XVI

The Chinese servant was a brisk, controlled rider. The passage to the beach felt even longer than it was because of the distrust and anger I could sense from him as I sat behind him in the saddle. Though the island had altered his dress and even the tint of his skin, there was something about the way he rode that remained different than that of the natives and Europeans—something that harkened to faraway lands.

Lloyd Osbourne traveled alongside us on his horse and treated the ride as he seemed to treat everything he did—half pleasure and half inconvenience. We slowed down several times to wait for him to catch up, each halt accompanied by a snort from John that mixed with those of the impatient animal beneath our hips.

Other things weighed down my mind despite the reprieve from the cannibals delivered by Stevenson: Nobolo’s murder, the horrific sight and sounds of Hines’s brutal demise, the abrupt loss of Vao’s companionship, Davenport’s imprisonment, the lost hope of ever finding Belial.

The final time the horses took on water, we were perched on a hill overlooking the village of Apia. It was dawn on a foggy morning. We saw a troop of natives with tall headdresses, their faces covered in black war paint, while from somewhere in the bush, war drums pounded.

“Is it true that if war comes, this time the whites will all be killed?” I asked.

“Hopefully not, selfishly speaking,” Lloyd said, after thinking about it for a moment.

There were sounds of another approaching party below. John removed a spyglass and, extending it, watched with interest before passing the lens to Lloyd. I asked if I could have a look and was given the instrument by Lloyd, whose smile seemed to bear no grudges about what had happened in Vailima. I removed my spectacles and pressed my eye against the instrument. I could make out a group of two dozen Chinese men marched across a road by armed natives. They were not chained, but were being kept in a controlled formation. Two Europeans headed the group. John began to roll a fresh smoke in the style of Stevenson, as though dangling a reminder over me that he remained part of Vailima while my place had been permanently forfeited. I studied his reaction to the strange vision below.

“Wherever there are merchants, there are men in chains, metaphorical or otherwise,” Lloyd philosophized, modifying one of Stevenson’s axioms about arms and ammunition. “Aphorism: Lloyd Osbourne.”

John could see I was waiting for his thoughts.

He turned toward me, his usual look of harsh scrutiny softened. It is hard to represent for you the broken and frustrated way he spoke in English, for anything more than a few words was obviously a great effort for him, and a challenge to understand. In fact, it made me feel honored that he used so much energy to address me. He explained that when he was eight years old he was sold to a French merchant, and brought to the Marquesas Islands as a plantation slave. He was later forced to be a soldier in the civil wars there. He continued: One day, he escaped his enslavement in a rickety boat and would have drowned if he had not been picked up by the ship Stevenson sailed in. “He ask me if I wished to be cook. I offer my services as servant for life.”

“In return for rescuing you?”

“Tusitala not rescue me. He was just passenger. No, not for rescue. He did not order, did not try to purchase or demand. He asked me, with . . .” He bobbed his head and ground his teeth together until he found the right word. “Respect. I am called John Chinaman so that real name not heard-over and repeated to someone who might encounter my former master. Heard-over by traders like men there.” He gestured toward the party in the valley below us sloping into the village. “Tusitala remarkable man. Man dedicate himself to write is a man of courage because he rely on his mind, nothing more. That you not understand.”

“Those men,” I replied, spurred to a new thought. “The Chinese ones being moved. Have they been sold into labor here?”

“No, not likely,” Lloyd chimed in. “The Germans do not like having such light-skinned men perform their labor for them. They would have been brought from one of the outer islands, and probably taken here only for transport from our harbor to another island, or perhaps to America for railroad work. What do you make of that?”

I rose to my feet from the rocks where we were sitting.

“What is it?” Lloyd asked me, noticing a change had come over me.

“The harbor.”

Those men, I knew, must have been on their way to some kind of vessel, and one big enough to take them all together and to travel far. Chinese laborers would not be transported on a man-of-war, which meant it had to be a merchant ship. We had heard of one coming in with the mails. If it was ready to sail now, Belial already would be on it. I was certain of it. I would be on it, too.

