“Whatever the cause, you say! You were the cause! Besides, even if you honored Stevenson’s wishes, you hurt the case against Belial.”
“That prosecution”—the bookseller stopped and shrugged—“never had a chance. Salisbury knew it as well as anybody. He just wanted to have keelhauled a literary pirate so he could campaign on the idea that he was the champion of authors. People hate the idea of politicians, you see, but love the idea of authors, at least until they meet one. Fire or no fire, Belial eventually would have been released. I just needed it to drag along until I had completed my transcriptions to bring to Scribner.”
“Where did Belial go after the case against him ended?”
“From all I heard, after he fled New York he decided to start a new life as a poet. Apparently, it was what he’d always dreamed of doing. But his jaw had been broken in two places by the policeman during the arrest, and it made it hard for him to talk at length, and almost impossible to be understood by an audience at recitations of his verse. He was a diminished man. He never stopped running, and did not stay in any one place for more than a few weeks. He had plenty of money, too, for he had saved and invested it over the years. His problem was not financial. It was a gap that opened between reality and his self-importance. Once he had been touched by the law, Belial thought everyone was trying to follow him, even long after he had become, in actuality, a forgotten man. The poems I saw of his were rather nicely composed, actually, if limited to obvious themes, sailing on rudderless ships in the night, that kind of thing. He ended up getting his throat cut in a fight with some men he accused of following him into a poetry recital in Hong Kong.”
“As soon as Belial heard the fireworks outside the office of Scribner’s,” I said, “he knew you had done him in. It was Samoan, wasn’t it? What Belial said to you when we met him in the courtroom.” When Mr. Fergins nodded, I knew I had finally cracked through the ice. I had unearthed a blatant lie.
He could tell what I was thinking. “I did tell you the truth, Mr. Clover, when I told you I did not know what he said to me that day in court. I could only assume he was threatening me. He believed I was vengeful and had orchestrated this on behalf of Davenport. Of course, that was not the reason. I vow I did not know what he said when you first asked me, but I do now. Since I returned to the South Seas, I’ve had time to study their languages much more fully. One night, in a dream, I remembered part of what Belial had said to me that day. It was: ‘Ou te le malama lama.’” The bookseller appeared crestfallen as he recited these words. “It means, ‘I do not understand.’
“You must see the pathos of it, Mr. Clover. He was the greatest bookaneer of our day. I rather hate to think of him so . . . bewildered.”
“It was you,” I repeated, fighting back a flash of anger. “You were the last bookaneer. Not Davenport or Belial, but you. You took it away from them.”
He laughed. “Who am I?”
“You’re as disloyal as you dare. Whiskey Bill was right about you. Why did you do it? Belial might have deserved to be tricked, but why betray your closest friend? Why did you decide to arrange for Belial to bring the pages to New York instead of letting Davenport succeed? If what you say now is true, you did not even stand to profit from any of this.”
He straightened his spectacles and looked away. “I should think the why of this would be the most obvious part,” he said, mumbling his words with a tone of disappointment.
“So it is, Mr. Fergins.” I was ready to meet his challenge. “Davenport brought you to Samoa without your consent, and in the process you lost your bookstall, the one place, as you’ve said, that was really your home. He never respected you and that showed in how he treated you. What he did to Charlie was the same thing he had done to you, only the poison killed this time—you could not forgive him for that, and for contributing to Tulagi’s despair and self-murder by corrupting Vao out of—well, some kind of perverse bitterness that Kitten had been taken away from him by Belial.”
Anger flashed in his eyes as I cataloged Davenport’s actions, but that passed, quickly replaced by surprise. “Say again? I did this for Davenport! For his own good!”
“What?”
He furrowed his brow and then began to pace up and down the chamber. “Yes, naturally, Mr. Clover. Think of it. Once Davenport’s foot and leg were badly injured in the storm, I knew Belial would defeat him. It was a matter of hours once Stevenson finished the book. What could a hobbled and stubborn bookaneer do against an able-bodied one? The only way to avoid this, to preserve the legacy of this final mission, was to use Belial to our advantage—to allow him to take the manuscript but then upend him. However, I knew Davenport as a man too vain to allow Belial’s triumph, especially after his discovery that Belial had been responsible for seducing Kitten into her final, fatal mission. When I realized this, I vowed to remove the mission from him altogether, from both of them. In the process, I would also do right by Stevenson, who had been kind to us. I saved Davenport’s most important mission the only way I could, by tricking him out of it. I saved his legacy, and that of all bookaneers!”
“Do you think Davenport sees it that way? What does Frankenstein think of his monster?”
Mr. Fergins lowered himself back onto the mat on the floor, folding his chin into his hands and sighing wistfully.