Beast (28 page)

“Who lent the money, then?”

“Aram Agajanian,” said Charlotte.

“Agajanian!” Darling shouted. “That pervert?” Aram Agajanian was a recent immigrant to Bermuda who had made a fortune producing soft-core pornography for Canadian cable-television systems and had chosen Bermuda as a tax haven. “Why did you go to him?”

“Because he offered. Dana had done the accounts for one of his companies, and she asked him a couple of questions about securing loans, and … well, he offered.”

“Christ!” Darling said, turning to Dana. “You had to hang out our dirty laundry in front of that Armenian star-fucker?”

“You want me to say I’m sorry, Daddy? Well, I am. I’m sorry. There. Does that make you feel better?” Dana was struggling not to sob. “But the fact is, he offered. No strings, no payment schedule. Pay it when you can, he said. I never thought he’d sell the note. He didn’t want to.”

“Why did he?”

“I think Mr. Manning made him one of those offers you can’t refuse. Mr. Manning owns a lot of cable companies.”

“How did Manning find out about it?”

“Agajanian thinks it must have been from Carl Frith.”

” What?! Is there anybody on this island who doesn’t know?” Darling heard himself shouting. “How did he find out?”

“He was working on Agajanian’s dock, and he must have overheard something.”

“Wonderful … great.” Darling felt betrayed and confused. He looked around and, for no reason, touched one of the walls. “Two hundred and twenty years,” he said.

“It’s just a house, William,” Charlotte said. “We’ll find somewhere else to live. Dana wants us to move in with her. For a while. It’s just a house.”

“No, Charlie, it’s not. It’s not just a house. It’s more than two centuries of Darlings. It’s our family.” He looked at his wife and his daughter. “It was passed on to me, and if I have one obligation in this life, it’s to keep passing it on for the future.”

“Let it go, William. We’re alive, we’re together. That’s all that counts.”

“Like hell,” Darling said, and he turned and left the room. “Like bloody hell.”

WHEN DARLING RETURNED to the end of his driveway, he found the tableau unchanged: Talley still paced and fidgeted; Manning still stood like a Bond Street mannequin.

Darling motioned for them to follow him, and as he led them down the driveway, he imagined Manning was gloating, and he had to fight to keep from spinning on the man.

He gestured for them to sit at a table on the porch.

“You’re pretty sure that beast is still around, then,” he said to Talley.

“Yes.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because nothing’s changed yet. The seasons haven’t changed, currents haven’t changed, there have been no major storms. I got figures from NOAA last night, and they think—it’s an educated guess—that the Gulf Stream won’t begin its seasonal shift for maybe a month.” Talley could feel his enthusiasm returning, erasing his embarrassment at being party to Manning’s extortion. “Meanwhile, Architeuthis is finding food— not its normal food, but food. There’s been no reason for it to leave.”

“There was no reason for him to come, either.”

“Yes, but it did, it’s here. The important thing to remember, Captain, is not to make Architeuthis into a demon. It—not he, it—is an animal, not a devil. It has its own cycles, it responds to natural rhythms. I think it’s hungry and confused. It’s not finding its normal prey. I think I can coax it to respond to an illusion of normalcy.”

“Whatever the hell that means.”

“Leave that to me.”

“And you truly believe you can get the best of this thing?”

“I think so, yes.”

“Before it kills everybody?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“How?”

Talley hesitated. “I’ll tell you … soon.”

“Is it a state secret or something?”

“No. I’m sorry, I’m not playing games. The means depend on the circumstances, on how the animal behaves. It may … there’s a chance … what I want to try to do is make it destroy itself.”

Darling looked at Manning, and saw him staring, stone-faced, at the bay, as if these details bored him.

“Sure, Doc,” Darling said. “It may take off and fly to Venus, too, but I wouldn’t count on it. I think I’ve got a right to—”

“No, Captain,” Manning said, suddenly interested again. There was a thin smile on his lips. “You have no rights. You have a duty: to drive the boat and to help us.”

“Now, Osborn …” Talley said, “I don’t think—”

“Why not, Herbert? We’re not civilized people here; Captain Darling said so himself, and I respect him for it. Politeness is deceptive, and it wastes time. Better that we all know exactly where we stand, right from the start.”

