“That was Endine himself,” contributed one of the others.
Keel gazed a long time at Chaka.
“Where can I find Dolbur?”
Keel’s teeth showed through the beard. “Finding him’s easy enough, but talking to him would be tricky. He’s dead. I’m trying to think who else was on that boat.”
“Knobby,” said the woman.
Keel nodded. ‘Yeah. That’s right. Knobby was part of that crew.”
“Who’s Knobby?”
“First mate. You want to talk to him?”
“Yes.”
“Be here tomorrow.”
26
Knobby’s real name was Mandel Aikner. While Chaka was too polite to ask the origin of the nickname, she didn’t need much imagination to guess that it derived from a bald skull that looked as if it had been rapped several times with a club. Knobby’s features were prominent: a large, bulbous nose pushed to one side in a long-ago fight; big ears; narrow, suspicious eyes; and a chin like the flat side of a shovel. A mat of wiry gray hair pushed out of the top of his drawstring shirt.
“I don’t know what I can tell you that you don’t probably already know, Chaka,” he said, while they waited for their steaks. (Chaka was alone with him, on the theory that he would speak more freely to a woman.)
“Assume I don’t know much of anything. Knobby. Karik Endine and his people arrived in Brockett and wanted to charter a ship. Why don’t you take it from there?”
Knobby picked up the carafe, studied the dark wine, refilled his cup, and refilled hers. “Before we get into any of this,’ he said, “I want you to understand, I won’t go back up there. Okay? I’ll tell you what I know, but that’s all.”
“Okay,” she said. She described her brother and asked whether Knobby had seen him.
“Yes,” he said. “I knew Arm.”
Her heart raced briefly.
“He was a good-looking boy. Didn’t talk much. I knew them all. Shay. Tori. Mira. Random. Axel. Even after all these years, I remember them. And Endine.” He drummed on the table with his fingertips. “It’s hard to forget.”
Chaka had met only Tori, who had been a friend of her brother’s. And Mira. Other than Karik, the others were just names.
“Endine’s the one who sticks in the mind,” said Knobby. “He was hostile.” She saw that he wondered whether he’d gone over a line. “He wasn’t your father or anything, was he?”
“No.” She smiled encouragingly. “I knew him, but not well.” I’m beginning to think no one knew him well.
“He didn’t seem to want to talk to anybody. On a boat the size of the Mindar, that isn’t easy.”
It was early. The entertainment wouldn’t start for an hour or so, and the dining room hadn’t begun to fill up. They were seated at a corner table. Knobby drank more of his wine, wiped his lips, and leaned forward confidentially, although there was no one close enough to overhear. His breath was strong, and he spoke with a wheeze.
“I was second officer on the Mindar at the time. We hauled mostly coal, iron, wheat, and liquor into Brockett, and manufactures out. And whatever else needed to be moved. We were commanded by Captain Dolbur. Dead now these three years.
“The first time I heard of Karik Endine was when the captain called me and Jed Raulin into his quarters. led was the first officer. We were dockside, between jobs, and the captain explained that there were some people in town, foreigners who wanted to lease the boat, wanted him to take it down the Hudson and out into the Atlantic.
“You’ve seen the boats around here. The Mindar’s downriver right now so I guess maybe you haven’t seen her. But she’s no bigger than any of the others, and none of these has any business going near the sea. But there was a lot of money in it, he said. And we’d stay within sight of land the whole way. Endine had shown him a pouch of gold coins. Anybody who went along would collect almost a year’s pay for a couple weeks’ work. If the captain said yes to Endine, would Jed and me go along?
“Jed had a family. He said he’d want to talk it over with his wife. In the end, she gave him a lot of trouble and he stayed out. So I got a promotion. Two of our crew also backed off.
“The visitors wanted to go north. Up the coast. There were seven of them, counting Endine. It would be a six-hundred-mile run from the mouth of the Hudson, give or take a couple hundred. These people didn’t seem quite sure where they were going. We were to help them look around, deliver them, and wait for three weeks to provide whatever support they needed. After that, we’d bring them back or, if they decided not to come, we’d be free to return.
“It was blistering hot while we got the boat ready. We leased a dinghy and installed a housing and a system of pulleys for it on the afterdeck. Nobody knew a damned thing about the kind of country we were headed into, so we loaded up with as much wood as we could. We also put on plenty of food and water. The captain went over every inch of the hull, replaced a couple of the spars, added some pitch. We got a new anchor too.
“Altogether, the Mindar needed about three weeks’ work. Then Karik and his people came aboard, and we cleared Brockett on a humid July morning and headed downriver. Afterward, after all that happened, some of the boys said they’d felt premonitions about that voyage right from the start. But I can tell you true, there was nothing to it. We were feeling okay. We knew we were a good boat with a good crew, and we knew we could handle her in blue water. And we knew we were making more money than we ever had before. Or likely ever would again. So there was nobody on that boat thinking we should turn back.
“On the second day out, we passed Manhattan and turned north up the coast. There’s a long peninsula down there. We rounded it in good shape and stood out to sea. It was a gray, rainy day, and a lot of the stories that got started later about omens and such, they always mentioned how the weather looked when we started. But nobody thought anything about it at the time.
“The coastline going north is wild. Lot of rocks, shoals, riptides. We anchored every night at sunset, and you could look forever and not see a light anywhere.
“The boat was lower in the water than we’d have liked. That was because of all the wood and supplies on board. Everybody knew that if we ran into rough seas, especially outbound, we’d be in trouble.
“Like I said, Endine was unfriendly.” Knobby wrinkled his brow and let Chaka see his yellow teeth. “No, actually, it’s fairer to say he just kept to himself. He spent most of his time on deck, staring out to sea. He had cold, blue-gray eyes, and he just didn’t look like he gave a damn about anybody. His own people didn’t like him much.
“I got to know the others pretty well. Can’t help it when you’re all on a boat together for a week. They’d lost some people on the road. A couple got shot, a couple to fever.
“One of them, Tori, the youngest one, told me what they were after. I hoped the captain had been paid up front because I knew they weren’t going to find this la-la land they were looking for.
“The nights were cool, and the boat didn’t have much in the way of accommodations, so we used the dinghy to take the passengers and some of the crew ashore every evening. I remember somebody shot at us one night. Nobody got hit and we never found the son of a bitch and it’s lucky for him we didn’t. But that was the only incident.
“Early in our second week, land appeared on the east. We thought it was an island but I’m not so sure now. It might have been an arm of the continent, just sticking out a long way. I don’t know. It was mountainous and pretty far off, but Endine got excited and announced we were ‘in the bay.’ We saw a couple of whales at about the same time and everybody took that to be a good omen. I’d never seen a whale before. But we saw a few more before we got home.