That bay in Tierra del Fuego from which Henri and the others were taken, his home, that’s where we needed to be on October 12. Find his descendants and ask them what they remembered from that violent past, what the great-great-grandparents had told their children so they could tell theirs, so some trace of that suffering remained alive in memory. What did they feel, those left behind, when, from one day to the other, their loved ones suddenly disappeared, were never heard of again? Vanished, as if they had never been born. What had the four Kaweshkar who came back in 1882 related of their trip, did any of them recall Henri writhing on the floor of a Zurich hospital, drying up with dysentery, his innards burning? Did they pronounce his real name? Did anyone recall it? Had the only woman to return, Piskouna or Trine or whatever her name was, had she at least whispered something about his fate? Had Pedro, who might have been Henri’s brother? Isn’t that what brothers do?
And once the distant relatives of Henri had spoken to us, then this distant relative of Petit and Hagenbeck would speak, I’d tell them our story, we would show that the forgiveness we were asking for was not fraudulent, came from our own sorrow, my penitence for what my ancestors had done to theirs. Perhaps they would lift the curse, perhaps they had the power, perhaps there was still some healer among them who recollected how to quiet the fire of revenge, how to sing the dead into the next world, how to lay to rest the spirit of Henri. And then maybe we could help them in a more concrete way, create a foundation in my visitor’s name for the last survivors of the Kaweshkar ethnic group, finance a museum for their objects, pay lawyers to demand reparations, something, anything, anything to atone.
Among the books I had laboriously read in Spanish about the Alakaluf, as they were insistently called, was one delving into their spiritual world that I particularly treasured. The author was a historian by the name of Frano Vudarovic, who taught at the local university in Punta Arenas.
Would he appreciate my writing to him in his native Spanish, however stilted mine might be, awkward, excessively formal, scattered with grammatical errors? My hope was that he’d appreciate that effort as proof of my sincerity—important, as so much of what I’d be telling him was deceitful. On a recent trip to Paris, I wrote, my wife and I had come upon a postcard of a striking young Indian (I included a photocopy of the carte). Because we couldn’t forget his features, and above all his haunting eyes, we had spent many months tracing the subject’s ultimate fate, su destino. After briefly summarizing this young Patagonian’s voyage and death, I asked Professor Vudarovic if he might provide us with information regarding any possible living relatives of this man who had been called Henri by his captors, as we were interested in contacting them to see if a ceremony might be performed to help his soul find some respite, given that his body probably couldn’t be found and buried. I enclosed a self-addressed, prepaid express mail envelope for any possible response.
It came back five days later.
Written in impeccable English.
Dear Mr. Foster:
As you may know, the Kaweshkar believe—or at least did, when there were enough of them alive to believe in something collectively—that the soul is made of air. Xolás, their Supreme Being, breathes that soul into the body at the moment of birth. When the body, a mere perishable creation of the parents, dies, the soul lifts up, light as the wind, rides up and ever up into the stars and beyond, where the vast hut of Xolás serves as the abode of the dead. When the soul arrives at the enormous door above which Xolás presides, it is overcome with trembling and shame and swears, even if this is not so—“I have not done anything really bad.”
Xolás does not deign to listen to these words. Instead, their god asks them to look back: “Reflect now on your life and actions.” And once the soul has done so and is ready to tell its host the truth, then Xolás opens the great door to the immense hut and says, “Now you may come in.”
If the world followed the advice of Xolás to tell the truth, it would be a far better place and I would not have been forced to write this response. It is advice, dear Mr. Foster, that you have chosen to ignore, though I conjecture that your motives are not sinister or malevolent, just guided by trembling and shame.
I called a colleague at the linguistics lab at MIT, with whom I had studied while completing my doctorate at the University of Sussex, and he informed me of your wife’s recent accident and recovery and also that it was rumored that her husband was a recluse, had not been seen in public for years due to some strange illness which made him agoraphobic. In short, you could not have traveled to the center of Boston, let alone to Paris.