Darling felt a sharp pain behind his eyes, sparked, he knew, by rage and a feeling of impotence. He pressed his temples, trying to squeeze the pain away. He wanted to hit Manning, but Manning was correct: He had found Darling’s price, and had bought him, and there was no point in pretending otherwise.

Darling said, “When do you want to go?”

“As soon as we can,” Manning replied. “All we have to do is load up the gear.”

“I’ll have to get fuel, food. We could go tomorrow.”

“Fuel,” Manning said, and he reached into his briefcase and brought out a banded packet of hundred-dollar bills. “Ten thousand enough for starters?”

“Should do.”

“Now, the terms.” Manning snapped his briefcase shut. “Dr. Talley is confident that he’ll be able to locate and attract the squid within seventy-two hours, so you’ll provision the boat for three days. Whether or not we catch the animal, on our return, I’ll destroy the note and pay you the balance of the two hundred thousand. Your net, after securing your house, should be somewhere over a hundred thousand.” He stood up. “Agreed?”

“No,” Darling said.

“What do you mean, ‘No’?”

“Here are my terms,” Darling said, looking at Manning. “You’ll burn the note now, in front of me. Before we leave the dock, you’ll give me fifty thousand dollars in cash, which will stay ashore here, with my wife. The balance in her name in escrow in the bank, in case we don’t come back.”

Manning hesitated, then opened his briefcase again and took out the note and a gold Dunhill lighter. “You’re an honorable man, Captain,” he said as he held the note out over the lawn and touched the flame to it. “We know that much about you. But so am I. Once a deal is done, I don’t quibble. You shouldn’t distrust me.”

“This has nothing to do with trust,” Darling said. “I want to provide for my wife.”

Darling watched Talley and Manning walk away up the drive and turn into the parking lot at Cambridge Beaches, then he put the stack of bills into his pocket and went down the path to the boat. He started the engine and climbed up to the flying bridge, and he was about to put the boat in gear when he suddenly remembered that it was still tied to the dock.

He felt as if somebody had punched him in the stomach, and he blew out a breath and leaned on the railing. It was the first real evidence he’d had that Mike was gone. He stayed there for a few moments, until the feeling passed, then went below and untied the lines.

As he rounded the corner out of Mangrove Bay on his way to the fuel pumps at Dockyard, Darling tried to think of somebody he could hire as a mate. He had no reason to believe that Talley and Manning knew anything about setting rigs or keeping the boat pointed into the wind or any of the scores of other chores involved in running a boat.

No, he concluded, there was nobody. He had friends and acquaintances who were capable and might even be willing, but he wasn’t about to ask them. He wasn’t about to be responsible for another death.

He’d do it alone. Well, not quite alone. He had one ally, in a box down in the hold, and he’d use it if he had to.

One chance, Mr. Manning, he thought. I’m giving you one chance. And if you screw up, I’m gonna blow that motherfucker to kingdom come.

It took Darling almost three hours to pump two thousand gallons of diesel fuel and seven hundred gallons of fresh water into the tanks on the Privateer, and to buy six bags of groceries: fresh and dried fruits and vegetables, corned beef, canned tuna, blocks of cheddar cheese, loaves of bread, stew meat and a variety of beans. By the time they’d eaten all that food, he figured, they’d either be home or they’d be dead.

When he returned to his dock, evening was coming on. He removed extraneous gear from the boat: broken traps, scuba tanks, parts of a dismantled compressor. He came across the pump Mike had been working on. He held it in his hands and looked at it, and he thought he could feel Mike’s energy in it.

Don’t be stupid, he said to himself, and he put the pump ashore.

Charlotte was in the kitchen, doing what she always did when things were bad and she didn’t know what else to do: cooking. She had roasted an entire leg of lamb and made a salad big enough to feed a regiment.

“Company coming?” Darling said, and he went to her and kissed the back of her neck.

“After twenty-one years,” she said, “you’d think I would have known what you’d do.”

“I even surprised myself. Until today, I thought there were only two things in the world that really mattered to me.” Darling reached into the refrigerator for a beer. “I wonder what my old man would say.”

“He’d say you’re a damn fool.”

