was dealing with. When I asked him why, he didn't answer. He still needs another day."
"And what did you say?"
"I granted him the extra day. But I made a decision. I'm giving him until tomorrow evening. If he doesn't get in touch, or if he puts it off again, that's it."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that's it, I'm dropping everything."
"Are you serious?"
"Of course I'm serious."
"But isn't this a good opportunity?"
"It certainly is!"
"So why drop something when you're already almost there?"
"Salvo, perhaps you still don't understand."
"Understand what?"
"That being one minute, even one minute away from you costs me a great deal. And being a whole day away is too high a price. A price I can no longer pay. And there's nothing whatsoever forcing me to subject myself to such suffering. To hell with Pedicini, Lariani, and the rest. They're all thieves!"
"What are you saying?"
"Yes, thieves! They've robbed me of a piece of happiness. And my happiness comes before anything else. Have I made myself clear?"
Before answering, he had to let a few seconds pass. He felt bowled over by Marian's stridency.
"You've made yourself perfectly clear," he finally said.
But a question kept spinning around in his head: Why was Lariani acting this way?
"Now," Marian resumed in the same tone as before, "since I'm convinced by now that nothing will be resolved by the end of the day tomorrow, I'm going to catch a flight early the following day and come back to Vigàta. That way, we can be together for dinner in the evening."
"I can understand your reasons, but just think it over, please, since you're about to seal the deal—after all, one day more or one day less... ," said Montalbano cunctator, the procrastinator.
Marian raised her voice.
"Salvo, I will not allow them to steal, to rob me of another second of my time with you. Can't you get that through your head? Don't you start now too. Anyway, don't delude yourself: Now that I've got you, I'm not about to let you go."
He'd never heard her sound so determined.
"All right," he said.
Marian changed tone.
"I'm sorry if... But I feel exasperated. I'm just boiling inside. I've thought about this long and hard. I was a fool to accept Pedicini's proposal. I should have said no even if it only involved being away for a single day."
"But now you should calm down," said Montalbano. "Otherwise you won't sleep a wink."
"I have a remedy for that."
"You really shouldn't take sleeping pills, which—"
"I have no intention of taking sleeping pills. You are my sleeping pill."
"Me?"
"Yes, you're my stimulant and my sedative. Wish me good night, as if I were lying beside you."
"Good night," said Montalbano, truly wishing that Marian were lying beside him.
He had just come out of the shower at quarter past eight when the telephone rang.
"Isspecter, 'iss Adelina."
"What is it, Adelì?"
"I talk a witta Nina Bonsignori. An' ya kenna stoppa that leddy when she start a talk abou' her boss, 'oo even called onna sill phone when she was tellin' me everyting."
"Nina has a cell phone?"
"Yessir, evverybaddy gotta sill phone now."
"Go on."
"She tol' me the name o' the lover o' her bossa father, an' iss Francesca Lauricella."
As soon as he hung up, he rang Fazio and told him about the phone call.
As he was about to go out, he dialed Livia's number. She answered with a thick tongue.
"What time is it?"
"Nine. Sorry if I woke you up."
"I wasn't asleep. But I'm still in bed and don't feel like getting up. Why did you call?"
"To see how you were. I'm worried."
"I'm the same. But you shouldn't worry. Please. Let's talk again tonight."
What heartache he felt upon talking to her! And how stingy he'd become, how few words of sincerity and generosity he had for her!
To go to the station he had no choice but to drive past Marian's gallery. This time he noticed that some asshole had written "THIEVES!" in green and red spray paint on the metal shutter. It served as an arbitrary reminder that Marian had used the same word for Lariani. He wished he could meet the guy. But there was another way to find out more about him. Why hadn't he thought of it sooner? Damn the condition his head was in!
Fazio and Mimì were waiting for him at the office.
"So?"
Fazio pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. The inspector warned him:
"I realize that the public record is important in this case, but spare me the rosary. Just give me the kid's name."
"His name is Rosario Lauricella, and he's twenty-five years old," Fazio said stiffly, putting the piece of paper back in his pocket.
"Where does he live?"
"In Montereale. And I can even tell you that on his ID card he measures one meter and eighty-one centimeters. And there's more."
"You can tell me later. First I want to call Tommaseo to tell him I no longer need a tap on Valeria's and Loredana's phones."
"Wait," said Fazio. "What if Valeria happens to call Rosario?"
"She won't. I've figured out how she communicates with him."
"How?"
"With her cleaning lady's cell phone. That's what she did the night of their meeting at the quarry. And to talk to Loredana, she can now go and see her in person."
He called Tommaseo, then let Fazio have his say.
"Chief, I don't know this Rosario in person but I know who he is."
"And who is he?"
"The Cuffaro family's representative in Montereale. He might be young, but they really trust him."
This was unexpected. The inspector just stared at Fazio openmouthed.
Then he pulled himself together.
"But it doesn't seem possible that Savastano's murder was a Mafia hit!"
"Why not?" Augello cut in. "Just because Guttadauro said it wasn't? He was probably just pulling your leg."
Montalbano shook his head pensively.
"No," he said at last. "I'm convinced Guttadauro was sincere."
"And so?"
The inspector remained silent. Then he stood up and, with his eyes looking past everyone in the room at some faraway point in space, he went over to the window, came back, sat down, and finally declared in a calm voice to the two men looking at him in puzzlement: "Guys, I've figured it all out."
"Well, if you feel like letting us in on it too..." said Mimì.
"Let me start with a disclaimer. The reconstruction I am about to present has no evidence whatsoever to back it up, only logic. And it begins with my sincere belief that after Loredana married di Marta, Carmelo Savastano kept on bothering the girl, but she said nothing to her husband, fearing his reaction."
"You mean he wanted to sleep with her?" Mimì asked.
"Maybe. Or, more precisely, he wished. But I'm convinced that he mostly blackmailed her into giving him money. In all likelihood he never turned over all the footage he'd filmed. Remember when di Marta told us that at one point he wanted her to prostitute herself with somebody? Maybe it really happened, and Savastano caught it on film. And naturally Valeria, her bosom friend, would know all about this. Every so often, Rosario Lauricella, Valeria's half-brother, comes to see her, and sometimes Loredana's there. And Rosario and the girl end up falling in love and become lovers. Valeria makes a room available to them, and the two get together on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. At a certain point, however, Rosario finds out about Loredana's situation with Savastano. And I think it was Valeria who told him."
"Why Valeria?" asked Fazio.
"Because I consider her the smartest of them all, and I think that she already had her plan in mind when she spoke with her brother. Which was to free herself, in one fell swoop, of both Savastano and di Marta. Before putting her plan into effect, Valeria takes the precaution of making it look like she's had a falling-out with Rosario. She appears to have broken off all relations with him. And she's so careful that, knowing he works for the Cuffaros, she uses her cleaning lady's cell phone when she needs to talk to him."
"Didn't I tell you the girl was a master?" said Mimì.
"So, to come to the point, on the evening when Loredana goes to Valeria's house and tells her she has sixteen thousand euros in her purse, Valeria calls her cleaning lady and tells her to call Rosario and tell him to go to Via Palermo at once. Rosario drives off from Montereale, leaves the car nearby, and goes a short distance on foot, making sure nobody sees him. At that moment his only assignment is to grab the money and have rough sex with Loredana, leaving visible marks on her body. You know the rest. The upshot is that we all end up thinking that Savastano was somehow involved, especially di Marta, who will thus become the prime suspect in a murder that has yet to happen."
"Okay, now to part two," said Mimì.
"When Loredana informs Valeria that she's told her husband her attacker was Savastano, Valeria contacts Rosario, who's surely been having Savastano followed for some time. Rosario, together with an accomplice, lies in wait for Savastano outside the gambling joint he often frequents, they kidnap him, take him out to the country, shoot him, and set the car on fire. They want to make it look like a Mafia hit, but this proves to be a miscalculation, since the Mafia make it clear they're on the sidelines."
"And what about the famous package?" Augello asked.
"I'll explain. Valeria realizes there's no proof that di Marta did it. She needs to give us some, but it has to be bomb-proof proof. So she thinks of asking Rosario for the gun he used to kill Savastano, so she can wipe away the fingerprints, put it in a box, and give it to you, Mimì."
"And what was I supposed to do with it?"
"Hide it somewhere in di Marta's office in the supermarket and then send us an anonymous letter. Whereupon we would search the office and find it. Which would have screwed di Marta forever. But Rosario isn't convinced, and on top of that, he says he threw the gun into the sea. Which I think is true. I don't think he's stupid enough to keep the gun."
"Well, that's a very fine novel you just recounted to us," said Augello. "But how are we going to make it become a reality?"
"That is the question," said Montalbano. "For the moment, at least, I haven't the slightest idea. Let's meet again later, because now, if you'll allow me, I have a personal phone call to make."
With Fazio and Mimì out of the office, he rang the central police headquarters of Milan and, after identifying himself, asked to speak with Deputy Commissioner Attilio Strazzeri. He and Strazzeri had long remained friends after their time at the academy together, and the inspector had once done him a big favor. He was now hoping Strazzeri still remembered.
"Hey, Salvo, what a pleasure! Long time no see! How are you?"
"Not too bad. And yourself?"
"Pretty good, thanks. You need something?"
"Attì, are you by any chance friends with the person in charge there of art theft, art forgeries, and stuff like that?"
"Very good friends, actually. More than a brother. I am he in the flesh."
Montalbano heaved a sigh of relief. With Strazzeri he could speak openly.
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 17
|
"I want to know something about an art dealer, assuming you've heard of him. His name is Gianfranco Lariani."
There was no answer.
"Hello?" said the inspector.
Not a breath at the other end. Overcome by a fit of separation anxiety, Montalbano started to panic and began yelling like a madman.
"Hello? Is anyone there? Hello!"
"What's got into you?" said Strazzeri. "I'm right here."
"Then why don't you answer?"
"Because your question caught me by surprise."
And what was so surprising about it?
"But do you know the man? Yes or no?"
"Listen, Salvo, write down this number. It's my cell phone number. And call me back in five minutes."
He wrote down the number. He felt a bit unsettled by Strazzeri's strange reaction. Then he dialed the number.
"Montalbano here."
"Sorry, Salvo, but there were some people in the room. Now I'm alone and can talk. Yes, I know Lariani. What did you want to know?"
"If he can be counted on."
Strazzeri started laughing.
"Hell, yes! Absolutely! He was arrested some years ago and convicted. And he's a repeat offender. His specialty is exporting stolen artworks."
The entire world, with all its oceans and continents, and the men and beasts inhabiting them, came crashing down on Montalbano's head. An ice-cold sweat covered him from the roots of his hair to the tips of his toes. He wanted to speak but couldn't.
"Hello? Are you there?" asked Strazzeri this time.
"Yes," the inspector struggled to say. "And how... how does he do it?"
"How does he export them? By a variety of methods. The most brilliant one is using a double canvas. A canvas of decent, exportable value is used to cover the stolen canvas that is classified as part of the national cultural heritage."
It was ninety-nine percent certain that the painting Lariani was going to turn over to Marian was rigged in this way. She, poor thing, completely unaware, would pay for it and take it to Pedicini, who would then load it on his boat, and that would be the last she'd ever see of him.
"We've been keeping an eye on him for a while," Strazzeri continued. "We think he's planning a major coup. He's usually in cahoots with an accomplice whose job is to win the trust of a dealer, collector, or small-town gallerist, and then—"
"Pedicini?"
Dead silence. Menaced again by a fear of abandonment, the inspector started yelling desperately before Strazzeri spoke up.
"Oh, no you don't! You're not playing straight with me! My dear friend and colleague, you call me up after years of silence, and just like that you come out with the names of Lariani and Pedicini? I think you must have something important to tell me. I told you what you wanted to know, and now it's your turn to speak."
Montalbano weighed his options. In a flash he became convinced that the only way to get Marian out of this pickle was to have her collaborate with Strazzeri. In exchange he could ask his friend to keep her name out of this.
"And what if I bring you Lariani's head on a platter?" he asked. "Think we can make a deal?"
"Speak," replied Strazzeri.
He told him the whole story. They made an agreement. And in the end Strazzeri told him what he had to do.
He immediately rang Marian.
"Salvo, what's wrong?" she asked in alarm.
"What's wrong is that you were about to get mixed up in a great big scam. Lariani is a crook, he's already done jail time."
"Oh my God!"
"Now listen to me. I'm going to give you a telephone number. It's for the office of Attilio Strazzeri, deputy police commissioner of the City of Milan, a trusted friend of mine. You must call him the minute you get off the phone with me and make yourself available to him. Got that?"
"But what will they do with me?"
Her voice was quavering; she was starting to cry.
"They won't do anything with you. They're not going to arrest you, and your name will be kept out of the whole thing, don't worry. All you need to do is meet with Strazzeri and do what he asks you to do. I send you a kiss. Call him right now. And ring me tonight. Take down this number."
He dictated it to her, had her repeat it back to him, then hung up. He felt a little better now.
He felt an overwhelming need to go outside and walk, to get over the fright he'd just had. But first he dropped into Fazio's office.
"Summon Valeria Bonifacio for four-thirty this afternoon. And inform Augello. We'll all meet back up in my office at four."
He left his car in the parking lot and started walking randomly, with no precise destination. It occurred to him he'd never wandered about the streets in town like this at that hour of the morning. He stopped in front of the most elegant men's clothing store in Vigàta. He needed a few shirts, but the prices on the ones displayed in the window chased him away.
All at once he found himself in front of the metal shutter of the gallery with the word "THIEVES!" written on it. He stared at it.
If not for that graffiti...
A municipal cop he knew pulled up beside him.
"You know what, Inspector? This morning we nabbed the guy who was going around mucking everything up with green spray paint."
"Oh, yeah? And who was it?"
"Some poor bastard half out of his mind. His name is Ernesto Lo Vullo. He mucked up half the buildings in town, the façade of the church, the monument to the fallen..."
"And what are you going to do with him?"
"He'll either have to pay a fine of three hundred and fifty euros or we'll press charges and he'll do a few days in the slammer. Where's he going to find that kind of money? The guy's a down-and-outer who's panhandling half the time."
Montalbano said good-bye to the beat cop and dashed into the town hall, asking directions for the office he wanted. Then, before the astonished, spellbound eyes of the clerk, he paid Ernesto Lo Vullo's fine with a check, and then resumed his walk.
He stopped to look into the window of a store called Vigàta Elettronica. On display were various computers and things called iPods, iPads, and iPuds, as well as recorders that looked like cell phones.
As he was looking at the latter, he thought of a way to corner Valeria Bonifacio.
He went inside and bought one of the gadgets. The salesman wanted to explain how it worked, but Montalbano told him not to bother, since at any rate he wouldn't have understood a thing even if the inventor himself explained it to him. He also told him he didn't need the box, and he slipped the thing into his coat pocket along with the instruction booklet. He paid and decided it was time to go to the trattoria.
At Enzo's he was sure he'd done the right thing, but until the whole case was wrapped up he couldn't be sure of anything. He wanted to call Marian, but was afraid that his phone call would interrupt her at the wrong moment. He would have given the world to be beside her just then.
He came out of the restaurant at three, but didn't feel like taking his usual walk along the jetty. He'd already walked enough, so he went back to the station.
Stopping in front of Catarella, he pulled out the recorder he'd bought.
"Do you know how to make this thing work?"
"Assolutely, Chief."
"And what do you do to listen to the recording?"
"Y'either load it onna yer kapewter or eltz ya need 'eadphones, Chief."
The salesman hadn't said anything about headphones.
"Could you go and buy me a pair at the store called Vigàta Elettronica?"
Catarella looked at his watch.
"It'll reopen in half a hour."
"How much do they cost?"
"Toity euros oughter be anuff. I'll get the best."
"I want them by four-fifteen at the latest," said Montalbano, giving him the money.
The meeting with Augello and Fazio started at four o'clock sharp. It was up to Montalbano to do the talking.
"Listen to me carefully. I've decided to set a trap for La Bonifacio. It's our only chance to get her to betray herself. The trap will unfold in three separate moves. First move: Valeria gets here and finds me here with Fazio. I talk to her, and five minutes later we make the second move. Which is that you, Mimì, will knock and come in. And I'll introduce you as Deputy Inspector Augello. We'll talk about the package. She'll say she wanted to surprise you and that the package was only to contain a little present. And at this point I'll make the third move."
"And what's that?"
"I'm not going to tell you."
"Why not?"
"Because in my opinion it's better if you both react spontaneously."
The office door flew open, striking the wall with a bomblike crash.
"My 'and slipped," said an embarrassed Catarella, frozen in the doorway.
Fazio gave him a dirty look, while Montalbano glared at him in anger and Augello's eyes shot lightning bolts at him.
Paralyzed by all these eyes, Catarella, who had a box in his hand, didn't move.
"Come on in."
"The he... he... he..."
"Put 'em on the desk and get out of here."
Montalbano opened the box, pulled out the headset, tore off the cellophane wrapping, stuck the set in a drawer, and tossed the box into the wastebasket.
"It's for the trap," he explained.
"I want to know exactly when I'm supposed to enter," said Augello.
"Mimì, as soon as Catarella tells us Valeria is here, you're going to go into your office, count up to five hundred, and then come and knock at my door."
The telephone rang.
"Chief, 'ere'd be a Signura Benefaccio onna premisses."
"It's her, she's early," said Montalbano.
Mimì got up and disappeared.
"Show her in."
Valeria was in fine form. She was all spiffed up and made up and decked out, with a big smile on her face. But despite her efforts not to let it show, the anxiety over having been called in must have been eating away at her.
"Please sit down, signora," said the inspector.
Valeria sat down at the edge of the chair, and smiled even at Fazio. Then she gave Montalbano a questioning glance, tilting her head slightly to one side. She was a picture of innocence personified.
"As perhaps you already know, since the investigating magistrate has failed to confirm the arrest of Salvatore di Marta, the public prosecutor has requested further investigation. Personally I don't think there's anything more to discover; it's all pretty clear by now, but we still have to carry out our orders."
Valeria visibly relaxed and settled more comfortably into her chair.
"I've already told you everything I had to say," she said.
"I don't doubt it. You've been honest and straightforward with me, and I shall do the same for you. You can answer my questions without fear."
"Okay."
"Do you know a lawyer by the name of Diego Croma?"
Valeria's entire body shook, as if from an electric shock, but she quickly recovered.
"Yes, but I don't see what that—"
With perfect timing, as if they'd rehearsed the scene all afternoon, there was a knock at the door.
"Come in," said the inspector.
Mimì Augello entered smiling. It was impressive to see just how much the expression on Valeria's face changed. In an instant she became surly, dark, and suspicious, as she struggled to understand what the lawyer's presence there might mean.
"Allow me to introduce Inspector Augello," said Montalbano.
Valeria's reaction took them all by surprise. She started smiling again.
"Hi. What need was there to present yourself under a false name? I would have liked you even if you were a cop."
Mimì, confused, said nothing. Montalbano, in his head, couldn't help but tip his hat to her. What a woman! What exceptional self-control! You really had to watch your step with someone like her.
"Could you please tell me what was supposed to be in the package you intended to give to Inspector Augello, and which he was supposed to hide in an unspecified place in turn?"
Valeria laughed.
"But what are you thinking! It was supposed to contain a small necklace. I wanted to surprise Loredana and have her discover it in the manager's office at the supermarket."
"Why did you change your mind?"
"Because I wanted nothing more to do with this Diego Croma, or Inspector Augello—I don't even know what to call him anymore. Our friendship had taken an overly... well, intimate turn, and I decided to break things off."
Montalbano had been expecting this explanation. All that was left now was to make the third move, the decisive one.
"Signora, we have information that the other evening, after midnight, you met with a man."
"I haven't gone out at night for months."
"Signora, you should know that your telephones have been under surveillance for several days, and that—"
Valeria swallowed this like a piece of candy.
"Then I challenge you to let me hear the phone call in which I supposedly made an appointment with this hypothetical—"
"I can't let you hear it because you used your cleaning woman's cell phone to make that call."
The shot was on the mark, but Valeria could take her hits like a pro and return fire at once.
"You dreamed that up, it's not true. Anyway, my cleaning woman would never admit it, not even under torture, even if it were true."
"I'm telling you we know with absolute certainty that you met with a man."
"Well, even if I did, I don't think that's a crime. I also met with the man who called himself Diego Croma. Isn't that right, counsel?"
"No, it's not a crime. Not at all. But I'd like to ask you a question. Do you remember why you and the man you met were suddenly forced to interrupt your conversation at the rock quarry and hurry back to your respective cars?"
"How could I possibly remember if I wasn't there?"
"Then allow me to refresh your memory. Someone nearby sneezed."
Valeria blanched. Fazio and Augello looked at each other in confusion. Montalbano continued.
"That someone was me. I sneezed fourteen times in a row. Would you like to hear me?"
He pulled the recorder out of his pocket and set it on the desk, then opened a drawer and withdrew the headset, which he offered to Valeria.
"Before the series of sneezes you'll also be able to hear, in this recording, your entire conversation with the man. You wanted the pistol with which the man murdered Carmelo Savastano, in accordance with the plan you devised, so you could put it in a box and have the here-present Inspector Augello hide it in the management office of the supermarket. Once it was found, Signor di Marta would most certainly have been convicted."
Valeria didn't move. She'd become a statue of white plaster. A mildly quaking statue, that is.
"Naturally," the inspector continued, "we've identified the man. His name is Rosario Lauricella, your half-brother and Loredana di Marta's lover. You generously lent them the use of a room in your house for their thrice-weekly appointments. And it was in this room that the phony rape of Loredana was performed."
Valeria was like a bowstring tensed to the point of spasm. The inspector decided to let her spring.
"But you know what? Rosario lied to you. He told you he'd got rid of the gun by throwing it into the sea, but in fact this wasn't true. We found it at his home a couple of hours ago, when we went to arrest him. In the face of such obvious and overwhelming proof, he broke down and confessed. He said it was you who organized everything. And therefore I here—"
He was unable to finish his sentence.
Valeria leapt up from her chair and tried to scratch his face, wielding her fingers like claws. Montalbano stepped aside as Fazio and Augello grabbed her on the fly.
"That stupid asshole! That imbecile! I told him to give me the pistol! But all the guy knows how to do is kill and fuck! And now he's screwed us all!"
She was blindly kicking the air like a mule.
Mimì was put out of commission by a kick in the giggleberries.
Hearing all the racket, Gallo and another cop came running and finally managed to restrain the young woman.
They took her into a holding cell foaming at the mouth, cursing like a demon in hell and accusing Loredana of having organized the whole plot.
Fazio, Augello, and Montalbano himself took a good fifteen minutes to put his office back in order after it had been turned upside down by Valeria's fury.
"Congratulations," said Augello.
"All the same," said Fazio, "I can understand Loredana's interests in this affair, and I can understand Rosario's interests. What I can't understand is what interest Valeria could have had in what they did."
"Me neither, as far as that goes," said Augello.
"Well, for one thing," said Montalbano, "there's a financial interest. With di Marta convicted, Loredana would have become practically the sole heir of his wealth. And she would have richly rewarded her bosom friend for organizing the brilliant scheme to liberate her from her husband, making her rich and freeing her up for a life of bliss with her lover. And I'm convinced that Valeria's feeling of friendship for Loredana bordered on passionate love. She only hated di Marta because he'd nabbed Loredana by buying her. She knew that Loredana was suffering with a husband so much older than her. She was ready to do anything just to make her happy. But I don't think she'll ever confess to these things."
"Speaking of which," said Fazio, "when should we put the confession down on record?"
"Go and talk to her right now," said Montalbano. "You go, too, Mimì. If we leave her too much time to calm down and start thinking, she's likely to deal from a different deck. Then you, Mimì, go to Tommaseo, give him the written confession, and get him to give you an arrest warrant for Loredana and another for Rosario Lauricella."
"Montereale's not in our jurisdiction," Augello pointed out.
"Then pass it on to the Flying Squad or the Catturandi. See what Tommaseo tells you."
Fazio and Augello left. The inspector looked at his watch. Five-thirty. A record.
What was Marian doing at that moment?
He waited until nine o'clock, feeling more and more agitated. Why was there no word from Mimì or Fazio? And what if in the meanwhile Marian had tried to call him at home and hadn't found him?
Had Tommaseo perhaps put up some obstacle?
The first to return was Augello.
"Tommaseo was great. He didn't waste a single minute. He issued the two arrest warrants immediately, and Fazio said he'd go and arrest Loredana himself. I lent the Flying Squad a hand."
"Did you catch Rosario?"
"No. The general impression is that he's gone into hiding."
"One possible explanation is that Valeria tipped him off with her cleaning lady's cell phone, telling him she'd been called in to the station. The guy weighed his options and decided to take to his heels."
"He won't be easy to catch," said Augello. "As one of the Cuffaro gang, he'll be protected."
"You really think so?"
Fazio came in.
"How'd it go with Loredana?"
"I got her at the supermarket."
"Did she make a scene?"
"Nah, among other reasons because I didn't tell her I had a warrant for her arrest. All I said was that Prosecutor Tommaseo wanted to see her at once. She called the chief clerk, told her to close up when it was time, and then came quietly with me. I don't think any of the customers noticed anything. But I had the impression that she herself was expecting it."
"Maybe Valeria told not only Rosario but her too about being called in by the police."
"It's been a good day," said Fazio.
"Yes. And I thank you both. But now, if you don't mind, I'm gonna head home. It's late."
|
A Beam of Light
|
Andrea Camilleri
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"crime",
"Italy",
"detective",
"Inspector Montalbano"
] |
Chapter 18
|
As he arrived in a flash outside his front door, he could hear the goddamned telephone ringing. He reached for the keys he usually kept in his left jacket pocket, but didn't find them.
The telephone stopped ringing.
Cursing and sweating, he searched every pocket. Nothing.
The telephone started ringing again.
He opened the car door and looked inside. No keys. They must have fallen out of his pocket at the office, when he took out the audio recorder.
He had an idea. He went down to the beach, circled round behind the house, climbed up onto the veranda, and pushed the French door. It was locked from the inside.
The phone, as if to spite him, started ringing again.
He raced back to the car, got inside, and headed back to Vigàta, driving as if he'd drunk a whole cask of wine. He very nearly had an accident and dodged four potentially violent encounters with enraged motorists before he pulled into the police parking lot. He got out, went in, and was blocked by Catarella.
"Ah, Chief! Iss a good ting yer 'ere! Matre santa, I been tryin' a ring yiz f'rever onna tiliphone!"
"That was you who was calling?"
"Yessir."
He heaved a sigh of relief. It hadn't been Marian.
"Why?"
"Cuz I wannit t'inform yiz o' the fack that ya forgat yer keys inni office."
"Wait a second, Cat. If you knew I forgot my keys, how could I have answered my phone?"
"Sorry, Chief, bu' how'z I asposta know 'at you wuz previnnit from ans'rin' yer phone?"
Montalbano gave up.
"Okay, okay, just gimme the keys," he said.
Once inside, he promised himself that he wouldn't go and see what Adelina had prepared for him before he had news from Marian.
He went out on the veranda and sat down. It was already five minutes to ten. He decided to wait until ten, and if Marian hadn't called by then, he would call her himself.
At that very moment the phone rang. It was Livia. He couldn't help but feel a little disappointed.
"How are you feeling?" he asked her straight off.
"I don't know."
"What do you mean?"
"Salvo, as I told you, I was in the grip of an oppressive, obscure anguish, an unbearable weight. Then, around six o'clock this evening, the anguish suddenly vanished."
"Finally!"
"Wait. Then, immediately afterwards, a sort of resignation took its place, as if there was nothing more to be done about anything, as if what I'd been fearing had actually and irreversibly occurred. The whole thing was accompanied by a feeling of very painful emptiness that can never be filled. The same as when you're in mourning. All I could do was cry. And I did nothing else. But crying gave me a kind of comfort."
"Naturally you didn't go to the doctor's, even though you promised me."
"I really don't think there's any need."
"Come on! With the condition you're in and—"
"Believe me, Salvo, I'll get over this, I can feel it. With effort and pain, yes, but I will get over it. Now I have to go. I don't feel like talking, it tires me out. All I want is to lie in bed. We'll talk again tomorrow."
In spite of everything, he felt reassured. There was a new note in Livia's voice that lent hope.
Now it was ten after ten. He was trembling with anticipation. Unable to wait any longer, he called Marian up on her cell phone.
He was agitated and twice dialed the wrong number. On the third try he finally got it right.
"My dear Inspector, I was about to call you myself."
"How are you feeling?"
He realized he'd used the same words he had with Livia.
"Pretty well, now. Really well. After the fright you gave me this morning..."
"I'm sorry, but—"
"I'm not reproaching you, Salvo. On the contrary..."
"Come on, tell me a little."
"Strazzeri is truly a lovely person. He made me feel reassured."
"Tell me everything in detail."
"After I called him up he was kind enough to come to my place. I told him the whole story, down to the last detail. He thought it over briefly and then said I should call Lariani and give him an ultimatum: Either he tells me something definitive by six p.m., or I drop everything."
"And what did Lariani say?"
"He joked around a little, reproached me for being impatient, but then said he'd call me back at six."
"And did he?"
"Yes. He gave me an appointment for tomorrow morning at eleven, at his place. He will show me the painting he says he's found, but which according to Strazzeri he must have retrieved from whoever was secretly holding it."
"Did you inform Strazzeri?"
"He was with me the whole time I was on the phone!"
"So how did you leave things?"
"Tomorrow morning at eleven I'm going alone to Lariani's. If he shows me the right painting, that is, the doctored one, Strazzeri showed me what to do without arousing any suspicion: All I have to do is press the button on a paging device I'll have in my pocket. And at that point the police will burst in. One of the officers' jobs is to get me out of there."
"But how will they explain your presence there when the case comes to trial?"
"In his report Strazzeri will write that I'm an undercover agent whose identity he's not at liberty to reveal."
"Well, that's excellent, don't you think?"
"Yes, I think so too."
A second later, Montalbano was overcome by doubt.
"Are you sure you'll be able to deal with Lariani all by yourself?"
"Of course I'll be able, don't worry."
"Don't you think it's a little risky?"
"Strazzeri and his men will be very close by. At the first sign of danger, all I have to do is press the button."
"Listen, as soon as they take you away, please send me a message on my cell phone."
"Okay, Salvo, but please don't worry. I'll be brave and determined, if only so I can get out of there. And thank you, dear Inspector, for saving me. But how did you come to realize that Lariani wasn't what he appeared to be?"
He told her about seeing the graffiti on the metal shutter.
"And that Pedicini!" said Marian. "He seemed so respectable! And he was so clever in winning my trust! He must have spent a fortune!"
"Apparently the painting you were supposed to bring him from Milan is worth a great deal more."
Marian, however, was already thinking of other things.
"There's a flight for Palermo tomorrow afternoon at five. Shall we have dinner together tomorrow night? Are you free?"
"As a matter of fact, I think I am."
"I'm counting the hours, my dear Inspector. I'm so happy. And tomorrow evening I'll be even happier. Does nine o'clock at your place sound okay?"
"It sounds perfect."
"Promise to wait for me if I'm a little late?"
"I promise."
When the phone call was over, he headed for the kitchen, singing the triumphal march from Aida. He decided to play a game. He would close his eyes and try to guess from the aroma what Adelina had made for him. The refrigerator smelled empty. When he opened the oven, his nostrils immediately filled with a breathtaking, twofold aroma. It didn't take him long to tell the one from the other: tagliatelle al ragù and eggplant Parmesan. Could one really expect any more out of life?
He ate on the veranda, taking his time because he wanted to watch the midnight news report. When he'd finished eating, he cleared the table, turned on the television, and sat down in the armchair with his cigarettes within reach. He watched a string of ads, after which the Free Channel's news report logo came on the screen, and then Zito appeared.
"We begin our report tonight with an item that came in right at the end of our ten o'clock report and which we were unable to present for lack of time. In the Savastano murder case, the investigating magistrate Antonio Grasso has failed to confirm the arrest of Salvatore di Marta, until now the prime suspect. We have also learned that Public Prosecutor Tommaseo will not appeal the decision, and as a result, di Marta was immediately released. The prosecutor, however, was keen to point out that di Marta remains nevertheless under investigation. But it's clear at this point that if subsequent investigation does not yield any solid evidence of di Marta's guilt, all charges will be dropped and the case will once again be in no-man's-land.
"We also have another important development to report, for which, however, we have not yet received any official confirmation. The word is that the hunt for the three immigrants that has gone on for several days has come to an at least partial conclusion. Apparently two of the three men have been arrested. They have thus far refused to answer any of the investigators' questions, shutting themselves up behind a wall of silence. As to the fate of the third man, the one armed with a machine gun and believed to be wounded, we know nothing at this time. As soon as we have more verifiable information on this case, which thus far has seemed fairly murky to us, we will bring it at once to the attention of our viewing audience.
"A fatal accident occurred this afternoon around four o'clock on the provincial road to..."
He turned it off. So nobody knew yet that the Savastano murder investigation was over. Tommaseo had been shrewd to say that di Marta was still a suspect. It was clearly a move intended to let the fugitive Rosario relax a little, in the hope that he would make a false move.
Mimì's words came back to him, when he said that Rosario would be hard to catch because he had the Cuffaros' protection. Except that the Cuffaros didn't know the truth yet. Still... there was in fact a way to let them discover it.
Montalbano smiled at the thought. He looked at his watch. It was twenty past midnight. Too early. He should call at one at the very earliest. He shuffled about the house a little, then decided to take a shower and get ready for bed.
When he picked up the phone it was ten past one. He dialed the number.
"Hello? Who is this?" a sleepy male voice asked in irritation.
"Am I speaking with Guttadauro the lawyer?"
"Yes, but who is this?"
"Montalbano."
Guttadauro's tone of voice immediately changed.
"Good Inspector! To what do I owe—"
"Forgive me for calling at this hour—I'm sure I woke you up—but since I'm about to leave, I decided that calling you at the crack of dawn would be worse."
"Not at all, there's no excuse necessary. You were right to call!"
The lawyer was clearly dying of curiosity to know why the inspector had called, but he didn't want to take the initiative.
Montalbano decided to tweak him a little.
"How are you?"
"Fine, fine. And you?"
"Not too bad, but for the past few days I've had a rather bothersome itch."
Guttadauro politely refrained from asking where he had the itch.
"You said you were about to leave," he said instead. "Going anywhere interesting?"
"I'm taking a few days off, now that the Savastano case has been closed."
"Closed? What do you mean?" asked a confused Guttadauro. "If di Marta remains under investigation despite being released, that means the case hasn't—"
"I'm surprised at you, counsel! With all your experience... Rest assured, if I say the case has been closed, it's been closed."
"Then who was the killer?"
"Now, now, counsel, that has to remain a secret!"
"But couldn't you—"
"Are you joking, sir?"
"All right, I won't insist. But then..."
"Then what?"
Guttadauro was at the breaking point.
"No, I meant..."
"Go ahead, I'm listening."
Montalbano was having a ball. Guttadauro finally broke.
"Then why did you call me?"
"Ah, yes. I almost forgot."
The inspector started laughing.
"Why are you laughing?" asked Guttadauro, getting upset.
"Do remember the little story you told me the other day? The one about the lion hunter? Well, just this evening I heard it again, but with some notable variants."
"What kind of variants?"
"Well, for one thing, these lion hunters were in an area in which lion hunting was prohibited."
"And what does that imply?"
"It implies that a very young hunter, a novice, from Montereale, who'd just joined the club—and not just any native, as in your version—killed a lion on his own, without telling the other hunters, and then arranged things so that the killing would be blamed on his comrades and not on him. Is that clear?"
Guttadauro paused before answering. He was trying to grasp the meaning of the inspector's words. At last he did. He said only:
"Ah."
"Is that clear?" Montalbano repeated.
"Perfectly," Guttadauro said curtly.
"Then all that's left for me to do is to wish you a good, refreshing sleep."
It was done. Guttadauro was surely already on the telephone, informing the Cuffaros that Rosario had strayed. The kid's fate was sealed.
If he didn't turn himself in to the police, he would be murdered by his former playmates.
The inspector went to bed and fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow.
The ringing of the telephone brought him up from the depths of a veritable abyss. He turned on the light: It was six a.m.
"Montalbano? This is Sposìto."
He balked. What could Sposìto want from him at that hour?
"What is it?"
"Can you be ready in half an hour?"
"Yes, but—"
"I'll be there at six-thirty to pick you up."
And he hung up. Montalbano lay there bewildered, receiver in hand. What had happened? No point in wondering, for now. The only thing to do was to get ready, and fast. He opened the window and looked out at the sky.
The weather promised to be variable and capricious that morning. And therefore, by contagion, the inspector's behavior would likewise be unstable at the very least.
He went and got into the shower. At six-thirty he was ready. A minute later there was a knock at the door. He opened it. There was a uniformed cop, who greeted him. Montalbano went out and locked the door behind him. Sposìto had him sit in the back beside him. The policeman sat down at the wheel and drove off.
"What's going on?" asked Montalbano.
"I'd rather not say anything until we get there," said Sposìto.
Was it something to do with the Tunisians they said were arrested the day before? And if so, why was Sposìto dragging him into the thick of it, after he'd done everything in his power to keep him out of it?
They turned off the main road and drove along dirt paths fit for tanks and little country roads less wide than the car itself. The sky had gone from a pale pink to gray, and then from gray had turned a faded blue before settling momentarily on a foggy whitishness that blurred outlines and muddled one's vision. Montalbano now knew where they were going; he'd figured it out a ways back.
"Are we going to the Casuzza district?" he asked.
"Do you know the place?" Sposìto inquired.
"Yes."
He'd been there twice, the first time in a dream, to go and see a coffin, and the second in reality, to go and see a charred car with a murdered man inside. What would Sposìto have him see this time?
The moment they arrived, Montalbano's blood ran cold.
In the exact same spot where there had been a coffin in the dream, there now was a real one, an exact replica of the one he'd dreamt. A coffin for third-class cadavers, the poorest of the poor, of rough-hewn wood without so much as a coat of varnish.
A corner of white linen stuck out from under the lid, which had been laid down crooked.
A short distance away was another police car with three cops inside, and a black hearse. The two attendants paced about beside the car, smoking.
There was total silence. Montalbano clenched his teeth. He was living a sort of nightmare. He looked questioningly at Sposìto, at which point the latter put his arm around the inspector affectionately and pulled him aside.
"Inside that box is one of the three Tunisians. I've been ordered to send the body to Tunisia. But before I do, I wanted you to see it. The man inside was not an arms smuggler, but a patriot. He died of complications from the wound he suffered during the entirely involuntary exchange of fire with my men. I'd been following him for a while. I knew everything about him, even his private life, but he remained elusive. When you see him you'll understand why I wanted to keep you out of this. It was he who recognized you that day when he was hiding out in the hayloft. He was watching you through a pair of binoculars."
The beam of light that had struck him square in the eyes.
In confused fashion, Montalbano began to understand but refused to accept it. He couldn't move. Sposìto nudged him gently towards the coffin.
"Be brave," he said.
The inspector bent down, gripped the linen between his thumb and index finger, and pulled it out a little further. Now he could see the letters F and M intertwined.
His legs began to give out; he fell to his knees.
F.M.: François Moussa. He'd had those initials embroidered himself on six shirts he'd given to François as a present for his twenty-first birthday. It was the last time he'd embraced him.
"Would you like to see him?" Sposìto asked softly, whispering in his ear.
"No."
He would rather his last contact with François remain the beam of light that had brought them together again for a fraction of a second.
And if he wanted every now and then to remember him, he would content himself with the time when, as a little boy of ten, François had run away from the house in Marinella, and Livia, who by that point considered him her own son, sounded the alarm and he ran after the boy along the beach, catching up with him and finally stopping him. They had a talk. François said he wanted his mother Karima, who was dead, and so Montalbano told him how he, too, had lost his mother when he was even younger than François. In fact he told him things he'd never revealed to anyone, not even Livia. And from that moment on, they'd understood each other.
Then, as the years went by, distance and detachment had settled in...
He had nothing more to do or say in front of the coffin. He stood up and leaned on Sposìto's arm.
"Could you have someone give me a ride back?" he asked.
"Of course."
"Listen, has Pasquano already been here?"
"Yes."
"Was he able to determine the time of death?"
"Approximately around six p.m. yesterday."
"Thanks for everything," said Montalbano, getting into a car.
Six p.m. Then, around six o'clock this evening, the anguish suddenly vanished, and a sort of resignation took its place, as if there was nothing more to be done about anything...
Without knowing it, Livia had suffered François's agony and death in her own body and soul, as if he'd been a son, of her own flesh and blood. A son which he, Montalbano, out of selfishness and a fear of responsibility, hadn't wanted them to adopt. Livia had taken it very hard. But he'd remained firm in his refusal.
Now he knew what he had to do. Through his death, François bound him to Livia and Livia to him even more than if they were married.
When he got home he phoned the commissioner's office and asked for a ten-day leave. He had a great backlog of vacation days, and they were happy to grant him the time. He reserved a seat on the first flight for Genoa, which was at two o'clock in the afternoon. Lastly he called Fazio, told him Livia wasn't doing well, and that he was going to spend a few days with her.
He sat down on the veranda and smoked a few cigarettes, thinking of François. Then he stood up, wiped his eyes with his shirtsleeve, and went and started leisurely packing.
That same evening at nine o'clock, Marian knocked a long time at his front door, which she didn't know would never be open for her again.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Chapter 1
|
"Have you ever thought about what it would be like if there were three of you?"
Sitting a little way ahead of me on the beach, turned to one side and silhouetted against the glittering Cornish sea, Catherine hesitates for a moment after asking that rather strange question. She has seemed unusually pensive all day, and now I believe I detect a hint of hesitation in her voice. I cannot see her features, only the shape of her head against the sun-dappled water, but her mouth is open a little. I always used to think that an open mouth was a sign of unintelligence, but on that matter Catherine has very much changed my mind. Indeed, this remarkable woman could most likely convince me that the world is flat, such is my regard for her brilliance.
Suddenly she turns to me, causing her silhouette to change.
"Sometimes I think there are three of us," she continues. "Of each of us. There's the good one, there's the bad one, and then there's the one who holds it all together."
"That seems..."
My voice trails off. How am I supposed to respond to such a strange, whimsical comment? Catherine is very intelligent, but she is certainly prone to these occasional flights of rhetorical fancy. I have always been irritated by people who attempt to philosophize, yet Catherine is different. Indeed, her attempts to sound poetic always strike me as rather endearing, even if she seems to be struggling a little whenever she tries to make some deep and meaningful point.
"Three of me would be very inconvenient," I say finally, hoping to lighten the mood. "For one thing, I would have to spend thrice as much on food and clothing."
I wait for her to laugh, but she does not. Instead, the only sound comes from the shore, where the tide is coming in.
Holding a hand above my eyes, in an attempt to shield myself a little from the sunlight, I squint as I try to get a better look at Catherine's face. I can just about make out her eyes staring at me with great intensity. We have been married for only a few weeks, and already I feel as if I am peeling back layers of her character. Not all at once, of course, but one by one. Until I reach her center, I shall likely not feel that I know her fully.
"Sometimes it terrifies me the way people change," she says suddenly. "I don't know what's worse, the times when people suddenly change in a big way, or the little incremental changes that occur each day but which add up over the years. When I said that there might be three of us, you assumed that was absurd, that there could never be more than one. But what I meant was that I wonder whether there could be as few as three. Don't you feel pulled, Charles? Don't you feel pulled in a million directions at once, as if we are all shattered and we have only these flimsy bodies to hold us together?"
"Well I shall not change," I tell her. "Of that, you may be assured."
She pauses for a moment.
"Yes, you will," she says finally, forcing a smile that does not seem entirely genuine, as the light fades and I see her face a little better. "Everybody changes. Everybody eventually risks becoming something they do not want to be."
Behind her, another wave crashes against the shore.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Maddie
|
[ Today ]
Morning sunlight streams through the window, catching the bubbles that fill the bath. And I'm sitting in that bath, listening to the calm sounds of the street outside while the smell of coffee drifts up from downstairs. Me – homeless Maddie Harper... I'm sitting here having a proper hot bath.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Chapter 3
|
"These photos are fascinating," Jerry says, as I walk back into the kitchen with damp hair. "I'd guessed the layout of the place from the exterior, but some of the details..."
His voice trails off as he leans closer to the print-outs. He's actually using a magnifying glass to get a better look, but then I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. After all, this is a guy who – upon receiving a load of digital photos – immediately printed them all out so that he could see them better. He said something about his eyes not reacting well to computer screens, but I've got a sneaking suspicion that he just likes his old-fashioned methods.
The old notebooks are on a table nearby, waiting for him to take a look at them but already being inspected by two of his cats. I honestly haven't figured out what Jerry has more of, books or cats, but it must be a close-run thing.
"Thank you for letting me use your bath," I say after a moment. "I really needed that."
"I really needed it too," he mutters. "Anyone who has to go within twenty feet of you needed it. You stank like an unchanged litter tray."
"So do you want me to take more photos today?" I ask, seeing that the camera has finished charging.
I wait for a reply, but he seems engrossed in his work.
"There's coffee on the side," he says finally, absent-mindedly. "And food, too. Help yourself."
"I can't pay you," I remind him.
He waves me away, toward the counter, so I wander over. So far, Jerry has been extremely generous, to the extent that I'm starting to feel bad. The guy clearly doesn't have much money, although I guess he must spend a fortune on printer ink. As I stop and pour myself a cup of coffee, I spot a plate of buns standing next to different pots of jam, and I swear I feel my stomach start to rumble. I'm so hungry, I think I could eat every bun on that plate right now.
"Did you sleep well last night?" Jerry asks.
"Huh?" Momentarily dazed, I turn to him. "Oh, yeah. Thank you."
"In that house?"
"Sure."
"And you didn't feel anything... unusual?"
"Like what?"
He pauses, staring at me with a hint of disbelief in his eyes.
"Everybody who goes near that place," he continues finally, "mentions it in some form or another. A monumental sense of dread, of tingling fear in the gut, of absolute certainty that something terrible is about to happen."
"I didn't notice anything," I reply, before realizing that I probably sound a little flippant. "I mean, I was hungry and cold, and in pain, so maybe I was distracted. I guess maybe I didn't have time to think about anything else."
"Eat, girl," he says, gesturing toward the buns. "You look like you'll snap in half if the wind picks up. And don't think I didn't hear your stomach growling, because I did. You're probably halfway along to digesting yourself by now. Frankly, judging by the state of you, it's a miracle you haven't wasted away already. You're barely any more than skin and bones." He points at the buns again. "Eat, girl!"
He doesn't need to tell me again. As I head over to the plate and start cutting open one of the buns, it's all I can manage to keep from wolfing the whole lot down in one go. I want to retain some dignity, though, so I force myself to take a little time. After a moment I see that one of the buns looked to have been nibbled slightly, and I realize there are cat hairs on the plate. Still, the bun in my hand seems clean and untouched, and beggars can't be choosers.
"Why did you never go into the house yourself?" I ask. "I mean, if you were so keen on getting pictures of the interior, why didn't you just go in once?"
"I tried," he mutters, "but I couldn't. My legs are bad, for one thing. I'd never make it through that window. But even if I could, that house is not for the living. The dead have had its rooms to themselves for too long, there's no place for the living. The house..."
His voice trails off.
"You think it's that bad in there, huh?" I ask.
He takes a look at another print-out, before glancing at me.
"I know it's that bad," he says. "Sometimes, I even feel it when I'm in here, like it's reaching out to warn me to keep away. There's something in there, and – whatever it is – it doesn't want visitors."
"It's just a house," I point out, before taking a bite from the bun and then swallowing the whole thing. I take a moment to chew, and then I start putting butter and jam onto another. Screw the cat hairs, I need to eat. "It's empty, and there's not really anything to do in there. I mean, sure, it's dark and it's cold and some of the rooms are kind of creepy. There's a lot of stuff left behind by the people who lived there before, but that's all. It's not like there are all these crazy bumps or creaks. There's nothing scary about it."
As I say those words, I suddenly think back to the sound of the bell. This morning, all the cat food was still on the plate at the top of the stairs, but I've convinced myself that maybe the cat has been out for a few hours. It's not like I heard the bell during the night. For all I know, it's Jerry's cats that sometimes slink into the empty house and cause trouble, and they were too busy last night.
"You should really just go inside," I tell him. "I get that you find it creepy, but I bet you'd be okay once you were inside. Sometimes you just have to face your fears and..."
Pausing, I realize that it's a little crazy for someone my age to tell an old guy about facing fears.
"Well, you know what I mean," I add finally. "You've been building it up for so long, it can't be as bad as you think."
"And how would I get in anyway?" he asks. "Through that broken window? At my age?"
"There's a back door," I point out. "I bet I could get it unlocked, if you were willing to give it a go."
I wait for him to dismiss the idea, to tell me that it's nuts and that there's no way he'd ever set foot inside the house. Instead, however, he stares at me with a growing hint of fear in his eyes, and I realize after a few seconds that he's actually considering the possibility.
"I can open the back door for you," I continue. "I'm sure of it. If you want to come into the house, I can take you over there right now."
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Doctor Charles Grazier
|
[ Tuesday October 2nd, 1888 ]
"That thing is not your wife."
I cannot tell him that he is wrong. Instead, I simply watch the space at the bottom of the steps, waiting as the growling sound edges closer and closer. Waiting as the shuffling becomes a little louder.
Waiting for this creature, whatever it might be, to appear and -
Suddenly I see movement at the bottom of the steps. With a growing sense of horror, I watch as Catherine crawls into view. She is naked on her hands and knees, rasping and growling as she emerges from the darkness and reaches out to touch the bottom step. She seems confused, as if she does not quite understand what to do next, but then she raises her head and look directly at me. It is as if I am staring down into the face of a wild and untamed beast.
"That is not Catherine," I whisper, shocked by the hatred in her scowl, and by the ferocity of her snarl. "That is not my wife. It cannot, please... Please God, no..."
Even as I speak those words, she starts climbing up. She moves slowly and awkwardly, as if she lacks full control of her limbs, and she slips several times before finally making it to the second step. Even there, she seems unbalanced, and I believe I can hear the bones grinding in her shoulders. Suddenly she reaches a hand forward, as if she's trying to grasp me from all the way down there, and then she lets out another snarl. This time I see some form of black liquid dribbling from her mouth and running down her chin, spattering against the wooden step.
And then she tries again to haul herself up, before slipping and falling back down to the very bottom. She lets out a loud grunt as she lands.
For a fraction of a second, I consider going down to help her, but somehow I remain glued to the spot. In truth, as Catherine lets out another angry snarl, I believe I am actually afraid of her. Never in all my years did I ever think that this could be the case, but as I stare at this growling bundle of bones and meat – at this thing that masquerades as my dear Catherine – I feel certain that I am witnessing a creature of pure evil. And sure enough, as if to prove this point, she looks up and snarls at me again as more black liquid flows down her chin.
"Dear God," I whisper, "please -"
Before I can finish, Jack slams the door shut and turns the key in the lock. He then checks the door several times, forcing the key until it will turn no more, as if he worries that even the door itself might betray us and let that creature come up from the basement.
I stay completely still, listening to the sound of Catherine – no, not Catherine... the creature... still slipping and bumping against the bottom step. She sounds utterly crazed, as if she does not understand the simple process of walking up a set of stairs.
"What is she?" I say finally, staring at the closed door for a moment before hearing footsteps walking away behind me. Turning, I see that Jack is making his way to my study. "What have I done? For the love of God, what is happening in this house?"
He does not reply.
He simply goes into the study, and a moment later I hear the sound of books being furiously taken from the shelves.
"For the love of God," I continue, "what -"
And then I catch myself, as I realize that I have begun to invoke God in my desperate pleas for help. I am a man of science, of integrity, and never before did I lapse into religious nonsense. Yet now, in my darkest hour, some part of my mind compels me to say such foolish things. Truly, I do not believe I have ever before felt my very foundations crack. It is as if everything I have ever believed in, everything I have ever known to be true, is at risk.
Hurrying after Jack, I stop in the doorway and see that he is taking several of my medical textbooks to the desk. I have always believed that the answer to all of life's mysteries can be found in those books, yet now for the first time I have doubts.
"Those books are my property," I tell him, although in truth my voice is faltering and I am in no mood to step forward and stop him. "Please, be careful how you open them."
He is muttering something as he rushes through the pages. Most likely he is damaging the books with his coarse and dirty hands, but in my current frame of mind I cannot think to intervene. After a moment I turn and look over my shoulder, back toward the door that leads to the basement, and I cannot help but think of Catherine – or rather, of Catherine's body – still slipping and sliding and snarling down there in the shadows, still trying to get up the stairs.
Eventually she will reach the door.
It might take some time, but she will get there in the end.
And then what? Will she find a way through? And if she does not, what is to become of her then?
"It's not me!" I remember her whimpering just a short while ago, when a vision of her appeared in the bedroom mirror. "Charles, you have to realize, it's not me down there. Oh Charles, it's not me!"
"It's not her," I whisper, before turning to look once again at Jack. "That is not my wife."
"I have already told you that," he replies darkly, still looking through the textbooks.
"I mean she told me," I continue, barely able to believe that such absurd words are coming from my lips. For a moment my guard slips, and I allow myself to consider the possibility that somehow Catherine really did speak to me upstairs. "She told me herself, when she -"
"THIS IS ALL NONSENSE!" Jack shouts suddenly, pushing the books off the desk and then leaning against the desk. He seems furious and breathless, and after a moment he looks at me with fearful, angry eyes. "The answer to your wife's condition," he continues, "is not to be found in any of your medical texts."
"It might," I reply, stepping over and starting to gather the books up from the floor. My hands are shaking, and I quickly find that the spines of several of the books have been damaged. Perhaps my faith in these books is returning. "There is a great deal to take into account, but Catherine's condition must fall within the parameters of some recognized physical condition. It simply must. Why, to suggest otherwise would be to invoke..."
My voice trails off. For a moment, I am too horrified to even move, but finally I look up at Jack and see that he in turn is staring at me with a growing hint of fear in his eyes.
"It cannot be anything else," I continue, rather weakly. "Tell me you agree. You have to agree. I have merely made a mistake, but it is one that can be rectified if only I am able to determine the nature of that mistake."
I wait for him to tell me that I'm right, but he says nothing.
"The human body is like a machine," I explain, hoping to reach some kind of fitting understanding. "If a machine moves, we do not say that it possesses a soul. I have inadvertently triggered something in Catherine's body that gives her motive power, absent her actual mind. I have revived the body before I revived Catherine herself, so I simply have to bring her mind back and then she will be well again. Don't you understand? It makes perfect sense."
Again I wait, and again he says nothing.
"It makes sense!" I stammer, although I can hear the doubt in my own voice. "Really, this... I must say, really this is actually a great success, and..."
"Do you still cling to your science?" he asks suddenly, sounding as if he does not believe me at all. "After what you just saw down there, do you still believe the answer is in one of those books?"
"It must be," I reply, before setting the books on the desk and starting to take a look through them, to see which Jack brought over from the shelf. "In all my life," I continue, "I have never once come upon a condition that cannot be explained by established reason. Certainly there have been challenges, and moments when it seemed as if no answer would be forthcoming, but that simply meant that I had to work harder and for longer. It is this stringent determination, this adherence to science, that marks out a great man."
"It sounds like just another type of religion to me," Jack says darkly.
"You know nothing," I mutter. "Nothing at all."
I open the first of the books, simply at random, and start looking through what turns out to be a wholly unhelpful section on liver conditions. I turn to another page, about kidneys, then to a section on the nervous system. Indeed, with each fresh page I am confronted by yet more information that sheds no light on Catherine's current predicament.
"It's in here somewhere," I stammer. "It must be."
A moment later Jack steps past me, bumping my shoulder as he goes. I turn and watch as he storms out into the hallway, and then to my horror I see that he is going over to the basement door.
"What are you doing?" I ask. "Why -"
My throat seizes with fear as I see that he is unlocking the door, which he pulls open a moment later. Standing framed in the doorway, he stares down into the darkness, and I realize I can just about hear the sound of Catherine still snarling and struggling somewhere down there. I wait for Jack to say something, or to do something, yet he simply stands there and watches her.
"What do you see?" I ask, with tears in my eyes. "What is she doing?"
"Come and see for yourself."
I pause for a few seconds.
"I would rather not," I say finally. "I have much to do here, in my office. Can you not just tell me?"
I wait, but he says nothing.
"Tell me," I add, and now my voice trembles worse than ever. "Please, tell me what you see."
"She is still attempting to climb the steps," he replies, "but so far she is making no progress whatsoever. She is looking up at me, and I swear I have never seen such anger before, not even in the eyes of the mad dogs that live in the mud at the river's edge. I believe, Doctor Grazier, that sooner or later she will learn how better to climb, and then she will make her way up to this door."
"And then what?" I ask.
I wait for an answer, but he says nothing. Instead, he watches the steps for a moment longer before shutting the door and turning the key in the lock.
"She cannot get through there," I point out. "Not when it is locked. Can she?"
"I do not believe so," he mutters, and then he turns and walks out of sight. "Then again, this seems not to be a time for certainties."
"Where are you going?" I call after him.
"To think," he replies. "To find an answer."
I hear him leave the house, and then I look out the window just in time to see that he is walking toward the far end of the garden. I remain in place, watching as he stops on the grass, and finally he sits cross-legged and closes his eyes. It takes a moment longer for me to see that he has taken position directly beneath the knife that he hung the other day from the tree, and that he seems to be meditating. I am not sure how such inaction can possibly help the situation, especially for a beast such as Jack who is barely capable of proper thought. Still, I suppose it is good to get him out of the way for a while, so that I can get some proper work done.
Looking back down at the textbooks, I start searching through their pages. The answer is in here somewhere. Of that I am sure. I simply have to keep looking until it is found. I have to hold my faith in medical science, else I shall lose my mind.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Maddie
|
[ Today ]
"Hang on!" I call out, as I continue to struggle with the bolt on the back door. "I'll be out in just a moment!"
I thought this thing would be a little easier to open, but it seems to be completely rusted shut. Then again, I might be doing something wrong. I keep wiggling the handle, hoping to somehow force the bolt across, but I can tell that it's bumping against something pretty solid. I must have been at this for a good ten minutes now, and I'm starting to think that maybe I'm not going to have any luck. After everything I said to Jerry, maybe we're going to fail at the very first hurdle.
"Just wait a few more seconds!" I shout, so that he doesn't give up out in the garden and wander off. "I'll get it soon, I promise. I think it just hasn't been opened for a long time, that's all."
And then I spot a small metal latch that seems to be holding the bolt in place. I slide the latch aside, and suddenly the bolt comes all the way across. With a feeling of achievement, I finally manage to pull the door open, and I barely manage to keep from saying "Ta da" as I see Jerry waiting on the other side.
Or rather, waiting all the way over by the gate, with a terrified look on his face. It's almost as if he's too scared to cross the threshold and actually come close to the house. After a moment, I see that he's actually got one hand on the gate itself, as if he's scared to let go.
"You can come in now," I tell him, standing in the doorway. "It's totally safe, I promise. I've checked all the rooms."
I wait, but after a moment I realize that he seems genuinely horrified by the idea. After I finally persuaded him to at least give this a try, I could tell that he wasn't convinced, but he seemed to at least be willing to make an effort. Then as we came around to the rear of the house, I could tell that he was becoming more and more nervous. Still, I figured I could help him get over this final little hurdle. He's been living next door for decades, obsessing over this house, and he's still never actually been inside. Now he's staring past me, toward the house's dark interior, as if he sees something terrifying.
I turn and look, but there's nothing. Just the dark, empty hallway and several doors leading into the rooms, plus the staircase rising high into the darkness of the upper floor.
"Come on," I say, making my way outside and heading over to where Jerry is waiting by the gate. Reaching out, I offer him my left hand. "I'll help you."
"Don't you feel it?" he asks, his voice trembling slightly as he stares past me toward the open, waiting doorway.
"It's a little cold," I admit.
"But don't you feel the house telling you to keep away?"
I almost make a joke, but I manage to hold back. After all, he looks genuinely terrified and it wouldn't be right to make fun of him. He's built this up so much, it's only natural that he's finding it hard now to get past a lifetime's worth of fears.
"Why don't you just come to the doorway?" I ask. "Then you can see how you feel once you've made it that far. Even if you only peer inside today, that'd be an improvement, wouldn't it? Then you can go a little further each time until eventually you'll get all the way into the hall. And who knows? Maybe one day you'll go upstairs, or into the basement. No pressure, but I really believe in you."
He immediately shakes his head, as if the idea is utterly horrifying.
"It's really just a house," I tell him yet again. "I know you've spent a lot of time wondering what's inside, but that's part of the problem. Imagination can be a powerful thing, and it can be difficult to see past illusions. Trust me, after everything that's happened to me over the past week, I really appreciate what it's like."
"I can feel it now," he replies, sounding a little breathless and panicked. "My throat is tightening, just being this close. There's a force reaching out, pushing me back, telling me that I have no business coming even this far. This force is so strong and so obvious, the only mystery is why you don't feel it. Something unnatural is in that house, something..."
He reaches his hands forward and moves them through the air, almost as if he thinks there's something right in front of him. There's one part of me that thinks he's taking this way too far, that he's getting a little deluded, but then there's another part of me that knows it must seem very real to him. After all, I hallucinated several times over the past few days, so I know how easy it is to believe in things that are conjured up by your own mind.
"If there was something bad in there," I say finally, "why wouldn't I feel it too?"
"Exactly," he replies, turning to me. "That is what I have been wondering too. Why don't you feel it?"
I reach down and take his hand in mine.
"Just to the door," I continue, offering a smile that I hope might make him feel at least slightly better. I give his hand a slight squeeze too. "I've spent three nights in the house now, and nothing bad has happened to me at all. Sure, I got a little scared once or twice, but I've never been a huge fan of the dark. The point is, I survived three nights, so I reckon you can totally survive a few minutes on the doorstep. What do you say, Jerry? Are you willing to give it a shot?"
He looks toward the house, and I can see the fear in his eyes. And then, just when I think he's about to give up and walk away, he nods.
"You're ready?" I ask.
He nods again. He's clearly still terrified, but maybe I've managed to help him find a little extra courage. And then, slowly, he lets go of the gate.
"Okay," I continue. "Let's take it steady."
I step forward, but he's still hesitant. Finally, however, he starts walking along with me, although I quickly feel him holding my hand tighter and by the time we get close to the back door I'm actually starting to find his grip a little painful. I don't say anything, though, since I really don't want to deter him from doing something that he clearly thinks is a huge deal.
"There we go," I say as we reach the back door. "How are you feeling?"
He's still gripping my hand, and when I turn to him I see that he's staring straight through the door and into the dark of the house. Following his gaze, I find that I can just about make out the kitchen and the hallway. To be honest, I can totally understand how the view is a little creepy.
"So," I continue, turning back to him, "do you feel like going inside today?"
"It's everywhere," he whispers.
"What is?"
"I know what it is now," he continues, his eyes widening with fear as tears start running down his face. "I've felt it, all these years, reaching out to me. I thought it was just noise, or a kind of static, but now I can actually hear it." He pauses, before turning to me with an expression of disbelief. "How can you not hear it?" he asks. "How can you not hear that scream? It's filling the entire house."
I wait for him to explain, but he seems almost frozen.
"I don't hear a scream," I tell him finally. "I don't hear anything."
"Somebody is screaming in there," he continues, taking a step back but still holding my hand. "I can hear it as clearly as I hear you. Clearer, even. I can hear it ringing out through the house, and I can hear it shaking the frame of the door."
"Huh."
I pause, before reaching over and touching the frame. I don't feel anything, of course, but I figure there's no need to say that to Jerry. The last thing I want is for him to think that I'm making fun of him.
"No more," he says suddenly, slipping his hand away from mine and taking a couple more steps back, almost as if the house is forcing him away. "No more, no more..."
"You don't want to try coming into the kitchen?"
"You must come with me," he continues, gesturing for me to follow him as he backs toward the gate. "Come, girl. You shouldn't be here."
"I'm fine, honestly."
"Just because you don't hear it, doesn't mean it isn't all around you. You're not safe in there. Nobody is!"
"And if I don't go back inside," I reply, "who's going to take all those other photos you want?" Reaching into my pocket, I take out the recharged digital camera. "I'm not doubting that you think you can hear something, but I don't hear it, so I figure maybe that means I'll be okay. I mean, that makes sense, right? If something in this house wanted to hurt me, it could have done it by now. That has to count for something."
I'm humoring him, of course, but I'm trying to do it in a nice way.
He stares at the house for a moment longer, looking up toward the windows above the door. He seems genuinely terrified, as if he's frightened to his core. Maybe he expects to see a ghostly face at one of the windows, or maybe he thinks he'll spot a shadow moving in one of the upstairs rooms. He's probably got all sorts of crazy ideas, and I wouldn't even be surprised if he managed to hallucinate something. He watches the windows for a moment longer, before finally turning to me again.
"You must come back to my house later," he says finally. "Before sundown, so I know that you're alright."
"Sure," I reply. "I can do that."
"You must come back!" he continues, sounding increasingly worried. "Promise me! If it gets to sundown and I haven't seen you, I'll think that something awful has happened!"
"I promise I'll come back," I tell him, "and it'll be way before sundown. And I'll have all the photos you want."
He stares at me for a moment, before muttering something under his breath as he turns and hurries to the gate. He seems desperate to get out of the garden, and as he disappears from view I can't help but realize that this house has really burrowed its way into his head. I don't think he's completely crazy, but it's pretty obvious that he's beyond obsessed with the house, and that he barely thinks about anything else. I just hope that maybe the photos, and the notebooks too, and even these little trips closer to the door, might help him see past his fears.
I honestly can't imagine what it's like to live in the shadow of such absolute, all-consuming fear.
Stepping back into the house, I take a moment to lock the back door and then I make my way through to the hallway. After everything Jerry has been saying, I can't help stopping for a few seconds and listening to the silence, and I have to admit that some of his words echo through my thoughts. The house is old and it is a little creepy, and it'd be so easy to start imagining bumps and knocks coming from the empty rooms. Finally, however, I force myself to remember that I don't believe in any of that ghost garbage, and that I just need to find some way to occupy my time today. I guess I can start by taking those photos.
At least I know I'm alone here.
"Gotcha!" a voice yells suddenly.
Startled, I'm about to turn around when a hand clamps tight over my mouth and I feel hot breath against the back of my neck. For a moment, sheer panic fills my chest.
"Somebody's screaming in here?" the voice continues, and now I realize with a rush of relief that I recognize her. "Who the hell is that old guy?"
Pulling away, I turn and see a face grinning at me, a face that's clearly very much amused by my state of shock.
"Alex!" I stammer, barely able to believe what I'm seeing right in front of me. "You came!"
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Doctor Charles Grazier
|
[ Tuesday October 2nd, 1888 ]
"Increased aggression can also be caused by damage to certain parts of the brain," I read out loud from one of the textbooks, "particularly the..."
My voice trails off for a moment, and then slowly I turn and look toward the basement door. For a few seconds I hear nothing, as if the entire house has fallen silent, but then I realize that I can perhaps hear a very faint bumping sound, as if Catherine is still struggling at the foot of the stairs.
No, not Catherine.
That thing, whatever it might be, is most certainly not my wife.
Suddenly the sound stops, and I am left in silence again.
Perhaps she is cured!
Perhaps her proper mind has somehow reasserted itself, and now everything is alright again! I wait, listening to the silence and feeling heartened by each second that passes without the sound of some growl or snarl or stumble. Indeed, after almost a minute like this, I cannot shake a rush of hope in my heart at the thought that the nightmare might finally be over. After all, Catherine has always been a very strong-willed woman, and it is certainly possible that she has simply taken back control of her body.
Getting to my feet, I head over to the doorway and listen, waiting in case -
Suddenly I hear another, loud bump, accompanied by a distant growl of anger.
My heart sinks.
For a moment there, I actually allowed myself to believe that the horror had ended, that Catherine had overcome her condition through sheer force of will. How foolish I am, and how desperate. Then again, perhaps it is possible that she might come to take back control of her own body, in which case time might be the only cure. Until that moment comes, however, I must continue to search for an answer in my books. Slowly, then, I turn and head back to the desk, where the books await my attention. I am so tired, I feel as if I might collapse at any moment, but I know I must keep going. I cannot afford to rest, to even close my eyes for a minute, until I have come to an answer.
Just as I am about to sit down, however, I happen to glance out the window. At which point, I see the most remarkable sight in the garden.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Chapter 7
|
"What are you doing, man?" I ask, as I stop in front of Jack. "Have you lost your mind?"
He does not answer. Instead he remains on his knees, with his head bowed and his eyes closed, as if he is engaged in some form of religious study. I saw him apparently meditating earlier, and I assumed that was the limit of his superstition. Now, however, he seems almost to be praying. That cannot be the truth, though. A man such as Jack – so lowly and so craven – would never turn his mind to spiritual matters. How could he, when he is so unintelligent? Frankly, I am amazed he can even read and write.
"Answer me," I say after a moment, exasperated by his behavior. "I demand to know what you think you're doing!"
Again I wait, and again he does not reply.
How can some impoverished, pathetic little runt dare think he has the right to ignore one of his betters?
"Answer me!" I bark, determined to put him in his place.
Yet somehow, unfathomably, he says nothing.
Finally, infuriated and out of patience, I storm over to him and grab the fellow by his chin, forcing him to lift his head. And when that does not work, and his eyes remain closed, I force the lids open until there can be no doubt whatsoever that he sees me. I do not like touching the wretch, but in this moment I feel I have no choice.
"What are you doing?" I ask yet again, with pure anger in my voice. "My wife is in terrible danger, my house is filled with something I do not understand, and you choose to spend your time out here on your knees?"
"I am searching," he replies, very matter-of-factly.
"You are what?"
"I am searching," he continues, as if it is the most natural answer possible. "There are many religions in the world, Doctor Grazier, and many other forms of belief. I do not know all of them, not nearly, but over the years I have spoken to many men from many different walks of life. And women, too. People who have journeyed to London from all the continents, who have settled in poor dwellings and who have nothing to trade but their stories. From time to time I have performed services for some of them, receiving as payment only their wisdom and their knowledge. I am trying to remember whether any of them ever mentioned anything like this. Anything that might help to explain your wife's condition."
"What nonsense is this?" I whisper, letting go of his chin and taking a step back. "I did not have you down as quite this type of fool."
"Forgive me for saying this," he replies, "but it seems to me that medical science alone cannot explain what is happening. When I was down there in the basement, Sir, and I had my hand over your wife's mouth, I had a great deal of time in which to merely ponder the situation. I must confess, I began to consider possibilities that had previously seemed incredible. Some of my certainties crumbled, Sir, and I thought it would be wise to reconsider the various options."
"Reconsider the options?" I stammer incredulously. "What options?"
"Causes, Sir. Things that might explain what is happening to your wife."
I am just about to tell him that he is out of his mind, but then I realize that perhaps I should at least hear what he has to say. As wrong as he might be – as he will inevitably be – it might do me good to hear the ravings of a madman, if only so that my own thoughts might become more ordered as a result.
"Have you come to any conclusions?" I ask finally, even though the question seems so utterly foolish.
I wait, and now I see the fear in his eyes.
"Tell me," I continue, feeling a ripple of fear in my chest. "If you have anything to say, then say it."
"There are some superstitions that I had previously dismissed," he says cautiously. "Stories that even now seem insensible, yet which might contain grains of truth. Things I was told by people who have traveled the world far beyond London's border. Stories about..."
Again I wait, and again he seems incapable of getting the words out.
"Stories about what, man?" I ask, although I immediately wonder whether I want to hear.
"Stories about the dead," he replies, "and about what happens to them after their lives are over."
I shake my head. I have always known that other cultures have their superstitions, stories rooted in ignorance and credulity, but I had hoped that modern enlightenment might have pushed such stories to the margins. Instead, here I am standing in the garden of my own home, in one of the most civilized cities in human history, listening to more of this prattling nonsense.
"These are stories about the spirits of the dead," Jack continues, clearly believing every word, "and about their bodies. There are so many different stories, Doctor Grazier, and most of them conflict heavily with one another. I am not a fool, not am I an unduly credulous man. I know that a great many of these stories are mere fairy-tales. Yet as I stood in your basement, with my hand over your wife's mouth, I began to think about whether some of these stories might contained different version of some fundamental truth. I began to meditate in the basement, even with my hand over your wife's mouth, and I am continuing that meditation now."
Again, I shake my head.
"Ludicrous," I mutter under my breath.
"That is not your wife in the basement," he says. "It just isn't, Doctor Grazier. You know that, I can see it in your eyes. It is your wife's body, animated by some force, but her soul is elsewhere. I fear the two might never be reunited."
"You don't know what you're talking about," I tell him.
"Indeed I do not," he replies, "which is why my meditation must continue. I shall need to check your journals as well, if that is acceptable. There is so much to draw together, so much I must consider. It will all, surely, take a great deal of time, but I am fearful that we have perhaps done something in this house that we should have left well alone. The creature that even now attempts to climb those steps from the basement, the thing that -"
"The answer is in medicine!" I snap, barely able to string a sentence together as I feel a flash of anger. "Only a truly feeble mind would fall back upon primitive superstitions."
"I hope you are right," he says with a hint of fear in his voice. "Truly, I do. I hope you are right and that I am the greatest fool in all the world."
"That is indeed the case," I mutter, before turning to head back inside. "There is no point trying to explain any of this to you. Clearly you are like all simple-minded idiots. At the slightest hint of trouble, you turn away from rational thinking and resort to primitive superstitions. I would tell you to be ashamed, yet I doubt you are even capable of such a thing."
"You spoke of God earlier," he replies.
"I did what?"
"You spoke of God. Three times, I believe. I noted this at the time, Doctor Grazier, because I was so very surprised. Such utterances seemed to mark a break in your character, a change from -"
"How dare you?" I snap, slapping him hard on the side of the face.
"I am sorry," he mutters.
"You would do well to attend to your own needs and fears," I sneer, "and leave me to worry about my own. I will not be lectured by such a primitive creature, especially not one that I have invited into my own home. And I shall certainly not explain a few simple slips of the tongue."
"Of course," he says, bowing his head. "I should not have mentioned what I heard. I am sorry."
Once I am back inside the house, however, I stop for a moment in the hallway and listen to the silence all around. I am still clinging to the hope that Catherine has reasserted herself, but I know that I cannot afford to assume that this is the case. Finally, even though I know that I should simply go back to my books, I cannot help making my way to the basement door and turning the key.
I hesitate for a moment, listening for any hint of movement on the other side, and then I carefully pull the door open a little way.
A shudder passes through my chest as soon as I see that Catherine is now around one third of the way up the steps, clinging desperately to the wood as if she fears she will slip at any moment. I stare at her for a few seconds, and then suddenly she looks up at me and lets out another hideous snarl. In the process, she loses her grip and falls back down the steps, collapsing in a heap at the bottom. For a moment she seems less like a human and more like a collection of limbs that cannot determine how they might work together. She struggles desperately until finally she manages somehow to grip the bottom step once again. I watch as she starts to climb again, and then I shut the door and turn the key in the lock.
I am trembling with fear. I must go back to my notebooks, but first there is one other possibility that I must try. Even though, deep down, I am ashamed of such thoughts.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Maddie
|
[ Today ]
"Of course I came," Alex says, stepping past me and heading over to the bottom of the stairs, where she stops for a moment and looks up at the dark landing. "That a-hole Simon told me you'd brought my stuff here. Can you believe he threw me out of that place?"
"Alex -"
"Hello!" she calls out, cupping her hands around her mouth and looking up toward the top of the stairs. "Anyone here? Any ghosts hanging around, thinking about haunting us? That'd be kinda lame, so you might as well just come out!"
"You shouldn't shout like that," I tell her.
"Why not?"
"It just -"
"Hello!" she yells again, even louder than before. "My name is Alex and this is my friend Maddie. If there are any ghosts here, we come in peace but we'd really love to see you! Don't be shy. Come out and rattle your chains a bit!"
She waits again, and then she starts laughing as she turns to me.
"There," she says, "how's that for challenging the dead? The silly old man said there's some kind of presence here, so I figured we should invite any spirits to come and say hello. Do you think your new pal could hear me from all the way over in his house?"
"I hope not," I mutter.
"I thought I told you never to come in here," she adds, turning to me. "Seriously, Maddie, I told you several times. This house is supposed to be totally out of bounds. Like, no-one's supposed to ever come in here, not for any reason."
"I needed to go somewhere," I tell her. "Things were getting kind of crazy."
"Huh." She looks me up and down for a moment, as if she's inspecting me. "I figured you wouldn't go to one of the shelters," she adds finally. "Me neither. There's no way I'm letting myself get shepherded into some kind of camp. They're still on about that, you know. I had to keep looking over my shoulder on the way here. It's like anything the government does. They pretend it's for our benefit, and maybe it helps in one small way, but then they're figuring out other ways to totally screw us over."
"The killer's still out there?" I ask.
She nods.
"Have more people died?" I add.
"Yeah, I think there was one the night before last. It's getting pretty nuts, people are really losing their minds and getting totally paranoid. Who'd have thought it, huh? Some loser starts copying Jack the Ripper, and the entire nation loses its collective shit."
"I saw some news reports the other day," I reply. "There were people smashing things up."
"So have you really been hanging about here all by yourself?" she asks, stepping past me and looking down the steps that lead into the basement. "That's actually pretty impressive, Maddie. I didn't know you had the balls to do something like that, especially after I told you how creepy this place is. Who was that old guy, by the way? Did you make friends with, like, some kind of old mental patient?"
"That was Jerry."
"He's not getting you to do stuff for money, is he?"
"Of course not."
"He looked a little pervy," she adds. "I wouldn't put it past him."
"He lives next door," I tell her. "He's a nice guy."
"That's how they lure you in!"
"He's not like that," I say with a sigh. "Not everyone's out to get us, Alex. Some people genuinely just want to help."
"Well, he sounded insane," she replies. "Absolutely, clinically insane. But kinda funny too, I guess. All that talk of being scared of the house..."
Her voice trails off for a moment.
"I can dig that," she adds. "I feel it too."
"You do?" I ask.
She turns to me. "Hell, yeah. Don't you?"
"It just feels like a house," I reply. "It's cold, and it's dark, but -"
"This isn't the first time I've ever been in here," she says, interrupting me. "I came in a few years ago, when I was having a bad time. I climbed through the broken window. I only stayed for a few hours, 'cause the place seriously gave me the creeps, but those hours were enough for me to realize that something isn't right about this house. That's how I knew to warn you away, but like you said, desperate times call for desperate measures and when I got your note, I realized I might as well come along. I can still feel it now, though. It's like a kind of panic that hangs in the air, and it gets into you. It's like pure fear."
"So you weren't too scared to come inside?" I ask.
"Well," she says with a faint smile, "back then, I wasn't used to living in fear. It was new to me. Now I am used to it, after all the stuff that's happened, so I guess maybe I'm a little immune. Or maybe I don't really care anymore. It's hard to say. By the way, I was poking about earlier before I heard you come back, and I was wondering. Why is there a bowl of cat food at the top of the stairs?"
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Chapter 9
|
"This is unreal," Alex says a few minutes later, once I've led her down into the basement. "Why did I not know about this?"
She has a flashlight with her, and she shines the beam around until she spots the slab in the center of the room. Heading over, she runs a hand across the slab for a moment before climbing on and settling down on her back.
"Maybe you shouldn't do that," I point out.
"Why not?"
She places the flashlight next to her waist, before crossing her arms over her chest and closing her eyes.
"Do you think this was, like, a morgue or something?" she asks. "They probably put dead bodies down here, back in the day. Like actual dead bodies of people who'd only just died. Tell me that doesn't give you the willies."
"I think it might have been an operating theater."
"No way. It totally feels like a morgue. It's just got that, like, morgue feel. I know that might seem hard to believe, but trust me, I'm really good at picking up on these things. I've got top notch instincts."
"There's equipment here," I tell her, heading over to the counter and picking up a few of the scalpels and knives, before making my way to the slab and stopping next to her. "See?" I add, holding the blades up. "Apparently this house used to belong to a doctor named Charles Grazier. I talked to Jerry, the guy from next door, and he thinks Grazier carried out procedures down here. Maybe on his wife."
"Seriously?" Opening her eyes, she stares at the knives for a moment before snatching one from my hand. "These are actually pretty cool. I might nab a few before we leave. You never know when you might need a knife on the streets of London. I used to know a girl named Ophelia who told me I shouldn't be so quick to draw, but sometimes you've got no choice." She pauses, and then she grins at me. "Are you planning something, Maddie?"
"Planning something?" I ask.
"The way you're standing there." She passes the knife back to me. "It almost looks like you're about to plunge one of them into me. Did I ever tell you? I've always thought I'd make a kick-ass heroine in some low budget horror flick. You know, the kind of girl who gets tied up and tortured but eventually makes it out alive somehow. I've always felt like I've got a bit of that in me. And a house like this would totally make a good setting."
She looks down at the knives in my hands.
"Are you sure you're not planning anything?" she adds. "You're not gonna suddenly snap on me, are you, and go full-on psycho? 'Cause people do that sometimes, and I've heard it's often the quiet ones." She stares at me for a moment. "You are a quiet one, Maddie. Sometimes I genuinely don't know what's going on in that head of yours. Are you constantly holding back the urge to kill?"
"Of course not," I reply, setting them down on the edge of the slab.
"No?" She sits up. "Pity."
She pauses for a moment, looking around with a hint of wonder in her eyes. I've known Alex long enough to realize that she's planning something. In fact, I can see very faint, very mischievous smile starting to spread across her lips.
"What?" I ask.
She grins at me.
"What?" I continue. "Alex, what are you doing?"
She doesn't reply.
She simply continues to grin.
"Maybe we should go back upstairs," I say finally. "I mean, we need to come up with a plan and -"
Suddenly she screams, so loud that I instinctively clamp my hands over my ears.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Doctor Charles Grazier
|
[ Tuesday October 2nd, 1888 ]
"Are you here?" I ask, standing in the doorway and looking into the bedroom. "Catherine, are you -"
Taking a deep breath, I cannot help but feel utterly foolish. Is this how far I have fallen? Am I really standing here, speaking into an empty room and listening for a response? Just a few days ago, I would have considered such action to be beneath me, to be a sign of deplorable constitutional weakness. Indeed, were I to witness another man acting like this, I would have severe doubts about his sanity. At the same time, desperation drives me to try this, so I take a step forward and keep my eyes fixed on the bed. If there is still a chance, then at least nobody can see me as I try this one final, desperate option.
"Are you here?" I ask again. "Catherine, if you are, you must let me know."
I wait.
Silence.
"You are not in the basement room," I continue. "I know that, Catherine. Please, do not fear that I see that monstrous creature and confuse it for you. My darling, something has gone dreadfully wrong but I have already made great advances. I feel you are closer than ever, so you must simply hold your faith in my abilities. It might take a day, or two, but a man has never been so motivated as I am now. And when I have you back with me, all this suffering will fall away."
Again, silence.
"Catherine? I love you."
She does not reply.
Perhaps she cannot.
I keep telling myself that when I briefly saw her last night, she was but a vision conjured up by my troubled mind. Indeed, that explanation makes perfect sense, yet I cannot help wondering whether there is a little more to the situation. I know that Catherine's spirit – or soul, or whatever else one might call it – cannot be here, separated in some manner from her body and lingering in the air like a fine mist, yet I cannot help replaying last night's vision over and over. And each time I think back to the sight of her, my belief is strengthened just a little.
What if she is aware of what is happening?
What if she is observing me even now, and bemoaning the fact that I have failed so miserably?
Indeed, in a sense I am committing the same sin that I observed in Jack earlier. I am allowing myself to consider the same superstitious nonsense. I can only console myself with the thought that I am doing this for better, more rational and scientific reasons, rather than regressing to primitive beliefs. I know that Catherine's spirit is not in this room, but I must prove this fact to myself before I go back to my books. I am a strong man and I do not fear the facing of my demons. And the tears in my eyes are due merely to overwork.
I am a strong man. I shall not falter.
"Please," I whisper, as I turn and slowly look around the room, "show yourself. If you can hear me, Catherine, do not leave me standing lost like this. Have mercy."
I stare at the bed for a moment longer, remembering the sight of her sobbing yesterday. She cried out to me, her voice filled with the most unimaginable anguish, and I truly cannot bear to contemplate the possibility that my dear wife is suffering in such a way. At the same time, she told me most specifically that the creature in the basement is not her, and I cannot understand how she could say such a thing unless...
Is this how it starts?
Is this how brilliant minds are brought down by primitive fears?
"I am Doctor Charles Grazier," I whisper, "distinguished member of no less than five London societies. I am respected by my peers and regarded as one of the finest surgeons of my generation. I am..."
My voice trails off.
"I am Doctor Charles Grazier," I stammer, trying again, but still the words fail me.
Somehow, deep down, I still have doubts.
I am about to turn and leave the room, when my gaze falls upon the mirror. It was the mirror that showed me the image of Catherine, so I make my way over and kneel down so that I can see a little better. Now I am able to make out the reflection of the empty bed, and there are tears in my eyes as I wait in case some figure might appear. My heart is beating so fast, I fear I might faint, and I cannot deny that I am searching the emptiness of the bed for any slight hint that my darling Catherine might materialize. I am torn, simultaneously believing that she will, and that she cannot, appear. In my mind's eye, I am already imagining some lurid puff of smoke that might deliver her, although I quickly remind myself that such things exist only in parlor tricks for the uneducated.
"Please," I whisper. "Catherine, my darling, if you can show me a sign, you must do so now."
Yet the silence continues, and mocks me.
She is so plainly, and so clearly, not here.
I have been duped. Indeed, in the course of just a few seconds I feel my body swell with anger as I realize that Jack's infantile prattle has seeped into my ears and turned my brain to mush. I allowed superstition to override my good senses, and I actually considered the possibility that Catherine's ghost might be lingering up here in the bedroom. Filled with an urgent need to express this fury, I look around the room for a moment before spotting a vase on the dresser. Catherine never liked that vase anyway, so I hurry over and seize it with my shaking hands. I examine the pattern for a moment, trying to calm myself, but in fact the opposite happens. My rage burns bright in a fiery flash, and I hesitate for only a moment before turning and throwing the cursed vase at the opposite wall.
As I do so, I let out a cry of rage that is most unlike me.
The vase shatters upon impact, yet I feel no better as the pieces fall to the floor. If anything, I feel more furious, and after a moment I realize that I can rid myself of this sensation in only one way.
"Jack," I mutter, as I start thinking of all the different forms of punishment at my disposal. "This is his fault. Without his interference, I would have succeeded by now. Everything was perfectly alright until Jack appeared. I would be with Catherine in whatever place comes after this world."
I hesitate for a moment, before opening the dresser draw and rooting through for something I can use as a weapon. Finding nothing, I hurry out of the room and storm downstairs, heading straight for my office. Once I am at my desk, I look through the various drawers until I find my largest letter-opener. All my good knives are down in the basement, which means I cannot get to them at present, but the letter-opener will be more than adequate. I can slice the blade into one side of Jack's throat and cut his carotid artery, and then I shall watch his miserable, weak, poor blood run from his body.
And then, all of a sudden, the rage passes.
I see the truth now.
If it was wrong of me to take on primitive superstitions, it would be equally wrong of me to succumb to primitive rage. There will come a time when I must dispose of Jack, but only after he has outlived all possible usefulness. For while he might be intellectually inferior even to a gnat, he is a large man and I might yet have need of more body parts from the streets. A farmer would not kill a horse simply because he was irritated by its stupidity, not when he still needed its strength to pull a cart. For all his faults, Jack is still a useful brute.
Looking out the window, I see that he is still meditating in the garden.
Fine.
Let him be a fool, if that is what he wants. Let him pretend that he is capable of serious thought, that he can actually help in any way other than as a beast.
For all I care, he can meditate until next I need him. After all, he is nothing more than a tool to be used as and when I see fit. In this regard, he is of no greater value than a scalpel or a saw, although I greatly look forward to the moment when he can be discarded. For a moment, all I can think about is how it will feel to cut the buffoon's throat, and how I shall enjoy seeing the fear and shock in his eyes as the last life slips from his body. Indeed, I run the idea through my mind over and over, almost salivating at the prospect of killing such a disgusting brute. I might even leave his body out for the ravens, in order to add some poetry to his final moments. That, after all, is the final end he claims to see for himself.
I must work. I cannot afford to falter.
Hurrying to the desk, I sit down and get back to work. I am so exhausted, my eyes keep trying to close of their own accord, but I refuse to sleep. My hands are sweaty as I turn from page to page, and I have begun to whisper to myself under my breath. Such things matter not, however, and I must focus solely on the task at hand.
"I am Doctor Charles Grazier," I whisper, slurring my words slightly but determined to remind myself of my strengths. "I am a distinguished member of no less than five London societies. I am respected by my peers and regarded as one of the finest surgeons of my generation. I am Doctor Charles Grazier, I am a distinguished member of no less than five London societies..."
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Maddie
|
[ Today ]
"Relax!" she laughs, finally ending her scream and scooching off the slab. She pats my shoulder. "It was just a bit of fun. I was messing with you. Anyway, didn't your pal from next door say he could hear a scream? I was helping out."
"It was very loud," I point out, as she saunters over to the far end of the basement and looks at the symbols carved into the stone wall. "And it wasn't really very funny."
"What are these?" she asks.
"I don't know. I saw them, but they don't make much sense to me."
"They must've made sense to someone," she continues, reaching out and running a hand across the wall. "Once, a long time ago, someone must have had a very good reason to put these here. Maybe they're meant to be some kind of message."
"That's what I thought," I reply, heading over to join her. "There are some more on the stairs."
"There are?" She furrows her brow. "Huh. That's weird. I guess I just didn't notice last time."
I pause for a moment, looking at the symbols and trying to figure out what they could mean. I suppose it's possible that they were carved by some kind of madman, but deep down I feel sure that someone sometime must have had a good reason. Maybe Doctor Charles Grazier carved the symbols, although that also feels wrong somehow. It's almost as if there's someone else, someone who was here many years ago but who was forgotten by history. I stare at the symbols for a moment longer, before turning to Alex.
"You said you came here before," I remind her.
"Nothing happened."
"But you were here for at least a few hours, right?"
"Yeah, well, I was kinda high," she explains. "It wasn't until I sobered up that I realized where I was, and then I bolted as fast as I could. Believe me, I didn't want to stick around." She pauses for a moment, before turning and looking back across the basement. "I really didn't explore very much. Not like you. I just passed out upstairs and then I woke up in the morning, and I noped right out of here. Frankly, I'm impressed that I came inside at all, even when I was out of my mind. I felt this real sense of dread about the place."
"We should go," I tell her.
"You're right. Let's take a look upstairs."
"I don't mean go upstairs. I mean go, full stop. We should get out of here. I was only waiting around until you showed up anyway."
"Let's not be hasty," she replies.
"Hasty?" I can barely believe what I'm hearing. "You're the one who warned me about this house."
"And do you feel it?" she asks.
"Feel what?" I reply, a little uncomfortably.
"The dread. The fear." She hesitates. "The overwhelming sense of doom that makes most people keep well away."
"I don't feel anything like that," I tell her, thinking back to the things Jerry said to me earlier.
"Neither do I," she replies. "Not anymore. Weird, huh? So given that, we might as well stick around until things have calmed down outside. I mean, in case you hadn't noticed, the city's still kind of in a state of lock-down 'cause of some maniac. If we go back out there, sooner or later we'll get picked up and taken to one of those camps. I really don't want my parents to show up and find me, and I know you're terrified of the same thing."
"Sure, but -"
"Imagine Mummy and Daddy pointed at you, and telling the people at the shelter that you're their daughter."
"No," I reply, feeling a sense of panic in my chest.
"Imagine the look of pure joy on their faces."
"Alex -"
"Imagine them thinking they've got their little girl back at last. 'Cause they would be happy, wouldn't they? There'd be loads of hugs and kisses, and promises that things would be different this time. Promises that they understand why you ran away, and that they'll fix everything, and that there'll be no more pain or fear. They might even mean it, too, but do you really think they'd be able to follow through? Do you really have that much faith in them?"
I take a deep breath, struggling to hold back tears.
"Imagine them taking you home," she adds.
"I wouldn't let them."
"You couldn't stop them, Maddie," she points out. "You're still not old enough. You'd be taken home, and nothing would have changed. Well, maybe one thing. They'd know to keep an eye on you, so it'd be much harder for you to escape again. Besides, you once told me how hard it was for you to run away, how you spent months trying to summon the courage. I reckon you'd be back to square one, and you'd have to find that courage all over again. It'd be a nightmare, Maddie, and I'm honestly not sure you'd be strong enough. Is that what you want?"
"You know I don't," I reply. "I can't let that happen."
"Which is why we have to keep our heads down. Because frankly I'm scared for you." She places a hand on my shoulder. "I'm worried that if you went home, you'd decide there's only one way to get out permanently."
"I wouldn't do that!" I say firmly.
"I'm sure everyone thinks the same," she replies. "Until something changes."
I want to argue with her, but I guess I know she's right. Going back out onto the streets isn't an option, not while the police are so keen to gather everyone up. It'd only be a matter of time before we got picked up and processed, and the rest would probably go more or less the way Alex described. A shudder passes through my chest, and I'm starting to feel a little nauseous.
"And this place is kind of cool," she adds, stepping past me and heading over to the center of the basement, before stopping next to the slab and turning to look around. "It's old, and I like old places. Old places have history, and history has soul. I like soul."
"But -"
"You worry too much," she continues, interrupting me. "I've told you that, like, a million times. You're always assuming the worst, Maddie, and sooner or later you're going to have to lighten up a little. In fact, right now I think would be a really good chance for you to -"
Suddenly she turns and looks over her shoulder, toward the door that leads back up to the main part of the house.
"What is it?" I ask, feeling a flicker of fear in my chest. I wait for her to answer, but she's still just staring at the door. "Alex? What's wrong?"
"Did you hear that?" she replies, still not looking at me.
"Hear what?"
She mutters something else under her breath, before heading over to the door and bounding up the stairs. I wait for her to come back and tell me she's joking, or that it's just the house settling or something like that, but then I realize I can hear her heading up the main staircase too, going all the way up to the top floor of the house.
"Hey!" I call out. "Alex! Where are you going? What did you hear?"
When she still doesn't answer, I have no choice but to set off after her.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Doctor Charles Grazier
|
[ Tuesday October 2nd, 1888 ]
"Have you ever thought what it would be like if there were three of you?"
Blinking, I turn and see that Catherine is standing at the shore. The water is glittering brightly in the late-afternoon sun, turning my wife into merely a dark silhouette. From the general shape of her, however, I can just about tell that she seems to be staring this way. The whole scene seems so beautiful and peaceful, yet at the same time exceedingly familiar. We must have been here before.
"Have I ever thought what?" I ask, playing for time. In truth, I heard the question perfectly, but I always worry when Catherine gets into one of her philosophical moods. It is always so difficult for me to keep up.
"Never mind," she says, taking a step toward me. "I do not wish to trouble you."
It is only now that I realize her dress has become almost entirely transparent. The sun-kissed sea is shining through the fabric, leaving only the silhouette of her body. The whole thing strikes me as almost obscene, and I quickly turn and look around. There is no sign of anybody else on this long, remote stretch of beach, but still I worry that Catherine might be spotted by a stranger. After all, with the dress revealing the shape of her naked body, it would be quite improper for any other man to pass this way.
"What are you thinking, Charles?"
I turn back to her. I cannot shake a sense of concern, as if deep down I feel that I should not be here.
"It is getting late," I point out, "and a little chilly. We should perhaps retire to the..."
To where?
Are we staying at a hotel? We must be, but I don't quite recall. Indeed, I am not even sure that I remember how we ended up here at the beach today. My mind is usually so clear, yet at this moment my thoughts are filled with a kind of fog. I must backtrack and determine my actions today, yet even this seems impossible. It is almost as if I barely remember who I am.
"I am Doctor Charles Grazier," I say out loud, trying to steady my nerves. "I am a distinguished member of no less than five London societies, I am respected by -"
"I'm always cold," Catherine says suddenly.
"You are?" I turn to her. "You should have told me."
"I've been cold since the other day," she continues. "Really, I've been cold for longer, since I first became ill. Oh, you gave me blankets, Charles, and you looked after me so very well. No wife could ask for better care. Yet my body was breaking down and there was nothing that anybody could have done. Even when my bones were burning, my flesh was cold."
"Ill?" I am about to ask what she means by this, and to tell her that she never mentioned feeling ill, but then I realize that those words have stirred some other memory in the back of my mind. "You were ill," I whisper. "You..."
My voice trails off as I see that something is moving beneath the fabric of her dress. Looking down at the silhouette of her waist, I see several small wriggling shapes moving down her skin, and then one of them falls to the ground. Before I can say anything, several more of the shapes drop from her waist on the other side, and then I realize that more are crawling along her arms. It is as if hundreds and hundreds of small creatures are swarming all over her body.
"Catherine," I whisper, "what..."
Suddenly I realize what they must be. For a moment I feared they might be worms of some kind, but now I know that they are something even worse. As they continue to fall from her body, I see more and more of them wriggling on the pebbles.
"Maggots..."
"Aren't there three of me now, Charles?" she asks, stepping closer across the beach. "There's the one in the bedroom, just a lingering voice. There's the one in the basement, rotten and moist. And there's the other one, the one in your head that's just cruel, cruel, cruel. Which is the real one, do you think? All of them? None of them? Or just one?"
"Catherine, no..."
Yet as she gets closer, I am finally able to discern her face, and I realize with a profound sense of horror that most of her flesh has been eaten away, particularly around her cheeks. Great hollow gaps exist between extant strings of yellowed flesh, and her eyes look putrid and swollen, as if they are about to burst. I have seen such awful injuries before, of course, but only on dead bodies in hospital mortuaries. It is quite impossible for anybody to be walking about and talking when they are in such a terrible state.
Taking a step back, I hold my hands up in an attempt to ward her off.
"Catherine, please," I stammer, "whatever is wrong with you?"
"Aren't you coming to me, Charles?" she gurgles, spraying blood from her mouth in the process. A foul stench is filling the air too, as if something rotten is wafting from the back of her throat. "I've been waiting and waiting, and I'm so lonely and cold. This is what you wanted, isn't it? To be with me forever? We were so happy in life. Perhaps we can be just as happy in death."
"I'm bringing you to me," I tell her, with tears already streaming down my face. "My darling, I -"
"You were supposed to join me!" she gasps. "I've been waiting! What have you done?"
"I've made mistakes," I explain, taking another step back and then another. "I've made advances that were beyond the dreams of other men. There have been terrible errors, Catherine, and moments when I have been ready to give up, but I have forged ahead regardless. I am so close now, I am on the verge of success. I have been tested, I have done things I never thought possible, I have even -"
"Look at me!" she screams, trying to grab my arm.
I step back, but this time I trip against a rock. Unable to steady myself in time, I fall back and land hard on the beach, and I instinctively put my hands up as Catherine towers over me. And then, as she leans closer, all I can do is put my hands over my face and turn away, letting out a whimpering cry as I feel her cold, dead hands brushing across the front of my shirt and up to my neck.
"Look at me," she groans, her voice accompanied by the foulest stench. "Look what you have done to me!"
"I am doing all that I can!" I shout, shaking with fear. "Catherine, you must trust me!"
Sobbing, I do not dare gaze upon this horror, yet I can feel her clutching at my body. As her dead fingers start clawing at my face, I lean my head back and scream, but already Catherine is digging her sharp nails through my skin and gouging my flesh, dragging the meat from my skull. I know this nightmare must end at any moment, but then seconds later I feel her teeth biting hard into my throat, squeezing tight until blood starts running down from the wound. There is blood in my mouth, too, and finally I start trying to push Catherine away. I am too weak, however, so all I can do is shudder as Catherine claws and claws at me.
"You did this!" she gurgles, spraying more blood against my face as one of her fingertips slices into my left eye. "You did this to me, Charles!"
If this were a dream, the pain would not be so intense, and I would not feel the blood so keenly. Somehow it is not a dream. Somehow it is all real, and I am a -
Suddenly I am broken from this reverie by the sound of somebody banging on my front door. The image of Catherine's rotten form lingers for a few more seconds, before vanishing when I open my eyes. And then, just as I think I am saved, I blink and see her once again. Opening my eyes for a second time, I stare at the bookcase opposite the desk, and slowly I feel myself becoming more anchored in the waking world.
I hesitate, still shaking and breathless from the dream, and when I look around the study I realize that I must have fallen asleep right here at my desk. I need to recompose my thoughts, but the banging is becoming more and more furious and finally I get to my feet and hurry across the hallway. I reach for the handle on the front door, but then I hesitate again. I cannot let anybody into the house, not given current events, so it might be wiser to wait and pretend that I am not here. Why, if anybody saw me in my current state, they would surely conclude that something is dreadfully wrong.
And then I hear footsteps hurrying around the side of the house, and I realize that this individual means to enter by the back door. Filled with horror, I suffer a vision of the police storming inside, but then I hear a second set of footsteps, accompanied by the plaintive cry of a familiar voice.
"There you are!" Thomas Culpepper shouts, storming into the hallway with Delilah right behind him. "Why did you not answer the door, Grazier? And where is that wretched manservant of yours?"
"Please," Delilah sobs, pulling on his arm as if she means to lead him out of the house. "Thomas, don't..."
"My wife's honor is at stake!" Thomas tells me firmly, filled with a level of anger I have never before seen in his face. "I will have my satisfaction this day, Charles. So help me, I shall not leave this house until that manservant of yours has paid for what he did to Delilah!"
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Maddie
|
[ Today ]
By the time I catch up to Alex, she's all the way up at the top of the main staircase, standing next to the bowl of cat food and looking at the doors to the three bedrooms.
"Alex?" I ask. "Hey, what's wrong?"
I wait for her to explain her strange behavior, but she seems mesmerized by the door that leads into the front bedroom. This is probably just her pulling another dumb stunt, although Alex can be pretty unpredictable. And as I step around her and look at her face, I see a faraway look in her eyes, as if something has genuinely caught her attention.
Almost as if she's scared.
"Can you cut the creepy stuff?" I continue. "Alex, it's going to get really annoying if you keep trying to prank me like this."
"I heard something," she replies, her voice tight with fear.
If she's play-acting, she's doing a very good job.
"What do you mean?" I ask. "Like, a bell?"
I wait, but she doesn't answer.
"Alex?" I continue. "Did you hear a bell? If it was a bell, I think there's a -"
"It wasn't a bell," she says suddenly, still staring at the open door. "I heard something."
"What was it?"
"Didn't you hear it too?"
"I didn't hear anything."
She turns to me. "Are you sure?"
"Can you just tell me what you heard?" I ask, as I feel a faint trembling fear in my chest. I'm still trying to persuade myself that this is a joke, but she's doing a really good job of making me worried. "Alex, what did it sound like?"
I wait for her to answer, but she looks genuinely scared. After a moment I turn and look at the open doorway, but all I see is the bare bed and the dresser. There's blatantly nobody there, but at the same time I can't deny that Alex's behavior is starting to seriously freak me out. I remember thinking I sensed a presence on that bed the other night, as if somebody was staring at me; I don't feel the same thing now, but that seems to be exactly where Alex is looking.
"I heard someone talking," she says suddenly. "Are you sure you're alone in here?"
"Of course I'm sure," I reply, trying not to let her hear the fear in my voice. "What kind of -"
"It was a woman," she continues, interrupting me. "I swear to God, Maddie, I heard a woman's voice coming from up here. I couldn't tell what she was saying, but I definitely heard her. She sounded scared, or upset, something like that. And I'm certain it was coming from that room." She turns and looks over at the doorway again. "Maybe even from that bed."
She turns to me.
"Have you seen or heard anything weird in this house?" she asks.
"No," I reply, although to be honest I'm starting to feel a little freaked-out. "I mean... No. Just a bell, but that was -"
"A bell?"
"Like on a cat's collar. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what it was."
"How can you be sure?"
"I can't," I admit, "but Jerry has lots of cats and I'm pretty sure one of them just wandered in. That's all."
"We might not be alone in this place, Maddie!"
"You can't seriously be -"
"This isn't good," she continues, shaking her head. "It's not good at all. Why didn't you mention this before? I told you this place was creepy, but I didn't think you'd actually been experiencing supernatural occurrences. You should have warned me, Maddie!"
"I haven't been experiencing anything," I tell her with a sigh. "It's just a few bumps. There's a cat here, and -"
"Have you seen a cat?"
"No, but that doesn't mean anything."
"And has any cat eaten from that dish?"
I look down at the untouched bowl for a moment, before turning back to her.
"No," I say, "but there's no such thing as ghosts, and -"
Before I can finish, a loud bump shakes the open door behind Alex, as if it was hit from behind. We both look over as the door swings shut, and we watch as it bangs against the frame and then creaks back open. I wait for a cat to finally appear, or at least to hear a plaintive meow, but now the house is completely silent again until Alex finally turns to me.
"If there's no such thing as ghosts," she says, her voice thick with tension, "then what the hell was that?"
"That was the wind," I reply uncertainly, "or -"
"Bull."
"No, seriously, this is an old house and it's natural for it to make noises now and again."
"Bull, Maddie."
"Just because we don't know what it was, doesn't mean it has to have been a ghost."
"Then go take a look."
I open my mouth to tell her that there's no need, but then I realize that I really can't back down, not now. Looking over at the open door, I feel a tightening knot of fear in my chest, but I know I've got no choice. I have to go into that room and look behind the door, which shouldn't be a problem so long as I believe everything I've just been saying.
There's no such thing as ghosts, and I'm going to prove that.
"Fine," I mutter, stepping past Alex but slowing a little as I get closer to the door.
Ahead, the gloomy room is waiting, and I can't help looking at the metal-framed bed.
"You don't have to do this," Alex says behind me, and she doesn't sound at all like she's enjoying this. She sounds really scared. "Seriously, Maddie, maybe we should just leave this thing well alone. If there's something here -"
"There's nothing here," I reply, but a moment later I swallow hard as I reach the door.
There's no rational reason to be scared. I have to remember that. This is just some kind of primitive fear, and I shouldn't fall for these things so easily.
"It's just a room," I say out loud, hoping to sound confident and unworried. "There's nothing in there."
I still hesitate for a few seconds, before finally stepping into the room and then pulling the door to take a look behind.
"See? There's no -"
Suddenly a voice cries out, and I scream as something lunges at me. Clattering back against the bare wooden floor, I instinctively turn to crawl away, but then I freeze as I realize I can hear raucous laughter. Looking up, I'm horrified to see that Alex is doubled over as she continues to laugh, and Nick – having leapt out from behind the door – is also cracking up.
"Gotcha!" Nick guffaws breathlessly. "Wow, Maddie! You should see your face right now! It's hilarious!"
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Doctor Charles Grazier
|
[ Tuesday October 2nd, 1888 ]
"Did you know that he touched her leg?" Culpepper asks as we stand in my study. His face is a picture of fury, such as I have never before seen in such a mild-mannered man. "He touched her bare leg! Her skin!"
"He was helping me," Delilah sobs. "Please, Thomas, I only told you because I wanted to be honest. I never thought you'd fly into such a rage!"
"Be quiet!" he sneers, turning to her. "You have said enough already."
"I showed you the wound," she whimpers. "You're making a great deal out of nothing."
"If you say one more word," he continues, "I shall -"
"Thomas!" She grabs his arm again. "Please, let us just -"
Before she can finish, he raises his right hand and slaps her hard about the face, causing her to let out a shocked gasp as she takes a step back. She almost loses her footing, managing to hold herself up only because she bumps against the bookcase. Sobbing, she puts a hand on her cheek, as if to cover the scene of her shame.
"Do not make me do that again!" Culpepper says firmly. "In your condition, you would do well to think of the child you are carrying!"
She mutters an apology, as her husband turns back to me with the fury in his eyes undimmed.
"Charles," he continues, a little breathlessly, "I know you are a good man, but evidently in this regard you have made some kind of dreadful mistake. I can only presume that Catherine's illness clouds your judgment. This is perfectly understandable, at least to some degree, but the matter cannot be allowed to persist. You have taken a beast into your home, and you must flush him out at once! You must send him back to the sewers of London's less reputable boroughs!"
I open my mouth to tell him that I shall take care of the matter, but at that moment I hear a faint bumping sound coming from the basement door. I look over, terrified that the sound might return and that I shall have to come up with an excuse for my visitors, but fortunately the house remains silent. When I turn back to Culpepper, I see that he apparently heard nothing at all. Evidently he is so angry that he has scant time for any other matter.
"Your wife came into my home uninvited," I tell him cautiously, as Delilah sits and puts her hands over her face, covering her sobs. "I returned home and found her sitting with Jack. Had she followed proper courtesies, none of this would have happened."
"You blame Delilah?" Culpepper asks incredulously. "You blame my elegant wife for the actions of your oafish manservant?"
"He merely touched her leg," I point out, "while he was assisting her. In the context, it was not such a terrible act. Indeed, things could have been a great deal worse."
"Are you defending him?"
"I suppose I am," I reply, surprising myself. "Thomas, this is not a good time. Your wife is in hysterics, and you should be taking her home and keeping her calm, especially when she is carrying a child. You certainly should not be striking her."
"Do not tell me what to do with my wife!" he snaps.
"You are -"
Before I can finish, I hear loud footsteps thudding this way, and I turn just in time to see Jack hurrying into the room. Ignoring us all, he heads straight around to my desk, where he sets a book down and starts looking furiously through its pages. He seems to be muttering something under his breath, although I cannot make out any of the words. A moment later I turn to Culpepper and see the shock in his eyes. He's watching Jack with a kind of horrified stare, of the type that one might ordinarily reserve for a beast that has dragged itself up from the pits of hell.
"Do you allow this?" he asks after a moment. "Charles, the brute is at your desk, looking through one of your books! Is he even capable of reading? Surely you will not allow him to -"
"Can you be quiet, please?" Jack snaps. "You're distracting me with your incessant whine!"
Culpepper lets out a shocked gasp.
"This really is not a good time," I say with a sigh. "Can we all -"
"He touched my wife's leg!" Culpepper says yet again, before storming over to the desk and staring at Jack. "You touched my wife's leg! Do you have no sense of proper behavior, man?"
He waits for an answer, but Jack merely turns to the next page in the book.
"Speak!" Culpepper shouts. "Or do you think you are above explaining yourself? Are you completely unaware of your status as a pitiful common man?"
Again he waits, and again Jack ignores him.
"You will answer me!" Culpepper continues, grabbing the book and pulling it away, only for Jack to grab it back and slam it forcefully against the desk.
"Leave me alone!" Jack sneers at him, with enough ferocity that Culpepper takes a step back. "Your constant babbling whine is causing my head to hurt! Nothing you say is important, nothing you say can help anybody in this room, so please try to keep your infernal mouth shut!"
"Did you hear that?" Culpepper turns to me, his face drained of color. "Did you hear what your manservant just said?"
"I heard," I reply, "and I think it would be best for everyone if you were to leave."
"Are you insane? Have you completely taken leave of your senses, Charles?"
"I cannot explain right now," I tell him. "Thomas, please, your wife is crying and she needs to be taken home. Do not answer one unfortunate situation by creating another. I shall discipline Jack in an appropriate manner, but your wife needs rest."
"I will not leave," he blusters, "until I have received an apology from both of you!"
I cannot help sighing. The man is becoming tiresome. And then, as I blink, I am momentarily shown a vision of Catherine's rotten body still lumbering toward me across a beach. The image vanishes as soon as I open my eyes, yet it leaves me somewhat shaken.
"I have the right to an apology," Culpepper continues, evidently unaware of my discomfort, "and I intend to pursue that right!" Clutching his lapels, he steps toward me and puffs his chest out, as if he is filled with a sense of his own importance. "Charles, you might be temporarily dispossessed of your senses, and you might not see the seriousness of the situation, but my wife has been besmirched by the beast you invited into your home. This requires redress, and frankly I am astounded that you cannot understand this for yourself. How would you feel if it was Catherine's leg that had been touched? Would you accept such an awful thing?"
"Touching her leg is a crime," I reply, "yet striking her about the face is good manners?"
"Do you question me?" Culpepper roars. "Delilah is my wife and I shall deal with her however I see fit!"
"Be quiet!" Jack hisses.
"And now he talks to me in such an awful manner," Culpepper adds, keeping his eyes fixed on me but pointing toward Jack. "Why, it is as if he believes that he is my equal. What kind of ideas have you allowed to get into his head?"
"Be quiet!" Jack roars, still looking through the book.
"That is intolerable!" Culpepper continues. "You have become almost a parody of yourself, Charles! By allowing this brute into your house, you risk destroying your own reputation! When I tell the others at the club, they're going to ask some very serious questions about your behavior, and I'm afraid I shall not know how to defend you! My wife is sobbing because of this brute, and it is your actions that have allowed the situation to occur! I intend to -"
"BE QUIET!" Jack shouts, slamming his fist against the table. "I am trying to read! Do not speak one more word, or I shall be forced to make you stay quiet!"
"Please," Delilah sobs, "can't we just leave?"
"It is perfectly deplorable," Culpepper continues, "that this situation is allowed to persist. My wife's leg remains sullied by the hands of that monsters, and frankly Charles I am shocked that you continue to just stand there doing absolutely nothing. Delilah's honor has been challenged and I expect better from you!"
Behind him, Jack sighs and steps around the desk, coming this way.
"Perhaps I shall go to the club," Culpepper tells me, evidently oblivious to Jack's approach, despite the thudding footsteps that are getting ever closer, "and inform the others of what has happened. How do you like that idea, Charles? All of polite society shall know of the beast in your home, and believe me, they will question your sanity. Why, I rather think that I must ensure that all of polite society is informed of your awful -"
Suddenly Jack takes hold of Culpepper's head from behind and twists it violently, snapping the man's neck in an instant before letting go and leaving his body to crumple to the floor, where he lands quite dead at my feet. Delilah lets out a horrified gasp and faints against the side of the chair. Jack storms back to the desk and starts looking once again through the book. I stare down at the corpse on the floor, unable to avert my gaze from its eyes. In death, Culpepper wears an expression of faint, unfinished surprise.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Maddie
|
[ Today ]
"It was just a joke," Alex says with a sigh as she follows me down the stairs. "Maddie, where did your sense of humor go?"
"That was not a joke," I mutter, fuming with anger but somehow managing to keep from screaming at her. "I can't believe you think it was funny."
"Maddie..."
She tries to grab my arm, but I pull away. Reaching the bottom of the stairs, I make my way to the center of the hallway before stopping as I realize that I have nowhere to go. I could leave the house, but then I'd be back out on the streets. I basically have no choice but to stay here, even though right now I want nothing to do with Alex or Nick. If they think scaring the life out of me is funny, then I can't even begin to imagine what they might pull next.
"Maddie, listen," Alex continues, starting to sound genuinely contrite now. She touches my arm from behind, and this time I turn to her. "Maddie, I'm sorry, okay? I had no idea that you'd get so scared. Nick and I thought it'd be a fun little prank, but obviously we misjudged the situation. And I guess I can see that we were dumb. I swear, it won't happen again."
"You nearly gave me a heart attack."
"Nick came up with the idea and I went along with it. I shouldn't have done that, Maddie. Please, can you forgive me?"
I'm still shaking, and to be honest I'm absolutely furious, but at the same time I can't stay mad at Alex. She's my only friend, and maybe she's right that I've become a little too serious. Besides, it was dumb of me to even entertain the possibility that there might be a ghost upstairs. I should never have fallen for their 'joke' in the first place.
"I'll get over it," I tell her cautiously. "Just tell him not to do anything like that again, okay? It's going to get really tired, really fast. What's he even doing here?"
"Nick and I have been sorta tagging along together," she replies.
"Since when?"
"Since a day or two ago."
"But... why?"
"Why? Why not? It's not like there are many people to choose from out there." She shrugs. "Anyway, what's the big deal?"
I open my mouth to tell her that I really don't like Nick, but then I hear footsteps above and I look up just in time to see that he's at the top of the stairs. He's looking through an old book, and after a moment I realize that he's found one of the notebooks from the hatch in the bedroom. I guess I didn't give them all to Jerry after all. I must have missed a few. I know I have no right to feel this way, that the house isn't my domain, but somehow it feels wrong to have him here. It's almost as if he's an intruder.
"Now this," Nick says with a smile, as he continues to flick through the notebook, "is some quality stuff."
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Chapter 16
|
"It's just a bunch of notebooks," I point out, as Alex and Nick sit poring over the pages at the desk in one of the downstairs rooms. "I promised I'd give them to the guy next door."
"Got yourself a boyfriend, have you?" Nick asks, without looking at me.
"He's researching the house's history."
He smirks. "Sounds like a fun fella."
"Just don't damage them, okay?" I continue with a sigh. "I want to give them to him later."
"Why doesn't he just come in and get them himself?"
"He doesn't like the house."
He casts a glance at me. "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"
"He doesn't want to come in."
"The old guy's scared," Alex explains, as she grabs another notebook. "I heard him earlier. She practically had to drag him to the door, and then he chickened out."
"He has some fears, that's all," I tell them. "There's nothing wrong with that, but I promised I'd give him the notebooks."
"If I'm holding them," Nick mutters, as he turns to another page, "then I reckon they're mine, aren't they? These are some sick pictures. It's like some psycho was doodling things he wanted to do to people."
He tilts one of the books so that Alex can see.
"Look!" he continues. "There's even one about cutting open a woman's belly."
Alex squints as she looks closer at the book.
"Delilah..." She hesitates, clearly struggling to decipher the old-fashioned handwriting. "Something something, and then a name. I think it says Delilah Colepepper, or Culpepper, or something like that."
"I've heard that name before," I reply, heading around the desk and taking a look at the page. I'm just in time to see a crude sketch of a naked woman, before Nick turns the book away from me as if I'm not allowed to see.
"Suddenly interested, are you?" he asks.
For a moment, I try to remember where I've heard a name like Delilah Culpepper before, and then I realize that Matt Wallace mentioned it when he was telling me about the alley. That's a pretty huge coincidence, especially since some of the other drawings had already reminded me of the woman I hallucinated. Whoever this Delilah Culpepper woman was, she just keeps on showing up. Still, coincidences do happen, and I'm not about to start believing in paranoid theories. That way lies real madness.
"There are kidneys and livers and things being transplanted in these pictures," Nick mutters. "This is some Jack the Ripper level stuff. Did they even do transplants back when these pictures were drawn?"
"It's medical," I explain. "It was all above board. There was a doctor who lived here, his named was Charles Grazier."
"Oh yeah?" Nick replies, turning to me with a grin. "Maybe he also went by the name of Jack the Ripper!"
"That's absurd," I point out.
"Why?"
"It just is."
"But why, Maddie?" He's clearly enjoying taunting me. "These pictures are savage."
"I'm pretty sure that if he was Jack the Ripper, Jerry would have -"
"You can't deny that it's possible," he continues, interrupting me. "Man, there's a lot of Jack the Ripper in the air right now. It's totally insane how there were those murders, and then we come to this house. It's almost like something got woken up."
Rolling my eyes, I look over at Alex and wait for her to acknowledge that Nick's out of his mind, but instead she seems engrossed in one of the other notebooks. She's muttering to herself under her breath as she reads, and I honestly don't think I've ever seen Alex so interested in a book before. In fact, I definitely remember her saying a few times that she doesn't even like reading. Something about too many words and pages.
"I'll tell you one thing," Nick says after a moment. "Whoever drew these pictures, they had a pretty sick imagination. Doctor or not, they really seem to have had an eye for disgusting imagery." He turns to another page. "I mean, in this one, some poor bitch is getting her guts scooped out, and then there's one that looks like..."
His voice trails off, and he stares at the page for a few seconds before tilting the book toward me.
"That's a fetus!" he proclaims.
"You don't know that," I reply, although I have to admit that he might be right. The drawing does look like a very early-stage fetus.
"Maybe the doctor here was performing back-room abortions," Nick continues. "Either that, or he was experimenting on them. It's pretty crazy to think of all the sick stuff that must have gone on in this place. It'd be a miracle if there aren't ghosts here."
"Shouldn't we be thinking about leaving?" I ask, hoping against hope that Alex will agree with me. "Alex?"
She mumbles something, but I can't make out a word of what she says.
"There's some valuable stuff here," Nick points out. "Earrings, necklaces, stuff like that. Plus these books. It looks like nobody's been here for years. We oughta take this house apart from top to bottom and make sure we get it all. We could get some serious cash. Even if we split it three ways, we'll still all come out on top."
"We can't steal," I tell him.
"We're not stealing," he replies. "You can't steal if there's nobody to steal from. We'll just be taking stuff that's been abandoned. Stuff's supposed to be used. If you ask me, it's criminal not to take it all and use it properly. If I was an earring, I'd want to be hanging from someone's ear. Anyway, it's not like this joint seems to belong to anyone anymore."
"It must belong to someone," I point out. "The stuff here belongs to someone too."
"And you're seriously not tempted to take anything?"
I'm about to tell him that of course I wouldn't do that, that I'm not a thief, but then I remember that I did take one thing. I guess I don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to moral things. And as Nick continues to stare at me, I can't help wondering whether somehow he knows that I did something wrong, that as a thief he can recognize someone who's just like him. It's almost as if he's looking right into my soul and seeing the stain.
"This place is pretty cool," he says finally, looking back down at the notebooks. "The way I see it, we need to take our time figuring out what used to happen here. And it's not like we've got anywhere else to be, right?"
"I'm going to check something out," I mumble, turning and heading to the door. Right now, I feel like I'm in the cross-hairs. I need to get out of this room for a few minutes.
"Don't go too far!" Nick calls after me. "The fun's only just beginning, Maddie! We're gonna make this house give up all its secrets!"
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Doctor Charles Grazier
|
[ Tuesday October 2nd, 1888 ]
"In the name of all that is merciful and good," I mutter under my breath, as I drag Thomas Culpepper feet-first from the study and out into the hall, "when will this madness end?"
Stopping for a moment, I realize that I have no idea where to put this unexpected corpse. The man is quite dead, of that I am certain, yet I cannot exactly toss him out onto the street. I hesitate for a few more seconds, looking around, before spotting the door to the basement. That would be the obvious place to put the man, at least for now, yet there is also the small matter of Catherine.
Realizing that I cannot hear anything from the other side of the door, I drag Culpepper over and then stop again. This time I'm just about able to make out a faint scratching sound that seems to be coming from some distance down the steps. I had not intended to open this door just yet, not until I have a better idea of Catherine's condition, but right now I fear I must take matters into my own hands before the entire situation spirals out of control.
Letting go of the corpse's feet, I remove the key from my pocket and then I unlock the basement door. Then, taking great care lest there be a surprise on the other side, I pull the door open just a crack and stare down into the darkness.
My heart skips a beat as soon as I see Catherine down at the bottom of the steps. She's still trying to crawl up, still filled with furious desperation, but she seems to have made absolutely no progress. A moment later she looks up at me and snarls, as if the mere sight of my face is enough to fill her with hatred. Certainly my Catherine would never look at me in such a manner. I instinctively start to shut the door, before forcing myself to keep it open as I realize that I really must find some place to put Culpepper, at least temporarily.
After all, if another unexpected visitor arrives at the house, I will surely be undone.
"This is just for a short while," I explain, somewhat superfluously, as I take hold of the man's legs once again and haul him through to the top of the steps. "I shall come up with a better plan shortly. Please rest assured that I mean no indignity to your person."
I take a moment to arrange Culpepper, in an attempt to balance him on the steps, but his body is heavy and I do not find it easy to maneuver him. I keep working, and then – just as I am about to call Jack for help – I lose my grip on the corpse's shoulder and he begins to slip.
"No!" I cry out, attempting to grab him again, but I'm too late.
I watch in horror as the lifeless body bumps down the steps, clattering into the darkness before it lands directly against Catherine and flattens her against the cold stone floor. The impact is so great, and so sudden, I cannot help but worry that Catherine's already damaged body might have been irreversibly broken. After a moment, however, I hear a faint snarling sound, and I watch as Catherine struggles to clamber out from beneath Culpepper's corpse.
"I'm sorry!" I tell her. "I did not mean to do that! I only -"
Before I can finish, she leans closer to his face and bites hard on his cheek. I can scarcely believe what I am seeing, but then I hear a tearing sound and I realize that she is indeed attempting to rip away some of the man's skin and flesh. Blood bursts down the side of Culpepper's face as Catherine twists her head to one side, and I am shocked to see stringy meat ripping away from the side of the man's skull as more blood runs down Catherine's chin. I had already seen her as a savage beast, but now the image is complete. She looks like a true monster.
"Dear God," I whisper, invoking a deity in whom I do not believe, "what madness is this?"
I watch for a moment longer, but then suddenly I am overcome by a terrible sense of nausea. Barely even capable of thinking properly, I step back and slam the door shut before starting to turn the key in the lock. My hands are shaking so violently, however, that I am unable to grip the key properly. Only after several failed attempts am I finally able – more through luck than any other factor – to get the key turned, and then I drop to my knees. As I do so, I realize I can still hear a kind of low splitting sound coming from down at the bottom of the steps, and I am quite certain that Catherine continues to feast upon the dead man's body. My hands are still shaking, and after a moment I realize that I can hear a strange, unnatural wailing sound coming from nearby.
I look around, trying to locate the source of this sound, before suddenly I am struck by the most awful realization of all.
It is me.
I am crying out, and I cannot stop myself.
How have I come to this, and how can my Catherine have been reduced to such a state?
The wailing continues, until I reach up and physically force my mouth shut. Even now, a desperate hum emerges from the back of my throat, and it takes several more seconds before I am able to quieten myself entirely. And now, with my hands still clamped against my mouth, I find that I am quite incapable of rational thought. Indeed, I move my hands on the sides of my head as I feel a huge pressure starting to build. At first, I fear that I might never be capable of thought again, but then the pressure subsides and I am left simply with a rumbling pain. I lean forward, with my hands still on my head, until my forehead bumps against the wall, and then I let out a more uncharacteristic and animal-like groan of sorrow. I have begun to wail and sob again. At the same time, I can still hear the sound of chewing coming from down in the basement.
"It cannot end like this," I whisper, trying to find some hope from somewhere. "She can be revived. She must be revived. That cannot be Catherine down there, she would not do something like this."
And yet the sound continues, and it is as if Catherine is not only chewing through Culpepper's body, she is also eating into my own mind. I cannot listen for a moment longer, yet I still cannot tear myself away. Letting out another animalistic whine, I roll onto my side, still clutching the sides of my head. It is as if all my thoughts are crashing together, as if permanent damage is being done to my mind. For a few seconds, I am absolutely convinced that even if this terrible sensation passes, I shall never be myself again.
Finally, somehow, I stumble to my feet and make my way back across the hallway, before stopping again as I reach the door that leads into the study. I feel utterly, utterly drained, as if every bone in my body is trying to pull me down to the floor.
Delilah Culpepper is still unconscious, although Jack has moved her to the reclining chair by the window and he is tending to her with a surprising degree of tenderness. For a few seconds, I can only stare at the scene as I feel all my certainties fall away. Now, with a heavy heart, I can truly contemplate the impossible.
"Tell me," I say to him finally, my voice trembling with fear. "Jack, you must tell me."
He looks over at me. "Tell you what, Sir?"
"What you were talking about before," I continue. "Stories of the dead. Tell me. I fear I am finally ready to listen. I fear I have finally fallen that far, because..."
My voice trails off for a moment. If feel as if – by even contemplating these words – I risk betraying everything I have valued during my life. Science. Medicine. Rational thought. All these qualities and more have been the bedrock of my work, yet now that bedrock is crumbling and I feel superstition coursing through my veins. Perhaps this is weakness, perhaps it is strength, but either way... I need to know more. I need to at least face the possibility that medical science cannot explain this wretched situation.
"Whatever has become of Catherine," I say after a moment, "I am no longer certain that it can be explained by conventional medical science. There. I have spoken words that strike horror into my heart."
"Sir -"
"TELL ME!" I scream, momentarily dispossessed of my senses before quickly recovering my composure. Taking a stumbling step forward, I almost slip and fall, only just managing to steady myself against the door. "For the love of God, man," I continue breathlessly, "tell me what you know. Or what you think you know."
For the love of God?
Did I really say that?
I am Doctor Charles Grazier, I am a distinguished member of no less than five...
No less than...
London...
What am I? What have I become? Have I become mad?
Jack takes a moment to check Delilah once more, before getting to his feet and making his way back over to the desk. He seems fearful, even scared, and I watch as he opens one of the books and reveals a set of handwritten notes that he has made on some of the blank pages. Ordinarily I would be furious that he used my books, but on this occasion I merely walk over to the desk's other side and look down at the scrawled, barely-legible words. Jack's handwriting is obscene, and it is quite clear that he lacks any sort of education whatsoever, yet at this moment I am willing to try anything.
"I pray that I am wrong," he says after a moment, his voice heavy with fear. "I pray that I am a fool, and that these ideas are mere foolish notions. I pray that -"
"Enough of that nonsense," I reply, interrupting him. "You do not need to set the scene with foreboding prattle. Tell me what you think is happening here."
He stares at the pages for a few seconds, before turning to another, revealing a set of symbols that he has jotted down. He looks down at these symbols, as if they possess some meaning that he understands. A moment later he runs a fingertip over them, as if to feel the ink that dries these scratched shapes to the page.
"I am starting to believe," he says finally, "that by attempting to bring your wife back, we have inadvertently stumbled upon something that should have remained in the shadows. Something that some men sense at times, but that no man grasps in its entirety, and that otherwise remains hidden from the lives of mortals. We, however, have somehow drawn back the veil and exposed some hidden aspect of life itself. Of death."
He pauses, and then he looks at me.
"We have gone too far, Doctor Grazier. We have gone farther, perhaps, than is permitted for mere mortals."
"But what does that mean?" I ask, with fresh tears in my eyes. "Tell me in plain English, man."
"I fear," he continues, "that our actions in this house have attracted the attention of something that has been dead for a very long time. Tell me, Doctor Grazier... Have you heard the story of the souls that refuse to die?"
And while once I would have told him to be quiet, now I merely wait for him to explain more.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Maddie
|
[ Today ]
They're laughing like schoolkids.
Sitting up in one of the house's bedrooms, I can't help flinching as I hear Alex and Nick giggling down in the study. When Alex arrived, I thought everything was going to be okay, and that she and I would be able to come up with some kind of plan. Even though she was being a little irritating, for a few minutes I genuinely thought that we'd be okay. Then Nick showed up as well and the whole thing fell to pieces. For the first time, I'm starting to wonder whether I was better off on my own. I mean, sure, I struggled to stay out there on the streets while the police were hunting for a killer, but London won't be in that state forever.
Once the killer has been caught, maybe I should cut the cord and set off without Alex.
"No way!" I hear her call out suddenly, followed by the sound of her and Nick running across the hallway. Then there's a bump, as if one of them just slammed against a wall.
"Get back here!" Nick yells. "You are so dead!"
"Yeah?" she giggles. "What're you gonna do about it?"
"Get real, bitch! You're going down!"
She says something back to him, but all I hear is them rushing down into the basement. They're making so much noise, I almost feel as if somebody should apologize to this old, quiet, proud house. Even now that they're all the way in the basement – two whole storeys below me – I can still hear them laughing and messing around. It's starting to seem as if Nick is changing Alex in some pretty serious ways, and helping her let rip with her less responsible side. Meanwhile I'm up here, feeling like some grumpy a-hole who resents other people having fun. I really hate feeling this way, but -
Suddenly I hear something brushing past me, just over my left shoulder. I turn, thinking that somehow Alex or Nick managed to sneak up here, but there's no sign of anyone. I definitely heard a sound, however, and now I sit in complete silence as I wait for it to return. As the seconds tick past, however, I hear only more giggles from down in the basement, and I start telling myself that the supposed 'brushing sound' was really either a figment of my imagination or something completely innocuous. I've let Alex and Nick get to me, and they've made me jumpy, but I have to hold onto at least some of my sanity.
And then I hear the sound again, accompanied by what I swear is the sound of somebody walking up the house's main staircase.
I remain completely still for a moment, before getting to my feet and hurrying to the door. Just as I look out toward the stairs, however, the sound comes to an abrupt stop. My heart is pounding, but deep down I already know that somehow Alex and Nick are trying to trick me again. I've already fallen for their stupid games twice today, and there's no way I'm going to give them yet another laugh. As I wait in the doorway, however, I realize I can still hear them laughing and messing around in the basement.
Or can I?
The more I listen, the more I realize that they could easily be faking the noise. Maybe they're playing a recording, using it to distract me while they sneak up to embarrass me again. In fact, that'd explain why they're being so obnoxiously loud. That's exactly the kind of thing I can imagine them doing, and I'm really not in the mood to be the butt of another stupid joke.
"I know you're just trying to mess with me," I say finally, convinced that they're hiding somewhere nearby and snickering. "Can you just knock it off? Three times in one day is kind of overkill, don't you think?"
I wait.
No reply.
"I'm sure you can have fun some other way," I continue, looking at the other open doorways as I try to figure out where they've gone. I hate sounding like the responsible one here. "I'm really tired and I just want to figure out what to do next. I don't mind you messing around, but can you leave me out of it?"
I turn to go back into the bedroom, but then I glance back toward the top of the stairs.
"And try not to make so much noise," I add. "I'm -"
Before I can finish, there's a loud bump right next to me, as if somebody stumbled against the wall. I step back instinctively, and this time I can absolutely see that there's nobody here. I peer into the nearest room, to check the wall's other side, but still I don't see anyone. Okay, this is a little spooky, but I guess that just means Alex and Nick are making an extra effort. If they can see me right now, they're probably struggling to keep from laughing out loud. I bet they think they've got me good.
"Just stop it guys," I mutter, turning and heading back into the room, then sitting on the end of the bed as I try to act like I'm totally not freaked out or annoyed. Putting my head in my hands, I sit in silence for a moment, trying to focus my thoughts.
And then someone touches me.
Startled, I sit back as I feel a hand brushing against my wrist. The sensation lingers for a few seconds, even as I stare straight ahead into empty space, and then I feel several fingertips slipping away from the palm of my hand. I try to tell myself that I'm imagining the whole thing, but a moment later the fingertips return, this time on the side of my face.
"Who is that?" I stammer, swallowing hard. I swear, I can actually feel a hand touching my cheek. "What do you want?"
The sensation fades, before quickly returning on the other side of my face.
I instinctively pull back, clambering across the bed and then stumbling off the other side. As I do so, however, I feel a faint twinge of pain in the wound on my waist. That's the first time the wound has caused me any trouble since yesterday, and a moment later I realize that there's a very faint taste of peaches in my mouth.
Backing against the wall, I look around the empty room, but there's definitely no sign of anyone. A few seconds later, however, I hear a faint creaking sound from the floor, as if somebody stepped on one of the old wooden boards. I wait, convinced that at any moment an explanation is going to leap out at me, but then another board creaks and then another, moving slowly across the room as if -
Suddenly the hatch in the floor lifts up, swinging open as if some invisible force wants to see inside. I stare, too horrified to move, until finally the hatch door falls forward and slams shut.
"Who's there?" I whisper.
This has to be a trick.
Damn it, why can I taste peaches?
"Okay, you're going way too far this time," I say out loud, feeling angry and ridiculous at the same time. I'm probably giving them exactly what they want, but I refuse to act like some dumb little kid. "Cut it out!" I yell. "Why do you even care, anyway? Why do you get off on freaking me out?"
I wait, but a moment later I spot my reflection in the faded, dirty mirror on the dresser. I look completely terrified, like some kind of idiotic girl who can't even keep her head together. I hate seeing myself like that, so I start making my way across the room, heading toward the open doorway. I don't even know where I'm going, but I definitely don't want to spend another moment in this room being mocked by a pair of a-holes who won't even show their faces. As I reach the door, I glance at a framed photo on the wall, and I see my reflection as -
Suddenly I freeze, spotting not only my own reflection in the glass but also another face just behind me. For a moment, I can only stare in horror at the sight of an older man whose eyes look to have been torn and cut. Just as I'm trying to convince myself that this is a trick of the light, the man steps toward me and I spin around.
There's nobody there, but there was. I swear, there was a man standing right behind me. And now the taste of peaches is gone, as I look around the room and wait in case the face returns.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Doctor Charles Grazier
|
[ Tuesday October 2nd, 1888 ]
"They are present in every religion," Jack explains, as he turns to another page in the notebook. "Every culture, every belief system. Sometimes prominently, sometimes not. Sometimes just in passing. Sometimes different groups even agree upon a name for them. Ghosts, demons, ghouls... Sometimes it is said that one feels the air chill in their presence, or that one notices an unusual taste in the mouth, or that one hears faint cries. So many variations exist, but there is one factor that is common to all versions of the story."
I wait for him to continue, but he seems genuinely awestruck by his own words.
"And what is that?" I ask finally. "What is this common thread?"
"It is the idea that while most souls move on to some other place, some turn back from the darkness and try to return to the light. They try to scratch and claw their way home, determined to find a way back to life. There is no way for them to succeed, of course, not in the natural order of things, yet still they persist. And occasionally, very occasionally, circumstances conspire to grant them an opening. A chance. And when that chance comes, sometimes one of these dead things is able to wriggle back through. And sometimes, even more rarely, the living become aware of them."
"This is nonsense," I reply. "It is superstition gone mad."
"It might be a clue to what has happened."
"I believe in rational things."
"I believe in what I see."
"I believe in science!" I stammer.
"THIS IS SCIENCE!" he roars, slamming his fist against the desk. "If what I am saying is even remotely correct, then it is absolutely a product of the scientific process! I am not claiming, Doctor Grazier, that your wife's body has become reanimated due to some magical hocus pocus, or by fairy dust dropped by a wizard who flew past on the back of a dragon! I am saying that there is a scientific process that we do not understand, that we are not even aware of, and that somehow this is what has allowed some other soul to crawl by its fingernails into your dead wife's body! Believe me, the idea sounds as impossible to me as it does to you, yet still I cannot dismiss it entirely."
"You are taking this too far," I reply, exasperated by his ideas. Yet for a moment I cannot help staring down at the symbols he has drawn in the notebook. Everything he has told me sounds like madness, yet there is clearly method to this madness, and a kind of logic. I feel as if I am torn between two possibilities, and that at any moment I might yet tip over into such ridiculous beliefs.
"They are markers," he explains. "The symbols you see on this page. They create boundaries that the dead cannot cross."
"Says who?"
"People who have studied these things."
"There is nothing to study."
"And yet they have persisted," he replies, "and they have found methods that seem to work."
"What kind of fool would believe in such things?"
"This fool," he adds. "Perhaps fear compels me, but I find myself thinking more and more that these symbols can help us. I mean to put them about the house, Doctor Grazier, so that your wife... So that that thing can be in some manner contained."
"The basement door is locked," I remind him.
"She will only grow in strength, Doctor Grazier. We must contain her while I determine the best method to destroy her, and then -"
"No!"
"Sir, she -"
"I did not conduct so much work to bring her back, only for you to dispatch her again!"
"That thing is not your wife!" he shouts.
I know that he is right, yet at the same time I have not given up hope that it might become her. I am trapped in the heart of the most dreadful chaos, yet I truly believe that I shall find a way out of that chaos. If I can just gain some time to think, I am certain that my goal of resurrecting Catherine might yet be achieved. I can tolerate setback after setback, and disaster after disaster, so long as I am able to retain some sense of hope. And hope can only survive while Catherine's physical form remains extant. She cannot be destroyed.
Before I can say any of this, however, I hear a faint groaning sound coming from the far side of the room, and I turn just in time to see that Delilah Culpepper is beginning to stir.
"Did she see?" Jack asks. "What I did to her husband, I mean. Did she see it all?"
"Of course she did," I reply. "Why else do you think she fainted?"
"And will she remember?"
I turn to him, and I actually believe that there is a hint of shame in his eyes. Regret, even. It is remarkable how even the dullest and most ape-like face can appear to have such complex emotions, even though I am certain Jack possesses only very basic urges.
"Of course she will remember," I tell him, enjoying the flicker of pain in his eyes. "She will remember every moment."
"I should have been more restrained," he continues. "I should have held back my anger, but the man who so intolerably irritating and his ceaseless babble was keeping me from my work. Nevertheless, I acted more like a beast than a man." He pauses, watching as Delilah continues to let out a series of groans. "She will surely see me as a monster now. How could she ever see me otherwise?"
I am about to tell him that he must put such things out of his mind, but then I glance at the woman again and realize that perhaps she might be useful after all. Indeed, while Delilah Culpepper has always seemed to be a thin and pointless creature, I am suddenly minded to believe that she could be the answer to my predicament. She carries something that I need.
"Leave the room," I whisper after a moment.
"I beg your pardon?" Jack asks.
I turn to him. "Leave the room. Let me speak to her alone when she wakes."
"But -"
"You do not want her to faint again, do you?"
"Of course not, but -"
"I am sure you can find something else to do," I continue. "Jack, I only have Delilah's best interests at heart." Realizing that he still needs to be convinced, I decide to strengthen my hand. "Let me speak to her," I add. "Let me try to explain things, so that perhaps she will be more disposed to your presence. All is not lost, if you dream of her friendship. I might be able to help, but for that to happen you must not be here when she wakes."
"You would do that for me?" he asks.
"Of course," I reply with a smile.
"I shall work on the symbols," he says, picking up one of the notebooks and heading toward the doorway. Just as he is about to leave the room, however, he stops and turns back to me. "Tell her... Tell her that I am not a beast, nor a brute, nor a monster. Tell her that I regret my actions, and that I can only beg her forgiveness."
"Of course," I say again. "Now leave us and shut the door, so that I might speak to her alone."
He does as he's told, and I'm left to walk over to the reclining chair and sit down, just as Delilah's eyes begin to open.
"Where am I?" she whispers, still sounding rather groggy. "What happened?"
"You will remember in a moment," I tell her, although after a moment I am unable to keep from looking down at her belly and thinking of the very young child that resides inside her. "Do not worry, my dear," I continue, as an idea begins to form in my mind and as a smile crosses my lips. "Everything is going to be quite alright."
"But what happened?" she asks, and then I see a hint of horror in her eyes. After a moment, she turns and looks toward the spot where her husband's lifeless body fell. "Oh," she whispers, clearly overcome by shock, "my dear Thomas..."
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Maddie
|
[ Today ]
"I'm fine," I say for the third or fourth time, as I sit at Jerry's kitchen table and watch some of his cats eating their food. "I just got freaked out for a few minutes. I'm sorry I came over in such a panic."
"You saw somebody behind you," Jerry replies, setting a cup of tea on the table for me. "Somebody who wasn't supposed to be there. That's enough to upset anyone."
"There was no-one behind me."
"But you saw them."
"Sometimes people see things."
"You doubt your own eyes?"
"I know that people can react to stress in strange ways."
"Have you hallucinated before?"
"Kind of," I reply. "Maybe. I think so."
"And you think that's all this was? A figment of your imagination?"
"I'm worried I might be losing my mind," I tell him. "Seriously, I think a combination of the house and Alex and Nick has managed to drive me completely crazy. I never thought I was so easily spooked, but it's as if that place really got to me." I pause for a moment. Now that I've calmed down a little since rushing out of the house, I'm starting to realize more and more that I must have had some kind of panic attack. "It'd help," I add finally, "if my so-called friend didn't seem to enjoy scaring me like that. She's put me completely on edge."
"Your friend sounds like a trouble-maker," Jerry says, gasping a little as he walks stiffly back to the kitchen counter. "I don't like trouble-makers. Life is full of enough difficulty as it is, without people going around making it worse." He picks up his cup of tea, holding it carefully in trembling hands, and then he glances back at me. "I wouldn't be so quick to assume, however, that everything you experienced was a trick."
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"I told you that I've been studying that house," he continues, with a hint of fear in his voice. "The face you saw in the reflection... I am wondering whether it might be who I think it is."
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Chapter 21
|
"That's him," I whisper, feeling a shudder pass through my chest as I stare at the photocopy in my hands. "Yeah, that's definitely him, but who is he?"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure. Who is he? How did I see him just now?"
He pauses, before taking the photocopy from my hands and staring down at it for a moment.
"This," he says finally, "is, or was, Doctor Charles Grazier, the man I think I told you about before."
"But I saw a photo in the house," I tell him. "Charles Grazier was..."
My voice trails off as I realize that maybe I've overlooked something. Looking at the photocopy again, I realize that whereas the man in this image is older and fuller in the face, the man in the photo back inside the house was younger and more lively-looking, with a keen and energetic smile. The difference between their expressions is so great that even now – while I'm trying really hard – it takes a moment before I can accept that they're the same man.
"He looks so different," I whisper, "but... I can see it now."
I pause again, before letting out a sigh of relief.
"It's obvious, then," I continue. "I hallucinated him. I'd already seen a photo of him, so it's not weird that my brain threw him back at me."
"You'd seen him when he was younger," Jerry points out, "not when he was an older man. How did your brain manage to age him thirty years?"
"I don't know," I reply, "maybe the light was different or..."
My voice trails off, and I know that I probably sound a little desperate. Still, that's preferable to actually believing that the ghost of this Charles Grazier guy was right there with me in the room.
"I saw another photo," I tell him, remembering the second picture in the house. "He was older in that one. Maybe my brain took that picture and just added something to it."
"Do you have a strong stomach?" Jerry asks.
"I guess."
"Then I shall show you yet another photograph of him," he says, reaching into one of his other folders and rifling through the pages, "one that I obtained by dubious means thanks to a source in the police archive building. I'm not supposed to have some of this paperwork, but it's not as if I'm hurting anyone. Those idiots keep hold of anything and everything, they just like having power. Fortunately I've been around for long enough to make a few connections."
He takes a moment to leaf through some more pages, and then he takes out another photocopy, this time showing a pair of trousers on a table, along with some kind of bulky shape that's taking up most of the image. The whole thing seems like a mess of blacks and grays.
Just as I'm about to ask what I'm seeing, however, the picture suddenly comes into perspective.
"Who's that?" I ask, realizing that I'm looking at a dead body on a mortuary slab. Or at least, what's left of a body.
"Who do you think?" Jerry asks. "It's Doctor Charles Grazier, after he jumped from the window and landed on the spiked railings." He points at the neck area. "See the face?"
"Not really," I reply, squinting to get a better look.
"Of course not. The spike went in through his belly and tore him open all the way to the top of his head. They say he was only identified by his clothing. What a way to go, eh? Spilled out all across the street in front of everyone, like a sack of offal. According to a contemporary newspaper report, several people fainted when they saw the bloody mess, and some people even say you can still see a hint of red staining the pavement outside the house. I don't know about that, I haven't seen it myself, but the man's death was a true shock for the entire neighborhood. It's said that he was a proud and arrogant man, a man who believed wholeheartedly in his own talents. Why do you think such a man would suddenly decide one day to kill himself?"
"I don't know," I mutter, "but I guess people have their reasons. Maybe he had doubts that he never revealed to anyone. It was the nineteenth century, right? I guess men had to keep their feelings to themselves, and maybe his fears or his grief just came out one day."
"His wife's body was never found."
"So maybe that drove him over the edge. He missed her, so he wanted to go and join her."
"There are other links I've been making," Jerry continues, setting the photocopy down and then taking some more photos from his folder. This time there are two faces on the image, and I find myself staring down at a middle-aged man and woman. "Doctor Thomas Culpepper," he adds, "and his wife Delilah."
"Delilah?" I whisper, taking the photocopy from him and looking more closely at the woman's face. "That name keeps coming up."
"In what way?"
"There are some notebooks I haven't brought over yet," I explain, "and in one of them, there's a sketch of a woman with her belly open and the name Delilah Culpepper scribbled nearby." I pause, wondering how much I should admit, before realizing that at this point I might as well be completely honest. "I recognize it because I'd already heard it once before, when I was talking to... a friend."