I am told your wife has no parents and you yourself sound bereft, and though I am not myself a Kaweshkar I have learned much from them; in this case, to revere their tradition, by giving refuge to you both as orphans. And am thus most willing to help you, sir, but can only do so if you are equally willing to share the truth with me. Then I will welcome you and your wife into my abode and my life with all the respect you deserve.
I await your further instructions.
Cordially,
Dr. Frano Vudarovic
P.S. There are no direct descendants of the man you call Henri, whose fate—as that of those kidnapped along with him—is a legend among the older members of this ethnic group. It is likely, however, that his blood—or that of brothers and sisters left behind—courses through some of the few pure Kaweshkar who still survive and are on their way to dying out.
His letter did not really surprise me. It was as if I had wanted to be found out, maybe had blatantly lied in order to receive an admonition demanding that, like the lost soul in the Kaweshkar myth, I pour out the truth to a stranger.
I began to feverishly write back. In English, naturally. After so many years of hiding from others, skulking in my room, entombed with Henri’s face, it was a relief to express my story with no ornaments attached, freely and forthrightly.
When I was done—seven pages later—I felt fresh, renewed, invigorated—and more so when my letter was dispatched the next day. Remembering what Cunningham had said about the agent Makaruska who had interrogated Mrs. Hudson at the library and the possibility that we might be under some sort of surveillance, I asked my father—he did not demand an explanation and I did not furnish one—to mail it from a post office with no return address. It would be unlucky if our confidential information fell into the wrong hands. Given such a confession of my vulnerability, I did not doubt that Professor Vudarovic would defer to my directives and send any response care of my father at his work address.
It took a while for the reply to arrive, but when it did, the news gave me yet another lift.
If my wife and I were able to arrive in Punta Arenas, despite the problems that I had with travel, two Kaweshkar elders were ready to welcome us and perhaps perform a ceremony that might offer some relief to the dead and also, perhaps, to the living. There was only one thing puzzling them. They were not owurken, shamans—most of the ancient rituals were no longer practiced in a semi-urban environment where the young were frequently disbelievers. If I was indeed possessed, they feared they did not have the knowledge to dominate demons and drag them out of my body, even though certain remnants of the ceremonies, like the language itself, had been transmitted from the past. If they were to engage in a burial ritual, what exactly was being given its final resting place, given that the body itself had been lost, perhaps forever, as well as anything that might have belonged to the dead person?
I spent several days mulling over how to respond to this query, when my dad offered an answer.
The joy he had received from his daughter-in-law’s New Year’s Day recovery had gradually eroded as Cam’s conduct became more obsessive and erratic. At first, perhaps channeling Mom, who would have counseled prudence, he reined himself in, but changed his mind when Vic called toward the end of July, confiding that Barry Cunningham was concerned about my wife’s increasingly shrill demands, putting excessive pressure on the agency. Perhaps the blow to the head had not completely healed? But when my father at last voiced his doubts, he did not blame her but me for indulging her manias.
“And what would you have me do?”
“Burn them.”
“Them?”
“The photos. And the documents, notes, photocopies, sources, the whole shebang, everything. But first of all, the photos. Down to the last one.”
I didn’t understand how that would help us—or get Cam to cease and desist from her research.
