Jade Rooster
Page 4
“You were the ship’s purser, I believe.” Sabatelli felt he knew the type. They were the bane of his existence. Clerical drones who totally immersed themselves in the nickels and dimes and were forever losing sight of the big picture.
“Supercargo, purser’s more a term for passenger ships. The terms are used interchangeably I guess. The Royster Line is mostly a shipping line, only does occasional passenger trade. So the officer in charge of financial matters and the cargo is referred to as the supercargo. We’re more and more into the steamship business these days, but we have a few sailing ships like the Nova Scotia-built barque, Jade Rooster, for the long crossings with cargos that’ll wait. A rooster is on several funnels plying the Trans-Pacific trade…Amber Rooster, Ebony Rooster, Emerald Rooster…”
“Any variation from the cargo recorded as shipped out of San Francisco? Do you know of anything that will change the claim?”
“Well, we took on some equipment in Hawaii when we picked up Mr. Atticaris, typewriters and sewing machines. Heavy stuff in crates, though not for our account. He paid the freight. His original vessel was laid up in Pearl Harbor and he had a deadline. Destined for Yokohama. If there’s an insurance claim it’s his, not Royster Line’s.”
“What was it like with the pirates?”
“Well all of a sudden mostly. I was in my stateroom, and next I knew, I was being escorted off the ship by pirates, or cannibals, or whatever they were. They didn’t seem real happy. I know I wasn’t. Wouldn’t give us oars or a sail. Just set us adrift.”
“Well, they could have left you like this.” Reeves looked at Sabatelli’s photo and swayed. “So they got the captain, the second mate, Hoyt, and one of the Koreans. Carson and I shared a stateroom. Hoyt kept accounts, too, for Atticaris, kind of like me.”
Reeves began to shake. Sabatelli gave him several minutes to resume his composure.
“Yes, kind of like me. Were there any others ended up like this?” He would not look directly at the photograph, but blinked at it out of the sides of his eyes.
“These are the ones we know about. Where’d all this happen?” Hobson asked.
“Not quite sure. The mate, MacLeod, could tell you. It was dark and overcast and couldn’t see very far ’cause of the weather, but I had the feeling we were in a group of islands. Don’t like any of this. Royster Lines is not going to pay mc from the minute we lost the cargo. I’ll be lucky to find a ship back.”
“Where do you think the barque is now?” Hobson asked casually.
“At the bottom. They didn’t look like they could handle a vessel that size. I know ship’s wages, and that means ship’s manning. Them pirates didn’t have the men, and probably not the skills to sail Jade Rooster.
Well, if the rest of the crew doesn’t turnup, then aboard her they stayed. Maybe they took them for a slave crew to run Jade Rooster.”
“Were you able to take anything with you?”
“A few financial records and the like.”
“We’ll want transcriptions later.” Sabatelli said patiently.
Reeves pondered that for a moment, then nodded affirmatively.
“Here’s my card. I’m sure we can find you a berth back to ’Frisco.” I don’t know about Royster Lines, but Lighthouse doesn’t leave officers or crew stranded.
Reeves smiled an unsettling, crooked-toothed smile.
They missed Atticaris at the hospital, but Sabatelli was able to trace him to the Grand Hotel. The Grand Hotel was a stately brick hotel with porches on the first two of its three stories. Sabatelli had a room there. Sabatelli sent his card up with a bellman and shortly Atticaris was down to meet them.
Atticaris was one of the Quality. Tall and well-dressed only hours from an ordeal in a lifeboat, he smiled with ease and the confidence that a certain station in life guaranteed. Somehow he’d managed to come up with a tailored suit, celluloid collar and cuffs, and a pocket watch on extremely short notice. The cufflinks and studs Hobson recognized as Japanese. He had even found himself one of those stylish new hard-straw boaters, one with a distinctive blue and white band, and a lanyard. His center of gravity seemed to be bunched up in his head, neck, and shoulders like a kingfisher, Hobson observed.
