Eye of the Whale (5 page)

Kazumi kept his receding gray hair perfectly tamed and wore a fashionably tailored blue suit despite the Caribbean heat. The British had never let the adversity of colonial life weaken their sense of propriety. At the elite boarding school that Kazumi had attended in England, the war had never ended, and he was seen as the enemy, de
spite the fact that his mother was British. Yet he never lost his love for England and felt that the British and the Japanese had many things in common, including their sense of propriety.

Kazumi gazed into the binoculars once again. The American was heading back to shore. Kazumi would hate to harm such beauty, but he was prepared to do whatever needed to be done—or, more accurately, to have Nilsen do whatever needed to be done.

I
N THE NARROW CABIN,
Halvard Nilsen’s eyes were still blurry from a night of drinking on the island. He should have known better than to guzzle the strong rum—it contained twice as much alcohol as vodka—and his throbbing head reminded him of that fact. In the mirror across from his bunk, he looked at his disheveled hair, the rough stubble on his red cheeks, and the bags under his eyes. Nilsen pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one, a puff of smoke momentarily eclipsing his face.

He heard the high-pitched whine that he had been too liquored up to notice during the night. He scratched the bumps along the back of his neck. His eyes darted around the room, looking for any sign of movement. He saw the black speck bump along the wall of the small cabin, drunk on his blood. It hovered, heavy and sated, near the fluorescent light. Nilsen got up slowly, stalking one step at a time, raising his hands with the slow, deliberate patience of the hunter.

K
AZUMI TURNED AWAY
from watching the small boat when he heard Nilsen’s heavy footsteps approach.

The Norwegian’s ruddy face was lined and sun-damaged under his once white captain’s hat. The stubble on his unshaved face rose into the beginnings of a mustache and goatee around his mouth. He
wore a black T-shirt and jeans, disregarding the ship uniform, but technically, he did not work for the fishing fleet. Technically, he did not work for the government, as Kazumi did. His services were called “offshoring,” and his salary was deposited into a numbered bank account in the Bahamas once a month.

Nilsen held up his right hand. On it was the crumpled remains of a large tropical mosquito, its legs and wings crushed, and a smear of blood across his palm. With his left hand, Nilsen pulled off each wing and each leg, dissecting his kill slowly. Once the mosquito had been utterly destroyed, Nilsen proceeded to suck the blood on his palm. “I got my blood back,” he said, a smile spreading across his face.

Kazumi looked at him with disgust. “We have bigger problems than mosquitoes.”

“That’s why you woke me,
sir?”
There was always a sneer in Nilsen’s voice. Kazumi knew that Nilsen did not respect him but had no choice other than to obey him. Few people ate whale meat these days, and as a former whaler, Nilsen needed work. Kazumi was willing to put up with the man’s arrogance because he needed both his skills and his lack of moral qualms. Nilsen lit another cigarette and took a long drag.

“Take a look through the glass,” Kazumi said. Their common language was English, although Kazumi emphasized his Oxford-educated accent to reinforce his superior position. Nilsen stepped up to look, and Kazumi winced at the smell of liquor, sweat, and old cigarette smoke that seemed to ooze from the whaler’s every pore.

“What do you want me to do to him?” Nilsen said, referring to the local in the boat.

“Not him. Her.”

“Her?” Nilsen’s sneer had turned into a snicker.

“Elizabeth McKay is a marine biologist who thinks whales are smart—smart enough to use language.”

“So can parrots.”

Kazumi rolled his eyes. “We’re not trying to convince the world to eat parrots, now, are we?”

“So what?”

“So we only have a few months before the vote. We can’t afford to have a public relations disaster.”

It had been over two decades since America and other cultural imperialists had forced the rest of the world to stop commercial whaling. Kazumi took great pride in the fact that a few nations like Japan, Norway, Iceland, and some island nations had managed to continue whaling through various means. They took several thousand a year, but that was a fraction of the whales being taken before the ban. Japanese scientists had shown that whale populations had recovered significantly. Kazumi was certain there were plenty of whales to support whaling in larger numbers, and he was leading an effort to overturn the out-of-date ban. Yet any vote at the International Whaling Commission was highly sensitive—people seemed to care more about whales than other seafood—and this American’s research was politically explosive.