“The photos,” Dad insisted. “That day, on your fourteenth birthday, remember how I pleaded with your mom to get rid of them? And she convinced me, damn it, to preserve them. Oh, if I’d—oh, I blame myself for not having had the balls to turn the fuckers to ashes right then and there, prove to this savage that he had no power over us. Instead, we let him grow each time we—”
“But you were the one demanding sessions, one after the other, so we could find out if he was still—”
“I know, I know. My mistake, stupid, idiotic, imbecile, to ignore my gut instinct. Keeping that poison in our home! And when your mom was murdered by him, I should have gone straight upstairs and burnt that savage like a witch, see how he liked being licked and consumed by fire like we were by his fucking face, blacken his fucking face, turn it to cinders, scattered to the wind, ground into pieces, drowned down a toilet. And I would lie awake at nights—by myself, by myself, reaching out a hand to where your mother used to sleep. Eyes wide open in the dark, thinking that those images were close by, in a box, seeping through the floorboards like a serpent, spitting at you, at me, at us. Gathering my courage to incinerate the motherfuckers, but always held back by the memory of Margaretta, her project, her hopes, not wanting to betray what she had dreamt of as a way out. And when Cam entered our lives, well, I quenched that desire, because she was like your mother. I could see that she was being seduced by this monster, but I fooled myself into believing she could tame him. And then he caused that amnesia—and even so, I held back, it wasn’t fair to trash the photos when Cam couldn’t protest, participate. And when she awakened, well, I thought maybe he’s satiated. But now, now it’s clear he’s cast another spell on her, engaged legions of other fiends, and we have to intervene, drastically, you have to show him who’s the boss, you’re the one—not me—who has to do it.”
He was wrong. That road of revenge and anger would not assuage Henri. It had led me nowhere for many forsaken years.
And yet, Dad’s outburst supplied me with the response to the question the Kaweshkar elders had transmitted via Frano Vudarovic.
The photos!
Take them down to Henri’s birthplace, the island where his life had been interrupted, where we would get the last Kaweshkar to honor Henri and his story. Even if it didn’t free me, it was the right thing to do. His body might be irretrievable, but his images—they were the greatest outrage. Pierre Petit had made immortal and perennial his humiliating captivity. But we could reverse what was done to him, at least symbolically, at least indicate that we understood. Take him home.
But how to get me out of the country without my photo being snapped or my face filmed? All airports were under surveillance, with hidden and not-so-hidden cameras everywhere. Though Cam had hinted that she had some ideas about how to circumvent that security, probably had contrived some harebrained scheme to—No, I wanted to present her with solutions and not problems. She was right that I was depressingly dependent on her initiative. And besides, who knows if she would abandon her quest for Hindu acrobats in London and Tuaregs in St. Louis long enough to look for a way of smuggling me out of the United States, she’d probably shelve my idea indefinitely—whereas if I had it all disentangled . . . Which I did more promptly than I could have expected—thanks to some inspiration from Henri, who must have whispered the solution that had been staring me in the face, his and mine.
He had left his home by sea and we would get there by the same means, of course. Arrive in Tierra del Fuego on a boat, avoid troubled, congested public areas and Downey’s presumably ubiquitous spies. For that we needed a ship seaworthy enough to get us there, run by somebody we could trust—if not with all our secrets, at least with the fact that we were not only in danger from treacherous currents or hurricanes but from human enemies as well. Someone ready to take risks and bend the law a little, with decades of experience sailing every ocean, preferably an older man whom no one would take on as a skipper anymore, perhaps slightly insane, ready to cater to the whims of a young couple who were more than a little insane themselves. Someone who wanted the job so urgently that he’d be loyal to a fault.
And how in the hell can you, Fitzroy Foster, unable to move out of your house, find someone like that?
The next day—it was a Sunday—Barry Cunningham providentially solved my problem.
He called to let me know that he happened to be in town. Would we mind if he stopped by to pay us a visit?
The first thing he did when he stepped up to the door was to flash Cam and me—Dad had gone fishing for the day—a piece of paper on which words had been written: at the top, in capital letters, ACT NORMAL, and below, pretend I’ve come to talk about possible wedding plans for Laura and Vic. While a technician sweeps the house for listening devices. Nod if you agree.
We nodded obediently and he flashed a signal to someone waiting in the Ford he’d rented. A tall, stooped, gloomy man emerged, blinked his eyes at us as a way of saying hello, and proceeded to make sure the house was clean. It was, I could have told Barry that. I did tell him that once we could speak freely, sure that nobody was eavesdropping.
“I’m always at home,” I said. “I haven’t left this place in years. So they—whoever they are—can’t plant their devices.”