"Around the time of Doctor Charles Grazier's suicide," Jerry reply, "his former colleague Doctor Thomas Culpepper disappeared. Vanished completely, off the face of the planet, with no trace left behind. Quite unusual for such a distinguished man. And you'll remember that Catherine Grazier vanished too."
"But Delilah didn't vanish," I point out. "She was found murdered quite a way from here."
"In Gregson Way," he replies. "Yes, I know. These coincidences are really piling up, aren't they? There was even talk for a while that Delilah Culpepper was another victim of Jack the Ripper, but the style of the killing didn't match. Whoever murdered her, he didn't take any of her organs. What he did take, however, was her unborn baby."
I shudder as I think back to the sight of the woman in the alley. I know she was just a hallucination, but it's still creepy to think that somehow the idea of her wormed its way into my mind and came out in such a bizarre, freakish vision. And now, as I stare at the old photo, I can't help remembering the woman's anguished voice as she screamed at me. I can still hear her words echoing in my thoughts.
"WHERE IS HE?"
"This doesn't mean anything," I say cautiously, turning to Jerry. "That house is just a house."
"You don't believe that," he replies. "I see it in your eyes."
"Of course I believe it."
He shakes his head.
"I don't believe in ghosts!" I say firmly.
"I think you do. Deep down."
"Of course I don't. I spent long enough in that house for a ghost to show itself. Just because I saw a few weird things, that doesn't mean the place is haunted. It's nothing more than an old, neglected house that nobody cares about anymore."
"I have spare bedrooms," he says. "I think it would be better if you stayed here tonight."
"That's really kind of you, but -"
"There are things I can't tell you," he adds earnestly. "Things that I suspect, but that I can't quite speak of, not yet. You'd think that I'm crazy, if you don't already, but I've been researching that house for all of my adult life and I'm finally starting to understand some of the things that happened there. I thought the ghosts were dormant, but something must have woken them, and you could be in terrible danger. Please, don't ask me to explain, but accept my offer. Don't spend another night at that place!"
"I already told you," I reply, "I don't believe in ghosts."
"And I already told you," he says firmly, "that your voice says one thing, and your eyes say another. You have nothing to prove to anyone, my dear. Please, just trust me. Do not spend another night there. It's not safe!"
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Doctor Charles Grazier
|
[ Tuesday October 2nd, 1888 ]
"I must confess," I say to Delilah finally, after we have sat in silence for some time, "I expected a different reaction from you. You are far calmer than one would expect of a lady in such circumstances."
As she stares at the window, there are hints of tears in her eyes. But only hints. I had assumed that she would weep and moan, that she would become inconsolable and that I would have to calm her down, but instead she seems lost in thought now that she remembers the moment of her husband's death. Is it possible that Delilah Culpepper, despite her fragile appearance, possesses a more formidable constitution? I can scarcely believe that anyone – let alone a woman – could react in such a manner.
I blink, and in that half-second of darkness I once again see Catherine stumbling toward me on the beach, rotten and putrid. The image vanishes as soon as I open my eyes, but for a few seconds I am struck by a violent fear.
"Would it have been quick?" Delilah asks, turning to me.
"Your husband's death?" I pause, before nodding. "He would barely have known it was happening."
"And Jack..."
She flinches, as if the mere mention of his name has had some terrible impact.
"And it was Jack who killed him?" she adds. "I know I saw it happen, but still I can't quite believe that it's true."
"Try to understand," I reply, "that Jack is a beast from the streets. Perhaps he fooled you by affecting the air of a gentleman, but nothing can change his true nature. He is a thing, the product no doubt of equally wretched parents. I imagine he grew up in the most terrible squalor. He is a criminal, I am sure, and I would not like to know how many people have died at his hands." I pause, aware that she must wonder why I allowed such a creature into my home. There is, really, only one possible lie I can tell. "I thought I could reform him," I explain. "In this, I was terribly, tragically mistaken."
"You must think I am so cold," she continues finally. "Oh, Doctor Grazier, you must think I am the most awful person in the world. I should be in floods of tears at news of my husband's death, I should be inconsolable with grief. You must wonder why I am not."
"The question had crossed my mind," I admit, and then I blink again, and again I see Catherine lunging at me. I must try not to blink.
"Do you recall when you came home the other day," she asks, "and chanced upon Jack tending to the wound on my knee?"
"Indeed. A most surprising scenario."
"He barely touched me. In truth, Doctor Grazier, he was very careful and delicate. His hands were not the hands of a beast, but of a kind and gentle man." She pauses, and now there are more tears in her eyes. "It was the most tender moment I have ever felt in my life. I suppose my husband hardened me over the years. Thomas was not a bad man, Doctor Grazier, not most of the time. However, when he had been drinking, he could..."
Her voice trails off.
"Was he violent?" I ask.
She pauses, before nodding.
"I can scarcely believe it," I tell her, struggling to keep from blinking, even though I can feel my eyes watering. If I blink, I shall surely see Catherine on the beach again, coming toward me.
"Nor I." Delilah sniffs back more tears. "He could be so charming when he was not under the influence of alcohol, yet after a night at the club he might come home and clatter about for hours. It was on one such night that he bumped against me at the top of the stairs and sent me tumbling down. I don't suppose you know, Doctor Grazier, that I was with child once before, about two years ago?"
"I did not know that."
"The child was lost when I fell," she explains, as she places a hand on her belly. "And so help me God, I changed in that moment. I tried so hard to forgive Thomas, but I never could. I was no longer able to stand his touch, though of course this only made him angrier and made his touch more harsh. I feigned a certain degree of contentment in public, but I felt dead to the world, at least until the other day when Jack touched my leg. I know I most likely sound utterly foolish, but in that moment Jack awakened something. Oh Doctor Grazier, is it wrong of me to feel such things?"
I pause for a moment, before nodding.
"Yes," I tell her. "Yes, it is quite wrong and unnatural. You should be ashamed of yourself."
She lowers her head, and I am sure that my words have cut through to her.
Still, she seems to be a more unusual woman than I had ever realized. In the past, whenever I met her in the street with her husband, she would be mostly quiet save for some outbursts of over-exuberance. Now I find that she possesses some degree of depth, and that she is thoughtful, and that for a woman she seems unusually perceptive and self-critical. These qualities can be troublesome in a wife, of course, and I am starting to realize that Culpepper must have had his hands full. Perhaps I am starting to understand why he used to strike her.
"It's a boy, you know," she says suddenly.
"I beg your pardon?"
"In here." She places a hand across her belly, drawing my gaze. "I know. I don't know how I know. I just do. Tell me, do you think a mother's intuition can perhaps give her some insight into such things?"
"Of course not," I reply. "There is no such instinct."
"But there might be."
"There is no science to support just a thing."
"And yet I feel it."
"That is an illusion," I tell her. "You wish it to be so, and therefore you imagine various symptoms. In truth, the child is connected to you merely by a single cord that runs into its belly. There can be no emotional connection, no instinct, whatsoever."
"You seem so certain," she says meekly, setting her other hand on her belly as if she thinks she might feel something. She is of course far too early in her pregnancy to show, let alone to feel the child's kicks.
I open my mouth to explain why I am right, but suddenly I am very much aware that my eyes feel dusty. I have been careful not to blink for several minutes now, and this has left me with an extremely unpleasant sensation. Indeed, as I sit here now, I have to fight constantly to resist the urge to close my eyes for even a second.
"Are you alright?" Delilah asks.
"Of course," I reply. "Why do you ask?"
"Your eyes..."
She hesitates, and a moment later I lose my focus and make the mistake of blinking. I see Catherine, of course, as if the dream is leaking into this real world. And she is getting closer.
"Might I speak to him?" Delilah asks suddenly.
"To whom?"
"To... him..."
At first, I assume she cannot possibly mean Jack, but then it occurs to me that I have once again under-estimated her. Perhaps, in some pathetic way, she actually believes that Jack has value.
"That is out of the question," I tell her.
"Only for a moment."
"To say what?"
"That would be private between the two of us." She hesitates, and I believe she might even be blushing. "I know I am not reacting properly," she adds, "but I wish to speak to Jack alone."
"He is from the street," I point out, "and just an hour or so ago he killed your husband in cold blood."
"I know." Again, she looks down at her hands. "I know, I know. It's just that for some reason I feel drawn to him. I should like to hear him explain why he did what he did, so that I might better understand. I think I should like very much to hear the explanation in his own words, and in his own voice."
As she says those words, it is I who reach a better understanding. She might not be willing to admit so much, not openly, but I believe Delilah Culpepper is actually pleased that her husband is dead. She knows she cannot celebrate, but at the same time she can only do so much to hide her true feelings. The whole situation is quite extraordinary, and for a moment I am minded to wonder whether Delilah is in fact a very deep and thoughtful woman. She cannot be, of course, but this is certainly the impression she gives.
"You must wait here," I tell her.
"I should like to get some air."
"And you shall in due course, but please... Just wait here for a short while."
She hesitates, as if she means to argue with me, but then she nods obediently.
Getting to my feet, I take a moment to adjust my shirt before heading over to the closed door. The room is so utterly silent, save for the sound of the floorboards creaking beneath my feet, and this silence compels me to wonder whether I might say a few more things to the woman, just to set her mind at ease. When I glance back at her, however, I realize that it makes no difference whether or not she is at ease. All that matters is that she remains here until I am ready for her. And barring one or two complications, I shall be ready for her very soon.
After a moment, as she begins to sob, I cannot help but look once again at her belly. Perhaps that awful dream earlier was a sign, a way for my mind to show me the way. I cannot give up yet, and the final solution to this nightmare is growing in soft tissue before me. All that remains is for me to extract that solution and prepare it for Catherine.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Maddie
|
[ Today ]
"Where the hell have you been?" Alex yells excitedly, rushing over to me before I've even got to my feet after climbing through the broken window. "Maddie, this craziness just got really real!"
"Actually -"
"We've hit the jackpot!" she adds, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me hard. "This is so unreal, my head is spinning!"
"What's wrong?" I ask, pulling away. "Alex, can you just calm down and tell me what happened?"
"This way!"
Grabbing my arm, she starts pulling me toward the door on the far side of the hallway, but I quickly slip free.
"Maddie, you have to see this!" she continues, trying again to grab my arm. "You won't believe what we've discovered! It's like the craziest, most insane thing ever, and the best part is that I think it might actually be our ticket off the streets! When you see what Nick and I have found, and what we've figured out, this whole house is actually gonna start making sense. He was joking earlier, but now I think he's actually right!"
She grabs my arm again, and again I pull free.
"Maddie, seriously!"
"I need to talk to you," I tell her. "Alex, the guy next door has offered to -"
"It's Jack the Ripper!" she blurts out.
I stare at her, and I honestly think she might have lost her mind.
"What?" I ask finally, before realizing that this is just another of Alex's dumb ideas. "Listen, the -"
"We've found it all!" she continues. "I know this is gonna sound totally nuts, but Nick and I have found a whole ton of stuff. It doesn't make any sense at all, until you take one tiny leap into the unknown and realize that there's a possibility that ties it all together! We're sitting on some grade-A shit here, Maddie!"
Grabbing my arm for a third time, she starts dragging me toward the study. This time, I can't quite twist free.
"Alex..."
"It's gonna blow your mind!"
"I don't want my mind blown," I tell her, glancing briefly – and with a flash of fear – toward the staircase that leads up into the darker upper floor of the house. "Alex, I just need to tell you that I'm -"
"Get your ass in here, dummy!"
With that, she grabs my arm and manhandles me through the doorway. I open my mouth to tell her that I don't even want to be here, but then I see that Nick is sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by scores of open notebooks as well as various other pieces of paper. And when he looks at me, I see a sense of absolute awe.
"Tell her!" Alex says, stopping behind me. "Tell her, Nick! Show her!"
"Do you know what this place is?" Nick asks, his voice trembling slightly.
"It's a house," I reply, although I already know that's not going to be the right answer. "It's just a big, empty house."
Reaching down, he picks up one of the framed photographs from upstairs, and then he holds it out so that I can see the happy, smiling couple. Or at least, I'd be able to see them if his hand wasn't shaking.
"This guy," he says cautiously, "is -"
"Charles Grazier," I reply, interrupting him. "Sure, I know. He's the doctor who used to live here."
"He was Jack the Ripper."
I wait for him to start laughing, but he seems deadly serious.
"Charles Grazier," he continues after a moment, "was Jack the Ripper. The Jack the Ripper."
"Isn't this intense?" Alex says, placing a hand on my shoulder. "We're geniuses. We figured out something that no-one else, not even the police, could ever get right. They've had over a hundred years to work out the guy's real name, and we did it in, like, less than twenty-four hours."
"What makes you think Doctor Grazier was Jack the Ripper?" I ask, trying to sound like I'm taking them seriously even though the whole idea is totally ludicrous.
"I need to do some research to be certain," Nick replies. "This is one of those times I actually wish I had a smartphone. I'll have to go out later and nick one from somewhere, just to pin down a few details, but I'm already pretty much there. The basic profile fits, Maddie. This Grazier guy was a doctor, a surgeon, and it's obvious that he was into doing stuff at home. I mean, he's basically got a full-on operating theater down there in the basement."
"Maybe he just liked working from here," I point out.
"It was more than that," he says, before holding up one of the notebooks. "These are his ideas, all written down and explained. He was carrying out some kind of research, and he needed body parts to do it. My theory is that he operated on women here at the house, but that sometimes he went out and ripped organs out of prostitutes he found in the street. The police always said that they thought Jack the Ripper might be some kind of trained surgeon, and they were right. Now we just need to figure out why he was doing all these operations, 'cause I don't think he was simply insane. I think he was trying to achieve something specific."
"You're making a lot of assumptions," I point out.
"And then there are these," he adds, setting the notebook down and picking up an old, fragile-looking piece of paper from a nearby pile. "These are the proof, Maddie. Whatever else you might think, you cannot argue with these little beauties."
"They're the letters," Alex whispers in my ear.
"What letters?" I ask.
"The ones that were sent to the police," Nick explains. "Taunting letters, telling the cops how they'd never catch him. You must have seen movies about Jack the Ripper. He was always sending letters in, sometimes he even gave them tips about who he was gonna kill next. He was like the original Zodiac. Jack the Ripper was the first killer who properly made fun of the cops for not being able to catch him."
"Why would he even do that?" I ask. "You make it sound like he wanted to get caught."
"That's a good question," he replies, turning the piece of paper so that I can see the blood-stained page. "It does seem a little theatrical, but then maybe he just liked having fun. Some of these letters are early drafts of the famous 'From Hell' letter, like he had to do it several times before he felt it was ready. Or maybe he was kinda crazy after all, in a little way. I don't know, it's almost like one guy had two completely different sides, but we can figure out the details later. Right now, Maddie, you've got to face facts. We solved one of the biggest mysteries in history. We found the true identity of Jack the Ripper!"
"We're gonna be rich," Alex says.
I turn to her.
"We are!" she continues, her eyes bright with excitement. "Maddie, we're gonna be rolling in it! I'm gonna buy a goddamn gold-plated mansion and a Ferrari and a swimming pool and all that shit! None of us will ever have to sit freezing on the street again!"
"We..."
My voice trails off, as I start to realize that maybe they're onto something after all. I mean, the idea is totally crazy, and both Alex and Nick seem to be running far too easily with the whole Jack the Ripper thing, but I can't deny that there are a lot of coincidences starting to pile up here. In fact, as I stare down at the photo of Charles Grazier and his wife, I can't help wondering whether I really am looking at the face of Britain's most notorious serial killer.
"We should call someone," I say finally. "We have to call the police. We have to tell people. Whether it's right or wrong, we have to get an outside opinion."
"Not so fast," Alex says, gripping my arms from behind and leaning close to my ear. I swear, I can hear the anticipation in her voice. "We can't let anyone steal this from us, Maddie. We have to be smart and figure out what to do. Right now, the three of us are the only people in the world who know. Right now, Jack the Ripper is all ours!"
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Doctor Charles Grazier
|
[ Tuesday October 2nd, 1888 ]
"Leave? But where shall I go?"
"Just across the city for a few hours," I tell Jack as we stand in the garden, out of Delilah's earshot. "I have some items that I need you to fetch. I would go myself, but I have far too much work to get done here."
"But -"
"I also wish you to bring more information about the unnatural phenomena you mentioned earlier."
"But Delilah -"
"She does not want to see you at this moment."
"Did she say that?" he asks plaintively, clearly disappointed. "Did she use those very words?"
"She did," I reply. "You must understand, she loved her husband very much. Whatever foolish notions you allowed yourself to pursue, you must realize they were quite wrong. An elegant lady such as Delilah Culpepper would never see you as anything more than a brute. And that was true before you killed her husband. Now, she would spit on your face if she saw you. Why, it is a miracle that I persuaded her not to call for the police yet."
"Of course," he says, shaking his head. "How could I have believed that she might think differently?"
"At this moment," I continue, "she sits in my study, plotting furiously to gain revenge. She wants you dead."
"Perhaps she is right to think that way."
"I need time to make her see otherwise," I tell him. I hesitate, before placing a hand on his shoulder. I do not wish to touch the man, of course, but perhaps at this moment it would be wise to make him think that I am on his side. "Go and fetch the things I need. Take your time, do not come back for an hour or two. I promise that by then, I will have made Delilah see sense. She is in shock, but she might yet be persuaded to see you in a more gallant light. All is not lost, Jack. You must simply trust me. Perhaps, if you are lucky, you might be able to touch her leg again."
"Her leg?" He furrows his brow. "Her leg is not my concern at this moment."
"You know what I mean," I say with a sigh. "I mean that the whole mess can be salvaged, but only if you go away for a few hours."
"And the basement?" he asks. "What shall we do with the thing in the basement?"
"Upon your return, I shall listen to your suggestions," I lie, "and do whatever you think best. Do you understand now? You must trust me in this matter, and in return I shall trust you in others. That is only fair, is it not? Perhaps then you can write some more of those awful letters to the newspapers. That was your intention when you first came here, was it not? It might be good for you to remember that."
"Of course," he replies, clearly exhausted by all that has happened. "You are right, Doctor Grazier. I should never have doubted you." He hesitates, staring at me. "Are your eyes alright, Sir? They -"
"My eyes are fine!" I snap.
As if to prove him wrong, I blink, but of course I immediately I see Catherine again. With each blink, she is getting closer to me across the shore. I must act before she reaches me.
"If they are irritated," he says, "I -"
"Think not of my eyes," I say firmly, "and instead attend to your own tasks. I have told you what you must do, Jack. Now get out of here and do it!"
He pauses, and then he nods.
"Of course," he says, turning to leave. "Please, tell Delilah that I am sorry for what happened. Tell her that if I could take back my rash actions, I would. I know it will be scant consolation for her, but please let her know that I am sickened by my rashness."
As he slopes away, heading toward the gate, I cannot help but feel desperately sorry for the brute. He has surprised me by imitating the ways of high society, although he has never risen above a mere imitation. Now, as he leaves, he has no way of knowing that by the time he returns, his poor dear Delilah will be no more, and that he himself shall swiftly join her in the grave. Then, finally, this madness will be over and life can go back to normal.
And then I blink, and I see Catherine reaching for me, and I realize that there is no time to spare.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Chapter 25
|
"He left? But where did he go?"
"Who can say?" I reply, as I sit next to Delilah and hold her trembling hands. "A creature such as Jack most likely skulks back to the sewers. I doubt he'll ever trouble you again."
"And he did not even want to say goodbye?"
"In all honesty, my dear, I doubt he even remembered you. I believe his brain is not fully developed, which means that he cannot retain very much information. You must not take this personally. It is merely his nature. I do understand your confusion, though. He was able to fool many people."
She stares at me for a moment, and I dare say I can see more and more tears welling in her eyes until finally she lets out a sob and buries her head in her hands. Great convulsing fits shake her shoulders, and the sobbing sound quickly gives way to a series of whimpering moans.
"There there," I say, patting her gently on the shoulder. "You have been through so much. Certainly more than any woman might reasonably be expected to endure."
"What will the police say?"
"The police?"
"When they come to take Thomas away." She turns to me. "Oh, but where is he? Did you take him to one of the other rooms?"
"Of course."
"Might I see him?"
"I think that would be unwise."
"But I must!"
She gets to her feet, but I quickly put pressure on her shoulder and force her back down onto the chair.
"He would not want you to see him as he is presently," I tell her. The urge to blink is relentless, but I believe I have finally mastered my eyelids. They might sing to me of their desire to close, they might make my eyes feel as if heavy scratches are criss-crossing the surface, but I shall not yield.
Not until my work is done.
"Night after night," Delilah says after a moment, "I imagined what it would be like if Thomas left my life. I do not mean that I wanted him dead, merely that I wished so very much to live without his presence. These thoughts did not crystallize in my mind until that day with Jack, but as soon as he touched my leg I was filled with some kind of passion that I have never felt before, and I -"
"Speak of this no more," I say, interrupting her. "It does none of us any good."
Looking past her, I see that the afternoon sky is beginning to darken. If I want this nightmare to be over by daybreak tomorrow, I do not have much time.
"Look out there," I continue, pointing toward the window. "Does the natural world not fill you with wonder? Are you not moved to tears by the colors of the clouds, or by the sunlight that even now catches against the glass?"
"It all seems to hopeless," she replies, still not turning to look.
"Then try," I say, gently touching her chin and tilting her head until she is facing the window. "Just try for a moment. Try to feel some sense of calm in your soul. Feast upon the sight of nature's miracles."
She tries to turn back to me, but I hold her chin until I feel her relax a little, and then I let go. She looks toward the window, while I reach into my pocket and quickly take out the cloth and small bottle that I retrieved from my desk earlier.
Still my eyelids sing of their desire to close. I fancy I almost hear their voices.
While Delilah is facing away from me, I tip some liquid from the bottle, soaking the cloth. Then I set the bottle aside, before hesitating for a moment. I have done far worse things, of course, and I have committed deeds that required a greater degree of bravery. Never, however, to somebody I already knew. Delilah Culpepper might not be the most vital woman in the world, but I find it hard to believe that I have arrived at this dreadful moment.
Suddenly she starts turning to me.
Panicking, I immediately place the cloth over her face.
She starts struggling, but I hold her tight and keep the cloth pressed against her nose and mouth. I can hear her desperately trying to breathe, and I know that with each gasp she's drawing more and more of the mixture into her body. Already I can feel her struggle starting to subside, and finally she slumps back against me. I keep the cloth in place for a few more seconds, just to be absolutely certain that its job is done, and then I move it aside as I gently let Delilah's unconscious body settle against the reclining chair. She is so light, and possessed of such a delicate frame, that the burden is scarcely much greater than when one moves an injured bird.
"You have new life within you," I tell her, moving some stray strands of hair from across her face. "I need that life for someone else. For someone important."
For someone I would see now, if I dared close my eyes.
Suddenly filled with the sense that I am about to blink, I turn and stagger to my desk. I know that if my eyes close for even a fraction of a second, I shall see Catherine coming at me on the beach, and I cannot allow that to happen. After all, each time she seems to come a little closer, and I cannot shake a superstitious fear that when she gets to me I might be overtaken by some terrible consequence. The idea is absurd, but it has taken root in my mind and I am not certain that I can refrain from blinking, at least not for long enough to complete the task at hand.
Clearly, there is only one logical course of action available to me.
I open the desk drawer and search frantically until I find my silver letter-opener and then, without even stopping to plan the procedure, I reach up and start slicing through the lid on my left eye. If the cursed things are gone, then blinking will be impossible.
"There!" I gasp, pulling the eyelid away and letting it fall onto the desk, where it lands amid drips of blood. The pain is intense, yet it is a type of pain that I notice without truly feeling. Perhaps the righteousness of my cause is enough to offset any meager discomfort. "Traitor!" I stammer, still staring at the eyelid. "Betrayer! You shall not fool me!"
And then I start working on the other eyelid, slicing as fast as I can manage until it too comes away in my bloodied fingers.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Maddie
|
[ Today ]
"Charles Grazier's wife disappeared," I tell Nick as I set the photo on the desk next to him. "I was talking to Jerry, the guy next door, and he told me what he'd managed to find out so far. Catherine Grazier just vanished right around the time of his death."
"He probably murdered her," he replies.
"But they look like they were really in love," I point out, still staring at the photo.
"Get real, Maddie. I'm sure everything was sweetness and roses for a while, but if the bitch found out that her husband was Jack the Ripper, do you seriously think shit wouldn't go down? He probably had to kill her, to stop her blabbing to everyone. If you want to get all romantic about it, he probably shed a tear or two at the time, but he did what had to be done. To be honest, I kind of respect a guy who doesn't beat around the bush."
"It still doesn't feel right," I reply, before glancing across the study toward the open door. "How much longer is Alex going to be?"
"Don't worry about her," he replies, "she can take care of herself. She's checking out the other rooms in case there's anything we missed. To be honest, she was bugging me earlier. I get that she's excited, but it's a bit soon to be fantasizing about gold-plated Ferraris and all that jazz."
"I think I might go and help her."
"No." He grabs my arm for a moment, before letting go slowly. "Stay here with me. It's cool working like this. Like, no offense to Alex, but she's not always the sharpest tool in the belt. You're different, Maddie. I feel like it's really good to have your help."
Looking at the old notebooks, I reach down and start flicking through the pages. I really, really want to get out of here, but I guess maybe I should help Nick a little. After a moment I come to a section in one of the notebooks where the handwriting is completely different.
"It's almost like two people," I mutter. "It's like we're missing someone."
"He probably went totally Jekyll and Hyde," Nick replies. "Hey, that's an idea! Maybe Jekyll and Hyde were based on this guy!"
"I think Jekyll and Hyde came out before Jack the Ripper."
"No, I'm pretty sure you're wrong. I think it was after."
"Whatever." I flick through some more pages, seeing a huge amount of scribbled notes, some of which includes the symbols that I found on the step in the hallway. "It really does seem like someone else wrote this section. Do you think it's possible that Doctor Grazier had an accomplice?"
"No chance. Jack the Ripper would have worked alone."
"But -"
"Think about it, Maddie. The guy was a total loner, he was basically a serial-killing version of Batman in nineteenth century England. Don't go come up with crazy ideas that he had his own Robin, though. His handwriting just changed, that's all. He probably went totally mad at the end."
"He committed suicide," I reply. "He jumped out of one of the upstairs windows and landed on the spiked railings out front."
"Sick!" Nick says with a laugh. "I would so love to see something like that! But it kind of proves my point that he lost his marbles."
"We're still missing something," I point out. "His motivation still doesn't make sense."
"But you agree that we're right, don't you?"
I want to tell him that we need to be cautious, but at the same time I can't deny that there's some very convincing evidence right here on the desk. Sure, I'm still having to make a few leaps and assumptions, but I can see the bare outline of a compelling argument, and I definitely wouldn't bet money on Nick being wrong.
"We really need to tell someone about this," I say finally. "There are experts out there, people who've studied this their whole lives. We need to get them involved so that they can go through all this stuff and figure out the truth."
"And we'll totally do that," he replies, before reaching out and touching my wrist again, "but only after we've worked out how to safeguard our investment."
"Investment?"
"Our time. Our good work here." He pauses, staring at me in silence as if he's lost in thought. "There's going to be a huge amount of money in this, Maddie," he adds after a moment. "Book rights, film rights, talk-show appearances, and a million other things. Hell, you deserve your share, 'cause you're the reason we ended up here, and you're contributing right now to it all. And without being immodest, I deserve my share 'cause I'm the one who really put all the pieces together. But Alex?"
He glances toward the door, as if he's worried about us being overheard, and then he turns back to me.
"She hasn't really done anything," he adds, noticeably lowering his voice to barely more than a whisper. "Instead of splitting the whole thing three ways, we could just cut her out and walk off with more for the two of us. Honestly, I reckon that's the only fair way to go about it."
Shocked, I realize that he's serious. And then, slowly, he moves his hand down over my wrist and starts slipping his fingers between mine.
"We make a good team, Maddie," he continues. "I've always liked you, you know. Alex tries to hide you away from people. She wants a little puppy dog who follows her around, but I know you're better than that. When this all blows up and we're getting attention for our discovery, I really want to experience that with you. Not with Alex, though. She's totally immature and crazy. Sometimes she even makes me do bad things."
"Like what?" I ask, trying to pull my hand away but quickly finding that he's persistent.
"She gets into my head," he explains earnestly. "I'm a good guy, Maddie, I swear. I'm not perfect, but I'm not the asshole I've been lately. But whenever I'm with Alex, she finds a way to bring out my worst side. All the stuff before at that Simon guy's house... I'd never have done any of that if Alex hadn't been goading me on. She was out there, you know, smashing things up in one of those masks. I need to get away from her, I need a better influence." He pauses again, staring deep into my eyes. "I think you'd be a good influence, Maddie. I think you could really help me. And I'd help you, in return. We'd make a pretty good team."
I want to slip my hand away from his, but I'm actually starting to feel bad for him. And then, suddenly, he pulls his hand free.
"Forget it," he mutters. "I shouldn't blame Alex. It's not like she's got mind-control powers. I should stand up to her more."
"It can be hard," I tell him.
"Do you ever think about ditching her?" he asks.
I open my mouth to tell him that I don't, but then I realize that he's right. I have thought about leaving Alex behind, although it never occurred to me that someone could guess that. Especially someone like Nick.
"We're all in this together," I point out finally, trying to be non-committal. "Alex is part of it too."
I wait for a reply, but he puts his head in his hands and sighs. Figuring that maybe I should just leave him alone for a while, I'm about to turn and leave the room when suddenly I realize that he's sniffing a lot, and then I spot a few tears falling onto the desk. Finally, not really knowing what else to do, I place a hand on his shoulder.
"It's okay," I continue. "Hey, don't get upset. Everything's going to be fine."
Sniffing again, he turns to me with tear-filled eyes.
"You're a good person, Maddie," he says with a faint, sad smile. "I wish I could be more like you."
"I'm no saint," I tell him.
"I bet you've never done anything truly bad. Not like me."
I hesitate for a moment, as more tears run down his cheeks.
"I stole some stuff from here," I tell him finally, and in a strange way it actually feels good to get the truth out. "Just some jewelry from upstairs, but I still did it, so I guess I'm a thief now. I feel bad about it all the time, and I wish I could take it back, but at the same time I really needed the money. So I guess I'm not as perfect as you thought, huh? I've got my rough edges, just like everyone else."
"On the contrary," he replies with a smile, "you've actually just impressed me a little bit more."
He pauses, before getting to his feet. And then, before I have a chance to react, he leans closer and kisses me. I know I should pull away, but somehow I let the kiss linger for a few seconds before finally turning my face. He tries to kiss me again, and this time I step back.
"I'd like to do that some more," he tells me.
"I should go and find Alex," I reply, not even managing to look him in the eye as I turn and head out of the room. I mumble something about checking to see that Alex is okay, but I'm pretty sure that I'm already blushing like crazy.
"Come back down soon, yeah?" Nick calls after me. "I like you, Maddie. I think we've got big things ahead of us. Mega things!"
As I head up the stairs, I can't help thinking that I'm a complete idiot. I mean, how stupid can I get? I should never have let that happen, and now I can't even think straight. I'm in such a loop, I somehow manage to knock the bowl of cat food at the top of the stairs, spilling the meat everywhere. As I crouch down to scoop it back up, I feel as if I'm burning with embarrassment. I'm not good around other people, I make dumb decisions, and I'm better off alone.
And then, hearing a sniffing sound nearby, I turn and look into one of the bedrooms, and suddenly I freeze as I see Alex kneeling on the floor with blood dripping from her hands.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Doctor Charles Grazier
|
[ Tuesday October 2nd, 1888 ]
Carefully pulling the basement door open just a little, I peer down the steps and feel an immediate shudder as I spot Thomas Culpepper's remains on the concrete floor at the bottom.
Or at least, part of his remains.
In truth, all I can really make out so far is what looks like a human spine that has been torn out from beneath the fabric of his clothes. There's meat glistening on the bone, but not much, and it is almost as if Culpepper's corpse has been stripped by some kind of wild animal. His legs are at impossible angles to one another, and as my eyes adjust to the darkness I am able to see a thick, smeared trail of blood leading away from the stairs and deeper into the basement. It is as if Catherine – or rather, the thing in Catherine's body – was driven insane by the prospect of fresh meat. Thomas Culpepper has been almost entirely consumed.
Good.
That is what I had hoped.
That, at least, gives me a chance.
With a fire-poker in each hand, I start making my way down the steps. I know which of them creak, of course, so I am able to remain very quiet as I get closer to the bottom. Now that I can see Culpepper's remains properly, I realize that his body seems to have been torn and chewed through ragged gaps in the fabric of his suit. His spine, meanwhile, pokes out above the rest of the mess. After a moment, spotting the remains of a forearm, I pick the tattered limb up by one end and grimace as soon as I see the torn muscle that still just about clings to the bone.
My Catherine would never do anything like this.
This is the final proof, if proof were needed, that there is not one scintilla of Catherine in that creature. She must be elsewhere, waiting for me to bring her back to the world.
I want nothing more than to turn around and retreat up the stairs, but I know I must keep going into the main part of the basement. I have to gain access to my tools, and to the operating table, and this mean that I must find a way to clear the creature out of the way. I should have sent Jack down to do this, but alas I did not realize this before he left, and I cannot possibly wait until he comes back.
Fortunately I have come up with an idea, and the tattered corpse of Thomas Culpepper suggests that my plan has a good chance of working. Besides, I am poised to turn and run if I feel that I am in danger, and I am confident that I could easily reach the top of the steps before the creature could ever get to me.
Nevertheless, as I edge away from the steps and raise the gas lantern so that I can see the basement properly, I feel an utterly terrible sense of fear tightening in my chest. Tears, meanwhile, are streaming down my face as I stare into the darkness. If I still had my eyelids, I would surely have blinked by now. Instead, I merely have tracks of blood that run down the sides of my face, while my untempered eyes themselves feel filled with the most horrific scratches of dust and other particles.
And then I see her.
Catherine is in the far corner, naked and covered in blood, curled tight as she chews on some part of the corpse that she dragged away. The lantern shakes in my hand, causing the shadows to swing wildly, and Catherine quickly turns and hisses at me. As she does so, I see blood all over her chin, and I realize that it is Thomas Culpepper's head that rests in her hands. Or what is left of his head, at least. For I can see that his skull has been almost entirely picked clean.
Catherine hisses again, but I do not let this deter me.
"Look what I have done," I stammer, hoping that somehow she might be able to understand. "Look at my eyes. I can sew the lids back on when I am done, but until then, I deserve to suffer as much as you. This is my way of showing you just how much you mean to me. How much I love you."
I wait, but she does not reply. She merely continues to stare at me. Of course she does. Did I not remind myself, a moment ago, that there is no part of Catherine in this creature? I must fix that certainty in my thoughts.
"I shall fix you," I say after a moment. "Whatever you are, you are not welcome in my Catherine's body. Do you hear me? I shall cast you out, and she shall return."
She lets out a slow, rattling groan. A moment later she drops the skull against the floor and starts crawling this way. She moves a little faster than before, but still not so fast that I cannot make my way around the side of the slab and over to the door in the basement's far corner. Pulling the door open, I step into the storage room that I use for preserving specimens. My heart is pounding as I step back into the darkness, and as I keep my eyes fixed on the door I can already hear Catherine shuffling this way across the stone floor. So far, the plan is working perfectly.
As soon as she appears, she lets out an angry groan and starts making her way toward me. No doubt she anticipates another juicy meal. I wait for a moment, before tossing the forearm toward her and then stepping around to her other side. As I had hoped, she is distracted by the arm, so I do not even need to use the pokers as I hurry back out of the storage room and slam the door shut. With trembling hands, I slide the bolt across, and then I flinch as I hear Catherine bumping against the other side of the door. She's still hissing and moaning, but at least for now she will be unable to get to me.
I must move quickly, however. Soon Delilah will wake, and by then she must be down here and in place.
"I am sorry, my darling," I whisper, as I hear the creature scratching furiously on the other side of the door. "Soon you will be back with me. This time I know what I must do. This time I shall succeed."
But it is not her. Not yet. If I am ever to get Catherine back, I must do one of the things that I always swore I would never do. I must kill a child.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Chapter 28
|
Carefully placing Delilah's unconscious body on the slab, I take a moment to adjust her limbs before taking a pair of scissors and starting to cut through her dress. As a gentleman, I feel very sorry that I must do such a thing, but I cannot exactly operate on her while she is fully-clothed. Once I have stripped her down, I shall have to bind her arms and legs so that she has no chance of escape, and I must gag her as well so that she does not scream. First, though, I need to -
"Do not do this, Charles."
I freeze as soon as I hear those words.
That was Catherine's voice, coming from the cold air behind me.
No.
No, it cannot have been Catherine.
I must keep my mind together and refrain from indulging in this weakness. Reaching down, I start tearing her clothes aside.
"I know what you're planning," she says suddenly, her voice filled with anguish. My hands freeze. "Charles, if you do this, I shall no longer know you as my husband. You are not a brute, nor are you a monster. Charles, please, let the woman go and do not harm her unborn child."
"I have no choice," I whisper, as tears start running down my cheeks.
"It is not me behind that door," she continues, even as the scratching sound continues. "Do not commit this atrocity. Not in my name."
"I must have you back."
"Not at any cost. Not at this cost. Charles -"
Suddenly I turn and look over my shoulder, and her voice stops. All I see is the dark basement, but the air is getting colder by the second and I am quite certain that I sensed Catherine nearby. At the same time, there is a taste of fruit in my mouth. I try to tell myself that I was imagining the voice, but somehow I cannot let go of the hope that she is here with me.
"Please," I whisper, as I feel a sharp, pulsing pain in one side of my head, "just leave me alone."
I turn back to Delilah and prepare to proceed, but then the pain bursts and I let out a cry as I clutch my temple. Stepping back, I feel for a moment as if this agony is going to take over my entire body, and I start groaning as I stumble against one of the stone pillars. I instinctively try to squeeze my eyes shut, but of course this is impossible now that I no longer possess eyelids. Instead I have no option but to reach up and press my palms against the exposed eyeballs, although I stop this when I realize that I might inadvertently damage my ability to see.
"I just need to work!" I gasp. "Let me work!"
Still the pain persists, building and building until I'm doubled over in agony. Only now does the sensation at last begin to fade, but it takes several more seconds before I am able to stand up straight. My body is trembling, and I'm terrified that the pain might return at any moment. This is no time to rest, however, so I turn and start shuffling back toward the slab, only to see to my absolute horror that Delilah Culpepper has disappeared.
"No," I whisper, stumbling closer and reaching out, running my hands across the bare surface to check that this is not some illusion caused by my damaged eyes. How can this be happening? "What -"
Suddenly I hear something behind me, and I turn just in time to see Delilah swinging a chair at my face. She lets out a furious scream. The chair hits me hard, and I feel my left cheekbone shatter as I fall back and slump to the floor.
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Maddie
|
[ Today ]
"I knew you did this before," I mutter, as I finish wrapping some cloth around Alex's wrists, "but I didn't know you still did it."
"It's nothing bad," she replies, sounding a little uncertain. "I just do it now and again, to relieve a little pressure. It's not like I'm trying to slit my wrists or anything. I'm not totally crazy."
Not really knowing what to say, I tuck a section of cloth into a fold, and then I double-check that the make-do bandage is secure. This isn't the first time that I've had to help her out like this, and she almost always does it just when I've started to think it won't happen again. If I hadn't been so distracted lately, maybe I wouldn't seen it coming.
"Cutting just makes me feel better," she says. "A little release, a little pain, and then it's over. Sometimes Nick and I do it together."
"He encourages you?" I ask, shocked by the idea.
"He understands. I like having someone around who understands." She pauses for a moment. "I could even show you how to do it," she adds. "We could do it together and I could show you the safe way. You might find that it helps."
I shake my head.
"How do you know if you don't try?" She pauses, before reaching over and picking up the piece of broken glass that she was using to lacerate her skin. "It's safe and it's therapeutic. Think of all the blood that's in each of us. Doesn't it make sense that sometimes it'd be good to, like, get some of it out? Just some of it? I mean, once you do that, your body makes more, doesn't it? So you're just letting out some old blood and prompting your body to make some fresh new blood in return. How is that not healthy?"
"I don't think you should be doing this," I tell her, "and I definitely don't think Nick or anyone else should be encouraging you. We should get out of this house. Don't you know somewhere else where we could keep our heads down for a while?"
"The streets are still crawling with cops," she replies. "While they're looking for that killer, there's nowhere safe to be. Except here."
"In the house of Jack the Ripper?" I ask. "That's your idea of a safe place right now?"
"It's not like he's still here," she points out with a faint smile. "Not unless you believe in ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night. Which, if I know you right, you don't believe in. Not my smart, rational little Maddie. You're always more focused on practical things."
She reaches out and taps the side of my head, like I'm some kind of kid, and I pull away.
"You've changed," she adds, with a touch of sadness in her voice. "You grew up a little while we were apart."
I pause for a moment, trying to figure out why I'm feeling so restless.
"You don't think it's connected, do you?" I ask finally.
"What's connected?"
"Doesn't it seem a little crazy to you?" I continue. "We've maybe stumbled into the house of the real Jack the Ripper, at the exact same time that suddenly there's a copycat out there on the streets. I know coincidences happen, but that's a huge one. That's one in a billion."
"So what are you saying?" she replies. "Do you think that we somehow disturbed the ghost of Jack, and now he's come back from the grave so he can terrify London?"
"Of course not, but it still doesn't quite all add up. And this house..."
For a moment, I consider telling her about all the strange things that have happened here. About everything, even the things that I think I've managed to explain to myself. Like the way I got stitched up on my first night here, and the sound of the bell, and the sensation of being watched by something on the bed, and the brief sight of Charles Grazier reflected in a glass frame. I know those things have rational explanations – they have to have rational explanations – but at the same time I've begun to feel just a little freaked out by the atmosphere here. Maybe Jerry was right when he said he saw doubt in my eyes.
And then there was the guy I saw down by the river, the guy who seemed like he was following me even when I was sitting in Matt Wallace's police car.
"What are you thinking?" Alex asks after a moment.
I turn to her, and I quickly realize that there's no way she'll ever understand. Or, if by some miracle she did understand, she'd turn it into some huge drama.
"We have to keep this all to ourselves for now," she continues. "You realize that, right? Maddie, the rest of the world is out to get us. They want to trample us down and leave us in the mud, but we've managed to find something that's gonna set the goddamn world on fire. Do you think some asshole journalist wouldn't love to steal all the credit and get a big exclusive? Or some cop would leak the news and we'd be shuffled to the sidelines? This story is ours, and it's gonna stay ours."
"Of course."
"You understand?"
I nod.
"This is our chance to get off the streets," she adds, "and it might be our last chance. I've been feeling that for a while now, Maddie. I know I always say we'll find a way to get back on our feet, but lately I've been seriously doubting that. And now, just when I thought things might end really badly, we've got this amazing opportunity. Nick reckons that if we uploaded a video to YouTube, we could make zillions of dollars from the ads alone. And we could do a whole series!"
She pauses, before reaching out with her bandaged wrists and clasping my hands tight.
"Let's stay in control of this situation, Maddie," she says with a faint, sad smile, "so it doesn't become a runaway train that leaves us behind. Jack the Ripper's dead, but that doesn't mean he can't be our best friend right now. He's gonna make us rich."
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Chapter 30
|
Glancing over my shoulder for the twentieth time since I left the house, I look back along the gloomy street and check once again that I'm not being followed. Maybe I'm being paranoid, but there's a part of me that worries Alex and Nick might be keeping an eye on me, that they might think I'm going to ruin everything. There's no sign of them, however, so I quickly turn and hurry on, making my way around the corner and toward the phone booth ahead.
This might be a huge mistake, but as I get into the phone booth and take some coins from my pocket, I feel as if I really need to get another opinion about the house. The whole situation feels completely insane, and I'm not convinced that Alex and Nick are making the right choices. They're treating this like a bonanza, like some kind of goldmine that can set our lives straight forever, whereas I'm starting to wonder whether what we've discovered could help the police catch the modern day killer. Deep down, I know I could never forgive myself if we kept our discovery hidden and another victim ended up dead. I have to at least try to do the right thing, even if Alex and Nick end up hating me. And maybe there's a tiny part of me that thinks this is a way to make up for stealing from the house.
After taking the crumpled piece of paper from my pocket, I slip some coins into the phone and dial the number. A moment later, the call goes straight through to a recording.
"You've reached the voicemail for this number," an automated voice says calmly. "Please leave a message after the beep. If you want to re-record your message at any time, press hash."
Then there's a beep. I glance over my shoulder one more time, to make sure that I haven't been followed.
"Hey Matt," I say finally, feeling a tightening sensation of fear in my chest. "It's Maddie, from the other night. Something's happened that I really think you need to see. It's about Jack the Ripper."
|
A Beast Well Tamed
|
Amy Cross
|
[
"horror"
] |
[
"The House of Jack the Ripper"
] |
Doctor Charles Grazier
|
[ Tuesday October 2nd, 1888 ]
The chair clatters down against the stone floor as I try to sit up. A sharp, splitting pain fills one side of my face, and my eyes are burning with dust and scratches. Letting out a faint groan, I touch my left cheek and feel blood running from the wound, and then I look up and just about manage to make out the sight of Delilah Culpepper standing above me.
"Kill me," I whisper.
I wait, but she says nothing. She merely stares at me in shock, as if she cannot believe what she is seeing. She's clearly out of breath, and there's a cut on her lip. After a moment, however, I see that she is holding one of my surgical knives in her right hand.
"Kill me!" I hiss, desperately hoping that she'll put me out of my misery. "If you have any human compassion in your heart whatsoever, you will kill me right now! Please! Kill me so that I can go to her!"
"What is this place?" she asks. "What have you been doing down here? What is scratching so furiously behind that door?"
"Do not look behind that door," I reply, trying to sit up, only for Delilah to flash the knife toward me. I instinctively pull back, but then I realize that perhaps I should rush at her and force her to drive the blade into my chest. "I have tried," I continue. "I have done everything, but it was not enough. I cannot stop, I cannot bring myself to give up, so I need someone to do it for me. Please, end my life. I thought I could save her, but I cannot. Now I must go to her instead. Please save me from trying again and again to bring her back into that body. I won't stop, I know I won't, not unless somebody takes action. Use that knife! Kill me!"
"What are you talking about?" she stammers. "What have you done to your eyes? What madness have you created in this place? Does Jack know?"
"That wretched brute knows everything!" I hiss. "He is a beast, and a beast well tamed is still a beast. Now kill me while you still have a chance!"
She stares at me, as if she is considering doing what I have ordered, but then slowly she shakes her head.
"I must call for the police," she says finally. "They will know what to do here. They will understand what -"
"I can not let you do that!" I shout. "I am about to lunge at you. When I do, I shall attempt to wrestle that blade from your hand. I cannot stop myself, I cannot surrender, so you must kill me. Do you understand? When I try to fight you, you must end my life."
Again, she shakes her head.
"If you do not," I continue, looking at her belly, "I shall commit the most awful crime against you. I shall do something that will change me forever, that will make me not myself. For the sake of your unborn child, do not let me do that. You must stop me, and you must stop me in the most brutal manner possible." Reaching up, I touch my chest just above the heart. "Here," I add, and now my voice is trembling with fear. "Right here. Drive the blade of that knife between my ribs and into my heart."
"I cannot..."
"You must, for now I am coming at you. Please, I beg you... Stop me."
"Doctor Grazier," she replies, "why are you saying these things?"
"Are you ready?"
"No, please..."
"I am coming for you now!" I say firmly. "I cannot help myself! You must stop me!"
"Doctor Grazier -"
Letting out a sudden cry of anger, I stumble to my feet and lunge at her. She raises the knife and I wait to fall upon its blade, yet her hand gives way and I instead fall heavily against the woman's chest. Still I expect her to find some way to force the knife into me, but she simply crumples like a weakling and whimpers with pain as she, and I, and the dropped knife all fall to the ground together. There is a moment of sheer, blind panic, during which I lose all sense of exactly where the blade might be, and I wait to feel its tip slice into my heart. And then, with a sense of utter horror, I realize that she is sobbing and shaking, and that the fight has entirely left her body. In that moment, a heavy sense of doom fills my chest as I realize that she has lost her chance to hold me back, and that now I shall not be able to stop myself.
"I told you to kill me!" I gasp, as I kick the knife away and grab Delilah by the neck. "It was easy. You stupid fool, you should have done it by now."
She kicks and screams, but in truth she is far too weak to fight back properly. I am able to drag her hysterical, shrieking body back across the basement, and then I manhandle her onto the slab. In truth, a woman of average strength would still be able to slip away, but evidently Delilah is no such woman. She is an uncommonly pitiful specimen of her gender. For all her desperate flailing, she does not actually slip from my grasp, and I am even able to arrange her on her back. Then, filled with a sense of despair, I take the ropes that I set here earlier and I start wrapping them around her neck, so as to hold her in place.
"Help me!" she screams desperately. "Somebody! Jack! Anybody! Help -"
I press my hands against her mouth, muffling her cries. Then, reaching down, I take out another section of rope and start wrapping it under the table, and then I press it into her mouth until her anguished scream becomes little more than a faint groan. She is struggling violently, but I know – and she must know too – that there is no longer any chance for her to escape. She had a chance, that much is certain, and yet she let it slip between her fingers.
And for that, I hope she burns in the fires of hell.
Making my way around the table, I start tying her arms and legs down. I work fast, struggling slightly to see properly as I feel more scratches on my exposed eyes. I get the work done, however, and then I pick up the knife from the floor and start cutting once again through Delilah's clothing. She struggles and groans, but soon I have exposed her bare belly. Although she is carrying a child, no bump is showing yet, although I fancy that perhaps she is a little plumper than I had expected.
"I told you to stop me," I whisper, as I press the blade's tip against her skin just below the center of her rib-cage. "This is happening because you let it happen. I begged you. I told you what you had to do, and you failed!"
She groans again, then louder still as I slice the blade through her skin and cut a line all the way down to her groin. Then I cut several more times, struggling a little as her body twitches and shakes. Fresh blood runs from the slices as I carve them, and then I set the knife aside so that I can slip my fingers into the slits and start peeling back the skin, flowing into the gutters that lead down from the table. I hear a faint tearing sound as I work, but I am quickly able to pull the skin away and reveal the woman's stomach muscles. Taking the knife again, I start cutting those muscles away, minded to focus on the fact that I must not cut too deep lest I harm the life that is even now growing in Delilah's body. It is that life that I need, that must be preserved at all costs. Even now, as more blood runs between my fingers, I feel certain that I am digging deeper and deeper toward a form of vitality that will restore Catherine's body to health.
The bodies of whores were never going to save my wife.
I needed the parts, and the blood, of a woman whose body is filled with the strength of impending motherhood.
How did I not see that before?
Once Delilah's muscles are out of the way, I start slipping my fingers deeper into her guts. I need to clear a way to her womb, yet I must work with care. My eyes are starting to fail me, filled with scratches, and I can barely see properly. Still, I know these bodies well and I need no guide, so I am able to fumble my way past the various organs until I finally get to the womb. I must take even greater care now, for the child will at this stage be small enough to fit into the palm of my hand. If my theory is correct, however, I can remove it from its mothers body so long as I work quickly on the next stage. Yet as I work, in my mind I am imagining how peaceful everything would be now if this foolish girl had just killed me.
"Have mercy on my soul," I whisper, finding some solace from those words even though I do not really believe in souls. "I do this for love."
Reaching my hand up, I lick blood from my fingers, and I feel certain that this blood possesses some extra strength, some extra vitality that I can detect in its taste. Then, slipping my hands back into Delilah's body, I take a moment to find her womb and then I split the edges open. Bubbles of blood pop between my fingers, accompanied by a loud squelching sound. I am past the point of no return now, and I cannot deny that I am filled with a certain sense of awe as I realize that to the unborn child in this woman's body, I must at this moment seem like some god who has come to crack open its world.
Shocked by my own brilliance, I cannot help glancing at Delilah, and I see that she is both alive and conscious, and staring at me with horrified eyes.
"You asked what I am doing down here," I gasp. "You must see the truth now, Delilah Culpepper. I am the one whose adventures so titillated you before."
With that, smiling an unblinking smile, I slip my fingers into her womb so that I can remove the child.
"I am so sorry, my dear," I add. "I am the man they have been calling Jack the Ripper."
|
A Beautiful Anarchy
|
Jeffrey Tucker
|
[
"nonfiction"
] |
[
"politics",
"economics"
] |
Introduction
|
From the beginning of time until 1837, the only means to communicate with each other over geographic space too large for yelling was to deliver a message by horse, boat, walking, carrier pigeon, lanterns, bonfires, or smoke signals. Then came the telegraph, the first big break in putting an end to the power of the gatekeeper. We could now communicate directly, peer to peer. And thus began modernity.
The critical fact about communication is its creative power. It is a form of exchange but the goods exchanged are not property but ideas, and this exchange results in new ideas, new intellectual wealth, the precondition for changing the world. Unscripted, uncontrolled, uncensored communication illustrates the productive power of anarchy. The more this communication anarchy advanced, the more it served to build civilization.
The telephone was a Gilded Age invention but the first coast-to-coast telephone call did not happen until 1915. (As for invention, let's please give credit to Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci, and Thomas Edison, in addition to Alexander Bell.)
By the 1930s, it was possible for almost anyone to make a phone call, provided you could get to the general store. Then came the neighborhood party lines. Even in the 1950s, you had to wait for the person down the street to get off the phone before you could call.
Switchboard operators dominated communication in the 1960s. By the 1970s, every household had its own phone, but it would have to wait another few decades before the end state of this trajectory would be reached: a phone in every pocket with enough power and technology to do instant face time with anyone else on the planet.
It all happened in less than one hundred years.
But notice the trajectory. Year by year, development by development, the market process working with no central plan eventually granted the amazing thing to everyone. Once for groups and communities, the systematic market preference eventually devolves the technological power down to the individual. And once primitive and rudimentary, the market process sharpens and improves all things through time.
And we aren't just talking about a phone here. The smartphone is everything: radar detector, musical instrument, blood-pressure checker, game board, weather forecaster, stock checker, book reader, and a million other things, all in a device we can put in our pockets.
The gatekeepers that ruled our ability to communicate, learn, share, and build have been smashed. The barriers that kept that most precious commodity from us — information — have been toppled. And what has replaced them is a beautiful anarchy in which individuals can build their own worlds even in an age of despotism.
I think back to my own childhood. There were three channels. The same news was delivered in three different voices for thirty minutes per night plus a few weekend shows. We were captive of what they wanted us to know, and so it had been since the 1930s when Americans hunkered down over their radios to hear their great leader speak to them about all the great things government was doing for the collective.
News today is what we make of it. There is no living thing called a nation so there is no national news except for perhaps the entertaining horse race called the presidential election. Otherwise, our news is fed to us according to our unique interests. We once had to be fed like prisoners; now we make or order our own meals. One web interface called Google News ended the monopoly and permitted us to customize our perceptions of the world according to our individual volition. For young people, their news consists of their friends' Facebook updates and tweets.
People regret this. I do not. It strikes me as more normal, real, natural, and reflective of human longings and desires than any system of knowledge distribution that preceded it. We can now obtain a life experience that is of our own creation rather than depending on powerful people and institutions to tell us what to think.
What's more, anyone can make a website, blog, movie, podcast, book, and any of these can reach the globe in an instant. It seems strange and dazzling that I can even type those words. It won't be too long as this book goes to print before 3-D printers will be within the budget of most people, thus permitting physical objects to migrate from the world of scarcity to the digital space of infinite availability.
This is a triumph for human liberty, and with liberty comes flourishing and the cultivation of civilized life. Philosophers of all ages have dreamed of a world without power, despots, and bullies, a world built by people and for people. The market in the digital age is delivering that to us.
And it's not only about us. It's about everyone. Wherever the state is not standing in the way, prosperity is flooding in. We are in the midst of the longest and most dramatic period of poverty reduction the world has ever known. In the last ten years, some seventy million people have been lifted from destitution. Fewer than half the people who so qualified twenty-five years ago still qualify today.
The reason is technology, communication, entrepreneurship, and that wonderful trajectory away from gatekeepers toward personal empowerment the world over. This is the gift of the digital age, the most spectacular and revolutionary period of change the world has ever known.
Who recognizes this? Not many people. President Obama certainly doesn't. As he made clear in his now-famous speech in Virginia, "If you've got a business, you didn't build that." However you interpret the context, he believes that the only real way we can "work together" is through government. Most politicians think this way. But actually the market has us all working together every day, and not with a gun pointed to our head. We work together through mutual betterment and of our own free will. These exchange relationships are the greatest source of social progress known to man. The digital age has unleashed them as never before, and done so just in time to save the world from the depredations of power.
The aim of this book is: 1) to draw attention to the reality that surrounds us but we hardly ever bother to notice, much less celebrate; 2) to urge a willingness to embrace this new world as a means of improving our lives regardless of what the anachronistic institutions of power wish us to do; 3) to elucidate the causes and effects that have created this new world; and 4) urge more of the good institutions that have created this beautiful anarchy.
The book is a hymn to an old idea: laissez-faire. It means leave it alone. The world manages itself. That's another way of saying that all of us as individuals, working together with others, can build our own civilization, provided that we understand the forces that have created the tools we've been given and that we are willing to pick up those tools and get to work.
Special thanks are due to the staff of Agora Financial who have urged me to write and given me the freedom to write whatever the heck I want to write, regardless of the consequences. I'm aware of how fortunate I truly am. The clarity of the book title owes much to Demetri Kofinas, and the content is heavily informed by the commentary from Douglas French and Addison Wiggin.
Also, my intellectual debts are too numerous to name but I will mention my formative gurus: Thomas Paine, Albert Jay Nock, H.L. Mencken, Garet Garret, Frank Chodorov, Murray Rothbard, F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and the whole of the liberal tradition. These people are all smiling down on our work today.
|
A Beautiful Anarchy
|
Jeffrey Tucker
|
[
"nonfiction"
] |
[
"politics",
"economics"
] |
Social Media as Liberation
|
Are We Oppressed by Technology?
Do we really need an iPad 3 after it seems as if iPad 2 was released only a few months ago? Was it absolutely necessary that Google give us Google+? Do phones really have to be "smart" when the old cell phones were just fine? For that matter, is it really necessary that everyone on the planet be instantly reachable by wireless videophone?
The answer to each question is no. No innovation is absolutely necessary. In fact, the phone, flight, the internal combustion engine, electricity, and the railroad — none of this is absolutely necessary. We could freely choose to live in a state of nature in which most children die in childbirth, those who do not live only a few decades, and "medicine" amounts to sawing off limbs if you are lucky enough to have a tool that can accomplish the deed.
It's true that those people who bemoan the pace of technological development are not really longing for the state of nature. They are just sick of being hounded, badgered, hectored and pushed — as they see it — constantly to learn new things, acquire new gizmos, keep up to date, and buy the latest thing.
A survey from Underwriters Laboratories last year revealed that half of consumers "feel high-tech manufacturers bring new products to market faster than people need them." There are many concerns such as privacy, safety, finances and the like, but mostly, I suspect that what's behind the report is a more inchoate kind of unease.
Learning new things can be uncomfortable. People sense that they were getting along just fine with the technology of the last few years, so why should they upgrade? They sense that always going for the new thing implicitly casts aspersions on our current or past lifestyles.
I get this all the time when I talk to people about new stuff. Their first response is often: "No, thanks. I've had it with all this techno-wizardry and digital-age mania. Whatever happened to a world in which people had authentic human contact, admired the beauty of God's creations and developed genuine relationships, instead of virtual ones?"
We've all heard some version of this. So let's be clear: There is nothing morally wrong with not adopting the latest thing. No one forces anyone to buy a smartphone, a fast computer, a fancier e-reader or whatever. There is no gun at anyone's head. Technological upgrades are an extension of human volition — we can embrace them or not.
And temperaments are different. Some people love the latest thing, while others resist it. There are early adopters, there are late adopters and there are refuseniks.
I talked to a person the other day whose aging sister absolutely refuses to get a computer, an email address or a cellphone. Yes, such people do exist. When siblings want to contact her, they call or write a letter with a stamp. There is no sharing of photos, no video Skype, no keeping up with daily events. Everyone in the family is very close in the way that only digital technology allows, but this one person is the outlier, cut off from what everyone else experiences on a daily basis.
I asked if she feels cut off. The answer: Yes, and she is very unhappy about it. She complains that people don't travel long distances to see her enough. They don't call enough. She is losing track of what is happening with the grandkids. She has a constant sense that she is just out of it, and this depresses her.
Exactly. She is not actually happy with her choice. It's just that making this choice seems easier than learning new things and buying new stuff. So she rationalizes her decisions as a principled stand against the digitization of the world.
My experience is that these people have no idea the extent to which they inconvenience others. In fact, I would say that it comes close to being rude. It is not immoral, but it sure is annoying. Instead of dropping an email or posting on a Facebook wall or clicking a button on Skype, family members have to write out up their communications and stick them in an envelope and find a stamp and walk to a mailbox and wait a week or two or three to get an answer back.
It's all kind of crazy. People do it for a while, but then eventually find themselves annoyed and give up. Then the person on the other end gets angry and upset and feels ignored or cut off. This is their choice, too! It is a direct consequence of refusing to join the modern world.
Then there are the late adopters who pride themselves in not glomming on to the new gadget. They imagine themselves to be above the fray, more wise and prudent than their fellows. There is a reason they are called "late." They eventually come around. Those who resist new technology are cutting themselves off from the stream of life itself.
True confession: I was once among the late adopters. I freely put down the techno enthusiasts. I wrote a highly negative review of Virginia Postrel's provocative book The Future and Its Enemies, which turns out to have seen what I did not see. After the digital revolution advanced more and more, I began to notice something. By being a late adopter, I gained no advantage whatsoever. All it meant was that I paid a high price in the form of foregone opportunities. If something is highly useful tomorrow, chances are that it is highly useful today, too. It took me a long time to learn this lesson.
Finally, I did, and my fears, excuses, rationalizations and strange antitech snobbery melted away.
To really engage life to its fullest today means being willing to embrace the new without fear. It means realizing that we have more mental and emotional resources to take on new challenges. If we can marshal those and face these challenges with courage and conviction, we nearly always find that our lives become more fulfilling and happy.
The biggest canard out there is that the digital age has reduced human contact. It has vastly expanded it. We can keep up with anyone anywhere. We make new friends in a fraction of the time. That sense of isolation that so many feel is evaporating by the day. Just think of it: We can move to a new region or country and find ourselves surrounded by communities of interest in a tiny fraction of the time it used to take us.
As a result, digital media have made the world more social, more engaging, more connected with anything and everything than ever before. This isn't a scary science fiction world in which the machines are running us; instead, the machines are serving us and permitting us to live better lives that were never before possible. Through technology, millions and billions have been liberated from a static state of existence and been granted a bright outlook and hope.
In the nineteenth century, people loved technology. The World's Fair was the glitziest and most wonderful thing that happened in the course of the decade. Everyone wanted to celebrate the entrepreneurs who made it happen. Everyone understood that technology that succeeds does so because we as people have chosen it and that we chose it for a reason: It fits in with our search for a better life.
Perhaps that sense of optimism changed with the government's push for the nuclear bomb. In World War II, we saw technology used for mass murder and ghastly accomplishment of human evil as never before seen in history. Then we went through almost fifty years in which the world was frozen in fear of the uses of technology. It wasn't called the Cold War for nothing. When it finally ended, the world opened up and we could turn our energies again toward technology that serves, rather than kills, people.
The real "peace dividend" you hold in your hand. It's your smartphone. It's your e-reader. It's the movies you stream, the music you have discovered, the books you can read, the new friends you have, the amazing explosion of global prosperity that has visited us over the last ten years. This is technology in the service of the welfare of humanity.
In conclusion, no, we are not oppressed by technology. We can embrace it or not. When we do, we find that it brightens both the big picture and our own individual lives. It is not to bemoan, ever. The state of nature is nothing we should ever be tempted to long for. We are all very fortunate to be alive in our times. My suggestion: Try becoming an early adopter and see how your life improves.
[ Power vs. People in the Digital Age ]
The government seems determined to turn out the lights on the digital age. And this is with or without SOPA or the other bills that were only this week shouted down by the global digital community on Blackout Wednesday. The very next day, after support for that legislation collapsed after an impressive mass protest, the FBI and the Justice Department demonstrated that they don't have to pay any attention to all this silly clamor. Congress, legislation, polling, debates, politicians, the will of the people — it's all a sideshow to these people.
The FBI and Justice Department, on their own initiative, shut down Megaupload, the biggest of thousands of file-sharing sites online, and arrested four of its top officials. The FBI is hunting down three others who seem to be on the lam. They all face extradition and twenty years in prison. As part of the sweep, the feds issued twenty search warrants and arrived at individual houses in helicopters. They cut their way into houses, threatened with guns, confiscated $50 million in assets and outright stole eighteen domain names and many servers.
And what is the grave crime? The site is accused of abetting copyright infringement, that is, permitting the creating of copies of ideas expressed in media. No violence, no fraud, no force, no victims (but plenty of corporate moguls who claim, without proof, that their profits are lower as a result of file sharing).
Megaupload had millions of happy users. It was the seventy-first-most-popular website in the world. Only 2% of its traffic came from search engines, which means that its customer base was loyal and collected through the hard work and entrepreneurship of site owners. For its users, it was a wholly legitimate service. For the owners, their profits were hard earned through advertising.
But the government saw it differently. And contrary to what many people believe, the already-existing law permits the government to do pretty much whatever it wants, as this case shows. The government relied on a 2008 law to make criminal, instead of civil, charges. A newly created IP task force is the one that worked with the foreign governments to seal the deal.
In the end, it was a presentation of exactly the nightmare scenario that anti-SOPA protesters said would happen if SOPA had passed. It turns out, as the deeper realms of the state already knew, that all of this was possible with no congressional action at all. Congress doesn't need to do anything. We can watch the debates, go to the polls, elect people to represent us, and perform all the rest of the rituals of the civic religion, but none of it matters. Power is here, active, oppressive, in charge and permanent, regardless of what you might believe.
Might it be that some of the users' shared content on Megaupload was copyright protected? Absolutely. It is nearly impossible not to violate the law, as shown by SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith's own campaign website, which used an unattributed background image in technical violation of the law. The leading opponent of piracy might himself be a pirate!
But the trendline with Megaupload was clearly toward using the space to launch new artists with new content — not piracy, but creativity. As Wired.co.uk wrote, this crackdown:
"came shortly after Megaupload announced music producer Swizz Beatz — married to Alicia Keys — as their CEO. They had rallied a whole host of musicians, including Will. i.am, P. Diddy, Kanye West and Jamie Foxx to endorse the cloud locker service. Megaupload was building a legitimate system for artists to make money and fans to get content."
What's this all about? It is some powerful corporate lobbyists trying to prevent the emergence of an alternative system of art and music delivery, one powered by people, rather than merely the well-connected.
The Internet's great glory is its seemingly magical capacity for distributing information of all sorts universally unto infinity. The idea of the state's regulations on information — instituted by legislators in the nineteenth century — is that this trait is deeply dangerous and must be stopped. So it is inevitable that the powers that be will try to shut it down; copyright enforcement is only the most convenient Taser of choice.
This is the battle for whether the digital age is permitted to exist in an atmosphere of free speech, free association, free enterprise and real property rights or whether it will be controlled by government in conjunction with aging media moguls from monopolistic corporate oligarchies. The lines are clearly drawn, and the battle is taking place in real-time.
Example: Within minutes after the officials of Megaupload were arrested, a global hacker group called Anonymous shut down the Justice Department's website and the sites of the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Universal music and BMI — the major lobbying forces in Washington for restriction and reaction against the Internet.
In another stage of the great battle over information freedom, the Supreme Court, on the very day of the SOPA protests, handed down a decision that could have a devastating effect in the months and years ahead. It permitted the re-copyrighting of works that are already in the public domain so that the domestic law accords with the international law. If that sounds like no big deal, consider that many local orchestras have already changed their season lineups to remove some major works from their repertoire because they can no longer handle the licensing fees.
It's hard to know what to call this but cultural masochism.
Regardless of how the legal struggles turn out, a culture of rational and irrational fear has gripped the Web. I've noticed this growing over the last months, but just this week, it has become worse, to the point of paranoia, and even mania. The successful protests against SOPA ended up only causing the censors to redouble their efforts, and the message is getting out: Almost everything you want to do online could be illegal.
A small sample of what I mean… Just this morning, I received the following email: "BBC Four recently broadcast a stunningly beautiful documentary called God's Composer (Tomás Luis de Victoria), hosted by Simon Russell Beale. A friend in Rome sent me a link to it, but I'm not sure I'm free to share it. Have you seen this documentary? It is stunning both visually and musically."
Not free to share a link? What? To be sure, I don't know whether he intended to send me to the BBC or some other site that is hosting an additional copy of it. Regardless, this is what it has come down to: a belief that every email is traced, every site is monitored, every act of individual volition on the Web could be a crime, every website is vulnerable to an overnight takedown, every domain owner could be subject to arrest and jail.
The battle between power and freedom dates to the beginning of recorded history, and we are seeing it play out right before our eyes in the digital age. It's as if at the beginning of the Bronze Age, the leading tribal chieftain made smelting ore illegal; or if at the transition from iron to steel, the ruling elite put a cap on the temperature of refining ovens; or if at the beginning of flight, some despot declared the whole enterprise to be too risky and economically damaging to the industry that depended on land travel.
In the current version, the issue of "intellectual property" is at the forefront of this battle. The first most people heard of this was on Blackout Wednesday, when Wikipedia went black. This is a foretaste of the future in a world in which power achieves victory after victory, while the rest of the world cowers with fear in darkening times.
[ Why Facebook Works and Democracy Does Not ]
This year, Facebook will reach 1 billion users — or one-seventh of the human population. It has elicited more participation than any single government in the world other than India and China, and it will probably surpass them in a year or two. And whereas many people are fleeing their governments as they are able, more and more people are joining Facebook voluntarily.
What is the logic, the driving force, the agent of change?
Yes, the software works fine, and yes, the managers and owners have entrepreneurial minds. But the real secret to Facebook is its internal human gears — the individual users, which turn out to mirror the way society itself forms and develops.
The best way to see and understand this is to compare the workings of Facebook with the workings of the democratic political process. Watching Facebook's development has been fun, productive, fascinating, useful and progressive. The election season, in contrast, has been divisive, burdensome, wasteful, acrimonious and wholly confusing.
That's because Facebook and democracy work on entirely different principles.
Facebook is based on the principle of free association. You join or decline to join. You can have one friend or thousands. It is up to you. You share the information you want to share and keep other things from public view. You use the platform only to your advantage while declining to use it for some other purpose.
The contribution you make on Facebook extends from the things you know best: yourself, your interests, your activities, your ideas. The principle of individualism — you are the best manager of your life — is the gear that moves the machine. Just as no two people are alike, no two people have the same experience with the platform. All things are customized according to your interests and desires.
But of course, you are interested in others too, so you ask for a connection. If they agree, you link up and form something mutually satisfying. You choose to include and exclude, gradually forming your own unique community based on any selection criteria you want. The networks grow and grow from these principles of individualism and choice. It is a constantly evolving, cooperative process — exactly the one that Hans-Hermann Hoppe describes as the basis of society itself.
Democratic elections seem to be about choice in some way, but it is a choice over who will rule the whole mob. It provides the same user experience for everyone, regardless of individual desire. You are forced into the system by virtue of having been born into it. Sure, you can choose to vote, but you can't choose whether to be ruled by the voting results.
In this democratic system, you are automatically given 220 million "friends" whether you like it or not. These fake "friends" are given to you because of a geographic boundary drawn by government leaders long ago. These "friends" are posting on your wall constantly. Your news feed is relentless series of demands. You cannot delete their posts or mark them as spam. Revenue is not extracted from advertising but collected as you use the system.
Nothing is truly voluntary in an election. You are bound by the results regardless. This creates absurdities. This is incredibly apparent in the Republican nominating process. If people under thirty prevailed, Ron Paul would win. If religious families with several kids prevailed, Rick Santorum would win. If the Chamber of Commerce members prevailed, Mitt Romney would be victor. It all comes down to demographics but there can be only one winner under this system.
Therefore, an election must be a struggle between people, a fight, a wrangling around, a push to assert your will and overcome the interests and desires of others. In the end, we are assured that no matter the outcome, we should be happy because we all participated. The individual must give way to the collective.
We are told that this means that the system worked. But in what sense does it work? It only means that the well-organized minority prevailed over the diffused majority. This is about as peaceful as the kid's game "king of the mountain."
Facebook has nothing to do with this nonsense. Your communities are your own creation, an extension of your will and its harmony with the will of others. The communities grow based on the principle of mutual advantage. If you make a mistake, you can undisplay your friend's posts or you can unfriend him. This hurts feelings, sure, but it is not violent: It doesn't loot or kill.
Your friends in Facebook can be from anywhere. They "check in" and plot their journeys. Whether your friend lives in or moves to Beijing or Buenos Aires doesn't matter. Facebook makes possible what we might call geographically noncontiguous human associations. Language differences can be barriers to communication, but even they can be overcome.
Democracy is hyperbound by geography. You vote in an assigned spot. Your vote is assembled together with those of others in your county to produce a single result, and therefore, your actual wishes are instantly merged. They are merged again at another geographic level, and then at the state level and, finally, at the national level. By that time, your own preferences are vaporized.
Sometimes people get sick of Facebook. They suddenly find it tedious, childish, time wasting, even invasive. Fine. You can bail out. Go to your system preferences and turn off all notifications and take a sabbatical. People might complain, but it is your choice to be there or not. You can even delete your account entirely with no real downside. Then you can sign up again later if you so desire or join some other system of social networking.
Try doing that to democracy. You can't unsubscribe. You are automatically in for life, and not even changing your location or moving out of the country changes that. It is even extremely hard to delete your account by renouncing your citizenship. The leaders of the democracy will still hound you.
We can learn from Facebook and all other social networks that the Internet has brought us. These are more than websites; they are models of social organization that transcend old forms. Make the rest of life more like a social network and we will begin to see real progress in the course of civilization. Persist in the old model of forced democratic community and we will continue to see decline.
[ LinkedIn: A Tool of Human Liberation ]
Of all social media on the Internet, LinkedIn is the least splashy. A movie will never be made about this tool. It has introduced no new words into our vernacular. The teen crowd doesn't download the app. But if you measure these technologies and Web tools by the positive ways they have changed lives, LinkedIn deserves to be listed way up top. It is sheer genius.
I've suspected this for a while but had it confirmed for me over the holidays. These are excellent times for the kind of detailed conversation that allows us to track the course of social evolution by seeing the things that are part of people's lives. I love finding out from people what kinds of technologies they are using these days and what they do with them.
It turns out that LinkedIn was a major subject of conversation. People talked about updating their profile, people they've met through the network, how they have found new positions by using it, how they are fielding applications coming their way, and more.
Of course people talk about it nonchalantly, as if it is just part of life. Not so. It is a singular thing in the history of the world, a tool for jazzing up the the labor marketplace in a way never seen before.
LinkedIn is many things and offers many services: a global "water cooler," a universal job bank, a method of learning from experts, and more. It has more than 130 million users in 200 countries, with two new users per second. It is the twelfth-most-popular site in the entire world. The company went public in May 2011 (LNKD), and remains profitable today.
But I suspect that its main benefit has not really been openly noted.
LinkedIn has solved a problem that has vexed people since the beginning of time: the problem of being trapped in a job that undervalues your services. Maybe that doesn't seem like a big deal, but in terms of the actual quality of life for hundreds of millions of people, this is a daily soul-killing disaster. LinkedIn is the liberation.
Had LinkedIn been around in the nineteenth century, people would have laughed derisively at Karl Marx with his prattle about the need for frenzied revolution. The workers of the world didn't need to expropriate the expropriators or establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. All they really needed was a well-constructed web-based networking tool.
You might say: "This is ridiculous, since there is no slavery. Everyone chooses to work in a particular job. There is no gun at anyone's head. It's all based on mutual agreement."
All that's true enough, but the problem is subtler than that. Most employers can't help but regard any employee on an active job search to be something of a traitor. That's an unfair attitude, and bosses know this, but it is just the way things are. Hiring these days is a big headache, and it extracts large upfront and ongoing costs. To recoup them, employers have developed unreasonable expectations of their employees.
And here is the problem: Labor mobility is very difficult to put into practice in real life. How do you get your application out there without letting your current employer know that you are looking around? How can you use the capital and skills you have accumulated in your current position to upgrade to a new position with a different firm, without using your boss as your reference? How can you shop for new jobs and go for interviews without letting anyone in your social network know, for fear that your aims might get back to the boss?
It is even a problem dressing up for interviews. You come back to the office and people wonder where you have been; so you have to lie and say you went to a funeral. Or you take a sick day and have to make up some tale about a twenty-four-hour bug. This is all rather ridiculous!
And if you can't actively search for a new position, how can you actually achieve professional advancement?
These are truly awful problems that end up locking people in positions they don't like but offer no way out. It restricts labor mobility. People get trapped. Fearing the reaction within the firm of looking outside the firm, people begin over time to block out the outside world. They secretly wonder if they are actually overpaid and worry about testing their wares on the job marketplace.
As a result, they are tempted to turn their attention to other things, figuring that jobs shouldn't be happy or fulfilling; they are just supposed to pay the bills. The result is internal stagnation, and if many people feel this way, this sorry attitude begins to spread throughout the firm. You can end up with a whole building filled with quietly disgruntled and fearful employees, sort of like the pathetic scenes we see in The Office.
In the early days of the Web, there were, of course, large job marketplaces out there, and there still are. But they were limited because they were for those who had self-consciously decided to look for a job or look for an employer. There is no real reason to be on them otherwise. As we know, that's not how real networking and good hiring takes place. Great jobs are often the result of a long process of experience and knowledge.
Thus the genius of LinkedIn: it permits you to stay constantly on the job market — cultivating a network — without seeming to be disloyal to your colleagues and managers and bosses. It is a completely unobjectionable thing to put your name up here. And because LinkedIn allows you to create networks based on your current employer, it is even seen as a benefit by your firm. It suggests that you care about your job and are happy to have it be part of your public identity.
If John Doe works at FastCompany, that appears by his name and serves as a kind of advertisement for the company itself. Other employees at FastCompany link up this way, too, so the whole office can use this as a platform for communication, and even discussion. Yet your profile can be public, and you can send the link out to prospective employers. They can see what you are doing and why you are valuable — and you can do this without ever alerting your present employer that you are somehow looking around.
And then, if you change jobs, it is merely a matter of a few clicks. Your institutional affiliation changes, but the network capital you have built up is wholly retained by you. Your value is yours and it is portable. This encourages every worker to have a better understanding of himself or herself as a self-managing individual firm. You are not part of a collective. You are an individual enterprise unit, offering services in exchange for money — exactly how market theory posits it should be.
It's a simple solution to a mighty problem — simple in the sense that truly brilliant solutions are obvious once they are stated.
The company opened its doors in 2003 — not even a decade ago! It was founded by Reid Hoffman, along with executives from PayPal and socialnet.com. Hoffman is an interesting guy in his own right. His background is in philosophy, and he was ascending the academic career ladder through his training at Stanford and Oxford. One day, Hoffman realized that he didn't want to spend his life writing books that "fifty or sixty people read." He wanted to have more impact on the world. In a digital age, this meant developing new and better tools to improve people's lives.
He got to work on solving this universal human problem. And it worked.
And contrary to the popular perception that social media is goofy and that the main purpose of technology is to push more gizmos, LinkedIn really has improved people's lives and transformed the nature of the job and employee hunt. It has worked to dramatically reduce the information asymmetries that exist between buyers and sellers in the labor marketplace.
Now, let's turn to a political point. Think of all the politicians who, for many decades, have claimed to have some great program for improving the lives of workers, making labor more mobile, helping to link up employees with employers. All of this is standard fare on the campaign trail. How many hundreds of billions have they spent? And ask yourself: How many of the zillion programs these people have created have you used? None? Thought so.
What's more, these programs actually have the opposite effects of their advertised benefits. Government intervention in labor markets has entrenched unemployment by raising the costs of hiring, raising the floor for job entry, forcing businesses to provide benefits that make jobs sticky in ways they shouldn't be.
With LinkedIn, we have entrepreneurs and private capital coming together to provide an amazing service that directly improves lives, one by one, every day and more each day. A takeaway political lesson: If you really want to do something dazzling, stay out of politics and find a way to do something wonderful in the commercial world. This is the path to human liberation; this is the path to true progress for humanity.
What Makes Twitter Great?
"I've got better things to do than broadcast a message to the world about my lunch."
An uncountable number of people have said this or something similar to me about Twitter. I've stopped responding. It's the same kind of faux snobbery that causes people to look down on Facebook, YouTube, Angry Birds, smartphones and the whole of digital life generally.
Of course, these days, hardly anyone puts down the Internet in total, but this was common ten years ago. Today, it is more common to put down popular applications of one sort or another, always with the message that my time is too valuable, I'm too serious for this kids' stuff, I don't go for the superficial fripperies that have enchanted Generation Mindless.
I've already discussed Facebook and LinkedIn, and why their popularity is not only justified, but they have also made gigantic contributions to human well-being. They all use the power of individual volition and the self-organizing dynamic of free association to offer services, methods of learning and means of connecting with others that break through barriers that have existed since the beginning of time.
Let's take on Twitter, the service that people love to hate the most. Among the nonusers, the word alone is almost always said with a sneer. It is the most transparently easy of all the popular social applications, but also the hardest one to integrate into your life if you are not already part of a set people using it.
Adults sign up to it and then sit and stare at it. Having no followers and following no one, the thing looks and feels as dead as Marley's ghost. Of course, you could always send out news of the sandwich you ate for lunch, but what's the point? In this sense, Facebook provides that much-more-immediate satisfaction that adults (ironically) demand from websites. Twitter is an application that has to be built by you.
But consider… when the unemployment numbers come out, I usually get an email from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This most recent time, even before that email arrived, I knew the numbers. I knew the grim truth behind the numbers. I had a sense of how several major newspapers were spinning the numbers. I had access to charts that were being posted, showing how labor trends interact with other trends. And I was able to react to the news myself by reposting what I appreciated and then adding my own thoughts. Then, finally, the email arrived from the Bureau.
This is an example of an everyday use of Twitter. But it is only one of an infinite number of possible uses. And once you start and get the hang of it, downloading the app and following things you care about, you begin to realize something absolutely astonishing about this seemingly superficial thing. Twitter has radically individuated, democratized and universalized the consumption and production of all forms of information, turning the whole world into a customizable communications bazaar like no generation in history has ever seen.
This customizability is what gives rise to the caricatures of the tweeter as a superficial twit, wasting time blabbing on about nothing to other similar types. But when you see people in revolutionary political situations organizing themselves, using tweets and evading the boot of the dictator by using Twitter to communicate, strategize and outmaneuver the most powerful armies, it should make you stop and think.
As a means of producing information, every user has potentially the same influence as every other user. The only possible difference concerns the number of followers you have (I have 700, while Lady Gaga has 20 million), but even that is not really a final determinant, since every message can be re-tweeted and a message sent to one person can turn into a message sent to 140 million people in a split second.
What this means that is The New York Times and White House have exactly the same technical power to influence as the person who just took my order for beer at the pizza shop. The difference in the reach of messages is entirely determined by other users of Twitter, thus resulting in a crazy meritocracy of distribution.
As a means of consuming information, you have access to the instant thoughts of every star, mogul, institution, official or whomever and to the exact same extent as the big-time reporters or other institutions. And it turns out that people like Lady Gaga really like this. Every public figure does, except perhaps the dictators threatened most by this powerful means of instantaneous truth telling.
Currently, Twitter is handling 1.6 billion search queries per day and being used to send some 340 million tweets in the same period. It's consistently in the top ten most popular websites. The service is offered to every person on the planet at no charge. The revenue model is to charge companies for promoted tweets in search results, as well as to charge large Internet companies for the use of applications that display Twitter feeds on their websites.
There's a rude awakening, however, for anyone who thinks he or she can jump onto Twitter and make a splash. You cannot invite others to follow you. People have to reach out to you, and therefore, in this sense, Twitter can be a more difficult nut to crack than Facebook.
Your first step should be to follow institutions or people you care about. They will be notified that you have followed them. One hopes, then, that they will respond by following you, but there is no way to make them do so. If you seek followers, your best approach is to find someone who is already deeply embedded in this world to recommend you to their followers. But even then, it is a long haul to get to the point that you have a substantial number of people caring about what you are saying.
Why should you bother at all? There might be someone who has no interest in what anyone has to say and also has nothing to say himself, and plans to maintain this attitude from now until death. That person has no use for Twitter. For everyone else, it is a great source for acquiring and relaying information on anything and everything, and therefore, there are few people on the planet who would not benefit.
For career builders, a war chest of Twitter followers is part of the personal capital that you accumulate and carry with you wherever you happen to live or work. In this sense, this can be an essential part of your freedom and personal empowerment. It reduces your reliance on institutions and helps you gain control of your life.
For public personalities, it is obviously rather indispensable. But the same is true for any business. If you assemble followers (I love to follow businesses!), you can immediately reach them with special deals and announcements and do so at zero cost. What could be better than that?
For any individual, there are always times when you need others and it becomes important to get information to them. You might be in danger. You might have amazing news. You might need to send for help. In those times, you will be glad that you have prepared by assembling a valuable network of people who care whether you live or die. Certainly, the state doesn't much care, so it is up to us to form associations that do.
This is why I'm most interested in Twitter, in its uses of building a global movement for human liberty against the despotism of the state in every nation. Twitter disregards borders. It disregards states and their pretensions. It follows no one's plan. It obeys no authority. It proves the capacity of free people to be self-ordering. Even the company deserves congratulations for not giving into pressure from government authorities to cough up user information.
Twitter enables individuals to be self-governing units with an important element of empowerment in their hands: the ability for one person to reach the globe in any instant in time with the most valuable commodity in existence — namely, information.
That's why Twitter is amazing.
Can We Quantify the Economic Contribution of the Internet?
How much does the Internet contribute to our economic life? A lot, yes. But what if we tried to put a number on it?
We love numbers, right? We imagine that we can slice and dice the world and look at everything on a spreadsheet, click a button and make it a pie chart, and click another button and put the results in colorful bars.
Well, that works for a single sector of the economy, like butter or shoes. We can add that up and compare it to other sectors. But what about technology? The truly life-transforming technologies benefit everyone and everything simply because almost everyone uses them, and everything is connected in a gigantic and cooperative globe of productivity.
Still, that's not enough for some people. And so this headline was probably inevitable: "Internet accounts for 4.7% of U.S. economy." Now that sounds scientific, precise, contained, empirical. CNN ran this as a report on a new study by the Boston Consulting Group. The study then compares the Internet economy to other sectors and finds it already bigger than education, construction, and agriculture.
Impressive, but the methodology is all wrong. In fact, a hint is provided in this laughable sentence that is part of the report on the study: "By way of comparison, the federal government, contributed $625 billion, or 4.3%, to the nation's output." In other words, the study narrowly concluded that the thing that makes life grand contributes slightly more than the thing that makes life hell.
In what sense has the federal government contributed anything to the nation's output? The last I checked, the federal government sucked $2.5 trillion out of the private sector last year, and that doesn't include the gigantic regulatory state that thwarts progress at every turn. This is sheer wealth destruction, which we can know for sure because the money is taken by force, meaning that the people who once owned that money would rather have done something else with it beside cough it up to the public sector.
Of course the method of calculation rests fundamentally on the idea of the gross domestic product, which attempts to quantify economic production. The problem is that it doesn't quantify economic destruction, much less any of the unseen dimensions of wealth. If an earthquake hits Los Angeles and the city is rebuilt, the rebuilding counts as productivity and the GDP goes up. Reflect on this fact and then you comprehend how it is that government's activities are recorded as productivity.
But let's return to this idea that you can segregate a sector called "the Internet" and account for its productivity. Nothing in business today takes place without the use of digits. Financial transactions are processed through the Internet. No inventory is ordered without its use. Accounting takes place with the use of software distributed through the Internet. All of human life is progressively passing through digital gates.
That the Internet has vastly increased productivity is the understatement of the century. The Internet has given birth to products and services that have never before existed — search, online advertising, video games, web-based music services, online garage sales, global video communications. Moreover, the main beneficiaries have been old-line industries that seem to have nothing to do with the Internet.
The most difficult-to-quantify aspect of digital media has been its contribution to the sharing of ideas and communication throughout the world. This has permitted sharing and learning as never before, and these might be the single most productive activity in which the human person can ever participate. The acquisition of information is the precondition for all investing, entrepreneurship, rational consumption, the division of labor and trade.
Step back and consider what a revolution this truly is. From the beginning of history until the nineteenth century, information could only travel as fast as we could run, walk, or sail. There were also smoke signals, carrier pigeons, and putting notes in bottles, waving lanterns in windows, and the like. Finally in the 1830s — extremely late in a vast and grueling history in which humanity languished in poverty and sickness without knowledge broader than the immediate surroundings — we saw the beginnings of modern communication with the glorious invention of the telegraph.
Here we had, for the first time, the emergence of geographically noncontiguous communication. People could find out more about what was going on in the world beyond their immediate vicinity, and that has amazing implications for everyone engaged in the grand project of uplifting humanity. What could people now share? Cures, technologies, resource availability, experiences, and information of all sorts.
This is also the period when we saw the first signs of the modern world as we know it, with a rising global population, extended lives, lower infant mortality, the creation and rapid increase of the middle class. Communication is what signaled people about new possibilities. From there we saw huge advances in metallurgy, medicine, sanitation, industry; and there followed expansions of income, the division of labor, transportation through railroads, and, eventually, more of the things that really matter: ever-better ways to share information and learn from others through telephones, radios, and televisions.
But then 1995 represented the gigantic turning point in history. This was the year when the web browser became widely available and the Internet opened for commercial purposes. It's remarkable to think that this was only seventeen years ago. Unimaginable progress has taken place since that time with whole worlds being created by the day, all through the wondrous spontaneous order of global human interaction in an atmosphere of relative laissez-faire. This was the beginning of what is called the digital age, the period of global enlightenment in which we find ourselves today.
And what gave it to us? What made it possible? This much we know for sure: the government did not make this possible. The forces of the marketplace caused it to come into being. It was the creation of human hands through the forces of cooperation, competition, and emulation.
This alone refutes the common lie that the free market is all about private gain, the enrichment of the few. All these technologies and changes have liberated billions of people around the world. We are all being showered with blessings every hour of the day. Yes, some people have gotten rich — and good for them! — but all the private gain in the world pales by comparison to what digital commerce has done for the common good.
Yes, of course we take it all for granted. In one sense it has all happened too fast for us to truly come to terms with this new world. There is also this strange penchant human beings have for absorbing and processing the new and wonderful and then asking just as quickly: what's next?
No amount of empirical work can possibly encapsulate the contribution of the Internet to our lives today. No supercomputer could add it all up, account for every benefit, every increase in efficiency, every new thing learned that has been turned to a force for good. Still, people will try. You will know about their claims only thanks to the glorious technology that has finally achieved that hope for which humankind has struggled mightily since the dawn of time.
[ In Defense of Homeless Hot Spots ]
BBH Labs is an advertising agency that specializes in new and creative ideas for marketing products. But few ideas have ever generated the heat of one used this past weekend at the Austin, Texas technology conference, South by Southwest.
Wireless networks are famously overcrowded at these events, and everyone is scrambling for a good connection. BBH had the idea of uniting two causes: help for data-hungry attendees and help for the homeless population of Austin. It invited homeless people to carry wireless hot spots and walk around offering their services in exchange for donations.
The homeless people were given $20 for the workday and allowed to keep whatever donations they could elicit in appreciation for their service. They would walk around wearing a shirt that says "I'm Clarence, a 4G Hot Spot." Anyone could connect and enjoy great access to the whole of the digital world.
It is obvious from the reports that everyone loved it, attendees and also the homeless, too. It gives them a chance to interact with people, feel valuable, earn money and be an important part of people's lives.
What's not to like? One reads with amazement, but maybe not shock, the screams of outrage against the whole idea. To some people, this smacks of "exploitation." The homeless are being used in a cruel experiment. Their very bodies are being commodified! It is demeaning! You can read all these claims and thousands more at hundreds of sites on the Internet right now.
The New York Times claims that the whole thing somehow "backfired" and became a public relations disaster for the ad agency. BBH isn't backing down, but it is explaining itself. It was once common for the homeless to sell newspapers and make a bit of spending money that way. But now, hardly anyone even wants a stupid newspaper, so they need other things.
What is the most valuable thing today? A broadband connection. Let homeless people carry them and be paid. Beautiful! Creative! In no sense is this exploitation, else surely someone party to the exchanges taking place would object. So far, none have; on the contrary, the homeless population has heralded the opportunity. One homeless man called it "an honest day of work and pay." Yes!
The terms "exploitation" and "commodification" are used by people who have something against commercial transactions between rich and poor. To this crowd, the reality that everyone obviously benefits from commerce means nothing, since we are all apparently blinded by some deeper reality that you can fully discern only by reading the collected works of Marx and Lenin. We don't have time, so it is up to the enlightened elite to read, interpret and implement on our behalf.
And what does this implementation amount to? It comes down to actually denying opportunity to people who need it the most. Instead of providing services people are willing to pay for, they would be languishing on a cot in a smelly warehouse somewhere, while allegedly retaining their dignity.
How is this better? If I were a homeless person, I would wear a shirt that said, "Please exploit me with a job! Please commodify my valuable talents!"
To a remarkable extent, our perceptions of our own self-worth are bound up with being valued by others. To see this realized requires opportunities for people to cooperate with each other, particularly in an economic sense. In economic exchange, we become important as individuals, and others become important to us. This is why market-based societies are also societies in which human beings flourish and feel a sense of being important and valued.
To be truly demeaned and exploited means to have that value reduced to zero, so that we become nothing but physical beings who produce nothing, but still take up space and use up resources. This is the path to psychological demoralization and death.
What are the conditions in which this sense of being completely without value is most intense? I would draw attention to two institutional arrangements in particular, in which this is an omnipresent feature. Both involve conditions of total state control.
First, soldiers in a war are not valued as individuals, but rather exploited to kill and be killed. They have very little control over their lives — their job is to obey no matter what — and their lives are stamped as expendable under the right conditions.
A second case in point is the jail, in which prisoners have no control and are not valued by those who do control their lives. At least animals in a zoo are providing value to others; the prisoners in jail don't even have that luxury. Jail is a wholly demoralizing and dehumanizing situation from which people never fully recover.
The unemployed and the homeless experience this feeling in a much smaller degree, but it is still present in their lives. Cut off from the commercial nexus, they wonder what they have to contribute to society. They wonder about their very value as humans and whether there is really any point to the day at all. They sense that no one needs them. They feel unloved and unvalued.
It is for this reason that suicide among the unemployed is two to three times the national average. Having a job is about more than getting a paycheck. It is about feeling that we have something to contribute, that there is a purpose to life, that our very existence has a point, and that others really do care about whether we live or die.
Let's formulate a general principle: If a person is disgruntled with life, it is generally because he or she is feeling undervalued in some way. In fact, I know of no exceptions to the rule. The solution, then, is to change the institutional conditions that have led to this unfortunate state of being. That change requires freedom and opportunity.
Among the unemployed and homeless, the solution to the problem is rather obvious: commerce. They need engagement with others in a tangible way that yields results. Only the market provides this. This why "commodifying" the homeless and the jobless is the best thing that can ever happen to them.
Apparently, for many people, however, the homeless population is not a problem to solve, but a group to be used for political purposes. Their job is to look pathetic, be down and out, live in squalor and pose for the cameras when activists show up to use them for purposes of political agitation. And the solutions that activists propose somehow always involve politics, not economics.
This is the real meaning of exploitation!
For all the kvetching about the homeless problem over the years, one might have expected that the housing price crash would have been greeted with shouts of glee. After all, it could have meant the new availability of vast numbers of homes at super-low prices that everyone could afford! But on the contrary, this is not how it was treated: The whole energy of the government and central bank was dedicated to keeping house prices as high as possible! So much for the plight of the homeless.
The self-proclaimed friends of the homeless aren't really that. Enterprises like BBH that provide them economic opportunity are their true friends. Shelters, handouts and political ploys don't improve people's lives over the long term.
Free enterprise and creative entrepreneurship will not only save the demoralized among us, they are also the keys to uplifting the whole of humanity so that everyone feels valued in service to others and to themselves. Commerce is unique in that it embodies that magical capacity to bring both together for the good of all.
[ The Race for the Coolest Stuff ]
A staple of action/thriller movies like the Mission: Impossible and the James Bond series is that the government agencies have all the cool gadgets, stuff we can't get.
There's usually some opening scene featuring geeky scientists displaying the latest technology, such as a pen that is really a flamethrower or special shoes that allow you to scale buildings. There is a car with amazing powers and built-in wings or jets that become enormously useful in the final chase scene.
There is something wildly implausible about all of this. The truth is that the government is behind the private sector in its pace of innovation, and even in its adoption and use of private technology. Just look at the post office! It's pathetic. And a decade after households had PCs connected to the Internet, government offices were still using typewriters and triplicate. It's been this way for a very long time. Government doesn't invent anything, and it is a very late adopter of what the market does bring to market.
Another implausibility of these movies is that the government's gizmos work most of the time. That's not true, as the modern history of "smart bombs" illustrates. Without access to a market for replacement parts or a market to test and improve technology on the margin, the government's innovations depreciate quickly and end up being highly unreliable. Anyone who has spent time in a government bureaucracy can tell you the stories.
Where does the idea come from that government has the cool gadgets? It is probably a result of World War II, and the atom bomb in particular. The legendary Manhattan Project, initiated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1939, ended up creating the ghastly and immoral nuclear bomb that annihilated a quarter of a million people at the end of the war. That made an impression and generated the myth that government, because it has access to more resources and people than free enterprise, can create more impressive technology.
It's one thing to build weapons for mass killing and another thing to invent things that improve life. The private sector never had a reason to invent a weapon of mass destruction, which accounts for why government did it first. The lesson is generalizable across a wide spectrum of technology.
In real life, the private sector pushes out the horizons one step at a time, with a constant stream of new releases that improve the old, each tested against user experience and economic viability. My reason for bringing this up is to praise a movie that has dramatically broken from the usual pattern. The movie is Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that you can't stand the sheer unreality of these movies, the way Tom Cruise can fall 30 feet onto a steel surface and bounce off mostly unharmed, the way these car chase scenes feature antics that couldn't be realized by the best NASCAR driver and so on.
And that is all true for this recent release too (but hey, they are supposed to be fun movies, so lighten up!). But there is one extremely important respect in which this film truly gets it right: It seems to be the first in this genre that fully understands that private technology is better than government technology.
Most of the government's own equipment in the film is flaky. The fancy gloves that allow you to climb up windows on skyscrapers fail. The right-hand glove somehow shorts out or maybe the batteries die or something along those lines. It makes this electric sputtering noise and shuts down, nearly killing agent Ethan Hunt. Then, in another scene, the wonky tractor magnet that is supposedly creating a levitating force field flies out of control and nearly kills another agent. The government's technology is so bad that even the amazing mask-making 3-D printer shuts down unexpectedly, requiring the agents to enter into high-level negotiations as themselves!
Not even the signature of all Mission: Impossible movies can exist, due to government incompetence. And there's another case: An agent is supposed to wear this contact lens that secretly takes pictures of paper, and then these pictures are automatically printed in a remote location. Taking the picture requires that you blink twice. The enemy agent happens to notice this peculiar blinking habit, and further notes that his eye has a strange crossword shape in the retina and orders the agent to be killed immediately!
Nothing the government has given them for their mission works right! But what about the private sector? Hilariously, the mission with its famed self-destruct message is delivered on an iPhone (in the one scene in which it is not, agent Hunt has to bonk the Soviet-era payphone to get it to go up in smoke). The agents all use iPads to accomplish their amazing techno feats. They use the iPads' scrolling technique to cycle through pictures of enemy agents. And all their computing is done with the very conspicuous use of MacBooks.
It's as if the filmmakers sat down to think of cool stuff and realized that there wasn't anything cooler than you can buy right now from Best Buy, so they finally decided to throw in the towel on the old idea that the best gadgetry emerges from a government lab. As for the remaining government stuff, it is the usual assembly of dangerous weaponry and satellites. It's all left over from the Cold War and can only be used for evil.
The message is then clear: Government technology is malicious, outmoded or ineffectual, while the private sector's technology is advanced and gets the job done. This amounts to a decisive turnaround, even an epic artistic shift. It amounts to an admission that the great technological battle between the public and private sectors has been decisively won by the free market. In that sense, the new Mission: Impossible might be the most realistic action film ever made. If you want to accomplish the impossible, you know where to turn.
[ Regulators Take on the E-book ]
Get this: The federal bureaucrat who last month started the litigation against Apple and book publishers for e-book pricing is the same person who, back in the stone age, represented Netscape in its lawsuit against Microsoft.
Recall that Microsoft was trying to give away its Internet Explorer to computer users for free. Netscape went nuts and got the government to clobber Microsoft for being so nice to consumers. It put the company through litigation hell and even demanded that Microsoft change its operating system code to untie it from IE.
The person's name is Sharis Pozen, and she is acting head of the Justice Department's antitrust division and a political appointee of the Obama administration. She is threatening state violence against Apple and publishers for pricing collusion — and she claims that it's her job to protect consumers.
Interesting. She began her career trying to protect the rights of an old-line company to rip off consumers. To her, a price of zero was unfair competition. She was sure that a browser should be a paid product. The progress of history flattens that argument. Today, dozens of companies beg you to download their browser for free. Browser use is all over the place, sort of like a free market. There is no Microsoft monopoly, contrary to the overheated predictions.
Given that history, one might suppose she would retire from public life and maybe go into flower arranging or something. Instead, she is still at it. Last year, she denied a proposed merger between T-Mobile and AT&T that would have improved your cell service. This year, she says that a deal between publishers and Apple is harming consumers, so she has to act.
Government had absolutely nothing to do with inventing the e-book. It didn't invent the e-reader, either. The Nook, Kindle, iPad, and all the others were purely the products of private enterprise. So too the distribution system that makes millions of titles instantly downloadable with a quick click, storing your downloads in the cloud. The whole apparatus has given new life to the book itself, and represents a bigger shift in publishing than even the printing press.
But we are supposed to believe that Sharis Pozen knows exactly what the prices of e-books should be. She knows how the contractual relations between publishers and distributors are supposed to work. She knows when there's competition and collusion. She knows how to protect the consumer against high prices because, of course, we stupid consumers are all sitting here completely clueless about whether $9 or $14 is too much to pay. We'd just mindlessly let go of our money, scammed by private enterprise, were it not for Sharis Pozen looking after our interests.
There is no arrogance in this world to compare with the government bureaucrats'.
There is no way that any mortal can know in advance how e-book pricing should work. For years, people tried to create a profitable market in selling PDF downloads. Some firms succeeded, but only in a limited way by selling to large institutions, and even then, the product add-ons had to be pretty impressive: fancy searches, large collections, citation help, and more. This model never penetrated the retail sector.
Why? It's hard to say for sure, but in hindsight, one might speculate that the PDF format just isn't very consumer friendly. It is fine for many purposes, and miraculous by any historical standard. But in the end, it was not commodifiable on a mass scale.
Then came the e-book. It had an HTML structure that allowed fonts to be increased and decreased. It allowed instant search. Navigation was a snap. It mimicked the page turn of a physical book. It was lightweight. For all these reasons, and probably some reasons that I haven't thought of, the e-book became commodifiable. I never would have believed it, but there it is.
I know that I'm hooked myself.
But how does pricing work? A conventional government model would examine costs and presume that prices are marked up along a preset path. This model has a superficial, if fallacious, plausibility with physical goods, but it is wholly irrelevant to digital goods. With digital goods, in which the marginal cost of each additional item is effectively zero, the price is very obviously nothing but a point of agreement between buyer and seller, having nothing to do with costs of production.
So it's anyone's guess what the final price of an e-book ought to be. The market dictates this. At first, publishers were selling on a wholesale model and letting the distributors determine the prices. As the distributors do with physical books, they were pushing prices lower and lower, and the publishers started to complain.
That's when Apple shifted to an agency model of pricing. The publisher sets any price and the distributor takes 30 percent. That way everyone can make a profit. This also allowed smaller publishers to get involved. Even a sole proprietor can get involved and push out e-books to the world.
So what's the problem? Apple and Amazon have made it part of their contractual relationships with those using their services that they do not want to be undersold by another company. And why? Of course they want the business, but more tellingly, they are trying to incentivize producers to bring down prices in the interest of making deals.
This is standard procedure in Web pricing. If you are using a service, the service wants to be able to offer the best deal available. Actually, Amazon and others have been doing this for many years. The service user can accept or reject the deal.
Here's the thing. If this is not the right model, it will hurt the service it delivers. Others can compete. Authors and publishers can establish their own systems. Markets work these things out for themselves. In this case, it appears that Amazon is the only complaining party: it does not want Apple to gain a foothold.
The e-book market is brand-new, for goodness sake. It is going to go through many changes before it is settled — and actually, here's to hoping it never settles! Ceaseless change in economics and life is a good thing.
But bureaucrats don't see it that way. They want to freeze everything in place and make all things conform to their model. And if Sharis Pozen had her way, we would all be paying Netscape for the opportunity to surf the Web. So much for caring about the consumer.
[ The Death of File Sharing ]
Last week's violent government attack on the hugely popular site Megaupload — the U.S. government arresting Belgian citizens in New Zealand, of all places, and stealing at gunpoint servers bank accounts and property — has sent shock waves through the entire digital world.
The first shock was the realization that the gigantic protest against legislative moves (SOPA and PIPA) that would smash the Internet turned out to be superfluous. The thing everyone wanted to prevent is already here. SOPA turns out not to be the unwelcome snake in the garden of free information. The snakes have already taken over the garden and are hanging from every tree.
The second shock took a few days to sink in. It could mean that the whole way in which the digital age has functioned is in danger, or even doomed. This is not a forecast. This doom is all around us right now.
The problem is this: Megaupload was accused of violating copyright through its file-sharing technology. This permits users to upload their own content and permit other users into their space. If anything that one person uploads is of uncertain copyright status — it could be anything, really — sharing it would then seem to amount to a crime.
For some years, the feds have unnecessarily harassed people for nonviolently streaming or sharing content. This has had something of a chilling effect and increased the use of IP-scrambling proxies to keep online habits from being traced. College kids know this all too well. Masking IPs is just the way they live and work.
The attack on Megaupload takes all of this to a different level. This was not some wholly surreptitious, sketchy institution that was trying to get around the law. It was already becoming a legitimate service for launching careers in music and art generally. It seemed to be doing exactly what we expect in the digital age. It was reinventing an old model for new times through innovation in production, delivery and profit sharing.
As I wrote before, this was most likely why the old-line industry came after them. It was not the illegal activities, but their legal ones that made them a target. The moguls do not want change. They crushed the competition.
At the same time, the actual legal rationale that the feds used to blast these people away was their supposed violation of intellectual property through file sharing.
Which raises the question: Is every site that makes file sharing possible in danger? Consider Dropbox, the hugely popular service that allows you to put your files in the cloud and create special folders that share them with others. This allows people to work on shared folders in a collaborative way, and prevents the inevitable problem of version control that comes with emailing back and forth.
How exactly is Dropbox different from Megaupload? It is not that different. It is staid and scholarly, rather than flashy and jazzy. It's interface is plain and neat, rather than colorful and upbeat. Otherwise, it is hard to qualitatively distinguish one from another.
Dropbox is hardly alone. As TechCrunch puts it:
"Several digital locker services operate like Megaupload. RapidShare and MediaFire are two of the larger services. But these sites have undergone a face-lift recently and at least appear to be much less nefarious than they once were. Other services like Dropbox, iCloud, and Amazon S3 are open to hosting any file type a user uploads. They also make sharing easy, but in a way, that's a lot more private than Megaupload. Still yet, there are sites like Zoho in which users can easily share content, content that could be copyrightable. But the prime goal of all these sites is open file sharing — just like Megaupload."
It is hard to see how any file-sharing site can pass muster under the new regime. There are plenty more like SugarSync and FileSonic. As Ghacks points out, users of the latter were greeted with the following ominous message just this week:
Question: What value is a file-sharing site if it doesn't permit the sharing of files? It becomes a thumb drive in the cloud. Maybe that is a bit of convenience, but it is not highly marketable or useful.
Another tactic that file-sharing sites are using after the Mega attack is to outright ban U.S. users in hopes that this will somehow immunize them from the terror attacks being used by the U.S. government. Thus at one upload site were American users greeted with a government-generated block message.
Americans look at China with shock that the government doesn't allow access to a huge amount of the World Wide Web. But look: It is happening right now in the United States, but in an indirect way. This has been called a "virtual Iron Curtain" that is being thrown up around U.S. borders. It has already happened to banking. We are seeing the first signs of this on Internet access.
Another site called uploadbox.com has decided that it will no longer deal with the risk of these kinds of terror tactics and plans to shut down completely at month's end.
What else? Google Docs allows file sharing and has solved so many problems as a result. This has been a great advantage of this innovation. I use it every day. It is essential. But it is in danger. What about Facebook? I could post a copyrighted image there right now and share it with thousands. Facebook thereby becomes an accessory to the same crimes that Mega is alleged to have abetted.
For that matter, what about email? When I send a file, it doesn't remove it from my machine. A copy is made and made and made again. Who and what is to say whether what is sent or received is proprietary and made it through all the legal hoops? In the last several weeks, I've actually received emails expressing fear of sharing links to public sites!
All these changes go beyond the traditional "chilling effect" of random attacks on free speech and free association. This is a sudden and outright freeze, one that is devastating for the whole way in which the Internet has come to exist. What is called "file sharing" is the unique service that the Internet provides. Without that, the Internet becomes an efficient post office or another means of delivering television-style content.
The reason that the Internet has been the driving force behind economic growth, political change, social progress and the general uplift of humanity is its capacity for taking scarce goods and converting them into nonscarce goods of infinite duplicability and availability. Information, media, data and images that were once captive of the physical world — paper and ink, film and bankers boxes — have been freed into another realm so that they can serve and enlighten the whole of humanity.
This has happened because of the miracle of duplicating digital goods that are driving economies in the digital age. To ban duplication and file sharing today is no different from banning flight in the 1920s, banning steel in the 1880s, banning the telegraph in the 1830s, banning the printing press in the 1430s and banning the wheel and sail at the beginning of mankind's advance out of the cave.
It will set humanity back. It violates liberty. It attacks everything that constitutes and defines the times in which we live. It replaces a world of sharing and thriving with a world of violence and technological regression. The Internet will continue to exist, but it will take a different form. Large sectors will have to thrive behind very secure pay walls and only within private digital communities.
And who is doing this? The U.S. government. Government in league with old-line corporate elites.
And what is the official reason? To enforce "intellectual property." It has really come down to this: Either the whole basis of copyright, trademark and patent are scrapped or we could see the death of the digital age as we know it. So long as IP is enforced, the U.S. world empire can continue to roam the world seeking whom it may devour.
[ Two Views of the Internet ]
The barely-defeated legislation called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) hit out of the blue and caused a global scramble among the smart set to make sure it was defeated. It was a close call, and the legislation isn't going away. It will come back and back again, and it will require relentless vigilance to keep this menace at bay.
This fact alone is supremely annoying. Why should we have to spend our time fighting so hard for what should really be our natural right to speak and share, to associate with fellow human beings through digital media? Why should we have to waste our time explaining dynamic digital networks to a gang of racketeering geezers with the political power to wreck things but no means to create anything of value?
In the week that followed the big fight, I've been thinking about the implications of the legislation, which itself amounts to a drastic change in the way people go about running their digital lives. Many opponents rightly warned that it could mean the end of Wikipedia, Google, YouTube, millions of blogs, Facebook, and just about everything else. I had supposed that this would amount to what is called an "unintended consequence" of legislation. In the name of supporting property rights, the advocates of SOPA would inadvertently smash the most productive and innovate tool of our times.
But it occurs to me (finally) that there is more going on here than just that. Let me quickly tell a story to illustrate the point. On a blog, I had posted something on YouTube that was an audio recording of a short narrative. It was no big deal. The video had been posted by many others, and I thought nothing of it. Then suddenly I received a takedown notice from a big magazine. The text itself was from their publication and the recording was unauthorized. It was a remix.
I explained that I had nothing to do with making the recording; I was merely linking it, and, moreover, I had no idea of the source. This settled nothing: the company was relentless in demanding either credit or take down. I was blown away by this. The YouTube poster from whom I linked had in fact credited the source. In any case, if they didn't want someone to record the text, they shouldn't have put it online. And, what's more, why be upset about this? It is a great thing to have published something that someone else found worthy of spreading and remixing.
But the correspondent didn't buy it. He was mad at the YouTuber, mad at me, mad at the Internet, and mad at the world. After all, he said, this short text was taken without permission and posted somewhere else in a different form. This amounts to piracy, he said. Certainly, under SOPA, not only would YouTube get hammered; I would too, and so would every Facebooker who posted the video. The law would be biased in this guy's favor, regardless of the injustice and regardless of the realities of the Internet that he clearly does not understand.
As I thought about this, I suddenly realized something. SOPA is not just dangerous legislation supported by self-interested people that would have inadvertently bad results. The result of transforming the way the World Wide Web works is precisely what they have in mind. They want to enact a dramatic shift in the entire way that digital media works in service of humanity.
Some background here. The reason the Internet fired up a generation of digital activists and brought about the greatest explosion of human-serving innovation in history is that it permits the building of real-time networks of information sharing. It is a low-cost, instantaneously working means of merging the products of individual human minds so that the results will be greater than the sum of the parts. The technology is brilliant but what makes it all come together is the individual human being who has the opportunity to contribute knowledge to something greater than himself.
The results of communication without the Internet are what gave rise to the technology explosion of the late nineteenth century, as Robert Higgs and Deirdre McCloskey have argued. It works like yeast with flour, sugar, and water. It becomes something bigger and grander than anyone first imagined. What the Internet did was take this model to a new level, expanding the number of participants and increasing the range of materials that could be shared. In other words, the Internet really amounted to mankind's most successful effort at intellectual collaboration toward everyone's mutual betterment. (If you are curious about this vision, have a look at the writings of Richard Stallman, whose work I've begun to appreciate ever more.)
The advocates of SOPA hear everything I just described as the glorification of piracy and looting on a mass scale. Collaboration is stealing. Learning is theft. Passing on and linking is graft. You can look, but you can't act. You can hear, but not learn. There should be no consumption without contract and no competition under any circumstances.
To see an analogy of how they see the digital world, consider television. Each channel does something different and there is no relationship between the channels. Each exists on its own. You are either watching one or you are watching another. It is ridiculous to speak of collaboration between them. No one "links" from one channel to another. We are not content providers to television. We are pure consumers, and a strict wall separates us from producers.
This is the old world way of doing things, and this is precisely how the Internet changed everything. The advocates want to change that back again and tear the heart out of what makes the Internet different from anything else that came before. In this sense, they are Luddites who are desperate to turn back the clock, kill the innovative spirit, and wreck the medium that accounts for the large part of global productivity of the last ten years. Does that sound crazy? It is, but this is what SOPA would do and what SOPA intends to do.
I never would have imagined it but this really is shaping up to be the battle of the future. Those who want to use the state to enforce "intellectual property rights" really have in mind a world without the Internet as we've come to understand it. It's incredible that a small intellectual error that took hold late in the 19th century (the notion that ideas can be property) would mutate into a wealth-eating machinery that is global and fundamentally threatening to the future of civilization. But that is really what we are dealing with today.
[ Economics of the Timeline ]
Most of us hadn't thought about Davy Jones of The Monkees in many years. Suddenly, he died at the age of sixty-six and we were all instantly living in his world. Tributes were everywhere. His YouTube videos were slammed with hits. Praise for his life and works appeared on blogs everywhere.
People were honoring his memory by looking back at the timeline of his life, seeing the change in his face and appearance from the youngest age when he played the Artful Dodger to his last year, in which he was still singing (and actually, he looked great!).
The same now happens when every major cultural figure passes on. We see a lifetime of pictures. We see the change, the aging process, the gradual graying, the weight gain, and the other intriguing responses of our physical appearance to the passage of time.
The digital age has brought us many new things, but the least expected is a new awareness of time and the inevitability of decline and death. Digits have a way of collapsing it all so we can view it in a much sped-up process. We can see performances from decades ago as easily as we can see one from yesterday.
It's never been this easy to observe the phrase "ashes to ashes" play itself out before our eyes. The analog age generally gave us only what was going on at the time, or rather, we could go to some lengths to get the full picture of past and present The digital age, with its penchant for giving us every bit of information we could possibly want, puts the passage of time at our fingertips and burns the reality of mortality into our brains.
The passage of time is newly fashionable. Facebook, used by nearly one-sixth of humanity, has recently changed its default layout from displaying random stuff to organizing it all in a timeline. Software widgets show what we will look like in fifty years. Our email archives keep a running chronicle of our lives, day by day, thought by thought, friend by friend.
It's all symbolic of a new embrace of the most relentless force in the universe, more powerful than all states and all private markets put together: the inevitability of change embedded in the passage of time. It is unstoppable, undeniable and omnipresent and a constant reminder that no matter how much power humankind accumulates, it will never be more powerful than time itself. There is some comfort in that.
What economic institution most embodies the inescapability of time's relentless march? Ludwig von Mises, in his wonderful treatise Human Action, tells us that it is the interest rate. Interest rates reflect our degree of valuation of present goods over future goods. Everyone prefers the same good now, rather than later, all else being equal. However, in the same sense that we choose which goods and services we want to buy or decline to buy, we also choose our time horizon: acting for now or acting for later to achieve our ends.
If we want a car today and don't want to defer our consumption for a year or two down the line, we have to pay someone else who has deferred that consumption to loan us saved money. If we are starting a business and think its near-term profits are going to be higher than the expected interest charges, we make the deal. If we save money and make it available to others to use, we expect a reward in the form of interest.
The interest rate is supposed to signal to investors how to handle time commitments. A low rate of interest is supposed to signal vast savings available in a society that has deferred consumption and planned for the future. A high rate of interest suggests a relative scarcity of savings and a scramble to use what is available. In this way, interest rates carefully sync present and future.
The passage of time also instantiates itself in the institution of capital — goods produced not for immediate consumption, but rather for making other goods. If there were not time structure of production, capital would have no unique value, no real contribution to overall prosperity. But it does because its very existence points to how property owners are able to plan for the future.
In societies in which there is no planning for the future, either because the culture is present-oriented or because the law is too unstable to permit planning, no capital formation takes place. No time structure of production exists. And there are no savings to back the wide availability of credit.
In developed economies, the capital structure reflects a huge variety of time commitments. Every production process has an endpoint of consumption, but those endpoints are all over the map. I can make soup to eat now. Or I can save to buy some grapevines and build a vineyard to make wine that might only be drinkable and marketable ten or fifteen years from now.
The Austrian economists tell us that other economic theories are nearly brain-dead when it comes to thinking about the passage of time and its role in the institution of capital. This is one of many reasons that they miss an extremely important point about Federal Reserve policy. That is, by manipulating the interest rates, the Fed is playing with the signaling system that tells investors and capitalists how much they can plan ahead — how much "real stuff" is available to cause their plans to work out.
In this way, a manipulated rate like we have today is nothing but a lie. It tells capitalists to borrow and plan when the resources aren't really available to justify that. It tells us that there are huge reserves available to support future consumption, whereas they aren't really there. As a result, the finely calibrated singling system of capital markets isn't really functioning as it should.
In a strange way, then, the Fed is in denial about something that we've all embraced in the digital age.
Even Facebook is on board with acknowledging that all its accounts will go the way of all flesh. The Fed seems to think that its powers allow itself to live as if time doesn't matter.
Bernanke might be powerful, but he can't achieve what no one ever has: the abolition of time as a undeniable factor of economic life. It is the ultimate act of arrogance to act as if the relentless forward march of time is pure illusion.
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A Beautiful Anarchy
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Jeffrey Tucker
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[
"nonfiction"
] |
[
"politics",
"economics"
] |
Leave the Nation State
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[ How to Think Like a State ]
Do you notice a pattern when dealing with any aspect of the government at nearly any level? We all have. There is a certain cast of mind at work here. This is my attempt to frame it up and identify its main features.
Experience shows that if something is going to go really wrong, predictably waste your time, annoy you and attack your dignity, and finally just prove to be totally ineffective at accomplishing the task, there's a good chance that it involves the government.
Society outside the state has corrective forces always at work. Life's not perfect but it is generally trying its best to improve. But with the state, everything seems to be stuck in a pattern of failure at every level. At best, government does stupid things; at worst, it does unspeakably horrible things.
Some quick examples from everyone's favorite example of government failure: the TSA.
Lots of people are deeply offended by the TSA's groping gruffness. What strikes me more is its sheer stupidity, its lack of concern for anything but the existing plan, and the complete disconnect between the goal of security and the actual reality.
Last week, I had a small bottle of liquor confiscated by the TSA. Pointless. A friend had his palm tested for traces of bomb ingredients. Huh? Everyone in the line took off all shoes, belts, and jewelry to be x-ray scanned, but to what end? Meanwhile, people who followed the procedures could carry all kinds of potentially deadly things on the plane provided they were properly packed in separate, see-through bags.
But the TSA is hardly unique in this respect. It just so happens that more people encounter it more often than almost any other government agency. Yes, it makes everyone crazy. But we would experience the same absurdities if every day we had to deal with the Department of Labor, the Pentagon, the Department of Transportation, or Housing and Urban Development. Those who do can tell you amazing stories!
Here's the deal. The state's distinguishing characteristic is its presumption of control and its use of force to exercise that control. But this is not the whole of the problem with statism. This characteristic gives rise to many other features that are part of what we might call a statist way of thinking. It really amounts to a pattern of being that comes with power, which is to say, that comes with the absence of any check or corrective consequences.
The market and the voluntary order have within them structures that keep human vice and relentless stupidity from completely taking over the system. That's not true with the government. The government builds protective walls around itself that prohibit inputs that would otherwise keep faulty thinking at bay.
So what are the features of this faulty way of thinking that seems pervasive in government institutions? Relying on my usual influences (Nock, Mises, Rothbard, Hayek), let us explore how you too can think like a state.
1. Presume that all things worth knowing are already known. That includes the goal and the means to achieve the goal. The state thinks that society should work a certain way and assume a predetermined shape, and it knows this with absolute certainty. There is no process, no unfolding of history that yields unexpected results. The state is so certain of the end point of the social order that it never has to explain or justify its perception.
It knows the right allocation of income between classes, the right size and number of businesses in each sector, the right allocation between security and risk, what is just and what is unjust. It knows when the economy is growing too much or too little. It knows what industries should die or last forever. It knows what is and is not good for you.
Because there is no uncertainty in the statist mind, there is no need for discovery, improvisation, or imagination that reveals itself through time through trial and error. There is no need for listening, learning, adapting. What's more, a state doesn't doubt that it has the means to achieve its goals. To will it is to cause it happen. Its omniscience comes with omnipotence.
This is why there is no arrogance in the world like the state's arrogance. At the same time, any person or any institution can adopt this regrettable habit of mind: managers, parents, pastors, business professionals. Outside the state and the protections it builds around itself, however, reality eventually strikes back. Reality is about uncertainty, change, surprise, innovation, adaptation. Markets give life to these forces in the same way that the state absolutely and by necessity crushes them.
2. Presume that the path of victory is paved by enforcement. This is a feature of the statist way of thinking that is most on display in wartime. Is the war causing more people to join the rebel ranks? The answer is more shock and awe! If that doesn't work, bring out the tanks, the bigger guns, larger bullhorns, and more troops on the ground.
It goes without saying that there is nothing wrong with the state's plan, so the only problem here is that people are being insufficiently deferential to the rightful authority. There is only one way forward: show people who is boss.
It's not only in wartime. Every agency of government thinks this way. Without exception. You see it in the penal laws. If something is bad like drugs or underage drinking, the answer seems obvious: increase the penalties for those caught. No punishment is too harsh! The harsher the punishment, the more the deterrence, or so believes the state. In the same way, there can never be too many police, too many people charged with making other people comply.
But might this path create unintended consequences? Might the enforcement be causing the problem to get worse and create backlash, blowback, and black markets? Or might harshness recruit more people into the rebel class and discourage law keeping? In the state's way of thinking, this is not possible. The laws and the regulations are the voices of god, period, and god is never wrong. Certainly this god never, under any circumstances, admits error.
3. Presume that all disagreement amounts to betrayal and treason. This point follows directly from the above two. If you know all things and all things are possible through enforcement, it stands to reason that should someone dare to pop up his or her head and take issue, this person is an enemy of the state or whatever the state stands for.
You are against the war? Then you are for the enemy and defying the rightful authority.
You have doubts about the endless looting of private wealth and the regimentation of human interaction? You are part of the problem instead of the solution.
In the state's way of thinking, there are only two possible archetypes of the good citizen: the serf and the sycophant. If you fall outside those two categories, you are a rebel to be watched or a traitor to be crushed.
To the state, there is only one path. That's because all things work in this world because one will rules all. In fact, that's exactly what everyone who thinks like a state believes. Unless there is a dictator, life will surely collapse into chaos, brutality, heresy, or some other disaster.
The state can't even conceive of the truth about society that the old liberal tradition reveals: it works precisely because it is not ruled by one will. It is the decentralized knowledge of individual actors that creates order in the world. It is the multiplicity of plans all coordinated through institutions that create the extended order that gives rise to civilization and causes it to develop in unexpected ways.
4. Presume that the material world matters more than ideas. Again, this follows from the above three points. The distinguishing characteristic of the state is its control over physical property. It rules the space where its tanks roll and within the lines on the map called borders. It takes wealth at the point of a gun.
Its love of the physical is so intense that it always and everywhere builds huge and imposing buildings for its bureaucrats and giant monuments to itself. It wraps itself in theories of the world that revolve primarily around physical things only.
It dabbles in propaganda and education but not in ways that are reliably successful. The state cannot finally control human minds. Those are and will always be ours alone. Even in the prison camp, the prisoners are free to think what they want. We all can. Anytime. This is why the state hates the human mind and what it produces. The human mind and the whole world of ideas is ultimately beyond its reach.
More incredible still is that the whole of the man-made physical world as we know it began with ideas. In the same way, the ideas we hold now are the foreshadowing of the world of tomorrow. And that's precisely why the statist way of thinking is fearful of free thought and why the state itself can never be forward thinking.
5. Oppose every unapproved change in the plan. This follows from the above four. The end point of the social order is already known. It can be achieved by enforcement and suppression of dissent and the crushing of new ideas. The whole cast of mind presumes no surprises. Therefore, it is best just to make sure that no change takes place that is not already built into the model.
Thinking like a state, then, means forever wallowing in the legacy content of what has been mandated before. If something was ever a law, it must stay a law. If something was ever enforced, it must be enforced forever. Look backwards to what has been (or a mythical version of it) and not forwards to what might be. The state loves its own history: its leaders, its wars, its legends.
This backwards bias is deeply entrenched. The bulk of the laws and regulations that are enforced daily on people in society have nothing to do with the current political managers (contrary to what elections promise). They date back decades and even as much as a century or more. Laws do not leave books. They are only added and accumulated like rings on the trunk of a tree. Shoring up what exists, adding band-aids as necessary, is much more important to the state than reversing mistakes of the past.
So entrenched is this idea that new laws, if they are ever to expire, must have a sunset provision explicitly built into them, and this is usually added only to buy votes. But more often than not, the sunset date arrives and the law is renewed again. It is a momentous event when a bad policy dies: think of the epic significance of the end of prohibition or the end of the fifty-five mph speed limit. These are exceptions that prove the rule.
This final feature of thinking like a state is the most deadly to civilization. Change is the source of society's life and development. There are new people, new ideas, new tastes and preferences, new patterns of living, new technologies. Mankind has a penchant to want to improve and that requires throwing out the old. The state uses all its power to shore up the past and wage a daily battle against progressive change.
If you understand these features, you can't be surprised by all the daily frustrations and annoyances imposed by regulations, bureaucrats, and politicians. The state has a personality disorder, one born of its monopoly status and its coercive tactics. This disorder is not unique to the state. You probably recognize at least some of these traits in people you know. You might even recognize them in yourself.
It's fine to rail against the bureaucrats but there is also a case for pitying the TSA workers and the millions who are part of the same kind of institutional structures. The difference between us and the state is that when these personality disorders appear, we are capable of changing them, and we have every incentive to do so. The state just keeps keeping on, long after it becomes completely irrelevant to anything that truly matters.
Thus ends the lesson in how to think like a state. It is a perfect recipe for failure in life.
[ The Regulatory State Does Not Like You ]
Two important regulatory rulings have been issued in the last day that will have a profound effect on your life, both immediately and over the long run. One forces a continued degradation of AT&T's cell phone coverage by forbidding a merger with the embattled company T-Mobile. The other targets a feature of Google's Android phone on grounds that it too closely resembles a feature of the iPhone over which Apple holds the patent.
Neither regulatory decision will help you. In fact, both directly target your well-being. AT&T has had trouble for years and has lost market support for its spotty cell coverage relative to its competitors. To prevent the company from reinventing itself through a merger is very bad for consumers. And it is the same with the Apple/Google decision. This intervention takes away a software feature from people who want to use something other than Apple's phone. Both decisions are blatantly harmful to consumers and to the cause of competition.
Who issued these rulings? The merger decision was handed down by the U.S. Justice Department. The Apple/Google decision was handed down by the U.S. International Trade Commission. If you don't recall having been asked who should populate these bureaucracies or whether they should have jurisdiction over your technology, your memory is not failing you. Welcome to the U.S. version of regulatory central planning, replete with mandarins and apparatchiks that purport to have total control over the direction and pace of economic development. They serve special interests but do not serve the rest of us.
There was a time when this type of regulation was said to be necessary for the consumer. In fact, this is still widely believed. But look at what is happening here. The consumers are the ones who are being left out, denied the right to influence the direction of technological change. The bureaucrats are thwarting the desires of those who actually use cell phones in their daily lives.
The reason for the Apple victory against Google is fairly straightforward, though there is no way it could have been predicted in advance. Apple, the current industry leader, wanted to harm its main competition. It has a huge war chest of patents and a fierce desire to use them to firm up a monopolistic status. The ruling is rather narrow and concerns the ability to use the content of one application to drive the behavior of another application, such as clicking on an address to open up a navigation tool. But what matters here are not the specifics but the power of Apple to enforce its claims. This is what chills pro-consumer development down the line.
Keep in mind that American consumers of the Android phone are already using the now-forbidden phone features. This is what gives lie to the claims of Apple that Android "stole" — a word used by the Apple spokesman — something or anything at all. When someone steals something from you, you no longer have it. The Android offering of this feature did not prevent Apple from using the same feature. Therefore, it cannot be theft.
At most, the similarity of software functioning is a good example of the learning process that open market competition permits and encourages. In a thriving marketplace, everyone learns from everyone else, and each firm strives to be ever more excellent in the service of the public. Apple's claims amount to a demand that no one else be permitted to compete using any features that it uses. This is a paradigmatic case of how patents are seriously harming economic development.
Software patents of this sort were nowhere known in the early years of the software industry. Both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have publicly reflected on how, in those days, they all learned from each other. They would watch the competition and emulate what succeeded in order to stay in the running, while striving to innovate constantly in order to gain the advantage. It was a free market and it gave birth to the modern world. But in the mid-to-late 1980s, the government started issuing patents that began the process of freezing development in place. Today, the entire sector has become a thicket of claims and counterclaims that only the most well-heeled companies can navigate.
The case of the AT&T merger with T-Mobile is even more interesting still for the layers upon layers of interest groups involved here. It was to be the biggest-ticket merger this year: $39 billion. Those kinds of numbers always have big institutions behind them. The choice partners here were J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley, along with others, who were to earn $150 million in accounting fees on the deal. It was a good bet for everyone involved. Market competition is difficult enough but there was always a very dangerous elephant in the living room: a government powerful enough to overrule the market process. This introduced the great uncertainty.
Left out of the deal completely was the influential mother of innumerable crony deals of late: Goldman Sachs. In this way, the defeat of this merger is a huge victory for Goldman because it slams its most direct competitors in the investment banking industry. The Wall Street Journal reports that the failure of the deal moves Goldman from #2 to #1 in the industry. Are we really supposed to believe that Goldman, which has massive influence within the Obama administration thanks to a well-documented revolving door between the two institutions, had no influence at all over this decision?
Two more beneficiaries include Verizon and Sprint, and carrier stock prices reshuffled very quickly in their favor as soon as the announcement came over the ticker. AT&T was slammed not only because its path to the future was blocked but also because it now owes $4 million in accounting fees to T-Mobile's parent company, a charge that is going to further hurt its ability to invest and compete.
Both decisions are bad on their own terms, but worse in terms of what they imply about the future of digital development. They make investors fearful, give unwarranted power to politically connected companies, and impose a general feeling of legal uncertainty about what is and is not possible in the great struggle to serve the consuming public. The decisions add a dangerous component of monopolization and stagnation in what should be a competitive and dynamic sector.
These are not going to kill progress in the digital marketplace but they distort its pathway, and with costs that are largely unseen. When your cellphone lacks features or your service provider's coverage isn't what it should be, whom do you blame? Most people will blame the business. They should be blaming the central planners — the real hidden hand that is working to dim the lights and make finding our way to a brighter future ever more difficult.
[ Brazil and the Spirit of Liberty ]
My most surprising findings in Brazil, aside from the amazing fruits that I didn't know existed because the U.S. government doesn't think I need them, were the young American kids who have moved here to find economic opportunity. This I had not expected, but now fully understand.
Brazil is a marvelous and massive country where private wealth thrives without embarrassment, where well-protected and healthy familial dynasties form the infrastructure of social and economic life, where technology is popular and beloved by everyone, where the police leave you alone and where Americans can feel right at home.
The world is changing fast. Freedom in America is slipping away so quickly that we are already seeing a wave of young people leaving in search of new opportunities, just as people from the around the world once came to America to live the dream. Brazil is one of many countries benefiting from the generational emigration from the U.S.
Discovering this rattled me more than I might have expected. But the young people themselves are not unhappy, and I can see why. They are valued. They are earning good money doing interesting things. They have access to one of the most beautiful and exotic and friendly places on Earth. They eat well, live well and have rich social lives.
More than anything else, they have the sense of freedom.
Now, you might wonder how it is that people have to leave the "home of the free" to find freedom. Over the last ten years, something horrible has happened to the United States. The police state has cracked down hard, not so much on "terrorists" or real criminals, but on regular citizens. The news items spill out of my feed on an hourly basis, things that just shock and alarm those who are paying attention.
Maybe it is not so surprising. The U.S. military is larger than most of the world's militaries combined. We have the largest prison population on the planet, and most are locked up for nonviolent crimes. The political culture focuses more on the need for security than for freedom. Add it all up and you have the perfect recipe for the emergence of a police state.
But most Americans are not entirely conscious of the change. It has been fast, but slow enough not to cause alarm. It hits you only once you leave. This happened to me two years ago when I went to Spain. I could move about and do what I wanted without bumping into authority at every turn. I felt it again in Austria last year. It is not something you can quite put your finger on, just a sense that you are not under constant surveillance in suspicion. You can breathe easily.
It was the same in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a happy and prosperous land of exotic fruits, thriving markets, consumer products that actually work and are not depreciated by regulatory mandates, and polite and warm people.
I received a very generous invitation to be a main speaker at the third conference on Austrian economics sponsored by Mises Brasil, a young organization with a very bright future. It was founded only four years ago. Yet today, it has a gigantic presence in Brazilian intellectual life. The hunger for the intellectual basis of freedom is palpable.
Three hundred or more people were here to listen to lectures and engage in debates on ideas. The audience was a sea of young people, almost everyone under 30. They were students, professionals, traders and workers of all sorts, all passionate about freedom and the economic answers provided by the Austrian tradition of Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek and Murray Rothbard.
What most excited them was the classic idea of laissez-faire — that is, the idea that society can thrive on its own in the absence of central management and that the government operates as a drain on society. The culture of the group was certainly more intellectual and educational than political. They were invigorated by ideas and given hope by the idea of freedom. Apparently, nothing like this organization existed in Brazil until recently. Now the group's website is one of the most heavily trafficked in the country.
My hosts were enormously generous with their time, and they knew exactly what I really wanted to do on the first day: see the delights of the open-air markets. I was told they are in the center of town. If you had seen a map of Sao Paulo, you would know just how odd it is even to imagine such a thing. The city seems to be everywhere in sight, everywhere you turn, going on forever. It is like 100 New Yorks.
Driving here is not for the faint of heart. The street layout makes no rational sense at all. I could have been driven the short distance between the hotel and the conference center a hundred times and still not have had the slightest clue about the layout. I was told that it would take at least two years of living here to gain a sense that you really know the place.
Go to a high spot in the center of town and look around on all sides. Everywhere you see a beautiful thing, a world built by millions of human hands. No central plan could have made this. No single mind could have conceived of it. To anyone who is intellectually curious, the obvious questions are how does this place work? How is order achieved? The answer is one that few people in the United States seem to care about today. The miracle is obtained through the coordinating forces of the market itself, of millions of free people interacting in small ways toward their mutual self-betterment. This is the answer that inspires a lifetime of intellectual curiosity.
For the first lunch on my first day, my hosts took me to a place like I had never seen, and they are as unconscious of its significance as Americans would be startled by its very existence. Again, it seemed to be in the center of town. To obtain entry requires extensive security checks. But once you are in, a new world emerges: restaurants, soccer fields, gigantic swimming pools of many varieties and delights as far as the eye can see.
This is a city within a city. But it is entirely private, what Americans would call a "country club," but of a particularly elaborate type. It is not hidden away in some alcove on the outskirts of town. It is right there in the city for everyone to see — something nonmembers can also take pride in. It is marvelous in every way, a living monument to the possibility of orderly, privately-owned anarchist communities.
One thing kept gnawing at me during my entire visit. I kept coming across people who were members of large and extended families with roots very far back in Brazilian history. They were impressive entrepreneurs, but the wealth was more robust than you would find in a place like Silicon Valley. It reminded more of Gilded Age families in the United States, people who carried themselves with grace and confidence born of excellent breeding and material security.
As I thought about it more, the ingredients were unusual by American standards: large and extended families, protected wealth, well-bred youths, a predominantly young population. What was the reason for this? I developed a quick, back-of-the-napkin theory. It had something to do with the inheritance tax. So I asked my hosts, "What are estate taxes like in this country?" The answer came fast: There are none. Some areas charge 3%, maybe 6%, but it is rather easy to escape even those minimal charges.
This contrasts with the United States, where estate taxes can be as high as 35%. We've been looting our best families for a hundred years. We've gouged and smashed the richest generations of American capitalists upon death ever since the Progressive Era. We've been living one generation at a time. Time horizons have fallen. Large-scale, privately held capital accumulation has been discouraged, even made illegal. Families have shrunk in size. The population has become ever more aged.
This tax policy has eaten the heart out of the desire of a free people to create dynasties. So our wealthy have to hide. They are encouraged to give their money away to causes, rather than to children. We live one generation to the next. Children are perceived as an economic burden, rather than a path to immortalizing a legacy.
In Brazil, the time horizon extends beyond the single lifetime. And this is what has given rise to the dramatic cultural, social and economic differences between our countries. These dynasties serve as robust intermediating institutions between the individual and the state. We have ever fewer such things in the United States. Maybe this is what accounts for the incoherent sense that this is a freer country than the U.S.
There are other factors, too. The military consumes only a tiny percentage of wealth, and Brazilians dread wars because they know that they will be roped into supporting whatever wacky war the U.S. starts. What's more, the police are well-known to be as likely to commit as prevent or punish crime, so they are not trusted. Security is extremely important in Brazil, but everyone knows that it is a private function and not anything anyone would entrust to the state.
The beautiful thing about Mises Brasil as an organization is that it is working to further encourage these instincts and spread an intellectual culture that openly embraces liberty as a model of life itself. They publish books and monographs, hold conferences and spread the liberal tradition far and wide among an idea-hungry generation. This is all about the future, and Mises Brasil is right to have confidence in it.
As I waited in the customs line to enter the U.S. again, we were all shown a film designed to introduce America to new visitors. The film featured kids in ballet class, people riding horses, barn raisings, people water surfing, dances from coast to coast, smiling people of all ages, all against the backdrop of an exciting Copelandesque musical score. It ended with the Statue of Liberty. It was wholly inspiring, but there was something missing: The government was nowhere to be seen.
How I wish this film were the whole truth about our country. It once was. But the American dream is not about geography; the American dream is an idea that moves like a spirit around the world, landing wherever people are willing to embrace it and confess it as creed. That spirit has landed in Brazil, and it was a great honor to be witness to it.
[ My Government Is Worse Than Yours ]
Now that hysteria over my original Brazil column has died down, let me add some comments and reflections about it and what gave rise to the reactions.
To review, I had written a piece praising the many glorious features of Brazil and especially the way in which civilization has managed to thrive by virtue of certain freedoms that we do not have in the U.S.: the freedom to pass on estates in whole to children and the seeming absence of the policestate security apparatus and military-industrial complex that represses us every day in this one-time land of the free.
Many Brazilians were appalled by what seemed to them to be my favorable comparison of Brazil to the United States. Don't I know that their country is ruled by a wicked socialist dictatorship that strangles the life out of enterprise every day? Don't I know about the other egregious forms of taxation they deal with constantly? Am I completely unaware of the stultifying bureaucracies that make it nearly impossible to open and run a business?
One thing that all the correspondents said again and again: if you think you have it bad, you should experience our disgusting lives and then you would really know the meaning of despotism.
I also detected in all these letters a sort of idealization of the U.S. that we often find abroad. No matter how much our government tries to wreck our reputation as the place where liberty thrives, many people around the world still like to imagine that we have full constitutional rights and freewheeling enterprise that they do not enjoy.
As Americans, we should resist this flattery. It is an interesting exercise to travel abroad and discover that, behold, in some ways people living under democratic socialism experience elements of freedom that our current American system (democratic fascism?) denies to us. To me, this is the strongest case for traveling, just so that we can gain some perspective.
But all of this raises an interesting question. Why is it that we tend to be more critical of our own governments than those in other lands?
In a sense, I agree with Noam Chomsky (I'm a sometime fan but not a devotee) who was once asked why he is such a severe critic of the U.S. government but doesn't have much to say about the evil of other governments around the world.
I'm paraphrasing his answer. First, he knows more about the U.S. government than other governments so he is in a better position to report accurately. Second, his criticisms of the U.S. government can actually have some influence whereas he would have no influence on the policies in Afghanistan or North Korea. Third, because he is a U.S. citizen he has a special and even moral obligation to object when the government that is stealing from him is using that money to murder and oppress people abroad.
He might have had other reasons too but those strike me as reasonable. I might add that we all have a tendency to believe that the government we know the best is probably the worst. For example, many people can tell grim stories of the corruption, graft, favoritism, and brutality of our local governments. We know its victims first hand. We've seen it up close and we are appalled.
Our heads should tell us that if it is this bad at the local level, it is surely worse at the state level and unimaginably bad at the central level of the federal government. Most of us have no direct experience with the feds, however, so its depredations are more abstract to us.
It doesn't help that the sheer numbers that the feds play with are beyond human comprehension. The local official who steals $100,000 is a criminal but what does it mean when a federal agency loses track of $2,000,000,000 in loans? The larger the number, the more abstracted it becomes from our experience.
I take it for granted that all governments everywhere are parasitic, power abusing, thieving, grafting bastions of hypocrisy, depredation, and duplicity. This is not an accident of history but rather an outgrowth of a fundamental structural reality: government operates by different rules from the rest of us.
If we steal, we are doing wrong and everyone knows it. But the government does the same thing and claims it is sustaining the social order — and calls us unpatriotic if we disagree. And that's only the beginning. The government punishes us for doing things — fraud, theft, murder, kidnapping, counterfeiting — that it does legally every day.
This is not a feature of bad government. The legal right to violate the laws it enforces against the population is the defining feature of the state as we know it. That is to say, there is evil at the very heart of the business of government. The more centralized the state, the less control we have over it and the more egregious the immorality, efficiency, graft, and lies.
I would go further than Thomas Jefferson, who said that the government that governs best governs least. Actually, the government that governs not at all is the best of all.
Returning to Brazil, the difference between the government there and the government here is not a matter of kind but of degree. So it is for all governments in all times and places, which is why we can read about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire and find so many parallels with our own time. Measuring the degree of evil can be extremely tricky. Chomsky is right here: if we wish to decry evil in politics, our primary obligation is to focus on the state we know best, which is our own. In that sense my critics are right, from their point of view, and I'm right from mine.
At the same time, there is more to the task of liberty than hating and decrying the state. The other side of the coin is developing a genuine love of liberty, which implies a love of its most spectacular, people-serving feature: commerce.
Commerce keeps the world orderly and rational and free. It gives us drive and ratifies our efforts. It sparks imagination and defines its boundaries. It feeds the world, sustains and builds civilization, and unleashes the best in the human spirit. It keeps us materially connected and linked to our brothers and sisters across the globe. It makes possible, in our own time, beautiful worlds we could never dream up on our own.
Wherever there is liberty, there is commerce. And this commerce breaks down the barriers that the state erects between people. Commerce ignores borders, draws people together whom the state would like to see separated. It always tends toward the service of human needs rather than civic priorities.
Without some liberty, however restricted it might be, and the commerce it sustains society would die in a matter of weeks. The state alone sustains nothing. This is why, when I travel, I'm very much drawn to finding and watching those sectors where liberty lives and observing the massive contribution it makes to the social order.
I take it for granted that the state is too big, invasive, and horrible — not just in Brazil, not just in the U.S., but absolutely everywhere. What's really exciting is to see people finding the workaround and making lives for themselves, and that usually means some commercial activity that thrives despite every effort to kill it.
This is what I saw in so many beautiful ways in Brazil. To see liberty work is to see a model for building the future. This is why it is so inspiring to visit real markets, to see what people can do with investable wealth, to observe all the ways in which people manage to make good lives for themselves despite every obstacle.
This is the spirit of liberty. The great merit of the work of Mises Brasil is that it encourages intellectual change throughout society, building from the liberty that currently does exist toward a full-blown free society. This is the path of change. It requires that we see more than what is bad but also see what is good, and build from that.
Wendy McElroy's forthcoming book from Laissez Faire Books is called The Art of Being Free. She raises a very profound question for serious libertarians. If the state went away, what would you be left with to give your life meaning? Find that thing and you will have found your North Star, the inspiration and driving force for building a vibrant and free future.
Hate the state, yes, but love liberty even more. Decry the thicket, yes, but then find the seed, plant it, and see the garden grow.
[ Democracy is Our Hunger Game ]
Whatever good you have heard about The Hunger Games, the reality is more spectacular. Not only is this the literary phenom of our time, but the movie that created near pandemonium for a week from its opening is a lasting contribution to art and to the understanding of our world. It's more real than we know.
In the story, a totalitarian and centralized state — it seems to be some kind of unelected autocracy — keeps a tight grip on its colonies to prevent a repeat of the rebellion that occurred some seventy-five years ago. They do this through the forced imposition of material deprivation, by unrelenting propaganda about the evil of disobedience to the interests of the nation state and with "Hunger Games" as annual entertainment.
In this national drama and sport, and as a continuing penance for past sedition, the central state randomly selects two teens from each of the twelve districts and puts them into a fight-to-the-death match in the woods, one watched like a reality show by every resident. The districts are supposed to cheer for their representatives and hope that one of their selected teens will be the one person who prevails.
So amidst dazzling pageantry, media glitz and public hysteria, these twenty-four kids — who would otherwise be living normal lives — are sent to kill each other without mercy in a bloody zero-sum game. They are first transported to the opulent capitol city and wined, dined, and trained. Then the games begin.
