The Pearlkillers Read online

  There was a scramble for places, but they had plenty of time. The wind rushed wildly around them, yet the sun seemed to be trying to break through from above. They could see the two waves clearly, like immeasurably high towers pushing forward towards them and towards each other. Anders knew that they would be hit: there was no question about it – they were right in the line of projection and had no means of moving away.

  When the crash came, the impact knocked him out. It also split the ship in two, as he discovered later from the evidence of the driftwood.

  He woke in the bottom of one of the boats, lying with his arms tightly holding on to Sten. The storm was over and they were being propelled across the sea on a long, rolling wave, as smoothly as if they were travelling on runners. They had food and water for two weeks, though they needed it for only six days.

  They came ashore on a small island in the Cape Verde group. The bodies of all their shipmates came after them, almost untouched, like a huge catch of fresh fish, and, like fish, began to rot where they lay on the beach. They counted them, recorded them by name, tried to bury some of them and gave up. The tide took the corpses out again and washed away the lists written on the sand.

  Anders went into a daze. He didn’t know from one minute to the next where he was or what was happening. Later he was to wonder whether during the destruction of the ship he’d been hit on the head and had his skull fractured; on the other hand, his confused condition might have been the result of an inability to comprehend the extent of his loss. The jars and pots for transporting seeds and plants, the leatherbound books in which to draw pictures, were all gone in the waters, torn to pieces; and the fragments made smaller until they joined themselves to the element that embraced them, becoming water too. And now they would be mere thought, as they had been before the ship set sail. The men also: they had become memory and would never again be otherwise.

  During that time he was cared for by Sten. Sten held the tin cup to his lips and pushed the ship’s biscuits into his hand and mouth.

  Anders couldn’t speak. He’d lost his voice from the shock, although he didn’t realize it until well into the second day. He hadn’t spoken since before the actual wreck. His throat, his mind, his body had been stilled from the instant when he’d seen the two waves approaching, had known there was nothing that would help, and had called out the order to abandon ship.

  As soon as he found that he couldn’t talk, he panicked. He tried. He grabbed hold of Sten and mouthed at his face as he’d done to his friends in the storm. Now he was in a different kind of storm. He fell on the sand and scooped it up with his hands and beat the air too, as if trying to pull a voice out of the ground, or out of the sky. Sten comforted him; he said there was nothing to worry about: he’d seen it a couple of times before and the voice always came back, always, only it took longer if you kept thinking about it and let yourself get too frightened.

  Sten explored their surroundings far enough to see that they stood a better chance of rescue at the other end of the island. He forced Anders on a march to the opposite side of the peninsula. Two days later they were picked up by a Spanish cargo vessel. Sten did the talking, and he lied. He said that they had been passengers on a luxury cruising yacht, that Anders and he were uncle and nephew and that they were of the nobility – the very top nobility.

  Anders followed Sten and moved when he was pushed. He was alive, that was one thing. He couldn’t speak and he couldn’t hang on to much more than isolated pictures and moments, but months later he knew that he must still have been thinking. Sten would come sit beside him, put his arm around him and stroke his head, face and shoulders, as if he’d been a dog or horse, or a child. ‘It’s all right,’ he’d whisper. ‘Look what I’ve got for your dinner. Eat that up and get well.’ When he wrapped Anders in the blanket at night, he kissed him on the cheek as his mother had done long ago. Anders returned the kiss but still he couldn’t speak, nor could he retain thoughts for long stretches; things came to him from moment to moment, without connecting links to past or future. Afterwards he was unable to recall what had been in his mind during that time. It was as if he hadn’t been in the world.

  He’d been rescued, he must have been thinking; and he had the rags he was still wearing. And there was one other survivor of the cataclysm. But what was going to happen next? How was he to explain the fantastic event – all those people killed at one blow? He could barely understand it himself. And how was he going to live with the failure of it? The crowd had cheered, the bands had played, and all for what? His family had laid out more money than they could afford on the outfitting of the boat and they were still back there – all the relatives and friends – waiting full of expectation and hope, to be told good news, to hear the results, to be given the reward they deserved. They expected success. It was their right.

  He agreed that they had the right. Yet he was no longer able to supply the success. And so, he couldn’t go back.

  *

  While his voice was lost, there were periods when the rest of the earth seemed silent too. He retained his consciousness through Sten, who guided his attention by touch and continued to hold on to him as if he were a large animal on a leash. The people around him were speaking a foreign language. They looked unfamiliar. He didn’t know where he was.

  Sten got a job in a circus. They lived in a gypsy caravan. There was very little in the caravan but the bed and some shelves on the wall and two cupboards. Anders was given the task of looking after the horses in the show. He was slow, but he did everything well and was thorough. They were in Spain. The other circus people thought he was a deaf-mute. Sometimes he would watch from inside the tent as Sten climbed high on to a ladder and walked across the wire or did dance-like exercises on a trapeze that swung in an arc all the way across the sandpits and back, from the ticket booth to the bandstand. Sten wore resplendent costumes scattered over with sequins, from which light and colour flashed as he turned his body. The audience gasped and cooed as he tumbled above their heads. He looked like a bird that might have come out of the tropical forests on the other side of the world.