“I doubt it. He was a big one for roots—that’s why they all loved this house. It was their roots. It’s our roots, too.”

“What about us?” Charlotte turned to face him, and there were tears in her eyes. “Aren’t we roots enough, Dana and I?”

“We wouldn’t be us without this house, Charlie. What would we be, living in a condo downtown or taking up Dana’s spare room? Just a couple of old farts waiting for the sun to set. That’s not us.”

The phone rang down the hall, and Darling answered it, told the caller to piss off and returned to the kitchen. “A reporter,” he said. “I guess there’s no such thing as an unlisted number.”

“Marcus called earlier,” said Charlotte.

“Did you tell him what’s going on?”

“I did. I thought maybe he could think of a way to stop you.”

“And could he?”

“Of course not. He thinks you walk on water.”

“He’s a good lad.”

“No, just another damn fool.”

Darling looked at her back. “I love you, Charlie,” he said. “I don’t say it too often, but you know I do.”

“Not enough, I guess.”

“Well …” He sighed, wishing he could think of comforting words to weave.

“Or is it you you don’t love enough?” Charlotte said, whipping gravy into a froth.

That was the strangest question Darling had ever heard. What did it mean, loving himself? What kind of person loved himself? He couldn’t think of an answer, so he turned on the television to get the weather forecast.

They left the television on while they ate, letting the local newscaster fill the silence, for they both sensed that there was nothing more to say, and that any attempts at conversation would result in words they would regret.

After supper, Darling went out onto the lawn and looked at the bay. There was still some light—the soft violet that ushers in the night—and he could see two egrets standing like sentries in the shallows by the point, perhaps hoping for a twilight meal of mullet. A gentle fluttering sound, like the opening of a paper fan, heralded the arrival of a school of fry, skittering in flight across the glassy water.

When he was a child, he had spent his evenings watching the bay, as enraptured by it as other children were by radio or television, for from the bay came sounds, and sometimes sights, that excited his imagination as vividly as had any ever fabricated on a sound-stage. Marauding barracuda slashed through schools of mackerel, and the water boiled with a bloody foam. Sharks came, too, sometimes singly, sometimes in twos or threes, their dorsal fins slicing the surface as they calmly cruised in search of prey, exercising some primal rite of plunder. Crabs scuttled on the beach sands; turtles exhaled like tiny bellows; irate kiskadees chastised one another in the treetops.

The bay was life and death, and it had given him a feeling of peace and security he could not articulate. It carried with it the reassurance of continuity.

There was still life in the bay, though less, still much to love.

The crown of a full moon peeked above the trees in the east, and cast arrows of gold that flashed on the egrets and lit them like golden statues.

“Charlie,” Darling called, “come look.”

He heard her footsteps in the house, but they stopped at the screen door. “No,” she said.

“Why not?” he asked.

She didn’t answer. Instead, she thought to herself, Oh William, you look like an old Indian, sitting on a hillside, getting ready to die.

DARLING WAS AWAKENED by the sound of the wind whistling through the casuarinas behind the house. It was still dark, but he didn’t need to see to know the weather; his ears told him that the wind was out of the northwest and blowing fifteen to twenty knots. At this time of year, a northwest wind was an unstable wind, so before long it should shift, either back around to the southwest and settle down, or veer into the northeast and crank up into a little gale. He half hoped for a gale: Maybe a rough ride would make Manning and Talley get sick and decide to quit.

Not a chance, he thought. Those two were in the grip of forces they probably didn’t understand and certainly couldn’t defy, and nothing short of a hurricane would put them off.

Charlotte lay on her side, curled up like a little girl and breathing deeply. He bent down and kissed the back of her neck, inhaling her aroma and holding his breath, as if trying to carry the memory of her with him.

By the time he had shaved and made coffee and heated up some of last night’s lamb, the sky was lightening in the east and the kiskadees were gathering in the poinciana tree to announce the advent of day.

He stood on the lawn and looked at the sky. There was still a stiff breeze on; low clouds were being shoved to the southeast. But a ridge of high cirrus was creeping northward, signaling that the wind would soon shift back to the south. By noon, the chop would be gone from the shallow water and the swell would have faded from the deep.