At the very outset, many are killed on the spot in the struggle to grab weapons from a stockpile. From there, coalitions form among the groups, however temporary they may be. Everyone knows there can only be one winner in the end, but alliances — formed on the basis of class, race, personality, etc. — can provide a temporary level of protection.
Watching all this take place is harrowing to say the least, but the public in the movie does watch as a type of reality television. This is the ultimate dog-eat-dog setting, in which life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," in the words of Thomas Hobbes. But it is also part of a game the kids are forced to play. This is not a state of nature. In real life, they wouldn't have the need to kill or be killed. They wouldn't see each other as enemies. They wouldn't form into evolving factions for self-protection.
The games provide the key element that every state, no matter how powerful or fearsome, absolutely must have: a means of distracting the public from the real enemy. Even this monstrous regime depends fundamentally on the compliance of the governed. No regime can put down a universal revolt. The plot twist in this story actually turns on a worry among the elites that the masses will not tolerate a scripted ending to the games this time.
So here we see the first element of political sophistication in this film. It taps into the observation first recorded by Étienne de La Boétie (1530–63) that all states, because they live parasitically off the population on an ongoing basis, depend on eliciting the compliance of the people in some degree; no state can survive a mass refusal to obey. This is why states must concoct public ideologies and various veneers to cover their rules (a point often raised by Hans-Hermann Hoppe in his work). "National traditions" such as the Hunger Games serve the purpose well.
The political sophistication of this film doesn't stop there. The Hunger Games themselves serve as a microcosm of political elections in modern developed economies. Pressure groups and their representatives are thrown into a hazardous, vicious world in which coalitions form and reform. Survival is harrowing, and hate is unleashed as would never exist in normal life. Candidates fight to the death knowing that, in the end, there can only be one winner who will take home the prize.
Slight differences of opinion are insanely exaggerated to deepen the divide. Otherwise irrelevant opinions take on epic significance. Lies, smears, setups, intimidation, bribery, blackmail and graft are all part of a day's work. All the while, the people watch and love the public spectacle, variously cheering and booing and rating the candidates and the groups they represent. Everyone seems oblivious as to the real purpose of the game.
And just as in The Hunger Games, democracy manufactures discord where none would exist in society. People don't care if the person who sells them a cup of coffee in the morning is Mormon or Catholic, white or black, single or married, gay or straight, young or old, native or immigrant, drinker or teetotaler or anything else.
None of this matters in the course of life's normal dealings with people. Through trade and cooperation, everyone helps everyone else achieve life aspirations. If someone different from you is your neighbor, you do your best to get along anyway. Whether at church, shopping, at the gym or health club, or just casually on the street, we work to find ways to be civil and cooperate.
But invite these same people into the political ring, and they become enemies. Why? Politics is not cooperative like the market; it is exploitative. The system is set up to threaten the identity and choices of others. Everyone must fight to survive and conquer. They must kill their opponents or be killed. So coalitions form, and constantly shifting alliances take shape. This is the world that the state — through its election machinery — throws us all into. It is our national sport. We cheer our guy and hope for the political death of the other guy.
The game makes people confused about the real enemy. The state is the institution that sets up and lives off these divisions. But people are distracted by the electoral and political mania. The blacks blame the whites, the men blame the women, the straights blame the gays, the poor blame the rich, and so on in an infinite number of possible ways.
The end result of this is destruction for us but continuing life for the Gamemakers.
And of course, in both elections and Hunger Games, there is a vast commercial side to the event: media figures, lobbyists, trainers, sign makers, convention-hall owners, hotels, food and drink businesses, and everyone and anyone who can make a buck from feeding the exploitation.
In all these ways, this dystopian plot line illuminates our world. I'm not suggesting that this is the basis of the appeal, though its uses as political allegory are real enough. More disturbing is the possibility that the story suggests to young people today the limits of the life opportunities for the generation now in its teen years. They have a darker worldview than any in the postwar period.
If The Hunger Games helps this generation understand that the real problem is not their peers or parents or anyone other than the Gamemakers, maybe they, too, will plot a revolt. Democracy is, as Hans-Hermann Hoppe says, the god that failed. I'm told that we have to wait for the third film for that.
[ Death by Regulation ]
I had previously heard nothing about the tragic and remarkable case of Andrew Wordes of Roswell, Ga., who set his house on fire and blew it and himself up as police arrived to evict him from his foreclosed-upon home. It was Agora's 5 Min. Forecast that alerted me to the case, and this report remains one of not too many mentions in Google's news feed.
So I got curious about this case, read some of the background, heard an interview with Andrew and read all the tributes at his memorial service and now I realize he was like all of us living under the despotism of our time. He resisted and resisted as long as he could. But rather than finally complying, he decided that a life that is not his own is not worth living.
It is a dramatic and deeply sad story that should raise alarms about the least-talked-about cost of a state-run society: the demoralization that sets in when we do not control our own lives. (I'm grateful to Glenn Horowitz for his careful reconstruction of the timeline of events.)
The whole ordeal began only a few years ago, when Wordes began to keep chickens in his backyard. His property was on 1 acre, but it was surrounded by secluded woods. He loved the birds, sold and gave away eggs to people and enjoyed showing kids the animals. He was also very good at this job, and being something of a free spirit, he chose to make something he loved his profession.
The city objected and came after him. In 2008, the zoning department issued a warning about the chickens on his property. This was odd because he was violating no ordinance at all; indeed, the code specifically approved chickens on properties of less than two acres. Even the mayor at the time objected to the department's claim, but the department went ahead anyway. A year later, and with the assistance of former Gov. Roy Barnes, Wordes won in court!
But then look: The city council rewrote the law with no grandfather clause. It forbade more than six chickens on any lot, and specified that all chickens have to be in a permanent enclosure. He had tried to get approval for an enclosure, but because his house was on a flood plain, the city would not issue an approval. In the midst of this controversy, a flood did come to his house, and he had to use a Bobcat to move dirt around to save his house and his chickens.
Sure enough, the city then issued two citations for moving dirt without a permit and having illegal, unrestrained chickens. Then, the city refused to submit to FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) his request for reconstruction funds after this storm (individuals on their own cannot get money of this sort). Next, the city contacted his mortgage holder, who was a friend and who had carried his mortgage for sixteen years, and pressured her to sell the mortgage to stay out of legal trouble.
Do you get the sense from this that Mr. Wordes was being targeted? Absolutely. And he knew it, too. The Roswell Police Department pulled him over constantly and issued as many tickets as possible for whatever reason, tangling him in more difficulties. Police cars would wait in front of his house and follow him. And when he didn't cough up enough money (he was nearly bankrupt after all this), they would book him and throw him in jail. This happened on several occasions. Meanwhile, the city itself filed several more suits against him.
It gets worse. The city planners came up with a "Roswell 2030 Plan" that posited a parks area exactly where his home was. Hearing of this, Wordes offered to sell his home to the city, but the city refused. They clearly planned to drive him out of it with this legal barrage. It didn't matter that Wordes won every legal challenge or managed to get the suits thrown out in court — that only made the city angrier. Eventually, the city managed to a get a probated sentence, setting up a tripwire that would eventually destroy his livelihood.
He posted on his Facebook account that he was going to be attending a political event. While he was gone, his chickens were poisoned. Also poisoned were the baby turkeys, ten of which were actually owned by the mayor, who was a friend. At this point, he had lost his means of support. While panicked about what to do, he missed a probation check-in. He was ordered to serve the remainder of his probated sentence in jail for ninety-nine days.
While in jail, his home was ransacked and looted. Of course, the police did nothing. In fact, they probably approved it. Also while in jail, the new mortgage holder foreclosed on his home. His entire life was now in shambles.
The final episode came on March 26 this year. The police had come for the final eviction. Wordes locked himself in the house for several hours. He then came out and told all authorities to step far away from the house. He lit a match, and the gasoline he had doused all over the house created a gigantic explosion. Wordes' own body was charred beyond recognition.
Maybe you think that Wordes was some sort of freak who couldn't somehow adjust to normal life with neighbors. Well, it turns out that he was just about the greatest neighbor one could ever have. At his final service, person after person testified how he would come to anyone's aid at a moment's notice, how he fixed things and gave away eggs and was incredibly generous to everyone around him. I listened to an interview with him and found him extremely well-spoken and intelligent.
I tell you, if you can listen to this interview without tears welling up, you have no heart. This man was the heart and soul of what made this a great country. The law hounded and hounded him, mainly because some bureaucrats had made a plan that excluded his home. They carried out that plan. He became an enemy of the state. Demoralized and beaten down, he finally had no way out. He ended his life.
Note, too, that he had the support of the high-ranking members of the political class, including the current mayor and a former governor. Bear in mind what this signifies: The political class is not really running things. As I've written many times, the political class is only the veneer of the state; it is not the state itself. The state is the permanent bureaucratic structure, those untouched by elections. These institutions make up the real ruling apparatus of government.
It is hard to say that Wordes made the right decision. But it was a courageous one — at least I think it was. It is a difficult moral choice, isn't it? When the police come to take all you have and are determined to cut out your heart and soul and reduce your life to nothing but a sack of bones and muscle, without the right to choose to do what you love — and you really see no way out — do you really have a life? Wordes decided no.
The rest of us need to think hard about this case, and perhaps you can also spare a few thoughts in memory of his good life, and even a prayer for his immortal soul. May we all long to live in a society in which such people can thrive and enjoy "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
[ No Escape from the Mark of the Beast ]
The Canadian gambling site Bodog.com thought it had the whole thing figured out. If you stay in Canada, use Canadian servers, block anyone inside U.S. territory from using the site and make sure that you don't use any American vendors for anything — stay completely away from anything having to do with the jurisdiction of the United States — you can be free to operate your online business.
Many sites have assumed this. More and more are doing this. Bodog was doing just fine, with hundreds of employees in Canada and Costa Rica. It had just signed a three-year sponsorship deal with the Canadian Football League, according to Michael Geist, whose column alerted me to this remarkable case. All was going well.
If you go to the site right now, you will find that it is among the growing number of seized domains. Instead of a free gaming site, you will see instead what is quickly becoming known as the Mark of the Beast. It is the Homeland Security seizure notice.
How could this have happened? Officials were somehow able to get the warrant and lean on VeriSign to redirect the URL. The homeland is safe! Whether this is legal is another question. There have been many legal challenges to U.S. takedowns recently, among them the Megaupload case from early 2012, a case that may eventually be decided in favor of the defendant.
Regardless, the chilling effect is real and lasting. Governments are going to be less likely in the future to permit any gaming sites, and large institutions such as the Canadian Football League are less likely to sign deals with any enterprise the U.S. government doesn't like.
What's absolutely bizarre is how the U.S. government can presume what is effectively a global jurisdiction over the global Internet. It can use its weapons of mass destruction to smash even the most developed and popular institutions — developed entirely by a voluntary meeting of minds between producers and consumers — and make them go away with one court order.
This case shows that it is no longer protection enough to put up a wall between U.S. jurisdiction and the website. In any case, it has been obvious enough for some months that the excuse the enforcers have used was a thin excuse, in any case. No, that excuse seems to be gone, and just as with U.S. military policy, any server located anywhere in the world is fair game.
This whole nationalist approach runs completely contrary to the international ethos of the digital age. Given the ubiquity of instantaneous and universal communication, where you live is less and less important. Consumers and producers can be in all corners of the world and still cooperate. But look what is happening: Dynamic companies are already setting up shop outside the U.S. just to evade what Ronald Reagan called the "evil empire" (except, of course, he was not talking about the U.S.).
This takedown notice seems to indicate that the government isn't satisfied merely with the digital age outside our borders. It is signaling the desire to crush it wherever it may appear.
And just like the Megaupload case earlier this year, this case is also a rebuke to those who worked so hard to beat back the SOPA legislation that Congress had been considering. A major concern of the opponents of this legislation was that it would dramatically expand the geographic jurisdiction of the U.S. If any dot-com, dot-net or dot-org site were accused of hosting pirated copy, it could be instantly shut down wherever it happened to reside.
Well, once again, we discover that no such legislation is necessary. The government already has that power. The excuses vary. It could be a copyright case. It could be a patent infringement case. Or it could be that the site is said to be doing something, like gambling, that the U.S. wants to see monopolized by some other market player. The rationale can be anything or nothing.
Under these conditions, the whole Internet is threatened every day. You might say that it doesn't matter, that you don't host pirated material, you don't tolerate illicit porn and you will have nothing to do with gamblers. Surely, you are safe. The truth is that no one is safe when the government has this much power.
First, they came for the pirates, but I was not a pirate…
In the 1985 film Brazil, the government would routinely drop through the roofs of citizens and throw people in body bags and take them away. If it turned out that a mistake was made, a bureaucrat would show up with a receipt and express regret. That's it. It's been this way in U.S. foreign policy, with the military killing innocent people and then reluctantly admitting that mistakes might have been made.
Internet enforcement seems to be going the same direction. A body bag is thrown over any website, and the details are worked out later. The business dies and hundreds lose their jobs and files. If mistakes were made, here's your receipt.
[ Political Migration in Our Time ]
If you are willing to look past mainstream media coverage of American politics, you can actually find exciting and interesting activities taking place that rise above lobbying, voting, graft and corruption.
Consider the Free State Project. It is an attempt, and a surprisingly successful one, to inspire a political migration by lovers to liberty to New Hampshire. It is not about lobbying, forming a political party, populating a real estate development or anything like that. It is about seeking a place to live and let live in these times when the political culture seems to be about everything but that.
The idea is to gather people with some consciousness of the idea of liberty so that they can live peacefully among friends and influence the political culture in a way that brings more freedom or at least protects what we have. As the statement Free Staters sign says, "I will exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of civil government is the protection of life, liberty and property."
I had heard of this movement for years, but, frankly, didn't pay much attention to it. I suppose that with only a passing glance, it seemed sort of cranky and unworkable, just another scheme. I was completely wrong. This is a serious movement that is achieving real results, as I observed when I was invited to attend the annual Liberty Forum in Nashua, N.H.
Why New Hampshire? It is the "Live Free or Die" state without a sales or income tax. It has low population density, which increases the chances that the influence of the libertarians can be felt in the culture and the State-house. It has lower business regulations than the rest of the country, and wonderful homespun culture that turns out to be highly tolerant toward cultural and political eccentricity.
The whole notion really began in 2001 with research by political scientist Jason Sorens, who was then studying at Yale University. He observed that the influence of the libertarians was muted by their sheer geographic diffusion throughout the country. If they could gather together in one place, they could achieve that critical level of influence over political affairs that would create a tipping point against statist-style management toward individual liberty.
It turns out that there is a huge tradition in American history for this type of political migration. The Mormons did this in their trek across the West to finally land in Salt Lake City. The Amish did the same. But it doesn't have to be about religion. This migrating impulse also populated Texas in the early nineteenth century, when the pioneering spirit drove a whole generation to settle this wild country.
Actually, if you think about it, the entire Colonial period was shaped by cultural groups arriving to settle in coherent communities formed around certain themes of safety and liberty. Puritans, Catholics and borderland immigrants all coalesced in geographically defined areas. Then there were the Quakers, the Mennonites and innumerable anarchist sects of the nineteenth century that formed their own communities. In all these cases, they found the liberty and security they were seeking. Rather than merely dreaming of a new life, they worked to put their dreams into practice in whatever way this world allows.
The Free State Project is different from these only in the sense that the invitation is to move somewhere within the state. And the driving force is simply to be left alone. It turns out that being around others who share your values helps that goal. If the police pull over a Free Stater, I'm told, a dozen others show up within minutes with video cameras. If you go to jail, there are people to defend you to the press. And there is something to say for living among people you can trust, especially in these times when the government is urging everyone to rat out their neighbors, friends and family for any reason.
There is a huge diversity among the 4,000 people who have identified themselves as Free Staters. In my trip, I met attorneys, teachers, bakers, software application developers, people who mint coins, welders, natural statesmen, bloggers, physicians and people from every walk of life one can imagine. Some are religious and some are not. Some look like crazy mountain men, some have oddly dyed hair, some wear suits and ties. They are single, married, young, old, whatever.
Free Staters take any job that suits them. Some run for office, and win, which is not entirely difficult in a state with 400 representatives in the state legislature. Others stay out of politics completely. Some are independent contractors who can relocate, so they choose this state. Others are craft makers who sell their wares from their house or online. Some are wealthy; some are poor.
Their reasons for coming to New Hampshire are all over the map. I met one young person who had graduated from high school two years ago with straight As and a perfect transcript for going to any college she wanted. But she didn't want to deal with the debt, was tired of the indoctrination and had seen too many people waste four or eight years in school and not find any work afterward. She didn't want that for herself. So she works various jobs, pays the bills, enjoys a rich social life and is completely happy. Most kids of her generation can't say the same.
At the opening reception of the Liberty Forum, I stood back, studying the huge crowd with puzzlement at first — the culture of the event might best be described as bourgeois bohemian — but then it became clear to me what was going on. These people were extremely well-read. They had developed a love of liberty, and it became a passion in their life. They realized that freedom is the precondition for everything else in life we love. Without freedom, all dreams die. But they weren't satisfied to read and reflect. They wanted to do something real, something practical. Moving here and joining this movement was the best hope they found.
Human liberation never happens in a social or cultural vacuum. The great steps forward in the history of liberty were preceded by periods in which the social and practical infrastructure had undergone years of development and maturation. The American Revolution was the culminating moment of 150 years of colonial experience with liberty. The abolitionist movement was preceded by many years of the development of a robust culture and experience of free men and women in both slave and nonslave states. The repeal of Prohibition was made possible because of the giant network of speakeasies and bootleggers and the ever-increasing demand of the population for the freedom to drink.
Perhaps, then, it is necessary that people take up the charge to live their own visions of liberty in whatever way they can, even in open defiance of our overlords, in order to prepare the ground for a brighter future.
A film has already been made about the movement: Libertopia. News coverage is increasing. And the movement is clearly growing as trends in the U.S. get worse and worse. And after this election season, when it becomes very obvious to disillusioned liberty lovers around the country that national politics are now and will forever be hostile to the philosophy of individualism, I can easily imagine that the Free State Project will have another wave of immigrants ready to wave the flag: "Live Free or Die."
[ It's a New World, and America Is Not Leading It ]
In the last decade, something astonishing has happened that has escaped the attention of nearly every American citizen. In the past, and with good reason, we were inclined to imagine that if we were living here, we were living everywhere. We were used to being ahead. The trends of the world would follow us, so there wasn't really much point in paying that close attention. This national myopia has long been an affliction, but one without much cost. Until very recently.
One symptom of the change is that it used to be that the dollars in your local savings account or stock fund paid you money. The smart person saved and got rewarded. It seemed like the American thing to do. It is slowly dawning on people that this isn't working anymore. Saving alone no longer pays, thanks largely to a Federal Reserve policy of zero-percent interest.
But that's not the only reason. There's something more fundamental going on, something that Chris Mayer, author of the absolutely essential and eye-opening book World Right Side Up, believes is going to continue for the rest of our lifetimes and beyond. The implications of his thesis are profound for investors. It actually affects the lives of everyone in the digital age.
Mayer points out that sometime in the last ten years, the world economy doubled in size at the same time the balance of the world's emerging wealth shifted away from the United States and toward all various parts of the world. The gap between us and them began to narrow. The world's emerging markets began to make up half the global economy.
When you look at a graph of the U.S. slice of global productivity, it is a sizable slice, taking up twenty-one percent, but it is nothing particularly amazing. Meanwhile, emerging markets make up ten of the twenty largest economies in the world. India is gigantic, larger than Germany. Russia, which was a basket case in my living memory, has passed the U.K. Turkey (who even talks about this country?) is larger than Australia. China might already be bigger than the United States.
Check these growth rates I pulled from the latest data, and compare to the U.S.'s pathetic numbers:
- Malaysia and Malawi: 7.1 percent
- Nicaragua: 7.6 percent
- Dominican Republic 7.8 percent
- Sri Lanka: 8.0 percent
- Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Brazil, and Peru: 8.5 percent
- India: 8.8 percent
- Turkey and Turkmenistan: 9 percent
- China: 10 percent
- Singapore and Paraguay: 14.9 percent.
Then there's the measure of the credit-default swap rating, which is a kind of insurance against default. The French rate is higher than Brazilian, Peruvian and Colombian debt. In the last ten years, the stock markets of those Latin American countries far outperformed European stock markets. Also, many emerging economies are just better managed than the heavily bureaucratized, debt-laden economic landscape of the U.S. and Europe. As for consumption, emerging markets have already surpassed the United States.
"These trends," writes Mayer, "will become more pronounced over time. The creation of new markets, the influx of hundreds of millions of people who will want cellphones and air conditioners and water filters, who will want to eat a more varied diet of meats and fruits and vegetables, among many other things, will have a tremendous impact on world markets."
Why does he see the trends as creating a "world right side up"? Because, he argues, this represents a kind of normalization of the globe in a post-U.S. empire world. The Cold War was a grave distortion. In fact, the whole of the 20th century was a distortion too. Going back further, back to 1,000 years ago, we find a China that was far advanced over Western Europe.
I read Mayer's prognostications with an attentive ear, for several reasons. His book is not the result of thousands of hours of Internet surfing or cribbing from the CIA World Factbook. He is an on-the-ground reporter who will go anywhere and do anything for a story about emerging wealth. The result is the kind of credibility that can't be gained any other way.
But there is another reason. Mayer is often cited as one of a handful of people who saw what was happening in the housing market in the mid-2000s and issued several lengthy and detailed warnings. Not only did he foresee the bust, he explained why the boom was taking place. He saw a perfect storm brewing with a combination of subsidized loans, too-big-to-fail mortgage agencies and a Federal Reserve policy that was designed to distort capital flows. He called it like few others.
This is not because he is a magic man. It is because he is schooled in solid economic theory — this becomes obvious in page after page — and also because he is intensely curious to discover the workings of that theory in the real world. In his way of thinking, if we can't understand or expect change, we can't understand markets, much less anticipate their direction.
Another thing: Mayer is less interested in big aggregates like GDP (and other such "economic monstrosities") and more interested in taking a "boots-on-the ground view, a firsthand look." His aim: "stay close to what is happening and what we can understand in more tangible ways." And he seems close to everything: cement factories, the hotel industry, ranches and farms, coal and cellphone companies, financial houses, glassmakers, water purification companies — all the stuff that makes up life itself.
And what he discovers again and again are localized institutions that are cooperating globally (trade!) to build capital, wealth and new sources of progress that no one planned and hardly anyone anticipated. Here is the story of the building of civilization as it has always happened in history, but tracked carefully and precisely in our times.
In this book, he uses this combination of smarts plus fanatical curiosity to examine all the main contenders for the future: Colombia, Brazil, Nicaragua, China, India, the UAE, Syria, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Mongolia, Argentina, Russia, Turkey, central Asia, Mexico and Canada. Here he finds innovation, capital, entrepreneurship, creativity, a willingness to try new ideas and a passion for improving the lot of mankind.
His reporting defies conventional wisdom at every turn. Page after page, the reader will find himself thinking: that's amazing. Nicaragua is not socialist. Medellín, Colombia (the "city of eternal spring"), is not violent. Brazil is no longer a land of rich and poor, but rather home to the world's largest middle class. China is the world's largest market for cars and cellphones; even in the rural areas you can buy Coke and a Snickers bar. India is the world's leader in minting new millionaires. Cambodia (Cambodia!) ranks among the world's most powerful magnets for investment capital. Mongolia has one of the world's best-performing stock markets.
He also discovers many large American companies that have seen the writing on the wall and opened up factories, manufacturing plants, financial services and retail shops all over emerging markets. These companies are attracted by the intelligence of the workers, the relatively unregulated and low-tax legal environment and the cultures that have a new love for enterprise. And the returns are there too. The bottom line is sending a signal for them to expand.
It's particularly intriguing to read about how all these emerging-market entrepreneurs overcome terrible and destructive bureaucracies — they exist everywhere! — that try to gum up the works, as well as bureaucrats who know nothing of business yet have the power to kill it off. Yet their very inefficiency is the saving grace. They can't control the future. The brilliance of the market somehow finds the workaround.
Mayer's main interest is in finding investment opportunities, and he lays them out in great detail here. If you think about it, this is just about the best vantage point from which to examine a new and unfamiliar world. Commerce is the driving force of history, the road map of where we've been and where we are going. To track down the profitable trade is likely to provide more valuable insight than all the academic speculations.
This is a very exciting book. It weaves history, geography, economics and firsthand reporting into a marvelous tapestry, one that is as beautiful as art and as complex and varied as the world itself has become in our times. A fine stylist, Mayer offers some fantastic one-liners in every section ("Change is like a pin to the balloons of conventional wisdom") and his detailed stories give you the sense that you are traveling alongside him, like walking with Virgil in Purgatorio and Paradiso in one trip.
Mayer quotes Marco Polo: "I have not told half of what I saw." In the same way, I've not told even 5 percent of what's in this extraordinary tour of the world most people don't know has come to exist only in the new millennium. There is no way a short review can do this book justice. There is so much wisdom packed in its pages. It is a meaty and enormously credible look at a world most people have never seen. In ten or twenty years, people will point to this book and say: this guy chronicled and understood what few others did.
[ Peter Schiff on American Citizenship ]
You have probably seen Peter Schiff on television, not once, but many times. Among the legions of indistinguishable talking heads out there, he stands out. He makes sense. He draws attention to reality. He is disregarding of the opinions and conventions that prevail on the financial news networks and just comes right out and says what few others are willing to say.
He gets away with it because he makes sense, is super-articulate, and is aggressive in getting his message out. Even if you don't watch television (I don't watch much), he has his own radio show, YouTube channel, blog, social media accounts and much more. You could probably spend a good part of your day living alongside the mind of Schiff and still not hear it all.
He is also the author of How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes. I assure you that there is nothing else like this on the market today. In many ways, it is a work of genius. Imagine learning the complexities of macroeconomics and the business cycle through a series of cleverly drawn cartoons that illustrate a kind of economic parable.
It's great for kids, but also for adults. It was originally written by his father, Irwin Schiff, and became somewhat famous in the 1980s, but this new edition improves the original because the accompanying text reduces one hundred years of scholarship into a plain-English explanation of economic development and the business cycle. The themes throughout are consistent: Production comes before consumption; debt is not a substitute for saving; credit is no fix for debt; economic reality cannot be held at bay forever.
I had occasion to listen to a dinner lecture by Peter at the New Hampshire Liberty Forum. The conventional wisdom is that a dinner speech should be super short — think twenty minutes — because people are slosh-headed with wine and woozy from eating too much. I didn't time his speech, but Peter might have spoken a hundred minutes. Dreadful? On the contrary. Everyone sat in rapt attention. I did too. We could have sat there and listened another hour.
Incredibly, Schiff doesn't use any notes when he speaks. He starts, and the speech rolls out of his mind like a carefully woven Persian rug. His cadence is unusual enough to entice the ear, never missing a beat. His vocabulary is vast. His rhetorical method is as follows: He introduces a topic. He presents the conventional wisdom. He points out what is wrong with the convention, and then adds his spin. Then he piles on evidence to support his opinion until it becomes completely convincing. He provides a nice segue to another point and repeats the method.
His topic was very interesting this evening. He addressed the brain drain from the United States, the very alarming trend that is unique to our times. Everyone wants to talk about the immigration problem, but he says we have an emigration problem. The smartest and wealthiest and savviest young people are trying to get out.
Already in the U.K., the waiting list for giving up American citizenship is long and growing. Americans are also leaving for Mexico, Latin America, China and the Far East. Official data are extremely difficult to obtain, so most evidence of the larger trend is anecdotal, but no less real.
Why would anyone do this? American citizenship was once the ultimate asset. People came here for freedom, and they got it. More and more, citizenship is a liability. A major reason is that the U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that actually tracks down its citizens to force them to cough up taxes on income made in any country.
Instead of being a form of liberation, Schiff said, American citizenship is like a metal ring around your ankle that you can't saw off. The only way is to give it up, but that turns out not to be so easy. The forms alone are $450, and the wait time can be interminable.
American citizenship also exposes foreign banks and institutions to unwelcome intrusions from American bureaucrats, who no longer care anything about borders. It's as if wherever you go, you drag the American empire with you. This makes you something of a pariah to many foreign institutions. Apparently, American expatriates bump into this problem immediately when they attempt to open bank accounts and brokerage accounts, and even when trying to buy server space from foreign service providers.
As Schiff pointed out, this trend is a signal of larger problems in the United States. The unemployment issue is a huge one, especially among the young. Businesses don't want to hire employees, which cost them far more than the salary. There are insurance mandates, payroll taxes, legal liabilities — not to mention the terrible risks associated with getting the wrong guy and then not being able to get rid of him.
How does this affect young people? It's a disaster. Many newly graduated students are carrying debt in the six figures. They did what they were supposed to do, staying in good schools, obeying their teachers, getting good grades. But when they got out on the market, they found that they didn't have the skills that businesses wanted and they had no work experience that demonstrated that they could bring value to a firm. So they started at a low salary that wasn't even enough to service their existing debt load.
As if to underscore the point, just over the weekend, I met a young lawyer who had graduated from one of the best schools with excellent grades. She couldn't find any position except that of a low-paying position as a public defender — a respectable job, but not one with upward mobility. But here's the catch: She was carrying close to $400,000 in debt. And this is at the age of 25. Talk about demoralization!
But back to Schiff's speech. The picture he paints of the American future is shockingly grim. The national debt, the regulations that grow and grow, the intrusive and intense tax enforcement, the spying and police impositions, the broken banking system, the shocking level of sheer phoniness in the financial world — all of it adds up to a dark picture.
The rich seem to understand this problem. A news cycle a few months ago mentioned that Mitt Romney keeps some assets in the Cayman Islands. Why would anyone do this, especially given the long reach of the American tax police? There are two factors: reducing legal liability in case of trouble and the general need for political diversification. It illustrates something very important: The smartest and wealthiest among the population no longer trust the future.
And compare with other countries! Contrary to what most Americans believe, other countries are freer, with lower effective taxes, less police intrusions, less spying, fewer regulations on small business. Schiff says that you don't have to go far to find more freedom: Try one country to the north or one country to the south. And while many other countries such as Sweden and Finland are becoming freer, the United States is going the other way, and there are very few prospects for a turnaround.
Schiff is an important voice to alerting us about realities that many people are reluctant to face. To gain insight into a fundamental understanding of economic realities, I can highly recommend his How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes. If something should ever happen to change the ideological culture in this country, this book can be an important tool for reintroducing people to sound economic thinking.
[ The Speakeasy Economy ]
There's a Mexican restaurant I like (I'm not saying where it is) that seems to thrive in good times and bad. It never has a shortage of servers, cooks and people to bus the tables, even when there are only a few customer cars out front. Actually, it is hard to tell the workers from the customers, and extended family seems to appear from nowhere, people of all ages, sometimes eating, sometimes just visiting and sometimes going back and forth to the kitchen.
How does this place handle the high costs of this labor? It's the sort of question that is impolite to ask. A passing familiarity with the existing labor regulations, mandates, taxes and edicts on resident documentation permits anyone to figure this out. The place survives and thrives because all these niceties are ignored. The whole arrangement works through quid pro quos, barter, cash, underage labor and undocumented workers.
They know it. We know it. No one is hurt.
Consider another case lately in the news. A report from ABC did some sleuthing on educational institutions all over Australia, where government demands that everyone sign up for public school or officially register as home schooling. The report estimates that 50,000 families completely ignore these rules. Some families don't believe they should have to register. Others have discerned that there is more risk by going legal than schooling underground.
We all know of such cases. We know a person who bakes cheesecakes in her kitchen and sells them to friends — all while ignoring licenses, health regulations, mandates on oven size, zoning laws and all the rest. Her kids help her in exchange for a weekly allowance — an arrangement that looks a lot like child labor. We know of people who have one normal job but also a job on the side making jewelry, designing websites or tutoring. They prefer cash.
All these small anecdotes — and we know many of them — come from every place in the world, especially with the recession's intense economic pressures. Faced with the choice of complying with government or making a decent life for themselves, people tend to choose the latter. So it is with hundreds of street vendors in San Francisco. It's this way for thousands of workers in Shanghai who make licit products in the day and "pirated" products at night.
This will be increasingly true in the digital economy now that the US government has shown its teeth and arrested and destroyed property in the name of enforcing copyright. The Web will not suddenly become the great land of compliance. Instead, those providing gray-area services will become more anonymous, less traceable, more private and obscure.
This is already happening, as ever more people are being forced to use IP-scrambling proxies to surf and put their content behind impenetrable walls. There is a tragic loss here, but it might prompt the final showdown in the great struggle between power and market.
Digital or not, the state can't make trading, sharing and associating go away. It only inspires the traders and entrepreneurs to avoid risks in different ways.
During Prohibition, the speakeasies sensing a threat would change the passwords to get in the door. With the massive increase in government all over the world, vast swaths of the world economy have begun to operate just like these speakeasies of old. They were zones of freedom, but their operations were distorted because they didn't have access to law and courts and because the people who ran them were from a class of citizens that was willing to take crazy risks.
We know all of this anecdotally, but what does it all amount to in the macroeconomic sense? I'm right now reading Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth. It is a mind-blowing book because it is the first in our time to attempt a broad look at the meaning of all this unregulated, untaxed, unofficial economic activity. Neuwirth estimates that fully half the world's workers are involved at some level in what he calls System D.
This is the sector that is variously called the "underground" and the "informal sector." He prefers System D (the street term derived from the African French word for highly motivated people) because it is nonjudgmental. It refers simply to the sector of economic life that exists "outside the framework of trade agreements, labor laws, copyright protections, product safety regulations, anti-pollution legislation and a host of other political, social and environmental policies."
He documents the amazing workings of System D and demonstrates that it is the world's second-largest economy, amounting to economic productivity of $10 trillion, which is probably a low estimate. At the pace at which government is growing, System D is set to employ as many as two of three workers by 2020. My own sense is that Neuwirth actually underestimates the size since he overlooks sectors like health, education and finance — which are surely three of the fastest-growing components of System D.
Neuwirth himself is not a libertarian or a free market thinker in any sense. He is a reporter with a lefty bias — a genuine leftist who believes in exalting the contribution of the poor and the working classes to the social and economic order. His reporting led him to discover that a main driving force for the classes is the need for economic relationships, and then also to notice that the state itself is the main barrier to their advancement.
He remains ideologically conflicted throughout the book. For example, he rails against child labor on one page, but then notes that were it not for child labor, many kids around the world would not be able to buy clothes, food and education and would likely turn to prostitution or some form of subjugation. But ideology is not the main contribution here. It is framing up the reality in a way that we can become conscious of the whole.
Reflecting on the sheer vastness of this sector of life, one realizes the fiction, for example, embodied in official government statistics that record only the on-the-books sector of economic life. These agencies are pumping out half-truths and whole myths every day. One further realizes the immense damage that would be done to humanity in general should there come a time when government actually managed to enforce all its edicts. It would be catastrophic. We owe much of our prosperity to people's willingness to enter the rebel class.
[ Protesting Government Digitally ]
There's been a long debate over digital technology. Does it help or harm the cause of liberty, individualism and human rights? People who say it has hurt point out that government has been able to use the products of private innovation for its own purposes. The government can watch us as never before. It assembles data on the population as never before. It can spy, intimidate, tax, regulate, control trade and even inflate ever more efficiently using the tools of the digital age.
All of this is true. But what Black Wednesday demonstrated is exactly the opposite point. Major parts of the Web withdrew their consent in protest against legislation in Congress that would have a devastating effect on how the Internet functions. Instead of being a sanctuary from power and control in which information is freely produced and distributed, it would become a delivery system for government/corporate-approved content not unlike the radio of 1930s or the television of the 1950s.
This legislation would transform our lives. The Internet declared its opposition with conviction. The institutions rose up by posting blackout notices, banner ads and messages of open defiance. It was a peaceful protest not unlike those of the past, but with a gigantic difference. Instead of being limited by geography and, therefore, easily ignored or broken up by police, the digital protest was global, impossible to ignore and could not be stopped. It applied to the English-speaking world, but all language groups become involved because the effects of the legislation would be truly universal.
It is always a risky venture to stand up to power. You face loss of commercial traffic. You face the possibility of reprisal, even violence. You face the real possibility of losing the fight and, therefore, not being declared a hero, but rather a fool. And if we look at the sweep of history, we can easily see that the odds of winning against power are extremely low. Liberty is a rarity in history for a reason. Despotism has ruled the day in most times and most places. People who choose to fight the power have to begin with this understanding.
It is only when a few people of conviction stand up to power and their protest is backed by some level of public consensus that the difference is made. It has happened rarely, but look at the effects. The liberty won through withdrawing consent built the modern world. Everything we use to better our lives is a product of this liberty. Our health, education, material prosperity, arts, faith, music and philanthropy all owe their greatest debt to liberty, not to government.
A convenient marker to signal the beginning of the digital age is the invention and popularization of the web browser in 1995 — at least this is the way I tend to think of it. That means that we've had seventeen years of seeing what free information flows can produce, and it is nothing short of astounding. We take it all for granted day to day, but when you step back to look, the transformation seems like a miracle. Anyone can communicate in real-time video at a near-zero price with anyone else in the world. At our fingertips, we have all the world's great literature, music, poetry and science. It is the key to our social networks, to educational efforts, to healing and cooking and every other life activity you can think of. And it all traces to that amazing thing: the ability to share and exchange ideas in whatever form.
Most of the time, people take for granted the products of freedom once they come into being and never stop to imagine an alternative. People go about their daily lives enjoying amazing blessings unaware of what made them possible, and they do not imagine a world in which it could all be taken away.
Even today, in former socialist countries, the young generation has little appreciation of the fact that only a generation ago, the shelves were empty and life was grim and without hope. In the U.S., we just expect and anticipate — almost as a human right — the newest digital toys, the latest upgrades, the ever-more bug-free environment of software lives. We saunter around stores and pick and choose from among the world's bounty and think nothing of it.
This is a serious problem because liberty requires awareness of its blessing to survive. Somehow, and against all odds, the debate over the technical details of the enforcement of intellectual property has sparked some degree of awareness. The protest has been cast as one against censorship, and it is indeed that. It is good to think about the counterfactual reality of a world of information gone dark. But actually, there is more at stake than that. Information is the essential building block of what we call civilization, of all the things that improve the human condition. It is about more than what we can see and what we can read; it is about the human right to share and exchange ideas that makes progress itself possible.
The anti-SOPA movement has been one of the most exciting protests I've seen in my life. It seemingly came from nowhere. It was built over the course of just a couple of months. The tipping point came when Wikipedia announced that it would join the protest. Then it seemed like everyone got involved, and over the course of just a few days. Programmers wrote applications to block out websites. Millions changed their Facebook profile pictures (hey, it's a lot easier than a hunger strike!). Congress was flooded with messages of opposition as never before.
And who and what started all of this? Strikingly and notably, it was the "conservatives" — or even the "libertarians" — who continued to be oddly confused by the whole topic. It was the "civil libertarians" and people associated with what is commonly called the "left" that became the machine behind the protest. This is a beautiful demonstration that you never really know for sure where to find the true friends of liberty.
People have asked for my speculations on the future of this legislation. My guess is that this protest will effectively kill the current versions of the bills in Congress. They will be tabled, and the corporate interest groups pushing them will quiet down. Then in the summer and fall, it will all start up again with less-objectionable legislation that claims to remove the offending powers, but, in reality, does largely the same. Will the protesters sit this one out, or will they see that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty? In the end, the freedom of the Internet can be guaranteed not just by stopping new legislation but also by repealing old legislation. In this respect, this protest represents not an end, but a beginning.
[ There's No Such Thing as a Stable State ]
Twenty years ago, and much to the shock of just about everyone, the mighty Soviet Union, the very embodiment of Hegel's view of the state as the divine on Earth, dissolved and disappeared. The malicious foe of the U.S., the deadly grizzly that was said to wander the world seeking whom it would devour, just rolled over.
What's more, the satellite states became independent nations. The empire on its borders devolved into a series of secessions. The map looked totally different from one day to the next.
The central power — said to be ruthless and all-controlling — lacked the will to fight it out and just gave up, completely unable to control events. The pretense of communism in all these places was dropped, industry was privatized, the countries adopted their old names and their populations were rolled into the global division of labor after fifty-plus years of being shut out.
The central plan stopped working, and not only in Moscow. The U.S.'s central plan also excluded the possibility that something this dramatic could happen. A decade of foreign and economic policy had been based on the Kirkpatrick Doctrine that totalitarian states were invulnerable and could only be contained or destroyed from the outside. It was on that basis that the U.S. chose its friends and enemies in the world.
Once the Iron Curtain was pulled back, we found societies ridiculously behind in the march toward material progress. The workers' paradise had never materialized. And everyone wondered what we had really been afraid of all those years.
There's no question that the Soviet state was an incredible threat to its own citizens — between 60-100 million deaths at government hands over 72 years — but was it really a threat to you and me? Far from being a superpower, it became clear that the Soviet Union had been decaying from within for a very long time.
I was raised at the tail end of the Cold War, but I find it nearly impossible to describe to younger people what it was like to be surrounded by the great Manichean conflict of those days. It consumed all political thinking from 1948-1991. Hundreds of thousands of experts devoted their lives to strategizing about it, writing about it and making a living off it in many different ways. It was the whole reason behind the gargantuan military empire that the U.S. put together over half a century. It was all done in the name of keeping us safe.
And then one day, it was gone.
Americans feared the communist menace for most of the 20th century. Russia was the embodiment of all evil but for those few years when, implausibly, Russia was oddly deemed an ally in World War II's even mightier struggle against the horrors of Japan and Germany. Then in 1948, the status quo ante was restored again, and the Red Scare returned with a vengeance — from threat to ally to threat again in a matter of a few short years. It was a turnabout satirized in Orwell's 1984 (flip the last two numbers and you see the point).
The great debate of my early political experience concerned whether Russia should be treated as a unique evil in the world or just another country with whom the U.S. should have diplomatic relations. The thinker and intellectual who won the day was Jeane Kirkpatrick. Long before she became secretary of state, she wrote a famous essay, "Dictatorships and Double Standards." This 1979 classic became a blueprint for the foreign policy of the next decade.
This powerful piece of writing excoriates the Carter administration for its alleged wimpiness on foreign policy, particularly with regard to its unwillingness to support authoritarian, noncommunist governments against the leftist rebels. The idea here is that we can live with authoritarian regimes and eventually democratize them, whereas once a state falls to communism, it is gone forever.
Therefore, the U.S. should back noncommunist thugs of any variety, whether in or out of power. That's how the U.S. ended up supporting the Islamic fundamentalists in the mujahideen in Afghanistan, for example, that later became the Taliban and later the terror network that the U.S. now says is the mortal enemy.
Kirkpatrick couches her claims in history, noting, "There is no instance of a revolutionary 'socialist' or communist society being democratized." From there, the forecast is implied: It could never happen, ever. "There are no grounds," she writes, "for expecting that radical totalitarian regimes will transform themselves."
A little more than ten years later, she was not only proven wrong, but history conspired to shred her entire analytical model to bits and toss it in the air like so much confetti. Not only has the Soviet Union vanished, but China is completely transformed. Cuba is privatizing. North Korea is probably the toughest nut to crack, but it too will relent in time.
Now, one might say that it was precisely the military buildup she inspired that brought about this result. The problem with that claim is that the military buildup was not designed to bring about that result, but rather to permanently "contain" the global Soviet reach and prevent it from spreading. In the mid-1980s, not a soul — and certainly not Kirkpatrick herself — anticipated that the next decade would open without the existence of the Soviet state at all.
What had been her mistake? She attempted to forge a law of politics based on recent history projected into the future. Her law blew up because there are no laws of politics of the sort she imagined. There are no permanent regimes. There is no impenetrable system of rules. States are created by elites and uncreated by everyone else. They are all more vulnerable than they appear, because they all consist of the few tricking the many into coughing up their property and giving up their lives on grounds that are ultimately revealed to be lies. When people catch on, the states get shaky and eventually crumble, sometimes when we least expect it.
This is a fact to celebrate, for if any state could create permanent rule, human freedom wouldn't stand a chance. This is because every state is a conspiracy against liberty. No state is satisfied with just a bit of power and no more, just a bit of your money and no more. There is never enough. We must give and give until our freedom is completely suffocated. In the end, the people don't like this and will not stand for it forever. This is true everywhere in all times.
Today, our own theorists say that the United States has figured out the key to permanent rule. Madeleine Albright called the U.S. the one "indispensable nation." Mitt Romney said that the U.S. is "the greatest nation in the history of the Earth." Surely, the current configuration of the United States will last forever. Surely, it is destined to be the one stable and eternal global hegemon. It is the U.S. now that embodies Hegel's divine will on Earth.
The lesson of the Soviet collapse is not just that socialism doesn't work. It is that all-embracing statism cannot last, regardless of whether this comes about under one-party tyranny or the illusion of democracy. This experience of 20 years ago ought to instill some humility. In the same way that the Soviet experience was upended, the future history of the last superpower could change just as quickly.
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A Beautiful Anarchy
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Jeffrey Tucker
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[
"nonfiction"
] |
[
"politics",
"economics"
] |
The Wrecking of the Physical World
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[ Government's Idle Hands: Underwear Bomber 2.0 ]
Government has a serious problem. It's got nothing worthwhile to do. All the cool things in life come from the private sector, and this is more obvious than ever. The market is creating whole worlds before our eyes, while the government seems ever more like a hopeless anachronism.
Government's life depends on public frenzy about some grand task it is seeking to accomplish. But today, there is no epic struggle, no grand historic project, no leading us to the light, no vanquishing evil and all those other things government used to claim to do.
It has certainly flopped as the Savior of the Economy. It can't educate the kids, it can't give us riches and it can't even deliver mail.
So its idle hands do the devil's work. Government grabs our money and dishes it out, roughs people up in the name of safety or security or whatever and otherwise hectors and prods us in a billion dumb ways that make it harder and harder to achieve a better life.
Oh, but wait! Let's not forget the War on Terror. Surely, there is a job worth doing.
Just last week, the headlines blared that government authorities had done it again. They had marvelously protected the homeland from a catastrophic bombing. The plot, fortunately foiled, involved an amazing bomb sewn into underwear, to be worn on another U.S. flight.
But the U.S. officials intervened and saved the day. They bombed the heck out of the nasty terror cell, slaughtered a few of these vermin. Ah, the world is safe for another day.
This is what we were told. I saw the headlines and smelled a rat, but I moved on. But then the headlines continued the next day and the next. You know how this happens. You finally relent and read the thing because the editors think it is important and, of course, it is irresponsible not to be "in the know."
But by the time I actually started paying attention to the latest act in this security theater, the story had changed — not just a little, but a lot. It turns out that the U.S. had an agent inside this terrorist operation. He was a Saudi national in the pay of the CIA, and he was operating in Yemen. Pretty exotic stuff.
The details continued to pour out. This guy was not just an informant. He actually delivered the real bomb to the CIA! Now, that's an effective agent. Right? It seems so. What's more, he was the actual guy who was going to carry out this operation.
And the operation itself? A suicide bombing. He volunteered to die. He was given the bomb that he would use. He took the bomb to the CIA. To what extent he was the actual plotter, the guy who talked others into this whole thing and whether the bomb even worked — these things are all unknown. All that is known is that this unnamed informant turns out to be the terrorist in question and that he himself did all of this on behalf of the CIA.
Now, let's just say you are an Islamic follower in Yemen and like nearly everyone else in this region, you are pretty fed up with U.S imperialism. This young punk from Saudi Arabia suggests a plot to blow up an American airliner. Maybe this sounds interesting and epic, but maybe somewhat reckless.
In fact, you are going to be pretty suspicious of this whole idea, but he is driving everyone crazy with demands that he be given a bomb. Then he even suggests that he be the suicide bomber. You might be thinking, "Hmm, whatever else, at least this plot could result in one fatality: this stupid punk from Saudi Arabia!
"Here's your bomb. Knock yourself out. Break more than a leg."
I, of course, have no idea if this is what happened. But the CIA's involvement here compromises the narrative enormously.
As David Shipler wrote in The New York Times:
"The United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.
"But all these dramas were facilitated by the FBI, whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naively played their parts until they were arrested."
In the Middle Ages, there was a profession called the wine taster. His job was not to discern the vintage or tell if the bouquet had a hint of blackberry. His job was to make sure the wine was not poison.
But let's say many years went by and none of the wine was poison. The wine taster started getting nervous for his job and profession. So he went around the city and tried to get people to poison wines. He made himself a presence among all the vandals and vagrants and volunteered to do the poisoning himself.
If the news of his mischief came out, do you think he would have been a hero or a villain? It seems that he would have been and should have been completely washed up. He was going around trying to get people to poison wines as a way of maintaining his job. This is a moral outrage. He would surely be out of work.
This is what the government is doing to us these days. It is trying to inspire terrorism and then claiming credit for having discovered it. Then it scares people into thinking that their job is extremely important, and therefore without it we would all be sunk.
In other words, this looks less like national security and ever more like a racket.
People say that terrorists are desperate cowards. Maybe. But then what phrase is left for a government that does this sort of thing as a way of maintaining its lease on life in times when ever more people are fed up with the whole game?
A Century of Cosmetics: Is the End Near?
The organization Campaign for Safe Cosmetics doesn't just want you to be able to have new choices about the makeup or other products you buy. It wants the FDA to be able to ban and recall products. It will decide for you what is and isn't safe.
And it is prevailing against the industry itself, which has no interest whatsoever in selling unsafe products, but precisely the opposite. The industry is already ridiculously overregulated, and new regulations could come into effect this summer.
What's the excuse? The usual nonsense about safety and security and health. There is a crowd of lobbyists backed by regulators who seem to believe that all of modernity is corrupting and horrible and must be reversed until we are living in the most primitive state of being, sans makeup, of course!
In other words, cosmetics are going the way of everything else. The quality of the product will be depleted by regulations, just as with indoor plumbing, electricity, cars, light bulbs, soaps and gas-powered tools. Entrepreneurship will be hindered and truncated. Innovation will stop. In a few years, you will wonder: Whatever happened to makeup and deodorant and hair spray that actually works? Prepare: The end is near!
Already, I've heard many women complain that cosmetics today are far worse than they were ten years ago. The colors don't behave they way they should, and color is mainly what the FDA currently controls. I don't doubt that whatever problems exist are due to government regulations. Whenever you see consumer products that decline in quality to the point that you have to pay vastly more for something of good quality, or that high quality suddenly becomes completely unavailable, you will find the hand of government if you look hard enough.
I can't read about this subject without feeling a sense of pride for the life and work (and sadness for the great legacy) of Maksymilian Faktorowicz, who lived from 1872–1938. He was a Polish Jew who lived in Russia under the czars. He started working for a pharmacist at the age of eight, and as he got older, he inhabited the world of wigs designed for the opera in Moscow. At the age of twenty-two, he obtained what amounted to a royal appointment. He was in charge of wigs and cosmetics for the Imperial Russian Grand Opera.
But by 1904, political unrest was making life more than a bit scary for Russian Jews, and he began looking to the United States as a place to settle. In these times before passports and visas, it was just a matter of catching a boat and moving in. So he did. He moved to St. Louis.
His big break came at the glorious pro-capitalist, pro-progress, pro-technology event: the World's Fair of 1904. There, Maksymilian Faktorowicz sold his fabulous cosmetics to great acclaim. All hail the practical arts!
He took the trade name you now recognize: Max Factor. He was a great American entrepreneur.
Following the World's Fair, disaster struck, and his partner stole his stuff and his money and left him penniless. He went back into barbering and crawled his way back, eventually moving to Los Angeles. He opened a shop that distributed cosmetics for the theater.
But it was not enough that he merely distribute what already existed. Max was an entrepreneur above all else. And there was a new industry in town: the movies. The existing makeup withered terribly under the hot lights. He combined his background in pharmacy with his expertise in cosmetics and created a new form of makeup, a thin greasepaint in cream form in twelve different colors.
It was a smash hit. The stars loved it. Soon every emerging star was coming to Max Factor to provide the right look for the camera. And his products kept improving. Eventually, he had an incredible list of clients that included Mary Pickford, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Judy Garland. He invented lip gloss, provided huge innovations in nail polish, came up with products specifically for color films and never stopped improving all his products.
His name appears in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But more than that, Max was the guy who mainstreamed the idea that every woman could look like a Hollywood starlet. As the song goes, "To be an actor, see Mr. Factor / He'll make your kisser look good!"
The term "makeup" that we use today is due to him as well. More broadly, when you consider the influence that Hollywood had on the world, he pretty well defined the 20th-century idea of beauty, both indirectly through his masterful work on the set and directly by marketing Max Factor products to consumers all over the world.
That's a pretty impressive contribution for a poor Polish-Jewish immigrant from Russia! And between his old-world position serving the court and the new position in capitalist America serving the American consumer, which do you suppose he preferred? He made his preference pretty obvious by immigrating and then by absolutely thriving in this land of the free. Free enterprise made this story possible.
Now, I can imagine some readers thinking: "Oh, this is all superficial and irrelevant. Why make this man out to be a hero?" Cosmetics have been part of the human experience since the dawn of time. And today they are an intimate part of the daily life of nearly every existing person on the planet. For women in particular, cosmetics are a crucial part of what makes for a quality life, which is one reason why they constitute a $20 billion industry globally every year.
Sadly, when you look at the regulations today, you can see that this huge and wonderfully innovative experience could never be repeated. Let's leave aside the point about immigration today, which is a tragedy in its own right. And let's leave aside child labor restrictions that would have prevented him from learning his craft early on.
Would Max have been able to try techniques and colors and solutions for the unique problems posed by the hot studio lights? If he had to obey government regulators, rather than his demanding consumers, would he have thrived as he did?
I seriously doubt it. Entrepreneurs need the freedom to try things. They need to have their experiments tested by the most relevant party, namely the consumer. The standards of excellence have to be set by the people who are using the inventions and buying the products. Because America valued this freedom and opportunity, and linked up geniuses like Factor with the buying public, many generations of American capitalists rose through the social ranks to achieve riches, fame and greatness.
Today, it is different. The regulatory bureaus step between the innovative capitalist and the consumer, causing friction and communication struggles. This forces the entrepreneur to have divided loyalties: Does he serve the bureaucrat, or does he serve the consumer?
Somehow I can't even imagine Bette Davis taking a back seat to any regulator!
Rumor has it that the fate of cosmetics will be sealed by the summer, when the final power of the life and death of any cosmetic product will be handed over to the FDA. This is a terrible tragedy. I can predict the future. The new and improved makeup will not work. It is not supposed to work. It is supposed to please beauty-hating activists and power-mad bureaucrats.
Here we have another instance of government unraveling the achievements of civilization one product at a time. It is Max Factor's grave they are dancing on this time. And that fact alone should infuriate every red-blooded and rosy-cheeked American.
Are You the Next Prisoner?
The United States is home to a gigantic socialist sector, larger and with a greater reach than any in the world, and it is fed by tax dollars and managed entirely by the government. Strangely, the opponents of socialized medicine and socialized industry don't complain about it. In fact, all throughout the 1980s and 1990s, they urged its expansion.
It is called the prison system. It's a fairly new system, but the cruelties of similar systems are so famed throughout history that they are spoken of by the Psalmist: "For the Lord hears the needy and does not despise his own people who are prisoners."
The presumption in the Psalms is that prisoners are despised, ignored, forgotten, dismissed — and they are in our country, where this topic is not even on the list in the mainstream debate.
It's stunning when you think about it. The "land of the free" is home to the world's largest prison population. Americans constitute 5% of the world's population, yet one-quarter of the entire world's inmates are in the U.S. The ratio of the prison population to the general population is higher in than any other nation in the world. Russia is second. China is third.
If the jailed lived in one place, the 2.3 million would be the fourth largest American city, between Chicago and Houston. Every day, 35,948 people are incarcerated, and the only people who even bother to talk about it are considered to be on the fringe left, crazy people who can't stop pleading for special interests.
Maybe we have more criminals who need to be locked up? It depends on how you define a criminal. Some two-thirds of people mired in the justice system (prison, probation, parole) are in for nonviolent offenses. Among federal prisoners, 91% are in for nonviolent crimes. No dictator in the world gets away with this.
And while the prison system as we know it came into existence in the early part of the 20th century, the trend toward mass imprisonment is relatively new. The numbers in prison are five times higher than in 1980, when the war on drugs really became a nationwide mania and sentencing became long and mandatory. Nearly the whole of the change is accounted for by these two facts alone. In 1980, 40,000 people were in the slammer for drug-related charges. Today, it is closer to half a million.
The statistics are not unknown. They have never been more accessible. But people hear these statistics and think: "Well, that seems like a lot of people, but hey, I'm not there and my friends and family aren't there. Regardless, we are probably better off with too many people in jail, rather than too few. At least the streets are a bit safer than they otherwise might be. So let's just forget about it, shall we?"
But it turns out to be very easy these days to trip over that wire that causes you to land in jail. The trouble is that you don't know that until it happens. It could be a mistake that you or a family member made in handling too much cash. It could be a joint that someone smoked at your house party. It could be an unpaid ticket. It could be a tweet you sent that insulted a bureaucrat.
It could be the wrong download, upload or file-sharing act. Or maybe you lost your temper at the airport and said something you shouldn't in the presence of a TSA agent. Maybe you acted on a stock tip that was slightly too revealing. Even the wrong glance at a cop could cause your life to unravel.
Any of these actions and thousands of others can cause you to become embroiled in a system you cannot control and cannot resist. You spend the night in jail. You are bailed out, but there are endless legal battles ahead to get out of the thicket.
Your life suddenly becomes about keeping your freedom. You pay lawyers. You lose time from work going to hearings. You lose sleep with worry and have to take pills you never thought you would. Your finances are crushed. You can hardly think about anything else. This goes on for months and you are pretty much a wreck.
The whole thing seems crazy and preposterous. Why is the state focusing on you, rather than on real criminals? You are an easier and safer target. Plus, you broke the law. It is a dumb law and it is understandable that you broke it — and you would never do it again, even though many others who have done the same are out free — but you finally have to admit it: You are more guilty than innocent.
It comes time to plea-bargain. Your lawyers make a deal with the system. If you admit guilt, you will be let off. The sentence of twenty years, or whatever it happens to be, will likely be suspended. You agree to the deal, anything to bring an end to this hell. But something goes wrong. The judge sentences you anyway. Wait, this isn't the way it was supposed to turn out! But now there is nothing you can do.
Then you find that the prison system is the crystallization of life under government control. Your Facebook, Twitter, email, phone number are all zapped. Freedoms of association, speech and press are entirely absent. Human rights don't apply. The choices you can make about how to spend your time are allocated to you by wardens and at their discretion. Your person and labor are valued by no one in particular. Everything you consume — whether it is food or space — your masters regard as a favor granted.
Everyone who cares about you is outside the prison. The people on the inside do not care whether you live or die. And to your amazement and shock, you find that the prison is not filled with violent thugs, thieves and murderers. Almost everyone is pretty much like you. They are people, real people with families and friends and lives, who were stopped by a cop and had forgotten to take the marijuana out of the glove box. They are people who exploded in a temporary rage at a bureaucrat. They are people who downloaded and shared the wrong files.
You discover an entire world behind walls, thousands of people just like you, and nearly all of them could be out living productive lives, caring for their families, contributing to life in their communities, living out their dreams on the outside. But here they are in this government institution — like millions of others in our time and throughout history — wasting away their lives in the name of some claim of "justice" that clearly does not exist.
The experience is enlightening and amazing. Prisoners are not who you thought they were. You want to get the news to everyone on the outside. You want to reveal this scandal to the world.
What do you say? The slogans that created this system — "the war on drugs," "get tough on crime," "zero tolerance," "mandatory sentencing" — are about politics, not justice or humanitarianism, and they have nothing to do with the reality you see. It is a cruel system, completely out of control, and one with an immense human cost.
The prison system is a massive human rights violation. It has to be stopped.
But there's a big problem: You can't speak. You can't act. You now know the truth, but now you also know that there is nothing you can do about it. And you also know that everyone on the outside pretty much thinks exactly how you used to think. They do not care.
[ Take Your Bureaucratic Hands Off My Microwave ]
The Department of Energy, which is the Supreme Court of your home appliances, thinks you might be wasting precious energy. And the bureaucrats have a plan for doing something about it. They want to take away the clock on your microwave oven. You know, that's the little digital display that we oddly depend on to tell us what time it is.
The bureaucrats say find some other way. Use your smartphone. Buy a wristwatch. Better yet, use a sundial. Whatever you do, just remember: The governing elites hate the time display on your microwave. Prisoners don't really need to know the time anyway.
Yes, this is what these people are paid to do.. The slogan under which the government is wrecking all your home appliances is "energy conservation."
Consumers are starting to figure out the racket. When a product proclaims that it is super-duper energy efficient, that usually means that it doesn't work as well as it used to. Your replacement model will be a generation behind the one you bought last time. New and improved is new and degraded.
It's happened to everything in our homes. Our refrigerators are so "efficient" that they wear out in a few years. Our ovens need new coils every few years. Our clothes washers attempt to wash whole loads on a cup of lukewarm water (yuk!). The dishwasher is being killed with a thousand cuts. You have to run the dryer all night and set your alarm to restart the thing.
Home appliances liberated generations from drudgery. The government is bringing drudgery back, one mandate at a time. Think of it. If we wanted to be really, really, really efficient, we would just roll back history to the 1850s. Our streets would be lit with torches, our homes heated by wood-burning stoves and trivialities like microwaves would be unknown. Our refrigerators would be iceboxes, at best.
Every candle would have a big-fat "Energy Star" sticker on it. And it would be true. To the government, the hysteria over electricity at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 was capitalist decadence run wild. If only Ben Franklin had never flown that kite!
So what's the deal with microwave clocks? Well, some bureaucrat has figured out that the microwave oven has to stay in the on position even when not in use for cooking food, and only to run that digital display. If the microwave were made so that it completely shut down when not cooking food, it could save, oh, a few pennies of energy expense over several lifetimes. Therefore, it has to go.
But hold on there just a minute. Can't manufacturers figure this out for themselves? If consumers really want a feature like auto-shutdown on a microwave, don't the manufacturers have every incentive to make it this way? Of course. This is particularly true with microwaves. For years, the makers have struggled to come up with features that will cause you to buy this one versus that one.
It's cutthroat competition out there. Let's face it: One model can zap that plate of leftovers just as well as the other one. There has been no real improvement in the underlying technology for decades. The improvement has to come from features like rotating plates, cool displays, nice colors and the like. If you could really entice people to buy a new microwave by building an auto-shutdown into it, it would be done in a day.
But it turns out that consumers apparently like the clock display. That could change tomorrow and manufacturers would respond. We don't need the geniuses at the Department of Energy to tell us what we want and mandate it. All they are really doing is imposing yet another thing to go wrong.
And what about the fact that if we don't have this display we have to buy a clock? It would run on batteries or be plugged in. Either way, that uses energy. What, then, would be the next step? How about a mandate that specifies precisely how many clocks you have running in each room? Then we would need home inspections to enforce it.
All in the name of saving energy. You would swear that the bureaucrats are unaware that we do actually pay for the energy we use. The system isn't perfect, because it is a public-private partnership, instead of being purely private. But the fact remains that we pay more when we use more. How about a bit of deference to consumer sovereignty here?
The DoE doesn't see it this way. I swear that these people imagine themselves to be our dictators. Nothing is outside their purview. Nothing in life is permitted to take place without their permission. And their goal is not really to bring us more energy, but rather to take it away from us. They are against wall outlets. They want us drawing all things from the sun and rain like some primitive cave people.
What a far cry we've come from the policy fashions from the 1930s. A big goal of the 1930s in the United States was to bring electrification to the rural areas. Forced progress isn't better than forced regress, but this generation of politicians wasn't so insane as to believe in forcibly driving us back to the Stone Age and expecting us to love them for it.
Foreigners used to say of America that it is a great country because everything works. Sadly, this is no longer true. The litany of stuff that no longer works is getting ever longer. And there is one reason for this: regulations. Wicked, anti-human regulations. They more they regulate, the less choice we have and the less freedom manufacturers have to serve us. The whole story is starting to read like a dystopian novel. If you like it, they will ban it.
The heck of it is that these people work in secret. Hardly anyone follows their deliberations, and no one reads the Federal Register. We buy things, they break and we blame capitalism instead of the real culprits, who dwell in their concrete palaces in the Beltway, people who were never elected and can never be fired no matter who is president.
This is the very strange form that American tyranny is taking. It makes no headlines. There is no debate. It appears in our homes in a form that we don't notice until it is too late. Not one in a million people understands the real cause.
Get a good look at the lineup of microwave ovens at the store. You might even pick up a spare while you can. The government might soon make them all disappear and replace them with something else. It's always and everywhere worse than what came before.
[ How Government Wrecked the Gas Can ]
The gas gauge broke. There was no smartphone app to tell me how much was left, so I ran out. I had to call the local gas station to give me enough to get on my way. The gruff but lovable attendant arrived in his truck and started to pour gas in my car's tank. And pour. And pour.
"Hmmm, I just hate how slow these gas cans are these days," he grumbled. "There's no vent on them."
That sound of frustration in this guy's voice was strangely familiar, the grumble that comes when something that used to work doesn't work anymore, for some odd reason we can't identify.
I'm pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn't work. Toilets don't flush. Clothes washers don't clean. Light bulbs don't illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It's all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.
It's like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we've made in bettering our lives. It's the bureaucrats' way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.
Surely, the gas can is protected. It's just a can, for goodness sake. Yet he was right. This one doesn't have a vent. Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress? After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn't pour right and is likely to spill.
It took one quick search. The whole trend began in (wait for it) California. Regulations began in 2000, with the idea of preventing spillage. The notion spread and was picked up by the EPA, which is always looking for new and innovative ways to spread as much human misery as possible.
An ominous regulatory announcement from the EPA came in 2007: "Starting with containers manufactured in 2009… it is expected that the new cans will be built with a simple and inexpensive permeation barrier and new spouts that close automatically."
The government never said "no vents." It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly. They are not permitted to have a separate vent. The top has to close automatically. There are other silly things now, too, but the biggest problem is that they do not do well what cans are supposed to do.
And don't tell me about spillage. It is far more likely to spill when the gas is gurgling out in various uneven ways, when one spout has to both pour and suck in air. That's when the lawn mower tank becomes suddenly full without warning, when you are shifting the can this way and that just to get the stuff out.
There's also the problem of the exploding can. On hot days, the plastic models to which this regulation applies can blow up like balloons. When you release the top, gas flies everywhere, including possibly on a hot engine. Then the trouble really begins.
Never heard of this rule? You will know about it if you go to the local store. Most people buy one or two of these items in the course of a lifetime, so you might otherwise have not encountered this outrage.
Yet let enough time go by. A whole generation will come to expect these things to work badly. Then some wise young entrepreneur will have the bright idea, "Hey, let's put a hole on the other side so this can work properly." But he will never be able to bring it into production. The government won't allow it because it is protecting us!
It's striking to me that the websites and institutions that complain about government involvement in our lives never mentioned this, at least not so far as I can tell. The only sites that seem to have discussed this are the boating forums and the lawn forums. These are the people who use these cans more than most. The level of anger and vitriol is amazing to read, and every bit of it is justified.
There is no possible rationale for these kinds of regulations. It can't be about emissions really, since the new cans are more likely to result in spills. It's as if some bureaucrat were sitting around thinking of ways to make life worse for everyone, and hit upon this new, cockamamie rule.
These days, government is always open to a misery-making suggestion. The notion that public policy would somehow make life better is a relic of days gone by. It's as if government has decided to specialize in what it is best at and adopt a new principle: "Let's leave social progress to the private sector; we in the government will concentrate on causing suffering and regress."
You are already thinking of hacks. Why not just stab the thing with a knife and be done with it? If you have to transport the can in the car, that's a problem. You need a way to plug the vent with something.
Some boating forums have suggested drilling a hole and putting a tire stem in there and using the screw top as the way to close the hole. Great idea. Just what I wanted to do with my Saturday afternoon, hacking the gas can to make it work exactly as well as it did three years ago, before government wrecked it.
You can also buy an old-time metal can. It turns out that special regulations pertain here, too, and it's all about the spout, which is not easy to fill. They are also unusually expensive. I'm not sure that either of these options is ideal.
It fascinates me to see how these regulations give rise to market-based workarounds. I've elsewhere called this the speakeasy economy. The government bans something. No one likes the ban. People are determined to get on with their lives, regardless. They step outside the narrow bounds of the law.
It wouldn't surprise me to find, for example, a sudden proliferation of heavy-duty "water cans" in one-and five-gallon sizes, complete with nice spouts and vents, looking almost exactly like the gas cans you could get anywhere just a few years ago. How very interesting to discover this.
Of course, this law-abiding writer would never advocate buying one of these and using it for some purpose other than what is written on the package. Doing something like that would show profound disrespect for our betters in the bureaucracies. And if I did suggest something like that, there's no telling the trouble that it would bring down on my head.
Ask yourself this: If they can wreck such a normal and traditional item like this, and do it largely under the radar screen, what else have they mandatorily malfunctioned? How many other things in our daily lives have been distorted, deformed and destroyed by government regulations?
If some product annoys you in surprising ways, there's a good chance that it is not the invisible hand at work, but rather the regulatory grip that is squeezing the life out of civilization itself.
[ How Government Wrecked Our Mowers ]
When I was a kid, lawn mowers worked. You pushed them and they cut grass. The grass went into the bag. Then you emptied the bag. The results were great. There was no grass to rake. It all went into the bag, because that's what lawn mowers did.
Then the feds got involved. Or so I now gather. I didn't know this for a long time. Every time I would buy a mower, I would be disappointed in the results. I kept buying mowers with ever-larger engines. Then I would buy them with different bag designs, and then a different brands, and then different features. Nothing worked.
The problem was always the same. I would mow and most of the grass would go in the catcher. But some didn't. Some landed on the lawn in a line. When the grass was wet, it left an even bigger trail. Or when I would go from the grass to the sidewalk, a big clump would fall out from underneath the mower onto the sidewalk, requiring that I get a broom and sweep it up. Then I would have to empty the bag long before it was full.
It took me many years of thinking to figure out the problem. After all, I never had this problem when I was a kid. Have companies started making lawn mowers that don't work? Are manufacturers worse than they used to be? It all seems crazy. I would mow with a smartphone in my pocket that could check my blood pressure, make the sound of a flute or surf the Web. Why can't private enterprise seem to make a mower that works?
I would try to forget about the problem, adjust to the downgraded reality and finish up the growing season. But the next year, it would all come back to me. Grass trails. Clumps on the sidewalk. Emptying too often. Buying a new mower and finding the same problem all over again.
What is the source of the problem? The spinning blade cuts the grass and creates a flow of air that lifts the grass and throws it into the catcher. A flow requires circulation, and where does the circulation come from? It can't be a vacuum seal. You can't create a small wind tunnel without a source of air. Where is this coming from? Nowhere. The base of the lawn mower is flush against the grass. The blades spin but create no suction effect.
Why is the base so low to the ground? I tend to mow my grass pretty low just because of the variety of grass and the topsoil level. But doing this causes a perfect seal between the mower and the ground, cutting off all airflow and denying the blade the air it needs to create the wind tunnel to empty the grass.
It is pretty obvious, right? So why have manufacturers not responded by raising the steel casing on the lawn mower? Why would they keep selling mowers that don't work well? I'm hardly the only person who has the problem. Lawn mower forums all over the Internet are filled with people asking exactly the same questions and having the same symptoms. The manufacturers are shy to mention the real reason. They talk about changing blades, removing obstructions and things like that. Users know better. There is another factor.
I was just looking at the detailed regulations for lawn mowers. In particular, the relevant passage is 16 CFR PART 1205 — the Safety Standard for Walk-Behind Power Lawn Mowers. Here we find that the height of the lawn mower case must be low enough to pass a "foot probe" test. No matter how high or low the wheels are adjusted, it cannot be possible to stick your foot under the case.
Now, when I was young, you could stick your foot under the mower. We didn't do that, of course, but we could. Therefore, there was suction. The air sucked from underneath and swirled up and out in the grass catcher. It was like running a vacuum cleaner over a floor. It shaved the grass, and not one grass blade was left anywhere in sight. It all went into the catcher.
The new regulations, which apply only to walking mowers that you use at home, went into effect sometime after 1982. I still used my old mower for years after that date. I fact, I didn't have a reason to buy a new one until about fifteen years ago. That's when my troubles began.
Now I know the cause. The bottom line is that federal regulations have degraded the lawn mower. In the name of safety, the government has forced all manufacturers to sacrifice functionality. They are forced to sell equipment that doesn't do what it is supposed to do. All the while, I've been blaming private enterprise. It turns out to be the fault of government.
The government's central plan for walk-behind mowers is mind-boggling. That bar you have to squeeze and hold on the handle to make the wheel move? Mandated by government. That annoying plastic piece that covers the blowhole for the grass that you have to push out of the way? Mandated by government. The government has mandated the blueprint for the whole machine and thereby frozen its structure in place with an inferior and unalterable design.
It is not enough that regulations have invaded the bathroom, ruined our showers and toilets, degraded our detergent, made it ever harder to unclog drains and made essential medicines hard to get. Now I find that regulations have even made it difficult for me to do something completely American like mow my own lawn!
This also explains why so many of my neighbors are using lawn mowing services that have giant riding lawn mowers. It turns out that these particular regulations do not apply to them. It wouldn't surprise me to find that lawn services were actually instrumental in lobbying for these safety regulations. This is how commerce works these days: Compete for a while, but when that doesn't work, turn to the government to wreck the competition.
Government hates lawns — except at the White House, of course. They consider private lawns to be wasteful and vain, a symbol of conspicuous consumption. If they had their way, we would all have rocks in our front yards. Or maybe we wouldn't have front yards. We would have little window boxes, and surely that would be enough for us.
It's all in the interest of your safety. And security. What about your freedom? It's been mowed under, and it landed like clumps of grass on the sidewalk.
[ The Great Lawn Mower Hack ]
The functioning of millions of our consumer products has been wrecked by government regulations in ways that are extremely hard to detect and difficult to narrow down. I wrote above about discovering the reason lawn mowers have mysteriously stopped working and stopped improving over the last decade or so. (I now have a hack that I can tell you about.)
But that's just the beginning. Someone pointed out to me that Band-Aids no longer stick. That seems right to me. I began to fish around the regulations for a clue. It is extremely difficult to find the one thing that caused it, since no regulation states outright that "Sticky Band-Aids are hereby banned." The reason is usually very complicated.
Looking around, I found myriad restrictions on how bandages can be produced. Most pertain to the types of glues used. I found a mandate that forces manufacturers to put a long and terrifying warning label on any product that uses a particular type of glue and wondered if perhaps this is the problem: Manufacturers are declining to use the stuff because they don't want to terrify the people they are trying to heal.
But I wasn't sure. I took a break and went to the store, where I saw a friend of mine who is a doctor. I asked him outright why Band-Aids no longer stick.
Without missing a beat, he said, "Because government banned the glues that work!"
I can't prove he is right, but I assume so. Sometimes only industry insiders know these sorts of things. For example, I wouldn't have known that government banned cloth aprons in commercial kitchens had a restaurant owner not told me the story of having to throw away piles of great stuff and start buying government-approved aprons.
It applies to so many products that don't work like they used to. Today, unless your toilet makes some explosive bomblike sound when it flushes, it is probably not doing the job and probably not staying clean after use. Unless you add phosphates to your detergents, your dishes and clothes are not getting clean. Government regulations are the reason your refrigerator died too soon and why your white paint turned yellow.
You can dismiss these points as nothing more than "first-world problems," but it's actually more serious than that. The essence of civilization comes down to whether the small things in life perform as they should and improve over time. Regulations are stopping this, systematically bringing about regress. These people are wrecking the world one consumer product at a time.
But let's return to the lawn mower. I touched on only one major aspect of the problem: the clumping problem from the bagging process. There are more problems, such as how the "self-propelled" mower moves more slowly and pathetically than it used to. Government regulations mandate that the wheels must stop moving within three seconds after the propulsion bar is released. That mandate required manufacturers to weaken the engines.
And why is it that we can't just push our mowers forward with our fingers, rather than having to hold down a long bar with both hands? This, too, is a government mandate. The bar must be there, and it must be held down with both hands. This is the way it has to be because the government has actually drawn up an official blueprint for gas-powered, walk-behind, grass-bagging mowers. There can be no progress under these conditions.
The problem I focused on above was how regulations mandate that steel casing go all the way to the ground to prevent a "foot probe." This cuts off the airflow that makes the grass fly up and into the bag.
Your ability to collect your grass in a bag was mandatorily sacrificed for your own good. What? You have no interest in sticking your foot underneath a running mower? Doesn't matter. Government is protecting you.
In any case, here is a short history of life: Government erects barriers to progress, and then the market finds some workaround that is not perfect but helps blunt the effects of government's attack. It's true in the lawn mower case as well.
There are two engineering issues to overcome: airflow and grass redirection. A company called Arnold, which specializes in parts for outdoor equipment and prides itself on innovation, invented what it calls the "extreme blade" that does two things. It uses an elevated blade tip for redirecting grass into the bag, and it also puts extra slits into that tip. The slits help use the existing air in the sealed lawn mower casing to create a windy circulation, as well as to chop up the cut grass even further so that the clippings are lighter. The result is absolutely marvelous.
The blade is more expensive. And you have to go through the trouble of taking off the old blade and adding a new one. Most consumers won't even think to do this and imagine that they aren't qualified to even try. They will never figure out that there is an answer to their woes. After all, I went through three mowers in ten years before being clued in that some company had invented a workaround to the problem of government regulation.
This is the archetypical case of how all these things happen. Some product works great, and then the government wrecks it through a stupid new mandate. The thing stops working. Consumers get mad and blame the product maker. A few years go by and some entrepreneurial company jumps out in front with a decent workaround. Meanwhile, millions of consumers are stuck with the stupid old thing and get mad and don't know the fix. They start to blame the manufacturers for their woes. In the worst case, the company that finds the fix patents the answer, which means that others can't copy the solution.
This scenario pertains to a vast number of products, including many that we haven't noticed along the way are gradually depreciating our standard of living. We just get used to it. Government regulators have a field day with our liberties, and we live vaguely vexed lives.
Another workaround — and really the best approach — to get around government regulations is to buy the product that is so revolutionary and amazing that there aren't government regulations yet crafted that ruin it. This is pretty much how it works in the digital world. Apple and Google and others — not government agencies — are responsible for authorizing applications that come along daily. That's why the digital world is progressing.
This same level of progress doesn't usually happen in the physical world because it is so heavily controlled. However, as long as we are talking about lawn mowers, have a look at something truly revolutionary. It is called the Robomower. It is amazing. It mows your lawn for you. That's right. You turn it on and the whole yard gets mowed on its own.
A reader actually told me that the whole thing works wonderfully well. But the price is unapproachable: $1,500-2,000. The producer has a lockdown on the patent. That situation will exist for some time, thereby preventing the price from falling and restricting this wonderful innovation to only the elite in society. The way that patents slow down innovation and limit access to cool stuff is a subject for another day.
Regardless, if you have a drink in your hand (provided by private enterprise), offer a toast to the free market and its ever-amazing capacity for overcoming the barriers to the good life that government puts up.
[ How to Ruin a Kid's Life ]
I was just down at the "feed and seed" buying two baby chicks to replace my female duck that was carried off by a bird of prey, leaving one lonely male duck behind. No one told me that ducks don't like chicks. The rest of the story is, well, let's just say "it's complicated."
In any case, the details distract from the reason I'm bringing this up at all: The store was bustling with activity and filled with rural people of all ages. Yes, lots of kids too. Prepare yourself for a shock: these kids actually work on the farm!
We city people don't really understand this world. We know that, and so do they. That's okay. I marvel at the social structure of rural agricultural life, the way kids learn and work from an early age, how extended families and communities all share in the work, how impervious and protected the culture is from the mechanized, regulated and planned life the rest of us live.
To me, the milk on the farm tastes like butter and the butter tastes like cheese, and I don't really understand where and how all this food comes from, much less how it is that young kids can learn to drive gigantic tractors and shoot varmints out the kitchen window with shotguns without blinking an eye. But it is all marvelous, regardless.
And on this very day, the news came across my screen. The Department of Labor had planned to destroy it all, and then barely pulled back when faced with massive protest. The bureaucracy was on the verge of passing new rules that would have banned many kids from working on farms. An exception in the law against "child labor" has always been made for agriculture. FDR would have been impeached if the 1938 law had not included that exception. (Other exceptions include family businesses, child actors and wreath makers.)
As a member of the Corleone family might say, the Obama administration don't respect nothin'. The urban elite who run the government think it's just awful that kids are getting up at the crack of dawn to feed chickens and bale hay when they should be reading a civics text that instructs them about the glories of government. Another sector that probably finds it awful: big agriculture that is fed up with dealing with these pesky extended family farms that keep honing in on its monopoly.
The proposed regulations were being pushed as an update to the last update from 1970. In government parlance, an update always means worse. The list of "shall not's" was extremely long and tedious and amounted to a complete ban on work by anyone under the age of sixteen or, in the case of driving tractors, the age of eighteen.
The proposal was first made last August, to the cheers of "Human Rights Watch," which apparently doesn't believe in the right to be productive. Since that time, the Department of Labor had been getting closer and closer to making it law. Such a rule would transform rural life in America. Or maybe people will just ignore the law and stick with tradition? The government thought of that. The Department said it would use "all enforcement tools necessary to ensure accountability and deter future violations."
Just think of it. One in two college graduates doesn't have a job. Teen unemployment has never been higher in the whole of American history. Young kids are desperate for opportunities. So what does government do? It proposed to ban yet another opportunity, spreading misery as far and wide as possible.
But look at it this way. If this wiped more people off the labor rolls, unemployment would go down again. This is truly how this works in an Orwellian sort of way. It's like poisoning people to death and then happily noting that sickness among the living is down.
The proposed law made an exception for children of parental owners, but no one took comfort in that. Most farms use extended family to help: nephews, cousins and the like. You can't draw a strict line between nuclear families and extended families and not cause havoc in this world. For this reason, rural farmers protested bitterly and the Obama administration backed down — for now.
Anyone who has been exposed even slightly to the agricultural lifestyle knows that working on the farm or ranch is not really like any other job. It is part of who you are and what you do. Everyone pitches in from the earliest ages to the oldest. There is great pride among all these people in the life they lead. A rule like this would be devastating.
Also as part of the legislation, reported The Daily Caller, the government would have mandated replacing 4-H training programs and private systems with a government-administered program. To be sure, I know nothing about 4-H, but I do know that for many people in this world, this program is as central to one's childhood experience as Sunday school in the suburbs or Catechism class in Catholic communities.
Thank goodness the Department of Labor has backed down. Regardless, this kind of thing should not be a threat in a free society. There would be no hectoring from Washington about things government can't possibly manage or understand. The outrage is that this is threatened at all. No one should have to protest such a law; it should have never been proposed in the first place.
And while we are at it, let's put in a good word for the city folk too. These so-called child labor laws came about 1938 only as an effort to prettify the unemployment data and give some extra market leverage to the labor unions that FDR was trying to win over.
Look at the thirteen-, fourteen-, and fifteen-year-olds today. They have no opportunities to learn anything useful. They are denied a chance to be part of the world of remunerative work. They are thereby denied the opportunity to learn adult-like responsibilities and serious skills beyond repeating what the teacher says while they are strapped in their tax-funded desks.
These laws have been wrecking lives for far too long. And with labor law enforcement today, there are ever fewer opportunities to work for cash. Then when that magic day comes when they graduate from college and we shove them out into the workforce and say, "Go to it!" it should be no surprise that they have no idea what to do.
The feds can't think of anything better to do except make sure that this pathetic situation spreads to another sector of life — and do it on behalf of big agriculture. And what will the bureaucrats say when yet another generation is wrecked by mandatory sloth in prison-like educational institutions? Maybe they will tell us that they all should have become child actors. That exemption still lives. For now.
[ The Banishment of the Marginal Worker ]
Do you know about Europe's problem with the NEETs? This is the name being given to those mostly young workers who are not in school, not employed and not in training. The designation applies to one in five people aged twenty-four and younger.
Unemployment among this generation is frighteningly high all over the eurozone. These people are wandering and lost. They are slumming and rioting from Athens to London, and not one politician in power has a viable plan for what to do about it.
The United States is a step behind this curve but going the same way, with unemployment among this generation in the 18-19% range, according to official statistics (12 years ago, it was 6%). The trend line is still up. Looking at the broad measure of all people who gave up applying or who are working in low-wage part-time jobs and begging for more hours, we are now in the third year of a gigantic demographic shift in which young people are being shut out by the millions.
Step back from this a moment and you realize just how crazily inexcusable this situation is. The digital age is requiring all kinds of new skills from workers, and no group is more adaptable in this respect than young people. This entire generation is comfortable with digital media in a way that their parents are not. This should be a time when the marketability of young minds should be at its height.
What's gone wrong? It's not that there is no work to do. There is always plenty of work to do at some price. And earning some wage is better than earning nothing at all. At least you get your foot in the door. The list of barriers to entry is a long one. It includes mandated benefits that business can't afford: the restrictions on moving people in and out of firms, fears of legal liability, mismatches between state-funded education and real-world workplace demands.
But let's just deal with the no-brainer: the minimum wage. This policy is a human rights violation. It forbids workers from negotiating directly with an employer and coming to mutually agreed-upon terms of employment.
The minimum wage says to workers the police power of the state prohibits you from offering your services for less than $7.25 per hour. If you strike such a deal, heads will roll. You might want to work for less, and your employer might be hip to this too, but the law absolutely forbids it. If you are caught making such a deal, you will be thrown out on the street where you belong.
How does this help anyone? It helps existing workers, perhaps, by lessening competition for their jobs. But it also guarantees a certain level of unemployment. How much? Art Carden at Forbes cites research showing that among the youth population of minorities, the minimum wage increases of the last three years have caused more job loss and unemployment than the recession itself.
This sounds about right, but these kinds of issues are notoriously difficult to quantify. All we do know is that the high minimum wage shuts workers out of the market. We don't know by how much precisely, and we don't know how many people would be suddenly employable if it were repealed. All we know is that repeal would help fix a disastrous situation.
Frankly, I find it ridiculously hypocritical for any politician to whine about youth unemployment while not pushing to repeal laws that make employment illegal. If you make work illegal under a certain wage ceiling, guess what? You are going to see more unemployment than you otherwise would. This is not rocket science.
And how high is the minimum wage? It is nearly twice as high today as when it was first implemented in 1938. The first minimum wage was $0.25, which translates to about $4 today. Would that we had the New Deal back today! Millions would suddenly be back at work. Some politician should propose the FDR Memorial Labor Act that reduces the minimum wage to $4. That would be fun to watch.
But let me tell you about some amazing research that will change the way you look at these laws. The researcher here is Thomas C. Leonard. His remarkable paper "Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era" was published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 1995.
Leonard proves that the minimum wage is not a case of good intentions gone wrong. It is not as if people didn't understand the fallout. Quite the reverse. It was originally conceived of as a means to toss people out of the workforce. To prove this, he returns to the economic writings of the Progressive Era to reveal some remarkable prehistory here.
Leonard summarizes: "Progressive economists, like their neoclassical critics, believed that binding minimum wages would cause job losses. However, the progressive economists also believed that the job loss induced by minimum wages was a social benefit, as it performed the eugenic service ridding the labor force of the 'unemployable.'"
He offers massive proof in the words of the economists themselves, all written for respectable journals and books at the time.
"'[O]f all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,' Sidney Webb (1912, Page 992) opined in the Journal of Political Economy, 'the most ruinous to the community is to allow them to unrestrainedly compete as wage earners.'"
Henry Rogers Seager: "If we are to maintain a race that is to be made of up of capable, efficient and independent individuals and family groups, we must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable by isolation or sterilization." The minimum wage was central to the isolation strategy.
Royal Meeker, Wilson's labor czar, wrote: "It is much better to enact a minimum wage law, even if it deprives these unfortunates of work…Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind."
Florence Kelley, whom Leonard says was "perhaps the most influential U.S. labor reformer of the day," "endorsed the Australian minimum wage law as 'redeeming the sweated trades' by preventing the 'unbridled competition' of the unemployable, the 'women, children and Chinese [who] were reducing all the employees to starvation.'"
Frank Taussig was even more brazen. In the context of wage floors, he said that they were a good way to deal with the criminal class and the tramps who "should simply be stamped out." "We have not reached the stage where we can proceed to chloroform them once and for all; but at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums and prevented from propagating their kind."
This was about one hundred years ago, when people were writing this kind of disgusting material as a defense of how the minimum wage would work. Well, in this sense, the minimum wage has worked. It has helped to shut out a generation from participating in the division of labor. Now they wander the streets in Europe and America, despairing for the future. They will grow older like the rest of us and some day be adults — without training, without work experience, without the learning and socialization that comes with productive employment.
Good intentions gone awry? Think again. There are certain people with influence over the shape of the law whose stated regrets about the current situation are just a bit implausible. Do they care about the rise of the NEETs? Do they care enough to repeal their stupid laws that created them?
[ Unemployment Solutions Both Weird and Scary ]
There was a brief moment of joy at the news that retailers hired 206,000 new people in November. But only one day later, the other shoe dropped: Jobless claims are, again, past the 400,000 mark — meaning that the unemployment problem is, overall, getting worse, not better. The broadest measure of unemployment exceeds 17%. It is much higher among new college graduates. And this doesn't even speak to the larger problem of job downgrades; there's a personal tragedy embedded in each one.
The longer the unemployment problem persists, the more we are seeing oddball theories and proposals for dealing with it. Ben Bernanke remains enthralled with the antique view that the way to cure unemployment is to depreciate the value of money. You have to blow the dust off some old Keynesian macroeconomics texts, surely to be found in some dingy library somewhere, to see his rationale.
I'll cite two additional cases in point (one news story and one commentary) as indicators of a more widespread problem.
A New York Times news story by Adam Davidson regrets how the economic changes of the last half-century have made job opportunities fewer than ever. He cites the common complaint about international trade. Steel, textiles, toys, furniture, electronics were once domestic industries, but these goods are, mostly, made overseas now, presumably, leaving less for us to do.
This is the common protectionist line, and it is rooted in fallacy. Offloading these industries where they can thrive more efficiently does two things: it saves American consumers money so that they can save or spend on different things, and saves American workers from wasting time making things that can be made more cheaply elsewhere, so that they can do things that are more productive, rewarding and remunerative.
The end result should be more and better jobs at home. (I'll get to why that is not happening in a bit.)
His second complaint is straight out of the Luddite playbook. Davidson regrets how technology (capital) has replaced human hands with machines. This isn't about technology only recently online. He regrets that "countless secretaries were replaced by word processing, voice mail, email and scheduling software; accounting staff by Excel; people in the art department by desktop design programs." It gets worse. He seems to regret even your ability to buy a bookshelf at OfficeMax because there are no longer "a bunch of people…helping measure things and making sure everything worked correctly."
My goodness. He might as well regret the invention of the wheel, because those employed to carry others around on their backs are now out of work. If we take this logic far enough, we would be back to the Stone Age, when, it's true, everyone had jobs to do. Then again, the living standards were rather low.
It seems trivial to point it out, but market-created technology is not violence to society. It appears because we want it, and we want it because it helps our lives. We become better at what we do. The outmoded technology no longer needs to be made — shed a tear for typewriter manufacturers! — but there are new jobs in making the new technology, and industries that use that new technology can expand because they are more efficient than ever.
I'm sorry for wasting your time by pointing out some commonplace refutations of brainless nostrums, but apparently, there is nothing so brainless that it is unworthy of being featured in The New York Times. And if it is being featured there, it strongly suggests the need for refutation. So let us visit yet another piece along these lines, this one even wackier and more wicked than the last one.
In "The Age of the Superfluous Worker" by Columbia sociologist Herbert Gans, we discover an even-more-bizarre explanation of why unemployment persists. He begins by pointing out that having surplus workers is hardly a new problem; it has been an issue faced by all countries in all times. But in the old days, he writes, surplus workers were afflicted with "illnesses" that caused them to be "incapacitated" or were otherwise "killed off."
Wow, bring back the old days, huh? What's more, he writes, wars were a blast, because they "absorbed the surplus" of labor by employing people to kill or be killed. Ah, the salad days of mass bloodshed when "sufficient numbers of those serving in the infantry and on warships were killed or seriously enough injured so that they could not add to the peacetime labor surplus."
Sadly, those days are long gone, he writes, because people are so much healthier now. Not even war works its magic on the labor pool anymore: "Iraq and Afghanistan wars have left many more service members injured than killed." (This whole line is based on a myth that war and death have an economic upside.)
So we are in a pickle. Gans says that we need an "industrial policy" that brings together government and business to make new jobs. An example he offers: "Reducing class sizes in all public schools to 15 or fewer would require a great many new teachers, even as it would raise the quality of education."
We could have government employ some people to dig holes and other people to fill them back up again. Laugh if you want, but this is precisely what J.M. Keynes suggested in his General Theory. His plan was to have government fill up bottles with money, throw them into mines, fill the mines with trash and have private enterprise set loose to find them. Voila, no unemployment. He failed to add that this would be incredibly stupid and a ghastly waste of resources. (The best refutation of this fallacy should be distributed by the case.)
Gans ends his theorizing with the suggestion that government restrict everyone to working only 30 hours per week. When that time is done, presumably, others will be standing right by to step in to fill up the rest of the week, while the first workers go home to vegetate and wait for their turns at the wheel again. Actually, I don't know why he says 30 hours per week. We have a growing population. Maybe we should all be forbidden by law from working more than ten or even five hours per week! That would, surely, bring prosperity.
All these cockamamie theories are deeply dangerous, and they evade the incredibly obvious point as to why there is unemployment in the first place. If you read economics books from the 15th-19th centuries, there was hardly a word written about unemployment at all.
Why is that? Because there is more than enough work to do in this world. There is no shortage of jobs, now or ever. The only question concerns the terms of exchange between the worker and the person who is being hired. Only in the 20th century and, mostly, beginning during the Great Depression has there been widespread unemployment, and that is because of the government's interventions in the relationship between workers and employers.
What kinds of intervention? There are legal restrictions that make hiring and firing a litigator's paradise. There are high payroll taxes that vastly increase the cost of new workers. There are minimum wage laws, labor union privileges and "child" labor laws that cartelize the workplace to benefit the few at the expense of the many. There are restrictions on immigration that make it very difficult for many businesses to function and expand. If you could somehow get rid of all these problems in one fell swoop, the so-called unemployment problem would vanish rather quickly.
The problem of unemployment is not really an economic problem; it is a political problem. It is one of the many costs imposed by a state that involves itself in things it ought to leave alone. But rather than eliminating these costs, there is a growing fascination with wacky ideas, which will only guarantee that a bad problem grows ever worse. If you know a New York Times editor, send him or her a book on the basics of economics, and soon.
As for Bernanke, he has never met a problem in life for which he doesn't see the solution as more paper-money printing. If he could find a way for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to hire seven million people, and another 6 million to fly the helicopters needed to distribute the new bills, we'd had full employment, and absolutely no reason to work.
[ The Case of the Missing Low-Mileage Car ]
How would you like to drive from New York to Los Angeles with just one stop for gas? It seems incredible and wonderful, but it can happen. In late 2010, the Volkswagen Passat BlueMotion set a new world record for the "longest distance traveled by a standard production passenger car on a single tank of gas." It travels 1,526.63 miles. It translates to a fuel economy of seventy-five miles per gallon.
Sweet! Only one thing — this passenger car is for the U.K. You can't drive this car in the United States. We have a Passat, but it gets nowhere near this excellent mileage. Even stranger, many of the engines in these, which are driven all over Europe, are actually built in the U.S. The trouble is that it can't jump through the regulatory hoops in the land of the free.
This fact was first brought to my attention by a video blogger who had been driving a van version of this amazing car in the U.K. He came home to ask his Volkswagen dealer about it. The dealer quickly informed him that this model is not allowed on U.S. roads. The Passat in Europe runs on a 54.1-fluid ounce common-rail four-cylinder engine. The standard in the U.S. is a 67.6-fluid ounce engine. For this reason and a few others, the version you can drive here gets 45 miles per gallon.
The blogger was furious as he reported this, and he further explained the absurdity. It seems that the emissions regulations are calculated based on a per gallon basis. The U.K. Passat does not pass because its emissions pollutants are slightly over regulation.
The blogger further pointed out the silliness: The car goes much farther than the American version on a single gallon, resulting in less overall pollutants. But that doesn't matter, given the manner in which fuel-efficiency happens to be calculated. In the U.S., a car with low emissions could get 1 mile per gallon and pass, but one with slightly higher emissions couldn't get through, even if it went one hundred miles on a gallon.
Infuriating, yes. But because the video was widely circulated, the revisionists started getting to work to debunk the claim. One blogger called Volkswagen. The spokesman made several salient points. A gallon in the U.K. is actually slightly larger than in the U.S., thereby reducing the mileage disparity between the U.K. and U.S. models. Further, these 54.1 engines are actually not that popular in the U.S. market because Americans don't really care that much about mileage. Finally, mileage is actually calculated differently in the U.K., so the cars aren't quite comparable in this sense.
Now, that's all very interesting, and provides an interesting corrective, but it begs the critical question: Can this record-breaking, high-mileage car be sold in the U.S.? It would appear that the claim of the original video blogger stands: It cannot. You might want this car. VW might want to sell it. Europeans love it. But we, as Americans, are not permitted to buy it, and VW is not permitted to sell it. Regardless of the details, these are facts. The VW spokesman was really just talking around the point, as all corporations do when they are confronted with the awfulness of regulations.
The original blogger suggested conspiracy. But then, there is Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to conspiracy what can easily be explained by stupidity. Regulations are inherently stupid because they presume the perpetuation of an existing technology and production model. They can never account for change or improvement.
No matter how you write them, no matter how smart you are, there will come a time when the intended results of all regulations will reverse themselves. They will inhibit, rather than advance, progress. They will degrade, rather than improve, products. They will block, rather than inspire, technological improvement. This is an unavoidable fate, no matter how smart the regulators are.
In a private market, rules and standards adapt to change. This is because private parties get that the point of a rule or standard isn't the rule or standard but the results. The point is to achieve results. If the exact reverse of the point is observed, the rule is changed over time. In this way, private markets are flexible in ways that government regulations can never be.
Let's raise a point about another incredible and wonderful thing: the flying car. It appears that the Terrafugia "roadable aircraft" is finally going into production and might be available for purchase sometime next year. It has recently been subjected to vast media attention, and that's all to the good.
Now, one might suppose that the journalism on this car would focus on what an amazing thing this really is, how it takes us a step toward the Jetsons' world, how it might make a contribution to unclogging highways and so on.
But no, that's not what the stories have been about. It seems that the major "work" that has gone into the engineering behind this flying car has nothing to do with making it amazing for you and me. It is all about the endless government regulations that have stood in its way. The bureaucrats, not the consumers, rule the day.
Imagine: It's hard enough to build a car that complies with regulatory bureaus. It's hard enough to build an airplane that complies with the mandates of regulatory bureaus. It appears to be darn near impossible to make something that complies with both! It has to pass emissions tests, crash tests, navigation tests, design tests, mileage tests and a million other tests. Then there's the problem of licenses for the drivers and fliers and the compliance with airport and road regulations. What a nightmare! It seems that the bulk of the energy of the company has been spent on this.
The actual reality of the flying car has been around since the 1930s. It keeps being revived again and again. What's making it flounder? The problem is that this innovation is neither fish nor fowl from the point of view of government bureaucrats. Therefore, they don't know what to do with it.
The results are, quite frankly, rather disappointing. The Terrafugia is a small plane with foldable wings so that you can drive it around. That's it. There will be no levitating out of traffic. There will be no landing in your driveway. You have to drive it like a car to the airport, and then take off, fly, land and drive home again. That's kind of cool, yet it raises the question: Why not just park your car and hop in your airplane?
You have to have a wild imagination to see the world that would exist were it not for government controls. These controls wreck innovation. They deny us access to seeming utopias. They kill the entrepreneurial spirit and set society back. They thwart progress and forbid us from working toward a future that is better than the past.
We will never know what we are missing so long as we continue to allow government to throw the whole of society into a regulatory thicket. Life is pretty amazing, true, but it could be far more so. Instead, we suffer in ways we don't know. This is the big, horrible picture.
[ It's Treason to Disagree ]
A horrifying aspect of modern life is how nearly daily threats to fundamental freedoms and human rights require that citizens become politically aware and active.
Here we are struggling to put food on the table, cultivate a civilized private life, support things we care about, manage our households and otherwise meet all the challenges of modern life and then some jerk politician pushes some dangerous legislation that poses an all-out attack on everything we take for granted.
One of those things we take for granted is the freedom to disagree with the government and its policies.
Consider the Enemy Expatriation Act now being pushed by Republican Charles Dent of Pennsylvania and Independent Democrat Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. This act adds to existing law that makes it a crime to support materially governments with which the U.S. is at war.
As Dent explains, the U.S. no longer limits its wars to governments. It takes on what it calls terrorists without regard to national identity. Therefore, he says, we need a new law that grants broader power to the state to crush its homegrown foes.
The Enemy Expatriation Act, therefore, allows the U.S. government to strip citizenship from anyone found to be "engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States."
This proposal is surely the worst proposed law since the Alien and Sedition Acts, against which the entire citizenry reacted by making Thomas Jefferson president in 1800 so that he could bring some sanity back to public life. The new version of these old laws would effectively forbid speaking or blogging against any foreign policy-related policy of the United States, with the unthinkable penalty of permanent banishment.
When I heard the name of the law, I also thought of the World War I law called the Trading With the Enemy Act. It was designed to bring about speech controls during wartime. You would get jailed for expressing any doubt about the war. But the law never went away, and was the thing invoked by FDR in 1933 when he confiscated gold. So far as I know, this law is still on the books.
So anyone who tells you that the Enemy Expatriation Act is actually narrow, that it doesn't forbid civil disagreement with the government, that it won't actually bring about routine banishment of responsible critics, that anyone who sounds alarm bells is hysterical…don't believe a word of it. Every new power government has government will use, and always and eventually in the worst possible way.
Bureaucracies love this sort of law. "It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere," wrote H.L. Mencken, "to assume…that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions."
I'm not even sure that it is necessary to read the fine print to discover this. The chief sponsors are actually rather open about it. Their slogan seems to be "Government: Love it, or we'll destroy you." In their view, these are extraordinary times that call for extraordinary measures. One of those measures is for the U.S. government to begin acting exactly like the terrorists that the government claims to oppose.
This isn't unusual. It always seems to happen in wartime. We fight tyranny abroad by becoming more tyrannical at home. We oppose internment camps abroad by building them at home for those who doubt the merit of the policy. We oppose the creation and proliferation of dangerous weapons abroad by creating and proliferating more of them ourselves. We fight Islamic extremism by instituting national thought and speech controls, punishable by expatriation.
The more objectionable and egregious a government policy is, the more the government depends on brute force to enforce it. So you can know for sure that when such laws are proposed, there are plans for the wars of the future to be even more objectionable, immoral and unjust than the wars of the past. If you have to criminalize and banish dissent, it is likely that every intelligent person is going to be a target.
But what of those people who really are seething in anger to the point that they actually do feel some sympathy for enemies abroad? Are the bill's sponsors correct that such a person has relinquished his right to be a citizen?
Again, let Mencken speak: "The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
This seems about right. The traditional notion of American citizenship is very different from that of the Old World. It is not about loyalty to the regime. It is not about the willingness to hold your tongue when you disagree with the civic priority of the moment. It is about the love of liberty, and surely, being wholly free to disagree with the powers that be is the core of what it means to be free.
The ironic effect of a law like this is that the best citizens we have will end up being stripped of their citizenship, leaving only the cowards, sycophants and brainless as the model citizens with full rights to live here and vote. Granted, it is the dream of every government that all its subjects obey without question. The day that dream comes true is the day we should all welcome banishment.
Is Taxation Voluntary?
Have you ever heard the claim that paying income tax is voluntary? The term "voluntary" is variously used in government documents, including the 1040 form itself, and some very naive people have actually taken this to mean that they don't have to pay if they don't want to. They think that "voluntary" actually means voluntary, as in the free exercise of human volition.
It's an odd position that seems not to comprehend the meaning of the word "tax." What makes a tax different from a contribution or a trade is that the revenue is extracted by force. You can choose not to comply just as you can choose to resist arrest. But then you must face the consequences. A truly voluntary tax is like a friendly insult, a peaceful war or a healthy cancer. The two words just don't go together.
By the way, this point doesn't apply to just the income tax. It is true for all taxes. You sometimes hear that excise taxes are voluntary because no one is forcing you to buy the taxed good or service. This is false. The point is that if you buy gasoline, cigarettes or anything else that is taxed at the point of sale, you have no choice but to fund the government with part of your purchase price. That is not voluntary.
Yet many people, convinced that they should take the government at its word, persist in believing otherwise. The courts have been dealing with these people for decades. They file what the government calls "frivolous lawsuits." In fact, the IRS has heard this claim enough to actually address it on a special webpage it has created to address these and other far-flung claims made by people who imagine that they have a right to keep what they earn.
The agency writes:
"The word 'voluntary,' as used in Flora and in IRS publications, refers to our system of allowing taxpayers initially to determine the correct amount of tax and complete the appropriate returns, rather than have the government determine tax for them from the outset. The requirement to file an income tax return is not voluntary and is clearly set forth in Internal Revenue Code 6011(a), 6012(a), et seq. and 6072(a). See also Treas. Reg. § 1.6011-1(a).
"Any taxpayer who has received more than a statutorily determined amount of gross income is obligated to file a return. Failure to file a tax return could subject the noncomplying individual to criminal penalties, including fines and imprisonment, as well as civil penalties. '[A]lthough Treasury regulations establish voluntary compliance as the general method of income tax collection, Congress gave the secretary of the Treasury the power to enforce the income tax laws through involuntary collection…The IRS' efforts to obtain compliance with the tax laws are entirely proper.' United States v. Tedder, 787 F.2d 540, 542 (10th Cir. 1986)."
In other words, you are free to comply. If you choose not to comply, you could go to prison. As proof that this is law, the agency cites court cases from 1938-88. Guess what? The courts, as creations of the government, have sided with the government's right to collect taxes from your income. But you say that this is not fair. This is not just. This is un-American. This contradicts the government's own claim that its system is voluntary.
Well, if you are writing the dictionary, you get to define words however you want to define them. However the government uses language, the reality is that the money is being taken from you without your consent. The only real difference between the robber (such as what was once called a "highwayman") and the government, as Lysander Spooner said, is that the robber doesn't claim to be doing this for your own good:
"The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a 'protector,' and that he takes men's money against their will, merely to enable him to 'protect' those infatuated travelers who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road against your will, assuming to be your rightful 'sovereign' on account of the 'protection' he affords you. He does not keep 'protecting' you by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy if you dispute his authority or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures and insults and villainies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave."
What strikes me about the legions of marginalized people who file "frivolous" lawsuits is not that they hate the government, as people often believe. It is not that they have lost confidence in the system or otherwise treat their public servants as their enemies.
My impression is exactly the opposite. They have actually underestimated the depth of the problem with the system. They believe that the courts really are independent and will side against the interests of the government. They imagine that the system is surely and fundamentally just and fair, and once challenged, it will take their side. They imagine that agencies of the government will stick to their word. They imagine that the system is not so corrupt as to not give them a fair hearing.
Keep in mind that there was no income tax in this country for the 126 years after the Constitution was ratified, except for a brief period during the Civil War. Even after the Constitution was amended to make income taxes possible, only a few actually paid. It was much later before it hit almost every American. Before that, your income was your own, period. Imagine! Most people can't.
The 16th Amendment represented a fundamental change in the nature of the American regime. From that point forward, there was a shift in ownership over national wealth. It belonged first to the government, and then to you only as the administrative apparatus permits.
These "frivolous" people who claim taxes are voluntary are doing what good citizens do. They are reading founding documents. They study the American Revolution. They contemplate the words of Jefferson, Paine, Madison and all the others. They take their words and ideas seriously. They look at the current system and see that it resembles the founding vision only in the most superficial ways. And they imagine that it is their right, as Americans and as human beings, to stand up to the powers that be.
What they lack is that critical intelligence to comprehend that the present regime does not agree. There is no real consent of the governed. There is no authentic social contract. The government isn't really of, by and for the people. To realize this is the beginning of true political wisdom. On this core point, it appears that both libertarians and the tax police are in full agreement.
|
A Beautiful Anarchy
|
Jeffrey Tucker
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[
"nonfiction"
] |
[
"politics",
"economics"
] |
Commerce, Friend of Humanity
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[ Commerce, Our Benefactor ]
What if we had the following economic system?
This system would shower the globe with free goods day and night, asking nothing and giving nearly everything. Most of what it generated would be free goods, and every living person would have access.
Anyone who amassed a private profit would do so only because he or she served others, and the system would require this person to cough up communally-owned information: Everyone on the planet would know the reason for anyone's success.
It would serve all races and classes this way. It would serve the common man slavishly and knock the elites when they become proud and arrogant. It would make it beneficial to everyone to include ever more people in its productive potential and give everyone who wants it a stake in the outcome.
That system has a name. It's called the free market. This is more obvious in the digital age, but the proliferation of free goods has always been a major feature of capitalism. It's just that people haven't really talked about it, though Robert Murphy's outstanding Lessons for the Young Economist does an excellent job.
In fact, the free market is the most misunderstood idea out there, by its detractors and, just as often, by its proponents as well. As for the characterization of the market as a utopia for profiteers, moguls and scammers, one doubts that people who think this way have ever really tried to make a buck in a competitive system. It's hard as heck. The whole process is seriously tilted against private gain at public expense.
Now, I could go on with a theoretical argument here, but sometimes personal examples get the point across better. To be sure, we do not live in a free market now; instead, the world's largest and most intrusive apparatus of intervention interferes with ours. But there is enough of a market remaining in this world to clue us in to how it works, and sometimes the simplest retail example suffices.
So let me tell you about the barbershop I stumbled into yesterday. The people there cut hair. But they also have ping pong tables, darts, pool and free beer that you can drink at a bar.
I walked in with a friend and stood marveling at the ping pong table and asked: "Can we play?" They said, "Oh, sure." So we played and played.
Finally, after a while, I asked, "Pardon me, but can I have a haircut?" They were pleased but surprised since they thought I was just another person who wanted to only play ping pong! They were perfectly happy to let me play for free.
The haircut happened; I hung around for a beer, continued to be dazzled by this extraordinary entrepreneurial venture and finally asked if they had a Facebook page. "Of course," came the answer. I took a picture, posted it on my page, liked their page and, within minutes, people all over the world were talking about this little place. "Salon de barbier avec tables de pool et ping pong, dards et bière gratuite," said one share in France that swirled around that network.
Now, consider this: Did I do the place a favor? The owners probably think so. It is a new business just starting out. It needs advertising and promotion. On the other hand, look what I did: I immediately alerted every other potential competitor to a great idea to get customers in the door. Now every barbershop in town can "steal" the idea. They can buy a ping pong table, grab a case of beer, put up a dartboard and off they go.
The barbershop would absolutely love to find a way to reach possible customers without also giving away its tricks to its competitors. But you know what? This is not possible. One comes with the other. Information is a free good; once it is released, it can be consumed and used by anyone who runs across it.
What then happens to the competitive advantage enjoyed by the new and struggling place? It is seriously threatened. It faces wicked competition, even from big chains that can implement these suggestions in a few days at very little cost. The thing that made the new place cool and great is now copied by everyone else. If this happens, the new place will face new pressure on its bottom line. It will be forced to innovate again.
To be sure, every other barbershop in town is unclear whether this pool-and-darts thing really is the magic bullet to achieve success. So rather than emulate that strategy right away, others might wait to see how it works for the first adopter. It might flop. Or it might be amazing. If it is amazing, others will adopt the practices, but there's a problem: The first mover has the advantage. It already has a loyal clientele and a fan base.
Billions of bits of information (free goods!) hit business owners every day that allow them to copy the successes (and failures) of others. Knowing which to implement and which not is an essential part of the job. It might even be the hardest part of the job.
But here's the point I'm making: It is not possible to succeed in this market without giving away the "secret recipe" to success. Fortunately, there is no patent or copyright on things like putting a pool table in a barbershop, so the government can't stop learning from taking place. And this is the way it would be in a pure free market in every industry. To succeed means first to give — giving goods and services to customers (this is the key to profitability) and then giving away the method by which you succeed (or the reason for your failure) to everyone in the world who cares. The very act of doing commercial enterprise — which always tends toward being an open-source undertaking — makes your methods an object of study.
The information you give away is the price you pay for the prospect of profits. But those profits are always being threatened by competitors who emulate your successes. This means that you can never rest, you can never be satisfied with the status quo. You must innovate and revamp on an ongoing basis — and you have to do this with an eye to bringing the public what it wants in the most efficient possible way. This is what gives the market such dynamism, such forward motion, such an innovative spirit.
Chances are that you are reading this article in a venue that is perfectly free to you. Maybe you saw it on a website you did not pay for or saw it linked on a social network that you do not pay to use. These are free goods, the means that capitalists use to entice your interest in what they are doing.
But these free goods are only the start of what the market offers. The most valuable free good that the market is cranking out by the minute is the ocean of information about success and failure, about what people want and don't want, about what works and what doesn't work. This vast reserve of information is being poured out globally and constantly, and it is like a relentless shower of blessings on civilization. Digital networks have increased the blessing by degrees no one ever imagined possible.
The example of the barbershop might not seem like much, but if you understand it — really understand it, and the underlying dynamic it reveals — you understand the thing that has lifted the entire world out of the state of nature into the glorious prosperity that is currently spreading all over the world. This is the market at work — that network of exchange, cooperation, service, innovation, emulation and competition that makes the world tick, all in the service of human well-being. The more market we have, the more progress we will see.
So let's ask the question: Why is it that so many people think they are against the free market? It must be because they don't really understand it. I would first suggest Robert Murphy's book. Then I would invite them to join me for a beer and a game of ping pong and ask what they think made this little slice of heaven possible?
[ The Wonderful World of Commerce ]
It's fashionable to put down commercial culture, but, when you think about it, this makes no sense. Commerce is the driving force of human progress, in more ways than we often realize. Americans in the 19th century knew this and celebrated this. Our commercial culture was a source of pride and the envy of the world.
I've just returned from a most spectacular public museum. It is the Jay Van Andel Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It is right across the street from the Gerald Ford Museum, which specializes in highlighting the miseries of the 1970s. In contrast, the Van Andel museum focuses on the wonderful world of commerce in Grand Rapids from the 19th century to the present.
If politics is about messing things up, commerce is about improving life for everyone. For example, consider the washing machine and clothes dryer, two common household items that were not part of the mainstream of American life until the 1950s. At this museum, I was able to see real television commercials from the period, along with advertisements and newspaper reports. It was truly inspiring.
What did this washing machine and clothes dryer mean in those days? The phrase that keeps appearing over and over is this: "liberation from drudgery."
I like this phrase! It seems that it was still in use by the late 1970s. Ten years later, it seemed to disappear, simply because the drudgery from which people were being liberated had largely disappeared. Technology, efficiency, and household appliances became the new normal. It was universal. Drudgery of the past was unknown.
Without much fanfare, women in particular found themselves free from the grueling toil and domestic routines that had defined their lives from the beginning of recorded history until the decade following the end of World War II.
Instead of spending an entire day or days turning cranks on washers, and hanging clothes out to dry on clotheslines — in addition to hundreds of other menial tasks — these two machines did the work for them. It meant freeing up two days of the week for other pursuits like reading, going to the park, shopping, spending time with kids, and developing professional skill. They enabled women to live more fulfilling lives.
Technology was the basis of the real women's liberation movement. The household machines that became mainstream from the 1950s to the 1970s added more concrete, real-life liberty to women's lives than all the marches and protests and pushes for the Equal Rights Amendment. While the political movement created divisions and ruckuses, technology had been quietly working in the background to free up women's lives through electric appliances, ever-wider distribution of clothing and ready-made food, indoor heating and cooling, ovens that cook without wood, and machines that reduced the time of domestic work from hours to minutes.
It's disturbing how little public consciousness of this reality even exists today. But the Van Andel museum reminds us of the past, what life was like and how technology, or what was once called the practical arts, changed life in such fundamentally wonderful ways.
Consider too the timing of all these great advances. They waited for peacetime to spread throughout the whole population. World War II delayed the upgrade of civilization.
Once the upgrade happened, everyone was free to forget about what life was like before. Then as now, the improvement was seamlessly rolled into our lives, and the new way takes on the appearance of being a human right.
It's for this reason that I especially appreciated the Van Andel recreation of a street from Grand Rapids in the 1890s. It is done at a three quarter scale. It is fully enclosed so that you gain the sense of the real streets and shops at the time. There is a printer, a grocer, a drug store, a gun shop, a funeral parlor, a barber and more.
I stood for probably thirty minutes just staring at the products available in the grocery store. For this time, this was all great stuff: cereal, baking powder, flour, syrup, jello, spices like cloves and pepper, and canned goods of various sorts. None of this would have been popularly available 50 years earlier.
Recall too that the 1890s in a place like Grand Rapids was a heaven of prosperity as compared with every spot on earth in the whole of history, a place where the middle class lived better than kings of any previous century. This was a mecca of what the modern capitalist world could provide.
But there is something oddly missing from the store: any items that you put in the refrigerator. The pickles and eggs were in jars, soaking in vinegar to keep them fresh. There was no meat or fish or milk, and the cheese that was there had to be kept at room temperature. The sausages were hard and cured. Why? Oh yes, the refrigerator would need to wait another 40 years before it became commonly available.
The print shop was absolutely captivating. Only a small portion of the place was taken up with the printer itself. Most of the square footage was consumed by huge racks with drawers that held tiny letters in multiple font forms. Every letter had to be taken out and set in molds, one tiny letter or punctuation mark at a time. This is where the word "typesetting" comes from.
The technology had not changed in its essentials from Gutenberg's time. I found it alarming, especially when the true-believing proprietor tried to show me that his printer was faster than a modern printer. But in the 1890s, remember, this was all amazing. It was advanced, luxurious, and modern in every way. This was their Valhalla. It was a social order doing what a social order should do: lift up and ennoble the lives of average people.
The museum also had cars. And band instruments — things that allowed anyone to make music. And so many great machines for sewing, making furniture, making possible ever more accurate clocks. These were a people who believed in the possibility of a peaceful, thriving, happy form of progress.
The museum also features posters of the 19th century that advertised for immigrants:
TO THOSE WHO
YEARN TO BE FREE
TO DECIDE THEIR OWN DESTINY
There has never been, in the History of Mankind, a time
of Better Opportunity for anyone who wishes to
CAST HIS LOT TO
IMPROVE HIS CONDITION
Prosperity awaits the settler who, with axe in hand might fell the tall forest trees and hew his own path out of the hard marble of human life.
Here is our history. Here is the view of life that gave rise to the greatest society ever known until that point in history. Here is the theory and practice of freedom itself.
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A Beautiful Anarchy
|
Jeffrey Tucker
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[
"nonfiction"
] |
[
"politics",
"economics"
] |
The Warehouse: Beauty and Solemnity
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The great recession continues in so many ways but online commerce is booming as never before, increasing in the last quarter of 2011 at the fastest rates in six years.
Before you know it, the retail side alone will account for $300 billion in sales per year. We click and pay, and if it's not a digital good, the good arrives at our home a few days later. Do you remember "allow six-eight weeks for delivery"? That's gone. Everything comes fast. And if it isn't in stock, we are notified. When it is shipped, we are notified. We can track our packages online, following them stop by stop.
The goods go straight from the manufacturer to the warehouse, and then to our homes, eliminating the display racks, storefronts, retail outlets, salespeople and everything else in between those stages. The most unassuming stage — and the stage that is increasingly important in modern commerce — is that warehousing stage, in which products rest and wait for consumer volition to awake them from their slumber.
The warehouse has been a feature of the commercial world since the most ancient times. Jesus even has a parable that involves a grain warehouser who amasses evermore grain without selling any, and then finally dies. Yes, that's how the story ends.
The warehouse, in our times, is assuming ever-greater importance. The globalization and digitization of commerce has turned the warehouse from a useful institution into the very heart of commercial life.
The technology that drives the warehouse has undergone upheaval over the last ten, and even five, years. Once, it was all about faxes and typewriters. Now Web services in the cloud can connect warehouses around the world to a dozen different shippers and hundreds of retail websites, all communicating with each other in a fraction of a second.
The time between the end-user's purchase and the printing of the label on the box is down to minutes. It is entirely possible to order at 8 p.m. and receive the goods the next day, even without paying for the rush.
Despite this incredibly modern technology, the warehouse is a world as cloistered as a medieval convent. Its underlying purpose is not the salvation of souls in the afterlife, but the betterment of mankind in this one.
Cities around the country have reported gigantic increases in the demand for warehouse space. The orders keep becoming ever more stunning: 10,000 square feet, 100,000 square feet and even 650,000 square feet. Whole communities are emerging from coast to coast that consist of nothing but huge metal buildings with loading and unloading docks.
The same is happening in China, India, Malaysia and Latin America. Formerly uninhabited spaces — warehouses tend to emerge in low-price areas — are being converted by the day.
Remarkably, most people will never enter a warehouse and never experience their strangely busy-but-contemplative environment, which is unlike any other on this earth.
The lighting is lower than one might expect and peculiar because it exists in a giant, windowless space sealed tightly on all sides. The only natural light one can see is from the dock for loading and unloading, a space that gives the otherwise directionless cavern a spatial orientation and purpose.
The ceilings are unnaturally elevated, with shelf after shelf soaring up to ominous heights. The visual orientation is equally weighed vertically and horizontally, like an old European cathedral, and the employees are as comfortable navigating one direction as the other.
They can speed from one point to another as quickly as they can leap into the air on their specialized machines. Their digital charts might indicate a need for a pallet 150 feet up, and they will traverse the space and come back with their prize — it could weigh several thousand pounds — in what seems like seconds.
They do this without comment, or even notice from anyone else. They are nonchalant about the feats that amaze visitors. Indeed, the employees in the warehouse do not talk without purpose. And when they do speak, they use a language that is entirely about their craft. It seems like a code, but they all understand each other. The volume of their voices is low, and they speak in quieter tones than one would expect.
The temperature varies based on the season, but the warehouse is tightly sealed on all sides but the dock. It can be bracingly cold in the winter, employees wearing heavy coats and gloves indoors — and uncomfortably warm in the summer — but always to a lesser degree than the world outside.
Nothing in the warehouse is designed to be beautiful, but the sheer utility of every physical thing in it creates its own beauty. Its orderliness — nothing is unaccounted for — conforms to one ancient definition of beauty itself.
And its cleanliness is also unexpected. Surely, a space this gigantic, used only for storing things, would have its pockets of dust and grime. Not so. The staff works hard to keep the dust and dirt at bay, treating the space the way a fussy homemaker treats the domestic space.
The noises one hears are almost entirely mechanical: beeps, hums, grinding conveyor belts, stamping machines, trucks coming and going. They can be random and loud; but for those who work there, nothing is startling. You begin to discern all movement within the space by the sounds alone, same as you can tell what people are doing in your own house by the noises they make.
What about the people who work here? There are permanent employees and temporary workers who specialize in helping out in high-volume seasons. There are bosses, owners, strongmen, accountants, managers, packers and the inevitable geek who is running and managing software behind the scenes.
They stick to the task all day, but mingle very well socially during lunch and other break times, which come as regularly as prayer times in monastic life. During these times, they talk about anything but business. They revel in the differences in their eating habits, talk about movies, share tips on places for happy hour and generally find commonalities in the usual joys and sufferings of daily life.
Then the clock signals that it is the time to begin the work again, and the place starts humming with the coordinated and orderly mechanism of machinery, software and human effort: a dazzling integration of all forms of motion possible in this world.
Think of this: Every item stored in a warehouse is seemingly idle in an economic sense, not currently employed in consumption or production. Everything is held here on the presumption that, at some point, someone will purchase it. This cannot be known for sure. It is a speculation, an entrepreneurial judgment that could be right or wrong.
If there were perfect information about the future, the warehouse wouldn't exist at all. All goods would be manufactured on a need-be basis only, with no storage needed or necessary. Despite its stillness and orderly calm, then, the warehouse embodies a wild leap into the unknown — a physical monument to the human capacity to imagine a future we cannot see.
This isn't a bug of the system. It is a feature. And it's the same with banking institutions of old, which served a warehousing function as well. The money wasn't idle, contrary to what the opponents of the gold standard and pushers of fractional-reserve banking said. Not at all. It was a service that came to terms with the reality of uncertainty of the future.
No government mandates caused these warehouses to come into existence. In fact, we the consumers have caused this, not with direct demands but with subtle market signals derived from interpreting profitability spreadsheets.
Hayek would use the term "spontaneous order" here, but the warehouse puts the emphasis on order. It is a prime example of how a market operating on its own, with no one in particular in charge, can create these cells of coordination — symphonic exhibitions of productivity in the service of humanity.
Rooted deep in history yet uniquely modern, the warehouse has emerged with its own culture, shape and conventions, all created and shaped by market signaling and entrepreneurial insight.
People are always looking for things to do with their kids. They take them to amusement parks and movies, thinking that wonderful things must always been fictional. Even better is when the real world itself is wonderful. Most warehouses enjoy visitors and love showing off the business. It's off the beaten path but it is worth your time to go and see for yourself all the things I've described here.
[ The Juice That Defied an Empire ]
What's great about POM Wonderful? Sure, this pomegranate juice tastes great. POM is one of the few drinks that seems to have the same scrunch-up-your-mouth effect that you get with a bold dry red wine.
When I was a kid, it didn't exist. Like everything wonderful in this world, it comes to us because of the grand beneficence of human volition and entrepreneurial enterprise; that is, people helping people to have a better life.
The company was founded only twelve years ago, and its owners are doing just fine, thank you, and the customers are gleeful to have a way to consume these fruits without having to crack the hard shell, dig through all those horrible seeds and stain their hands and clothes.
But that's not why I'm writing about POM. What's especially great is how the company pushed the envelope with its health claims. They've been extremely specific on the benefits for the heart, prostate, longevity and every other thing you can imagine and some you don't want to think about. The owners and entrepreneurs, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, are true believers and great ambassadors for their product.
Especially Lynda. She is a "force of nature," as one person put it. She believes in this stuff. In fact, she is a fanatic. She lives and breathes the juice. No surprise: serious entrepreneurs love their products, probably more than any one of their customers.
In interviews and in advertising, POM smashed through a barrier with all these claims. These days, the government has nearly every food and drink manufacturer terrified to even mention what its makers regard as the health benefits of its product. They fear being dragged through the bureaucracy and facing some awful government judge.
Why isn't this an imposition on free speech? It is, and it's bad for consumers too. We are left to guess or search the Internet while shopping just to figure out ways in which our diet relates to our health. Or we have to visit some witch doctor at the local health food store who thinks we should eat eye of newt or soak our feet in some crazy fluid to become pure, or something like that.
I always have the feeling these days that lots of information — important information that the manufacturer wants me to know — is being hidden from me by regulations.
POM not only tore through this regulatory barrier; the company poured tens of millions into funding scientific studies that no one else wanted to do. That's serious. Sure enough, these studies have proven what the owners suspected. This is good stuff. No, it is not magic, but nothing is. As far as a drink is concerned, this is healthy juice. It beats soda.
But of course, the government didn't like what POM was saying and came after the company. Rule of thumb: if something is exciting, new, popular, and profitable, there's a government lawsuit in the making that is planning to end it all. That's the role of government these days, to be the monkey wrench thrown in the wheel of progress.
First it was the Food and Drug Administration, which said that its health claims suggest that the juice needs to be regulated like a drug, in which case it has to face what other drug makers face. Then the Federal Trade Commission got involved and said that its advertising claims amount to deception of the consumer.
POM never backed down. It fought all the way through, and continues to fight even after the ruling on May 22, 2012. The press reported that POM lost miserably, and cited the result of a twenty-year cease-and-desist order. That's very puzzling because here is what the FTC judge actually said:
"Competent and reliable scientific evidence supports the conclusion that the consumption of pomegranate juice and pomegranate extract supports prostate health, including by prolonging PSA doubling time in men with rising PSA after primary treatment for prostate cancer."
"Pomegranate juice is a natural fruit product with health-promoting characteristics. The safety of pomegranate juice is not in doubt."
"Competent and reliable scientific evidence shows that pomegranate juice provides a benefit to promoting erectile health and erectile function."
At the same time, said the judge, "The greater weight of the persuasive expert testimony demonstrates that there is insufficient competent and reliable scientific evidence to substantiate claims that the POM products treat, prevent or reduce the risk of erectile dysfunction or that they are clinically proven to do so."
Do you see the subtle difference here between reducing risk of dysfunction and promoting function? I'm not entirely sure that I do. Sounds like legalistic baloney to me. And it is any surprise that a dedicated entrepreneur would be a bit hyperbolic about the product he or she is promoting? This seems like a clear case of harassment of a business, not prevention of fraud. Pomegranate juice never hurt anyone. And all these studies do indeed show that it promotes health. So whatever.
POM put its company on the line and staked everything on its right to get consumers information about its products, information that people want and need. Would-be customers are free to look up the claims for themselves and decide. Consumers can reject the claims if they find them crazy and cranky, or embrace them completely. It's up to the buyer. But shouldn't people be entitled to know things that businesses want to tell them? One might suppose so.
POM believes that there was more at stake in this hearing than just its business and its health claims. The company believes that the FTC/FDA were preparing the ground to regulate all health products as drugs that should be subject to the entire regulatory control of the government. That would be absolutely catastrophic. Imagine!
In this respect, says the company, "the FTC tried to create a new, stricter industry standard, similar to that required for pharmaceuticals, for marketing the health benefits inherent in safe food and natural food-based products. They failed."
The company has been fabulously and delightfully defiant and brassy in the face of all this intimidation. In response to the ruling, the company said, "Although we disagree with the finding that some of our ads were potentially misleading, Roll Global will make appropriate adjustments if necessary to prevent that impression in the future."
Catch that? It will make "adjustments if necessary." If! Love it!
At least one enterprise in America is not willing to curl up into a tiny ball and beg for life when faced with government harassment. Not only that — and this is even better — the company rightly saw that this judge's ruling was a great marketing opportunity. So it took out giant and expensive advertisements in The New York Times and touted its innocence using the judge's own words. That takes guts these days.
May its sales soar to the moon!
I seriously resent how virtually the entire mainstream media presented this FTC decision as some sort of deadly blow to the company. It was not. But at least the company saw that it, and it alone, needed to bear the burden of telling the truth. It didn't even attempt to crawl. It stood up strong and proud for its product, and their right to tell consumers what they believe to be true. Again, that takes guts.
Maybe the rest of Corporate America needs a drink of this juice!
In fact, let me add an additional and slightly implausible claim about POM Wonderful: This drink can cause your company to be proud of its product and defy even gigantic and powerful government bureaucracies that have zero interest in the well-being of American citizens and only want to expand their power and control at the expense of Americans' right to know and right to choose.
So sue me!
[ Five Pillars of Economic Freedom ]
The great debate between capitalism and socialism suffers from a lack of clarity about definitions. This is why when Walter Block lectured in Brazil this past week, he was very careful to distinguish between crony capitalism and authentic capitalism. And it's why when I was interviewed, the question came up immediately: What precisely do you mean by capitalism?
Every day, for example, we read how the European economic mess is a "crisis of capitalism." Huh? It's been more than a century since governments let these economies grow on their own without bludgeoning them with regulations, taxing and looting the public, littering financial systems with fake money, cartelizing producers, shoveling welfare benefits, funding gigantic public works and the like.
Some advocates of market liberty believe that the term "capitalism" should be jettisoned permanently because it causes confusion. People might think that you favor using the state to back capital against labor, using public policy in a way that supports prominent producers over consumers or pushing political priorities that advance business over labor.
If a term elucidates an idea with accuracy, great. If it causes confusion, change it. Language is constantly evolving. No particular arrangement of letters embeds an immutable meaning. And what is at stake in this debate about market freedom (or capitalism or laissez-faire or the free market) is a substance of profound importance.
It's the substance, not the words, we should care about. Civilization really does hang in the balance.
Here are five core elements to this idea of market freedom, or whatever you want to call it. It is my short summary of the classical liberal vision of the free society and its functioning, which isn't just about economics but the whole of life itself.
Volition. Markets are about human choice at every level of society. These choices extend to every sector and every individual. You can choose your work. No one can force you. At the same time, you can't force yourself on any employer. No one can force you to buy anything, either, but neither can you force someone to sell to you.
This right of choice recognizes the infinite diversity within the human family (whereas state policy has to assume people are interchangeable units). Some people feel a calling to live lives of prayer and contemplation in a community of religious believers. Others have a talent for managing high-risk hedge funds. Others favor the arts or accounting, or any profession or calling that you can imagine. Whatever it is, you can do it, provided it is pursued peacefully.
You are the chooser, but in your relations with others, "agreement" is the watchword. This implies maximum freedom for everyone in society. It also implies a maximum role for what are called "civil liberties." It means freedom of speech, freedom to consume, freedom to buy and sell, freedom to advertise and so on. No one set of choices is legally privileged over others.
Ownership. In a world of infinite abundance, there would be no need for ownership. But so long as we live in the material world, there will be potential conflicts over scarce resources. These conflicts can be resolved through fighting over things or through the recognition of property rights. If we prefer peace over war, volition over violence, productivity over poverty, all scarce resources — without exception — need private owners.
Everyone can use his or her property in any way that is peaceful. There are no accumulation mandates or limits on accumulation. Society cannot declare anyone too rich, nor prohibit voluntary asceticism by declaring anyone too poor. At no point can anyone take what is yours without your permission. You can reassign ownership rights to heirs after you die.
Socialism is not really an option in the material world. There can be no collective ownership of anything materially scarce. One or another faction will assert control in the name of society. Inevitably, the faction will be the most powerful society — that is, the state. This is why all attempts to create socialism in scarce goods or services devolve into totalitarian systems.
Cooperation. Volition and ownership grant the right to anyone to live in a state of pure autarky. On the other hand, that won't get you very far. You will be poor, and your life will be short. People need people to obtain a better life. We trade to our mutual betterment. We cooperate in work. We develop every form of association with each other: commercial, familial and religious. The lives of each of us are improved by our capacity to cooperate in some form with other people.
In a society based on volition, ownership and cooperation, networks of human association develop across time and space to create the complexities of the social and economic order. No one is the master of anyone else. If we want to succeed in life, we come to value serving each other in the best way we can. Businesses serve consumers. Managers serve employees just as employees serve businesses.
A free society is a society of extended friendship. It is a society of service and benevolence.
Learning. No one is born into this world knowing much of anything. We learn from our parents and teachers, but more importantly, we learn from the infinite bits of information that come to us every instant of the day all throughout our lives. We observe success and failure in others, and we are free to accept or reject these lessons as we see fit. In a free society, we are free to emulate others, accumulate and apply wisdom, read and absorb ideas and extract information from any source and adapt it to our own uses.
All of the information we come across in our lives, provided it is obtained noncoercively, is a free good, not subject to the limits of scarcity because it is infinitely copyable. You can own it and I can own it and everyone can own it without limit.
Here we find the "socialist" side of the capitalist system. The recipes for success and failure are everywhere and available to use for the taking. This is why the very notion of "intellectual property" is inimical to freedom: It always implies coercing people and thereby violating the principles of volition, authentic ownership and cooperation.
Competition. When people think of capitalism, competition is perhaps that first idea that comes to mind. But the idea is widely misunderstood. It doesn't mean that there must be several suppliers of every good or service, or that there must be a set number of producers of anything. It means only that there should be no legal (coercive) limits on the ways in which we are permitted to serve each other. And there really are infinite numbers of ways in which this can take place.
In sports, competition has a goal: to win. Competition has a goal in the market economy, too: service to the consumer through ever increasing degrees of excellence. This excellence can come from providing better and cheaper products or services or providing new innovations that meet people's needs better than existing products or services. It doesn't mean "killing" the competition; it means striving to do a better job than anyone else.
Every competitive act is a risk, a leap into an unknown future. Whether the judgment was right or wrong is ratified by the system of profit and loss, signals that serve as objective measures of whether resources are being used wisely or not. These signals are derived from prices that are established freely on the market — which is to say that they reflect prior agreements among choosing individuals.
Unlike sports, there is no end point to the competition. It is a process that never ends. There is no final winner; there is an ongoing rotation of excellence among the players. And anyone can join the game, provided they go about it peacefully.
Summary. There we have it: volition, ownership, cooperation, learning and competition. That's capitalism as I understand it, as described in the classical liberal tradition improved by the Austrian social theorists of the 20th century. It is not a system so much as a social setting for all times and places that favor human flourishing.
It's not hard to discern my political outlook then: If it fits with these pillars, I'm for it; if it does not, I'm against it. Now, you tell me: Is the European crisis, or the U.S.' own, really a crisis of capitalism? On the contrary, an authentic capitalism is the answer to the biggest problems in the world today.
[ Greedy Governments and the Double Irish ]
Beginning last year, mainstream reporters began kvetching about a rather brilliant tax strategy used by Google, Apple and hundreds of other technology firms. It's been the path to survival for these companies. It relies on a feature of digital goods that would have otherwise been impossible with physical goods. Firms are setting up revenue-receiving subsidiaries in lower-tax states and countries as a means of lowering their overall tax liability.
The most colorful tactic is called the Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich. It involves setting up holding companies to receive profits in Ireland, where corporate taxation is 12.5%, and in the Netherlands, too, rather than the in the U.S., with its outrageous rates that can be above 35%, including state taxation. Another step is to create virtual corporate offices in states with no corporate taxation.
These tactics are saving Apple, for example, some $2.4 billion annually from being confiscated, according to a report in The New York Times. Wal-Mart and other physically bound companies can't do this. "Technology giants have taken advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill-suited to today's digital economy."
That is true enough, and this is true in many more ways, as well. Thank goodness the tax code is ill-suited for the digital economy; if it were suited, the digital economy would be far less advanced than it is!
It is precisely because so many features of digital economic life escape the anachronistic regulatory machine that the technology sector is booming while almost everything else is breaking under the weight of government control.
Consider that the latest data on U.S. economic growth are pathetic — anemic! And this is the stuff the government dishes out, which probably paints a prettier picture than the grim reality.
Yet how can anyone be surprised given the explosive growth of government power and debt over the last 10 years? It's crowded out private growth and left hardly any room for enterprise to breathe at all. If you doubt it, ask anyone who is actually trying to make a buck these days.
After all this bludgeoning, the real question is why hasn't the American economy been actively shrinking 5% per year? Why are there any signs of life at all?
It has something to do with the emergence of digital technology. That's been our one source of salvation. It's as if government sank the economic Titanic and then lifeboats made from digits suddenly appeared in the water to save us all. Without the growth of technology, we would all be sleeping with the fishes by now.
Digits are light and quick and can scoot around to avoid the killer sights of the government tax police. The production of their most valuable assets can take place anywhere on tiny units. They are scalable, copyable and infinitely reproducible, to permit the marginal unit production costs of items sold to fall to zero, or close to it.
Put this all together and you have a workable model for escaping the grasping clutches of greedy governments all over the world, especially those whose systems of exploitation are rooted in analog anachronisms like Keynesian-style macroeconomic planning.
In a laissez-faire world, the advent of the digital revolution would have inspired double-digit growth like we see in many other countries today. In the American case, the government has been stealing so many of the gains that our heads are barely above water.
It is one of history's great missed opportunities. In the Gilded Age, with relatively little regulation and taxation — plus a gold standard and a Congress that was restrained by it — innovations led to growth like we have never seen before or since in the United States. (See Thomas DiLorenzo's How Capitalism Saved America.)
In these years between 1870 and the end of the century, lives lengthened dramatically. Per capita income soared. Innovation begat innovation. Wealthy, successful entrepreneurs were national heroes. A new model for building civilization through trade and commerce captured the imagination of an entire culture.
The things that were amazing back then were railroads, wide availability of steel, communication improvements, electricity and the possibility of commercializing automobiles and flight. That was all great stuff that showered humanity with unimaginable blessings.
But in our times, our things are even more amazing. We are all using miracle technologies we keep in our pockets that presidents couldn't have accessed ten years ago. We have more computing power in our digital devices than existed anywhere in the world in the 1990s. The whole world is universally and instantly networked. What's more, the prices are falling and falling for all these things.
It's a hinge of history, a new world. You would have to try pretty hard to prevent a moment like this from giving rise to historic levels of economic growth. And it has in countries like China, India, Turkey and Ethiopia. Indeed, a quick look at World Bank charts shows that 150 nations of the world are growing at faster rates than the United States.
Where is the outrage? It is there, but it is entirely misplaced. Opinion culture is decisively in favor of even more looting of more private wealth. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the top 1% of earners are funding 21.6% of all taxes taken by governments at all levels. This is wildly disproportionate. Yet a dominant policy idea out there is to loot the 1% ever more, and rope the digital economy into the planning apparatus.
It is not a scandal that Google and Apple have discovered fancy ways to reduce the extent to which they are being looted by the tax state. The real scandal is that they have to spend so much money and energy finding ways to keep the money they make. They are serving us; our governments are looting them.
If we want to restore prosperity and bring to the United States some of the economic growth other countries are enjoying, a first step would be to dramatically cut corporate taxes from their current confiscatory level. If we want to avoid the injustice of double taxation (never forget that individuals are paying too!), the right level should be zero.
A change to zero corporate taxation in the United States would bring an instantaneous end to the Double Irish.
[ Wal-Mart: Victim of Extortion ]
To do serious business in America requires vast campaign contributions to several layers of elected politicians, an army of lobbyists in Washington, retired government employees on your board and public devotion to the American civic religion. It goes on every year and restarts every election cycle.
Even then, it is hard to know if you are going to get what you pay for.
It's easier and more efficient in Mexico. You pay bribes directly. The decision maker gets the money. He or she clears the path for you to do the thing. The facilitator takes a slice. People mostly keep their promises. The deal is done.
Apparently bribe paying in the United States is a sign of a healthy, functioning democracy; doing the same thing in Mexico in a more streamlined way is a criminal violation of the standards of good corporate governance.
Here we have The New York Times "exposing" the shocking and presumably ghastly fact that over several years, Wal-Mart paid out some $24 million in payoffs to politicians, bureaucrats and petty gatekeepers in Mexico, all in the hope of employing people who need jobs and bringing goods and services to those who need them.
The breathless and bloviating Times exposé is written as if these intrepid reporters were exposing a violent mob engaging in killings to get its way. You never quite get that Wal-Mart would much rather have used the money to expand its business, hire more employees or beef up its inventory. Money used for bribes is a loss to any company, a terrible price of doing business under the state.
In any case, the trove of information was shoveled on the paper by disgruntled employees. And it is hardly unusual. It's how business is done. Regardless, the Times is out for blood — not from the extortionists who run the system but from the victim, Wal-Mart.
Last count, there were 1,200 news stories about this on the wire. Forbes reports: "Wal-Mart Stores will likely face the wrath of the U.S. Department of Justice for reining in an internal investigation into bribery allegations at its Mexican subsidiary."
I'm sure that congressional investigations are around the corner, with all the named executives hauled before committees and harassed by regulators.
The bitter irony is that it will transfer more of the Mexican system to the U.S. To survive, Wal-Mart will be forced to spend more than the $12 million-plus it already spends every year on campaign contributions and lobbying.
All that enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) does is increase the amount of domestic corrupt practices. Indeed, that is the way the system is supposed to work. Truly, if the FCPA were actually enforced as written, business around the world would come to a grinding halt.
Under the well-known Mexican system, people called "gestores" specialize in interfacing between business and bureaucracy. They deal with inspectors, permit issuers, environmental bureaucrats, labor officials and zoning regulators. If the gestores can make the deal, they keep 6% as a matter of convention. Even average citizens use these people to stand in line for them — all in an effort to find non-violent means around the bureaucrats.
Given the ridiculous barriers in place, it's not a terrible system. Corrupt government that you can buy your way around is far better than "good government" that blocks all progress.
The rap on Wal-Mart is that it did far worse. When the company discovered this was going on, it buried it, rather than going public. No kidding. Maybe the company imagined that it would be smeared and attacked?
Bribing officials is illegal in Mexico, just as it is in the United States. But of course, that is just the gloss. Anywhere there is government, there is corruption. That's the purpose of barriers to enterprise, to extract wealth from those who want to get past them.
Is it worth it? It is either pay or don't do business, which means lasting poverty. Today, Wal-Mart Mexico employs 209,000 people and is the country's largest employer. It has provided a fabulous example of the merit of private enterprise in this country, which is finally getting on its feet economically. It has brought food, goods and services to millions of people who otherwise would not have them. It has done more in ten years for Mexico than all the government bureaucrats have done in one hundred or a thousand years.
For its crime of bringing economic development to this country, it must be smeared, beaten and forced to pay obeisance to the American political class. Why should Mexico enjoy such largess when there are millions of American bureaucrats who need to be part of this gravy train?
You can read thousands of academic papers on the problem of "corruption" in countries around the world and completely miss the central point. The way to eliminate the corruption is to eliminate the barriers to enterprise. Why is this not obvious? Because many people imagine a utopian ideal that does not now and never has existed: good government. They imagine that government rules can be enforced impartially based on science or the public good.
It's sheer nonsense. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in Human Action in 1949:
"Unfortunately, the office-holders and their staffs are not angelic. They learn very soon that their decisions mean for the businessmen either considerable losses or — sometimes — considerable gains. Certainly, there are also bureaucrats who do not take bribes, but there are others who are anxious to take advantage of any 'safe' opportunity of 'sharing' with those whom their decisions favor… Corruption is a regular effect of interventionism."
But here's the part that upsets me so much. Somehow, private enterprise is always and everywhere blamed for perpetuating it, when the truth is obviously that the blame rests with government. It's like watching a mugging and blaming the mugged for carrying too much money with him. It's like telling anyone who has faced the demand "your money or your life" should always choose to give up his life.
The background here is nothing short of anti-capitalist resentment. The elites loathe Wal-Mart for its achievement in putting on display the incredible reality about capitalism that you never hear about in school: It is a system that is maniacally focused on the well-being of society in service of the common man.
Go to Wal-Mart, and you see the workers and peasants not rebelling against the system, but buying stuff that makes their lives better. It looks rather mundane. It's how civilization is built: one economic exchange at a time. The people who stand in the way don't deserve a dime, but private enterprise is kind enough to cough it up, anyway. Wal-Mart deserves sympathy, not condemnation.
[ Economic Lessons of Silly Putty ]
We loved it as kids — that amazing substance called Silly Putty. I recently found a version in a hotel room the other day, re-branded as Thinking Putty. It turns out that the names differ based on the targeted market segment. In any case, the whole phenomenon is curious. How it is that this seemingly ridiculous stuff could become a product that links the generations?
A closer look reveals that you can learn so much about the way the world works just by looking at this history of this pliable plaything.
Who invented it? There are several competitors for the title, and at least two patents. Earl L. Warrick, who died in 1992, always claimed that he and a colleague at Dow Corning, Rob Roy McGregor, invented it in 1943. But the claim is so uncertain that Warrick's New York Times obituary even hedged. It appears that James Wright, who was a researcher at General Electric, also has a claim and a patent dated from 1944 to prove it.
More likely, it is a case of simultaneous invention. It turns out that this is not unusual in human history. It is actually the norm. In fact, if you look at the history of just about anything from the cotton gin to the telephone to flight itself, you find a raging dispute over who was first. Patents settle nothing: The bureaucrats approving those things mix things up constantly, and much depends on how the lawyers write them.
