We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [54]
But the falcon always spots his chance.
It was when Giovanni was briefly alone with Isaiah that O'Connor attacked him next. They came running at the sound of his screams—but it was too late. O'Connor had got hold of his left hand. Giovanni grabbed a knife with his right, but the pathetic bundle of broken fingers had lost all its strength and precision and he could barely lift it. He knew he was fighting for his life, and all he could manage was a scratch across O'Connor's chest.
How desperate Giovanni must have been to use the knife like that. When the men in the fo'c'sle had encouraged him to take his revenge and promised to cover for him—and yes, even take the blame themselves—he'd replied, "I'm a knife thrower, not a murderer."
The plates sailing across the table again, the reawakening of our taste buds: those had been Giovanni's revenge. Only now he'd gone for the knife. Isaiah said later that he'd seen tears in the artist's eyes as he clutched the weapon in his damaged hand—as if in that moment, forced to share the coarse language of his enemy, his honor was lost.
O'Connor laughed and offered up his chest.
"Come on," he snarled.
But Giovanni put the knife down on the table.
When they got there it was too late. The killing blow had been struck.
***
Wrapped in sailcloth, Giovanni's body was swallowed by the sea the same day. Captain Eagleton wasn't present at the funeral. O'Connor represented him. The crew suspected he'd turned up only to relish his meaningless triumph.
Isaiah arrived with a shovelful of ash from the galley.
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," the cook's boy said, and scattered the ashes over Giovanni's body as it lay on the deck in its sailor's shroud.
At that very moment, a gust of wind came like an avenging hand and flung the ash right into O'Connor's maimed face, where it settled into every line and crack, including the slits of his eyes. It burned and stung. He roared and thrashed about as if a real enemy had attacked him, and the men scattered: nobody wanted to be hit by the random's flailing of his fists. From a distance they saw him commit a final act of sacrilege against the deceased as, cursing and shouting, he lifted Giovanni's frail corpse from the deck and tossed it over the rail like a piece of rubbish.
They were watching the funeral of a mutineer. That, at least, was the message that Captain Eagleton passed on to them.
But below deck, they plotted O'Connor's death.
EVERYONE VOLUNTEERED for the job. No one had any scruples when it came to killing O'Connor. If they hadn't all been hardened men when they signed on to the Emma C. Leithfield, they were now. They'd been abused daily, and there wasn't one of them who didn't bear the mark of the first mate's fist. He even beat his fellow officers. The second mate, a Swede by the name of Gustafsson, went around with a closed-up eye that might never regain its sight.
With no rule of law on board the Emma C. Leithfield, they'd have to create one themselves. It wasn't mutiny: it was justice.
Their only concern was technical. How to do it?
O'Connor was stronger than any of them: they'd learned that much. They'd never defeat him in an open fight. But the thought of their own weakness merely added fuel to their anger.
"When he's asleep," said a Greek who went by the name of Dimitros.
Could that be the answer? They exchanged glances. There were two problems. The first was the loaded gun that O'Connor always carried, and the second was the dog. When the first mate dozed in his chair on deck, the dog always lay at his feet, and the minute anyone approached, it raised its massive head and growled menacingly. No one could figure out how to get close to O'Connor without waking the dog first. At this point their rebellion began to crumble. They discussed the dog at length, but it