Better safe than sorry, was Barry’s clichéd but unassailable reply. More so, when we heard why he’d come to warn us personally of the discovery made by the detective assigned to Cam’s genealogical inquiries, who had confirmed that everywhere he went a man had preceded him. The description of this person corresponded to Danny Makaruska, the agent who’d been to the library to interrogate Mrs. Hudson. Barry’s source at the FBI had indicated that this was all part of a hush-hush Pentagon project—Operation Memory Redux—and that Camilla Foster Wood and her husband were among its targets.
This meant that someone could be listening in on our phone conversations, opening our mail, examining packages sent out. If we had revealed confidential information in recent calls or encounters, he suggested disseminating contradictory versions in the weeks ahead in order to confuse our pursuers.
As to the investigations initiated on Cam’s behalf, progress was negligible. Collating all those names in search of a common lineage had turned up only a few possible leads and even those had fizzled out. He thought, frankly, that we were wasting money and resources. His firm had more normal cases to pursue, adultery and fraud and missing children, and hoped we didn’t mind if he desisted from tracking down the far-flung progeny of circus impresarios and photographic hacks. If any other need happened to arise, he’d still be in town for a few days.
Neither Barry’s warning nor his withdrawal from the investigation had any effect on Cam. On the contrary, she seemed even more resolved to stick it out, engaging another agency if necessary. “We’re so close, Fitz, I can feel it.” Nor did she care if Downey and his henchmen were spying on us—“So what else is new? Just proves that we’re nearing success, that he’s worried we’ll get to all those people before he does.”
I was, however, shaken. Did our adversaries know of my contact with Frano Vudarovic, had they intercepted my confession to him, his invitation to Punta Arenas? I would have to throw them off the scent, as Barry had counseled—one more task awaiting me, along with hiring a skipper and vessel to take us down there.
The next morning, as soon as Cam was on her way to the library to check out who had photographed a nine-year-old Hottentot girl exhibited in Paris and a phony Swahili tribesman in Basel and some early film by the Lumière brothers in Lyons, I called Barry Cunningham at his hotel and asked him to come over right away, see if he could help us get to Europe by sea.
As he had told us that the less he knew, the better, I didn’t mind lying to him about our destination. Le Havre, I declared, we wanted to arrive in that port by early September—a voyage by sea, as the air might help my wife recover from her sickness. Our intention was to visit Zurich and then board the same boat and cruise the North Sea before heading to the Caribbean in time for the five-hundredth-anniversary celebrations. Perhaps he could locate a sea captain, preferably someone slightly shady?
A few hours later I called Barry, notifying him that it was Hamburg and not Le Havre we were sailing to, hoping that whoever was recording the call would take due notice.
“Hamburg, eh?” Barry said, emphasizing the word, he had probably guessed that this was some sort of trick on my part.
“Hamburg,” I confirmed, relishing how Downey would receive the news, prepare his cohorts for a European excursion. He’d assume we were going there to interview the Hagenbecks and visit the Jardin d’Acclimatation and then on to Zurich to disinter some Kaweshkar body.
“I’ll find the right person,” Barry said.
That Captain London Wolfe was indeed the man for the job was obvious to me one week later during the first five minutes of an interview that was to last for several hours. Before we even sat down, in fact. He had not called ahead of time, just showed up at our door, banging on it as if funneling a gale. A tall and burly man, face burnished by wind and brine and sun, with a white beard out of some novel and knuckles the size of hammers.
“You must be Fitzroy Foster,” he said, pumping my hand genially. “Was told you never leave the house so why bother letting you know I was on my way, huh? Though if you never leave your house, not sure why the hell you and your wife want to cross the Atlantic and cruise other seas and then sail around the Caribbean in hurricane season—and hey, a vessel before the end of August, not much time to get ready.”
“Before I invite you in, Captain . . .”