 • • • 

THE HASTILY CONSTRUCTED BERTHS on the lower deck of a merchant vessel are not made with the comfort of man (or beast) in mind. They represent a calculation of maximum profit, in this case for human chattel. How I longed for that humble berth on the Colossus that once seemed to me a coffin.

A formless mattress, spitting out the shavings with which it was stuffed, fitted into a kind of netted hammock that was attached to two hooks in the beams of the ceiling. A small box nailed to the floor in which to keep belongings, with the end of my misshapen umbrella hooked to it. That was all. My so-called bed swayed with every awful motion of the ship. There were four other men in my berth, Chinese members of the group we had observed on our way to the beach. We each had a pot, spoon, and a cup that we kept in our respective boxes and brought with us to the mess for our mealtime rations, though our stomachs were usually too unwell for eating, for they rolled and pitched as much as the vessel. The Chinese passengers may have been just as miserable and sick, but at least they could converse with each other about it.

I have seen you cast your eyes on my coat rack, Mr. Clover, remembering I had parted with my umbrella under desperate circumstances and wondering how it appears here in New York and, in my narrative, on the merchant vessel. I will explain. Shortly before the vessel launched, I heard cries of “White Chief! White Chief!” There was the unexpected sight of a Samoan waving around my umbrella and running toward the ship. He explained to me that the chief of the village where I had traded the thing had been informed by an elder that the umbrella was an object of bad luck, due to its stripes, or perhaps its bloodstains, I could not make out the reason. The chief had ordered that I be found because according to the superstitions of this particular village, a talisman of ill fortune could not simply be discarded; it had to be reunited with its original owner. Much frantic searching ensued until this representative of the tribe discovered me on the beach hurriedly preparing for my passage. It was a relief to them and a small stroke of luck for me, as I now opened and closed its ribs to create a bit of breeze when I felt I was suffocating belowdecks. When you are reduced to nothing, you make use of everything.

Each lurch and pull of the ship sent my stomach reeling and my heart with it. I had used every last cent of the funds that had been restored to me in my belongings returned by the prison officials to arrange my passage inside the depths of the vessel. I was lucky to be able to afford even steerage. If my berth was the cloud, I reminded myself that the silver lining would be that the more time I spent down below, the better hidden I was from the sight of Belial, if he really was onboard at all. By the time I had reached the ship in Apia’s port, there had been no time to confirm his presence—I had to trust instinct alone, in the incorrigible style of Davenport, and arrange my passage or remain behind on the island.

I carved a little calendar from a loose square of wood and crossed off each passing day of this horrid journey with an X.

After the first few nights the sea and my stomach grew calmer and I wandered with caution. I came across a big brown trunk in stowage that could have been the one I saw in Belial’s wagon during our first encounter with him. It was unlocked and filled with some out-of-season clothes and nothing more. No hidden compartments. Little to go on. Still, it was just enough for me to keep faith he really might be on the ship.

Had Davenport been there and demanded to know my plan, I would have been able to lay it out in a very logical fashion. First step, I would have said, was to confirm the Subject’s presence; then locate his stateroom; then identify to a reliable degree what times he was dining with the officers (where else would Belial dine?), before infiltrating and searching his chambers. Not as laden with natural impulse as Davenport might have orchestrated, but it was efficient and sensible, which was my life in a nutshell. But none of it mattered.

As my cot rocked me through the fourth night of fitful sleep and terrifying movements, I was jolted awake by the sound of music. It was beautiful humming—an aria from an opera that had been staged in London a few months before our departure. I had attended one of the first performances. I could not begin to imagine how one of my poor Chinese steerage mates had learned this tune, or why he would be rehearsing it in this floating dungeon. Thoughts and memories crashed together in the manner of a confused dream. I felt around for my spectacles, hanging on a nail protruding from the boards on the wall. Then I groped in the dark for a lantern and turned the gas up. It gradually illuminated the craggy, remarkable face of Belial, grinning expressively. He was sitting at the edge of one of the other passengers’ cots, with the prone man pinned underneath peering up at the formidable stranger. From one of the other hammocks emerged a string of curses in Chinese.