  They moved from town to town and from country to country. One night there was a quarrel in the troupe and a big fight. Sten came for Anders, pulled him out of the caravan and pushed him towards the horses.

  They galloped into the darkness, not stopping until they came to the bend beyond the train station, where the engine had to slow down on the track. Then they let the horses go and climbed up on the train. Sten had stolen some money – a lot of money. And he had papers for both of them.

  They stayed in cities, bought new clothes, ate in restaurants. Sten rented an apartment for them. Anders began to see everything as it was happening, rather than only remembering afterwards. He also heard that people were talking in German, a language he could speak himself. Eight weeks after the two waves had hit them, he turned to Sten and whispered, ‘Where are we?’

  Sten smiled with delight. ‘Austria,’ he said.

  ‘What are we doing here?’

  ‘We’re seeing the sights.’ He put his hand against Anders’ cheek, touched the lobe of his ear. He asked, ‘Do you feel better?’

  ‘I think so. Have I been ill?’

  ‘Very ill.’

  ‘I couldn’t talk.’

  ‘Don’t concern yourself. It’s all right. I told you, I’ve seen it before.’

  ‘I remember the wave. The two waves – double.’

  ‘Don’t be upset. It’s over.’

  ‘What can I do here?’

  ‘Whatever you like. Enjoy yourself.’

  ‘Austria has no coastline. The empire is practically landlocked. You’d have to go all the way to the Dalmatian coast before you hit water.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I’m a ship’s captain.’

  ‘You can do other things.’

  ‘Is there any money?’ Anders asked.

  ‘At the moment. For a while. We’ll have a good time till it’s gone, and then we�
��ll think of something.’

  Anders looked around the room they were in, and up at the windows. He could see out for a long way, across rooftops and spires. Bells were ringing outdoors. He thought it must be Sunday. ‘All right,’ he said.

  He remembered Spain and the journey, and that Sten must have done something so bad that they’d had to run away. He remembered the rotting corpses on the beach and the spangled dancers on the tightrope. Now that he was well enough to go back home or to write to his family and tell them where he was and what had happened, there were other reasons why he couldn’t.

  He remembered the wonderful yacht smashed to matchwood, the men before they were killed. He wondered if he too hadn’t committed some offence for which the police might want him. And he was bound to Sten, who had cared for him during the weeks of his collapse. They were sleeping in the same bed; in fact, they appeared to be living together the way lovers would. Like all discoveries it seemed strange only beforehand, not afterwards. He had set out to explore a different world; and he had found Vienna.

  *

  They were in Vienna for three years, but at the end of the first month they were out of the comfortable apartment and moving downward through the city’s architectural and social scales. They lived by their wits, doing anything that came to hand, taking jobs for a day or an afternoon. They began to look like people who lived that way. And their changes of luck, up or down, were extreme. When they had money they had large amounts and spent it as if throwing it away. Occasionally Anders would pay rent ahead, or invest in some object that could be sold when times grew hard again, but Sten never even bothered to pay their debts when the cash came in. Neither of them managed to save.

  They worked with horses: as handlers and trainers, and as dealers. They unloaded fruit in the markets and set up a stall with the gypsies, where they told fortunes. They robbed men who were walking home alone or in pairs at night. They broke into empty houses when they knew the owners were going to be away, and they sold the carpets and paintings they took. Once Sten was interrupted by a porter who had been left to guard a place and Anders hit the man such a crashing blow on the head from behind that he was sure he’d killed him. He wanted to get out of town after that. Knocking down drunken burghers was one thing – this was worse: causing suffering to the innocent, crippling or injuring servants too poor and ignorant to have a choice about how they lived. Sten laughed at him. Anders was worrying himself about nothing, he said.

  Through the fortune-telling sessions and the serving maids who came to them, they began to know a lot about the secrets of rich families. When his eyes had been shadowed with lampblack and he was dressed in his cap with stars and the blue-black silk robe set with magic symbols, women told Anders things he could hardly believe were in their minds. He’d had no idea that women had such wishes and hopes, such peculiar, intricate notions, or – in some cases – such actual knowledge.

  He spoke with nursemaids and governesses, cooks, parlourmaids, seamstresses, shopgirls, women who worked in the dairies. And they told him about the men they were in love with, the women they hated, the children they were afraid they might be carrying. They wanted herbs and charms for this and that – for conditions and emotions he hadn’t known about before. Sometimes the girls and women were pretty. Sometimes he could tell that they were interested in him. Occasionally when he pulled the curtain and put the sign up, it was so that he could make love to the customer. The first time it happened, he had to be told; the girl leaned forward, placed her hand on top of the crystal ball he was carefully touching only at the sides, and said, ‘Let’s have the present, instead of the future.’ When he still didn’t understand, she lifted his right hand off the glass and pressed it to her breast. She had paid in advance, and when she went away, he forgot to say anything about giving back the money. Some of the others counted out extra notes when they left. He never thought of using the information and the women until Sten planned everything.