“Name’s Wolfe—Captain London Wolfe. Born in Nantucket, smelled the salt and the sand before I even knew the taste of milk, like six generations before me. Been sailing since I was a lad, lied to the skipper of my first boat about my age, he thought—or maybe not—that I was several years older—done every ship, every shoal, every sea. Served in the Coast Guard, sailed the Norway fjords and the depths of Sumatra, cruised the Great Lakes as master boson, speared sharks and hunted marlin, towed vessels in Korea and Singapore and Rio, can fix any electrical and mechanical problem, deal with boat maintenance and engineering, first aid and CPR certified, one-hundred-ton endorsement, you won’t find anyone better equipped.”
“Then why do you need this job so desperately, Captain Wolfe?”
He measured me as if I were lightning on the horizon. He must have liked what he saw or maybe he was, in fact, so desperate that he would have liked me if I had been Godzilla or mad Ahab.
“You asked for someone who knows the ropes but nobody will hire. Now, if you’re not interested, let’s not waste each other’s time. I’ll go my way and you—well, you’ll never find anyone like me.”
I was soon to find out how true this was.
We sat down together—after he had refused a cup of coffee, the tilt in his eyes telling me that there would be plenty of time to share beverages and warmth once we reached an agreement.
“So, you asked me a question, Fitzroy Foster, sir, and here’s what I propose. You’re hiding something and I’m hiding something. If you tell me the truth, then I’ll retaliate. You tell me your plans—your real plans, not the bullshit you fed Barrington Cunningham—and I’ll tell you why nobody else will hire me.”
I liked that. Though no way was I going to reveal all my secrets to this stranger, certainly not the existence of Henri. Just as I did not expect him to come completely clean. But other things he would get to know in due course if we engaged his services, so I explained that Hamburg was a fraudulent endpoint, meant to fool anyone who meant us harm—here, the captain’s features lit up with bliss at the possibility of a good brawl, I noticed approvingly how he clenched his robust fingers into a fist—and that as soon as we were in extraterritorial waters, we’d deviate from our course to Europe and head south until we reached Punta Arenas, so we could visit one of the most inaccessible islands on October 12.
“Patagonia,” Wolfe exclaimed. His eyes—squinty from having faced windward for so long—opened a tad, brightening even more below a forest of bushy eyebrow outcrops. “Went there on my first ship, I was just fourteen—” And at the sound of that age my eyes began to sparkle as well, this was the sort of adventure I had dreamed of during my humdrum early adolescence—“when I escaped to sea, following in the wake of my pa and grandpa, whalers both of them from Nantucket. Climbed the masts on that whaleship, swabbed the decks, peeled potatoes, slept in the filthiest quarters reeking of bilge and seaweed, did anything the first mate commanded and several things that he didn’t. I’ve been back many times since, in every capacity, I know those reefs and inlets, coming from the Atlantic and from the Pacific and under the worst gales, but also enjoyed some days that were gloriously sunny, fewer than anywhere on this earth, but oh so translucent and bright. So I’m your man. It was meant to be. I have contacts with the Coast Guard who will facilitate that change in course, I know somebody in the International Maritime Organization who will help us avoid collisions but not pass the information along, frustrating reconnaissance by the pursuers out to cause you mischief. I’m your man, I say. The Straits of Magellan! And I’d thought I’d die without braving them again.”
I reminded him that we had a bargain: no deal until he opened his life to scrutiny.
“Fair’s fair. I can’t get a job because I was caught smuggling refugees into our resplendent land of the free. From El Salvador, to escape the civil war—a few years ago, you know, when . . . It was for money, I’ll admit that any day, though the truth is I’m proud of saving those families caught in the middle of a massacre they wanted no part of and didn’t understand. They caught me, my former buddies in the Coast Guard—caught me, but the charges couldn’t stick. Some idiot had deported all the Salvadorans so the evidence was gone, they couldn’t be cross-examined by my attorney who’s as sharp as a cutlass. So I got off the hook on a technicality—far from heroic, but I’m not complaining. My license was reinstated, they couldn’t deny me that, but the bureaucrats made sure nobody’d ever touch me again, not with a ten-foot anchor. So, enough said?”
What would Cam have done? She’d have pressed him for more. I needed to play the tough guy.