Established by whaling nations to regulate whaling, the IWC had become quite political and many member nations increasingly obstructionist. Fortunately, Kazumi and his allies had found a way to bring in new island nations that were supportive of his goals. At approximately 10,600,000 yen per whale, billions of yen were at stake. And then there was the matter of Kazumi’s retirement, which was not too far off, and his “descent from heaven.” He had been assured a lucrative board position by the whaling industry if everything went according to plan.

“What do you want me to do?” Nilsen asked with a smile. Kazumi knew Nilsen was always happiest when he had something to do.

Kazumi’s face was impassive. “We’re going to stop her from proving anything to anyone.” He saw three blows from the whales that Elizabeth had been studying. The Japanese did not yet have permission to whale in these waters—but the local whalermen did. “Don’t you think that Captain Teo would be interested to know about whales so close in?”

FOUR

5:20
A.M.
Next day
Sunday
La Pompe, Bequia

E
LIZABETH WAS STARTLED AWAKE
by the cacophony of rain on the corrugated metal roof. The air in the one-room house she rented from Milton’s family was thick and moist, and the blades of the wooden fan did little to cut through the heat. The blue walls were peeling, perspiring as everything did in the tropics. Only briefly, after a cold shower or the rare and welcome rain, did she ever get the layer of sweat off her skin.

She could smell the pungent smoke of the green mosquito coil that had long burned itself out. There was something about being stalked by a blood-sucking creature that robbed sleep of its rest. Fragments of dreams still flashed in her mind like scattered snapshots. She blinked, and recalled an image of a birthday cake floating on the water with burned-out candles.

She shook her father’s voice from her head. Dreams were not messengers from the spirit world. They were simply the detritus of the brain’s random firings during REM sleep. She was just feeling guilty about arriving back home the day before Frank’s birthday. Maybe he was right. She was always trying to push the limits, get more time with the whales, and make the big discovery that would validate her research. But the new song she had recorded the day be
fore could
be
that discovery; the extra day really might have made all the difference. She promised herself she would make it up to Frank.

Elizabeth sat up as her eyes focused on a mosquito that clung to the outside surface of the netting. It was still waiting, wanting, needing the blood protein in her veins that allowed it to lay its eggs. The numerous lenses of its compound eyes detected movement easily, so Elizabeth slowly placed one hand on either side of the fold where it rested. The mosquito did not move, perhaps exhausted by its all-night vigil, its maternal hunger for blood. The sting of her clapping hands was satisfying, but the mosquito was gone. She had missed and would have to leave the safety of the netting.

As a biologist, she was supposed to love all creatures great and small, but the truth was she disliked most insects. She thought of the disgusting cockroaches that would scurry over the countertops and on her bed in her aunt’s apartment, when she was sent to live in New York at the age of seven. She shivered as she remembered the feeling of their wiggling antennae and their skittering flat bodies and hairy legs.

“You’ll be better off with your aunt,” her father had said the night they scattered her mother’s ashes over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge. It had been just the two of them. Elizabeth had tried to see below to where the racing current swept her mother’s remains out to sea, but the lights of the bridge did not shine down to the water’s surface. “The whales will watch over her now,” her father had said. After that, whales had begun to appear in her dreams, always carrying her mother back to her, but inevitably, when she awoke, her mother was still dead, and she would feel her heart break all over again.

Elizabeth opened the slatted shutters, letting the cool trade winds blow in, and watched the downpour. She leaned out the window and gazed up at the dark clouds, feeling the drops splash on her face. Ever since she was a girl, she had loved rain. It reminded her of when she
was young and still living in California, where water was scarce and always needed. It was easy to forget that for most of human history rain was the difference between life and death. Her father used to say that in rain was the secret of everything: Water runs down the rivers to the sea, then rises up to the clouds, and finally falls from the sky. All the things we do are the same. They come back to us just like rain. She watched the water sluice down Milton’s green metal roof and into the pipe where it was captured and stored for drinking. And then the miserly squall stopped as quickly as it had started and the clouds were gone.

