The Whiteness of the Whale: A Novel

by David Poyer

  She steered for hours, locked in the queer fishbowl world under the dome; within the boat, yet not. In all that time the seas rolled huge and empty under chasing clouds that only occasionally parted for a low sun the ominous reddish black of a rotting tomato. Each sea built off Anemone’s quarter, loomed, then burst against her side, seething the smooth composite with harshly hissing foam. Sara’s mind wandered, but her attention did not slip from the one hundred to four hundred yards in front of the dipping, tossing prow.

  Then something seized her thigh and she flinched, only belatedly recalling she had a body that was not the boat’s, tendons other than shrouds, a consciousness not bounded by a saw-toothed horizon. It was Perrault. He clambered up to relieve her, their bodies twisting around each other like in an interpretive dance, or a party game designed to be played drunk. When she climbed down she staggered. Fell to her knees. Then groped erect again, and felt her way to her bunk.

  * * *

  “Breakfast,” Eddi sang.

  Sara woke from a sleep akin to death. Found herself shuddering, bare of blankets. Nosing her own dank animal reek. Was this what she smelled like to the others? Of too much perfume over underwear stink and old sweat? She shivered and reached for the damp sweater that swayed from a hook. Grabbed the handhold and waited for the roll and swung herself down.

  Dorée stood braced in the galley, hair hanging over her face, pushing something around on the stove to the accompaniment of a popping sizzle. Plates slid this way and that, corraled by the wooden grid that kept them from flying off. Sara got coffee and joined Auer, Bodine, and Georgie. Kimura sat a few feet off, cocooned in blankets but still shivering. His face was lemony gray, and his gaze was locked to a fire extinguisher bracketed to the bulkhead. A glance upward told her Lars was steering. She murmured a good-morning that only Georgie returned. “How’s Jamie doing?” she asked Bodine. He shook his head, squinting as if the light hurt his eyes. Their exhaled breaths mingled, white, vaporous, like visible ghosts.

  Dorée lurched from the galley like a hermit crab venturing from its shell, caught herself on a stanchion, then slapped a platter down in front of them. Sara noticed that the rash, or whatever it was, extended up her neck now. The digits sticking out of teal gloves with the fingers snipped short were white and red with chilblains.

  “Thank you, Tehiyah.”

  A sour glance. “I never cook. Remember?”

  “Well, I see I was wrong.” The eggs were partially charred, rubber at the edges. The toast, cremated. Shriveled, turdlike objects turned out to be soy sausages. Sara forced herself to chew one. Swallowed. There. Another bite.

  From nowhere a distant voice whispered. Distorted, incomprehensible, but in distinct words. She lifted her head. The others looked up too, some quickly, others slowly. We’re all getting stupid, she thought.

  Norris-Simpson frowned. “D’ I just hear something?”

  “Shut up,” said Bodine. They listened. The voice spoke again, low and crackling. Sara pushed back her plate and rose. It seemed to be coming from back by the nav station.

  “VHF call,” Madsen’s shout echoed down. “Get the captain.”

  Sara crammed the last sausage into her mouth and lurched up, rising off her feet as the deck slanted away, then coming down so hard pain shot through her knees. She gasped, and scurried aft.

  Perrault was a long hump under a pile of covers. She shook his shoulder and he bolted upright, striking his head on a fold-down bookshelf. He rolled out, rubbing his forehead but looking unsurprised, as if this happened often. He followed her out without a word.

  When they emerged Madsen’s voice was echoing in the bubble. The others were gathered around the tubing that supported his chair. All except the Japanese, who still sat tented and shivering on the settee. They parted to let Perrault through. He said roughly, “What is it?”

  “Someone calling for us. Sounds like Spanish.”

  “Anyone here speak Spanish?” Perrault looked around, then snorted. “Okay, give me the mike. You haven’t answered yet?”

  “No. I figured it was one of the whalers, trying to get us to transmit.”

  “Good thinking. It’s—”

  He cut himself short as the radio spoke again. Madsen had turned the gain all the way up. “Black Anemone, Black Anemone. Estamosla corbeta Argentina Guerrico. Black Anemone, Black Anemone.”