“What are you holding back?” I asked.
“Okay, okay. I smoke and I drink and I whore around—yeah, even at my age, but you don’t want one of those goody-goody squeaky clean seafarers who swears that they’re as pure as the Virgin Mary, blessed be her soul. So that’s me: slightly over seventy, and no job. There you have it. I’ve told you as much as I’m willing to tell, just like you told me only a wee bit of the truth, but enough so that each of us knows who we’re dealing with. You need a boat that can survive the roughest squalls and the most treacherous rocks on this planet? I can have the perfect craft in a few weeks’ time, along with two mates I’d trust my mother’s life with, if she were alive—one’s a hand deck, the other’s a cook, ready to help in case of an emergency. Just give me the word. And a deposit.”
He had me and he knew it. But there was still one more condition he and his crew needed to agree to before we could sign a contract: no cameras on board, not one picture taken, not one.
London Wolfe shrugged. He’d seen stranger requests. He’d never been partial to photos anyway—they always lied.
I had never met anyone like him. An understatement. My tiny world of Cam and Dad and my two brothers was about to expand explosively with this stranger who seemed to have emerged from one of the adventure tales I had read as a child. Who knew such people really existed? And would Cam find him as attractive as I did? We shook hands and its roughness felt like yet one more auspicious sign that change was coming. It had been sailors like him who had handled the ropes and rigging and currents that had taken Henri from his home and now would carry his photos with us to the southernmost tip of our hemisphere. Would Wolfe be able to deliver on his promises?
Two weeks later he returned and I had the response in my own rather more delicate hands. A series of pictures of a magnificent cruising sloop. One sail, two diesel engines, three cabins—one for me and my wife, a smaller one for him, the last one with berths for the two crew members, toilet a bit compressed, but what the hell . . . A Delanta Dehler model, forty feet. Slick, sturdy, nobly built—another auspicious sign—in 1981, slipping into the sea at about the time Henri was slipping into the waters of my mind. And with a name—The Southern Cross—that made my heart leap. Snug inside if it was raining, ample decks if the day was bright with blue and the cloudless nights full of stars.
I tried to contain my excitement, sound business-like.
“And how long would it take to reach Punta Arenas?”
“Thirty-three days, eighteen hours, and two minutes—at ten knots a day, but taking into account weather delays, stopping for repairs and fuel, water and supplies, calculate a month and a half to get there by early October, as per plan.”
I computed all this rapidly in my head. “But that means we’d have to leave by this Saturday at the latest. Four days from now.”
He nodded his head, yes, that’s what it meant, adding: “We’ll tell the authorities that before we head for Europe we’ll sail the Caribbean first and then my contact at the IMO will cover for us when we keep going south. Just the right window of time to escape Hurricane Andrew as it diminishes and before Bonnie, that vixen of a storm, blows us to kingdom come.”
“Good plan,” I said, as if I understood what he was talking about. “Saturday’s fine.”
The captain passed me a sheaf of papers to be read and signed, along with a budget detailing overall costs. This little adventure was going to cost us close to $300,000—if we did not run into any unforeseen trouble.
The enormity of that sum, so nakedly exposed, startled me out of my grandiose reveries. Was it worth it, to spend so lavishly, based on a capricious intuition on my part, a plan not so much as whispered to the woman I loved and who would be asked to join me on the high seas four days from now? All this money, time, and energy expended, and there was no guarantee—quite the contrary, really, given the record of the last eleven years—that taking the photos to Tierra del Fuego and burying them in some island which might not even be Henri’s birthplace would appease my visitor. Wasting such a fortune might be deemed by Henri as proof that I had learned nothing, was just a spoiled brat who deserved to be persecuted by those eyes till the day of his death and beyond. He had been abducted for money and photographed for money and raped for money and touted through Europe for money and probed for money and now my money was supposed to save me, buy my freedom. How would the men and women and children of the world, enslaved, starving, dying for lack of water, dying from curable diseases, judge me? How would Cam? And Henri? Wouldn’t he have preferred that I use the funds to help the few indigenous people left in Patagonia?