Lesson No. 1: The legend of the lone inventor in his lab is a myth. We all breathe the same air of ideas. Those ideas get mixed and remixed. Researchers in the history of invention have found that innovations occur on the margin and simultaneously over large parts of the world, a bit of improvement here and there, all stemming from trial and error and the targeted purpose of the product. This applies not only to products, but also to ideas.
To freeze one stage and isolate one inventor with a government monopoly grant of privilege (the patent) is wholly artificial and injurious to the process of discovery. This is why the lawsuits by Apple against Samsung (among a million other wasteful patent lawsuits) are so pointless. Everyone "steals" from everyone else, except that it is not stealing to learn from others, adapt, improve, remix. That's how society advances.
In any case, the scientists who discovered the initial putty imagined revolutionary uses for the new rubber substitute. Guess what? No one ever found such a use, unless you include the desire to make a quick and rubbery copy of your favorite Sunday comic. The main use of this stuff turns out to be pretty much what it was in the lab: a fun thing to play with.
Lesson No. 2: No man is smart enough to foresee the most highly valued economic contribution of any good or service. We think we know, but we do not. The only way to discover economic value is to put something out there in the marketplace and see what happens. Most of the time, we are surprised.
In any case, Silly Putty languished in the world of labs and science until the owner of a toy store in New Haven, Conn., Ruth Fallgatter, saw some potential and put it in the catalog. It was a smash hit, selling millions, for adults at first and later to kids. Even then, Ruth didn't quite see the possibilities here. It took the marketing executive that she hired, Peter C. L. Hodgson, to push it to the limit and become the first Silly Putty millionaire.
It wasn't easy, however. Everyone told Hodgson that he was crazy, that this stupid stuff had no use. He forged ahead in any case, making more millions in the early fifties. Then the Korean War nearly shut him down with its rationing of essential ingredients. Still, after the war, he persisted and adapted to the changing market.
Lesson No. 3: Invention is never enough. You need marketing to make something wonderful and change the world. Nothing sells itself. You can invent the greatest food, drink, drug or shoe in the history of the world, but it will languish unless there is someone around to take the risk to get it to market. In the course of this marketing, the product often changes. Invention is overrated; marketing is underrated. And even when there is a successful push, it still takes a special entrepreneurial mind to see a possible future of continued success.
By the 1960s, Silly Putty was huge, a massive seller all over the world. It was the classic case of a fad gone wild, except for one thing. It wasn't a fad. This stuff continues to be an integral part of the cultural experience, generation after generation. In fact, consider this: How many consumer products that you know have been largely unchanged for 50 years and yet still sell millions per day?
Lesson No. 4: Nothing can be dismissed a priori as a fad, and nothing can be declared a priori as a valuable item destined to be a classic. There is no way to know for sure. This is because what we call value is ultimately bound up with the individual human mind. Value is subjective, as the Austrian economists say. We make value by our thinking, and our thinking is notoriously unpredictable. What is useless and what is useful is bound up with human experience. No one can know in advance, which is one reason that central planning is impossible.
Peter Hodgson, the world's great champion of this stuff, a man whose whole life was dedicated to selling a stretchy, bouncy substance, died in 1976. The next year, the product and the marketing apparatus was taken up by the same company that sells Crayola crayons. It remains an amazing success, unchanged from its long tradition.
Lesson No. 5: Corporate takeovers do not spell disaster. They are sometimes the best means for preserving a tradition and taking it to a new level. It all depends. In the case of this one product, Silly Putty has been an amazing seller for decade after decade. Even for huge corporations, the rule still applies: If it isn't broken, don't fix it.
Looking from the outside in, taking on the role of a dictator who knows what we need and what we don't, one would never say that Silly Putty was an essential contributor to life just because, for some odd reason, we are intrigued by its capacity for both bouncing and stretching. And yet there it is — a staple of civilization as we know it. And why? It makes us happy. That's a good enough reason.
Jetsons, Episode 5,437: "The Kroger Vending Machine"
You have heard of unmanned flight. Much more impressive to me is the unmanned grocery store that could be coming to a street corner by you. It's being pushed by Kroger. It is a large-scale machine stocked with 200 items from the grocery store.
Crackers, cheese, milk, bread, chips and dip, maybe even some fruit and cold cuts — most of the common items found in the grocery store — are all in this brilliant vending machine now being tested at select places around the United States.
The prices are more comparable to the grocery store but it has more convenience than the convenience store. The savings to the company includes no twenty-four-hour staff, no high insurance for security risks, no sky-high real estate, no maintenance of building, and the foregoing of the endless headaches of wacky customers, untrustworthy employees, bathroom catastrophes, theft, and more.
It seems like a sure thing. It's not. People have to keep it stocked. There are many inventory tweaks that have to be done over the coming months. My first thought was that these machines had better carry beer and cigs else people won't go to them, but of course that wouldn't be compatible with the nanny state's existing age restrictions. So it might work and it might not. Only the balance sheet will say for sure.
This is something new that private enterprise is bringing to us. It begins small. It could grow and grow and become something widespread and common and amazing. I recall seeing reports of even more amazing machines in Japan that sell live crabs, hot food, and bananas (very popular in Japan). These could all come to the U.S., but, again, it all depends. The profit-and-loss statements tell us what's what, whether something should stay and expand or contract and die.
We are rather used to this sort of relentless progress in the world of free enterprise. In the last decade or so, it seems like the world turns upside once every twelve months, so that reverting even a year in progress would be unthinkable. If people have to give up even one benefit of this progress — my favorite example is Skype video conferencing from hand-held wireless devices — there would be wailing and gnashing of teeth.
We are surrounded every day by the glories of free enterprise and risk tasking. We don't have to lobby for the progress. We don't have to vote for it. We don't have to stop our lives and get involved in some stupid pressure group and march around with signs that say: "We want to do our grocery shopping through vending machines!!"
Instead, the entrepreneurial companies are working constantly to figure out what it is that we might like and then working hard and taking the risk of offering it to us. It's up to us to decide that we are for this or against that. If we use the service, it stays and expands. If we don't, it goes away and something else comes along.
I was thinking about this as I stood in line at the post office last week. The line was long. There were two clerks and they seemed to be moving at a pace that was completely disregarding of the long line. The clerks, who seemed to be nice enough people, seemed to be telling nearly every customer what the customer had done wrong, and also instruct them on various mandates with which they needed to comply.
The environment inside is joyless, dingy, bureaucratic, dutiful, stale. The distance between the employees and the customers was great. They were guarded by a high counter. We were kept at bay by various lines on the ground. While we waited, we read signs about what we were required to do. Absolutely no one was happy to be there: not us and not them.
I make it a task to try to dissect government agencies like this and try to figure out what is wrong with them. Sometimes it is hard to figure out why these buildings are so depressing, why the service is so bad, why a sort of terrible dreariness pervades these institutions. It's beyond what any "management consultant" could fix, beyond what any house cleaning would repair. The sense of lifelessness, sadness, and anachronism is pervasive and seemingly unrepairable.
Meanwhile, service gets ever worse. The post office is lobbying Congress to let it cut out Saturday service altogether because otherwise it will bleed red beyond even what Congress will be willing to support. I can't think of the last time that the post office offered anything that seemed splashy or wonderful. Just looking at the general structure of its business model, it doesn't seem to have changed much in a hundred years.
Why is private enterprise so amazing, always on the side of progress, while government institutions are so dreadful, dreary, and backwards? Some people figure that this is because the wrong people are in charge of government. We need to elect better rulers so they can shape up the bureaucrats and reform them so that we get "good government" instead of staid, belligerent, inefficient, anachronistic government.
That's not the reason. The core of the cause was explained by Ludwig von Mises in his 1944 book Bureaucracy. He wrote it as a follow up, 25 years later, to his original book on Socialism. As Mises explained, socialism could never work because there could be no profit-and-loss test to discover the best use of resources in society. The balance sheet is built from data that emerges from the real-life exchange of private property. Eliminate private property and exchange — as socialism does — and you crush the very heart of economic life.
Mises took the next step to point that the same problem that dooms full-blown socialism is integral to bureaucratic management as well. There is a wedge driven between the producer and the consumer. The producer is not acting based on any feedback it gains from those who depends on its production. The balance sheets reflect inputs and outputs but are not profit-and-loss statements that emerge from real-world experience. There is no real market at work here. The bureaucrats, at best, are playing market but not actually experiencing one.
What difference does it make? It makes the difference between regress and progress, between systemic and sustained failure, on the one hand, and a system that is forward driven and self-correcting, on the other. The difference matters for our daily lives. Improvement lifts our spirits, lengthens our lives, boosts our standards of living, grants us more fulfilling lives. A world of stasis and decline denies all of this to us.
It's remarkable, isn't it, that what kind of institutions society creates — and a seemingly small factor like whether an institution's balance sheet is built by markets or legislatures — could have such an incredibly profound affect on the whole of the way we experience life itself.
If you pass one of these cool new vending machines, remember to consider what its very existence implies about our world. Think of the way that the unplanned order of the market economy serves society in ways we hardly ever think about, and consider too how absolutely dreadful the world would be if the whole thing were organized by politicians and the misnamed public sector.
I propose what we might call the "munchy test." If you have the munchies at 1:00am, and you just have to have an ice cream and soda, who is going to give it to you? The institution that cares to feed your eccentric eating habits is the one that cares about your life and well-being.
[ A Hymn to Taco Bell ]
We've all visited Taco Bell a thousand times — two billion of us at least once every year — but now I've taken the time to examine why it is we love this place so much.
Let's just start with the obvious thing: the food. It is, of course, wonderful and full of varied textures: crunchy shells, robust meat, cold and fresh lettuce, stringy cheese, and all the fatty stuff that we love because it both satisfies and gives us energy. It arrives quickly, and it's ready to eat, mostly with your hands, which is really how we all want to eat.
The menu itself is an absolute blast. Should we get a dozen tacos, mix in a few steak burritos, throw in an enchirito or two, or just fill up on nachos? And what's the deal with these prices? For $2 I can get just about any standard menu item. For $10 I can walk away with a case full for great stuff to share, or, better yet, munch on from breakfast through to the midnight snack.
But there's more going on than just fun food. The company obviously puts a great deal of thought into the ethos of the restaurants themselves. The decor gives us things to look at that we don't see anywhere else. The colors are all those we associate with the Southwest, but not in a conventional way. The shapes are geometric and modern, with a daring flare that delights the eye and fires up the imagination.
The details around the place add to the sense of adventure, but you don't take note of them individually unless you are looking closely. The backs of the chairs all have a bell shape cut out in the steel. The lighting is not mainly in the ceiling but rather comes from orange hanging glass lamps in the shape of cones, and I was trying to think where I had seen this before. Is it like the knave of a chapel in a monastery in a Spanish mission territory? Maybe that's it. I'm unsure but it conjures up something different.
Hold on here. Perhaps you have already realized this and I'm slow on the take, but the whole Taco Bell experience is suggestive of that Spanish mission sensibility. That's why the buildings are shaped the way they are. And, obviously, that's the whole meaning behind the bell, and why it adorns the front entrance of the place. It's a church bell! It taps into something deep and lasting in our cultural sensibilities, something that shaped our ancestors and their communities, and presents it all anew in our times.
Have you seen the paintings on the wall? They are very peculiar and aggressive in their use of color and shape, kind of like the iconography of Latin America. Most seem to have some walking man or robot, abstractly designed but with sharp edges, and the words "Taco" and "Bell" appear somewhere on them. They are unframed, such as you might see in a gallery. I want to meet the person who put these together. He or she has talent, for sure, and I want to congratulate this person for using that talent in the service of the public good.
Next time you are there, take a close look at the gorgeous photography of the dishes themselves. There's never been a prettier taco, never been a burrito that looks more exciting, much less a plate of nachos that seems as if every chip is practically dancing with joy at the prospect of being eaten.
Each image features a splashy use of color, depth, and action. How do you make food look this way? It must be a rare skill. I could take pictures of tacos with my iPhone all day and never get one to look presentable by comparison.
Now, the usual response is to point out that the food doesn't actually look this way once it arrives on your plate. No kidding! But does anyone really care? Not really. The point of the images is to get you in the mood to eat the thing, rev you up into the spirit of the moment, create that deep sense of longing for the real deal.
You don't feel a bit of disappointment when the food doesn't look like the picture, and why? Because you can't eat a picture. And the food is right there in front of you ready to be eaten. Part of Taco Bell's secret must be that it makes its images so ridiculously unrealistic that you sound like an idiot to point it out.
This restaurant came into existence in 1946 and really caught its stride in the 1990s. It's another reason we are all fortunate to live in our times, right now.
Go ahead and dismiss that statement as hyperbole if you want to. But I seriously submit to you if you had dropped this restaurant on any spot on the planet before about 1940, to say nothing of 1200 or 1000BC, all the people would have been in profound awe and regarded it as a sector of heaven that had somehow dropped from the sky. There weren't enough travelers and traders alive to make it possible, much less affordable.
This is the free market at work. It has gathered corn, flour, beans, tomatoes, meat, and fresh lettuce from all the ends of the earth, combined it with advanced kitchen technology, added experienced management, brilliant entrepreneurship, and a service ethic to give us something more wonderful than that the teller of tales of yesteryear could have ever dreamed up in his wildest imaginings.
It's inconceivable to me that a small group of parasitic activists could have targeted this place for destruction. But that's what they did a few years ago with the lawsuit against Taco Bell. They claimed that Taco Bell was not serving 100% beef in its tacos. Of course the organized left rallied around this lawsuit, a fact which confuses me because you would think that they would be glad that the company doesn't serve 100% beef. They hate the cow for its demand for vast pasture land on which to graze and even its biological functioning which allegedly adds to the "problem" of climate change.
The whole hysteria was like a joke. Of course Taco Bell adds stuff to its beef to make the final product. So do you when you make tacos at home. At least I hope so. You drain the fat and add spices and flour and other things to turn it into the right texture for eating. I don't see the big deal. But the activists were so desperate to destroy this place that they acted like this company, which is all about service, was somehow guilty of mass fraud.
The news media jumped on the campaign in hopes of giving Taco Bell a bad name. The response by the company was brilliant. It added a whole new series of menu items not based on hamburger but on sliced up steak. These are the most expensive items on the menu. So now you go in with the intention of spending $3 and instead spend $7 or more! Good for Taco Bell.
Even better, after the dopes withdrew their silly lawsuit, Taco Bell launched a nationwide advertising campaign with the slogan: "Would it kill you to say you're sorry?"
Fantastic!
The genius of capitalism is that it always ends up outwitting its opponents, whether they are central planners and regulators or crazed activists armed with lawsuits. But capitalism is not just an anonymous, nameless, faceless force operating in the universe. It is flesh, blood, and brains dedicated to serving humanity at a profit and always through voluntary means. The owners and workers at every one of its 5,800 restaurants deserve our admiration and thanks.
Does the Market Preserve or Wreck Tradition?
The fliers from the local grocery arrive by the day.
"Buy your complete holiday meal for $40!"
To me, this is just thrilling. You get a golden brown baked turkey, rolls, salad, stuffing, cranberries, and the rest of the works, straight off a Norman Rockwell painting, all for a low and memorably even price, and it is bundled up and delivered right to your front door. Even if you decline the deal, and you end up slaving over the stove, fighting for oven space, washing and washing huge pans, trying to remember how to make that family recipe, and when it is all over, the consumers bail out to watch football while leaving the mess to a handful of responsible people, these fliers implant a little idea in your head: for forty bucks, I could have avoided all of this! Maybe next year!
The offering becomes especially attractive given the latest reports on the price of a Thanksgiving dinner for four. It is up 13% this year, to a whopping $49. You can not only save time by buying the thing pre-done at the store; you can save money now too.
To be sure, some people look at these commercial offerings and balk. This is an attack on tradition! What has this world come to when we even commercialize sacred rituals like the cooking of holiday meals? Is there nothing left that we truly treasure, nothing that is immune from poisoning by the dollar economy, nothing outside the cash nexus?
This is a critique of markets that has been made for a century by both the left and the right. Everyone seems to agree that the market is at war with tradition. The left says that our lives are being gobbled up by giant corporate conglomerates that are sapping our ability to manage our lives. The right says that these commercial deals are ripping up our cultural and civilizational roots, attacking our community ties, and replacing ties that bind with the cold calculation of the balance sheet.
Nonsense. Once you strip away all the rhetoric and melodrama, these attacks on the market really make no sense all. If people want to buy a precooked turkey from the store, the store has given these people an opportunity to do so. Everyone is free to accept or reject the deal. There is no force involved. No one is ripping up roots or gobbling up lives. This is about people and their choices. I fail to see how the world would be any better off if grocery stores were somehow prevented by law from offering people food and services that people want.
But what about the critique that this is really an attack on tradition? I can't even follow what this could possibly even mean. What the stores are doing is reinforcing a tradition and making it possible to live within its structures in a way that is more readily accessible and affordable. What if all the people who buy this pre-set meal deal would otherwise be opening cans of soup for the holidays? The stores are making it possible for these people to partake in a tradition that would otherwise not live in their home.
In other words, the commercialization of these holiday rituals is not destroying tradition but rather causing them to be more widespread. This goes for all the Christmas accouterments that are filling up the shelves at the stores. In fact, the commercialization of the holidays has been the very means by which all the holiday traditions have been preserved — and, in many cases, commerce created these traditions in the first place.
We only need to look back at the first Thanksgiving to see this. William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth colony, had imposed a form of managerial socialism, expecting everyone to work for the good of all and throw their proceeds into a common pool. The system didn't work. People became lazy and thieving and nearly starved.
Bradford saw the error of his ways and let everyone take possession of their own plots of land and enjoy the proceeds for themselves. This led to trade, honesty, hard work, and eventually bounty. This is why the crop yields of 1621 were catastrophic and the yields of 1623 were bountiful. The celebration of Thanksgiving really dates from a market-produced bounty. In other words, what is most traditional about our holidays is the integral relationship that private property, markets, trade, and commerce have with what we consider our folkways. Markets enable our rituals, and often create them. They certainly make them more fun.
People rail against the free market but without it, our culture and our traditions would suffer. They might cease to exist. We might end up like those poor residents of the Plymouth in 1621. We need wise thinkers like William Bradford who can recognize the error of their ways and embrace commerce now when we need it most of all.
Who Moved My Juice Bottle?
Most people think of the capitalist marketplace as the venue for the unleashing of the human ego. Selfishness reigns as those with financial means buy and build whatever they want, acquiring and amassing with no concern for the fate of anyone but themselves.
Bah! I can't even imagine a more inaccurate description of real life. In fact, the opposite is true. The marketplace encourages community-mindedness like no other institution. It prods and pokes and corrects, the rich especially, all with the purpose of inspiring decision makers to leave the self and the individual ego aside and think mainly about the needs of others.
By way of illustration, let me jump right in from a scene from the grocery store this morning. For more than a year, my favorite fruit juice was displayed right as you walked in the front door. There they were lined up. Early-morning shoppers could grab a juice and check out in minutes. It made it all very convenient.
I recall thinking, "Wow, what a science it is to know where to display stuff in a store!" One might expect that these juices would be with the produce, but no. Their inventory signals tell them about the existence of people like me who want to get in and get out in a hurry. Juice is what we want, and we want it fast. Good business!
But this morning, a change rocked my world. I went to my spot at the front of the store, and there was no juice. There were hats, scarves and a wine display, of all things. I was stunned. I called over the friendly store manager and asked him what gives. He politely pointed out to me that two weeks ago, the juice had been moved to the produce section. Stunned, I slogged all the way over there — it was like a hundred yards away — and then back again.
Slightly burned, I confronted the guy again.
"Surely, you are losing sales. People want this juice when they first walk in. No one wants to walk to the other side of the store for one item!"
He laughed and pointed out that he had thought this, too. But then last week, a memo arrived from inventory management at the central office. Their tests had revealed that the fruit juices sell more when they are with the fruit. Taking a chance, but not really being a believer, he bundled them all up and moved them, completely changing the front-of-the-store display.
"And how is this working out?"
To my amazement, he had the data for me off the top of his head. It turns out that in the two weeks since he made the move, sales of the precise juice I bought were up by 160%! I was completely wrong. Good thing I'm not in charge around here. I'm only one guy among thousands. My behavior, which I had thought was what "everyone did," turns out to be eccentric.
Not only that, but the manager was completely wrong, too. His intuition and his ego had been checked by the actual sales data. The profit-and-loss accounting system dictated another result.
Now, to be sure, the manager did not have the final answer. This new system for juice display could change again next week. Maybe there is somewhere else in the store that the juice could generate even more sales. Or perhaps last year, the juice at the front model was the best possible way.
There is actually no way to know, no way to perform perfectly controlled experiments that yield final results. The marketplace is not a laboratory with unchanging variables and elements that behave in predictable ways. The marketplace is made up of human beings who have the crazy habit of making choices and changing their minds for no apparent reason.
This means that the successful business enterprise must be constantly on alert to the decisions that people make. No detail is too small. Moreover, the business must change the way it operates in the face of the evidence of what yields the most profit.
The business that is led by egomaniacs who are always right about everything, implementing a rigid formula that can't adapt to new influence, is absolutely doomed in a competitive world in which your competition is always free to copy your past successes.
Profits are always tending downward in absence of innovation. There must be new successes all the time, and these depend completely on the ability to bury the past, suppress the perception of managerial infallibility and adapt to seemingly random change.
What applies to the juice bottle applies to every single item in the entire grocery store.
Let's say you are in charge, but you have no experience. You have to put the maraschino cherries somewhere. Play the game, please: Do they go with baking supplies (fruitcakes!), canned fruits (it is a canned fruit) or with cocktail mixers (they are great in drinks)? Which is it? It can't be all three. That would create a terrible inventory problem, and shelf space is too scarce. You have to choose.
It's a serious problem. Your chosen way may or may not be right. You have to try things out, look at the evidence, be prepared to change your mind. You must defer to the buying public. You must be community-minded. You have to be willing to admit error. You must be humble, open to correction. The unleashed ego has absolutely no place here.
(My store went with cocktail mixers.)
Again, this applies to every product in the store. Not only that, but this applies to every good and every service offered in the world economy, all untold billions of them. It's not just about store display. It is about the whole of the production process: what to make, how much to make, how to make them, where to sell them, what features they should have, how they should be sold. There is a mind-boggling array of alternatives.
As you try to parse out this conundrum, you are free to be a jerk, to be an egomaniac, to be unteachable, to be uncorrectable. No one is stopping you. But you pay the price. You are in business to make money, and the only way to do that consistently over the long term is to be slavishly devoted to the needs of others over the rightness of your own position.
This is why I say that the market instills humility and service as an ethic. After all, you might be in this only to make a buck. But experience tells you that the only way to do that is to defer to and seek out the needs of others. The profits are a reward, but you dare not rest on your laurels. The service can't ever end. After a while, this sensibility begins to shape the human character. You develop an outward gaze and leave aside the childish demand to always get your way.
This is what is forgotten in all the frenzied concern about how websites are collecting data on our shopping and browsing habits. Why are they doing this? Because they want to invade our privacy? No, it is because they care about us. They want to serve us better. They care for the same reason that the grocery store cares to put the most demanded items at eye level. They are there to meet our needs.
No, we don't always get our way. But rather than a society in which know-it-alls rule with a fixed model, I would prefer to live in a society with a service ethic that drives economic life, one in which there are no final answers, one in which every decision is subjected to a test and that test is graded by the people and their everyday choices. In other words, a free economy is better than a controlled economy precisely because the free society curbs the human ego and keeps the infallibility complex at bay.
Put Those Kids to Work!
I was reading a wonderful set of small biographies of Gilded Age entrepreneurs and took note of something we all know once we think about it. These men and women worked in productive labor from an early age.
They universally credit these early work experiments for instilling an ethic to stick to the job, be alert to opportunities and feel that sense of accomplishment that comes from the exercise of stamina. They don't typically talk about school. They talk about the barges they steered, the rocks they hauled, the mines they dug, the rivers they navigated. Their work was their main teacher.
This was hardly unusual. All through the 18th and 19th centuries, all kids worked. This was not at the expense of academics. Kids still learned to read, write and do math. Work was something that they did in addition to schooling and was part of schooling. So it has been through all of human history. The idea that a healthy kid of fourteen years old would do nothing but sit in a desk for seven hours every day and then play video games and chat on Facebook the rest of the time would be unthinkable.
In the developing world, matters are different. Everyone works. Stealth of Nations, a new and mind-blowing book by Robert Neuwirth, shows that in the fastest-growing economies in the world, kids are working from the age of ten. This is not exploitation — quite the opposite. It means that the kids are getting a great education in the real world of commerce. This gives them a leg up in life, and a firmer hold on the future than America's young people have.
I think about my own life and remember in vivid detail the jobs I had. I'm grateful for every one of them. My first job was working at a company that moved pianos. I recall going up several flights of stairs and being terrified that the whole thing would fall and cause disaster. I was ten years old.
Then I worked my way up to be a worker with an organ tuner. I crawled around dusty organ lofts, wearing a mask to protect myself from contagious diseases spread by dead pigeons, whose bones I crushed under my feet as I walked.
Then I did roofing. Then it was fence building. Then it was water-well digging. Then I mowed lawns. Then I did cleaning for a haircut place. Then I washed dishes.
It was five years before I had my first real job with regular hours and a W-2 paycheck. It was a job cleaning restrooms in a department store. This was the highest responsibility I had ever been given, and I was intensely aware that the fate of the store was in my hands. If a customer went to the restroom and found a mess or a stall that lacked toilet paper or something gross around the sink, they would forever have terrible memories and not come back.
I recall taking on bathroom messes like a centurion took on a battle. War is hell.
To get that job, I was fifteen and I had to lie about my age. You could get away with that in those days. The paperwork requirements to get a job were minimal. There feds weren't involved in enforcing so-called "child labor laws" — outmoded work rules that deny opportunities to people perfectly capable of getting great training.
This is no more. To get any job before sixteen years of age is exceedingly difficult. There are so many forms, mandates, documents and restrictions. The minimum wage is preposterously high for a first-time employee. Many young people are shut out of the market, and they stay that way through high school, college and even after (which is no surprise).
The youth unemployment rate for all classes of people has never been higher. It is essentially one-third of people sixteen to twenty-four years of age. Not working in remunerative labor amounts to training for a lifetime of being a drone and a dependent.
To be sure, when I was young, it was much easier to be paid in cash, essentially working under the table, as almost everyone my age did in those days. Now the government has every employer terrified. You risk everything by hiring a young person.
The laws against "child labor" do not date from the 18th century. Indeed, the national law against child labor didn't pass until the Great Depression — in 1938, with the Fair Labor Standards Act. It was the same law that gave us a minimum wage and defined what constitutes full-time and part-time work. It was a handy way to raise wages and lower the unemployment rate: Simply define whole sectors of the potential workforce as unemployable.
By the time this legislation passed, however, it was mostly a symbol, a classic case of Washington chasing a trend in order to take credit for it. Youth labor was expected in the 17th and 18th centuries — even welcomed, since remunerative work opportunities were newly present.
But as prosperity grew with the advance of commerce, more kids left the workforce. By 1930, only 6.4% of kids ages ten to fifteen were actually employed, and three out of four of those were in agriculture.
In wealthier, urban, industrialized areas, real child labor (as distinct from teen labor) was largely gone, as more and more kids were being schooled. Cultural factors were important here, but the most important consideration was economic. More-developed economies permit parents to "purchase" their children's education out of the family's surplus income — if only by foregoing what would otherwise be their earnings.
This was widely seen as a wonderful thing. I'm actually not so sure. Education was already being subsidized by the state. The relentless flow of young people out of the commercial sector to the state sector to sit in classrooms meant too many resources being diverted to the professional ideas industry and away from the production of real stuff and a different form of education that went along with it. In any case, this trend was blown up by World War II, which drafted people out of both so that they could kill and be killed.
Regardless, the law itself forestalled no nightmare, nor did it impose one. In those days, there was rising confidence that education was the key to saving the youth of America. Stay in school, get a degree or two and you would be fixed up for life. Of course, that was before academic standards slipped further and further and schools themselves began to function as a national child-sitting service.
Yet today, when young people grow up faster than ever before, we are stuck with these laws, which have the opposite effect of infantilizing teens. They are incredibly complicated once you factor in all state and local variations. Kids under the age of 16 are forbidden to earn income in remunerative employment outside a family business. If your dad is a blacksmith, you can learn to pound iron with the best of 'em. But if dad works for a law firm, you are out of luck.
From the outset, federal law made exceptions for kid movie stars and performers. Why? It probably has something to do with how Shirley Temple led box office receipts from 1934-38. She was one of the highest-earning stars of the period.
If you are fourteen or fifteen, you can ask your public school for a waiver and work a limited number of hours when school is not in session. And if you are in private school or home school, you must ask your local social service agency — not exactly the most welcoming bunch. The public school itself is also permitted to run work programs.
This point about approved labor is an interesting one, if you think about it. The government doesn't seem to mind so much if a kid spends all nonschool hours away from the home, family and church, but it forbids them from engaging in private-sector work during the time they would otherwise be in public schools drinking from the well of civic culture. The legal exemption is also made for delivering newspapers, as if bicycles, rather than cars, were still the norm for this activity.
Here is another strange exemption: "Youth working at home in the making of wreaths composed of natural holly, pine, cedar or other evergreens (including the harvesting of the evergreens)." Perhaps the wreath lobby was more powerful during the Great Depression than in our own time?
Oh, and there is one final exemption, as incredible as this may be: Federal law permits states to allow kids to work for a state or local government at any age, and there are no hourly restrictions. Virginia, for example, allows this.
The exceptions cut against the dominant theory of the laws that it is somehow evil to "commodify" the labor of kids. If it is wonderful to be a child movie star, congressional page or home-based wreath maker, why is it wrong to be a teenage software fixer, grocery bagger or ice cream scooper? It makes no sense.
Once you get past the exceptions, the bottom line is clear: Full-time work in the private sector, for hours of their own choosing, is permitted only to those "children" who are eighteen and older — by which time a child has already passed the age when he can be influenced toward a solid work ethic.
What is lost in the bargain? Kids no longer have the choice to work for money. Parents who believe that their children would benefit from the experience are at a loss. Consumers who would today benefit from our teens' technological know-how have no commercial way to do so. They have been forcibly excluded from the matrix of exchange.
There is a social-cultural point, too. Employers will tell you that most kids coming out of college are radically unprepared for a regular job. It's not so much that they lack skills or that they can't be trained; it's that they don't understand what it means to serve others in a workplace setting.
They resent being told what to do, tend not to follow through and work by the clock, instead of the task. In other words, they are not socialized into how the labor market works. Indeed, if we perceive a culture of sloth, irresponsibility and entitlement among today's young, perhaps we ought to look here for a contributing factor.
The law is rarely questioned today. But it is a fact that child labor laws didn't come about easily. It took more than a hundred years of wrangling. The first advocates of keeping kids out of factories were women's labor unions, who didn't appreciate the low-wage competition. And true to form, labor unions have been reliable exclusionists ever since.
Opposition did not consist of mining companies looking for cheap labor, but parents and clergy alarmed that a law against child labor would be a blow against freedom. They predicted that it would amount to the nationalization of children, which is to say that the government, rather than the parents or the child, would emerge as the final authority and locus of decision making.
Young people have to be creative to be productive today. Seeking unpaid internships can work and is far better than doing nothing. There are also ways to get paid without receiving cash. A kid can work in a neighbor's garden in exchange for some vegetables for the family. You can fix people's computers and receive Amazon store credits in compensation. You can work at a country club and receive tennis instruction in a barter-style arrangement.
You have to think outside the regulators' box. You need connections with people you trust. You need to push past that default position of doing nothing. Regardless, work is essential for the well-formed life, starting early. Sixteen is probably too late, even if you manage to get a job this late.
If you have kids, nothing is more important for their future. You can spend $150,000 or more on their college education. You can pay for expensive tutors to get them through their standardized tests. You can buy them the most expensive computers and tools to become smart. But if they do not understand the meaning of work from experience, they will not be prepared for a creative and prosperous life.
One way or another, put those kids to work!
[ Capitalists Who Fear Change ]
Digital technology is reinventing our whole world, in service of you and me. It's free enterprise on steroids. It's bypassing the gatekeepers and empowering each of us to invent our own civilization for ourselves, according to our own specifications.
The promise of the future is nothing short of spectacular — provided that those who lack the imagination to see the potential here don't get their way. Sadly but predictably, some of the biggest barriers to a bright future are capitalists themselves who fear the future.
A good example is the current hysteria over 3-dimensional printing. This technology has moved with incredible speed from the realm of science fiction to the real world, seemingly in a matter of months. You can get such printers today for as low as $400. These printers allow objects to be transported digitally, and literally printed into existence right before your very eyes.
[ It's like a miracle! It could change everything we think we know about the transport of physical objects. Rather than sending crates and boats around the world, in the future we will only send lightweight digits. The potential for bypassing monopolies and entrenched interests is spectacular ]
But here is what Andrew Myers reported in Wired Magazine last week:
Last winter, Thomas Valenty bought a MakerBot — an inexpensive 3-D printer that lets you quickly create plastic objects. His brother had some Imperial Guards from the tabletop game Warhammer, so Valenty decided to design a couple of his own Warhammer-style figurines: a two-legged war mecha and a tank.
He tweaked the designs for a week until he was happy. "I put a lot of work into them," he says. Then he posted the files for free downloading on Thingiverse, a site that lets you share instructions for printing 3-D objects. Soon other fans were outputting their own copies.
Until the lawyers showed up.
Games Workshop, the UK-based firm that makes Warhammer, noticed Valenty's work and sent Thingiverse a takedown notice, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Thingiverse removed the files, and Valenty suddenly became an unwilling combatant in the next digital war: the fight over copying physical objects.
There we have it. The American Chamber of Commerce — the supposed defender of free enterprise — is in a meltdown panic, determined to either crush 3-D printing in its crib or, at least, to make sure it doesn't grow past its toddler period.
In the 1940s, Joseph Schumpeter said that the capitalists would ultimately destroy capitalism by insisting that their existing profitability models perpetuate themselves in the face of change. He said that the capitalist class would eventually lose its taste for innovation and insist on government rules that brought it to an end, in the interest of protecting business elites.
An example: when music and books started going digital, there was an outcry. How will authors and musicians survive this onslaught?
The truth is that there was no onslaught. It was a windfall for consumers that turned into the greatest boon for music and literature ever. Today we see how this is working, and not only working but there are more authors and musicians making money today than ever before. My best example: the Laissez Faire Club. The methods could never have been anticipated in advance. Some give away their content and sell their performances. Some have found interesting new methods of distributing content behind pay walls that are affordable and convenient. Authors are starting to self-publish through fantastic numbers of venues.
I've been touring museums lately, and I've begun to realize something important about the long process of technological improvement. Through our long history of improvement, every upgrade and every shift from old to new inspired panic. The biggest panic typically comes from the producers themselves who resent the way the market process destabilizes their business model.
It was said that the radio would end live performance. No one would learn music anymore. Everything would be performed one time, and recorded for all time, and that would be the end.
Of course that didn't happen. Then there was another panic when records came out, on the belief that this would destroy radio. Then tapes were next and everyone predicted doom for recorded music since music could be so easily duplicated ("Home Taping is Killing Music"). It was the same with digital music: surely this would be the death of all music!
And think back to the mass ownership of books in the 19th century. Many people predicted that these would destroy new authors because people would just buy books by old authors that were cheap and affordable. New authors would starve and no one would write anymore.
There is a pattern here. Every new technology that becomes profitable causes people to scream about the plight of existing producers. Then it turns out over time that the sector itself thrives as never before but in ways that no one really expected.
The great secret of the market economy is that it embodies a long-run tendency to dissipate profits under existing production and distribution methods. This is how competition works. This is how competition not only inspires improvement but makes it unavoidable. And this is one reason that so many capitalists hate capitalism.
The process goes like this. The new thing comes along and it earns high profits. Then the copycats come along and do the same thing cheaper and better, robbing the first producer of the monopoly status. Profits eventually fall to zero and then something even better has to come along to attract new business, earn new profits, elicit new copycats, and the whole thing starts all over again.
I've never understood why leftists complain about profits going to capitalists. In a vibrant market economy, profits are the temporary exception to the rule. They accrue only to the most innovative and efficient firms, the ones that serve the consumer best, and the gains are never permanent. As soon as the company loses its edge, entrepreneurial profit vanishes.
Under free-market competition, writes Ludwig von Mises, the trajectory of existing production and distribution models is always to reduce profits to zero. For those who want to hang on to profits, there can be no rest. New and improved must be an everyday experience. There must be a ceaseless striving to serve consumers in ways that are ever more excellent.
This is why business is always running to government for protection. Kill this crazy new technology! Stop these imports! Raise the costs on the competition! Give us a patent so that we can clobber the other guys! Impose antitrust law! Protect me with a copyright! Regulate the newcomers out of existence! Give us a bailout!
Aside from this, there is a public fear of the new. Otherwise, people would not find the self-interested protests of the existing establishment to be persuasive.
Here is a striking fact about the human mind: we have great difficulty imagining solutions that have yet to present themselves. It doesn't matter how often the market resolves seemingly intractable problems; we still can't become accustomed to this reality. Our minds think in terms of existing conditions, and then we predict all kinds of doom. We too often fail to consistently expect the unexpected.
This poses a serious problem for the market economy, which is all about the ability of the system to inspire discovery of new ideas and new solutions to solving the problems. The problems posed by change are obvious enough; but the solutions are "crowd sourced" and emerge from places, people, and institutions that cannot be seen in advance.
Capitalism is not for wimps who don't want to improve. If you want guaranteed profits for the few rather than prosperity and abundance for the many, socialism and fascism really are better systems.
The push to stop market progress won't work in the end, of course. Technology eventually mows down its forces of resistance. The mercantilists can only delay but never finally suppress the human longing for a better life.
Who Should Control the World?
In the days following the gift-giving holidays, many millions of people stand in judgment over the quality of the gifts they gave and the gifts they receive. Did they arrive on time? Did the quality hold up? Did the reality match the advertising hype? The Internet ads an extra wrinkle. Anyone dissatisfied can post blistering attacks on any merchant and the products in question. Anyone can vote up or vote down.
The down votes are what make the news. The Wall Street Journal tells the story of Scott Mitchell of Connecticut, who purchased from Best Buy the Playstation 3 for his two sons ages 10 and 14. The company let him know via an email that the goods didn't arrive. He was furious and wouldn't stop posting diatribes against the company. Eventually, the suits got involved and sent him his full bundle of goods at a low price plus a $200 gift certificate.
"While I can't say I'm happy, I wound up being satisfied," Mr. Mitchell told the Journal.
The case was cited as one of many such cases. Consumer demand was so intense that Best Buy got behind. The company didn't have the inventory it needed to fill all requests. Cyber Monday overloaded the staff and they couldn't respond fast enough. Any business that hears the story thinks: nice problem to have. Inventory decisions like this require daily clairvoyance.
What's more important here is what this anecdote indicates about the social order. In this setting above, who is in control? Mr. Mitchell is just one lone guy with one problem with a company that serves untold millions. But he had a voice and his voice was heard. The company scrambled to please him.
Justice was served, and not because he was part of a big pack of people going to voting booths once every four years. There were no hearings, committees, testimonies, debates, complex systems of legislation and signings, judges and juries, regulations and legal rights. He was served because he was a consumer. One man with a credit card beat the system.
The institution that allows this great thing to happen is known as consumer sovereignty and it is an intrinsic part of the market. The preferences and rights of one individual prevailed even though he was not in the majority, even though he never registered for any system in a political apparatus, even though he had no lobbying firm or friends in high places. He complained and the giant corporate monolith bowed to his wishes. And they did so for self-interested reasons. It's bad for business to have dissatisfied customers. So the corporate execs fell to their knees in supplication.
This is a good system. Who set it up? No one. There was no votes, no constitutions, no committee hearings, no lobbying. It emerged spontaneously from the decisions of self-interested parties. The company exists to make a profit by finding ways to get goods to people who want them. Mr. Mitchell was among those who decided on his own volition to trade with the profit-seeking company. That trading relationship is one of billions and billions that go on every day, all day, all year. Put them all together and you have what is known as the market economy.
Philosophers from the ancient world to the present have tried to imagine how to set up a society in which every individual matters, a society without exploitation, a society without violence, a society with peace, justice, and prosperity. They have usually imagined that this world would have to emerge from the political process. That is where their speculations and plans usually begin. They were and are wrong. The society that does these things is right before our eyes and found within the framework of our own choices, actions, and trades with others.
We are often told about the evils of corporate power and the grim nightmare of the market in which we are all swallowed up by the forces of materialism and consumerism. Where is there evidence of any of this in the sphere governed by voluntary exchange?
In the market economy, the buyer is the decision maker. He or she determines what gets produced, how much, and directs the pattern of change. The supposedly powerful fat cats of the corporate world are daily submitting to the wishes of the little guy with a computer and a credit card. Any company in a market can be shut down in a matter of weeks if the consumers switch loyalties. This happens every day.
Nothing like this system exists in our dealings with the state. For years now, masses of people have been screaming about the indignities imposed upon us by the TSA. The TSA responds with a propaganda blitz designed to make us believe that they are strip searching us electronically for our own good. The institution doesn't comply with all our wishes, much less the wishes of one person. Instead it sets out to change our thinking, trying to make our mental habits conform to those with the power.
In other words, the TSA operates on the opposite principle of the free market. In the market, we are in charge and the producers slavishly attempt to find out what we think and try to conform their operations to our point of view. In government, we are told that we are the ones that must change. We must submit. We must comply. We must go along no matter what. We can choose to be grumpy about it or happy about it, but, in either case, there is no choice. We must obey. And the institutions of government never really go away.
And so it is with every government agency at all levels. The little guy doesn't matter. There is nothing like the consumer/producer relationship that we see in operation in every instant on the market economy. Instead, the government takes our money by force and spends it as it wishes. If we don't like the system, we are invited to slog our way to designated spots every four years and choose among a slate of drones who want to be our designated leaders.
Government vs. the market: which system is better? Granted that neither system provides utopia. The real issue is: which system is better capable of self-correcting in our favor? The market does this every day. There is a ceaseless struggle going on globally with the goal of winning us over as consumers. The market is always saying: "How can I help you?" The government is always saying: "Help us or else."
Looking at the choice here, it seems rather obvious that the market — as a particular application of the principles of choice and free association — is the best approach to organizing society. No one designed it. It is controlled by us in the very exercise of our free will. It gives power to the people. The statist approach can only lead to less satisfaction, less mutual benefit, less control, and ultimately the very nightmare that we all want to avoid.
Think of all that the market contributed to your holidays and all it will do for you in the year ahead. As a form of social organization, nothing is more deferential to your needs and wishes.
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A Beautiful Anarchy
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Jeffrey Tucker
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[
"nonfiction"
] |
[
"politics",
"economics"
] |
The Love of Money
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[ The Great Monetary Debate ]
When National Public Radio airs a segment on the gold standard, you know that the debate over the quality of money has reached the point where it can no longer be ignored. Another sign came last month when Newt Gingrich, who has never shown the slightest interest in the cause of sound money, suddenly began to talk about restoring the gold standard.
The last time there was talk about this issue was more than thirty years ago, after the devastating inflation of the late 1970s robbed an entire generation of their savings, upended American family life, and launched a debt addiction that has destabilized economies all over the world. The Nixon administration promised a rose garden after the paper dollar; the results were very different.
The crisis in our times is not (yet) hyperinflation, but it is just as serious. The problems of the Fed-managed paper dollar system are too many to name, but they can be reduced to three that hit the average person most seriously.
First, it is no longer possible to earn a conventional return on saving money. That reality pretty much undermines the whole practice and ethics that built prosperity as we know it. The reason is directly related to the quality of money: Lacking any independent substance at all, its value and yield is managed by a small group of technocrats in a marble palace. They have used that power to impose the ultimate price control on the relationship between time and money.
Second, the problem of unemployment and the ever-shrinking labor participation rate has hit the young generation in a way that we've never seen before. This has terrible economic effects but just as devastating cultural ones. It attacks the core hope that people have for the future. Again, the paper dollar, as the generating force behind the bust and boom, is a cause.
Third, there is a growing movement against the power, secrecy and insider racketeering by the Federal Reserve, which prints and throws around inconceivable volumes of loot to its friends and clients in total disregard for the political process or the fate of the American middle class. This angers people of all political persuasions. The opening up of the records and dealings of the Fed has not calmed people down, but rather has confirmed the worst possible fears.
In the 1970s, writers like Henry Hazlitt struggled mightily to get people to see the connection between monetary policy and the falling value of the dollar. While the Ford and Carter administrations lashed out at business and speculators, Hazlitt and others pointed to the real cause. His message stuck. By 1980, even the Republican platform included a call for a sound dollar. Congress formed a gold commission.
The connection between the Fed's paper money and our economic plight is even more difficult to make this time around. But the intellectual foundations have been in place for years, and they have been given voice in the relentless hammering away at this issue by Ron Paul in interview after interview. He never misses a chance to talk about this previously unspeakable subject.
A tricky issue for the movement now is dealing with the diverse political coalition coming together against the current monetary system. The biggest critics of the Fed, for example, agree that the current system is a mess but don't seem to agree about what to do about it.
This week in D.C., I debated Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The setting was fantastic: a speakeasy environment sponsored by the beautifully named Empire Unplugged. Baker is a strong critic of the Fed for reasons both good and bad. On the good side, he is as appalled as Ron Paul at the insider racketeering of the central bank. On the bad side, he would like to see its powers transferred to a body with more political oversight and democratic influence.
This is the exact opposite of what I argued for: the complete depoliticization of the entire system. We went back and forth for an hour on these topics, agreeing on the great evil, but disagreeing on what should replace it. As is typical of progressive critics of the Fed, he raised fears that market control of money and banking would revive the wildcat banking of the 19th century. This camp conveniently forgets that the age of the gold standard (which was never perfectly adhered to) also happened to produce history's largest and most positive economic transformation, propelling the creation and entrenchment of what is called the middle class.
Do these debates matter that much? On the level of theory, yes. In practice, not so much. These mirror the kinds of debates in the middle stages of the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe. Recall that the movement against Polish central planning began not as a movement for private ownership of capital, but rather as a labor union protest against power and privilege of state-connected oligarchs.
This tendency made the champions of free markets squeamish, for good reason. Replacing a state monopoly with a state-protected labor monopoly does not necessarily look like improvement. But that's not what ended up happening in Poland. Solidarity was the major vehicle that wrecked the regime as it stood. At one point, the major labor organization Solidarity had 9.5 million members. That mass movement upended history. Today, Solidarity is a normal union like any other, with membership at half a million and declining and no serious power. The result was not a labor monopoly, but a beautifully prosperous market society.
The lesson here: Sometimes you have to topple the system that exists and see what happens. This is why Ron Paul has been tolerant of a wide divergence of views within the anti-Fed movement. He is right to do so. Writers at The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere wring their hands about the dangers of political control of money in the post-Fed age. But history shows that the reform is not so easily managed. Breaking up the current monopoly is the most important priority right now.
If the Fed were an Eastern European socialist government, the year would be about 1987. If the economy takes another dive after the fake boomlet that Bernanke's printing presses have manufactured, he should make sure that the helicopter on the roof is in good working order.
[ Mere Mortals at the Fed ]
The secrecy of the Federal Reserve is legendary, but pressure in recent years has led to some opening up. Already in the last 12 months, we've seen some eye-popping records of who received credit during the 2008-09 credit crunch. We've seen lists of institutions that the Fed favors, and these lists have confirmed the worst fears. Hint: It's all about the big banks.
But now we get the really fun stuff. The transcripts, released five years after the fact, of the open market committee meetings provide a fascinating look into how the Fed was thinking about the world just before the greatest market meltdown in modern times. No one at the 2006 meetings saw it coming. Thousands of market commentators, economists and bankers saw it coming, but the Fed — the all-wise and all-knowing Fed — did not see it coming.
That the Fed actually played the largest role in producing the bubble that turned to bust only adds to the irony that the Fed was clueless about the emerging reality on the ground. Ben Bernanke saw some softening in home prices and needed correction to the run-up, but he was somehow sure that there would be a soft landing.
The meetings opened that year with Alan Greenspan at his final meeting and saying his goodbyes. There was some talk about long-term pension problems. Greenspan dismissed it, pointing out that, "We have enough trouble forecasting nine months." Everyone laughed. Ha ha. Thanks for admitting this — in private.
At this final meeting, the group also heard one of the clearest statements in all the transcripts that there were troubles on the horizon. Fed chief economist David Stockton stated very clearly: "As I contemplate our outlook and the things that I worry about the most on the domestic side of the economy, I'd say the housing sector is clearly one of the biggest risks that you're currently confronting."
But the gloom didn't last long, and the meeting ended with a wildly upbeat report from none other than Timothy Geithner, now secretary of the Treasury. He begins with an over-the-top tribute to Greenspan ("I'd like the record to show that I think you're pretty terrific") and continues on with an upbeat forecast of endless growth and happiness forever. Even though he was spectacularly wrong, he is now running the show.
The opening meeting with Bernanke set the tone for all the meetings that followed. Stockton probably sensed that he might be free to speak his mind for the first time in years. He compared the situation in housing to riding a roller coaster blindfolded. "We sense that we're going over the top, but we just don't know what lies below."
But Bernanke intervened to stop all such crazy talk. "I think we are unlikely to see growth being derailed by the housing market," he said. He assured all present that "the strong fundamentals support a relatively soft landing in housing."
Ever the pleaser, Geithner agreed. "Equity prices and credit spreads suggest considerable confidence in the prospect for growth," he said. "Overall financial conditions seem pretty supportive of the expansion."
Later that summer, Fed Gov. Susan Bies tried again to introduce some caution, pointing out that the banks were all using models that presume falling interest rates and rising home prices. This has allowed many American families to depend on home equity loans more than they should. "It is not clear what may happen when either of those trends turns around," she cautioned.
Once again, Bernanke smacked down the naysayer. "So far, we are seeing, at worst, an orderly decline in the housing market… As I noted last time, some correction in this market is a healthy thing, and our goal should not be to try to prevent that correction, but rather to ensure that the correction does not overly influence growth in the rest of the economy."
From the point of view of economic theory, there is an interesting comment made by Dallas Fed president Richard Fisher. He pointed that everyone on the planet was talking about the housing problem, but he cited this as a reason not to be concerned. "If we have not discounted what has been happening in the housing market, we have been living on Mars."
In other words, he was saying that if something awful were going to happen, it would already have happened. Because everyone was talking about something meant that the awareness of the risk was surely already built into the existing data.
This amounts to a reversal of the old joke about the economist who refused to admit that there is a $20 bill on the ground in front of him on grounds that if the bill were there, someone would have already picked it up. In the same way, if this economist were going to be hit by an oncoming truck, it would have already hit him.
The year ended with Gov. Bies again warning that the risk is much more serious than anyone had yet acknowledged. "A lot of the private mortgages that have been securitized during the past few years really do have much more risk than the investors have been focusing on," she said. But Bernanke shoots her down yet again: There will be a "soft landing" for the economy.
Look, there is no crime in not knowing the future. No one knows: no palm reader, no philosopher, no economist. You can assemble all the data the world has to offer, but it tells you only about the past. Forecasts are fine, but they are always speculations. The people assembled in the Fed's meeting room were doing forecasts not unlike what every business in the world does every day. Sometimes they are right, and sometimes they are not.
What is significant here is not that Bernanke did not see the future. The significance is that the power and responsibilities of the Federal Reserve itself are premised on the idea that somehow its managers know something that we do not. They are charged not with planning the past that they can know, but with planning a future that they cannot know. This is the essential error of the central bank's planning powers.
And there is another problem. The Fed has an institutional bias, and this is clear from the transcripts. It is especially obtuse in taking note of risks and problems that the Fed itself is responsible for creating. In this way, it is just like every other government agency. They all see problems in the world but not those that the institution itself caused.
The congratulatory praise of Greenspan at that opening meeting of 2006 is a metaphor for the arrogance and self-congratulatory culture of the entire institution. The Fed imagines itself to be the solution for every problem. The truth is that the Fed itself is the source of a vast number of our problems.
[ The Fed's Men Behind the Curtain ]
The debate about the Fed is under way, and thank goodness. But as with many policy debates, there really shouldn't be a debate at all. That's because, if you think about it, the idea of central banking makes no sense.
We don't have a government-created central repository that plans and manages shoe distribution. The market takes care of that. We don't have one for cabbage, keyboards or curtains. Somehow we get books, clothes, tree-cutting services and everything else we need and want without a central planning agency that manages the quantity available, fixes the prices of the products, and bails out the firms when they overextend themselves.
Why should money and banking be any different? Money is a commodity. Banking is a business. They both originated in the market, not the state. They should have been left that way, so that the quality of the product could be subject to market discipline. In a market economy, things work themselves out. There is supply and there is demand. Entrepreneurs take notice of profit opportunities and jump in to pull the two together.
This is how the world works for us. This is how it has always worked. This is how we get our software, coffee, sheet music, and beef. It's how we get our cars, the parts that keep them running, and the gas that fuels them.
The world is man-made in every respect, and the hands that made it productive, efficient, dynamic and socially beneficial operated within the market matrix. The simple relationships of learning, exchanging and competing gave rise to a glorious system that manages to sustain a global population of seven billion people.
The Fed is a nonmarket institution, much like public housing and the space shuttle. It is a Dark Age creation that still exists for no apparent reason. By Dark Age, I mean, of course, the world before 1995, when the Web — meaning all information — became accessible to the world. Before that, the world remained mostly in the dark, when government controlled the information we could access and private truth had to be shared through paper sent through the government mail system.
During the Dark Age, only geniuses like Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek knew that the Fed was a hoax. Almost everyone else imagined that the people at the Fed were doing magical, wonderful things inside hallowed walls so that the economy would be stable and grow. Its Board of Governors was populated by people who knew the economic future and held the power to steer it in a way that benefited everyone.
Thanks to the digital age, we now have access to what really goes on. In the last twelve months alone, we've been inundated by reports of what actually goes on at the Fed. In 2006, according to released transcripts of its board meetings, its wise men were busy reassuring themselves that absolutely nothing was fundamentally wrong with real estate and that all other economic structures were humming along beautifully.
It is fascinating to read those candid transcripts. Far from being an open forum for discussion, Greenspan and Bernanke preside with all power to determine results, practically daring any of their subordinates to disagree with the consensus they arrive at beforehand. The Fed economist sometimes pops up his head to say that all is not well, but it's like a game of Whac-A-Mole: He gets the hammer on the head every time.
It's the worst case of bad corporate management you can find on record. It makes Dilbert's world look like a paragon of management success. There is no openness, no truthfulness. If the chairman makes a joke, you must laugh. If the chairman says all is well, you must agree. If the chairman says he knows the future, you must be in awe of his insight. All dissent must be couched within a puffy framework that raises only a slight and probably irrelevant concern, and it is still likely to be punished.
[ Then there is the problem that it is not entirely clear, even to the people in the room: what precisely they can do about anything. They know what they are doing is important and want to believe that they have tremendous power. But here's the problem: the Fed really only has one significant power: to create the conditions intended to encourage a change in the supply of money and credit ]
That's a huge power, but it is not a precise one. The money supply is a lot like an unruly child. Lots of times, the kid will obey you. Sometimes, and unpredictably, it will not. It depends on the mood, the context, the prevailing temperament, the rewards and punishments. And even when the kid obeys, the results are not always what you intend. The council of parents can meet and plan all day, but in the end, the kid has a mind of its own.
Two notable examples follow. In the early 1930s, the Fed was desperate to expand the money supply as a matter of both policy and practice. There was no intention to let it collapse, as Murray Rothbard has shown. The problem was that the Fed had to depend on the banking system to make it happen through the loan markets. But the system was broke, and it never happened.
The same thing happened again from 2008 and forward. The Fed did everything possible to manufacture a far-reaching monetary inflation, but failed to make it profitable for the banking system to cooperate. Contrary to the Fed's wishes, it never fully materialized. Their efforts only ended up subsidizing failure and preventing a much-needed and deep market correction.
The sheer power of the Fed was in full display in 2008, and all the public records indicate what it was used for. The Fed provided liquidity for its friends. They said that they did it all for the nation, but it is unclear that the nation got anything at all from the deal. What is clear is that its friends survived and thrived, whereas many institutions should have gone belly up, as the capitalist system would dictate. That's the essence of its power and the core of what the Fed does.
This is nothing new at all. It's just that it is now on full display for all the world to see. And this is one reason that the Fed is now under fire as never before. The digital age has pulled back the curtain. Instead of the mighty Oz, we find a few people pulling levers with smoke and mirrors.
Before 1989, the world was strewn with such central planning agencies. They were all over Eastern Europe and the old empire called the Soviet Union. Then one day, the whole thing melted away and the absurdity and arrogance of the central planners were revealed to the world. The Fed is no different in structure from these institutions. The whole thing is based on a lie that it takes government power to have a good monetary system.
In what sense is it good? The depreciation of the dollar since 1913 has been catastrophic for prosperity. The dollar is now worth less than a nickel. Savings have been expropriated. Its interest rate policy has negated any real advantage of saving money. Business cycles have become national, international and extended, rather than local and short-lived as they were in the 19th century. The moral hazard that the Fed has built into the system is that financial systems no longer take proper account of risk.
In the digital age, the opportunity costs of the money monopoly have been huge. We might have had a competitive money system emerge by now. It could have been based on gold, silver or any other commodity. But the market has not been allowed to work. The Fed, working with the government that created and sustains it, has cracked down hard on every attempt by the market to make something better than the Fed-managed dollar. People now languish in jail for the crime of trying to restore money and banking back to the market.
What is the worst cost of the Fed? It has made the federal government, no matter how big it gets, beyond failure. This is the ultimate moral hazard. It has puffed up the leviathan state beyond anything that should ever exist in the world. It's not taxes that have done this. It is the Fed. In this way, it has made itself the ultimate enemy of freedom itself. And as goes freedom, so goes human rights.
The whole catastrophe is no longer possible to ignore. Ron Paul has made it a political issue. Newt Gingrich has jumped on the bandwagon to scrap the Fed. The former CEO of BB&T gave an interview in which he said, "As long as the Fed exists, Congress can effectively print money. And it doesn't matter whether they are Democrats or Republicans, they would rather print money than tax people. They want to spend because that effectively buys votes, and they don't want to tax people because that loses votes."
The problem of ending the Fed is not a technical one. It is not much of an intellectual one, either. It takes only a few minutes to figure out that the whole thing is rooted in myth. The problem of ending the Fed is entirely political. The government is dependent on its powers. So yes, it makes some sense that the political class and its friends — let's call them the 1% for short — think the Fed should exist. The rest of us should know better by now.
[ The Fed Does the Figure-Four Three-Quarter Leglock ]
The money masters at the Federal Reserve have done a splendid job, haven't they? Well, no, and all the more reason to End the Fed, in the legendary slogan of Ron Paul.
Every few months since the great meltdown of 2008, there's been some announcement that appears in the financial press about the latest fancy-pants move that the Fed will undertake to save the day.
These guys aren't just printing money! They are engaged in amazingly technical maneuvers that mere mortals can't fathom. The catchphrases are multiplying: quantitative easing, Operation Twist, sterilized QE, ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) and now reverse repo.
Stay tuned for other amazing tricks. They could pull out the camel clutch, the bite of the dragon, the hammerlock, the bridging chickenwing, the gorilla press, the octopus hold, the sunset flip, the inverted figure-four three-quarter leglock and finally, if they really get desperate, the Tree of Woe.
These names are all, of course, drawn from the world of professional wrestling. Sadly, the world of central banking is not nearly as entertaining, mainly because instead of just hurting each other, the bankers are hurting the rest of us.
You know this when you look at your bank statements and see that all your efforts to save money are for naught: Your money is losing more value through higher prices than it earns in cash.
The Fed is sending the message: If you save, you are a fool. What message is it sending to investors? It is telling them to put their money in something, anything, besides short-and long-term bonds. In this way, it hopes to stimulate some kind of artificial boost of stocks and any form of financial arbitrage besides buying and holding debt.
This is outright market manipulation of the sort that the government criminalizes if done by the private sector. For example, the Justice Department has said it is looking into charges that book publishers are manipulating the price of e-books and also said that it might force a settlement that could wreck this wonderful emerging market. Thanks a lot!
But how does pushing up the download fee of e-books by a buck or two compare with completely wrecking the price-signaling mechanism of interest rates, the very thing that every human soul relies on to estimate the profitability of long-and short-term economic planning? As a result, no one knows for sure what is real and what is not.
This is not only perfectly legal, but it has also become the job description of the Federal Reserve itself. It is nothing more than an elaborate and insanely contorted central plan designed to manipulate prices. But because the Fed has the legal monopoly and claims to be doing this in the public interest (thanks for wrecking my reward for saving!), they get away with it.
Worse, they demand our respect and deference to their brilliance. But do they deserve it? The Fed set out in 2008 to rescue the credit markets, boost the housing industry, save the employment sector from stagnation, and boost the economy.
It has failed on all four fronts. Bank lending for industrial and commercial purposes is still at 2007 levels. Housing price pressure is still pushing downward, there's no end in sight to the foreclosure fiasco and the Fed is the proud owner of as much as a trillion dollars in mortgage-backed securities. The unemployment picture is grim: Jobless claims are up, and labor force participation is at 1980 levels!
As for economic growth, it is so sparing that the whole financial press celebrates over the slightest good news like prisoners of war cheering the arrival of scraps of bread. Meanwhile, China, India, Argentina, Indonesia, Vietnam, Mongolia and even Botswana are managing growth rates between 6 and 10%. And this in times when economic growth ought to be as easy as breathing, giving the digital revolution that has blessed us with astonishing productivity gains.
The Fed couldn't possibly have screwed up more than it has. Its zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) has been a complete failure by any standard but one: It has kept the borrowing costs to the federal government at the lowest possible levels. Even then, the fiscal budget crisis is never ending. Should interest rates come back up to something approaching a human and realistic level, the budget will blow, which the Fed surely knows and which further gives some indication that the Fed knows who and what butters its bread.
But let's say a quick word on this new trick called reverse repo. The Fed prints money to buy long-term bonds. But then the Fed "locks" the use of the new money by borrowing it back again for short periods at lower rates. It can conduct this operation with institutions other than banks, such as money-market funds. As James Grant has said, borrowing short and lending long is a great way to go broke.
There's a line from the Hayek-Keynes video made by John Papola and Russ Roberts put into the rap by F.A. Hayek: "You've got to save to invest; don't use the printing press." That sums it up. There is no sound investment that is not preceded by savings. To save, you have to forgo consumption. Once saved, the money can be loaned out for future-oriented projects and pay higher returns than one could experience without the initial steps of saving. That's how capitalism grows the economy: an ever-more-complex expansion of the division of labor sitting on a rising stock of capital.
The Fed's claim to be spurring economic growth rests on a doctrine that gets this whole process backward. We are supposed to consume more and save less. If that works, the ticket to good bodily health is to be a beer-guzzling couch potato and avoid the gym like the plague. Or maybe the plague is exactly what all these fancy Fed moves are actually bringing us.
[ Money and Finance as If You Mattered ]
During the 2008 credit crisis, a horde of central bankers, Treasury officials, and large corporations screamed that the end of the world was upon us — unless trillions of your money were spent (or created) to prop up the existing financial and banking systems.
The presumption was that the existing structure must never be changed, or the Fed's control over the financial and monetary system ever brought into question. Everything is just as it should be. This is a minor blip on the radar screen, nothing to be concerned about, provided certain steps were taken.
So we were all looted. There was the debt run-up, the new regulations, the funny money creation, the absorption of bad debt that was revarnished and relabeled as assets, the complicated payouts to every institution that Bernanke and his friends deemed to be too big and too crucial to our well-being to be allowed to fail. The government must be permitted to throw around inconceivable amounts of money, they said, in order to save our glorious system.
Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives and every conventional media outlet on this green earth agreed: No expense can be spared to solve this great emergency. Anyone who resists this multiyear bailout, begun under Bush and continued under Obama and to be continued by whomever follows, is clearly an egregious cretin who doesn't understand the depth of the emergency we (as a nation) face.
Yet here we are not too many years later, and it seems that entrepreneurs understand something that the political and banking classes did not understand: The system is rotten and needs to be fixed. It doesn't serve consumers, which is to say that it doesn't serve society. There are too many layers between us and the people running the show.
These young entrepreneurs have been hard at working to find new ways for us to develop financial relationships with each other, human ways that don't rely on force, fraud and freaking out at every sign of trouble. The most remarkable thing is how they are doing this within the rigid existing structure, regardless of every barrier thrown in their way.
I've been exploring some fascinating new digital-age systems for banking, money, loans, and payments. If you aren't following this stuff day to day, you would miss them. They might be used by millions to transfer billions of dollars, yet even still, they aren't in our purview. This is because people are using digital media as never before to create and innovate in ways that the mercifully spared money institutions of old could not even imagine.
Let's name a few from simple to complex. And let me say, just before marching through these things, if you have had a rotten day, working in a routine job in which nothing new ever happens, or you have been sitting in a desk listening to some drone professor babble on about the dated falsehoods that clog his brain, these little tools will seriously lift your spirits.
Squareup. This is an innovation by Jack Dorsey (of Twitter fame) and his friends, and came about only in 2010. The first problem they were trying to overcome was there has to be an easier way for merchants to accept credit cards. They decided to give the hardware away for use on simple mobile phones and then charge per transaction. Win!
In the course of developing the business, which is valued already at $1 billion, they solved an even stranger problem that all of us have but never really noticed that we have: If we don't have our wallets with us, we can't buy anything.
Now this is genius: Squareup allows you to pay by saying your name. The merchant matches a picture of you on the square system with your physical face. You look each other in the eye and the deal is done. Anyone can sign up. Yes, it is incredible. Simple and wonderful.
The Lending Club. Again, this is mind-blowing. The Lending Club matches up lenders and borrowers while bypassing the banking system altogether. The idea emerged in October 2008, just as the existing credit system seemed to be blowing up. Today, the company originates $1 million in loans per day.
Anyone can become a lender with a minimum investment of $25 per note. Lenders can choose specific borrowers or choose among many baskets and combinations of borrowers to reduce risk.
Any potential borrower can apply, but of course the company wants to keep default rates at the lowest possible level, and these are published daily (right now, they are running 3%). As a result, most applications to borrow are declined (this is good!).
The average rate of interest on the loans is 11%, cheaper than credit cards but more realistic than the Fed's crazy push for zero. As a result, the average net annualized return is 9.6%.
The focus is of course on small loans for weddings, moving expenses, business startups, debt consolidation and the like. If you are an indebted country with large unfunded liabilities, you probably can't get a loan. But if you are student with a job who needs upfront money to put down on an apartment, you might qualify.
Dwolla. This is a super-easy, super-slick online payment system that specializes in linking payments through social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Like most of these companies, the idea was hatched in 2008 in response to the crisis. The system was breaking down and needed new services that worked. Dwolla got off the ground in 2009, and today, it processes more than $1 million per week.
An easy way to understand Dwolla is to view it as the next generation of PayPal, but with a special focus on reducing the problem that vexed PayPal in its early years: getting rid of credit card fraud. Dwolla is focusing its product development on ways to pay that do not require sending credit card information over networks.
Dwolla has also taken a strong interest in the Internet payment system called Bitcoin, a digital unit of account that hopes to become an alternative to national monetary systems. It is a long way from becoming that, but it is hardly surprising that a young and innovative company would be interested in competition to failed paper money.
These are a few of the services, but there are hundreds more. None were created by the money masters in Washington. They are results of private innovation, individual entrepreneurs thinking their way through social and economic problems and coming up with solutions. They accept the risk of failure and enjoy the profit from success.
What they all have in common that is missing from the current monetary, financial and banking structure — a maniacal focus on serving the individual consumer. If or when the official structure blows up, such private enterprises will be there to save us.
[ Money Laundering ]
The story from The Daily swept through the Internet with blazing speed. The report: Criminals around the country are stealing an inordinate number of bottles of Tide laundry detergent. This is not because the criminals plan to go into the laundry business. There is not a "grime wave." It seems that these Tide bottles are functioning as a store of value, even a form of money, within many black markets.
As the story memorably puts it, on the street, Tide is known as "liquid gold." Harrison Sprague of the Prince George's County, Maryland, Police Department says that his undercover agents are asking for drugs but being offered Tide instead. They are busting drug rings and finding more blue liquid than white powder.
To be sure, some news outlets are raising some questions about this story, pointing out that Tide theft doesn't seem to be a national problem. For my part, I have no problem with the credibility of the report. In fact, it seems entirely reasonable that new forms of currency are popping up in black markets. This is why stores are starting to add anti-theft devices to the bottles.
The driving force here is a war on the dollar. Carrying around vast amounts of cash raises questions among the authorities. It is increasingly difficult to "wash" the money through the banking system. And in any case, dollars are always losing value. So it makes sense to look for other ways to facilitate exchange. This is hardly unusual. The digital economy is getting ever better at bartering services and software as an alternative to letting dollars change hands.
But if we are to think of Tide as money, that means its use goes beyond the barter stage. People aren't acquiring Tide to wash their clothes, but rather to trade for other things, like drugs. In a limited sense, then, Tide is being used to facilitate indirect exchange. That is to say, it has become a money.
Actually, there are many conditions in which alternative monies can come to exist. You can see this among kids when they trade candy following Halloween night. The kids will gather and first begin to barter, but as the trading term continues, one candy will emerge as the one to get — not to consume, but to trade for other things. For a brief time, one candy will emerge with monetary properties. As trading comes to an end, that very candy will be demonetized and re-emerge as a consumption good.
Money is frequently reinvented under the right conditions, emerging from a commodity currently in use. Cigarettes become money in prison. War zones become hotbeds of currency competition too, in anything from liquor to matches. Throughout history, money has taken many forms, from shells to salt to animal skins. The usual qualities of a commodity that economists say make for good money: durability, divisibility, high value per unit of weight, uniformity of quality (fungibility), recognizability.
Tide doesn't qualify in every respect. However, it is durable in the sense that it doesn't spoil. It is divisible. The tamper-proof top provides a measure of security against counterfeiting. True, it's not as good as a precious metal, but traders aren't worried about that. They are just looking for some marketable commodity that can take the place of the dollar, which has become extremely risky to use for blatantly illegal purposes.
The government's war on the dollar as a means to fight the drug war wins nothing in this case. So long as there is a market, so long as there is demand and supply, there will be pressure to come up with some means to make indirect exchange possible. Or so Ludwig von Mises explained in his treatise The Theory of Money & Credit, written in 1912, at the dawn of the central banking age.
One major problem is Tide doesn't have a stable supply, so its value as a means of exchange will be subject to inflationary pressures. The more that enters the black market, the more its price falls relative to the goods and services it can buy — the inflationary tide could rise and rise.
But as you think about it, as bad as Tide might be as a currency, there is a sense in which the dollar is actually worse. It costs less to print on linen than it does to make a bottle of laundry detergent, meaning that the dollar is more likely to be inflated into oblivion. And whatever is wrong with detergent, if the price falls low enough, the producer doesn't have any reason to keep making it. Profit-and-loss signals govern how much is produced. Its physicality alone imposes some limit — and this is not the case for the Fed's data entries that it calls money.
The monetization of Tide demonstrates something critically important about the institution of money itself. Its existence in the market owes nothing to the government or some social contract. Its emergence, as Carl Menger argued in the late 19th century, grows out of market exchange. Selecting which commodity is to become money is a matter for entrepreneurs and market forces.
No central planner — even one within the black market community — decided that Tide should become money. Also note that Tide is produced entirely privately, which provides an indication of what could be true of all money today. We don't need government to select it and make it. The market can handle this just fine.
There is a final lesson to observe in this case: It is sometimes asserted that only government is smart enough to be able to select, make and manage monetary affairs. Surely private parties can't handle this job, and the attempt will just lead to chaos. But this is not so. Private markets can do all these things, including juggling many different currencies in competition with each other and managing the price relationships between them. This goes on in the developing world all the time, with even young children learning the math and workings of the currency market.
The biggest problem Tide money now faces is a security issue. When you see the armored car driving up to the local Walgreens, you'll know that they are working on getting the problem solved. The sight can make us all nostalgic for the old days when our official money was something at least as real and useful as laundry detergent.
[ The Blessing of Falling Prices ]
The DVD player crashed last night. The disc wouldn't load. Clearly, the player had gone the way of all flesh. With great reluctance, it was off to Wal-Mart to replace this appliance for the first time in perhaps ten years. While I was there, I figured I would get a case for my iPhone.
Much to my shock, I paid about the same for both. The DVD player — and I didn't get the cheapest one — was a startlingly low $28. I'm pretty sure that I paid $150 for my last one. Looking this up, it turns out that these were $1,000 and up in 1997, and the price has been falling ever since. The price deflation has been relentless over these fourteen years, and yet, somehow, the companies that make them have survived and thrived.
And the falling prices of such hardware are nothing compared with the price of the memory used in your laptop. After fifteen years of falling, prices this year have dropped completely off the cliff, to the point where the eight gigabytes I once thought unaffordable are now practically free. By year's end, the homeless will enjoy more access to DRAM (dynamic random-access memory) than soup.
Falling prices are a great gift to the consumer, and the whole experience of the digital revolution has demonstrated that they are no threat to free enterprise as we know it. Far from having killed technology, this sector is the main source of economic growth, jobs, innovation and productivity. Thank goodness technology did not enjoy the same treatment as real estate after its price crash in 2008.
We tend to realize this when we look at specific sectors like technology, but somehow, when it comes to the larger macroeconomic pictures, confusion sets in. In truth, there is no reason to fear falling prices. The greatest period of economic growth in American history took place during the Gilded Age, when average prices were falling 3.8% per year, even as economic growth marched onward at 4.5%.
Today, however, the Fed at every possible opportunity pushes fear of deflation. Just last month, Ben Bernanke, speaking in Fort Bliss, Texas, called falling prices "both a cause and a symptom of an extremely weak economy." Bernanke would clarify that he means deflation induced by deleveraging and liquidation, not falling prices in response to increased productivity and innovation.
The problem with that distinction is that it is purely theoretical; it means nothing from the point of view of producers and consumers who face the same reality, whatever the cause. What's more, even in cases of an economic bust, market prices do not lie; they are there to reveal truths about resource allocations that not even central bankers can sweep under the carpet.
So in his mind, falling prices, even of the sort that we've seen in the technology sector, can be seen not only as a sign of weakness (which is, obviously, untrue), but also an actual cause of weakness (which is even less true). This view seems like a leftover from the Great Depression, when economists wrongly concluded that deflation was the reason for the persistence of weakness. Murray Rothbard, nearly alone, has disputed this and pointed out that falling prices are the one saving grace of a depressed economy, something to cheer, not jeer.
Afflicted with this dogma, the Fed, the Treasury and nearly everyone else set out to stop the fall in real estate prices starting in 2007. This has been a central concern of economic policy ever since, and trillions have been wasted in this endeavor. But it's all for naught. Prices have a mind of their own, an amazing pigheadedness that disregards the wishes even of the world's mightiest military power. The price system is the ultimate resistance force in the universe, more effective than all the insurgency operations in the world combined.
Why might the Fed be so interested in propagating the view that falling prices are a disaster? Because its main business is creating money, which always ends up watering down the value of the existing money stock, in addition to distorting production structures. Inflation is its main product. Or in our times, when the Fed's attempt to do this has been frustrated by the banking system's lack of cooperation, it can at least claim that it does the good of preventing deflation.
In 2009, consumer prices as measured by the CPI actually fell for the first time in fifty years. Thanks to the Fed's intervention, this trend came to a halt and prices in general have marched upward ever since, despite the downward pressure in housing and technology. The main movers here have been the sectors where the state has the most control: education, utilities and medical care.
Counterfactuals are always speculative, but one does wonder what the world would look like today had the Fed not pushed its inflationary agenda after 2008. Would the price declines have continued? And if so, how much cheaper might everything be today after the global deleveraging that took place? It would have been wonderful for the consuming public and posed new challenges for capitalist producers to solve. It would have been thrilling to see how this would have led to a much-needed upheaval across the corporate world.
So let us speculate here. Given the efforts that the Fed has undertaken to manufacture high inflation, how can we account for its seemingly slow rate today? Why is the inflation taking the form of a slow burn, rather than a roaring bonfire? One possible way to look at this is that it has taken the form of the absence of the price deflation we otherwise would have enjoyed in absence of the Fed's actions. If prices might have fallen 10%, but instead rise 2%, perhaps we should include the boon foregone as a cost of the Fed's monetary policy.
We can see, then, why the Fed has every reason to push this view that deflation is the worst possible hell in which we can find ourselves. This claim stands against all human experience. When I encountered stacks of DVD players at Wal-Mart, I experienced the right kind of sticker shock. Broaden that model to all goods and services and we would be living in a beautiful world of rising prosperity, rising value for our money and relentless innovation.
Perhaps someday, even iPhone 4 cases will be reasonable.
[ The Monetary Metal That Just Won't Die ]
For more than one hundred years, governments have been trying to kill gold's role in the monetary system. They've dreamed of a day when the cursed metal would vanish completely except as jewelry and luxurious adornment. And yet its monetary properties won't go away. Central banks still hold it, and many have increased their gold holdings in recent years.
The U.S. Government holds it and reports it on their balance sheets. The International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, China, Germany, Russia, India — they all hold gold. Turkey bought about 41.3 tons of gold for official reserves in November. Goldman Sachs is expecting central banks to buy 600 tons this year. Look at the combined official holdings to date: 30,744 tons.
Why?
Contrary to public mythology, gold has no statutory role in the monetary system at all. The paper standard has ruled since 1973, though most people are still slow to figure that out. Sure, it is an asset but so are many things that governments and central banks own: computers, land, buildings, mortgage-backed securities however toxic, and many other things. There is no special reason why gold should be reported, listed, touted, purchased in scary times, but not these other assets.
The truth is that gold does have a huge and continuing role to play. And it is more than purely psychological. It is deeply embedded in the history of money itself and in the development of the world economy as we know it. Governments destroyed the gold standard long ago but they know better than anyone that there is no surer means of financial security, proven over nearly all times and all places.
But here is an interesting question. What precisely are governments and central banks seeking to protect with their gold holdings and acquisitions? It is not you and me. It is about their system and their interests. As much as they love foisting the paper stuff on the population, risking even the destruction of the means by which we earn, save, and provide for ourselves, when it comes to government and central bank finance, gold serves them well. They deny it publicly but their actions speak more loudly than their press conferences.
This is one reason among a million that you can't trust government to manage or even make the money that runs the economy. This should and could be the job of the private sector. The first time I heard Murray Rothbard make this claim, I was amazed. Doesn't everyone know this is a primary function of government? But he was not only correct about this; since his book What Has Government Done to Our Money? came out, fantastic research his book on this topic has reinforced the point.
The leading historian of private coinage is George Selgin. His book Good Money is one of the most fascinating books on monetary history ever written. The country is England and the time is the Industrial Revolution. The official Mint was cranking out only large denomination coins suitable for old-world trade by large companies, but this was a time when the bourgeoisie was being born. Small manufacturers all over the country needed small denominations to pay their workers. They didn't wait for the government to make the stuff. Button makers jumped at the chance to mint small denomination coins for factories to pay their workers.
What emerged from this event was a highly developed and extremely sophisticated system of private coinage at the very heart of England's birth into the modern world. Selgin's book tells the entire story in remarkable detail, and the publisher went all out with this book to provide a large section of beautiful color images of many of the private coins of the period, with even a comparison to the government's unimaginative and often ugly coins. The free market picked up where government left off!
You can guess what happened. The result was the same as today when private traders have come up with digital currencies to compete with the government: the state shut them down. Don't mint your own money; the government hates the competition! Selgin's book covers the drama with energy and wit, revealing a slice of history that is hardly known by anyone.
Never let anyone tell you that the private sector can't be wholly in charge of the monetary system. Selgin has demonstrated otherwise.
This is the history but what about the future? In 1982, the Reagan administration pushed through a bill that created a U.S. Gold Commission to look into the question. It was the great missed opportunity, because — no surprise — the fix was in on what the commission would decide. Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman were both on the committee, and they dissented from the majority opinion.
The dissenting opinion wasn't just an opinion paper; it was a wonderful book on the past, present, and future of gold as a monetary unit. It ends with a detailed plan for restoring sound money and liberating us from the tyranny of paper. The book is out in a special edition of Laissez Faire Books: The Case for Gold.
Can gold really be the money of the future? Nathan Lewis thinks so and he makes the case in Gold: The Once and Future Money. He points out that without a gold standard, with money that is sound and tied down to strict limits on production, the whole theoretical apparatus of government finance stops making any sense. What does it matter how much debt you run up if you can just print the money to pay for it? Perhaps this might have something to do with why government can't seem to control its spending. And how can we even have a rational discussion of tax policy and its likely effect on revenue streams and the government deficit so long as any revenue shortfall can be made up for through the magical powers of the central bank?
The absence of gold, Lewis argues, has introduced irrationality and fiscal chaos into government finance. Nor has it served the population well. It is directly responsible for the creation of the boom-and-bust cycle — paper gives the central bank massive power to manipulate interest rates — as well as the relentless declines in the value of the dollar. The system has failed, he says, and if governments don't repair the money, the private sector will respond, just as it did in the early years of the industrial revolution.
Growing economies are about change. Industries are born and industries die. Businesses come and go, and even seeming Goliaths are often slayed by startups. The jobs we do change. The types of production that nations specialize in are constantly in motion. All this global enterprise changes the face of the earth every half century or so. Thank goodness for change: without it, there would be no supporting the seven billion people who inhabit this place.
There are very few things in this world that do not change, but one of them is the perception and reality that sound money is rooted in the gold standard. Powerful presidents could not kill it, though more than a dozen have tried. Elite economists have tried to wish its place in the world away but couldn't do so. It is the ultimate immovable object in the world of economics. That gold as a monetary unit will outlive us all is one of history's few sure bets.
[ Leaping Toward the Keynesian Dream ]
The Fed's latest inflationary scheme sounds like a technocratic innovation. It lowered the costs of currency swaps between central banks of the world, with the idea that the Fed would do for the globe what Europe, England and China are too shy to do, which is run the printing presses 24/7 to bail out failing institutions and economies. In effect, the Fed has promised to be the lender of last resort for the entire global economy.
It sounds new, but it is not. Following the Second World War, John Maynard Keynes pushed hard for a global paper currency administered by a global central bank. This was his proposed solution to the problem of national currency disputes. Let's just take the inflation power away from the national state and give it to a world authority. Then we'll never have to deal with a lack of coordination again.
The idea didn't fly, but the institutions that were supposed to administer such a system were nonetheless created: the International Monetary Fund and the so-called World Bank. It didn't work out that way. Instead, nation-states retained their monetary authority, and the new institutions became glorified welfare providers, conduits for transfer payments and loads to developing nations.
The dream lived on, however. The creation of the euro and its central bank was a step in that direction. So was Nixon's closing of the gold window. Each new currency crisis has created the excuse for further steps toward what Murray Rothbard calls the Keynesian dream.
Why hasn't it happened yet? Many reasons. Nation-states do not want to give up power. The World Bank and the IMF are institutionally unsuited to the task. Many people in the banking world are also downright squeamish about the idea, with full knowledge of the ravages that unchecked inflationary credit can bring to the world economy. Mostly, there hasn't been a crisis big enough to warrant such extreme measures.
However, that crisis might have finally arrived. Since 2008, the Fed has demonstrated that among all the world's central banks, it alone is brave enough to embrace gigantic inflationary measures without wincing. The European Central Bank is under some strictures to not act as a monetary central planner. China is unconverted to the inflationary faith. The same holds true for England.
Ben Bernanke, however, is different: He is revealing himself to be an unreconstructed Keynesian with an unlimited faith in the power of paper money to solve all the world's problems.
What this means is that it is left to the Fed alone to bail out the world. There is a perverse logic to this. After all, if you are going to be a world empire, operating under the assumption that nothing on the planet is outside your political purview, you bear certain responsibilities as well. Foreign aid and troops in every country are just the beginning. You must, eventually, embrace your financial responsibilities, too. A globalized economy addicted to debt needs an institution willing to step up and guarantee that debt, and provide the liquidity necessary to get us through the hard times.
As soon as the announcement of the new Fed measures came, the smart set of the World Wide Web lit up with the obvious observations that these measures come with massive risk of setting off a global inflationary crisis. It could lead to the final crack-up boom.
The Fed assures us otherwise. It "bears no exchange risk" in undertaking such actions. But as economist Robert Murphy explains:
"Strictly speaking, this isn't true. If the Fed gives $50 billion in dollars to the ECB, which (at those market prices) gives $50 billion worth of euros to the Fed, then the ECB lends out the dollars to private banks, and before they repay the loans, the euro crashes against the dollar…then the ECB has no means of acquiring dollars to repay the Fed. Even though the ECB has a printing press, it is configured for euros, not dollars."
He further states what everyone knows but no one will say:
"The current round of interventions will not solve the problem. Down the road — probably much sooner, rather than later — the central banks of the world will engage in some further extraordinary measures, again, lest the whole world fall apart. Even so, printing money doesn't fix the underlying problems. No matter what they do, eventually, the whole financial world will fall apart."
The speed at which all of this is happening is startling to behold. It was only thirty-six hours ago that we heard the first public worries about the drying up of credit in Europe. Large corporations were seeing their credit lines tightened. Banks were starting to become more scrupulous in their operations, which is hardly a surprise, given that zero interest rates have made it nearly impossible to make a profit in conventional lending operations.
Where in the fall of 2008, the Fed let the worries about tight credit grow to the point of international mania before it acted, this time, it jumped in to anticipate the inevitable warnings about the imminent death of civilization. Only trillions in paper money can save us now! The Fed saw what was coming and decided to do the deed, even before the demand came.
But rather than settle markets down, the real effect is the opposite. If you go to the doctor with a head cold, and he rushes you to the hospital for surgery, you don't merely congratulate him for being thorough. You figure that he knows something that you don't; namely that your condition is way more serious than you thought. Your family is likely to fly into a panic.
For this psychological reason alone, this action is likely to roil markets in crazy ways. The Fed is now paper money printer for the entire world. It's a new world, and a brave one. If you think that a new era of prosperity, peace and stability awaits, you have been living under a rock for at least a century. There's not a soul alive who will sleep soundly knowing that Ben Bernanke has elected himself the loan officer of the entire globe.
[ Deleverage the World ]
Capitalism is supposed to be a system of profit and loss, but in recent years, central bankers and central planners seem to have forgotten the part about losses. They push and pull every lever on the control board to try to make losses for the big players go away, which can be a bit like trying to stop a receding tide. The strategy cannot work over the long term. Economic law, eventually, prevails.
For this reason, the news that American Airlines has filed for bankruptcy — an actual large company that is finally throwing in the towel — comes like a blast from the past of the way things used to work (remember the failure of Lehman?). The tide receded, and nothing could stop it.
Not that the company didn't try. But its capacity to adapt to new realities was hindered by its own hectoring unions, rising fuel prices, mounting debt, and a blizzard of mandates and restrictions imposed by federal regulators. Whatever the reason, the company could no longer deny reality, as much as its stockholders, managers and even paid-for politicians would like it to be otherwise.
The blessed power of economic law! It operates without anyone pulling levers. It imposes itself, even against the determined will of the world's princes and potentates. It is what keeps the world honest and truthful about what is and is not possible. It keeps the material world on track, so that fallible people cannot do stupid things forever. It's no wonder the political class hates it.
As goes American Airlines, so goes the whole of Europe. A credit crunch not unlike what the U.S. faced in 2008 is now threatening the Continent. Banks are looking at their own portfolios of toxic government debt, and they are concerned about their own liquidity going forward. They have begun calling in loans and cutting credit lines, even from big players. This is starting to send the first signs of panic through the land. Given the U.S. precedent here, all stemming from the housing crisis, the problems can only get worse.
Think back to those days of 2008, when the reality began to surface, housing prices went into a tailspin, and Lehman fell. We had not seen a financial hysteria, on this level, in our lifetimes. The political class, the banking class and the financial pundit class all seemed to agree that if we let the credit crunch continue, the next step could be mass starvation.
Just look at the boats filled with goods that can't even leave harbor because of cut credit lines! Look at Iceland, with its empty grocery-store shelves! Imagine a future in which people might have to actually save money to buy things, rather than relying on the fictitious prosperity as created by the fiat-money machine!
We could have gone one of two directions. We could have recognized that the failure of Lehman represented a reassertion of reality. We could have let the deleveraging continue, so that the signs of false prosperity could be washed from the system. We could have let housing prices fall to their market level, and let the same market have its way with banks and financial institutions that had built their houses on the sand of bad debt, rather than the hard rock of real savings.
But that is not what we did. The addiction to credit had been permitted to permeate too deeply, and hardly anyone could even imagine a world in detox. One in prosperity was rebuilt on real things and not illusions. So while even President Obama admitted the sheer size and scale of the financial bubble, no one in power had the guts to sit back and let the deleveraging take its toll. Had we done that, say many economists, we would already be back on the road to building a reality-based civilization.
Instead, what did we see? Many trillions in real resources were sucked out of the private economy and dumped onto companies that should have but did not enter bankruptcy. Interest rates were driven down to zero and negative levels, a move designed to inspire borrowing but which only ended up punishing savings and guaranteeing that banks could no longer make a profit from its lending operations. Three years later, what good did it do? The latest news on housing is rather devastating. Prices are still falling. Year-to-year unadjusted September prices declined 3.3% for the 10 major markets. The 20-city index dropped 3.6%, to levels not seen since 2003. Some commentators tried to find a silver lining, noting that the pace of falling prices has actually slowed.
Let's just admit something: This is one of the most gigantic failures of Keynesian-style economic policy in human history. The central planners started with the theory that the whole mess was caused by falling housing prices, so clearly the fix was to bring them back up again. They pulled out every contraption in the grab bag of tricks but nothing worked. And why? It turns out that prices are determined by agreement between buyer and seller. The planners have a lot of power but not yet the ability to tap into our brains and force us to do stupid things like buy and sell at a loss.
Every new report on housing prices is like a stern rebuke to the Fed, the Treasury Department, to Congress and to two successive presidential administrations. There is nothing wrong with protesting their policies and lobbying against them, but in the end, nothing speaks as loudly and plainly to their failure than the dazzling and bracing forces of the price system and the balance sheet. This is where we find the undisputed speaker of truth in a world of lies.
If they had to do it again, would the establishment react differently? Probably not, because in the end, it really isn't about creating or protecting the conditions of prosperity for the rest of us. It is about protecting their own power and the profits of their friends. We will soon see the whole scenario repeated against throughout Europe: hysteria followed by folly followed by failure.
This is why the bankruptcy of American is really an occasion to celebrate, not because a once-great company was taken down by stultifying regulations, union demands or poor management; rather, it is a victory for the forces of supply and demand, which, contrary to the claims of dictators from time immemorial, are the best friends that the common man ever had. It's proof that the politicians only pretend to rule the world.
[ Money or Capitalism in Crisis ]
When the Financial Times started its series on "Capitalism in Crisis," I winced. Here we go yet again, an attempt to blame private enterprise for what are actually the failures of the state and paper money. And some writers — but not all — in the series have done exactly this, while obscuring the differences between free and unfree markets by referring only to the way "the system" has failed.
And what is the evidence of this failure? It is everywhere. Household income continues to fall all over the developed world. Unemployment is persistent, and to the extent that it is being fixed, it is by dramatic reductions in living standards, one paycheck at a time. Debt is egregious. Young people face terrible prospects. Complaints about inequality resonate in this environment not because the financial sector has bred such paper wealth, but because life is such a struggle for everyone else.
All of this begs the question: What exactly is this "system"? Our times are constantly being compared with the Great Depression, and plenty of people are hoping for an analogous ideological shift toward ever more state control of economic life. J.M. Keynes urged the destruction of the gold standard and the "end of laissez-faire." Strongmen all over the world complied.
But back then, it was easier to bamboozle the public into believing that capitalism was the source of the problem and that the new scientific managers of the state machinery would deliver the restoration of prosperity. The Jazz Age was surely a time of free markets, was it not? Not entirely — there was the important matter of Prohibition as well as the central bank and its capacity to blow bubbles, such as the one that burst in 1929. That message did not stick, because only a handful of people truly understood, and they didn't have the microphone. So the strongmen had a field day.
But today? The state machinery is the lumbering leviathan that leaves no part of life untouched. It taxes and regulates all things, and uses the central bank as its unlimited credit card to pass out welfare to all classes and maintain a worldwide empire rooted in military violence and executive privilege. It takes chutzpah to claim that this has anything to do with a capitalist crisis. This is a crisis of a system of state-based social and economic management.
This might explain why the socialist left has yet to gain much traction in the post-2008 environment. Does any living soul doubt the role of the government and its friends in generating the housing and financial bubble? It has been demonstrated 10,000 times, and this information is available to one and all in a world of digital information delivery. We are no longer hunkered down by the radio, waiting on a homily from the high priest in Washington. This guy no longer controls what we are allowed to read and think.
Writing as part of the series, former Clinton Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers points out that a recent survey demonstrated that "among the U.S. population as a whole, 50% had a positive opinion of capitalism while 40% did not." I'm not sure what the take-away from that survey really is, however, because it presumes a shared understanding of what "capitalism" really is. Is it a system of privileged protection for the financial elite at the expense of everyone else, or it is a synonym for the free economy? These are two very different things.
What is especially striking about Summers' article is his admission that Keynesian-style solutions seem pointless in this environment. He writes that, concerning the crisis, "there is no obvious solution at hand." He further points out that some of the largest existing social anxieties are focused on three sectors in particular: education, health care and old-age provision. All three are run or lorded over by the state. He concludes with an honest admission: "It is not so much the most capitalist parts of the contemporary economy but the least…that are in most need of reinvention."
Another contribution to the series comes from Gideon Rachman. He presents a fascinating typology of the four ideological divides of our time. He says that public and intellectual opinion can be divided as follows: 1) right-wing populist, 2) social democrat, 3) Hayekian libertarian and 4) anti-capitalist socialist. This sounds right to me.
The right-wing populist camp (alive in the U.S. and Europe) is the warmongering contingent that opposes immigration, wants war on Islam, favors restrictions on civil liberties, obsesses over demographics, clamors for its own kind of income distribution and longs for a strongman to arrive to impose some kind of order. This penchant has a long history in politics, probably dating to the ancient world.
The social-democratic tendency is found in the Obama constituency, and it wants more of the same that got us into this mess: Keynesian fiscal management, union privileges, an ever-larger public sector, piecemeal planning and regulation, central-bank-backed stimulus, democracy-spreading imperialism or some random combination of this list. This is the party in power here, there and nearly everywhere.
The anti-capitalist/socialist element is obvious enough. It consists of a strange coalition of intellectuals and down-and-out young people leading the Occupy movement, together with media idiots always looking for a splashy and simple story to tell. It is a ridiculously simple-minded view of the world that all would be well if we could just take the income from the tiny group at the top and spread it around the population. To them, the market-based social order is little more than a scam to rob and loot the iPhone-carrying workers and peasants and benefit the financial elites.
What's most interesting is the emergence of what Rachman calls the Hayekian-libertarian tendency, represented most conspicuously by Ron Paul but actually encompassing a global intellectual and popular movement that sees through fog of propaganda. Here we find total coherence: both realistic explanations of our current plight and clear answers for what to do about it.
Of the four groups, this is the only group that sees the importance of the issue of monetary reform. Keynes saw back in the 1930s that the most important step to modifying the market system in favor of state management was the destruction of the gold standard. He hated it and dedicated himself to convincing all governments to give it up in favor of paper money. Without this step, there was no hope for Keynesian policies.
In a similar way, the libertarians recognize that the most important step toward restoring economic vitality and a free market is to repair the quality of money. The gold standard would be wonderful but unlikely, since its re-institution requires enlightened statesmen and bankers who do the right thing. A more viable path toward the restoration of sound money is through total monetary freedom: Let the market reinvent sound money in our time through the free use of any and all monetary instruments.
What's critical is that the libertarians have put the money issue on the map. We are living under a form of monetary prohibitionism today, forbidden to use any means of payment other than that maintained by the state. And it is not unlike the alcohol prohibition of old. It redistributes wealth, steers gains to the unscrupulous, strengthens the state and promotes various forms of criminality.
In introducing this series, John Plender writes, "F. Scott Fitzgerald chronicled the moral vacuity of Jazz Age capitalism in The Great Gatsby". Nonsense. Fitzgerald nowhere slams capitalism in his great novel. Jay Gatsby made his fortune as a bootlegger, a profession that would not have existed in absence of state prohibition.
In the same way, our own age is filled with Gatsbys, people who have done well for themselves by manipulating a failed system. It is the system that must change, not the right to do well.
[ The Bizarre World of Plastic Fees ]
Almost everyone is really down on financial companies these days. What kind of scam are they running, anyway? It seems as if everywhere we turn, there are fees, fees, fees. Because almost everyone has some kind of credit or debit card, the popular mind is particularly focused on them, expecting to find signs of exploitation and graft.
Let's look a bit closer.
A friend of mine is in a Virginia diner and receives an odd offer with the check. There is a note: If you pay with cash, you get a 5% discount. And why? Credit card fees. The place would rather not pay them. My friend forks over the cash and saves himself sixty cents. Keep in mind this was an established business, not some street vendor.
Of course, we've all experienced something similar a thousand times when working with individual proprietors. The person who mows your lawn, paints the kid's room, fixes your plumbing or gives you a taxi ride would much rather have cash. And why? Let's just say that cash is more liquid than plastic. Everyone knows that.
But for established businesses to routinely discount the use of cash over debit/credit is not entirely usual. But it is increasing. Neither government nor credit card companies are going to tolerate the spread of this practice, which is considered price discrimination. There will be new rules, new interventions, new restrictions, all in an attempt to stop it.
What will restaurants and other businesses do? What many have already done — refuse credit for charges of less than $5 or $10. This should be the age of micropayments, especially with digital commerce. Instead, we are going the opposite way.
This plastic card price pressure is only now boiling over, and this is a direct response to government regulation. The relevant regulations were passed last year, with hardly any debate and very little public awareness. The credit card companies objected and warned, but given today's anti-business climate on Capitol Hill, their protests were dismissed as special interest pleading.
The relevant legislation is the Dodd-Frank Act, which went into effect late last year. The Durbin Amendment capped the fees that card companies can charge for debits at 21 cents per transaction. This was supposed to reflect the "actual cost" of processing. And this would supposedly stop the practice of charging more than twice that amount on average.
Seems like a good idea, right? Save the consumer a bit of money, right? Curb the plastic-based scams. Surely, these companies make high enough profits.
It's not so easy. A complicated formula typically determines the fees that the companies charge for processing. And before we go any further to describe them, let us be clear that these fees are agreed upon by both parties to the contract: merchants and card services. No one has forced anyone into the deal.
The formula in the past used a graduated scale so that the higher the transaction price, the higher the fee. Some transactions would have a far higher than average fee. Similarly, smaller transactions would charge lower fees. Most of the small transactions for movie rentals, coffee at the convenience store and the muffin at the airport charge the merchants only a few cents per transaction.
This isn't about charity or a desire on the part of card processors to help the little guy. It is a matter of making the deal. If you want the mom and pop shop and the small Internet merchant to make a go of it, you have to move beyond cash. The companies were using the large merchants to "subsidize" the small merchants. The high fees covered the losses from the low fees.
The system worked. Then Congress intervened with a price control — just like central planners in socialist states — that flattened fees.
An immediate effect was that renting from Redbox went up twenty cents last year. People blamed the movie distributor. Actually, it was the politicians, but who knew?
There's more legislation in play here. The Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009 put serious restrictions on the ability of card companies to raise interest rates on existing balances. This was supposed to protect consumers from the evil and rapacious people who were lending them money at a fee.
Guess what? This backfired, too. Instead of raising card fees for legacy balances, companies were being forced to impose very high fees at the outset. This not only took from the companies a major marketing strategy; it also ended up costing consumers far more than they used to pay for carrying balances month to month. It is the relatively poorer class of card users who end up being hurt by this.
Whom do the consumers blame? Visa, MasterCard and all the rest, of course. They are charging 15% at a time when banks are paying negative rates on deposits. The whole thing is absolutely perverse. People look at this system and correctly figure that some people must be collecting loot like bandits.
I've covered only two of the most recent and egregious pieces of legislation. There are thousands, tens of thousands more. All of these regulations together distort the market in more ways that we can possibly know. But again, who catches the blame? It's not Congress, Treasury, the Fed or the White House. It is private enterprise.
Now consider the greatest and most egregious of all regulators that affect interest rates and financial markets: the Federal Reserve. It is attempting to falsify reality in ways that contradict every principle of the market economy. And what are the results? It's a crazy, mixed-up world. Whatever the distortions, they are huge and potentially very scary.
We'll soon know the full implications. Whether people understand the underlying cause (government, and not markets) may determine the future of the free economy itself.
[ The Transformation of Banking ]
There is a scene in the Parable of the Talents in which the returned master berates the shabbiest of his three servants. Discovering that he had buried his seed capital in the ground, the master says: "You should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest." The servant is then thrown outside "into the darkness," where he faces "weeping and gnashing of teeth."
In today's world, burying that money might have been the better idea. Otherwise, the servant would have paid fees for depositing, withdrawing and transferring and would have earned no interest at all, and the money would have depreciated in value the whole while. It's enough to cause you to weep and gnash your teeth.
That parable has had a long life because earning interest on deposits is a universal feature of the human experience in any finance economy. Until now. The Fed has announced that it will work to keep interest rates at zero for the next several years, all with the supposed goal of refurbishing the economy. Or so Bernanke tells us at great length.
But here's the problem: This very strategy of driving interest rates to zero has been a feature of the period in which the Fed has managed the post-meltdown world. The result has been what The Wall Street Journal accurately described as a five years of missing economic progress: The economy today is barely larger than it was at the end of 2007, despite a rising population and a gigantic explosion in technology. Household income is still sinking, and an entire generation has readjusted its expectations for the future.
What has the Fed done? It has moved to create and guarantee some $13 trillion in phony assets to prettify the balance sheets of financial institutions that would have otherwise gone belly up. Those fake assets have served as substitutes for real reserves to create the illusion of balanced books. It has made its own discount rate vanish as a way of opening up its own reserves to the banking system to keep it floating. Finally, it has made it clear that it stands ready to be the lender of last resort for just about everything, removing the risk premium that would normally be attached to longer-term loans.
Altogether, this strategy has nearly abolished the banking system's capacity to function, in effect turning banks into public utilities to serve themselves and governments, instead of depositors and lenders. Private industry seeks funding outside the official banking system, investors are scrambling for some other option and banks themselves have turned to other pursuits, like interest rate arbitraging and lending to other financial institutions, hedge funds, insurance companies and real estate.
During the 1930s, New Deal policies tried to revive agriculture and economic activity generally by telling farmers to plough under their crops and kill their livestock. Today, Fed policies are trying to revive real estate, banking and economic activity generally by undermining the capacity of the loan markets to function with any degree of normalcy.
Michael Hudson insightfully explains the problem:
"People used to know what banks did. Bankers took deposits and lent them out, paying short-term depositors less than they charged for risky or less-liquid loans. The risk was borne by bankers, not depositors or the government…Banking has moved so far away from funding industrial growth and economic development that it now benefits primarily at the economy's expense in a predatory and extractive way, not by making productive loans."
Even if Bernanke were telling the truth that this is all about inspiring recovery, there is no hope that it can work. The real estate markets are still an amazing mess, with one-quarter of the existing mortgage contracts marked above their market value. It fights against gravity to keep trying to lift up what wants to go down the instant that artificial stimulus recedes. And it should be obvious by now that ever-lower rates don't stimulate lending in this environment, but rather the reverse.
As the Austrian tradition has long explained, the basis of future prosperity is capital accumulation and deferred consumption in the form of real savings. These policies punish both. Worse: They make conventional savings nearly impossible. These policies encourage ever more consumption and debt accumulation and do nothing to address the core problem that brought about the artificial boom and the resulting bust.
But is Bernanke really telling the truth? No. In the balance between restoring growth and saving the banking system from the consequences of its own irresponsible policies, the Fed has chosen the latter. This is the unavoidable conclusion.
Otherwise, we would have to believe that the Fed is utterly blind to the recently proven results of its own policies. It is not managing the Fed in the public interest, but in the interests of the banks and the governments that are in hock to them. That you can't earn a reward from saving money anymore is a microeconomic indication of a much-larger problem.
Consider the opportunity costs of these policies. We are living in a time of unprecedented innovation, thanks to digital media, the Internet and daily improvements in the production, management and distribution of information. Vast swaths of the commodifiable world have left the realm of scarcity to enter the sector in which infinite reproducibility is not only possible, but a regular feature of daily life.
With a healthy economic foundation, society should be getting wealthier and wealthier at a pace that exceeds even that of the Gilded Age, when 10% and 15% growth was common and the human population began to thrive as never before. The digital age has given us economizing technologies that make all that have come before look like mere warm-ups. Instead, we are being denied those benefits and that growth, thanks to catastrophic policies of governments backed by central banks and dependent financial institutions.
What is the scenario under which normalcy returns? From Bernanke's point of view, there is no end to this. It means ongoing stagnation for no good reason. For this reason, there has never been a more urgent time to abolish the Fed, institute a free market system and let a new monetary system emerge on a sound foundation. At the same time, the Fed has never faced more reason to keep alive the system that is killing future prosperity.
If the Parable of the Talents could be retold today, it would need a different ending, with a different gang of thieves thrown into the darkness to face weeping and gnashing of teeth.
[ A Way to Soak the Rich ]
You might have noticed that lots of people are really down on the so-called 1%. It drives many people, especially politicians, absolutely bonkers that there are lots of people out there sitting on millions, billions. Populists imagine that these people do nothing but hoard and count and let out menacing laughs about the advantages they have over others.
Therefore, the activists are proposing schemes to part this crowd from their money by force using government policy. It's a brutal approach that involves a heavy use of state coercion against people. If you believe in peace, as many activists claim, that's not so great. Violence begets violence, so it is never a solution.
The other problem with taxation is that the money is transferred to the state itself — the same institution that suppresses free speech, jails people for smoking pot and breaks up demonstrations against the 1%. It doesn't help anyone to transfer the cash from wingtips to jackboots.
Surely, there has to be a better way to go about getting money out of the hands of the rich and into the hands of the middle class and the poor. Is there a more peaceful, yet lethal, way to accomplish the same end?
I have the perfect solution. It came to be me the other day as I was walking along an urban street and saw a Rolls-Royce Phantom, parked right there where any normal car would park. These ridiculously ostentatious cars might be amazing, but they run about $320,000.
Incredible! Why would anyone buy this? Whoever owns the thing could have spent a tiny fraction on a used normal car that goes from here to there (like mine), but instead, and for reasons no one can really explain, this person decided to fork over seven years of income for an average worker — all for one car.
The point is that this person parted with his money. And where did it end up? It went to the people who sold the car, built the car, shipped the car and made everything in the car, all the way down to the workers in the rubber plant who made the tires and those in the steel plant who made the material for the fancy grill.
That money went from the rich guy to everyone else, and no one had to threaten him with jail in order to make that happen. Those who received the money didn't have to lobby, tax or force anyone. The guy gave it up voluntarily! It seems to me that we are onto something here.
The rich are an interesting group. They like to define themselves with symbols of what the rest of us consider crazy luxury. If there aren't things for them to squander their money on, they might just hoard it all, bury it in some tax haven or lock it away in obscure trust funds.
Thorstein Veblen had it backwards. People who resent the wealth of the super elite shouldn't be condemning conspicuous consumption. They should be encouraging more of it. The answer is to have a society with a vast proliferation of hugely expensive things on which the rich can spend their money. This is the path to voluntary expropriation and effective redistribution of wealth, from them to the rest of us, from the 1% to the 99%.
Consider the first-class plane ticket. On some flights, these tickets nearly break the bank. On international flights on short notice, a ticket like this can cost $15,000. And what do you get? You get a flight attendant who thinks you are great, free drinks, and extra room for the legs. And for this, you give thousands upon thousands of dollars from your bank account to the bank accounts of pilots, flight attendants, baggage handlers, ticket takers, assembly line workers, gas pumpers, and everyone else involved in making these flights happen.
It's the same with expensive hotels. To me, they are just places to crash until I get to where I'm going. But there is a whole class of hotels out there designed to give you an entire lifestyle for the time you are there. There are spas, saunas, pools, workout rooms, several layers of restaurants, bars everywhere, libraries, plus golf, hiking, dance halls, and more bling than you could use in a year. They can cost thousands of dollars per night.
I don't get it, but lots of the 1% are all about these places. All to the good! Their money is siphoned off from their person straight to the hands of waitresses, pool cleaners, doormen, maid service people, cooks, groundskeepers, repair workers, bricklayers and every other kind of worker and peasant you can possibly imagine.
We need ever more of this. Look at the yachting World Cup. It's crazy expensive to be involved at every level. The yachts can be $5 million and up. Just to get going can run in the millions in addition. These things would totally break the bank of a lifetime for any normal person. But the rich do it and voluntarily transfer their wealth straight to lessers in all walks of life. Especially when you consider the media attention and the hoopla, there are hundreds of thousands of people who gain the benefit of their extravagance.
What's especially nice is that their products, adopted by the rich, eventually become available for everyone else, so long as the market economy is working as it should. A cellphone in the 1980s was the ultimate luxury good. Today, they are available to all the world's poor. Same with computers, of course. I carry more computer power in my pocket than was available to all the richest and the most powerful people in the world combined two decades ago.
The rich are the early adopters. What was luxury then becomes the new normal for the rest of us today. The feed runs from the exclusive, high-priced shops that you have to have an appointment to enter and then straight to Wal-Mart a few years later. They bite the bullet so that we don't have to. In this way, they are society's benefactors.
If we want to soak the rich, we need ever more opportunities for them to blow millions and billions on things you and I would never think of buying. We need more luxury, more conspicuous consumption, more over-the-top and outrageous things and services that tempt them to part with their money.
But of course, if this is true, we also need producers to make these things to sell to the rich. That means that we should not punish investment and capital accumulation, and we certainly shouldn't impose tax penalties when investments targeted to the rich pay off. Capital gains taxes need to be zero, and the same with income taxes and other consumption taxes. Anything that discourages the building and selling of luxury needs to be repealed, provided we want to empty the pockets of the well-to-do.
Also, we need to cut out this growing ethos that the rich should give all their money away to far-flung charities. Whom does that really benefit? Sometimes it is hard to know, but certainly nonprofit organizations that may or may not be doing what they say they are doing. A far better path is to encourage the rich to get as rich as possible and spend like crazy for things that benefit the rest of us.
They can't take it with them. The commercial marketplace is the best and most peaceful way to make sure that wealth is distributed to the whole world.
[ Zero Percent Über Alles ]
We are getting a sense of what life is like with the new Fed policy of openness. It means that the chairman tries to beat the world record for the longest, most boring press conference in modern history. Ben Bernanke is getting even better at that crucial skill of repeatedly saying nothing at great length. The better he gets at this, the longer he is willing to entertain questions from reporters.
They all ask some version of the same question, in any case. It's the cocktail-hour question asked of every economist: What does the future hold and what should be done about it? The problem is that Bernanke doesn't know more about the future than the markets know. Actually, looking at the transcripts of the 2006 FOMC meetings, the Fed knows much less than the markets know.
But at least we now know what Bernanke thinks he knows. A short summary of the flurry of news from the Fed yesterday: The economy is still in the tank, it will stay that way for years, interest rates will be held at zero and savers can go to hell.
That last part we can glean from the most interesting question posed to Bernanke yesterday. Greg Robb of MarketWatch pointed out to him that he has some severe Republican critics. The Fed has been a major issue in the debates and on the campaign trail. Mr. Robb had a theory about why: many Republican voters lived on fixed incomes that depend on some return on their money. For this crowd, zero interest rates are a disaster. Robbery, really.
Bernanke's first response was to say that he was not going to involve himself in politics because he "has a job to do." It is a credit to the press corps that they did not double over in laughter at the ridiculous claim that the Fed's job has nothing whatever to do with politics! After 100 years of Fed service, it is pretty obvious that the Fed serves two clients: the big banks and the government. The Fed certainly doesn't serve the class of people who save and invest.
So how did Bernanke deal with the second part of the question? This was interesting. He said that he was very sorry for savers and those who depend on interest income, but they need to understand that they too have a long-term interest in a healthy economy. If investment and productivity are rising, they create the conditions for growth down the line, and surely this is good for everyone.
That's some crazy kind of circuitous reasoning going on there. It's a bit like the thief who steals the silverware and then explains to the former owners that a wider distribution of beautiful tableware is surely good for everyone in the long run. Even if you buy the argument, it would be nicer if the owner had some choice in the matter.
And there's another problem that is so incredibly obvious that no one at the press conference even dared point it out. The problem is that the zero-interest-rate policy has not worked to boost economic growth. What possible basis is there for thinking that two more years of this extermination of the saving class is going to do what the last three years have not done?
Of course, it depends on what you mean by "worked."
Let's say that the Fed wants to drive all investors away from government bonds and into riskier instruments in an attempt to artificially boost financial markets. Check.
Let's say that the Fed wants to punish anyone who wants to sock away money for a rainy day and, instead, prod them into buying more plasma TVs, digital gizmos and summer homes. Check.
And let's say that the Fed wants to artificially suppress the government's own costs of borrowing in order to reduce pressure on the political class. Check.
In all these ways, abolishing interest rates works for the Fed and the political elites. But there are at least three downsides.
First, banks depend on interest payments for profitability, and low interest removes the financial incentive for banks to lend money in a normal way. This is why commercial bank loans remain low, with the latest data showing the volume at mid-2007 levels. One might suppose that this is contrary to the Fed's aims, but it is a price that it is willing to pay.
Second, a low interest rate agenda requires that the Fed try to control not just the short-term rates over which it has the most influence, but also rates across the entire yield curve. This means removing risk premiums on longer-term loans by implicitly guaranteeing bailouts, just like those of 2008-10. This entrenches more moral hazard and drives a wedge between risk and result.
Third, this policy of low rates is similar to — but even worse than — the very policies that created the bubble of the 2000s that burst in 2008 and prompted the worst financial and economic calamity in many generations. The Fed has learned absolutely nothing from even its own most recent history. If people can't earn money through interest, financiers will find some other way to market risk, leading to crazy investment schemes and misallocated capital.
As David Malpass writes in The Wall Street Journal:
"Near-zero interest rates penalize savers and channel artificially cheap capital to government, big corporations and foreign countries. One of the most fundamental principles of economics is that holding prices artificially low causes shortages. When something of value is free, it runs out fast and only the well-connected get any. Interest rates are the price for credit and shouldn't be controlled at zero. It causes cheap credit for those with special access but shortages for those without — primarily new and small businesses and those seeking private-sector mortgages.
The big take-away from the Fed's day in the news is its new policy benchmark of keeping inflation at 2%. This is sheer silliness. There is no such thing as a price level, as even recent CPI releases illustrate. Some prices went up (food, education, health), and some prices went down (oil, software, services). Mash them together and you get a single number that applies to absolutely nothing in particular."
In any case, the Fed can't control prices in this way. It is always driving while looking in the rearview mirror. When the crash comes, there is nothing the Fed can do about it, despite Bernanke's repeated promises to rescue the world from any bad effects of his policies.
As Bloomberg's Caroline Baum says, it's almost as if the Fed itself has completely forgotten the existence of the "long and variable lag" that separates its policies from their effects. She recalls Milton Friedman's own analogy of the "fool in the shower" who keeps turning the water from all hot to all cold and wonders why he is either scalded or frozen.
Baum concludes that under Bernanke's own plan, we would have "eight years of 0% interest rates. There will be a revolution in this country before then if the economy is lousy enough to warrant 0% interest rates for that long."
Really? One would hope.
[ The Self Expropriation of the Patriotic Millionaires ]
Do you want higher taxes? There is an easy answer. Pay more. No one is stopping you. You can overpay to the tax authorities. There is even a check box on the form, as I recall. Give to this charity you find worthy! No government in the history of the world has turned down money that its most "patriotic citizens" want to donate of their own free will.
Alas, that is not what the "Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength" — this is actually the name of a new organization — are calling for. A tax is not a voluntary contribution. Otherwise, it would be called a donation. A tax is a forcible extraction of private property by the state for the state to use for its own purposes. If it doesn't involve force, it is not a tax. The use of force defines the tax. That even goes for excise taxes said to be voluntary: try buying gas or cigarettes without paying the tax and see how far you get.
These many signatories of the Patriotic Millionaires are not just calling for their own taxes to be raised. They are calling for your taxes to be raised. The patriotic among us have ways of making the unpatriotic pay, and it is called lobbying government to loot the population even more than it does now.
The point is that this is not an act of self-sacrifice on their part. They are free to make a sacrifice anytime they want to. No, they are plotting to enlist you in their cause, whether you like it or not.
There is a long history of the rich getting together to call for higher taxes. Andrew Carnegie wrote passionately for a tax that would loot people at their deaths so that they could not pass on the wealth to others. In our own time, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have earned the respect and admiration of the left-liberal elite by calling on the state to take more of their money.
Why would these people do this? Well, for one thing, it is a nice thing to earn the respect and admiration of the left-liberal elite, who are inclined to forgive any amount of wealth accumulation, provided that the accumulated is willing to sign up to support left-liberal causes. You get a pass this way, a badge of honor to cover what some people otherwise consider your ill-gotten wealth.
There are a myriad of psychological reasons that have been bandied about, too. Maybe these rich people are self-hating and filled with guilt. They need public policy to expiate their sins or otherwise vacuum clean their consciences.
Another theory is that the already rich are perfectly happy to lock in their gains with a policy that will prevent others from joining their ranks. A tax, then, becomes a method by which the wealthy elite fight back competition and entrench their monopoly position.
Or perhaps we should just take them at their word, that they really do believe in reducing the deficit. The truth is that all their wealth wouldn't make a dent in the deficit. A 100% expropriation of everything that people who make over $10 million per year would barely cover a few weeks of government spending. A progressive tax up to 70% on incomes over $1 million would barely cover 10% of the deficit. In fact, doubling the taxes of everyone today would not even balance the budget (all else equal).
The problem is not that taxes are too low for everyone; the problem is that government has no institutional mechanism that encourages any spending restraint.
In any case, this whole thing is bizarre. Why would anyone expect that the government would suddenly start restraining itself if it suddenly enjoyed a temporary windfall of revenue? There is absolutely no evidence to support this supposition. What does government do with more money? It spends it, if possible.
There is a much faster and much more sure way of imposing fiscal discipline. The government itself needs to face a market test of some sort. The best way to make sure that there is some sort of penalty for bad financial habits is to subject government debt to the same discipline faced by private debt. The Treasury bond needs a market-based default premium attached to it.
But that cannot happen so long as the Federal Reserve is there to be the lender of last resort for anything that the politicians do. No matter how bad the finance, how high the debt, how egregious the deficit is, the Fed is there with the promise that the money will be there. Funding it might require hyperinflation, but the money will be there. It might, eventually, be worth less than the linen it is printed on, but the money will be there.
The central bank is the real source of fiscal irresponsibility. But the millionaires won't talk about that. It is the great untouchable topic, the one sacrosanct institution. Our own bank accounts are vulnerable to their lobbying pressure, but the Fed is perfectly safe. That's what they called "patriotic."
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A Beautiful Anarchy
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Jeffrey Tucker
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[
"nonfiction"
] |
[
"politics",
"economics"
] |
Private Digital Societies
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[ History of the Club, Part I ]
"Launch" has been the watchword this week in the world of Laissez Faire Books. It's been on everyone's mind since the brilliant idea of a club first emerged in the early weeks of 2012.
When the launch finally happened, I experienced one of those moments: "Pinch me so that I know I'm not dreaming." I was, at that very moment, flying through the air on an airplane, logged into the Internet with my portable laptop, running about five different applications that allow real-time interactions with the mortals on earth.
This was not even possible a few years ago. It's like a dream world, a miracle that is part of our daily lives, a gift to us from the entrepreneurial class working within a market framework. It has produced results no one could have expected only a few years ago.
I was reflecting on this amazing reality when suddenly, there was a stillness that I detected from those doing the work at the home office. The texts and chatter had stopped. I texted Doug Hill, who has worked so hard on this project from his position at Agora Financial.
"How's it going?" I asked.
"Rockin'," he said.
I pulled up the page to see what he meant. Rockin' indeed. The Laissez Faire Club was live. We existed. It finally happened. The thing that was a dream only a few weeks ago was suddenly a reality.
Here is the proof of a notion that has consumed me for years, a theory I gleaned from my years of reading the works of Ludwig von Mises: the world we see is the realization of the ideas of the past; the world of the future will consist of the ideas we hold today. We need only to dream, create and act, and the course of history is changed.
I don't doubt that there will be books written in the not-too-distant future about the early days of the Laissez Faire Club, this history-changing idea. The future of this venue, the combustible mixture of commerce and intellectual work, might determine the future of human liberty itself. It is a reinvention of the whole project of creating and distributing the best ideas.
This short account is just the beginning. There are so many moving pieces, so many creative minds and talented people involved, so much extraordinary drama. Had this launch been made in a reality television show, it would be bigger than The Office.
The genesis stretches back in time before I got involved. Agora Inc. has long had an interest in the acquisition, preservation and refurbishment of undervalued assets. Look at the properties it owns in Baltimore, Md., the historic buildings that it has made its own. Look at the land in Nicaragua now becoming a luxury resort. Look at the way this company has changed the lives of so many people around the world by giving them the tools to manage their own lives.
Laissez Faire Books was one of those undervalued assets. It had a mighty history stretching back to 1973, but since the digital age, there was a wide perception that it had been in decline, changing hands every few years and never quite able to change with the times. Addison Wiggin and Bill Bonner decided to take it on with the goal of doing for this company what Agora had done for so many physical properties.
I came into the mix in November 2011, and the first task was to migrate to a modern Web space. For those who have never attempted this, you would be amazed at the work here. We were talking about a large inventory that had to come to life in a new way. Building a commercial space from the ground up takes time, but it is doable; migrating a giant store from one space to another is not unlike moving a city from one state to another.
But it finally happened, and in a relatively short time. The release came the first week of January. It was thrilling and wonderful, a perfectly beautiful website. Yet we all knew the truth: We had just begun. There had to be something else. There was something wonderful waiting to happen; we just had to discover what that thing was.
The pieces came together gradually in late January. It began with Joe Schriefer from Agora, who said that we really need a small set of great books that offer a total economics education in one small package. Brilliant! Addison Wiggin and I talked it through, and it was rather obvious what these had to be: Hazlitt, Hayek and Garrett.
But is that really all? Surely not. Let's talk e-books. What if we gave them all away for free with the purchase of the physical books? Sounds great to me: I love nothing better than free books. And how many of these free books can we actually give away? Dozens, hundreds, thousands. How about one per week, forever? Perfect. It can be done. Each will have new editorial notes, new introductions, amazing art, the best possible functionality.
Still thinking. What if we provide a way for people to discuss these books? There are public forums everywhere, but I knew from experience that their value is limited and unstable. What if we make them private, a members-only deal, so that everyone has a stake in keeping them as civil and intelligent as possible? We were all beginning to see how this works. Big ideas, a community of discussion, reckless generosity, practical effects.
And what is the context in which this appears? The government is growing and wrecking the physical world in every possible way. Standards of living are slipping. Despair is growing. Politics provides a nice diversion of energy, but no real answer. Ah, but the digital world is different: It allows us to create our own civilization.
Now the fullness of the possibilities is emerging. We need our own private city, not so that we can hide, but so that we can think and discover in peace. This new world should be a place where ideals rule, where friendships blossom, where we can all learn together. We can disagree without being nasty or argue, and expect to learn at the same time, checking our experiences and ideas against others.
The time between the period in which we had only glimpsed this and when it all came together was no more than a few days. Then it was born: the Laissez Faire Club. Now we have it. Here we combine the magic of the commercial marketplace with the thrilling uncertainty that comes with a free thinking society of ideas.
Having the model is one thing. Building the software infrastructure is another. This where the fun began, and this is when I really got know the inside culture of this place called Agora. There have been so many times when I wished that everyone could see what I've seen in this place. It represents the very best of what modern commercial life has to offer, an institution that is a great servant of the market that drove its creation and growth.
Every employee has something to contribute. The diversity of the cast of characters is a real kick. Regardless of their official title, they are all interested in ideas. They might be technicians or accountants or customer service people or database managers, but they care about so much more than what they do. Any topic is fair game.
As an example: on my way out of the office one day, the mastermind behind the database infrastructure of Agora's Web family gave me an inspired painting that he had done. It is a treasure, a scene from a graveyard in France in which a 500-year-old statute is brought to life amid spring blooms.
Another example: a book author was talking about how she anticipated with fear and joy an open performance she would attend the following night. The opera is Charles Gounod's Faust, and she is right: scarier than any modern movie.
A cover designer was looking for inspiration. It was provided by a payment systems operator who knew the book in question very well. He pounded out a great paragraph explanation for the designer while I was still thinking about the question. The result was genius.
I wish I could write a personal tribute to each one. They've all made contributions to making this dream come true.
The place can be quiet and solemn one minute, and then, just as quickly, become a place of frenzied fun and wild laughter. Employees work to the point of exhaustion, all in the service of the customer, but somehow never seem exhausted. At the end of the day before launch, I was slumping over a desk, holding my head up with my hands, feeling as if the last ounce of energy had been drained from me. I picked myself up and went out into a large room on the second floor where the copywriters and editors work. They had all been through what I had been through. But there were no long faces. They were still brimming with energy and excitement about what was coming. They were smiling and joking. Instantly, I felt a change come over me. The inspiration came back, as did the energy.
In any office like this, in which everyone cares so intensely about the results, there will be arguments, and even explosions and strong words. Everyone is used to differences of opinion, passionately expressed. They are allowed. No one holds back, even in a manner that disregards the company hierarchy. There is nothing phony about the culture here. If you are going to explode, bring it on.
But what is truly wonderful is that even the most tense moments, even following sharp exchanges and argument, normalcy and collegiality returns with ease. At one point before launch, things were getting pretty tense in the conference room. Suddenly, the head of media affairs showed up with a box of "Agora Financial stress balls" and dumped the whole contents on our heads. Balls were bouncing everywhere. The whole place broke up in laughter.
These moments pass quickly. There is no grudge. We all want the same thing. We are on the same team. Each day is new. Each hour is a chance to do something great.
Reflecting on how this could be, and why this culture of honesty, innovation and collegiality is so sadly lacking in other sectors of life, it finally hit me. The gaze of this institution is always outward and upward, toward the North Star of the commercial marketplace: the consumer. At Agora Financial, he even has a name: Bob. Bob is the archetype of the person we serve. He is smart, searching, inquisitive and hoping for a better life through better ideas.
Well, Bob has a new home. A happy home of ideas and friendship. We made it for him. We are developing it every day. We invite him in so that we can serve him generously and for as long as he finds benefit in what we do. Bob might be you.
[ History of the Club, Part 2 ]
Dreamers and accountants — they say that both types of people are necessary for a great business. One without the other is a dead end. Together, the magic can happen. And the magic is certainly happening at the Laissez Faire Club, now celebrating what Doug Hill calls its one-month-iversary (I'm pretty sure that is a neologism) with a level of success that has lifted everyone's spirits.
Am I surprised? Not entirely. Everything seems inevitable in retrospect. We had put months of careful thought into what people really need in these times of growing government tyranny. We can't just throw in the towel. We can't just submit to unrelenting abuse. We can't just stand by and let government dismantle civilization piece by piece.
Frank Chodorov wrote that we must first will freedom in order to achieve it. That requires reading, learning, communicating, sharing ideas and growing intellectually — all with an eye toward the practical results of living freer, smarter lives. This is the vision, the dream, the hope. The Club embeds that dream in a practical and generous solution within a commercial context.
We are hardly the first people in history who have faced this problem, and we are joined by people all over the world who are struggling to throw off the anachronism of the invasive state. There is nothing more ridiculous, in a digital age, than the belief that millions of bureaucrats in a far distant capital city can protect us, plan our lives, manipulate economic outcomes, redistribute the wealth, and bring justice to the world.
Fewer and fewer people believe in this system anymore. The failures of despotism surround us, as does the evidence of the success of freedom and the capacity of societies to form and manage themselves. We only need to learn to see these truths, understand them and use the freedoms we have to build institutions that help us gain more freedom, one step at a time.
And think of all the advantages we have that previous generations did not have. We have centuries of scholarship, amazing new tools for communicating and getting to know each other, the technology of real-time contact between individuals all over the world. These are tools that have been granted unto this generation, right now, in our times — tools that seemed like science fiction only a decade ago.
Even with all these advantages, every act of entrepreneurship is a leap into the unknown. People who like stories of successful businesses fail to appreciate this. In retrospect, every success seems inevitable, just a matter of going through the paces. Data of history always look this way, like the unfolding of a coherent story with a beginning, middle and end.
In the thick of the building process (which never ends!), however, the future is uncertain and the results unknown. As if in a dark room, you use whatever signals you have to find your way forward. It requires a combination of intuition, attention to accounting data, wise judgment, careful monitoring of consumer feedback. The risks are always present and the failure rate is extremely high. It is always an uphill struggle, especially in these times, when the whole of leviathan seems to conspire against success.
Many scholars have written about that special cast of mind that characterizes entrepreneurship, scholars such as Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter and Israel Kirzner. Entrepreneurship requires the imagination to see that the world can be different from what it is today, to believe that new knowledge can emerge and be acted upon in a manner that shifts the given reality into something better.
This is a rare cast of mind even for individuals. It is especially difficult to embed this outlook in an institution like a business firm. It is an outlook that is cultivated through outstanding and imaginative leadership, attentive and accomplished employees at all levels, a widespread tolerance for living with risk and uncertainty, and a culture of adaptability and flexibility that is pervasive throughout an organization.
This is true whether the business is tiny or gigantic, the lemonade stand or multinational conglomerate. Every business faces the same unknowns. Tomorrow is a blank page. For those who want to see beautiful images appear, there can be no rest. They must have that hunger for the new, and the ability to live with the belief that the answer is out there but has not yet revealed itself. In this sense, an entrepreneurial firm lives on faith. There is no infallible formula for making it work.
These features are completely absent in government bureaucracy. Bureaucracies see only what exists and are unprepared for change. They want stability and conformity. They certainly cannot and will not lead that change. This is why government is not in a position to keep up with our times, much less manage them. This is why societies that are dominated by bureaucracies dry up and die.
I think about this often as I look back to the formative days of the Club. I watched and learned as people at Agora Financial brought ideas to the table. Every bit of evidence and experience for or against any idea flowed freely and openly. Criticism flowed as freely and compliments, disagreement was as welcome as agreement. People listened, contributed, learned, and the model emerged in fits and starts, at first slowly and then at a quickening pace until it all fell into place.
The Laissez Faire Club would indeed be something entirely new. It would be rooted in the deepest desire of humankind to discover and thrive — even in hard times — but use tools that are only now on the table. There was no mastermind behind the plan; everyone contributed, and the result was something no one expected. The whole was bigger than the sum of the parts.
Forgive me for being a bit dreamy about this whole project. Working with Club staff yesterday, I sat and recorded a series of videos in which I discussed many books, one by one, that have had a gigantic impact on my life and experienced that great pleasure that comes with sharing knowledge of things one truly loves. I kept thinking to myself, "I'm the luckiest guy in the world."
The unity of great ideas and the commercial spirit — here are the things that make life dramatic and exciting. Poets of old wrote of battles and wars, of kings and their exploits, as if these were the things that shape history. It's not true. The best that history offers humanity is shaped by the producers and the entrepreneurs who serve others in peace through creativity. In this sense, the Laissez Faire Club is making history in our times.
[ Throwing Out the Old ]
Two years ago, I was the soul of generosity. I had culled through my sizable collection of CDs and found thirty discs that I was happy to give away. My social circle went nuts, praising me as the great giver. They were so happy to have such fabulous music for free.
This week, I tried the same thing, with an even more generous offering. No takers. I'm sitting here with a pile of CDs containing what was considered great two years ago, yet I can't find a home for the discs today. There has been no physical change to the stuff. The music is as high-quality as ever.
What changed? The valuation and, therefore, the price. I once held treasure. Now it seems destined to be trash. The only thing that changed is the passage of time — and it so happens that the slice of time in question has seen the most spectacular innovations in music reproduction ever.
Think about it. The same amount of work went into making the CDs (so much for the "labor theory of value"). The CDs have not depreciated in any physical sense. The music they contain is no less valuable now than it was then (it is mostly Baroque and before, anyway, so we aren't talking last year's Top 40). All that changed was the hands on the clock. Yet the value went from high to zero.
What does that tell us about economics of the price system? It tells us that prices are fundamentally a reflection of human values of the moment. They provide no insight into anything intrinsic to the good itself. They tell us nothing about what it took to make the good. They provide no reliable basis for forecasting.
Prices are a point of agreement in an instant of time, and nothing more. Yet no institution is as essential in conveying to us the signals and giving us the tools that enable us to manage our lives. The world never stops changing. In a free economy, prices change as a reflection of those changes in the world. We respond to the prices in more ways than we are often conscious of. They provide a means for all of us to interface with — and navigate the shifts and movements in — the reality that takes place outside our own minds.
I've known for some time that most of my CD collection would eventually be obsolete. People have been buying digital copies ever more. They have been plugging in their devices to micro speaker systems or using earbuds to listen to music. The old ritual of changing the shiny discs was starting to seem like a thing of the past, like starting your car with an engine crank.
My problem is that I waited too long to finally detach myself from the old technology. I waited until the price fell to less than zero. I took too long to adapt to new realities and act on that information I had acquired and knew in my heart. The reality moved faster than my brain could process data and act on it.
How well I remember the day when I bought my first CD. It must have been 1986 or so. I put it in my player and the sound came out and it played and played for a full hour. It was Bach, I think. I didn't change it. Days and days went by, but it was all Bach all the time. My long-playing vinyl records sat in the corner untouched. After a week or so, I had come to terms with reality: I would never listen to those things again. It was not that they were bad; it was that I had found something more convenient.
Yet I couldn't let go. The LPs just sat there. A year went by, and then I moved out of my apartment. It would have taken more room in my car than I had to move 200 vinyl records. I gritted my teeth and did something I never thought I would do. I hurled them all in the dumpster, armload by armload. It was painful. It seemed crazy. But it was the reality. I never looked back.
Yet here we are twenty-six years later and I've made the same mistake all over again.
Now, one reaction might be: Slow this world down so that I can take a breather! The problem with that solution is that it means slowing down the pace at which humanity is permitted to seek a better life through innovation and enterprise. The only reason why some technologies prevail over others is their merit in serving people what they desire.
We sometimes imagine that we are on a ride that we can't control. The truth is that people are, in fact, controlling the pace of development. CDs outcompeted LPs for a reason. And digital music downloads are outcompeting CDs for a reason, too. If people did not like the new thing, it would have no traction and no future. But people demand ever better ways to achieve their ends, and the purpose of a free economy is to help people in the most efficient (and least wasteful) way.
The most remarkable development in our times as regards music distribution is the subscription service. Let me illustrate. In the early days of the CD, I had one disc with music by Palestrina. It took me many months, or even up to a year, to discover that he wasn't the only composer of Renaissance music. I had to check out books, spend hours in the CD shops, talk to friends, act on information overheard at parties and the like.
Eventually, I came to discover Victoria, Josquin, Tallis, Byrd, Ockeghem, Sweelinck, Morales, Guerrero and others. This process took me many years of searching and hunting. It was painful.
Today, you get a free account to Pandora or Spotify and make your own channel. One word is enough: Palestrina. What follows are all kinds of music that fit within that genre. You say what you like and don't like and buy the full album or not, and the software does the magic of putting together a playlist for you based on your tastes. There are no search costs. The knowledge of others becomes your own knowledge in an instant.
And yes, I said that it is free. There is not a soul alive who ten years ago could have predicted that such a technology would exist, much less that the producers of it would be begging us to take it and use it for free, charging us later only if we want fewer commercials. This is genius. This is progress. This is civilization brought to us by the market economy and the entrepreneurs that give it a forward direction, all in ways that are completely unpredictable.
Even with all this seeming upheaval, we aren't really throwing out the past. It still lives in our hearts, and increasingly, it is documented and digitized in the annals of history available at our fingertips. What we are doing is embracing ever better ways of living and overcoming the limits of scarcity. Society must move forward, and the market-price system is there to coordinate things and help us achieve our goals.
No government regulatory planning apparatus can substitute for the market's approach to innovation. In fact, if government were in charge, we'd be lucky if technology had advanced beyond the presidential fireside chat. We certainly wouldn't have the ability — each one of us — to reach the world right now with media blogs, YouTube, video phones, live streaming of anything to anyone and all the other wonders of the world brought to us by the free interaction of thinking, creating, cooperating human beings.
[ How to Think: Lunchtime Lessons ]
"I just joined the Club!"
That's the whole content of an email I received from a very old friend who is very special to me. He is speaking of the Laissez Faire Club, the startup digital literary city created by Laissez Faire Books.
I credit this writer for (inadvertently) training me in an important aspect of how to think. He wasn't my professor. He didn't lecture to me. All we did was discuss things, random things of passing interest. Every day. But by listening to his approach to thinking, I discovered a serious deficiency in my own approach and established a new ideal for which I've been shooting ever since.
So of course I was honored and thrilled to have him in our digital society that is growing and growing and doing ever greater things by the day. It's a new model for distributing and generating ideas, something that has never been tried before, and it turns out he is super excited about it.
The man is Sheldon Richman, editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education. We were both working in Fairfax, Va., and nearly every day for several years, we went to lunch together. We were both interested in politics, libertarian thinking, and Austrian School economics.
But politics create bad mental habits. If you are following around a tribe that has "positions on the issues," it becomes too easy to grab a position and hold it without thinking too much. I'm for this. I'm against that. This is a good guy. This is a bad guy. This policy is no good. That policy is good.
We are tempted to be self-satisfied by being on the right team, making the right noises, echoing the approved sentiments. Bromide replaces logic. Bluster replaces reasoning.
The trouble is that this is not thinking. This is just the training of a reflex.
You see this habit of mind every day on television. This is how the commentators talk. They assert their views and then argue with each other. The biggest bully wins.
In fact, this is how the whole of modern politics want us to go about things. We are given two simple paradigms in a vending machine. We push this button or that button based on whatever biases we hold. Our product arrives, and we consume it. Then we spit it back out on cue.
Sheldon taught me that holding and consuming opinions is not the same thing as thinking seriously. He taught me this by example.
One of us would throw out a news item. My instinct was to blurt out my opinion. That's what I did. Sheldon would nod and wait. Then he would begin to offer a series of reasons for holding this view. He would offer up a logical argument. He would cite evidence from history. He would refer to the literature. When he felt that he had made a well-rounded case, he would stop, and then he would raise additional questions and posit possible applications that would generate new topics.
I was always struck by this. He wasn't doing this to show off or to interrupt the flow of conversation. He did it to satisfy his own craving for intellectual rigor. It was never enough for him to hold the "right view." He did it to check himself to make sure that he wasn't operating by habit, but rather that he was capable of making an impenetrable argument that made sense even apart from his own bias.
Why was it is that I wasn't doing this? Actually, I wasn't even sure that I could do this. So I began to listen more carefully to how he went about this. I began trying this myself and I discovered that, actually, it is not so easy. It is much easier to just throw out a point of view with the brain very comfortably disengaged. Again, this is how politics want us to going about it. It is far more difficult to actually do the hard work of making a case for or against something using clear reasoning, evidence, and citations.
This approach comes through in his writing. The other day, he wrote a piece on Mitt Romney's involvement with Bain Capital. It would be very simple to just throw around a bunch of assertions. Instead, he deferred judgment on the precise case and dealt with the whole topic of businesses that have to reverse direction, lay off workers, and reformulate their plans. He discussed scarcity, uncertainty, learning, ignorance, and change, and pointed out that without the ability to adapt to change, no business can truly contribute to the well-being of society over the long term.
It was a classic case of how he goes about thinking. He avoids the easy path and instead makes it hard for himself. As I came to realize, the reason he does this is because he believes very strongly in the free society. He believes in it so strongly that he does not fear subjecting its positions to relentlessly rigorous questioning and argumentation. If he is wrong about a point, he wants to know where and why he is wrong. He is fearless because he believes in the impenetrability of the idea of liberty. Even if he doesn't know the answers, he is happy to take the risk of thinking through the case in order to find them.
This is the hard work of thinking. If everyone did this, many myths would melt away, primarily the myth that society and the economy need a strong central hand guiding them or else they will collapse into disorder and chaos. Would that everyone followed this example! But we can't make others think. All we can do is take responsibility for our own thinking. It is especially incumbent on people who hold a minority position to do this.
By the way, I didn't agree with everything Sheldon said back then and I don't agree with him in every case now. But that raises a point. If you have 100% agreement with someone, what could possibly be the point in a give-and-take conversation with the person? If neither of you has anything to learn from the other, what is the point of meeting and discussing at all?
Conversations over ideas should be like exchanges with goods and services. Both parties should show up expecting both to give and to get. The result should be a greater value for both parties than simply what they brought into the conversation. Just as economic exchange increases wealth, so great conversation makes us more enlightened than we would otherwise be.
The lessons I learned during this time with Sheldon have stuck with me for a lifetime.
Part of the idea of this Club is to make this lunchtime experience universal. It is to inspire an intellectual exchange that defies geography and government restrictions. It is to use the technology that private enterprise has given us to create a digital exchange of ideas every day, not so that we can preach to each other, but so that we can learn and grow through exchange with each other.
So of course, I very much welcome Sheldon as a member! It is an honor to have him.
[ Why They Hate Free Speech ]
Sometimes — why not now? — you just have to reflect on what an amazing man Thomas Jefferson was. I mean, he really got the whole idea of liberty, maybe better than anyone before him, and far better than most people today. What a man! What a dream he had!
I'm reminded of his bravery and brilliance from reading this magisterial work: Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism by Geoffrey R. Stone. It's a strangely thrilling history of villainy, wickedness, despotism and lies by the U.S. government.
Yet the book gives great comfort. It shows that there's nothing new about the current repressive climate. I mean, you can land yourself in jail pretty quickly these days with the wrong tweet or Facebook status. It's dreadful, but it's happened many times in the past. Yet liberty has always won over the tyrants.
Another point: This book shows precisely why government fears words more than anything else: because ideas are more powerful than guns. Otherwise, what would be the point of cracking down?
But back to Jefferson. He would have been happy to retire in his Virginia home, living in peace and contentment, but duty called him to run for president. What was happening? Incredibly, the new central government was cracking down on free speech. A 1798 law criminalized "false, scandalous and malicious writing," and 25 people were arrested for saying nasty things about the president.
Keep in mind: The ink was still wet on the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which included the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. Two states refused to go along, and there was talk of secession in the air. People were shocked and appalled and even then commented on the sheer farce that we fought a revolution against exactly the actions the new government was taking. It was out of the frying pan and back into the frying pan.
In 1800, Jefferson was swept into office on popular acclaim. How his enemies must have burned with fury at these words in his inaugural address: "And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions."
(In the same address, he blasted taxes, standing armies, high spending, regulations, and every manner of despotism.)
The incident is hugely important for many reasons. Knowing of it helps sweep away the mythology that our "Founding Fathers" were universally in love with liberty. It turns out that once they got control of the government, liberty began to slip and slip on the list of priorities, which is one reason that no man should ever be trusted with power (another subject well covered by the great Jefferson). It helps put into historical context just what a threat war always and everywhere is to human rights and liberties.
The author, a law professor at Chicago (along with an army of researchers), covers the six great periods in which government chilled the environment for free political speech:
- 1798, when war with the French was heating up
- The Civil War, when the "Great Liberator" suspended habeas corpus and persecuted and jailed his enemies
- World War I, when thousands were sentenced to prison for daring to disagree
- World War II, when Japanese citizens were rounded up and you got your name on a list for bad associations
- The Cold War, when every political dissident was called a communist
- The War on Terror, which has turned into a war on freedom itself.
Professor Stone chronicles them all in amazing and riveting detail. His biographies of each of the victims (this guy can really write well!) make you realize at every step that this could have been you or me. It causes you to respect the people who dare to go against the government line, which always ends up meaning that the dissidents go against the dominant strain of public opinion, too.
I loathe communism, but I have to admit that the commies often spoke truth during wartime!
It takes guts to stand up to the state, yet it is enormously necessary. Chances are that if the government criminalizes some words, those words need to be said more than ever, probably because they embody a truth that no one wants to hear. And even if the words aren't true, the cause of freedom is well served by those who dare to speak out.
Some people have written that this very book has changed their life. I can see why. For one thing, it is hard to stop reading because the detail is so vivid, the historical sweep is so good and the writing itself is so compelling. It is also right up to the minute in terms of timeliness. We are blasted in every public space these days by Orwellian messages to rat out any suspicious people to the authorities. Yes, it is creepy, but hardly new.
Stone himself is not nearly as much an absolutist on free speech as I've come to be after learning of all these cases. He seems to think that there might be good reasons to suppress speech, even if the government gets carried away; my own view is that government should never be trusted with that power and that any that exercise it deserve to lose power. This power will always be abused.
We might say that controls on free speech are the great compliment that government pays to the power of words. And you wonder why the power elite hates the Internet? It's the worst enemy that would-be despots have ever faced. We've seen its power at work not only in Arab countries, but also every day in the U.S. It has recruited millions into the ranks of the dissidents.
Imagine how much worse our times would be if the government had the same amount of control today as it had during World War I or the Cold War! Thanks to digital technology, that cannot happen. The cat's out of the bag, and every attempt by the government to put it back in produces protests of the type that put Jefferson in office in 1801.
It's the highest compliment I can give to say that Jefferson himself would have loved reading Perilous Times. So will you.
[ How Hunger Games Benefited from Online Piracy ]
So you want to see The Hunger Games when it comes out on Thursday at midnight? It's not likely that you will get the chance. Tickets in my community have been sold out for weeks. In fact, the first 10 showings of the film are sold out. This disappoints me greatly because it is one of the few teen flicks I've really wanted to see.
The whole phenomenon seems set to make the Harry Potter hysteria and the Twilight mania seem like warm-up acts. Ask around among teens, and you will hear this confirmed. This is a true example of mass frenzy. Actually, the whole thing seems like a modern "madness of crowds." It's "pandemonium," as People magazine put it.
Both the plot line and the marketing genius have lessons for our time.
Based on a book by Suzanne Collins that came out in 2008, the film tells the story of an impoverished, totalitarian society in which rebellion among the subjects is punished by the creation of a killing game for mass entertainment. A teenage girl is put in the position to kill or be killed, but she cleverly plots to stand up to the regime by cooperating with her opponent. Together, they win the hearts of the crowd and bring the regime to its knees.
In other words, it is a story about personal freedom against a powerful state, a tale of courage and defiance in the face of power. The reviews by actual readers (versus professional critics) are over the top. It's Amazon's No. 1, and it has 4,000 reviews and counting. This is a phenom.
Aside from the plot line, there is something contemporary about the theme of sheer deprivation and survival. It sums up the way young people are looking at the opportunities they are being presented in these times. We aren't playing hunger games yet, but when an entire generation is pretty sure that it will not fare as well as its parents' generation, that's not good. Life seems like the zero-sum game posited in the film.
The marketing guru behind the push — and don't kid yourself, for everything needs marketing — is Tim Palen. He began his work three years ago. He used social media to the max. He had video and smartphone app games created. He tweeted constantly. He made puzzles based on finding pieces within Twitter. He worked on amazing posters and pushes of every sort. Not one day went by when he and his staff weren't pushing some button. (He is also likely to lose his job after this but that's another story.)