“How did you know that I was here?” I asked, a question I had been imagining I would hear from Belial’s lips before the voyage was finished.

His humming stopped and he bestowed upon me a munificent nod. “With our dear friend Davenport so unjustly detained, I supposed the only move he had left would be to charge the king with his pawn.”

“I am a pawn, you mean. And you are the king.”

“You understand me. I supposed you sufficiently intelligent to find the first large ship to sail after the storms fully cleared, and correctly presume I would be sailing on it, and if so that you would attempt to conceal yourself from me, and of course to sail in steerage would be the best way to do so, if an affront to your good English sensibilities. I might have waited for you to show yourself. But to be honest, I tire of all the games just as Davenport did. Tell me, bookseller, how do you sleep in here, swinging like a man hanged?” He passed a sad glance around the crowded berth, and a disgusted look at the confused man on whose arm he was still sitting. “Look what Davenport has done to you.”

“What do you mean, what he has done to me?”

“Surely you are sufficiently intelligent to see . . . Well, no matter. He has lost his final gambit. It must be a sweet relief for you, in a way.”

“Relief?”

“You do not have to struggle to help fulfill his potential for him any longer. That is too much a burden for any man, even—no, especially—Pen Davenport himself.” Then, with increasing pity and a strangely uncaring solicitude, he whispered, “Look at yourself.”

I needed no mirror to know what he beheld. I was unshaven, my hair unwashed and greasy, my once-pristine and polished spectacles stretched, blackened, and scratched. I was almost touched by the note of sympathy in his words. I welled with emotion and could not convince my tongue to work.

“You are lost, dear man,” he concluded, in his Pope Thomas voice, which, after all, was just a natural part of him. I had known him only in his missionary role, but it now occurred to me it had reflected the bookaneer’s natural disposition.

Belial invited me to take breakfast with him on the upper deck. Liberated from the tough salt pork and vinegary bread of the lower mess chest, I gratefully ate the finer servings of fruit and meat, and it seemed to give Belial pleasure to watch, chin at rest on his knuckles. After the meal, we walked the length of the ship. I took in the raw, fresh air with the eagerness of a starved man.

“Did you really believe in your heart you would come here and filch Stevenson’s manuscript from me?” he asked. He seemed genuinely curious but also completely unthreatened.

“I suppose.”

He gave a heavy, rolling laugh while he patted my arm with the affection a victorious politician might grant his opponent. “Is there anything less natural than taking a stroll on a ship? It is as if the earth were flat, and in every direction you will eventually drop into nowhere. I despise it. We never should have been at each other’s throats, Mr. Fergins. Davenport got in the way of what could have been a friendship between us. You have been one of the greatest appreciators of our profession. Where did you rate me as a bookaneer?”

It was the second time in my life I had heard a variation of that question. “Quite at the top. Indeed, with Davenport’s failure in Samoa, I suppose you will be seen as rather untouched in your position.”

“Thank you! It is an honor to hear so from your lips, and Christina will be tickled pink to hear of your praise. Think of this, you have been witness to the last and greatest of the bookaneers. You will have that story to tell in the future to those with brains enough to listen. What will you do when you go home?”

“How do you mean?”

“My informants wrote me that your bookstall in London is shuttered.”

“Perhaps I will not go home,” I said with a windy sigh, acknowledging the fate of my life’s work. “Not yet, anyway. I cannot bear to go back to Hoxton Square—well, I can stay with my brother and his wife in Slough, where we were raised; there is plenty of space and my nieces humor my reading habits. Or I can do something temporary when we make port in New York, perhaps, until I feel ready to go back. Perhaps a traveling book cart.”

“A fine idea. Gothamites are as aggressive about reading as about all their sport. Or, as my Christina says, the people of New York are as fine as they are rich.”

