Eye of the Whale Read online

  Ito and several other workers tied large cables around each whale’s tail to secure it as the boat raced back to the mother ship. The drag of the whales’ forty-ton bodies caused the water to foam. On the side of the Ryukyu Maru, Ito read the English word RESEARCH in large capital letters, each many times larger than the height of an ordinary man. But today there were no foreign media or environmental groups nearby.

  The factory ship hauled the lifeless whales effortlessly up the ramp and onto the processing deck. Ito and several other members of the testing crew took some standard morphometrics, measuring the total length, the width across the flukes, and flipper size. They cut out the gonads to determine the whales’ reproductive state, their earplugs to tell their age, and their stomachs to see what they were eating. The scientist from the Japanese Cetology Research Center was looking for information that would demonstrate the health and abundance of humpback populations around the world. The whalers hoped to prove that the population had increased sufficiently and that they could begin commercial whaling once again.

  Ito was simply a lab technician, not an official researcher, and he looked around nervously to see whether anyone was watching him. He stole a glance at the members of the flensing team, each in a green hard hat and a bright blue uniform. They were busy cutting away the whale blubber and meat and were joking about something he could not hear. According to the IWC treaty, the “by-products” of whales killed for research must not be wasted. The meat would be shipped to market in Tokyo.

  Ito’s official responsibilities were limited. He was taking tissue samples from various internal organs, and his hands now worked with practiced skill on the slippery stomach. His mind was free to think about what he was going to do. He had tried to speak to his supervisor but had been told to mind his own business. Ito knew whom he needed to call, but would the executive director of the Fisheries Development Department speak to him, an ordinary worker?

  FOURTEEN

  5:00 P.M.

  La Pompe, Bequia

  TEO WALKED UP the final cement step that led from the beach, his body bone-weary from a day like any other, out looking for whales. They still had another two whales in their quota for the season, but his heart was not in it. Every time he looked out at the horizon, he saw Elizabeth’s face. He had stayed after the other men left to refinish the boat where it had been damaged by the tail of the bull, but he had also wanted to be alone.

  “When the whaling captain gon choose heself a wife?” Eve, Maggie, and Cynthelia were sitting on a wooden stoop. It was Eve who had spoken. She had been widowed young, and Maggie’s man had run off. Cynthelia was not yet married. They were all attractive women and dressed in shorts and T-shirts, like women who were still fishing for a man. “You just tell us which one you choose, and any of us gon make you a happy man!” Eve winked and Cynthelia giggled.

  “I’m sure you know that a sailor he married to the sea. It wrong he break a lady’s heart.” Teo flashed them one of his famous smiles and then bowed his head and kept walking.

  “Break me heart! Please break me heart,” he heard Maggie call out after him. He chuckled at the proposal but knew that he could not do to hers what had been done to his.

  A cheer rose up from the rum shop across the street, where his crew was playing a heated game of dominoes on the porch. The incessant beat of the soca music was punctuated every few moments by a sound like a pistol as one of the men slammed a domino down on the wooden table. The men considered the pieces they held like leaves in their knotted mahogany hands, and adjusted their strategy.

  On the wall behind the men hung a turtle shell and the remains of a poster that had once said SAVE THE WHALES. The only word left was WHALES, and above it, someone had etched into the blue paint the word EAT.

  All around the posters, like wallpaper, were magazine and newspaper articles: “The Man Who Battles the Giants,” “Caribbean Whaler a Legend on Island,” “The Last Great Whaler?” Teo remembered the words from one. It said he had the “rough way of the buccaneers but the charm of the captains that left many women gazing out to sea awaiting their return.” Though he liked that description, it wasn’t true, at least the part about many women. There had been only one woman, and she had left him gazing out to sea, thousands of miles away to America.

  “Come have a drink, Cap.” Rafee was waving him over.

  He smiled as they all stared at him expectantly, but he had no time for drink. It muddied the mind, and a hunter always needed to have his wits about him. “Not tonight,” Teo said.

  “Nother time,” Rafee replied, and the men returned to their game.

  Teo walked under the arching rib bones of a humpback whale that marked the entry to his property. They were ghostly gray in the twilight. He touched the rough surface, paying his respects to the whale that he had killed as a boy at his father’s side. He could still hear the cheering of the whalermen.

  Some who had been in his father’s crew remained in his. They were his men and he was their captain, and together they hunted the whale that fed the whole island when they were lucky enough to catch one.

  The bare two-room house clearly belonged to a man who did not have a woman. All Teo owned of value was the boat, a few pieces of furniture, and a handful of pots and pans. He pulled the levered handle of the old fridge and opened the small door of the freezer compartment. In it was the whale part that Rafee had given him, wrapped carefully in white butcher paper. There had been something strange and wrong with it. He took out a chocolate-flavored Popsicle and, from the fridge, what was left of an open can of tuna.

  Out on the deck, Teo looked down into a square plastic container, where half a dozen sea turtle hatchlings bumped into one another. He crumbled the tuna into the water as they swam around, nibbling at the meal. Their brownish-green shells were only three inches long. It would be several years until they were large enough to release back into the sea without getting eaten right from the start.