But here's another thing to know about this. There is no point in marketing — and it certainly doesn't work over the long haul — if the essential product isn't good. You have to have both: good selling technique and something good to sell. Only then does the magic happen.
A number of media outlets have examined his strategy, and it is fascinating to see how it all unfolded, all based on the idea that this movie would work only if users themselves were empowered to spread the word. The experts and insiders were kept at bay. The kids were the targets, and they were the ones that the producers relied upon to make this happen. Such is the way stuff works in the digital age. The guys in the boardroom matter only once they figure out that they need to reach the kid on the street.
But in all the marketing roundups I've seen, I've seen no mention of what might in fact be the central thing that made this book and movie take flight. It came to me in talking to teens themselves. I asked many: Where did you read the book? The answer comes immediately: online. Online? How is that possible? I thought we were living in times when piracy was punished by death or something close to it.
Well, try this for yourself. I searched for "Hunger Games free online." In about one second, I had access to the full text for all the books, in every format: PDF, doc, txt, rtf, html, and epub. Even audio. It is amazing. And following all these links I see search engines posting notes about how they have taken down many links based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. What this means is that there is at least some perfunctory effort to keep these books offline.
It's not working. And thank goodness. These kids have become wild for this book and therefore dedicated to seeing the movie, buying the shirts, and otherwise doing the whole teen-mania thing. True, the books are selling but, let's face it, not every parent is willing to shell out money for their young teens to buy books about kids killing kids in a dark, dystopian world.
I'm speculating here but I suspect that a major reason for the insane success of these books and movies — easily the most spectacular teen freak out of our time — is that dread thing called piracy. That's right, piracy. Except that it is not stealing to read something online. It takes nothing away from anyone. No physical property is stolen. Intellectual property is being shared, copied, duplicated, multiplied.
But wait just a minute. Isn't the whole energy of the leviathan state swinging into gear to stop this very thing, all in the name of saving private enterprise, even though the most successful book of our time is universally pirated like few things I've ever seen? That's exactly right. And therein rests the amazing perversity of all this anti-piracy mania. The state is seeking to shut down the sharing of information, the very source that has given life to so much enterprise in our time.
Some authors are figuring this out. The remarkably successful writer Paulo Coelho writes on his blog: "As an author, I should be defending 'intellectual property', but I'm not. Pirates of the world, unite and pirate everything I've ever written! The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever." You see, as a writer, he believes in ideas and he believes in his work and wants it to achieve a universal destination. He has also noticed that the more people read him, the more money he makes.
So get with it, writers and producers and publishers. Look at this case as just another one among thousands. Piracy is your friend. Only second-rate writers and publishers are hip to enlist the state to crack down on people's desire to know more. You can't succeed through blackmailing people to buy infinitely copyable products. Successful enterprise comes from giving people want they want, enticing the imagination, and finding ways to profit from people's desires. You can't achieve that by stringing people up.
The Hunger Games has so much to teach the world: the power of the individual, the evil of the state, the wickedness of the zero-sum game. Maybe it can also teach us that a major initiative by the state today to end Internet piracy is also rooted in fallacy. Sharing information is not a zero-sum game; it is a market process, a joyful area of play in which everyone can win.
[ The Failure of Another Dystopian Film ]
Every good dystopian story needs a villain responsible for bringing about the sad state of affairs. Half the interest in the plot concerns how the despotic conditions developed and are maintained. This is precisely why almost all dystopian stories tend toward a libertarian bent, or at least a theme of human liberation from some coercive arrangement.
The Hunger Games is a great case in point. The premise is brilliant. The central state manufactures a high-stakes national tradition that does double duty: First, it extracts a penance from the people for their past rebellion, and second, it gives them an outlet for entertainment, sport and the creation of heroes and martyrs.
It's all about control, and control stems from a complex mixture of compulsion and propaganda. Both are necessary to any political system. The results grind down and corrupt the people and feed the parasitic power elite. The drama stems from the dawning of consciousness and the plot to throw off the oppressors.
In thinking through why the 2011 film In Time (written and directed by Andrew Niccol and starring Justin Timberlake and Cillian Murphy) ultimately fails, one has to focus on its utter failure to conjure up a compelling villain. And this is despite the wonderful premise on which the movie is based.
As a result of some genetic engineering, every person in society is slated to live one year after turning twenty-five, unless a person collects extra time by some means. Time is the currency in this world. You spend it to buy anything and everything, from a bus ride to a cup of coffee, and you earn it by doing work or being gifted extra time units by someone. It can also be gained through violence, such as a mugging. Once you have time added beyond your allotment, you stop aging.
This is a zero-sum world. The time taken from some is given to others. The geographic areas are strictly divided by how much time the residents possess. The range of castes goes from those who have only one year up to those who are effectively immortal — the richest of the rich.
This is an enormously intriguing premise. How would people behave if they could buy and sell time this way? Sadly, beyond showing how the poorest people tend to run places and otherwise rush around — leisure time is not for the time-impoverished — the cultural implications of this are never really explored in any depth.
And how would the economy actually work in this world? Would it be a hand-to-mouth existence, or could a genuinely complex division of labor actually emerge?
I'm not entirely sure of the answers here. But neither is the film, since none of these questions are even explored. All we see is people exchanging time back and forth through a kind of locked-arm embrace. It is creepy to watch, and we are shown this operation repeatedly, but there is no depth beyond this simple operation.
When the viewer finally gets to see the richest of the rich, the disappointment sets in. The top dog in this world turns out to be the leading corporate time banker. He lends time at interest (which is, of course, paid in time, too!) and has managed to monopolize the vast majority of time available in the world.
It is left to the hero and heroine to plot a massive redistribution scheme that causes the immortals to die and the poor to live much longer.
The intriguing premise, then, is completely wasted on what becomes a highly conventional political saga rooted in a socialist fantasy of a zero-sum world in which the capitalist elite thrive at everyone else's expense. There are a few police here and there (underpaid "timekeepers") who work for the upper class, but there is no state in the normal sense. The bad guy is a boyish-looking banker, and not a very scary one.
The whole film ends up being oddly boring, preachy and uncaptivating. Such is the fate of a dystopian novel that tries to make the money matrix the cause of all human woe. Adding to the disappointment, the premise is very good and could have been the foundation of a great novel or film by someone who actually understands economics. But now that the film is out, a second attempt to make something robust emerge from the basic fabric wouldn't go anywhere, sadly.
Another criticism I would make of this film applies to most dystopian stories, including The Hunger Games. In the city where the rich live, there is vast technological progress. The people live exceptionally well, the transportation systems are amazing, the cars are zippy and pretty and the buildings gleam.
If you think about it, the only kind of system that produces such cities is one rooted in freedom. People own their own stuff and trade with each other. New ideas are given flight through entrepreneurship. The rewards of economic success are conferred on the individuals who make it happen. A complex and extended division of labor, along with a complex structure of production in a stable legal environment, allows for maximum productivity of capital.
There is no other way to create vast prosperity and gleaming cities. Despotic systems can't do it, no matter how hard the dictator tries. Look at Romania under Ceausescu or North Korea today. These regimes would love to create gleaming cities. They can't. Only freedom does that. So it is hard to make sense of where all this prosperity even comes from in these dystopian movies.
By wonderful contrast, consider Ayn Rand's wonderful novella Anthem. Here we find the truth about society and economics. The despots hate technology, new ideas and individualism and, of course, they have made for themselves the disgusting dump that they fully deserve. Rand lived under Russian socialism and knew this truth that even George Orwell never really grasped.
[ Violating Rights in the Name of Property ]
You know that anti-piracy video you sometimes see at the beginning of movies? It explains how you wouldn't steal a handbag, so neither should you steal a song or movie by an illegal download. Well, it turns out that the guy who wrote the music for that short clip, Melchoir Rietveldt, says that his music is being used illegally. It had been licensed to play at one film festival, not replayed a million times in DVDs distributed all over the world. He is demanding millions in a settlement fee from BREIN, the anti-piracy organization that produced the thing.
Interesting isn't it? When you have hypocrisy that blatant, criminality this rampant, practices called piracy this pervasive — it reminds you of the interwar Prohibition years — you have to ask yourself if there is something fundamentally wrong with the law and the principles that underlie the law. Yes, people should keep to their contracts. But that's not what we are talking about here; this case is being treated not as a contract violation but a copyright violation, which is something different. We are dealing with a more fundamental issue. Is it really stealing to reproduce an idea, an image, or an idea? Is it really contrary to morality to copy an idea?
The verdict here is crucially important because ever more of the state's active intervention against liberty and real property is taking place in the name of intellectual property enforcement. The legislation SOPA could effectively end Internet freedom in the name of enforcing property rights.
If people who believe in liberty do not get this correct — and it is no longer possible to stand on the sidelines — we will find ourselves siding with the state, the courts, the thugs, and even the international enforcement arm of the military industrial complex, all in the name of property rights. And that is a very dangerous thing at this point in history, since IP enforcement has become one of the greatest threats to liberty that we face today.
Another case in point to consider here. This week a judge in Nevada, acting in a case brought by the luxury Chanel, ordered the takedown of some 600 websites that he alone deemed were guilty of trafficking in pirated products, that is, selling fake Chanel products. There was no extensive research done; the claim of the company was enough. The judge then issued an order that went beyond the parties to the lawsuit itself and ordered the complete de-indexing of such sites by GoDaddy, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo and Microsoft. Meanwhile, there is legislation before Congress that would permit similar takedowns of any website regarded as a violator of intellectual property.
Every time one of these cases comes along, I'm reminded of a scene from the streets of Washington, D.C. that I saw years ago. Some immigrant families were doing a brisk business in knockoff fashion goods and watches. A new convert to the cause of free enterprise, I stood there in admiration of their entrepreneurial skill. They weren't ripping anyone off. The goods looked very much like the real thing but with a few differences, and the consumer was not defrauded in any way. All buyers knew exactly what they were getting, and they were also aware that they were getting their goods at a tiny fraction of the price they would pay for the real thing at the department store.
I recall thinking: isn't the market grand!
A few days later, The Washington Post carried a story about how those very vendors were arrested for trafficking in fakes and violating trademarks. A judge issued the order and their property was confiscated. And so it was. The bustling businesses were now shut down by the police. Consumers and producers were thereby denied a chance to trade peacefully to their mutual benefit. And this was all because some third parties complained, invoking a government regulation.
But wait a minute? If you own a trademark, isn't it stealing for someone else to come along and make your product, hocking it as a great knockoff but selling it at a fraction of the price? If so, can the judge's order be seen as the enforcement of property rights, and isn't property rights enforcement exactly what we free enterprisers are supposed to favor?
Let us grant that trademark — which is what is being enforced here — is the most intuitively plausible of all forms of intellectual property protection. Trademark concerns a federal registration of a name or logo, one that forbids competition from using those protected things in commerce. I don't think that is compatible with free enterprise, but much less defensible forms of IP are copyright and patent. They both stand the competitive principles of free enterprise on their heads, and illustrate just how contrary to free markets IP really is.
The idea of competition is that you are free to emulate the success of others, improve on the product or process involved in making or marketing it, and chip away at the market share held by another producer. Because of this freedom, every producer must constantly innovate and cut costs in service of the consumer, and there is constant change taking place among the firms that seek to profit from enterprise.
With patent protection, however, a single company owns a government-protected monopoly on a product or process, and can thereby exclude all competition. This is a variation of the old "infant industry" fallacy for protectionist policies. One company is effectively sheltered by law for a period of time from the demands of competitive commerce. It doesn't really matter if another firm stumbled on an idea independently. The patent forbids anyone from becoming a competitor to the privileged firm.
With copyright, everyone in society is bound for a very long period of time from producing any words or making any image that would seem to reflect a learning process used by a copyright holder as an example. We have a similar granting of monopoly privilege here but instead of having to seek out protection, it is granted automatically. This might seem to be a benefit to the creator, artist, composer, or author, but the reality is that these people nearly always sign away their rights to the production company, the publisher, the filmmaker or whatever, and this most often occurs for the lifetime of the copyright. Even the creator, then, must beg or pay in order to use his or her own material. The law has been expanded and internationalized so that the monopoly lasts seventy years after the death of the person who wrote the song, drew the picture, or wrote the book.
If you look at the origins of these two institutions, we can see the essence of what is going on. Copyright originated as a government restriction on printing during England's religious wars. As it developed, it had nothing to do with individual rights and everything to do with protecting dominant publishing firms against competition. It is the same with patents, which grew out of the mercantilist experience of Europe in which the prince would grant one producer rights against all competitors. Both are designed to slow down innovation and drag out the process of economic development with government restrictions. For this reason, the idea that IP somehow creates an incentive to innovate is completely wrong; in fact, the reality is precisely the opposite.
The advent of the liberalism of the 18th century gradually wiped out most of these antique institutions and replaced them with competitive capitalism. But in the world of ideas, these protections remained and became worse, especially in the latter part of the 20th century. They are remnants of a precapitalist age.
In the digital age, when ideas can be multiplied by billions of times in a matter of seconds, the notion of IP protection becomes ridiculously outmoded. And it is for that very reason that enforcement is being stepped up and now threatens free speech and the freedom to innovate. Ultimately, a consistent enforcement of IP would shut down free enterprise as we know it.
This is not an easy subject and it does take some serious thinking to sort out all of the issues. But here is one clue about where people who love freedom should come down on the question. When the state is totally dedicated to using its enforcement arm to harm so many businesses and so many free associations, and it does it in the name of private property, you have to wonder if something has gone terribly wrong. The state is the least trustworthy institution when it comes to defending our freedoms; there is no reason to suppose that this gang of thieves has been converted to the cause of real property rights just because that is what it claims to be defending.
|
A Beautiful Anarchy
|
Jeffrey Tucker
|
[
"nonfiction"
] |
[
"politics",
"economics"
] |
The Lorax: An Allegory on IP
|
Anyone who read Dr. Seuss's The Lorax as a kid might dread the movie version. No one really needs another moralizing, hectoring lecture from environmentalists on the need to save the trees from extinction, especially since that once-fashionable cause seems ridiculously overwrought today. There is no shortage of trees and this is due not to nationalization so much as the privatization and cultivation of forest land.
And yet, even so, the movie is stunning and beautiful in every way, with a message that taps into something important, something with economic and political relevance for us today. In fact, the movie improves on the book with the important addition of "Thneed-Ville," a community of people who live in a completely artificial world lorded over by a mayor who also owns the monopoly on oxygen.
This complicates the relatively simple narrative of the book, which offers a story of a depleted environment that doesn't actually make much sense. The original posits an entrepreneur who discovers that he can make a "Thneed" — a kind of all-purpose cloth — out of the tufts of the "Truffula Tree," and that this product is highly marketable.
Now, in real life, any capitalist in this setting would know exactly what to do: immediately get to work planting and cultivating more Truffula trees. This is essential capital that makes the business possible and sustainable through time. You want more rather than less capital. An egg producer doesn't kill his chickens; he breeds more. But in the book (and the movie), the capitalist does the opposite. He cuts down all the trees and, surprise, his business goes bust.
The book ends with the aging capitalist regretting his life and passing on the last Truffula seed to the next generation. The end. However, the movie introduces us to the town that is founded after this depletion occurs. It is shielded off from the poisoned and depleted world outside, and oxygen is pumped in by the mayor who holds the monopoly on air and builds Lenin-like statues to himself. The people eventually rise up when they discover that "air is free" and thereby overthrow the despot, chopping off the statue's head.
It was this line about how air is free that clued me in to the movie's possible subtext. You only need to add one metaphor to see how this movie can be the most important and relevant political-economic drama of the season.
The metaphorical substitution is this: The Trees are Ideas.
Now, the action really begins. You can even see that the dazzling tufts of the trees look like how we might imagine that an idea looks. It is puffy, colorful, silky, and has the scent of "butterfly milk." And of course the tufts are the essential capital that makes the business possible. The Thneed from which the tufts/ideas are made is useful for anything from wearing as a hat to functioning as a hammock. Its sheer flexibility adds to the allegorical flavor.
Of course the trees are renewable just like ideas. You can draw from them but you dare not forcibly prevent access to them, much less kill them. And yet every time the axe slices through the trunk, the ideas are rendered nonrenewable. The axes represent the state's laws that introduce artificial scarcity into the non-scarce realm of ideas. Do this enough — and private businesses use the government's laws to do this all the time these days — and you kill what gave rise to the business in the first place.
And in this case, the cooperation of the capitalists makes total sense. When a business uses "intellectual property" law to forcibly monopolize an idea — Apple's touch screen, big pharma's medicine formulas, a tune recorded by an industry mogul, a story printed by a big publisher — it is killing that idea for others to learn from and use. The idea is made nonrenewable for a period of time dictated by the government. This introduces a propensity toward economic stagnation and decline. It might seem to make sense in the short run but in the long run, everyone suffers.
This is exactly what we see in the real world. Industries that are not cutting down the trees of ideas are flourishing. Fashion is innovative and dynamic. The cooking world shares recipes and techniques. The open-source software movement is innovating every day. In contrast, industries where IP is dominant have a tendency toward monopolization and stagnation: pharmaceuticals, proprietary software, old-line publishers, for example. It is especially interesting to remember that one of the most controversial and hated monopolies of our time happens to be Monsanto's patents on seeds.
In the movie, the results are put on display in the most compelling way. The town of Thneed-Ville is stagnant. Nothing is growing, nothing is changing, nothing is truly alive. It is frozen and fixed, cartelized by a single mogul who provides everyone that essential thing: air. It is also a police state with inescapable surveillance. Tellingly, there is total unity between the owner of air and the state. It is the ultimate corporate state, and it has bamboozled everyone into thinking that this is just the way the world is supposed to work. They know of no better way.
This situation changes when a young boy discovers the truth about what happened to ideas. He finds out that they were once plentiful and provided all the life and energy that society needs to thrive and grow. He is given a single seed to a Truffula tree — and it represents the hope that the world of ideas could again come to exist and inspire the recreation of a thriving, dynamic, progressive, growing society.
So of course the mayor has to steal the seed that represents hope for ideas again. A massive chase ensues, and, in the course of it, the boy breaks down the wall between Thneed-Ville and the darkness outside. It is enough for people to discover that air is not scarce but rather belongs to everyone. They begin to turn on the mayor and sing a great song and dance: a dance in complete defiance.
As in real life, once the ruler has lost the confidence of his subjects, his rule is over. The seed is planted right in the middle of town, and the air monopoly is ended. Eventually the beauty and life of the world is restored.
There are wonderful lessons to this movie if rendered in this metaphorical way. Look at what we are doing to ourselves with the imposition and enforcement of the gigantic thicket of "intellectual property" that is taking over the world. It is like a huge thicket of thorns, and we can hardly move without getting stuck and stabbed. It is transforming the nature of the market, which needs ideas as we need oxygen, from a world of free exploration into one with billions of invisible cages. This is slowing down progress, killing creativity, monopolizing production in the hands of the rich and powerful, and even threatening the digital age itself.
The lesson is summed up in the incredibly inspiring anthem at the end:
We say let it grow
Let it grow
Let it grow
You can't reap what you don't sow
It's just one tiny seed
But it's all we really need
It's time to banish all your greed
Imagine Thneedville flowered and treed
Let this be our solemn creed
We say let it grow
|
A Beautiful Anarchy
|
Jeffrey Tucker
|
[
"nonfiction"
] |
[
"politics",
"economics"
] |
Market Failure: The Case of Copyright
|
How gigantically humongous and intrusive is the federal government? A traditional measure is to look at the pages of regulations in the Federal Register, which is, by now, probably the world's largest book collection. The problem with this approach is that it takes no account of how a single bad regulation can have monstrously deleterious effects.
Copyright regulation is a good example of this. There was no universal enforcement until the very late part of the 19th century, and terms were mostly short in the early days of this regulation. In the course of the 20th century, regulations became ever more tight and the copyright terms ever longer, so much so that today, the words you sign away to a conventional publisher are theirs to keep for your lifetime plus seventy years!
One standard argument for doing this is that noncopyrighted works will not be efficiently exploited. You have to assign ownership or else the resource will vanish into the ether. No one will care about it, and civilization will lose extremely valuable literary works. Our market for ideas will be impoverished.
Now, to me, this argument seems obviously false, but that's probably because of my own experience in publishing. I've seen it happen — so many times that it is predictable — that once a work has fallen out of print but is still under some kind of protection, it is mostly neglected by the heirs. No one who "owns" the work has the incentive to bring it to light, while those who care about it fear the law or don't want to pay some arbitrary price set by the owners.
Meanwhile, when a work is in the public domain, there are dozens of people bidding to get it into print. This was true all throughout history, actually. The reason American school kids in the 19th century read British literature is that it was not regulated in the U.S., and therefore, it could be sold very cheaply and distributed very widely. It is true today: Whether music or books, the material in the commons is far more in demand than that which is regulated. And the demand leads to the supply.
In other words, the opposite of the conventional exploitation theory is correct. The copyrighted works drop from memory, while the public domain works last and last. But of course, this observation draws from my deep involvement in the industry, and we can't expect academic scribblers to understand anything about how the world actually works in real life.
For years, I've suspected that there was a serious problem developing due to government regulations. There is a vast gap into which millions of books have fallen. They can be reprinted or republished only at high risk and expense. Many of these books have uncertain copyright status or the "owners" are asking too high a price, can't be found or are orphaned. The costs are too high. I've had experiences with probably a hundred or so titles in this class, and I've always assumed that thousands or millions more fall into this category.
There was a brief moment in the early days of Google when the company naively imagined that it could do the right thing and make all of this literature available for instant viewing and printing. They had the technology to rescue it all and bring it to the whole world. Publishers, backed by regulations that favor them, went bonkers. Google tried a profit-sharing agreement. Didn't work. Finally, Google bailed and cooperated with the prevailing system.
In some ways, a whole century of ideas is being forced under a rock by government in league with large publishers. And it is getting worse by the day. Publishers are going through their back catalogs and threatening anyone who puts even a scrap online. Not that they plan new editions; they are just claiming what they think of as their assets.
The literature of 1850 is more available than the literature of 1970. How preposterous is that? This is all a direct result of unprecedented, outrageous regulations that have effectively put a censorship veil over history's most productive period of literary creation. This entire world is trapped in libraries that no one visits, or is being put on remainder racks so that libraries can create more space for coffee bars.
There is a more general lesson that pertains to all government regulations. Even one line can be impossibly damaging to industry and to social advancement. It is extremely difficult to quantify the losses. This is just one case, but it is an important one because it deals with the most important thing any civilization possesses: its treasury of ideas. That treasury has been thrown to the bottom of the sea. Someday, explorers will discover it and wonder how any society could have let this happen even though it had the means to do otherwise.
[ ISPs Becoming Enforcers for the State ]
Remember that battle over SOPA, in which the world's largest websites beat back a congressional threat that would have changed the Internet forever? It was pretty obvious within a day after this Pyrrhic victory that the existing laws in place were enough to give the government the power to wreck the digital world. But how would it happen? How would government end digital freedom?
Well, the excuse is obvious. It is "intellectual property." This phrase serves the same purpose for would-be censors that "terrorism" does for warmongers. It is a way to ramp up government control while kicking sand in the faces of those who would oppose such control. Are you for terrorism? Are you for theft?
It's rather easy to detect normal theft. One day, I have a planter on my porch. The next day, the planter is on your porch, and it got there without my permission. Or one day, I'm driving my car. The next day, you are driving my car because you took it from me in the night. This is the way normal theft occurs. You can tell when it has happened. And the means of redress are obvious.
Now imagine a different scenario. One day, the paragraph above appears on the website for Laissez Faire Books. The next day, it appears on your Facebook page or blog. But it is not thereby removed from lfb.org. Instead, it is copied. A second instance of the paragraph has been created, taking nothing from me. My paragraph still exists. And let's say this happens 10 billion times in the course of a few minutes, as can happen in the digital world.
Is this a case of mass looting, or is it a mass compliment to me?
Copyright law sees this as theft. But how can that be? The whole merit of the digital world rests on the remarkable scalability of everything digitized. That's the basis of the economy of the Internet. Its capacity for inspiring and achieving infinite emulation and sharing is unparalleled in history. It's what makes the Internet different from parchment, vinyl or television. Remove that, and you gut the unique energy of the medium.
Intellectual property law became universal only about 120 years ago. It was gradually expanded over the course of the century, invading the digital realm in the 1980s and expanding its coverage ever since. How do you make copies illegal in a medium that specializes in its capacity for sharing, multiplying, linking and community formation? You need totalitarian control.
But how is the government going to do it? Well, consider how the government went about ramping up the tax state during the 1940s. Instead of just taxing people directly, it leaned on private businesses to do it, via the "withholding tax." Business was forced to become the tax collector for the state. And it was the same with health care. Instead of just mandating universal coverage, it leaned on private business to do the government's bidding. Business became the health care provider through mandate.
The same is now happening with the enforcement of intellectual property on the Web. All the latest reports say that ISPs (Internet service providers) have struck a deal with old-line media companies to start policing the way users of the Internet surf, upload, download, and link.
There will be several warnings, and then, presumably, after some point, access will be cut off. They will do this based on the IP address of the user. In other words, ISPs will be doing the dirty work for the state. Probably, they struck the deal just because 1) the laws are already in place, and 2) they are probably trying to avoid a worse fate.
To be sure, some of this is already going on. If you use WordPress or Blogger for blogging, you probably already know this. Open and aggressive violators are presented with notices, whether the violation took place knowingly or not. For several years, YouTube has been blanking out the audio on home videos if the music is under copyright. And innumerable upload sites blast away anything that is under question, presuming guilt before it is proven.
Even an open Creative Commons announcement that grants permission to copy is not always enough. The presumption is that every duplication is a crime. Every upload is suspect, and every download is, too.
And contrary to what people claim, it is not always easy to tell the difference between protected property and common property. Copyright law is notoriously difficult to figure out. Sometimes the answer is obvious, as with material published before 1922. But there is this huge land of publication between that time and 1963 in which renewals are sometimes fuzzy, especially when multiple authors are involved.
Patent is an even worse case. Right now, everyone is suing everyone else for whatever. It has become a wicked game in which the competition takes place not in the arena of consumer service, but in the courts via various forms of trolling and legal blackmail.
In the end, all these disputes are won by the companies with the deepest pockets. I've seen copyright disputes that are settled on this basis alone, regardless of the merits of the case. In the end, it is too expensive for the little guys to defend themselves against large corporate interests, so the little guys invariably relent to avoid super-costly litigation.
This is the way it will be in the future. The big boys will run the show, doing for the state what the state is unable to do for itself, and they will do it on behalf of big corporate interests. This does terrible things to the competitive culture. It does even worse things to the culture of community sharing that has created a vast world of miracles and marvels available to the whole of humanity. It is a case of man's cruelty to man, serving no purpose except the material interests of large corporations that are determined to slow the path of progress for humanity.
However, it is not all dark. Every legal imposition creates incentives for the geeks of the world to find the workaround. There will always be a way. Just as the speakeasies remained open in the 1920s, there will always be zones of freedom in the digital world. And I have no doubt that, in the end, the freedom of information will win this. The tragedy is that there will be many speed bumps along the way to victory.
[ Theory Comes to Life ]
The final general session of the Oxford Club's Investment University — the fourteenth annual and held in San Diego this year — just wrapped up, and a series of afternoon sessions now follow. It is the kind of event that only a tiny percentage of the population — one might say that this is the 0.01% — will ever attend, and that's too bad in some way. That's because the educational opportunity is absolutely extraordinary.
Many people here have slogged through every manner of graduate school for theoretical, technical, and business training. But again and again, I heard the same claim from people: four days here is vastly more valuable than all the classroom education offered anywhere.
I can see why so many would say this. The intellectual level was very high, though the focus is not theory but praxis. This is a conference of practitioners, people who experience and engage the way the world works first hand and with their own property, all with an eye to finding and building value.
Talk to any attendee (some of the smartest people I've ever met), any speaker (some of the most impressive minds I've ever heard lecture), and you will hear dazzling stories of the rise and fall and rise of great businesses in every land and in every sector, the stuff and the services that define the past, present, and future. The collective knowledge here is awesome to contemplate.
The roster of speakers is mind blowing. These are people with proven records as fund managers, stock analysts, venture capitalists, traders, builders, intellectuals with money on the line, and daring entrepreneurs of all sorts. Yes, many people had something to sell; that is a given, and that is also a test of credibility as well. Unlike a lecture in the college classroom, in which the supposed expert may not have done anything in life but read and repeat, every speaker here was grounded in the real-world accountability that only the commercial marketplace can provide.
The event isn't just about making money, though that is real (and refreshing) enough. It is about charting the course of life itself — and despite the name of the event, the scope of the event really is about the whole of life. No matter the sector or strategy being discussed, the core always ends up dealing with the most fascinating intersection between economics, finance, psychology, sociology, technology, and politics.
Politically, one could observe a libertarian bent here, mostly born of the general and unassailable observation that markets create wealth whereas politics does not. But precious little time is used preaching about how the way the world should work. The focus here is entirely on how the world does work and finding opportunities in a world that still has plenty left. These days, this task absolutely requires an open, cosmopolitan, and global outlook.
In some way, the task of investment today is necessarily subversive. Government in the developed world targets wealth for confiscation or destruction. The culture is disinclined to celebrate financial success. The Fed has wrecked the ability to make any money from saving the old-fashioned way. If everyone did what the government and the culture wanted people to do, the result would be a mass fleecing. The only way to avoid this is to think unconventionally.
Therefore, the smart money has to chase the smart ideas around all corners of the globe. It is in emerging markets and digital technologies where the outlook for prosperity really brightens. Being at this event is the equivalent of getting a tour through the whole world sector by sector, and hearing about strategies for dealing with it.
There was a huge array of speakers, each with an intimate knowledge of some technology, the process it requires, the history and present on the companies and ideas that make it work, the barriers that it confronts going forward, its marketability and meaning in the course of human events. No one person could ever absorb every bit of expertise on display here over four days.
My own topic was inevitable. I spoke on the economically unique aspects of the digital age, and the struggle to commodify and commercialize goods and services in a world of infinite reproducibility. I spoke about the various ways in which successful companies have conquered this terrain through innovative code work, marketing, and relentless adaptation to change, even without taking recourse to forced monopolization tactics.
Of course this touches on the subject of intellectual property, and there were really two views here. The first is the conventional venture capitalist view that a company worth owning needs an impenetrable IP portfolio to protect itself against competitive imitation.
A second perspective is exactly the opposite. An innovative and growing company should never seek out patent protection because that tends to tie a firm to a particular process and technology that may or may not be the best way going forward. Patents distort development. Statis is a greater threat than competition. Any startup banking on its patent war chest is going to be outgunned. Obviously, I found the latter point of view most compelling.
The Oxford Club had Mark Skousen serve as the master of ceremonies for this event, and his books were big sellers at the Laissez Faire book table. Most of his work deals with the intersection between economics and investment, but the biggest selling of his books here is actually his history of economic thought — a book which has become the most used text on the topic.
Professor Skousen is also the entrepreneur behind FreedomFest, a July event in Las Vegas that brings together several thousand libertarian-minded thinkers to present research, debate ideas, and generally have a rip-roaring great time. I've attended two years in a row and each time I've found the whole event to be enormously refreshing. The tone and approach here emphasizes a broad and diverse exchange of ideas. It is guaranteed that you will hear things you disagree with; it is also a guarantee that you will come away from the event smarter and more intellectually inspired than you came.
It was the same with Investment University. Laissez Faire Books did a wonderfully brisk business in every kind of book, from technical works on futures trading to classic works on history and economics. This is a very intellectually curious and well-read group, with a great interest in ideas — ideas grounded in the real experience of real human beings.
|
A Beautiful Anarchy
|
Jeffrey Tucker
|
[
"nonfiction"
] |
[
"politics",
"economics"
] |
The Agents of Liberation
|
[ The Genius of the Price System ]
The other day, a local hamburger joint was advertising a ninety-nine cent hamburger, and I took the offer. It was great. I wondered: how can they make money this way? A few days later, my head still swimming with memories of that great experience, I went back. This time, I dug in a bit deeper and upgraded the order, including fries and a drink, and this time shelling out for my passenger too. The total bill came to $16. Wow. That's how they make money!
This was an interesting case of how a company uses a loss leader to draw you in and then makes up the difference on the upgrade. Of course, I could have stuck with the low-priced burger, but I did not. I behaved exactly as the burger joint hoped I would. This is dazzling in so many ways. They know me better than I know myself. And good for them.
To be sure, some cynical people would regard this as a rip-off. I don't see it this way. I didn't have to return to the drive-through window, didn't have to upgrade my preferences, didn't have to buy for the person next to me, didn't have to order fries and a drink. These were all decisions that I made on my own. Nor do I regret them: The food was better than ever. I'm free to refuse to go back, but I will go back.
A wise man once told me that in this life, you can obey balance sheets or bullies. In the end, those are the only two paths. He was drawing attention to an unavoidable reality in a world of scarcity. All scarce things must be allocated among competing ends. This can be done top down by people in control, or it can be accomplished bottom up with the signaling system that emerges from voluntary exchange. The two approaches don't mix well.
Of course, prices do not exist apart from human will. They can be played with, but not finally controlled, by producers in the market. There are vast surprises along the way. It's not the case that only the rich thrive in this environment. Who would have thought that the sci-fi machine in old movies that provides instant answers to all questions would eventually be provided for free by one of the world's biggest companies? I'm speaking here of Google, but the same good could be said of the many alternative search engines out there.
Who would have thought that the world's largest communication networks — email and social networking — would be free also, funded mostly by selling ad space and upgraded products? In the same way, most of the world's most useful software is free, as is the cloud-based word processing system I'm using to type this article. So too for the music that filled my living room for twelve straight hours yesterday, all selections from the 16th and 17th centuries, all provided to me for free. Amazing.
The price system is a constantly changing kaleidoscope that beautifully merges our subjective imaginations with the gritty realities of the physical world. It is the combination of mind and matter that yields an output — a simple number — that never lies. It gives us that glorious balance sheet that tells you whether you are doing sustainable or unsustainable things. No institution can compete with its efficiency, much less displace its indispensable utility in this world.
I once heard of a man's mother who had an obsession with gas prices. Everywhere she would go, she would look at the price signs and announce to one and all what they said. "Hmmm, they are charging $3.15." "There's one charging $3.45." "That place is charging $3.10." "They have gas for $3.50." So it would go for the entire trip. She had no opinion on any of these prices; she just found it interesting to observe and compare. And perhaps her observations reflected a kind of confusion about how the same thing offered in different places could be priced in such different ways.
It is, indeed, intriguing. There are two things we can know for sure. First, the producer — the retailer, in this case — would like to charge more for a gallon of gas, even a million dollars. Second, the consumer would like to pay less for a gallon of gas, even zero dollars. The final price represents a point of agreement. It is arrived at even though the parties to the exchange did not speak in advance; a single number embeds billions of bits of data about human values, resource availability and alternative uses of money and resources.
And it all happens without a central planner — or even so much as a central board of experts — telling us what the prices should be. This is genius at work.
Who could have even a year ago predicted that physical books would sometimes sell for less than digital books of the same title? This defies every expectation. The physical good is a real thing that you can hold and costs money to make (so much for the labor theory of value). The digital goods need only be made once and then can be sold billions of times. So what is the trick? It comes down to consumer demand. We really like e-books — their convenience and speed of delivery — and are willing to pay for them.
The price system also decides which companies are profitable and which are not. It has nothing to do with the size of the company. If you take in less than you spend, you will eventually go belly up. If you take in more than you spend, you will grow. The vast global network of price formation ultimately reduces to this simple calculation that determines how all the world's resources are used. Every company faces the same constraint. So whether or not these pricing decisions are rational has much to do with the fate of the world.
The point is that it is impossible to predict these things. No matter how smart the team of experts, how powerful and prestigious the price setters behind the curtain, there will always be surprises out there. That's because no one can fully predict the values manufactured by the human mind, nor know enough about the world to foresee every possible alternative use of a resource that goes into the production process. When economists say that something should be "left to the market," they are really saying that people should be left to work all this out for themselves. This is the only way of dealing with all the uncertainties of this world.
These are some of the insights about the price system that can be drawn from the works of Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek. They understood that there is no substitute for the price system. And this is why it is also so enormously dangerous for any society to give power to a central bank to manipulate the price system from the top down. Its decisions about the money supply can't help but be irrational and ultimately destructive to economies and the realization of the common good.
The same could be said of a range of state institutions that distort prices, such as wage floors and ceilings, subsidies and penalties for particular companies, and taxes and regulations that extract resources and profoundly affect the profit-and-loss calculation. They all interfere with the fluid functioning of the price system. They all waste resources. They all interfere with the efficiency of the market.
More and more, people of the developed world are seeing the balance sheet replaced by the bully. This is harming both our prosperity and our personal liberty to make decisions for ourselves. If the bully can tell the fast-food joint what its prices ought to be, the same bully can tell me what I can and cannot eat, what and where I can and cannot drive and where I can and cannot work and under what terms.
The price system, premised on the idea of private property and the freedom to choose, is the best friend liberty and prosperity ever had. The next time someone complains about it, ask that person what he would prefer to take its place.
[ The Non-crime of Knowing ]
Let's say that Rajat Gupta, former director at Goldman Sachs on trial for insider trading, is tossed in the slammer for passing on information four years ago. Let's say that he really did receive — and then let slip — a tip that Goldman would soon be getting a nice cash infusion from Berkshire Hathaway, and that information was used by others to generate a nice profit.
Where exactly is the justice in locking the guy up? I see none. What precisely are investors going to get out of this? Absolutely nothing. What will it deter? Nothing again, not for an industry that rewards intelligence above all else.
If Rajat languishes in jail like Martha Stewart and so many others before him, the markets will miss his intelligence, taxpayers will be on the hook for providing for him for years, and he will be denied his basic human right to know and speak.
No victims of his actions will ever be compensated. And that raises an interesting point: Even if the worst is true, there were no victims, only winners. The people who sold the stock that day would have sold in any case. The people who bought would have bought in any case.
Whether he is technically "guilty" of passing on information or not, no one was robbed. No one was harmed. His only crime was knowing more than he should and acting on it, in a business that rewards people for good judgment based on specialized knowledge.
At worst, Gupta is guilty of breaking a confidence related to his employment, which should be a matter dealt with by the firm itself. The government accomplishes nothing here except to persecute some of the world's smartest people, letting them know who is in charge.
What's more, the whole basis for insider trading regulation is preposterous, especially in the digital age, and more obviously so by the day.
In regular life, if you want to keep a secret, there is really only one way: Tell no one. Most people figure this out in about the third grade. The more valuable the information you have, the more likely it is to make the rounds. And in so doing, the information changes and mutates and comes out the end in strange ways that are never entirely trustworthy.
The whole business of markets is to generate information. Information is the only defense we have against that intractable foe, the uncertainty of the future. There are no guarantees. It's not just that you can't know for sure what is true and what is not; even if you do know what is true, you can't know for sure what the implications of that information are for the future price.
The public availability of information is the "socialist" side of the "capitalist" coin. Information that the market generates is ubiquitous, multipliable and incredibly transportable. But information is never distributed evenly throughout society, nor acted upon with equal acumen.
Do traders seek and obtain "inside information?" Absolutely. There's no stopping it. The war on insider trading is going to be as successful as other government wars on tobacco, pot, illiteracy, obesity and terrorism. In each case, the only obvious result is that the government has more power and we have less liberty.
People who make trading their lives process hundreds of thousands of data bits every day. They pass on just as many or more. Research of trading habits reveals that the more successful the trader, the more information he or she processes coming and going.
Notice that we've never seen the government prosecute people for trading on inside information and losing. That's because it never comes to the attention of the regulators. But then it's perverse to punish only profitable actions.
Making secrets (material nonpublic information) illegal creates a government-owned and operated sword of Damocles that the regulators hold over everyone on Wall Street and in the industry. It is the constant reminder of who is in charge.
As an active trader on Wall Street hunting for any and all nonuniversal information, you'll find at any point the SEC can requisition all your phone records, emails, text messages and more and claim that your winning trades were fundamentally unjust. You then go to jail.
As scholars of the Austrian School have long pointed out, there is no clear line between what is and what isn't insider information. And here is the thing. The whole business of profitable trading comes down to acting on information that is not universally known or acted upon by others.
That's their job. To make successful insider trading illegal in security markets is like punishing beauty in the fashion world or good meals in the restaurant industry. You end up only establishing a basis for arbitrary enforcement.
Back when the movie Wall Street was made, the big attention was focused on mergers and acquisitions. Today, it is all about earnings reports. Starting the day before they appear, people trading markets are bombarded by speculations, promises, bluffs and oceans of rumors.
What is reliable and what is not? This is the job of the entrepreneurial trader. Regulators are looking at only notably successful trades, finding the information revealed just before, and then naming the parties as criminals. In the most recent cases, the SEC was targeting even excellent research that so happened to be correct.
As Felix Salmon writes in Reuters, "The markets should be a game of people using independently obtained information and analysis to make their own determinations about what various securities are worth — that's the best way to maximize the amount of information reflected in the price of those securities."
What insider trading regulation neglects is that no information in the world guarantees a profitable result. Salmon cites the case of the Facebook IPO. The stock was deliberately priced low to create an upward swing that turned out not to happen. As Salmon says, "Pricing securities, especially stocks, is always more of an art than a science."
All the experts were wrong about Facebook, at least as far as the public knows. Some people were right this time, and those same people will be wrong next time. No one individual is ever smarter than the markets over the long term. This is why traders are voracious for information from any and every source. They are constantly correcting and improving their knowledge. This is the business of markets.
I would go further than Salmon and agree with Murray Rothbard that there is no basis for the government to be involved here at any level. It's up to the firms themselves to police what information is revealed and in what time frame. Putting the responsibility on them will encourage a greater degree of openness and less reliance on nondisclosure contracts that are untenable in any case.
As for the regulations themselves, to imagine a world in which all trades take place based on universal, equally known information is to posit a world of robots, not human beings scrambling for knowledge and making speculative judgments about an uncertain future. To punish a robot that has come to life and made a good bet is to kill the very thing that makes markets both human and wonderful.
[ The Economy Is Us: A Tribute to John Papola ]
For many people around the world, the first they had ever heard of the great economist Friedrich A. Hayek came from a rap video. That's right. Some 3.4 million people have watched "Fear the Boom and Bust" since its release two years ago. It has been shown in classrooms and featured in countless stories on economics.
This video did more than just educate people on the alternative to Keynesian-style macroeconomic policy of which only a small number had been previously aware. It shocked free-market advocates out of their stupor and made them realize they had to do more than write thick treatises that sit on library shelves to get their message out.
This video made economics interesting and dramatic. It took an intellectual battle that had been going on behind the scenes for nearly 100 years and put it into contemporary imagery. The lyrics were not only clever and intelligent; they were accurate as regards the theories of Hayek and Keynes.
Then there was a follow-up last year: "Fight of the Century." It already has 1.7 million views, and many people think it is even better than the first one (both videos have their strengths, in my view). Then there have been hundreds of media appearances, thousands of stories and blogs, spinoffs and public debates. Several books have come out on the topic.
You can see here the way ideas work to change the ideological landscape. It is now widely understood that there is another side to the issue — a point few understood in the days of FDR's "fireside chats" or Walter Cronkite's nightly instructions on what Washington wanted us to think.
Today, not even mainstream journalists can write about the topic of countercyclical policy and economic stabilization without acknowledging another side to the debate. And this new awareness is leading people to truth that has otherwise been suppressed.
Hayek himself would have been overjoyed. He wrote that liberty is doomed unless we "can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue, and its implementation a task that challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds." (Emphasis mine.)
The minds behind the videos: economics professor Russell Roberts (who has specialized in finding new ways, such as novels and podcasts, to get the word out) and media genius John Papola. I'm focusing on Papola here because he gets the least attention of this duo, and it has been my pleasure to get to know him personally and interview him on several occasions.
Of course, I'm pleased as can be than John wrote the long and thoughtful introduction to Laissez Faire Books' new edition of Hayek's outstanding compilation, A Tiger by the Tail. It is available in a fabulous softcover edition or e-book. Or you can get both for free by joining the Laissez Faire Club, which provides an unrelenting stream of digital bling.
John's background is in media, having done outstanding work for Spike TV, Nickelodeon, and MTV. Then in 2006, he watched the PBS documentary Commanding Heights. He caught the economics bug. He realized that the science of economics holds the secret to the rise and decline of societies, the answer to so many of our cultural problems, the crucible that determines whether we thrive or die as a people.
He could have stopped there, but — as he explains in this introduction — he continued his studies and found his way toward a truth that goes beyond the choices we are presented in current political debates. He realized that contrary to conventional wisdom, neither Reagan nor Thatcher represented some kind of free-market ideal. There are more foundational issues in play than any political party represents.
He set out on a gigantic, and even obsessive, reading plan that took him through the works of the Austrian School economists from a century ago to the present. It was a heady intellectual journey that ended up causing a dramatic vocational change in his life. He decided to use his skills and talents to advancing the cause. He would do it not by merely propounding doctrine, but through civil, creative and imaginative means, just as Hayek has suggested. He was pushing ideas that were otherwise ignored.
The most conspicuous results of his intellectual journey are the two rap videos. He worked with Roberts to create fabulous rhyming couplets and memorable phrases that have changed the way free-market advocates talk about the issues. If you spend some time with him, you can observe his talent for this at work. I swear that he can make a great rhyme out of anything. It is dazzling just to hear him think out loud.
Here are two of the most famous passages from the second video, put into the mouth of Hayek:
The economy's not a car, there's no engine to stall,
No expert can fix it, there's no "it" at all.
The economy's us, we don't need a mechanic,
Put away the wrenches, the economy's organic.
And:
[ We need stable rules and real market prices ]
So prosperity emerges and cuts short the crisis.
[ Give us a chance so we can discover ]
The most valuable ways to serve one another.
Just reading those last two lines absolutely warms my heart. This is the language of genuine liberalism. This is the great truth of the market that has been so long suppressed. The second video in particular makes heavy use of the notion that we face a choice between a society organized top down or bottom up. That's it exactly, a fantastic summary of what liberal minds have been saying for centuries, finally given to us in an easy-to-understand image.
What his introduction to A Tiger by the Tail reveals is that John Papola is not just a media genius. He is also a first-class intellectual. He discusses the history of thought here, along with the misuse of economic metaphors, capital theory, banking institutions, the role of prices and entrepreneurship, interest rates and the role of money. He places special emphasis on the issue of "Say's Law," which Keynes claimed to have refuted, but which still stands as the theoretical bulwark of the market's capacity for self-management.
His essay, which stretches to 5,000 words, is a veritable primer on Hayek and the Austrian School. Of course, he ends with a few rhyming couplets. What a performance! As Hayek would observe, this is the way to use ingenuity and imagination to make economics and liberty living intellectual issues.
[ There's No Such Thing as Too Much Liberty ]
Some great books are the product of a lifetime of research, reflection, and discipline. Others are written during a moment of passionate discovery, with prose that shines forth like the sun when new understanding first brings the world into focus.
The Market for Liberty is that second type of classic. Written by Morris and Linda Tannehill after intensive study of the writings of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, it has the pace, energy, and rigor you would expect from an evening's discussion with these two giants.
More than that, the authors put pen to paper at precisely the right time in their intellectual development, that period of rhapsodic freshness when a great truth had been revealed and one has to share it with the world. Clearly, the authors fell in love with liberty and the free market, and they wrote an engaging, book-length paean to these ideas.
This book is radical in the true sense of that term: it gets to the root of the problem of government and rethinks the whole organization of society. Starting with the idea of the individual and his rights, the Tannehills work their way through the market, expose government as the enemy of mankind, and then — surprisingly — offer a dramatic expansion of market logic into areas of security and defense.
Their discussion of this controversial topic is integrated into their libertarian theoretical apparatus. It deals with private protection services, private arbitration agencies to resolve disputes, and private insurers to provide profitable incentives for security. It is for this reason that Hans Hoppe calls this book an "outstanding yet much neglected analysis of the operation of competing security producers."
The section on war and the state is particularly poignant.
The more government "defends" its citizens, the more it provokes tensions and wars, as unnecessary armies wallow carelessly about in distant lands and government functionaries, from the highest to the lowest, throw their weight around in endless, provoking power grabs. The war machine established by government is dangerous to both foreigners and its own citizens, and this machine can operate indefinitely without any effective check other than the attack of a foreign nation.
Also remarkable is their plan for desocialization, or transition to a fully free society. The Tannehills argue against privatization as it is usually understood, on grounds that government is not the owner of public property and so cannot sell it. Instead, they say, public property should be seized by people with the strongest interest in it, then put on the open market. If that seems crazy to you now, you might change your mind after reading this book.
Remarkably, The Market for Liberty actually predates Rothbard's For A New Liberty. It had a huge impact when it came out in 1970, especially among the generation that was debating whether the state needed to provide basic functions or be eliminated altogether. Rothbard even chose it as one of the top 20 libertarian books of all time, to be printed in his Arno Press series.
The authors were drawn to Ayn Rand's ethical outlook but Murray Rothbard's economics and politics. But, clearly, they were surrounded by classics of all ages when they wrote. So this fiery little treatise connected with the burgeoning movement at the time, providing just the type of integration that many were seeking.
Since the 1980s, however, the book has languished in obscurity. If the authors are still around, no one seems to have heard from them, a fact that seems only to add to the mystery of this never-to-be-repeated book.
There is no reader who can possibly agree with all its contents. I find the section on intellectual property rights to be completely wrong, and obviously so. However, this was written before the digital age when the real challenge to the idea of IP had not yet presented itself. Their fallacies are obvious to me.
However, in other ways, these authors made great leaps forward, particular as regards the usefulness of the market institution of insurance for the provision of security. They write as if they knew that there had to be a market-based solution to the problem, and they struggled to find it. Libertarians have been drawing on their insights ever since. The Market for Liberty makes a bracing read for a person who has never been introduced to these ideas. For the person who has an appreciation of free enterprise, this book completes the picture, pushing the limits of market logic as far as it can go. No reader will be left unchanged by it.
[ The Equality Obsession ]
The word "equality" is being rammed down our throats every day, with special focus on the so-called "income gap." The presumption is that we should all denounce the gap, work to eliminate it and embrace perfect equality as an ideal.
It's true that inequality is growing, but the focus on that alone is sheer folly. Equality applies to math equations. You could also use it to describe how the law should be impartial with respect to persons — the traditional use of the term "equality" in the classical liberal literature. But that's it. Otherwise, an obsession with this topic is very dangerous for a free society.
That's because the people who invoke equality have no intention of creating the conditions to make it easier for the poor and for middle-income earners to grow rich. Leveling upward is never the goal. Egalitarians want to flatten incomes at the top so that the rich no longer exist. This can't help anyone but the envious, those who get a kick out of destroying, rather than creating.
As Shikha Dalmia writes, "Income inequality tells us zilch about the only thing that really matters: Are the lives of Americans, rich, poor and in between, getting better or worse?"
Try an experiment in your mind with a society of ten people. Five people earn $50,000 and five earn $100,000. Let's say we flatten out the top half so that everyone earns the same. Equality! But who benefits? Absolutely no one. Society as a whole is poorer, and that is to the detriment of everyone: less capital, less wealth available for wealth-forming projects, demoralization among the smartest and most inspired and a ceiling on those who might have previously desired to move from the lower half to the upper half.
In any case, the supposed egalitarian ideal can always be achieved by driving everyone into the dirt and universalizing poverty. There is a serious problem, with an ideal that can be achieved by wrecking the lives of absolutely everyone.
In a free society, we just have to get used to the idea that some people are going to be vastly richer than other people. And those rich people do act as benefactors to the rest of us. They give more to charity. They start the new businesses that employ us. They take the risks that make capitalism dynamic and progressive. They act as society's economic leadership team. And the individual members of that sector of society are constantly changing — and this is a good thing.
What's more, in a free society, the rich are completely dependent on the poor and the middle class, who, in a market setting, make it possible for the capitalists of society to accumulate wealth in the first place. It is the voluntary choices of the masses that direct the use of society's resources. The "distribution" of wealth is a result of the choices we all make in our capacity as consumers.
Yes, I've watched lectures by people who claim that societies with more equality are happier places. What they end up pointing to are places like Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Norway. This is just a mistake: These countries are demographically homogeneous and cannot be compared in any way to places like the U.K. or the U.S.
Consider this: where would you rather live? Ethiopia or the Netherlands? Ethiopia has more income equality, according to the statisticians who calculate the so-called Gini coeffiicient. Another example: Tajikistan or Switzerland? The former has more equality than the latter. Another: Bangladesh or New Zealand? According to the egalitarians, we should rather live in one of the poorest places on the planet than one of the richest.
Again, the degree of equality is not in any sense related to the quality of life.
So why the hysteria right now? The real problem is more fundamental in the United States. The poor are growing and entrenching. The unemployed are staying this way. The middle class is slipping, and more substantially after the recession statistically ended than when the statistical recession was on (and polls show that hardly anyone believes we are out of recession).
Now, this is catastrophic, not because this increases the income gap, but because it is killing the American dream. What the political left is doing is attempting to change the subject away from what matters (we are all getting poor) to what doesn't matter (the income gap between the top and bottom). And this rhetorical shift is scary: It prepares the way for higher taxes, more redistribution, more attacks on the financially successful and more of all the policies that are causing our worst problems right now.
So why the focus on the equality? As Mises says in his great work Socialism (1922): "The principle of equality is most acclaimed by those who expect to gain more than they lose from an equal distribution of goods. Here is a fertile field for the demagogue. Whoever stirs up the resentment of the poor against the rich can count on securing a big audience."
Americans should know better. Even when our economy was the freest in the world, we had one of the most unequal distributions of that wealth on the planet. It was during these years that the lifespans of everyone increased, when the chances of moving from poor to rich were huge, when the per capita income was growing as never before in human history. Growing inequality is likely to coincide with growing wealth (see How the West Grew Rich, the masterpiece by Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell, Jr.).
We need to learn to admire the justly rich and strive to emulate them and their outlook on life. This is what the advice manuals of the late 19th century said. The most popular magazines of the time chronicled their lives, and they were held up as national heroes. This is a sign of a healthy society. It is because of this ethos that the poor of today live vastly better than the richest of the rich one hundred years ago.
Today, on the other hand, we are told to resent the rich, attack them, hate them, expropriate them. This is the sure path to disaster. Freedom is what enables the poor to become rich. The state is the means by which everyone in society is driven into poverty. We need less state and more freedom.
[ How Change Happens ]
My brother is teaching a semester in London, and he casually video Skyped me last week to show me around his apartment, which is small but charming. I reciprocated by hauling up the cover of the e-book I am reading, and shared my desktop to show a YouTube performance of Renaissance music I thought he would enjoy. We chatted a bit more and hung up. No "long distance" charges.
So what? Well, none of this could have happened ten years ago. Not only that, you probably wouldn't have understood the paragraph in the slightest because it contains words and actions no one had heard of. Had I told you in 1992 that in 20 years, virtually anyone would be able to speak in wireless real-time video to anyone else on the planet, even to the point of sharing a real-time digital experience, you would not have believed it.
And if I had added that the technology was not outrageously expensive, but rather being carried around in the pockets of students and commuters everywhere, this would have seemed too outrageous for science fiction. What amazing force in the universe hath rained down such blessings on us mere mortals?
The truth is that we all live in a world today that would have been unimaginable to us only very recently. It is so much woven into our lives that we don't think about it much anymore. And contrary to the rap on the digital age, that it is all about geekery and gadgetry, the real driving force behind this innovation is the flesh-and-blood human being and the oldest desires known to humankind (such as wanting to stay in touch with family).
Another quick example. I was emailing with a U.K. choir director two nights ago, and I mentioned a book of chanted music. He hadn't heard of it, so I sent him a link, from which he downloaded the material (that magic click that creates a copy!). This morning, his choir sang the piece in church halfway around the world, and he let me know that it was fabulous.
Here we have it: digits flying over oceans in a matter of seconds, and then embodying themselves in beautiful music, sung now with the same human energy as music was sung in the ancient world, that transforms real lives. The person kneeling to prayer didn't know and didn't need to know how the music arrived there. The technology is just the means; the end is the improvement of human life.
Such cases like this are only a tiny snapshot of two things I can briefly recall. Just today so far, I'm sure I've read articles I never would have seen, talked with people I would have long ago lost touch with, found out about events that would have remained forever unknown to me, connected with someone who found something I said interesting enough to consider … and just now, I recall that I heard word that a friend with asthma is out of a Shanghai hospital all safe and sound. None of this would I have known only a few years ago.
Again, ask the question: What is causing all of this amazing change? What is the driving force, the source of the manna, the wellspring of all this avalanche of human progress?
I'll tell you what is not causing it: politics. It's the great lie, the most gigantic drain of valuable human energy ever conjured up in the mind of man. What is politics but a grand argument about how we should rule each other? Meanwhile, every step forward in history has come not from this task, but a completely different one.
American politicians are always running on a platform of change. They explain how their policies will make your life better. They map out timetables. They present a portrait of a future. Above all else, they presume that the future is theirs to control, and voters often go along with this idea. As an example, look no further than the history of the State of the Union address.
What if none of it is true? Just think about education. Everyone has a plan for how to improve what exists. So it has been for a hundred years. Meanwhile, the private sector, through physical and digital technology, is reinventing the entire enterprise from the ground up through every possible means. This decentralized, private-sector-driven, technologically sophisticated education reform is making it almost impossible not to be educated about something with each passing hour.
Online academies are opening by the day. Universities are putting their courses online for free. For-profit companies are distributing every manner of teaching tool one can imagine. For-profit learning centers are opening in every town, all making a buck from teaching kids what the public schools have failed to teach. For that matter, the History Channel alone offers more sweeping programs than any public school textbooks two generations ago.
Anyone in the world can be a teacher to the world today, with a laptop and an Internet connection, and so, too, anyone can be a student.
It's true in health care reform, too. For all the problems in the pricing system and the terrible insurance system, health care is getting better, mainly due to private-sector innovations. The best radiologists in the world can examine your scans in minutes, no matter where they actually happen. Access to medical information is no longer trapped in a dusty book but flies all over the world from hand-held devices. Error is more likely to be corrected this way, saving and changing lives.
Society is not waiting for the politicians. When you listen to what they say, when you watch what the bureaucrats do, when you look at what the agencies are regulating, you suddenly realize that the political monstrosities that burden the world are hopelessly out of touch with the kind of progress that people are experiencing in their daily lives now.
Politicians can make the world a worse place, to be sure. But if you look at the actual trends that are driving change in a positive direction in our world today, none of them is inspired by political initiative. They take place outside the public sector, and even outside the purview of the politicians and bureaucrats. Sometimes it seems as if the political class is clueless that the world has long ago moved on.
What is driving the world in a forward direction? It is people connecting with people through free association, communication, money exchange, enterprise, risk taking, commercial aspirations and the practical arts. And from these forces, we are newly discovering the wonderful fruits of civilization: arts, music, philosophy, faith.
And truth. Truth above all. The truth that is all around us, the one that the public-sector machinery somehow cannot and will not see, is that global society is making a future for itself without the help of the world's self-described public servants. The state in all its manifestations struts and preens — builds monuments to itself and waves its flags — but when it comes to really making change, we must look elsewhere.
[ The Elves of Capitalism ]
One reason that the Brothers Grimm fairy tales have such appeal — more so than the folklore that came before — is that they deal with a world that is familiar to us, a world that was just being invented in the early 19th century, when these stories were first printed and circulated. They deal with people, scenes and events that affect what we call the middle class today, or the bourgeoisie. Yes, the stories feature kings, queens, princes and princesses — this was not yet the age of democracy — but most often our sympathies as readers rest with the plain people and their triumphs, which the stories feature most poignantly.
Both Marx and Mises agree that what we call the middle class was a new creation in the history of the world, and it was brought about by capitalism. The caste chasms that once persisted between the peasants and the lords, those privileged by title and land grants and those fated to serve them, were melted away by the advent of commercial society. Universal possession of property and money replaced servitude and barter, and exchange relationships of people's own choosing gradually replaced the required lifetime associations of birth and happenstance. The distinguishing mark of this new middle class was the prospect of social advance through rising prosperity. Fluid classes replaced fixed castes.
This was the world that serves as the backdrop to the tales of the Brothers Grimm.
A great example of this is the very short story called "The Elves and the Shoemaker." A cobbler and his wife worked very hard at their craft, making shoes all day. But leather was expensive, and no matter how hard they worked, they could not put their business in the black. They were selling some shoes, but they couldn't make enough fast enough. They were getting poorer, rather than richer.
One night, the shoemaker left his cut leather out on a table and went to bed. The next morning, a fantastic pair of shoes made out of that leather awaited him. The craftsmanship was impeccable. They were of the finest style. He was able to charge a very high price to a customer who was very impressed by them. This same series of events repeated themselves again the next day and the next. Some months later, the shoemaker and his wife were financially secure and part of the rising middle class. All their financial worries were gone, and they were comfortable and happy.
At this point, the shoemaker said to his wife: "I should like to sit up and watch tonight, that we may see who it is that comes and does my work for me." The wife agreed, and they stayed up to watch what was happening in the night.
Now, to be sure, this turn of events strikes me as rather strange. One might think that curiosity would have caused them to examine this long before. Why didn't they stay up after the second or third time that leather had become shoes? Why did they wait so long to investigate the cause of their prosperity?
In any case, they did stay up and look, and they found two naked elves there working away, turning scraps of leather into fine shoes. The wife thoughtfully decided to return the favor and make them tiny little clothes. When the elves found the clothes, they put them on and ran away with great delight. They never returned, but the story assures us that this was just fine because the shoe business stayed in the black. The shoemaker and his wife lived a long and prosperous life.
We can see in this one story an archetype of what was then a new type of middle-class success story in the framework of a commercial society. The couple went from poverty to wealth in relatively short order. This came about not because of favors from the king or the discovery of gold, much less from stealing or piracy, but purely by virtue of work and commerce, combined with the assistance of some benefactors in the night whose favors they never sought, but nonetheless came to deeply appreciate.
Apply this story in our times: We are all in the position of poor shoemakers with benefactors. In a state of nature, we would be struggling for survival as most of humanity did from the beginning of recorded history until the late Middle Ages, when the first lights of capitalism as we know it began to appear on the horizon. Over the next several hundred years, and especially during the 19th century, life itself was transformed. The state of nature was vanquished, and the world completely re-made in the service of human well-being.
As William Bernstein summarizes the situation: "Beginning about A.D. 100, there had been improvement in human well-being, but it was so slow and unreliable that it was not noticeable during the average person's twenty-five-year life span. Then, not long after 1820, prosperity began flowing in an ever-increasing torrent; with each successive generation, the life of the son became observably more comfortable, informed and predictable than that of the father."
We were born into a world of amazing prosperity that our generation did not create. We have the expectation of living to old age, but this is completely new in the sweep of history, an expectation we can only have had since about 1950. The shift in population reflects that dramatic change, too. There were most probably 250 million people alive 2,000 years ago, and it took until 1800 for the one billion mark to be reached. One hundred and twenty years later, that was doubled. Three billion people lived on the planet by 1960, and there are seven billion today. Charting this out, you gain a picture of a world of stagnation and stasis from the beginning of recorded history until the Industrial Revolution, when life as we know it today was first experienced by humankind.
If we are shoemakers in this story, the prosperous world in which we live — the world that grants us smartphones, health care, gasoline to power our cars and the ability to communicate in real-time video with any living soul on the planet with the click of a button — might be regarded as the elves that came in the night to turn our leather into a marketable product. Most of us never did anything of our own merit to cause us to benefit from this amazing world. At our birth, we woke up in the morning and found a finished and beautiful pair of shoes given unto us.
Earlier, I said that it strikes me as strange that the shoemaker and his wife waited so long to become curious about who or what was nocturnally turning their leather into shoes. How could they have gone for months without wanting to know what was causing their poverty to turn to riches? How could they have treated the magic in their shop as something helpful but rather normal, and only decided to look into the cause as an afterthought?
Yet this is how almost everyone behaves in the world today. We are surrounded by bounty in this man-made world, a world completely unlike anything that has existed in 99.9% of the rest of the history of the world. And how very few bother to investigate the causes! We take it all for granted.
We use our technology, eat foods from all over the world available for sale a few blocks from our home, hop on planes that sweep us through the air to any destination on the planet, instantly communicate with anyone anywhere and have the expectation of living to the age of 80 and beyond, yet we are remarkably indifferent and incurious about what forces operate within this world to have turned the cruel state of nature into an earthy paradise.
Actually, the situation is worse than that. Many are openly hostile to the institutions and ideas that have given rise to our age of plenty. We've all seen the protests on television in which mobs of iPhone-carrying young people are raising their fists in anger against commercial society, capitalism and capital accumulation and demand just the type of controls, expropriation and regimentation that are guaranteed to drive us back in time to the restoration of castes, poverty and shortened lives. They are plotting to kill the elves.
In the fairy tale, there are only two elves. In the real world, scholars have discerned that there are actually six, and they go by the following names:
First, there is private property, without which there can be no control of the world around us. It would not be necessary if there were a superabundance of all things, but the reality of scarcity means that exclusive ownership is the first condition that permits us to improve the world. Collective ownership is a meaningless phrase as it pertains to scarce resources.
Second, there is exchange. So long as it is voluntary, all exchange takes place with the expectation of mutual benefit. Exchange is a step beyond gift giving because the lives of both parties are made better off by the acquisition of something new. Exchange is what makes possible the formation of exchange ratios and, in a money economy, the development of the balance sheet for calculating profit and loss. This is the foundation of economic rationality.
Third, there is the division of labor that permits us all to benefit from cooperating with one another toward mutual enrichment. This is about more than dividing up productive tasks. It is about integrating everyone into the great project of building civilization. Even the master of all talents and skills can benefit by cooperating with the least skilled among us. The discovery of this reality is the beginning of true enlightenment. It means the replacement of war with trade and the replacement of exploitation with cooperation.
Fourth, there is risk-taking entrepreneurship that bravely pulls back the veil of uncertainty that hides the future from us and takes a step into the future to bring us every manner of material progress. Uncertainty over the future is a reality that binds all of humanity; entrepreneurs are those who do not fear this condition, but rather see this as an opportunity for improving the lives of others at a profit.
Fifth, there is capital accumulation, the amassing of goods that are produced not for consumption, but for the production of other goods. Capital is what makes possible what F.A. Hayek calls the "extended order," that intertemporal machinery that stabilizes the events of life over time. Capital is what makes planning possible. It makes the hiring of large workforces possible. It allows investors to plan for and build a bright future.
The sixth elf is not an institution, but a state of mind. It is the desire for a better life and the belief that it can happen if we take the right steps. It is the belief in the possibility of progress. If we lose this, we lose everything. Even if all the other conditions are in place, without the intellectual and spiritual commitment to climb higher and higher out of the state of nature, we will slip further and further into the abyss. This state of mind is the essence of what came to define the Western mind, and which has now spread to the entire world.
Together, these elves constitute a team with a name, and that name is capitalism. If you don't like that name, you can call it something else: the free market, free enterprise, the free society, liberalism or you can make up your own. What matters is not the team name but the constituent parts that make up that team.
The study of economics is much like the decision of the shoemaking couple that stayed up overnight to find out the cause of their good fortune. They discovered these elves and found that they had no clothes. They decided to make clothes for them as a reward for their service. So too should we clothe the institutions that made our world beautiful in order to protect them against the elements and their enemies. And even after they scurry off into the night, we must never lose consciousness of what they have done for us.
[ I've Tried but Failed to Become a Wine Snob ]
Yes, I've been to the wine-tasting parties with the index cards to fill out sip by sip. I've compared the 1984 with the 1986 variety of French wine and commented on their subtle differences. I've swished and swirled and learned how to affect a face of revelation just from the mere passing scent of a light white or a big red.
And I've listened as the wine tasters say things like "raspberries," "lemon grass," "oak," "saddle leather," and "mulch of spruce." And as soon as the words come out, the wine in your hand magically reflects those very properties. Then you suddenly discover with embarrassment that those around you are actually talking about a different wine from the one you are trying!
But, look, I'm just going to say it. After a lifetime of trying, I just can't pretend anymore. I'm not a wine snob. I like it all. I like everything. I used to draw the line at the big jugs with the screw tops, but no longer. I like those too. I can buy a random case from anywhere, take it home, and enjoy every single bottle.
I no longer even pretend to be critical. All wines are wonderful. Sure, there are differences, and if they are next to each other, I can easily distinguish them. And there are times when a great bottle appears before me and I know it, love it, and call it dreamy. But how much more do I love it than a bottle one-tenth as expensive? Not that much.
How do I buy wines? Apparently the same way as most Americans (and I don't mean the people who attend wine tastings). I buy on price, name, and label. The price has to be low. The name has to be clever. And the label has to be pretty and fun. If one of these is wrong, I won't buy. So I'll buy "Oops!" before "Clos de la Roche, Grand Cru." I'll take home "Arrogant Frog's Big Ribbet" before anything with the words "Medoc Chateau d'Armailhacq," and "Mad Housewife" before "AC Chassagne-Montrachet."
For this reason, I'm partial to wines from California, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, Oregon, and other places that seem to have figured out that the best way to market your product is to…well…market it! Starting about ten years ago or so, it became rather obvious to industry specialists that the snob factor was dying out and that they had to start reaching a mainstream audience. That's when the industry went through upheaval with what is now called the advent of "labels gone wild." It changed everything.
Nor do I care about the year the wine was made. It seems to make sense to me that there, in fact, ought not to be any difference if wine is made in 1997 or 1998. It would be one thing if wines were like iPhones, so that 4G is definitely better than 3G, and so on. But that's not what the year on wine refers to: they aren't getting better and better at making it. It refers instead to the fact that the production process is so unstable that they can't even make the product consistent.
This is apparently a big deal especially in France, which has the equivalent of a Gosplan put together by bureaucrats and old-world industry technocrats for the production of wine. You can't just show up and stick some grape plants in the ground and make wine. No, no, that would somehow violate some precious tradition. You must obey the bureaucrats to make real wine.
And until recently, this central plan even forbid you from "artificially" irrigating your crops. It was believed that proper wine production required you to sit on your hands and wait for mother nature to decide to bless you with rain. This is what accounts for the big differences between vintages. Talk about primitive! If all producers had this view, we'd still all be living in caves or sitting under trees waiting for fruit to fall into our hands.
Fortunately, the great American wine company Gallo — the world's largest wine maker and it does make plenty of great wines — has made huge strides in recent years in cracking into the French market. The French government loosened up and let the American company in, and actually let the company water its plants, much to the derision of the traditional French wine industry experts, who love to sneer at Americans while watching their bottom line get ever worse and their dependency on government subsidies grow ever stronger.
So they watered their plants and the result was a smashing success. The wine Red Bicyclette became a giant export. And you didn't have to become a wine and vintage expert to enjoy it. French wine became fun for the first time ever. Together with Fat Bastard, made by the Seattle company Click Wine Group, it is the Americans in France who have finally made the French wines a giant commercial success in the United States. By cutting through the wine world's traditional thick air of pretense and pomp, wine has once again become what it was in the ancient world, a drink for every man, every day.
Of course the French weren't going to sit by idly and let its precious traditions be tramped on by crude and rude Americans. So they did the traditional thing: they sued Gallo in court. It seems that someone found out that Bicyclette's Pinot Noir (popularized in the United States by a movie of course) was only 85% Pinot and the rest a variety of grapes. It was a criminal conviction but the sentence was suspended. People predicted disaster for Gallo. Nope: the wine and the company enjoyed the new fame and the ever-higher sales.
This is the glory of capitalism at work. It has the capacity to reinvent the most stick-in-the-mud traditions and make them live again in new times. It has a wonderful way of stripping away the artifice, leveling the classes, and bringing wonderful things to everyone in a way that everyone can appreciate and understand. We don't have to put on airs. We can be ourselves and still enjoy the finest things in life.
This is because, eventually, capitalism turns every luxury into a necessity and make things once enjoyed only by the rich available to the workers and peasants of every land. This is why Gordon Gekko carried a cellphone the size of a brick in 1987, and today bums on the street surf the web with iPhones. The system that made this possible is the most democratic, most pro-people, most common-man social system ever conceived of in history.
Capitalism is the system for the 99%. This very feature is why the elites, and particularly the governing elites, truly hate it, and, if they have their way, they will never fully legalize it.
[ The Mighty Return of Lard ]
Few things in life are as satisfying as a transformative and implausible reversal of history that carries with it stern justice for wrongdoing and sweet victory for the side of truth and human well-being. When it happens, the period in which the wrong persisted without correction fades into memory as a mere parenthesis in the forward trajectory of time — and this is true whether the period of error lasted a year or ten or a hundred.
A beautiful case in point: the re-emergence of lard. It has happened with astonishing speed. Maclean's ran a piece praising its use in the flakiest of pie crusts. Mother Nature Network has declared that it is no longer a four-letter word. National Public Radio ran a segment rehabilitating the food and pointing out that one hundred years ago, lard was "a casualty of a battle between giant business and corporate interests."
Finally, Gourmet Live, the cooking site with the highest traffic on the Web, announced:
"Not only does lard produce superior pie crusts, crispier fried chicken and crunchier cookies than vegetable shortenings like Crisco, which was introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, but its fat is mostly monounsaturated, like olive oil's. Sourced properly (ideally, from a farmers' market) or made from scratch, lard is the ultimate natural food."
All of this in the last thirty days! This is indeed sweet victory, and it is a belated rebuke to that sanctimonious, socialist vegetarian Upton Sinclair, who in 1906 wrote The Jungle, a book that claimed that meatpacking workers sometimes fell into vats of boiling lard and only parts of the bodies were ever fished out.
Gross out! That book was said to have dealt a real blow to lard, at least according to NPR, though I also wonder if war rationing had something to do with the loss of favor for lard. In any case, in 1907, Procter & Gamble was awash in cottonseed oil for candles that was unmarketable due to the spread of the light bulb, so it came up with a new idea: a ball of fat called shortening.
The lard business was largely dead by World War II. I ran across a Milwaukee Journal editorial from February 1940 that expressed some sympathy for pig farmers and the lost market for their fat product, but it essentially told them to give it up, that lard was a lost cause and they needed to find some other use for their pig fat.
Some lost cause! More and more stores are carrying lard and displaying it proudly. To be sure, this might not be true in self-proclaimed "natural food" stores — which, as Marge Simpson says, "have a philosophy." I asked for lard at my local philosophy-based grocery, and the guy looked at me with barely concealed disgust and said, "You are kidding, right?"
Hey, it's their loss.
For my part, I never bought the whole anti-lard campaign. It is obviously better for pie crusts, but that's just the start of it. It is better for biscuits, and even better when lard biscuits are themselves fried in lard. It is better for fried chicken. Better for pancakes. Better for cakes and muffins. And bread. And fried potatoes. Once you have a tub of the stuff around the house, you will be amazed how many wonderful things it can do. And as every lard-experienced cook will tell you, things come out less greasy than they otherwise would with corn oil or shortening.
It's especially satisfying to see an emerging consensus that the rap against lard and fats in general is completely changing. I highly recommend a documentary called Fat Head that you can watch on Hulu. It is produced by Tom Naughton. Among many amazing points he makes, he documents a catastrophic turn in American diets that took place as late as the late 1970s.
It seems that Sen. George McGovern's Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs held hearings on "diet and killer diseases," out of which emerged Soviet-like Dietary Guidelines for Americans. We were told to eat less fat, that eggs were killing us, that meat was death, that we needed to live on grains and corn and so on.
These days, I'm not sure that anyone would pay much attention to such nonsense, but back then, it was a huge deal. School lunches all changed. The grocery stores shifted what they carried in response to a changed market driven by a gullible population. I vaguely recall this whole period, when burgers were mixed with soybean, corn was turned to sugar and we were all encouraged to chow down on a steady stream of carbs while avoiding any food that once walked on legs.
If you think about it, it's a bad sign for any government to back this or that form of diet. Talk about an intrusion into personal liberty. What we eat for dinner ought to be off-limits to the state, just as a matter of principle, in any free society. But in those days — kind of like these days — nothing was off-limits. So bad science and fanatical vegetarian ideology ended up getting control of the levers of power. It goes without saying that lard was deader than ever.
Ah, but sweet justice comes around! The beautiful thing about the market economy is that it is responsive to changing public tastes. A fat that was killed off one hundred years ago can suddenly come back. There are producers ready to supply the market at a profit. The capacity of history to bend to the will of the consuming public is one of the many features of the market economy that government cannot replicate.
After all, take a look around at the silly things that government starting doing one hundred years ago that it is still doing today: the post office, compulsory public school, the central bank, the income tax. We are stuck with all of this nonsense. Would that a change in public taste would cause these institutions to be replaced with institutions that extend from market choice. But no such luck: All this is forced on us at the point of a gun, which makes opting out rather difficult.
Change is a beautiful thing when its driving force is human choice. Our tastes change, and history changes with them. That's the way it should be, but it can be this way only in a world of freedom, private property, trade and entrepreneurship. In short, we need global capitalism all over the world so that human choice permits mistakes to be corrected. In this world, the results are often delightfully improbable: We are choosing lard again.
[ The Good News (for Animals) on Health Care ]
There's so much bad news about health care these days. Maybe it's time for some good news.
One sector, technology, is advancing at a pace never seen before. Customers have a range of services to choose from, and price competition is very intense. The doctor sees you whether you have insurance or not. Customers mostly pay directly for services. Overall spending is increasing, but that's because there are more services to purchase. Competition between providers is very intense.
Sadly, for humans, all this is taking place within veterinary medicine, and the beneficiaries are animals, mostly pets. According to The New York Times, the demand for advanced treatment is booming, and supply is responding. The paper cites the case of Tina, the ten-year-old chow that recently underwent chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant at a clinic associated with the Mayo Clinic. The $15,000 spent on this may sound like a lot, but it is far cheaper than the same services provided to people.
"A long list of cancers, urinary-tract disorders, kidney ailments, joint failures and even canine dementia can now be diagnosed and treated, with the prospect of a cure or greatly improved health, thanks to imaging technology, better drugs, new surgical techniques and holistic approaches like acupuncture."
To be sure, not too many people are willing to shell out this much to help their pets achieve a better life. This is a niche market. But that makes the existence of technological progress all the more remarkable. "Improved veterinary care for all pets has increased consumer spending in this area to $13.4 billion last year from $9.2 billion in 2006, according to the American Pet Products Association."
Some people theorize that progress in medicine is possible only with massive government involvement. You have to force business to provide insurance, for example. But only 3% of pet owners have insurance on their pets, and somehow the system works. You pay for what you need. Prices are posted and openly discussed. Everyone knows what's what. You can even find out the costs of services by looking on the Internet. Imagine that!
Also, and strikingly, veterinary medicine is relatively unregulated compared with the human health care industry. There are no budget-busting government programs to provide for poor pets or pets in their older years. There are no prescription drug benefits. There are no subsidies, mandates or third-party payment systems, much less threats, bureaucracies or a giant central plan designed to achieve universal access.
Instead, medicine for animals works just like any other normal market. There are standards, rules and private boards to assure quality control. There are strict and highly regrettable regulations on how many universities can offer certification, a fact that undoubtedly raises prices and salaries, but harms availability. But once the certified doctor opens shop, the customer is in charge.
You know it immediately when you walk in. There is not an intimidating receptionist, a long wait that takes all afternoon, detailed checks on your coverage or anything else. Instead, it is a friendly environment in which everyone speaks to you like a normal human being. You are welcome to call the doctor by his or her first name. They tell you everything you need to know. Prices are posted openly, and you can select among a vast range of services.
The customer comes first. And there is a constant awareness at every step that the customer is the one paying the bills, and that changes everything. You get thorough explanations of every option and procedure, along with a realistic look at risks relative to spending. You are in a position to accept or refuse, which gives the entire clinic a strong reason to be open and forthcoming about every aspect of treatment.
There are sometimes malpractice lawsuits, but they are rare because there is such open discussion of risks and uncertainties. The typical veterinarian pays $500 per year in insurance to guard against such lawsuits. The annual fees for human doctors are $15,000 and up.
What I find most striking in this case is the way progress in animal health care is happening as if driven by an invisible hand. There are no congressional debates, executive decisions or plans from the White House, no nationwide solutions imposed from the top down.
Now, you might say that this is a superficial example, that humans are obviously more important than animals, so it makes no sense to compare the two systems. The truth is that the same laws of economics apply to both. The laws of economics are universal and apply to every sector in all times and all places. So there are lessons to be learned.
If the customer were not paying, and the doctor were paid by a third party through some sort of mandate with a centrally planned price list, you would see prices go through the roof. Moreover, if there were some sort of universal access provided by government funding and control, you would see further upward price pressure.
In fact, if you were to set out to wreck this industry, you would follow a path very much like what has occurred in human health care. You would have business be responsible for the insurance, and make that insurance pay not only for emergency situations but for routine care involving simple shots and fleas. Then you would create giant programs to provide funding for young pets, old pets and poor pets and contemplate the bliss of universal coverage. If anything ever went wrong, you would have courts side with the pets over the doctor every time. You would have the government fund massive pet hospitals and insist that there should be no range of services, but rather that absolutely every pet has a "animal right" to the best care available no matter what.
You would popularize arguments: "Animal care is too important to be left to the wiles of the free market." Maybe you would even put this statement in a U.N. charter document on universal rights. In short, if you wanted to wreck this sector, you would socialize it, thereby dramatically reducing service, raising prices, increasing costs and stopping technological advance.
So far, the health care debate for humans has been driven by all the wrong impulses. The correct example of where we need to be going is right in front of our eyes. But it would mean getting the government to give up its control, and there is no more difficult task than that.
[ Truth in Advertising ]
If you are a visitor from another planet and you want to find out about real life on Earth, what do you watch on television to give the most accurate picture: the news, the shows or the commercials? Think about it realistically. We are seeking here an accurate window into what human beings are really like, the things they do, the stuff they really care about, the decisions they face on a daily basis. I would suggest that advertising is, by far, the best teller of the truth.
The news is mostly the "fake news," as Saturday Night Live many years ago put it. What matters and what doesn't matter is designed for certain effect that doesn't reflect anything really going on in your life at all. The North Star of the network news is the state and the political theater that serves as a kind of glossy finish on the top of the structure. The reporters prioritize their stories and values based on the state's own stories and values, and the rest of us mostly just pretend to care.
The television shows are unapologetic fabrications of life, with idealized actors and preset plots that do not and cannot really exist in real life. People don't do the normal things the rest of us do. There's nothing wrong with that, but it is not reality. Even "reality" shows are this way. If you are starring in an episode of Bridezillas, for example, you are going to go out of your way to be as witchy and horrible as possible.
Ah, but with advertising, you get the real story, the unvarnished presentation of real-life problems that affect everyone. One I just saw for the Neat scanner points out that our problems with paper have gotten worse, rather than better, since the advent of digital media. Unless we are making a concerted effort to de-physicalize things, we are going to be snowed under with 8.5x11 sheets piled to the ceiling. The Neat scanner shows us a way out of this problem, and it is a good way out. This is a serious problem that all of us have to deal with every day.
Another ad begins with a lady shopping for adult diapers in the grocery store while feeling profound humiliation as she checks out and others look on. Ouch. But now comes the solution. There is a website called adis.com that provides every manner of undergarment that you can order online at good prices. The goods arrive at your house in an unmarked package so that you don't have to feel that sense of humiliation.
In the daytime, there is a constant stream of products to deal with aging, which, we might point out, is a ubiquitous feature of the human condition. The normal problems people have hardly ever appear on the shows or the news, but the commercials are not even slightly squeamish in dealing with balding, bankruptcy, sexual dysfunction, weight gain, energy loss, depression and every bodily function and real-life malady one can imagine.
This is the real stuff of daily life that consumes people. Am I too fat? Why do I have to get up three times in the night to go to the bathroom? Why do my feet hurt at the end of the day? What should I do about my sky-high credit card debt? These questions are way more important to people than the latest political poll or Middle Eastern flare-up.
Maintaining a household turns out to be another center of people's real lives, and the advertisements fail us not. They deal with the problems of greasy meatloaf, knives that don't cut properly, silver that is tarnished, vacuums that don't stay plugged in, leftovers that do not store well — and in each case, the advertiser proposes what turns out to be an ingenious solution at a surprisingly low price.
Yes, of course, the advertiser wants us to buy the product, but it is your choice to do it or not. You are invited, not coerced. And even if you do not buy, you have to admit feeling a sense of inspiration to solve the problem in some other way, an element of collegiality with your fellow human beings just to know that you are not alone in your problem and a sense of empowerment just to know that all is not lost and that there is some hope.
It is beyond comprehension to me why advertising has been the target of brutal attacks ever since television came into existence. The top criticism is that advertising is somehow socially inefficient. Instead of giving price cuts to consumers or spending money on research and development. We can dispense with this nonsense quickly: If it weren't efficient for the company, the company would not do it. Every ad is tested against profitability insofar as this is possible.
Recall, too, that the major reason for advertising is to overcome the core problem that every enterprise faces, which is its obscurity. You have to get yourself known to people. But knowledge alone is not enough. You have to ascend the value scale of their preference rankings. You have to persuade people that what you have to offer is going to make enough of a difference in their lives to get them to cough up the money.
You might complain that these advertisers are only after your money. I don't see why this is a criticism. After all, the consumer is only after the product. The consumer gives the money, and the producer gives the product. It's called mutually beneficial exchange. And you might say that the advertiser only wants ever more of your money. Well, so too for the consumer: You want ever more of the product, which is why we are constantly told on ads to wait because "there's more!"
Another criticism of advertising is that it generates "false wants." The people who say such things imagine that they alone are the arbiters of what is a legitimate want. In other words, they want to rule your choices and tell you what you can and can't want. Down with those types, I say!
A final criticism is that what the ad says is often false or exaggerated. No kidding. Compare the content of advertising with the content of the average human conversation, of which lies and exaggerations are an integral part. We can't expect of advertising what we don't even expect of regular human interactions. At least there is accountability and a profitability test on advertising that tend to select out the liars over time. I'm not sure you can say the same with casual human interactions on a day-to-day basis.
I see that several infomercial makers have been prosecuted for making false claims, such as the guy who promoted a calcium product he said would reduce cancer risk. He was charged $150,000 and banned from television for life. I don't get this. Why should the government be policing what people can and cannot claim on television? Buyer beware. Besides, if the state is to rid the TV of all false claims, the State of the Union address should never again be aired.
You know those ads from the government that you see at airports? They are announcing their policy. They tell you what you must believe or else. No private-sector ads are this way. They invite you to believe something. They seek to change your values. Then they want to bring something new and special to your life. It is up to you to go along or not. This is the way all human interaction ought to take place.
It is for this reason that advertising gives such a gritty, down-to-earth, truth-telling look at the human condition. It is a window into who we are, what we do, what makes us tick. And better than that, advertising seeks to improve the human condition and give us a better life. In this sense, it does for us what no state can ever really do.
[ Despair and the State ]
The sad and tragic story of Andrew Wordes — the chicken farmer who was driven to despair by government harassment and killed himself last month — continues to haunt me. And it turns out to be just one of millions of cases of similar psychological torment caused by government, directly and indirectly. These are wholly unnecessary events, inflicting terrible loss on the world.
For every one person who dies these days fighting in U.S. wars around the world, twenty-five other soldiers kill themselves. Veterans are killing themselves at a rate of one every eighty minutes. There are than 6,500 veteran suicides every year. That's more than all the American soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq in the last ten years, according to a New York Times analysis. Being a veteran apparently doubles your risk of suicide.
Economic conditions wrought by government policies around the world have contributed to the death toll. Europe is undergoing an epidemic of suicide in countries seriously hurt by the downturn. In Greece, the suicide rate among men increased more than 24% since the disaster hit. In Ireland, male suicides have shot up more than 16%. In Italy, economic-motivated suicides have increased 52%.
The big aggregates reported here do not convey the level of tragedy experienced in the lives of every single individual here. They leave behind shattered families and wrecked communities. There is an unbearably sad story behind every single statistic.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the same is happening in the U.S and that the broad trend follows economic prospects. The difference between the rising prosperity of a free market and economic desperation caused by government is really a matter of life and death. The desperation and sadness wrought by war — an extension of domestic policy and carried out with much higher stakes — is a symptom of the same problem.
These represent both direct and indirect ways that government is spreading misery around the world. The direct way involves war and its psychological effects. Being harassed by regulators is another direct way: The person sees no way out and is thereby driven to desperate measures. The indirect way results from the economic stagnation caused by government policies.
Life is hard enough on its own. Government makes it harder: its recession-causing policies; its policy responses that do not work; its regulations that makes people crazy; its poverty-inducing taxes and inflation; and, most of all, its wars have driven millions to despair.
Why the state in particular? It all comes down to the sense of having control over your life. The essence of statecraft is the absence of choice and the inability to escape. Many operations of the state try to disguise these features.
Once you develop a nose for this, you see it everywhere. The faces of people in line at the DMV, the sauntering mass in line to be screened by the TSA and even the blank stares you see in the post office lines. There is something about state policy that demoralizes us all. That takes a toll on our health and our outlook on life and even leads to tragedy.
I think back to the old Soviet days, which to me typify what it means for a society to be entirely under state control. The government put out a magazine called Soviet Life, and it was filled with pictures of happy, healthy people who were living fulfilling and active lives. The contrast with reality couldn't have been more extreme. Emigrants told stories of a demoralized population turning to alcohol, drugs and suicide — anything to escape the toxic combination of sinking living standards and the absence of choice due to despotism.
Today we know that the propaganda was a lie. What we fail to realize is that this human tragedy is not unique to a fully socialized society. We can get there in small steps by growing the state and expanding its reach year by year until it envelops us in all our life activities. We have to turn to the state ever more. We are blocked by barriers. Everywhere we go, we encounter bureaucrats who demand our papers, rifle through our belongings, forbid what we want to do and mandate what we do not want to.
Of course, soldiers in war face this reality every day. They are not their own persons. They must obey orders whether they make sense or not. They see things that no one should have to see and they are ordered to do things that no one should have to be forced to do. It is hardly surprising that people who go through such an ordeal have confused perspective on the value of human life.
To a lesser extent, citizens in every country with an interventionist state face an analogous situation. They may have a dream of starting or growing a business, but they are blocked — not because of their own lack of vision, but because of the thicket erected by public policy. The state acts as a dream killer. It becomes all the more maddening when there is nothing that the citizen can do about it. There is no real choice.
Oh they tell us that in a democratic system, we can vote and that this is our choice. We have nothing to complain about. If we don't like the system, we can change it. But this is wholly illusory. The government completely owns the democratic system and administers it to generate the types of results that government wants. More and more people are catching on to this, which is why voter participation falls further in every election season.
The great thinkers of the libertarian tradition have always told us that freedom and the good life are absolutely inseparable. I think of Thomas Jefferson, Frédéric Bastiat, Herbert Spencer, Albert Jay Nock, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, F.A. Hayek, and so many others. Even contemporary authors have addressed the theme. They had long warned that every step away from freedom would mean a diminution of the quality of life. We are seeing these prophecies come true.
Too often public policy debates take place on the wrong level. The core point is not to make the "system" work better or otherwise fine-tune the rules within a bureaucracy. We need to start talking about larger issues about the dignity of the human person, the moral status of freedom, and the rights and liberties of the individual in society. The expansion of the state is not just wrong as a matter of "public policy"; it is wrong because it is dangerous to the good life and the quality of life.
To kill freedom is to kill the essence of what makes us human.
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A Beautiful Anarchy
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Jeffrey Tucker
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[
"nonfiction"
] |
[
"politics",
"economics"
] |
The Literature of Liberty
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What Is Laissez-Faire?
The latest data show that book sales are way up this season. So much for the prediction that books will be killed by technology. On the contrary, technology has enabled the great literature of the ages and the present to be put in the hands of everyone. I can't think of a better time to begin refurbishing Laissez Faire Books (founded in 1972), because it is the market that laissez-faire celebrates that has made all the literature we love more accessible than ever.
Addison Wiggin, president of Agora Financial, and I were discussing the various challenges ahead of us as we infuse new life into an old and venerable institution. He drew my attention to a point that I've overlooked. Most people don't know the term "laissez-faire." They don't know how to say it (that very day, I was introduced for a speech, and the host mispronounced it) and they don't know what it means. Once in common circulation, this term has not been in common use, even in libertarian circles. So we have some work to do, in helping people even understand the name of the bookstore at lfb.org.
The pronunciation in English is lay-say-fair. Its French origins date back to the late Renaissance. As the story goes, it was first used about the year 1680, a time when the nation-state was on the rise throughout Europe. The French finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, asked a merchant named M. Le Gendre what the state could do to promote industry.
According to legend, the reply came: "Laissez-nous faire," or "let it be." This incident was reported in 1751 in the Journal Oeconomique by the free-trade champion Rene de Voyer, Marquis d'Argenson. The slogan was codified finally in the words of Vincent de Gournay: "Laissez-faire et laissez-passer, le monde va de lui même!" The loose translation: "Let it be and let goods pass; the world goes by itself."
We've rendered this in the form you see on our masthead: Leave the world alone, it manages itself. You could shorten it: Let it be.
All these renderings express not only the idea of free trade — a main subject of dispute in 18th-century European politics — but also a larger and more beautiful vision of the way society can be permitted to work.
This idea can be summed up in the phrase "laissez-faire," or in the doctrine of what was once called simply liberalism, which today is clarified as classical liberalism. This idea is this: Society contains within itself the capacity for ordering and managing its own path of development. It follows that people should enjoy the liberty to manage their own lives, associate as they please, exchange with anyone and everyone, own and accumulate property and otherwise be unencumbered by state expansion into their lives.
In the centuries that have followed, millions of great thinkers and writers have elaborated on this core idea within all disciplines of the social science. Then as now, there stand two broad schools of thought: those who believe in state control of one or many aspects of the social order and those who believe that such attempts at control are counterproductive to the cause of prosperity, justice, peace and the building of the civilized life.
These two ways of thinking are different from what is called the right and the left today. The left is inclined to think that if we let the economic sphere be free, the world will collapse, which advances some theory of the disaster that would befall us all without government control. The right is similarly convinced that the state is necessary lest the world collapse into violent, warring, culture-destroying gangs.
The laissez-faire view rejects both views in favor of what Claude Frédéric Bastiat called "the harmony of interests" that make up the social order. It is the view that the artists, merchants, philanthropists, entrepreneurs and property owners — and not the cartelizing thugs of the state — ought to be permitted to drive the course of history.
This view is now held by millions of thinkers around the world. It is the most exciting intellectual movement today, and in places where we might least expect to find it. There are institutions in every country devoted to the idea. Blogs and forums are everywhere dedicated to the conviction. Books are pouring out by the week and the day. The revolt against the state is growing.
The growth of the idea of laissez-faire in our times is infused by a digital energy. But the idea itself is not new in world history. Though it is mostly associated with 18th-century British thought, it is a view of society that has much deeper roots in the Christian Middle Ages and early Jewish thought. Nor is laissez-faire somehow a Western idea alone. The deepest roots of laissez-faire actually trace to ancient China, and even today, the thoughts of the masters offer a fine summary.
Here are some examples:
Lao Tzu (6th century B.C.): "The more artificial taboos and restrictions there are in the world, the more the people are impoverished…The more that laws and regulations are given prominence, the more thieves and robbers there will be…"
"The Sage says: 'I take no action, yet the people transform themselves, I favor quiescence and the people right themselves, I take no action and the people enrich themselves…'"
Chuang Tzu (369-286 B.C.): "I would rather roam and idle about in a muddy ditch, at my own amusement, than to be put under the restraints that the ruler would impose. I would never take any official service, and thereby I will [be free] to satisfy my own purposes."
"There has been such a thing as letting mankind alone; there has never been such a thing as governing mankind [with success]." The world "does simply not need governing; in fact, it should not be governed."
Pao Ching-yen (4th century A.D.): "Where knights and hosts could not be assembled, there was no warfare afield… Ideas of using power for advantage had not yet burgeoned. Disaster and disorder did not occur…People munched their food and disported themselves; they were carefree and contented."
Ssu-ma Ch'ien (145-90 B.C.): "Each man has only to be left to utilize his own abilities and exert his strength to obtain what he wishes…When each person works away at his own occupation and delights in his own business, then like water flowing downward, goods will naturally flow ceaseless day and night without being summoned, and the people will produce commodities without having been asked."
These early beginnings of the idea began here but can be traced through thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome and through the Middle Ages, until the notion swept the world in the 18th and 19th centuries, giving rise to unheard-of prosperity, liberty and peace for all. In the 18th century and in large parts of the world (other than the English-speaking world), laissez-faire has been called liberalism or classical liberalism, a doctrine of social organization that can be summed up in the words of Lord Acton: Liberty is the highest political end of humankind.
To be sure, the notion of liberalism was already corrupted early in the 20th century. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in his book Liberalism (1929), "The world today wants to hear no more of liberalism. Outside England, the term 'liberalism' is frankly proscribed. In England, there are, to be sure, still 'liberals,' but most of them are so in name only. In fact, they are rather moderate socialists. Everywhere today, political power is in the hands of the anti-liberal parties."
That remains true today. And the revolt against this is often termed "libertarian," a word that has long been associated with a primary concern for human liberty. In current understanding, it refers to a tightening and radicalizing of the old liberal view. It asserts the inviolability of property rights, the primacy of peace in world affairs and the centrality of free association and trade in the conduct of human affairs. It differs from the old liberal view in dispensing the naive view that the state can be limited by law and constitutions; it imagines the possibility that society can manage itself without a state, defined as the one institution in society that is permitted the legal right of aggression against person and property. Libertarians are consistently against war, protectionism, taxation, inflation and any laws that interfere with the right of free association.
Libertarianism came of age in the early 1970s with the writings of Murray Rothbard and, later, with the founding of Laissez Faire Books and the work of Robert Nozick and Tibor Machan. Libertarians are not necessarily anarchists or anarcho-capitalists, but the main strain of thinking in the libertarian world today revolves around the idea of statelessness as an intellectual benchmark. This view is not utopian or far-flung; it is only the hope for an ideal in which theft, murder, kidnapping and counterfeiting are not legally sanctioned by the state.
Nor is such a society historically unprecedented. Rothbard wrote about Colonial America as an example of a wildly successful experiment of society without a central state. Medieval Europe made the first great economic revolution without recourse to the power of the nation-state. David Friedman has documented anarchism and competitive legal orders in medieval Iceland. Other writers go so far as to say that given how we conduct our lives day-to-day, relying on the productivity of private institutions and associations, we never really leave anarchy.
As Mises says, liberalism/libertarianism/laissez-faire is not a completed doctrine. There are so many areas remaining to be explored and so many applications to make both in history and in our time. The most exciting books of our time are being written from the vantage point of human liberty. The state is on the march, but the resistance is growing.
[ It is my great honor to be involved in the Agora effort to revive Laissez Faire Books as the international distribution and publishing house for the greatest ideas of our time. It is a debilitating thing to watch the state on the march, but it is a source of joy to know that ideas are more powerful than all the armies of the world. Reason, literacy and relentless work for what is right and true will eventually lead the idea of laissez-faire to victory ]
What Is or Should Be the Law?
It seems that the president is frustrated with Congress. What kind of legislature is this, he asks, that fails to immediately enact the will of the executive? The executive has been using a slightly different approach these days: He uses an executive order. Forget all that stuff you have read in the civics texts about checks and balances and the branches of government. The executive order bypasses them all.
The White House even has a name for this: "We Can't Wait." There is even an official dot-gov website. Hey, if you are going to shred the Constitution and pass laws like a dictator, the best approach is to do it out in the open. "If Congress refuses to act," he says, "I'll continue to do everything in my power to act without them."
To be fair, he is hardly the first. The president before him did it, and the president before that and so on back to World War I and before. Every new guy cites the precedent of the old guy, as if that alone provides justification. Defying the Constitution has a long tradition, don't you know.
But you know what this tells me? What this country needs is a good theory of law. We even lack the language to talk about what is happening to us. One party denounces the other but only in ways that exempt itself from criticism. As a result, the "man on the street" is not even prepared to talk about fundamental questions.
Example: Where did law come from, and what should it do? Sure, people get annoyed at the police, irritated by the TSA or startled to read about periodic injustices of public policy. One party gets annoyed when the other party's president enacts laws without regard to any constitutional conventions.
But what is the law, and what should it be? These are the bigger questions that are not part of public consciousness.
The same was true in the time of Frédéric Bastiat (1801—50). At the very end of his life, he wrote an impassioned plea on the topic. He tried to get people to think hard about what was happening and how law had become an instrument of plunder, rather than a protector of property.
He writes:
"It is not true that the function of law is to regulate our consciences, our ideas, our wills, our education, our opinions, our work, our trade, our talents or our pleasures. The function of law is to protect the free exercise of these rights, and to prevent any person from interfering with the free exercise of these same rights by any other person."
This is from Bastiat's The Law, one of the great political essays to emerge from the whole Continental world of the 19th century. It vanished into obscurity in France, was resurrected in late 19th century English, and then disappeared again, only to reappear in the United States in the 1950s, thanks to the efforts of the Foundation of Economic Education.
This essay asks fundamental questions that most people go through life never having thought about. This book is part of Laissez Faire Books' set of new works that seeks to find what is essential in the literature and distribute it in new ways. (It also has the coolest cover ever for this book.)
The problem is that most people accept the law as a given, a fundamental fact. As a member of society, you obey or face the consequences. It is not safe to question why. This is because the enforcement arm of the law is the state, that peculiar agency with a unique power in society to use legal force against life and property. The state says what the law is — however this decision was made — and that settles it.
Bastiat could not accept this. He wanted to know what the law is, apart from what the state says it is. He saw that the purpose of law is, most fundamentally, to protect private property and life against invasion, or at least to ensure that justice is done in cases in which such invasions do take place. This is hardly a unique idea; it is a summary of what philosophers, jurists and theologians have thought in most times and places.
Then he takes that next step, the one that opens the reader's eyes as nothing else. He subjects the state itself to the test of whether it, the state itself, complies with that idea of law.
He takes notice, even from the first paragraph, that the state itself turns out to be a lawbreaker in the name of law keeping. It does the very thing that law is supposed to prevent. Instead of protecting private property, it invades it. Instead of protecting life, it destroys it. Instead of guarding liberty, it violates it. And as the state advances and grows, it does this ever more, until it becomes a threat to the well-being of society itself.
Even more tellingly, Bastiat observes that when you subject the state to the same standards that the law uses to judge relations between individuals, the state fails. He concludes that when this is the case, the law has been perverted in the hands of the governing elites. It is employed to do the very thing that the law is designed to prevent. The enforcer turns out to be the main violator of its own standards.
The passion, the fire, the relentless logic have the power to shake up almost any reader. Nothing is the same. This is why this monograph is rightly famous. It is capable of shaking up whole systems of government and whole societies. What a beautiful illustration of the power of the pen.
But take notice of Bastiat's rhetorical approach here. His conclusion is at the beginning. Why? He did not have that much time (he died not long after writing The Law). He knew that the reader didn't, either. He wanted to raise consciousness and persuade in the most effective way. Even from a stylistic point of view, there is much to learn from his approach.
Laissez Faire Books is honored to give new life to this remarkable document in this edition, which revives the translation by Dean Russell. It also includes an introduction by Bill Bonner, who gets my vote for the most underrated voice in defense of old-style liberalism in the world today. He explains how Bastiat's essay opened his eyes to see the world in a new way.
It is a habit of every generation to underestimate the importance and power of ideas. Yet the whole world that we live in is built by them. Nothing outside pure nature exists in this world that did not begin as an idea held by human beings. This is why a book like this is so powerful and important. It helps you see injustices that surround us, which we are otherwise inclined to ignore. And seeing is the first step to changing.
That's why it continues to be printed and circulated and why every living soul should read it. If we are to see a renewed appreciation of the idea of liberty in our lifetimes, this monograph written so long ago in a country so far away will deserve a great deal of the credit.
[ See the World Through Bonner's Eyes ]
In the spring of 2012, Bill Bonner, founder of Agora Inc., took a break from his daily column in The Daily Reckoning, and, like hundreds of thousands of others, I went through withdrawal. Fortunately, I had a copy of his wonderful book, Mobs, Messiahs and Markets, to devour as I awaited his return.
This is a book, written with co-authored contributions from Lila Rajiva, that lifts the fog spread by governments and mainstream media so that we can all see reality for what it is. It covers in great detail the transformative decade from the late '90s to the late 2000s, and therefore chronicles everything crucial to understanding the world as it is today: the digital revolution, the rise of the police state, the move from boom to bust, the end of American economic supremacy, the expansion of imperial violence.
Several points stand out here about Bonner the man, who (to my mind) doesn't get the vast credit he deserves as one of the most articulate and insightful public intellectuals of our time. He is neither political agitator nor walled-off professor, but his writing tells you more about politics, economics, culture and trends than you are likely to find in any rally or classroom. He has his eye on the issues that matter, and a value system (he loves liberty and loathes despotism) that shatters political conventions.
As for his influence as a thinker, a whole generation or two of investors, intellectuals, journalists and citizens of the world have been raised on Bonner's writings. They are compelling not because they are ideologically driven or splashy, but because they are independent-minded and infused with vast knowledge of history and philosophy and take a perspective that disregards the opinion cartel. That is to say, they are eye-opening and provide a completely different look at the world.
As a stylist, he is legendary. I would put his writings on public affairs in the same class with other famed stylists like Frédéric Bastiat, Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, and Joseph Sobran. There is a curse that comes with that status. It means that hardly anyone has the competence to write about their work, because the attempt can't come anywhere close to matching the virtuosity of the subject's own prose.
To put it plainly, writing about Bonner is intimidating because reading Bonner is always a better use of time. I feel that same sense just writing about this book. Nothing I can say will be as clear, precise and downright interesting as what Bonner himself writes.
"Fake news is not news at all. It's old news. Storyboarding does to the news what waterboarding does to prisoners — it persuades it to say what you want to hear. Hoodwinking the enemy on a classical battlefield — which follows its own rules of engagement — is one thing. Bamboozling civilians in modern total warfare is rather different. And swindling the crowd cheering at home is something else altogether.
"By that standard, American chariot wheels have not just hit the ground. They have gone through it and are burrowing down into Hades. Storyboarding was directed not at the population in Iraq, which is supposed to be a born-again democracy now, anyway. It was aimed at the population back home in America. Journalists who faked news stories were firing on this pathetic home crowd, making it impossible for the lumps to get even the tiniest scrap of real information about the war, even though they were being asked to give up their children for it. They thought they were volunteering to fight for the republic; they didn't know they were signing up for the Aztec child sacrifice."
My friends, that is not just great thinking; that is brilliant writing. Consumers of Bonner's prose marvel day after day, ever since 1978 and especially since he went online in 1996, at his capacity to offer prose and analytics on an ongoing basis. Most of us struggle to write anything this good in a year; for Bonner, it is a daily thing.
Here is another sample of his writing and thinking, and this passage concerns the outrageous CEO salaries during the credit-drunk boom times of 2005:
"Top business leaders have become like sports heroes but without the talent. You need not have any real knowledge of the business you are getting into, or, as Bernie Ebbers demonstrated, any real knowledge about business of any sort. What will get you a job as a leader in the corporate world is the same thing that will get you a woman in the mating game — outsize confidence.
Human life — apart from the obvious physical aspects — is largely about what scientists call "impression management." A man with a good line of talk and a confident air about him gets almost anything he wants, and that includes the CEO job at a major U.S corporation… Then you may worry — what if the company doesn't do well? Well, what if? Again, recent history shows us that you can fail miserably in Corporate America and still leave with a lot of money."
On equality as proclaimed by the Founding Fathers:
"When Americans celebrate the birth of their nation, it bothers no one that the Founders' most important insights are palpably untrue. People are born different. It is only before the law that they are equal, and then only if they have enough money for a good lawyer."
Here is how that insight pertains to investing:
"What of the so-called level playing field of the investment markets? A fellow has been told that he has as much chance to make money from his investments as Warren Buffett and George Soros. In the abstract, it sounds as though it might be true. But if he drove his car based on abstract principles, he'd soon be dead. For investing as well as driving, it's the precise details that matter."
I'm toying with a theory why some of the best books of our time — this one among them — are written by people with an eye to investment opportunities and strategies. How is it that this commercial beat manages to unearth such spectacular insight, whereas thousands of dreary academic tomes languish and have no impact on the world at all?
My theory is that this is because real-time commerce is the most overlooked force in the universe. Commerce even provides the test of the long-run merit of ideas: Ideas rooted in truth instantiate themselves in institutions and become part of history. Therefore, following the commercial thread through time means following meritorious ideas and the real ways in which people use them to live their lives. Yet because economic ignorance is so pervasive, especially in journalism and academia, few are in a position to follow this thread. They end up daydreaming about untruths for a living.
This sets up an interesting irony. A writer like Bill Bonner, and the same can be said of Lila Rajiva, can track and explain our world in a way that few tenured professors can or ever will. Of Mobs, Messiahs and Markets, the famed investor Marc Faber says it "is such an excellent book that if I had to name just one book investors should read, this is the one I would select."
I would actually go further to point out that its insights pertain not only to investment but to the whole of life and, therefore, should be read by everyone who wants to see the world with new clarity.
[ A Case for Danger ]
There's a national park close to my house that has a large lake and all the swimming accoutrements left over from the 1970s. It's a nightmare for any "safety Nazi." The water is very deep. A diving board is very high and slippery, even slightly broken. There is no lifeguard on duty. If you dive incorrectly and get the wind knocked out of you, you could easily drown. The distances in the lake are deceiving. The shore looks closer than it is. If you are swimming in the middle of the lake, and find yourself tired out, there's no hope.
Older people reading this are thinking: "So what? This sort of thing was everywhere when I was a kid." True enough. But younger people today know nothing of this environment. Today, every playground is hyper-safetyized. Danger has been nearly eradicated. Swings don't swing high. The movements of all playground equipment are severely restricted. Swimming pools are getting ever more shallow. Diving boards aren't even allowed in many subdivisions.
It's suggestive of a gigantic cultural shift, one backed by thousands and millions of government regulations, with more on the way. The drive is to create an entire world around us that is all about safety so that we can be coddled in every conceivable way, a world that never gives rise to that inner feeling of possible danger and, therefore, self-responsibility and internally driven caution.
It is all about which parts of the brain are fired up when we go about any of life's activities. If we have institutions to protect us and eliminate all risk and all genuinely experimental play, we no longer have a sense that risk even exists or how we should respond to it.
I dove into the lake of danger the other day and felt it, that sense that I had better make the right decisions here or I'm a goner. It's an unusual feeling. I admit that I found it initially alarming. But after you get used to it, it's invigorating. It makes you feel as if your fate is in your own hands. You must be wise. You have to take account of unknowns. You have to think, prepare, be cautious, and calibrate the payoff relative to the probability that something could go wrong. Once you do that, lo! It is fun and wonderful.
How is it possible that anyone today is even allowed near this lake? I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect that it remains untouched by regulatory trends because it is federally owned and therefore inevitably neglected. No one cares about this space. So long as the workers get paid, and the safety Nazis are not out picketing and screaming about it, the place retains that old-world sense of real life. (No surprise that this place is enormously popular among young students.)
The impulse to create environments that are hyper-cushioned and protected does not prepare anyone for effective functioning in real life. That's because this type of environment has nothing to do with the real world. No matter how much we regulate, manage, create safety nets and otherwise build systems that remove obvious dangers from the world, the structure of the universe guarantees that the future is always unknown. Uncertainty does exist and cannot be eradicated. Change happens, and we have to be prepared to adapt to it. Nothing that happened in the past can necessarily be repeated in a changed future.
This is especially true in the economic environment. In a growing and developing economy, there is no stasis. Nothing is exactly the same from one day to the next. There are constant changes in prices, resource availabilities, consumer tastes, worker availability and, especially, in technology. If a system cannot accommodate these, it is useless.
In a growing economy, there are profits and losses, success stories and bankruptcies, amazing triumphs and terrible losses and, most of all, there are surprises around every corner. Every day is an opportunity for something newer and better.
The government talks of stabilization, but there is no stability in a developing economy. Change, change, and more change is the central character. Institutions rise and then must be torn down and replaced by new institutions.
This is the core of what builds a great civilization. It is not safety and stability but open-endedness, the opportunity for discovery and reinvention — that is the driving force of social and economic development. This also happens to be the very thing that bureaucracies and regulations oppose. They shut opportunity and constrain innovation. They tend to want to preserve what is outmoded and put fetters on what is emerging.
But here is the irony: If we think of history as the competition between controlled safety under despotic rulers and open-ended uncertainty under freedom, societies that embrace freedom win out every time. Freedom leads to growth and long-run triumph.
In the 20th century, we saw many experiments with the closed model that used the state to try to guide societies toward a certain end. This necessitated the constricting of experimentation, trial and error, human liberty and self-responsibility.
The experiments went by various names: socialism, fascism, New Dealism or whatever. But they all failed. There were many reasons for the failure, but a main one was that they put down the ability to dispense with things that were no longer working and experiment with new approaches that may or may not work.
Daniel Cloud, author of The Lily, the e-book of the week in the Laissez Faire Club, explains that every truly successful society must have two features.
First, it must have some system in place for getting rid of laws, institutions, production processes and patterns of living when they are no longer working. That means that human volition must be unleashed in the context of personal responsibility and private property. People, and not bureaucracies, must be empowered to be the primary decision makers, because only acting human being can be truly adaptable to change.
Second, there has to be a system for new institutions and innovations to make further innovation down the line ever easier. Each step down the path to social advancement has to enable the next step to be less costly and more rewarding. In this way, innovations are not dead ends, but tools that inspire ever more progress.
This is another way of saying that capital, the tools that make other tools, is indispensable for serious economic development. But that also means that capital must be in private hands — owned and controlled — from which it can be applied in ways that embrace the unknown future with an eye to trial and error.
If you think about the government's response to the 2008 financial meltdown, it has pursued a course that is exactly the opposite of what you want in a growing economy. It saved unprofitable institutions. It tried to restore the status quo ante in the housing market. It tried to cushion the needed shift in labor resources. It tried to reverse history and make things as they were, spending and creating many trillions of dollars to do it.
But things can never be as they were. The crisis was an opportunity to clear out what was not working and inspire the creation of new institutions that would work. In the digital world that the government (mostly) does not control, this happens every day. But in the physical world that the government does control, policy intervened to prevent the clearing out of the bad and the emergence of the new.
It is hardly surprising that we are left with a terrible and grinding stagnation, with no end in sight. The government has tried to turn the entire macro economy into a massive safety zone for everyone. Indebted consumers, bloated corporations, coddled and overpaid workers, subsidized sectors and dependent financial institutions are just supposed to keep on keeping on. It's as if the government tried to create a modern kid's playground of perfect safety and predictability, a place where all that happens is preapproved and nothing unexpected ever takes place.
It's been tried before. It might sound like a good idea, but the result is catastrophic for the social order.
What economic actors really need is an environment much more like the national park lake I went to. There is danger and risk. There is no lifeguard on duty, and everyone knows it. Everyone feels it. This inspires individuals to take responsibility, to feel that sense of awesome adventure, to carefully calibrate risk and reward and to try to things that test the limits. In the end, as the students who frequent this park can tell you, a society like that hones skills and inspires the imagination; in the end, it is also a heck of a lot more fun.
[ Mencken the Great ]
Shawn Lyttle, a colleague at Laissez Faire Books, did a very dangerous thing yesterday. He shoved into my hand a little book called Three Early Works, by H.L. Mencken. I opened it and felt that whooshing sound of my brain being sucked into the delirious world of the greatest American sociologist.
For anyone who loves liberty and ideas, Mencken is impossible to put down. As you read, you feel your internal constitution change. It is exhilarating and transforming. You sense that you are thinking hard for the first time in a long time. With him as your guide, you throw off conventions that surround us. You feel liberated, prepared for new things, renewed in spirit, defiant, courageous.
So there went my evening. I had a thousand other things to do, but instead, I couldn't stop reading this material written almost a hundred years ago. The writing is fresh and wonderfully reckless, like a banned document newly come to light.
On culture, Mencken was a highbrow elitist who understood lowbrow tastes like no one else. On politics, he was an anarchist in spirit who regarded democracy as the world's most idiotic political system. On religion, he considered the whole thing to be hokum designed to sustain myths we want to believe, yet he maintained deep and lasting friendships with high church officials. On life in general, he loved liberty with a deep and burning passion, and it is this point that makes his work so inspiring.
If you were not both delighted and outraged as you read anything he wrote, he would consider himself a failure. How did Mencken do it? How did he write so much dazzling prose that holds up so long after it was written? Where did he get his insight? How did he manage to write so well? One more telling question: In our times of hypersensitivity and opinion conformism, how does it come to be that it is still legal to read this stuff?
The three early works in print in this one book here are A Book of Prefaces (1917), Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918) and The American Credo (1920). The first shows that he was a first-rate literary critic, probably the greatest ever. This man was a genius scholar, even though he never taught in a university. He was a journalist at a time when there were high standards attached to that word.
In this first work, he writes about Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, James Huneker and "Puritanism as a Literary Force," which set the whole literary tone of the next decade. These are the works that caused a whole generation to fall down in awe. He didn't attract fans by saying what people wanted to hear. He never curried favor. He never bowed to convention. Quite the opposite. He is alarming, unsettling, unexpected, outrageous. In this way, he pioneered what came to be called literary criticism.
The next book is hilariously subtitled A Book of Calumny. A calumny is an unflattering comment that is false but passed on anyway. By calling these 49 essays in this book calumnies, he immediately evades the criticism that what he is saying is untrue and wicked. In truth, most of what he is saying is both true and wicked. The essays are about a page long, sometimes only a paragraph. They are so rich and pithy that you nearly have to stop after reading each one — stop just to absorb his point, arguing with him in your mind, contemplating the implications of what he is saying.
The final section is his book called The American Credo. It consists of 488 small sentences that Americans believe about the world. There is no way to read even a few without laughing out loud. In fact, I disturbed a roomful of quiet lounge patrons in this very nice hotel by involuntarily emitting loud yelps of delight. After even the servers started glaring at me, I realized that if I was going to keep reading this, I was going to have to move to another venue.
I'll just offer some of his whimsical musings completely randomly. Americans believe:
- That when one takes one's best girl to see the monkeys in the zoo, the monkeys invariably do something that is very embarrassing
- That something mysterious goes on in the rooms back of chop suey restaurants
- That oil of pennyroyal will drive away mosquitoes
- That the old ladies on summer hotel verandas devote themselves entirely to the discussion of scandals
- That every circus clown's heart is breaking for one reason or another
- That a bullfighter always has so many women in love with him that he doesn't know what to do
- That the music of Richard Wagner is all played fortissimo, and by cornets
- That the Masonic order goes back to the days of King Solomon.
And so on through all 488 of them. From them, you get a great picture of the American mind as it stood in 1920. Mencken poked fun constantly and uproariously at Americans — while at the same time absolutely loving American culture. It is an interesting balance. He helps us understand ourselves and laugh at ourselves, while inspiring a discomforting level of internal criticism.
Readers should not skip the introduction to this third section. Here is a brilliant contribution to understanding the big picture. Read the following and remember that we are talking about 1920:
The American of today, in fact, probably enjoys less personal liberty than any other man of Christendom, and even his political liberty is fast succumbing to the new dogma that certain theories of government are virtuous and lawful, and others abhorrent and felonious. Laws limiting the radius of his free activity multiply year by year: It is now practically impossible for him to exhibit anything describable as genuine individuality, either in action or in thought, without running afoul of some harsh and unintelligible penalty. It would surprise no impartial observer if the motto "In God we trust" were one day expunged from the coins of the republic by the Junkers at Washington, and the far more appropriate word, "verboten," substituted. Nor would it astound any save the most romantic if, at the same time, the goddess of liberty were taken off the silver dollars to make room for a bas-relief of a policeman in a spiked helmet. Moreover, this gradual (and, of late, rapidly progressive) decay of freedom goes almost without challenge; the American has grown so accustomed to the denial of his constitutional rights and to the minute regulation of his conduct by swarms of spies, letter-openers, informers and agents provocateurs that he no longer makes any serious protest.
Please permit me to quote his observation on the core of the American spirit, a point that explains the total disorientation that has affected the young generation today:
But what, then, is the character that actually marks the American — that is, in chief? If he is not the exalted monopolist of liberty that he thinks he is nor the noble altruist and idealist he slaps upon the chest when he is full of rhetoric, nor the degraded dollar-chaser of European legend, then what is he? We offer an answer in all humility, for the problem is complex, and there is but little illumination of it in the literature; nevertheless, we offer it in the firm conviction, born of 20 years' incessant meditation, that it is substantially correct. It is, in brief, this: That the thing that sets off the American from all other men, and gives a peculiar color not only to the pattern of his daily life but also to the play of his inner ideas, is what, for want of a more exact term, may be called social aspiration. That is to say, his dominant passion is a passion to lift himself by at least a step or two in the society that he is a part of — a passion to improve his position, to break down some shadowy barrier of caste, to achieve the countenance of what, for all his talk of equality, he recognizes and accepts as his betters. The American is a pusher. His eyes are ever fixed upon some round of the ladder that is just beyond his reach, and all his secret ambitions, all his extraordinary energies, group themselves about the yearning to grasp it… The American is violently eager to get on, and thoroughly convinced that his merits entitle him to try and to succeed, but by the same token, he is sickeningly fearful of slipping back, and out of the second fact, as we shall see, spring some of his most characteristic traits…Such a thing as a secure position is practically unknown among us. There is no American who cannot hope to lift himself another notch or two, if he is good; there is absolutely no hard and fast impediment to his progress. But neither is there any American who doesn't have to keep on fighting for whatever position he has; no wall of caste is there to protect him if he slips. One observes every day the movement of individuals, families, whole groups, in both directions. All of our cities are full of brummagem aristocrats — aristocrats, at all events, in the view of their neighbors — whose grandfathers, or even fathers, were day laborers; and working for them, supported by them, heavily patronized by them, are clerks whose grandfathers were lords of the soil.
Do you see, then, how much Mencken truly loved this country? He loved this country and hated its government, especially because he saw what the government was doing to the American culture and to the core spirit of his times.
His times are our times. Mencken speaks as powerfully to us as he did to his generation. That is why it is a good idea to read as much Mencken as possible — before doing so is made illegal.
[ To Love the Unknown ]
Why do we let the police power of the state take over and inevitably wreck so many aspects of our life? Why do we tolerate the invasions of our homes, businesses, and bank accounts?
One theory: people find more comfort in the false security that the state provides over the uncertainty of a liberty-driven future.
We want a plan. We want a road map. We want assurance of what tomorrow will bring.
Politicians don't provide that, but they are glad to promise it. Liberty makes no such promise.
Fine. In that case, if we are to treasure liberty, we need to find a way to embrace, to love, to understand, and to appreciate the beauty of an unknown future. Just because we can't imagine it doesn't mean that it won't dazzle and delight us with creative surprises. How can we develop affection for and confidence in something we cannot yet see?
We need a better understanding of how society evolves. I think I have just the guidebook here.
"The true measure of human genius," writes Daniel Cloud in The Lily, a poetically dazzling defense of economic freedom, "lies in the fact that we're able to bring about things that exceed our own comprehension."
And what is it we cannot comprehend? A future that is always clouded in uncertainty. That none of us know what tomorrow will bring is a universal fact that unites all of humanity.
Cloud has a radical judgment on this condition. He writes that this position of not knowing is the very source of society's progress, creativity, inspiration, and productive learning. It is also why we need radical freedom to discover and adapt. He urges us to embrace what most people find scary, to learn to love what we do not know and to use uncertainty as our finest tool in building a bright future.
This unusual defense of freed institutions goes to the root of the problem that confronts every intellectual and every society: How can we confront the issue of change? Do we regret it as destabilizing and contrary to rational plans? Or do we welcome it with openness, playfulness and anticipation of learning tomorrow what we do not know today? His conclusions challenge the very core of the social sciences, including mainstream economics and the dominant assumptions about politics today.
Cloud has a most interesting background that prepared him to write this expansion of the case for the free society on themes first taught by F.A. Hayek. Cloud teaches the philosophy of science at Princeton University. Before that, he was the manager of several hedge funds and traveled and worked extensively in China. This book brings together his two loves: entrepreneurship in real markets and high-level philosophy with a focus on biological evolution.
In his business life, he observed how enterprise relies most fundamentally on adapting to unknown conditions: Those who excel at this difficult task are those most willing to acknowledge the limits of their understanding and learn as they go. They make "irrationality" work in their favor. In contrast, the world of academia is packed with people who are loath to admit any absence of understanding because they believe that their knowledge of the world and ideas is complete and fully rational.
This book, then, could be retitled What My Academic Friends Could Learn About Society From Understanding the Real World of Economics. The book is called The Lily by way of reference to the famous passage from the Sermon on the Mount: "Consider the lilies, how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." As Cloud renders the passage, the lily was not weighed down by a rational plan for its well-being and, for this very reason, adapted and became the most beautiful of all the flowers.
So it is for societies. Free societies beat controlled societies every time. This is not because free societies get more attention and care from the intellectuals and political elites but rather the opposite. The more the intellectuals attempt to think them through and the more the state attempts to provide for them, the more they stagnate and eventually fall to ruin. But societies that are permitted to develop from the internal energy of problem-solving individuals, developing in unexpected and seemingly irrational ways, grow in a manner consistent with the well-being of everyone.
In a passage that is typical of the evocative poetry of this work, Cloud asks:
"Why, exactly, didn't government of the people, by the people and for the people perish permanently from the earth, despite repeated contests with opponents, from the Duke of Alba to Stalin, who seemed to have everything going for them, who viewed their disorganized, disunited opponents with open contempt? We seem a bit like the Fool, continually stepping off cliffs, but repeatedly borne back up to the heights on the wings of angels, fighting off armored knights with a wooden stick, casting our bread on the water and getting it back a thousandfold, at our wisest when least sober. Is it pure dumb luck that keeps saving us from our own stupidity, or is there something else going on here, some new dispensation?"
This theory heightens the role of what the author calls "play" in the course of social and economic development. People must be free to try and fail, to learn on the job, to improvise and adapt on the fly, to find new ways of doing things that completely depart from the plan and tradition. To be free to do so becomes essential.
"To whatever extent an unfree society necessarily depends on the fear of punishment, rather than the desire to impress as a motivation for good performance," the author writes, "willingness to make mistakes or introduce playful variations is likely to be less, and the incremental evolution of complex new skills correspondingly more unlikely. Nobody wants to be shot for trying something frivolous; Stalin was very successful in eradicating that kind of boldness."
He applies the model to the issue of capitalist firms. Management textbooks tend to map out plans for how firms should work. But the plans are next to useless so far as this author is concerned. How do you keep large organizations from stagnating in the same way that societies ruled by large states die? By the freedom and willingness of employees and managers to try new things and to come and go. Those firms who attract and retain great talent — and that includes creative and playful talent — are the ones that thrive, while those that cannot tend to shrivel, become technologically backward and die. This determines which institutions flourish or decay.
The Cloudian perspective helps illuminate what makes great entrepreneurs last and last. It has nothing to do with the alleged power of capital. Capital can vanish as quickly as it came. "How do people make abnormal profits in markets? By being in the minority and being right and being persuasive."
The real stickiness of wealth in certain hands has to do with the speed at which competitors learn:
"The real reason the entrepreneur's profits don't quickly get arbitraged away is that it takes people who aren't quite as creative a long time to realize that he is not crazy and begin to imitate him, and by that time, he's already moved on to some other uncertain project on the basis of some new keen hunch. You become Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett by doing this over and over and being right almost every time. People seldom get rich by just correctly measuring a risk; the real source of economic profit in a technologically dynamic capitalist economy is individual intuitions about objective uncertainties."
The ultimate example of the institution that forbids coming and going, experimentation and play, is the state:
"The economic planner who wants to actually succeed in rationally planning an economy has to first suppress exactly the sort of negotiation individuals might be able to do if they weren't chained to their desks, because he has to get people to follow the plan, to stay where they are and do what they're told. This suppression seems to bring the evolution of institutions and skills to a grinding halt — with grave consequences a few years or decades down the line."
The state always favors the rational and certain plan, rather than permit the unforeseen in an environment of freedom. For this reason, states oppose what they consider the waste of competition, business failure, research and entrepreneurship.
"In a world where we all just cooperated like sensible people, there would be no real room for conversations with two sides, and that is what the political rationalist always finds himself trying to eliminate. To keep things rationally optimal," writes Cloud, "he needs to stop social evolution in its tracks, but that brings him into direct conflict with the things that make us human."
This tendency becomes the source of failure. Social evolution can never been planned or designed:
"Planned markets are sick markets, markets that are always in crisis, because their most important social function — facilitating selection between competing pools of capital on the basis of what way of doing things in the real world works best in practice, distinguishing between real capital formers and fools — has been disrupted by the planner's clumsy interference. When the state tries to plan a market, it must try to make clever contrarians into mindless lemmings who follow where they are led; but then they become useless for their old function of picking good risks."
Sometimes it can be hard to see the costs associated with state planning, simply because the changing and advancing that comes with freedom is not permitted to occur and we cannot observe what fails to happen:
"As long as you're just installing old technology invented by someone else, a planned economy and a managed society can be made to work, but as soon as you reach the technological frontier, as soon as the free play of endogenous innovation is genuinely needed to maintain the pace of growth, as soon as you actually have to cope with real uncertainty, the whole thing is likely to grind to a halt at some arbitrary point on the tortoise-blanket-pea landscape, and begin to die as the tortoise moves away."
Even worse and more dangerous are the frenzied attacks on commercial society that keep reemerging in our history — the loathing of the entrepreneurial class that leads to utter destruction. He cites Cambodia as a case in point: the application of political rationalism gone mad and leading to unthinkable bloodshed and extinction of society itself. He issues a warning that people have not yet learned from these experiments in hyper-rationalism in politics and that no people are immune from such frenzies.
This is Professor Cloud's first major work, but it follows a lifetime of exciting experience in the two very different worlds of capitalist speculation in emerging markets and the staid and static world of academia. He brings the two together to urge intellectuals to learn from the experience of real-world markets and for market participants to gain more confidence over their primary role of embracing a changing and developing society. To this end, he uses many tools from economic science to create biological metaphors about the philosophy of society from the ancient world to modern times.
The prose style is like nothing you've seen from a thinker of his caliber. It is rhapsodic, imaginative and poetic. His erudition is often startling. His vision is refreshing and new. You can't escape the feeling that he has put his finger on something very important, very profound. Here he acts as our teacher to help us learn to love and appreciate the very point about freedom that most people have considered regrettable. He teaches us to love what we do not yet know.
[ Spooner the Prophet ]
How much more ridiculous can the US Postal Service get? This you will not believe. It has embarked on a public relations campaign to get people to stop sending so much email and start licking more stamps. This is how it is dealing with its $10 billion loss last year. Meanwhile, rather than offering better service, it is cutting back ever more, which can only guarantee that the mails will get worse than they already are.
It's true that mail still has a place in the digital world, as the post office says. But the government shouldn't be the institution to run it. It already has competitors in package delivery but the government stands firmly against letting any private company deliver something like first-class mail. And so it has been since the beginning. The state and only the state is permitted to charge people for non-urgent paper mail in a letter envelope.
It's a control thing. The government is into that. And it is far from new.
Do you know the amazing story of Lysander Spooner? He lived from 1808 to 1887. His first great battle was taking on the post office monopoly. In the 1840s, he was like most people at the time: fed up with the high prices and bad service. But as an intellectual and entrepreneur, he decided to do something about it. He started the American Letter Mail Company, and his letter business gave the government some serious competition.
It opened offices in major cities, organized a network of steamships and railroads, and hired people to get the mail to where it needed to be. His service was both faster and cheaper than the government's own. Then he published a pamphlet to fight the power: "The Unconstitutionality of the Laws of Congress Prohibiting Private Mails." It was brilliant. It rallied people to his side. And he made a profit.
The government hated him and his company and began to litigate against him. It dramatically lowered the price for its services, and used public money to cover its losses. The goal was to bankrupt Spooner, and it eventually succeeded. Spooner's private postal system had to be shut down. It's the same way the government today shuts down private schools, private currencies, private security, private roads, private companies that ignore the central plan, and anyone else who stands up for freedom.
From this one anecdote alone, you can see that the post office is hardly a "natural monopoly" — something the government has to provide because free enterprise can't do so. It is a forced monopoly, one kept alive solely through laws and subsidies. If the post office closed its doors today, there would be 1,000 companies rushing in to fill the gap. Just as in the 1840s, the results would be cheaper, better services. The government runs the post office because it wants to control the command posts of society, including communication. The Internet as a global communication device snuck up on the state before the state could kill it.
Let's return to the 19th century. Spooner didn't go away. He was more than an entrepreneur. He was a brilliant and pioneering intellectual, as the collection The Lysander Spooner Reader makes clear. He was a champion of individual liberty and a passionate opponent of all forms of tyranny. He was an abolitionist before it became fashionable but he also defended the South's right to secede.
Most incredibly, he was probably the first 19th century American to return to the old anti-Federalist tradition of post-Revolutionary America. He did this by asking the unaskable question: why should the US Constitution — however it is interpreted — be binding on every individual living in this geographic region?
This document was passed generations ago. Maybe you could say that the signers were bound by it, but what about those who opposed it at the time, and what about future generations? Why are the living being forced to live by parchment arrangement made by people long dead? Why are the living bound by a privileged group's interpretations of its meaning?
In his view, people have rights or they do not have rights. If they have rights, no ancient scroll restricting those rights should have any power to take those rights away. Nor does it matter what a bunch of old guys in black robes say: rights are real things, not legal constructs to be added or reduced based on the results of courtroom deliberations. Plenty of Americans before his time would have agreed with him! It's still the case.
Now, keep in mind that Spooner lived in a time where the living memory of these debates had not entirely disappeared. He knew what many people today do not know, namely that the Articles of Confederation made for a freer confederation of states than the Constitution. The Constitution amounted to an increase in government power, despite all its language about restricting government power. Remember too that it was only a few years after the Constitution was rammed through that the feds were suddenly jailing people for the speech crime of criticizing the US president!
Spooner spoke plainly: what you call the Constitution has no authority to take away my rights. Hence his famous essay: "No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority." In "No Treason" he argues that the state has no rights over your freedom of speech. In "Vices Not Crimes," he shows that people in any society are capable of doing terrible things but the law should only concern itself with aggression against person and property. Reading them all together, as they are in this book, is a radicalizing experience — a liberating experience. It makes you see the world in a completely different way.
It's true that they aren't teaching about Spooner in public school. But he was a giant by any standard, the 19th century's own Thomas Jefferson (but even better than Jefferson on most issues). There is still so much to learn here. It's no wonder that his legacy has been suppressed.
This edition of his best work is published by Fox & Wilkes, an imprint of Laissez Faire Books. Incredibly, you are still permitted to buy this and read it without getting arrested — for now.
[ The Twelve-Year Sentence ]
You look at the parade of mindless dopes and dopers that make up the Occupy protesters and think: What is wrong with these people? They are mostly kids. They don't have jobs. Most don't even look employable. Those who are employable can't find work at a wage they are willing to accept. Instead, they meander around in a mob at all hours, spouting inanities and imagining themselves to be radicals.
They don't even know what they are protesting, not precisely, anyway. They oppose injustice, inequality and the like, but what does this mean? It means: The people in the buildings have money, and they do not. They are against that.
Meanwhile, they walk around with iPhones and Androids with fat data contracts paid for by moms and dads, all while agitating against the capitalist system that put these miracles in their palms in the first place. They claim to be against the suits, but they demand that the suits have more power to regulate, tax, redistribute, inflate, interfere and centrally plan.
What is going on here? Let's speak the unspeakable truth that is still nearly taboo in today's world. They were raised by government. From the ages of 6–18, they were tended to by the state in a system they were forced to join.
This is a point made first in an incredible book published in 1974, edited by William Rickenbacker. It is called The Twelve-Year Sentence. It is not only one of the greatest titles in the history of publishing; it is a rare book that dared to say what no one wanted to hear. True, the essays are all scholarly and precise (the book came out of an academic conference), but a fire for liberty burns hot below the footnoted surface. Especially notable: This book came out long before the homeschooling movement, long before a remnant of the population began to see what was happening and started bailing out.
The core truth that this book tells: The government has centrally planned your child's life and has forced both you and your child into the system. But, said the writers, the system is a racket and a cheat. It doesn't prepare them for a life of liberty and productivity. It prepares them to be debt slaves, dependents, bureaucrats and wartime fodder.
I'm thinking of this book as I look at the televised coverage of these protests. This is what the system has produced. This is the mob that once gathered in "home room," assembled for school lunches, sat for endless hours in their assigned desks, was tested ten thousand times to make sure they have properly absorbed what the government wants them to know. Now they are out, and they want their lives to amount to something, but they don't know what.
And it's just the beginning. There are tens of millions of victims of this system. They were quiet, as long as the jobs were there and the economy was growing. But when the fortunes fell, they become a marauding mob seeking a father figure to lead them into the light.
Think of the phrase "twelve-year sentence." The government took them in at the age of six. It sat them down in desks, thirty or so per room. It paid teachers to lecture them and otherwise keep them busy, while their parents worked to cough up 40% of their paychecks to the government to fund the system (among other things) that raises their kids.
So on it goes for twelve years, until the age of eighteen, when the government decides that it is time for them to move on to college, where they sit for another four years, but this time, at mom and dad's expense.
What have they learned? They have learned how to sit in a desk and zone out for hours and hours, five days per week. They might have learned how to repeat back things said by their warden… I mean, teacher. They've learned how to sneak around the system a bit and have something resembling a life on the sly.
They have learned to live for the weekend and say, "TGIF!" Perhaps they have taken a few other skills with them: sports, music, theater or whatever. But they have no idea how to turn their limited knowledge or abilities into something remunerative, in a market system that depends most fundamentally on individual initiative, alertness, choice and exchange.
They are deeply ignorant about the stuff that makes the world work and builds civilization, by which I mostly mean commerce. They've never worked a day in the private sector. They've never taken an order, never faced the bracing truth of the balance sheet, never taken a risk, never even managed money. They've only been consumers, not producers, and their consumption has been funded by others, either by force (taxes) or by leveraged parents on a guilt trip.
So it stands to reason: They have no sympathy for or understanding of what life is like for the producers of this world. Down with the productive classes! Or as they said in the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution: "Expropriate the expropriators." Or under Stalin: "Kill the kulaks." Or under Mao: "Eradicate the Four Olds" (old customs, culture, habits and ideas). So too did the Nazi youth rage against the merchant classes who were said to lack "blood and honor."
The amazing thing is not that this state system produces mindless drones. The miracle is that some make it out and have normal lives. They educate themselves. They get jobs. They become responsible. Some go on to do great things. There are ways to overcome the twelve-year sentence, but the existence of the educational penitentiary still remains a lost opportunity, coercively imposed.
Americans are taught to love the sentence because it is "free." Imagine tying this word to the public school system! It is anything but free. It is compulsory at its very core. If you try to escape, you are "truant." If you refuse to cough up to support it, you are guilty of evasion. If you put your kids in private school, you pay twice. If you school at home, the social workers will watch every move you make.
There is no end to the reform. But no one talks about abolition. Still, can you imagine that in the 18th and most of the 19th century this system didn't even exist? Americans were the most educated people in the world, approaching near-universal literacy, and without a government-run central plan, without a twelve-year sentence. Compulsory education was unthinkable. That only came much later, brought to us by the same crowd who gave us World War I, the Fed, and the income tax.
Escaping is very hard, but even high-security prisons are not impenetrable. So millions have left. Tens of millions more remain. This whole generation of young people are victims of the system. That makes them no less dangerous precisely because they don't even know it. It's called the Stockholm Syndrome: Many of these kids fell in love with their captors and jailers. They want them to have even more power.
We should celebrate the prophets who saw all this coming. William Rickenbacker saw it. He and the writers in this book knew what was going on. They knew what to call it. They dared to tell the truth, to speak the unspeakable: this system is more like prison than education, and it will end when its escapees are loosed on the streets to protest against anything and everything.
Even after nearly forty years, this book has lost none of its power. It should take its place among the great documents in history that have dared to demand that the jailer step aside and let the inmates free.
What Is America, Anyway?
There are occasions in American life — and they come too often these days — when you want to scream: "What the heck has happened to this country?!" Everyone encounters events that strike a particular nerve, some egregious violations of the norms for a free country that cut very deeply and personally.
We wonder: do we even remember what it means to be free? If not — and I think not — The Idea of America: What It Was and How It Was Lost, a collection of bracing reminders from our past, edited by William Bonner and Pierre Lemieux, is the essential book of our time.
I'll just mention two outrages that occur first to me. In the last six months, I came back to the country twice from international travel, once by plane and once by car. The car scene shocked me. The lines were ridiculously long and border control agents, clad in dark glasses and boots and wearing enough weaponry to fight an invading army, run up and down the lines with large dogs. Periodically, U.S. border control would throw open doors of cars and vans and let the dogs run through, while the driver sits there poker-faced and tries to stay calm and pretends not to object.
When I finally got to the customs window, I was questioned not like a citizen of the country but like a likely terrorist. The agent wanted to know everything about me: home, work, where I had been and why, and whether I will stay somewhere before getting to my destination, family composition, and other matters that just creeped me out. I realized immediately that there was no question he could ask me that I could refuse to answer, and I had to do this politely.
That's power.
The second time I entered the country was by plane, and there were two full rescans of bags on the way in, in addition to the passport check, and a long round of questioning. There were no running dogs this time; the passengers were the dogs and we were all on the agents' leashes. Whatever they ordered us to do, we did, no matter how irrational. We moved here and there in locked step and total silence. One step out of line and you are guaranteed to be yelled at. At one point, an armed agent began to talk loudly and with a sense of ridicule about the clothes I was wearing, and went out of his way to make sure everyone else heard him. I could do nothing but smile as if I were being complimented by a friend.
That's power.
Of course these cases are nothing like the reports you hear almost daily about the abuse and outrages from domestic travel, which now routinely requires everyone to submit to digital strip searches. We have come to expect this. We can hardly escape the presence of the police in our lives. I vaguely remember when I was young that I thought of the police as servants of the people. Now their presence strikes fear in the heart, and they are everywhere, always operating under the presumption that they have total power and you and I have absolutely none.
You hear slogans about the "land of the free" and we still sing patriotic songs at the ballpark and even at church on Sunday, and these songs are always about our blessed liberty, the battles of our ancestors against tyranny, the special love of liberty that animates our heritage and national self-identity. The contrast with reality grows more stark by the day.
And it isn't just about our personal liberty and our freedom to move about with a sense that we are exercising our rights. It hits us in the economic realm, where no goods or services change hands that aren't subject to the total control of the leviathan state. No business is really safe from being bludgeoned by legislatures, regulators, and the tax police, while objecting only makes you more of a target.
Few dare say it publicly: America has become a police state. All the signs are in place, among which the world's largest prison population. If we are not a police state, one must ask what are the indicators that will tell us that we've crossed the line? What are signs we haven't yet seen?
We can debate that all day about when, precisely, the descent began but there can be no doubt when the slide into the despotic abyss became precipitous. It was after the terrorists hit on 9/11 in 2001. The terrorists wanted to deliver a blow to freedom. Our national leaders swore the terrorists would never win, and then spent the following ten years delivering relentless and massive blows to liberty as we had known it.
The decline has been fast but not fast enough for people to be as shocked as they should be. Freedom is a state of being that is difficult to recall once it is gone. We adapt to the new reality, the way people adapt to degenerative diseases, grateful for slight respites from pain and completely despairing of ever feeling healthy and well again.
What's more, all the time we spend obeying, complying, and pretending to be malleable in order to stay out of trouble ends up socializing us and even changing our outlook on life. As in the Orwell novel, we have adjusted to government control as the new normal. The loudspeakers blared that all of this is in the interest of our security and well-being. These people who are stripping us, robbing us, humiliating us, impoverishing us are doing it all for our own good. We never fully believe it but the message still affects our outlook.
The editors of The Idea of America are urging a serious national self-assessment. They argue that freedom is the only theme that fully and truly animates the traditional American spirit. We are not united in religion, race, and creed, but we do have this wonderful history of rebellion against power in favor of human rights and freedom from tyranny. For this reason the book begins with the essential founding documents, which, if taken seriously, make a case for radical freedom not as something granted by government but as something that we possess as a matter of right.
The love of liberty is rooted in our colonial past, and it is thrilling to see Murray Rothbard's excellent account of the pre-revolutionary past printed here, with follow-ups by Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine to make the point. Lord Acton makes the next appearance with a clarifying essay about the whole point of the American Revolution, which was not independence as such but liberty. He forcefully argues that the right of secession, the right to annul laws, the right to say no to the tyrant, the right to leave the system, constitute the great contribution of America to political history. As you read, you wonder where these voices are today, and what would happen to them if they spoke up in modern versions of the same thoughts. These revolutionaries are pushing ideas that the modern regime seeks to bury and even criminalize.
The voice of the new country and its voluntaristic themes is provided by Alexis de Tocqueville, along with the writings of James Madison. As Bonner and Lemieux argue in their own contributions, the idea of anarchism — that is, living without a state — has always been just beneath the surface of American ideology. Here they bring it to the surface with an essay by proto-anarchist J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur, who said of America, "We have no princes for whom we toil, starve, and bleed: we are the most perfect society now existing in the world."
The anarchist strain continues with marvelous writings by Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Voltairine de Cleyre, plus some court decisions reinforcing gun rights. The book ends with another reminder that American is an open society that is welcoming to newcomers. The final choice of Rose Wilder Lane's "Give Me Liberty" is inspired.
The value of this book is dramatically heightened by the additional material from Bonner, whose clear prose and incisive intellect is on display here both in the foreword and the afterword, as well as Lemieux, whose introduction made my blood boil with all his examples of government gone mad in our time. Bonner in particular offers an intriguing possibility that the future of the true America has nothing to do with geography; it exists where the free minds and free hearts exist. The digitization of the world opens up new opportunities for just this.
The contrast is stark: what America was meant to be and what it has become. It can be painful to take this kind of careful look. Truly honest appraisals of this sort are rare. Adapting, going along, pretending not to notice are all easier strategies to deal with the grim situation we face. But this is not the way America's founder dealt with their problems. This book might inspire us to think and act more like we should.
We should prepare.
In the words of Thomas Paine:
O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose, not only the tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her. — Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.
[ Conspiracies and How to Defeat Them ]
Someone asked me the other day if I believe in conspiracies. Well, sure. Here's one: it is called the political system. It is nothing if not a giant conspiracy to rob, trick and subjugate the population.
People participate in the hope of making our lives better, or at least curbing the damage government does. Yet look at the results: exactly the opposite. No matter who is selected as temporary front men to "reform" the system, the regime thrives and the population withers.
It should be obvious by now that reform doesn't happen by drawing ever more people into the ranks of the oppressor class. But somehow, people keep getting pulled in. What's more, the regime is fully aware of this, even if the population is not. So, yes, I would call it a conspiracy.
The word conspiracy comes from the Latin roots con and spiro, meaning to breathe together. It implies a shared interest and an understanding between people that doesn't always need to be openly stated. In the normal use of the term, the purpose of a conspiracy is always negative or destructive — a deceptive plot to do something bad.
This is why the government is always accusing other people of conspiring — terrorist cells, armed resistance at home and abroad, rebellious and plotting sectors of society — but exempts itself completely. The regime regards itself as unimpeachably fantastic, never destructive, never nefarious. Therefore, it is incapable of conspiracy.
It all depends on how you look at it. You don't have to work yourself into a fever over the Bilderbergers or the Trilateralists to see real conspiracy. Take a look at any government bureaucracy. Everyone there knows the goal: more power, more money and less work. The bureaucratic class "breathes together" toward the same nefarious goal of making itself safer and richer, while making normal life difficult for those who are subject to its dictates. And it all comes at the expense of everyone else.
