The Boatmaker (25 page)

The boatmaker takes his candlestick and goes down the stairs past the landlady's ancestors, descending from the current century of progress to the darker centuries before. He stops for a moment at a portrait that reminds him of Father Robert. The painting, in a square frame, is of a young man, seated, wearing a white ruff over a steel breastplate, helmet in his lap. The man is young—fair and strongly built. He has the priest's blond hair, his stabbing eyes, rounded face, high cheekbones and snub nose.

The boatmaker examines the painting in the flickering light from his candle. Then he goes down to his landlady's door on the first floor in the rear. She comes to the door in her robe, wiry hair askew, book in hand, cigarette burning.

The landlady is never surprised when lodgers appear at her door. Her attitude is neither cold nor welcoming. Boarders have their rights; she has hers. She has her station; they have theirs. Her lodgers are simply part of what her life has become. With time and change, the landlady has shed many of the mental habits of her caste, but some of those habits go so deep they will be buried with her when she is placed between her mother and her
father in the cemetery across the river reserved for Mainlanders of ancient and noble blood.

Two black-and-white cats twine between her legs. The cats have the run of the house—and more privileges than the lodgers. Crow hated them. He insisted cats are unclean.

“You said my friends left some things here.”

“Yes, I put them down in the cellar.”

“I'd like to look at them.”

“Can't it wait until tomorrow?”

“I need to see them now.”

The landlady sighs. To any of her other lodgers she would have refused without a second thought and gone back to her cigarettes and the anxious Dane. But the boatmaker paid a year's rent without being obliged to.

She closes the door, then comes out, cigarette burning, without Kierkegaard but with a candlestick of her own and a big iron keyring. The cats follow at her ankles, avoiding contact with the boatmaker.

She leads this little band to the back of the house, opens a door, and they go down rough stairs. The air is damp and musty between the stone walls. At the bottom of the stairs is a landing with old wooden doors left and right. The landlady pauses and draws on her cigarette before dropping it and crushing it in the dirt.

“On the right, I think,” she says, examining one iron key after the other while the boatmaker holds both candlesticks. The cats circle, thinking of juicy mice and rats in the storerooms, which they are rarely allowed to visit.

The landlady finds the key she wants. The lock groans and gives way. Inside, the room is filled with ancient dark furniture, huge crates. There are cobwebs over everything. Mice scurry in the darkness. The boatmaker thinks he sees some Lippsted pieces against the rear wall, but in the dark he can't be sure.

After inspecting the piled belongings, the landlady realizes she's in the wrong cellar. They back out, shooing the cats, before repeating the procedure and entering the opposite storeroom. Here there is also furniture, though it looks smaller and more recent. The boatmaker sees no Lippsted pieces. The cats squeeze between their legs and disappear into the center of the room, where lamps, boxes, old shoes, clothes, a chandelier, trunks and suitcases are piled.

“They must be in here somewhere. I'm not staying to look.”

She takes the key off the big iron ring and hands it to him. The boatmaker hopes his friends' belongings are somewhere near the top.

“Make sure you don't lock Castor and Pollux in here. You're a good tenant—when you're not disappearing
without giving notice. Better than those friends of yours. At least you came back. But if you lock my cats in here, there will be Hell to pay. Do you understand me, young man?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

The boatmaker takes the key and steps into the room. In the light of his candle shadows dance up the walls then slide down behind the furniture, taunting him. The black-and-white cats slink through the piled goods as if they are hunting through underbrush, alone, then together.

The boatmaker advances slowly, moving boxes, shoes, lamps and suitcases. Everything is coated in layers of dust, deeper or thinner depending on how long ago the goods were stored. By the time he reaches the center of the room, the cats are in a frenzy near the walls, snapping at vanishing mice.

In the center, on top of the pile, is a cardboard valise, held together by twine, which the boatmaker recognizes as Crow's. The little man was secretive about its contents, as he was about his notebook, his money—and everything to do with his affairs.

The boatmaker picks up the valise. It is light. Inside, a few items rattle against cardboard.

The boatmaker puts the valise aside and looks for anything else that might have belonged to them. He finds a couple of old nightshirts that smell of Crow's cologne and
a bundle of newspapers tied with string, which might have belonged to Crow; White could not read. On top is a copy of
The Brotherhood
. He finds nothing else in the storeroom that might be connected to two boarders of this house who wound up staring from telegraph poles on the New Land.

The boatmaker is ready to leave, but Castor and Pollux have gone silent, missing. He sets Crow's valise outside the door and calls the cats. It takes an hour of rooting through the remnants of lodgers' lives, and scratches on both hands, to get the cats outside with the door closed. One of them—the boatmaker can't tell the cats apart and doesn't care—has a fat mouse, nearly dead, in its mouth and is not sharing. He gets back to his room torn and bleeding, valise in hand.

By now there is little left of the night, but he feels no need for sleep. He lays the valise on the bed and unties the twine. Inside, neatly folded, are two of the white shirts with ruffled fronts Crow favored: shirts only a man who never worked at any honest trade would have chosen.

Lifting them up, the boatmaker sees the silver flask, recalling the hundreds of times the little man reached inside his jacket and pulled it out, offering it occasionally to the boatmaker, less often to White, who mostly drank beer. Perhaps Crow made White drink beer because it was cheaper than whiskey. The flask is thin and curved,
its surface striped, matte finish alternating with shining polished stripes. Engraved on two of the matte stripes are the initials
A. K.

Other than the shirts and flask, the only item in the valise is Crow's black notebook. It is much like the one Sven Eriksson carries, although in every other way the two men could hardly have been more different. Sitting on his narrow bed, the first hints of daylight at the window, the boatmaker holds the notebook, trying to decide whether to open it and read. He does not believe in spirits or an afterlife. But there is something about the way Crow died that makes the boatmaker hesitate before opening his book. He holds it on his lap for a while. Then he begins.