E
LIZABETH’S LARGE BLUE DUFFEL BAG
was packed. She was ready for the ferry to St. Vincent, then the flights to Barbados and Miami, and finally to San Francisco and home to Frank. Elizabeth remembered her wedding ring, hidden in a pocket of her bag. Her fingers were swollen from the humidity, and the ring resisted her efforts to put it back on. She sucked nervously on her finger, using her saliva as a lubricant, and wriggled the ring over her knuckle.

Relieved, she flipped open her cell phone and glanced at the photo of Frank. He smiled at her, handsome and confident. She touched the wide, open face and the laugh lines around his cheeks and eyes. Frank’s forehead was broad and strong under short brown hair that was just beginning to recede. His cheeks and squared, dimpled chin had a day or two of a stubbly beard that made him look like he had just rolled out of bed—which was often the case, first as a medical student, then a resident, and now a fellow. His sparkling, mischievous, green-gray eyes stared at her.

It was these eyes that had first captivated her across the crowd at, of all places, a funeral. Professor Maddings’s wife, Louisa, had died of ovarian cancer, and Elizabeth had left Bequia and the whale season early to go to the funeral. Death always demanded new life, and she
was not the only woman who had met her future husband at the grave. Louisa had been one of Frank’s patients during his medical school training. It was rare to meet a doctor, especially a student, who cared so much about his patients, but Elizabeth soon discovered that Frank’s love was wild and fearless.

Right outside the church, he invited her for dinner. Later that night, when the owner of the Italian restaurant locked the door behind them, it was as if their hours together had been minutes. It may have been his eyes that she noticed first, but it was his questions that made her fall in love with him. He wanted to know everything about her, about the whales, about her world. He seemed to drink her up with the bottle of red wine, and she knew in an intoxicated cocktail of love and desire that this was the man she would marry. There was no careful consideration, no deliberating of variables—just one headlong plunge. From that first night, they spent every possible minute together. They shared a passion for the ocean, and three months later, on the ferry to Nantucket Island, Frank got down on one bended, trembling knee.

Elizabeth looked at the large diamond ring now. It was impressive but not very practical for field research. She and Frank had very little money: She was a graduate student at Woods Hole, and he was a medical student at Harvard. But they had not needed much. They spent most of their time in each other’s arms and left his apartment only when absolutely necessary.

Elizabeth had tried to convince Frank to save money on an engagement ring and just get her one for the wedding, so they could take a longer honeymoon scuba diving in Belize. But on the advice of his father, Frank bought a two-carat princess-cut diamond. Frank’s father was a nice man, but from a different generation, when big rings, big weddings, and big families were signs of having made it in America. There were times when Elizabeth wondered if Frank wanted a wife from a different generation.

Elizabeth plugged the audio cable of her DAT machine into the cheap boom box by her bed. The sound of Echo’s song filled the room. The night before, she had listened to the song over and over again, trying to memorize the phrases and individual units. Now she kept rewinding and listening to one particular pair of upward sweeping sounds:
“w-OP-w-OP.”

“What it mean?”

Elizabeth looked up through the open window and was startled to see Milton’s dog, Catcher, his mouth open and pink tongue hanging out, panting. The mutt was part sheltie, with bright shining eyes and blond bushy ears that were cocked curiously at her. Elizabeth shook her head incredulously, knowing that the dog had not asked the question. Then, behind the shutter, Elizabeth saw Eldon, Milton’s eight-year-old son, and she sighed, relieved that she was not losing her mind.

“IIt’s a social sound—a contact call,” Elizabeth explained. “The mother uses it to get her baby to come closer when it strays too far.” Elizabeth and other researchers had known about these social sounds for many years, but she was one of the first to try to correlate the sounds with the social behavior. Whales had one of the most diverse sound repertoires of any species, but while song had been studied for decades, the social sounds were just beginning to be deciphered. It was like discovering an entire alien language and trying to understand it. Even SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—had expressed interest in her research.