  The voice was definitely Spanish-accented. They all looked at Perrault, who scowled, scraping his chin with his fingernails. He sighed. “Corbeta argentina—what do you think, Lars?”

  “Can Mick get us a bearing?”

  “Three five five,” Bodine yelled from up forward. “Just about due north.”

  “We last saw the whalers to the east,” Madsen added.

  “We last saw one kill ship to the east,” Perrault corrected.

  “True.”

  “You’re our official CPL representative,” the captain reminded him. “This is properly your decision as much as mine.”

  Sara blinked. This was the first time she’d heard Lars had any kind of official status.

  “Hey. Hideyashi,” Lars yelled. The Japanese flinched. “C’mon over here. Listen to this. Tell me if this guy’s Japanese, pretending to speak Spanish.”

  “Black Anemone, Black Anemone. Esta corbeta Argentina Guerrico. Over.”

  Kimura shook his head. “That is not a Japanese speaker.”

  “You’re sure?” Perrault said. “You understand, if it is, they could demand your return. And I might not be able to refuse them. Not if the alternative is being run down.”

  Kimura nodded, looking glum. “Absolutely. No possibility otherwise.”

  The voice took on new sharpness, as if it could hear them discussing it. “Corbeta Guerrico. Te vemos hacia el sur a una distancia de quince kilómetros. Por favor, responda!”

  Perrault took another breath. “Well?” he said. Madsen shrugged and spread his hands.

  The captain raised the mike to his lips like an unwelcome chalice.

  * * *

  The ship was three times their length and its sides towered like a gray iceberg. She heaved several hundred yards away, all sharp angles and slants. Riding, like Anemone, several points off the wind. A sea crested against her side and broke in trailing bridal veils. A single cannon on her bow pointed backward at a lofty pilothouse with square windows. The number 32 was painted in white angular symbols a third of the way back from her stem. Red and yellow and white flags snapped in the wind, and a sparse brown smoke stripped off the stack. At the mast whipped the same blue-and-white flag that had welcomed them at Ushuaia.

  Perrault was on deck, supervising as the women heaved at the Zodiac. It tore free at last and slid down its ramp, the line uncoiling, and spooled out behind them, tossing higher than their heads, then sinking away. A larger inflatable dangled from the corvette, swaying and bouncing off the hull as the ship rolled. Men tumbled into it, and a davit rotated. Before long it was surging across the waves toward them.

  “Keep her steady, now,” the captain told Sara. She bit a fold of her sweatshirt pulled up from under her suit and concentrated on the compass. “We’ll transfer one by one. Into the dinghy first. From there, to their boat. Be very careful. Comprenez?”

  “Who’s going?”

  “Me, Lars, and you. They’re bringing a medical officer to look at Jamie.”

  “I’m not?” Dorée said, beside them.

  “I’m sorry, Tehiyah,” the captain said. “I don’t really want to risk—”

  “No. I’m going.”

  Perrault sighed. Started to turn away, but the actress seized his arm. “Yes, Tehiyah,” he said. “You are going. Tell Mick he’s in charge. I want Eddi on the wheel.”

  Dorée went below. Sara concentrated on steering a straight course through the mountainous waves. Seas, she reflected, that would have had her moaning in terror not long before. She still feared them, but now understood how to slip around their blows and tap their immense power to lift the planing hull
beneath her and surf at dizzying speeds for hundreds of feet before they sank back.

  Not that she was doing that now. Not with the Argentine navy boat coming up astern. It disappeared for seconds in the troughs, but each time bobbed up closer. The crew stood black-suited, black-hooded, holding grip rails on the center console. The next time she glanced back they were reaching for Anemone’s inflatable. In a minute or two voices rose. A rubber-suited figure crawled past and down the companionway, a waterproof bag stenciled with a red cross slung over one shoulder. She glanced back again to see Perrault spidering into the inflatable. He slid in cautiously, hung to the line by one arm, then let go. The boat skated aft on the smoothed water behind the stern.

  She faced forward again. Until Madsen said into her ear, “Okay, I got the wheel. In the inflatable, then over to their boat. Keep your hands and feet out from between them, and do not let go.”