Most of my waking time on the ship was spent with Belial. The Chinese men were passed along to their buyers at a small port island where we made a brief stop for the purpose. Belial convinced the officers to move me into a comfortable berth on an upper deck. Though he did not say as much, I knew Belial would not want to make himself too conspicuous to the captain or the officers during a mission, and so he limited his society with them; his intrinsic need for adulation and interest kept bringing him back to me, and the fact that I knew who he was and what he was doing allowed him to talk freely. And talk and talk and talk. He spoke frequently about his wife, which in his mouth really somehow seemed fantastical, just as Davenport had warned me. I asked him if they had children and he said four daughters. “Alas, no sons to carry on my work, but, then again, there is nothing left to carry.” There were not many opportunities to interject my questions and thoughts because of his fluid and winding elocution, but at least, unlike with Davenport, I never felt obligated to keep up both sides of a conversation. Belial lectured, pontificated, boasted, and brayed. He would ask, “Do you know what I’m thinking?” and, after having to reluctantly admit I did not, he would not tell me the thought until a half hour later. From afar, this tendency in him seemed utterly obnoxious, but after being taken into his confidence I noticed that something changed. I could not help but feel enthusiastic to be the object of his general attention, even when he was especially self-important and obnoxious. The secret of despots and tyrants is that people enjoy dining with them.

We took our meals together; lounged and played cards in the common rooms together; sat on deck chairs on sunny days. He even told me his given name: Benjamin Lott. I only called him that once because in a feral voice he said, “Belial.” The weather, which had been mild, turned harsh and Belial began to appear less often. Strangely, I was not seasick even as we dipped and sloped. A new feeling settled over me. Now that I was suddenly without Belial’s frequent company, I was eager to talk to someone, anyone; the first mate had grown comfortable with me, a sailor thirty or thirty-one years old with a square jawline and half-moon eyes. I began to tell him stories from my stay in Samoa—without names, of course—stories about a white genius making his life among island natives as a sort of king or chief. He urged me to go on, and though I felt an indescribable and unexpected itch to tell every detail, even to confess why I had gone there in the first place, I knew I should not, and made an excuse to return to my berth. That was how close I came to throwing away discretion for the temporary glow of friendship.

When the sky grew wild, the ship had to tack and change course, and Belial appeared at my door with a tired, twitchy air. His head was covered with an oilskin hood used to keep dry above deck. I had not yet seen him look so distracted.

“The calendar,” he demanded.

“What?”

“I saw you scraping one out. The damned calendar you were carving from wood!” He stomped his boot against the floorboards as he spoke. His eyes bulged and his substantial lips and chin quivered.

“Oh. There.” My voice sounded meek and defeated in my own ears.

“Thank you,” he said with relief. I watched him carefully as he rummaged where I’d pointed, under my mattress, until he found it. “Have you been checking off the days?”

“Yes, since the very beginning of the voyage. There is little else to do at night.” Indeed, by this point I had read each of the few books in the ship’s library twice through, all but one of which I had read in the past (the downside of being a bookseller, at least the kind who reads).

We conferred about how long the vessel would be delayed, according to the members of the crew we had each consulted. “Let us put the worst case forward,” he said, studying my calendar, “and add four full days to our journey—why, that would return us to New York City on the twenty-seventh of June.”

“I believe that’s correct.”

“Splendid!” He checked the calendar again and found the same result, which expelled the tension from his face and voice. “Time to spare. Splendid indeed. You know, Fergins, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Would you like to read it?” He leaned forward with a smile that showed all his teeth. “Stevenson’s novel.”

“Truly?”

“This will be an historic moment for me as a bookaneer. The last book I can bring to the public before the wrongheaded changes in law set in. There is one thing more I’d like to do, something I’ve never done. I’d like to watch the pleasure I bring to a reader, the very first reader of the thing. I want it to be you.”

“You mean you’d want to watch me while I read the book?”

“Exactly,” he replied with haughty triumph. “Who else will read it on a ship like this? A sailor? I want to read the surprise and gratitude in your face as you become the first man on earth to bear witness to Stevenson’s final masterpiece. You saw that the poor exile does not have long in this world. I know you cannot resist such an offer. Not you, of all people. You cannot turn down serving an immortal part in the history of literature.”