“Everett Atticaris. Ah, I see Mr. Sabatelli that you have brought along a naval Quartermaster Third Class. Is this about my father? I really have very little recollection and nothing to do with all that. It was so long ago.”
There was an almost baby-fat softness to him, an aura of good living unmarred by the hard knocks that Hobson and his shipmates experienced everyday.
“Your father?”
“Captain Atticaris, surely you or the Quartermaster have heard of him?”
Sabatelli looked uncomfortable. “I have only a passing acquaintance with the Navy. That’s why Hobson is here with me. Hobson, do you know a Captain Atticaris?”
Hobson shook his head and Atticaris’ mouth muscles tightened. He put the fingertips of one hand to his pomaded hair.
“A naval officer,” he placed great emphasis on the third word, “would remember my father’s name. “He wrote the very popular book, Cruising the Antarctic, while he was the executive officer of the Levant. He was with Farragut at Mobile Bay as skipper of the Saratoga. He retired in 1867.”
Sabatelli tilted his head as if remembering something, and then smiled, “Oh yes, now I make the connection. Never really heard the name said out loud, only read it in the papers. Your father, the captain, died a few years later under unusual circumstances in a Connecticut industrial town. Bridgeport, I think. It was a well-known claim in the insurance industry. Yes, something of a mystery.”
Atticaris dismissed the memory with a broad sweep of his hand, “Well simply history, simply history. Now you’re here about Jade Rooster.”
Sabatelli’s eye settled upon an elegant young woman with strawberry blonde hair. She was seated across the lobby and attended by a male servant. Atticaris followed his gaze just as another woman who looked much like the first glided into the sitting room.
“What happened on Jade Rooster?”
“Nothing much. Had a terrible crossing, heavy weather throughout. Captain Brewer anchored to take on water on the coast and effect some repairs I think, and instructed all passengers to stay below.”
“Take on water?”
“Yes, the crew was at the pumps constantly. When it happened, there was land nearby, though we couldn’t see it. Staying below was not unusual; we had had similar instructions during the crossing. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, bandits were all over us and we were forced into open boats without oars. Never did see everyone put into the boats. Ours held a few crewmen, Reeves the purser, MacLeod the first mate, and a Korean couple, the Kims.”
“What do you think of Captain Brewer?”
“A rough diamond, but necessarily so. Competent, very competent. Very strict and forceful, but very competent. Coming from a naval family, I think I can understand the reason for his strict and demanding nature. Not all the classes appreciate the necessity for good order and what less understanding persons might call harsh discipline. There are those who serve before the mast, as it were, who need a strong guiding hand.”
Atticaris avoided meeting Hobson’s eye. Hobson seemed not to notice, but concentrated on the facts of the incident. “Sir, off which coast was this? What did the boarders look like?”
Atticaris voice seemed strangely distant. “Korean? Chinese? Don’t really know. You should ask First Mate MacLeod, he would know for sure. As for the bandits they were barefoot and wore that loose muddle of clothing typical of the Orient. Swords, guns, big straw hats.”
“What sort of guns?”
“Revolvers and rifles. Don’t ask me what type, I carry a nicely engraved gentlemen’s derringer which I have never fired and that’s the limit of my knowledge of firearms.”
Sabatelli, distracted by t
he brace of strawberry blondes in shirtwaists at the other end of the room, seemed impatient to get the interview over with. “If I may be so bold, Mr. Atticaris, what do you do? Or have you the good fortune to list yourself as a gentleman?”
“No sir, I must ‘do’ things. My father died a bankrupt. I own several small companies. I am a manufacturer of sewing machines and this new gadget called a typewriter, which I hope to introduce to the Far East. My home state, Connecticut, is famous for its manufacturing. We have a massive building full of elves tinkering away, just stamping gewgaws out.”
“Bridgeport?”
“Bridgeport and New Haven.”
Sabatelli indicated he was impressed and showed Atticaris the photograph.
“Grisly, so very grisly. I guess one must expect that sort of thing in this part of the world. Poor, poor Hoyt.”