I must have gone pale, shown signs of dizziness, because Captain Wolfe had to steady me with his strong arms.
“Having second thoughts, eh, lad? Can’t say I blame you. It’s one thing to get all excited about going to sea, another to face the storm when there’s nothing to save you but your own two hands and whatever mates are by your side and just damn luck. Lord knows, the South is calling to me, but if you don’t feel up to it, just pay me for my two weeks of prep and I’ll go and spend it at a nasty dive I haunt in Boston and then it’ll be goodbye—as long as you also compensate my buddies Jim and Wellington. No harm done, except to my dreams and yours—and mine have been frustrated enough times for me to be vaccinated by now. Yours, well, I won’t pry, but I can recognize suffering when I glimpse it on a man’s face. Whether this voyage will placate whatever demons are plaguing you, that I can’t say and you’ll surely never know. Unless you sign on the dotted line.”
I signed, of course I signed. Feverishly, until every consent had been agreed to, the lease of the ship, the bond in case anything happened to it, the insurance, the three contracts with Wolfe and his mates, the escrow fund to cover future costs, an array of fees we’d encounter on our way, I signed each document with a flourish and then a hefty check, and handed the whole lot to him.
“Now,” I said, and my hand was trembling but not as much as my heart, “there’s only one thing left for me to do.”
“Oh. What’s that?”
“I need to tell my wife we’re departing in four days’ time.”
“She doesn’t know?”
“Not a clue.”
“You’re a brave man, Fitzroy Foster, I’ll say that much for you. Though I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when the missus hears what you’ve got her into without her say-so.”
And now I really panicked.
That independence of mine that gave me such pride, it broke the unspoken pact and consonance we had automatically established since those first strokes in the water of a pool more than half a lifetime ago. Now to be tested in waters that we would navigate under the guidance of an old man whose main merit was his expunged criminal record. I was putting Cam’s lovely, lithe body, not to mention my more cumbersome and awkward one, at the mercy of rough waves and someone I really knew nothing about. I could already hear her: You what? Three hundred thousand dollars? Pretend you’re going to Hamburg and end up in Patagonia? Back out, Fitz. There’s got to be a clause that allows it. Or do you really believe I’ll just hop on an unknown boat with a drunken, whoring smuggler? With all those photos of yours and Henri? Giving Downey the chance to grab you?
“Can you wait here a sec?” I said to the skipper—and rushed upstairs to the attic. The photos were there, nestled in a box. The imagery and itinerary of my life. Those eyes of his that had bewitched me and that now wanted to convince me to take them thousands of miles away. A final act of perdition, that was Henri’s deepest desire, to destroy me as he had done with my mother and tried to do with Camilla. Burn them, my father had urged, burn the damn things and be rid of the specter forever.
I closed my eyes, beset by turmoil and confusion.
My hand reached into the box and extracted a photo.
Filled with apprehension, I forced my eyelids to open and he was there like a corpse or a newborn child, as unspeaking and demanding as the first time we had met, almost eleven years ago. And I knew that I could not burn him anymore than set fire to myself and my loved one and our home.
I would follow my plan through to the end.
Only one way to cast aside all doubts, make it impossible for Cam to persuade me to withdraw from this mad scheme: to do something even more foolish and bold than the voyage on The Southern Cross itself. I scribbled a short letter and then placed it in the box, alongside the thousand and one images of Henri monstrously twinned with my body. Next I wrapped it with brown paper, taped the edges and seams and addressed it to Frano Vudarovic at the University in Punta Arenas, Chile. And asked Captain London for a favor. “Can you send off this box by express mail? Taking care that nobody’s following you and that you pay with cash, as credit cards can be traced. Can you do that for me?”
He accepted with alacrity.
Cam would be, I thought, a harder nut to crack.
Downey, of all people, unwittingly smoothed the way. He had, that very afternoon, tracked Cam down at the library.