  Teo sat down in a rickety wooden chair, its slatted seat and back rough and dried out by the salt air. Below him, a few stilts propped up the porch precariously. The house clung to the cliff as if desperately trying to avoid the hungry seas below.

  It was threatening rain, and the whole sky looked gray and gloomy. Teo thought about his grandfather, his mother’s father, who said it was the devil’s work to kill the leviathan. He could hear his voice like a ghost: “When me a young man out fishing, before the Norwegians set up their whaling station at Glover Island, me never afraid of nothing and never felt lonely, neither. Me talk to the whale, and he answer me with his gentle blow—a great sigh—like he understand me and all the trouble of the world. But after a time—only take them two years to fish them out—me sit in me boat with nothing living to be seen anywhere. Me get this lonely feeling in me belly, like the whole world empty. Me miss them whales.”

  Something off of Mustique caught Teo’s eye. It was near where Sliver and the calf had been killed. A whale was breaching. It was no doubt Echo, although from this distance, he couldn’t be sure. All he could see in the gathering dusk was the whale tearing itself from the water again and again.

  “Father be proud of you. You caught the whale at last and is the big man.” Milton was standing on the porch. He hadn’t bothered to knock. Family rarely does.

  Teo decided not to take offense at Milton’s reference to having gone three years without catching a whale. “Liza get off all right?”

  “No thanks to you.”

  “I didn’t know the whale was Liza’s,” Teo said. “I gon make it right.” He held up Elizabeth’s tape recorder.

  “What you got that for?”

  “She leave it in the whaleboat.”

  “She gon need it,” Milton said nervously. They both knew that his boat now depended on it.

  “I’m gonna get it to her. You have her address in California?”

  Milton looked at him suspiciously. “You thinkin she have you just because her husband gon and left her.”

&nbs
p; “Did he now?” Teo said, his eyebrows blown high on his forehead by the news. “How you know?”

  “I call her bout my boat. Didn’t sound like sheself.”

  Teo was already thinking of what tack to take. “Well, maybe is time for tell Liza the truth about what the whale saying.”

  “What you know about the whale?”

  “I’m a whaler, and our father was a whaler and his father before him.”

  Milton scowled at this reference to their father’s giving Teo the whaleboat. Teo was an “inside” child and Milton an “outside” child—conceived on one of their father’s fishing trips.

  “So what that have to do with Liza? I thought you tell her everything you know.”

  “Not everything,” Teo said.

  “She better off without you.” Milton no doubt knew that Teo’s desire to see Liza was hardly just an interest in her research.

  “Don’t worry about your boat, Milton. Family watch out for its own. Is always a seat on the whaleboat for you.”

  “I rather starve.”

  “And your children?” Teo got up and went inside to the fridge. Milton followed him and watched as Teo took out a coffee can and removed the cover. There were rolls of ready cash in it, both colorful Eastern Caribbean dollars and green U.S. “You gonna need somethin til Liza can replace your boat.” He handed Milton a roll of Eastern Caribbean bills and put the U.S. in his pocket.

  Milton looked down. “We ain’t need a handout,” he said, choking on his pride but taking the money.

  “Is not a handout. Is payment for keeping an eye on things while I gone.”

  FIFTEEN

  6:00 P.M.

  KAZUMI TOOK THE CALL from the lab technician in a private room where he would not be overheard. The test results confirmed exactly what they had found in the diseased calf.

  “You have copies of all the lab work?”

  “Yes, sir, everything.”

  “Who else have you told?” Kazumi spoke calmly and smiled so that his voice would sound warm and encouraging. He knew that a great deal was at stake. Over 1.4 billion people relied on the oceans for their primary source of protein. Within fifty years, the edible fish in the sea would be largely gone due to overfishing and pollution, and this large percentage of the world’s population would not be able to just start eating more chicken or beef. Baleen whales, which feed mostly on microscopic krill, would survive at least for a while, and the market for whale meat would be enormous, but only if people believed that it was a safe source of animal protein.

  “I tried to tell the researcher from the center,” Ito said.

  After the calf’s autopsy, Kazumi had sent a memo to the researchers at the center, telling them that all testing beyond basic morphology should be suspended. Managing public perception was essential. Other food industries had been ruined by health concerns, and the whaling industry was struggling to get started again. All seafood had some level of toxicity, and Kazumi was confident that they could show the public there were safe levels of whale consumption, like the tuna industry had already done. But if whales were showing up diseased and deformed, then it was only a small leap of the imagination for people to worry about what might happen to those who ate them.

  “You did the right thing trying to tell him, and you did the right thing calling me,” Kazumi said. “I will make sure the proper authorities are alerted. Fax the tests to me and then shred the copies you have. This is very sensitive information, as you no doubt know, and I will need to handle it personally.”

  “Yes, sir, I will do exactly as you say.”

  The call was over, but Kazumi could not resist the temptation now that he knew who the lab technician was. “How is your son, Mr. Ito?”

  “My son, sir?”