The more dependencies government creates, the more people it can convince to go along with the conspiracy, and the better off it is. This is why Frédéric Bastiat once described the political system as follows: "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
The fiction part is the deception. It works only so long as the social consensus is there to support it. The task of anyone who opposes the great conspiracy, then, is to reveal and expose the reality that is being covered up by all the stories of all the wonderful things that government does. The fiction is unsustainable in light of logic and evidence. The curtain must be pulled back.
To my mind, the modern thinker who has best dissected the true nature of modern politics is Hans-Hermann Hoppe. He is incredibly clearheaded about modern politics, particularly the workings of democracy. It is a system of governance that was developed to give the people more direct control over the government; in fact, it has given the government more direct control over the people.
I'm pleased to report that Laissez Faire Books is publishing his next book, a massive collection with the title drawn from Bastiat: The Great Fiction. It will be released in electronic form to members of the Laissez Faire Club. So it comes free as part of the subscription.
As I've told many people, the Laissez Faire Club works like any high-end private club. Once you are a member, the drinks are on the house. And this book by Hoppe is one very stiff drink!
Joining the club right now gives you all the books we've already released — plus movie shorts to go along with them and forums to discuss them — and this Hoppe book plus many others come once per week. It is an incredible deal by any standard, and the perfect way to defeat the great conspiracy.
If you are unfamiliar with the work of Hoppe, prepare for The Great Fiction to fundamentally shift the way you view the world. No living writer today is more effective at stripping away the illusions almost everyone has about economics and public life. Hoppe causes the scales to fall from one's eyes on the most critical issue facing humanity today: the choice between liberty and statism.
The whole of Hoppe's writings on politics can be seen as an elucidation of Bastiat's point. He sees the state as a gang of thieves that uses propaganda as a means of disguising its true nature. In fleshing this out, Hoppe has made tremendous contributions to the literature, showing how the state originates and how the intellectual class helps perpetuates this cover-up, whether in the name of science, religion or the provision of some service like health, security, education, or whatever. The excuses are forever changing; the functioning and goal of the state is always the same.
The reader will be surprised at the approach Hoppe takes because it is far more systematic and logical than people expect of writers on these topics. I suspect that this is because he did not come by his views except after a long intellectual struggle, having moved systematically from being a conventional left-socialist to becoming the founder of his own anarcho-capitalist school of thought.
This particular work goes beyond politics, however, to show the full range of Hoppe's thoughts on issues of economics, history, scientific methodology and the history of thought. In each field, he brings that same level of rigor, that drive for uncompromising adherence to logic, the fearlessness in the face of radical conclusions.
It seems too limiting to describe Hoppe as a member of the Austrian or libertarian tradition, for he really has forged new paths, in more ways than he makes overt in his writings. We are really dealing here with a universal genius, which is precisely why Hoppe's name comes up so often in any discussion of today's great living intellectuals.
It also so happens that Hoppe is also an extremely controversial figure. I don't think he would have it any other way. Besides, this is always the case for truly creative minds that do not shrink from the conclusions of their own premises. The perspective from which he writes stems from a passionate yet scientific attachment to radical freedom, and his work comes about in times when the state is on the march.
Everything he writes cuts across the grain. It is paradigm breaking. Just when you think you have figured out his mode of thinking, he takes it in a direction that you didn't expect. It is not only his conclusions that are significant, but also the masterful way that he arrives at them.
It is my great honor as executive editor of Laissez Faire Books to be the publisher of a work of this significance. It is a testimony to the fact that progress in ideas is still possible in our time. So long as that remains true, so long as the tradition Hoppe represents is living and improving, we have reason to believe that human liberty has not and will not finally succumb to the great conspiracy.
[ Economics by and for Human Beings ]
"Economics puts parameters on people's utopias."
Yes. That's exactly it. That's why the politicians hate economics. That's why the media are so… selective in which economists they call on to talk about policy.
That's why the economics departments in colleges are put down by the sociologists, philosophers, literature professors and just about everyone else who has romantic longings for a coerced utopia.
"The teachings of the principles of economics should inform as much on what not to do, perhaps even more than providing a guide to public action."
That's it again. Don't control prices. Don't socialize medicine. Don't raise taxes. Don't inflate the money supply. Don't put up trade barriers. Don't go to war. Economists just keep bursting people's bubbles. And it's because economists say these things that the ruling class wants them to shut up about it.
It's been going on for hundreds of years. Every generation for the past 500 years has seen the battle wage between those who want to use the power of the state to contort and distort the world to fit some daydream on one hand and the economists who have seen the futility in this manipulation and warn against it on the other.
The man who wrote those above words is Peter Boettke, economics professor at George Mason University. He is one of the nation's leading producers of economists, having directed several dozen dissertations over 20 years and having spread his students to colleges and universities around the country and the world.
His new book, which ought to be read by every college student who secretly suspects that economics is not as dreary as they say, is Living Economics, just published by the Independent Institute. It's a big book, but a luxurious read from Page 1 to 450.
The phrase "living economics" means two things: 1) economics is part of life whether we recognize it or not, and 2) economics is a living discipline, rooted in universal principles but always changing in nuance and application.
Professor Boettke's purpose is to provide a guided tour through the profession as it is now and how he would like to see it changed. He does this by first explaining what got him interested in the science.
It turns out that he remembers the gas lines of the 1970s and recalls being amazed to discover that they were wholly manufactured by Washington policy. It was the price control of oil combined with inflationary pressures from bad monetary policy. Contrary to what the media mavens and politicians were saying at the time, it had nothing to do with producer greed, secret price manipulation or financial speculation.
That's what did it for him. He realized that economics is woven into every aspect of our lives. It is inescapable. When the market is allowed to work, beauty and growth results. Humanity flourishes. When markets are truncated and hobbled, people suffer.
Then he realized how little public understanding there is of economics. And he realized that he could play a role in changing this. He has. His students are now teaching other students in six different Ph.D.-granting institutions, among dozens more institutions.
Here Boettke reflects on the decision to make economics his vocation. Economics as a reality in our world will exist whether there are people around to study and explain it or not. As a discipline, it was very late in developing, mostly during the High Middle Ages. And it came about precisely to elucidate the way the world works in order to prevent kings and other big shots from using force to interfere with its mechanisms.
As Boettke puts it, "We do not need to understand economics in order to experience the benefits of freedom of exchange and production. But we may very well need to understand economics in order to sustain and maintain the institutional framework that enables us to realize the benefits that flow from freedom of exchange and production."
What follows this beginning material is a plunge straight into the core of what economics teaches. Boettke chooses a very engaging path. He tells the story through a series of intellectual biographies of the economists he most admires. We read about his teacher Hans Sennholz, about Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek and Murray Rothbard (his chapter on Rothbard is particularly celebratory). He covers James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. Perhaps the most interesting sections are the ones that find "Austrianness" in unusual places — in the work of Kenneth Boulding, for example.
In contrast to most books on economics, this book is very warm and humane. He goes all out to describe economics as the science of human choice in the real world. The prose matches his intellectual sense. We are spared the usual academic pomp and the absurdities of trying to cram people and their spontaneous decisions into mechanical models. He never talks down to his readers. This reader found no showing off, no strutting around, no defensiveness or bickering. The prose and line of thinking are open and generous.
It's no surprise that the Austrian School is at the core of the narrative. This figures into his choice of biography, of course. And it informs the whole of his worldview, accounts for why he is able to write about real-world problems and explains the failure of planning in such lucid terms.
At the same time, Boettke cautions, "The main thing that makes someone an Austrian is not the willingness to identify one's work with that label, but the substantive propositions in economics that an economist identifies with." With this in mind, he shows that Austrian ideas are very more widespread that one might suppose.
In general, Boettke attempts to show that the profession has lost much of the arrogance that it practiced from the 1930s through the 1970s. While methodological positivism and mathematical hubris still exist in form, he attempts to show that the old ways have shifted toward a greater emphasis on institutions and human choice. He detects the rise of a certain humility in the profession, which has made way for a broader and more eclectic approach that includes even radical libertarians like Boettke himself.
A book like this will provide anyone vast insight into what economics has to offer the world of ideas. It is an excellent overview about what is great and what is awful in the profession today. But even when he criticizes, there is no anger; instead, there is conviction that openness and frankness is the best path to finding truth. I can't think of a better good for an economics major to have on hand when the lecture content begins to depart from reality.
As for the author himself, I can't add to what Israel Kirzner has already said (and I'm almost certain that Kirzner has never written an endorsement this over-the-top:)
"Living Economics is in many ways a remarkable book. The volume luminously reflects the amazing breadth of Professor Boettke's reading, and the deep and careful thoughtfulness with which he reads. But the true distinction of this volume consists of more than the profound economic understanding and wealth of deeply perceptive doctrinal-history observations that fill its pages. Its distinction consists in the delightful circumstances that these riches arise from and express Peter Boettke's extraordinary intellectual generosity and unmatched intellectual enthusiasm — rare qualities that have enabled him to discover nuggets of valuable theoretical insight in the work of a wide array of economists, many of whom are generally thought to be far away from the Austrian tradition, which Boettke himself splendidly represents. Boettke's prolific pen is dipped, not in the all-too-common ink of professional one-upmanship, but in the inkwell of an earnest, utterly benevolent — and brilliant — scholar, seeking, with all his intellectual integrity, to learn and to understand."
Many others have said the same: Bruce Yandle, Richard Wagner, Steve Hanke, Randall Holcombe and dozens more. As you read through the tributes, you realize that these are more than coerced blurbs. Boettke has managed to make economists themselves re-excited about what they do. He will do the same for you, and help you appreciate the creativity, courage and sheer adventure associated with this grand craft that elucidates the workings of our world like no other.
[ The Case for Live-Blogging a Book ]
The buzz on the next big thing: products and services that claim to make you smarter. Forbes says it is the next trillion-dollar industry. Get-smart video games are hitting the markets. Websites and apps that promise fast results are booming.
I'm a skeptic of the tools being promoted these days, but not of the overall idea. It makes complete sense. Maybe you can't do anything about the core capacity you were born with, but you can surely improve the efficiency and functioning of the equipment you have.
Heaven knows we think enough about getting our bodies in shape. Maniacal energy goes into pumping up our bodies, losing weight, flattening our bellies and bulking up our chests and arms. Health clubs have remained a boom-time industry, and there's no end to the diet books, strategies, theories and ambitions.
It's all terribly superficial compared with a much more important matter of finding ways to strengthen our capacity to think. But as with health clubs and exercise machines for our bodies, we will quickly discover that there are no shortcuts for… hard work.
Why so little attention to the mind? We can easily fool ourselves into thinking we are intellectually fit. It's hard to admit it to ourselves that we aren't thinking very well, that we are relying too much on our biases, that we aren't challenging ourselves, that we have a reduced capacity for creativity and absorbing new information.
Step one: Admit there's a problem that needs to be addressed.
To shape up the body, and overcome our natural tendency to cut ourselves too much slack, people have various strategies. They hire personal trainers to push them further than they think they can go. They go to class so that they can exercise alongside others. They go to month-long camps that monitor eating and compel all-day exercise.
None of this works with intellectual life. It is just you and your brain, and if you lack the discipline to undertake the challenge, improvement is not going to happen. You need some framework to help, like the virtual path on a treadmill or stationary bike, something that keeps you on track and discourages you from cutting corners.
The best method I know is something taken from the world of digital journalism. When people attend live events like concerts or conferences, they tweet or blog the event as it happens. You see this during political debates, too. The journalist listens, reports and responds in real time.
It makes for exciting reading, and it is also a very challenging way to write. You have to pay careful attention and stay constantly engaged. You can't suddenly flake out and skip some of the action. It is a challenge to extract information from the external world and convey its meaning in prose. It is also an excellent way to remember and learn from any event.
What if we treat a book like an event? It is an event, really. A great book can be just as interesting and invigorating — and even more evocative — than a live event in reality. This is obviously true of fiction, but it is also true of nonfiction, provided the book is well written and deals provocatively with a topic you find intriguing.
This task takes us away from our default use of our intellectual talents. Hey, I'm not putting down the tweet, the Facebook update, the email or the video game. All of these activities are better than what consumed the brains of several generations from the 1950s onward, namely sitting in a puffy chair and watching people on a screen talk to you.
But live blogging a book is far better still because of the sustained focus on one single subject that it requires. It is a seriously difficult task, one that requires a stream of daily concentration, creativity, and a willingness to stick it out until the end. The results will be obvious to you at the end of the long road. You will have experienced an upgrade in your capacity to think, write, read, and process ideas.
Live blogging a book is different from reviewing a book or writing a book report. The point is to process information and react to it as it comes to you in real time. The live blog doesn't merely relate the contents. It reacts to the contents of the book and how it interacts with your own prior existing ideas and how it may or may not have changed your understanding.
If while you are reading you find yourself reflecting on an example or remembering some debate you had with someone on the topic, this is perfect live blog fodder. Put it in there. The point is to make a literary chronicle of how some book has affected your thinking chapter by chapter, and to do so in the most intellectually honest way you can.
In other words, if you are buying what the author is selling, say so. If the author illuminates an experience or thought you already had, say that too. If the author has contradicted himself and you take note of that, put that in too. There's no reason to try to anticipate what is in the next chapter. Write only what you have learned so far as the literary event proceeds.
Part of the challenge here is to make your own writing compelling, even apart from what you are reading. You will notice that you will probably start writing a bit like the prose in the book you are live blogging. That's very good, because imitation of this sort is an important part of learning, too.
I would suggest a word goal for each live blog, perhaps 750 words per chapter. If the book is 20 chapters (never skip), you will end up with a pretty sizeable monograph on your hands. This is extremely satisfying!
Put a title on it and go back through it. You might be surprised at what you wrote at the outset. Then you will be in a position to see whether and what extent this book actually changed the way you think.
This much is for sure: Your capacity to recall the contents and use them in later conversations and thinking will be greatly enhanced. It teaches you to be thorough and not selective in your reading. Not only that, you will experience an upgrade in your capacity to notice things and ideas, think about them, process them and roll them into your existing thinking.
It's like an intellectual boot camp that you initiate and manage entirely on your own.
It is not as hard as it may first appear. And the use of the live-blog model provides the disciplined framework that inspires you to push through all the way to the end.
What books? I might suggest the four that are part of the Economics in One Library. Start with Hazlitt's own book on economics. Move to Hayek's book. Cover Bastiat's The Law next. End with Garrett's A Bubble that Broke the World. These are all great choices, but there are millions more. The important thing is to choose great books that interest you.
One of the hopes I have for the Laissez Faire Club is that we can use the forums as a place to post these live blogs. It requires a certain humility to publicly post these things, but that is also a virtue that I hope the collegial atmosphere of the club can cultivate.
We can also learn from watching others learn. Mostly, we learn from possessing teachable spirits. The smartest people I've ever known are also the first people to admit that they do not know something.
Regardless, whether in the club or out, the live blogging is an effective literary tool that will do more than all the gizmos you might have over the next decade to enhance your ability to think and process information. It is something we should all require of ourselves just to try it out and see the results.
It is also a great activity for young students. It's true that the spread of this approach will contribute nothing to the trillion-dollar industry, and certainly not give us an abdominal six-pack, but it could make a mighty contribution to making us all think more clearly.
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A Beautiful Anarchy
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Jeffrey Tucker
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"nonfiction"
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[
"politics",
"economics"
] |
Pirates and Emperors
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[ Iran and the Recurring Bad Dream ]
Maybe U.S. energy independence isn't such a great thing after all. Some years ago, when the American political class was whooping it up for war with China, what stopped the push were the American commercial interests who essentially asked, "What, are you crazy? This is bad for business. We need China, and China needs us. You can't do business during a shooting war."
In contrast, an isolated Iran is a dispensable Iran. And an energy-independent U.S. is a warlike U.S., presuming to tell nations such as Japan, Turkey and Spain where they can buy their own from, at what quantities and under what terms.
How does the U.S. get away with this? Take a look at the U.S. military bases around the world and see. The U.S. may be an empire in decline but until that decline turns to fall, we are going to continue to see this repeat performance of sanctions followed by war.
Between Israel's daily threats against Iran and Obama's absurd claims that wind and sun can easily replace internal combustion, we have to rely on Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to make any sense in this world. He said that an Israeli attack on Iran would be disastrous for the entire region. It is certain to embroil the U.S. in a war that would be equally disastrous for the U.S. as a whole (but probably beneficial in some way for the U.S. government).
If there was ever a clear exhibit that government learns nothing from its past — nothing from its long record of fiascoes, waste, destruction and pointless killing — the pressure against Iran now mounting day by day is it. This repeat performance is going to turn out as bad or worse than the Iraq mess.
Americans who have paid no attention to the saber rattling against Iran shouldn't feel so bad. It's like watching old reruns on television. It was interesting the first time, perhaps, but you can watch a second time only if there is nothing else on. Or perhaps America's leaders are cynically counting on short memories: Who cares about the past?
The plotline seems the same as Iraq (and only one letter difference). The truth is that most Americans can't tell Iran from Iraq in any case. All the elements are there. Iran is headed by a guy the U.S. doesn't like. It is said, without evidence, that Iran "may" be "researching" nuclear technology, which Iran denies has anything to do with "weapons of mass destruction," but the U.S. knows better than to believe this line.
Step one is the path of sanctions. Step two is to observe that the sanctions didn't work to turn foreign leaders into compliant lambs. Step three is to make daily crazy claims that can be neither confirmed nor credibly refuted. Finally, another war.
The U.S. doesn't buy any Iranian oil, but the U.S. is leading a global campaign to stop anyone else from doing so. Iran has the fourth-largest oil reserves in the world. They currently export to China, which takes 22% of Iran's crude oil exports. Japan (14%) and India (13%) are next. Then the European Union imports 18% of Iran's total exports, and that's mainly Italy and Spain. South Korea (10%) and Turkey (7%) are also sizeable importers.
Of all these countries, only China has not yet bowed to U.S. pressure to cut and curb imports of Iranian oil. Meanwhile, Iran's oil business has been growing like crazy in the last ten years, increasing by nine times in dollar value from 2000 to today. It is now the fourth-largest exporter, behind Saudi Arabia, Russia and the U.S. And there are vast untapped reserves in Iran; the country is well positioned to move up the rankings in the years ahead. U.S. policy seems constructed to kill off the Iranian oil boom before it gains too much traction.
Meanwhile, despite all of Obama's latest talk about the U.S. moving away from U.S. oil consumption and production, it is very obvious, at this point, that the U.S. is in a better position to achieve the great dream of energy independence than at any point since the 1970s. As Robert Samuelson writes, "In 2011, oil imports fell to 45% of consumption, the sixth year of decline." Moreover, if you consider total domestic resources, the proved reserves are only a drop in the bucket.
What does it all mean? It means that there are perceived low risks for the U.S. in badgering Iran and even going down the path to war. It could be knocking out a big competitor to the U.S.'s regime friends in the region, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and have no serious consequence for the U.S. (beyond risking property and lives, but since when has the government cared about that?).
The White House has said as much. "There currently appears to be sufficient supply of non-Iranian oil to permit foreign countries to significantly reduce their import of Iranian oil," said a White House press release. "In fact, many purchasers of Iranian crude oil have already reduced their purchases or announced they are in productive discussions with alternative suppliers."
For this reason, the U.S. keeps tightening the noose more and more. It's like the 1990s with Iraq. Same damn thing. Incredible. And all based on a public rationale that is completely unproven: namely, that Iran is secretly developing a nuclear program toward developing WMDs, even though there is absolutely no evidence at all that this is the case.
Just as with Iraq, the official rationale for the belligerence has nothing to do with the actual driving dynamics, which all come down to the matter of oil production, supply, trade, and competition. We are supposed to believe that the U.S. is only making the world a safer place by batting down crazy world leaders who want nuclear weapons; the reality is that the U.S is fomenting war solely to advance what it sees as the economic interests of the government, its favored producers and its regime friends around the world.
Thomas Jefferson summed up the best case against all this frenzied pressure against Iran: "The state of peace is that which most improves the manners and morals, the prosperity and happiness of mankind." Sanctions and war do exactly the opposite.
[ What a Lovely Day for the Total State ]
Ah, what a weekend, with blue skies, singing birds, budding cherry blossoms and the government's announcement that it has totalitarian control over everything. Wait, what was that last thing? It was an Executive Order released late Friday that no one on the planet seemed to notice until about 30 hours later. It is unnumbered, but called "National Defense Resources Preparedness."
Let's call it NDRP. The first I heard of it was Sunday morning. Something called The Examiner had a write-up about this order in which President Obama would, in the event of an emergency or even in "peacetime," assume control of all energy, food, water, people — the whole of the material and natural world as we know it! — and claim the right to requisition professions to serve the state.
Nuts, right? Some more of the conspiracy stuff that has lately been clogging up the web. By 6 a.m., there was still only that one news story, but there were 463 forum discussions and 1,410 blog commentaries. Six hours later, there were eight news stories (none of them from a mainstream source), plus 712 forum discussions and 3,640 blog commentaries. Oh, and an uncountable number of tweets.
How could all these paranoids be yammering on about something that hadn't even been confirmed by The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC? No wonder the government has such trouble governing this nation of gullible oddballs.
There was only one problem: the order itself was hosted online by the White House. You can read it with your own eyes. It was issued Friday evening, March 16, 2012, the last day of spring break for many colleges, just as most news shops had closed up for the week and people were otherwise planning barbecues and outings.
Here at Whitehouse.gov we find the announcement that "The United States must have an industrial and technological base capable of meeting national defense requirements and capable of contributing to the technological superiority of its national defense equipment in peacetime and in times of national emergency," and so therefore it must assume all control of energy, food, water, health care, equipment and, of course, people.
Yes, you read that last one correctly. The executive branch claims it can perform a civilian draft of people of "outstanding experience and ability without compensation and to employ experts, consultants or organizations."
The authority cited in the document is the Defense Production Act of 1950, another dictatorial imposition, but which happened to have congressional approval. The dictator this time was President Truman. It allowed him to requisition every manner of resource to fight the Korean War: to draft people into war and to enable the executive branch to impose wage and price controls at will.
This was the Act that Sen. Robert Taft spoke about on the campaign trail in 1952. He regarded it as unconstitutional, illegal and totalitarian, nothing more than an attempt to reclaim the total state of World War II as part of the regular powers of the state in all other times. He said it was the surest sign that we had lost our moorings as a nation.
Historians of the period regard this act as the thing that cemented in place the political culture of the Cold War, in which the government accumulated ever more weapons of mass destruction, instituted the draft, went to war with whomever and wherever and presumed total control over all industry, all while the civilian population lived in fear of nuclear holocaust.
It is no different today: an unconstitutional power grab piled on top of a previous unconstitutional power grab piled on top of previous cases. So far as I can tell — and the real experts really need to get involved here to explain the details — there is very little new here at all except that perhaps the claim that the government can force everyone into slavery without compensation, plus the addition of a strange role for the Federal Reserve.
Part III, Sec. 301(b) says: "Each guaranteeing agency is designated and authorized to: (1) act as fiscal agent in the making of its own guarantee contracts and in otherwise carrying out the purposes of section 301 of the Act; and (2) contract with any Federal Reserve Bank to assist the agency in serving as fiscal agent."
This suggests that any federal department that is part of the executive branch can make a separate deal with the Fed to print as much money as the agency needs to do whatever it wants, without having to ask Congress for any kind of special allocation. It is also possible that this power already existed.
As the day progressed, a number of people from the "responsible" portion of the blogosphere began to say pretty much the same thing. This is nothing new. It is merely an update of what existed previously. There was an update in 1994 and one under every previous administration. There is nothing to see here: This is business as usual for the executive branch.
It's been going on for sixty years. Make that eighty. Make that a hundred if you count the wartime central planning of World War I. Actually, take it back further to the Civil War, when Lincoln assumed dictatorial powers. Or go back to the Adams administration, which criminalized sedition during a war fever over France.
True, the water in which the frog is being boiled is perhaps slightly hotter than before, but don't blame Obama for coming up with the idea for frog soup! True, this point has some relevance for those who would try to score some political victory at the expense of the Democrats alone. What I don't get is why this background is supposed to bring comfort to anyone who has in mind the broad interest of human liberty.
What is true now was true in 1994 and true in 1950 and true in 1932 and true in 1917. Anyone with a love of human liberty should be alarmed by the presumption of totalitarian control anytime, and especially during our own times, when there might be something we can do about it.
These powers might be old as the hills, and the battle between power and liberty is the core drama of human history, but there is a major difference this time: We have digital media that allow us to see this stuff with our own eyes.
That's what makes the difference.
[ Nicaragua and the Cold War Political Theater ]
Some friends and co-workers spent their holidays at Rancho Santana in Nicaragua, where you can live like a king on a pauper's salary. The beaches are among the best in the world, and the people are nuts for Americans. There is every amenity and consumer product, even better stuff than you can get at Wal-Mart. Local food is outrageously good. There are even local beers that best most on the market in the U.S. In general, it's the real deal, the closest thing to a paradise this world has to offer.
How do I know these things? Larry Reed, now president of the Foundation for Economic Education, and I visited this country for a full week during that volatile year of 1985. In those days, the superpowers had somehow decided to choose this little country as its theater for one of the last showdowns of the Cold War.
The U.S. said that the communists had taken over at the behest of the Soviets and they were exporting their revolution around the region. The Soviets said that the U.S. was trying to topple a democratically elected government by funding death squads. Remember Oliver North and all that? The drama was intense.
We went there to see what was going on. From the American press reports, we had every expectation of finding a civil war and communists battling it out with freedom-loving rebels. What we found was very different, indeed. We ended up meeting with leaders on both sides of the great issue of the day, but they weren't dressed in battle gear. It was more like a political squabble of the kind that you find on Capitol Hill every day. We met with high-ranking officials in the current regime, as well as opposition leaders like Violeta Chamorro, who was later elected as president.
Before leaving on the trip, I had read a wonderful book by New York Times reporter Shirley Christian. It was called Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family. Her detailed report documented how what appears to be a revolutionary environment on the outside is actually a fairly normal tug-of-war between two ruling factions. Ideology plays very little role in reality beyond serving as a pretext of sorts. When one side gets control, it does things to hurt the other side, and so on. In other words, politics as usual.
I was amazed to hear this. This was a far cry from the language you were hearing from Washington at the time about how this was the battleground of the great Manichean struggle of our epoch. But it wasn't just budding Cold Warriors like me who got taken in. There were first-world political pilgrims from the left who got sucked up into the theater and came to Nicaragua to experience the new egalitarian utopia as well. These people provided the main amusements for the week.
And so everywhere we went, we bumped into literature majors from the United States, seminarians from West Germany, women's rights advocates from the U.K. and assorted Hollywood gadabouts who came to mix their labors with the liberators now in control. We all lived together in downtown Managua in a hotel that catered to our every need. So much for the workers and peasants. We truly lived like kings for a week.
Breakfast was amazing, with juices from all over the region. I've never seen anything like it since. The coffee was beyond-belief great, so strong that it had to be cut with hot fresh milk. You could eat a gigantic lunch and pay only a buck or two. Dinner always seemed to feature entertainment of some sort and the local liquor, which, I learned from experience, is rather dangerous for inexperienced drinkers.
My favorite bar was not far from the capitol building. I don't recall the name, but at the time, I just called it the "communist bar." That was because that's where all the communists hung out to drink nearly every evening. Again, they were all from the United States and Western Europe, and they would sit around talking about the great utopia being built before their eyes. There were pictures of Che, Castro and Lenin on the walls. The reading material was Soviet Life magazine, and I would swear that some of the issues dated from the 1950s. Larry and I would flip through them and laugh uproariously at the pictures and propaganda. I don't know whether this junk was brought in by the students or shipped directly by Moscow, but as I think about it, the former scenario is more likely.
One night we went to a movie. I was a smoker at the time, so I experienced that singular pleasure of blowing smoke up in the air during the movie and watching it mix with the light of the projector and create a beautiful film noir ambiance. I recall thinking that this was a pleasure that I could never experience in the United States. Maybe there is something to this communist idea after all! (Kidding.) I've since learned that smoking has been banned in theaters, and tragically so.
We hopped into a cab after the movie. Larry and I were in the back seat and two jaded-looking women were in the front seat. I tried to make small talk about how good the movie was. One of the women shot back at me: It was a terrible movie, but exactly what you would expect given how American imperialists send their cast-off flops down here to exploit the workers by extracting their money. Silence followed this stern lecture. I piped up again, innocently saying that, even so, I thought the movie was pretty good. She grunted extreme disapproval of my opinion, and we rode in silence until we got back to the hotel.
The next morning at breakfast, I met Gary Merrill, the former husband of Bette Davis who had starred in many films at his height, including Davis' smash hit All About Eve. He was wearing a dress. I asked why. He said that he could do this in Nicaragua because it was a free country where the human spirit was liberated thanks to socialist control. I asked if he considered himself a communist. "All I know is that this works," came the reply.
We had a charming meeting overall, but he said that he had to go because he was meeting with some government officials. That meant that he needed to change out of the dress and into a suit. I asked him why he must give up his freedom when meeting with government officials. He responded that it was just an intuition he had that he would make a better impression in a suit. Good intuition! We met with Gary several more times on that trip, and I can't but have the fondest memories of his good cheer.
Later that day, we decided to do some sightseeing of government buildings. We were taking pictures like crazy at the ministry of defense building, asking all the soldiers and guards to pose. Some thug came up to us and told us to stop. We resisted a bit and suddenly found ourselves under arrest. They took Larry's camera and planned to ruin all the pictures. But they never figured out how to open it. They gave us our equipment and let us go. The benefit from our point of view: We had a cool story to tell!
Looking back on the event, I'm realizing that the fastest way to get arrested in Washington, D.C., would be to try to get as close as possible to the Pentagon with a camera and take pictures of all the guards. You would probably be held for slightly more than a few hours!
On this trip, I also learned something about currency exchange. The government in those days tried to keep tight control on the rates. There was a government rate that you got at the hotel and the airport. And then there was the market rate that you could get on the streets.
You didn't have to look far to find a currency exchange dealer. There were kids that seemed as young as 7 and 8 years old, budding young entrepreneurs. They were everywhere outside the hotel, and no one bothered them. Their math skills were absolutely amazing. They could figure the exchange rates on any amount in a matter of seconds.
How did they know the market rate? It is a bit mysterious to me, but they must have run back and forth to each other in some kind of cooperative/competitive arrangement, perhaps arbitraging with the dealers around the block or the other side of town. It was hard to say, but there was no question that they were the masters of the craft.
I think about this when I hear people object to the idea of competitive currencies in the United States. People say, oh, it would be so confusing and no one could figure it out! Perhaps there would be a learning curve, but surely over time, the math skills of the typical American could rise to the level of a peasant Nicaraguan child. It's a tall order to be sure, but it is possible.
Much to my disappointment, we saw no bloodshed, death squads, gulags, or secret missile stashes. All the communists I met I could have also met by visiting the local university. And the government officials were pretty much like those you would meet anywhere: greedy, lazy, puffed up and useless. Everyone knew this. I assume the same is true today.
A few years later, the "dictator" of Nicaragua submitted to a democratic election and was tossed out. Later on, long after the Cold War ended and everyone stopped caring about this country, he was re-elected. Nothing much changed either way.
"Most Americans," writes investment guru Chris Mayer, "would be surprised to learn Nicaragua is the second-safest country in Central America, behind only Costa Rica. "The World Bank ranks it as the easiest country in Central America, Panama excepted, in which to start a new business. Or that in 'ease of doing business,' Nicaragua ranks well ahead of such perennial darlings as Brazil or India — or even neighboring Costa Rica. A recent IMF report said that Nicaragua was the Central American country that best protected investors' rights."
I can believe that. It is certainly among the most beautiful places I've ever visited, and I would take a week here over any visit to the Old World on the Continent. The food is better and cheaper, and the people seem far more insistent on and appreciative of their core freedoms. People say that going there now reminds one of how few freedoms we have remaining in the U.S.
How history turned on a dime: Our country is looking more and more like the nightmare that the U.S. said it was stopping from taking over Central America. Today, Central America is the beneficiary of a glorious benign neglect, whereas the "freedom fighters" finally got their way in the United States and brought us a tyranny that Daniel Ortega would never have dared impose even at the height of his power.
Victory in Iraq?
There is no peace treaty, no humbled enemy, no national glory and certainly no newfound freedom. The "liberation" of Iraq leaves a widely hated puppet dictator in charge with a mandate "to see that process of strengthened central authority continue," in the words of a U.S. cable revealed by WikiLeaks.
Still, the U.S. has declared victory in Iraq after a war that lasted not nine years, as the media says, but twenty years, if you include the first war and the decade of cruel sanctions that separated it with the second war on Iraq. At least 4,500 Americans are dead, 32,226 are wounded, uncountable millions of Iraqis are dead, too, the Iraqi economy is in ruins and the American economy is more than a trillion dollars poorer.
As the Americans held somber goodbye ceremonies at a heavily guarded airport, hundreds of Iraqis burned the American flag and cursed the infidels as never before. On the very day that the Americans said goodbye, there were bombings in Tal Afar, Mosul and Baghdad that killed six Iraqis and wounded forty-four more.
The deaths on that day hardly made the news at all because it is so routine. This once-peaceful and relatively prosperous country — people from all over the region and the world came to study in its universities and play for its symphonies — has been reduced to warring religious tribes with far-diminished populations after all the emigration over the years of war. The scars are deep and the resentment extremely high.
Yet to the U.S. governing elite, this is victory. During final ceremonies, official after official came to the microphone to assure the soldiers that their sacrifices have not been in vain, that they are brave and courageous and leave behind a wonderful legacy. But the soldiers themselves know otherwise. Everyone does. This war was a disaster from beginning to end, and it was wholly unnecessary.
Looking back to the first segment of war against Iraq, it was pushed because the first President Bush faced disastrously falling poll numbers, the end of the Cold War, and growing cries to pull back on the American imperial presence in the world. He had a personal bone to pick with the one-time American puppet Saddam Hussein and a gigantic military budget that needed to be spent, lest the pressure mount to give the money back whence it came.
The public-relations angle Bush chose was that Iraq had to be punished for invading Kuwait. Leaked cables have reinforced what close watchers already knew, namely, that the U.S. had given a green light for that action to Iraq. Bush said that the aggression would not stand, but today, the U.S. not only owns and controls Kuwait — which is now populated by American troops — but also purports to control the future of Iraq, too. This type of aggression is perfectly fine.
So the first great opportunity for peace after the Cold War was squandered in a pointless struggle against one of the liberalized and nonfundamentalist, mostly Islamic nations where people of all religions lived in relative peace. Bush declared victory back then, too, but kept on the trade sanctions. President Clinton followed suit with punishing policies that kept the boot on the nation.
After Sept. 11, George Bush junior seized the opportunity to repeat the mission of his father and waged war yet again. Riding the wave of anger for terrorism on our soil, he attacked a country that everyone admitted had absolutely nothing to do with Sept. 11 (however, the terrorists did admit that that were partly acting out of vengeance for the sanctions), and then on the false pretense that Saddam was building weapons of mass destruction. We were really supposed to take seriously this idea that a now-impoverished country, with no real military and negative economic growth, was a genuine threat to the world.
Many people hoped that President Obama would stop the madness of what he called a "dumb war," but he did not. He stepped up troop levels instead. There would be more violence, longer terms for soldiers, more pressure, increased surveillance, more authoritarian measures. Nothing worked. As The Wall Street Journal put it, "The advanced U.S. military was brought low by primitive weapons: homemade bombs made from fertilizer or discarded artillery shells."
The resistance grew and grew. The Iraqi people could never be made to love the empire that ruled them. The only genuinely successful Iraqi politicians these days are those who set themselves against U.S. presence. Finally, the incredibly obvious became undeniable, even to the arrogant conquerors: The only hope for Iraq was for the U.S. to leave.
The U.S. promised liberation and brought conflict, destruction and death. The pullout at this point is hardly a victory, but an incredible defeat, the very archetype of the truth that the world's mightiest military force cannot finally prevail over a people that will not submit.
This lesson is not unknown to those who remain in Iraq. There are two bases and several thousand soldiers along with diplomats that remain. They are all targets and will continue to be for many years to come. Meanwhile, life in Iraq will certainly start to improve now. Income is lower there today than it was in 1940, so this wouldn't be hard.
In truth, this pullout is one of the few pieces of good news that Iraq has had in many decades. And it should be a model for the U.S. for the future. Close the rest of the bases and pull the rest of the troops out. And do this in the other 140-plus countries in which the troops are stationed. That is the way forward.
In 2004, Dick Cheney declared of Iraq: "I think it has been a remarkable success story to date when you look at what has been accomplished overall." He might as well have been speaking for the military contractors who, as Robert Higgs has pointed out, made off with the loot that this war stole from the American taxpayers.
And it is not only about loot: it is about liberty. War-mongering and freedom are not compatible. This war and other wars like it have made us less safe and more dependent on the police state. They give health to war machinery that should have been dismantled a quarter of a century ago. Instead, it survives to find some war somewhere to fight another day.
[ Iran and the Prospect of Domestic Terrorism ]
I hate to be the one to bring up a very unpleasant subject, but let me begin with a question: do you recall the reasons that the Sept. 11 terrorists gave for their rampage, the one that killed so many, did so much damage, and led the U.S. government to unleash fury on the world and also its own citizens?
They, and Osama bin Laden, cited three factors: U.S. sponsorship of Israeli settlements, U.S. support for the kept regime in Saudi Arabia, and the decade of sanctions against Iraq.
Because the U.S. went to war against Iraq following the attacks, hardly anyone thinks of the previous 10 years in which the U.S. punished Iraq with cruel sanctions that led to multitudes of deaths, particularly of children. This was in the name of stopping an Iraqi program to build weapons of mass destruction — except that no evidence that such a program existed ever came to light.
The terrorists saw themselves as retaliating for something that most Americans don't even begin to understand and hardly even know about at all. This is not an excuse for the attacks but a window into understanding the motives behind them. How can we prevent future such terrorism if we don't examine the thinking that led to the attacks in the first place?
Yet there is something about war that has the effect of wiping out the memories of all that came before. Especially in the U.S., the perception prevails that it always happens in a vacuum. The short history is always the same: There we were, minding our own business, when suddenly some bad guys from abroad started threatening our way of life, so of course, we had to smash them.
As proof of this, I invite you to examine a remarkable collection of essays published in 1976 in a book called Watershed of Empire, edited by James J. Martin and Leonard P. Liggio, with essays by Murray Rothbard, Justus Doenecke, William Neumann, Lloyd Gardiner, Robert Smith and others. The subject is the lead-up to World War II. Laissez Faire Books has a nice stock of this book that is so truth-telling that it will probably never be reprinted (hope you catch the irony). It turns out that this war didn't just happen, either; it was preceded by years of saber rattling and a push for dollar imperialism that produced a pushback from Germany and Japan.
I'm now looking at the headlines on Iran. The parallels with the Iraq case are preposterously close. Israel is promising some kind of military action against Iran, not to stop an existing weapons program, but to prevent one from being started. The Obama Administration says that it won't intervene or stop an attack and further pledges continued alliance with Israel, come what may. The U.S. has already imposed sanctions on Iran and is prepared to ramp those up (and we know from experience just how well this part of the world responds to our sanctions!). Plus, U.S. bases in the region are spreading.
Not only are the conditions that led to Sept. 11 in place yet again, but they are also arguably heightened relative to what they were the first time around. Does anyone believe that this is good for peace and domestic tranquility here at home? Has anyone seriously considered what this could bring about on the domestic front? I guess not, since, apparently, we learned absolutely nothing from Sept. 11 except for the need to put all airline security in the hands of government and prevent me from carrying a corkscrew on the plane.
No one really expected Sept. 11. No one expects the current sanctions and war talk about Iran to inspire suicide bombers or some other unthinkable act of violence here at home. The event doesn't have to be huge. It can be small and local. And if it does happen, I suppose we will once again assure ourselves that "they hate us for our freedom," and then proceed to tighten the screws further on the domestic front. No amount of security theater will be too much on the fateful day.
Seriously, it is worth considering just what would happen to this country in the wake of another large-scale terrorist attack. Where are the limits of statism? What would our own government be willing or unwilling to do this time? What part of the Bill of Rights will matter under these conditions? These are unthinkable thoughts precisely because any close observer of our existing political moment understands the implications. It will be the end of what freedoms we have remaining.
Already, we all put up with a level of militarization that would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Washington, D.C., is a fortress. Every government building is managed as if the people outside are preparing an attack. Hardly anyone even remembers a time when the local police seemed more like an extension of the civic order, rather than a separate and heavily militarized caste. The truth is that the whole of the "security regime" has been more than ready to spring into further action at a moment's notice.
For goodness sake, the U.S. attorney general gave a speech at Northwestern University in which he argued for the Obama Administration's position that the government can hunt down and kill American citizens, without any of the legal niceties that are generally considered a sign of civilized governance. Such talk would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
Yes, I know, only "conspiracy theorists" draw attention to these points. The rest of us are just supposed to pretend as if government is a wonderfully benign force in the world, serving us as we ask them to do as part of the great social contract. Surely, there is no plot to grab more power, take more money, shred what's left of the Constitution or otherwise violate our human rights under the phony pretense of making us more secure or bringing justice to bad guys around the world.
Following Sept. 11, there was a feeling of complete helplessness that swept over the proponents of peace on earth. The state was on the march, and there was nothing to stand in the way. Finally, after a few years in which our lives were transformed and freedom faded, things settled down. There is something about the tenor of this drumbeat on Iran that makes me wonder: Has this been the calm before the storm?
[ Elections and the Illusion of Choice ]
The political season has unleashed its predictable frenzy, much to the delight of people who make a living off it. But to what end? There are only two types of politicians who end up holding office, wrote H.L. Mencken: "First, glorified mob-men who genuinely believe what the mob believes, and secondly, shrewd fellows who are willing to make any sacrifice of conviction and self-respect in order to hold their jobs."
That about sums it up. The plus side of elections is that sometimes the debates, discussions, candidates and parties raise fundamental questions about what kind of society we want to live in. That's the best we can hope for.
But there is a downside to all this hullabaloo: It gives the impression that the mere existence of the electoral process gives "we the people" a fundamental choice about the kind of state we want. This is not true. The politicians we elect are veneers or facades. They are bandits, but they do not constitute what is called the state. This goes for just about every developed state in the world for the last 200 years.
The whole election process leads people to believe that the state is in embedded in leaders. Not so. In France, this system ended with the execution of Louis XVI; in Germany, with the ascent of Bismarck; and in Russia, with the Bolshevik Revolution. The personal state died in the U.S. pretty early on, as even Thomas Jefferson discovered when he became president in 1801; he felt himself powerless to do anything.
The modern state lives outside the will of a particular leader or administration. Voting and elections only change the temporary managers, but do not touch the core of the problem.
The first book that saw through the facade was by the great German sociologist Franz Oppenheimer. It is called, appropriately, The State. It was written in 1908, just as the state had begun to entrench itself deeply into the social order — more so than at any point in the previous thousand years. He described the state as the one class that dominates all others, obeying a different law and thriving off violence against person and property. He sums up this violence in a phrase: the "political means." He contrasts this with the "economic means," the essence of which is voluntary human association and trade. (His book came to have an amazing influence through Albert Jay Nock's Our Enemy, the State.)
Violence? That sounds like the opposite of elections, doesn't it? Surely, we are exercising our free will in deciding who leads us. The truth is that the people who run for office specialize mostly in what they do best: running and getting elected as an end in itself. The real state is beneath the surface of this public theater. It is the vast army of professional bureaucrats and the mandates they carry out. It is the enforcement apparatus that oversees a gargantuan tax code. It is the Federal Register that is too large to print. It is the central bankers, their staffs, their machinery, their mandate to bail out the state no matter what. It is the hundreds and thousands of agencies that purport to control every aspect of life.
The best source to gain a full grasp of the realities of the modern state apparatus is Robert Higgs' amazing work, Against Leviathan. No contemporary author has so fully documented the vast expanse of the modern leviathan in all its permutations. He sees how welfare and warfare are not opposed to each other, but work together to form the main two activities of the modern state. He sees how central banking works to sustain the system. He understands the ways in which the state serves as a cash cow for every form of interest group, and how it works to trick the population into believing that the state is doing good for people when it is really wrecking their lives.
Most of all, Higgs gets that the political system that so enraptures the public mind is not owned by us. It is owned and managed by the state itself and for a precise purpose: to perpetuate the idea that we have all chosen the regime that rules us. That is why there is so little difference between the political parties. As Higgs puts it, the U.S. has "two revolving factions of a one-party state farcically masquerade as authentic alternatives, the one specializing in crushing economic freedom and the other concentrating on crushing every other form of freedom."
After the election is all over — in a grueling 10 months! — and our new managers take their seats, the talking heads will tell us once more: "The system worked." Yes, it did work in exactly the way they want it to work. Nothing much will change. If you don't like the results, there is something wrong with you. If you don't like the rules, taxes, human suffering, wars, inflation, intrusions, confiscations and all the rest of the apparatus, you had better run for office, give to another candidate or otherwise throw yourself into the politics full time!
This is not choice. When we go to the grocery, we face a choice of what to buy. Or we can walk out without buying at all, keeping our money instead. Whatever the result, it is really in our hands. The electoral system is different. The store is the state. The products it offers are produced by the state. There is no real choice, only enough shadings of differences to keep us entertained. And we cannot really walk away. There is no "none of the above" and there is no keeping your own money.
Every once in a while, someone comes along who offers a fundamental challenge to the whole racket and somehow manages to attract public attention and even use the system to urge the dismantling of the system. This is what has happened with the candidacy of Ron Paul, and it is precisely why the media strains so hard to keep from reporting on him or letting others speak out for his views.
The elites are not so concerned that he can be elected. The system is fixed well enough to prevent that outcome. The real threat — and Dr. Paul understands this better than anyone — is the fundamental intellectual challenge that he offers. His book Liberty Defined contains enough radicalism and enough intellectual power to destabilize the entire structure that Oppenheimer and Higgs have so beautifully described.
The ideas in these books are far more powerful than any ballot box. They expose the illusion of choice for what it is and unmask the violence embedded in the state-dominated society, a system that no one chose but has been imposed on the population through propaganda, wars, payoffs, and every manner of trickery. If there were a way to re-channel all the human energy that people put into politics into reading and thinking, the state would finally meet its match.
[ The Difference Between OWS and the Anti-Vietnam War Protests ]
The Occupy protesters imagine that they stand in a great tradition of American radicalism, willing to stand up to the man and risk arrest in order to achieve their goals. The most obvious case of such a mass movement would be the anti-war protests of the 1960s. They started small and grew and grew until they became mainstream and actually affected a dramatic policy change. The U.S. military pulled out of Vietnam, implicitly conceding defeat and mourning the long history of calamity.
But consider the gigantic differences. The Vietnam protest movement had a clear goal. It wanted to end the war. It had a clear enemy: the politicians and bureaucrats who wanted the war to last forever. It had a clear message: this war is wrong. It had an intense motivation: the protesters were terrified of being drafted to kill and be killed. This is what standing up to power is all about.
So far as anyone can tell, the Occupy movement has none of this clarity. Ten thousand articles have been written on these people and there is still no consensus concerning what the issue really is. The goals of the movement are posted here and there, but not everyone among the protesters agrees with them. The motivation is just as amorphous and varied: unemployment, sinking job prospects, sinking incomes, blowback from the bailouts, the desire to slum around in a decadent sort of way, and the destructive urge to trample down the pea-patch of life itself.
Worse, from my point of view, is that the movement isn't really standing up to power. It is standing in for power to urge that the state take on more responsibilities and control people's lives even more than it does already. They imagine that they are demanding human rights, but the main agenda as listed in public websites amounts to a list of ways for the government to violate human rights, or at least intrude aggressively upon them.
Raising the minimum wage, for example, amounts to a limitation on the rights of workers to negotiate their own employment contracts. The minimum wage says: you have no right to offer less for your services than the state gives you permission to offer. Thus, the minimum wage not only promotes unemployment; it restrains the human right to associate on any terms of a person's choosing.
Likewise, the demand to nationalize health interferes with the rights of doctors and patients to negotiate their own contracts. The demand for tariffs interferes with the rights of people to peacefully trade with anyone from around the world, and effectively entrenches the nation-state as the only permitted geographic range of economic associations.
The imposition of new taxes takes people's property. This is property acquired through their own labor which is then forcibly taken by the state to use for political purposes. This demand is a prescription for further impoverishment.
The push for refunding domestic infrastructure denies private entrepreneurs the opportunity to use their resources and talents to rebuild on a for-profit basis and in a manner that that can actually be maintained. There is a reason that state infrastructure always seems to be crumbling: it is built by the state with all the inherent economic irrationality of most state projects.
The real problem with the OWS movement is its political naiveté. The protestors imagine that by attacking free enterprise and the capitalist system they are upholding the rights of the common man. The exact opposite is true. The only real alternative to free enterprise is an economy owned and administered by society's most ruthless and cruel elements, who always seem to gravitate toward statist means.
If OWS is successful, it will wake up to a world that is lorded over by federal bureaucrats and jackbooted enforcement thugs. The entire world will be run like the Post Office, the TSA, the IRS, and the Customs Bureau. This has nothing to do with freedom and nothing to do with human rights.
For this reason, the OWS protest is not really a threat to the establishment. So far, its message has been that the state needs to be truer to itself, that the worst aspects of both the Democratic and Republican platforms need to be implemented with a vengeance. This is a movement the state can come to love. Indeed, the White House has drawn closer and closer to this movement, saying that Obama "will continue to acknowledge the frustration that he himself shares."
Again, the contrast with the Vietnam protests of the 1960s cannot be starker. The White Houses hated these people. The politicians of both parties were terrified of what "people power" meant in those days.
If we had the equivalent movement as it relates to economics today, it would be calling for an end to the Fed, privatization of education, privatization of health care, the right to global free trade, an end to state robbery of persons and their businesses, and a right to keep what you own. In short, a truly radical protest movement would be calling for a consistent and authentic capitalism as a corollary to the peace agenda in international politics.
Now that would be radical.
[ How Politicians Wreck the World ]
One of the coolest aspects of modern life is about to come to an end. I'm speaking of the great innovation in the last 10 years in which vending machines accept credit and debit cards. No more fishing in our pockets for quarters, dimes and nickels. No more having to flatten out your $1 bills so that they will fit in just the right way and not be coughed up by the bill acceptor. Instead, you feed your card in, it is charged and you get a handy statement at the end of the month that makes sense of your spending habits.
Merchants have grown ever more willing to accept credit and debit cards for small transactions. This is how Redbox movies has made its profits and put new movies in high quality at nearly everyone's fingertips. It is easier to get a movie than a value meal. It's true at the convenience store too. You don't have cash, so you pull out the card to pay for the bottle of juice or the Snickers bar.
Online it is true too: Buy a small thing or donate to a small charity with micropayments. This is just part of modern life — something we have learned to love and take for granted. It's wonderful and innovative. It makes our lives better and the world a more beautiful place.
How could it end? Get the politicians involved. And they have gotten involved and it is all coming to an end. It is ending through a circuitous route that takes a few minutes to understand. So let me explain this.
As part of a political "crackdown" on the financial world, the Dodd-Frank Act passed last year, the fees that credit card companies can charge merchants now have a cap of twenty-one cents per transaction. The geniuses in Congress figured that this would save money for consumers because the average fee is actually forty-four cents. The masters of the universe figured that passing a law could make the world right. Oh, how necessary are their powers and privileges!
But you know what? The world is a bit more complex than that. What actually happened to make small transactions profitable was that companies would charge a high fee for large tickets and use that revenue to subsidize the costs of smaller transactions. Smaller transactions were not averaging twenty-one cents. Instead, they cost six or seven cents. This was made possible by the high fees that the politicos decided to legislate out of existence.
This makes financial sense in many ways. Card companies have every reason to maximize the number of institutions that use their services. Spreading out the variable costs according to a heterogeneous model does precisely this. It works, as all things in the market tend to work.
Maybe you can figure out already what is happening. If companies can no longer subsidize small transactions, they have to spread the revenue model among everyone equally. No longer able to charge forty-four cents, they can now charge only twenty-one cents. But transactions that used to cost six cents are also going up to twenty-one cents. This is intolerable for small merchants.
An immediate effect is that renting from Redbox will go up twenty cents, to $1.20. That is politicians picking your pocket. Many merchants are already declining to accept credit cards at all for purchases under $10. It's their right. It's their choice. If they can't make it work financially, they will end the practice. For other small merchants, like convenience stores and candy stores, this is nothing short of catastrophic.
Vending machines? Enjoy it while it lasts. Many of those machines will be shut down, or else the price of a can of Coke will have to go up 20%. You might soon have to go back to fishing for change and flattening out dollar bills.
Incredible, isn't it? Yes it is. Here is a piece of legislation that was supposedly designed to help you and me. Heaven protect us from their help!
Look what they have done. They have smashed one of the great emerging conveniences of modern life. How many small donations will no longer be made? How many micropayment widgets and systems will now go belly up? What kind of charitable projects and small web-based businesses will not come into existence because they can no longer afford the costs of doing business?
And all of this is happening in these terrible economic times. It's been blow after blow, delivered by the political class that claims to be stimulating the economy. To be sure, the credit card companies warned that this would happen. They said it would kill their business model. But the politicians are inclined to treat every complaint by business as a lie. So they dismissed it. They figured, hey, we put a price cap on something and the world obeys our dictate, so what's the downside?
The downside emerges only later. And hardly anyone will really understand the cause. All they know is that the price of movie rentals will go up, and they blame business. Everyone blames business for everything. Meanwhile, these puffed-up mini-dictators are hiding in the corner hoping that no one notices the mess that they make of the world.
Here is an archetype of what is often called "unintended consequences" of government legislation. This is just one tiny piece of a much-larger puzzle. Multiply this many millions of times and you gain some insight into why the world is such a mess. The politicians try to fix it and it only gets worse. Here is a general rule: politicians should do nothing, ever, except repeal their rotten attempts to make our lives better.
|
A Beautiful Anarchy
|
Jeffrey Tucker
|
[
"nonfiction"
] |
[
"politics",
"economics"
] |
Epilogue
|
[ Hayekian Moments in Life ]
I never tire of looking out the windows of airplanes. For all of human history until just about the day before yesterday, no living person saw the world like this. People could climb up to the top of mountains and see the valleys below. But to see that whole view looking straight down was the privilege of birds and God. Then about a hundred years ago, this changed and we could see what we never really experienced directly.
It's not raw nature that enthralls me. It's cities. It's the small towns. It's the lights. It's the vast, cultivated farmland. It's the seeming orderliness of human civilization that was no one's plan, but rather emerges through the bit-by-bit creation of minds. Everything we see was once an idea, and then it was made real through action.
Despite all the pretense by the government and the arrogance of its officials and the planning mind-set of its bureaucrats, what you see out the window of a plane is essentially ordered anarchy, the evidence of what millions of explosive units of creativity (also known as people) can build when they are all cooperating in pursuit of their own self-interest.
I'm also intrigued by the gargantuan swaths of seeming nothingness that stretch between east and west in the U.S., and it causes me to marvel about the talk over "overpopulation" or how we are running out of room. Under the right conditions, the whole planet could fit in this space with plenty of breathing room. Oh, and remember that talk some years ago about how we are running out of landfill space? Nuts!
That's not the only lesson to be drawn to this bird's-eye view. There is a scene in the 1949 movie The Third Man, set in Vienna after the Second World War, when the criminal bandit Harry Lime and the visiting author Holly Martins are at the top of a Ferris wheel. They look down, and Holly asks Harry if he has ever seen one of his victims. Harry answers as follows:
"Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?"
The allusion to how fighter pilots see the world must have been impossible to miss in those days following the war. The people are just dots from way above, about as valuable as the ants we routinely crush under our feet when walking through the grass.
This is pretty much the way the state sees us. The state is the predatory bird looking down, seeing not thriving and precious life, but dots that can be stopped and eaten or allowed to move in ways of which it approves. It imagines itself to be the master of all things below, but lacking the ability to actually cause beautiful things to be created, it falls back, again and again, only on its power to destroy without mercy.
The great challenge of liberty is to view the world from above, not as a predatory bird, but rather with the awe we feel as passengers when looking out the window of an airplane. We should see precious and awesome complexity, an order that can be observed but never controlled from the top.
This is how I imagine that F.A. Hayek came to see the world when he wrote his famous article "The Use of Knowledge in Society," which came out during the war in 1945. In his view, the whole economic problem had been radically misconstrued. Economics was not really about how best to employ social resources. Instead, he said, the economic problem was finding a system that made the best possible use of the various forms of knowledge of time and place that exists in the minds of individuals. This knowledge, he wrote, is ultimately inaccessible to central planners:
"The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge that all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate 'given' resources — if 'given' is taken to mean given to a single mind, which deliberately solves the problem set by these 'data.' It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality."
Looking from above, then, we can only see, but we cannot actually know all the data that go into making the social order turn out the way it does. If we cannot know in totality what drives individual choice and human action, we certainly cannot substitute in their place the will of planning agents and expect a better result.
I admit that I've struggled for years to fully appreciate this insight. Even after reading the paper 100 times, Hayek's core point has eluded me, at least to some extent.
But when I was in Sao Paulo, Brazil, I had an amazing experience that helped to crystallize it for me. I went to one of the highest buildings in the middle of the city. On the roof, there is a very fancy place called the Sky Bar. It looked out over the whole city in all directions. You could spin in circles and see nothing but the evidence of human hands struggling to create a life.
There are some twenty million people in this city, but from the looks of the place, one imagines five instances of New York City all crammed together. There doesn't seem to be any center to it. It just goes on and on in a way that is impossible for the human mind to grasp in totality. What can you do but just stand in awe of such a sight? That is exactly what I and my friends from Mises Brasil did.
Brazil is a socialist state, but like all modern socialist states, it is only pretending to do what it claims to do. Rather than inspiring some new wonderful thing to happen, it only gets in the way with its meddling and regulation and taxation. Like all states, it drains productivity and wealth from society, rather than contributing.
Somehow it struck me as more obvious than ever from the height of this Sky Bar. It is the height of arrogance for any group of people to imagine that they can control such a place as this. Black and gray markets thrive. Unauthorized things define life itself. Spontaneity prevails. The whole city is gloriously rebellious of official dictate, and this is precisely what makes the place wonderful.
Yes, there is planning. Plenty of it. Individuals plan their lives. Businesses plan their production. Consumers plan their purchases. But the government plans nothing. It only interferes and lies about why.
It is as Hayek said: "This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals."
Just as I stood on the top of that building trying to imagine and comprehend the expanse of the space of Sao Paulo, a couple stood in front of me and blocked my view. They fell into fond embrace, at length. Who are these people? How long had they known each other? Who between them felt the greater degree of affection? What would this public display of affection lead to? Was this one evening in the making or a lifetime?
I had no clue about any of this, and I wouldn't dream of interfering. Only these two know and can shape their lives, mistakes and all. These are two of twenty million who live out there. These twenty million are only 10% of the whole population of Brazil, and this country has only 3% of the total population of the world. And every single individual has a mind of his or her own. Thank God for that. Somehow it all works.
No one will finally rule this world.
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
SOUTH AFRICA, SEPTEMBER 1952.
|
Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper switched off the engine and looked out through the dirty windscreen. He was in deep country. To get deeper he'd have to travel back in time to the Zulu wars. Two Ford pickup trucks, a white Mercedes, and a police van parked to his right placed him in the twentieth century. Ahead of him a group of black farmworkers stood along a rise with their backs toward him. The hard line of their shoulders obscured what lay ahead.
In the crease of a hot green hill, a jumpy herd boy with fifteen skinny cows stared at the unusual scattering of people in the middle of nowhere. The farm was a genuine crime scene after all—not a hoax as district headquarters had thought. Emmanuel got out of the car and lifted his hat to a group of women and children sitting in the shade of a wild fig tree. A few of them politely nodded back, silent and fearful. Emmanuel checked for his notebook, his pen, and his handgun, mentally preparing for the job.
An old black man in tattered overalls stepped out from the band of shade cast by the police van. He approached with his cloth cap in his hand.
"You the baas from Jo'burg?" he asked.
"That's me," Emmanuel said. He locked the car and dropped the keys into his jacket pocket.
"Policeman says to go to the river." The old man pointed a bony finger in the direction of the farmworkers standing along the ridge. "You must come with me, please, ma' baas."
The old man led the way. Emmanuel followed and the farmworkers turned at his approach. He drew closer to them and scanned the row of faces to try to gauge the mood. Beneath their silence he sensed fear.
"You must go there, ma' baas." The old man indicated a narrow path that snaked through tall grass to the banks of a wide, shining river.
Emmanuel nodded his thanks and walked down the dirt trail. A breeze rustled the underbrush and a pair of bullfinches flew up. He smelled damp earth and crushed grass. He wondered what waited for him.
At the bottom of the path he came to the edge of the river and looked across to the far side. A stretch of low veldt shimmered under clear skies. In the distance a mountain range broke the horizon into jagged blue peaks. Pure Africa. Just like the photos in English magazines that talked up the benefits of migration.
Emmanuel began a slow walk of the riverbank. Ten paces along he saw the body.
Within reach of the river's edge, a man floated facedown with his arms spread out like a parachute diver in free fall. Emmanuel clocked the police uniform instantly. A captain. Wide shouldered and big boned with blond hair cut close to the skull. Small silver fish danced around what looked like a bullet wound in the head and another gash torn into the middle of the man's broad back. A thicket of reeds held the body fast against the current.
A blood-stiffened blanket and an overturned lantern with a burned-out wick marked a fishing spot. Bait worms had spilled from a jam can and dried on the coarse sand.
Emmanuel's heart hammered in his rib cage. He'd been sent out solo on the murder of a white police captain.
"You the detective?" The question, in Afrikaans, had the tone of a surly boy addressing the new schoolmaster.
Emmanuel turned to face a lanky teenager in a police uniform. A thick leather belt anchored the blue cotton pants and jacket to the boy's narrow hips. Wisps of downy hair grew along his jawline. The National Party policy of hiring Afrikaners into public service had reached the countryside.
"I'm Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper." He held out his hand. "Are you the policeman in charge of this case?"
The boy flushed. "Ja, I'm Constable Hansie Hepple. Lieutenant Uys is on holiday in Mozambique for two more days and Captain Pretorius…well…he's…he's gone."
They looked over at the captain, swimming in the waters of eternity. A dead white hand waved at them from the shallows.
"Did you find the body, Constable Hepple?" Emmanuel asked.
"No." The Afrikaner youth teared up. "Some kaffir boys from the location found the captain this morning…he's been out here all night."
Emmanuel waited until Hansie got control of himself. "Did you call the Detective Branch in?"
"I couldn't get a phone line to district headquarters," the boy policeman explained. "I told my sister to try till she got through. I didn't want to leave the captain by himself."
A knot of three white men stood farther up the riverbank and took turns drinking from a battered silver flask. They were big and meaty, the kind of men who would pull their own wagons across the veldt long after the oxen were dead.
Emmanuel motioned toward the group. "Who are they?"
"Three of the captain's sons."
"How many sons does the captain have?" Emmanuel imagined the mother, a wide-hipped woman who gave birth between baking bread and hanging up the laundry.
"Five sons. They're a good family. True volk."
The young policeman dug his hands into his pockets and kicked a stone across the bank with his steel-capped boot. Eight years after the beaches of Normandy and the ruins of Berlin, there was still talk of folk-spirit and race purity out on the African plains.
Emmanuel studied the murdered captain's sons. They were true Afrikaners, all right. Muscled blonds plucked straight from the victory at the Battle of Blood River and glorified on the walls of the Voortrekker Monument. The captain's boys broke from their huddle and walked toward him.
Images from Emmanuel's childhood flickered to life. Boys with skin white as mother's milk from the neck down and the elbow up. Noses skewed from fights with friends, the Indians, the English, or the coloured boys cheeky enough to challenge their place at the top.
The brothers came within shoving distance of Emmanuel and stopped. Boss Man, the largest of the brothers, stood in front. The Enforcer stood to his right with his jaw clenched. Half a step behind, the third brother stood ready to take orders from up the chain of command.
"Where's the rest of the squad?" Boss Man demanded in rough-edged English. "Where are your men?"
"I'm it," Emmanuel said. "There is no one else."
"You joking me?" The Enforcer added finger pointing to the exchange. "A police captain is murdered and Detective Branch send out one lousy detective?"
"I shouldn't be out here alone," Emmanuel conceded. A dead white man demanded a team of detectives. A dead white policeman: a whole division. "The information headquarters received was unclear. There was no mention of the victim's race, sex, or occupation—"
The Enforcer cut across the explanation. "You have to do better than that."
Emmanuel chose to focus on the Boss Man.
"I was working the Preston murder case. The white couple shot in their general store," he said. "We tracked the killer to his parents' farm, an hour west of here, and made an arrest. Major van Niekerk called and asked me to check a possible homicide—"
"'Possible homicide'?" The Enforcer wasn't about to be sidelined. "What the hell does that mean?"
"It means the operator who logged the call got one useful piece of information from the caller—the name of the town, Jacob's Rest. That was all we had to work with."
He didn't mention the word "hoax."
"If that's true," the Enforcer said, "how did you get here? This isn't Jacob's Rest, it's Old Voster's Farm."
"An African man waved me off the main road, then another one showed me to the river," Emmanuel explained, and the brothers shared a puzzled look. They had no idea what he was talking about.
"Can't be." The Boss Man spoke directly to the boy constable. "You told them a police captain had been murdered, hey, Hansie?"
The teenager scuttled behind Emmanuel. His breathing was ragged in the sudden quiet.
"Hansie…" The Enforcer smelled blood. "What did you tell them?"
"I…" The boy's voice was muffled. "I told Gertie she must say everything. She must explain how it was."
"Gertie…Your twelve-year-old sister made the call?"
"I couldn't get a line," Hansie complained. "I tried…"
"Domkop." The Boss Man stepped to the side, in order to get a clear swing at Hansie. "You really that stupid?"
The brothers moved forward in a hard line, cabbage-sized fists at the ready. The constable grabbed a handful of Emmanuel's jacket and burrowed close to his shoulder.
Emmanuel stood his ground and kept eye contact with the head brother. "Giving Constable Hepple a smack or two will make you feel better, but you can't do it here. This is a crime scene and I need to start work."
The Pretorius boys stopped. Their focus shifted to the body of their father floating in the clear water of the river.
Emmanuel stepped into the silence and held out his hand. "Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper. I'm sorry for the loss of your father."
"Henrick," the Boss Man said, and Emmanuel felt his hand disappear into a fleshy paw. "This here is Johannes and Erich, my brothers."
The younger brothers nodded a greeting, wary of the city detective in the pressed suit and green-striped tie. In Jo'burg he looked smart and professional. On the veldt with men who smelled of dirt and diesel fuel, he was out of place.
"Constable Hepple says there are five of you." He returned the brothers' stares and noticed the areas of redness around their eyes and noses.
"Louis is at home with our ma. He's too young to see this." Henrick took a swig from the flask and turned away to hide his tears.
Erich, the Enforcer, stepped forward. "The army is letting Paul out on compassionate leave. He'll be home tomorrow or the day after."
"What unit is he in?" Emmanuel asked, curious in spite of himself. Six years out of service and his own trousers and shirtsleeves were still ironed sharp enough to please a sergeant major. The army had discharged him, but it hadn't let him go.
"Paul's in intelligence," Henrick said, now flushed pink from the brandy.
Emmanuel calculated the odds that brother Paul belonged to the old guard of the intelligence corps—the one that broke fingers and smashed heads to extract information. Exactly the kind you didn't want hanging around an orderly murder investigation.
He checked the brothers' posture, the slack shoulders and unclenched hands, and decided to take control of the situation while he had a moment to do so. He was on his own with no backup and there was a murder to solve. He started with the classic opener guaranteed to raise a response from idiots and geniuses alike:
"Can you think of anyone who would do this to your father?"
"No. No one," Henrick answered with absolute certainty. "My father was a good man."
"Even good men have enemies. Especially a police captain."
"Pa might have got on the wrong side of some people, but nothing serious," Erich insisted. "People respected him. No one who knew him could do this."
"An outsider, is your guess?"
"Smugglers use this stretch of river to go in and out of Mozambique," Henrick said. "Weapons, liquor, even Commie pamphlets, they all come into the country when no one is looking."
Johannes spoke for the first time. "We think Pa maybe surprised some criminal crossing over into SA."
"A lowlife bringing in cigarettes or whiskey stolen off the docks in Lorenzo Marques." Erich took the flask from Henrick. "Some kaffir with nothing to lose."
"That casts the net pretty wide," Emmanuel said, and studied the full length of the riverbank. Farther upstream, an older black man in a heavy wool coat and khaki uniform sat in the patchy shade of an indoni tree. Two frightened black boys nestled close to him.
"Who's that?" he asked.
"Shabalala," Henrick answered. "He's a policeman, too. He's half Zulu, half Shangaan. Pa said the Shangaan part could track any animal, and the Zulu part was sure to kill it."
The Pretorius brothers smiled at the captain's old explanation.
Hansie stepped up eagerly. "Those are the boys who found the body, Detective Sergeant. They told Shabalala and he rode into town and told us."
"I'd like to hear what they have to say."
Hansie pulled a whistle from his breast pocket and blew a shrill note. "Constable Shabalala. Bring the boys. Make it fast."
Shabalala rose slowly to his full height, over six feet, and made his way toward them. The boys followed in the shadow he cast. Emmanuel watched Shabalala approach and instantly realized that he must have been the policeman who'd set up the series of native men to guide him to the crime scene.
"Quick, man!" Hansie called out. "You see that, Detective Sergeant? You tell them to hurry and this is what you get."
Emmanuel pressed his fingers into the ridge of bone above his left eye socket where a headache stirred. The country light, free from industrial haze, was bright as a blowtorch on his retina.
"Detective Sergeant Cooper, this is Constable Samuel Shabalala." Hansie performed the introductions in his best grown-up voice. "Shabalala, this detective has come all the way from Jo'burg to help us find out who killed the captain. You must tell him everything you know like a good man, okay?"
Shabalala, a few heads taller and a decade or two older than any of the white men in front of him, nodded and shook Emmanuel's outstretched hand. His face, calm as a lake, gave nothing away. Emmanuel made eye contact, and saw nothing but his own reflection in the dark brown eyes.
"The detective is an Englishman." Henrick spoke directly to Shabalala. "You must use English, okay?"
Emmanuel turned to the brothers, who stood in a semicircle behind him.
"You need to move back twenty paces while I question the boys," he said. "I'll call you when we're ready to move your pa."
Henrick grunted and the brothers moved away. Emmanuel waited until they re-formed their huddle before continuing.
He crouched down to the boys' level. "Uno bani wena?" he asked Shabalala.
Shabalala's eyes widened in surprise, then he joined Emmanuel at child height and gently touched each boy on the shoulder in turn. Continuing in Zulu, he answered Emmanuel's question. "This one is Vusi and this one is Butana, the little brother."
The boys looked about eleven and nine years old, with close-shaven heads and enormous brown eyes. Their rounded stomachs pushed out their frayed shirts.
"I'm Emmanuel. I'm a policeman from Jo'burg. You are brave boys. Can you tell me what happened?"
Butana held his hand up and waited to be called on.
"Yebo?" Emmanuel prompted.
"Please, baas." Butana's finger twisted through a hole at the front of his shirt. "We came here fishing."
"Where did you come from?"
"Our mother's house at the location," the older boy said. "We came when it was just light because baas Voster doesn't like us to fish at this place."
"Voster says the natives steal the fish," Hansie said, and crouched down to join the action.
Emmanuel ignored him. "How did you get to the river?" he asked.
"We came down from that path there." Vusi pointed past the blanket and lantern that lay on the sand to a narrow pathway that disappeared into the lush veldt.
"We came to here and I saw there was a white man in the water," Butana said. "It was Captain Pretorius. Dead."
"What did you do?" Emmanuel asked.
"We ran." Vusi rubbed one palm against the other to make a swishing sound. "Fast, fast. No stopping."
"You went home?"
"No, baas." Vusi shook his head. "We came to the policeman's house and told what we saw."
"What time?" Emmanuel asked Shabalala.
"It was past six o'clock in the morning," the black policeman said.
"They just know what time it is," Hansie supplied helpfully. "They don't need clocks the way we do."
Blacks in South Africa needed so little. A little less every day was the general rule. The job of detective was one of the few not subject to policies forbidding contact between different races. Detectives uncovered the facts, presented the brief, and gave evidence in court to support the case. White, black, coloured, or Indian, murder was a capital offense no matter what race the offender belonged to.
Emmanuel spoke to the older boy. "Did you see or hear anything strange when you came down to the river this morning?"
"The unusual thing was the body of the captain in the water," said Vusi.
"What about you?" Emmanuel asked the smaller boy. "You notice anything different? Besides the captain in the water?"
"Nothing," the little brother said.
"When you saw the body, did you think of anyone you know who could have hurt Captain Pretorius?"
The boys considered the question for a moment, their brown eyes wide with concentration.
Vusi shook his head. "No. I thought only that today was not a good day to go fishing."
Emmanuel smiled.
"You both did a very good thing by telling Constable Shabalala what you saw. You will make fine policemen one day."
Vusi's chest puffed out with pride, but his little brother's eyes filled with tears.
"What's the matter?" Emmanuel asked.
"I do not want to be a policeman, nkosana," the small boy said. "I want to be a schoolteacher."
The terror that came with discovering the body had finally surfaced in the little witness. Shabalala laid a hand on the crying boy's shoulder and waited for the signal to dismiss the boys. Emmanuel nodded.
"To be a schoolteacher, first you must go to school," the black policeman said, and waved to one of the farmworkers standing on the ridge. "Musa will take you home."
Shabalala walked the boys past the Pretorius brothers to a man standing at the top of the path. The man waved the boys up toward him.
Emmanuel studied the riverbank. The green spring veldt and wide sky filled his vision. He pulled out his notebook and wrote the word "pleasing" because it was the first thing to come to his mind when he examined the wider elements of the scene.
There would have been a moment just after the blanket was spread and the lantern turned to full light when the captain would have looked out over the river and felt a sense of joy at this place. He might have even been smiling when the bullet struck.
"Well?" It was Erich, still put out by being moved away from the questioning. "Did you get anything?"
"No," Emmanuel said. "Nothing."
"The only reason we haven't taken Pa home," Henrick said, "is because he would have wanted us to follow the rules…"
"But if you're not getting anything," Erich said, his short fuse lit, "there's no reason for us to stand here like anthills when we could be helping Pa."
The wait for the big-city detective to work the scene had taken a toll on the brothers. Emmanuel knew that they were battling the urge to turn the captain faceup so he could get some air.
"I'll take a look at the blanket, then we'll take your father back to town straight after," Emmanuel said when Shabalala rejoined the group. "Hepple and Shabalala, you're with me."
They leaned in close to the bloodstained blanket. The material was coarse gray, scratchy, and comfortable as a sheet of corrugated iron to sit on. Every outdoor event, farm truck, and braai came with blankets just like this one.
Blood had dried rust-brown on the fabric and spilled over the blanket's edge into the sand. Deep lines, broken at irregular intervals, led from the blanket to the river's edge. The captain had been shot, then dragged to the water and dumped. No mean feat.
"What do you make of this?" Emmanuel pointed to the blood-stiffened material.
"Let's see." Hansie came forward. "The captain came fishing, the way he did every week, and someone shot him."
"Yes, Hepple, those are the facts." Emmanuel glanced at Shabalala. If the captain was right, the Shangaan part of the silent black man would see more than the obvious. "Well?"
The black policeman hesitated.
"Tell me what you think happened," Emmanuel said, aware of Shabalala's reluctance to show up Hansie's poor grasp of the situation.
"The captain was shot here on the blanket, then pulled over the sand to the water. But the killer, he's not strong."
"How's that?"
"He had to rest many times." Shabalala pointed to the shallow indentations that broke the line as it ran from the blanket to the water. "This is the mark of the captain's boots. Here is where his body was put down. Here was his head."
In the hollow lay a dried pool of blood and a matted tuft of blond hair. The indentations appeared closer and closer together, the pools of blood larger, as the killer stopped to catch his breath more often.
"Somebody wanted to make sure the captain wasn't coming back," Emmanuel muttered. "Are you sure he didn't have any enemies?"
"None," Hansie answered without hesitation. "Captain got on good with everyone, even the natives, hey, Shabalala?"
"Yebo," the black constable said. He stared at the evidence, which said otherwise.
"Some places have trouble between the groups. Not here," Hansie insisted. "A stranger must have done this. Someone from outside."
There wasn't much to go on yet. If it had been a crime of passion, the murderer might have made mistakes: no alibi, murder weapon hidden in an obvious place, blood left to dry on shoelaces…if the murder was premeditated, then only careful police work would catch the killer. Outsider or insider, it took guts to kill a white police captain.
"Comb the riverbank," he instructed Hansie. "Walk as far as the path where the boys climbed up. Go slowly. If you find anything out of the ordinary, don't touch it. Call me."
"Yes, sir." Hansie set off like a Labrador.
Emmanuel scoped the scene. The captain's killer had dragged the body to the water without dropping a thing.
"Did he have enemies?" he asked Shabalala.
"The bad people did not like him, but the good people did." The black man's face betrayed nothing.
"What do you really think happened here?"
"It rained this morning. Many of the marks have been washed away."
Emmanuel wasn't buying. "Tell me anyway."
"Captain was kneeling and facing this way." Shabalala pointed in the direction Hansie had gone. "A man's boot prints come here from behind. One bullet in the head, captain fell. Then a second bullet in the back."
A boot print with deep, straight grooves was pressed into the sand.
"How the hell did the killer manage a clean shot in the dark?" Emmanuel asked.
"It was a full moon last night and bright. The lantern was also burning."
"How many people can take a shot like that even in broad daylight?"
"Many," the black policeman said. "The white men learn to shoot guns at their club. Captain Pretorius and his sons have won many trophies." Shabalala thought for a moment. "Mrs. Pretorius has also won many."
Emmanuel again pressed his left eye socket where the headache was beginning. He'd landed in a town of sharpshooting inbred Afrikaner farmers.
"Where did the killer go after dumping the body?"
"The river." Shabalala walked to the edge of the water and pointed to where the captain's heel marks and the killer's footprints disappeared into the flow.
A clump of bulrushes with the stems snapped back lay on the opposite bank. A narrow path trailed off into the bushlands.
"The killer came out there?" He pointed to the trampled rushes.
"I think so."
"Whose farm is that?" Emmanuel asked, and felt a familiar surge of adrenaline—the excitement of the first lead in a new case. They could track the killer to his door and finish this today. With luck he'd be back in Jo'burg for the weekend.
"No farm," came the reply. "Mozambique."
"You sure, man?"
"Yebo. Mo. Zam. Bique." Shabalala repeated the name, long and slow, so there was no mistake. The syllables emphasized that across the bank was another country with its own laws and its own police force.
Emmanuel and Shabalala stood side by side and looked across the water for a long while. Five minutes on the opposite shore might give up a clue that could break open the case. Emmanuel did a quick calculation. If he was caught across the border, he'd spend the next two years checking ID passes at whites-only public toilets. Even Major van Niekerk, a canny political animal with connections to burn, couldn't fix up a bungled visit across the border.
He turned to face South Africa and concentrated on the evidence in front of him. The neatness of the scene and the sniper-like targeting of the victim's head and spine indicated a cool and methodical hand. The location of the body was also a deliberate choice. Why take the time to drag it to the water when it could have been left on the sand?
The brother's smuggler theory didn't hold water, either. Why wouldn't the smuggler cross farther upstream and avoid all that attention and trouble? Not only that, why would he compromise his path between borders by murdering a white man?
"Did the killer come out of the river?" Emmanuel asked.
The Zulu policeman shook his head. "When I came here the herd boys and their oxen had been to the river to drink. If the tracks were here, they are gone now."
"Detective Sergeant," Hansie said, walking toward them, pink skin flushed with exertion.
"Anything?"
"Nothing but sand, Detective Sergeant."
The dead man floated in the river. A spring rain, gentle as mist, began to fall.
"Let's get the captain," Emmanuel said.
"Yebo."
Sadness flickered across the black man's face for a moment and then it was gone.
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
Chapter 2
|
The coffee was hot and black and spiked with enough brandy to dull the ache in Emmanuel's muscles. A full hour after going in to retrieve the captain, the men from the riverbank were back at the cars, shoulders and legs twitching with fatigue. Extracting the body from the crime scene proved to be only slightly easier than pulling a Sherman tank out of the mud.
"Koeksister?" asked old Voster's wife, a toad-faced woman with thinning gray hair.
"Thank you." Emmanuel took a sticky pastry and leaned back against the Packard.
He looked around at the gathering of people and vehicles. Two black maids poured fresh coffee and handed out dry towels while a group of farmworkers tended the fire for the hot water and milk. The wheelchair-bound Voster and his family, a son and two daughters, were deep in conversation with the Pretorius brothers while a pack of sinewy Rhodesian ridgebacks sniffed the ground at their feet. Black and white children ran zigzag together between the cars in a noisy game of hide-and-seek. The captain lay in the back of the police van wrapped in clean white sheets.
Emmanuel drained his coffee and approached the Pretorius brothers. The investigation needed to move forward fast. All they had so far was a dead body and a killer walking free in Mozambique.
"Time to go," Emmanuel said. "We'll take the captain to hospital, get the doctor to look him over."
"We're taking him home," Henrick stated flatly. "My ma's waited long enough to see him."
Emmanuel felt the force of the brothers as they turned their gaze on him. He held their stare and absorbed the tension and rage, now doubly fueled by alcohol and fatigue.
"We need a medical opinion on the time and the cause of death. And a signed death certificate. It's standard police procedure."
"Are you blind as well as fucking deaf?" Erich said. "You need a doctor to tell you he was shot? What kind of detective are you, Detective?"
"I'm the kind of detective that solves cases, Erich. That's why Major van Niekerk sent me. Would you rather we left it to him?"
He motioned to the fire where Hansie sat cross-legged, a plate of Koeksisters on his knees. The thin sound of his humming carried through the air as he selected another sweet pastry.
"We won't agree to a doctor cutting him up like a beast," Henrick said. "He's God's creature, even if his spirit has departed his body. Pa would never have agreed to it and we won't either."
True Afrikaners and religious with it. Wars started with less fuel. The Pretorius boys were ready to take up arms for their beliefs. Time to tread carefully. He was out on his own with no backup and no partner. Some access to the body was better than none at all.
"No autopsy," Emmanuel said. "Just an examination to determine time and cause of death. The captain would have agreed to that much, I'm sure."
"Ja, okay," Erich said, and the aggression drained from him.
"Tell your ma we'll get him home as soon as possible. Constable Shabalala and I will take care of him."
Henrick handed over the keys to the police van, which he'd found in the captain's pocket when they hauled him out of the river.
"Hansie and Shabalala will show you the way to the hospital and then to our parents' place. Take too long and my brothers and I will come looking for you, Detective."
Emmanuel checked the rearview mirror of the police van and saw Hansie following in the Packard with Shabalala's bike lashed to the roof. The boy was good behind the wheel, tight and confident. If the killer was a race car driver, Emmanuel noted, Hansie might get a chance to earn his pay packet on the police force, possibly for the first time.
The vehicles entered the town of Jacob's Rest on Piet Retief Street, the town's only tarred road. A little way down, they turned onto a dirt road and drove past a series of low-slung buildings grouped together under a haze of purple jacaranda trees. Shabalala directed Emmanuel into a circular drive lined with whitewashed stones. He paused at the front entrance to the Grace of God Hospital.
Crude icon images of Christ on the Cross were carved into the two front doors. Emmanuel and Shabalala slipped out of the police van and stood on either side of the filthy bonnet. Mud-splattered and sweat-stained, they carried the smell of bad news about them.
"What now?" Emmanuel asked Shabalala. It was almost noon and the captain was doing a slow roast in the back of the police van.
The doors to the hospital swung open and a large steam engine of a black woman in a nun's habit appeared on the top stair. Another nun, pale skinned and tiny as a bantam hen, stepped up beside her. The sisters stared out from the shade cast by their headdresses.
"Sisters." Emmanuel lifted his hat, like a hobo practicing good manners. "I'm Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper. You know the other policemen, I'm sure."
"Of course, of course." The tiny white nun fluttered down the stairs, followed by her solid black shadow. "I'm Sister Bernadette and this is Sister Angelina. Please forgive our surprise. How may we be of service, Detective Cooper?"
"We have Captain Pretorius in the van—"
The sisters' gasp broke the flow of his words. He started again, aiming for a gentler tone.
"The captain is—"
"Dead," Hansie blubbered. "He's been murdered. Someone shot him in the head and the back…there's a hole…"
"Constable…" Emmanuel put the full weight of his hand on the boy's shoulder. No need for specific information about the case to be sprayed around so early. It was a small town. Everyone would know the bloody details soon enough.
"Lord rest his soul," said Sister Bernadette.
"May God have mercy on his soul," Sister Angelina intoned.
Emmanuel waited until the sisters crossed themselves before pushing ahead.
"We need the doctor to examine Captain Pretorius to determine cause and time of death, and to issue the death certificate."
"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear…" Sister Bernadette muttered quietly, her Irish brogue now thick. "I'm afraid we can't help you, Detective Cooper. Doctor left on his rounds this morning."
"When will he be back?" Emmanuel figured he had four hours at most before the Pretorius brothers showed up to claim the body.
"Two, maybe three days," Sister Bernadette said. "There's been an outbreak of bilharzia at a boarding school near Bremer. Depending on the number of cases, he might be longer. I'm so sorry."
Days, not hours. Country time was too slow for his liking.
"What would you do if Captain Pretorius was badly injured but still alive?" he asked.
"Send you on to Mooihoek. There's a doctor at the hospital full-time."
He didn't get his hopes up. The situation was fubar, as the Yank soldiers were fond of saying. Fucked up beyond all recognition. He tried anyway.
"How long?"
"If the road is in good shape, just under two hours." Sister Bernadette delivered the good news with a weak smile, then cast about for a friendlier face, one that understood geography. "Isn't that so, Constable Shabalala?"
Shabalala nodded. "That is the time, if the road is good."
"And is the road good?" Emmanuel asked. The headache suddenly pulsed red and white behind his left eye socket. He waited for someone to answer the question.
"Good until ver Maak's farm." Shabalala spoke up when it became obvious no one else was going to. "Ver Maak told captain there was a donga in the road, but he drove around it to come to town."
The collapse in the road was passable, but it would add time to the journey to Mooihoek. He didn't want to risk breaking the case open like this. A police van with a dead police captain was sure to get noticed, especially in Mooihoek, where a phone call would bring the press swarming down on them in no time.
"Detective Cooper…" Sister Bernadette touched the silver cross around her neck and felt the comforting sharpness of Jesus' ribs against her fingers. "There is Mr. Zweigman."
"Who is Mr. Zweigman?"
"The old Jew," Hansie said quickly. "He runs a dry goods store down by the bus stop. Kaffirs and coloureds go there."
Emmanuel kept his gaze steady on Sister Bernadette, God's black-robed pigeon ready to take flight at the smallest sound.
"What about Mr. Zweigman?"
Sister Bernadette released a pent-up breath. "A native boy was run over a few months ago and Mr. Zweigman treated him at the scene. The boy came here later and you could see…he was fixed up by someone qualified."
Emmanuel checked Shabalala. Shabalala nodded. The story was true.
"Is he a doctor?"
"He says he was a medic in the refugee camps in Germany but…" Sister Bernadette gripped the silver cross tightly and asked the Lord's forgiveness for the confidence she was about to betray. "We have had Mr. Zweigman look at one or two cases while Dr. Kruger has been away. Not officially, you see. No, no. A quick look, that's all. We'd rather Doctor didn't find out."
"The old Jew isn't a doctor." Hansie bristled at the idea. "Dr. Kruger is the only doctor in the district. Everybody knows that. What kind of rubbish are you talking?"
Sister Angelina stepped forward with an angelic smile. She could have crushed Hansie in her enormous black fist, yet she chose to appear small in front of the puffed-up boy policeman.
"Yes, of course," she said in a warm voice. "Dr. Kruger is the only proper doctor, that's correct, Constable. Mr. Zweigman is only for us natives who don't need such good medicine. For the natives only."
Emmanuel found himself no closer to knowing if the old Jew was a doctor or a shopkeeper with a first aid certificate.
"Shabalala." He motioned the policeman to the back of the police van, and out of earshot. "What do you know about this?"
"The captain told me, if you are sick you must go to the old Jew. He will fix you better than Dr. Kruger."
Better, not worse. That was the captain's opinion and this was his town. Emmanuel fished the Packard keys from his pocket.
"Here." Shabalala pointed to a row of shops pressed close together under sheets of rusting corrugated iron. A pitted footpath added to the derelict appearance of the businesses, each with its doors thrown open to the street. Khan's Emporium was pungent with spices. Next stood a "fine liquor merchant" manned by two bored mixed-race boys playing cards out the front. After that sat Poppies General Store, which looked in danger of sliding off its wooden foundations and into the vacant lot next door.
Across the road, there was a burned-out garage with a charred petrol pump and piles of blistered tires. A lanky walnut-colored man patiently worked his way through the rubble, picking up bricks and pieces of twisted metal and throwing them into a wheelbarrow.
A black native woman ambled by with a baby tied to her back, and a mixed-race "coloured" boy pushed a toy car made of wire along the footpath. No English or Afrikaners. They had slipped out of white Africa.
"The last one is the old Jew's place." Shabalala pointed to Poppies General Store. Emmanuel switched off the engine and put his optimism on ice. A broken-down shop on the wrong side of the color line was no place for a qualified doctor unless he was crazy or had been struck off the medical register.
Poppies was crammed with hessian sacks of corn, cans of jam, and corned meat. The air smelled of raw cotton, and bolts of plain and patterned material leaned against the far edge of a long wooden counter. Behind the counter stood a slight man with wire-rimmed glasses and a shock of brilliant white hair that flew up from his skull like an exclamation point.
A crackpot, Emmanuel judged quickly, and "the old Jew" wasn't as old as he'd imagined. Zweigman was still the right side of fifty, despite his hair and stooped shoulders. His brown eyes were bright as a crow's as he took in the sight of the mud-spattered pair without reaction.
"How can I help you, Officer?" Zweigman asked in an accent Emmanuel knew well. Educated German transplanted into a rough and charmless English.
"Get your medical kit and your license. We need you at the hospital." He made sure Zweigman saw the police ID he slapped onto the counter.
"A moment, please," Zweigman answered politely, and disappeared into a back room separated from the main shop by a yellow-and-white-striped curtain. The mechanical whir of sewing machines filtered out, then stopped abruptly. There was the sound of voices, low and urgent, before the shopkeeper reappeared with his medical bag. A dark-haired woman in an elegant blue satin dress tailored to fit the generous curves of her body followed close behind Zweigman.
The old Jew and the woman were as different as a gumboot and a ball gown. Zweigman could have been any old man serving behind any dusty counter in South Africa, but the woman belonged to a cool climate place with Persian carpets and a grand piano tucked into the corner.
The word "liebchen" tripped from the woman's mouth in a repetitive loop that stopped only when Zweigman gently placed his fingers to her lips. They stood close together, surrounded by a sadness that forced Emmanuel onto his back foot.
The headache had returned, glowing hot behind the socket. He pressed his palm over his eye to clear the blur. An image of Angela, his own wife, imprinted over his retina. Pale-skinned and ephemeral, she called to him from a corner of the past. Had they ever stood together as intimately as the old Jew and his anxious wife did just now?
"Let's go," Emmanuel said, and headed for the door.
Outside, the light was soft and white and shot through with fine dust particles. The coloured boys in front of the liquor store looked up, then quickly returned to their game. Better to have a policeman walk by than stop and ask questions.
Emmanuel got into the driver's seat, cranked the engine, and waited. Zweigman slid in next to him with his medical bag balanced on his knees. No one spoke as the car eased away from the curb and started back toward the hospital.
"Where did you get your medical degree?" he asked. All the boxes had to be ticked before Zweigman was allowed to work on the captain's body.
"Charité Universitäsmedizin in Berlin."
"Are you qualified to practice in South Africa?" He couldn't imagine German qualifications being denied by the National Party, even if the person holding them was Jewish.
Zweigman tapped a finger against the hard leather of his medical bag and appeared to give the question some thought.
They swung off Piet Retief Street with its white-owned businesses, and headed up General Kruger Road. Every street in Jacob's Rest was the answer to an exam question on Afrikaner history.
"Are you qualified?" Emmanuel asked again.
The shopkeeper waved the question away with a flick of his hand. "I no longer feel qualified to practice medicine in any country."
Emmanuel eased off the accelerator and prepared to swing a U-turn back in the direction of Poppies General Store.
"Ever been struck off the register in Germany or South Africa for any reason, Dr. Zweigman?" he asked.
"Never," the shopkeeper said. "And I don't answer to 'doctor' anymore. Please call me 'the old Jew' like everyone else."
"I would." Emmanuel pulled the car up in front of the Grace of God Hospital and switched off the engine. "But you're not that old."
"Ahhhh…" The sound was dry as parchment. "Don't be fooled by my youthful appearance, Detective. Under this skin, I am actually the ancient Jew."
Strange turns of phrase were one possible reason the oddball Kraut was sitting next to him, and not in some swank medical suite in Cape Town or Jo'burg.
"I think I'll call you the peculiar Jew. It suits you better. Now let's see your papers." Friendship with a man crazy enough to choose shopkeeper above physician was not on his list of things to do. He just wanted to verify the qualifications, then get relief for the pounding in his head.
Sunlight caught the rim of Zweigman's glasses when he leaned forward, so Emmanuel wasn't sure if he'd seen a spark of laughter in the doctor's brown eyes. Zweigman handed him the papers, the first of which were in German.
"You read Deutsch, Detective?"
"Only beer hall menus." He flipped to the South African qualifications written in English and read the information slowly, then read it again. A surgeon, with membership in the Royal College of Surgeons. It was like finding a gold coin in a dirty sock.
Emmanuel looked hard at Zweigman, who returned his stare without blinking. There had to be a simple explanation for the white-haired German being in Jacob's Rest. Deep country was the ideal place to bury a surgeon with shaky hands. Did the good doctor have a fondness for alcohol?
"No, Detective Sergeant." Zweigman read his thoughts. "I do not hit the bottle at any time."
Emmanuel handed the papers back with a shrug. Zweigman was more than qualified to do what was asked of him. That was all the case needed.
Far enough from the main buildings to create a buffer zone between the living and the dead, a round mud-brick hut worked double time as the hospital's morgue and hardware storeroom.
Emmanuel paused under the shade of a jacaranda tree and allowed Shabalala and Zweigman to get ahead of him. The stooped doctor and the towering black man moved toward the morgue on a carpet of the jacaranda's spent flowers. At the path's end, Sister Angelina and Sister Bernadette administered spoonfuls of cod-liver oil to a row of ragged children while Hansie slept the dense sleep of the village idiot, with his head propped against the morgue door.
My team, Emmanuel thought. He stepped out of the shade and the headache hit him again. The thatched roof of the hut bled into the sky and the grass merged with the white walls of the buildings so that everything resembled a child's watercolor. He pressed his palm hard over his eye socket, but the blur and the pain remained. By nightfall the headache would be a sharp splinter of hot light that shut down the eye completely. After the examination of the captain's body was set up, he'd get a triple dose of aspirin from the sisters. A double dose for now and a single one he could chase with a shot of whiskey before bed. At least he knew where the liquor store was.
"Asleep on duty." Emmanuel gave Hansie a sharp tap on the shoulder. "I could write you up for that, Hepple."
Hansie jumped to attention to prove his alertness. "I wasn't sleeping. I was resting my eyes," he said, then caught sight of Zweigman. "What's he doing here? I thought you went to fetch the Pretorius brothers."
"We got lost." Emmanuel sidestepped Hansie and pushed the door to the morgue open. It was cool and dark inside. He looked over his shoulder and saw Zweigman walk over to the sisters, who were flushed and uncomfortable in front of the man whose confidence they'd betrayed.
"Sister Angelina and Sister Bernadette." The white-haired German gave no indication he'd been co-opted by the police. "Will you please assist me?"
"Yes, Doctor," Sister Bernadette said. "Excuse us while we prepare the necessary things."
The sisters marched the children toward the main building, where black and brown faces pressed up against the glass windows. The whites-only wing was empty. This afternoon the nonwhites would have something to tell their visitors. "The captain, ma big boss man Pretorius, he's dead!"
"Doctor?" Hansie was fully awake and glaring at Zweigman. "That's the old Jew. He's not a doctor. He sells beans to kaffirs and coloureds."
"He's qualified to look at natives, coloureds and dead people," Emmanuel said, and took refuge inside the darkened morgue. The pulsing behind his eye eased off a fraction but not enough. He switched on the examination light. Hansie and Shabalala stepped in and took up position against the wall. When the sisters got back, he'd ask for the painkillers right away. There was no way he'd make it through the examination with the harsh white light in the stifling mortuary.
He pulled the sheet back to reveal the captain's uniformed body. Zweigman looked ready to deposit the contents of his stomach onto the concrete floor. His knuckles strained white against the leather handle of his medical bag.
"Were you friends with the captain?" Emmanuel asked.
"We were known to each other." Zweigman's voice was half its normal strength, the guttural accent more pronounced than before. "An acquaintance that, it appears, has come to a most abrupt end."
Zweigman regained his color and started to clear a side counter with robotic precision. Was there the smallest hint of satisfaction in Zweigman's comment about an abrupt end?
"Not friends, then," Emmanuel said.
"There are few whites in this town that would claim me as a friend," Zweigman said without turning around. He calmly rolled up his sleeves to his elbows and snapped open his medical kit.
"Why's that?"
"I did not come here on the first Trekboer wagons and I do not understand how or even why one would play the game of rugby."
Emmanuel shaded his eyes against the naked light to get a clearer look at Zweigman. His headache pounded behind his eyeball. Zweigman had gone from shock to calm in the blink of an eye.
"Where to, Doctor?" Sister Angelina entered the morgue with a huge bowl of hot water in her muscular arms. A starched white apron covered her nun's habit, reaching to her knees.
Zweigman pointed to the cleared counter. Sister Bernadette shuffled in under a load of towels and washcloths. They set up in silence, moving like dancers in a well-rehearsed ballet. Zwiegman scrubbed his hands and forearms, then dried himself with a small towel.
"Doctor?" Sister Bernadette held out a white surgical robe with the name "Kruger" embroidered on the pocket in dark blue. Zweigman slid into the robe and allowed Sister Bernadette to knot the ties along the back. It was obvious they'd worked together before.
"What do you want from me?" Zweigman asked.
"Time of death. Cause of death and a signed death certificate. No autopsy."
Emmanuel pulled out his notepad, but his headache blurred his writing into dark smudge marks.
"Detective?"
Emmanuel refocused and saw Sister Angelina in front of him with a glass of water in one hand and four white pills in the upturned palm of the other.
"Doctor says to take these right away."
He swallowed the tablets and chased them down with the water. Double the dose, the way he always took it when the blurring wouldn't go away. Perhaps "the clever Jew" was a better name for Zweigman.
"Thanks."
"No need." Zweigman turned to the body. The ghostly face shone white under the glow of the naked lightbulb. "Let us begin with the clothes."
Sister Angelina picked up a pair of pruning shears, sliced along the stiff line of buttons that ran from neck to waist, then flicked the material out like the skin of a fruit to reveal the pale flesh of the captain's bloated torso.
Emmanuel stepped closer. Until the blurring lifted, he needed to take it slowly and write all the information down in large slabs. Obvious details needed to marry to a one-or two-word description in the notebook—at least until he could see straight.
"Big" was the first word. The Pretorius brothers had inherited their height and strength from their father. The captain was six feet plus with a body built by physical labor.
"Captain still play sport?" Emmanuel asked no one in particular. The captain's nose, broken and then crudely reset in the face, was probably the result of time spent on the muddy playing fields dotted throughout Afrikanerdom.
"He coached the rugby team," Hansie said.
"And he ran," Sister Bernadette continued. "He ran all over town and into the countryside sometimes."
"Same time every day?"
"Every day except Sunday, because that was the Lord's day." Sister Bernadette sounded full of admiration. "Sometimes he ran in the morning and sometimes we'd see him run by well after dark."
That would explain why the captain hadn't piled on the fat like so many senior officers on the force. It was practically against police procedure to remain at normal weight after more than ten years in service.
"Yes." Zweigman pulled a bootlace free from its knot. "Early morning or late at night. There was no way to tell when the captain would run by. Or when he'd stop for a friendly talk."
Emmanuel wrote "Zweigman vs. Captain?" in his notebook. He sensed a sting behind the doctor's words. He'd sniff out the details later.
"Oh, yes." Sister Bernadette sighed. "The captain always stopped when he had the time. He knew all our little orphans by name."
"Trousers." Zweigman moved aside and Sister Angelina sliced each trouser leg open with her pruning shears. The top two buttons of the trouser fly were undone and the buckle of the leather belt had twisted open in the rough river current.
"Sister Bernadette," Zweigman said. "Please remove the trousers while we lift." He moved to position himself at the captain's shoulders.
"Doctor, please." Sister Angelina waved him aside and single-handedly pushed the captain's deadweight into a sitting position while her miniature Irish partner pulled the dirty uniform free and threw it onto the floor. They repeated the action with the trousers, leaving the captain naked and pale on the gurney. Sister Angelina discreetly draped a towel over the exposed genitals.
"Poor Captain Pretorius." Sister Bernadette placed the dangling arms back onto the gurney. "No matter what condition the body was in, I'd still know it was him."
There were no identifying marks. Was there something about the naked captain only the little nun could identify?
Sister Bernadette lifted a dead hand. "There wasn't a time I didn't see this watch on him. Captain wore it always."
"He never took it off." Hansie's eyes were reddening. "Mrs. Pretorius gave it to him for his fortieth birthday. The strap is real crocodile skin."
Even under layers of dirt it was easy to see the quality of the watch. It was dull gold with a textured wristband. Elegant. Not a word that kept easy company with the meaty captain or his sons. Emmanuel lifted the hand. Fresh bruises stained the flesh along the knuckle ridge. Captain Pretorius had recently hit something with force. He made a quick note in his pad, then turned the hand over. A small collection of calluses was scattered across the tray-sized palm.
"What kind of physical work did the captain do?"
"He liked to work on engines with Louis. They were fixing up an old motorbike together." Hansie sniffled.
"No," Emmanuel said. Some of the calluses had the soft, broken edges of newly minted blisters. This was the hand of a laborer who hauled and lifted right until the day he died. "I mean heavy work. Work that makes you sweat."
"Sometimes he helped Henrick out on the farm," Hansie said softly. "If it was cattle dipping or branding time, he liked to be there to watch because he grew up on a farm and he missed the life…"
Shabalala said nothing, just kept his gaze directed at the concrete floor where the captain's uniform lay, torn and disregarded. If the black policeman knew the answer, he wasn't inclined to share it.
Emmanuel turned the cold hand palm down and stepped back. Perhaps the sons had an answer. He wrote "heavy work/ blistered hands" on the pad. The black lines held steady on the page. The medication had kicked in.
Zweigman began a sweep of the body. "Severe trauma to the head. Appears to be the entry wound from a gunshot. Bruising to the shoulders, upper arm and underarm area…"
From dragging the body, Emmanuel thought. The killer had to hold on tight and pull hard as a mule to get to the water. Why bother? Why not shoot and run off into the night?
Zweigman continued down the body, paying meticulous attention to every detail. "Severe trauma to the spine. Appears to be the entry wound from another gunshot. Bruising along the knuckles. Blistering on the palms…"
The German surgeon was completely focused on the task, his face lit by something close to contentment. Why, with all his obvious expertise, was he serving behind the counter of a decrepit general store?
"Let's wash him down," Zweigman said.
Sister Angelina wrung warm water out of a hand towel and began wiping the pale skin down with the no-nonsense touch of nannies throughout English and Afrikaner homes across South Africa. Forty-something years on, the captain was leaving life as he'd entered it, in the hands of a black woman.
"No, no, no." Hansie rushed forward, breathing hard. "Captain wouldn't like it."
"Like what, Hepple?" Emmanuel said.
"A kaffir woman touching him down there. He was against that sort of thing."
There was a tense silence, colored by the ugly tide of recent history. The Immorality Act banning sexual contact between whites and nonwhites was now law, with offenders subjected to public humiliation and jail time.
"Go out and get some air," Emmanuel said. "I'll call you when I need you."
"Please. I want to help, Detective Sergeant."
"You have helped. Now it's time for you to take a break. Go out and get some fresh air."
"Ja." Hansie headed for the exit with hunched shoulders. It would take a while for the image of the captain, naked and molested by a black woman, to clear from his mind.
Emmanuel waited for the door to close before he spoke to Sister Angelina and Zweigman, both of whom had stepped back from the body during the young policeman's outburst. A white teenager with a uniform and badge clearly outranked a foreign Jew and a black nun.
"Carry on," he said, trying to move past an acute feeling of embarrassment. The Afrikaners had voted the National Party in. Racial segregation belonged to people like Captain Pretorius and his sons. A detective didn't have to adhere to the new laws. Murder didn't have a color.
"It is just as well," Zweigman said after he'd murmured a low instruction to the sisters, who unfolded a white sheet and held it across the front of the captain's body to shield it from view. Zweigman reached for the internal thermometer, hesitated, then cast Shabalala a concerned glance.
"You can leave now, if you'd like," Emmanuel said to the Zulu constable.
"No." Shabalala didn't move a muscle. "I will stay here with him."
Zweigman nodded, then continued with the grim task of extracting information from the dead. He checked the results of the internal thermometer, rechecked the milky film masking the captain's eyes, and then examined the cleaned body for a second time.
"Cause of death was trauma to the head and spine caused by a bullet. The trauma to these areas is so specific and severe I believe the victim was most likely dead before reaching the water. I have not gone into the lungs to confirm, but that is my opinion."
"How do you know he was found in water?" Emmanuel was sure he hadn't mentioned the fact to Zweigman.
"Sediment on his wet clothes and in his hair. Captain Pretorius smells of the river."
Emmanuel's shoes were covered in mud and decaying leaves. Both he and Shabalala looked as if they'd been dredged in the river and then hung out to dry.
"Time of death?" he asked.
"Hard to tell. The captain's lack of body fat and the cool water in which his body was found make calculations difficult. Somewhere between eight PM and midnight last night is my best guess." The white-haired grocer handed the internal thermometer to Sister Bernadette and peeled off his gloves.
The sliced police uniform was heaped on the floor. The buttons still shone.
"Shabalala, did the captain always go fishing in his uniform?"
"Sometimes, when it was late, he went straight from the station to fish. He didn't like to disturb madam after dinner."
"Or maybe"—Zweigman pulled off the untied surgical gown and dumped it onto the side counter—"he just liked to wear the uniform."
Emmanuel flicked back in his notebook and placed a tick next to "Zweigman vs. Captain?" The uniform statement was harmless enough, but there was an edge to it. Had Pretorius used his position to come down on the shopkeeper for some minor infraction? Every year the National Party introduced a dozen new ways to break the law. Zweigman wouldn't be the first to get caught.
"If you'll excuse me, I will fill in the death certificate and be on my way. Here is a supply of painkillers for your head." Zweigman handed over a full bottle. "No offense, Detective, but I hope not to see you again."
"Can you think of anyone who could have done this?" Emmanuel pocketed the pills and opened the morgue door for the physician.
"I'm the old Jew who sells dry goods to natives and coloureds. Nobody comes to me with their secrets, Detective."
"An educated guess, then?"
"He didn't have any enemies that I know of. If the killer is from this town, then he has kept his feelings well hidden."
"So you think the murder was planned and personal?"
Zweigman lifted an eyebrow. "That I cannot say, as I was not privy to any discussions leading up to the captain's unfortunate demise. Will that be all, Detective?"
"For now."
There were few certainties this early in a case, but one was already clear: he'd be seeing the old Jew again and not to buy lentils.
"Constable Hepple!" Emmanuel called.
The boy policeman scuttled over. "Get the Pretorius brothers. Tell them their father is ready to go home."
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
Chapter 3
|
The front office of the Jacob's Rest police station consisted of one large room with two wooden desks, five chairs, and a metal filing cabinet pushed against the back wall. Gray lines worn into the polished concrete floor made a map of each policeman's daily journey from door to desk to cabinet. A doorway at one side led to the cells and another in the back wall to a separate office. Shabalala was nowhere to be seen.
Emmanuel entered the back office. Captain Pretorius's desk was larger and neater than the others and had a black telephone in one corner. He picked up the receiver and dialed district headquarters.
"Congratulations." Major van Niekerk's cultured voice crackled down the line after the operator's third attempt to connect them.
"What for, sir?"
"Uniting the country. Once the story gets out, the native, English and Afrikaans press will finally have something to agree on—that the Detective Branch is understaffed, ill informed and losing the battle against crime. One detective to cover the murder of a white police officer—the newspapers will have to run extra editions."
Emmanuel felt a jolt. "You know about the case, sir?"
"Just got a call from the National Party boys." The statement was overlaid with a casual indifference that didn't ring true. "The Security Branch, no less. They think Pretorius's murder may be political."
"The Security Branch?" Emmanuel tensed. "How did they get to hear about it so fast?"
"They didn't get the information from me, Cooper. Someone at your end must have tipped them off."
There was no way Hansie Hepple or Shabalala were hooked up to such heavyweights. The Security Branch wasn't a regional body monitoring rainfall and crop production. They were entrusted with matters of national security and had the power to pull the rug from under anyone—including Major van Niekerk and the whole Detective Branch. Did the Pretorius brothers have those kinds of connections?
"What do they mean by 'political'?" Emmanuel asked.
"The defiance campaign's got them spooked. They think the murder may be the beginning of Communist-style revolt by the natives."
"How did they come up with that?" The revolution idea would be funny if anyone but the Security Branch had flagged it. "The defiance campaign protesters prefer burning their ID passes and marching to the town hall after curfew. They want the National Party segregation laws repealed. Killing policemen isn't their style."
"Maybe the Security Branch knows something we don't. Either way, they made sure I knew they were taking an interest in the case and they expect to be informed of any developments as they occur."
"Is taking an interest as far as it goes?" Even members of the foot section of the police knew "taking an interest" was code for taking control.
There was a long pause. "My guess is, if the defiance campaign dies down, they'll step back. If it doesn't, there's no telling what they'll do. We're in different times now, Cooper."
Emmanuel didn't think the defiance campaign showed any sign of dying down. Prime Minister Malan and the National Party had begun to enact their plan as soon as they'd taken office. The new segregation laws divided people into race groups, told them where they could live and told them where they could work. The Immorality Act went so far as to tell people whom they could sleep with and love. The growth of the defiance campaign meant that the Security Branch, or Special Branch as it was tagged on the street, would walk right into Emmanuel's investigation and call the shots.
"When can you get more men onto the case, sir?"
"Twenty-four hours," van Niekerk said. "Everyone here is focused on a body found by the railway line. She's white, thank God. That means the press will keep running with the story. I'll get a day to pull some men from headquarters and load them onto your case on the quiet."
Major van Niekerk, the product of a highbred English mother and a rich Dutch father, liked to keep a clear line of sight between himself and his ultimate prize: commissioner of police. His present rank of major wasn't high enough for him. His motto was simple: What's good for me is good for South Africa. Sending out a single detective on a crank call that turned out to be an actual homicide wasn't something he was keen to make public.
"And the Security Branch?" Emmanuel asked.
"I'll handle them." Van Niekerk made it sound easy, but it was going to be more like taking a knife from a Gypsy. "Meanwhile, you've got a chance to treat this like an ordinary murder, not a test case for the soundness of the new racial segregation laws. Consider yourself—"
Static swallowed up the rest of the sentence and left an industrial hiss breathing down the line.
"Major?"
The singsong beep, beep, beep signaled a disconnected line. Emmanuel hung up. Lucky? Was that the major's last word? Consider yourself lucky?
Emmanuel tipped the contents of the captain's drawer onto the desktop and began sorting through it. Booking forms, paper clips, pencils, and rubber bands got placed to one side. That left a small box of ammunition and a week-old newspaper. The box revealed rows of gold bullets. The newspaper stories he'd read last Wednesday. No luck there.
"Detective Sergeant?"
Shabalala stood in the doorway, a steaming mug of tea in hand. For such a large man, he moved with alarming quiet. He'd stripped down to his undershirt, and his trousers were damp from where he'd washed the material in an attempt to clean it. The black location, five miles to the north of town, was too far to ride his bicycle for the sake of a change of clothes.
"Thank you, Constable." Emmanuel took the tea, aware of the crisp lines of the shirt he'd changed into half an hour earlier. The Protea Guesthouse, the boardinghouse where he'd thrown down his bag, then washed and changed, was in the heart of town, surrounded by other white-owned homes. Shabalala would have to wait for nighttime to wash the smell of the dead captain from his skin.
"Where's your desk?" The front office, like the one at district headquarters, was reserved for European policemen.
"In here." Shabalala stepped back and allowed him entry through the side door to a room that included two jail cells and a narrow space with a desk and chair. A row of hooks above the desk held the keys to the cells and a whip made of rhino hide called a shambok, the deadly South African version of an English bobby's truncheon. A window looked out to the backyard, and underneath it sat a small table with a box of rooibos tea, a teapot, and some mismatched porcelain mugs. Tin plates, mugs and spoons for the native policeman rested on a separate shelf.
"What's out there?"
Shabalala swung the back door open and politely motioned him out first. Emmanuel picked the black man's tea up off the table and handed the tin mug to him. The police station yard was a dusty patch of land. A huge avocado tree dominated the far end and cast a skirt of shade around its trunk. Closer in, a small fire glowed in a circle of stones. Shabalala's coat and jacket, wiped down from filthy to dirty by a wet cloth, hung over some chairs crowded around the outdoor hearth. A small sniff of the air and it was possible to imagine the smell of the police station's Friday-night braai and fresh jugs of beer.
"Did you know the captain a long time?" Emmanuel's tea was milky and sweet, the way he guessed Pretorius must have liked it.
The black man shifted uncomfortably. "Since before."
Emmanuel switched to Zulu. "You grew up together?"
"Yebo."
Silence breathed between them as they stood drinking tea. Emmanuel noted the tension in Shabalala's neck and shoulders. There was something on the black man's mind. He let Shabalala make the first move.
"The captain…" Shabalala stared across the yard. "He was not like the other Dutchmen…"
Emmanuel made a sound of understanding but didn't say anything. He was afraid of breaking the fragile bond he felt between himself and the native constable.
"He was…"
Emmanuel waited. Nothing came. Shabalala's face wore the curious blank look he'd noticed at the crime scene. It was as if the Zulu-Shangaan man had flicked a switch somewhere deep inside himself and unplugged the power. The connection was broken. Whatever Shabalala had on his mind, he'd decided to keep it there under lock and key.
Emmanuel, however, needed to know why the Security Branch was sniffing around this homicide.
"What clubs did the captain belong to?" he asked Shabalala.
"He went always to the Dutch people's church on Sunday, and also the Sports Club where he and his sons played games."
If the captain had been a member of a secret Boer organization like the Broederbond, Shabalala would be the last to know. He had to find a simpler way to track down the Security Branch connection.
"Is there another phone in town besides the one here at the station?"
"The hospital, the old Jew, the garage and the hotel have phones," Shabalala said. "The post office has a machine for telegrams."
Emmanuel swallowed the remainder of his tea. Two phone calls that he knew of had gone out regarding the murder. One to van Niekerk, who'd sooner eat horse shit than call in the Security Branch, the other to Paul Pretorius of army intelligence. It was time to go direct to the source, the family home, and find out what information it yielded.
"I'll go and pay my respects to the widow," Emmanuel said. "Is the captain's house far from here?"
"No." Shabalala opened the back door and allowed him to enter first. "You must walk to the petrol station and then go right onto van Riebeeck Street. It is the white house with many flowers."
Emmanuel pictured a fence made from wagon wheels and a wrought-iron gate decorated with migrating springbok. The house itself probably had a name like Die Groot Trek, the Great Trek, spelled out above the doorway. True Boers didn't need good taste; they had God on their side.
The late-afternoon sun began to wane and blue shadows fell across the flat strip of the main street. The handful of shops sustained themselves with a trickle of holidaymakers on their way to the beaches of Mozambique and the wilds of the Kruger National Park. There was OK Bazaar for floral dresses, plain shirts and school uniforms, all in sensible cotton. Donny's All Goods, for everything from single cigarettes to Lady Fair sewing patterns. Kloppers for Bata shoes and farm boots. Moira's Hairstyles, closed for the day. Then, on the corner, stood Pretorius Farm Supply behind a wire fence.
A handwritten sign was tied to the mesh: "Closed due to unforeseen circumstances." Unforeseen. That was probably the simplest way to get a handle on the murder of your father. Inside the compound a black watchman paced the front of the large supply warehouse while an Alsatian dog, chained to a spike in the ground, ran restless circles of its territory.
Across a small side street was the garage Shabalala had told him about. The sign above the three petrol pumps read "Pretorius Petrol and Garage." It was open, manned by an old coloured man in grease-covered overalls probably called in at short notice to supervise the black teenagers operating the pumps. Why wasn't the town called Pretoriusburg? The family owned a big enough slice of it.
Emmanuel turned right onto van Riebeeck Street. The neat country houses with manicured beds of aloe and flowering protea had a deserted air. Garden boys, now usually finishing up for the day, were nowhere in sight. Dried laundry flapped on backyard lines. No maids. No "missus" or "baas," either.
The news was out, he guessed. A quick glance down van Riebeeck confirmed it. A group of the captain's neighbors was gathered in front of a house at the end of the street. Housemaids and garden boys, many of them gray haired despite the title, stood in a group two dwellings down: close enough to look on yet far enough to show respect.
A woman's sob floated out into the afternoon. Emmanuel approached a wide gravel driveway choked with cars. An elegant Cape Dutch–style house nestled in an established garden. A dark thatched roof perched over graceful gables and gleaming whitewashed walls. Wooden shutters, the exact shade of the thatch, were shut against the world. A long veranda, decorated with flowerpots, ran the length of the house. There wasn't a wagon wheel in sight.
Like the captain's hand-tooled watch, the house was a surprise. Where was the bleached antelope skull he expected to find nailed over the doorway? He stepped past the front bumper of a dusty Mercedes and into the garden.
"Hey! Who you?" A hand settled on his shoulder and stayed there. A skinny white man with watery blue eyes stared him down. The crowd turned to examine the interloper.
"I'm Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper." He flicked his ID open and held it uncomfortably close to the man's face. "I'm the investigating officer in this case. Are you a family member?"
The hand dropped. "No. Just making sure we all act decent toward Captain Pretorius and his family."
Emmanuel returned his ID to his pocket and smiled to show there were no hard feelings.
"He's okay, Athol. Let him by." Hansie stood on the veranda in his filthy uniform, cheeks glowing an eggshell pink. Exercising his authority in public agreed with him.
"This way, Detective Sergeant." Hansie waved him across the garden flushed with early spring color, and up the stairs that led to the imposing front door. Emmanuel took off his hat.
"I've come to pay my respects to Mrs. Pretorius. The family all here?"
"Everyone except Paul." Hansie opened the front door and ushered him in. "Mrs. Pretorius and her daughters-in-law are seeing to the captain. The rest are out on the back veranda."
They entered a small receiving area that led farther along to a series of closed doors, most likely the bedrooms. Hansie walked left into a large room dominated by heavy wooden furniture, the kind built to withstand generations of pounding by unruly boys and leather-skinned men. The polished tile floor was smooth as snakeskin under the yellow light of the glass-faced lanterns. An enormous sideboard covered in trophies and framed photos ran along one side of the room.
The photographs covered several generations of the Pretorius clan. There was a girl in ponytails playing in the snow, then a dour-faced clergyman surrounded by an army of equally humorless children. The next photo showed a young Captain Pretorius and a pretty woman in her twenties seated on a park bench. Then an image stopped Emmanuel in his tracks. The Pretorius boys, ranging in age from five to fifteen, stood shoulder to shoulder in their Voortrekker Scout uniforms. It was night and their faces and uniforms gleamed in the light of the flaming torches held high in their hands. Their eyes stared out at him, hard with Afrikaner pride. Emmanuel thought of Nuremberg: all those rosy-cheeked German boys marching toward defeat.
"The Great Trek celebration," Hansie said. "Captain and Mrs. Pretorius took us Voortrekker Scouts on a trip to Pretoria for the ceremony. We got to throw the torches into a huge fire."
Emmanuel remembered his own trip to the same celebration well. He remembered the heat of the flames breathing onto his face and the uncomfortable feeling that he was outside the circle of those selected by God to be pure.
"I read about it in the papers," he said, and moved on to the next photo. Paul, as big and thick necked as his brothers, in army uniform, then a Pretorius family portrait no more than a year or two old. He focused on the youngest son, who was finer boned than his brothers, with a sensitive mouth and messy blond hair that fell over his forehead. The captain and his wife had run out of brawn by the time it came to making Louis.
"An Englishman came through town with his camera and charged one pound to take a photo. We have one in our house showing me with my ma and sisters."
They moved through to the kitchen, where two black maids laid cold meat and slabs of bread onto a giant platter. A third maid, white haired and ancient, sat at the small table and sobbed in quiet bursts.
"That's Aggie," Hansie whispered. "She's been with the family since Henrick was a baby. She's not so good anymore, but the captain wouldn't let her go."
They passed a dining room dominated by a wooden table and chairs that carried a whiff of the Bavarian forest. Large windows looked out onto the vine-covered back veranda where a group of older men, rough farmers in khaki, stood together in a tight bunch.
"The fathers-in-law," Hansie explained. They stepped out of the house and onto the veranda. Six children, from knee to shoulder height, played with a wooden spinning top that wobbled and bounced between them. A young black girl rocked a fat white baby on her knee. The Pretorius brothers held their own council out on the garden lawn. All except Louis.
Emmanuel approached them. Erich started straight in.
"Hansie here says it was the old Jew who looked Pa over. How's that?"
"Checked his papers myself. Everything was in order. He was qualified to conduct the examination."
He waited for angry denials, but none came. The brothers stared back at him, expressions unchanged.
"Pa was right." Henrick's speech was a beat too slow, thanks to an afternoon of steady drinking. "He always said the old Jew had something to hide."
"Shifty," Erich threw in. "Who else but the old Jew would lie about something like that, hey? Probably doesn't know how to tell the truth. No practice."
The Pretorius brothers were halfway to being wrecked, and in no hurry to slow the ride.
"Did your father and the old Jew have a disagreement lately?"
"Not for a while," Henrick said. "Pa went to see him a couple of times this past year just to talk to him about how things work here in Jacob's Rest. Give him guidelines, like. To keep him clear of trouble."
"Good of him," Emmanuel said mildly, recalling Zweigman's comment about the captain dropping in for a "friendly chat." "You think the old Jew resented your father's help?"
Henrick shrugged. "Maybe."
"Enough to kill him over?" Emmanuel plowed ahead, exploiting the brothers' relaxed state of mind. Sober, it was hard to find a wedge into them.
Erich snorted. "Him, kill my pa?"
"The old Jew's scared of guns," Henrick explained. "Won't touch them. Won't even sell bullets from his shop."
"He couldn't strangle a chicken without help," Johannes said.
"Couldn't piss on a fire without his wife aiming it for him," Erich added with a mean-spirited giggle that set the brothers laughing.
Emmanuel let the laughter subside. In a few hours, when the whiskey bravado had worn off, they'd feel the full weight of their father's murder, and remember that the killer still walked free among them.
"Pa, look. Look, see," a boy of about ten called out from the veranda as the spinning top wobbled down the stairs and rolled onto the grass. The children followed in a rush of high-pitched squeals.
Henrick grabbed a tiny girl and threw her into the air. The other children crowded around, begging for a turn. Emmanuel wondered where the youngest brother was hiding himself.
"Where's Louis?"
"In the shed," Henrick said. "He's been in there all day working on that bloody bike."
"Ja." Erich ruffled the hair of a child in front of him. "Go see if you can get him out, Hansie. Ma will need his help soon."
Hansie turned to the far end of the garden where a small shed stood flush against the back fence. Behind the corrugated iron structure, flat-topped trees threw their shaggy branches up against wide-open sky.
"I'll come with you." Emmanuel broke from the family group and fell into step with Hansie. A man's shed was a good place to start feeling out the man himself. Something about the captain had marked him out for a violent death, and something about his death had caught the attention of the Security Branch. No time like the present to try to find out why.
Hansie knocked on the shed door. "Louis. It's me."
"Come." The door swung open and Louis, a boy of about nineteen, stepped back to allow them entry. With a featherweight's build, the captain's youngest son was more finely drawn than the photo in the house suggested. If the other brothers were rock, Louis was paper.
"Louis, this here is the policeman from Jo'burg." Hansie performed the introductions in a rush, embarrassed about taking an adult role in front of his teenage friend.
"Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper," Emmanuel said, and shook Louis's hand. There was strength in the boy's grip that belied the softness of his appearance.
"Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper." Louis repeated the title as if memorizing it, then saw the grease stains on Emmanuel's hand. "I'm sorry, Detective. I've made a mess of you."
"It's nothing." Emmanuel wiped his hands clean with his handkerchief and Louis moved back toward a pile of engine parts laid out on an old rug. The restored body of a black Indian motorcycle rested up on blocks close to the rear door.
Louis kneeled down and continued cleaning pieces of metal with a rag. His whole body shook with the effort he expended. "I've been cleaning parts all day and I forgot…"
"What's this?" Hansie squatted down next to his friend. "I thought you finished the engine already."
Louis shook his head. "Have to wait on a part to come from Jo'burg. Do you know much about engines, Detective?"
"Not much," Emmanuel answered truthfully. The right-hand side of the shed was the hunting area. A pair of giant kudu horns hung above a gun rack holding three sighted rifles. Below the guns was a beautiful Zulu assagai, a warrior's spear, complete with lion hide bindings. Under the spear was a wooden desk with two drawers. To the left side of the shed engine parts and tools surrounded the Indian motorcycle. Diagrams and calculations were stuck to the wall under a manufacturer's illustration of the dismantled motorbike in its prime. The organization of the shed indicated a clear and methodical mind. The back door was propped open with a brick to let in the afternoon breeze and it wasn't hard to imagine the captain happily at work here.
"You know a lot about engines." Emmanuel stepped over the spare parts and headed for the hunting desk.
"Oh, no," Louis said, "Pa is the one who knows all about fixing things."
There was an awkward silence, then the loud clank of metal on metal made by Louis sorting through a pile of spanners with shaking hands.
"You can finish the bike, hey, Louis." Hansie pumped enthusiasm into his voice. "Get that coloured mechanic to help and you'll have it going in no time."
"Maybe," Louis said quietly, then began sorting the cleaned screws and bolts into neat piles on the floor. Emmanuel watched the compulsive behavior for a moment, then moved deeper into the shed. Grief made people act in strange ways; it could rip them open or close them right down.
A check of the guns found them clean and unused. Inside the desk, Emmanuel found newspaper articles on rural pursuits like the art of biltong making and the proper care of hunting knives. He kneeled down and peered into the empty drawer cavity.
"Looking for dirty magazines, Detective?" Louis asked.
Emmanuel caught the hard edge of the boy's stare.
"You want to show me where he hid the magazines, Louis?" he asked casually, aware it was a clumsy attempt to catch the boy out, but worth a try.
Louis flushed pink and began sorting through the spanner box again. "No, because there aren't any. My pa was very clean that way. If you knew him you'd understand."
"That's right." Hansie took up the fight on Louis's behalf and threw Emmanuel a look of disgust.
"I wasn't the one who mentioned dirty magazines," he pointed out. Did the captain have a secret stash somewhere? Or was Louis worried about a dog-eared magazine hidden somewhere in his own bedroom?
Two maids and a garden boy hurried past the back entrance to the shed without slowing pace or looking in. The three figures disappeared into the darkening veldt.
"What's this?" Emmanuel pointed to the grass pathway the servants had taken.
"A kaffir path. The kaffirs use them to get around," Hansie said. "They run all through the town and join up near the location. It's quicker than using the main roads."
"People don't mind?"
"No. Nobody uses the paths in town after eight-thirty. There's big trouble if a kaffir is caught walking along here between then and sunrise."
"You ever use them?"
"They're kaffir paths. For kaffirs." Hansie had the dumbstruck look of an idiot asked to explain the facts of life to an imbecile. "Coloureds use them sometimes, but we never do."
"Then how do you know they're not used at night?" Emmanuel stepped out of the shed and onto the path.
"The captain," Hansie replied. "He ran along these paths three or four times a week. Sometimes in the morning and sometimes at night. Shabalala took care of the paths near the location."
Emmanuel moved deeper into the veldt as a second group of house servants, determined to clear the white part of town before curfew, jogged by singing. Emmanuel knew the song:
"Shosholoza, shosholoza…Kulezontaba…"
The song translated roughly to "Move faster, you are meandering on those mountains. The train is from South Africa." The sound of the word "shosholoza" was like the hiss of a steam train itself.
The servants' rhythmic chant drifted back and he felt the African night warm on his skin and hair. The voices of the servants grew softer and he turned toward the captain's house.
"How often did you and Lieutenant Uys patrol?"
"We patrolled when the captain asked," Hansie said. "Once we went out every night for a week, then not again for a long time. It wasn't a regular-type thing."
"Random," Emmanuel said, aware of the simple genius underpinning the captain's system. Zweigman was aware of the close scrutiny of the patrols and didn't like it. How much did the captain see and hear as he crisscrossed the town at constant but irregular intervals? Had he uncovered a secret someone was willing to kill to protect?
Emmanuel reentered the shed where Louis packed the last of his tools into a red metal box. The boy appeared engrossed in his task, but there was a tightness in his shoulders that suggested an alert and mindful presence.
"Hey, Louis." The shed door swung open and Henrick stepped in. "Get yourself cleaned up, it's time for supper and Ma needs you."
"Ja." Louis ducked out past his elder brother and made his way quickly toward the house. He scuttled up the stairs and across the veranda like a crab racing for safety on a rock ledge.
"Ma will see you now, Detective," Henrick said. "She's not doing so well, so make it quick."
"Of course," Emmanuel said. Henrick's boss-man act was starting to get on his nerves.
Lamplight flickered over a group of young women in mourning clothes who were gathered around a small blond woman in an oversize armchair. Her pale face, lined with grief, was all cheekbones and wide mouth. It was still possible to see vestiges of the young beauty who had married a hulking policeman and produced five sons to swell the ranks of the Voortrekker Scouts and the Dutch Reformed Church.
"Who is this?" she asked. Emmanuel felt her blue eyes focus on him for the first time. "Who is this person?"
"The detective," Henrick explained from the doorway. The room was now a female space that he did not want to enter. "Detective Cooper has come from Jo'burg to lead the investigation. He's going to help find out who did this to Pa."
Mrs. Pretorius sat forward like a sleepwalker awakened. "What are you doing here? You should be out there, arresting whoever did this evil thing."
"I need your help. I know it's hard, but there are some things only you can tell me about your husband."
"Willem." It was the first time the captain's name had been spoken. "My Willem is gone…"
The tiny woman howled in anguish, her body swaying back and forth like a marionette on broken strings. Emmanuel sat down, breathed deeply, and allowed himself to observe but not connect. Disconnection. That was the trickiest part of the job, the one in which he excelled.
"Shhh. Ma. Shhh…" Louis slipped into the room and kneeled beside his mother. He kissed her on the cheek, and mother and son held on to each other for a long moment. There was a startling resemblance between the youngest Pretorius boy and the fragile woman who held him in her arms.
Out of his grease-covered overalls, Louis was comfortable in the room full of women. He was blonder and finer boned than the sisters-in-law, buxom farm girls built to outlast famine on the veldt.
Emmanuel glanced over at Henrick and caught a flicker of discomfort. How had the captain felt about the soft boy who bore no resemblance to the hard-edged Pretorius men?
"It's okay," Louis whispered. "I'll take care of you, Ma. I promise."
Emmanuel waited until mother and son loosened their grip on each other. The daughters-in-law murmured comforting words.
"Mrs. Pretorius…" Emmanuel knew he was about to make himself unpopular. "May I talk to you alone? I have a few questions I need answered and it would be better if we had some privacy."
"Not Louis," Mrs. Pretorius said. "Louis stays."
The daughters-in-law glared at him and walked out of the room to join the family groups congregated on the back stoep. He waited until the sound of their whispers faded, then said, "Mrs. Pretorius, when was the last time you saw your husband alive?"
She held on to Louis's hand. "Yesterday morning. We had breakfast together before he went to work."
"Did he say he was going anywhere unusual or meeting anyone in particular?"
"No. He said he was going fishing after work and that he'd see me in the morning."
"You were normally asleep when he came home from fishing?"
"Yes. Willem used the spare room so he wouldn't disturb me." She squeezed Louis's hand tighter. "I had no idea he wasn't home until Hansie came…"
She began to cry and Henrick stepped into the room. Emmanuel held his hand up like a traffic policeman and Henrick stopped in his tracks.
"Can you think of anyone who would do this to your husband, Mrs. Pretorius? Anything he told you would help." Emmanuel kept his voice soft and urgent.
"Come, Ma," Louis said. "Tell the detective what you know."
The blond woman took a deep breath. When she looked up, her eyes were hard as uncut diamonds.
"The old Jew," she stated flatly. "Willem said he caught him hanging around the coloured area at night. He was up to some funny business."
"Did your husband catch him doing something?" That would explain Zweigman's resentment.
"No. You know how clever Jews are. Willem saw him going in and out of different coloured girls' houses after sunset. It was obvious what he was up to, so Willem gave him a warning."
"Did he tell you how Zweigman reacted?"
"He didn't like it, I know that. Willem had to see him a few times before he was sure Zweigman had stopped."
"Did Captain Pretorius have problems with anyone else?"
She was ahead of him, ready with the answer. "That pervert Donny Rooke. Willem sent him to jail for taking dirty pictures of the du Toit girls. He's been back in Jacob's Rest four or five months."
"He lives out past the coloureds," Henrick said from the doorway. "He doesn't come into town unless he has to. His brother runs the shop now."
Emmanuel remembered Donny's All Goods on the main street. "He was angry with the captain for sending him to jail?"
"Of course. The worst sinners don't believe they should be punished for their sins." There was no mistaking the contempt in her for the morally weak. "Willem helped guide this town and now he has been struck down. I pray to God for swift retribution upon the killer."
"Amen," said Louis.
Emmanuel shifted in his seat, unnerved by the intensity of the woman in front of him. There was no room in her for forgiveness.
"Anyone else?"
Mrs. Pretorius sighed. "There was always trouble with the coloureds, drinking and fighting, that sort of thing. They find it hard to control their emotions no matter how much white blood they have in them. Willem understood that, and tried not to be too hard on them."
Emmanuel flicked his notebook to a clean page. He'd heard every race theory in South Africa. None of them surprised him anymore. "Can you remember any specific names?"
"No. Lieutenant Uys will know all the coloured cases. Shabalala will know the native cases. They were a good team, Willem and Shabalala. Everyone respected them. Everyone…"
The tears came again and Emmanuel stood up before Henrick had a chance to kick him out. He flicked his notebook closed and put it in his pocket. "Thank you for your time, Mrs. Pretorius. Please accept my condolences on the loss of your husband."
Louis sprang up and made it to the front entrance ahead of him. He swung the door open and leaned a shoulder against the wood frame. "You'll catch the killer, won't you, Detective?"
"I'll try." Emmanuel stepped out onto the veranda. "I can't promise you any more than that, Louis."
"My grandfather was Frikkie van Brandenburg and Pa was a police captain. Your boss sent the best detective out, didn't he?"
Stuck in the shed all day, Louis had no idea about little sister Gertie's botched call to headquarters. As far as the teenaged boy was concerned, the police department had handpicked Emmanuel to break the case open.
Emmanuel let him down easy. "I've solved quite a few cases and I'll do everything I can to solve this one. Good night, Louis."
"Good night, Detective." Louis's voice followed him as he crossed the veranda and walked down the stairs to the garden. He made his way back to the police station.
Emmanuel paused at the corner of van Riebeeck and Piet Retief streets, and felt himself pulled in the direction of the liquor store. Instead, he turned toward the station and Constable Shabalala.
Now he understood: Frikkie van Brandenberg was the reason the Security Branch was involved. Captain Pretorius was son-in-law to one of the mighty lions of Afrikaner nationhood, a man who preached the sacred history of white civilization like an Old Testament prophet. No wonder the Pretorius brothers hated Zweigman. Jacob's Rest was too small to contain two tribes claiming to be God's chosen people.
The main street was empty. Lights from the garage made a yellow circle in the darkness. A fragment of memory flickered to life. He was running barefoot down a small dirt lane with the smell of wood fires all around him. He ran fast toward a light. The memory grew stronger and Emmanuel pushed it aside. Then he disconnected it.
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
Chapter 4
|
"Down there."
Shabalala pointed to a corrugated iron shack anchored to the ground by rocks and pieces of rope: Donny Rooke's house since his fall from grace. Emmanuel pulled the sedan into the patch of dirt that was the front yard. The early-morning light did nothing to soften the hard edge of poverty.
He exited the car, and the first stone, sharp and small, hit him in the cheek and drew blood. The second and third stones hit, full force, into his chest and leg. The stones hit hard, and he lost count of them as he ran behind the car to take shelter. He crouched next to Shabalala, who calmly wiped blood from a small cut in his own neck.
"The girls." Shabalala raised his voice over the torrent of sound made by the pebbles hitting the roof of the car.
"What girls?" Emmanuel shouted back.
Shabalala motioned to the front of the car. Emmanuel followed and risked a quick look out. Two girls, skinny as stray dogs, stood at the side of the shack, a pile of rocks in front of them. Behind them, a man with blazing red hair took off across the veldt.
"Go after him," the black policeman said, and filled his pockets with stones. "I will get the girls."
Emmanuel nodded and sprinted full speed across the dirt yard. A stone knocked his hat to the ground, another skimmed past his shoulder, but he kept the pace up, eyes on the redheaded man running into open country.
"Ooowww!" There was a high-pitched squeal, then the sound of yelping. Shabalala walked calmly toward the girls, his stones hitting their target with sniper-like accuracy. The girls scuttled into the shack, seeking shelter.
Emmanuel cleared the side of the dilapidated vegetable patch and ran hard. The gap closed. Donny slowed to catch his breath, his hands resting on his knees. A minute more and Emmanuel body-slammed Donny, who toppled over with a groan. He held the redhead's face in the dirt for longer than he needed to, and heard the dust fill his mouth. The dents in his Packard meant he'd have to write a detailed damage report. He pressed down harder.
"Where you going, Donny?" He flipped the choking man over and looked down at his dirty face.
"I didn't do it. Please God, I didn't do anything to the captain."
He pushed a knee into Donny's chest. "What makes you think I'm here about Captain Pretorius?"
Donny started to cry and Emmanuel pulled him up with a jerk. "What makes you think I'm here to talk about Captain Pretorius?"
"Everyone knows." The words came out between broken sobs. "It was him that put me in jail. He forced me to live out here like a kaffir."
Emmanuel pushed Donny toward the shack. His cheek stung from where the stone had broken the skin and his suit was covered in dust. All in pursuit of a man with less sense than a chicken.
"There's your army." He shoved Donny between the shoulder blades and forced him to look at the girls, now crouched in the dirt next to Shabalala. They were hard faced and thin from living rough.
"Inside," Emmanuel said. "We're all going to have a talk."
The girls picked themselves up and slipped in through the rusting door. Emmanuel followed with Shabalala and Donny.
"Nice place," Emmanuel said. There wasn't a piece of furniture not propped up by a brick or held together with strips of rag. Even the air inside the shack was inadequate.
"I used to have a good home," Donny said from the edge of the broken sofa. "I was a businessman. Owned my own place."
"What happened?"
"I was—" Donny started, and then bent over with a groan. His right arm hung limp by his side.
"You hurt him," the oldest girl said. "You got no right to hurt him. He didn't do nothing wrong."
Emmanuel pulled Donny into a sitting position. He'd been rough with him, but no more. This pain was something else.
"Take your shirt off," he said calmly.
"No. I'm okay. Honest."
"Now." The faded shirt was unbuttoned to reveal a collection of dark bruises spread out across Donny's stomach and chest.
"What happened?"
"Fell off my bicycle, landed on some rocks."
Emmanuel checked the tear-streaked face, saw the swelling at the corner of the weak mouth. "A rock hit you in the mouth as well?"
"Ja, almost broke my teeth."
Emmanuel glanced at Shabalala, who shrugged his wide shoulders. If Donny had taken a beating, he knew nothing about it.
"You were telling me about your business."
"Donny's All Goods. That was my shop."
"What happened?"
Donny pulled at an earlobe. "Border gate police told Captain Pretorius about some photos I brought in from Mozambique. He didn't like them and had me sent off to prison."
"What kind of photos?"
"Art pictures."
"Why didn't the captain like them?"
"Because he was married to that old piece of biltong and me here with two women of my own."
"He was jealous?"
"He didn't like anyone having more than him. Always top of the tree. Always putting his nose into everyone else's business."
"You didn't like him?"
"He didn't like me." Donny was in full steam now. "He stole my photos and my camera, then put me in jail. Now look at me. Skint as a kaffir. He should have been the one in jail. Not me."
"Where were you last night, Donny?"
Donny blinked, caught off guard. His tongue worked the corner of his bruised mouth.
"We was here all night with Donny," the older girl stated. "We was with him all the time."
Emmanuel looked from one hard-faced girl to the other. Their combined age couldn't have been more than thirty. They stared back, used to violent confrontation and worse. He turned to Donny.
"Where were you?"
The girl had given him time to collect himself. "I was here all day and all night with my wife and her sister. As God is my witness."
"Why did you run?" Emmanuel asked quietly.
"I was scared." The tears were back, turning Donny's face into a mud puddle. "I knew they'd try to pin it on me. I ran because I thought you'd do whatever they asked you to."
"We was here with him all the time," the child wife insisted. "You have to leave him alone now. We's his witness."
"You sure you were here, Donny?"
"One hundred percent. Here is where I was, Detective."
Emmanuel took in the sordid ruin that was Donny Rooke's life. The man was a pervert and a liar who'd scraped together a flimsy alibi, but he wasn't going anywhere.
"Don't leave town," he said. "I'd hate to chase you again."
The air outside Donny's squalid home smelled of rain and wild grass.
"Detective." Donny scuttled after them with Emmanuel's filthy hat as an offering. "I'd like my camera back when you find it. It was expensive and I'd like it back. Thanks, Detective."
Emmanuel threw his hat into the car and turned to face the scrawny redheaded man. "Just so you know, Donny. Those are girls, not women."
He slid into the sedan and gunned the engine, anxious to leave the shack behind. The car wheels bumped over the potholed road and threw up a thin dust serpent in their wake.
"Where are the parents?" he asked Shabalala.
"The mother is dead. The father, du Toit, likes drink more than he likes his daughters. He gave the big one as wife, the small one as little wife."
They rode the rest of the way in silence.
The mechanical hum of sewing machines filled Poppies General Store as Emmanuel and Shabalala walked in for the second time. Zweigman was behind the counter, serving an elderly black woman. She pocketed her change and left with a parcel of material tucked under her arm. Zweigman followed and shut the doors behind her. He flipped the sign to "Closed," then turned to face his visitors.
"There's a sitting room through this way," Zweigman said, and disappeared into the back. Emmanuel followed. For a man about to be questioned in connection with a homicide, Zweigman was cool to the point of chilly. He'd obviously been expecting them.
The back room was a small work area set up with five sewing machines and dressmaker's dummies draped in lengths of material. The coloured women manning the machines looked up nervously at the police intrusion.
"Ladies." Zweigman smiled. "This is Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper from Johannesburg. Constable Shabalala you already know."
"Please introduce us," Emmanuel insisted politely. He wanted to get a good look at the seamstresses. Maybe there was something to Mrs. Pretorius's poisonous accusations. Zweigman did have access to five mixed-race women under the age of forty.
Zweigman's smile froze. "Of course. There's Betty, then Sally, Angie, Tottie, and Davida."
Emmanuel nodded at the women and kept a tight focus on their faces. He ticked them off with crude markers. Betty: pockmarked and cheerful. Sally: skinny and nervous. Angie: older and out of humor. Tottie: born to make grown men cry. Davida: a shy brown mouse.
If he had to lay money on Zweigman's fancy, he'd bet the farm on Tottie. Light skinned and luscious, she was the kind of woman vice cops used as bait in immorality law stings, then took home for a little after-hours R&R.
"Gentlemen." Zweigman opened a second curtain and led them into a small room furnished with a table and chairs. The dark-haired woman, so nervous yesterday, now poured tea into three mugs with a steady hand.
"This is my wife, Lilliana."
"Detective Sergeant Cooper," she responded politely, and waved him and Shabalala over to the table, which was set with tea and a small plate of cookies. Emmanuel sat down, senses on full alert. With a few hours' notice, the old Jew and his wife had rebuilt their defenses and nailed all the windows closed.
"Which one of those women are you ficken?" he asked conversationally, using German slang to sharpen the impact.
Zweigman flushed pink and his wife dropped the plate of cookies onto the table with a loud crack. There was a drawn-out silence while she collected the cookies and rearranged them.
"Please," Zweigman said quietly. "This is not the kind of talk for a man to have in front of his wife."
"She doesn't need to be here," Emmanuel answered. "We'll question her later."
"Take the ladies out for a walk, liebchen. The air will do you good."
The elegant woman left the room quickly. Emmanuel sipped his tea and waited until the front door closed. He turned to Zweigman, who looked suddenly stooped and worn down by life. There were tired circles under his brown eyes.
"That was cruel and unnecessary," Zweigman said. "I did not expect it of you."
"This town brings out the worst in me," Emmanuel answered. "Now, which one of those women is the lucky one?"
"None of them. Though I'm sure if you had your choice, you'd pick Tottie. I saw how you looked at her."
Emmanuel shrugged. "Looking was still legal the last time I checked the list of punishable offenses. Captain Pretorius thought you'd done a lot more than that."
"He was mistaken." The answer was clipped. "I walked the ladies home after dark because there was"—he struggled to find the right word in English—"a peeping man in the area. It was purely a safety measure."
"Really?"
"Constable Shabalala, please tell your colleague that I did not make the peeping man up."
Shabalala stared at the floor, uncomfortable at being included in the questioning. He cleared his throat. "There was a man. The captain looked but did not find anyone."
"No arrests?"
"No," Shabalala answered.
"The man would have been found if it was European women being harassed," Zweigman said. "The activity stopped and it was never mentioned again."
"Did you have occasion to comfort the scared women? It's easy for emotions to get heated up when there's an element of danger."
"Ah…" Zweigman had regained his composure. "How your mind works: always looking for the dirty secret. I will repeat. I am not and never was 'ficken,' as you so gently put it, any of the women in my wife's employ."
"Captain Pretorius came to see you a couple of times this year. What for?"
"To give me advice. Don't be seen with women other than my wife after dark. Don't let my employees become too friendly. Don't go to social get-togethers with coloureds or blacks. Don't forget you are a white man and not one of them. Would you like me to go on?"
"You didn't like him."
"That is correct."
"Did you kill him?"
"I did not." Zweigman took off his glasses and wiped them down on the front of his shirt. "I do not own a gun or know how to use one. Anton the mechanic across the road and my wife Lilliana will both tell you that I was here in the shop until after ten trying, unsuccessfully, to balance the store accounts."
Emmanuel wrote the witnesses' names down. He had no doubt they'd supply Zweigman with gold-plated alibis. Two suspects both accounted for during the hours Captain Pretorius was shot. His thin list was washed out on the first full day of the investigation. It was time to join Hansie in the door-to-door. He had to turn over some rocks and see what spiders crawled out from underneath.
