"Stories distort in the telling."
"It may be time to move to the next level."
"Escalation?"
"I have read your polls. They are sinking. You are sinking."
"I am receptive to your merciless counsel, as always, Mistress."
"Of course. How could it be otherwise?"
She dug her heel into his back, and the bullwhip-whose leather he smelled but did not see unwound from her unseen hand to fall heavily over his head like a shiny, crinkled tentacle.
"I can see you are in need of convincing."
In fact, it was the contrary. But he had more urgent needs. Already the bullwhip was being gathered up into a tense, tight coil of unreleased energy.
"Whatever you decree, Mistress."
"I decree pain!"
And the bullwhip cracked down on his back like a bitter, stinging kiss.
His face was pushed into the black floor. His hardness burned, sliding to one side under the pressure of his recoiling body. Later he would discover friction burns. He loved friction burns. They were like a badge of honor.
She was hectoring him mercilessly. "You will escalate. You will provoke and you will obey."
"I will obey."
"You will obey absolutely!"
"I will obey absolutely."
And kneeling before him, she lifted his head by the sweaty hair, thrusting her womanly face into his own. Her eyes burned like icy blue diamonds. Her golden hair was a wild cloud framing a perfect face made more perfect by the yellow silk domino mask. Her lips glistened with a bloody shine. They pulsed with her moist, confident exhalations, not an inch from his eager ear.
"I will tell you what you must do ...."
Chapter 11
Tomasso Testaverde was a survivor. From his earliest days of stealing fish off the slush-laden wheelbarrows and ice buckets on the busy Kingsport, Massachusetts, wharves of his youth to the day he crewed his first dragger, he was a survivor.
It was said of Tomasso Testaverde that he was a survivor to the day he died.
He died on a day just like any other. All of the days of Tomasso Testaverde's life were essentially the same. That was to say, larcenous.
Deep in his larcenous heart, though Tomasso didn't see himself that way, he was a low thief.
When he stole fish off the docks and cooked them over fires made in the crumbling, naked chimneys of Old Dogtown, where witches used to dwell in the long-ago days before his grandfather Sirio came from Sicily, Tomasso saw himself as simply an opportunist. One who took advantage of life's little opportunities. Nothing more. And besides, he was hungry. His father was away for weeks at a time fishing cod off the Grand Banks, or sometimes seining mackerel off the Virginia coast. Tomasso's mother was, as they liked to say, a woman whose heels grew rounder the longer her husband's shoes were not tucked under her bed.
Had he been born a fish, Tomasso Testaverde would have been a bottom feeder.
When he grew older, it was no longer possible to hide in small places or outrun the fishermen from whom he pilfered haddock and flounder. Tomasso discovered he had acquired an unfortunate reputation. And so crewing on the trawlers and draggers of his peers, as his ancestors had done, was not in his future.
But a resourceful boy invariably flowers into a resourceful adult. Denied the livelihood of a man, Tomasso shunned those who refused to let him crew on their boats and so found other, more creative ways to survive.
In those days they set lobster pots in the water just off the shore, lowering the pots in the morning and hauling them up again at night. The buoys were colored, so that no one hauled up a pot that was not his, but as far as Tomasso was concerned, any untended pot he happened upon in his rickety dory was his.
After all, he always replaced the pot just as he found it, keeping only the lobsters within. This was fair.
And so Tomasso acquired a new reputation, one more lasting than the old. For a wayward boy might be forgiven in time, but a man who stole the sustenance from the mouths of hardworking Italian fishermen was branded for life.
Having no overhead, and expending little labor, Tomasso in time hauled up sufficient free lobsters that a more seaworthy vessel became his.
Here began his true career.
Fishing was hard work and hard work wasn't to Tomasso's liking. Not that he didn't try. He attempted dragging. He tried seine fishing and gill netting. He eked out a haphazard living, acquired a crew that often needed firing because it was cheaper to fire than pay a man regularly, and along the way Tomasso learned every draggerman's trick there was.
It was possible to survive by foraging off the coastal Massachusetts waters for many years.
Until the fish began to recede.
Tomasso refused to believe the stories that were circulating. He was unwelcome in the United Fishermen's Club, where these things were discussed. So he learned of them secondhand and imperfectly.
"Old ladies," he would sneer. "The oceans are vast and the fish free to swim. The fish are not stupid. They know they are sought. They swim farther out. That is all. We will go even farther out for them."
But the farther out the boats went, the harder it was to catch fish. Where in the days of not-so-long-ago, it was possible to lower a net and lift it bursting with pale-bellied cod, the nets straining because the innards of the cod were filling with raw air, by the early 1990s, a lowered net came up filled with wriggling, less desirable brownish whiting, some gray halibut and on a good day a mere bushel of silvery cod.
Tomasso, who had to sell his catch down in Point Judith, Rhode Island, because his cargoes were unwelcome in Massachusetts fish ports, could not meet his expenses.
There were other inconveniences. The diamond-shaped mesh was outlawed. Only small square-mesh nets were legal now. But nets were expensive and Tomasso refused to throw his away. After he was caught for the third time hauling up endangered groundfish in forbidden biomass nets, he was told his license was forfeit.
"I don't care," he told them. "There is no more fish. The others have frightened them all away. I am going north, where the lobster is plentiful."
And it was true. Lobsters were plentiful up in the Gulf of Maine. Also, Tomasso Testaverde wasn't known up in Maine. Maine would be good for him. It would be a fresh start.
Up in Bar Harbor he was accepted. The lobsters were coming back after a short period of decline. Catches were exploding.
"The cod will come back, too. You wait and see," Tomasso often said.
They were harvesting other things in Maine. Rock crab. Eels. Spiny sea urchin was very lucrative, too. But it was intensive work, and urchin roe was not to Tomasso's taste. He refused to catch what he could not also eat.
"I will stick with lobsters. Lobsters I know," boasted Tomasso Testaverde. "I will be the King of Lobsters, you wait and see. I know them well, and they know me."
But Tomasso was surprised to discover that they had rules in the Gulf of Maine. The fisheries people down east, as they called Maine or Maine called itself, were concerned that the lobsters would go the way of the cod, although that was absurd on the face of it, Tomasso thought. Cod swam far. Lobsters were crawlers. They could only crawl so far.
In the early months he caught great red jumboes, some albinos and even a very rare fifty-pound blue lobster. It made the newspapers, this monster lobster of Tomasso Testaverde's. Marine biologists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute said it was possibly one hundred years old and should not be sold to the restaurants for food.