I had never seen her so agitated.
“He knows Barry’s detectives have not come up with any other victims like his daughter, he knows Barry came to visit, he calculated that now we might be more receptive to his offer to join forces. He wants to use you, Fitz, I knew it, I knew it, didn’t I tell you what his plans were? He’s got some horrible experiments in store, tap your blood, sample your skin, scrape your retina, graft your hair, extract marrow from your spine, he’ll—”
“Wait, wait, wait. He said he intended to do all that to me?”
“He didn’t need to. I know what he’s up to. He spoke about his daughter, how she could have helped him stop the invasion if she hadn’t lost hope, but there were others out there, close by, very close by, he said, who could thwart the enemy before they get their hands on the process—sometimes he seemed to be speaking about the Russians or the Chinese, other times he hurled insults at savage creatures who were infiltrating cameras and photos and synapses.”
“Did he tell you anything else about his research?”
“He said that he had just recently detected the first tentative signs of a pandemic, a game changer that made his work more urgent, something he calls the next stage.”
“The next stage?”
“He spoke about finding some combination in the blood, the bones, the optical membrane, an aberrant gene. That if we could prove it was recurrent, if we had enough cases for a scientific comparison—just as I had told you, right, how important it was that you not be a unique specimen, right?—if we discovered this mutation, we could stop the plague from becoming widespread, advance to the next stage, our faces, our faces, he said over and over, and not just the photos. He grew more excited as he talked, as if he’d forgotten who he was speaking to—we can do it, we can do it, he kept repeating.”
“Do what?”
“Isolate the strain of that virus so as to find an antidote before somebody introduces it into our food or water supply. Worse than the Black Death, he said, our whole way of life could collapse into chaos, the social fabric that holds together our civilization. And then you know what he said? He said he couldn’t wait to meet you, because he’d heard you were so brilliant at computing and that you’d find the solution. And then he took a step back and looked at me, leered at me, as if stripping me naked, Fitz, I’m not embroidering this, and said, No, not find. Your husband won’t find the solution. Fitzroy Foster is the solution.”
“And that makes you sure he wants to get his hands on me.”
“But he won’t. I won’t let him. As long as you stay put, don’t venture forth from this house, we’ll be fine, we’ll be protected.”
I took a deep breath. We had exchanged roles. Here was my love demanding that I never leave the nest and here was I, about to tell her that four days from now we would be on a small vessel on our way to Patagonia. A deep breath as a prelude to revealing everything I had been up to while she was busy chasing down duplicate victims. She listened quietly, anxiety and alarm draining from her face as if my words were a transfusion of energy and courage and serenity—could this really be me formulating these plans?—there was none of the fury or dismay I had expected.
She took it all in her stride.
“Good for you,” she said. “It’s wacky, of course, and risky as hell, and will probably end in shambles, but it sure makes sense. More than what I’ve been doing, can’t dispute that. Good for you,” she repeated, “and also for me. I love it that you’ve fixed this up, that you did it without my help.” And then: “But not through the Panama Canal, right? Down the Atlantic Coast.”
“Like Henri,” I said. “The same seas he was forced to cross . . .”
“But in reverse, undoing his route, yes.”
She was back, she had returned to me, the two of us were again thinking the same thoughts!
“Only one more question before I start packing—winter clothes, as it rains all the time—what did you write to this Professor Vudarovic in your letter?”
“That we’d arrive there by boat a few days before October twelfth. That we felt that the photos were safer with him and the elders of the Kaweshkar in case anything happened to us—so that if we did not show up, they could go ahead with the ceremony. To please be careful because we were under surveillance and he might be as well. And I apologized for burdening him with all of this, but he had said he would welcome me if I told him the truth, so I was only appealing to Xolás and the tradition he had invoked.”
Four days later, on a gray imperfect misty dawn, we set sail from New Bedford for the islands Magellan had first sighted and claimed for a European king, the islands that Henri’s ancestors had inhabited for thousands of years.
Without knowing who was awaiting us there.