“Can you identify them?”
“One, my secretary, Owen Hoyt. That’s him, the third one. Oh yes, this other one is Captain Brewer. I guess I got off lucky with too much sun and a terrible thirst.”
He gestured to one of the staff for a cup of tea. “Chinese, make it Chinese, not that ghoulish green stuff. Would you gentlemen like some tea? A fine establishment, given the circumstances really. Out here one must take one’s recreation where one finds it. Old Nakamura puts out a good breakfast. Can you imagine the natives here have soup for breakfast?”
Conversation ceased, not awkwardly, but of its own accord.
Sabatelli looked at the strawberry blondes and gave an unconscious sigh. Atticaris brightened. “Sir, it seems we may be of mutual advantage. We were planning to see the show at the Gaiety Theater tonight. Could use a second gentleman. Might I introduce you to the Sisters Rowbotham?”
Sabatelli could barely contain himself and gave Hobson a look that could not be misinterpreted.
The sisters were at the far end of the lobby draped decorously across well-stuffed chairs in languid diagonal slashes. Their resemblance to several well-known art nouveau poster girls could not have been totally unconscious. Each wore her hair in a dizzying study in swirls and eddies. Both smoked with hand gestures that assured the smoke too flowed in sinuous curves. Emancipated women.
“Excuse me, but old seadogs such as myself must be off into the evening to carve scrimshaw or tie intricate knots or construct ships in bottles.” Hobson assumed a wry expression. “Actually with extended time ashore, I’d set my sights on a rather large tattoo of a barebreasted maiden from the Sandwich Islands.”
Atticaris and Sabatelli pondered the image, and it seemed to inspire them.
Hobson left, but no one seemed to notice. It was not a hotel he could have stayed in without an aggressive sponsor.
CHAPTER SIX
The next morning Sabatelli was positively buoyant.
“Ah, the Sisters Rowbotham,” he mused, then caught himself, his jaw setting like a steel trap.
“Learn anything more about Atticaris?”
“Not much, a charmer for sure and one great one with the ladies. A socializer and a good hand at cards. Hard to believe he’s his father’s son. Can’t see him barking orders in smoke and sweat alongside Farragut. It all came back to me about his father.”
Sabatelli adopted a thoughtful look. “The Captain was a bookwriter and with Farragut all right. He also got into a lawsuit afterwards about prize money at Mobile Bay. He left a sour and materialistic aftertaste to a famous heroic incident. He married into New England society. He
then proceeded to blow everything on the stock market. In the early ’70’s he was found dead in a back street in Bridgeport with an old horse pistol lying nearby. Looked like a hold-up and murder. A newspaperman thought something was fishy and eventually there were allegations that the body was not Atticaris, allegations that the whole thing was staged and insurance fraud. There was a settlement, all hush-hush. It wasn’t a Lighthouse Insurance matter—they don’t handle life insurance—so we’ll never know the details, but I think it could be interpreted to mean something was rotten. Still for the time being I’d like to stay on his good side.
“Well sir, young Everett seems to have done all right in the world and he makes friends easily.” Hobson observed dryly. “Now, if he can only learn to put up with Japan’s horrid green tea.”
Sabatelli gave Hobson a look of pure class-inspired disdain.
The fading afternoon light was not kind. This particular edge of Chinatown was dirty and rundown. Large ceramic storage jars and the pervasive aroma of garlic and charcoal burners identified it as the Korean quarter. Hobson had explained that since the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese had abandoned all pretense that Korea was an independent country. Japanese intrigues had left Korea under Japan’s iron fist and the only surviving member of the Korean royal family was under house arrest in Japan. Japanese military police in Korea numbered about a hundred thousand and the Koreans had been relegated to a servant race.
It was Hobson who found the Kims at a Korean-run ryokan in Yokohama’s Chinatown. His fluency in Japanese and Korean had been the key, since the two Asians blended in physically and the Korean community was closed and circumspect.