Emmanuel sat upright in bed, mouth open, gasping for breath. He was in darkness and sweat beaded on his skin. Deep in his stomach he felt the familiar ache of fear. He slid a hand over his body, to check for injuries. The bullet wound on his shoulder had long since healed and the cut on his cheek from Donny's insane girl blitzkrieg was only a nick. No knife, no blood.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed. The dreams came and went, but never with the woman. She was new. No way to know who she was. The cellar in his dream was in darkness, always. The pattern of events the same: a bombed-out town. The patrol moving on foot from one ruin to the next, checking and double-checking for the enemy. A routine sweep of a wine cellar. He turns to leave. The blade slices deep into his flesh and he falls forward into darkness and pain.
That was the dream, played out in an eternal loop. Every door-to-door he conducted as a detective brought up memories from the bottom of the well. Things weren't so bad now. He didn't scream anymore, or reach for a light to bring himself back to reality.
Emmanuel breathed deeply, closed his eyes, and imagined the corner of the cellar again. The smell of the woman fills the space. His ex-wife? No, her scent was English tea rose and iced water. Angela, so polite and restrained, would never claw and lick and bite. Sex was for the half hour before bedtime. Primal cellar fucking was not her thing. Fucking was not her thing.
He lay back down. The woman was no one he knew from his waking life. Surely he'd remember if she was. Why hadn't the dream ended with them falling, naked and warm, into a black morphine sleep?
The sound when it came was crisp and distinct. A footstep on the gravel pathway leading to his door. He held still. This was not a dream. This was Jacob's Rest and the crunch of gravel was close and getting closer. He slid off the bed and moved in the darkness toward the door. Moonlight spilled in from a crack in the curtain. He crouched close to the handle. The screen door opened, then closed just as quickly. Then the sound of something heavy pressed against the mesh, and the footsteps grew fainter.
Emmanuel pulled the door open hard. Across the yard, a figure moved quickly into the shadow of a sprawling jacaranda tree and slipped into the night. Emmanuel charged at the screen door, ready to fly. The door jammed, held closed by the weight of a whitewashed stone borrowed from the garden edging. He pushed again, and the door gave way.
"You! Stop!"
Emmanuel sprinted out into the moonlit night. The sound of the intruder's footsteps running hard across open ground drove him on. He felt the brush of tall grass and tree branches against his body. Dark houses disappeared behind him. He was on a kaffir path heading out to who knows where. He sped up and glimpsed the figure rounding a bend just ahead. After the bend, the path split into two. He sprinted to the left and pressed on, full throttle for a few minutes, until he realized he was alone and running blind into the moonlit veldt.
A wave of nausea hit and he doubled over. His lungs were on fire, the bile rose up in his throat. Four years in the Detective Branch and he'd never been outrun. Down alleyways and over fences he was the fastest in the department. Whoever led him on this barefoot marathon across sand and stone had not let up or slowed down. Emmanuel sucked in a mouthful of cool night air. He'd been beaten clean and clear by a country mile.
He closed his eyes and, without warning, there she was. The woman in the cellar, lit just enough for him to see her brown-skinned arms reaching up to him. Definitely not a European. One of the women from Zweigman's shop: the delectable Tottie with her juicy mouth and grab-on-to hips? Or could it have been Sally, pockmarked and eager to please?
You have to get out, get laid, he thought. Call the brunette who works the tie and hat counter at Belmont Menswear. She was perfect. Attractive, willing, and most important, white. Black and brown women were for vice cops with carnal appetites and no ambition. Mrs. Pretorius would have him hanged for being sinful enough to have the dream.
"Move and I'll blast you, mister."
Emmanuel felt the heat of a spotlight on his bare back and heard the click of the safety releasing. He froze.
"Put your hands up where I can see them, and turn around to face me. Slow like."
Emmanuel did as he was told and the glare of the spotlight shone in his face. He squinted and saw two dark figures standing side by side.
"Who you?" the man with the gun demanded.
Emmanuel kept his hands held high, palms spread open like flags of truce. He was a barefoot stranger in pajama pants caught panting in the darkness. If they shot him now, a jury would move to acquit.
"I'm Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper. I'm here to investigate Captain Pretorius's murder. My ID is back at the boardinghouse." He concentrated on sounding sane.
"My fat behind." The man with the torch spat onto the ground. "Even white men can't be policemen if they're crazy."
"The Protea Guesthouse." Emmanuel stuck to familiar things. The men were local and coloured, by the sound of it. "I was at Zweigman's shop this afternoon. Ask anyone who works there. They'll tell you who—"
"Shut it, mister." The man with the light stepped closer. "You people think now Captain's gone you can come back and interfere with our women?"
"That's not—"
"Get down on your knees or I'll get my man here to shoot you for the fun of it."
Emmanuel turned his head away from the white glare of the light and slowly sank to his knees. The men stepped closer and he sucked in his breath, ready for the kicking he knew was coming. Heat from the spotlight burned his face.
"Who you got?" the question was shouted across the veldt. Another coloured man come to join the hunting party.
"Crazy white man," the gunslinger called back. "Says he's a policeman."
The third man picked up pace until he was running hard toward them.
"Jesus Christ, Tiny." The third man gasped for breath. "That's him. That's the detective from Jo'burg."
"You kidding me? Look at him."
"Truth's faith." The new arrival swore an oath. "That's the detective. He came to my place this afternoon with Shabalala."
Emmanuel placed the voice. It belonged to the coloured mechanic who'd alibied Zweigman. A lanky man with dark brown skin and a gold filling set into his front tooth.
"Anton Samuels," Emmanuel said, still on his knees. "Number one mechanic in Jacob's Rest. That's what Constable Shabalala told me."
"I will be as soon as my shop is up and running again," Anton said, and stepped forward to offer Emmanuel his hand. "I've got a month or so to go before I rebuild, but I'll get there."
The safety was back on the gun and the spotlight aimed at the ground by the time Anton pulled him to his feet. There was a tense silence. The men waited for a cue. Assault of a white police officer meant jail time. An assault carried out by armed coloured men meant jail time with hard labor and regular beatings thrown in. Shooting him and slipping away was probably their best option.
"Sorry about this," Emmanuel apologized. "I must have given you a fright, running around like a lunatic in the middle of the night. I'm lucky you didn't shoot me right off."
"Lucky for all of us, Detective," Tiny said. He was a small man with a few wisps of coarse hair combed in a grand sweep across his skull. What he lacked in height and hair he made up for in girth. His stomach curved in front of him and strained against the buttons at the front of his shirt.
"I'm Tiny Hanson." He cleared his throat to minimize the quaver in his voice. "This here is my son Theo."
"A half-naked white man out on a kaffir path," Theo said. He was six inches taller than his father but already beginning to run to fat. "That's something I never thought I'd see. You do this sort of thing in Jo'burg, Detective?"
The men laughed nervously, aware of how much still lay in the balance. One wrong move could send them plunging over a precipice, with no hope of a rescue mission to pull them out.
"I thought you were used to white policemen on these paths. Didn't the captain run on them all the time?"
"Ja, but he had clothes on."
"Good point." Emmanuel smiled. "Where did you guys come from, anyway?"
"Liquor store," Anton replied. "Tiny and Theo are back from Lorenzo Marques tonight. We were having a card game out the back when we heard you run by."
Emmanuel glimpsed a pale window of light to his left. He had no idea where he was. Off the grid of main streets, there was no way to orient himself. The kaffir paths put him on the outside looking in.
"Will you take a drink, Detective?" Tiny offered politely. "Theo will show you back after."
Under usual circumstances the invitation was breaking all the rules. Coloured men and white police officers were not natural drinking partners.
"Okay," Emmanuel said. Sleep was a long way off; the dreams waited for him to return to his bed. "It'll help wash the dust from my mouth."
"I own the liquor store," Tiny said proudly, and moved toward the light. "I have enough to wash the dust from your throat and your stomach, too. I got new stock in from Mozambique. Port. Whiskey. Gin. You name it."
"Did you bring it in through the border post or across the river?"
"I do everything legal. The captain knew that and I never had no trouble. A bottle or two to those at the border post. A keg of beer to the police station. I make sure everyone gets their share."
Tiny pushed open a wooden gate and led the party into a small courtyard at the rear of the liquor store. Three kerosene lanterns hung from hooks in the rafters of a lean-to built up against the back door.
"Well, my share is a glass of whiskey," Emmanuel said. A card table was set up in the middle of the lean-to. "What's your game?"
"Poker." Theo poured a triple measure into a clean glass and slid it across the table. "You play?"
"Used to," Emmanuel said. "Where's your other player?"
"Harry," Theo called into a darkened corner. "You can come out, it's just the detective from Jo'burg."
A sunken-chested old man with a waxed mustache shuffled out of the corner and slid into the vacant seat. His skeletal frame was weighed down by an army-issue greatcoat decorated with service medals and faded ribbons from the Great War.
Emmanuel took the seat next to the old soldier, who'd no doubt been dumped into the back blocks of the Empire with a warm coat to keep out the memories of gas and gunshots. There but for the grace of God…, Emmanuel thought.
"Relax, Harry," Anton said kindly. "It's just past midnight. You've got another hour before you get in trouble. I'll make sure you get back on time."
"Harry here is married to Angie, who works for the old Jew's wife," Tiny explained. "She's very strict with the poor fellow. Isn't she, Harry?"
"Tough. Tough," the man muttered to himself. "Tough on everything."
Emmanuel remembered Angie. Older and out of humor was how he'd labeled her. Right on the money, as it turned out.
"You in, Detective?" Anton asked.
Emmanuel took a mouthful of whiskey. Staying was foolish. It would put the whites off side if they found out and make the investigation more difficult than it needed to be.
"Deal me in," he said. "What's the ante?"
"Five matchsticks," Tiny informed him seriously. "You sure you can afford it? I hear they don't pay police so well these days."
"I can handle it," Emmanuel answered with equal gravity. "Someone will have to stand me. I've got nothing on me."
Theo slid the matchsticks across the table. "Look at you, man. You've got a body like a tsotsi. How'd you get like that?"
"Scratches from my little run tonight. The bullet wound from the war."
"My grandfather was German," Tiny said, and topped up the glasses. "From Düsseldorf, he said."
"Mine, too," Harry muttered. "Mine, too."
"No, man," Theo corrected him. "Your grandfather was the Scottish preacher who drank like a fish. Ask Granny Mariah, she'll tell you."
"Who are your people?"
It took Emmanuel a moment to realize that the question was addressed to him. He took a deep swallow of his drink before he answered. There was no shame at this table in being a product of the Empire: impure and resilient.
"English mother. Afrikaner father." He had no idea why he told the truth. He didn't speak about his parents often, and in the last four years on van Niekerk's instruction, not at all. They were one of the things he kept at the bottom of the well.
"Ah." Anton laid his cards down with a flourish. "So, you're mixed race just like us. Imagine that."
The laughter was loose and natural, greased by the whiskey and the dark blanket of night. South Africa, with its laws, each more punishing than the last, was a long way from the backyard of Hanson's fine liquor merchants. The unreal truce would hold until tomorrow.
"Hope it wasn't one of my relatives that did that to you, Detective." Tiny gestured at the bullet wound. "We aren't all bloodthirsty like the English say."
"Could have fooled me," Emmanuel said. "You almost finished me off tonight. Must be the Kraut in you."
"No! Honest," Tiny protested over the easy laughter. "We thought you was the pervert. With captain gone, who knows what will happen?"
"They never caught the guy?"
"Not that we know of," Anton said. "The old Jew kicked up a fuss, but the police said to forget about it. Go home. It's over."
Tiny swallowed his tumbler in one hit. "That's why I don't mind serving Donny Rooke in my shop. The white hotel banned him, but I say he's served his time and done the right thing by the girls. I don't like what he done, but I know about it. The whole town knows."
"You should have seen Donny when the captain came into the store the other night," Theo said. "So scared he almost kaked himself. The man who molested our women should be the same way. Instead, he's walking around free as a lark."
"What night was that?" Emmanuel asked. Theo and Tiny had been out of town when the door-to-door happened. Their information wasn't on file yet.
"Wednesday." Tiny threw his losing hand down with a grunt. "The night the captain passed."
"What time?"
"Some time after six. Donny was running late and I opened the store especially for him. He's fonder of the bottle than he used to be, is Donny."
"The captain came by?"
"Ja, once a month he'd come by for a little bottle. Just a tot."
"Donny saw him?"
"Heard him." Theo snorted. "He was hiding behind the counter like an old woman."
"Pretorius know he was there?"
"No. The captain didn't stay long. Had to go to old Lionel's place to get bait worms, so he took off. Donny stayed another half hour or so, till he was sure the captain had cleared town."
Emmanuel threw his cards in and noticed the casual way his own hands performed their task. Donny was back on the list with time, opportunity, and motive next to his name.
"Well, that's me done for. Got to get some sleep before the big day."
"All of us," Tiny agreed. "Got to look respectable for a funeral, that's one thing I remember from mission school."
Anton tapped Harry on the shoulder. "Time to make a move, my man, if you don't want a fry pan to the head like last week."
"Home." Harry sank the last of his drink. "Home."
"I'll see you back, Detective," Anton offered when they stepped out onto the kaffir path. "I've got to walk Harry to his house, and he lives just on the edge of the Dutch area."
Emmanuel waved good night and started down the path behind Anton and Harry. First thing tomorrow morning he and Shabalala would pay Donny a visit, and this time he and his child bride were going to tell the truth. He was going to give Donny a good reason to cry.
"The Protea Guesthouse is down there to the right." Anton aimed his torch at a narrow path wedged between two houses. "It would be better if you went alone. That part of town is off limits for us at night."
"Thanks." Emmanuel shook Anton's hand and watched him slip away into the veldt with Harry trailing behind. The old soldier's voice drifted back in a thin and broken rendition of "It's a Long Way to Tipperary."
Emmanuel followed the path and emerged into the gardens of The Protea Guesthouse. The coloured mechanic had saved him from a beating and worse. Donny wouldn't be so lucky. The screen door groaned, and then a flash of white at the corner of his eye. A torn piece of paper was wedged between the frame and the mesh. He pulled it free. His late-night visitor had left him a present. Moonlight hit the page. Two words in black ink: "Elliot King."
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
Chapter 5
|
The sheet of corrugated iron gave way and Emmanuel was in, crouched in the dim interior of the shack. Donny Rooke was sandwiched between his wives, head thrown back like a walrus bull protecting his harem with rumbling snores. Emmanuel crossed the room before Donny opened his eyes. He grabbed the redhead by the throat and lifted him from the squalid bed. The smell of unwashed bodies wafted from under the blankets and he heard the cry of the girls as he swung Donny out and pinned him naked against the wall.
"You lied to me, Donny."
"Leave him!" The older girl was on the attack. Emmanuel felt the sting of her fists across his back, then came the sound of her flailing and kicking in midair. Shabalala had the furious girl off the floor. Emmanuel kept his focus on Donny.
"You lied to me," Emmanuel repeated calmly, and eased his hold on Donny's neck a fraction. "Why did you lie?"
"Scared—" Donny gasped for breath.
"That was your excuse for running yesterday. You have to come up with something a lot better or I'll give you good reason to be scared. You understand me, Donny?"
"Please—"
"You. Englisher." It was the older girl. "Tell the kaffir to get off me. He can't touch me. It's against the law."
Emmanuel pushed Donny into a chair and turned to the girl sitting naked on the sofa. Shabalala was behind her, a hand resting firmly on her head, his gaze directed at the floor. The strange, paternal scene was undercut by the grotesque angle of the girl's hips, which tilted upward to offer a full view of everything between her thighs.
"Close your legs." Emmanuel picked up a thin sheet from the floor where it had fallen and threw it over the girl's lap before turning back to Donny. "You ready to tell me the truth or do you need me to help you remember?"
"No." Donny cowered in the chair. "I was too scared to tell you yesterday. Honest to God."
"Why?"
"I knew it would look bad. Me being the last person to see Captain Pretorius in town."
"At the liquor store?"
"No," Donny insisted. "On the kaffir path that goes behind the coloured houses."
Emmanuel pulled up a chair opposite Donny. The chair tilted to the side and came to rest at a crooked angle, like everything else in Donny Rooke's life. He picked up a discarded shirt from the floor and handed it to the naked man.
"On Wednesday?" Emmanuel prompted.
"Ja. I go in once a week to pick up supplies. This day I was running late and it was getting dark when I got to Tiny's shop." Donny stopped to pull the shirt over his bruised body. He didn't bother with the buttons. "While I was picking up my bottles, Captain Pretorius came in and I hid behind the counter. I didn't want him to see me. I thought he'd take the bottles off me."
"Go on."
"Captain left and I stayed behind. I thought I'd give him long enough to get his worms and head out fishing. I went out on the kaffir path. The sun was down, so I took it slow. I came around the bend, heading toward the hospital, and saw the police van parked behind a tree. I hid myself and waited for him to leave." Donny pulled his shirt tight around himself. "I wasn't spying. I was waiting for him to leave. That was all. I swear it."
"Then?"
"I heard footsteps. I looked up and he's standing there with his torch pointing right at me. 'You spying on me, Donny?' he says. I say, 'No, Captain, I'd never do nothing like that. Never.' He laughed and I almost wet myself. There was something…" Donny struggled with his poor vocabulary. "Something like a stone about him. Hard like. He didn't raise his voice, nothing like that. I said, 'Listen, Captain—' and bam."
Donny swung his head around to indicate a slap to the face. "He hits me like this, then he lays into me with his fists. He beat me down to the ground, then he grabs my hair and says, 'This is just a taste of what you'll get if I catch you spying on me again.' I wasn't spying but I says, 'Yes, Captain.' He pulled me up and brushed some dirt from my shirt, like I'd fallen all by myself. Then he picks up my bottles and gives them to me. 'Don't forget these. You're going to need them tonight,' he says. My hands was shaking, I was so scared. 'Thank you, Captain,' I said, and limped away as fast as I could."
"What time you get home?"
"I don't know," Donny cried. "He beat me like a dog. There was pain all over my body. I got no idea how long it took me to get back from town."
"You own a clock?"
"It's broken."
"You own a gun?"
"Ja, of course." Donny pointed to a ledge behind the kitchen sink. Emmanuel got up and removed the gun. He slid the bolt back and wasn't surprised when the whole piece fell to the floor.
"Own any other guns?"
"No." Donny motioned to the girl on the couch. "She's good with a slingshot…"
Emmanuel returned the rifle to its stand and sat down in the tilting chair. The sight of Donny, naked but for the shirt yawning open at the front, was unsettling. He pressed his palms against his eyes as Donny began a quick slide off the suspects list. The killer was patient and careful. The crime scene was neat and controlled. Donny Rooke was a shambles. Body, mind and shack: all in disarray. He was the sort to leave a flask engraved with his name and address next to the corpse.
"You were angry at Captain Pretorius for handing you a beating. You wanted to get him back, get revenge." Emmanuel kept down the path.
"I wanted to get as far away from him as I could. There was something…" Again a struggle for words. "…wrong about him. Different."
"Did you follow him?"
"And get more of the same? No dice. I came straight home and pushed the furniture against the door."
Emmanuel looked over at the elder girl. She was tougher than most of the gangsters he ran into in Jo'burg. He turned to the younger sister, a silent figure huddled under the weight of a tattered patchwork quilt. She was his best bet. He approached slowly and squatted by the side of the bed.
"I'm Detective Cooper," he said. "What's your name?"
"Marta." The voice was barely audible.
"Did Donny tell you how he got hurt, Marta?"
"Ja."
"How's that?"
The adolescent chewed on her bottom lip before answering. "Said Captain Pretorius kicked the kak out of him. Belted him black and blue for no reason."
"What did Donny do when he got home on Wednesday?"
"Got into bed and cried. In the finish we give him a second bottle to put him to sleep, he was making so much noise."
"He didn't leave again?"
"No, he was too drunk to stand up."
"I was hurt." Donny rushed to defend himself. "My arm still don't work properly from where he punched me. Look."
He struggled to raise his right arm above shoulder level. There was no doubt he'd been worked over thoroughly and that Captain Pretorius's hands with their bruised knuckles were the perfect fit for the assault.
"Why didn't you say this yesterday? You have the injuries, and you have witnesses to back up your story."
Donny's laugh was a thin, bitter sound. "Who was going to believe he beat me for no reason? A 'good man' like him. Never smoked or swore in front of women. Always friendly like. And me here with nothing. The whole town would laugh at me. Call me a liar."
"Are you lying?"
"No, if you'd seen Captain Pretorius that night you'd understand." Donny went down on his knees, his shirt thrown off to highlight his dire circumstance. "I left him on the kaffir path and came straight home. I didn't know nothing else till a coloured boy told Marta he was dead. As God is my witness."
Emmanuel doubted that God and Donny were on speaking terms, but his own gut reaction was now a solid feeling. The pathetic man kneeling in front of him was, in all likelihood, not the killer.
"Constable Shabalala. What do you think? Is our friend here telling the truth?"
Shabalala spoke with deep pity. "I think this man could not kill the captain. This man is not strong enough to do this thing."
"That's right. Look at me." Donny jumped up and used his skinny body as an exhibit. "Look. I hardly got any muscles. No way I could handle someone as big as Captain Pretorius."
"Put your clothes back on, Donny. That's not what Shabalala is talking about."
The killer wasn't physically strong: he and Shabalala both knew that. It was mental strength Shabalala was talking about, a toughness of the mind. Emmanuel wondered about the tight-lipped constable. He never volunteered information and didn't comment unless specifically asked to. There was resistance there, a stubborn refusal to get involved.
"Hey, you." It was the older girl, peeved at not being included in the conversation. "Is it true what they say about Englishmen? That they like it with boys?"
"You shut it, you hear?" Donny rushed toward his wife, fists clenched with violent intent. The girl stared him down.
"Sit," Emmanuel instructed Donny quietly. The shack and its inhabitants were beginning to seep into his skin. He picked up a cotton dress, discarded on the floor, and handed it to the older girl. She stood up and allowed him to get a good look at her. The flat stomach and small high breasts, the thatch of strawberry blond hair covering her mons. And most arresting of all, the defiant sexual invitation glittering in the dark brown eyes.
"We have to get to the funeral," he said to Shabalala. Brassy young girls did nothing for his libido.
"Yebo," the black policeman answered with relief. The squalor of the shack was beginning to get to him, too.
"If I have to come back here again," Emmanuel said to Donny, "you're going to get a double dose of what Captain Pretorius gave you. That's a promise."
"Ja, of course, Detective." Donny was giddy with relief. "Everything I said is true as the Bible. I swear on my mother's grave."
The older girl flashed Emmanuel a look of disgust when he passed by.
"Scrotum licker," she said coolly in Afrikaans, certain that the English detective had no taste for girls. Emmanuel made his way out to the sunlight.
Donny followed them to the car, shirt open like a tent flap. "Detective, if you find my camera—"
Emmanuel slammed the car door behind him and flicked the key. "I'll make sure to bring it to you." Emmanuel eased the car into first gear. He gave it some juice. Donny and his sad dirt yard were soon behind them.
"Did Captain Pretorius get rough with people?"
"No," Shabalala answered firmly.
"Why Donny?"
"That one"—Shabalala motioned in the direction of Donny's receding figure—"he came to the station and asked Captain Pretorius for his camera. The captain said he did not have such a thing and Rooke called him a liar and a thief."
"Captain Pretorius give him a tap or two?"
"No, but I think maybe Captain remembered what this man said to him."
Emmanuel turned onto the main road leading back to Jacob's Rest. The image of Pretorius's bruised knuckles was clear in his mind, as were the faces of the townsfolk when they talked about their murdered police captain. "Righteous" and "upstanding" were two words that came up frequently. That was the problem. The righteous also believed in punishment and retribution.
"Up here," Emmanuel instructed a puffy-eyed Hansie, who jumped onto the car's mudguard. "Tell me when you see him."
Hansie rubbed his swollen lids and squinted at the mass of people pouring out of the graveyard of the Dutch Reformed church. First came the blacks who had been on the outer rim of mourners, then the coloureds, then the inner core of whites. The whole district had turned out for the funeral. Every inch of space on the street leading to the church was taken up by bicycles, cars, and tractors driven in from outlying farms. Many more blacks from the location had come into town on foot. The captain's death had turned Jacob's Rest into a bustling metropolis.
"Well?" Emmanuel prompted. Shabalala had been invited into the Pretorius family's honor guard, which left Hansie as his only source of local intelligence. The phrase almost made him laugh.
"I can't see him," Hansie said. "Maybe he didn't come."
"If he's alive, he's here. Keep looking."
"I am." Hansie sulked as the crowd pressed out of the church grounds.
A curvy brunette made her way toward the street. "Is that Elliot King with the brown hair and the big breasts?" Emmanuel said.
"No." The young policeman hiccupped in surprise. "Mr. King has light hair."
Emmanuel thought Hansie was joking, but there was no spark in the dense blue eyes, just a teenaged yearning to be close to the sweetie jar. A powerful mix of sadness and longing had sucked the last spark of energy from a brain that had no backup generator.
"Go," Emmanuel said. It was time to cut his losses and find an alternate source of local knowledge. Hansie was as much use to him as a blind parrot. "I'll see you back at the police station later this afternoon."
Hansie was down and pushing his way through the crowd before the sentence was finished. The brunette was still on the church grounds when the most senior police official in Jacob's Rest, eighteen-year-old Hansie Hepple, laid a hand on her shoulder.
At least he feels something, Emmanuel thought. In a small crush of coloured people he caught sight of Anton, the level-headed mechanic who'd saved him from a beating. He motioned him over.
"Elliot King," he said after they'd exchanged greetings. "Can you tell me where he is without pointing him out?"
Anton's brown eyes flickered over the gathering with quick intelligence. "Under the tree to your left, paying his respects to the family. Fair haired, wearing a safari suit."
Emmanuel spotted him right off. He exuded the kind of casual ease that comes from sitting on a pot of family gold. The tailored khaki suit was a nice touch. It imparted a rural man-of-the-people charm without diminishing his superior status.
"Money?"
"Sugar mills and now game farms."
Elliot King proceeded down the line of family members, shaking hands as he went. The chill from the Pretorius men reversed the midday heat by a few degrees. Even Louis managed a look of disdain.
"What's up?" Emmanuel asked.
"Captain Pretorius sold the old family farm to King a year or so ago. They think King cheated the captain on the price."
"Did he?"
Anton shrugged. "Captain never complained about the money, only the sons."
"Anything come of it?"
"Just a lot of hot air. Silly talk from the brothers about King being a swindler, but King is too big for them to mess with. The Pretorius boys don't like it when they don't get their way."
"You know what it's like to be on the wrong side of them?"
"Everyone in Jacob's Rest has had a taste. I'm no different."
Emmanuel was about to ask for more details when two newcomers to the family group caught his attention. The men, crewcut commando types, were squeezed into the cheap cotton suits worn for court appearances and interrogation cell duties. Both were drawn from the "rough justice" section of the training manual. Neither appeared capable of playing the soft man, versed in worming confessions out of prisoners using empathy and skill. They were the Security Branch.
"Friends of yours?" Anton asked.
Emmanuel jumped off the mudguard and pulled Anton down after him. The crowd washed around them like a black sea, momentarily blotting out the presence of sharks in the water. Emmanuel took a deep breath. Two days. Just long enough to select personnel for the assignment, brief them, and arrange transport. The Security Branch had no intention of taking a backseat. They were in on the investigation from the start. "Taking an interest" was just the bullshit they'd thrown van Niekerk's way to keep things calm while they marshaled their forces.
"Don't know them," Emmanuel replied. "But I've got a feeling they'll introduce themselves to all of us soon enough."
Anton swallowed. "Should I be worried, Detective?"
"Are you a political man? Do you belong to the Communist Party or a union that disagrees with the National Party laws?"
"No," the coloured man replied quickly. "Can't say I like what's going on, but I've never done anything about it."
"Are all your identification papers in order?"
"Far as I know."
"Then keep it that way," Emmanuel said. "The Security Branch is here to look for political activists, and whatever the Security Branch looks for they find."
"So I've heard," Anton answered quietly. If the Security Branch had the power to spook a white detective, what chance did a coloured man have?
"You know how to play the game, Anton. Just keep playing it."
"You a strange man," Anton said lightly. "What do you know about the game, anyway?"
"I was born here. Everyone in SA has to know their place. Some of us are pawns and some of us"—he stopped and motioned in the direction of Elliot King, who was walking toward a canvas-topped Land Rover parked on the street—"are kings. I'll see you later."
Emmanuel pressed through a gathering of white farmers and drew parallel with the dapper peacock of a man just as he reached his car. The door to the Land Rover was held open by an older native in a green game ranger's outfit with the words "Bayete Lodge" embroidered over the breast pocket.
"Mr. King." Emmanuel stepped into the space in front of the door and held his hand out in greeting. "I'm Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper. Could I have a moment of your time?"
"Certainly, Detective Sergeant." The smile was cool, the handshake brief and firm. "How can I help?"
In the churchyard, the Security Branch goons were deep in conversation with Paul Pretorius. They'd be down at the police station this afternoon, pissing in all the corners to make sure everyone knew the investigation was theirs.
"I'd like to ask you a few questions about Captain Pretorius. Would it suit you to talk at your house? Town is crowded, and I think it would be better if we had some privacy."
"Am I a suspect, Detective Sergeant?"
"It's just an informal chat," Emmanuel said, aware of the thinning crowd and the risk of exposing his leads to the National Party musclemen. "A favor to the investigation."
"In that case I'll be happy to see you at my farm in an hour or so." King slid into the Land Rover. "As you're coming out my way, do go to the old Jew's place and pick up my housekeeper and her daughter, there's a good fellow. It will save Matthew here a trip back into town. They'll be ready to come out to the farm in about an hour."
The door slammed shut before Emmanuel had a chance to reply. His reflection blurred in the dusty car window. Elliot King had given an order and he expected it to be obeyed.
Emmanuel gave a mock salute and the car pulled away from the curb and headed out to the main road. He'd met every form of arrogant Englishman on the battlefield, but at least this one, in his tailored khaki suit and new Land Rover, didn't have the power to order him over a hill littered with land mines. He'd play the lackey for as long as it took him to figure out why Elliot King's name had been given to him as a clue in the dead of night.
"When's my backup getting here, sir?" Emmanuel asked. He'd reached Major van Niekerk at home: a redbrick Victorian mansion nestled on vast grounds in the posh northern suburbs of Johannesburg. "I can't run this investigation on my own."
"No backup," van Niekerk replied over the sound of a whistling kettle. "The commissioner has told me to step away. The Security Branch is in control now."
"Where does that leave me?"
"Alone," the major replied. "The Security Branch wants you replaced but I've convinced the commissioner to keep you on. That means you'll be a very unpopular addition to the team."
"Why not replace me?" Emmanuel asked.
"You're not a Security Branch stooge," van Niekerk informed him. "You'll make sure the right person hangs for the crime."
Despite what he said, van Niekerk wasn't big on the pure justice element of policing. The ambitious major was making sure that a detective loyal to him was on the ground to represent his best interests. Van Niekerk wasn't going to hand over the headline-making murder of a white police captain to the Security Branch without a fight. Fine, Emmanuel thought, except for the fact that van Niekerk was in Jo'burg sipping tea while he was about to go toe-to-toe with the hard men of law enforcement.
"What are they like?" van Niekerk asked with mild curiosity.
"They look like they can beat a confession out of a can of paint."
"Good. That means you can turn the whole thing around on them."
"How do I do that?" Emmanuel asked drily.
"Find the killer," van Niekerk said. "Find him before they do."
Outside the captain's office, the Security Branch officers rifled through the contents of the police station's file cabinet. Their faces made two sides of an ugly coin. They turned to him and Emmanuel felt their hostility radiate outward. "Unpopular addition to the team"? Major van Niekerk had a talent for understatement.
"We can relax, Dickie," the older, leaner officer instructed his hefty colleague, his smile a bare stretch of his lips over yellowing teeth. "God is with us. Finally."
"You must be the smart one," Emmanuel said, and threw his hat onto Sarel Uys's vacant desk. He waited for the second salvo. The Security Branch boys were going to give him a kicking just to let him know who was in charge.
"God?" Dickie's brain was straining to keep up.
"Emmanuel," the senior officer said. "That's what his name means. God is with us. According to Major van Niekerk, Detective Sergeant Cooper here can walk on water. He's a real miracle worker."
Emmanuel let the comment ride. If the Security Branch wanted a fight, they'd have to land a few more solid punches.
"Where are you off to, Cooper?"
"I report to Major van Niekerk," Emmanuel said. "No one else."
"That was yesterday. From today you report to me, Lieutenant Piet Lapping of the Security Branch. Your major was informed of that fact by my colonel." He paused to let the full weight of the information sink in. "Now, where are you off to, Cooper?"
"A farm," Emmanuel said.
"You sure you want to do that?" Lapping asked. "Farms are dirty places. You might get cow shit on your shoes."
Dickie, the muscle of the outfit, rested his beer-fed rump against the edge of Hansie's desk. "That's what we heard, hey, Lieutenant? That Manny here likes to keep himself neat and tidy. Always with the ironed shirts and polished shoes."
Piet lit a cigarette and threw the packet over to his sergeant. "That's probably why his friend Major van Niekerk promoted him so quickly. Neat bachelors like to stick together."
"Truly?" Dickie asked conversationally.
"Ja." Piet blew a cloud of smoke out from between bulbous lips. "They meet in secret and starch each other's underpants till they're good and stiff."
Emmanuel ignored the urge to shove Piet, headfirst, into the rubbish bin. Security Branch intelligence was becoming legendary, but pockmarked Piet and his partner had only a few days' worth of it to draw on. They knew he'd been promoted quickly: too quickly for some senior detectives' liking. His personal hygiene habits and the ugly liaison rumor came from deep inside the district Detective Branch. Somebody had talked.
"Where does a man learn such unnatural things?" Dickie's hippo-sized head tilted to one side as they continued their routine.
"The British army," Piet replied. "That's probably why Manny here did so well during the war. Foot soldier to major in a few years, plus all those shiny medals to pin onto his pretty uniform."
Emmanuel sifted through the ranks of his detractors and came up with a name. Head Constable Oliver Sparks: a bitter twig of a man due to be pensioned off the force after twenty years of indifferent service. The homosexual liaison rumor was his doing, payback for van Niekerk's refusal to offer up the high-profile cases.
"How is Head Constable Sparks?" Emmanuel asked. "Still planting evidence and drinking on the job?"
The porridge flesh on Piet's face tensed noticeably and he took a long drag of his cigarette and exhaled. Emmanuel knew he'd scored a hit with Sparks's name. The lieutenant's pinprick eyes darkened.
"Whose farm are you going to?" Lapping continued the previous conversation and Emmanuel felt a rising uneasiness. Lieutenant Piet Lapping and his sidekick were not the "hard man/hard man" combination he'd picked them for at the funeral. Beneath the lumpy facial mask and the concrete-reinforced body, Piet had a brain that worked at above average capacity.
"Elliot King's farm," Emmanuel said. "I'm following up a rumor that King cheated Captain Pretorius on a financial transaction. There might have been bad blood between the two."
"You're chasing the personal angle?" Lapping made it sound like a fool's errand.
"Is there another?" Emmanuel asked.
"None that I can discuss with you." Lapping waved a hand toward the front door. "Go off to your farm visit and report to me immediately when you get back to town. I am in charge of all aspects of this case. Understand?"
Emmanuel got the feeling that the Security Branch was way ahead of him. They were searching for specific information. "The personal angle," as the lieutenant put it, was at the bottom of their list of motives.
"Back again so soon, Detective?" Zweigman was wrapping a parcel in a length of brown paper. "Are you perhaps interested in our special on apricot jam? Top quality. You won't find better. Not even in Jo'burg."
"The funeral's put you in a good mood," Emmanuel said. "Planning a party for later?"
"Just a quiet drink with my wife," came the deadpan reply.
"I though you never hit the bottle, Doctor."
"Only on special occasions." Zweigman tied the parcel up neatly and laid it with a pile of others on the counter. "Do you plan to join the funeral reception at the Standard Hotel, Detective? I hear Henrick Pretorius is serving up half-price drinks until sunset."
Emmanuel imagined the Pretorius brothers and their Boer brethren singing Afrikaner folk songs late into the night. Someone might even pull out a squeezebox for good measure. His blood ran cold.
"Not my kind of gathering," he said. "I'm supposed to give King's housekeeper and her daughter a lift to his farm. He said they'd be here."
Zweigman stilled. "Mr. King has a driver."
"I know that, but as I'm going out to King's farm, he thought I'd be a 'good fellow' and do him the favor of driving his staff back. 'Saves Matthew making two trips.'"
"I see." Zweigman busied himself picking pieces of string off the countertop.
"Well, are they here?"
"Of course." The German shopkeeper collected himself. "I will go out to the back and inform them that you will be providing them with transport."
"Thank you," Emmanuel said, and strolled over to the window that fronted the street. A throng of white men passed across the corner of van Riebeeck on their way to the half-price drinks at the Standard Hotel. Groups of blacks drifted onto the kaffir paths that headed out to the location. The town was emptying.
He turned and found Zweigman at the counter with Davida, the shy brown mouse, and a graceful woman dressed in a black cotton dress teamed with a row of fake Indian shop pearls.
"This is Mrs. Ellis and her daughter, Davida, whom you have already met." Zweigman performed the introductions as though the task itself was distasteful to him.
"Mrs. Ellis. Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper."
"Detective." King's housekeeper gave a deferential bow, the kind reserved for white men in power. She was green eyed and brown skinned, her lips full enough to hold the weight of a weary man's head. Davida stayed in the background with her head bowed like a novice about to take orders. The tiger had given birth to a lamb.
"Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Ellis," Emmanuel said, and fished out the car keys. "I'm afraid we have to get going."
"Of course." Mrs. Ellis hurried to the counter and Zweigman shooed her away while he and the shy brown mouse divided the parcels between them.
Emmanuel stepped outside. A skinny mixed-race woman with coarse yellow hair walked a chubby toddler past the burned-out shell of Anton's garage. The wreckage reminded him of any one of a thousand French towns flattened in the march toward peace.
A cloudbank passed overhead and a dark shadow crossed the street, followed by the blinding light of the sun as the clouds moved on toward the veldt. Emmanuel blinked hard in the changing light. Mrs. Ellis stood on the store veranda, and Davida and Zweigman stood face-to-face on the bottom. They were so close, Emmanuel could almost feel the breath move between them. White glare reflected off the car's bonnet, then died away to a soft shimmer.
"Headache bothering you again, Detective?"
"No, it's just the sun," Emmanuel said. He checked Mrs. Ellis for a reaction. She gave no indication that her daughter's honor might have been compromised in any way.
Emmanuel opened the car door and slid into the driver's seat. He didn't put much store in Mrs. Pretorius's lecherous Shylock story: her world was populated with crafty Jews, drunken coloureds and primitive blacks. It was the standard National Party bullshit that poor Afrikaners swore by and educated Englishmen loved to mock while their own servants clipped the lawn.
The passenger doors closed and he switched on the engine. What he'd seen, so briefly, between Zweigman and the mute girl was not an offense under the Immorality Act. Had he imagined it?
"Where to?" he asked Mrs. Ellis, who was perched at the edge of the seat, as if she was afraid her weight might offend the springs.
"Take Piet Retief Street to Botha Drive, then turn left at the Standard Hotel and head out to the main road. Bayete Lodge is about thirty or so miles west."
"Is there any way out of town that doesn't take us past the Standard?" Emmanuel asked.
Every white man in the district would be there, the Pretorius brothers included. Driving by with two brown women in the backseat when he could be attending the formal reception was the quickest way to get doors slammed in his face.
"There's only one way in and out of town," the older woman pointed out. "We have to go past the Standard."
Emmanuel turned onto Piet Retief Street and slowed down. He glanced in the rearview mirror, uncomfortable. "I need to ask you both a favor."
"Yes," Mrs. Ellis said as her hands played nervously with the fake pearls around her neck. White men asking favors spelled bad news for nonwhite women.
"I'd like the two of you to lie down in the back before we get to the Standard. It would be better for the investigation if no one saw you." He said it all at once, without stopping: he'd never ask a respectable white woman and her daughter to do the same. "You can get back up once we clear town."
"Oh." Mrs. Ellis twisted the pink tinted pearls tighter. "I suppose that would be okay. Hey, Davida?"
Davida smiled at her mother and slowly laid her head down on the backseat, like a child playing a game she already knew the rules to. Mrs. Ellis copied the movement and lay next to her daughter.
Up ahead, groups of men stood on the pavement in front of the Standard Hotel. It was early afternoon and the crowd hadn't spilled out onto the street yet. Another hour or two and traffic would have to negotiate a slow crawl through the crush of mourners.
Emmanuel checked faces on the drive past the hotel. His luck held good. No one from the Pretorius family camp was in the roadside throng. He took the left turn and gave the accelerator a tap. Soon he was out past the town boundary and heading west on the main road.
He slowed almost to a stop and looked over his shoulder at the women hidden in the backseat. Davida lay with her cheek against the warm leather, her arm thrown across the top half of her face. She breathed slow and deep, her mouth held open slightly. For a moment he thought she was asleep.
"We're clear," he said, and turned his attention back to the road. The veldt rolled out on either side of them in a tangle of wild fig trees and acacia bushes. Against the blur of the landscape he recalled the image of the girl fallen and fragile in the backseat of his car.
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
Chapter 6
|
"What do you think?" Elliot King pointed to the half-finished construction perched above a riverbank.
Emmanuel knew there was only one correct answer to the question. "Very impressive," he said.
"This is going to be the finest game camp in the southern part of Africa. Five luxury lodges with views to the water hole, top-level trackers and rangers, private game drives on tap. The best food, the best wine, the biggest variety of animals. I have spent an absolute fucking fortune stocking this place, but then again people will pay a fortune to stay here, so it's only fair."
Emmanuel heard pride in the Englishman's voice: he was filled with the joy that comes from being supreme ruler of your own piece of Africa.
"This used to be the Pretorius farm," Emmanuel said, thinking of the captain's family, who also owned a giant slice of the Transvaal.
"Yes." King reached over and rang a small silver bell on the low table next to him. "Captain Pretorius sold it to me about a year ago when he realized Paul and Louis weren't going to take up farming."
"I hear there was some trouble over the sale."
"Oh, that." King smiled. "The problem was between Pretorius and his sons. They don't have their father's business acumen…he was an intelligent man."
"Mr. King?" It was Mrs. Ellis responding to the bell. She had changed out of her black mourning clothes and was now wearing the lodge uniform, a tailored green shift with the words "Bayete Lodge" embroidered over the pocket. She still managed to look elegant.
"Tea," King said. "And some cakes, please."
"Right away." Mrs. Ellis dropped a half curtsy and disappeared into the cool interior of the house. Being in Elliot King's company was like slipping into the pages of an old-fashioned English novel. Any moment now they'd hear the beating of drums and a frantic call to defend the house against a native uprising.
"Intelligent?" Emmanuel repeated the word. They were talking about an Afrikaner police captain with a neck the size of a tree trunk.
"I know," King said, and smiled. "He looked the part of a dumb Boer, but under all that, he was a complex human being."
"How so?"
"Come with me." King stood up and entered the house, talking as he went. "Yes, this was the Pretorius family farm. The captain was the third generation to live out here. He only left when he got married and moved to town."
Emmanuel followed King into the house. The main living area contained soft, wide-backed sofas and animal skin rugs. Paintings of the English countryside teamed with family photographs on the whitewashed walls; Mrs. Ellis kept it all in impeccable order. Tribal masks, shields, and assagai spears added just enough of a primitive edge to place the room in South Africa instead of Surrey.
"Look at this." King pulled open a drawer in the office and took out a stack of yellowed envelopes. There was writing on each envelope, faint but still visible. "Read them and tell me what you make of them."
"'Full moon fertility. Sprinkle across mouth of kraal after midnight,'" Emmanuel read aloud.
"Keep going." King was obviously delighted by his find.
"'Spring rain creator. Dig into topmost field first day after seeding.'" Emmanuel flicked through the rest in quick order. All the labels had a mystical element to them. "They're black magic potions of some kind. The natives swear by them."
"Not just natives. We found these when we cleared the house. They belonged to old man Pretorius, the captain's father."
White Police Captain Dabbles in Black Magic: the English papers would have a field day.
"When I found these I asked my driver Matthew about Pretorius the Elder." King threw the envelopes in the drawer and started back toward the veranda. "He was widowed early and lived out here alone with his son. The other Boers thought he was insane and apparently steered clear of him. He believed the whole Boer 'white tribe in Africa' story without reservation."
"Lots of people do," Emmanuel said. Two-thirds of the present government, in fact.
"True, but how many of those people partner their son with a black companion so they can learn the ways of the natives? How many make their sons undertake the training of a Zulu amabutho between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, and endure the pain that goes with it?"
"Pretorius did that?"
"He and Shabalala would apparently run barefooted from one end of the farm to the other five or six times without stopping, without drinking. Matthew says they were quite a sight. It brought tears to the eyes of those who remembered the old days. The sound of Zulu warriors, the impi, thundering across the veldt." King sat down in his chair with a nostalgic sigh.
The expanse of sky and gentle hills, once native homeland, was now part of King's fiefdom. What was it about the British and their love of nations they'd conquered in battle?
"Constable Shabalala was his companion?"
"Yes. Shabalala's father was a Zulu. He trained them."
"Why did the captain's father do it?" Emmanuel asked. Most whites were happy to claim higher status as a birthright.
"This is the crackpot element." King obviously relished talking about the eccentricities of the Boers. "Old man Pretorius thought that white men should be able to prove themselves equal to or better than the natives in all things. He brought his son up to be a white induna, a chief, in every sense of the word."
Mrs. Ellis carried in a tea tray and placed it on the table between them. Her movements were sparse and economical, the body language of someone born into the service of others. She handed King his tea. Why the high-toned Englishman talked as if the days of the white chiefs were over was beyond Emmanuel.
Mrs. Ellis, the perfect servant, vanished indoors.
"You know, Captain Pretorius could name every plant and tree on the veldt," King continued. "He spoke all the dialects, knew all the customs. Unlike the Dutchmen around here, he didn't need some paper shuffler in Pretoria to legislate his superior status."
"You knew him well?" Emmanuel asked. It was obvious the aristocratic Englishman believed that Captain Pretorius occupied the same "born to rule" category as himself. The rest of humanity, including police detectives, were mere servants.
"I got to know him a little while we were negotiating the sale and much better once he started building." King paused to select a cake from the tray. "As I said, he was actually very complex and intelligent, for a Boer."
"Building?" Emmanuel put his tea down. This was the reason he'd been given the note. He was sure of it.
"Nothing grand. Just a little stone hut on the allotment he kept for himself."
"He has a house out here?"
"More of a shack than a house," King said, and bit into his cake. He took his time chewing. "It looks like something out of the kaffir location, but he seemed to like it."
"Did he spend a lot of time here?" No one, not Shabalala or the Pretorius brothers, had mentioned a secondary residence of any kind.
"Not that I know of. He came out a few times during hunting season and then at odd times after that. It all seemed a bit random, but it was his land and his shack."
Captain Pretorius appeared to be a man of quiet habit and routine. Fishing on Wednesday, coach of the rugby team on Thursday, church every Sunday, and yet the word "random" kept coming up in connection with him.
"Where is the shack?" The weight of the car keys and the piece of paper with King's name scribbled on it suddenly became heavy against his thigh. Afternoon teatime was over.
"Ten or so miles back toward the main road. There's a giant witgatboom tree right at the turnoff. You passed it on your way in."
The witgatboom tree was a good signpost, with its branches flung out to support a wide flat top. It was a quintessentially African sight.
"I'll need to go out there," Emmanuel said.
"It's not my place to give or deny permission. I have no say over that piece of land, so feel free to do as you wish."
Emmanuel stopped at the top of the veranda stairs. "I thought you bought this farm from Captain Pretorius."
"Most of it," King corrected. "He kept a small parcel. That's what his sons couldn't understand. The sale wasn't about money. Their father just wanted a piece of his old life back."
Emmanuel felt in his bones that the Pretorius brothers had no idea about the shack or their father's plans to resume his life as a white induna.
"I'll head straight back to the station after looking over the place," Emmanuel said. "Thank you for your help, Mr. King, and for the tea."
"Pleasure," King said as a red two-door sports car with rounded haunches and curved silver headlights pulled into the gravel driveway and stopped inches from the Packard's back bumper. The driver's door swung open and a man in his twenties eased out of the scooped leather seat. Emmanuel caught the flash of his perfect white teeth.
"Winston…" Elliot King called out a greeting to the handsome boy making for the stairs. "I wasn't expecting you till tomorrow. Meet Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper. He was just on his way out."
"An officer of the law." Winston smiled and shook hands. "Have you finally been able to bring charges against my uncle, Detective Sergeant?"
The King men laughed; the law was a servant to whom they did not have to answer.
The sleek sports car and the beachside tan irritated Emmanuel beyond reason, as did the simple elephant-hair bracelet worn by Winston to authenticate his "African-ness."
"Routine questioning," Emmanuel said.
"What happened?"
"Captain Pretorius." King went back to his seat and sat down. "He was murdered Wednesday night. Shot twice."
"Jesus…" Winston leaned against the railing. "Are you a suspect?"
"Of course not." King took a sip of tea. "I provided the detective with some background information. As a favor to the investigation."
Emmanuel edged toward the top stair. Stuck between King and his linen-clad nephew was the last place he wanted to be. The secret hut beckoned to him.
"What made you think my uncle knew anything about Captain Pretorius?" Winston asked.
The boy was half the size of the Pretorius boys, but he shared with them an uncomplicated sense of entitlement. Emmanuel took the first stair.
"Routine questioning." He took the second and third stair, then turned to Winston. "Do you know anything about the murder?"
"Me?"
"Yes. You."
"How would I? I just found out about it now."
"Of course." Emmanuel paused to enjoy Winston's moment of discomfort. "Thanks again for your help, Mr. King."
He walked past Winston's Jaguar to the Packard, which looked wide and lumbering next to its expensive English cousin. No maps or discarded drink cans on the passenger seat. All Winston King needed for his travels was a fast car, a fat wallet and a smile. Emmanuel's dislike rose again and he pushed it aside.
He eased the Packard into first gear and piloted it out of the circular drive. Winston disappeared into the house and his uncle poured himself another cup of tea.
Elliot King carefully selected a piece of cake and watched the detective drive away. He rang the silver bell.
"Mr. King?" The housekeeper stepped out onto the veranda.
"Bring Davida here," he said. "I want to speak to her."
A fence made of tall sticks lashed together with twine and strips of bark stood at the end of the red clay road. The construction was identical to those encircling the native kraals that nestled into the landscape like giant mushrooms.
Emmanuel got out of the car and checked the perimeter. The entrance, a small opening half the size of an average man, was located in the back, away from the road. Casual visitors were obviously not encouraged. He crouched down and entered the compound like a supplicant and there, directly in front of him, was a stone rondavel, a round hut, with a thatched roof and a pale blue door.
"Lair of the white induna," Emmanuel said, and took in his surroundings. The entrance to the stone hut was deliberately aligned with the hole in the fence so that all visitors came and went under the watchful eye of the headman. Even here, miles away from the town, security and surveillance were taken into account.
A river, close by, filled the air with the hum and gurgle of water moving over rock. Emmanuel felt a deep satisfaction. The shed in Jacob's Rest was a front. A place to display the things acceptable to friends and family. This kraal, lying under a clear spring sky, was where the captain let himself out to play.
Emmanuel crossed the compound to a pile of stones heaped against the fence. What did King say? "When he started building…" That would explain the blistered hands and the sinewy muscles noted during the examination of the body. Pretorius had put the hut up himself: stone by stone.
Emmanuel pushed the pale blue door and it swung inward. He squinted into the dim interior. There were two windows, each with its curtains drawn. He left the door open to get more light. Cowhide rugs crackled underfoot as he pulled the curtains open and looked around. As male bolt-holes went, it was embarrassing. Everything was in order: the bed made, dishes washed and resting on the sideboard, the small table wiped clean. Aunt Milly would be happy to spend an afternoon here.
"Come on," Emmanuel said. There had to be something. A man didn't build a secret hut, then use it to practice housekeeping skills.
Nothing in the room stood out as aberrant or unusual, but then it never did where the captain was concerned. Everything appeared normal until you got close enough to press your nose against the dirty window. The vicious beating handed out to Donny under the cover of night, the relentless surveillance of the town disguised as daily exercise, the building of a hut no one in his family knew about. There was a reason this modest stone rondavel was a secret.
Emmanuel stripped the bed and checked the pillow, mattress and sheets, which were made of fine cotton weave. Nice. For a woman? Or did the captain have sensitive skin? Next came the chest of drawers, then the small cupboard holding cutlery and crockery. He looked over, under, on top of and behind every item until he arrived back at the front door empty-handed.
He crouched low in the doorway. The room stared back at him with its scrubbed and innocent face. He'd missed something. But what? Everything had been checked, except the ceiling and the floor.
How many bizarre hiding places had the platoon come across during their sweep of villages in France and Germany? Cupboards with fake backs. Trapdoors cut into ceilings. Even a hollow staircase designed to hold a whole family. The captain, with his fondness for facades, would have the good stuff hidden.
Emmanuel grabbed the edge of the cowhide and pulled it toward him.
The opening, a small square with a wooden top, was craftily hidden. A woven loop of rope, finger-sized, was the only indication that the surface of the compacted earth floor had been violated. Emmanuel shuffled forward on his knees and tugged at the rope. The trapdoor swung open easily, its hinges oiled in anticipation of frequent use. He reached in, expecting the usual bundle of frayed pornographic magazines. The National Party crackdown on immoral publications had slowed the trade but not stopped it. His hand touched on soft leather, a strap of some sort. He pulled it up toward him and felt the weight at its end.
"My God…"
It was Donny Rooke's camera, with his name proudly stamped into the hard leather casing in gold letters: he'd even included the J, his middle initial. Emmanuel flicked up the clips and examined the beautiful instrument. What had Donny said? The camera was expensive and the captain had stolen it from him—and the pictures of the du Toit girls with it.
"Even a broken clock is right twice a day," Emmanuel muttered, and shut the case. He reached into the hole and fished out a thick brown paper envelope. If Donny's story held, the "art" pictures of his wives would be inside. Did the captain have a taste for underage flesh? He flipped the envelope over and something cast a shadow from the doorway.
Emmanuel turned in time to see the hard line of a knobkierie moving toward him. The Zulu club generated its own breeze as it arched downward and made contact with the side of his head.
Whack.
The sound exploded in his eardrums like a mortar round. He fell forward and tasted dirt and blood in his mouth. There was a bright fizz of sheer white pain behind his eyelids and the club fell a second time. He heard his own labored breath and smelled ammonia. A blue shadow flickered and then the distant sound of a mechanical rattle.
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
Chapter 7
|
You lazy bastard. How long are you going to lie there, humping the floor?" It was the sergeant major from basic training, his voice thick with the coal and filth of the Edinburgh slum he'd crawled out of. Emmanuel felt the sergeant major's breath on his neck.
"Call yourself a soldier? All you're fit for is fucking German whores. Is that why you joined up? You hopeless piece of African shit. Get up now or I'll shoot you myself. Get to your feet or get the fuck out of my army."
"Detective?"
Emmanuel shook his head. The dark blue shadow hung over him.
"You going to let that Kraut piss all over you? What did I teach you? If you have to go, take one out with you."
"You okay?"
Emmanuel pushed himself off the ground, wheeled full circle, and jumped on the source of the voice. He felt neck muscles tense under his fingers, heard the slam of the body as it hit the ground; then he was straddling the flailing mass, gaining supremacy. There was the quiet hiss of air leaving lungs.
"De-tec-tive…" The sound drained away to nothing.
Emmanuel shook his head. Detective. He'd heard that title recently. The memory of a police ID card fought its way past the hot shower of pain snaking down from his scalp to his jaw. He eased his grip and felt the body beneath him, small and surrendering: a boy soldier called to defend the fatherland against hopeless odds.
"Go home," Emmanuel said, and released his grip. His hands were stiffened into the shape of animal talons. "Ghet du zuruck nach ihre mutter. Go home to your mother."
A relentless boom, boom, boom pounded the side of his skull with grim military precision. Piss and blood, the classic smell of the battleground, clouded the air.
"Detective. Please."
He focused beyond his hands and recognized Davida, the shy brown mouse, lying under him, a red mark slashed across her throat.
"You can speak," he said.
"Yes."
"What are you doing here?"
"Where do you think we are?" She lay still, afraid of startling him.
Emmanuel glanced around. Through the haze, shapes began to appear. A table, a chair, a bed stripped of its linen. The boom, boom, boom continued loud as a kettledrum. It was impossible to think.
"Where is that smell coming from?" he demanded. "The room is so clean."
"The smell's from you, Detective." There was a slight tremor in her voice, which was barely accented, as if she'd learned English from someone who demanded correct pronunciation and usage. "It's on your clothes."
The jacket and shirt, crisp and clean a few hours ago, were crusted in dried blood and urine. Emmanuel jumped up, hands feeling frantically at the crotch of his pants. The material was crumpled but dry.
"It's mainly here." She rose unsteadily to her feet. "Where my head was."
They looked at the dark pool, still damp and reeking. Emmanuel felt for his crotch again. Dry. He pulled off his jacket and sniffed at the material like a dog. Urinal odors rose up in an ammonia cloud. Someone—some fucking inbred country Dutchman—took a piss on him.
"Goddamn it." He threw the jacket from him in disgust. "What is it about this place? A man can't wear a suit two days in a row."
The jacket landed at the edge of the captain's homebuilt safe, and slithered inside. Images, each crisper than the last, flashed through his head until they made a seamless run of film. The camera, the envelope, the blue shadow, then the club crashing down against his skull.
Emmanuel dropped to his knees and scrambled toward the hiding place. The dirt floor threw up puffs of dust and sand as he frantically searched for Donny Rooke's camera and the brown paper envelope.
"Fuck." He widened his radius, hoping something had been knocked under the chair or the bed when he fell forward. His hands patted the surface like a drunk in a minefield and came back with nothing but the dirt under his fingernails.
"Gone." He slammed the wooden lid shut and the hinges buckled.
"What's gone?" It was Davida, so quiet he'd forgotten she was there.
"Evidence," he said. "Someone took the camera and the photos."
Adrenaline stiffened the muscles of his neck, got his heart rate up to machine-gun speed. Who knew he was here besides King? One of those sanctimonious farmers with a Bible under his armpit? Or was it the Security Branch guard dogs?
His fist swung down hard onto the wooden lid. Never keep your back to the door: it was the most basic rule of self-defense. Even Hansie would know that. Blood leaked from the slit on his knuckles. The boom, boom, boom continued with the intensity of artillery fire in his head and the world tilted to one side.
"Sit down." Hands pulled him up and a chair was pushed in behind him. "I'm going to find something for you. Sit. Don't move."
He heard the clang and scrape of drawers and cupboards being searched, then she was by the chair again.
"Open your mouth."
He did as he was told and a fine powder coated his tongue with the taste of bitter lemon mixed with salt.
"Now swallow this." There was the smell of whiskey, then the hot taste of it filled his mouth and washed the powder down a fire trail to his stomach.
"Stay here, Detective. I'll come right back."
"Wait." He grabbed her wrist harder than he intended and felt her delicate bones under his fingers.
"You're shaking," he said.
"I…I'm…"
"What?"
"…not used to being touched…" She looked out toward the open door. "…by one of your kind."
"'My kind'?" He repeated the words in a slightly comical tone. What did she mean?
She lifted her captured hand and held it at eye level. His fingers were white as pear flesh against the dark skin of her wrist. He let her go. The National Party and its Boer supporters weren't the only ones who believed SA was divided into different "kinds," each separate and unchangeable.
"Where are you going?" Emmanuel flexed his hand. Touching her was a mistake. Everything he did from now on was a potential source of ammunition for the Security Branch. Physical contact across the color line was a no go.
"To get some water from the river."
Emmanuel watched her stop and pick up a bucket from near the doorway. She was still shaking. The bucket did a jiggling dance against her leg as she moved fast toward the breach in the fence.
She's scared of me, he thought. Scared of the crazy white man who tackled her to the ground, then almost snapped her wrist without once saying sorry. He closed his eyes and ignored the tightness gathering in his chest. He'd been beaten unconscious and what did he have to show for it? No suspects, no real leads, the evidence gone before he had a chance to examine it. The Security Branch would have a field day if they found out about the stolen evidence. It was all the excuse they needed to kick him off the investigation completely.
The slosh of water lapping over the bucket rim told him that she was back. He opened his eyes and took a good look at her.
"No wonder I thought you were a boy," he said once the bucket was placed in front of him. She was dressed in loose-fitting men's clothes, a faded blue shirt and a pair of wide-legged pants that hid the natural outline of her body. Black hair, cut close to the scalp, glistened with moisture from a quick wash in the river.
She touched her wet curls. "I like it this way."
"Then why do you keep it covered?" The plain cotton scarf she normally wore lay on the dirt floor where it had fallen during their struggle.
"It makes people stare."
"Like I'm doing?" Emmanuel asked. Her eyes were the most unusual shade of gray. Davida had her mother's mouth, full and soft.
"You should wash your face, Detective," she said, and moved behind the chair and out of his view. Some questions had no correct answer, especially when white people asked them.
Emmanuel wiped the grime and blood from his skin and heard her shallow breath, amplified in the stillness of the hut.
"I'm not going to hurt you," he said. "Is that what you're afraid of?"
She studied the tips of her battered leather boots. "No. Mr. King will be angry when he finds out I've been in here."
"Why?"
"This is the captain's place. Nobody's allowed but the captain."
"Why did you come?" She must have seen the sedan and known that one of his "kind" was inside. He could see her quickening pulse under the smooth brown skin at the base of her throat.
"You left Mr. King's house a long time ago. I was riding by and I thought maybe your car was broken."
Emmanuel leaned forward and splashed his face and neck with the cool river water. Something didn't feel right. Natives and coloureds shied away from white people's business, especially when the law was involved. Yet she was here in the hut with her shaking hands and uneven breath.
"You ever been inside before?"
"No." The word was sharp. "What would I be doing in Captain Pretorius's private place?"
"I don't know," Emmanuel answered drily. "Cleaning?" The neatness of the hut was another thing that didn't sit right. "Your mother ever tidy up for the captain?"
Her hands were behind her now, held out of sight. "I told you. Only Captain Pretorius was allowed."
"Who knows about this place?"
"Those at Bayete Lodge. Mr. King said not to tell people in town. He made everyone promise. The hut was going to be a surprise for the captain's sons at Christmas."
"You ever tell anyone about it?" Emmanuel studied his bruised knuckles, now eerily like the dead captain's.
"Never." The word was emphatic.
"How many people work at Bayete Lodge?" Clarity and focus, both bruised by the wooden club's bloody kiss, were slowly making a comeback. The first thing to do was narrow the field, concentrate on those who knew about the hut.
"About twenty," Davida said. "Most of them are back at the location for the weekend. Mr. King gave them two days off because of the funeral."
That narrowed the field of suspects for the attack down to a small footprint. "Who's at the lodge now?"
"My mother, Matthew the driver, Mr. King, Winston King, and Jabulani, the night watchman."
"Six, including you," Emmanuel said. The field narrowed to the head of a pin: large enough for angels to dance on but not thieves or murder suspects. "Any of those people leave the house?"
"Only me."
"You sure?"
Her gaze flickered up. "Everyone was there when I left."
He considered her for a moment, then turned toward the open door. The shy brown mouse was barely able to hold her own head up, let alone swing a club with enough force to knock out a grown man. Still, there was something about her being in the hut that niggled him. He moved on.
"You hear or see anything when you came near the hut?"
"Well…" she said. "There was something…"
"What?"
"A sound. It was a machine."
"A mechanical rattle like an engine." The memory, still hazy and clouded, pressed forward into the light. He'd heard the sound just before passing out. "I remember now."
The pin-sized field of suspects collapsed into a black hole. His assailant had come to the hut with his own transport, a wooden club, and a full bladder. None of the workers at the lodge was likely to own anything more mechanical than a bicycle. That left the Dutchmen who'd ridden into town on tractors, motorbikes, cars, and pickup trucks. Did one of them slip away and follow him to the hut? There was no way to know.
Emmanuel crossed to the safe and pulled open the buckled lid. He'd report to Lieutenant Piet Lapping and tell him the truth: that he had nothing to show from the visit to King's farm. He put his hand into the safe to retrieve his filthy jacket. His fingers touched on the crumpled material and something else.
"Jesus…"
"What is it?"
He threw his jacket to one side and studied the square piece of cardboard—a wall calendar with the months stapled to the front in easy pull-off sections. Red ink circled the dates August 14 to 18; 18 was heavily ringed.
"Two days before he was murdered," Emmanuel said, and quickly flicked through the remaining months. It was the same on every page. Five to seven days marked in red ink, the last day marked out as special. He looked over the dates again. The pattern was clear, but the heavily circled day could mean anything.
"'Carlos Fernandez Photography Studio, Lorenzo Marques,'" Emmanuel read aloud from the calendar. The name was printed below a photograph of happy natives selling trinkets to whites on the beach. There was no street name or address: a low-profile business. Donny Rooke had been caught smuggling pornography across the border from Mozambique. Did the captain take over Donny's flesh and photo trade?
"Captain Pretorius go to LM a lot?" he asked.
"Everyone does," she answered. "Even my people."
"How far is it?"
"Less than three hours by car."
The circled days could be pickup or delivery dates for some other form of contraband. Being a policeman meant easy passage across the border. Wading across a river was for criminals and natives. A high-ranking officer could smuggle goods in comfort.
"How often did the captain visit? Once a month or so?"
"I don't know," she replied. "What the Dutchmen do is their business. You must ask Mrs. Pretorius or her sons."
Emmanuel rubbed his bruised knuckles. The red-marked days glowed with hypnotic brightness. Was he willing to hand over this vital information to Lieutenant Piet Lapping, who had made it clear that the "personal angle" was not something he was interested in? The calendar might just end up at the bottom of a drawer because it didn't fit the political angle the Security Branch was working.
"Can you keep a secret, Davida?"
"Uhh…" Her voice quivered with fearful anticipation. The skin of her throat and face flushed and made her dark skin glow. Passing for white was never going to be an option for the shy brown mouse.
"Not that kind of secret," he said. "You mustn't tell anyone about today. Not about me, the hiding place, or the calendar. Understand?"
She nodded.
"You have to look at me and promise not to tell anyone."
She lifted her head. "I promise."
"Not even your mother, hey, Davida?"
"Not even my mother." She repeated the phrase like a dutiful child instructed in the dark secrets of the house.
"Good," he said, and wondered how many white men had exacted the same promise once the sweat was dry and the shadow of the police loomed overhead. Even the use of her name, Davida, made him feel he'd crossed a line.
Emmanuel closed the safe and returned the cowhide rug to its original position before remaking the bed. He wondered about the sheets again. He folded the calendar and put it in the pocket of his jacket. Davida was the perfect accomplice. If he decided to keep the calendar to himself, the Security Branch would never approach her as a person of interest. He ducked through the low opening and followed Davida out of the compound.
A black horse with Thoroughbred leanings was tethered to the fence next to his Packard sedan. The stallion, all rippling muscle and glossy coat, was not destined for the glue factory anytime soon.
"Yours?" Emmanuel asked.
"No." She blushed. "I ride him for Mr. King."
"Ahh." That explained the unlikely teaming. In King's world the tedious upkeep of animals and property was a job for the servants. The habits of rich men duplicated themselves the world over.
Emmanuel pulled the car keys out of his jacket pocket. "You'll remember what we talked about?"
"Yes, of course." She made direct eye contact, let him feel the power he had over her. "I won't tell anyone, Detective Sergeant. I promise."
The urge to stroke her damp hair and say "good girl" was so strong he turned and rushed to the car without another word. If he wasn't careful he'd turn into a grown version of Constable Hansie Hepple: a puffed-up bully drunk on the extraordinary power handed to white policemen by the National Party.
Emmanuel sat back and closed his eyes. He needed a moment to get things clear in his head before driving back to Jacob's Rest and reporting in to the lieutenant.
"It felt good, didn't it?" It was the sergeant major again. Out of nowhere. "A man could get used to it. Learn to love it, even."
Emmanuel opened his eyes. Through the mud-flecked windscreen the dirt road unfurled in a soft red ribbon toward the horizon. Dark clouds gathered overhead, poised to feed the rivers and wildflowers with spring rain. He concentrated on the landscape, felt the dip and curve of it inside him.
"It won't work, boyo. Nobody ignores me, you know that."
"Go away," Emmanuel said, and switched on the engine to drown the voice out. He drove to the dirt road cutting across King's farm and swung left toward the tarred road. God knows what was in the powder he'd swallowed back in the hut.
"I don't need a pissy medicine to get to you, soldier. You'll have to cut off your head to get rid of me, because that's where I live. Up in there."
"What do you want?" He couldn't believe he'd answered. The sergeant major, all six feet two of him, was probably trussed up in a dingy Scottish retirement home for ex-military tyrants.
"To talk," the sergeant major said. "You know what I like about being out here? The open space. Enough space for a man to find out who he really is. You know what I'm saying, don't you?"
He didn't answer. The army psych test passed him clean. "Healed and ready to return to active duty," that's what the hospital discharge papers said.
"Her trembling brown hands. The feeling in your chest, tight and burning."
Emmanuel slowed the car, afraid of crashing.
"You know what that was, don't you, Emmanuel, perfect soldier, natural-born leader, clever little detective?" The sergeant major continued his assault. "You want to think it was shame, but we know the truth, you and I."
"Fuck off."
"It's been so long since you felt anything."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Yes, you do," the sergeant major said. "It gave you pleasure to hurt her and not say sorry. Felt good, didn't it, soldier boy?"
Emmanuel stopped the car and took deep, even breaths. It was daylight, hours yet before the war veteran's disease crept up on him in the form of sweaty nightmares.
He tore at the buttons of his shirt and threw it onto the backseat with the jacket. The smell of the clothes had dragged buried memories to the surface. That's all it was. There was no truth in the sergeant major's bizarre accusations.
If the Security Branch caught even a whiff of the daylight hallucinations, he'd be off the case and in a sanatorium by week's end. Van Niekerk couldn't help him. He'd be suspended pending psychiatric evaluation and there was every chance he'd fail the test.
"You finished?" Emmanuel asked.
"Don't worry," the sergeant major purred. "I won't make a habit of visiting you. If there's something important to say, I'll drop by and let you know. It's my job to keep you alive, remember?"
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
Chapter 8
|
Lieutenant Piet lapping and Dickie Steyns huddled over a decade's worth of files. A row of empty beer bottles sat on top of the filing cabinet. After an afternoon of steady drinking and mind-numbing file checking, the Security Branch boys would be in a foul mood, ready to jump on anything new. Emmanuel pushed the door open and stepped into the room.
"Where the fuck have you been?" Lapping snapped, and lit a cigarette.
"Taking a bath," Emmanuel said. "You were right. Being a field detective is dirty work."
"I thought I smelled lavender," Dickie said.
Piet ignored his partner. "How did your visit with King go? Find out anything you'd like to share with us, Cooper?"
Emmanuel felt a kick of fear in the pit of his stomach. Did he really have the steel to withhold evidence from the Security Branch? If they found out, they'd make him pay in blood.
"I did a search of Captain Pretorius's hut," he said, "but didn't find anything. It was clean, like someone had tidied the place up."
"Hut?" Dickie's brain was just firing up. "What hut?"
"The captain built one on King's farm. He used it for R&R." Emmanuel spoke directly to Dickie. "That's rest and recreation, for those of you who don't speak army bachelor talk."
Dickie stubbed his cigarette out with a grinding action that made the ashtray creak. "One day you going to get that clever head of yours kicked in, my vriend. You wait and see."
Emmanuel smiled. "Headkicker is one up from shitkicker, isn't it? Your ma must be proud."
The veins on Dickie's neck swelled and he stepped forward. He clenched his fists.
"Sit down, Dickie," pockmarked Piet ordered calmly. "Cooper here is just playing with you. Aren't you, Cooper?"
Emmanuel shrugged.
"About the hut…" Piet continued where Dickie had lost the thread. "You'll take us there tomorrow morning and show us everything of importance."
"That's not possible," Emmanuel said. "It's Sunday. I'll be in church for the morning service."
"You religious?" Piet asked with a trace of disbelief. There was no mention of it in the thin intelligence file.
"Aren't you?" Emmanuel asked.
The lieutenant took a long drag of his cigarette. "That's twice you've turned the questioning around onto us, Cooper. Once with Dickie and now with me. Must be force of habit, hey?"
"Must be," Emmanuel said, and upped the likelihood of being found out for withholding evidence. Piet Lapping was coolheaded and clever.
"So, you finally turned up." It was Paul Pretorius, looming in the doorway to the police cells.
"I was out working the case," Emmanuel said. The spit-and-polish soldier swaggered into the room and set himself up behind Hansie's desk.
"Tell me," Paul said, and leaned back in Hansie's chair, square jaw jutting out. "Why are all the suspects on your list whites?"
Emmanuel looked at Lieutenant Lapping. Who was in charge of this investigation, him or the tin soldier?
"Answer the question." The words barely made it out from between Piet's clenched teeth. Having Paul Pretorius along for the ride wasn't Lapping's idea. Some bigwig must have pulled strings.
"You think Jews are proper whites?" Emmanuel threw the question out and waited to see if the bait was taken.
"No," Paul replied without hesitation. "They're different from us, but we need their brains and their money to build a new South Africa. We don't have to worry about them mixing blood with us or the kaffirs because it's against their religion. Blood purity is part of their thinking."
"Are they the chosen people?" Emmanuel wondered out loud, and made a close study of the captain's second-born son. The man's barrel-like chest was puffed up like a bellows.
"They may have been the chosen people in the olden days, but it's our turn now. We've been given a covenant by God to rule over this land and keep it pure." Paul Pretorius leaned across the desk as if it were his own personal pulpit and continued his sermon. "In years to come, the world will look to us for guidance. You mark my words. We will be a beacon."
"Guidance in all areas or just—"
"Detective Sergeant Cooper!" Piet Lapping couldn't contain his frustration. "I said answer the question. How did you compile your list of suspects?"
Dickie and Paul were easy to distract but Piet kept his pebble eyes on the prize: relevant information. If Emmanuel were caught out, it would be by Lieutenant Piet Lapping.
"Preliminary inquiry found that Zweigman and Rooke both had motive. The captain suspected Zweigman of crimes under the Immorality Act and was known to have reprimanded him. Rooke blamed the captain for his arrest and imprisonment. Mrs. Pretorius supplied me with the names. Both suspects provided alibis."
"What about this man King?" Piet asked. "Was there bad blood between him and Captain Pretorius?"
"Not that I could find. They seemed to have liked each other. The captain even built his own bush hut on King's farm."
"Rubbish." Paul Pretorius leaned farther across the desk. "My father had nothing in common with that Englishman. They hardly knew each other."
"That doesn't change the fact that your father had a deal with King to retain some of the old family farm."
"Rubbish again." Paul waved the information away with a flick of his hand. "Anything King says about my pa is an out-and-out lie."
"Okay." Lieutenant Lapping ground his cigarette out. "Let's leave that for a moment. Anyone else on your list, Cooper?"
Emmanuel stopped himself from rubbing the lump at the side of his head. At the top of his personal list was the bastard who'd smashed his skull, pissed on him, and then stolen the evidence.
"I'm looking at another lead. A Peeping Tom who molested some coloured women a year or so back."
"Who was it?"
"Don't know yet," Emmanuel replied. "It's possible this man killed the captain to keep his secret hidden."
Paul snorted out loud. "No man, no white man in Jacob's Rest would interfere with coloured women. That sort of thing might happen in Durban and Jo'burg, but not here. Have you questioned any native or coloured men?"
"None of them presented as suspects," Emmanuel replied evenly.
"They're not going to hand themselves over." Paul spoke with blunt force. "You have to go in there and show them who's boss and then they'll start talking."
"Okay…" Lieutenant Lapping tried to keep the discussion on the rails.
"No, man, it's not okay." The seams of his blue army uniform stretched under the strain of Paul Pretorius's muscled bulk. "With your help, my brothers and I could shake the investigation up. Get information flowing instead of following up some stupid rumor put around by the coloureds to shift blame onto an innocent white man."
Piet pulled another cigarette from the pack and took his time lighting it before he answered. "You and your brothers are the injured party, but you are not the law. I am the law. Understand?"
"Ja." Paul looked almost sulky. For a soldier he didn't take orders very well.
"Good," said Piet, and took a drag of his cigarette. "When the time comes to get your brothers involved in the investigation, I'll let you know."
The lump on Emmanuel's head throbbed back to life. Giving the Pretorius boys a slice of the investigation would create the potential for disaster. Did the lieutenant support the idea of a family vendetta or was he just trying to keep Paul and his powerful backers on his side?
"You think there's something in the pervert story?" Piet asked.
Enough to make two angry coloured men threaten violence in an attempt to protect their women. The stalker was no storybook phantom.
"The new laws make men with particular appetites nervous," Emmanuel said. "Public humiliation and jail time are good enough motives for murder. Even here in Jacob's Rest."
"Any political leads?"
"Haven't looked into that yet. The bus boycotts and pass burnings haven't made much of an impact out here."
"Not yet." Piet was grim. "This resistance campaign is like a fucking disease. The whole country is set to go up in flames. There is nothing the comrades won't do to crush the government. They want a revolution. They want to destroy our way of—"
The door to the police station crashed open and the Pretorius men washed into the small room on a wave of crumpled black suits and beer fumes. Shabalala remained out on the porch, sober and impassive.
"Howzit? Howzit?" Henrick slumped against the edge of Hansie's desk and addressed no one in particular. His suntanned face was mottled with patches of red brought on by alternating bouts of crying and beer drinking.
"Detective Sergeant…" It was Hansie, lobotomized by a few drinks too many. "You find anything? You find anything good at King's?"
"Nothing," Piet Lapping said, and looked over at Emmanuel while he said it. All information was going out through the Security Branch, and the Security Branch alone.
Emmanuel kept quiet. He needed time to work out the calendar while Piet and Dickie crash-tackled their way through the political side of the investigation.
"You didn't find anything, Detective?" It was Louis, the only Pretorius male not glassy-eyed and slack-jawed.
"Nothing," Piet said.
Emmanuel shifted uncomfortably under Louis's continued scrutiny. Despite Piet's definitive answer, the boy was waiting for him to reply. He shook his head and made sure to keep direct eye contact.
Out of the corner of his eye Emmanuel glimpsed Shabalala moving quickly off the veranda and onto Piet Retief Street. There was the sound of a scuffle and a loud cry.
"Captain…" a drunken voice called out. "Captain! Please!"
"What the fuck is that?" Paul was on his feet, ready to play the commando.
"Captain. Captain. Please!"
The Pretorius men pressed out of the building in a rush. Emmanuel followed close behind and saw Harry, the old soldier, in the middle of Piet Retief Street. Shabalala was trying to guide him away, but the gray-coated man refused to move.
"Captain," he continued to bay. "Captain! Please…My letters…"
Paul and Henrick made it first down the stairs. One push on the chest and the skeletal old man fell back onto the hard surface of the road with his arms and legs askew.
"We buried my pa this morning." Henrick bent low over the crumpled figure. "Hold your tongue. Hear me?"
"My letters…" The warning passed Harry by. He struggled to his feet and continued toward the police station. "Captain. Please. Come out."
Erich grabbed the addled soldier's face. "My father's dead. Now shut up."
Emmanuel pushed past Piet and Dickie, who watched the action with bemused smiles. Drinking and fighting were natural Saturday-night activities and getting between white men and a feeble-minded coloured one wasn't worth the effort.
"Shut up." Paul grabbed the old soldier by the lapels and shook him like a dry cornstalk. Johannes and Erich joined their brother, and the medals on Harry's coat rattled a discordant tune as they pushed him from one to the other. Louis hung back.
Emmanuel approached the phalanx and felt Shabalala move with him. They shouldered their way into the circle and stood on either side of the old man.
"What you doing?" Erich's blood was high and ready to boil over.
"He's crazy," Emmanuel said quietly. "Constable Shabalala and I are going to take him home. His wife will do a much better job of beating the shit out of him than you ever will."
"Home." Harry grabbed Emmanuel's jacket sleeve. "Not home. No. Not home."
"See?" Emmanuel said. "He'd rather stay here with you than go home to his wife."
"Not home." Harry's thin voice went up an octave. "Not home."
Paul laughed first, followed by his brothers.
"He sounds like an old woman, hey?" Erich imitated the shell-shocked old man. "Not home. Not home."
The laughter stepped up a notch and Emmanuel and Shabalala moved slowly out of the circle with Harry between them. They went down Piet Retief Street. They kept their pace measured and deliberate. Walking. Just walking home.
"Go back to your wife," Henrick called after them, his mood lightened by the violence and the old man's comic turn. "You lucky this time, Harry."
"Captain…" Harry whimpered softly. "Captain. Please."
"Here." Shabalala pointed to a small path that ran along one side of the police station. "Go here."
They slipped onto the path and moved briskly until they were out on the veldt. Harry turned back toward the station, his palsied hands held out like a beggar's.
"Captain," he said. "My letters."
Shabalala picked the old soldier up and raced along the narrow kaffir path. Emmanuel struggled to keep up with the black policeman who worked fast to put distance between them and the volatile Pretorius brothers. Guard dogs snarled and barked at a perimeter fence as they slipped past houses lit by the gentle flame of gas lanterns. Night began to fall.
Shabalala stopped at a rickety wooden gate and put the old man back on his feet. A sheen of sweat on the black constable's brow was the only indication he'd done more than stroll from the police station.
"This is his house," Shabalala said. "You must go in and give him to his wife."
"You're coming with me."
"Captain or Lieutenant Uys go in with the coloured people. Not me."
"The captain's dead," Emmanuel said. "Tonight, there's only you and me."
Shabalala nodded and followed him in through the gate and past a narrow vegetable patch that ran the length of the yard and pressed up against the back stoep of the house. Emmanuel pounded on the door.
"The letters." Harry started toward the gate. "The letters."
"Get him," Emmanuel said as the sound of footsteps approached the back door. "Police. We have Harry."
The door opened and Angie, the old soldier's wife, stepped out. She wore a brown cotton housecoat double stitched along the collar and sleeves to reinforce the fraying material. Her dark crinkly hair was pulled up and stretched taut across the curve of huge plastic rollers.
"Where did you find him?" she asked curtly. Harry went walking almost every day. Most of the time he found his way home without trouble.
"Outside the police station," Emmanuel said.
"The letters," Harry wailed. "The letters."
Angie crossed the stoep in five quick steps. "You talk about the letters? You say about the letters, you stupid man?"
Emmanuel rested a warning hand on her shoulder, then withdrew it. "He's had a hit or two already. He doesn't need any more."
She saw the bruised flesh around her husband's left eye. "Who hit you, Harry?"
"I want the letters," Harry said. "I want the letters."
She addressed Shabalala. "Who hit my Harry?"
"Madubele. He and his brothers."
Angie took her husband's arm and led him into the small cinder-block house. She looked back toward the gate, fearful of what lay beyond it in the gathering darkness.
"Inside. Quick," she said to Harry, who shuffled in ahead of her.
Emmanuel followed without an invitation.
He signaled to Shabalala, who reluctantly stepped into the house and stayed with his back pressed against the closed door.
The cinder-block house consisted of two plain rooms joined together by a cracked seam of mud and plaster. The kitchen, a collection of mismatched pots and plates on a chipped sideboard, sat directly opposite a curtained alcove that contained a double bed and a small chest of drawers with a beveled mirror.
They were in the sitting area: four wooden chairs and a moth-eaten love seat that must have been transported by sea and bullock train from the mother country to the outer edges of southern Africa decades before. A round table with the diameter of a tin bucket displayed two photos in tarnished frames: one of Harry as a young soldier bound for the glory of the battlefield, the other a family portrait of Harry and Angie with a trio of white-skinned girls. The picture was identical in setup to the one he'd seen in the captain's house, a family group formally arranged against a plain backdrop. The traveling photographer had done a good trade in Jacob's Rest.
Harry sat on the edge of the double bed, his palsied hands resting unsteadily on his knees. Angie pulled the curtain closed around them. The clink of campaign medals was followed by the metal sigh of the springs as the old soldier lay down to rest.
Emmanuel picked up the family photo and motioned Shabalala over. "Where are the daughters?" he asked. There was no sign of them in the cinder-block house, not a ribbon or a hairpin.
"Gone," Shabalala answered. "To Jo'burg or Durban. For work."
The girls in the photo had taken after their father. Skinny and pale skinned with fair hair and freckles, they were a race classification nightmare. Pose them against the cliffs of Dover and they'd blend right in. They were white girls, pure and simple. Only someone who knew the family could say any different.
"What's on their papers?" he asked Shabalala. "Mixed race or European?"
Shabalala looked at the floor. "I have not seen their papers."
"Those are my girls." Angie reentered the sitting area and took the photo from Emmanuel. She wiped the frame down with her sleeve, as if to clear it of germs.
"Where are they?"
Angie tilted the photo so the light hit it fully. "That here is Bertha, she lives in Swaziland. Then Alice and Prudence, they live in Durban now."
"How long have they been gone?"
"Six months or so."
"The letters Harry was asking for. Were they from Alice and Prudence?"
"No." Angie put the photo down and angled it away from the room. "Harry doesn't know what he's talking about. The mustard gas, it's made him imagine things."
"He seems certain about the letters," Emmanuel said.
"That one is certain about a lot of things. But that doesn't make it so."
Angie moved across his line of sight and blocked the photo from view. She was the lioness at the gate whose job it was to stand guard over the family secrets.
"Make sure Harry stays in until morning," Emmanuel said. "Tonight's not a good night for him to be wandering around."
"I'll make sure he stays right where he is." The furrowed lines on Angie's bulldog face softened and she showed them out the back door. "Thank you for helping my Harry home, Detective."
Emmanuel and Shabalala left by the back gate. The moon was on the wane but its light still shone strong enough to see by. Out on the kaffir path, Emmanuel turned to the black policeman.
"Tell me about the letters," he said.
"I have not seen any letters," Shabalala replied simply.
Emmanuel studied the closed face of his partner.
"Did the captain see the letters?"
"Uhhh…" Shabalala cleared his throat nervously. "He saw them. Yes."
"Who did the captain say they were from?"
"Those inside. The two youngest children of the old man."
"Why was the captain collecting letters for Harry?"
"Uhhh…" This time, the black constable's lips closed firm and sealed the words in.
Emmanuel watched him, saw the gates slam shut.
"Nobody else will know what you tell me tonight, Constable," he said. "That is a promise."
Shabalala took off his hat and turned it like a spinning wheel in his broad hands. The hat stopped spinning, and he breathed out.
"The old man's daughters, they are living among the white people. They cannot write to their own people in case someone finds out."
"How did they get white ID papers?"
"They are white, just like the Dutchmen. Captain said they must register in the city and if there was a problem he would say they were from a European family."
"Captain tell you this?"
"Yes."
"Why did he do it?" From all he'd seen, the Pretorius family were firmly in the racial segregation corner. In their world, race mixing wasn't in bad taste; it was a crime.
"I do not know why he did it." Shabalala put his hat back on and pulled it low on his forehead.
"If you knew would you tell me?" Emmanuel asked.
The constable spread his hands out in a conciliatory gesture. "I have told you all I can," he said politely.
The black policeman would tell him all he could, not all he knew. Was it possible that the strong bond between black and white playmates, so common in childhood, had actually survived the transition to adulthood for Captain Pretorius and Constable Shabalala?
"Those men at the station," Emmanuel said. "They won't wait for you to tell them what they need to know. They will get information the fastest way. You understand that?"
"I understand fully."
"They can do as they please."
"I have seen this," Shabalala replied.
Emmanuel turned to leave, then stopped. "You said Madubele and his brothers hit Harry. Who's Madubele?"
"The third son of the captain and his wife."
"Erich?"
"Yes. The third son has a temper. He is always exploding like a rifle shot. That is why he was given that name."
"Tell me the others," Emmanuel said. The names given to people by the natives always had a core of truth to them that was instantly recognizable.
Shabalala held his hand up like a schoolteacher and worked his way from thumb to little finger. "The first one is Maluthane. He deceives himself in thinking he is the boss. The second is Mandla because he is strong like an ox. Three is Madubele and fourth is Thula because he is quiet. Five is Mathandunina, meaning he is loved by his mother and he loves her."
Each name was a thumbnail sketch of the Pretorius boys, each one broadly accurate in its content. Even Louis, the runt of the litter, was described not in his own right but in connection with his mother.
"What's your name?" Emmanuel asked.
"It is long. You speak Zulu, but even you will not be able to pronounce it."
Emmanuel smiled. It was the first time the black constable had made a joke in his presence. In five or ten years' time Shabalala might come around to telling him the truth about the captain.
"Tell me what it is," Emmanuel said.
"Mfowemlungu."
Emmanuel did a quick translation. "Brother of the white man."
"Yebo."
"The captain was the white brother?"
"That is correct."
Emmanuel thought of the people on the Pretorius family farm, their hearts soaring as the young Shabalala and Pretorius ran the length and breadth of the property like warriors in the Zulu impi of old.
"Mrs. Pretorius, what does she think of this name?"
"She believes we are all brothers in God's sight."
"You and the captain were like twins?"
"No," Shabalala said. "I am always the little brother."
Emmanuel sensed Shabalala's resignation. Never the man, always the garden boy. Never the woman, always the cleaning girl.
"Did the captain think of you that way?"
"No."
"You felt for him as one who is a true brother?"
"Yebo," the constable said.
The leaders of the Afrikaner tribe made a great deal out of blood bonding. Their most secret organization, the Broederbond, meant "blood brothers." What happened when the bond went across the color line, and tied black to white?
"I will find out everything," Emmanuel said. "Even if it hurts you and the captain's family, I will find it out."
"I know this to be true."
"Good night, Shabalala."
"Hambe gashle. Go well, Detective Sergeant."
Emmanuel followed the narrow kaffir path that led to the coloured houses and the shabby strip of businesses serving the nonwhite population. He needed a drink and the Standard Hotel was the last place he was going to look for one. Time to pay Tiny and his son an after-hours visit.
The path skirted the grounds of the Sports Club. Farm families, overnighting in town after the funeral, were camped out in trucks, which were drawn into a circular formation like the wagon laagers of frontier times. Emmanuel ducked low to avoid being seen. He came up to his full height when the dark outline of the Grace of God Hospital became visible.
Past a stretch of vacant land decorated with scraps of windblown garbage, he entered the small grid of coloured people's homes. The first house, set on a wide span of land, was well hidden behind a high timber wall and a row of mature gum trees. Emmanuel ran his hand along the fence. His fingertips brushed against the wood and the small gate that led into the garden. It was good to walk in the dark: silent and undetected.
This is how Captain Pretorius must have felt: free and godlike as he moved across every boundary in his small town. It was here, on this stretch of the kaffir path, that he beat Donny Rooke to a pulp. Out on the main streets, in the houses and the stores, the captain was a good man: moral and upright. But outside the grid, in the shadows of the kaffir path, who was he?
Emmanuel passed the burned-out shell of Anton's garage, two more houses, and a small church. The path swung hard to the left to run along the edge of the vacant lot adjoining Poppies General Store. The next shop along was the fine liquor merchant's. Emmanuel slowed at the gate but didn't go in. A woman's voice, shrill and liquored up, drifted out over the back fence.
"You bad, Tiny. You a bad, bad man."
"How can I be bad when I make you feel so good, hey? How's that?"
Emmanuel found a gap in the fence large enough to see through. He pressed his eye to the slit. Tiny and his son, both shirtless and drunk, were working the clothes off two well-used coloured girls. Emmanuel recognized the woman sliding herself over Tiny's hardened stomach like a grease cloth. She was the one in front of Poppies, walking a toddler along the street.
"Mmm…Ja…" The coarse-haired woman gave a practiced groan and sucked on a hand-rolled dagga cigarette. "You bad, Tiny."
"I'm about to get badder," Tiny promised in a sodden voice. "Let me see some."
The woman threw her unbuttoned shirt to the floor and lifted a drooping breast up for inspection. "This what you want?"
Tiny was on her nipple in a second. The wet sound didn't bother Theo, who hammered away at a fat brown girl with two missing front teeth. The girl, built to absorb maximum thrust, managed to take deep sips from a whiskey bottle even as Theo worked his magic on her.
Emmanuel stepped back. No chance of a drink just at the moment, but Captain Pretorius was onto something. A night on the kaffir paths was worth twenty door-to-doors.
The split where he'd lost his late-night visitor was up ahead. The rustle of footsteps broke the peace. Someone else was out, skirting the town in the dark. Emmanuel retreated into the shadows.
Louis trotted past. Emmanuel waited until he got well ahead, then followed. The boy wasn't lost; he walked as if he owned the kaffir path. The light from Tiny's courtyard cut into the darkness. Louis moved in on it like a moth.
The boy stopped and knocked on the gate. The noises from inside drowned him out. He tried again.
Emmanuel slipped into the space between the liquor store and Khan's Emporium. A shirtless Tiny opened the gate to Louis.
"What you want?" the coloured man asked. He was in a foul mood.
"Give me something small," Louis said.
"No dice. I promised your father. Never again."
"The captain's gone," Louis said.
"What about your brothers? What happens when they find out?"
"They won't."
"Ja, well…they better not," Tiny said, and retreated into his courtyard before reappearing with a small bottle of whiskey.
"How about a smoke?" Louis asked, and slipped the bottle into his pocket.
"What? And get my business burned down when Madubele finds out?" Tiny waved the boy away. "Make tracks."
"He won't find out."
"If he does? You going to make him pay compensation like the captain did for Anton? You lucky I gave you anything. Now get moving before someone sees you."
"The captain's gone to the other side," Louis repeated. "There's no one to see us."
Tiny ended the conversation by closing the gate in Louis's face. The boy unscrewed the whiskey bottle, took a long swallow, then raised his free hand to the sky with his palm held open. Another swig from the bottle and Louis's clear voice graced the empty lot and the night sky.
He sang "Werk in My Gees Van God," "Breathe in Me Breath of God," a well-known Afrikaans hymn. The tune was the source of uncomfortable memories and even now Emmanuel could recall the words: Blend all my soul in Thine, until this earthly part of me glows with thy fire divine.
Was Louis able to distinguish between the whiskey fire in his belly and the divine fire of the Holy Spirit? The back gate to the liquor store swung open and Tiny pushed his face out.
"Keep it for church, Pretorius. You're spoiling the mood."
Louis raised the bottle in a salute, then sidled off in the direction of the coloured houses and the Sports Club where the overnighting white families were camped. What was he going to do there? Give a sermon? Or find a dark corner to do a little of the devil's work?
The kaffir path was a gold mine of information and Emmanuel sensed that at least part of the answer to the captain's murder lurked out here in the shadows of the town.
The main street was in darkness, as was the dirt road running to The Protea Guesthouse. He passed the police sedan, its locked boot home to the filthy suit and the captain's marked calendar. Tomorrow he'd find a proper home for the sensitive items. The Security Branch could jimmy a boot lock with no effort.
The door to his room was ajar and the light was on. He stepped inside. Piet and Dickie lounged on either side of the bed. Clothes and papers were dumped onto the floor.
Piet yawned and lit a fresh cigarette.
"You always pack this lightly, Cooper?"
"A hangover from the army," Emmanuel said. "You need to borrow a clean tie, or was it starched underwear you were after?"
"Your fondness for old soldiers?" Dickie asked. "Is that a hangover also?"
Emmanuel pulled up a chair and sat down. "I confess. I got to the rank of major by bending over for all the Allied generals. What else do you want to know?"
"We didn't come to ask questions," Piet said. "We came to tell you something."
"I'm listening."
"In the next day or two"—Piet spoke through a curtain of smoke—"we're going to know everything about you, Cooper. What you drink. Who you're fucking. Where you buy those sissy ties. We'll know it all."
"I drink tea white, no sugar. Whiskey neat. Water when I'm thirsty. I haven't fucked anyone since my wife ran back to England seven months ago, and I get my sissy ties from Belmont Menswear on Market Street. Ask for Susie. She'll help you find the extra-large sizes."
"It's good you have a sense of humor," Piet said. "You'll need it."
"When you take the credit for any arrests? Or when you dump a bad result on me?"
Piet's smile was a slash cut into his acne-scarred face. "Either way, you and your boyfriend van Niekerk are going to regret trying to grab a piece of our investigation."
"I thought the two of you came to my room because you wanted to be friends. You won't be bunking with me tonight, then?"
Dickie flushed red. "No wonder your wife left you."
"You're the one who came to my room uninvited," Emmanuel said. "Have a good time looking through my underclothes, Dick?"
Dickie leapt to his feet.
"Sit down," Piet instructed him. "I have to tell Cooper a few things."
"Threaten away," Emmanuel said. It was getting late and he'd had enough of the Security Branch.
"Seven AM tomorrow morning we will go to King's farm. You will show us over the hut. You will then investigate the Peeping Tom story. All other leads are our territory."
"There's only two of you," Emmanuel noted.
"No," Piet corrected him. "The local guys, Hepple, Shabalala and Uys will make up the rest of our team."
Emmanuel had no trouble interpreting the information. The Security Branch was officially shutting him out of the case.
"Nice to see some people still make house calls," he said when Piet and Dickie squeezed their giant frames through the doorway.
Piet stopped and flicked his lit cigarette butt into the garden. "Let me tell you how this will end, Cooper. If you work against us, I will find you out and then Dickie here will beat the English snot out of you. That's a promise."
Emmanuel closed the door on the Security Branch. His breath was tight in his chest. He resisted the urge to gather his scattered clothes, throw them into his bag, and head back to his flat in Jo'burg. He was in Jacob's Rest on Major van Niekerk's orders. The choice to leave wasn't his to make.
"Fuck them up." It was the sergeant major with some gentle late-night advice. "Go in hard. Take no prisoners."
Emmanuel looked up at the ceiling. He'd hoped he'd heard the last of the Scotsman and his deranged pronouncements out on the road.
"Take the tire iron. Give them a taste of steel."
Emmanuel touched the lump on his skull. His head ached, but not enough to bring on a delusional episode. He emptied five white pills into the palm of his hand and chased them down with water. He lay back down. The voice would go away as soon as the medication took effect.
"Use the element of surprise." The Scotsman continued his barrage. "Get them before they get you, soldier."
"It's peacetime." He didn't bother answering out loud. He knew the sergeant major would hear him fine. "Killing people isn't legal anymore."
"What are you going to do, then?" The sergeant major was at a loss now that brute force wasn't an option.
"Figure it out," Emmanuel said. "Find the killer."
"Hmm…" The prospect of a peaceful solution threw the Scotsman off balance. "How are you going to do that?"
"Don't know yet."
"Do you have a plan?"
"Not yet."
"I see…" The sergeant major's voice drained away into the darkness.
The pattern on the ceiling changed when the wind moved the tree outside the window. Figure it out? That was easy to say, but what did he have? A couple of coloured girls passing as white, a father and son who played with cheap whores, and a wily white boy with a taste for whiskey and dagga. Big news in a little town, but no match for the solid evidence he'd let slip away from him at the hut. And who'd left the note with King's name on it in the dead of night? The killer or someone trying to help the investigation?
"You have the calendar." The sergeant major fought his way past the flow of medication.
True, he had the calendar. But how was he going to get across the border without drawing the attention of Piet and his gorilla?
"Sleep," the sergeant major instructed in a slurred voice. "I'll keep the dogs at bay for you."
Darkness folded in and Emmanuel floated down to a blackened barn smoldering in twilight. The sergeant major sat in front of the ruin surrounded by a dozen soldiers in torn and bloodied uniforms. One of the soldiers turned to Emmanuel. His face was reduced to lacerated flesh and smashed bone.
"All eyes to me," the sergeant major ordered. "Gather round, lads, and let's talk about drinking and fucking. And women and children and home. Our man Cooper needs a kip."
The soldier with the smashed face laughed. The troops pressed close around the sergeant major. Emmanuel closed his eyes and fell asleep.
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
Chapter 9
|
Emmanuel eased the Packard into the space next to the Security Branch Chevrolet at 6:55 the next morning. The police station appeared small and abandoned in the morning light. Piet wound his car window down and leaned out.
"Change of plan, Cooper. Follow us." He gave the command and Dickie flicked the engine on. "We'll make a stop at the black location first, then go to Pretorius's hut."
"Whatever you say, Lieutenant."
Dickie and Piet swung a right at the Standard Hotel and headed west on the main road. Emmanuel turned in behind them and pressed the accelerator.
He couldn't get a handle on why the Security Branch was heading to a black settlement outside a small country town. Not a single clue led in that direction.
They peeled off onto a pitted dirt road and minutes later entered the black location, a haphazard planting of cinder-block houses and mud huts on a dusty span surrounded by veldt. Children in Sunday clothes played hopscotch in front of a dilapidated church with a rusted tin roof.
The Chevrolet pulled to a stop near the children and Piet waved a boy over. It was Butana, the little witness from the crime scene.
"Shabalala"—Piet raised his voice to a near shout so the kaffir boy understood—"go get Constable Shabalala. Understand?"
"Yes, baas." Butana raised the volume of his voice so the Dutchman understood, then slipped off his too big shoes and took off down the dirt road that bisected the location. The other children followed behind, happy for an excuse to put some distance between themselves and the white men in the big black automobiles.
Emmanuel got out of the Packard and scoped the scene. It was a clear spring day. Fallow cornfields ran from the edge of a grassed area to a stream swollen with night rain. Beyond that, a lush carpet of new grass and wildflowers spread out beneath a blue sky and a roll of white clouds.
Breathtaking, Emmanuel thought. But you can't eat scenery.
He turned his attention to the irregular grid of dwellings. They were ramshackle constructions put together with whatever was at hand. A corrugated iron roof patched with flour sacks to keep out the rain. A fifty-five-gallon drum rolled into a doorway to keep out the draft. It was spring, but the memory of a hard winter lingered over the native houses.
The young and fit could move to E'goli, the City of Gold, Johannesburg, where even a black man had the chance to become rich. Or they could stay in the location with their families and remain poor. Most chose the city.
The church door opened and a wizened pastor with watery eyes peered out. Emmanuel lifted his hat in greeting and received a wary nod in return. From down the dirt lane came the sound of children's voices.
Constable Shabalala hurried toward the cars, followed by a long train of children. The black policeman was in his Sunday clothes: a graying white shirt, black trousers, and a corduroy jacket with leather patches at the elbows. The bottom seam of his trousers had been let out to their full length, one inch too short to cover his socks and boots. Perhaps the captain's hand-me-downs.
He approached the Security Branch car with his hat in his hand. He knew that Afrikaners and most whites set great store by a show of respect. Piet pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket.
"N'kosi Duma," Piet said. "Where is he?"
Shabalala spread his palms out in an apologetic gesture. "That man, he is not here. He is at the native reserve. He will be home maybe tomorrow."
"Christ above." Piet lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the clean spring air. "How far is it, this reserve?"
"Before baas King's farm. One hour and a half on my bicycle."
Piet had a quick discussion with Dickie, who was hunkered down behind the wheel.
"Get in," Piet told Shabalala. "We'll go and get him."
Emmanuel made his way over, determined to wedge himself into the situation somehow. He felt the beat of his heart. Piet knew whom to ask for. How the hell did they know a man named N'kosi Duma lived on a location outside of Jacob's Rest?
"Constable Shabalala can ride with me," Emmanuel said. "I've got enough fuel."
"He's with us," Piet said coolly. "Your job is to show us the hut."
"The reserve is between here and the hut." Emmanuel knew he was pushing his luck but kept going. "Should we call in there first?"
"The hut," Piet said.
"It's a hunting camp," Dickie said after they'd examined the captain's clean little space. "Only an English detective from the city would think it was anything else."
"A waste of time, just like I thought," Piet muttered. "Let's move on."
Emmanuel didn't show them the hidden safe.
They ducked out through the hole in the tall stick fence and rejoined Shabalala, who waited patiently between the cars. Piet motioned Dickie into the black Chevrolet and turned to Emmanuel.
"You will go back to town," Piet said with a glimmer of pleasure in his pebble eyes. "The Peeping Tom story is your area of investigation. Remember?"
"It's Sunday. I don't think there's much chance to make inroads there."
"You're a religious man, aren't you? Here's your chance to get to the church service in time. That's what you wanted, isn't it?"
"Amen," Emmanuel said, and approached Shabalala, who'd stepped back to allow the Dutchmen some room. The Peeping Tom story was all he had to keep him in Jacob's Rest and close to the main game. He had to follow that trail and do it with a smile.
"The coloured church," he said to Shabalala. "Where is it?"
"You must go past the old Jew's store. The ma'coloutini church is at the end of that road."
"Let's roll." It was Dickie, chomping at the bit like a racing hippo out for the derby day sweepstakes.
Shabalala hesitated. "You will be at the station this afternoon, Detective Sergeant."
It was a request, not a question.
"I'll be there," Emmanuel said, and Dickie gunned the engine. The chassis on the Security Branch Chevrolet dipped a half foot closer to the ground when Shabalala got into the car. There was enough collective muscle in the vehicle to pound a steel girder into shape.
Piet leaned his head out the window. "Go first," he instructed. "We'll follow you out."
Emmanuel did as he was told. The Security Branch needed to see him run off with his tail between his legs. It gave them pleasure. It wasn't hard to hand them what they wanted. He got in the Packard and drove back to town.
Emmanuel made a sweep of the police files and hit the letter Z with nothing. No files under P for pervert, or Peeping Tom. No files at all for any of the women in the old Jew's shop or for Zweigman himself. There was no written evidence the molestation case ever existed.
He pulled out files at random. Cow theft. A stabbing. Damage to property. The usual small town complaints. He searched for Donny Rooke and found him—charged with the manufacture and importation of banned items. The photos of the girls were signed into evidence, but not the camera.
Was it possible the coloured women's complaints weren't taken seriously enough to write up? Or had the files been lifted? Donny Rooke's stolen camera proved the captain wasn't above confiscating evidence when it suited him.
The Security Branch and the National Party machine wanted a respected white policeman struck down in the line of duty. They didn't want complications to that story. Under the new race laws, everything was black or white. Gray had ceased to exist.
Physical intimidation, theft and the possible importation of pornographic items—Captain Pretorius may have appeared to be a straightforward Afrikaner, but something more complicated lurked beneath the surface.
The small stone church overflowed with worshippers. Families, starched and pinned in their Sunday best, spilled out onto the front stairs that led to the open wooden doors. The captain's premature death was good for business.
An organ wheezed "Closer My God to Thee," and the coloured families stood to sing the final hymn. Twin girls in matching polka-dot dresses broke free of their plump mother's embrace and ran into the churchyard. They threw themselves down beside a flower bed and peered into the foliage where Harry, the old soldier, was curled around the stem of a daisy bush, fast asleep.
Emmanuel leaned against the wall between the church and the street and watched the Sunday service let out.
Every color from fresh milk to burnt sugar was on show. There was enough direct evidence in the churchyard to refute the idea that blood mixing was unnatural. Plenty of people managed to do it just fine.
A clutch of wide-hipped matrons in flowered dresses and Sunday hats brought pots of food to a table set up in the shade of a large gum tree. Men in dark suits and polished shoes milled around waiting for the signal to pounce on the food.
At the bottom of the stairs Tiny and Theo kept company with two respectable coloured women. Emmanuel needed someone to get him into the community and introduce him around. A white man hanging off the edge of a mixed-race gathering had an unsavory feel. He also had to show the Security Branch something to convince them he was hard at work on the pervert lead now that the station files had yielded nothing.
"Tiny." He put his hand out in greeting, aware of the murmur of the congregation around them.
"Detective." The coloured man was all scrubbed up. Any trace of last night's debauchery had disappeared. "This is a surprise. What can I do for you?"
The liquor merchant was ill at ease, his handshake a quick brush of the fingers. The crowd thinned as people moved back to assess the situation.
"Sorry to disturb you on a Sunday, Tiny. I need to reinterview all the women who filed complaints about the Peeping Tom." He took off his hat in a friendly gesture. "I was hoping you could give me a hand."
"Um…" Tiny hesitated. It didn't seem right, talking about a degenerate on a potluck Sunday when all the good families were gathered around.
"I won't talk to them now," Emmanuel reassured him. "I need a list of names, that's all."
"Well…"
"There were four of them." The tight-girdled woman next to Tiny spoke up. She was fair skinned, with two blobs of rouge painted high on her cheekbones. "Tottie and Davida, who work for the old Jew. Della, the pastor's daughter, and Mary, Anton's little sister."
"Detective, this here is my wife, Bettina." Tiny fell into line. "And this here is my daughter, Vera."
While Tiny and Theo were up late with the whores, the women in the family stayed safe at home working the hot comb. Both mother and daughter were starched and neat with hair that hung in a lifeless curtain to the shoulder. Burn marks, now a faint red, marked the skin along their hairlines—battle scars earned in the war against the kink.
"Are all the women still in town?" Emmanuel asked.
"Tottie is there by the steps…"
Honeypot Tottie was surrounded by a swarm of suitors. She wore a tailored green and white dress with a neckline cut just low enough to produce un-Christian thoughts. The girl was ice cream on a hot day.
"Della is there next to her father." Tiny's daughter, Vera, pointed to a long, skinny girl with breasts a giant would have trouble getting his hand around. The pastor's daughter was plain in the face but all souped up under the hood.
"Davida lives with Granny Mariah, but she's with her mother at Mr. King's lodge today and Mary is over there, helping serve the food." Mrs. Hanson indicated a pixie-sized teenager working the tight space between two hefty matrons. Mary was halfway across the bridge between childhood and adulthood.
The women were different from each other, and distinct from the crowd in their own ways. There was Tottie, the all-round beauty and bringer of wet dreams; Della, the generously endowed pastor's daughter; and Mary, the pocket-sized woman-child. That left Davida, whose only distinction, as far as Emmanuel could tell, was the fact that she didn't stand out in any way. You had to get close to her to see anything of interest.
Now that he had the women's names, it was time to chase up the garage fire story. Anton the mechanic was absent from the gathering.
"Anton not a churchgoer?" Emmanuel said.
"We're all churchgoers, Detective," Tiny's wife said primly. "This is a righteous town, not like Durban and Jo'burg."
The round-heeled women from the liquor store were missing in action.
"Drinking, dagga smoking, loose women, and loose morals." He looked at Theo meaningfully for a moment. "I'm glad Jacob's Rest doesn't have that kind of thing, Mrs. Hanson."
"You want to see Anton, Detective?" Theo asked, anxious for the conversation to move on. "He's in the church. Come, I'll show you."
"Thanks for your help." Emmanuel tipped his hat to the straitlaced pair and followed Theo through the crowd and into the church. Anton was inside, stacking hymnbooks. The stained-glass windows cast a jigsaw of colors onto the stone floor.
The mechanic looked up.
"Got you working Sundays, Detective?"
"Every day until the case is closed."
"How's it going?"
"Slowly," Emmanuel said, then waited while Theo left the church. "I need information about the captain and his family."
Anton emptied the last pew of books. "Can't say I can help. The Dutchmen keep to themselves, the black men keep to themselves, and we do too."
"What about the fire? How did you and the captain arrange compensation?"
There was a pause as the lanky coloured man placed the pile of books next to the pulpit. "How'd you know about that?" he asked.
"I've got big ears," Emmanuel said. "Tell me about the fire."
Anton shook his head. "I don't want to get the Pretorius boys off side. Without the captain to control them, anything could happen."
"Does King know about the fire?"
"He's one of my investors," Anton said. "He knows everything."
"Good. If I have to, I'll tell the Pretorius boys that King let the story out. King is too big for them to mess with, isn't he?"
"He is," the mechanic agreed, then got a cloth from a cupboard and began wiping down the wooden lectern with a vigorous hand. He worked for a minute in silence. Emmanuel let him get to the story in his own time.
"I used to work at the Pretorius garage," Anton said. "Five years. Not bad work, but Erich is a hothead, always on about something or other. One day, Dlamini, a native who owns three buses, got me to do some work out at the black location and it got me thinking maybe I could go it alone, you know?"
Emmanuel nodded. He could see where the story was headed.
"I talked to a few people. King, the old Jew and Granny Mariah put up the seed money and I was on my way. Things went good for a while. The Pretorius garage kept the white trade and the holidaymakers moving through town." Anton worked the dust rag over the wooden pews. "I kept the black and coloured trade. It was a fair split, seeing the Dutchmen own most of the cars."
"What happened?"
"King's nephew was visiting and his roadster needed new spark plugs. He brought the car in to me and that started it off."
"A red sports car with white leather interior?" Emmanuel asked.
"The very one," Anton replied. "Well, you can imagine the fuss in a town this size. An actual Jaguar XK120. White, black, coloured, they all piled into my shop for a look. I was excited myself. A car like that doesn't come around every day."
"You forgot," Emmanuel said.
"That's right." The coloured mechanic managed a smile. "I forgot it was a white man's car and off limits. Didn't think about it until the old Jew came pounding on my door that night."
"How does he fit in?"
"He saw the whole thing," Anton said. "He saw Erich pour the petrol, light the match and walk away. It was Zweigman who went to the police station the next morning to file a witness statement. Wouldn't be talked out of it by anyone, not even his wife."
For someone trying to hide out in a small town, Zweigman managed to attract a lot of attention.
"Did you try to talk him out of filing the statement?"
"I was scared my house would be firebombed next," the mechanic said. "I wanted King to handle it."
"Did he?"
"He didn't have to. Captain Pretorius himself came to see me in the morning and told me Erich would pay for the rebuilding of the garage and for the replacement of my lost stock."
"In exchange for what? Getting Zweigman to withdraw his statement?"
The mechanic flushed. "It's not possible to live here and be on the wrong side of the Pretorius boys, Detective. I asked the old Jew to withdraw the statement like the captain asked. He wasn't happy, but he did it."
"How long ago was this?"
"Four months."
"Did Erich pay you the whole amount in cash?" Where would anyone, with the exception of King, get that kind of money?
"Half up front, the rest due next week."
"How much?" Emmanuel asked.
"One hundred and fifty pounds still owing." Anton balled the cleaning rag and threw it into the corner with a hard click of his tongue. "Not that I'll see a penny of it now the captain has passed. There's no papers, no nothing, to prove Erich owes me a thing."
"No criminal record to connect him with the fire and no more debt," Emmanuel said. Hotheaded Erich was now a person of interest to the investigation. "How did Erich feel about paying the money?"
"He was furious." Anton sat down in a cleaned pew. "Marcus, the old mechanic who works at the garage, said the captain and Erich had a real head-to-head about it. Erich thought his pa was siding with the natives instead of supporting the family."
That piece of information didn't surprise Emmanuel. The Pretorius brothers were princes of Jacob's Rest, who took their father's protection for granted. It must have stunned Erich to find he'd overstepped the line from privileged Afrikaner to criminal.
"Why do you think the captain made Erich pay?"
"The old Jew," Anton said. "He was one hundred percent certain he saw Erich start the fire and he was ready to swear to it in a law court. Said he'd even swear on the New Testament Bible. It took me an hour of begging to make him go to the police station and withdraw the statement."
The captain was levelheaded enough to see that paying the money was the best option. It wouldn't do for Frikkie van Brandenburg's grandson to be held in a place of confinement with the detritus of European civilization. Even though it was likely that a handpicked jury of whites would decide in favor of Erich, the purebred Afrikaner, over a Jew. Captain Pretorius, it seems, was an expert at keeping things off the record and out of public view.
"The next payment is due?" Emmanuel asked.
"This Tuesday."
"You going to ask for it?"
Anton got to his feet. "You believe a coloured man can walk into a Dutchman's place and demand his money? You really believe that, Detective?"
Emmanuel looked at the floor, embarrassed by the raw emotion in Anton's voice. The mechanic didn't have a hope of getting the money unless a white man, one more powerful than Erich Pretorius, made the approach. Both he and Anton knew the simple truth.
The church door opened a fraction and Mary the woman-child peeked in.
"Anton?" Her lips clamped shut and she stood like a gazelle caught in a hunter's spotlight.
"What is it?" Anton asked.
"Granny Mariah's curry…" she said, then withdrew her head and disappeared from sight.
Anton forced a smile. "That's my sister Mary. I think she wanted to say Granny Mariah's curry is going fast. It's a popular dish at potluck Sunday."
"She was one of the victims in the molestation case?"
"Ja." The mechanic rubbed a finger along the edge of a pew. "That's why she's like you see her now. Frightened of men she don't know."
"Who interviewed her?"
"Lieutenant Uys, then Captain Pretorius." Emmanuel stepped into the aisle and moved toward the front door.
"Was Mary interviewed at the police station or at home?" he asked.
"Both." Anton followed behind. "Why? Is the case being looked into again?"
"I'm looking into it," he said.
"Good." This time the mechanic's smile was real. "It never sat right with us that nothing came of the complaints."
"Something about the case doesn't sit right with me, either," Emmanuel said, thinking of the absent police files and Paul Pretorius's dismissive attitude toward the idea that any member of his chosen race would cross the color line in search of thrills.
Anton pushed the door open and allowed Emmanuel to exit first. Outside, the potluck lunch was in full swing. The smell of mealie bread and curry flavored the air. Most of the families sat on the grass with plates of food spread out in front of them or stood in the skirt of shade cast by the gum trees. The matrons had begun to serve themselves from the depleted bowls on the long table.
"Think there's any of Granny Mariah's curry left?" Emmanuel asked. The look of powerlessness on Anton's face when he talked about the money was still with him.
"Hope so." Anton waved a hand toward the serving table. "Would you like a plate of food, Detective? You don't have to. I'm sure the Dutch church has its own potluck, it's just…I thought maybe…"
"I'll take a plate," Emmanuel said. Lunch with Hansie and the Pretorius brothers would be as much fun as the time the field medic dug a bullet out of his shoulder with a penknife. Besides, the Security Branch's insistence that he follow up the molestation case meant he'd be spending a lot of time going in and out of coloured homes. This was a good chance for them to see him and get used to his presence.
The crowd stilled while Anton and Emmanuel approached the food table. A mother smacked her daughter on the hand to stop her talking, and the congregation kept a wary eye on his progress.
Emmanuel kept his posture relaxed. A white detective from the city was never going to be the most popular person at a nonwhite potluck Sunday lunch. Anton handed him an enamel plate edged in blue. Emmanuel walked along the table and, army mess style, received heaped spoonfuls of potato salad, roast chicken, lentils and spinach from the matrons, all of whom kept their attention on the serving plate.
The last of the matrons looked directly at him. He nodded a greeting at the woman, whose light green eyes shone like beacons in her dark face. Her wavy gray hair, pulled back into an untidy bun, was untouched by the hot comb.
"You investigating one of our people for the captain's murder, Detective?" There was nothing in the matron's manner to indicate any deference to the fact that she was a coloured woman talking to a white man in authority. The churchyard went quiet.
Emmanuel kept eye contact and smiled. "I'm here for some of Granny Mariah's curry," he said. "Any left?"
"Hmm…" She reached under the serving table and produced a silver pot. "Lucky for you we saved some for Anton."
The formidable old lady split the curry between the two plates, and the crowd started talking again.
"Thanks," Emmanuel said, and turned to face the picnicking congregation.
"Best we eat over there," Anton said, and they made their way to a red gate and set their plates on a stone wall. They were as far away from the congregation as they could get without actually leaving the churchyard.
Emmanuel pointed to the dark-skinned matron who was busy tidying the serving table. "Who's the woman with the cat's eyes?"
"Granny Mariah." Anton laughed. "You almost got her to smile with that curry comment. That would have been one for the books."
"Why's that?"
"Well…" The coloured man heaped his fork with yellow rice. "Granny doesn't have much time for men. Doesn't matter what color. We all a bunch of fools so far as she's concerned."
"I got that feeling," Emmanuel said, and dug into the food. They ate in silence until the plates were half empty.
Anton wiped his mouth. "You want to know what's really going on, Granny Mariah's the one to talk to. She knows everything. That's another reason men hold their tongues around her."
Emmanuel recalled Tiny and Theo's late-night antics. "Does she have anything on you?" he asked.
"Just the usual stuff." The gold filling in Anton's front tooth flashed bright when he smiled. "Nothing that would shock an ex-soldier or a detective investigating a murder."
"I don't know," Emmanuel said. "What passes for the usual stuff in Jacob's Rest?"
"I'm not about to confess my sins to the police. No offense, Detective Sergeant."
"That's wise," Emmanuel said. Harry, the World War I veteran, crawled out from under the daisy bush and grabbed at the plate of food set out for him. He shoveled handfuls of rice into his mouth, barely chewing the food.
"Harry eats every two or three days," Anton said. "He won't touch anything in between. Nobody knows why."
He's in the trenches, Emmanuel thought, starving until the next ration trickles down from the supply line. Harry's body was back in South Africa, but a part of his mind was still knee-deep in European mud. Emmanuel knew that feeling.
"Anyone here work at the post office?" he asked Anton as Harry cleaned the plate in four quick licks.
"Miss Byrd." The mechanic indicated the church steps. "She's the one in the hat."
Several women on the stairs wore hats, but Emmanuel spotted Miss Byrd easily. The hat Anton referred to was designed to draw all eyes to its glorious layers of purple felt and puffed feathers. Miss Byrd's Sunday crown transformed her from a sparrow into a strutting peacock.
"What does she do at the post office?"
"Sorts the mail," Anton said. "She also serves behind the nonwhites counter now the whites have their own separate window."
Emmanuel finished his lunch and wiped his mouth and hands clean with his handkerchief. Miss Byrd was perfect for what he needed.
"I'd like an introduction," he said to Anton.
The town was deep in a Sunday-afternoon slump. All the shops were closed, the streets empty of human traffic. A stray dog limped across Piet Retief Street and onto a kaffir path running beside Pretorius Farm Supply. Emmanuel's footsteps were loud on the pavement. He peered into Kloppers shoe store. Hard-wearing farmer's boots and snub-nosed school shoes clustered around a pair of red stilettos with diamantés glued to the heel. The strappy red shoes sat at the center of the display like a glowing heart. The order for the red shoes must have been made while fantasy images of dancing and champagne blocked out the dusty reality of life in Jacob's Rest.
The Security Branch Chevrolet was parked in front of the police station with its doors locked and windows rolled up. A sharp-faced man with clipped sideburns sat on the stoep and stared across the empty main street. His tie was loosened, his shirtsleeves rolled up past the elbow to reveal pink strips of sunburned flesh. Lieutenant Uys was back in town after his holiday in Mozambique.
"Lieutenant Uys?" Emmanuel held his hand out. "Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper, Marshal Square CID."
"Lieutenant Sarel Uys." The lieutenant got to his feet for the formal introductions and Emmanuel felt the brief crush of sinewy fingers around his hand. Sarel Uys barely scraped the minimum height required to join the force, which explained the "show of force" handshake.
"You've heard?" Emmanuel asked.
"About a half hour ago." The lieutenant slumped back down in his chair. "Your friends broke the news."
Emmanuel ignored the reference to the Security Branch. Deep furrows of discontent ran from the corner of Sarel's mouth to his jawline.
"Did you know the captain well, Lieutenant?" he asked.
Sarel grunted. "The only one who knew the captain was that native."
"Constable Shabalala?"
"That's him." Sarel looked like he'd sucked a crateful of lemons for breakfast. "He and the captain were tight."
Sandwiched between the giant forms of Captain Pretorius and Constable Shabalala, the wiry little lieutenant was number three at the Jacob's Rest police station. It seemed that fact cut deeper than the captain's murder.
"Have you been stationed here long?" Emmanuel continued with the informal fact gathering.
"Two years. I was at Scarborough before."
"That's quite a change," Emmanuel said. Scarborough was a prime post. Policemen fought hard to get into the wealthy white enclave and then, if they were smart enough, they made some influential friends to ensure they only left Scarborough to retire someplace sunny. A transfer to Jacob's Rest smelled of involuntary exile. He'd get someone at district headquarters to dig up the dirt on Lieutenant Uys's transfer to the cattle yard.
"That's why I spend my holidays in Mozambique or Durban," he said. "I prefer the ocean to the countryside." Sarel Uys smiled and showed a row of teeth the size of dried baby corn kernels. Everything about the man was small and hard.
"Most people in town go to Mozambique a couple of times a year, don't they?"
"Everyone but the natives," Sarel said. "They don't like the water."
The blacks' dislike of water was a tired belief that ceased to apply the moment whites needed their clothes washed or their gardens watered.
"Did Captain Pretorius go often?" Emmanuel asked.
"A couple of times a year."
"With the family or by himself?"
The lieutenant was suddenly curious. "You think maybe someone from over there did it?"
"Maybe. Do you know if Captain Pretorius ever went to LM for business?"
"Ask the native," the lieutenant threw back. "He'll tell you if he has a mind to."
"You've been here two years," Emmanuel continued. It was getting harder to maintain a friendly tone with this man. "Surely you got to know Captain Pretorius a little?"
"This murder is typical of the captain." Sarel shook his head in disbelief. "I tell you, it's typical of the way he treated me."
Emmanuel had trouble following the logic. "How so?"
"He got himself killed while I was away on holiday so I didn't get to find the body or call in the detectives. My one chance to get back to Scarborough and he makes sure I'm not here to take it."
"Captain Pretorius didn't plan on getting murdered," Emmanuel said.
"He knew everything that went on in this town. He must have known he was in danger. I could have helped him if he'd just told me what was going on." The lieutenant's slender fingers rubbed a bald spot into the material of his trousers.
Perhaps Sarel Uys needed a permanent holiday from the force instead of six days in Mozambique.
"He never asked for my help." Uys stared across the quiet street. "I could have been his right-hand man if he'd given me the chance."
The bitter tone had changed to longing. Uys had never left the playground or outgrown the desire to be close to the most popular and athletic student. The captain had denied him the small pleasure of living in his reflected glory.
"I've heard you helped the captain with a lot of cases. You both worked the molester case, didn't you?"
"Oh, that." The little man was dismissive. "Catching a man who interferes with coloured women doesn't get you noticed with the higher-ups, believe me."
Emmanuel leaned a shoulder against the wall and thought of Tiny and Theo out on the veldt with a loaded gun and itchy fingers. They'd taken the law into their own hands because the law didn't give a damn what happened to their women.
"Captain Pretorius didn't care about promotion," Sarel went on. "He was happy here with 'his people,' as he called them. He didn't have any plans to move up. Not like me."
Emmanuel doubted Lieutenant Uys was moving anywhere but sideways and eventually out of the force. He'd end his days warming a bar stool and complaining about his missed chances.
"Did the investigation run for a long time?" Emmanuel asked.
"Maybe two months or so. There were times I couldn't get through a week without hearing some coloured woman complaining about being followed or being touched up."
Emmanuel thought of Mary, the woman-child, darting away from the church door like a startled springbok. Who had put the fear of men into her? The Peeping Tom or Lieutenant Uys?
"You filed all the interviews?"
"In one big fat folder. Under U for unsolved," Sarel said with satisfaction.
The file wasn't under U or any other letter. The files were no longer "absent," they'd been taken. Sarel had no idea the file was missing, but even if he'd noticed, he'd have let it ride: there was no glory in hunting up a file concerning a nonwhite problem. The new laws were set to make old attitudes worse. Nonwhite cases were already at the bottom of the pile. That's why the Security Branch was so pleased to off-load the molester case onto him. Only grunt cops with too much time and too few brains dirtied their hands exclusively with nonwhite cases.
Emmanuel pushed himself from the wall. Why would someone take the files unless there was something in them worth hiding?
He left Uys to his bitter musings. The filing cabinet needed to be searched again and then he'd move on to Constable Shabalala and see what shards of information he could extract from the black man.
Emmanuel entered the front office. A dog-eared paper folder lay on Hansie's desk. The folder was dark blue and not like any of those in the police station's filing cabinet. It was not like anything he'd seen at Marshal CID, either. A pale yellow snakelike S was hand-drawn on the front—a Security Branch file. Emmanuel checked the front door and the side door leading to the cells. He couldn't lock either without drawing attention to himself, so he moved quickly.
He unbuttoned the fastener: inside the folder was a stack of mimeographed papers stamped along the top with the bright red warning "Highly Confidential." The word "Communist" was repeated on every page above lists of names neatly drawn into two columns underneath.
A pamphlet with the optimistic title "A New Dawn for South Africa" was clipped to the front of a hazy black-and-white graduation photo. The face of a young black man wearing thick-rimmed glasses was circled in red. At the bottom of the photo was the school's name, "Fort Bennington College."
Emmanuel knew the school by reputation. It was an Anglican mission school famous for turning out the black academic elite. The first black lawyer to open his own law firm, the first black doctor to run an all-black practice, the first black dentist had all come out of the school. Fort Bennington College educated blacks to rule the country, not just carry a bucket for the white man. Afrikaners and conservative Englishmen hated the place with a passion.
A cough from the direction of the cells forced Emmanuel to close the file and rebutton the fastener. The folder was proof that Piet and Dickie were the attack dogs of a powerful political force with vast intelligence-gathering capabilities. His hands shook as he repositioned the blue folder and moved to the filing cabinet, where he checked under the letter U and found nothing.
The door to the cells opened. It was Piet with his shirtsleeves rolled up and a cigarette hanging from the side of his puffy lips. The Security Branch officer undid the fastener on the blue folder and slid a piece of paper into the middle.
"Have fun at the coloured church?" Piet asked, and took a deep draw on his cigarette.
"Not much," Emmanuel said.
"Shame." Piet grinned. "Van Niekerk won't like to hear his number one boy has come home empty-handed."
Piet blew a series of smoke rings into the air and Emmanuel's heartbeat spiked. The Security Branch had found something. N'kosi Duma had given them something good. Piet could hardly contain his glee.
"Is Constable Shabalala around?" Emmanuel asked. There was nothing to gain from going up against the Security Branch in a cocksure mood. He had to sidestep them and find out as much as he could from other sources.
"Out the back," Piet said. "You can come through, but be quick about it."
Emmanuel walked through to the police station yard and saw Dickie standing by an open cell door. A gaunt black man, whom he assumed was Duma, cowered against the hard metal bars.
"Don't worry…" Dickie spoke to the terrified miner in a grotesque parody of motherly concern. "I'm sure your comrades will understand why you did it."
"Dickie." Piet encouraged his partner to move his tank-sized body farther into the cell. The black man flinched and held his arms over his head in a protective gesture. Dark bruises marked Duma's skinny arms and a low animal whimper came from deep in the terrified man's throat. The Security Branch always got what they wanted: one way or another.
"Keep moving," Piet ordered. "Your business is outside."
Two steaming cups of tea rested on the small table by the back door. Emmanuel exited and found Shabalala seated by the edge of a small fire that burned in the outdoor hearth. Piet slammed the back door shut.
"Detective Sergeant." Shabalala stood up to greet him.
Emmanuel shook the black man's hand and they sat down.
"What happened in there?" he asked in Zulu.
"I have been outside," Shabalala answered.
"What do you think happened?" Emmanuel pushed a little harder. Unlike Sarel Uys and Hansie Hepple, the black policeman showed a real aptitude for the finer details of police work. Constable Shabalala needed to know that nothing he said could be used against him by the Security Branch later.
The black policeman checked the back door to make sure it was still shut. "The two men, they want to know if Duma has seen a piece of paper with"—he paused to retrieve the unfamiliar word—"Communist writing on it when he worked in the mines."
"Did they get an answer from him?"
"Those two did not get an answer from Duma," Shabalala said with a trace of contempt. "It was the shambok that got the answer."
Emmanuel took a breath and looked deep into the fire. The liberal use of the rawhide whip, the shambok, readily explained the bruises on the miner's arms. Hard questioning was one of the things that made the Security Branch "special."
"What did Duma say?"
"I did not hear," Shabalala said. "I could not listen anymore."
This time Emmanuel didn't push. The sound of a man being broken during interrogation was enough to turn the strongest stomach. Shabalala had walked away and Emmanuel couldn't blame him.
"Did they find out anything about the captain's murder?"
"No," Shabalala said. "They wanted only to know about the writing."
If a link, however tenuous, was proved between a Communist and the murder of an Afrikaner police captain, Piet and Dickie were set for a smooth ride to Pretoria and a personal meeting with the prime minister of the Union. After the ministerial handshake they'd get fast-tracked promotions and an even bigger shambok to wield.
It seemed the Security Branch was in the middle of an investigation that somehow tied in with Captain Pretorius's murder. Piet Lapping was no fool. He was in Jacob's Rest because something in his confidential folder drew him to the town with the promise of netting a genuine Communist revolutionary.
"Are all the police files for this station kept inside?" Emmanuel steered away from the dark swamp of torture and political conspiracy that Piet and Dickie waded through for a living. The Security Branch could continue chasing Communist agitators. He'd play his hunch that the murder was tied to one of the many secrets Captain Pretorius kept.
"Sometimes," Shabalala said, "Captain took the files home to read. He did this many times."
"He had an office at home?" Emmanuel asked. Why hadn't he thought of that when he was at the house?
"No office," the black constable said. "But there is a room in the house where Captain Pretorius spent much time."
"How would a person get into such a room?" Emmanuel wondered aloud.
"A person must first ask the missus. If she says yes, then he can go into the room and see things for himself."
"If the missus says no?"
The black man hesitated, then said very clearly, "The man must tell me and I will get the key to the room from the old one who works there at the house. She will open this room for the person."
Emmanuel let his breath out slowly.
"I will ask the missus," he said, and left it there.
They sat side by side and watched the flames without speaking. The bond, still fragile, held firm. The Security Branch had a file crammed with enemies of the state but he had the inside track on the captain's shadow life.
The back door opened and Piet stepped out into the backyard with his cup of tea. His pebble eyes had an unnatural sheen to them, as if he'd swallowed a witch's brew and found that what killed other men made him strong.
"We're through." Piet spoke directly to Shabalala. "You can take him back to the location but make sure he doesn't go anywhere until our investigation has finished. Understand?"
"Yes, Lieutenant." Shabalala moved quickly toward the back door. When he drew level with Piet, the Security Branch agent put his hand out and patted his arm.
"Good tea," he said with a grin. "Your mother trained you well, hey."
"Dankie," Shabalala replied in Afrikaans, then stepped into the station without looking at him.
Emmanuel marveled at Piet's ability to mix an afternoon of torture with harmless banter. It didn't matter that Shabalala and Duma knew each other and might even be related. When pockmarked Piet looked at Constable Samuel Shabalala, he didn't see an individual; he saw a black face ready to do his bidding without question.
The Security Branch lieutenant sipped his tea and took in the dusty yard with a sigh.
"I like the country," he announced. "It's peaceful."
"You thinking of moving out here?" Emmanuel said, and made for the back door. He didn't have the stomach to listen to Piet waxing lyrical about the beauty of the land.
"Not yet." Piet wasn't letting anything penetrate his bucolic reverie. "When all the bad guys are behind bars and South Africa is safe, I'll move to a small farm with a view of the mountains."
"Home sweet home." Emmanuel pulled the back door open and walked into the police station. Captain Pretorius had lived the dream. He was a powerful white man on a small farm with a view of the mountains. He'd ended up with a bullet to the head.
"Woza. Get up, Duma, and I will take you home." It was Shabalala trying to coax the traumatized black man out of the cell. The injured miner was still pressed up against the bars with his arms over his head.
Shabalala put both his hands out like a parent encouraging a toddler to walk for the first time.
"Woza," Shabalala repeated quietly. "Come. I will take you to your mother."
Duma struggled to his feet and steadied himself against the bars of the cell, then limped painfully toward the door. The miner's left leg was half an inch shorter than the right and twisted at an odd angle. Even before the Security Branch abuse, Duma must have been a pitiful sight.
Emmanuel felt a flash of heat across his chest. Not the familiar surge of adrenaline that accompanied a break in the case but a white-hot bolt of rage. The captain was shot by an able-bodied man with keen eyesight, a steady hand, and two feet planted firmly on the ground. Duma didn't come close to presenting a match with the killer.
Shabalala held the crippled miner's hand and led him out of the cell toward the back door. The front door and the front offices were for whites only. Emmanuel's rage turned to discomfort as he stepped back to allow the black men passage. Shabalala and his charge would spend the next hour dragging themselves across the veldt until they reached the location five miles north of town.
"Stay by the front door to the hospital," Emmanuel said quickly before sanity returned and he changed his mind. "I will come and pick you up."
"We will be there," Shabalala said.
Emmanuel walked through the front office and out onto the veranda, where Dickie and Sarel were watching a line of three cars driving down the main street. The sour-faced lieutenant looked like a ventriloquist's dummy next to his hefty companion.
"Weekenders coming back into SA from Mozambique." Sarel Uys indicated the country-style traffic jam. "They'll make a dash for home before the sun sets."
Dickie drank his tea with noisy enjoyment. Like pockmarked Piet, he had the look of a man with the wind at his back and the road rising up to meet him. What had Duma said? The Security Branch had released him, so they weren't looking to hang the captain's murder on him. What, then? He could try to find out, but Duma wasn't in a fit state to talk to anyone. The connection between a Communist plot and Captain Pretorius's murder remained a mystery for the moment.
"Any luck with the pervert?" Dickie called out with great cheer.
"Not yet," Emmanuel said, and turned in the direction of The Protea Guesthouse, where the Packard sedan was parked. Justice be damned. He'd find the killer first, not to serve justice, but to see the look on Dickie's face when he shoved the result down his throat.
Duma was slumped in the backseat of the Packard with his eyes rolled back in his head. A low whimpering was the only sound he made. Emmanuel pulled the car to a stop in front of the church and glanced at Shabalala, who was nursing the half-crazed man.
"How was he before this afternoon?" he asked Shabalala.
The black constable shrugged. "Since the rock crushed his leg, he has been bad. Now he is worse."
A group of older black women approached the car. They were cautious and fearful in their movement, not knowing what to expect once the car doors opened. The women stopped short when Shabalala got out and approached them. There was the quiet murmur of Zulu before a pencil-thin woman in a yellow dress gave a shout and ran for the Packard. Emmanuel stilled as the woman hauled the miner into a sitting position in the backseat and wailed out loud. The sound was an ocean of sorrows.
Shabalala pulled the woman away and lifted Duma from the car. The women followed the black policeman who carried the cripple down the narrow dirt road toward home.
The skinny woman's cries carried back to him and Emmanuel switched on the engine to drown out the sound. Five years of soldiering and four years picking over the remains of the dead and still the sound of a woman's grief made his heart ache.
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
Chapter 10
|
He came up to the big white house early the next morning and found Mrs. Pretorius planting seedlings in the garden. A wide straw hat covered her head and her delicate hands were protected from the dirt by sturdy cotton gloves.
"Detective Cooper." Her blue eyes were hopeful as she greeted him.
"No news yet," Emmanuel said in response to the look. "I've come to ask you if I could see the spare room where Captain Pretorius slept."
"On Wednesdays," she told him with the diamond-hard look he'd seen at their first encounter. "Willem only slept there on fishing nights."
"Forgive me. I know you and the captain were dedicated to each other. Everyone in town commented on it. Even the nonwhites."
"We tried to set an example. We hoped others would see us and follow the path to a true Christian union."
"A good marriage is a rare thing," Emmanuel said. Mrs. Pretorius might believe herself to be half of a Christian partnership, but the sin of pride was heavy on her.
"You're married, Detective Cooper?"
Emmanuel touched a finger to the spot where his wedding ring had been. Any mention of a divorce was sure to set her against him and get the door to the spare room slammed in his face. Mrs. Pretorius wouldn't countenance a morally flawed outsider touching her saintly husband's belongings.
"I lost my wife almost seven months ago." He told the truth to the degree he could and hoped she'd fill in the blanks.
"God has his reasons," she said.
She touched his shoulder. Even when cast down into the valley of grief, Mrs. Pretorius had to be the one to shine her light onto the world.
"I'm trying to understand," Emmanuel said. He was thinking of the captain and the homemade safe cunningly hidden from view. He was starting to see into the dark places in Willem Pretorius that his wife's goodness failed to illuminate.
"You may go into the room," she said with a nod. His confusion, which she took for spiritual struggle, branded him worthy of her help. "Come with me."
Emmanuel followed Mrs. Pretorius across the garden and noticed the imprint of her boots in the freshly turned soil. A work boot with deep straight grooves almost identical to the prints left at the crime scene. He remembered what Shabalala told him: that the Pretorius men and Mrs. Pretorius had won many medals for target shooting.
"You'll have to get Aggie to open up for you. Willem used the room for work and kept it locked when he wasn't at home."
The words nudged something in her and she began to cry with a soft mewling sound. Her face collapsed with grief. If the fragile blond woman had killed her husband, she regretted it now.
She pulled off her gardening gloves and wiped away the tears. "Why would anyone hurt my Willem? He was a good man…a good man…"
Emmanuel waited until the sobs lessened in intensity.
"I'm going to find out who did this to your husband and I am going to find out why."
"Good." The widow took a deep breath and got herself under control. "I want to see justice done. I want to see whoever did this hang."
The diamond-hard look was back and Emmanuel knew Mrs. Pretorius meant every word. She planned to be at the prison when the hatch opened and the killer took the long drop to the other side.
"Aggie—" Mrs. Pretorius called out into the large house. "Aggie. Come."
They waited in silence while the ancient black woman shuffled across the entrance hall to the front door. Her ample body was bent in on itself after a lifetime of domestic work; her hands were gnarled from years of washing laundry and scrubbing floors for the ideal Afrikaner family. Emmanuel doubted she did much of anything anymore.
"Aggie." The volume of Mrs. Pretorius's voice dropped only a fraction. The maid was deaf into the bargain. "You must take Detective Cooper to the spare room the captain used. Open up for him and lock it when he's finished."
The ancient maid motioned Emmanuel in without speaking. What was her position in the household? Hansie said the old woman was no good anymore but that the captain wouldn't let her go. Most Afrikaners and Englishmen had a black servant who was almost part of the family. Almost.
"You must have tea with me after, Detective Cooper," Mrs. Pretorius said. "Get Aggie to show you to the back veranda."
"Thank you."
After tea with Mrs. Pretorius, he was going to see Erich. The doors to the Pretorius family home were going to shut in his face after he questioned the volatile third son about the fire at Anton's garage and the fight he'd had with his father over compensation. He had to get information while he could.
Aggie stopped in front of a closed door and rummaged in her apron pocket. It took her an age to fit the key into the lock and turn it with her arthritic hands. She pushed the door open and motioned him in without a word. Emmanuel wondered if the black maid was mute as well as deaf.
He viewed the room before he disturbed the contents. It was a large, pleasant space with a neatly made bed, bedside table, dark wooden wardrobe, and writing desk positioned by a window that looked out over the front garden. It was another example of the clean, ordered spaces Captain Pretorius specialized in.
Emmanuel moved to the bedside table and pulled the drawer open. It contained a black calfskin-covered Bible and nothing else. He picked up the Bible and examined the well-thumbed pages. The good book wasn't just for show. Captain Pretorius read the words of the Lord on a regular basis. There was no Bible at the stone hut, however—just a camera stolen from a sniveling pervert and an envelope with something worth pissing on a man for.
Emmanuel turned the Bible upside down and gave it a shake to see if anything fell out.
"Ayy…" It was the maid, Aggie, scandalized by his rough treatment of The Word. Seems she wasn't mute or blind, just reluctant to use her dwindling energy stores on talking. Emmanuel gently closed the Bible and turned it the right way up. With the old maid looking on, he flipped through the pages as if he were a preacher seeking pearls of wisdom for an upcoming sermon.
Emmanuel put the Bible back into the drawer. There was nothing in the book but the word of the Almighty. The bed was made up with a plaid blanket over clean yellow sheets. He lifted the pillow. A pair of blue cotton pajamas nestled underneath. The maid gave another soft gasp and Emmanuel replaced the pillow exactly as he'd found it. The room already had the feel of a shrine, with everything in it destined to remain untouched until the captain returned on Judgment Day.
The wardrobe was a handsome piece of furniture with double doors and mother-of-pearl handles. Two ironed police uniforms on wooden hangers hung side by side. Two pairs of shiny brown boots glowed with polish and waited for the captain's size-13 feet to fill them.
"Patience," Emmanuel told himself. The room was locked for a reason. He opened the writing desk's top drawer and his heart began to pound. Inside, a fat police file lay next to a slim hardcover book. He undid the tie and flicked the file open. The first page was an incident report filed in August '51 in which the luscious Tottie James was subjected to a gasping noise coming from outside her bedroom window. No surprises there. Emmanuel guessed that most men made gasping noises when she was in the immediate vicinity.
He flipped to the end of the reports and failed to find a humorous angle in the description of Della, the pastor's daughter, who had been grabbed from behind in her own room and held facedown on the floor while the perpetrator ground his hips against her backside. Peeping Tom implied distance, a furtive individual coveting the desired object from afar. Physical assault resulting in bruising and a cracked rib was another matter entirely.
Tonight he'd read the file in detail and try to get some idea of the man who committed the offenses and why the captain and his lieutenant failed to find and apprehend him.
Emmanuel put the police file down and examined the hardcover book in the drawer. Small enough to fit into a jacket pocket, the slim volume was a high-class item. He felt the smooth leather cover. The title intrigued him: Celestial Pleasures.
He opened the hand-cut pages at random and skimmed a couple of lines: Plum Blossom stretched out on the plush sedan, her only covering a red and gold tassel that hung from her exquisite neck. Wisps of opium smoke escaped her parted lips and rose up into the air.
Curiosity got the better of him and he skipped to the middle. There was a line drawing of a naked Oriental girl with downcast eyes kneeling on a cushion. Classy, Emmanuel thought, and edging on literary, but a stroke book nonetheless. He slipped it into his pocket.
"Hmmm…" Aggie was alerting him to the fact she'd seen him take the book.
Emmanuel kept his back turned. He was leaving the Pretorius house with the police file and the book no matter how outraged the deaf servant might be.
The rest of the drawers revealed the captain's love of starched undershirts, plaid pajamas and olive drab socks. He moved back to the bed, checked underneath it, and found not a speck of dust.
Emmanuel approached the generously padded black maid, who was resting her weight against the doorjamb. It was nine-thirty in the morning and she looked ready for a nap.
"What do you do in the house?" he shouted in Zulu. Holding a conversation in English was likely to send the maid into a coma.
"Clean," she replied in her native language. "And keep the key."
"What key?"
She rummaged in her apron pocket and pulled out the key to the spare room. She displayed it in the palm of her hand but didn't say anything.
"You keep the key to this room?"
The maid nodded.
"How did the captain get in?"
"He asked for the key."
Aggie the trusted servant was the gatekeeper, but how did Willem Pretorius gain access when he came home late from fishing?
"Did he wake you and get the key when he came home after dark?"
"No. He said where I must leave the key."
"You left the key on a table," Emmanuel said. "Somewhere like that?"
"He said where I must leave the key," she repeated, and waved him out of the room impatiently. She was ready to move on.
Emmanuel stepped into the corridor.
"Where did you leave the key?" he asked.
"In the flowerpot, behind the sugar sack, in the teapot. Wherever he said I must put it."
"Really?" Emmanuel marveled at the captain's relentless need for secrecy. He acted like an undercover policeman whose real identity was his greatest liability.
"Why do you think he changed the place for the key?" he asked while Aggie pushed the key into the lock with her gnarled hands.
The worn-out old woman gave a shrug that implied she'd long since given up trying to understand the mysterious ways of the white man.
"The baas says, 'Put it in the teapot,' I put it in the teapot."
That was the end of the matter as far as the maid was concerned. A servant didn't question the master or try to make sense of why the missus needed the shirts hung on the line a certain way.
"Aggie!" Mrs. Pretorius called from the back veranda. "Aggie?"