  “He works for an anti-whaling group, does he not? We keep a close watch on all of our opponents.”

  “We have not spoken in—”

  “A son’s actions bring shame on the whole family, don’t they?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Maybe you should speak to him…more often.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I will wait by the fax machine for your transmission.”

  SIXTEEN

  5:00 P.M.

  Next day

  Saturday

  Davis

  ELIZABETH SAT on the brown couch, flipping through a box of photos. Her long hair was tangled and messy and pulled to one side, bound by a black hair band. The television was on with the sound off. She had just over two weeks to complete the final half of her dissertation, though it was no longer her greatest concern. She still wanted answers, but her most pressing questions had nothing to do with the whales. In the box of photos, she searched for reasons, for clues, for mistakes that might be corrected.

  Elizabeth had gone to see Frank to apologize again. She had driven up in front of Tom’s enormous plantation-style home in her run-down station wagon when she saw that young, perky nurse, Kim. Maybe Frank was leaving her for someone else after all; someone who would cook all of his mother’s recipes, fill his fridge, and have his children. Elizabeth’s foot instinctively hit the accelerator, and the car lurched forward quickly. She didn’t stop driving until she was home. Only then, in her driveway, did she let her head collapse against the steering wheel. But even as sorrow and regret surged through her body, no tears would come.

  It had been four days since he had left, but it seemed as long as the entire six weeks that she was away. Elizabeth continued flipping through the photos that were jumbled together in the box. She promised herself yet again that she would put these into orderly albums as soon as she had finished her degree. Elizabeth looked at a picture of herself on her fourth birthday, all pigtails and smiles. She was in her mother’s arms, and her father was by their side. Her mother had light brown curly hair and blue eyes and was smiling at the camera. Her father, with his long black ponytail, was stone-faced, as if he knew what was to come. Three years later her mother would be dead from metastatic breast cancer.

  After her mother died, her father was never the same. Her parents had loved each other the way people from different worlds can, with an almost desperate love, like two lifeboats lashed together in a storm of disapproval. Back then her father was fishing up in Alaska much of the year, out at sea for months at a time. It was the only fishing he could get with the fish stocks the way they were. She begged him to take her with him, but he said a fishing boat was no place for a seven-year-old girl. There were no other pictures of her childhood.

  The rest of the photos in the box were of her and Frank. She stopped and pulled one out. She had found it—evidence of their happiness.

  Frank was dressed like a Roman soldier, and in his strong arms he was carrying Elizabeth, wearing a mermaid costume. Her curled black hair flowed around her low-cut top, and her body was wrapped in sequined green fabric that ended in a wide blue tail. It was the Halloween before their marriage—her arms were wrapped around his neck and their eyes were lost in each other’s. Perhaps it was the bright light of the flash, but their faces seemed to shine with love. She had never met anyone who loved being alive more than Frank.

  Elizabeth continued flipping through the photos until she found one more piece of evidence. She swallowed, her throat dry, her mouth bitter with regret. The photo was from the last hospital Christmas party. She wore a black dress with spaghetti straps, and Frank was wearing a blue suit, but it was the looks on their faces that interested her. They were proof positive of their estrangement. She held up the two photos. Like time-lapse photography, they revealed the death of a marriage. Both of their gazes looked vacant, distracted, and lonely. Frank had big bags under his eyes from exhaustion, and Elizabeth was staring away from the camera, clearly wanting to be somewhere else. There was space between their bodies, and his arm was behind her back not out of intimacy but out of formality.

  The phone rang cheerfully. Elizabeth looked over as it continued to ring. The number “6” blinked red on her answering machin
e. She needed to call Professor Maddings back, but she could not bring herself to tell him that she was about to be kicked out of her program and that Frank had left her. Professor Maddings had been at their wedding.

  Finally, the answering machine picked up. After a moment’s pause, she could hear the message through the tinny speaker: “Elizabeth, it’s Maddings again, calling you from Chile, where I’ve found the aggregation grounds of the blue whales. They are gathering by the dozens. I’m ringing you on a sat phone—must be costing the university a fortune…”

  Her hand ached to pick up the phone.

  “Elizabeth, you were right about the song change. It’s been recorded in half a dozen other locations around the globe. I mobilized a team of graduate students, and they’ve time-mapped its diffusion…the radiation dynamics are classic—it’s beautiful—like ripples of water in a pond. Elizabeth, what I’m trying to say, in my long-winded way, is that it all began with you in Bequia—”

  Elizabeth lunged for the phone. Her heart was pounding. She got the handset to her mouth, her fingers trembling. “Professor Maddings.”

  “Elizabeth.” Maddings uttered her name with such warmth that it was as if he were greeting his own daughter. Her whole body relaxed. “I knew that if I prattled on long enough, you might just pick up the phone and talk to me.” Elizabeth smiled. He always could see right through her. “We also witnessed bizarre gatherings and breaching behavior at the breeding grounds off Socorro. And I’ve heard from three colleagues that these kinds of behaviors are being observed in other populations around the world—Elizabeth, I can tell something’s wrong. You haven’t given up on your music, have you?”