After the initial dramatic surprise of his offer waned, I turned the idea over in my head. Then, you may not believe it, you may believe I am reporting someone else’s words, but I flattened my hands together and said: “I will decline, but thank you.”

It was as though I had struck the man. “Did you understand what I said to you?”

I explained myself the best I could at the time, knowing how quickly the bookaneer could be enraged. “I came to Samoa with Pen Davenport to help him with his mission and to chronicle his final success. He failed, of course, and in his failure, I also failed. If I read the novel before the rest of the world, I would do so with the sneaking knowledge that I did not earn it—in fact, that I earned no privilege like it.”

He held his gaze on me for another moment before dropping his chin in thought, then giving a heavy nod, as though in mourning for me. “You are an honorable man, Mr. Fergins. I am thankful that we have become such fast friends, and I know Christina would adore making a big feast for you. Do you like a brace of grouse, fried with truffles and butter? Of course you do. That is what it shall be.”

My racing heart slowed. I knew I was never going to meet his wife and eat grouse alongside his four daughters, yet the offer to do so felt generous beyond description. I had a sudden feeling as though I had betrayed Davenport, my lost master, by engendering such feelings of friendship from his rival. I thought back to what Davenport had once asked me in the smoking room of the Garrick Club, so many worlds removed from the strangling jungle and the swamp-bound prison of Upolu, through the more civilized suffocating air of his cigars. If he and Belial had both offered me a place beside them, what would I do?

Belial popped his lips, as he did when he seemed to have a thought that impressed him. “You said you came to chronicle Davenport’s mission to Samoa.”

“Yes,” I answered, “though that plan became waylaid by, well, all the complications, in many cases because of you.”

“You must have come to finally realize what poor Davenport’s biggest flaw was.”

“I have not stopped to think about it.”

“He was a professed misanthrope, yet he had this need to know that people recognized him and knew him as a great bookaneer.”

“You speak as if he were not still alive.”

“Take his missions, for instance. When he was not on a mission, he was rather lethargic and sluggish, lying around in hotels and brothels and concert halls for weeks at a time. But when he was on a mission, he was bigger than life. When he secured a prize, for instance, a manuscript or proofs to sell, he marched in plain view to the publisher to sell it.”

“So?”

“You see, he disappeared at the wrong time. The time to disappear, utterly and completely, without a trace, is as soon as one has a prize, and if you think nothing of the literati, then they will think of nothing but you.”

I nodded.

“There is more for you to learn and witness if you’d wish,” he said, the familiar self-satisfied grin on his face. “I mean it’s not over, our journey, even when we reach port. They will be after the thing, you know.”

“Who? You mean bookaneers? But they—” I stopped myself. I knew why he had been so urgently concerned with the calendar, and I understood the relief that possessed him after examining the dates. On July 1, the new copyright laws would finally be in effect.

“You needn’t shy away from talking about it. Speaking of the death of our profession is like eulogizing an old friend. True, as you consider, that most of the bookaneers have run for the hills before now. It is the barnacles I speak of—the lowest of our line—they are minor fellows and rather ordinary, that is true, but with all this time they would have heard of our mission and be expecting my return. These bottom-feeders are without vision or philosophy but possess certain skills—in gathering intelligence, in smuggling. If you wish, you may accompany me off the ship and watch me scrape them away.”

In the depth of his vanity, I saw traces of Davenport. It should have been no surprise, at the end of this, that I found these two men possessed twin souls, however differently expressed, separated into enemies by the cosmos. I accepted Belial’s invitation to be by his side when we disembarked.

He was right about the so-called barnacles waiting for him. When we arrived in New York, having switched from the merchant ship to a packet in the tiny port of Halifax, he sent his trunk up with one of the porters who came onboard; the trunk disappeared before we reached the docks. Belial was carrying a bundle of papers in a valise; I turned and saw him jostled as we entered the crowds. After a passing few seconds in which my view was blocked, when the crowds cleared a bit, his valise was gone. He gave me a meaningful look free of any concern. I knew the papers inside the valise were actually worthless ledgers that had been left in his berth by a businessman on a previous voyage. More jostling and every item from the inside pockets of his coat had been removed in a flash. Meanwhile I had not been able to identify a single one of the barnacles among the crowds, as though these bandits were invisible and operated by black magic.