The black maid didn't hear the missus. She was busy turning the key in the lock with as much speed as her brittle fingers allowed.
"I will go outside and have tea with the nkosikati," Emmanuel said, and walked through to the back of the house. If he waited for Aggie it would be lunchtime when they finally made it outside.
He stopped by the display cabinet running along the side of the large sitting room and picked up the picture of Frikkie van Brandenburg and his family. He was used to seeing the dour clergyman, the Afrikaner oracle, as an older man with a furrowed brow and fire in his eyes but even in his youth the unsmiling Frikkie looked ready to set the world to rights.
What would van Brandenburg make of his daughter's family? Dagga-smoking Louis, Erich the arsonist and Willem the deceiver were all tied to him by blood and marriage. Would Frikkie be proud or would he doubt, for just a moment, that the Afrikaner nation was set on a higher plane than the rest of humanity?
Emmanuel replaced the photograph and continued toward the kitchen, where a younger black maid set up the tea service on a silver tray.
"Sawubona…" He said good morning to the girl and stepped onto the vine-covered veranda. Mrs. Pretorius waved him over to a table overlooking a small vegetable garden. A garden boy, a squat man in his thirties, weeded the rows and turned the earth with a hand fork.
Emmanuel sat down opposite Mrs. Pretorius and placed the police file on the ground. He kept the book in his pocket. The young black maid came out with the tea service and set it down on the table before she disappeared back into the house.
"How do you take your tea, Detective Cooper?" Mrs. Pretorius asked.
"White, no sugar," he replied, and studied the late Willem Pretorius's wife. She was beautiful in a refined way. There were no rough edges to her despite the steel he sensed within.
"You have a lovely garden," Emmanuel said, and accepted his tea. This would be his first and only chance to get a bead on the captain's home life.
"My father was a gardener. He believed that with God's help and hard work, it was possible to create Eden here on earth."
"I thought your father was a minister. An exceptionally well-known one."
She made a weak attempt to wave off the reference to her famous father. "Pa didn't pay any attention to the stories written about him. He liked better to work in his orchard than to speak to a hall full of people."
Like many powerful men, it appeared that Frikkie van Brandenburg had greatness thrust upon him.
"He was a homebody?" Emmanuel asked with a smile. The newly written history books made a point of mentioning van Brandenburg's zeal in spreading the message of white superiority and redemption. No meeting was too small or insignificant. No town too isolated to escape the gospel according to Frikkie. The great prophet traveled to them all.
"He was home when he could be. We knew how important his work was for our country. Four of my brothers followed in his steps and became ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church. My two sisters are married to ministers."
"You're the odd one out."
"Not at all," Mrs. Pretorius answered. "Willem could easily have become a minister of the church. He had the strength for it but he wasn't called."
"I see," Emmanuel said. Perhaps the captain realized early in life that the path of moral rectitude wasn't for him. Beating a small-time pornographer with your bare fists was not on the list of pastoral duties. And of course, Celestial Pleasures wasn't required reading at the seminary.
"Louis is going to be a minister," Mrs. Pretorius said with satisfaction. "This was his first year at theological college."
Emmanuel didn't show his surprise. After witnessing Louis hassling Tiny for booze and smokes, it was hard to imagine him leading a congregation or dispensing Christian wisdom.
"What's he doing home?" It wasn't holiday time. All the schools and colleges were still in full swing. The summer break would begin in late December.
Mrs. Pretorius sipped her tea and considered her answer. It took her a few moments to find the correct words. "Louis wants to be part of our people's new covenant with God, but he's too young to be away from home. The separation didn't suit him."
Emmanuel waited. He'd seen a flash of doubt escape through a chink in the widow's holy armor. Louis was her weak spot and there was something more to his early return from theological college.
"My father took a break from his studies, you know. When he returned to the church he was stronger than before, more able to lead the people on the Way. Louis will spend time on Johannes's farm, get to know the land and the concerns of the volk…he'll go back to theological college and when he comes out he'll be a lion of God."
There was absolute belief in her eyes.
"Maybe Louis will be a farmer or a businessman like his brothers?"
"No. Not Louis." Her smile formed icicles on the rim of her teacup. "He's not like the others. Even as a child he had a gift for gentleness and compassion. He is destined for greater things than what can be found in this town."
Mrs. Pretorius dreamed big, he'd give her that. Her sons ruled Jacob's Rest but her ambitions were grander. She wanted a leader of the people who could make the nation into a holy land. The boy's total unsuitability for the job was a fact that escaped her completely.
"Did the captain share your dreams for Louis?"
"They're not my dreams, Detective Cooper. They're Louis's." This time Emmanuel felt the chill from her smile in his bones. She was certainly van Brandenburg's daughter. To go against her wishes was to go against the wishes of God.
It was no wonder Willem Pretorius and his son traveled the kaffir paths in the dark. A woman with fire in her eyes and ice in her heart ruled their home.
Emmanuel drank his tea. Mrs. Pretorius's home was a showcase for her vision of how Afrikaner life should be. If he proved a link between the captain and the importation of banned materials, she'd burn the house down to purify it.
"Willem loved this place and these people." The widow's blue eyes glistened with tears as she looked over the back fence to the veldt. "He was like a native that way. The land was all. I know you English laugh at our belief that we are the white tribe of Africa, but in Willem's case it was true. He was an African man."
The captain certainly had an affinity with the Africans. His closeness with Shabalala was the source of Sarel Uys's bitterness and maybe the lieutenant wasn't the only one uncomfortable with Willem Pretorius's relationship with the black constable.
"Do you think some whites resented the captain's good relationship with the natives?" he asked. He was thinking of Uys and the fact he'd just returned from Mozambique. Did the hard-faced little man park his car across the border, swim the width of the river then back again after committing the crime? He would have had two days to lie low and get a suntan before showing up at Jacob's Rest again.
"Willem didn't mix with them socially," Mrs. Pretorius said firmly. "He knew all of them because he grew up here. As police captain he had to talk with them and spend time among them. People understood that."
"Of course." Emmanuel set his teacup down. Willem Pretorius did more than police the native community. He'd chosen Shabalala and Aggie the arthritic old maid to keep his secrets safe. That implied trust.
The new segregation laws formalized the long-standing idea that the Black tribe and the White tribe were created by God to be separate and to develop along separate lines. Each tribe had its own natural sphere. Only degenerates crossed over into unnatural territory. In the eyes of some whites, Captain Pretorius might have done just that: crossed the line into the black world.
"He's not like other Dutchmen." That was what Shabalala said on the first day of the investigation. Maybe that difference got the captain killed.
"Thank you for the tea, Mrs. Pretorius." Emmanuel retrieved the molester files from the floor. He had to see Erich and then he'd dig deeper into the "white man gone to black" lead.
"I'll be in contact if there are any developments." He held his hand out, aware that this was the last time he'd have physical contact with her. After he interviewed her son, Mrs. Pretorius would freeze him out.
She shook his hand and stared at the police file. "What's that?" she asked.
"A file on the molestation case involving some of the coloured women in town." He told her the truth. She didn't like dirt in her house and he wanted to gauge her reaction to the news that Willem Pretorius had brought darkness into her world.
"Oh…" She took a half step back. "Was it in the spare room?"
"Yes," Emmanuel said. "The case was unsolved and probably due for a review to see if any fresh leads came up."
Her brow wrinkled with distaste. "It was most likely one of them. One of their own who did it."
"Did Captain Pretorius say that?"
"He didn't have to." She regained her composure and moved on to a topic she knew a lot about, the weakness of others. "The man who committed these acts still has strong primitive traits. We Europeans are further away from the animal state than the blacks or the coloureds."
Emmanuel wanted to tell her that every night he dreamed of the terrible things that civilized Europeans did to each other with guns, knives and firebombs.
He slipped the file under his arm. Every hour of every day someone somewhere in South Africa commented on the strange behavior of those outside their own racial group. The Indians, the blacks, the coloureds and the whites pointed the finger at each other with equal enthusiasm.
"Strange…" Mrs. Pretorius's voice was soft. "Willem didn't say anything about working on the case. He said it was closed."
The widow looked at the bulging file with a hungry curiosity. It was as if she wanted a taste of the shadow world her husband had worked to contain.
"Did he discuss his cases with you?"
"Not all of them," she said. "But this one was special. It upset him to work on it. There were nights he couldn't sleep for worrying about the town's morality."
"Unsolved cases can do that to a policeman."
"That's why…" Her focus on the file was complete. "I don't understand why he didn't say he was looking it over again. He…Willem told me everything."
The presence of the file in her house without her knowledge cracked the foundation of Mrs. Pretorius's fantasy world. The certainty of her true Christian union with the captain had been called into question.
"I'm sure he didn't want to trouble you." Emmanuel gave her an easy way out. She'd face a real test of her beliefs if he found the captain's business in Mozambique was criminal.
"Of course." She smiled at her own doubts. "Willem was a natural protector. He lived to keep our family and the town safe."
The tears returned as the word "lived" left her mouth. It was the past tense. Every conversation she held about her husband was now a conversation about the past. Mrs. Pretorius's sorrow was genuine but he had a feeling that if she'd caught her beloved Willem in an immoral act she'd have pulled the trigger herself.
"I'm sorry…" she said. "I'm keeping you from your investigation. You could be using this time to hunt down the killer and bring him to justice."
"I do have some people to talk to. I'll let you know if there's a breakthrough."
Grief and vengeance would be Mrs. Pretorius's constant companions for the next few months.
Emmanuel left through the garden. He needed to see Erich Pretorius soon, but first he was going to ask Miss Byrd, the coloured postal clerk, for his second favor in as many days.
"Where is the nkosana?" Emmanuel asked the black teenager manning the pumps at the Pretorius garage.
"Office." The stick-legged boy pointed to a room adjoining the mechanical repair shop.
Emmanuel knocked twice on the door labeled "Pretorius Pty. Ltd." and waited for an answer.
"Whozit?"
"Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper."
"What is it?"
Emmanuel pushed the door open. If he got through this encounter without a fist to the chin, he'd consider himself lucky. The third Pretorius son was in a filthy mood and the interview hadn't even begun.
"What do you want?" Erich looked up from a stack of paperwork on his desk.
"The polite thing to say is 'How can I help you?'" Emmanuel said. Spare parts and piles of old invoices littered the office. Unlike his mother, Erich Pretorius was comfortable with disarray.
"You want something?" Erich pushed the unfinished paperwork away from him and sat back in his chair.
"This must be a good business," Emmanuel said, and studied a farm supply calendar highlighting the latest in tractor technology. "A corner position on the main street. You've done well."
"I do okay. What's it to you?"
"I'm just saying that business must be good, especially now you're the only garage in town."
Erich leaned across the desk with a smile that promised a world of pain. "Who's been whispering in your ear? That coloured?"
"King was the one who explained to me that your next payment is due here." Emmanuel returned to the calendar and tapped a finger to Tuesday.
"What payment?" Erich sneered.
"Fire insurance," Emmanuel said. "Or don't you need to pay it now your father is dead?"
Erich was on his feet in a half second. "What the fuck has the payment got to do with my pa dying?"
"He was the only one keeping the deal on the level." Emmanuel felt the heat coming off Erich. He was about to combust with rage. "With your pa out of the way, there's no proof you owe Anton a thing."
"You think I'd kill my own father for a hundred and fifty pounds?"
Emmanuel stood his ground as the Afrikaner brick rounded the desk and moved toward him.
"People have been killed for less, Erich." He kept his tone amiable and calculated how fast he could make a dash for the door if need be.
"Get out." Erich was close enough to spray spit. "Get out of my place, you piece of English shit."
Emmanuel didn't move. Erich was loud, but he was used to being second in command. He was the muscle of the Pretorius household, not the brains, and he'd fold as soon as it was clear who was boss.
"Where were you the night your father was murdered?" Emmanuel asked calmly.
"I don't have to answer that," Erich said.
"Yes, you do." Emmanuel stared the furious man down and showed no fear in the face of hopeless odds. The Afrikaner was big enough to break his jaw with one swat.
"I was with my family." Erich broke off eye contact. "My wife and our maid can vouch for me. We were all up at eleven PM with little Willem. Croup."
Emmanuel pulled out his notebook. "I'll have to talk to your wife and verify your alibi."
"Fine by me," Erich said without hesitation. "She's just around the corner. Moira's Hairstyles is her store."
Moira's Hairstyles, set on the main street, was another slice of Jacob's Rest belonging to the Pretorius clan. The captain's family didn't need the pro-white segregation laws to give them status. They were doing fine without the official leg up given to whites under the new government.
Emmanuel sized up the man-mountain standing in front of him. He might not have killed his father, but was he angry enough about the debt to arrange a severe form of punishment for him?
"How do you feel about paying all that money to a coloured?"
"I got no choice." Erich swung back to his desk with a grim expression. "Pa said if I don't pay, that prick Englishman Elliot King will have the town crawling with Indian lawyers."
Emmanuel made a sound of understanding. Indian lawyers were universally acknowledged as being on par with the Jews when it came to brains and ambition.
Erich opened a drawer and retrieved a bulging paper bag.
"One hundred and fifty pounds." He let the bag fall onto the desktop. A bundle of twenty-pound notes slid out. "I'd shove it up your arse but I have to deliver it to the old Jew this evening."
"What was your father thinking?" Emmanuel mused out loud. "Making you give money to a Jew to pay to a coloured?"
Erich kept his temper in check. "You're clever," he stated. "But not clever enough to make me confess to a murder I didn't commit. I never in my life raised a hand to my father."
"You were angry with him, weren't you?"
"Of course," Erich said. "Ask the boys out there. They'll tell you we fought about the payments. If the old Jew stuck to his story, I'd have to hire a lawyer to defend me. Then I'd have to close up shop for the trial, which could last weeks and weeks. In the end it was a hell of a lot cheaper to pay the money and be done."
Interesting that the captain hadn't argued the right and wrong of his son's actions with him. He'd gotten to Erich through the hip pocket. It was about the money. Mrs. Pretorius lived in a world governed by a moral code, but her departed husband had been a pragmatist.
"Does your ma know about the fire?" Emmanuel asked. He was curious to see the degree to which Willem Pretorius kept his wife's fantasy world intact.
"No." Erich blushed, an odd sight in a man so big. "Pa thought it was best if we didn't bother her with…um, details."
"I see."
Willem Pretorius had succeeded at concealing many of the, um, details, but somewhere along the line he failed to safeguard all his secrets. Someone knew about the stone hut. Someone knew about the stash of goods in the safe. The theft of the evidence was not random. The wooden club proved that the perpetrator was prepared to commit violence to keep one step ahead of the law.
While Captain Pretorius had kept watch on the people of Jacob's Rest, someone had watched him as well.
"Is that all?" Erich crammed the money back into the bag, an activity that clearly incensed him.
Emmanuel decided to take a run at his "white man gone to black" lead. He had to follow every avenue in the hope that one of them led him back to the stolen evidence.
"Your father was tight with the nonwhites, wasn't he?"
"Pa grew up with the kaffirs but he wasn't a kaffirboetie if that's what you're getting at."
Kaffirboetie, brother to the kaffir, was one of the most potent insults to sling at a white man who wasn't a native welfare worker.
"Do you think any of the whites believed he was too close to the natives?"
"Maybe some of the English. You people have a hard time understanding that we don't hate the blacks: we love them. They're in and out of our homes, with our children and our old people. Blacks are family to us."
"Like Aggie?"
"Exactly. She's useless, but Pa kept her on because she's been with us since I was in nappies. Aggie was a second mother to me and my brothers."
Emmanuel didn't dispute Erich's sentiments. His feeling for the old black woman with the gnarled hands was genuine. The wheels fell off the Afrikaner love cart, though, the moment nonwhites wanted to be more than honorary members of the blessed white tribe.
"So." Emmanuel slipped his notepad into his pocket. "No problems among the whites that you can think of?"
"None," Erich said.
That brought him back to Sarel Uys. He was the one white person to exhibit real animosity toward the captain's ties to Shabalala. How much bitterness did the jealous policeman have stored in his gut?
"Thanks for your time." Emmanuel finished with the standard sign-off to an interview. "I'll call in at Moira's Hairstyles on my way back to the station."
"Do that," Erich said, and dumped the money back into the drawer.
Emmanuel closed the office door behind him. The sound of the telephone receiver lifting off the cradle filtered through. Erich was calling his commando brother at the police station to report on the questioning. The Security Branch would have an ear to the phone as well.
The police station was a no-go area for the rest of the day. He had to find another place to conduct his business, somewhere across the color line.
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
Chapter 11
|
Emmanuel stepped out of Moira's Hairstyles and headed straight onto the kaffir path. Everything had checked out. Little Willem was up with croup at eleven PM and again at two AM. The black maid, Dora, was willing to swear on the life of her own sons to that effect. Erich Pretorius might be a human flamethrower, but he was safe at home on the night of the murder.
The captain's third son was a long shot, so it was no surprise to learn that he'd had no direct physical involvement in the homicide. Evidence at the crime scene pointed to the killer's lack of physical strength. Erich was capable of pulling a loaded freight train to Durban in an afternoon. The killer had a cool head. Erich was seventy percent muscle and thirty percent combustible fuel.
Emmanuel crossed a vacant lot thick with weeds and untidy clumps of grass. It was close on lunchtime and the street was quiet when he turned a sharp right in the direction of Poppies General Store. The old Jew sat behind the long wooden counter, reading a book. The hum of sewing machines filtered out from the back room. Zweigman glanced up as he entered.
"Detective."
Emmanuel had come to ask for use of the shop telephone but he'd remembered something else.
"How did Captain Pretorius know you were a qualified doctor?" he asked. Zweigman the surgeon and Zweigman the storekeeper still seemed at odds to him. If Sister Angelina and Sister Bernadette had kept their promise, Zweigman would have remained just another Jew trading his wares in the marketplace, practically invisible.
"Knowing things was the captain's speciality," Zweigman replied drily.
There was more. Emmanuel could see it in the German's face, in the peculiar way he held his head tilted slightly to the side when he spoke. When Shabalala withheld information, Emmanuel suspected it was to protect the memory and reputation of his childhood friend. Who was Dr. Zweigman protecting?
Emmanuel wrote "time of doctor recommendation from Shabalala" onto a clean page in his notebook. When did the captain tell his black right-hand man to see Zweigman instead of Dr. Kruger if he needed help? Was it before or after the little boy was run over in front of the store? If it was before, then the captain had advance knowledge of Zweigman's true status.
"I've come to ask you for the use of your phone," Emmanuel said.
"There is a telephone at the police station for just such business." Zweigman's brown eyes burned with enough curiosity to kill six cats.
"The homicide case and the police station have been taken over by the Security Branch." Emmanuel told the truth. "I need another place to carry out my investigation."
"You are reopening the case involving the molester?"
"That and a few other things," Emmanuel said, thinking of the files lying in their safe hiding place, waiting to be read. He'd report to van Niekerk and send out feelers for new information first, though.
"If that is so…" Zweigman reached below the countertop and retrieved a weighty black telephone connected to miles of fraying cord. "I am happy to do you this favor, Detective Cooper. You may call from the back room."
The women sitting at the sewing machines looked up when they entered, this time with less trepidation. He nodded at each of the seamstresses and made sure to give Hot Tottie an extra-long pass as he followed Zweigman through to the sitting room. Focusing on the show pony was a sure way to cover up his connection with the shy brown mouse at the captain's hut.
Tottie's emerald green eyes sparkled with amusement. She was a queen and he was yet another supplicant come to lay his desire at her door.
Davida was laying out a paper pattern onto a cutting table under Lilliana Zweigman's guidance. Her head, covered by a green scarf, remained bowed. She gave no indication he'd talked to her and touched her and asked her to keep his secrets safe.
"Here." Zweigman placed the black Bakelite phone on the tea table and indicated a chair. "My wife and the ladies will come through this room to go out to the backyard in twenty minutes. Lunch break."
"I won't be that long." Emmanuel sat down and pulled the phone toward him. Zweigman left the room and Emmanuel waited until the busy hum of the sewing machines started up again. The fragile Lilliana had stopped all activity until her husband emerged unharmed from the back room. Something in the past still cast a shadow over the Jewish couple. How many people in towns and villages and cities lived with the firsthand knowledge that nothing is safe? History, written with the help of bullets and firebombs, swept away everything in its path.
He rang through to the operator and waited to be connected to district headquarters. The line was clear.
"Cooper?" Van Niekerk's voice was clipped hard. Something was going on at the office.
"Yes, sir."
"Call me back on this number in ten minutes. Local area code." The major gave the number, then cut the line without explanation. The familiar beep, beep, beep came down the line, followed by the operator's voice.
"You've been disconnected, sir. Shall I try again?"
"No. Thank you." Emmanuel hung up and checked his watch. Ten minutes gave van Niekerk just long enough to walk the two city blocks from headquarters to a public telephone box. The Security Branch had flushed the major out of his private office and onto the streets.
The white noise of the sewing machines contrasted with the jagged beat of his heart. He read over the notes he'd made at the crime scene. Was Captain Pretorius's murder the corner piece of a bigger puzzle the Security Branch was working on?
Emmanuel acknowledged his surroundings. He was in a small tearoom annexed to the back of a sweatshop operating on the dark side of the color line. The Security Branch and their heavyweight political backers occupied the power seat while he trawled through the grubby entrails of the victim's private life. A feeling of doubt came over him and he closed his eyes to think. A needle of pain pricked his eye socket.
"Jesus…" the sergeant major's voice whispered. "What if those fuckers are right and the murder was a political assassination?"
Emmanuel pushed the voice away and revisited the basic laws of homicide investigation. Most murders are the result of banal and human impulses: a robber kills for money, a husband kills for revenge, and a misfit kills for sexual release. Ordinary, sad, and confused human need lifted the hands of killers.
"The Security Branch doesn't operate in your ordinary world, laddie," the abrasive Scotsman said. "While you're sifting through underwear drawers and skiving on kaffir paths, they're shaping the map of South Africa and every country around it. You are a foot soldier and they are the general's personal aides."
Emmanuel tried to ignore the sergeant major's comments, but couldn't. There was too much truth in what he said. Why would the Security Branch go after this murder so fast and so hard if they didn't already have evidence to back up their political revolution theory?
The words "neat" and "sniper-like" in his notes caught his attention as never before. Professional assassins targeted the head and the spine. Professional assassins left no traces behind. Had he misread the crime scene by looking for personal elements where none existed?
He dialed the number van Niekerk had given him.
"Cooper?" The major was out of breath and out of sorts when he answered on the second ring.
"It's me. Why the change in telephones?"
"The Security Branch has big ears and I'm not about to give them information for free," van Niekerk replied. "Are you calling from the police station?"
"I'm using a private telephone."
"Good. What's your news?"
"The Security Branch is going hard after the Communist link. They have a confidential file with lists of Party members and their affiliates. It seems Captain Pretorius's murder is tied in to an existing investigation."
"Operation Spearhead," van Niekerk said with the casual superiority that set half the detectives who worked homicide or robbery against him. "The National Party plans to break the back of the Communist movement by arresting agents crossing into South Africa with banned writings and pamphlets. They conduct raids at illegal border crossings and hope they net a Red fish to fry up on treason charges."
"Captain Pretorius was shot along a stretch of river used by smugglers," Emmanuel said. "The Security Branch may have been watching."
"This coming Thursday they were due to hit the Watchman's Ford crossing where Captain Pretorius was found, acting on a tip-off. The Security Branch wants to salvage that operation by finding a link between the murder and a specific Communist agent they've had under surveillance."
The depth of van Niekerk's political and social connections impressed Emmanuel and gave him pause. Was there any piece of information beyond the grasp of the ambitious Dutchman?
"Is the suspected agent a black graduate of Fort Bennington College?"
"Now it's my turn to be impressed," van Niekerk replied with a trace of humor. "That fact is known to less than a hundred people in the whole of South Africa. Are you sure you don't want to join the Security Branch? They're looking for bright young men."
"I'm not interested in redrawing the map of the world with a thumbscrew and a steel pipe."
"Have they gone that far?"
"Yes." The crippled miner's bruised arms and wild eyes came to mind.
"Has any of it come your way?"
"Not yet," Emmanuel said. "But it's just a matter of time."
"What have you got on Captain Pretorius?" Van Niekerk's voice took on a new urgency.
"Nothing conclusive. I'm chasing something now that could knock the captain off his pedestal, though."
He didn't mention the stolen evidence. That wound was too fresh to open in front of van Niekerk.
"Find it," the major said. "Information on Frikkie van Brandenburg's son-in-law is the only ammunition that will stop the Security Branch in their tracks if they come after you."
"You think I'll need to fight my way out of a corner here?"
"I'm talking to you from a filthy call box on a side street. You're calling from God knows where. We're already in a corner, Cooper."
"What do I do with the dirt when I find it?" The security arrangements he'd rigged up in Jacob's Rest weren't enough to stop a Security Branch raid. He needed a second net to catch him if he fell.
"Go to the local post office. I'll telegraph through what you need in half an hour."
The hum of the sewing machines began to wind down. It was almost lunch break for Lilliana Zweigman and the seamstresses.
"I have to go," he told the major as the sound of chairs pushing back filtered into the tearoom.
"Emmanuel…"
The use of his first name held him on the line.
"Sir?"
"There's an information satchel being sent by courier to the Security Branch tomorrow morning. One of the things in it is a personal dossier on you. I can't stop it. I'm sorry."
"What does it have?" He couldn't stop himself asking the question. He needed to know.
"Everything. That's all the more reason to collect whatever dirt you can on the Pretorius family. You're going to need it regardless of who catches the killer first."
"Thank you, sir."
He hung up the phone and reached into his pocket for a handful of magic white pills. Fear joined his feeling of doubt and he wondered how his life was going to keep from flying off the narrow rails he'd painstakingly built since returning to South Africa. He swallowed the pills with a glass of water from the tearoom tap. It was too late to stop the folder and too late to withdraw from the investigation.
"Stop feeling sorry for yourself, for Christ's sake," the sergeant major said. "Get off your arse and get to work. You still have a murder to solve."
The women filed out into the back courtyard and Emmanuel made his way onto the kaffir path running toward the post office. A squadron of yellow-winged grasshoppers flew into the air at his approach and settled on curved stalks of field grass. He didn't want to think about the personal dossier but it was on his mind.
"Dark, isn't she?" the sergeant major mused aloud. "What does it say about you, Emmanuel…the fact that Davida stirs you?"
"It means nothing," he said quietly.
"Really?" The sergeant major was amused. "Because it makes me wonder if what the jury said about your mother was true after all. What do you think about that, laddie?"
Emmanuel didn't answer. The pills he had swallowed at Zweigman's would kick in soon. He shut the sergeant major out and locked the gate. Under no circumstances was he going to think about what the mad Scotsman had said.
Harry the shell-shocked soldier was sitting on the post office steps when Emmanuel emerged from the one-room building with van Niekerk's telegram safe in his pocket. It was early afternoon and the main street was bathed in shimmering springtime light. Down the road, a barrel-chested white farmer whistled a tune while his farm boys loaded his pickup truck with hessian sacks of fertilizer and seed.
"Little Captain"—Harry's voice was a rough whisper—"Little Captain…"
The jangle of medals and an insistent tugging at his sleeve let Emmanuel know that the veteran was talking to him and not a mustard gas phantom.
"I'm Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper from Jo'burg," he reminded the old soldier. "You met me at Tiny's shop. Remember?"
"Little Captain." Harry paid no attention to what he said. "Little Captain."
Emmanuel didn't correct Harry a second time. He had to get off the main street before the Security Branch got wind of his whereabouts and decided to convey their displeasure at his questioning of Erich Pretorius.
"How can I help you, Harry?" he asked.
"Tonight?" Harry's bony hand curled around his wrist and held on. "Tonight, Little Captain?"
Emmanuel looked around to gauge how much attention was coming his way. None of the people walking along the street paid any mind to the unusual sight of an addled coloured man holding on to a white man's wrist. Harry was the village madman: no one expected him to behave like a normal resident of Jacob's Rest.
"Maybe tonight." Emmanuel answered Harry's question once he'd made sense of it. "Maybe tonight. I don't know yet."
"Good, good." Harry's smile lit up his face and revealed who he was before the war: a charming light-skinned man with his thoughts in the right order. "Good, Little Captain. Good."
"Go along. I'll come tonight."
"Good, good." The old soldier dropped his hand and turned in the direction of the police station. Emmanuel touched his shoulder and spoke close to his ear.
"Don't go to the station, Harry. Captain Pretorius doesn't live there anymore."
"Home," Harry said. "Home."
Harry shuffled his way along the street like a daylight specter. Where would he be without Angie the bulldog to watch over him and without his play-white daughters? The world was an unkind place for old soldiers.
"Are you friends with Harry?"
It was Louis. He had materialized like an apparition in the spring sunshine.
"I've met him a few times," Emmanuel said.
"He's a soldier, just like you. But that doesn't make him the same as you."
"That so?"
Louis must have picked up information about his stint in the army from the brothers.
"We have to be on guard against our feelings for them," the Pretorius boy said. "They can never be our spiritual equals, which is why we must remain separate and pure."
The glow in Louis's eyes made Emmanuel uncomfortable. This curbside sermon came out of nowhere and it reminded him of the hymn Louis sang behind Tiny's liquor store.
"Was your father in the army?" A "brothers in arms" bond might explain Captain Pretorius's decision to deliver the letters to Harry and to help the old man's daughters gain white identification.
"My father didn't fight in the English war." Louis seemed a lot like his mother: soft on the outside but with a diamond-hard core. "Two of my grandfathers were commando generals in the Boer War. Our family are true volk."
The blacks had it right. Louis and his mother shared an overwhelming pride in the family's Afrikaner bloodline and a taste for spiritual superiority. If pride comes before the fall, Emmanuel thought, then Louis and his mother were due for a nosebleed dive into hell.
"You coming to collect the part for your motorbike?" Emmanuel asked. He remembered the mechanical rattle he'd heard at the stone hut before passing out. Could it have been a motorbike engine?
"It hasn't come yet," Louis said.
Dickie lumbered out onto the front porch of the police station and lit a cigarette.
"Maybe today's your lucky day," Emmanuel said. It was time to make for the kaffir path. The afternoon was slipping away and he still had to retrieve the files and read them over.
"Detective…" Louis called to him. "I almost forgot. My brothers are looking for you."
"They'll find me soon enough," Emmanuel said, and hurried by the stretch of white-owned businesses on Piet Retief Street. He had to get onto the kaffir path before drawing level with Pretorius Farm Supply, Moira's Hairstyles, and the garage. The captain's family was everywhere.
Emmanuel paused at the entrance to the path. Louis stood on the post office stairs and watched him with the intensity that his mother had used when she fixed her gaze on the police files. The teenager waved good-bye and disappeared into the building where the coffee-colored Miss Byrd and the pink-skinned Miss Donald boxed the mail by race grouping and sold stamps.
Out on the kaffir path Emmanuel thought about Louis. There must have been tension in the Pretorius household over the boy and his future. Mrs. Pretorius saw in Louis a holy prophet. A pragmatic realist like Willem Pretorius would have seen something different.
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
Chapter 12
|
Sunlight filtered through the branches of the lemon tree in the backyard of Poppies General Store and threw a patchwork of shade over the police incident reports of the attacks on the coloured girls. Six months of violence and perversity with no result.
Emmanuel checked the dates again. There were two distinct stretches of time during which the molester was active. The first was a ten-day blitz in late August when he spied through windows at women. Then, in December '51, he went on a two-week spree of increasingly bold physical assaults. Each report read darker than the last.
The perpetrator began the December stretch peeping through windows and in fourteen days had progressed to an attack involving broken ribs and deprivation of liberty. A white man found guilty of such crimes was, in the view of the courts and the public, a deviant and a traitor to his race. Paul Pretorius laughed off the idea that his father's murder was connected to an unsavory case involving nonwhite women, but a European man, especially, might be inclined to use drastic measures to keep his shameful secret hidden.
Emmanuel picked up the last report, written in Afrikaans by Captain Willem Pretorius himself.
Molestation Case Summary
28 December 1951
After re-interviewing the women concerned I believe the likelihood of an arrest remains unlikely for the following reasons.
1. None of the women is able to identify the offender, as the attacks occur at night and the victims are grabbed from behind.
2. The racial group of the offender remains unknown.
3. The offender's accent suggests he is a foreigner who may come into South Africa undetected for the purposes of attacking women outside his home territory. Our border location makes Swaziland and Mozambique the offender's most likely place of origin.
4. Due to the high likelihood that a foreign national or a vagrant camping along the border is committing the attacks, apprehension of the offender remains difficult.
5. The case files will be reopened if and when new attacks occur.
Signed,
Captain Willem Pretorius
Fast work. Two days after the last attack and Pretorius had the case summed up and the files tucked away in his private room. "If and when new attacks occur…" The captain had anticipated a cessation to the attacks despite every sign the molester was sliding into serious and compulsive criminal behavior. A week after the captain's intervention, the activity stopped. No fresh sightings. Nothing but a sweet country silence where there'd been the sound of breaking ribs the week before.
Emmanuel drummed his fingers on the incident report. A foreign national or a vagrant camping on the veldt: who could have guessed Pretorius had such a lively imagination? Putting on an accent was presumably beyond the capability of a South African–born male. The flimsy summary didn't feel right. Had the captain found the attacker and tightened the reins without laying charges?
At the back of the file was a list of suspects interviewed by the captain during his investigation. Anton Samuels, the mechanic, and Theo Hanson were both questioned twice with no result. At the end of the list was a Mr. Frederick de Sousa, a traveling salesman from Mozambique passing through Jacob's Rest with a suitcase of cheap undergarments. He was in town during two of the attacks but couldn't be tied to any others.
De Sousa was all the excuse Emmanuel needed to cross the border into Mozambique and visit the photo studio that had advertised on Captain Pretorius's calendar. He'd face off with the Security Branch in the morning and then pretend to limp off to Lorenzo Marques to continue his vice work.
Emmanuel pushed the police report away. There was no excuse for the total disregard for the job evidenced in the shoddy files. He believed in the law and the difference it made to people's lives. He got up and walked to the back of Poppies General Store.
"Mrs. Zweigman?" He stuck his head into the workroom and attracted her attention as gently as possible. "Can I talk to Davida and Tottie? It's police business."
"Please…to…" The fragile woman stumbled over the words. "Wait…"
Lilliana Zweigman disappeared into the front of the store and returned with her husband, whose hand rested on her arm.
"I need to talk to Davida and Tottie," Emmanuel said. The hum of the machines died down and an expectant silence took its place.
"I will accompany you. Davida and Tottie, come with me, please. Angie, could you take care of the counter?"
"Yes, Mr. Zweigman." Angie pushed her chair back and went to take her place at the front of the shop. The sewing machines whirred to life and the two remaining women went to work attaching sleeves to half-made cotton dresses.
Emmanuel motioned the women over to a table positioned beneath the shade of the lemon tree. He ignored the shy brown mouse. He couldn't afford to expose her and the information she had about the calendar to anyone. Zweigman stood at the back window of the store with his nose pressed against the glass. He showed an almost paternal concern for the women in his wife's care. Or was it more than that? Captain Pretorius certainly thought so.
"Sit down," Emmanuel instructed Tottie and Davida, and slid two pieces of blank paper and two pencils across the table. "I want you to draw me a map of your houses. Label the rooms. Draw the windows and doors. Mark the room where the Peeping Tom made his appearance."
"Yes, Detective." Tottie gave him a smile guaranteed to pop the buttons off a grown man's fly. The coloured beauty didn't care how many moths got burned against her flame.
Davida was bent over her paper with intense concentration. She drew the outline of a house with a small servant's room out the back.
"Detective?" Hot Tottie was thrown into confusion by an uncharacteristic lack of male attention. "Is this what you want?"
Emmanuel made sure to maintain eye contact before looking down at the map, which was hastily drawn but adequate for the task at hand.
"It's exactly what I want," he said, and smiled.
The shy brown mouse slid her finished map across the table without a word. She didn't look up once. Emmanuel placed the drawings side by side and studied them, paying particular attention to the location of the rooms where the Peeping Tom struck.
He tapped a finger to Tottie's map. "Your room is here at the back of the house?"
"It used to be." The beauty flicked a strand of dark hair over her shoulder to give a clearer view of her exposed neckline. "My daddy moved me to the front room after it happened the second time."
"Your room is here, separate from the house?" he asked Davida.
"Yes. My room is the old servant's quarters."
"Do you live with Granny Mariah?"
Her gray eyes flickered up in surprise. "Yes."
Emmanuel wanted to ask why she didn't live in the house with her grandmother but concentrated on the maps again. Both Davida's and Tottie's bedrooms were at the very back of the house, with windows facing the kaffir path. Was that a common element in all the crime scenes?
"Do either of you know the layout of Anton's house?" he asked.
"You know where the bedrooms are in Anton's house, don't you, Davida?" Tottie said, and almost purred with satisfaction when Davida blushed two shades darker.
Davida didn't rise to the bait, just pulled a piece of paper across the table and drew a quick sketch.
"Mary's bedroom is in the back." She slid Anton's house plans back over to him. "Della's bedroom is also in the back of the house."
"Does the kaffir path run close to the rear boundary of all the houses?"
"I don't know anything about the kaffir path," Tottie said. "My daddy only lets me use the main streets. You have to get Davida to answer that question for you, Detective."
Emmanuel took stock of Tottie. The curvy beauty was a spoiled little miss who liked to take a cheap shot. She'd as good as called her workmate a kaffir by implying that respectable girls, girls with a daddy to look out for them, didn't go near the native byway. Why was the shy brown mouse a target for Tottie?
"The path runs by them all," Davida said without moving her attention from the tips of her fingernails.
The connection between the rooms and their proximity to the kaffir path was too obvious to miss. How had the attacker managed to evade the captain, who policed the path and the streets most days of the week? Then a radical thought occurred to him.
"The attacker? Was he a big man like Captain Pretorius?"
"I don't know," Tottie announced with a triumphant smile. "That man didn't lay a finger on me. My daddy and my brothers made sure I was safe."
A teaspoonful of Hot Tottie went a long way. Emmanuel had enough of a taste to last a full week.
"You can go back to work," he told her. "I have a few more questions for Davida."
"You sure, Detective?"
"I don't want to embarrass you with the sordid details of the attacks. You shouldn't have to hear such unpleasantness."
"Of course," Tottie said. She looked disappointed at missing the good stuff.
He waited until she sashayed into the shop before he turned to Davida.
"Was the attacker big like Captain Pretorius?" he asked again.
"He was bigger than me but not as big as the captain."
"How can you be sure?" The connection between the captain and the molester was too strong to dismiss. Willem Pretorius traveled the kaffir paths with impunity day and night and he had the power to pull the plug on the investigation when things got too hot. Was he protecting himself all along?
"Did you know the captain well enough to be certain that he wasn't the man who grabbed you?"
"Captain Pretorius was very tall with wide shoulders. Everyone in town knew that." She moved her hands from the table to her lap so he couldn't see them. "The man who grabbed me wasn't so tall."
"You think it was a white man?"
"It was dark. I didn't see him. He had a strange accent. Like a white man from outside South Africa."
"Could he have been a Portuguese?"
"Maybe, but I don't think so."
Emmanuel noticed the old Jew still had his nose pressed hard against the back window of the store. So, Hot Tottie wasn't Zweigman's fancy. It was the shy brown mouse he had an eye for.
"You sure you're not used to being touched by one of my kind?" Emmanuel asked straight out. Maybe the gray-eyed girl was keeping his secrets and a few more besides.
She shifted in her chair but didn't look up. "Just because I don't have a daddy doesn't mean I run around."
"What about Anton? Did you run around with him?" He wanted to know if he'd been mistaken in his judgment that she was a silent and watchful woman who kept to herself.
"I saw Anton a few times but it didn't work out."
"Have you told me the truth about everything, Davida?"
"Why would I lie?"
"I don't know."
He had a perverse desire to pull her head covering off and unbutton her shapeless cotton shift so he could search for the hidden places he sensed below the surface. She glanced upward suddenly and he had to look away.
"You can go back to work." He pretended to shuffle the reports into place and then watched her disappear into the back room of the store. Was Davida hiding something or was he simply revisiting the shameful sense of power he'd felt over her outside the stone hut?
Emmanuel deviated off the path and swung past the post office before making his way to the police station's back entrance. He rested against a tree and waited for Shabalala to appear on his bicycle. It was sunset and the kaffir path was busy with blacks funneling back to the location for the night.
"They have been looking for you," the constable told him after they'd exchanged greetings.
"Are they still looking?"
"There were many phone calls from Graystown and now they are not looking for you anymore."
"Phone calls about what?"
"A man. A Communist," Shabalala said. "That is all I heard."
"And how did you hear that?" Emmanuel asked. How did a six-foot-plus black man move in and out of a Security Branch investigation without drawing attention to himself?
"Tea." Shabalala gave a straight-faced answer. "My mother. She taught me how to make good tea."
"Ahh…" The invisible black servant was etched into the white way of life. Shabalala had used that to its full advantage.
They moved along the rear property line of the houses on van Riebeeck Street and soon drew level with the captain's house. The shed door was open and the sound of contented humming drifted out onto the kaffir path.
Inside, Louis was at work on the Indian motorcycle, which was close to fully assembled. The boy's overalls were covered in grease, his leather work boots splashed with oil and dirt. Did the contents of a hymnbook get Louis humming out loud with happiness?
"That one." Emmanuel pointed back in Louis's direction once they'd passed the captain's house. "He is going to be a pastor?"
"The madam has told everyone that it is so."
"You don't see it?"
"I see only that he is different."
"I see this also," Emmanuel said, and they continued along the narrow path. The icy Mrs. Pretorius was aware that Louis was not like her other sons, but she chose to interpret this as a sign of his greatness.
"I've been thinking…" Emmanuel stayed with the Afrikaner family for a moment. "When did Captain Pretorius tell you the old Jew was a doctor?"
"Before the middle of the year," Shabalala said. "I think in April."
"Before the accident in front of the shop," Emmanuel said. "How did he know Zweigman was a doctor?"
"The captain did not tell me how he knew this. He said only that the old Jew would fix me better than Dr. Kruger."
Better. That was a value judgment. Willem Pretorius knew that Zweigman was more than your run-of-the-mill general practitioner. Clever Captain Pretorius had tabs on everyone in Jacob's Rest except the killer.
"The old Jew, where is his house?" Emmanuel asked.
"It is on the same street as the Dutchmen's church. A small brick house with a red roof and a gum tree near the gate."
They walked on in silence until they came to the Grace of God Hospital. Sister Angelina and Sister Bernadette were kicking a patched-up soccer ball across a vacant lot with a group of orphans. Dust rose in the twilight as the diminutive Irish nun dribbled the ball through the opposition defense and made a run for goal. A shout erupted from the barefoot soccer team when Sister Angelina lunged to the side and caught the ball as it sailed toward the mouth of the net. To thrive in Africa, nuns had to take and block a few shots on goal.
Emmanuel waved a greeting and he and Shabalala moved on to the grid of coloured houses where a pickup truck painted with the words "Khan's Emporium" was backed up to a wooden gate. Two Indian men loaded crates of sealed jars into the vehicle while Granny Mariah watched.
"Detective. Constable Shabalala." The steely-eyed matriarch greeted them with a brisk nod. "How's the investigation coming?"
"Still checking into things," Emmanuel said. A huge vegetable plot crowded with rows of furrowed earth ran the entire length of the backyard. To the far right of the market garden stood the one-room building that once served as the servant's quarters.
"That's Davida's room?" He pointed to the whitewashed structure hemmed in by flowering herbs and empty wood crates stacked to the windowsill.
"Yes. What's that to do with anything?" Granny asked.
Emmanuel walked over to the open gate and looked toward the small white room. There was a clear view from the kaffir path to the curtained window. He checked the locking mechanism; a piece of timber that slotted into two brackets at either side of the entry held the gate shut.
"Was this always here?"
"I had it put on after that man grabbed Davida. We had no problems once the lock was there."
Did the assailant give up indulging his compulsion when access to the women became difficult? Tottie was moved to the front of the house where her brothers and father surrounded her, and the gate to Davida's yard was locked tight.
"Did the other women who were attacked have extra security put in?"
"Oh, yes." Granny Mariah paused to direct one of the Indian men to the last crate of bottled pickles. "When it first happened back in August last, the men started patrolling the kaffir path at night, but after three weeks, not a whisper. It was like the man just disappeared, so everyone went back to their business. Then came the December troubles and we all got locks put in."
"What did the captain have to say about the patrols?"
After dark, the kaffir path was Willem Pretorius's domain. He might not have welcomed a rival patrol.
"He said fine so long as the men kept to the coloured area. They weren't allowed past the hospital or Kloppers shoe store on the other side of town."
Despite what Davida said about the size of her attacker, he couldn't let go of the niggling feeling that Willem Pretorius might be the right fit for the perpetrator. The Afrikaner man knew the kaffir paths like the back of his hand and he was used to traveling on them without arousing suspicion. He knew the women and where they lived. The patrol was no barrier to his activity. No group of mixed-race men would dare stop a white police captain for questioning.
If Willem Pretorius was involved in the attacks, that fact opened up a whole new set of possibilities regarding his death. What lawful avenue was open to a coloured man when he found a white police captain was molesting his sisters? Tiny and Theo had come after Emmanuel himself with a loaded gun.
He leaned his shoulder against the open gatepost. Candlelight flickered out from behind the curtain in Davida's room. A shadow moved past the window. Signs of a small and secret life. Just what did the shy brown mouse do when night fell?
"You checking the other girls' rooms or just Davida's?" Granny Mariah's question was hard-edged.
"I was just wondering how the attacker avoided Captain Pretorius. The captain was out here all the time, wasn't he?"
"Here? Who says he was here at my place?"
"I meant the kaffir path. Captain ran past here a couple of times a week, didn't he?"
"Sometimes he went past and sometimes he didn't. He didn't hand out a timetable."
"No, he didn't."
Emmanuel raised his hat good night and set off with Shabalala. Once the last of the house servants headed home, the path became the domain of Willem Pretorius and a handful of coloured men breaking up from a once-a-week poker game. Did the captain abuse his power and molest women he knew were unlikely to be taken seriously by the law? What option did a mixed-race man have but to pick up a gun and go after the offender in order for justice to be served?
"Hamba gashle. Go well, Shabalala," Emmanuel said, and the tall policeman swung his leg over his bicycle and steadied himself against the handlebars. He couldn't bring up his suspicions about the captain just yet.
"Salana gashle. Stay well, Detective Sergeant." The black man rode off into the failing light. Soon he was gone, leaving behind a red sunset.
Emmanuel walked on past the coloured church and shops. He moved past backyard fences locked and barred against the night, past the path that ran to The Protea Guesthouse and his room, then around the outside curve of the town that showed him civilized backyards pushing against the untamed veldt.
He kept his pace up until he reached a rickety back gate. He took out a letter he had retrieved earlier that afternoon from Miss Byrd at the post office. It was addressed to the captain, but it was actually for Harry from one of his daughters. Now living as white, she had no other way to communicate with her father without putting her new social status in jeopardy.
The ghost of Willem Pretorius breathed in Emmanuel. He walked to Harry's back door, rapped twice and slipped the Durban-postmarked letter into the old soldier's shabby room. He moved away quickly, as he knew the good captain had, and made his way back onto the path.
Darkness surrounded him. He stopped now and then to listen to the voices drifting out of back rooms. An evening prayer over dinner, an argument, a child's unsettled cry…The people of Jacob's Rest were preparing to say good-bye to another day.
At Granny Mariah's again, he leaned back against the barred gate and pictured Davida's little room surrounded by herbs and flowers. Gum leaves rustled and the wind sighed.
Off to his right a catlike footfall disturbed the undergrowth, then fell silent. Emmanuel stilled. Another footstep advanced in the dark. Something or someone was moving slowly in his direction. He eased his weight forward and the gate fell back into place with a loud click.
There was a sharp release of breath and the slither of a body in the dark. Emmanuel wheeled off the kaffir path and turned full circle as he tried to pinpoint the source of the furtive movements. The whisper of grass and leaves was the only sound. He released his breath and the night enveloped him. Under the cloak of darkness, he felt a human presence close by. Someone was out on the veldt watching.
The next day, Emmanuel walked into the police station at 9:20 AM, ready for anything after he had questioned Erich Pretorius. Instead of an ambush, he found the Security Branch policemen and commando Paul Pretorius clustered around the captain's desk. The phone rang and Piet jumped on it.
"Ja?" he said, tapping a fresh cigarette from his pack and inserting it into the corner of his mouth. Paul and Dickie leaned close to the phone. There was an electric current in the air that signaled the beginning of a big push. The Security Branch was ready to make a move.
"Don't do anything." Piet sucked the nicotine from his cigarette. "We'll be there in three hours. You will wait for us. Understood?"
The phone was slammed down and Piet swung to Dickie.
"Go to the hotel and get our bags ready. We move tonight." He turned to Paul. "You coming?"
"Wouldn't miss it for the world." The hulking soldier was primed for action, his neck and shoulder muscles knotted tight in expectation.
"Just enough for one night," Piet cautioned him. "We'll bring the package back here sometime tomorrow. Do the work under the radar."
Emmanuel pushed himself off the wall and approached them. He wanted to report in and be dismissed in quick order. The border crossing into Mozambique was only minutes away.
"Anything I can do to help?" he asked the Security Branch team.
Piet blew a plume of smoke into the air. "Where have you been?"
"Looking into the molester case. I'm following up a suspect who lives in Lorenzo Marques. An underwear salesman."
Piet's eyes narrowed and Emmanuel wondered if he'd gone too far by including the underwear comment. The Security Branch officer scrutinized him for a moment and tried to work out the angles on the Mozambique lead.
The phone rang and Piet picked it up before Dickie or Paul got a chance. Pockmarked Piet loved being in command.
"Don't do anything," Piet breathed into the phone. "Follow and observe. That's all. We will direct the operation when we arrive."
He slammed the phone down and turned his attention back to Emmanuel. His smile was an unpleasant trench dug into his irregular face.
"This Mozambique trip better be in connection with the molester case. I don't want a repeat of yesterday."
"That was a mistake." Emmanuel told Piet what he wanted to hear. "I overstepped the bounds and it won't happen again."
"Better not." Paul Pretorius moved toward him with his index finger stuck out like a sword. "You're lucky we didn't find you yesterday, my vriend."
There was a pinprick of pressure on his chest as Paul gave him a hard jab. The fact that Emmanuel would escape punishment made Paul angry.
"Go pack your things," Piet instructed calmly. "If Cooper crosses the line again, we'll deal with him in a more thorough manner. Understood?"
"Good," Paul said. The lure of a future beating was enough to placate him and get him moving toward the front door.
Piet collected the files on the desktop and handed them to Dickie. "Pack these and put petrol in the car. I'll meet you back at the hotel."
Emmanuel gave the Security Branch plenty of room to make their exit. He'd allow them an hour to clear town, then head to the border with the name of the photo studio tucked in his jacket pocket.
Piet paused at the front door and glanced over his shoulder with cold eyes. He was still bothered by the Mozambique lead and didn't like the idea of the English detective roaming over international boundaries unsupervised.
"Remember my promise?"
"The English snot beaten out of me?" Emmanuel said. "Yes, I remember."
The Security Branch team disappeared onto the street. A big Red fish was on the hook and that far outweighed the need to punish a flatfoot assigned to chase a deviant.
Emmanuel walked through to the back of the station and found Hansie and Shabalala sitting in the yard.
"Where's Lieutenant Uys?" he asked, taking a seat between the boy policeman and the Zulu constable.
"Gone," Hansie said. "He gets to ride with the others."
Exclusion from the carload of hard-knuckled men obviously upset him. Even Hansie understood that being sent outside with the kaffir while the other white men talked business marked a low point in his law enforcement career.
"Go inside," Emmanuel told Hansie. "You can sit behind the captain's desk and answer the phone."
Hansie was up and running before the sentence was finished. Evidently, he'd never been allowed to sit in the captain's chair before.
"What have they said you must do?" Emmanuel asked Shabalala in Zulu.
"Stay here. Go home when it is dark and come again tomorrow."
"I have to go to Lorenzo Marques for only one day. Can you keep that boy inside, out of trouble, and doing his job?"
"I will do what I can," Shabalala said.
"Detective Sergeant—" Hansie called out in a shrill voice. "Detective Sergeant Cooper?" Hansie was jumping from foot to foot in the back doorway.
"A messenger. He has a special envelope."
Emmanuel's stomach tightened with excitement. Could he really be this lucky? He rushed to the front office, where a dust-covered messenger waited by the captain's desk. Hansie followed close behind.
"Can I help?" Emmanuel asked.
"Envelope for Lieutenant Piet Lapping." The young man in the brown traveling overalls spoke through a tight mouth.
"Are you a courier?" Emmanuel asked, knowing full well that the Security Branch trusted no one outside the organization to relay information.
"No." The messenger's mouth became a hard line of discontent. "I'm the Security Branch."
Emmanuel understood the reason for the taciturn speech pattern. The young messenger, the cream of the police academy and hand-selected for the Security Branch, was not pleased at being chosen for the lowly task of delivering an envelope to a backwater. The value of information had not become apparent to him yet.
"Detective Sergeant Emmanuel Cooper," Emmanuel introduced himself. "You've missed Lieutenant Lapping, I'm afraid. He's out on a mission and doesn't know when he'll be back."
"They've all gone." Hansie spun a circle in the captain's chair. "They even took Lieutenant Uys with them."
"I'm happy to sign for the envelope." Emmanuel moved in on the disgruntled messenger and his package. "I'll make sure Lieutenant Lapping gets it when he gets back."
"It has to be signed over to Lieutenant Lapping. Those are my orders."
"Lieutenant Lapping has to be the one to sign for the package?"
"That's right."
"You could place it into the police mailbox at the post office," Emmanuel suggested. Miss Byrd had explained the workings of the postal service to him in great detail at their first meeting. "Only Lieutenant Lapping will be able to sign it out and he'll have to produce identification before they let him have the package."
"I don't know…" The messenger rubbed at the dust that had collected on his smooth-shaven chin when he'd turned onto a farm lane by accident, then had to double back to the main road. The motorbike tires still had fresh cow dung stuck in the treads.
"Maybe Lieutenant Lapping will be here tomorrow when they send you back with the package," Emmanuel went on. "Or maybe he'll be here the next day. I can't make any promises."
The messenger looked around the small-town police station like a doctor inspecting a plague house. He didn't want to set out before dawn and travel across the country only to be turned back again and again.
"Only Lieutenant Lapping can sign it out?"
"With identification," Emmanuel emphasized.
"Okay." The messenger pretended to give the idea serious thought even as he pulled his motorcycle gloves on in preparation for the trip back to the city. "Is the post office close by?"
"Down the street," Emmanuel said. "I'll take you over and get Miss Byrd to sign the envelope into the police box."
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
Chapter 13
|
It was 12:15 in the afternoon when Emmanuel parked the Packard on the beachside strip in Lorenzo Marques. The calm waters of Delagoa Bay lapped the sand and seagulls wheeled overhead. Tourists of every skin color strolled along the promenade, the women dressed in bright cotton dresses, the men in casual drill shorts and open-necked shirts.
Emmanuel took a deep breath of the fresh salt air. It felt good to stand in the sun and know that the Security Branch and the Pretorius brothers were in another country. He crossed the wide avenue to the ocean. The tide was in. Fishermen cast nets into the water and low-slung Arab-style dhows skimmed the horizon line. To the south stood a long wooden jetty with boats moored alongside.
A group of red-faced anglers loaded a wide trawler with supplies for an offshore fishing safari. The jetty was the obvious place to find a paid guide to take him to the photo studio.
"Hot samosas, ice cream…" Vendors called out their wares as he strolled along the beachside. A sallow-faced street performer amused a group of tourists by throwing peanuts into the air for a monkey tethered to a fraying rope. At the entrance to the jetty, homemade placards advertising island visits and fishing charters crowded together. One sign stood out. It advertised Saint Lucia Island. A sleek wooden sailboat, a hymn to expensive old-fashioned craftsmanship, was tied up behind the sign. Saint Lucia Lady was written along the sailboat's stern.
"Baas…senhor…mister…"
A group of dark-skinned boys waited for the opportunity to shake the change loose from the pockets of visiting tourists. A spindly-legged youth ran over to him.
"Prawns, beer, peri-peri chicken? Whatever the baas wants, I will get it," the youth said. The last part of the sentence was accompanied by a vaudeville wink and a smile that revealed two missing front teeth. The boy was about seven years old and already familiar with white men in search of illicit pleasure.
Emmanuel fished the name of the photo studio from his pocket and read it out loud. Chances were the worldly little guide with the stick legs couldn't read or write. The street was his classroom.
"Carlos Fernandez Photography Studio. You know this place?"
The boy said, "I know all the places in Lorenzo Marques. I will take you for only fifty pence, baas."
Emmanuel handed twenty-five pence to the boy. "Half now, the other half when we reach the studio. Okay?"
"Come." The boy waved him along the seaside strip and past an array of ice cream vendors, grilled-corn sellers and trinket peddlers. The streets pulsed with life and Emmanuel relaxed for the first time since finding Captain Pretorius floating in the river.
They moved across a wide avenue bordered by flame trees and straggly jacarandas and then navigated the edges of an open-air market selling fresh fruit and fish. Further on, the little guide took a left, then a quick right before stopping in front of a nondescript building without a street number or business name to identify it. The front window display, an old-fashioned light box camera, positioned against a dusty, blue velvet drop curtain, gave the only indication of the building's purpose.
Emmanuel handed his guide the balance of his payment and pushed the door to the photo studio open. A corpulent Portuguese man sporting an oily black toupee and a half-dozen gold necklaces around his tire-wide neck sat behind the low wooden counter. He smiled and showed a mouth full of gold and silver fillings.
"How can I help?" The greasy fat man sounded as if his windpipe were lined with loose gravel.
"I'm here to collect for Willem Pretorius," Emmanuel said. "He's been detained and can't make this month's pickup."
The man stroked the quivering folds of his neck and pretended to think. "Pretorius? I don't recall that name."
"This is Fernandez Photo Studio, isn't it?" Emmanuel kept cool and kept pushing.
"Of course. But I still do not recall the man you are collecting for."
"He's big, with a broken nose and short blond hair."
The man who Emmanuel assumed was Fernandez moved to stroke the gold chains hanging around his neck. The green silk shirt he wore was unbuttoned low enough to display his ample cleavage. "No." He shook his head. "I have no memory of this man."
"Perhaps someone else who works here does remember. It's not worth my life to return to South Africa without his order and this is the address he gave me."
"Ahmed," the Portuguese bullfrog called with a loud croak. "Ahmed!"
A wiry, dark-haired man with nervous seal pup eyes darted out of a back room and hovered close to Mr. Fernandez. He looked to be a mix of Arab and black African and wore a white lab coat; he smelled of chemicals and sweat. A crocheted skullcap was attached to his head with four oversize hair clips.
"Ahmed. This gentleman is looking for an order for a…" Fernandez paused dramatically and looked to Emmanuel for help.
"Willem Pretorius. Big man with a broken nose." Emmanuel repeated the description for Ahmed, whose attention bounced from one object in the room to another without settling on anything in particular.
"Mr. Fernandez?" Ahmed tapped his boss on the shoulder with yellow-stained fingers and waited patiently for recognition.
Fernandez maneuvered his bulk counterclockwise and stared at his assistant. "Answer this gentleman's query so that he can be assured that he is in the wrong place."
"The samosas. Rose has delivered the samosas and coffee. They are still hot."
The fat man, animated by the promise of fried food and caffeine, heaved his weight out of the chair and struggled to his feet. "I'm sorry we have not been able to help you locate your friend's order but now we are closing the studio in honor of my saint's day. Ahmed, show the gentleman to the door and lock up behind him."
"Of course, Mr. Fernandez." The lab assistant scuttled to the front door and swung it open with a flourish. "This way, please."
Emmanuel reviewed his options and found the only one open to him was to leave and return when the abundant Mr. Fernandez was fed and rested. As he stepped through the doorway, Ahmed leaned closer.
"You must go for a swim and then have an ice cream." The assistant spoke in a loud stage whisper. "At five o'clock you must go to the Lisbon café. I will be there at that time also."
"Five o'clock, the Lisbon café?"
"Yes. If I am late you may wish to order the fish curry. It is very good."
The door shut behind him and Emmanuel saw his little guide waiting farther up the street. The boy ran to his side.
"I need to buy a pair of bathers," Emmanuel said. "You know a place?"
"Of course," the boy replied. "But first I will take you to a place to exchange your money. I will get the best rate for you, baas. Then I will take you to get the bathers. At this shop I will get the best price for you."
"Okay," Emmanuel said. "Can you get me to the Lisbon café at five o'clock sharp?"
"Yes. I can do this for the baas," the guide said. "When you are there, you must have the fish curry. It is the best in Lorenzo Marques."
The assistant from the photo studio slipped into the café and performed a quick check of the patrons. He clutched a slim leather satchel in his arms. Emmanuel lifted his hand in greeting and Ahmed made his way over to the table.
"Mr. Curious White Man." The assistant sat down next to him and angled his chair to face the door. "I, Ahmed Said, have decided that I must talk to you."
"About?"
"The photos, of course." The assistant removed a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped his forehead. He was sweating a river. "But first, I think you must buy me a drink. Double whiskey, if you please."
Emmanuel nodded at the knitted skullcap covering Ahmed's glossy head. "I thought drinking was against your religion."
"It is," Ahmed replied without rancor. "But I am a very bad Muslim. Which is why I have come to talk to you about this policeman's photos. I will tell you all I know as soon as my throat is not so dry."
"Double whiskey and a strong coffee." Emmanuel gave the order to a passing waiter, then turned back to his informant. "How do you know the man I was asking about was a policeman?"
"Please. What else could he have been? Even his khaki shorts had a pleat down the front, just like a uniform."
"You always so observant of the clients who come into the studio?"
"Only the ones who ask for me by name. They are the ones willing to pay Mr. Fernandez for my extra-special service."
Emmanuel paid the waiter and paused until he'd moved to another table.
"Developing pornographic photos?"
"Art photographs," Ahmed corrected him with a smile. "The client must specifically ask for Ahmed to develop art photos or we do not touch the film."
"The policeman knew what to ask for?"
"Certainly." Ahmed worked the whiskey tumbler with spinster-like sips. "At first I thought he might be spying on us, trying to get evidence to shut us down, so I said I wasn't taking in any more art photos."
"Then?"
"He was cool, that one. Most men are sweating like I am now, afraid they'll be caught red-handed, but not him. He looked me straight in the eye and said, 'Don't worry, these are for my own personal use.'"
Emmanuel swallowed a mouthful of tar-black coffee. "And were they 'personal use' photos?"
"Oh, yes." The assistant's dark eyes lit up. "And very good ones, too. None of the usual images of women licking penises like lollipops or being done from behind like a cow. These were very…unusual."
"Two girls?" Emmanuel ventured a guess.
"No." Ahmed checked his watch, then drained his glass in one gulp. "I see that kind of thing every day. These photos are not like the others, but I promised myself that I would not tell you too much. You must see them for yourself."
"You have copies?" Emmanuel sat up. This was more than he could have hoped for. The bastard who'd knocked him cold wouldn't be the only one with access to the evidence.
"That is why I'm here." Ahmed sighed. "I am a bad Muslim who is about to marry a good Muslim woman. Much as it pains me, I must cleanse myself of the filth I have gathered over the years."
"You have the photos with you?"
Ahmed stood up abruptly. "No. They are in the safe at the photo studio. You must break in and steal them in ten minutes."
"What?"
"Mr. Fernandez is cheap," Ahmed explained. "The night watchman comes on duty one hour after the studio has closed. That gives you one hour to go in, get the photos, and leave Lorenzo Marques before the police are alerted."
Emmanuel couldn't believe his ears. "I have to steal the photos? I thought they belonged to you."
"They do." Ahmed checked his watch again. "We must get moving. I will explain on the way."
The buzz in the café increased as a large group of sunburned tourists came in for an early dinner of cheap wine and prawns. Breaking and entering was as much a crime here as it was back in South Africa, and Ahmed was not the ideal accomplice; his shirt and jacket were soaked through with sweat and they hadn't even set the wheels in motion yet.
"What makes you think I'm willing to break the law to get the photos?"
"You've come all the way to Mozambique. Something tells me you would not like to go home empty-handed. Now, please. We must hurry. I promise I will explain on the way."
"You have between here and the photo studio to convince me," Emmanuel said, and followed Ahmed into the sunset.
Outside, the air smelled of charcoal fires and the ocean. The pink-and brown-skinned beach crowd surged along the sidewalk in search of spicy food and holiday trinkets. In the crush, Ahmed caught hold of Emmanuel's sleeve and led him into the middle of the moving traffic.
"It's faster this way," Ahmed shouted over the blast of horns that accompanied their reckless scramble past car bumpers and smoking exhausts. He appeared not to notice the screeching tires or the irate driver yelling at them in Portuguese. For the second time Emmanuel questioned the wisdom of going anywhere with a backsliding Muslim pornographer.
"Tell me more about the photos," Emmanuel said once they'd cleared the sweating asphalt and stepped onto the opposite side of the boulevard. "Did the policeman come once a month to pick them up?"
They turned into a laneway flanked by African women selling carved animals and shell jewelry. A skinny black girl held out a fat wooden hippo for their inspection. Ahmed waved her away and they continued to move at a clip toward the photo studio.
"He came twice only, in January and again in March. Each time with one roll of film."
"You sure?"
Ahmed stopped to catch his breath and mop the deluge of sweat from his face and neck. "I told you. I always remember my special clients. He came twice only."
"Is it the same woman on both rolls?" If the du Toit girls weren't starring, then who was?
"Who said it was a woman?" Ahmed gave an evil giggle and squeezed himself into a tight alley running between two turista hotels with painted wooden shutters and breezy "ship to shore" curtains at the windows. Emmanuel didn't make it into the narrow corridor. Shock held him prisoner.
"The photos are of a man?" he asked bluntly. Maybe Louis, with his blond hair and girlish mouth, really was his father's son. How could you keep a secret like that in Jacob's Rest? Almost impossible, but the captain had already proved his ability to keep parts of himself hidden from public view.
Ahmed waved him in with a grin. "Who said it was a man?"
"What does that mean? It has to be one of the two."
"Does it?" The assistant laughed, clearly enjoying the game. "You cannot imagine the things I see in my work. It is for this very reason that I myself can never own a pet."
Emmanuel smiled at the lab assistant. Against his better judgment, he'd taken a liking to Mad Ahmed.
"Not even a chicken?" Emmanuel asked when they set off again. "Surely some things are sacred, even in your line of work."
"Hmm…" Ahmed gave the subject serious thought. "You are right. I have seen eggs in unnatural places, but never the chicken itself. My new wife and I will have chickens, thanks to you, chickens, and maybe some grasshoppers. Yes, that's what we'll do."
Emmanuel was laughing out loud now. There weren't enough doctors in the army psych unit to cure whatever Ahmed had.
"Who is this woman you're marrying?" he asked.
"A poor one," came the quick answer. "My mother found her in the countryside."
"She has no idea what you do."
"No," Ahmed said as they crossed a dirt laneway and came to a stop behind the back entrance to the photo lab. "That is why I must make every attempt to rid myself of my little problem."
Emmanuel checked the high walls crowned by coils of barbed wire and broken glass. The back gate was padlocked.
Ahmed's madness wasn't so funny anymore. "Why are the photos in the safe if they belong to you?" Emmanuel asked. This was the moment to walk away and leave the nervous assistant to do his own dirty work. Ahmed pulled a key from his pocket and slipped it into the padlock.
"They are in the safe for my own protection. After a year or two of working here I began to spend too much time with my friends."
"Who?"
"The ones in the photos. I cannot tell you the hours I spent in solitary pleasure with them. Once I did not come out of my room for the whole weekend. Every Monday, I was exhausted after milking my body of its life fluids. Buckets—"
"Okay…" Emmanuel interrupted the nostalgic memoir. "You grew hair on your palms. What then?"
"No." The assistant pulled the padlock open and held his sweaty palms out for inspection. "My palms remained normal but my mother began to worry. She talked to Mr. Fernandez, who came to my house and took my friends from me. He put them in the safe. I am allowed to see them twice a week for one hour at a time."
The back gate creaked open a fraction. Walk away, Emmanuel told himself, that's the smart thing to do. New evidence was sure to turn up in Jacob's Rest.
He stayed put. "Go on," he said. "Where's the problem?"
Ahmed was shamefaced. "I have begun breaking into the safe when Mr. Fernandez is out. I fear there will be no life fluid left for my wife if my friends and I continue meeting."
"What happens when you get the photos? You going to lock yourself in a room with your friends until you're tapped dry?"
"No. I will destroy the photos. You and I together will burn them in a fire."
"We'll burn them?" Emmanuel stepped back. "What makes you think I'll do any of this?"
Ahmed turned from crazy to cunning in a flicker. "You came to Mozambique alone and you have not asked the help of our local police even though you are also a lawman. Like my special clients, what you crave is not available to you legally."
"I'm looking for evidence. That's different from being one of your special clients."
"Even so, I am the only one who can help you procure what you need."
The word "procure" made him sound like a pervert haunting the streets after dark. It wasn't too far from the truth. "How do I know the photos have anything to do with the policeman?"
Ahmed put his hand on his heart. "I offer no proof. I give only my word."
"Your word may be gold in the tugger's world, Ahmed, but I need more than that."
The pornographer shook his head. "To speak of the photos cheapens the experience of seeing them, virgin, for the first time. I will not do that to myself or to you. I am sorry."
Emmanuel patted the sweaty man's shoulder. "Good luck with the break-in. I'm going to get myself a drink and head back to the border."
He turned to leave. The assistant scuttled around him and held the empty satchel up like a stop sign.
"No images. No favorites. No order. Location. Yes. Location. I will give you a place."
"Go ahead."
"A police station with two cells, side by side. A desk with a chair, near the back door. Above the desk, a row of keys, a shambok and a knobkierie. That is all I will say of the photos. Push me no more!"
It was a clear description of the Jacob's Rest police station. "What's the combination to the safe?" Emmanuel said.
Ahmed pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and held it up between his thumb and forefinger. "I give you this only because our cause is pure."
"You've been in the business too long, Ahmed. We're breaking and entering to steal a stash of hard-core. A judge will find another word to describe our cause."
"There will be no judge. You will please go straight to the back door. Here is the key. The office is the first door on the left. The safe is hidden at the bottom of a long cupboard behind the desk. You may use this bag to put the envelopes in and leave the safe open in order to simulate a robbery. When you are done, come out to me."
"Easy as that?" Emmanuel slipped the key and the safe combination into his pocket. It was too clean and too simple, but the description of the police station pushed him on. Twenty paces away was the envelope that dealt the dirt on the captain: fat with admissible evidence. He was no better than Ahmed's special clients. He was ready to risk jail for a taste of the forbidden.
"Godspeed," Ahmed whispered, and Emmanuel slipped into the backyard. Two garbage cans stood flush against the back wall of the studio.
Twelve steps to the back door. He inserted the key and entered the building. On the left was the door Ahmed had described. A dim light fell in through a window. Night was falling.
He moved quickly into the office. His breath was hard in his chest as he kneeled down next to the safe and dialed the numbers Ahmed had given him. He felt a click beneath his fingers, the door eased open, and he reached in. The thick wad of files neatly bound in brown cardboard felt like gold in his hand.
He stuck the files into the satchel and sped toward the yard. It was time to skip and run. A short sprint and the file was his. It was as easy and clean as Ahmed promised. He stepped outside.
A white shaft of light hit him full in the face.
He caught a fist flat against the head, fell hard and looked up, dazed. The security guard, a lean black man, came at him like a pickax. Pain shot through his rib cage, then along his jawbone as the guard took the cruel-to-be-kind approach with his heavy boots.
Emmanuel rolled and a second kick went wide. He felt the weight of the envelopes as he struggled to his feet and judged the odds. Not good. The guard took up the whole doorway and he wasn't going anywhere.
Emmanuel waited for the guard to move. The black man stared him down, nostrils flared with the scent of wounded prey. Emmanuel faked a move to the left and the guard came at him fast. He crouched low, tipped the guard's legs from under him, and heard a wet smack as the guard's body landed on the hard concrete.
The guard pulled himself up to a kneeling position. Emmanuel legged it to the fence. He wasn't too proud to run from a foe seconds away from beating the crap out of him.
He reached the gate. It was closed. He hammered his fist against the steel.
"Open up!"
"You must go over the fence," Ahmed instructed him calmly from the other side. "I cannot let you out this way."
"Open the fucking door!"
"You must go over the fence. Over the fence."
The top of the fence was too high to jump over, the surface too smooth to get a toehold. The guard came toward him with his nightstick raised. The weight of the files tugged at his shoulder and his plan fell into place. First beat the living hell out of the guard, second get a garbage can and climb out, third beat the living hell out of Ahmed. Not up to the scale of the D-Day invasion, but it would do.
Emmanuel let the guard get close enough to taste victory, then dodged to the right. The nightstick swung down and grazed his shoulder but he kept moving. He was at the garbage can in two seconds flat. He picked up the half-filled container and turned to get a close view of the nightstick making a comeback. This time it landed square against his arm and sent the garbage crashing down.
Emmanuel scooped up the lid and held it over him like a shield. The nightstick worked double time, each hit making a dull metal clank in the night air. An alley cat howled as Emmanuel rolled the can toward the fence. He steadied it against the wall and turned his attention to the guard, who was hammering away at the lid with grim precision.
He crouched low, reached out from behind the safety of the lid, grabbed the guard by the ankles and pulled. The guard fell hard a second time. The nightstick rolled free and Emmanuel threw it over the fence. That was one less thing to worry about. He jammed the lid in place on top of the can, then stripped off his jacket and threw it over the coil of barbed wire along the top of the fence. He placed a foot on the lid, and the night watchman hit him square between the shoulder blades.
Emmanuel turned, ducked a blow, then landed a solid punch against the guard's jaw. The man wobbled unsteadily. Emmanuel hit him with his right fist, then again with his left, and the guard went down for good. Emmanuel quickly climbed onto the garbage can and scrambled over the wall. A shard of broken glass sliced into his calf as he hauled himself over. He landed in the alley, bruised and bleeding, and saw Ahmed waiting. He picked up the nightstick.
Ahmed ran.
Emmanuel caught the sweaty lab assistant and swung him hard against the wall of an empty shop.
"You are angry. I understand this."
Emmanuel slammed Ahmed back again.
"I am mildly annoyed," Emmanuel said. "Angry is when I break both your kneecaps with this nightstick."
"The guard, of course. I had every confidence you would deal with him efficiently."
"Did you?" Emmanuel made sure Ahmed felt the full press of his thumbs as he dug them deep into the tender muscle of his shoulders.
"Please." Ahmed winced in pain. "You must listen to me. We must hurry to complete our plan."
"It's your plan, Ahmed. My plan was to get the photos and walk out the back door."
"The photos. They are yours now." The assistant was unbalanced enough to sound enthusiastic. "You can take them across the border if you allow me to guide you."
Emmanuel eased the pressure of his thumbs on Ahmed's shoulders.
"Another stunt like the one you just pulled and you will get a taste of this nightstick. That's a promise."
"Follow me and we will complete our mission," Ahmed said, and slid into the dark with the certainty of an alley rat. They followed a dusty back lane and turned into a wide tree-lined boulevard fronted by white stucco colonial buildings in the Portuguese style.
Ahmed picked up his pace and they walked past a group of older men playing cards outside a brightly lit café. They cut across the center of a night market offering monkeys in cages, racks of cotton suits and fiery bowls of chili prawns for sale. After ten minutes trudging steadily upward, they stopped at a wooden gate hanging off its hinges. Ahmed squeezed through the entrance and motioned Emmanuel into an overgrown garden bisected by a zigzag pathway leading to a small tumbledown shack.
"My house," Ahmed announced with pride, and led the way to a cleared corner of the garden where there was a circle of stones filled with dry leaves and kindling. A can of petrol lay next to the hearth.
"You were expecting me?" Emmanuel said.
"Every week I say to myself, 'Ahmed, burn the filth and be done,' but I have not had the strength to do so. Now, with your help, I will say good-bye to all my friends."
The smell of petrol was strong in the air as Ahmed doused the dry leaves and dropped a lit match onto the incendiary mix. There was a whoosh when the fire ignited the leaves.
Emmanuel placed the satchel on the ground. Ahmed was welcome to do what he wanted with his "friends" but he needed the captain's photos and he needed to get the hell out of Mozambique. He kneeled down to unpack the stash of pornography, and his leg and shoulder spasmed with pain. The cut from the broken glass was raw, the hit from the nightstick throbbed.
"Give me my photos," he said. "I need to get back to SA before the border closes."
Ahmed removed the envelopes from the leather bag and laid them out on the ground at evenly spaced intervals. His index finger stroked every envelope before stopping two from the end of the row.
"This is yours." He picked up two identical envelopes but made no move to relinquish them. "You must promise me to look at the photos in order. This is very important. It cannot be done any other way. It must not be done any other way."
"What for?" Emmanuel asked with as much patience as he could muster.
"You must promise," Ahmed insisted. "You must look at them one at a time and lay them out on a table in order."
"How do I know the correct order?" Emmanuel said, humoring Ahmed, who was now hugging the envelopes to his chest like a cherished loved one.
Ahmed reached into the first package and carefully withdrew two photos. "I have numbered them," he said, and laid the prints down next to the fire. "You must arrange them just so."
Photo number one was a picture of the cells at the Jacob's Rest police station. Photo number two was of the desks in the front office. Light from the fire flickered over the banal images. Despite the pain and the difficulty of obtaining the photos, Emmanuel was intrigued. He'd been beaten and pissed on at the captain's hut for whatever was in the envelopes Ahmed was holding.
"I promise to look at them in order," Emmanuel said. He'd promise his firstborn if that made Ahmed hand over the goods sooner.
"You will not regret it." Ahmed replaced the photos and reluctantly surrendered the package. "You are a very lucky man. I am filled with envy at your joyous introduction to this special friend."
The worn skin of the envelope rested softly in Emmanuel's palm. He was one step closer to the truth about Willem Pretorius and hopefully one step closer to catching the killer. He turned to leave.
"Mr. Policeman," Ahmed said. "Please stay a moment. I need you to make sure I complete my task."
"Go ahead," Emmanuel said, and Ahmed pulled the photos from their envelopes and threw them onto the fire. Heat blistered and distorted grainy images of naked blondes, brunettes, black women, white women, twins and couples arranged in every imaginable configuration. Ahmed's collection ranged far and wide. Within minutes, all that remained of the mad pornographer's "friends" was a pile of gray ash on the glowing twigs.
Ahmed sobbed. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose with gusto. "Thank you, Mr. Policeman. You have been my redemption. I will be faithful to my wife as the Creator intended. Please take this leather case as a token of my esteem."
Emmanuel accepted the gift and slipped his envelopes inside. For Ahmed he was the redeemer; for the Pretorius family he might be the destroyer.
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
Chapter 14
|
The dark blanket of night had spread over Jacob's Rest by the time Emmanuel arrived back from Lorenzo Marques. He parked in front of his room at The Protea Guesthouse and eased his aching body out of the driver's seat. The Security Branch was conducting a raid in another part of the country and that left him free for the first time to use his own accommodation without fear of intrusion.
He limped to his room with the leather satchel in his hands and unlocked the door. Inside, he flicked the light on and pulled the drawers of the bedside table open. He checked the empty cavity, fingers sweeping into every corner in the hope that one magic pill had come loose from the pack.
The drawer was empty and Emmanuel calculated a window of perhaps half an hour before the pain burning along his calf worked its way to his shoulder, then up to his head—a half hour tops before he was limping along the kaffir path toward Dr. Zweigman's modest brick bungalow.
Drops of sweat broke out on his top lip when he reached down and pulled the photos from the first envelope. His injured shoulder protested at the movement and he narrowed the window of rational function to fifteen minutes.
He opened the envelope and laid out numbers one to four. The photographs showed the cells, the desks, the table with tea and cups, and the back window. Harmless images that could have been taken by a keen twelve-year-old on a Voortrekker Scouts excursion. Numbers five to ten showed the station's backyard. A tree. A chair. The circle of stones used for the braai fire.
A sense of panic welled up. Was Ahmed so desensitized by years of developing hard-core that only images of ordinary things turned him on? The urge to split the pack of photos and check the middle was strong but Emmanuel resisted. Maybe there was method to Ahmed's madness.
He laid out numbers eleven and twelve and his luck took a turn. Photo number eleven was a sunlit boulder out on the veldt. Number twelve was the same rock, but with a young woman leaning back against it, her tanned arms crossed over her torso. She was fully clothed. An unremarkable image except for the fact that it was a photo of a mixed-race woman taken by a white man and the woman's face was not shown.
Emmanuel laid the rest of the photos from the first package out in order and examined them one at a time. Each image was a fumbling, almost adolescent revelation of the woman's body, the photographer a novice asking for just a little more in each frame. The woman's dress, a plain cotton frock tailor-made for church hall revivals and family picnics, was undone two buttons at a time and the sleek curves of breasts, thighs and hips gradually revealed themselves. Then the modest covering was gone. The images contained brown skin, sunlight, dark, hard nipples and pubic hair.
The last photograph in the pack, number twenty-five, was the woman, face still unseen, leaning naked against the rock with her legs spread wide. She was a beautiful, sunlit invitation to bliss.
Emmanuel examined the slow-motion striptease. He could see why Ahmed loved the photos; they documented a shedding of innocence more profound than the removal of clothing. There was the sense in every shot that the woman and the photographer were moving slowly and inexorably to a place they had both never been before.
As evidence, there was a lot less to like about the images. There wasn't one single element in the photographs to connect Willem Pretorius to the mystery woman. Anyone with access to the police station could have taken the first few shots and there was only Ahmed's word that the Afrikaner captain was the one to hand over the undeveloped rolls for processing. A dark-skinned half-Arab Muslim pornographer was not a reliable witness in a South African court of law.
"Open the second envelope." The sergeant major slid into the room on a wave of pain and took his position at the head of the parade. "You'll not get the pills until you know exactly what you have, laddie."
Emmanuel opened the envelope and pulled out a fresh stack of photographs. His shoulder ached with an intense throbbing that spread across his back and forced him to breathe through an open mouth.
He laid out the first five photos with shaking hands. Same woman in a different location: a bedroom with a wide wrought-iron bed and lace-edged curtains at the window. It wasn't the stone hut with its narrow single cot. The room in the photos was a feminine space, possibly the woman's own bedroom.
"The naked female is a wondrous thing, is it not, soldier?" The Scotsman was in awe. "Look at that arse. I could bounce a shilling off it, it's so tight."
Emmanuel kept flipping, quicker now as the pain worked its way up toward his neck. In five minutes his head was going to be alive with the sound of jackhammers. The photos flashed in front of him in a blur of hard-core images. The woman naked on all fours, then naked from behind, thighs open to display every fold and detail of her shaved sex.
"Oh, yes, lad." The sergeant major was delighted. "After food and water and whiskey, this is the stuff of life. Exactly what the doctor ordered, hey?"
"Unless I can tie these photos to Willem Pretorius," Emmanuel said aloud, "the Security Branch will throw them out the window as unrelated to the case. Smut and Communist infiltrators don't mix."
"Not so fast. You're missing all the good bits, lad. Can't you take a moment to enjoy your work? Take a look at the last one."
Emmanuel picked the photo up. The woman was lying naked on the unmade bed with her hips tilted upward and her hand buried deep between her legs. He backtracked and examined the preceding photo, which showed the woman lying on her side with her face masked by the fall of her long dark hair. A new element was added and he'd all but missed it. Around the woman's neck was a necklace, an opened flower with a small diamond at the center.
"Pretty," the sergeant major cooed. "I like the look of that."
"The necklace or what it's resting against?"
"Both. Jewelry on a naked woman is a sacred thing, my lad."
"You'd say that if she had a tire iron around her neck," Emmanuel said. The pack of photos thinned to nothing and he flicked the last two photos onto the bed. The woman's identity was going to remain a mystery. The slim waist ruled out Tottie, and the long hair and bold physical presence of the woman's body made Davida Ellis an unlikely suspect. Was the captain's model someone from an outlying farm or hamlet? Emmanuel placed the last photo down and felt its mesmerizing power grab hold of him.
"Well, well," he said. The pain in his body drained away and was replaced by an unassailable sense of well-being. Maybe he was going to win the war after all.
"What in hell makes a man do something so…unsavory?" the sergeant major blurted out.
Emmanuel wiped the sweat from his forehead and examined the last photograph. A naked man lay on the unmade bed with his forearm thrown over his eyes in a playful parody of the woman's efforts to hide her identity. A crumpled sheet was pulled low over his hips to expose an edge of wiry blond pubic hair. The hard shape of the man's erect penis strained against the cotton sheet, proof of his readiness to go again, despite the fact that the smile on his mouth suggested he'd already spent a good deal of time thrusting his way to heaven.
"Jesus!" The image made the cast-iron sergeant major ill at ease. "It's wrong for a man to parade himself like that."
"She asked him to pose. And he said yes."
"He did it to please her?"
"Yes."
"Well…" The Scotsman considered that fact for a moment. "There's not much a man won't do for pussy."
"There more to it than that," Emmanuel said, and traced a finger over the broken nose and the unique gold-faced watch that clearly identified this slab of Afrikaner manhood as one Captain Willem Pretorius, moral defender of the town of Jacob's Rest and enthusiastic amateur photographer. Pussy, as the sergeant major suggested, was only part of the reason for such a flagrant act of self-revelation. Willem Pretorius had taken a life-threatening risk by posing for the camera.
"He loves the fact she's looking at him: seeing him for who he really is. Check the expression on his face. He's not Captain Willem Pretorius, upholder of the sacred covenant with the Lord. He's a bad man who's spent the afternoon doing bad things to a woman his tribe says is unclean and he couldn't be fucking happier."
"Maybe it was love made him do it?"
"I doubt it," Emmanuel said. The morphine-like sense of well-being ebbed away and the pain surged up to his jawline. "Forty-something pictures of her doing every imaginable thing for his pleasure and one photo of him looking like the king of cock hall. Being the white induna is what he loved."
"The necklace cost a few pounds."
"A trinket." Emmanuel began packing the photos. His thoughts had taken a turn to a dark place. "A piece of insurance to gain her loyalty. You really think he'd stand by her if it affected his perfect Afrikaner family? He'd have her on a bus to Swaziland with ten pounds in her pocket or six feet underground with nothing."
"What the hell are you so angry about? I only meant that he gave her presents and made sure no one knew who she was. He protected her, didn't he?"
"He protected himself," Emmanuel said, and returned the pictures to the leather satchel as quickly as he could without damaging them. He needed the pills. He needed something to stop him from limping over to the captain's house and shoving the feast of hard-core down Mrs. Pretorius's lily-white throat.
"You're not going to do that," the sergeant major cautioned. "The old Jew will fix you up and first thing tomorrow you'll send this lot off to van Niekerk, fast post. This shit is going to save your life, soldier."
The sergeant major was right but that didn't diminish the anger Emmanuel was feeling. It was the last photo. The satisfied look on Willem Pretorius's face needled him into an incomprehensible rage. Emmanuel could almost hear the woman's teasing voice coaxing the naked Dutchman to smile for the camera after she had arranged the sheet just so.
Emmanuel clipped the satchel shut. He had to dream of a woman in a burned-out cellar while Pretorius got the real thing. The rage was sharpened by another emotion. He stopped short. He was blindingly, furiously jealous of the captain and the woman who'd spent the afternoon fucking and then shared a dangerous joke.
The pain pushed Emmanuel onto the kaffir path toward the old Jew and his scarred leather doctor's kit.
Emmanuel knocked on the door a third time and waited. It was 10:35 PM and Jacob's Rest was a small town: the residents had locked up for the night and it would take Zweigman a while to answer.
"Yes?" the German asked through the door.
"Detective Sergeant Cooper. I'm here on a personal errand."
The double lock clicked open and Zweigman peered out. His white hair stuck out at odd sleep-tossed angles but his brown eyes were sharp and focused. He was wearing plain cotton pajamas under a tatty dressing gown that sported a moth-eaten velvet collar.
"You are injured," Zweigman said. "Come this way." He indicated a doorway immediately to his right and Emmanuel shuffled his aching body into a room barely large enough to house the leather sofa and armchair that stood at its center. There was a gramophone on an occasional table with a stack of records in paper sleeves resting next to it, but what dominated the space were the books. They lined the walls and jostled for room in the corners and at the ends of the sofa. There were more books than could be read in a lifetime.
Zweigman picked up an old newspaper from the leather armchair and threw it aside, not caring where it landed.
"Let us see what damage you have done," he said.
Emmanuel sank into the cracked leather chair and pushed his injured leg out with some effort.
"Some aches and pains. Nothing that a few painkillers won't fix."
"That is for me to decide," Zweigman said, and gently lifted the torn trouser leg out of the way to examine the wound. He emitted a satisfied grunt.
"Painkillers will help, but the wound is deep and needs both cleaning and stitching. May I see your shoulder, please?"
Emmanuel didn't ask the German how he knew about the other souvenir collected from the guard in Lorenzo Marques. Despite his current circumstance, Zweigman couldn't shrug off the mantle of intellectual superiority that hung from his stooped shoulders. He had commanded respect in another life and Emmanuel imagined the good doctor's expertise was once dispensed to gold-plated families in rooms with polished furniture.
Emmanuel's shirt was half unbuttoned when there was a knock at the door that started out as a soft tap and rapidly turned into a manic pounding when the call wasn't immediately answered.
"Liebchen?" The woman's voice was husky with tears. "Liebchen?"
"Please stay seated," Zweigman said, and walked to the door and opened it gently. Lilliana Zweigman stumbled into the room in a pale silk dressing gown embroidered with dozens of purple butterflies in flight. Her hands reached out and patted her husband's face and shoulders like a field medic searching for hidden injuries.
"We have a visitor." Zweigman gave no indication that his wife's behavior was in any way unusual. "Would you be kind enough to make us a pot of tea to be served with your excellent butter cookies?"
"Is he?" Lilliana mumbled. "He is?"
"No, he is not. The detective is a book lover and we were discussing our favorite writers. Is that not so, Detective?"
"Yes." Emmanuel picked up the book closest to him and held it up. His shoulder screamed in protest but he didn't let it show. "I was hoping to borrow this copy for a few days."
"Ahh…" Lilliana became bright as a welder's spark now that the danger had passed. "Yes, of course. I will make the tea."
She floated out of the room and Emmanuel wondered at the capacity of the human mind to mold reality to its will. He was seated in Zweigman's house with bloodied trousers, an unbuttoned shirt, and a copy of A Field Guide to Spores and Fungi in his hand, and Lilliana had willed herself into believing it was a social call.
"The shoulder," Zweigman continued as if they had not been interrupted. "Let me see it, please."
Emmanuel removed his shirt slowly and hot pain coursed through his muscles. The guard would be able to tell Mr. Fernandez, the Portuguese land whale, that he'd given the thief a taste of suffering.
"An old bullet wound overlaid with a new bruise. I will not ask how you acquired such aggressive injuries." Zweigman pressed his fingers around the edge of the bruise. "Arnica to take down the swelling and painkillers to take away the pain. Nature will do the rest in its own time."
The doctor found his medical kit among the chaos, snapped it open, and rifled through the contents. He pulled out a container of pills and shook four into the palm of his hand.
"Swallow these with your tea," Zweigman instructed before digging into his bag to extract a tub of cream. "Please rub this into your shoulder while I arrange for the washing bowl and sterilize a needle from my wife's sewing kit."
Emmanuel scooped ointment out of the jar and spread it over his shoulder as the doctor left the room. Zweigman was right. The nightstick had brought the pain of his old injury back to life.
Zweigman reentered the room and set up the bowl next to the gramophone. He moved with such certainty that Emmanuel wondered again what had landed the old Jew and his wife in Jacob's Rest.
"How did the captain know you were a doctor?" he asked.
The German dipped a cloth into the washbowl and started cleaning the cut. "You asked me once before and I have told you that I do not know."
"Something happened back in April that tipped him off. What was it?"
"I recall no such incident, Detective." Zweigman reached up for a pair of tweezers and began digging into the cut. "Hold still, please, I have found the source of your discomfort. There." He lifted the tweezers to show a jagged piece of clear glass. "Once again I will not ask how you came by this."
"Very kind of you. But I can't return the favor."
The doctor didn't respond to the statement and set about preparing the sewing kit. At some point during his fall from grace, the German had learned to keep his mouth shut. He would not volunteer any information.
"Which one of the coloured women was the captain close to?" Emmanuel asked the question straight out.
"'Close'?" Zweigman gave a top-notch impression of a penniless migrant hearing the English language for the first time. "What does this mean, Detective?"
"It means close enough to stick his tongue in her ear and a few other places besides," Emmanuel said, and the doctor flushed.
Zweigman said nothing for a moment. "If you repeat that accusation outside this room, even in jest," he warned, "it will take a team of surgeons to sew you together and I am not sure they will succeed."
"Was it one of the women in your shop?" Emmanuel asked as the German threaded a needle and tied a knot into the surgical thread. His hands were steady, but there was an odd tilt to his head, as if he was trying to get as far from the conversation as possible.
"Tottie or maybe Davida?"
"I'm afraid that I cannot help you," Zweigman said, and closed the cut. He stitched the flesh together with the quick skill of a surgeon used to mending much deeper wounds. Emmanuel was sure that the old Jew knew more than he was telling, but unlike the Security Branch, he preferred confessions to be voluntary.
"You know what's strange?" he said to Zweigman after the thread was tied off and the sting in his flesh had subsided. "You didn't tell me I was mistaken about the captain. The suggestion that a morally upright white policeman might be fooling around with a coloured girl didn't get a response from you. No surprise. Nothing at all."
Zweigman carefully packed everything back into his wife's sewing kit. He looked old and worn out, his shoulders pushed down by a heavy weight.
"We are men of the world, Detective. We have been through a war and seen cities burn. Does an affair really have the power to shock either of us?"
"Maybe not. But the rest of the town and the country will see it differently. The Immorality Act is the law, and the fact that it was broken by a policeman will shock plenty of people."
"The Immorality Act." Zweigman snorted. "The forces of nature are more powerful than any law made by men."
The door to the lounge cum library opened and Lilliana Zweigman backed into the room carrying a tray containing a teapot, cups and a plate of butter cookies cut into the shape of snowflakes.
"Here." Zweigman took the tray from his wife and balanced it on the wide arm of the sofa. "You are a marvel, liebchen, a true wonder. You have earned a rest. Why don't you go to bed now while we talk?"
Lilliana didn't move. She sensed something not quite right about the detective's presence in her house.
"Please help yourself to tea and one of my wife's cookies."
Emmanuel bit into a pale yellow disk of pastry sprinkled with sugar. It was delicious and he hadn't eaten for hours. He finished the cookie in two bites and reached for another one.
"You see?" Zweigman touched his wife's arm. "You have not lost your touch. I'm sure our visitor would appreciate a small tin of your pastry to take home."
"Yes." Lilliana backed out slowly. "I will pack him some in the container with the red roses on the outside."
"The ideal choice," the doctor said, and gently closed the door behind her.
"Please excuse my wife, Detective. She's not comfortable with members of the police."
"No offense taken," Emmanuel said, and swallowed the painkillers with a mouthful of tea.
Zweigman sat down and rested his teacup on his knee. A wealth of past sorrows seemed to surround the doctor and the melancholy reached out and embraced Emmanuel like an old friend. Men of the world, Zweigman had called them. Men formed by war and cruelty—and unexpected kindnesses.
Emmanuel picked up a book to break the morbid spell and ran his fingertips over the smooth calfskin cover. City of Sin was embossed on the spine. It was the same size and style as Celestial Pleasures, the slim volume he'd found in the captain's locked sanctuary. In a town the size of Jacob's Rest, the book of erotica could only have come from this room.
"Did Pretorius borrow any of these books?"
"He never honored me with such a request," Zweigman said. "I believe the Bible was his mainstay."
"Do you lend books from here?"
"Everyone is welcome, Detective."
Emmanuel breathed out in frustration. "No specific names to give me, I suppose. No clue as to who borrowed a book entitled Celestial Pleasures."
"I have no memory of that particular book and no idea who may see fit to read it."
Emmanuel finished his tea and pushed himself out of the deep folds of the leather armchair. The painkillers surged through his blood and he felt just fine.
"When Constable Shabalala avoids telling me something, I know it's to protect Captain Pretorius. Who are you protecting, Doctor?"
"Myself," Zweigman answered without hesitation. "Everything is done to protect my soul from further onslaughts of guilt and blame."
"I was hoping for something as simple as a name," Emmanuel said, and turned to leave. He needed sleep. Tomorrow he had to try to identify the woman in the photos and hope that she would lead him to the man who'd stolen the evidence from the stone hut.
"Detective." Zweigman held the jar of ointment out. "Apply this to your shoulder once every two to four hours. It will help reduce the swelling."
"Thanks. I also need more painkillers. I'm out."
Zweigman's brown eyes made a close study of the wounded detective before he answered.
"You received a three-week ration less than one week ago. What has happened to the rest?"
"Gone," Emmanuel said, conscious of how that must sound to a medical professional. "I don't normally run through them so quickly."
"What made you lift your dosage?"
The sergeant major's voice and the memory of running through the smoke of wood fires were not things he was prepared to share with anyone, even a highly qualified surgeon. The town of Jacob's Rest opened all the cages he normally kept locked and he couldn't find a reason for that.
Zweigman went to his medical kit and returned with a half-filled container of white pills.
"These are for physical pain. They will not cure the pain you are feeling in your heart or your mind. That pain can only be cured by feeling it."
"What if the pain is too much to bear?" Emmanuel asked. The army psych unit was big on drugging the pain away: on the patient not feeling anything that ruled out a return to active duty. Fit enough to pull the trigger meant fit enough to return to the killing fields.
"You will go mad." Zweigman smiled. "Or you will transform yourself into a new being, one that even you will not recognize."
"Is that what you've done? Transformed yourself?"
"No." The old Jew looked ancient as Jerusalem stone. "I am merely hiding from who I used to be. A sad and cowardly end in keeping with the rest of my life."
"You stood up for Anton. You protect your wife and the women in your care. How is that sad and cowardly?"
"Rearguard actions to keep the past at bay." Zweigman opened the front door and let fresh air into the room. "Come to the store tomorrow. I will check on your injuries and give you my wife's tin of cookies. It appears she has been delayed."
Quiet sobbing came from the back of the house, and Emmanuel stepped out into the sleepy embrace of Jacob's Rest.
"Thank you," he said, and limped to the front gate. It seemed to him that the German refugee and his wife had run from the past only to find they had brought it with them to a distant corner of southern Africa.
Zweigman watched the injured detective slip away into the night, then rushed to the kitchen tucked at the back of the small brick house. His wife stood at the table with the tin of butter cookies held tightly to her chest.
"That man…he will take what we love from us."
"No, liebchen." Zweigman tried to remove the rose-covered tin from his wife's hands but found her grip impossible to loosen. He touched her cheek. "I promise that will not happen to us again."
Emmanuel was halfway back to The Protea Guesthouse when the singing began. It was a popular tune rendered almost unrecognizable by a high-pitched voice that broke on every fifth word and then started up again like a scratched record. He located the drunken songbird behind the coloured church.
"Hansie." Emmanuel greeted the tottering figure. "What are you doing out here?"
"Sarge, howzit?" The teenaged policeman held up two bottles of whiskey triumphantly. "See? Louis said he wouldn't give it, but he did when he saw the uniform. My uniform."
"Tiny gave you those bottles?" One of them was already half empty. Hansie was having the time of it.
"Won't give any to Louis. But he gives to me because of the uniform."
"Where are you going with the bottles, Hansie?"
"Louis bet me I couldn't but I did." Hansie thumped his chest. "Because I am the law and people respect the law."
"You going back to Louis's house?"
"The shed." The boy squinted out across the dark veldt, then turned in an unsteady circle. "Louis said take the kaffir path but I don't know…where…where's the way back?"
Emmanuel put his arm around Hansie's shoulder. He was interested in how the lion of God managed to talk his friend into shaking down a coloured merchant for liquor.
"I'll show you," he said, and turned Hansie in the direction of the nonwhite houses in order to get more time to "interrogate" him. "Why didn't Louis get the bottles? He knows the kaffir path better than you, doesn't he?"
"See." Hansie held the bottles up. "I got them. Me."
"Good job." Emmanuel tried another tack. "Does Louis normally get the bottles?"
"Ja. But he sent me this time."
"Why?" It was hard to stop himself from smacking some sense into the idiot constable.
"He went, but Tiny said no, no, no dice."
"Why?"
"Captain found out about the drinking. He sent Louis away to a farm in the Drakensbergs…long way away up in the mountains." Hansie gave a full-bodied burp that echoed across the empty veldt. Up ahead, the light from the captain's work shed punctuated the darkness.
"That's the shed. Go in but don't tell anyone you saw me. Understand?"
"Ja." The drunken Afrikaner lurched forward, eager to show his spoils.
Emmanuel spun Hansie around to face him and leveled the police boy a severe glance, the kind used by headmasters about to hand out a "six of the best" caning.
"Forget you saw me. That's an order, Hepple."
"Yes, sir, Detective Sergeant, sir."
Emmanuel launched Hansie toward the light with a gentle push. The inebriated boy stumbled toward the open door with the bottles held aloft like the conquering hero. A chorus of cheers greeted his entrance. Louis wasn't the only one waiting for the whiskey river to start flowing.
At the open shed door, Emmanuel risked a quick look in. Hansie, Louis and two freckle-nosed teenagers sat on an oil-stained blanket and passed the half-empty whiskey bottle among them. The second bottle of amber was placed in the middle of the circle with its top off in readiness.
"Hey, Hansie." A boy with a train-tunnel-sized gap between his front teeth took a swig. "Louis here says that Botha's daughter isn't the prettiest girl in the district. Says he's seen better."
"Who?" Hansie was flabbergasted. "Who could be better than her? No one."
"I've got different tastes from you." Louis pushed his messy blond hair from his forehead. "Just remember that no matter how modest women are in their appearance, no matter how shy and clean, they are the reason Adam fell into sin."
"That's exactly what I'm hoping for, man!" Hansie replied.
The policeman's answer set off a round of laughter that continued even as Emmanuel slipped away into the veldt. He didn't have to stay longer to know how the evening would unravel. There'd be talk of girls, imagined and real, then someone, most likely Hansie, would lie about having lost his virginity. There'd be more talk of girls and cars and the next big social dance. And during all this, Louis the sleeping lion of God, and Louis the juvenile delinquent, would jostle for supremacy.
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
Chapter 15
|
Emmanuel called in at the Grace of God Hospital early the next morning and found Sister Bernadette and Sister Angelina supervising a breakfast of cold porridge without milk for the twenty or so orphans collected on the open veranda. He waited until they'd dished up the last bowl, then approached them. He had no idea how to ask for what he wanted.
"Sisters…" He cleared his throat and started again. "Sisters, I'd like you to witness a likeness of Captain Pretorius for me."
"Of course," Sister Bernadette said. The tiny white nun wiped her pale hands on her apron. "Do you have a pen, Detective?"
"Yes, I do…it's just that…I…" He trailed off.
"Yes?" Sister Angelina prompted.
"I should warn you that it's a…a provocative image. One that might upset or shock you."
"Oh…" Sister Bernadette's smile was strained. "In that case we should get it over and done with as quickly as possible."
God bless the pragmatic Catholic sisters, Emmanuel thought, and pulled the second of the two envelopes from the leather satchel. In fifteen minutes the photographs were due on an express bus to Jo'burg with Miss Byrd's cousin, Delores Bunton.
Sister Angelina motioned him over to the far end of the veranda to an old gurney covered by a sheet. They were out of sight and earshot of the children. Emmanuel hesitated, then pulled the image free.
"Look at the photo," he said, "then turn it over and write 'I swear that this is a true image of Captain Willem Pretorius.' Sign your names underneath and date it, please."
He put the image faceup on the trolley and felt the heat of a blush in his cheeks.
"Oh, my," Sister Bernadette gasped.
"Gracious." Sister Angelina crossed herself and blinked hard.
"This is a surprise," the little Irish nun muttered. "I had no idea."
"Yebo." The black nun pursed her lips. "Who knew the captain had such a big smile."
"Yes." Sister Bernadette pushed an imaginary strand of hair into her head covering. "I don't recall seeing him this happy before."
The sisters stood motionless and stared at the photograph. Emmanuel turned the image over and heard a sigh from the nuns. He handed over the pen and watched them sign and date the photo. He placed it back in the envelope.
"Thank you, Sisters," he said. "If anyone from the Special Branch or the Pretorius family asks about this photograph, deny ever having seen it. It's the safest way."
Poppies General Store was quiet. The normal hum of sewing machines was replaced by the soft scrape of Zweigman's shoes as he unpacked cans of sardines from a box and stacked them on a shelf.
"Detective." The shopkeeper greeted him with a nod. His hair, normally chaotic, was now positively Medusa-like with warring white strands fighting each other in an epic battle for control.
Emmanuel motioned in the direction of the silent back room. "Nobody home?"
"My wife is unwell," Zweigman said. "She has given the ladies a day off."
"Anything to do with my visit?"
"The damage was done long before you appeared." The German stacked the last can of sardines on the shelf. "You have come for your checkup, yes?"
"That and use of the phone if I may." He had to let van Niekerk know that the satchel of photographs was already on its way to the address he'd telegraphed through two days ago.
"Of course." Zweigman picked up the phone from the counter and shuffled into the back room, where the rows of sewing machines stood with their night covers still on. Poppies felt deserted without the ladies bent over patterns and pins under the watchful eye of Lilliana.
"I will be in the front unpacking." Zweigman put the phone on the tea table. "Call me when you are ready for your examination."
Emmanuel sat down and dialed the operator. He wanted to be at the Jacob's Rest police station within the half hour to see if the Security Branch raid had netted a big Red fish during the night.
He got through to headquarters without any trouble and was given a new number to call. Van Niekerk knew how to fly under the Security Branch radar.
"I've sent you something," Emmanuel said once the major picked up.
"Is it useful?" Van Niekerk was in high spirits for a powerful man forced to dirty his hands in a public call box. Like a prized bloodhound, he sniffed something on the wind.
"Extremely useful," Emmanuel said.
"Smut? Dirty money? Political?"
"Smut."
"Can it be tied to our departed friend or a member of his family?"
"Let's just say the captain was as good behind the camera as he was in front of it."
"My God! Are you absolutely sure it's him?"
"One hundred percent," Emmanuel said. "I had the image signed and verified by two people who knew him."
He felt guilty using Sister Bernadette and Sister Angelina, but nuns were hard witnesses to push around on the stand. It was uncharitable to attack a bride of Christ.
"Good man," the major said. "I knew you'd come up with the goods. You always do."
Giving the information to van Niekerk didn't feel as rewarding as Emmanuel thought it would. Willem Pretorius's homicide was still unsolved and that was the only reason he'd come to Jacob's Rest. The pornographic pictures were of value only if they helped catch the killer.
"The packet will be hand-delivered this evening to the address on the telegram." He was suddenly impatient with van Niekerk. Catching the killer was secondary to the power that possession of the photos gave the major over the Security Branch and factions of the National Party. "I have to go and check out what the Security Branch dragged in," Emmanuel added. He wasn't leaving Jacob's Rest until he found out who'd killed Willem Pretorius and why.
"They got him," van Niekerk stated bluntly. "Your man from Fort Bennington College."
"How do you know?"
Van Niekerk laughed, as if the question itself was too stupid to answer.
"I just do, Cooper."
"Anything else you can tell me?" Emmanuel asked. There was no way Piet or Dickie would let him in on the questioning.
"He was at the crossing on the night the captain was killed," the major said. "That's a solid fact. The miner Duma from the location was his contact. You may want to start entertaining the possibility that the Security Branch is on the right track."
"I'll do that, sir," Emmanuel said before signing off. He knew in his bones that the Communist agent wasn't a fit for the murder. Why was the body dragged to the water when it could have been left on the sand? And Shabalala was sure the killer had swum back to Mozambique. Maybe the Security Branch had some answers.
He went to the front of the store, where Zweigman was busy cleaning the shelves with an ostrich feather duster.
"I'll come back for my examination this afternoon," he told the shopkeeper, and set the phone back on the counter. "I have to check in at the police station."
"Of course. I will be here until approximately five-thirty."
Emmanuel stepped onto the pitted dirt sidewalk fronting Poppies and the liquor store. It was time to hammer on Shabalala's door until the black man told him everything he knew about Willem Pretorius's secret life.
Four Chevrolet sedans were parked in front of the police station, the shiny chrome trim of each car flecked with dust and the dried bodies of crushed insects collected on the night drive. A handful of plainclothes officers in creased suits mingled on the porch, smoking and talking to a plump man with a camera slung around his neck. Press, Emmanuel guessed. The reporter would be in the employ of one of the toady Afrikaner newspapers that ran with the official National Party line no matter what the real story was.
Emmanuel climbed the stairs, ready for the brush-off. The Security Branch machine had a stranglehold now on the police station and he wasn't on their list of invited guests. One of the new Security Branch officers stepped forward.
"This is a restricted area," said the moonfaced man in the badly cut suit. "No entry without Lieutenant Lapping's say-so."
Emmanuel stepped back. He was unlikely to get pockmarked Piet's nod of approval in this lifetime.
"I was looking for the regular police. Constable Shabalala, Lieutenant Uys and Constable Hepple. I'm working a local investigation."
"Check out the back." Moonface smiled, then said, "Hey, you caught the pervert yet, Detective Sergeant?"
Emmanuel walked away without answering. Lieutenant Lapping had isolated him from the murder investigation and made him a figure of fun into the bargain. He'd eat humble pie for as long as it took to find Shabalala and until he'd finished sifting through Willem Pretorius's dirty laundry.
He opened the side gate to the police station's backyard. Paul Pretorius and the diminutive Lieutenant Uys were sitting in the shade of the avocado tree with three men he didn't recognize. Was there anyone left at the Security Branch offices?
Paul Pretorius stood up and closed the gap between them with his slow swagger. "So." The hulking soldier smiled at him for the first time in their acquaintance. It was an unpleasant sight. "How does it feel to be at the arse end of the investigation, Detective Sergeant?"
"You've got a confession from the suspect?" Emmanuel said.
"Another hour or two and it'll be done," Paul said, stroking the bristles on his chin to emphasize how long a night it had been for those at the center of power. "I tell you what, those boys inside know what they're doing."
"They're sure he's the one?"
"Absolutely. And you thought Pa's killer was some degenerate white man. Looks like you'll have to run back to Jo'burg with empty pockets. Shame, hey?"
Emmanuel knew just the thing to wipe the smile off Paul Pretorius's face: a single image of the respected white police captain nursing a giant hard-on in a coloured woman's bed. That would do the trick. It was just as well the packet of pornographic photographs was on its way to van Niekerk and well out of his reach.
"The constables aren't here?" He continued with the conversation as if the arrogant Pretorius son hadn't taken the whip to him. Paul was destined to find out the truth about his father one day, and Emmanuel hoped he'd be there to witness the moment.
"Hansie's out with his girl, and Shabalala I haven't seen." Paul Pretorius strolled back toward the group of men seated in the shade with a shrug that implied he had more important things to do now that he was finished baiting a detective with no power and no credibility.
Emmanuel moved onto the kaffir path. He had to find Shabalala and explain to him that protecting Willem Pretorius's memory was a waste of time. With enough pressure he might even be able to find out the identity of the mystery woman in the photos.
At the juncture of the kaffir path and the main street he spotted Constable Hepple nestling close to a hugely betitted brunette with milkmaid's arms. It was the girl from the churchyard: the one Hansie had targeted after the captain's funeral. The lovebirds didn't notice him until he was almost on them.
"Detective Sergeant." Hansie sprang back and straightened his jacket over his slim boy hips. "I…I didn't see you."
"You were busy," Emmanuel replied, and the girl made a hasty attempt to straighten the neckline of her dress. "Do you know where Constable Shabalala is?"
"The location." Hansie's breath was short and his color high. "Lieutenant Lapping said for him to come back tomorrow."
"Lieutenant said Hansie could have the day off as well." The girl's work-worn hands fluttered up over her enormous breasts to stroke the diamond center of her necklace. "We were going for a walk."
Emmanuel pointed to the necklace nestled in the girl's cleavage. "That's an unusual design. Can I take a closer look?"
"Of course." The milkmaid flushed with self-importance and lifted her chin to allow a better view. "It's real gold and diamonds."
"A flower," Emmanuel said, and examined the gold petals set with a sparkling diamond stamen. It was the necklace worn by the brown-skinned woman in the captain's flesh extravaganza. Hansie shuffled closer, intent on protecting his girl from the big-city detective's attentions. Emmanuel ignored him. The farm girl's mammaries were important only because their eye-popping size ruled her out as the model in the photos.
Emmanuel's brain leapt from one bizarre scenario to the next in an attempt to explain the appearance of the gold flower around the neck of an Afrikaner brunette. Did Captain Pretorius have a multicolored harem of women he rewarded with identical gold flower necklaces?
"Where did you get the necklace?" he asked.
"Hansie." The girl beamed at her idiot boyfriend. "He gave it to me just now."
That explained the sweaty clinch. It wasn't every day a farm girl was given an expensive piece of jewelry to flash around.
"You've got good taste, Constable." Emmanuel placed his hand on Hansie's shoulder and moved him farther onto the kaffir path. "Where did you get the necklace?"
The boy tensed at the serious tone and scraped the toe of his boot into the sandy path.
"I don't remember."
"Tell me."
"I…I found it."
"Where?"
The constable's cornflower-blue eyes filled with tears just as they had when the Pretorius brothers made a move to beat the daylights out of him at the crime scene.
"By the river. On the path leading to the veldt."
Emmanuel regretted not letting the Pretorius boys give Hansie a solid pounding. It was more than the imbecile policeman deserved.
"You're talking about the riverbank where the captain was found?"
"Ja." Tears rolled down the constable's face and dripped onto his starched uniform. His mother was going to have to spot clean the fabric this evening.
"The necklace was on the path the boys used to get back to the location?" Emmanuel clarified the facts and struggled to stop his fingers digging into the flesh of Hansie's shoulder. Surely the National Party government realized that giving a uniform to a boy like this was the same as giving it to a monkey?
"Ja, on that path."
"Why didn't you call me to look at this unusual thing?"
Hansie chewed on his thumbnail and gave the question his best efforts. It was an excruciating exercise to watch. "Well…A woman's necklace has nothing to do with the captain dying. I mean…it would be like a woman was there with him…and…there wasn't a woman with him, so…because…Captain wasn't like that."
"Hepple." Emmanuel dropped his hand from the young man's shoulder and rifled in his jacket pocket for the car keys. "That necklace is evidence. You have until this afternoon to get it back from your girlfriend and give it to me. You understand?"
"But…she…she really likes it."
"This afternoon," Emmanuel said, and made for the Packard. He had an idea now of what Shabalala was hiding and why the Zulu policeman was covering up for his boyhood friend, Willem Pretorius.
He ran through the unplanned maze of dilapidated dwellings, on the lookout for the pink door that he was told marked the Zulu constable's house. He found it and pounded twice. The door swung open and Shabalala stepped back in surprise.
"A woman was with him," Emmanuel said. "There was a woman with Captain Pretorius at the riverbank on the night he was shot."
"It rained and many of the marks—"
"Don't give me that rubbish, I'm not buying it today. You're a tracker. You knew Pretorius wasn't alone that night."
The Zulu-Shangaan made an effort to speak and when that failed, he reached into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out a blank-faced envelope, which he handed over without saying a word.
"What's this?"
"Read it, please, nkosana."
Emmanuel tore the envelope open and extracted a folded piece of paper with two lines of text written on the lined face. He read the words out loud. "'The captain had a little wife. This wife was with him at the river when he died.'"
"You were the one who sent me to King's farm," Emmanuel said. He recognized the hand. It made sense now. The person who'd left the note ran like no one he'd ever seen, ran with a relentless stride that had left him gasping for breath out on the veldt. Captain Pretorius and Shabalala stirred the hearts of the old people as they crossed the length and breadth of the Pretorius farm without stopping, without drinking. Like so many white men, Emmanuel thought, I was beaten by a warrior of the Zulu impi.
"What happened that night on the riverbank? I'm not going to tell the Pretorius family or the other policemen. So go ahead and just say it."
Shabalala paused as if he couldn't bear to put into words the things he'd kept bottled up for so long.
"The captain and the little wife were together on the blanket. Captain was shot and fell forward. The little wife, she struggled from under him and ran on the sand to the path and then the man pulled the captain to the water. This is all I know."
"Christ above, man. Why didn't you tell me straightaway?"
"The captain's sons. They would not like to hear these things. None of the Afrikaners would like to hear this story."
The Pretorius boys were the unofficial lawmakers in Jacob's Rest. Anton and his burned garage were an example of the rough justice they meted out to offenders. What chance did a black policeman stand against the mighty hand of the Pretorius family?
"I understand," Emmanuel said.
Shabalala had to live in Jacob's Rest. Writing unsigned notes was the simplest way for him to help the investigation and stay out of harm's way. It was better and safer for everyone involved if a white out-of-town detective was the one to uncover the truth about the captain.
"Detective Sergeant." The Zulu constable motioned to the back of the house. "Please."
Emmanuel followed Shabalala through the neat sitting room into the kitchen. A black woman stood near a table. She looked up with a concerned expression but did not make a sound.
Shabalala led Emmanuel through the back door. They took seats on either side of a small card table. In the yard behind Shabalala's house there was a chicken coop and a traditional kraal for keeping animals overnight. Behind the kraal the property fell away to the banks of a meandering stream.
Both men looked toward the distant hills as they talked. The serious business of undressing Captain Pretorius could not be done face-to-face.
"Do you know who the woman is?"
"No," Shabalala said. "Captain told me of the little wife but not who she was."
Emmanuel sank back in his chair. He'd had about enough of Willem Pretorius's fire walls. Why didn't he boast about his conquests like a normal man?
"What did he tell you about the girlfriend?"
"He said he had taken a little wife from among the coloured people and that the little wife had given him…um…" The pause lengthened as Shabalala sought the most polite way to translate the captain's words.
"Pleasure? Power?" Emmanuel prompted.
"Strength. The little wife gave him new strength."
"Why do you call her 'little wife'?" He'd seen the photographs and there wasn't one thing in them that his own ex-wife, Angela, would have agreed to do.
"She was a proper little wife," Shabalala stated. "The captain paid lobola for her, as is the custom."
"Whom did he pay the bride-price to?"
"Her father."
"You're telling me a man, a coloured man, agreed to exchange his daughter for cattle?" He leaned toward Shabalala. Did the Zulu policeman really believe such a far-fetched story?
"Captain told me this is what he did. He had respect for the old ways. He would not take a second wife without first paying lobola. This I believe."
"Yes, well. I'm sure the white Mrs. Pretorius will be delighted to hear her husband was such a stickler for the rules."
"No. The missus would not like to hear this." Shabalala was deadly serious.
The sound of a woman's voice singing in a far-off field carried back on the breeze. Spread out before them, a great span of grassland ran toward distant hills. This was one Africa, inhabited by black men and women who still understood and accepted the old ways. Five miles south in Jacob's Rest another Africa existed on parallel lines. What made Willem Pretorius think he could live in both places at the same time?
"We have to find this woman." Emmanuel pulled the Mozambican calendar from his pocket and laid it on the small table between them. The time for secrets was over. "She was the last person to see Pretorius alive and maybe she can tell us what he was doing on these particular days."
Shabalala studied the calendar. "The captain was in Mooihoek on the Monday and Tuesday before he died but he did not leave the town on the other days."
"What do you think those red markings mean? Did he go somewhere for a few days each month?"
"No. He went to Mooihoek to buy station supplies and sometimes to Mozambique and Natal with his family but not every month."
"These markings mean something." Emmanuel sensed another dead end coming up. "If Pretorius was doing something illegal…smuggling goods or meeting up with an associate…would you have known?"
"I think so, yes."
"And was he doing anything like that?"
Shabalala shook his head. "Captain did not do anything against the law."
"You don't think the Immorality Act counts?" Emmanuel was amazed by the tenacious respect Shabalala still held for his dead friend. Of all the people in Jacob's Rest, Shabalala had earned the right to be cynical about Willem Pretorius, the lying, adulterous white man.
"He paid lobola. A man may take many wives if he pays the bride-price. That is the law of the Zulu."
"Pretorius wasn't a Zulu. He was an Afrikaner."
Shabalala pointed to his chest just above the heart. "Here. Inside. He was as a Zulu."
"Then I'm surprised he wasn't killed sooner."
There was a shuffle at the back door and the round-faced, round-bottomed woman from the kitchen carried a tea tray onto the stoep and set it down on the table.
"Detective Sergeant Cooper, this is my wife, Lizzie."
"Unjani, mama."
Emmanuel shook hands with the woman in the traditional Zulu way, by holding his right wrist with his left hand as a sign of his respect. The woman's smile lit up the stoep and half the location with its warmth. She was a fraction of her husband's height but in every way his equal.
"You have good manners." Her graying hair gave her the authority to speak where a younger woman would have stayed silent. She gave the calendar a thorough look-over.
"My wife is a schoolteacher." Shabalala tried to find an excuse for his wife's inquisitive behavior. "She teaches all the subjects."
Lizzie touched her husband's broad shoulder. "Nkosana, may I see you in the other room for just a moment, please?"
There was an awkward silence before the Zulu policeman stood up and followed his wife into the house. It didn't do well for a woman to interrupt men's business. The murmur of their voices spilled out from the kitchen. Emmanuel sipped his tea. How Captain Pretorius arranged the purchase of a second wife was not as important as finding the woman herself. She was the key to everything.
Shabalala came back out onto the stoep but remained standing. He tugged on an earlobe.
"What is it?"
"My wife she says this calendar is a woman's calendar."
"It was the captain's. I found it at the stone hut on King's farm."
"No." Shabalala fidgeted like an awkward schoolboy. "It is a calendar used by women to…um…"
Shabalala's wife stepped out from the kitchen and picked up the calendar.
"How silly can a grown man be?" she asked Shabalala with a click of her tongue. She pointed to the red-ringed days. "For one week a month a woman flows like a river. You understand? This is what this calendar is saying."
"Are you sure?"
"I am a woman and I know such things."
Emmanuel was stunned by the simplicity of the explanation. It never would have occurred to him in a hundred years of looking. The calendar was about the woman and her cycle, not an elaborate puzzle of illegal pickup dates and activities. The camera, the calendar and the photos were all linked to the shadowy little wife, whoever she was.
"Thank you," he said, then turned to Shabalala. "We have to find the woman before the Security Branch beats a confession from the man in the cells and then throws all the other evidence out the window."
"The old Jew," Shabalala suggested. "He and his wife also know many of the coloured people."
"He won't speak," Emmanuel said. "But I know someone who might."
Emmanuel crossed the street to the burned-out shell of Anton's garage and Shabalala set up watch in the vacant lot next to Poppies General Store. If Zweigman took flight during Emmanuel's talk with Anton, the black policeman had orders to follow and observe from a distance.
Emmanuel entered the work site and the coloured mechanic looked up from the wheelbarrow of blackened bricks he was cleaning with a wire brush. Slowly, a sense of order was being imposed on the charred ruins of the once-flourishing business.
"Detective." Anton wiped his sooty fingers clean with a rag before shaking hands. "What brings you to these parts?"
"You know most of the coloured women around here?" Emmanuel didn't waste time with preliminaries. If he didn't get anything from the mechanic, then he'd move on to the old Jew.
"Most. This got to do with the molester case?"
"Yes," Emmanuel lied. "I want to find out what set the victims apart from the other coloured women in town."
"Well…" Anton continued moving bricks to the wheelbarrow. "They were all young and single and respectable. There are one or two women, I won't mention names, who are free and easy with their favors. Molester didn't go after them."
"What about Tottie? You know anything about her private life?"
"She hasn't got one. Her father and brothers have her locked down so tight a man's lucky to get even a minute alone with her."
"No rumors about her taking up with a man from outside the coloured community?"
The mechanic stopped his work and wiped drops of sweat from his top lip. His green eyes narrowed.
"What you really asking me, Detective?"
Emmanuel went with the flow. There was nothing to gain now from being shy or subtle.
"You know any coloured man who practices the old ways? A man who might take a bride-price for his daughter?"
Anton laughed with relief. "No dice. Even Harry with the mustard gas would never swap his daughters for a couple of cows."
It was highly likely that the deal, any deal with native overtones, was done in secret to avoid the scorn of a mixed-race community that worked tirelessly to bury all connection to the black part of the family tree.
"Has any coloured man come into money that can't be explained?"
"Just me." Anton grinned and the gold filling in his front tooth glinted. "Got my last payment a couple of days ago, but I don't have a piece of paper to prove where it came from."
The secretive Afrikaner captain and the coloured man who'd bargained for sexual access to his daughter were not likely to advertise their venture in any way. Only a traditional black man, steeped in the old ways, would talk openly about the bride-price paid for his daughter.
"Okay." Emmanuel abandoned the line of questioning and backtracked. "Have there been rumors about any of the women in town or out on the farms taking up with a man from outside the community?"
Anton carefully selected a charred brick and began scrubbing in earnest. "We love rumors and whispers," he said. "Sometimes it feels like the only thing that keeps us together."
"Tell me."
"If Granny Mariah hears I repeated this, she will hang my testicles out to dry on her back fence. I'm not exaggerating. That woman is fierce."
"I promise she won't get that information from me."
"Couple of months back…" Anton chose to talk to the brick in his hand. "Tottie let slip to some other women that she thought the old Jew and Davida were close. Too close."
"Any truth in it?"
"Well, Davida was over at the Zweigmans' house all hours of the day and night. She walked in and out whenever she pleased and it didn't seem right, one of us being so comfortable with whites."
"Did anyone ask her what she was doing there?" He couldn't connect the heated exchange of bodily fluids with the shy brown mouse and the protective old Jew. His relationship with her seemed paternal, not sexual.
"Reading books, sewing, baking, you name it, she always had an explanation for being there." Anton worked a lump of ash out of the brick's surface with his fingernail. "I was sweet on Davida at the time. We went walking and I even got some kisses in but she changed, Davida did. It was like she went into a shell once the talking started. She wasn't like you see her today, all covered up and quiet. The girl had some spark back then."
"Really?"
"Oh, yes. Beautiful wavy hair down to the middle of her back; all natural, not straightened. At socials she was the first one up to dance and the last one to sit down. Granny had her hands full with her, I'll tell you."
The description didn't remotely match the cloistered woman hiding under a head scarf. But the fact that the shy brown mouse once had long black hair did make her a possible match for the model in the captain's photographs. What was her body like under the shapeless clothes that hung from her like sackcloth?
"What happened?" Emmanuel asked.
"I still can't figure it," Anton said. "She got through the molester thing okay and then one day the hair is all gone and she won't walk with me anymore."
"When did this change take place?"
"April sometime." Anton threw the damaged brick into a wheelbarrow. "Zweigman and his wife nursed Davida through a sickness and when she came out, well, nothing was the same as it was before."
April. The same month Captain Pretorius discovered the German shopkeeper was actually a qualified surgeon. Did Zweigman reveal the extent of his medical skills during treatment of Davida's mysterious illness? And if that were the case, how had Willem Pretorius found that out? The shy brown mouse was the only common link between the two men.
"Thanks for your help, Anton," Emmanuel said, and held his hand out to end the informal interview. "Good luck with the cleanup."
He wanted to run through the connections between Willem Pretorius and Davida Ellis with Shabalala so he could clarify the links in his own mind. First, Donny Rooke sighted the captain behind the grid of coloured houses on the night he was murdered. Then Davida appeared at the stone hut. Somehow Celestial Pleasures had traveled from Zweigman's study to Pretorius's locked room as well. The elements were beginning to connect.
"Detective." Anton stayed half a step behind him. "I wasn't joking about Granny Mariah. She'll never forgive me if I cause trouble for her granddaughter."
Emmanuel didn't know how to tell the mechanic that Davida's troubles were likely to run far deeper and wider than a rumor spread by an ex-boyfriend. If the shy brown mouse proved to be the principal witness in the murder of a white police captain, everyone in South Africa was going to know her name and her face.
|
A Beautiful Place to Die
|
Malla Nunn
|
[
"mystery"
] |
[
"South Africa",
"1950s",
"crime",
"Detective Emmanuel Cooper"
] |
Chapter 16
|
Granny Mariah and Davida were at work in the garden, planting seeds in a long row of freshly turned earth. The older woman's green eyes widened at the sight of the white policeman and his black offsider walking across her garden on a spring day.
"What do you want?" She straightened up and put her hands on her hips.
"I need to speak to Davida." Emmanuel remained calm and pleasant in the face of Granny Mariah's hostility. There wasn't much a nonwhite woman could do once the force of the law turned against her.
"What do you want with her?"
"That's between Davida and myself."
"Well, I won't have it. I won't have you coming in here and making trouble for my granddaughter."
"It's too late for that," Emmanuel said. He felt sorry for the fiery woman and admired the strength she showed in the face of overwhelming odds. This was a battle they both knew he was going to win.
"Granny…" The shy brown mouse stepped forward. "It's all right. I'll talk to the detective."
"No. I won't have it."
"He's right," Davida said quietly. "It's too late."
The brown-skinned matriarch held on to her granddaughter's hand and squeezed tight. "Use the sitting room, baby girl," Granny Mariah said. "It's more comfortable."
"We'll talk in her room." Emmanuel walked to the small white building at the edge of the garden and opened the door. Inside the old servant's quarters he pulled up a chair from which to survey the interior of the room. The wrought-iron bed and bedside table were instantly familiar from the photographs. On the floor closest to the pillows was a neat stack of leather-covered books taken from Zweigman's library. All that was missing was a giant slab of white meat lying resplendent on the bed.
Davida entered the room and the images Emmanuel had seen after getting back from Lorenzo Marques flashed through his mind. The fall of long dark hair across her face, the jewel hardness of her erect nipples against the white sheets, the sleek lines of her legs ending in a thatch of dark pubic hair…and Willem Pretorius ready to taste it all.
"Did you know Captain Pretorius?" he asked.
"Everyone knew him."
"I mean did you know him well enough to, say, have a talk with? That sort of thing?"
She turned to face the window, her fingers toying with the lace edge of the curtains. "Why are you asking me these questions?"
"Why aren't you answering?"
"Because you already know the answer. That's why you're here." Her breath made an angry sound as it escaped her mouth. "Why must I say it?"
"I need to hear it from you, in your own words."
"Okay." The shy brown mouse turned to him and he glimpsed the fighting spirit of Granny Mariah alive and well in her. "I was sleeping with Captain Pretorius in that bed right there. You happy now?"
"Sleeping with as in napping or sleeping with as in fucking?"
"Most nights we did both." She was defiant, ready to burn all the remnants of herself as a good woman.
He liked the angry Davida a lot better than the milk and water version she peddled to the world.
"I'm wondering why a mixed-race woman would get involved with a married white man whose family lives just a few streets away. Do you like taking risks, Davida?"
"No. It wasn't like that."
"How was it?"
"I didn't want to." She scraped curls of flaking paint off the windowsill and rubbed the residue between her fingers. "He didn't want to."
"He forced himself, did he?" Emmanuel didn't try to hide his skepticism. How long did it take Willem Pretorius to raise the white flag and surrender to the pleasure of the wrought-iron bed? A day, a week, or possibly a whole month?
"He tried," Davida insisted. "First with abstinence and then with the photos, but those things didn't work."
"Tell me about the photographs," he said.
She'd volunteered the information without knowing he was in possession of printed copies. Maybe it made her feel better to admit to the things in her life that had been locked in the internal vault. Being a model in pornographic photographs was an illegal activity sure to have her barred from membership in the League for the Advancement of Coloured Women.
"Captain said if he had some photos to look at, then he wouldn't have to touch me. He said looking at pictures was a lesser sin than committing adultery."
"I see."
The differences between the two envelopes of photographs were stark. The first pictures were naive and gentle, the second explicit and untamed. Sometime between shooting roll number one and roll number two, sin had won the battle for Captain Pretorius's soul.
"But the photographs didn't work and the two of you ended up committing adultery? Is that right?"
"Yes." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "That's what happened."
"What was your relationship like?"
"I already told you."
"So, Captain Pretorius would have sexual relations with you and leave immediately afterward? There was nothing more to it?"
"No. Captain liked to stay and talk for a while afterward."
"How would you describe your relationship with him? Good?"
"As good as it could be." She shrugged her shoulders. "There was never going to be wedding bells."
"Then why did you do it? Anton or any of the other coloured men in town would have been more suitable choices, wouldn't they?"
She made a sound of disbelief low in her throat. "Only a white man would ask a question like that and expect an answer."
Emmanuel felt he was seeing her for the first time. The meek coloured girl he could deal with, even ignore, but this furious sharp-eyed woman was something else altogether.
"What's the question got to do with my being white?"
"Only white people talk about choice like it's a box of chocolate that everyone gets to pick from. A Dutch police captain walks into this room and I say what to him? 'No, thank you, Captain sir, but I do not wish to spoil my chances for a good marriage with a good man from my community, so please ma' baas take yourself back to your wife and family. I promise not to blackmail you if you promise not to punish my family for turning you away. Thank you for asking me, Mr. Policeman. I am honored.' Tell me, is that how it works for nonwhite women in Jo'burg, Detective?"
Emmanuel felt the truth of her words. It was as if she'd slapped him hard with an open hand. He sat forward and considered the implications of what she'd said. A secret and illegal affair with an Afrikaner certainly delayed any chance of getting married or of beginning a serious relationship with someone in her own race group. Jacob's Rest was too small to cover that level of illicit activity. Davida Ellis was stuck in limbo: an unmarried mixed-race woman tied to a married white man.
"When was the last time you saw Captain Pretorius?"
The rush of color brought on by her tirade against the white man ebbed away, leaving her curiously ashen.
"The night he died," she said.
"Where?"
"He came here to the room. He said for me to get my things because we were going out to the river. I didn't want to go but he was angry and said we were going."
"What was he angry about?"
"He caught Donny Rooke spying on him and had to give him a hiding as a warning. I cleaned the captain's hands with a cloth before we left because he'd split the skin on his knuckles."
That was one up for Donny and confirmation that Pretorius leaned hard when he had to. It was unlikely that Donny, the outcast, could have organized an assassination and a foray into Mozambique to cover his trail after the beating he'd taken. Donny wasn't nearly smart enough or strong enough for that.
"You didn't want to go out that night?"
"No." She fell back into her old ways and concentrated on her hands while she spoke. "I never liked going outside with the captain. I was scared that someone would see us."
"Pretorius had no such worries?"
"He said it was okay now that he knew who was spying on him, and the river was his favorite place to…you know…to go."
Emmanuel remembered his impression of the crime scene and the distinct feeling that the victim might have been smiling when the bullet struck. Not so far off the mark, then.
"Captain Pretorius thought someone was spying on him before he caught Donny that night?"
"He said he knew there was someone out on the veldt and that he was going to catch him."
"When did he first tell you that someone was spying on him?"
"Three, four weeks or so before he died."
"He thought that man was Donny?"
"Yes. That's what the captain told me."
What on earth would lead Willem Pretorius to believe that Donny Rooke, of all people, was capable of cunning undercover surveillance? The watchful presence was still out there in the dark, and it sure as hell wasn't Donny.
"What happened then?" He believed everything Davida had said so far and wondered when she'd slip and try to cover up a hole in her story. Everyone had something to hide.
"We went to the police van and I got under the blanket in the back. We drove to Old Voster's farm. Captain got out and checked to see if everything was okay. He didn't come back for a long time and…" She took a deep breath. "I got scared but then he came and said it was all clear, so we went down to the river."
She was breathing harder now, her chest rising and falling in an unsteady rhythm. She was like this in the stone hut. Scared to death.
"Go on."
"Captain spread the blanket out and then…well…that's when it happened. Two popping sounds and he fell forward just like that."
"Captain Pretorius was standing by the blanket and you were sitting down?" Emmanuel asked. Something was missing from her description of the events.
"We were both on the blanket." She stared out the window like a prisoner watching a flock of birds soar above the barbed wire. "We were…he was…you know…"
"Davida, turn around and look at me," he said. "Tell me exactly what happened on the blanket. Don't leave anything out. I won't be angry or shocked."
She turned back to him but didn't lift her gaze from the middle button of his jacket. After what she'd done in the photographs, it was amazing to see a blush work its way up her neck and darken her skin.
"Captain was doing it to me from behind." Her voice was a reedy whisper of sound. "He finished and was doing up his buttons when I heard the two popping sounds. I didn't know what it was and then the captain fell forward and I couldn't move. He was on me, lying on top of me. I tried to move but he was on top of me."
"What did you do then?"
"My heart was beating so loud that my ears were ringing. I was crying, too. Trying to get out from under the captain. That's how come I didn't hear him until he was behind me."
"Who?"
"The man."
"What man?"
"The man with the gun. He kicked my leg and said, 'Run. Look back and I'll shoot you.' I pushed myself out from under the captain and I ran. I fell over on the kaffir path and my necklace snapped but I didn't stop to look for it. I got up again and I ran until I got back home."
"This man. What language did he use?"
"English. With an accent."
"Tell me about the man. Did you see any part of him?"
"I was facing away and the captain was behind me. I didn't see him. I only heard him telling me to run."
"From his voice," Emmanuel said, "what would you guess? White, coloured, black, or Indian?"
"A Dutchman," she answered straight off. "A proper Afrikaner."
"Why do you say that?"
"His voice. A Boer used to giving orders."
That description matched ninety percent of the men who'd attended Willem Pretorius's funeral. It was the same as finding a match for a man wearing khaki work pants or overalls.
He was skeptical about the appearance of "the man." Wasn't it a little too improbable, and convenient, to have a phantom Afrikaner descend from the sky to absolve her of involvement in the captain's murder?
"Did you know the man, Davida?"
"No, I didn't."
"Was it a coloured man? Someone from town?"
She looked up now, alert to the change in atmosphere. Her eyes were the color of rain clouds.
"It was a white man," she repeated. "He spoke to me like I was a dog, like he enjoyed giving orders."
"Did you know the man, Davida?" He hit the question again and waited to see where she went with it.
"I told you. No." Her voice was pitched high with frustration. "I don't know who it was."
Emmanuel studied her face, strikingly pretty now that she'd ditched the novice-nun pose and he could see her clearly. "He did you a favor, didn't he? The man. No more posing for illegal photos. No more lifting your skirt every time Pretorius came calling."
"That's not right. I didn't want to hurt the captain."
"Why not?" Emmanuel countered. "Sleeping with you is against the law. Making pornographic photographs is also against the law and yet he forced you to do both those things. That's right, isn't it? You couldn't say no to an Afrikaner police captain."
"That's true." The rain clouds burst and she wiped the tears from her face with a quick hand. Crying for a dead Dutchman in front of an Englishman. Could there be a more ridiculous thing for a mixed-race woman to do?
"You had feelings for him," Emmanuel said. He'd seen the photograph she'd taken of Pretorius. Davida and the captain shared more than just a mutual physical pleasure.
"I didn't love him." She was angry about the tears and the cool way he watched her struggling for control. "But I didn't hate him, either. He never did anything to hurt me. That's the truth."
"There's plenty of ways to hurt someone without raising a hand to them." His own anger came in a flash and he let ten percent of it out to breathe. "What will happen when you testify in court and everyone in South Africa hears about the photos and the fact that you were a white policeman's skelmpie? Will that feel good or will that hurt? No matter. You can always remember how considerate Willem Pretorius was when he led you down the road to nowhere."
"You're cruel," she said.
Emmanuel stayed quiet for a moment. He'd gone too far.
"I'm sorry," he said. "Let's get back to the riverside. Is there anything else you can tell me about the man who shot Captain Pretorius? Anything at all will help."
It took her a while to recover from the terrifying specter of the courtroom and the public fallout from the murder trial.
"He was quiet," Davida said. "Like a cat. I didn't know he was there until he was right behind me."
"You were frightened and crying," Emmanuel reminded her. "Hearing anyone would have been hard."
"I know but…it was like the time the Peeping Tom grabbed me. I didn't know he was there until right before he jumped. It was like that."
"Was the killer's accent the same as the man who grabbed you?" Emmanuel asked. No matter which way the case turned, the molester was always there, like a shadow.
"They both sounded strange." She looked directly at him, the connection clicking into place. "Like someone putting on a voice."
Well, if she was lying about the man at the river, he couldn't fault her performance. She looked amazed not to have made the link before now between the killer on the riverbank and the molester.
Emmanuel digested the new information. It supported his sense that the captain's murder was tied to small-town secrets and lies and not part of an elaborate Communist plot to derail the National Party government.
He stood up and brushed the creases from the front of his trousers. Two days ago he'd believed Davida was a shy virgin who shrank from the touch of men not of her own "kind." That perception was now a confirmed pile of horseshit and he was forced to give serious credence to her version of events regarding the captain's murder. He no longer trusted his instincts when it came to the captain's little wife.
Was that because, as the sergeant major suggested, there was something in her that stirred him? Emmanuel avoided looking at the wrought-iron bed and resisted the flood of uncensored images that came to him in a rush. Of all the times for his libido to rise from the dead, this would have to be the worst. Davida Ellis was a mixed-race woman and a key witness in the murder of an Afrikaner policeman: the devil's very brew.
Emmanuel turned his back on the bed and faced the window where she stood. "When did you take up with Pretorius? Before or after the molester stopped?"
"After. The first time the captain came into this room was to interview me about the attacker. That was the end of December."
"Do you remember being asked anything unusual by the captain?"
"Well…" She considered her answer. "Everything about the interview was strange. Not like with Lieutenant Uys, who asked three questions and then chased me out of the police station."
"Strange in what way? Tell me about it."
"Captain came here to this room by himself." She let that breach of protocol sink in. "He asked me to sit down on that chair and close my eyes. I did and then he asked me to think about the man who'd grabbed me. He asked a lot of questions. Was the Peeping Tom bigger or smaller than me? I said bigger but not by that much. What was his skin like? Rough or smooth? I said smooth with only a little roughness, like a man who works with his hands now and then. Did his skin smell of anything in particular? Coffee, cigarettes, grease, or soap—any of those things? I said no but his hands did smell familiar. Captain told me to keep my eyes shut and try to remember. Where had I come across the smell before?"
"Did you remember?"
"I said that Anton's hands smelled the same way. Like crushed gum leaves."
"You think Anton's the Peeping Tom?"
"No," Davida said. "Anton's hands are rough, like sandpaper, and his arms are hard with muscles. The man who grabbed me had soft hands and a smaller body than Anton's."
He didn't ask her how she knew those intimate details about Anton. Presumably she had done a lot more than take the air when she went out walking with the lanky mechanic.
"How did Captain Pretorius react when you told him about the smell on the molester's hands?" There was no mention of the gum leaf smell in the record of interview typed up and filed after the captain's informal visit to the old servant's quarters. There had to be a reason for the omission.
Davida shifted uncomfortably, and then seemed to realize that both her reputation and the captain's were lost beyond any hope. Head up, she spoke to Emmanuel directly, in much the same way as Granny Mariah had outside the church.
"My eyes were closed. I didn't see his face but I know he was pleased. He stroked my hair and said, 'You're a clever girl to remember that, Davida.' I opened my eyes and he was halfway out of the door."
What was it about the town of Jacob's Rest? The heat, the isolation, or maybe just the proximity of the race groups appeared to make the exercise of power over others irresistible. Emmanuel himself had almost touched Davida's wet hair outside the captain's stone hut because he'd tasted the thrill of knowing that she was under his command and would keep his secrets safe. Wasn't that feeling of power just an extension of the white induna fantasy that the National Party was now enacting into law?
"Did you ever tell Anton about the connection with the Peeping Tom? Ever ask him what the crushed gum leaf smell was?"
"Captain Pretorius came back here three or four days later and it was hard to talk to Anton after that. I don't know what the smell was and the captain never mentioned it again."
"Did you always call him Captain?"
The bold act evaporated and Davida went back to looking at the magic spot in front of her right toe. "He liked to be called Captain before and during and then Willem afterward."
Yes, well. A relationship with a morally upstanding Dutchman with a taste for pornography and adultery was bound to come with a dizzying level of complications and arcane rules. Emmanuel glanced around the room and took note of the hastily made bed and the dust motes dancing over the painted concrete floor. It seemed that Willem got all the neatness he needed at home and then came to this room to wallow in the mess.
"Did you visit Pretorius at the stone hut?" he asked. The stone hut that was kept as fastidiously clean as the locked study in the immaculate Cape Dutch house but without the help of a maid.
"Yes, I did."
"When you'd finished calling him Captain Pretorius and then Willem, did you clean for him?"
She looked up, gray eyes sparking with indignation. "I'm not a maid," she said.
No, she wasn't a maid and not overly fussy about housekeeping on the whole. Somebody had cleaned the stone hut to a hospital-ward level of cleanliness. The only thing missing was the astringent smell of pine antiseptic. "Was the captain fussy about the interior of the hut? You know, did he have a place for everything and everything in its place?"
"No. He didn't care so much about keeping neat."
"Not in this room and not at the hut," Emmanuel said. In every other respect Willem Pretorius had kept himself very neat indeed. The immaculate white house with his immaculate white wife, the starched police uniform and spotless undershirts were all outside indications of his clean and spotless soul. Flip a coin and you got the shadow Willem, slumming naked in an unmade bed with a smile on his face. Why was the stone hut so clean? The captain hadn't been expecting any visitors.
"What were you doing at the hut?" Emmanuel asked.
"Getting the photos." She was nervous now, her shoulders straightening as she pulled herself out of her slouch. "I didn't want anyone to find them."
"Did your mother clean up the hut, Davida?"
"No."
"What did your father think about your relationship with Captain Pretorius? Did he approve?"
That threw her and she cupped a hand to her flushed cheek. "What are you talking about? My father died when I was a child. In a farm accident."
"I thought Willem Pretorius arranged for a bride-price to be paid to your father in exchange for you."
"Wh—what? Where did you get that from? That's a lie."
"Which lie are we talking about? The one about the bride-price or the one about your father being dead?"
Davida quickly hid her fear and confusion in her shy-brown-mouse persona. "I told you the truth about Captain Pretorius and myself. I even told you what we were doing when he got shot. Why would I lie to you now, Detective Sergeant Cooper?"
"I don't know." He noted the correct use of his title. "But I'm sure you have your reasons."
He walked to the door, conscious of Shabalala waiting outside and of the gathering speed of the investigation. He had to make the connection between the molester and the captain's killer real enough to stand up in court. He needed evidence.
"Are you going to take me to the station?" she said.
"No."
The Security Branch and the Pretorius brothers were the last people he'd expose her to. She was safe so long as she remained an anonymous coloured woman working for an old Jew in a shabby local store. Once she'd been revealed as Captain Willem Pretorius's doxy, the knives were going to come out and the punishment for her transgressions would be fierce.
"What do I do now?" She sounded lost now that everything about her secret life had been exposed.
"Stay here. You can help your granny in the garden but don't leave the property until I get back and tell you it's okay to move around."
"When will that be?"
"I don't know." He pulled the door halfway open, then stopped. "What happened back in April?"
"How do you know about that?"
"I don't. That's why I'm asking."
She hesitated, then said, "I had a miscarriage. Dr. Zweigman made sure everything was cleaned up and healed, but the captain thought he killed the baby. They had a fight about it. I never talked about Dr. Zweigman with the captain after that and I never talked about the captain with Dr. Zweigman, but we all knew."
"I'm sorry," Emmanuel said, and stepped out of the room and into the garden. He was sorry to have ever heard of Jacob's Rest. He was also sorry to discover that the disconnect switch, the one that allowed him to endure the grisliest murder investigations without getting emotionally involved, no longer worked.
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