“What could have . . . ?” he again echoed my words. He polished his spectacles with the tail of his gown and, returning them over his eyes, blinked out at me with the look of a trapped animal. To observe him was to think that more than four years had passed since I had last seen him. He appeared different. I do not mean he looked as though he’d aged so much. True, the top of his head was now completely bald and his remaining hair whitened along with his new beard, but on the whole the bookseller, who at this point had to be nearing sixty, looked far heartier and more alive than the last time I had seen him. Perhaps it was the light, so much more natural and forgiving in this tropical setting than in the confines of a train car or the distracted haze inside any room in New York City. He seemed a man remade.
As I continued to wait for an answer, the details of the story he had told me on the stalled train and in his boardinghouse swirled in my mind, reordering themselves into something that had a new and fuller meaning. He was still examining me, expecting me to answer my own question—something, I thought, Pen Davenport himself might do.
“It was you,” were the words that came out of my mouth, and suddenly I was trying to fathom my own realization.
“What? What do you mean?”
“What happened to Belial and Davenport . . . You did it. . . . You did it all. . . . You were the one.”
“You always managed to impress me.”
“If I impressed you so much, then why did you lie to me?”
“Lie? I did nothing of the sort, Mr. Clover.” He seemed genuinely distressed by the charge. “Everything I told you was true. There were certain omissions, I suppose. Why, stories never can include every detail—it would be dangerous for all involved. Things must be left out.”
“Tell me the rest of what happened when you were in Samoa.”
“Mr. Clover, it was such a long time ago.”
“You said stories must begin somewhere. Well, they must end somewhere else. Tell me how you turned the events against Davenport,” I demanded, and he seemed to know that I had no intention of repeating myself.
“When we realized Whiskey Bill had sent both Davenport and Belial on the mission, and suspected that he might have written Stevenson in the latest mail to sabotage them both, I went upstairs to Stevenson’s little sanctum, as I related to you from my sickbed in New York. ‘Tusitala,’ I called out to him. I found him there opening his mail, just as I described it to you. ‘Mr. Fergins,’ you’ll recall he replied, ‘I have here a most interesting letter from abroad. You might as well join me.’ Only . . . there was nothing there from Whiskey Bill. He was showing me an amusing letter from a man in Wales who claimed that Stevenson stole the idea for The Black Arrow from him. That’s when I interrupted and told Stevenson everything about us. Everything. I told him the truth about why the man they knew as Porter—Davenport—was really there, I told him who Belial was, too. Even about Kitten, and about the lives and times of the bookaneers.
“‘You mean you men have all come here, clear across the globe to Samoa, to steal my book?’ Stevenson replied to me. ‘Did you think I would stand for it?’
“I asked him to hold his fire. I said I had an idea to make things right. I began to tell him the intricacies of a plan. Then I added, ‘You’ll need my help with this design, because even with Davenport out of the way, Belial has to be dealt with.’”
Incredulous at what I was hearing, I interrupted. “Wait a minute. You mean to say you were the one to arrange for Davenport to be imprisoned?” I asked the bookseller.
“Yes, Mr. Clover, I arranged it with Stevenson, and I went along to the prison, so Davenport would not suspect my part.”
“But Belial still got the manuscript,” I pointed out.
“Of course he did! That was part of our design!” Mr. Fergins said, and emitted a joyful laugh. “It was essential to make sure he took it without any problems. You see, I knew that by the time we reached America the word would have circulated about our adventures, and every bookaneer left in the world would be trying to take the manuscript. They would be the bottom-feeders, the ‘barnacles,’ who would not mind the laws until they were in jail. But even if they were lesser lights than the top-notch bookaneers, they were still far too skillful for me to handle. I needed Belial to transport the manuscript in order to get it past them. Nobody but a bookaneer of the finest caliber could have managed it.”
“But then you had to find a way to get it away from him once he was in America.”
“A bit like taking a bone from a starved dog.”
“The calendar—wasn’t that it, Mr. Fergins? You tricked Belial into walking into that publisher’s office, didn’t you, by providing an incorrect calendar on the ship and making sure he wouldn’t realize it was already after the first of July. Is that it?”
“When I was first in the South Seas,” he said with a glimmer of pride in his eyes, “I noticed how there was almost no sense of the passage of time, usually hardly anyone even knew the date. Sometimes they didn’t know the year! Time really does seem unsure of itself here, as though washed out by the tide tick by tick. With the copyright laws changing and paving the way for other charges, I suspected that if I could make Belial think we had arrived just a few days before we actually did, then the manuscript could be confiscated as soon we got past that final and crudest rung of literary thieves. I knew Judge Salisbury—now Senator Salisbury—a man who had bought books from my stand and who had traveled to London to deliver a lecture he called ‘The Wrongs of Copyright,’ was hungry to put a literary pirate on a whipping post to use for his campaign for the United State Senate. While I was at the German consulate with Vao, after she was carried out, I used their telegraph desk to wire Salisbury, telling him the publishing firms where I suspected Belial would try to sell the book upon arrival. His men were waiting at the offices of each important publisher the day our ship came in, with policemen ready to make the arrest.”
“That is how you knew Salisbury would arrange with the judge presiding over the case for you to review the pages at the courthouse.”
“Yes, he was in my debt. All was well for me, because I needed time to prepare it for publication. Meanwhile, Stevenson wired Scribner’s. Everything was set.”