Two Korean laborers built solid and low to the ground challenged Hobson and Sabatelli as they approached the ryokan. They were dressed in western overalls, the attire of dockworkers in Yokohama, not the traditional dress they had seen in Yokosuka. They had a certain masonry-block physique that was distinctly Korean. This community knew it must depend on itself alone for security and these two were the visible tip of volunteer security. Fortunately, with a few words, Hobson both mollified and mystified them. A Caucasian who could speak Korean was about as common as a talking dog. An unfortunate analogy, Hobson mused, because the few dogs in Japan that wandered into the Korean quarter ended up in stews. The larger laborer guided the two Americans to the ryokan. He gave them one last look of warning and the benefit of a few words under his breath. Even talking dogs required discipline.
The Kims seemed to have mixed emotions, pleased to have callers, but not comfortable with Western strangers. Mrs. Kim was poised, strikingly beautiful, and seemingly mismatched with Mr. Kim who was stooped and moved in awkward surges.
Hobson started in Korean, but was cut short.
“If Mr. Sabatelli does not speak Hangugo, I think it would be more polite to speak in English,” responded Mr. Kim. “My wife, she understands English, but has difficulty speaking the language. I studied English with American missionaries in Korea and in Hawaii. I wish to be an English teacher someday. We would like to avoid the Japanese authorities. They are always unpleasant to Koreans who have studied in the West. We are embarrassed by the attention our sea journey has attracted. We weren’t expecting Western visitors.”
The room was furnished in Korean fashion, a few embroidered cushions, and no chairs. Mr. Kim studied their faces very carefully.
Hobson made note of the fact that Mr. Kim was extremely thin and looked very tired. He was sunburned, but his skin had an unhealthy pallor. There was other discoloration, perhaps old bruises, but neither Hobson nor Sabatelli could be sure. He moved very little and seemed physically uncomfortable. Sabatelli was equally uncomfortable kneeling, but that was understandable. Hobson seemed used to the posture.
Sabatelli brought out the photograph. Mr. Kim gasped and Mrs. Kim began to weep.
“Do you know them?”
“Yes, the captain, a businessman from Connect-i…an American state I cannot pronounce, one of the ship’s officers, and Mr. Sato.”
“Anything we should know about them, do you think? Do you have any idea why they got this…this particular treatment?”
“We are confused about what happened. It happened quickly. These men came and put us into a small boat.”
“What nationality were the men?”
He looked at his wife and spoke with hesitance; “They spoke to us in Hangugo, in Korean.”
“They were fisherman I think, at least some of them.”
“What makes y’say that?”
“The way they looked at the ship and some of the words they used. One of them looked at a cargo net and thought its weave was too large for regular fish. I thought I saw tall islands in the distance, but I cannot be sure. The captain never told us much. In the boat the ship’s officer said we were in the West Sea, what you call the Yellow Sea.”
“Anything more?”
“Yes, my wife thinks they were Christians.”
“Why?”
“She is not sure. They put us off boat and did not kill us. Wako is the Japanese word or haejok is the Korean word…what is your word?”
“Algerines, pirates,” Hobson interjected.
“Haejok, they would not leave women alone as these men did. Women they are part of…”
“Spoils.”
“Yes, spoils.”
“She thinks they have some problem and they have some principles.”
“Why?”
“She just knows.”
“Pirates with principles, who set heads in baskets adrift in pulling boats,” Sabatelli called to Hobson from his ginricksha. His ginricksha had pulled up parallel to Hobson’s as they overtook a horse car.
As they passed the fountain in front of Yokohama Station, a Japanese military officer jogged to intercept them and with a wave of his hand stopped their coolies short. He wore what might have been a Prussian mustache and severely cropped hair. He was short, but burly, and had a bright, even smile. He wore his glasses low on his nose in a way that gave him a jolly professorial air.
“Gentlemen, if you will join me for a meal, I must request some assistance, if I may?” He seemed out of breath.
“With respect to…?”
“Jade Rooster. A Japanese national was among those murdered.”