  Getting into the dink was fairly easy, but as the boat from the warship roared in again she felt real fear. If she slipped, or missed, trying to make the transfer, they’d never find her in these seas. Not in time. Water surged back and forth in the bottom of the inflatable. She got her boots braced and rose, clinging to rope handholds as the other craft soared above her, then dropped nearly to her level. She launched herself and hands grabbed her arms. She stumbled and fell against legs, then something hard slammed her mouth so violently she felt a tooth loosen. Fuck, she thought. A front one, too.

  Then the hands hauled her up and fastened her fingers to handgrips. The big swollen-looking outboards roared, and she clung like a shaken monkey watching Anemone, her world for so many weeks, shrink amid the rolling waste, the dashing spray, the clouds that pressed down. The whole world was black and gray and white. Monochrome, like in an old adventure film.

  A wetshining wall so high it looked unclimbable. A sling came down, and she slipped it over her arms. It steadied her as she climbed a rope-and-batten ladder, straight up, until more arms reached down and pulled her the last few feet up and over.

  She staggered crazily across a strange deck, stared blinking into strange faces. A sense of another life, another planet, another race. The weird sensation of another ship under her feet.

  * * *

  When they took them below her glasses fogged instantly. She took them off and was led through white-painted passageways that smelled impossibly clean and glowed impossibly bright to a huge space of vast tables set with white china with blue rims. Smiling stewards in starched white jackets served salads, chops, lima beans, carrots, whipped potatoes, fresh milk, apple cobbler. The food was the best she’d ever tasted and despite feeling queasy from the long, slow heave and roll, so different from Anemone’s, she ate until she could hold no more. Then came coffee, black and richly flavorful, and fruit, and packages of cigarettes, and small wrapped peppermints.

  When they could eat no more, a young officer rose and led them through more passageways, or maybe the same passageways, and up a ladder until they filed one by one into a spacious teak-paneled room. Only then, looking about, did she realize they’d left Tehiyah back in the dining area.

  A dark-complected officer introduced himself as Capitán Simon Giordano and another, taller, younger man as Teniente Ferrero. Giordano tried Spanish, got blank stares, and shifted to a heavily accented but passable English. “Please, you will sit? This sofa is very comfortable. You had a good lunch, yes? I would have eaten with you, but a report had to be made. Which is Captain Perrault? You, sir. Welcome. Sit, please, ladies. Where is the famous Tehiyah Dorée?”

  “I think she’s finishing her coffee.”

  “Perhaps I can meet her later.” He bent to Sara’s hand. “And you, miss?”

  “Dr. Sara Pollard.”

  “I am sorry, I understood there was no doctor aboard.”

  “Not a medical doctor. A behaviorist.”

  “Sí, claro, a scientist—I understand. We supply our country’s science outposts in Antarctica. Will you smoke? Do you mind?” They didn’t and he and Perrault lit up, which surprised her. She’d never seen him with a cigarette, but he exhaled the sweet smoke of the Argentine tobacco with pleasure and what looked like haggard relief. Giordano leaned back in a leather chair. “So, you are comfortable? I imagine it is a change from your sailboat.”

  “We’re at your disposal,” Perrault said. “But I did want to thank you for sending your doctor.”

  “That is all right, we are all men of the sea.” He waved the cigarette dismissively. “He will report shortly to me. Now, forgive, shall we get down to business? I must begin by asking officially, what is your intention in our fishery and economic zone off Argentine Antarctica?”

  Perrault said, “Lars?”

  Madsen said, “Captain, we are operating under United Nations charter. The World Charter for Nature authorizes private bodies to help monitor and enforce international conservation laws.” He produced a slip of paper sleeved in plastic and read from it. “‘Article 24. Each person has a duty to act in accordance with the provisions of the present Charter; acting individually, in association with others or through participation in the political process, each person shall strive to ensure that the objectives and requirements of the present Charter are met.’”

  Giordano nodded as if he’d heard it before. “Yes, yes. But specifically, no? What are your aims here?”

  “Commercial whaling was banned in 1986. Japan continues to kill, process, and sell whale products illegally. Not only that, they do it within an internationally declared sanctuary surrounding Antarctica. Argentina, by the way, signed these conventions. So you see, we’re on the same side, Captain.”