  At the beginning, they were going to go right to the top: find some influential citizen, blackmail him, and set themselves up. Sten tried to do it alone. The man he lighted on wasn’t the kind to stand for such tricks; he sent his two toughest and largest footmen to follow Sten from the marketplace and beat him up. Anders was at home when they came. He walked in from the other room, caught the men unawares and knocked them out. Sten was bruised and cut above the eye; he was furious when he checked his appearance in the mirror. It was always bad business to look as if you’d been in a fight.

  ‘Leave this to me,’ he told Anders. ‘Help me tie them up and gag them, and then just wait here till I come back.’ He took one of his pistols and left. Anders waited as he’d been told. Sten didn’t come back until it was dark. At midnight they carried the footmen down the stairs, loaded them on to a wagon Sten had brought into the courtyard, and hitched up the horse he had borrowed. They drove out to the suburbs, to the open fields.

  Anders looked around and saw nothing but blackness. Sten reined in the horse. They climbed down and dragged the men across open ground. Anders kept stumbling. Sten seemed to know where they were going; he said, ‘Go back and wait for me.’

  Anders went. He could make out, very faintly, a shape he thought was the wagon. He fell against it before he expected it to be there in front of him. He climbed up. Sten followed soon after. Before they reached their street again, Anders asked, ‘Did you kill them?’

  ‘Of course,’ Sten said. ‘And this afternoon I shot the man who paid them. I’m not going to have to leave this town just because one scheme goes wrong.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have killed you.’

  ‘That was their mistake, wasn’t it? We’re in the clear now. You can forget about it.’

  ‘We should move house again.’

  ‘It won’t be necessary.’

  ‘Maybe not, but we should.’

  They found better rooms with money that Sten produced. He hadn’t had it before the murders. Anders didn’t brood over the incident but he thought: It could happen again; it came into his mind very easily. It could happen to me. It isn’t that he’s bad, but that circumstances goad him to action, and murder is something he doesn’t have to deliberate about. Some people look at it that way – they’d just do it, like doing anything else.

  He told Sten that they should think about going separate ways. Sten cried; he said it wouldn’t happen again, that Anders mustn’t leave, that he’d never had any luck at all before they met, that he couldn’t go on without his help and had he forgotten how much they’d been through together?

  Anders stayed. They called themselves Hahn and Strohmeyer after two adjacent shop-signs they saw in a street one day. They sold fake paintings and had a backroom in a furniture storehouse where they made frames. They dealt in ribbons and perfumes and received regular payments from a prostitution ring Sten organized at the market. And they developed a passion for the opera. They sat up in the gallery with the students, though sometimes they made their entrance from the front: on a good night they could collect between ten and fifteen gold watches together with the fobs, to be put on the jeweller’s scales in the morning. Once they got one with a sapphire on it. Sten kept that for himself.

  Twice in three years they hit the bullseye, making a killing that they thought would set them up for life. They bought houses, gave parties, lived regally. And then somehow – gambling, drinking, wasting thousands on horses, cards, women, casino life – they lost everything again. And the moment you lost it all, Sten complained, it was very difficult to call on acquaintances from the good times. The very fact that you were asking became a warning.

  They had one magnificent holiday in Budapest, when they gave entertainments out on the river and had music and dancing that lasted all night. It was a sentimental visit to the city Sten’s family came from. He and Anders had their photographs taken together in their fine clothes and with their fine friends, but the picture Anders remembered best was of Sten throwing piles of banknotes up in the air and laughing, s
aying that this town had kicked his people out like vermin and now he could buy the whole damn place and screw anybody he liked.

  He also remembered, from a later time, that they started to have quarrels, especially after they’d just made a bit of money, which was not quite so much as they thought they needed. They argued about nothing: one evening they sat and quarrelled for two hours about where they were going to eat, and they ended up hitting each other. Anders stormed out of the house. He didn’t go back for three days. As soon as he came through the door again, Sten screamed at him that if he wanted to fight – all right; but what the hell did he think he was doing just leaving, just walking out like that? And the quarrel went on.

  One year they struck a particularly bad patch during cold weather. Sten was sick; Anders thought he was going to die. It was his turn to steal in the street and pick pockets. He began to hate doctors. Sten had always been drawn to medical men – he believed them all, and if he had fears about his health, he’d go to dozens; but he was usually only worried when he was all right. For Anders the facts were simple: there was no way of telling who the good doctors were except by trial and error – a system you couldn’t risk. Even if you found one of the ones who knew what he was doing, if you didn’t have the money, he couldn’t afford to let you have the treatment. And if you didn’t get the medicine, you died.

  When Sten was better, he got up and looked at himself in the mirror, examining every inch carefully, like an actor preparing for the stage. He was very concerned that his appearance should be unchanged, both the body and the face. And it was, except for a small streak composed of three hairs which were growing out white at the roots and showed up against the other, dark hair. Anders had noticed them as he was putting the heel of his hand to Sten’s forehead to see if the fever had broken. When he called attention to them, Sten pulled out the hairs in one quick tug.