An hour later the candle flame makes flapping sounds as it dies. The boatmaker gets up to replace the candle, sits down on his bed and continues reading, looking for answers as he enters the secret life of the man who was his friend, then his assailant and finally a riddle stuck on a pole like a handbill. Daylight begins to open his room to the outside world for inspection. He does not have much time before the landlady will knock, offer him coffee and a soft roll with butter and he will have to leave for the compound.

Inside the front cover, in dark ink in Crow's best hand, as if he was trying to impress his final reader, is
Anton Kravenik
, with a flourish beneath it. Under the
name, in smaller script, without a flourish, is the address of the boardinghouse. The boatmaker wonders how long Crow and White lived here before he met them. He could go to the landlady's room and ask. She will be up, perhaps never having gone to bed, ready to go down to the kitchen and direct the maid in preparing coffee and rolls. Instead, he keeps reading.

Crow's legal name inside the cover is the clearest entry in the entire notebook. The rest is a jumble, the writing large and crude, almost printing, in whatever implement came to Crow's small, clever hand. Much is written in pencil. The boatmaker remembers seeing Crow suck on a pencil stub, pursing his face and wetting the lead before writing.

The book is not a story, or even a string of sentences. It is a tangle of financial dealings: money coming in and going out, much of it from people indicated only by single letters. The record is not in chronological order, though the dates of transactions are noted, along with dates and places of meetings. Reading through these entries brings the boatmaker back to the beginning of his time with Crow and White, when he enjoyed their friendship. He had wanted the unfamiliar sensation to continue.

In Crow's notebook are three different kinds of entries for sums received or paid out. Though not large
sums, they are more than adequate for the life Crow and White lived. In fact, based on the amounts flowing through his ledgers, Crow was a man of means, at least from the boatmaker's point of view. Or would have been, had it not been for the fact that one category of entries consists of what are obviously winnings—and much larger losses—at the racetrack.

Crow was an impulsive, careless gambler. Tips on horse and dog races, from Crow's friends in the shadow world, are decorated with doodles and exclamation points. Many are followed by angry, obscene entries, indicating that another sure thing had failed to materialize. Some are scored almost all the way through the tough paper. While he pages through the book, the boatmaker recalls Crow returning to the construction site from his mysterious comings and goings, occasionally ebullient, more frequently dark and withdrawn, lashing out at White and drinking by himself at the edge of the site, not inviting the boatmaker with them to the Grey Goose for dinner.

The second stream is a smaller, steadier flow into Crow's household economy. The amounts don't vary much, never huge, never too small, mostly weekly, disappearing in the winter. They are scattered through the pages but, unlike some of the other entries, these are not difficult to decipher: They represent White's pay,
disappearing into Crow's pocketbook and reappearing as Crow saw fit. White never expressed any resentment at this arrangement. White was grateful to Crow, as if the smaller man were guiding him through a distracting world in which White would otherwise have been lost. The amount White was paid is larger than the boatmaker would have expected. He wonders whether that was because of White's unusual strength or Crow's connections to the shadow world, or both.

The third stream of amounts is impossible for the boatmaker to make sense of. Here there are no names—only dates, numbers and letters.
P
,
Q
and
R
appear repeatedly, appointments with each one scrawled in pencil, along with payments received from them. No payments seem to have been made to them, so they cannot have been bookmakers. In fact, in spite of his losses at the track, Crow does not seem to have had to resort to loans from bookmakers. The payments from
P
,
Q
and
R
are larger than any of the other sums, except a few of Crow's worst losses. They are irregular, beginning before the boatmaker met the mismatched pair and continuing to the end.

The boatmaker leafs through the notebook, trying to find patterns in the jumble. The only thing he can see is that payments from
R
increase in frequency and amount over time, while those from
P
and
Q
remain the same. The
three largest payments from
R
, each larger than the last, are in the months before the boatmaker was beaten. He turns down the pages where payments from
R
are noted.

At a knock on his door he stuffs Crow's notebook under the rumpled sheets and rises, his body both light and heavy from lack of sleep. While he was absorbed in the book, morning has filled his room. He snuffs his candle.

At his door, the landlady holds a bowl of steaming coffee, heavily diluted with milk, as he likes it. The black-and-white cats are twining between her legs. There is no sign of a mouse.

CHAPTER 19

A few snowy nights later the boatmaker stands at the door of the Grey Goose, stamping snow from his boots. When he enters, he sees that the interior looks just as it did when Crow and White sat in the back at one of the rough, poorly lit tables. Around them, the tavern would be filled with workingmen and people from the shadow world, eating goulash, sopping it up with bread and washing it down with dark, yeasty beer.

But he's come early, and the Grey Goose is quiet. One or two men who are always there, alcohol their only company, stare into space, not registering the entrance of the man from Small Island. As always, Gosdon stands behind the bar, apron lashed around his substantial middle, polishing a glass. He turns when he hears the boatmaker enter, puts the glass down and lays his palms on the bar, arms spread wide in the classic pose of the bartender,
ready to hear your confidences—or reach under the bar for his truncheon.

“Well, if it isn't my friend from Small Island. Haven't seen you for many a long day,” says the owner of the Grey Goose in a tone of commercial bonhomie. “Nor your friends Crow and White. Left quite a tab, those two. Meaning Crow, of course. White never handled money. But
you
knew that. What's your pleasure, friend? Where have you been? In an accident, were you? Interesting scar that, on your nose. Been jumping through windows, have you?”