A sculpture of the look on Belial’s face as we walked down the street—the creased eyebrows, the wide black nostrils, the tight pucker in his mouth—would seem to say, “Is that all you can manage, you fools?”

“You see, my dear Fergins, that barnacles are merely that. Thieves. Pickpockets and launderers. A true bookaneer is another breed altogether, one the world will now be emptier without. You may write that in your chronicle, if you like, but attribute it to me.”

I abandoned any written chronicle long before this, but didn’t want to bruise his ego. “Of course. But where is the manuscript?” I whispered.

He had, as far as I could tell, run out of any places to hide it. His golden cane might have been hollow but was too narrow. Then I noticed I had to look higher up to meet his face than in the past. His boots. They were wider around than necessary and much taller.

We were separated as we entered another throng of people crossing the street. Then, just as his trunk and the valise had vanished, the man himself vanished from my sight.

 • • • 

I NEXT ENCOUNTERED BELIAL less than two hours later. In the entrance to the building occupied by the publishing house known as Charles Scribner’s Sons is their bookstore, to use one of your most unfortunate Americanisms, with galleries of volumes arranged by theme and glass cases of the most expensive editions. By the time I arrived, I had only to wait for fifteen minutes before Belial also appeared. I rushed to his side. “Good afternoon,” I called out. I was still short on breath. I had hurried through the crowded streets, down to an underground train, up the steps outside the four-story building, and inside the spacious elevator, which floated like a slow rocket to the third floor, where the publishing offices were located.

“What the deuce are you doing here?” he demanded. “How did you know where . . .” he stopped himself because the answer was obvious. From the years at Davenport’s side I knew which of the New York publishers would pay the most for a Stevenson novel, according to its history and finances; Scribner’s not only was a well-known book publisher that had published Stevenson before, but it also had its own monthly magazine that would benefit from serializing a new book. Belial would start here and, were the terms offered not lucrative enough, would move on to the next publishing firm.

Belial had also come straight there, but in a less hurried manner, befitting his philosophy of dignity. His leisurely pace served to make a point.

“I wanted to see it. To be a witness,” I began. “You yourself said our journey was not over.”

His eyes burned into me, causing me to stumble backward, nearly falling over some furniture and into a bronze sculpture of an Amazonian woman locked in battle with a leaping tiger. “I do not understand you. I give you the chance to be the first reader of this historic addition to literature, and you reject me. You, a lowly peddler!”

“Peddler?”

“Our journey together ended when I left you in the streets. Do you have brains enough left in your head to understand? I left you behind, left you with the empty-handed barnacles. Now you pop up again. You little pig. You dare make yourself a pest to me. You were nothing but an amusement while I was trapped on that ship. Did you invade Whiskey Bill’s life like this, too, and Davenport’s?”

“No . . .” I tried to protest.

He held the thick manuscript in front of me, then pushed it against my spectacles until the metal pinched the skin around my eyes. I asked him to stop, with no effect. The spear of the sculpture’s female warrior pinched my back.

“Do you really think this is how you’ll finish your friend Davenport’s story? By taking this from me? What will you do in order to accomplish it, shoot me for it, stab me?”

“Of course not! You said—”

“Go on, try to take it! Try! No, coward, you cannot. If you ever speak to me again, if you even look at me, I’ll tear you in half, am I understood?”

I was completely startled by the degree of his anger, even though I had seen it before directed to others. By this point, some publishing clerks, a male and two young females, had come from their desks to stare at the spectacle. “Belial, please,” I said with quiet embarrassment. “I really just supposed you would expect me to guess where you were going. . . . After all, you spoke of the chess pieces, of our roles in the match, the pawn and king, and I thought—”

“You were the pawn!” He pointed at my head with his cane and I thought of poor Tulagi, bent over with the life bleeding out of him.