  The Argentinian nodded. “But if Argentina should undertake whaling here ourselves, or mining, or test a nuclear weapon—you would support us in that as well? Yes, or no?”

  Madsen shrugged.

  “Captain Perrault?”

  “Mr. Madsen has stated our case.”

  “Very well.” Giordano took a last drag, stubbed his cigarette out, and opened a folder. “The Japanese have entered a formal protest to my government, that you interfere with their fishing operations and endanger safety of navigation. I would just as soon have nothing to do with this. I am not fond of the Japanese treating our waters as their own. But here I am on fisheries patrol and so the matter comes to me. They also allege you refuse to return a crewman who fell overboard.”

  “A student researcher who jumped ship,” Perrault said. He finished his own cigarette and stubbed it out with evident regret. “He left voluntarily and does not wish to return. I am treating him as a refugee.”

  “They say he is a drunk and mutineer who fled to escape punishment.”

  “He has convinced us otherwise. In any case, to return him—a civilian—involuntarily is to place him in the condition of a slave.”

  The navy captain lit another cigarette, gaze neutral. Offered the pack to Perrault, who shook his head no. No one said anything for a while. Finally Giordano said, “And the charge of interfering with navigation?”

  Madsen said, “We observed the kill ship Maru Number 3 chasing a mother-calf pair, which is illegal under International Whaling Commission regulations. We placed ourselves between the ship and the threatened animals.”

  Sara frowned. She’d seen two whales, but mother and calf? She held her tongue, though, as Giordano exchanged murmurs in Spanish with the other officer.

  Finally he said, “This is a delicate matter. Here is what I will do. I will send my second in command to take an official statement from your refugee. I will not remove him from your ship, if he says he wants to stay. If Japan wishes him extradited, they will have to proceed against him when he reaches land. However, these other accusations I cannot ignore. I have prepared for you an official warning about illegal actions and endangering other vessels in Argentine waters. I will require a signature on this document.”

  “Perfectly willing,” Madsen put in. “As long as you issue the same document to Captain Nakame, warning him about illeg
ally taking whales, and endangering our navigation in Argentine waters.”

  Giordano looked from him to Perrault, then nodded and reached for a sideboard. “Perrault. You are, I think, from France?”

  “Provence, by way of Quebec.”

  “Ah! Provence, the true wine country. Have you ever tasted Malbec? We have been out some time, so this is my last bottle. Lars, the lovely Sara—you will help me finish it?”

  “Happy to,” said Perrault. “Then we can discuss perhaps obtaining some fuel and steel wire, and other stores, for which we will be glad to pay.”

  The wine was sharp and deep and sparkled with sunlight, and she was savoring it with her eyes closed when a burst of laughter and music came from somewhere. The captain frowned, and spoke angrily to the younger officer. Ferrero swiftly left. A moment later Giordano stood too. “If you will accompany me,” he said stiffly.

  When they followed him to the bridge it was filled with sailors. One was strumming a guitar; others were eagerly focusing cameras on the helm. Where, Sara saw, a radiant Tehiyah Dorée was posing with dark hair shaken free over her shoulders, blouse unbuttoned to the navel. She held a plastic rose in her teeth and was dancing a flamenco—actually, with great skill and extreme vivacity. Sara suddenly recognized the dance from Juan Gallardo, the Steven Spielberg remake of Blood and Sand. Dorée had played Ina, Carmen’s hot-blooded and sadistic sister. A supporting role, but she’d shone. Especially in Ina’s final scene, where, trapped in a burning stable, overtaken by madness and despair, she’d danced until the roof fell in.

  The crewmen swayed and clapped, hooting and whistling. Even Giordano stood rooted. Cigarette ash drooped, fell, and showered his jacket. He cursed and beat at the sparks. The sailor with the guitar played faster, then faster still. Dorée kept pace, hair flying, feet stamping, a whirlwind, a dervish. The sailors clapped harder, shouting, joining in a roar of song as the guitar hammered.

  Then suddenly the dancer stretched out a hand, and Sara was shaking her head no, no, but being pulled out nevertheless into the center of the pilothouse. Dorée faced her, snapping fingers over her head, stamping her feet. She tried desperately to back away, but the sailors thrust her forward again, shouting.