“And what were you receiving?” Roberto asked.
“Let’s talk about that part later,” the old man said. “For now, I want to get to the important part, which is that I’m out here in the dark, a moonless night, sea mist coming up off the water, really glad I had GPS to tell me where I was, because there would have been no way without it, because it was getting to be like a regular sea fog, what they call a pea soup fog, very thick. I did get a glimpse of the Empire State once or twice, because it was lit up then too, but nothing else was visible. I was just out there in a white blackness, or a black whiteness. And then out of the fog a man comes rowing. Pretty big wooden rowboat, single man in it. He had white hair cut close, and a long white beard that kind of came down in two points. Big barrel-chested old man. And rowing pretty hard in the fog, so he almost ran me down, because of course when you’re rowing you’re not looking the way you’re going. Although in his case, the moment I called out to him, he swung his boat around by rowing forward one way and backward the other. He turned on a dime, and then he was rowing at me stern forward, so he could look at me. He spun around as neat as you please. That was my first impression, that he was a really good rower. As of course made sense.”
“Why?”
“Roberto, shut up!”
“No, that’s a good one. He was good because he had rowed on a whaling ship when he was young, and they had to chase whales and spear them, and then pull their dead bodies back to the big ship by rowing them. I tell you, when you have a dead whale tied to the stern of your boat, you develop very little momentum with each stroke of the oars. So he got really good at rowing. And then after his writing career tanked, he had that job on the docks. Lot of rowing involved with that. Herman Melville, customs inspector. My favorite book about him, although admittedly I wrote it.”
“I thought you said you didn’t write it.”
“Roberto!”
“In those years he was said to be the only honest customs inspector in Manhattan. Which of course had to be incredibly dangerous.”
“How come?”
“Think about it. With all the others on the take, he was a danger to everyone. He was bad for smugglers, and bad for the other customs inspectors. It’s amazing he didn’t get shot and dumped in the river, and in fact he had all kinds of adventures in those years. The book is mostly a detective novel, I guess you’d say, or an adventure novel where it’s just one damn thing after another. Him foiling plots, people trying to kill him. Crazy old Confederates trying to stir up trouble. And a lot of that happened out on the river here. Sometimes he had to row out here, when ships got backed up and were anchored in the harbor waiting for a dock to open. Row all the way to Staten Island and back. He could catch smugglers by rowing them down. They’d be sailing and the wind would die a little, and he would row those criminals down. No, he was a champion oarsman!”
“So what happened when you met him out here? I mean you were smuggling too, right?”
“That’s true. Maybe that’s why he showed up! But in fact on that night he pulled his boat right next to mine, and leaned over and peered at me. He said, ‘Billy, is that you?’”
“Who’s—”
“Shut up!”
“I don’t know—I’m wondering now if he meant Billy Budd. But when I said no, he looked really startled, kind of scared, and he said, ‘Malcolm? Is that my Malcolm?’ and I said, ‘No, I’m Gordon. Gordon Hexter.’”
“Who’s Malcolm?”
“That was the name of his older son.”
“So then what?” Stefan insisted.
“He looked at my zodiac and said, ‘What’s this, a rubber boat?’ And I said yes, and he said, ‘Good idea!’ and then, ‘But what about your oars?’ I told him I had lost them overboard, and he frowned at me like he knew I was lying, because there were no oarlocks on my zodiac. And of course steamboats were already there in his time, and the Monitor and Merrimac. And he saw the motor at the back, and asked me what it was, and I said it was a fishing line reel. I should have just said it was a motor. But he just looked at me, and told me he would pull me in to shore, and I had to say okay, as it wouldn’t make sense to say no to him at that point. So he tied a line to my bow cleat and started rowing me in, so I missed my rendezvous out there. But I wasn’t thinking about that then.
“‘How do you know where you’re going in this fog?’ I asked him, because he was looking back at me. He smiled a little smile under his mustache; it was the only time I saw any expression on his face. ‘Oh I know,’ he said. ‘I know this river by now, I can say that. Moony night or pouring rain or fog as thick as the thoughts in my head. I can hear where I am. I can feel the bay’s bottom, feel it like my bed under me at night. This harbor is my Pacific now. I have finally fitted myself to my circumstances.’
“Then some kind of wave hit us from behind. I felt the wave raise me, and then saw it raise him up and let him down. I looked around, and I think I said, ‘What was that?’ and I couldn’t see anything in the fog. But the water was slick under us, and more waves kept coming and lifting me up, then dropping me back. He stopped rowing and my zodiac bumped into the back of his rowboat, and he leaned toward me and whispered to me, ‘It’s that which is after thee, son! I see the line around thee!’ So I turned to look behind again, but I didn’t see anything, and then when I turned back around to look at him, there wasn’t anything there either. He wasn’t there, his rowboat wasn’t there. He was just gone.”
“What happened to him?” Roberto asked.
“I don’t know. That’s why I say he must have been a ghost, because he disappeared like that. That was the first indication I had that he wasn’t real. I was pretty close to West Street by then, as I found out by puttering around a little. I was pretty freaked out, I can tell you. And even more so later, when I read that a couple of boats of dead guys were found out in the river the next day, drifting around. Killed by knives. I think that’s what he was telling me about. That’s what he rowed me away from in the fog. I was going to get killed when that deal went down, but he rowed me away.”
“Yikes,” Stefan said.