I suppose I must have appeared greatly cowed by the memory of the deceased dwarf’s pain, for Belial suddenly seemed satisfied with himself. His well-slimed tongue smacked his lips. Perhaps you notice that when I am happy, I chatter; when anxious or scared, still I chatter. It would be obvious to you, as a reasonable and assiduous young man, that I should have said no more in the face of this volatility. But I could not help it: “There was one last thing, though, something I thought about, Belial, after we parted, that might be of some help and importance to you—”

In one grand movement his broad back was turned on me and he marched away through the main door of the office, closing it in my face. I tried to make my suit look a little more decent, though it was wrinkled and had patches of sweat at odd angles, like streams coming to a common crossing. There was loud noise from outside, like a series of gunshots, but my attention was too consumed for the moment by what had just happened. I dropped myself onto a bench against the wall.

Only a few minutes later the same door opened again, revealing Belial. This time there was another man directly behind him. I could not yet see who he was because of the shadows thrown by the doorway.

“I know you asked that I not speak to you for a while, but, as I was saying, I realized there is one other thing I need to tell you,” I said to the bookaneer, as though he had returned in order to complete our conversation, or to apologize. “The dates. I believe while we were at sea we might have miscalculated.”

Now he stepped forward, closer to where I stood, or rather was pushed forward. The man behind him was a New York City policeman and his brown-gloved hand was encircling Belial’s arm. Then yet another man, whom I can only describe as grimly mirthful, walked out behind the other two, holding the big manuscript under his arm.

“How dare you manhandle me! Do you know who I am?” Belial shouted, rearing back.

The policeman cracked his baton against Belial’s face. “Don’t care who you are, but you’ll learn to talk with respect to one of our city’s attorneys.”

The sounds from outside the windows fronting Broadway were renewed, sounds of missiles and rockets, popping and fizzing, sending pools of bright light over us. More pistols firing. Now the air smelled of gunpowder.

“Starting earlier and earlier, every year,” the attorney grumbled to his companion. “It’s not even five o’clock, is it?”

“True enough, sir,” the policeman said.

“Full of patriotic feelings, as long as they can be noisy about it. Isn’t that the way?”

“True, indeed.”

“Show me the warrant,” Belial was demanding of the two men. “Show it to me!” Blood trickled from his mouth onto his battered jaw.

The attorney had been searching through his papers and held one out for Belial. “Here you are, Mr. Lott.”

“It is the fourth,” Belial said to himself, reading from the paper. “Today is July fourth.” Then he turned to me. “You made me believe I had more time. You wanted to avenge Davenport’s failure, however you could, even if it meant throwing away the result of this entire mission.”

“No, it’s not true!”

I kept protesting as he was led away.

Within four months there would begin the trial you’ve visited where men and women alike would line up to glance at this specimen of the legendary breed. A bookaneer, snared and captive, a sight never before beheld and, I’d venture to say you’ve seen and heard enough to agree, a sight as sad as any imaginable. It makes me think of the great jaguar I saw one summer in a Paris zoo, pacing with his bounding steps, nowhere to leap.

What I remember most about this historic moment is watching the bookaneer as the bright, artificial lights filled the room and the noises from outside repeated themselves—rat-tat-tat-boom, rat-tat-tat-boom. As he turned to look at me over his shoulder, the expression on Belial’s comely face grew darker and helpless, and the grand inner rage—you saw it for yourself in court—took hold. But I still believe, perhaps from naïveté or idealism, he knew his accusations against me were false and that his rage stemmed from realizing his general error. Had he envisioned me burning to death in that evidence room? Judge for yourself. Belial had already known before that day at Scribner’s the bookaneers were finished—he had even come to accept it—but I think he did not realize that the world was not finished with the bookaneers; as recompense for the glory and excitement they had seized for years for themselves, all that life would be wrung out of him now. I still hear it all around me.

Rat-tat-tat.

Rat-tat-tat.

Rat-tat.